Annika Inampudi

Before he died, the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, complained of back pain. A pain, he expressed, that began at the base of his spine and bloomed outwards, a pain ancient and vestigial. He held the interlocking bones in his back desperately, as if his hands were the last thing holding himself up. He expressed the pain to his valet, who went to call a doctor. No sooner than the doctor was summoned, the Architect of India collapsed. It was six thirty in the morning.

Nehru’s health had been declining for six months. He fell into a depression after India’s defeat in the Sino-Indian war. The rumor is that he died because of the knife in his back, so deeply betrayed by the neighboring country that his body crumpled in on itself. This may be a gross oversimplification of a very complicated socio-political border dispute. But maybe — if we allow ourselves to think it — he was simply an old, tired man with a broken heart.

The author Victor Anant describes his body on the day of his funeral. “No, the face was not waxen. No, the face was not sad. No, the face was not in pain. No, the face was not that of an old man. The face was frozen into a mold of bewildered determination.”

Oh, what it means to be a man who is also a mold.

In 1964, the year that he passed, Nehru’s India established a heavy electrical factory on the outskirts of Hyderabad, a massive animal of twisting metal parts pushing against the developing city. Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL, pronounced bee, etch, ell) is India’s leading manufacturer of power and electrical equipment.

The factory itself is a juggernaut: three large gleaming buildings, the trucks of product being shepherded out through a bright blue gate. The company, owned and operated by the Indian government, makes all sorts of nouns named after verbs: boilers, generators, compressors, exchangers, pulverizers.

The factory was the magnetic center of the small town surrounding it, aptly named BHEL colony. A town of swarming people. The town was built to be entirely self-sufficient. Its residents were the factory workers and their families and other administrative roles that aided in its smooth functioning (doctors, postal workers, teachers). It was divided into seven neighborhoods called “types,” for each of the seven income groups. Type one and type two had eight families in a home. Types three and four were four families to a home. Type five were two family homes, and type six were single family bungalows. There was only one house in type seven, a ten acre plot of land, with a mansion and a rose garden.

But the factory—that was the center of attention.

BHEL was part of Nehru’s project of industrialization. Assisted by Soviet technologies and inspired by their ideology, BHEL’s factory town was born. Nehru flirted with Soviet ideology his entire career. In 1928, he wrote a book, titled 

Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions.

 He believed in a kinship, a mirrored people, two concurrent struggles to create a whole out of a set of unforgiving parts. “No one can deny the fascination of this strange Eurasian country of the hammer and sickle, where workers and peasants sit on the thrones of the mighty and upset the best-laid schemes of mice and men,” he writes. “For us in India the fascination is even greater.”

In the sixty years since BHEL’s establishment, it is still unclear what “heavy electricals” is supposed to mean. How can we weigh the untouchable? Electric power came to India from the hands of the British. As a proponent of self-reliance, Nehru wanted to frontload industrialization onto the fledgling country. Nehru was obsessed with the impossible task: to make India so heavy, so insistent on its presence, that the country was untake-able. By making each breath of the country hulking and metallic, he hoped that it could never be stolen again.

He likens the steel and metal factory to a mother: “We must start with the production of the machine which makes the machine.”

It was a good place to live; they chose it because there was work. Her husband, a boy her father knew, just graduated from trade school. He was set to work in the factory as a steelworker. They were sixteen and nineteen: clean, smooth faces; high cheekbones; wrists that brushed against each other when they walked side-by-side.

A few hours before, they had sat together in front of the hardy, full-bodied foreman. He explained, in the exact number of words needed, the terms of her husband’s employment: he would work from nine am to five pm, he would be given half of an hour for lunch, and he should not overstay. This was fine, for the man at the factory gave them everything they needed: a steady wage, a newly built school for the children, one eighth of a sand-colored house.

As they walked away from the factory, she saw the rows of houses, each identical to the last. Everything was empty and clean and ready to be touched. This new place was different from the village where she grew up, where houses drunkenly fell on top of each other, where the land stretched lazily and extravagantly backwards. She touched her husband’s shoulder. A bird skipped a beat in its song.

A completely unverified story: during Nehru’s first state visit to the Soviet Union in 1955, amidst the tours of Moscow’s greatest landmarks and monuments, he visited the public park. Waiting outside of the park was a long, twisting line of people. Curious, the prime minister asked if there was some sort of event going on. Khrushchev explained that public parks in the Soviet Union had entrance fees. They were waiting to get in. Nehru was shocked; he could not understand how a socialist nation, one that prided itself on equality, could have public parks that were closed to the public. “Khrushchev was profoundly embarrassed, and livid,” witnesses said. By the next morning, every public park was free to enter.

Young people, who were unable to afford restaurants, and who had few opportunities for recreation not under the watchful eye of their floor supervisors, flocked to the city parks. From morning until night, they danced and they fucked and they had many children. Khruschev and Nehru became the prophets of the new romantic age. 

When Khrushchev visited India later that year, he said: “We are your friends in any weather, and if a breeze of draft should ever blow which is harmful to the health of the Indian people, remember us and we shall never forget you.”

Her husband was a gardener. She didn’t find this out until a year into the marriage, when he brought plants home and buried their roots in the front yard. By the time their three children were born, one could not enter the house without being choked by the fragrance and flavor of the air, the tilted leaves of the jackfruit tree, the warm shade of the towering banana plant. They planted every kind of fruit so that they would never go hungry. There was never a barren year, nothing but the patient ritual of the white flowers opening their petals at night and then closing themselves off again in the morning. The garden had gooseberry bushes and two types of guava trees and the sweetest, juiciest mangoes you’ve ever tasted. The fruit was so delicious that the children would fight over the pit, gnawing at the last bits of stringy flesh, juice dripping down their chins and onto their shirts.
There was a thick piece of wire wrapped between tree trunks, taut and heavy with school uniforms, workman’s clothes, sarees, and undershirts. The outside of the house was pristine; the government repainted the exterior of the building every two years. It was their little paradise; walking to the Wednesday market, bag in tow, coming home to make food for the week. Every day, making her husband breakfast and lunch, and then dinner. The same shade of sand, the same market, the same dance year after year. Time, back then, felt like a very large sink that they kept pouring their life into, one that never quite filled. There was nothing around them but the pleasant simmer of a planned life. The garden in the front yard remained lush and evergiving.

Every Dasara, she would take her children to the factory, and they would pray to the equipment that their father used. Someone had cleaned the room the night before, until every tool in the factory shined. Her children were similarly polished and steamed dry. A priest put a garland of orange chrysanthemums on the factory equipment, streaked the pristine parts with yellow and red turmeric. The scent of jasmine and burning incense filled the room.

Her husband would pour the molds that made the turbines. She never saw him do it, but there was something about the machinery that evoked her imagination, and though her husband was standing next to her in a suit and tie, she imagined the arch of his shoulders and back as he strained to turn the wheel at his station, releasing the massive bucket of molten steel into the molds below. The fiery light of the metal, something akin to the rays of the sun, illuminated his face, covered by the welding mask, and his head, protected by a helmet. The whole room was a mess of metal limbs, each set of intersecting beams like two lovers stumbling over each other. She could imagine that, by the end of the day, it would be hard to tell what was man and what was machine.

She felt her husband shift next to her. They pressed their hands together and bowed their heads slightly down to the machinery. The priest uttered something in Sanskrit. And they prayed.

Her boy — the eldest — was in a Shakespeare play. She laughed the first time that she saw him: his youthful body absurd against the large gray scarf he draped over his head and shoulders, his hunched back and deliberately shaking hands. He said all of the words in a thick Hyderabadi accent, and though she thought she knew what English sounded like, she had no clue what the boy was saying. The theater, right next to the community pool, filled with curious guests watching the children in the play.

The stage was slightly higher than the sets of folding chairs where the audience sat, so she looked up at the boy as he said his lines. She thought about her own father, how he sat in the same chair at home for a decade, and the gruff and measured voice that her boy was trying to emulate. Back home, her house had shelves filled with books: her father’s Telugu translations of the Russians, their red covers in stark contrast with the lilting, curvy text. At times, it felt like the language itself was incongruous with the sharp angles of the book, such that any attempt to contain the words on something as trivial as a page would be as foolish as putting water through a sieve.

Back in the village where she came from, field-working women stood ankle-deep in rice paddies, their backs bending over as they sliced through the crop with their crescent sickles. If you went far enough, you would be able to watch them gather the plants together, the unruly bundles larger than their bodies and their billowing sarees hiked up to their shins, and carry them away from the field. Any understanding of this world that she now lived in, with its paved pathways and regimented organization, would be nothing but a whisper of a dream.

The majority of the photos of Nehru and Khrushchev are from those 1955 visits. By 1960, relations between the two countries, though cordial, were strained. Nehru had been repeatedly asking Khrushchev for help with the conflict on the northern border. China and India had been quarreling over the northern part of Kashmir, a territory called Aksai Chin. The 

, as it has been named, was a remote and inhospitable stretch of land. Aksai Chin — which sits at double the height of where altitude sickness kicks in — requires any human settler to undergo a painstaking acclimatization or suffer incredible headaches, nearsightedness, nausea, and fatigue. Why stand by such a hostile expanse? In doing so, Nehru joined the canon of Indian leaders that insisted forcefully upon Kashmir’s integration into the Indian republic.

In a statement to Lok Sabha, Nehru explained his reasons for the war: “It does seem to me rater absurd for two great countries — or two small countries — to rush at each other’s throats to decide whether two miles of territory are on this side or on that side, and especially two miles of territory in the high mountains, where nobody lives. But where national prestige and dignity is involved it is not two miles of territory, it is the nation’s dignity and self respect that become involved in it.”

It was this self-insistence that Nehru hoped to impress upon Khrushchev in their meetings. Khrushchev visited India once in February to little fanfare and much hesitation, according to State Department reports. During the meeting, the Russian proposed negotiations, much to the chagrin of Nehru, who continued to assert that there was no budging on India’s border.

Seven months later, the two men met again in New York. They were photographed together during this visit sitting together on a couch, presumably in the United Nations building. Like an animated couple, they were cartoonishly opposite in shape — Khrushchev’s rounded body stands in stark contrast to Nehru’s stiff, angular face. It was obvious that they are discrete entities, that the space between them was intentional. They did not look at each other. Khrushchev was turned inwards, chest pointed towards the Indian leader, arm resting on the sofa back. There was something childlike about the way that Nehru sat, hands resting on his lap, face in a partial smile. He was careful, almost uncertain in the way that he interacted with the Russian. It was as if they were both taking part in separate conversations.

Khrushchev declined to interfere in the Sino-Indian war.

By the nineties, her children had all moved out of the house. There were rumors of privatization. India had a declining need for thermal energy, and there was less reason for steam generators and turbines. Once supplying 95% of power generation equipment to India, BHEL’s market share had dropped to 5%. Private companies began to manufacture electrical equipment faster and cheaper.

At a conference in 1993, A. Gavisiddappa, the chairman and managing director of BHEL, announced, to a crowd of eager open market industrialists, that he planned to fight back: “Even though we have to adapt to free-market determined circumstances, we are looking forward to an exciting future, despite certain odds against us,” he said. “Why should I bother to hide the fact that I'm faced with steadily dwindling orders? But I also believe that eventually we shall recoup.”

And yet — the town faltered. The government stopped painting the houses, letting them streak with rainwater and dirt. The roads were lined with plastic and debris, candy wrappers and aluminum cans covered the neglected ground. The children's park, the library, the recreation center stood like empty monuments, idols whose original meanings were lost to time. Shops populated the town like weeds— a grocer, a popular shoe outlet, a car dealership. The state continued to build the town outwards, creating a low-income group (LIG), a medium income group (MIG), and a high income group (HIG).

Her husband developed a perpetual cough, and was unable to stay at his job, every task interrupted by his discontinuous breath. In the middle of the night, she listened as her husband forcefully emptied his lungs from the other side of the bed.

is two stories tall, with a big gate of its own. There is no front yard, only an orange tree on the neighbor’s property that they would steal fruit from and a henna plant that stretches from the upstairs balcony down. When the grandchildren come over, they grind and crush the leaves and add lemon juice to make a paste that they put on their hands. There are no other plants to tend to. They install an air conditioner in the front room and a computer the size of a small child in the hallway. Everything in this new house is under their dominion; they are the rulers of a small kingdom.

When her voice begins to go, they don’t believe it. At first, it is like a small swelling, a perpetual itch that grows from within. They found the tumor a year later. The illness is a slow crawl, creeping towards something, out there — the alive eating the already alive. A hunger that painstakingly swallows every inch of what is left. Her muscles ache, her joints inflame, and she wonders what a body can weather.

When she dies, they take her body from the hospital back to BHEL, place it on the floor of the veranda. After the priest finishes administering last rites, he wraps her body in a white sheet, and they drive her to the outskirts of town, where there is nothing but dust and cracked earth, where you could walk for miles and miles and never reach another soul. When they return, they can hear the wind twisting through the empty rooms, waiting for something that will never come back.

Back in 1955, as Nehru rode through the streets of Yalta, excited spectators would toss bouquets of roses at the windows of the car. In stretching his hands out to catch the stems, Nehru’s fingers got caught in the thorns. “Look,” he’s reported to have said, “I have shed my blood for Russia.”

Fall 2024 - Land

Features

The Machine that Makes the Machine

Una Roven

Kyra Siegel

It’s winter break. Our treasured time for rotting, reunion, and fervor. And, more importantly, hedonistic consumption. These are the books essays films albums and snacks that filled 

 with flames in 2023. May they warm us well into the new year.


If you are an annoying Carhartt-Pinterest-balaclava-in-the-winter MFer like me, then you’ll love Blackbird Spyplane. It’s the jawniest newsletter on Substack and brilliantly lowbrow in a way that Laura Reilly’s Magasin (bless her Khaite heart) could never approach. It’s such crunchy writing and the clothing recs are unbeatable and acce$$ible. Any one of their articles will send you down an Internet rabbit hole of underrated brands, cool designers, and aspirational moodboards. Enjoy and, as always, consume ethically! —Caroline Choi

I know all of you literati have probably already read 

 by Elif Batuman, but I just got to it, and let me tell you, it will make you cry. Not because it’s touching or phenomenally good or something like that. If you have ever had a situationship in the walls of this university, you must read it. Ivan is the ultimate Harvard man, and he made me so angry - I am now allergic to him. Every page where he speaks has tear stains on it – he’s so annoying, I fucking hate him, read the book. —Varya Lyapneva

Other than holding the obvious sentimental value of reliving your memories, a journal acts as a sort of insurance policy for the dissociating type. I for one find the holiday season— and every other season— to be a particularly forgetfulness inducing moment for such a type. So, when your father asks you about that one random friend from middle school that he remembers only by nickname, or your neighbor asks if you’re “still planning on that whole acting thing” and you find yourself in another realm just nodding… write about it immediately. All of the moments you try to forget… write about them immediately. Maybe they can actually help in the future. —Kyra Siegel

“Merchandising the Void” (Kelly Pendergrast, 2023)

why are influencers turning their pantries into miniature supermarkets? it could be regular tiktok brain rot, but pendergrast argues that it reveals something deeper in our current moment: the "fetishization of logistics itself," where our culture's "fascination with capital's abstraction" is reaching a critical point. she also explains the history of gendered domestic technology, the work of critical theorist alberto toscano, and the color "kardashian greige" along the way. —Conan Lu

Look. I should not have liked this book. I am not a fantasy person by any stretch of the imagination. But this semi-fantasy semi-mystery semi-literary novel had me regularly gasping in my common room to the extent that my suitemates were laughing at me. A page-turning treat that I can truly not tell you anything more about without spoiling the fun. —Eve Jones

“Story of Your Life,” “Exhalation,” “Tower of Babylon” (Ted Chiang)

Take any classic science fiction trope - time travel, alternate universes, first contact - and you'll find that Ted Chiang has already written about it. What makes Chiang's short stories stand out is his ability to write about digital pets, infinite towers and alien linguistics in a way that is surprisingly close to the soul, with stories lingering in your head for weeks, months, or even years after you put them down. He is, for me, the ultimate "what if" writer. You can't go wrong with Ted Chiang, so just pick any short story of his and get busy reading. I think your only complaint, after a day or two of binging his stories, will be that there aren't any more for you to read.—Andreas Lordos

Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era

The book that brought autotheory to the world, 

is about getting high, it’s about birth control, it’s about grief, it’s about drag. 

is praxis. Changed the way I think about every aspect of my life. —Una Roven

Women at Work: Interviews from the Paris Review 

“I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.” The 2022 

is an insightful collection of interviews with women who are–well, at work. The collection features twelve interviews with prolific female writers, including one with the electric Dorothy Parker, quoted above, and a preface by Ottessa Moshfegh. The interviews themselves are refreshing; one is structured like a four-scene play, another asks Parker what the evil in Hollywood is. Definitely recommend. —Roxy Hreb

There’s something dizzying about this movie. It’s like being led through a maze when you know you’re making the wrong turns but can’t turn around because everything is disappearing behind you. But the maze is also incredibly sexy.  This is not a feminist movie. It’s a womanizing movie. But it’s hot. I kept wanting Snàporaz (the beautiful Marcello Mastroianni) to go back to safety, to even acknowledge that he was doing something insane. But this is Fellini’s world… you have to follow the gorgeous terrifying girls no matter what. —Una Roven

 but without the gossip columns. It takes place (you guessed it) during the Gilded Age in New York City and follows the lives of both the elite and working class. I think it is so interesting because it offers real historical insight into the period while being facetiously dramatic about the social problems of the time. 10/10 —Sadie Kargman

 is a display of one's wildest, most fantastical, yet deeply perverse dreams. It follows the gorgeous Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan in what I deem as 

 The whole theater was gagging, screaming, and crying in unison the entire time, but alas, it is the best thing I have ever seen and perhaps my new favorite movie. 10/10 —Sadie Kargman

“his name is bryce, which like, um hello! good name. he works in product development which is like perfect for me because i love products” —Conan Lu

Why don’t we write romantic emails anymore? — Annika Inampudi

“Alphabet City,” “Moose Crossing” (Margot Fox)

If you like Indigo Girls but wish the lyrics were about things like a moose crossing or recycling, try listening to my actual kindergarten teacher who tested these songs out in my class back in 2008. Genuinely, I still listen to these today. My favorites are “Alphabet City” and “Moose Crossing,” but they’re all excellent. “Recycle in Boston, recycle in France, recycle in New York, do the recycle dance.” God, I wish she’d perform live again. —Eve Jones

I recently took inspiration from my friend Jacob and listened to the entire Nicki discography in one go. This is her best song. Not taking questions. Dick in your face. —Una Roven

Written after vocalist Elizabeth Fraser gave birth to Lucy Belle, Heaven or Las Vegas is the dream. Listen to it while walking in wide open spaces, thinking about Nietzsche, or eating a savory soup. – Annika Inampudi


This is simply a wonderful album. The vocals hold emotion in every breath, the tone is exquisite, the production is five stars. I am both heartbroken and thrilled to share that I heard “The Hardest Part” playing at a Lush while buying a dreidel bath bomb for my roommate. But Dean deserves to be heard by the mainstream bath product chain store demographic, she‘s just that good. My favorites are Dive, Ladies Room, and The Hardest Part… but all of the songs are special. —Kyra Siegel

sega bodega’s production revives homogenic-era björk from permafrost. strings and reggaeton beats create an incredibly lush and eclectic soundscape, much like a tundra in the wake of climate change. 1 stream = 1 icelandic fish saved from the pen farming industry. —Conan Lu

The awesome cocktail you drank at fall dinner? A generous spoon of blueberry jam (but any will be delicious), shot of gin, dash of lemon juice, stirred with ice, topped with seltzer. Outside of 21SS I would add muddled fruit and mint. —Una Roven

No longer are the best chocolates on the market relegated to Easter. You can now have them during the Christmas season, too. My method is to pop one in my mouth, bite off the coating, and then let the chocolate melt. Chewing is for the weak. —Eve Jones

in preschool i built an unsuccessful bird feeder with a mango juice carton. “built” in the sense that i stuffed it full of seeds and put it outside. “unsuccessful” in the sense that i fed no birds. now i’ve been looking for this mango juice at school, but they’re all minute maid mango punches, dole orange peach mangos. just imagine a dole orange peach mango bird feeder. it’s demented. way too many nouns in a row. but so i'm at the grocery store in my 3.79-square-mile non-city of a hometown, buying cabbage, finding kern's mango nectar, drinking kern’s mango nectar, eating cabbage, buying more cabbage. this was not supposed to be about cabbage. —Jessica Zhang


Fall / Winter 2023

Notes

ADVO RECOMMENDS: WINTER 2024

Stephin Merritt is a singer-songwriter of the Magnetic Fields. Six months before the twenty-five year anniversary of their hit album, 

 for an interview. He sat in his New York apartment, surrounded by books and paraphernalia. We spoke about Boston in the 70s, love in the 2020s, and what he’s been reading lately.

This interview has been condensed for brevity and clarity.

The Magnetic Fields sort of got their start at Harvard. Do you have any fond memories of Boston?

I spent parts of my childhood and teenagedom in mostly suburban Boston. The day that we arrived in 1974, there were race riots going on. There were people throwing things and screaming and yelling because the schools were being desegregated, or threatening to be slightly less segregated. So people were up in arms, and it was awfully late to be having that argument but apparently, South Boston is especially conservative and they were having it. So my first impression of the Boston area was that it was a hotbed of racism and I was being thrown into a school system that was in turmoil about desegregation. And my impression never got much better.

fond memories of Boston. I mean, there were shops I liked. I liked the huge number of bookstores that used to be in Harvard Square, most of which are not there anymore. Is the Grolier Poetry Shop still there?

your experience of the music scene in Boston in the 70s and 80s?

I wasn’t really in the music scene. The kind of music I made was not the kind of music that the music scene wanted to be about. And like the school system, the ways that people socially organize themselves around music, or almost explicitly insisted that there were two magazines about the rock and rock adjacent music scene in the 80s. There was The Noise, which basically covered the Irish people, and the Beat, which covered the Italian people.

I went to an elementary school in Newton and I was told by a teacher in fourth grade to not socialize with people from the ethnic groups that were not my ethnic group. And I thought that was just ridiculous and I thought that was an eccentricity of her own, until I encountered the music scene, where things were again sorted by ethnicity, and people just didn’t talk to each other. It was really strange, and these were not different genres of music – the only thing different was the ethnicities and the performance. We noticed that many of the bands covered in 

had the singer’s last name as their band name, and none of the band names in 

There’s no reason the two magazines couldn’t have merged and covered the same people. But no, the listings were different. Sorry to keep returning to racism but that heavily colored my experience in Boston in the 80s – racism all the time.

But in New York, that's just not a reality. It's not like that. It wasn't like that and it's still there may be ethnic tilts to the audiences, but everything goes.

There's sort of like a lack of genre and a lack of like allegiance to a genre in a way.

Right. We played with the Apollo Theater, we were completely comfortable playing at the Apollo Theater. No one batted an eyelash. Whereas in Boston that would have been a very big deal.

Speaking of genre, you once mentioned that 

 arose out of an interest in the genre of love songs, which has very little to do with music, but it is mostly held together by the extra musical concept of love. A lot has changed in the 25 years since the album was released, including some changes in what we experience as love. I’m thinking about, specifically, like love and the Internet, love and social media, etc. Would your approach to the album change if you wrote it now? Would you think about love any differently?

Yeah, there would be a lot more explicit sex. There would be a lot more three ways and triples and polyamory there will be probably a lot more almost anonymous sex from the computer. There would probably be a lot less about the expectation of monogamy. And society through kink lenses because I’m surrounded by gay people.

My sense of what people do with their love lives is very much a function of the fact that I live in New York. When I was in Mexico City a year ago, I felt like gay love from Mexico city was different. I didn’t like it, I wasn't comfortable with it, but I didn't know it and I was only seeing the most visible parts. So in most of Europe, life is essentially the same as it is in New York. But that's not true all over the world. That's just New York and Europe. And I bet if I had written songs in Tokyo, I would have had a very different experience too. So the world is changing. But not all at the same rate and not all in the same direction. But I did. I did write it in New York and live in New York.

So I guess it would again be a New York centered album. Again, slash still. Love in New York has changed a great deal in the last 25 years.

Yeah, it has. Your songs also have a really interesting sense of place, like they sort of flit from like New York to San Francisco to DC and to all these different places within the US and without it. How do you negotiate with setting in your work, especially since a lot of pop songs nowadays are pretty vague, and I believe at least sort of intentionally obscure those details to make it more universal.

are vague. It’s just that a few of them are specific. And it’s in the nature of New York that we’re very interconnected with other cities. And Washington is a train ride away. And gay New York is always in conversation with gay San Francisco, which is better in many ways. But we can’t really change New York to be more like San Francisco, because we’re only 3% of the population.

I don't know that I would want to be back in New York of 1999 especially knowing what was about to happen.

has encouraged me, at least, to do a lot of thinking about what has changed. And certainly my life drastically changed immediately after 

I had zero money at the time and now I have a whole apartment. I really spent 1998 and 1999 only working on 

. So my life is not at all like that now. I have two dogs, named Edgar and Agatha. They are not named after the mystery novel awards. They are named after Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie, because their origins are mysterious. So it seemed like a good idea, at the time. If I were naming them after the awards, they would be Hugo and Nebula.

Speaking of your apartment, what’s on your nightstand right now?

What’s about to be on the nightstand is a cup of tea, which I will make between my interviews today.

A magazine called Cave Hollow.  I can't tell you anything about it. I haven't opened it yet. But it's made by a friend of mine. 

 by the wonderful writer Kelly Link, who we have known for 20 years. She opened for us a few times on tour. And we stayed at her delightful, many-colored house. And this music book, 

which is named after an Ultravox song, is a history of the beginnings of synth pop. I haven’t cracked that yet. I just got it, and I’m looking very much forward to reading it.

What songs have been stuck in your head lately?

Well, that song that is stuck in my head right now is the Ultravox song that the book is named after. I don't remember what was in my head before actually, I'm always bad at that. I can tell you what is in my head, but I can’t tell you what 

That makes sense. You write a lot of music in bars. What’s your drink of choice?

The Magnetic Fields will be performing at The Roadrunner on March 24th and 25th, on their 69 Love Songs 25th Anniversary Tour.

An Interview with Stephin Merritt

The Advocate Building was erected in 1956, to much fanfare. On our ninetieth anniversary, we attached a set of pegasi wings to a white horse, affixed the poor horse to a giant dictionary, and had it chew through the ceremonial red ribbon to announce the opening of the new building. T.S. Eliot cablegrammed an ode, Donald Hall and President Pusey spoke. The onlookers applauded. “The dedication was followed by revelry,” the Crimson wrote.

Nobody said that us artists weren’t a dramatic bunch.

In the years since, our lovely Ma Advo has ebbed and flowed with the times. A Crimson article from 1982 describes the house: “A hole in a carpet, a lamp without a shade, a curious emptiness to the threadbare offices all evoke a feeling that good times have come and gone.” And yet, the good times kept coming. Forty one years since the article, the Advocate is teeming with life.

& this is the transient, cyclical experience of the college campus. Within four years, no one you thought that you knew would be there anymore. The rooms are empty, they are filled with young people you don’t know, the inscriptions on the wall are in the handwriting of someone who you’ll never meet and know and say 

thank you for the bit of poetry that you wrote in Sharpie on the wall. I think about it often, and I hope you are okay.

This semester, the Advocate thought deeply about places & their meanings. We’ve given our beloved 21 South Street a total makeover. We’ve rouged her lips, painted her face, made her insides all nice and pretty. We’ve furnished the interior, we’ve scrubbed, polished, swept away any blemishes. Within a semester, the Advocate has become a livable space, far from carpet holes and curious emptinesses.

In between midterms and parties, we thought about belonging & alienation, being of here & also not of here at the same time. Sazi Bongwe ‘26 writes about the magnetic rush of his hometown, Johannesburg, in “Nobody’s Paris,” while Maren Wong ‘26 ponders estrangement on the fall from Weekes Bridge into the Charles River. Frank Liu ‘26 talks to Peter Hessler about joining the Peace Corps and finding nostalgia and affection for Fuling, China, “a Sichuan river town known for pickled mustard stems and little else.”

In Victoria Kishoiyian ‘26’s interview with Hilton Als, she asks him what it was like to exit adolescence. “It was easier to be connected to lovers because you don’t have to be someone else in your own home,” he answers. I think often about the simultaneous freedom and tethering of the college campus. A sort of transition home, a perpetual first crack in the egg.


Imaan Mirza ‘25 summarizes the push and pull of one’s hometown beautifully. “I don’t think of it as home, not exactly,” she writes about her childhood city, Jeddah. “I could navigate the city blindfolded, but I couldn’t tell you if it ever was home to me.”


The Poetry Board walks through transitions with their selections this semester. Tracy K. Smith celebrates President Claudine Gay’s Inauguration in “Panoramic,” and Edie Meade contemplates creases in “Experiments in Folding Paper.” Danny Liu ‘27 dances with Gustav Klimt in his poem “Second.”


Richard Siken contemplates life from bed. “Time / passed. Day turned to night. I woke and slept. I drank, I ate a / bit, I slept.”

A lone girl screams in a cage of red in Ava Salzman ‘23’s self-portrait “Ava.”


O, what it is like to be a home that no one stays in for very long.


Juliet describes the sickly feeling of getting older: “I think the reason I could be friends with him is that the first time I met him he said he wanted to be a child again. That he couldn’t stand the homesickness,” Juliet Coe ‘25 writes. She’s writing about miracles just as Gina Gwen Palacios’ mixed media subject sits expectantly on her suitcase in “Esperando/Esperar I,” and the soft lines of her dissipating “Family Portrait.”


The Fiction Board was interested in imagined settings, of places that don’t exist but are still eerily familiar. Suphil Lee Park is nostalgic for a future Korea in “The Last City of Ours.” Dylan Ragas ‘26 takes us back to summer camp in “The Bison.” In “Pieces,” Serena Jampel ‘25 tracks a mother and her son, falling apart and growing older. Graeme Benzanson takes us “up the Waterway, through the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi, and back across the Gulf of Mexico” in “America’s Great Loop.”


This issue of the Advocate is bounded and finite on all four sides, just like a house should be. Just like our plucky white building, who will weather another sixty-seven years of hopeful students, walking in and out like a revolving door, looking for something, somewhere, where – just for a moment – they can feel at home.


The Harvard Advocate proudly presents: Fall / Winter 2023

Editor's Notes

Editor's Note: Fall / Winter 2023

, Miranda July describes two kinds of people.

“In life there are Parkers and there are Drivers,” July writes, “Drivers are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring…they get joy from petting a dog or hanging out with their kid and that’s enough… Parkers, on the other hand… need a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause.”

The panic of being a Parker is what sets July’s protagonist on a cross country road trip; it is also exactly that set of characteristics that lead her to forgo the journey and stay at a motel 30 miles away from her house. It’s an absurd premise, one that gets a few laughs from my friends as I describe to them the plot of the book. But, July’s novel is a smart reversal of the road novel. It is witty and earnest and finds freedom, ironically, in staying put.

“I didn’t think a lot about death, but I was getting ready to,” July’s protagonist thinks while driving. “I understood that death was coming and that all my current preoccupations were kind of naïve; I still operated as if I could win somehow. Not the vast and total winning I had hoped for in the previous decades, but a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season”

As I followed the secluded vacation of the main character, a sort of abject horror overcame me. 

 The page I was reading looked like this:

July calls this “the cliff.” The sharp drop of women’s estrogen and libido in between forty-five and fifty.

July’s protagonist is haunted by the image of her grandmother, who “jumped out of the window of her New York City apartment building when she was fifty-five. No warning except she had recently been lamenting all her gray hairs.”

While reading I couldn’t help but feel lightheaded – not at July’s writing, which is evocative and physical and reminiscent of 

 – but rather at the plummeting feeling of doom that women feel when they realize the culmination of their life is 

The novel began as July’s intent to reframe the aging narrative. “I interviewed many, many gynecologists. I interviewed naturopaths. I interviewed older women about their experience of this time,” 

she said in a conversation with Elif Batuman

. Though little of the research went into the actual book, July was interested in “the idea that there might actually be something kind of hot in [menopause]”

People often write stories that imagine the conception of womanhood; rarely do we write about its fall. July’s novel feels like the mirror of a coming of age novel – a wild and exciting sexual fantasy, a rupture in the self, a heightened awareness of the plight of every other woman. Despite never leaving the greater Los Angeles area, July’s protagonist emerges from her motel chrysalis a changed woman.

 which feels like an ill-informed attempt to belittle her characters into a series of personality traits. It is true that often I wondered why any of the other characters put up with the deliriously bad decisions of the protagonist. But to read 

like that would be to neglect the contradictions of the female psyche, the holistic care with which July builds her characters.

Where July shines is her endearment to the strange intimacies of women and womanhood. “I’m forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What were we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth?” her protagonist asks. After every decision she makes, a call is placed to a different woman in the character’s life – her best friend, her mother, her older friend who is “obsessed with hot flashes.”

At the end, the July’s protagonist makes a group text with every woman above forty that she knows, and asks them about menopause. The women feel like some sort of chorus, as their texts clog up the page. “My chronic migraines stopped completely after menopause…I feel like my true self… What other people do, think, or say has become kind of irrelevant since I stopped bleeding.”

For July, the cliff is a peak – to stand at its brink is the beginning of a great adventure. And the fall may be the most thrilling part of the ride. In the same way, July’s vast universe – her delightful and obscure characters, twists of a completely unpredictable narrative, and incisive wit – can’t help but pull a reader in. Slowly, 

becomes a book that you cannot live without finishing.

This book was provided as a NetGalley from Riverhead.

Miranda July Imagines Life On The Brink

Talia Blatt

Tadhg Larabee

Eve Jones

Kyle Mandell

Serena Jampel

Sidonie Brown

Ottessa Moshfegh is an American author and novelist. Her debut novel 

 won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her subsequent novel 

 bestseller, and will be adapted for film by director Yorgos Lanthimos.

Moshfegh judged the Advocate’s 2022 Louis Begley competition for short fiction, and selected Yash Kumbhat's "Shaking, Trembling, Quaking, Rending." On May 13th, the fiction board interviewed her about her decision, as well as her upcoming novel, secret talents, approach to historical fiction, insomnia, and storytelling. Fiction editor Talia Blatt was joined by former editor Tadhg Larabee, and members Sidonie Brown, Serena Jampel, Eve Jones, Annika Inampudi, and Kyle Mandell.

This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

Talia Blatt: Let’s start with your decision in the Begley contest this year. Can we hear more of your thought process? And in general, when you read fiction critically, what do you look for?

Ottessa Moshfegh: I'm always looking for something that grabs my attention and sustains it. Second, I'm looking for a story that I want to understand. And the winning story was one that I felt immediately confused by, and not because it was written in a confusing way, but because it was about something that I didn't understand. I thought it was profoundly deep, and I was very impressed by how the story is woven in an almost abstract way through firsthand experiences as told by various characters that are all part of this strange world, going through this disaster. And I also just thought that it was beautifully written.

TB: You don't have any presence on social media. We're wondering to what extent you think authors should participate in the online conversation about their work.

OM: I think authors should participate to the extent that they care to. I don't think that there's any real requirement or restriction there. I think for me personally, I'm doing this interview from my car because I'm so busy. If I tried to have a life online, I don't think I could live my life IRL in the same way. And this is the life I care to live. For me, the way that I work with language, and the way I express myself, is my art form, and giving it all to Twitter or Facebook feels a bit like energy wasted. I can have conversations with people, and I'm satisfied with those conversations, when it's not being published online by an app or mediated in any way through a third party. I don't know. I like direct conversations.

Tadhg Larabee: I was incredibly excited to hear, maybe a year ago, the rumors about Yorgos Lanthimos adapting

, since it's one of my favorite books and he's one of my favorite directors. And I was wondering, especially given what you just said about the importance of unmediated language to your art form, how you're thinking about that book being adapted visually. How is that process going?

OM: I've written a bunch of screenplays, and most of them are adaptations of my own work. 

 is definitely the hardest adaptation because the novel is so much an interior monologue, and moves around the inside of the unnamed protagonist's mind back and forth through time. It required a whole new lens for me to see it as a movie. And I can't really talk about what's happening with that. But it's been an interesting process.

TB: I think we were hoping to do something of a fun speed round. Short questions, whatever comes to mind first. So: What's on your night table?

 by a friend of mine named Daniel Saldana Paris, a Mexican writer. I've been meaning to read his book for a long time. And I just saw him in Mexico City last week.

TB: You can have three writers, alive or dead, over for dinner. Who are they?

OM: James Baldwin. Honestly, I would just want James Baldwin to myself. Yeah, him and two empty chairs. I think that would be one good evening.

OM: Well, my high school graduating class was like 25 people. So it's hard to say. It was a very small school, very intimate. I think we all loved each other in a way that isn't possible in a bigger school. Two of my best friends now at almost 41 are friends I made in high school. So maybe I wasn’t the most popular girl in school, but I definitely had some really great friends.

TB: What was the last gift you gave someone?

OM: My friend stayed at my house dog sitting while we were in Mexico, and I brought her back a peyote-stitch, beaded bracelet.

OM: Maybe voices? I have a secret ambition to be a voice actor and do cartoon voices.

TB: What is one small thing that brings you joy?

OM: Probably when my husband comes home with flowers.

TB: If you didn't write fiction, what do you think you'd do?

OM: I think I might have ended up being some kind of executive. I don't know.

TB: Alright, that's the end of our speed round.

, but I was unsettled by it, particularly the femininity that's portrayed. I was interested in how you think about writing about women, because that book is a totally different femininity than I've ever read.

OM: Well, I think of writing about women the same way I would write about men: that they are human beings with very complicated egos and belief systems. Everybody has a past and everybody has a strategy of coping with what hurts them. I identify as a woman so often I feel that I am adjacent to my female characters because if they don't feel exactly like me — and they never do — I'm sort of observing them from the outside more. And weirdly, when I'm writing a male character, maybe because I'm not male, I find that I can feel possessed by the character best if I fully embody him. So I might imagine myself on the inside, rather than adjacent to him. But that's a very abstract way of answering your question.

TB: Your answer reminds me of conversations the board has had recently about autofiction. I'm curious what pieces of yourself you find appearing in your work — if it's like looking at a funhouse mirror.

OM: When I look back at my work, it is an archive of my curiosities, and the things that fascinate me, things that repulse me, things I find really funny. Still I don't actually identify with autofiction, and I'm not quite sure I understand what it is, not that I need to. I've always been interested in first person narratives because it's a way of writing from a different perspective, unique to your character. I've always thought about that kind of storytelling as voice-driven, almost like a song. It also has a lot to do with acting. And because it's such an interior form, or it can be, I think it's really easy to project the consciousness of the author onto the character. That's really common, and really funny to me, because if that's so, then I'm not a creative person. I'm just writing about myself. Trust me, if I wrote about myself, it would be really boring.

TL: On the subject of proximity to yourself, proximity to our world and our time, I'm really excited for your new book, which is historical fiction. I'm wondering how you wrote about a time so far from our own, and people so different from ourselves.

OM: Thanks for asking about the new book. It’s funny — I've written several novels that could be called historical fiction, but I've never really thought of them as being part of the genre, in that formal way. Like my first book was a novella and it takes place in New England on a ship in 1851, and I've been working on a long term novel project that takes place in Shanghai and San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century. Lapvona, the new book, felt more like it was playing with the genre of fable than the genre of historical fiction. But it is not in any strict sense of the word, a genre book, or at least I didn't intend it to be. I love research, and my methodology of research is really unscientific. I see research as part of the creative process, in that, in each detail that I find, I find a new trail of breadcrumbs to follow, into the next subject, the next article, whatever is going to bring me closer to understanding how to describe, in language, the world of my story. So I never mean for my work to be historically accurate. It's more like I'm stealing from history to inform my own work.

Eve Jones: On this note of the creative process, what does it look like for you to sit down and write? Do you have any rituals?

OM: Good question. I really wish there was a ritual, because then I could just, like, do it. Usually when I'm writing a first draft of something, like a novel, I just set aside a certain number of hours each day, and have a goal to write a certain number of words. It's different when I'm writing a short story. A short story, because it's shorter, because you can sit back and hold it out and look at the whole thing at once, the process of drafting is way more one of revision and rewriting and moving things — it's like a constant shifting collage, until the story snaps into place. But when I'm drafting a novel, I just try to keep moving forward every day, so there is a kind of rigid discipline. And when I’m revising, I have a really specific method. It’s very boring, but it looks like me with my manuscript and a pencil, for hours and hours each day over and over and over again, until I can read it though and not make any scribbles. Then I’m like, okay, here's a draft.

TB: Your work seems to really relish in disgust, especially as it relates to the body. I'm curious — why disgust? And has it changed the way you relate to or inhabit your own body?

OM: I think it's more that my feelings about my own body were showing up in my writing. Revulsion has always been a prevalent emotion in my experience, especially when I was younger, starting from puberty up until a couple of years ago. Disgust was a primary emotion for me; instead of getting angry or sad I felt disgusted. I think that's why I've had to write about it so much—it's part of my make-up. I don't find the human body disgusting. I actually find human intelligence kind of disgusting. But I like conflating the two. I do think there's a lot of value in writing about a character's physical being. Reading is such a thoughtful process, that I think we do it to escape the physical world. But if you can bring the physical world back into that experience, I find that very interesting. Having a visceral response to literature is something I think is important to keep up the power of the written word. It's also just sort of my jam.

Sidonie Brown: We discussed the ways in which the self creeps into writing. But on the other side of that coin, I'm curious if you find writing creeping into your life. For example, the narrator in

Annika Inampudi

Annika Inampudi

Features

Fall 2024 - Land

The Machine that Makes the Machine

Fall 2025 - Diagnosis

An Interview with Lisa Mendelman

Notes

Notes

ADVO RECOMMENDS: WINTER 2024

Notes

An Interview with Stephin Merritt

Notes

Miranda July Imagines Life On The Brink

Editor's Notes

Fall / Winter 2023

Editor's Note: Fall / Winter 2023

Spring 2023 - Decoy

Editor's Note

Fiction

Spring Summer 2022

An Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh