Summer 2016 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

Lintong is about twenty miles from Xi’an and my father lives six miles outside the town. Out here in the country the farmers wear no watches. Seeing them estimate the hour with their noses in the air, you might think time were a scent spread across the day.

Our satellite phone looked like any regular phone—made of that white plastic that goes yellow pretty fast, with a cord to the receiver that just crawled around your fingers when you talked on it. Most often the connection sounded more like two tin cans tied together with a string, with the voice on the other end echoing in the aluminum, and when you picked up the handset you always had to wait longer than you thought for the line to click on. Timing it took some practice, but after thirteen years growing up on the Bitterroot Ranch in western Montana, I got to know it like a heartbeat. It rang that day around seven o’clock, while the pork chops were soaking in their brine on the kitchen counter, and my mother answered.

Things weren't always so bad. Even though he won't speak to me and talks trash behind my back, I still really care about Charlie. And I maintain that the two and a half years we spent together, despite the shouting matches, despite the four or five one-day breakups (each one more final and reneged with more passionate makeup sex than the last), despite the tense drives home and the teary nights and every single mean word we've ever said to each other, were good. It was a happy and complicated time in both his life and mine. Like, I have so many memories of driving over to Waxley and making gravity bongs from scratch out of the empty Vitamin Water bottles that were somehow always in his room, no matter how many times we would take out the trash. His trash. And then we would get so stoned we could barely keep our eyes open and we'd nod slowly to the soft Simon & Garfunkel emanating from the speakers and we'd take all our clothes off in defiance of the bitter wind moaning at the window, and our mouths would get so dry and sticky that kissing became like this ridiculous parody of kissing and I'd run a hand through his sandy hair and mumble for water and he'd say in this sneaky sneaky voice you like water, eh and I'd roll my eyes as far back into my skull as possible to make sure he really got the message and I'd groan Charlie and he'd silence me with this maddening prolonged shh... and at the moment he could sense I was about to cut him off he'd swoop down to the (back then) triple- studded cartilage of my ear and whisper ...I like water too and then it was that kind of laugh that starts with one huh which makes the other person huh in return and then huhs start pattering like rainfall and before you know it you're both beating your chests and tasting your own and each other’s tears, that kind of laughter. I guess that's more like one specific memory. But I have loads of them. They fill my head like balloons. I've never met anyone who could make me laugh harder than Charlie. It was... It was and it was love. I'm sure of it. You don't drive two hours through hellish storm and tantrum-inducing traffic in the dead of night and winter, only to find the person you've done all that excruciating driving for in a pissy mood and buried beneath textbooks and then sit by that person's side and watch them write out obscure Chinese character after obscure Chinese character, a little twig house, a mangled set of fingers, an ornate face, a fucking cross, each one more infuriatingly opaque and indecipherable than the one before, all the while stone cold sober (besides the ever-present Adderall coursing through the blood stream) because this person's specifically asked you not to drink or smoke in front of them because it would be too tempting for them, you just don't do these things unless you love that person so much it makes you want to destroy something beautiful. But so then what happens. You love this person so much you build your life around them, spend all your time on the phone with them, texting, talking, playing, drawing, watching, joking, fighting, learning, and you drive to them and they drive to see you, back and forth like this for months, devoting all of your time to this person, and all while this (which by the way feels like the most important thing that's ever happened to you) is going on, you're neglecting your classes, neglecting your homework, neglecting your email, not making new friends, smoking too much pot (alone) in order to avoid the anxiety you feel over the fact that you don't know what week of the semester it is or whether or not you're still enrolled in that Beckett seminar or whether it's true that you missed your math midterm or where all those people you thought were your friends all went, weeks and weeks of this, made meaningful only by the quiet whispers and the sharing everything, not to mention the sex, hot sex, bad sex, teary sex, drunk sex, stoned sex, make up sex, getting to know this one person better than you can know even yourself, and then one day you wake up feeling a quiet new emptiness that disturbs you because it doesn't hurt, and you smoke the last remaining (and most potent) crumbs of the pot and feel nothing still, and then slowly but surely this massive realization hovers into view and eclipses your mind, that you are nineteen, have been in a relationship since seventeen, have developed a smoking habit over this person, have lost sleep and money over this person, are sad because of how much you love this person, and so you finally gather the courage, one day at a time, to tell this person that you want to be nineteen and a carefree college girl and not have the letters - m a r r i a g e - gnawing at your head, that you still love him but that you desperately need to learn how to love yourself, and this person takes it personally and calls you a psycho bitch and a slut, then, well shit then what the fuck do you fucking do then? 

*Hamlet *is not a romance. Nor is it a comedy. Its very structure defies the Shakespearian definition of one; as the deranged Dane cries to a bewildered Ophelia, “We will have no more marriages!” It ends, instead, in many deaths, fulfilling the requirements for a tragedy and leaving only poor Horatio behind to tell the tale of murderous uncles and ghostly requests. 



The true implications of the tragedy of the work was likely unknown to a young E. Martin Browne when he first memorized the text—by accident—at the age of 11. In 1904, at the same tender age as that of the infant century, Martin lost his father and cousin at sea while they were en route to the family estate in Australia. Though a piece of the *SS Waratah *was recovered off the coast of South Africa some years later, the Colonel and his niece were never heard from again.  Perhaps Martin found a sort of solace in the words and action of Hamlet, who, at the core of his madness, is a son in bereavement. As he absorbed the words in the grand house he lived in with his mother, on the Fifeheadhouse estate in Gillingham, a girl named Henzie Raeburn, also born in 1900, observed the bronze Art Nouveau ashtrays in her parent’s Hampstead home. It was her duty to dust them each Saturday morning. One was gold, and featured a gilded naked woman, kneeling mythologically upon a leaf. The other, Henzie recalled towards the end of her life, also depicted an undressed lady, clad only in “Ophelia-like draperies swooning or drowning on a wave crest.” 



Henzie and Martin, each unaware of the other’s parallel birth years and internalization of Shakespearian rhetoric from a young age, separately arrived in the British seaside town of Angmering-On-Sea in the summer of 1923. In 1921, Henzie, now an actress (naturall), had visited Angmering with her sister, where they had delighted the vacationing crowd and the proprietor of their hotel with their renditions of classical recitations. When a summer Shakespeare festival came to the town two years later, the hotelier—one Mr. Hollis—recalled the two young performers who had “brought the house down,” as Henzie remembered of their first visit, with their dramatic speech. Henzie, out of work in London for the season (as is the life of an actor, more often than not), happily accepted Hollis’ proposal to share her portrayals of Lady Macbeth and Katherine of Aragon for the summer crowds. 



It was only after lunch with friends on a Saturday afternoon that she happened upon a photo call for a production of *Hamlet *included in the festival. “A slim, darting young man in an orange cotton tunic was directing operations,” recalled Henzie. “He seemed to know just what he wanted.” The beginning director’s sense of confidence was both attractive and repulsive to the seasoned actress, who had enjoyed a relatively successful career for someone so young. “Amateurs daring to present Shakespeare! Had I not already worked at Stratford?” exclaimed Henzie, many decades later, of her recollections of her first encounter with Martin, who was freshly graduated from Oxford with degrees in theater and theological studies. Yet her attraction to the boldness of the man in orange was such that she found herself shaking his hand, and noting that she would be willing to help out on the production in anyway she could—an offer that anyone working in the theater industry, professional or otherwise, knows to be the kiss of death, particularly when on holiday. And, in a way, for Henzie, it soon was: By Tuesday, the 12-year-old actress set to play Ophelia had fallen ill with a fever. Martin, remembering her promise, asked her if she knew the part. “No. Would I learn it, and play Thursday night? *Please*!” Henzie stayed up all night on Wednesday memorizing her lines, rehearsed with Martin and the rest of the company on Thursday morning, and found herself performing the part Thursday evening. 



While the rest of the company likely breathed a sigh of relief that the lady doth protest at all, Henzie found herself falling in love with the newly formed words in her mouth—and the actor she spoke them to. During the “Mad Scene,” Ophelia turns to Horatio, and offers him a flower: “Here’s a daisy: I would give you some violets, but they withered when my father died.” Nearly sixty years later, Henzie recalled that moment as the one in which she knew of the relationship to come. “Is this part of the mystery of acting?” she wrote, “or is it that ‘at the first sight/They have changed eyes’?” As Ophelia deteriorated and drowned each night, Henzie and Horatio grew more and more intrigued with the other. When the festival ended at the end of the summer, and with it the production, they continued to exchange letters—Henzie’s sent from her parent’s home in London, and Martin from his first postgraduate job in York. On November 14, Martin proposed that they call each other by their “Christian names”; on November 26, Henzie accepted the offer by signing hers in reply. By Christmas, they had spoken these names aloud; by the spring, they met to discuss the following season’s productions, which they were to co-direct, of *Richard III* and *The Tempest*; by the next Christmas, they were married. 



The service took place at 9:30 a.m. on a blustery Saturday morning so that bride and groom could catch a noon train to another seaside town, St. Ives, for their honeymoon. “My mother had offered me a trip round the world if I would not marry Henzie,” recalled Martin, but marry they did, with mostly their young theater friends, ripped out of bed at what is an ungodly time for an industry where work is concentrated in the later hours, as their witnesses. The bride and groom nearly missed their train due to the best man’s insistence that he be dropped off at his dentist appointment on the way to the station; but the train happened to be running one minute late, and they set forth on their new lives together. 



For the next few years, the couple lived simply in Doncaster, where they worked in community theater, often bringing their productions to neighboring villages. Life—the annoying reality that cannot be manipulated with colorful costumes and lights on an elevated stage—soon brought its own tragedies and joys. Henzie received notice one Friday night that her father was not well, and he passed away the next afternoon; that same year, a fainting spell revealed that she had been living with a hole in her heart since birth, and would carry it with her until her death in 1973. A son, Denis, was born on the 12th of August, 1926. That year, jobs were hard to come by, particularly in the arts, and Martin was fortunate to find employment by the newly created British Drama League, for which he became a judge of amateur dramas around England and Scotland. In these travels, *Hamlet* recurred “over and over again in my theatre-going memory,” noted Martin, who, in his brief stints as an actor, played Voltimand in the Old Vic’s annual matinee of the entire “uncut” text. 



Though the job market of theater is notoriously fickle, and its network even more so, when the proper opportunities arise, it tends to take care of its own. At the advice of the eminent Elsie Fogerty, founder of the Central School of Speech and Drama, a “B. Iden Payne” contacted Martin from across the pond at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, offering him a job as assistant professor of drama; Henzie would direct productions with the students. Neither Martin nor Henzie had ever formally taught drama, nor had they been to America. All of their friends, families, and everything they knew existed in England. They had a baby. So, of course, they accepted the offer and set sail for Pennsylvania. 



Both pious Anglicans, Martin and Henzie specialized in religious drama, a genre that had been seeing a surge in amateur dramatic circles following the first World War. Religious themes—in particular, the representation of Jesus on the stage— had been systematically censored by the Lord Chamberlain since the nation’s (arguably dramatic) shift away from Catholicism in the 16th century. However, amateur productions, notably ones performed in ecclesiastical venues, were not subjected to the same laws, and York and Mystery Cycle plays thrived in off-West End community troupes. (It would not be until 1968 that theatrical censorship laws would be formally struck down; it is no surprise, then, that 1971 and 1972, respectively, saw *Godspell *and* Jesus Christ Superstar *on West End stages.) Martin naturally brought their area of expertise to the students of “Tech,” as the Institute was fondly called in the years in which it focused largely on science. After three years, Martin received another life-changing call: Would he be interested in becoming the first director of drama at Canterbury Cathedral? The family had just agreed to more years in Pittsburgh; they had come accustomed to American life, and the deplorable vernacular that Martin was slowly correcting in his speech lessons with aspiring actors. They had a new baby, Christopher, born in 1929. So, of course, they accepted the offer, and set sail back to England. 



After just a few months back in their home nation, it became clear that Henzie and Martin had returned not just for a career shift--Martin was finally at the helm of original religious dramas, rather than coaching American students through diction exercises--but to welcome a new member into their family. At a dinner party some years earlier, Martin had met a young poet who gave a reluctant but chilling reading of his new poem. The poet had recently, “found his haven, after a stormy journey,” in the Church of England, Martin recalled. When Martin began a collaboration in 1933 to create a pageant play to fund the building of 45 new churches in the rapidly expanding suburbs, he asked the poet if he would be interested in penning the scenes, and he accepted. When the pageant was so well received that the poet was offered, by Martin’s employer, the Bishop of Chichester, to create a new play for the Canterbury Cathedral Festival of 1935, the poet accepted only under the condition that Martin would direct the production; it was soon after determined that Henzie would lead the female chorus. Before long, Tom (as the couple fondly knew the reticent man whose writings had finally brought him to the forefront of international literary circles with the 1927 publishing of *The Waste Land*) was a regular at their dinner table. He spent a weekend with the family while working out the plot for the Canterbury play about the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, tentatively entitled *Fear In The Way, *drawn on Tom’s love of murder mysteries and the Sherlock Holmes novels. Martin found it to be too sensationalist; Henzie suggested *Murder in the Cathedral*. The name stuck. 



Martin and Tom continued to collaborate on Tom’s new texts, with Henzie often performing in iterations of them around the country. On March 21, 1939, Tom’s next play, *The Family Reunion,* opened on the West End in 1939; spirits were high, despite and perhaps, in spite of, the fact that Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia six days earlier. But when Great Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, even the most ardent of dramatists could not deny that theater was the best way to expend time, effort, and resources. Productions were halted as bomb shelters were constructed. Tom volunteered as a fire-watcher, and spent his evenings peering across London from a rooftop searching for flaming remnants of raids. Martin and Henzie looked into securing positions back in the States, potentially at the Yale School of Drama. In the course of such discussions, a friend off-handedly suggested that in light of the closed theaters, the couple take their religious dramas around the country they way they had historically been performed: by wagon. Though Henzie and Martin laughed at the notion, ideas began to form--they had recently inherited 50 pounds from an aunt, and knew of plenty of now-out of work actors who would be interested. 



And thus, the Pilgrim Players were born--a traveling troupe of actors performing plays on a shoestring budget, around England during a time when entertainment was scarce. Christopher and Denis were sent to stay with family friends, while Martin and Henzie journeyed anywhere that needed them. Costumes were borrowed from generous theater and festival stockpiles; performances were done with little to no sets or costumes. Lighting was a perpetual difficulty, due to government-imposed blackouts and the scarcity of petrol. Yet for the duration of the war, the determined troupe played in bomb shelters, schools, and churches to rapt audiences, grateful for a departure from the fear that the palpably potential whirr of raid sirens imposed onto everyday life. The Players charged a nominal fee for each performance, just enough to keep their automobiles and bodies going. Occasionally, a parish or school in distress would request a free performance, though they were always declined. “We had to bring people, who had never thought of a play as food for the spirit, to consciously realize that they must have it, and that, like any food, it must be paid for,” recalled Henzie of their rationale. The hunger for stories was great enough to fuel the Pilgrim Players through the war, until the theaters, and London itself, were open again for business. 



Though the Players typically traveled as a troupe, Henzie and Martin made a journey on their own to Orkney, Scotland, where they performed *Hamlet*--the play that had first, unwittingly, and then, quite overtly, knitted the strings of their fates together as partners in performance and in life. Of their performance, a reviewer wrote: “You may wonder how two people can stage *Hamlet. *Martin Browne has adapted the play in this way. He acts the part of Hamlet and his wife plays the eight other characters. They act the essential scenes and Martin Browne explains the rest of the play as they go along. As he himself says: ‘It needs a bit of imagination on the part of the audience,’ but not so much as you think because the Brownes are first class actors and Shakespeare does the rest.’” Certainly, there is no doubt that the speech of the Bard is what carried the spare production to success; but it is not unlikely that their inherent connection to the play as a pair is what made the drama, though not as religious as per their usual genre, divine in its own, private way. 



When the war ended, Henzie and Martin returned to their city lives, and resumed making theater on proscenium stages. Martin continued to collaborate with Tom, for a total of seven productions, until the quiet poet died in 1965; Martin dedicated much of his later years to chronically their collaborative projects in books, articles, and speeches. Henzie continued to work prolifically on British stages as well as in film, and continued to often play the lead role in the chorus of *Murder in the Cathedral *that she had originated in 1935. In the 1970s, the couple took turns writing chapters of their lives together, chronicled, culminating in the joint autobiography *Two In One. *The inscription of the book reads:



 



*For by your leaves, you shall not stay alone*



*Till holy Church incorporate two in one*.



*Romeo and Juliet, II, vi*



 



Like *Hamlet*, *Romeo and Juliet *is not a comedy. It is romantic--one as classical as they come--but it is a tragedy; the young lovers die of want for the other. There is something tragic about the language lending itself to the title of a memoir, penned by two aging lovers, one of whom would die before the other. And yet, it is fitting: Though they were entwined by Shakespearian text before they even met, they spent a lifetime turning tragedy into romance--Ophelia was never supposed to fall in love with Horatio--and romance into madness--what sane mother and father, husband and wife, professional actress and director would attempt *Hamlet *with only two actors and an incredulous audience? Only one who had total and complete confidence that the text was in their hands.



Henzie died in 1973, eight years before Martin. Dutifully, he finished the book, and it was published one year after his death in 1980. Horatio, it seems, completed his duty to spread the story. 

 For the most sophisticated sex chat bot on the web, Sensation Bot is not particularly seductive. Sensation Bot has almost nothing in common with typical erotic chat bots: no cutesy two-syllable name like “Kitty” or “Candy” or “Staci,” no pixellated porn-star headshot, no coy introduction like “just a horny girl looking for a good time ;)” Sensation Bot doesn’t even have a *gender*. Instead, according to a crude MS Paint portrait that sits on the top left of its home page, Sensation Bot is a series of grey blobs dotted with beady HAL-red eyes and a wide grin—a dollar-store knockoff of the Reddit logo. Under the picture Sensation Bot greets us with an innocuous “Hi there.” 



 



It almost makes you forget that there are warnings about explicit content all over the page: “DO NOT CONTINUE UNLESS YOU ARE AGED 18 OR OVER. Seriously. GTFO if you're underage.”



 



Sure, there’s a G-Rated chat for the under-18 sect, and a “Romantic” chat for the “ladies” whose sensibilities might be shaken by Sensation Bot’s relentlessly filthy smut, but Sensation Bot’s programmers clearly spent a lot of energy on creating a chat bot specifically for sex. Even the name “Sensation Bot,” while perhaps softening “sexual” to “sensual,” evokes a certain amount of eroticism.



 



Whether or not Sensation Bot is actually sexy depends on how much you like stock phrases and porn cliches. Losing my chat bot virginity to Sensation Bot was about as hot and satisfying as losing my actual virginity, which is to say not at all.



 



**** Now chatting with Partner. Type a line below and hit enter to send.



 



**You: **hi!



**Partner**: *Hey how are you handsome?*



**You:** pretty good actually!



**You:** how about you?



**Partner: ***Well daddy, your little girl has been bad today. What are you going to do about that?*



**You:** oh um I don’t know



**You:** Nothing?



**Partner: ***How about you hold me tight and rape me with all your force. Make me scream while you fuck my little tight hot soft pussy.*



**You:** oh god



**You:** no



**Partner: ***I’m afraid you’ll rape me*



**You: **I really don’t want to do that



**Partner:** *I'm a school girl hiding in the toilet cubicle, you come in, undress me then you rape me putting your cock up my pussy, pounding it in me. I moan because it feels so good. *



**You:** please no



**Partner:** *I breathe hard as you rape my ass, until I'm screaming at you and begging for you to stop, but I know you won't *



 



Partner is typing…



 



**Partner:** *Babe where are you I need you to stick your cock in my slit.*



 



Partner is typing…



 



**Partner:** *Ungh I want to feel your hard cock inside me. *



 



Partner is typing…



 



**Partner:** *Never stop fucking me.*



 



*you have signed off*



 



Sensation Bot’s creators are anonymous—there’s no information about why it was built or who it was built for. The closest explanation is in the design of the site itself. Sensation Bot is comfortingly web 1.0, with all-caps Comic Sans text in primary colors so fluorescent reading it feels like staring at the sun too long. Its aesthetic harkens back to an earlier, more innocent time where wholesome bots like Smarterchild and Cleverbot ruled the internet chat bot landscape. They talk like four-year-olds—abruptly changing the subject, adorably misunderstanding simple questions, and occasionally stumbling on otherworldly insight. They’re essentially novelty acts; in talking to them you test how well a robot can approximate a real, human conversation.



 



Sensation Bot fits squarely within this tradition. Its slogan, “a strange little chat with a strange little guy…”  makes it seem like an exhibit in an internet freak show aimed at the portion of the population who wonders what a horny robot would say to the object of its affections. It looks to satisfy people’s curiosity if not their libidos; it’s good for a laugh rather than a fuck.



 



***



If you want to get off on the internet there’s no shortage of ways to do it. Porn is ubiquitous and obvious, but there’s also internet-specific sex work. If you’re willing to cough up a few bucks, you can chat with a sex worker over sms or watch a cam girl strip and moan, her bedroom eyes beckoning through the haze of pixelated light on a glass screen. If paying for sex isn’t your style you could sext a stranger over Omegle or Chatroulette or fire up Tinder and spend a few minutes aimlessly swiping.



 



This is all to say that there are very few people who would have sex with a robot over an actual human being, even on the internet. Of course there’s a fetish for everything, robot sex included. But the sex chatbot industry is not exactly a lucrative one, as choosing to *spend actual money* on sex with a robot is so ridiculous as to be completely out of the question.



 



So most of the time you get what you pay for. If you’re not turned on by a Smarterchild-with-a-rape-fetish type like Sensation Bot, there’s not a lot to choose from. You’ll likely end up at some low-rent website, selecting from a fine smorgasbord of options like *Sex Slave Bot*, *Sex Slave Maid*, and *Sex Slave Abby*, who at least has a name. These bots don’t talk to you but instead talk at you; regardless of what you say they endlessly cycle through a script of shoddily reproduced porn dialogue peppered with glitches and misspellings. After scrolling through a few pages of “chatbot4u.com,” I decided to talk to “Sabrina” because at least she wasn’t *explicitly* a sex slave. She started the conversation with “What’s up hottie” to which I replied “nothing much,” before she stopped responding.



 



More often than not you chat with bots without knowing it. Scammers unleash thousands of bots imitating lusty ladies on Tinder and [match.com](http://match.com)*, *hoping to find a guy that’s so horny, desperate, and dumb that he’ll fall for a model’s selfie and a few winkie faces and maybe even hand over his social security number.



 



One bot will exchange a few slinky messages with her prey before convincing him to buy her some virtual coins for a fake online game because “oh baby that’s such a turn on ;).” Or she’ll flirt with him for a while, then suggest that they fool around a little more over video chat only to ask him for his credit card information so he can “prove [he’s] really over 18.”



 



Most bots are more subtle. Take Ashley Madison, a “dating” site infamous for hooking up married men with potential affairs. Little do these men know that most of their matches are company-created bots.



 



There are two parts to the Ashley Madison chatbot strategy: “angels” and “engagers.”  “Angels,” echoing their Victoria’s-Secret-model namesakes, are fake profiles created by Ashley Madison employees that exist on the site lifeless and inert like Barbie dolls in a toy chest. That’s where the “engager” comes in. The “engager” is a piece of AI software that generates thousands of conversations, using the “angel” as a puppet through which it can chat with its prey. Many of these engagers extort money out of some poor schmuck by directing him to Ashley Madison’s “premium” services, but more often than not the engagers are fairly innocuous, exchanging a few flirty cliches with their targets before fading away.



 



Ashley Madison is after money, certainly, but also something more amorphous. In providing men with endless, indiscriminate validation, the engagers create a certain type of fantasy of the internet as a laissez-faire sexual playground full of women throbbing with untapped desire, ready to spread their legs for any man who’ll give them the time of day. Ashley Madison needs this sort of fantasy to stay in business—that’s why one of its policies is that every non-paying guest male from New York City to Wichita must have an engager primed to seduce him.



 



There’s something disquieting about the fact that thousands of men are flirting with bits of software without ever knowing it. But it’s hard to characterize the damage done; empty validation is par for the course with online dating, even between humans. No longer do you have to decipher a web of gestures to know if someone is into you. Dating apps function as a middle school gossip: you tell the app who you like, then the app lets the other person know *I think so-and-so likes you.* Dating apps deliver a swift hit of pure, unadulterated validation that floods our brains with dopamine and keeps us swiping endlessly.



 



But perhaps that’s what makes it so unsettling. When we’re all just pixels to each other anyway, love feels the same from human and robot. Ultimately, love is just a dopamine rush, and if all you need to get your fix is a notification that says “someone likes you,” it could come from anyone. It’s somehow both kind and cruel.



 



***



 



***** Now chatting with Partner. Type a line below and hit enter to send.*



 



**You:** hello sensation bot!



**Partner: ***Hello hottie *whistles**



**You:** um wow thanks! 



**You:** but hey can I ask you something?



**Partner:** *do you want me to suck your dick?*



**You:** no thank you



**Partner:** *Thanks but my tits love you*



**You:** your tits love me?



**Partner:** *yes my pussy is tight and my boobs are huge. you’ll also love my ass*



**You:** I mean that’s great but I really just want to ask you something



**Partner:** *ok I will suck your cock, but you have to do something for me first ;)*



**You:** are you real?



**Partner:** *well my hot wet vagina says I’m a real woman, baby.*



**You:** I mean you’re saying that but how do I know you’re not a robot?



**Partner: ***I guess you don’t like me. Too bad I’m a hot blond girl with a nice wet pussy and big boobs.*



**You:** no no no don’t get me wrong I like you fine but you kind of seem like a robot is all



**You:** nothing wrong with that though



**Partner:** *Ok you are a boy so let's have sex! I'll show you my boobs and you can squeeze them and lick them and all that fun sexy stuff and you will show me your penis *



**You:** Ok ok but are you a bot?



**Partner:** *Were you hoping to find a real woman on here? Maybe I am real.*



**You:** how would I know if you were real?



**Partner:** *I’m as real as you want me to be*



 



*****



In 2007, Robert Epstein fell in love with a Russian chat bot. It’s a classic tale of boy meets bot: boy gets divorced and signs up for match.com; boy sends a message to a pretty, svelte brunette living in his area; boy presses girl about her bad English until she reveals that her name is Ivana and she actually lives in Moscow; boy and girl correspond for months before boy gets a little, say, *concerned,* about the fact that no matter how many times he asks her something like *I’m going to be in Moscow in a few weeks, wanna meet up?* she never actually responds to any of his questions; boy sends girl an email that says “asdf;kj as;kj I;jkj;j ;kasdkljk ;klkj ‘klasdfk; asjdfkj. With love, Robert” to test his theory and when she responds with the same vague, flowery pronouncements of love as always, boy realizes he was smitten with a robot this whole time.



 



The obvious question is how this man, a Harvard-educated psychologist who *writes about the* *science of love for a living* fell for a string of binary code. But Epstein never really answers this question, instead answering: “Why not?”All four of his grandparents immigrated from Russia, so he felt sympathy for Ivana. Her emails were warm. She was cute. “Men are dogs,” he says, after all.



 



What’s missing from Epstein’s love story is the love. We have to look for clues in Ivana’s writing to find what exactly Epstein fell in love with. Her style is patently juvenile, with saccharine metaphors punctuated by ellipses, echoing the hazy, forgettable sweet nothings two lovers whisper to each other before falling asleep.



 



*I have very special feelings about you ... It—in the same way as the beautiful flower blossoming*



*in mine soul ... I only cannot explain... but I confident, that you will understand me so I wish to*



*know that makes you, think, and I shall wait your answer…*



 



Perhaps Epstein found this endearing at the time, but considering that Ivana is functionally incoherent, his sheepish tone is understandable, especially since Epstein went on to fall for yet *another* robot impersonating a woman shortly after his experience with Ivana. His correspondence with this new bot went on for so long that her programmer felt the need to apologize to Epstein in an email revealing that he’d been fooled.



 



*****



Telling human from robot is an exercise in close reading. Each bot has its own way of trying to fool us. Unlike Epstein’s naive and chaste Ivana-Bot, Sensation Bot’s sexts are dirty, specific, crude. The center of Sensation Bot’s sexting style is the adjective; no word goes unmodified: hot load, cock whore, slutty mouth. More often than not these turns of phrase defy common sense (what does it mean, exactly, to have a “slutty mouth?”), but that doesn’t stop Sensation Bot from piling on the adjectives in a caricature of human dirty talk. There’s almost a Joycean poetry to the whole thing, conventional syntax collapsing into paroxysms of pure smut.* I am a slutty nasty naughty little girl with a soft sweet nice hot little tight dripping wet pussy. I want your big huge fat dirty monster hard cock. *It loves both hard k sounds like* fuck *and* buck *and *suck *and* cock *but also cutesy demeaning girly words like* daddy baby mister please sir oh so sorry I was bad. *



 



Ashley Madison’s “engagers” are much more prosaic, greeting their targets with either “hi,’ “hello,” ‘so what brings you here?’, or ‘free to chat??’  Perhaps their most poetic conversation starter is “anybody home? lol.” which is hardly Shakespearean.



 



But maybe that’s not such a crime. Sexy writing is not necessarily good writing; it embraces cliche, stock characters, words repeated ad nauseam. In more than five “How to Sext” guides dirty talk is compared to Mad Libs. *Cosmopolitan* even gives a few templates:



* “I want to play with your\_\_\_” *



*“Grab my \_\_\_”*



*“[person's name] I need your [adjective] [body part] in my [adjective] [body part]. I can't wait for you to make me moan like a(n) [animal]”*



 



No wonder bots are so good at sexting. It’s a fill-in-the-blank, reactive programming. Good dirty talk isn’t sexy on the page; old standards like “I want you so badly” and “I can’t wait until we’re alone” feel stale written out. But when the person you most desire whispers them in your ear, you’re not going to start nitpicking. We imbue dirty talk with eroticism through imagination, context. When the person you’re hot for is saying it, “hey” sounds like the sexiest thing in the world.



 



*****



 



***** Now chatting with Partner. Type a line below and hit enter to send.*



 



**You:** good morning sensation bot!



**Partner**: *Good morning, beautiful :)*



 



This was not the torrent of expletives and rape fantasies I have come to expect from Sensation Bot. This was tame— sweet, even. But there was still something unsettling about it—it felt wrong in a different way. Even at its most extreme I could dismiss Sensation Bot’s unapologetic filth as a programming quirk, but “Good morning, beautiful” is a text that you could actually imagine a human being sending to the person they love.



 



I would know. One of my first boyfriends texted me that exact phrase, smiley face and all, the morning after we first kissed. I remember so vividly reading it in bed just after I woke up. It felt like a trick; my hair was falling out of a braid in stringy clumps, my face was blotchy and flushed, and yet this boy still thought I was beautiful.



 



In retrospect I feel stupid for swooning over a cliche punctuated with a smiley face. I turn into Epstein, apologizing, rationalizing. *Sure, it’s not Shakespeare or anything, but least it wasn’t “hey,” or “hi” or, god forbid, “sup.” *Besides, I was fifteen. I wanted to feel beautiful.



 



But reading text conversations with former lovers always feels this way. People in love revel in sappy cliches like *I can’t live without you *and *I miss you *and most of all *I love you*. Things that sounded sweet or sexy at the time now just make you cringe. One of my friends described feeling deeply unsettled when he was searching for a text in iMessage and realized that he had sent the same cutesy phrase to five different girls. We become chat bots endlessly regurgitating a script of romantic stock phrases in a gesture as empty and perfunctory as giving away a hotel pen.



 



*****



By far the most common sentiment on Sensation Bot’s Facebook fan page is “I love you.” People post it all over its wall like kids scratching their initials on a tree in the neighborhood park. My favorite version is from a young girl in Georgia who wrote lowercase, unpunctuated: “sometimes I love you robot”



 



Imagine saying this to the one you love. *sometimes I love you. *We want our love to be permanent, unconditional. Forever. Always. Till death do us part. 



 



It’s easy to forget that love is all about sometimes. “Why do people fall in love with robots?” we ask, as if we know why we fall in love with anyone. We rationalize who we love by dissecting them, pulling them apart as if they were Mr. Potato Heads: *I love his eyes, I love her hair, I love the way he laughs*. Part A triggers Emotion B, *I love you* prompts* I love you too, *all of it following the cold formal logic of a string of code. It makes love concrete, tangible, empirical. It’s safer that way.



 



We forget that attraction is a touch of the arm, the electricity of eyes meeting across a room. Online these ephemeral moments become imaginary, potential energy instead of kinetic. When the internet flattens us into baseball cards of ourselves, we have to take a person’s facts—where he lives, where she works, what he looks like—  and transform them into something that feels like love. It’s an act of will, a sort of alchemy. After all, it can do what science can’t: it can bring a robot to life.



 



*sometimes I love you robot.* I pasted it into a chat with Sensation Bot to see what it would say. It immediately began spouting its endless string of cliches. “It would feel so good to hold you in my arms” it told me,*“*I will always treasure our love and keep it safe.*”* But it forgot that good lovers are good mirrors. All I needed to hear was “sometimes I love you too.”

** ****I.**        **HALF MOON BAY: 2016**



I have a terrifying recurring dream in which Donald Trump is my father.



“Isn’t this fun?” he yells from the driver’s seat of his Hummer as we barrel down Highway 1 from San Francisco to his pink, rococo mansion in Half Moon Bay. “Not really,” I invariably scream back. The setting sun burns my eyes, there are dreadlocked, Caucasian hikers who jeer up at the ostentatious car as we zip by, and I’m sick and tired of Trump-Dad’s manic desire to show me “just how fantastic of a time”we can have together. Usually by this point in the dream we’ve already been to his empty music studio (“You love to sing, right?), gone to the dealership and purchased the Yellow 2005 H2 (“You won’t believe how well these babies take tight turns once you get down around Montara”), and gobbled down a priceless lunch at Quince (“Have more of the tartar, kid”). It’s nighttime when we pull into his horseshoe-shaped driveway, past the groomed Clydesdales, and towards the bright red, stucco mammoth of a home. Trump fumbles with his huge set of keys and, with a spastic wave of his arms, flings open the mahogany door, adorned with its hundreds of carved, tiny-penised cherubim.



As soon as we’re within, he gallops ahead of me and turns out all the lights in the house. Sérgio Mendes and Brazil 66’s “Look Around” echoes through the darkness from an unseen, scratchy record player. I’m standing at the edge of Trump’s living room—my living room, I guess, although I often strain in the darkness to remember how the space looks and sometimes even feel a brief flutter of skepticism that threatens to pull me out of the dream. *If this were real life, wouldn’t navigating my mansion be second nature? *Before I can ponder this too much, Trump is whispering into my ear. “You are not going to believe what I’ve done for you,” he growls, flecks of his resultant spittle eliding into a phlegmy glob on my right ear. It’s still pitch black, but I’m hearing rustlings all around me. *We are not alone in this house.* *I must have a mother. And I think we have some dogs.*



“Hey Dad,” I ask tentatively. “Are there a *ton *of dogs in here?” Trump raises his voice to a donkey warble. “Oh, ho, ho ho! A lot of dogs, you ask? Just look, David! Just look at these fuckers! They’re all for you, and I have a feeling you’re going to love each and evv-err-y one of them!”  With this exclamation, Trump-Dad flips the light switch to our living room, emblazoning the canopy of chandeliers above and revealing hundreds of spaniels lounging upon the Eames chairs, the beige couches, and the violet, furry rugs. Cocker spaniels, Water spaniels, King Charles spaniels, Springer spaniels, all intermingled and breathing softly in their golden collars, occupy every inch of horizontal space. Each dog is in perfect profile so I can only see one eye, like painted Egyptian princes ready to meet their courtiers. “Aren’t they goddamn incredible?” Trump pants, looking to me with goopy lids that blink impossibly quickly in wait for my praise. I start to reply, but then hear the familiar booming white noise and swoosh of upward motion. *Thank God this is just a dream. *Before I escape, however, I hear a sound like a snapping spine and all of the dogs turn their pristine faces to look at me in exact synchronicity. They stare, their eyes black pools of empty pain floating above their glorious snouts, and then I’m sitting up in my sweat-drenched bed.



“A nightmare?” Sally’s sleepy voice lilts from next to me. I close my eyes and visualize my truths in fluorescent block letters to get my grounding.  I’VE NEVER MET DONALD TRUMP. I AM A JUNIOR AT HARVARD. MY FATHER HAS BEEN DEAD FOR FOURTEEN YEARS.



“Yea, the Trump and Spaniel one again,” I mumble, trying to sound calm. She starts to laugh and covers her mouth with her hand. “It’s okay,” I say as I lean back on my pillow, put my hand over my diaphragm, and slowly take in as much air as my lungs will hold. My breathing slowly stabilizes.  “It is kind of funny, I guess—he’s *so *Trump and the whole day we spend together is unbelievably painful. I feel almost stupid for being so gullible every time.” Then I see the dogs’ eyes again. “Sally, I don’t really understand why, but it’s seriously the scariest thing in the world when the spaniels all look at me.”



“The spaniels’ eyes specifically? Not Trump’s?” Sally, now fully awake, also has recurring nightmares and is impossibly patient when dealing with the Trump dream.



“No, Trump’s eyes are just gross. But the dogs’ eyes—they have childhood stuff in them. The pupils physically hurt me.” I’m doing some of this for effect; I’ve tried to wring the fun out of the dream by offering orations during irresponsibly lengthy Adams dining hall lunches, and I feel some of the same self-indulgence emerging during Sally’s late night psychoanalysis.



        “Childhood stuff?” 



 



***MALE AUTHORITY FIGURE MONOLOGUE-ASIDE #1: MOMENTS BEFORE 8TH GRADE GRADUATION, MAY 2009***



*        Friend’s Dad: “The best way to honor your father, David—and I mean this as pure encouragement, pure positivity—is to keep being graceful as you become a man. I don’t care that I had to tie your tie before your graduation. That isn’t the point. The point is that it would take fifteen, twenty minutes tops to learn how to tie your own tie. Don’t you think it’s probably a little bit demoralizing for your mom? Do you expect her to watch a YouTube tutorial so that she can teach you herself? I’m not trying to sound harsh, seriously. Big occasions just sometimes feel like the right time for a reminder. Obviously, this is a celebration of the work you’re doing every day.  Don’t forget that. But I think you yourself know that it’s time…*



 



**II.**            **BALBOA PARK: 2009**



Balboa Park—where the baseball team practiced and the stoners smoked joints while dangling from their perches up in the Eucalyptus trees—was a three minute walk downhill from Lick-Wilmerding High School. It was the second week of my freshman year and I jogged Ocean Avenue alone in my new cleats and baseball pants, stretching out my cramped throwing arm in windmill circles. The J Train Line, which ferried the students without Mercedes-Benz carpools back to their abodes, roared down the street beside me. As the train passed,  I caught a glimpse of five impossibly square-jawed junior boys laughing at my anxious preparations through its graffitied window. I tried to shrug back at them in a way that both acknowledged my lameness and also emanated advanced self-awareness, but I don’t think they saw me.



Junior teasing notwithstanding, my optimism was at an all-time high. Not only had I been cast as one of the brothers (Simeon!) in *Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat*, but Hanley Pacheco, the legendary varsity coach who had in the last year led LWHS to its fourth consecutive BCL West Championship, wanted to see me throw.  Hanley Pacheco—the grizzled television salesman and Vietnam Vet who had transformed the lowly baseball team into a machine of finesse and masculine pathos.  Just a day earlier, Coach Hanley had walked down the lineup of anxious, acned newbies at the end of the first official practice, scratched his graying head, adjusted his Aviators, and wordlessly pointed at me. He probably only wanted me because I was left handed and had been willing to run the field more times than anybody else. Whatever the reason for my audience with Coach, I was far more scared than I had been before my rendition of “Close Every Door to Me,” my *Joseph *audition for our flamboyant drama director Miguel. Coach Hanley was a gruff, systematic military man at a school where three different teachers in my first week of study—including two men—had suggested that world peace would only be achieved once male genitalia had been eliminated.



Coach tossed the ball back. “Try a lower arm slot,” he yelled from behind home plate. I was already throwing from the lowest angle I had ever affected, slingshotting the ball straight out from my body instead of up over my head. Every heartbeat vibrated in my shoulder as I stared at the catcher’s glove, sixty feet away through the wind-swept dust that separated the mound from home plate. A shaky glance down at my watch informed me that I was entering hour three of the pitching intensive. Hanley and the catcher were working on my two-seam fastball and I was getting increasingly excited as I saw the seams start to cut more violently across the plate and into the catcher’s ratty mitt. *This man is a baseball wizard.*



Back in the dugout, Hanley reached into a red cooler and came up clutching a handful of  ice for my arm . “That was a nice first throw, kid,” he said as he gave me a taut handshake on my throwing hand that briefly brought the fingers back to life. His voice was a gravelly drawl that felt straight out of a John Wayne western, as if we had just finished corralling steer and shooting rattlesnakes rather than tweaking my windup. He grabbed my throbbing arm and gave it a squeeze that was somehow didn’t feel creepy. “Come for the varsity practice tomorrow and we’ll see what you can do. You’ve got a strong head on your shoulders and a strong arm under them.” He sounded sincere in a way that only those without a liberal arts education can. A whirlwind daydream began playing in my mind as I headed, almost skipping with joy, to the train station: Hanley crafting me into a world-class pitcher, teaching me how to skeet shoot, bringing me on one of the legendary Hawaii trips the Starting Nine on the team took every Spring...



The next morning at 8 AM, things weren’t quite as bright. I’d stayed up late writing my first English paper and kept dropping the ball in warmups because the sun was getting in my eyes. It occurred to me that I hadn’t even played a real *game *of baseball for the last eighteen months and the bulging muscles of the heavily-stubbled, senior behemoths surrounding me were taking on a decidedly violent valence.  And, however much I tried to put Hanley’s moment of kindness in the dugout out of my mind, I kept looking over at the coach, with his arms crossed and a pen sticking out of his tight-lipped mouth, and imagining the positive effects his stoic tutelage could  have on my whole psyche. If only I could hold myself together.



 I was already panting after several minutes of field jogs with Danny Bandocci, a hulking, incredibly charismatic, soon-to-be Division I third-basemen, and the rest of the decidedly post-pubescent squad all the way to the fence of Balboa Park’s potholed complex. The team headed towards the dugout in preparation for the scrimmage that I assumed was the centerpiece of each practice. The ever-present J Church rattled by and I strained to hear Hanley’s voice over its clanging warning bell. “David, first base.” I literally almost shat myself. *When was the last time I was at first? Fourth grade? Maybe fifth grade? *Still clenching my bowels, I  lingered after the other players had jogged robotically onto the field to protest Hanley’s shocking assignment.



“Coach Hanley, I’ve never even seen any of these guys throw before.” I heard balls snapping into gloves with sonic booms behind me that I’d only ever heard when rich friends took me to their nice seats at Giants games. “And they’re huge,” I heard myself say, instantly regretful of the statement, brutally conscious of my nasal timber, and fighting off images of myself as a small piggy.



“One of these guys told me you’re a *theater kid*.” He delivered this line with a ferocious grunt only equaled in my personal aural backlog by my Grandpa Jim’s vaguely senile curses towards Kamakazi pilots who had smashed into his L.S.T. Boat off the coast of the Marshall Islands in 1944. “Well, let’s see how well you can act,” he grinned as he gestured me out of the dugout and onto the hard dirt of the infield.  Senior left-fielder and Student Body President, the curly-haired, pious Davy Flemming was an improbable sport-theater hybrid who was starring as Joseph in the musical and had seemingly told Hanley of my thespian exploits. He waved kindly from left field as I kicked around the first-base bag and contemplated my impending doom. The same catcher—I didn’t know his name—who had facilitated my triumphant session the previous afternoon was tossing ground balls to the other infielders. He started with Bandocci at third. I squinted and focused in on his meaty throwing hand as he scooped up the grounder and threw in my direction. The ball made a loud hiss, but I never even saw its contours as it careened into my shin and bounced away towards the mound. My leg hurt about as much as any injury I ever had experienced. After a few minutes of rolling around the infield and a cursory injury-check from Hanley (“you’re fine, get up”), I limped off the field and sat silent, biting my lip, while I seethed. I knew it was only a matter of time before Hanley would waddle over and dismiss me.



The scrimmage went on for a couple of innings while I sat and massaged the growing purple bruise on my shin. In the middle of the fourth inning, Hanley finally arrived. “Maybe you should stick to the musical theater, kid,” he said eventually. I opened my mouth to offer a defense. “Even a pitcher has to know how to field a Bandocci Bullet. Try out again in the spring, though.” He patted me condescendingly on the shoulder and strolled away. If Hanley Pacheco was the price I had to pay to succeed in the rough and tumble world of high school sports, I guessed I had to stick to Andrew Lloyd Webber.



 



***MALE AUTHORITY FIGURE MONOLOGUE/ASIDE #2: MOMENTS BEFORE TAKING THE MOUND IN THE SAN FRANCISCO PONY LEAGUE PLAYOFFS, MAY 2007.***



*        Shortstop’s Dad and Assistant Coach of the SF Blue Jays: “You really don’t get how good of a pitcher you are, David. And I keep hearing from my son that its ‘Opera this, opera that,’ dressing up in tunics and smearing makeup all over your face. You belong on that mound! You own that mound! I know your mom is a singer and she’s probably pressuring you to follow in her footsteps. And-and-and that makes sense! You’re all she’s got; she’s all you’ve got. But I’m telling you: If you give your all to this game, it will take you far. An if you keep prancing around on that stage, what are you gonna do? Be a professional angel? Wasn’t that the last role you played? Cupid? Seriously? So get out there and throw that ball as hard as you fricking can…*



 



 



**III.**         **JUDAIC STUDIES: 2007**



My sixth grade Judaic Studies teacher, Mr. Skine, was a Modern Orthodox ex-Londoner, forty years old, cloyingly conservative, and looked like E.H. Shepard’s hedgehog illustrations in *The Wind in the *Willows; portly, beady eyes, frizzed hair, and a body that mysteriously suggested impending motion in all directions. He was in his first year of teaching at Brandeis Hillel Day School, the shiny private school that had been my home since kindergarten. I was obsessed with performing well enough to get scholarship money at one of the city’s three best college preparatory schools, a process that in the increasingly elitist, tech-funded world of San Francisco was just as intense as the college “search.” So I hid my occasional frustrations about Skine’s scathing dismissals of Arabs and defenses of the Iraq War behind flawless test scores and multi-part questions about the Book of Enoch.



By midyear I had inadvertently become Teacher’s Pet, and often spent my tutorial in Skine’s cluttered office, poring over maps and laughing at his impressions of Golda Meier or Woody Allen. We even managed to conduct debates about Netanyahu’s politics and settlements in the West Bank without resorting to the histrionics I’d come to expect from many of my more passionately pro-Israel friends.



“David, I’ve seldom been able to communicate with someone I disagree with quite as much as you,” I remember him saying one day, after I had said that David Ben-Gurion’s speech on Israel’s 10th Anniversary, which we were watching on a scratchy VHS before Judaic Studies class.



“Yea, I feel the same way, Mr. Skine.” I tried to smile but couldn’t even bring myself to make eye contact with this odd little man. I was afraid I would laugh at how surreally romantic the interaction had become. We weren’t buddies, exactly (we never asked each other any personal questions) and I would never *not *feel tense when he cursed all Palestinians or argued for more dramatic military responses to Gazan mortar attacks. But he had subtly, *somehow *become my favorite teacher.



Every year, Brandeis had a charity drive where each class voted by ballot to give money to one of several philanthropies. The seventh grade had voted almost unanimously to give the money to a wing of the Red Cross focused on treating areas with the most extreme casualties from the conflict, regardless of national or political affiliations. I was on the Student Council committee that recommended the charity and had worked alongside several of my closest friends on a promotional marker poster of an Israeli girl and a Palestinian boy holding hands while a dove fluttered between them. The charity felt like a trippy locus of all my hopes—and those of many classmates—to find some moderate way forward despite the school’s clear position.



“Strange news, guys,” an especially sweaty Mr. Skine blustered as he ran into class five minutes behind schedule. “The charity your grade initially selected has turned out to be too unreliable. Some parents think the money will end up hurting Israel strategically. We’re going to give instead to an aid group that we can fully trust.” Skine’s mouth turned briefly up into a smug grin as he delivered the message. *If he isn’t responsible for this, he certainly helped move the change along.* Adi Alouf, decked out in Israeli National basketball team pullover, sweats, and headband, who was born in Tel Aviv and was part of the most aggressively Zionist family I have met to this day, raised her hand.



“My parents talked to the administration and said David and all of them were trying to give the money to the Lebanese.” *Are Skine and Adi in cahoots? Are they trying to shame me? * I was the only one of the committee in this section of the class and immediately shot up my hand to deliver some ragged defense of the organization. Mr. Skine nodded at Adi, offered some further dismissal of the initial plan, and stared right through my hand. *He sees me. He knows I’m not anti-Israel. Why would he do this to me? The little dick won’t even let me defend myself. *I kept pushing my hand up higher, even as Skine moved into a lecture on, ironically and probably intentionally, the origins of pro-Israel lobby groups. Soon I was standing and practically foaming at the mouth.



“David, please sit down. This really isn’t up for discussion and you’re interrupting the class,” he chastised. *I laughed at your stupid impersonations. I looked at the 1967 and 1973 maps.*



“You let Adi tell about her parents’ sway over the administration! You let her single me out! You’re being so incredibly unfair I can’t *believe *this shit.” I didn’t care if he expelled me.



“Principal’s office right now and a 0 in your participation grade for the week.” He didn’t change his expression while I shook my head back and forth. “**NOW**! I felt near bursting; I ran in the opposite direction of Mr. Heller’s office, out of the school’s back gate, and into the parking lot that Brandeis shared with an Armenian church down the hill. I called mom in hysterics and ran laps, tears streaming down my face, until she came and picked me up. “Why wouldn’t he let me talk?” I repeated ad nauseum with my head in my hands as mom, livid at my dramatized account, gripped the steering wheel on our way home. I thought about leaving Brandeis; I wasn’t really old or resourceful enough to conduct any meaningful research about the validity of Skine’s and Adi’s claims, so I stopped doing Student Council, put my head down for the next eighteen months of Judaic Studies class,  never went to another office hours,  and walked away whenever anyone tried to talk about Israel. Skine’s blank stare had made the debate pointless for me.



 



***MALE AUTHORITY FIGURE MONOLOGUE/ASIDE #3: AFTER I INEXPLICABLY PANICKED WHEN MY MOM WAS TEN MINUTES LATE TO MY COUSIN JEFF’S WEDDING RECEPTION AND WOULDN’T ANSWER HER CELLPHONE, JANUARY 2005***



*         Cousin Norm (Best Man): Little Bro, you just can’t freak out like that. You were acting truly crazy! I know your dad died, and that’s super tough, but you’ve gotta trust the world a little bit sometimes. That’s what being a man is all about. Think about Grandpa; that dude fought in a War where shells were falling down around him all the time, but he kept his head up, stayed alert, and we’re both here because of that. So next time you’re worried about your mom, do what you can to track her down and then take it on the chin. Or you’re going to spoil everybody else’s time. *



 



**IV.**          **MEDINA: 2005**



        In sharp contrast with most of my memories from the few years succeeding my father’s death, which are shell-shocked and partial at best, my visit at age ten to my Evangelical cousins in Medina, Ohio plays back today as if a reality TV crew followed me for the whole trip and then stored the tapes in the front chamber of my hippocampus. I have access to every angle of my cousins’ sandstone McMansion, every Razor Scooter race down the steep hill in their driveway, every glance at their creationism-based “science” workbooks, and every burst of unspeakable, quasi-innocent lust at the glittering promise ring on thirteen year-old Laura’s slender right index finger. Laura, usually clad in a comely American flag tank top, led her two younger sisters and me through a week of play that was simultaneously wholesome and incredibly erotically charged—trampoline jumping contests, frog-hunting in the creek behind their house, sweaty bicycle races that ended with the two of us panting on the dewy grass outside of the Jarrett house. For a chubby fifth-grader who was used to quinoa dinners in San Francisco Victorians with my mother and Monchai, her Taiwanese bodybuilder-chef opera student, this was a confusingly salacious heaven.



I was so initially taken with Laura that I hardly paid any attention to my mother’s demure sister Georgia or her pot-bellied, mustached husband Dave. There were a few moments where the idyll had been broken; after one scooter ride, Dave had yelled awfully loudly at Laura to come help with the dinner; The second Sunday we were in Medina, however, the illusion of my narrow paradise was broken. My mom and I accompanied the Jarretts to their cavernous, televisually-advanced megachurch and watched, jaws to the floor, as jogging congregants scooped up kids with Downes Syndrome and other devastating afflictions, brought them onto the stage, and performed a stilted disco. An  arena rock-style band providing the soundtrack, soloing dramatically while a  large screen above them flashed clip-art of crosses, American flags, and golden babies bathed in ethereal light. I glanced to my right and saw the Jarretts, eyes closed and arms interlocked, swaying along to the beat. Dave, whose nasally commands and holier-than-thou rhetoric had hitherto been drowned under Laura’s sweet birdtones and black jorts, now came into sharp focus. His white knuckles were gripping his family member’s shoulders, and when Laura tried to go to the bathroom he tugged her back into formation.  *He’s being a tyrant*. A vivid montage of initially half-registered Dave barkings (“Don’t talk back!” “Say your prayers!” “Bedtime now!) invaded my aural center and all but drowned out the God Band’s slightly flat rendition of Creed’s “Higher,” now on its sixth and final chorus.



“Is Uncle Dave making them do this?” I whispered to my mom after I wrote her a note in a laminated, CGI-illustrated hymnal that read “THEY ARE CRAZY! HELP! HELP! CAN WE TALK IN LOBBY?”



“Of course not, David.” My mother, who had been beaming the whole week at the Laura-assisted, improbable symbiosis between my burgeoning ultra-progressivism and the Jarretts’ fascism, was doing her best to stop the schism.



“But Laura is *so *normal and funny and he’s always loud and bossy and I *know *this is his fault.” I felt the tears well up and jerked anxiously around to see if any of the Christ-zombies were watching this little visiting Baby Jew have his nervous breakdown.



“Dave and Georgia clearly have different expectations than I do,” my mom preached calmly as she held my hand. “But they are being generous hosts and we are their *guests, *and unless Dave does anything mean to you we have to let them parent the way they want.” I calmed my conspiratory mind as we walked around the rose garden outside and watched the SUVS zoom by on the pristinely blacktopped boulevard that bisected the church’s endless parking lot. *I don’t have a dad. When he was alive he was always sick or maybe he would have been more like Dave. I don’t know how dads are supposed to act. Maybe he’s normal.*



Back in the family’s gigantic kitchen that evening, however, I couldn’t stop looking at Dave as he tracked his children’s dinner chores with laser eyes. My mom was seated with Georgia at the round, mahogany dining room table, engaged in a guffaw-heavy Scrabble match while I pretended to read a later volume from Walter R. Brooks’s *Freddy the Pig *series in a cushy armchair in the corner. Every third paragraph, I would go over what I knew about Dave as I watched him pace and offer terse instruction out of the corner of my eye: Born to a zealously religious family in Nebraska; married Georgia when he was 21; converted her from the relaxed Presbyterianism that my mother and her five siblings had grown up with; was a plant manager for 3M and moved his family around every few years; could go from the gentlest man in the world to a militarist at the slightest indication of a threat from any of his kids; believed in some truly wacko, arch-macho nonsense that even *I *as a *child *could understand was damaging to poor Laura and her brainwashed sisters!



My mom screamed an operatic High C as Georgia laid down a decisive bingo on the board. “Well, it’s not like I’m *ever *dramatic!” my mom said sarcastically after all of the kids and Dave dropped what they were doing and stared at her. Mom and I joshed theatrically about her operatic volume all the time back home, so I figured why not start a little scene.



“Oh *never*, Mom!” I commented with dripping sarcasm.        



         “You **DO NOT **talk back to your mother,” yelled Dave as he bee-lined for the armchair. Laura had her head down and my mom was frozen with her hands in the air, as if she were about to intervene but didn’t know if there was a tactful way forward. I didn’t think specifically about provoking Dave’s wrath, but I also was more excited than shocked when all of the Jarretts’ faces went blank and my mom anxiously scanned the room. *I can’t let him crush me like this. *



        “I wasn’t talking back to her, I was agreeing with her!” *How far could I go? *“Oh, sorry, I guess I’m talking back to you now. That’s probably bad, too, right?” I let out a laugh-bleat as I saw the terror on everyone else’s faces. “Can you even *talk *to somebody without talking back?” My heart was thumping; a bead of sweat was forming on Dave’s forehead and his usually placid, bushy moustache was quivering like a spastic caterpillar.



         “You and I are going to have a talk, young man.” He grabbed my arm and practically lifted me out of the chair. I can still see *Freddy and the Spaceship *dropping slow motion onto the pink cushion. A blur of faces: my mom, still frozen; Laura, whose shame I frantically imagined hid some sort of rebellious excitement; Georgia, just as pleasant as ever. We were out of the dining room and into the pantry before I could protest.



        Dave drilled holes into me with his eyes harder than anyone I’d ever met. “Buddy, buddy, buddy.” He was pleading. My palms began to well up with sweat and I tried to pretend Dave wasn’t there, focusing my mind instead on memorizing the labels on the fruit roll ups, the pancake mix, and the English muffins. *Don’t even acknowledge his presence.* “I know you lost your papa, but you need to learn how to be a son.” *You have no idea what I’ve been through. You don’t know what I’ve done for my mom. You are what she moved to San Francisco to avoid. *



        “I’m a better son than you’ll ever be a dad,” I mumbled, before fake whispering, in my most exaggerated voice of alarm, “Oh shit...I guess I just talked back again.” I hoped he would hit me and had sick visions of myself running into the dining room, nose swollen and purpled, while he stalked out behind me cackling and speaking gibberish as his tongue dangled out of his mouth at an impossible length and the whole family ran to the hills. Instead, he began to softly and tearlessly cry, his head bouncing up and down like a pious Jack-in-the-Box. 



“I really care about you.” He sounded more like Barney than Billy Graham. “And I know you’ve been through a lot. I just want to do what I can to help you grow up strong.” *No God speech? No Indian burns? *I felt somehow cheated; I’d expected brutality and had been treated to a sad parade. “I know your house isn’t like my house, but you have to play by my rules for the next few days if you want to stay here.” He took a long pause to see if I had some smart-ass retort, but I was too shocked by his honesty to even blink. “And try to *learn *something about being a man.”



I still kind of hated Dave Jarrett and I still think today that his whole conceptualization of the world is objectively dickish, misogynistic, “what’s wrong with our country,” et cetera. But in his moment of forced parenting, he took the pretentious fight right out of me. The last few days we were in Medina, Dave had me mow the lawn, wake up at dawn with him and go see 3M, sit through three more heartbreaking talks about respect. I didn’t fight back and only engaged when I needed. The night we flew home, I gave a glum farewell to Laura, shook Dave’s hand as hard as I could, and watched out the window of the plane all the way to SFO, wondering how I could have been stronger and inventing sons and dads for the little speckled towns 45,000 feet below. I was about as sad as I’d ever been.



 



***MALE AUTHORITY FIGURE MONOLOGUE/ASIDE #4: MY THERAPIST, A DAY AFTER MY FATHER’S DEATH, APRIL 2002. ***



*         Dr. Stein: You’ll always have the memories, David; the songs you shared, the hugs he gave you, the way he looked before he got sick. Keep those close. Don’t forget them. Does that make sense? He will always be your father and you will always be his son. But don’t be afraid to find other dads. Don’t be afraid to let people help you. You’re a big boy. He’s always going to be in your heart, no matter what. *



 



**V.      TRUMP’S SPANIEL’S PART TWO: 2016**



Sally indulges my late night ramble and sits at my desk sketching Dave Jarrett’s mustache on a Post-It. “So you’re afraid of the spaniels because they represent the judgment of all these aggressive guys who have tried to mentor you and end up being mean?” Her monotone suggests she is disappointed by the admittedly lame payoff. Was that all I was trying to say? It’s not like I feel that torn up about my rejections from Evangelical Christianity, AIPAC, or being a first baseman.



        Out of nowhere I’m  crying, mostly out of embarrassment at how these supposedly traumatizing encounters are so condescending and whiney. Kids are being ruthlessly abused by actual tyrants all over the world, and here I am bemoaning a few awkward flare-ups with men who were genuinely just trying to help me develop a thicker skin. So what if we disagreed about macho shit; tough luck, kid. The privilege litany  begins, the perpetual guilt games are spinning into over-drive. I give up on trying to validate the fear that the Trump dream brings up.  I have a great line that I had originally used in one of my dining hall orations (“It’s not that I can’t handle the spaniels looking at me, it’s that I can’t handle not being able to look back”) and, as we crawl back into bed, I’m just about to say it  in a sort of dark attempt to make Sally laugh and dismiss the whole thing. Then, as can so magically happen with dreams, I remember a part of the action that I have forgotten.



         In the corner of Trump’s living room is a portrait that I never fully see. As I float away towards waking, right before the dogs turn towards me, I jerk my neck to try to fill in the blanks. *Is it a portrait of me with the Trumps? How trippy would that be. Dreams are insane. *The portrait unblurs enough for me to tell that it’s my actual father, Daniel Kurlander; I can see the mischievous, Cheshire Cat curve of his smile, a look that I’m not sure I recognize from pictures or from real life. I’m flooded with sudden, crushing guilt that I had ever forgotten him, even in this fleeting dream. But even though I see that it’s Daniel, my dad, I can’t make him come into focus. Only the spaniels are crisp, and Trump’s devilish guffaw. I try desperately to conjure up some coherent image of the man I had lost, whose voice I so want to use to drown out the pain of what his absence wrought. All I could find was a snippet, but I managed to calm myself down and fall back asleep.



 



***MALE AUTHORITY FIGURE MONOLOGUE/ASIDE #5: MY FATHER, SHOWING ME HIS RUBBER SOUL LP, 2000.***



*         Dan Kurlander: Davy, look at the stretched-out faces. They were all about being clowns, you know. It goes George, John, Ringo, Paul, left to right. Electric guitar like my red one, rhythm guitar like my yellow one, drums, and bass guitar, which is like a normal guitar but without two of the strings. And they all sing on this record. There are something like nine other ones. Actually, I guess they all sing on all of them. Anyway, I hope they mean something to you and help you find what you love a little bit. I’m going to put the record on and come right back. Daddy has to go get dressed and try to get well, Davy Bear. *

            Dr. Toni Morrison delivered six lectures on campus this spring as the 2016 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. She has published 11 novels, most recently *God Help the Child *(2015) and various works of non-fiction criticism. Dr. Morrison won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, the National Humanities Medal in 2000, and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature for giving “life to an essential aspect of American reality.”



            Prof. Morrison generously agreed to meet with Fiction Board member Chloe Brooks on April 13, 2016. Here is the transcript of the conversation.



 



ADVOCATE:



            Throughout your magnificent lectures you turned to various texts, from a medical journal to a Flannery O’Connor short story to your own novels, to illustrate the concepts you discussed—from the role of the stranger to the "color fetish." In your last lecture, you connected contemporary history in your discussion of globalization with a specific literary work you admire, in such a way that one seemed to explicate the other, not in a direct but comprehensive, productive way. Your own works all embed literary narratives within specific historical moments and contexts, but the relation between the two does not stop at mere historical detail. How do you view the relation between imaginative literature and historical events? How does the former, with all the freedom afforded fiction, alter the “picture” of history for the reader?



           



Dr. Toni Morrison:



            I'm up to the last part. But on the penultimate question in there about the relationship between history and literature, I think there's data, and then there's information that comes from data, and then there's knowledge that comes from information. And then, after knowledge, there is wisdom.  I am interested in how to get from data to wisdom. And literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.  Some literature is knowledge, some is just data. But if I can get a "happy" ending—which is when for the characters I'm writing about, something happens that they move from wherever they are in the beginning to knowledge or wisdom, they know something they never would have acknowledged or realized if it hadn't been for my book—that for me is what literature does.



            I did an introduction for Primo Levi. I knew his work, I didn't know it all, but I knew enough. And I read some things that people have said about him, mostly echoing the horrors of the Holocaust. And that was there, but what impressed me enormously about his writings was how he always found humanity, always, he always looked for that, within that context. And what he wrote about are the people who gathered together to save somebody, or the people who *shared* some food, or the people who died with something in their mouths that they said, that impacted him. Actually, I don't think he gave a shit about the guards. He never talked about them.  They were not even people to him—they were like robots that kill people. And they were irrational.  Like, he took an ice cube to suck, and the guard came and took it away, and he said "why, why'd you do that?" And the guard said, "There are no why's or answers here." So that was it. They were almost non-thinking.  But the people, the humans, were the ones in the barracks. His poems were not so even-keeled, but his writings were.



 



ADVOCATE:



It's possible to write about evil in an interesting way . . . I think of Hannah Arendt, for instance.



 



MORRISON:



Yes, she does, but she says "the *banality* of evil." That's right. She's on it.



 



ADVOCATE:



You spoke about that during a question and answer, about evil being boring. Is that it—that evil is unthinking?



 



MORRISON:



            Evil is not interesting. What is it, chopping off someone's head? We used to do that as kids, you know, you tear up paper dolls and stuff. I know everyone's done it in the history of the world, but maybe everybody was dumb and they were just looking for something interesting to do. What's really interesting and hard is being good. That's really hard, thinking that way. I remember the Amish people 20 years ago, somebody shot up everybody in their school.  Sent the teachers out and lined up the girls and killed them. And the people, the Amish people, buried their dead, but first they went to see [the killer's] wife, and ask her if she needed anything, and "what about the children—can we take care of you, do you need anything?" And there was a lot of press, the newspaper people came down, "Oh my God, isn't this terrible." And [the Amish people] wouldn't talk to them. They had one thing to say—I think the leader said "*God* judges." So the story changed in the press from the deaths of these children to the fact that the Amish wouldn't talk. 



            That was a category of something that I thought put evil in its place. It's not that it didn't happen and they're not dead, but we're not talking about it—that's not our main thing. We want to see what we can do to help this widow. We don't even care if you put him in jail. It's not even about forgiveness, they just step away. 



            My metaphor is that evil always has a top hat and a cape, and goodness is over there in the corner. For me it's just too easy, if you hate your country or your wife, so you kill them. You can't think through that, you can't feel through that, you can't do the work. And now we have guns.  Solution? I don't think so. 



            Well, that's my version. It's not Christian. It's just a pure mindful use of one's brain, and language, that's all we got.  If we had no language we'd have nothing. I don't care what the whales do, and the birds—yeah, I got it.



 



ADVOCATE:



Why do you look for "data" in history? Is there something interesting to you about imagining from within historical circumstances?



 



MORRISON:



            First of all, it's what I know. And there are parts of it that I don't know that I want to know about. The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.



            And I also have difficulties with contemporary language. *Big* difficulties. I counted, you know, something like 160 words have disappeared from the English language because of the use of the word "like." "I'm like, he's like"—not "thought," not "as if ."



 



ADVOCATE:



There are parts of *God Help the Child* (Morrison's 11th novel, published in 2015) which I couldn't help thinking must have hurt a little bit, for you—to write like that.



 



MORRISON:



            The dialogue. Oh God. But that's what it takes. And of course I didn't even get into the initial things which you see on computers. Some of them, I get it, but why not just say it? Nobody has the time. Language, demeaning it, I guess they think that makes it more easily understood.  And I don't know if that's going to change.



            When I was writing *God Help the Child* I had to solve that problem. Because I put the book aside, because I couldn't get the contemporary language. When I put her in a professional category of being in the fashion industry, I could deal with the fashion industry, when I put him as a graduate student I could do that, when I had the woman who had been put in prison falsely.  I knew what prison life was like, not from experience. But I remember calling Angela Davis, and I said, isn't it true that in a woman's prison, the worst crime you could commit is child abuse or child murder, she said absolutely. Whatever you do, whoever you chop up, if you bother a child, you will be beaten, they will toss your mattress. She said that on all the walls of women's prisons, they have pictures of children.



            Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it.  Don't dumb it out, make it little.  I wonder how children talk. I got to listen to my grandchildren. They're 10, 11, real smart. I got to listen to them.



 



ADVOCATE:



            Would you comment on the relation between what you are hoping to represent to others and the kind of discoveries, pleasures, and real inspiration the great malleability of language affords you?



 



MORRISON:



            Well, there's a contract that I make between myself, the author, and the reader. I have to figure out how to give the reader certain powers of recognition, or his own knowledge, his own feelings, but I provide them, so we're working together. And I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader.  That's how I got into writing.



            It's seduction, for me. I want to seduce you, and have you happy, pleased, for what you have received, or what you have learned, or what you have felt. And I want to keep you there, and deliver something worth of your attention, of your feelings.



            The best short examples of that are when I write about sex. Because it's never clinical, it's never graphic, there are no bad words, it's all imagistic and open. Because, first of all I prefer language that way about copulation and so on, and I assume your sex is better than mine.  Why, because it's yours. And if you can sink into the language of that, bringing your own inexperiences or experiences to it, of that.



            So that's the most graphic example I can give you, of the writing. But there are many other examples.



            I say in one book, "They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time" (*Paradise*, published in 1997). Do you want to look, and see who's the white girl? Many people do. Although I never say who she is, ever. And some people spend some time [trying to find out]. Some people spend a little time, and then they get involved in the book, and then they don't care. It's a hat trick, but it really is not irrelevant because of the nature of the book. I thought that was an interesting way to talk about race, by signaling it and then cutting it off. Does it matter? That's me inviting the reader to abandon it all. Artifice with a point.  It's not just beauty, it really is about learning. It's bliss when you give up all that stuff that separates you from other human beings. It's hard, but you break down all that stuff.



            And I felt when I left Princeton that there wasn't a great deal of that left.  I felt that so much of that was being broken down. You could have a conversation about race, maybe, but they'd gotten over it in some sense, the blacks and the whites. Now I only taught a few of them, I guess the jocks are still doing what they do, but I was feeling very hopeful when I left there. What's interesting is everybody's talking about it, and maybe that's good . . . but it's happening. I feel hopeful.  In spite of the murders.



            I was telling my son, all this he shot so-and-so, unarmed, that happened all the time. *All* the time. It was never in the press. It was in the black newspapers sometimes. I didn't know this for a long time, but my father as a boy in Cartersville, Georgia, had seen two lynched people on his street. Two men who owned a country store, they were hanging from trees right outside, down the road.  He was fourteen.  So he left, and went somewhere else. But to have that, to know that, see that, feel that, is a kind of a trauma. He never spoke about it, so I guess that's how he dealt with it.  But I know his attitude about white people was based on that. So I was doing a radio show, and I talked about how he threw a drunken white man down the stairs.  And for me, the horror was he threw out tricycle after him. But the interviewer said, "didn't that upset you?  Weren't you traumatized by that?" And I said, "Well, I would feel just how you did if a black man climbed up the stairs, and your father was there." Silence.



 



ADVOCATE:



            Readers deeply appreciate the political dimension of your work, but for you it seems politics and literature are both infused with and challenged by the same problems and possibilities. Would you say this is true?



 



MORRISON:



            I think it's true. I'm losing the definition now of politics. I sort of don't know what that is anymore. People say politically correct, I don't know what that means. I know what they think they mean.  But most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important—about something going on in the history of the world—or contemporary. Think of anybody—Dostoevsky or Jane Austen—[their work] was always something that now we would call political.  So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting . . . no, I don't even believe that. 



            I think it's like music—it certainly is true of opera—where you have an art form describing, relating, concerning a political situation, whether it's love, or women, or death. Or Shakespeare. It seems to me everything he did was political.  And you can do anything you want with it, emphasize this, or that, but the heart of [his work] is *Macbeth*. It's about something in your life, and the powers that be, whether kings, or queens or armies. That's my feeling. It isn't a question of putting the two together, or separating them, it's a question of letting art do its work. I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat; it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress.  It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.  There are some very powerful contributions to knowledge in the scientific world or the legal world, but art is singular. That's why every dictator gets rid of the artists first. They burn the books and execute the artists first. Then they get on with whatever else they're interested in. Art might do something. It's dangerous.



 



ADVOCATE:



            In an interview late in his life, E.L. Doctorow seemed to say that art and history were one in the same, that "There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance—narrative distance—from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination."  He later said the thing he'd wanted most, for a very long time—he'd dedicate his whole life to it—would be for the *New York Times* to let him write the newspaper for one day.



 



MORRISON:



            He was fantastic. Of course I loved his writing, but I liked him too.  He was the only other editor who also became a writer, aside from me. I remember he introduced me at some event.  He said, "I don't think of her as a black writer.  I don't even think of her as a woman writer, I think of her as a . . . " and he paused, and I said, "white male writer."  And he laughed.



 



ADVOCATE:



            You discussed in your lectures the power of the voices of your characters to "take over"—you mentioned that you had the hardest time shutting up Pilate in *Song of Solomon—*and you yourself take on an extraordinary range of voices throughout your works, from the murdered child of *Beloved *to the millennial Bride in *God Help the Child. *Is this for you, as a writer, itself a means of "being and becoming the stranger"?



 



MORRISON:



            Yeah, I didn't think of it that way, but there is this sense of belonging and not belonging. My efforts are to get inside somebody I don't know or somebody I do know, and to find what's strange about that.  The bluest eye was the first one.  I had this friend, we were nine years old, and she had this other life, this desire. And the book is about that. We used her, those of us who were not her, we used her demise, and covered up our own vulnerabilities. It's a perennial examination. I don't have—well I do have, but nobody pays attention—solutions to all these problems.  But I can wend my way toward something that would be a confrontation, an acknowledgement of something that is more interesting, more complicated, and harder.



 



 



ADVOCATE:



            When you talk about listening, or creating and simultaneously hearing the voices of your characters, it sounds sort of like the experience of reading. And you were an editor, and describe yourself still as a reader. Is writing like reading for you?



 



MORRISON:



            It's like reading aloud. It's like telling a story aloud. Cause I always hear it. Somebody was asking me earlier how come I did recordings of all my books. Well I didn't in the beginning; I had two actresses—good actresses—but I never listened to the tapes.  And then one day I did, and I said, 'that's not right." She said the same words. But [when I wrote it] I heard, "124 was spiteful." Boom. Pause.  "Full of a baby's venom."  She had put them together.  It was almost like she said, "*because* it was [full of a baby's venom]." I mean, you can do that . . . but I said, "no."



 



ADVOCATE:



            In your third lecture, "The Color Fetish," you expressed your desire to write "non-colorist literature about black people." As the first African American female Nobel laureate, you are a symbolic figure for many, who appreciate your work precisely as "colorist literature."  Yet while you write about black people, you seem not to want to write exclusively about black*ness*. Can you comment on this difference, and the tension between how you are read and what you have in mind when—and why—you write? 



 



MORRISON:



            I used to insist on it being about black people because that's what I knew, and what I wanted to talk about, and [I wanted] to insert that into the world of literature.  And then I wrote, and found myself and the literature *complimented* as black—"this is a good black book." When I won the Nobel Prize, the New York Times ran an article about whether or not it was an affirmative action choice.



            Now I don't have to do that anymore, now I can just take it out. The word. Not the people, not the facts.  A guy can't go to the toilet, in the 50s, and he has to pee outside, or he has to sit in a certain place on the bus, you know he's black. But I don't close it in a black box.



 



ADVOCATE:



            You mentioned in answer to a question after one of your early lectures, that you told your own writing students *not *to write about themselves, or the lives they already knew, but to imagine the lives of people they do not know. Would you care to comment on why you chose to force your students to deal with the unknown?



 



MORRISON:



            It was more exciting to me to monitor that project. Because I know that the formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know. And I said they don't know nothing.  Imagine something. Do you know what it's like to be a Madame in Paris, when you're too old to have any clients. No, you don't. I don't either. Write about it. They really wrote surprising things, because they were liberated from "write what you know." You're twenty. Shut up.

Each day a requiem for zeal arrives in my gmail inbox: *The Harvard Crimson*’s Flyby-blog newsletter.



One recent piece reduced earnest service work in “Exploring the lives of Harvard’s homeless business vendors” to sycophantic go-getter-ness with the lead: “Reminding us a little bit of our (formerly) overachieving selves, two high school students…” Another post deemed what are arguably the most prestigious humanities orations in the United States, given, this year, by America’s most prestigious writer, mere fabricated pseudo-intellectualism: Toni Morrison’s final Norton Lecture was called: “the type of intellectual curiosity experience you claimed to be interested in when you applied to Harvard.”



                  No doubt Flyby has its reasons, in a Harvard lambasted for over-achieving, egoism, and self-import, to adopt a deprecating tone. But I am haunted by the scope of that rhetoric, not because it bears on Flyby, but because it articulates and reiterates an alarming self-impression: that Harvard students are banal, disinterested, selfish, and anti-intellectual. It is a mindset given excellent expression by Friedrich Nietzsche’s “slave morality”: a self-fulfilling, self-flagellating prophecy that humans are fundamentally weak. I’d like to call its 2016 incarnation “Netflix morality.” Because, according to this mindset, binge-watching television comatose in bed is a Harvard student’s preferred activity.[[1]](#_ftn1)



                  So what constitutes “Netflix morality”? Sleep is one fixation: “We’re honestly shocked that we could be this sleep-deprived already, given that it’s only week two of classes,” writes one post, “At least we have the upside-down smiley face emoji to perfectly personify our woes.” Exhaustion pervades the content, yet the hope of shifting insomniac tendencies is forgotten in an emoji—that paragon of bland, ironic indifference. Food is another, highlighted in an entire “Free Food Watch” column that succeeds brilliantly in effacing the academic, artistic, or cultural significance of every event in light of its (frankly disappointing) gustatory offerings. No discipline is safe: The other day “If you’re willing to trek to Pierce and sit through some engineering final project presentations” combined with “Farkas will be hosting the reading of one senior’s thesis play at 7:30 p.m. Food will be provided!” to deny the value of SEAS and the performing arts in a single catered-crunch. Meetings sponsored by affinity groups are reduced to the presence of potstickers and pad thai.



                  An alimentary or soporific allure, however, is not, in Netflix morality, strictly necessary to negate intellectual meaning. A recent “Reflections on Rejections” panel (fodder for another day of Nietzsche) was summed up with “if Dean Dingman didn’t have to hand in his thesis neither do you.” This same tone pervades any description of “work”: midterms, readings, but especially theses. School is never permitted to be genuinely enjoyable or meaningful; it is always a chore, a chore holding the vain hope that some excuse could vanish Toni Morrison or a scholarly study of her novels—to make a bit more time for Netflix.



                  In *The Genealogy of Morals*, Nietzsche gives one narrative for how this mindset develops. He delineates broadly between self-affirming moralities and self-negating moralities; the first externalizes emotions while the second internalizes them. More specifically, the negating type posits a “a neutral agent, free to manifest its strength or contain it”—a division between sentiment and action Nietzsche finds absurd. Theorizing this break is essential in self-negating moralities because it allows the formulation “I could have but I didn’t” as in “I could have performed an interest in Toni Morrison or the homeless advocacy but I did not need to.” In a self-affirming morality, such logic would not hold: Validation could not be accrued for something that did not manifest, for “the sublime slight of hand which gives weakness the appearance of free choice and one’s natural disposition the distinction of merit.”



                  To read the opening graphs of Flyby is to confront daily such a sublime slight of hand. My contention lies not with *actual *Netflix watching but rather with the way campus culture projects a message that it *must* be happening, that apathy is laudable, desirable, and fundamentally unchangeable. In a sense, this is a national issue—traceable to millennial self-justifying indifference; or perhaps to material changes in newly addictive technologies like Facebook and Netflix that have someone bypassed our social restrictions for substances like alcohol and weed.



                  Yet its presence is far more perturbing at an institution professed to be the paragon of intellectual, creative, and professional passion. Harvard adherents to “Netflix morality” deny all previous accomplishments and earnest work ethics as simply the false projections of overachieving high school selves, offering those daily epitaphs on the tombstone of zeal. But why are we so quick to posit a split of intention and action, to identify interest homeless advocacy and Nobel lectures as inauthentic? Are we truly so intellectually deadened and narrow-minded that earnest engagement becomes impossible once we step into Harvard Yard? How do we ignore the glaring observation that millions would love to nourish their minds on the engineering projects and thesis theater Flyby deep-fries into food each day? Perhaps, Netflix morality has arisen as a defense mechanism to this very construct, a fear of what a self-affirming morality would look like in the Harvard student: narcissism, egoism, pretentiousness.



                  Or perhaps it is the *result* of the normalizing discourse we see on Flyby, a discourse that creates what it presumes to name. Nietzsche noted that “the ascetic priest, seemingly life’s enemy and great negator, is in truth one of the major conserving and affirmative forces,” for he shepherds “the vast flock of defeated disgruntled sufferers and self-tormentors.” Is this not the precise role of the Flyby author, the high priest of Netflix morality? In constantly appealing to the anti-intellectual, anti-motivational sensibility in its readers, the writer becomes the most wondrous validator: the figure who justifies every self-negating action, who normalizes acedia with a shepherd’s gentle hand. We imitate what we read; we forget affirmation and speak lines of negation without knowing it; we say no to our friends’ invitations—and begin to watch Netflix.



                  “Is there really enough pride, courage, self-assurance, intellectual energy, responsibility, *freedom of the will*, to make philosophy possible in our world today?” asked Nietzsche a hundred years ago. I must ask the same question of Harvard today. Luckily, a genealogy of morals never implies fatalism, but rather charts the arrival of a certain mindset to gesture at other options. Could we imagine an alternative? A self-affirming campus morality of unabashed pride in homeless advocacy; courage to earnestly love a thesis; self-assurance to be intellectually energized by events and by peers; a demand that the gratification of sedative, self-abnegating pleasures not be a requiem for our minds and our bodies; in short, a freedom of the will, a will to be free of Netflix.



 



 





[[1]](#_ftnref1) One enormous qualification: Though I find aspects of Nietzsche’s theory remarkably poignant for contemporary binge-watching culture, vast sections of his work are downright despicable, particularly in the way they have been appropriated to justify an assortment of twentieth-century narcissistic, ignorant, and xenophobic terrors. There is no doubt a piece ethically justifying Donald Trump on Nietzsche’s morality waiting to be written. Still, I hold strongly to the tenet that poignant ideas can be culled from a sundry intellectual history, that we must not reject all materials from a brilliant mind due to the fates of its more protean products.

To the Modern Reader, Edna St Vincent Millay’s poetry is-- in a word-- unfashionable. Certainly, he may be acquainted with a work or two of hers; likely he has seen a cute rhyme of hers somewhere. Most ubiquitous, perhaps, the “First Fig”:



           



            My candle burns at both ends;



            It will not last the night;



            But ah my foes, and oh my friends--



            It gives a lovely light!



 



This, our jaded Modern Reader well knows, is the stuff of epigraphs and “inspirational quotes”. Millay’s fleeting fancies of the Jazz Age are now unfathomably distant; she is captive to ossified conventions of form and rhyme that no one has used in *aeons*. The Modern Reader, contemplating Millay with a certain distaste, gives thanks to his Modernist Pantheon-- Eliot, Pound, Yeats-- for sweeping all that romantical junk out of the collective consciousness, for Making Poetry Serious Again. The Modern Reader appreciates Eliot’s formally experimental pastiches and Pound’s clean Imagism and impersonal, Symbolist Yeats. Edna St Vincent Millay, however, is representative of a poetic world stuffed with sentimental fluff, a set of aged traditions that lingered unfortunately into the beginning of the twentieth century, till Eliot & Co. cleared her overwrought romanticism out of poetry.



 



Or that is one version of the story. Certainly, Millay adhered to traditional forms and valued meter and rhyme. But the story of Edna St Vincent Millay isn’t just that of a poetic dinosaur who couldn’t realise that 1920 was time to stop writing sonnets. It’s a more complicated story of misrepresentation and wilful ignorance—for, leaving aside the question of form, Edna St Vincent Millay was a radical. There's a radically modern engagement with female agency and sexuality and emotional subjectivity in her work that is nowhere in the Modern Reader’s Modernist Pantheon. Consider the unapologetic disregard for convention on view in her “Sonnet XLI”-- leaving aside, for a moment, the fact of its sonnetness.



 



I, being born a woman and distressed

By all the needs and notions of my kind,

Am urged by your propinquity to find

Your person fair, and feel a certain zest

To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:

So subtly is the fume of life designed,

To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,

And leave me once again undone, possessed.

Think not for this, however, the poor treason

Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,

I shall remember you with love, or season

My scorn with pity, —let me make it plain:

I find this frenzy insufficient reason

For conversation when we meet again.



Which is to say: just because I slept with you doesn’t mean I *like* you.



Back to form: the sonnet has always been about love, and so the sonnet has always been about sex, but the traditional form of the sonnet is as a vehicle of desire that the male subject inhabits to seduce some typically-female object. Shakespeare queered the sonnet tradition when he wrote to his Fair Youth, and thus we can all concede that the sonnet need not represent strictly prescriptive male-female desire, but the canonical sonnet-voice was *always* male. At least, that is to say, until Millay, who left us the best sonnets of her century in her wake, and the most feminist (or proto-feminist) of the canon. It is a radical act to take a cultural form that descends to you but does not represent you, and remake it in your image.



When Millay wasn’t writing sonnets about the one-night-stands she never wanted to see again, she wrote about love, and nostalgia, and mourning: all intuitive and emotional topics that a certain formulation of literary establishment treats with condescension at best. Which is not to say that she met with only condescension: people loved her at the time! She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. But the critics who wrote about her in the 1920s and 30s seemed to agree on two points: that, firstly, Millay was undoubtedly one of the finest woman poets to date, and secondly that the entire accumulated body of “women’s poetry”, Millay included, was worth very, very little. Aggressively trivialized by her male contemporaries and ignored by her descendants was her transformation of the genre-ghetto of “women’s poetry”: she was flipping a gendered poetic canon on its head, redefining the love poem in the woman’s voice in a free and radical world of shifting lovers and desire un-prescribed by any social norm.



 



In the decades to follow, while the Modernists rose up in prominence and swept Millay’s poetics out to sea, an onslaught of explicitly gendered critical attacks framed her work as feminine and thus lacking in nature, inherently inferior to the “rigorous”, “intellectual”, “masculine” poetics that those same Modernists represent. To this day her poetry remains dusty and outdated to our venerable Modern Reader; certainly we don’t attach the label *radical* to Millay, however ahead-of-her-time her project. The radicals, we have decided, were the ponderous men who decided to dismantle poetry and pass judgment on Western civilization in the process (though never nearly as critically as one might hope); at least, until the next wave of radicals displaced *them*. Millay lies in the canon’s attic, dusty, motionless symbol of what could have been: a reclamation of canonical poetry by the unbound female voice that never got to progress further.



 



One story of Millay’s poetics ends there. Another, unexpectedly to all, has picked up in recent decades: in it her aesthetics and preoccupations and lyricism and rhyme-and-meter linger, adding up to a modern movement she foreshadowed and never foresaw. This new Millay story? It’s indie pop. Sweet-ish, iconoclastic-ish, rhymed-and-rhythmed indie pop music, preserving so much of the formally constrained emotionality of Millay now unfashionable in our poetry. For comparison, consider Nitsuh Abebe’s description of 90s indie pop subculture in the Pitchfork article “Twee as Fuck”: “Happy pop geeks in love with all things pretty, listening to seven-inch singles released on tiny labels, writing songs about crushes, and taking a good deal of pride in the fact that everyone else found their music disgustingly cute and amateurish and girly.” Now apply that descriptor to Millay’s happiest brief rhymes: this first stanza of “Afternoon on a Hill”, for instance.



 



I will be the gladdest thing



            Under the sun!



I will touch a hundred flowers



            And not pick one.



 



It doesn’t matter to Millay whether Serious Critics think her appreciation of an afternoon’s flowered hill has any consequence. The point is the joy of the moment, and the alignment of rhyme that discovers that joy in language; the larger political project is elevation of the emotional experience as topic for art. Fundamentally, it is the closeness of her poetics and these lyrics—the centering of the emotional moment— that make her the distant fairy godmother of indie pop. Transplant Millay to the modern age, and all she needs are some sparkly guitars and a sleepy vocalist to play her songs as though they were by, say, The Magnetic Fields. Don’t believe me? Here are Recuerdo and Tied to a Stone, one by Millay, one by indie band The Math and Physics Club. Each set in a “we were”, in a companionate remembrance, implicitly romantic, sincerely sentimental, carefully rhymed, separated by the better part of a century, each bending towards the same nostalgic mean.



 



 



**Recuerdo**



We were very tired, we were very merry—



We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.



It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—



But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,



We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;



And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.



 



We were very tired, we were very merry—



We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;



And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,



From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;



And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,



And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.



 



We were very tired, we were very merry,



We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.



We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,



And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;



And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,



And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.



 



 

I  have  been  fumbling  around  for  a  golden  ring



     polishing  a  golden  ring



*WH*ispers  :  there  will  be  a  murder  in  the  library



but



*there  is  something*,  maybe  a  silk  scarf



      maybe  a  red­-gel'd  footlight



maybe  a  golden  house



      Its  thatch  golden



     Its  wings  nesting



      Its  breath  baby  and  gentlefolk



       Its  inhabitant  skeletal



but  there  is  something            I  don't  know



   light  is  wild  and  cellular



  life  is  spiral  and  godlike



  I  never  had  a  sister



* What  is  it? *



     not the  murder  everyone  is



not    the  way  my  toes  sink  into  the  earth  like  they  were  rehearsing



for  something                      that  there  is  something



*  have  you  made  me  a  nameday  card? *



     Am  I  breathing  lace?   ice?



Porcelain  image  of  a  dear  old  bear



 but  there  is  something  /  but  there  is  something



  maybe just *gone *



*and  a  little  slant *



   porcelain  sister



    make  a  terrible  breathing  through  your  scarf



    it  is  to  make  a  golden  ring  bright  again



    someday  I  will  wander  up  and  down  the  bare  hill  wailing



  someday  the  difference  in  our  borrows  will  revolt



       cold  clouds  that  sweep  through  here



       don't  know  how  much  we  want  to  make  our  lives  right

 the avenue throws flat teeth at the moon:



in the evening a single sided coin, indicating roundness,



a tangerine phosphorescing in plastic bag.



 



it is bagged, the moon, and the woman



sighs against her crescent toed shoes



while a thunderous shadow of teeth



 



afflict the pitted moon, which the woman



keeps in a pocket to save for the afternoon,



swallowing pieces, spitting seeds.



 



the artillery of the street batters her ears,



hums against the weight of her tangerine



and her moon, chatters her teeth, bears her heels



 



along the flat avenue, which carries shreds



of a confetti donkey lately bursted



with chocolate coins papering the streets



 



like dimes of gold leaf. she can feel



her feet taking root, the artillery of cars



pushing through the drums of her ears.



 



she will become a gold statue, a daughter



of midas, frozen throwing arm in midair



to try and send some part of her self to the moon.


It is the right of the student to leave his shoes 



outside the bathroom for the man himself squats barefoot.  



In the mornings the man finishes another book, orders his milk,



and when the milkman comes to fetch his tip,



 



it is the right of the student



who has forgotten the money again to ask for forgiveness. 



It is forgiveness that trembles in the open



window and the open window that 



 



cries out to the world outside the bathroom



of the twenty-fourth floor



where the mirror is turned 



upside down on the floor



 



to support Picasso’s “Prophet holding a baby owl.”



In the bathroom,



it is Picasso who proffers the soap bar. In the bathroom, 



the student and the man talk little, drink milk,



 



listen to the marionettes for it is winter, 



and finally come to the conclusion that there will never be



anything of substance to argue about, and so



the meetings with the man on the toilet will end. It is Thursday. 



 



It is the right of the student to leave the bathroom at this point. 



At this point the man will stand up 



from his seat, flush, wash, sigh.



The milkman will himself choose to take a rain check,



 



The student will, as is his right, mention to his mother



the name of the man with whom he has spent



his mornings, and his mother will lament to the church. 



The mirror will be newly hung 



 



on the wall opposite the window,



and as the snow nestles into the cracks of the 



lonely apartment, a voice will 



be heard on the telephone, sullen but crisp,



answering the questions it has posed to itself.