are you a good witch or a bad witch?
Nine years ago, I was alone in my bedroom watching a livestream from the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore on my laptop. I couldn’t look away. It was late at night. The cops were loading detained protestors onto buses.
Now this is where I don’t trust my memory because I wasn’t there and I was tired and I’ve seen no other reporting on this —just some tweets — but it’s stayed with me, so I’ll share the story with all these caveats.
The cops were loading detained protestors onto two buses. White protestors were sent to one bus, black protestors went on the other bus.
Again, my memory is hazy. I thought it happened at 2 or 3 in the morning, but the tweets say it wasn’t even midnight. What feels right in my mind might not be factually correct, but this is how I remember it: it was late, and what was happening on the livestream was horrifying.
White protestors screamed when they realized what was going on. I understood it as an expression of the white privilege that law enforcement had beamed to emphesis like light from a flashlight. Whatever happened next, the cops had already made a cruel joke of their expression of solidarity.
I thought of it again this weekend. I was, like everyone, listening obsessively to Columbia’s WKCR radio coverage of the police raid on the campus anti-genocide protests, impressed by their conviction and the thoroughness of their reporting. Charmed when the team would take a break and switch on Max Roach and how, in that moment, you realized this really was a college radio station, like any other. If a few things had happened differently in the world and on campus, these students would have been playing jazz all night.
But then the news kept coming. News about CUNY students, protesting that same night, charged with felonies while Columbia students were charged with misdemeanors. Yes, of course, give the Columbia student journalists all the awards and flowers and the cover of New York magazine. But, don’t forget the students at CUNY. We know the ending to this story.
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I hate that we are living in such A Canticle for Leibowitz times. That I’ve got to be some idiot monk stating the incredibly obvious like, “But but but…art matters! Books matter! The human spirit and triumph of creativity must be preserved for the ages!!”
I guess the protests also made me miss New York. I don’t miss New York often but I do miss those nights you are out on a friend’s fire escape hearing word of something going down and deciding, okay, we need to be out there. Someone needs to witness this. The reason you came to New York is to be present for reality as it is happening.
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Lately I've been playing The Wizard of Oz as background noise and visuals while I write. It’s working.
And I reread Anna Kavan’s Ice for the first time in twenty years. This time I was left with the curious feeling—not quite of disenchantment, but that the author doesn’t need me anymore. She doesn’t need my love, doesn’t need me to champion her work, she’s no longer forgotten. There was that Penguin Classics 50th edition, the novel is widely referenced, canonized. The readers she always deserved have found her, finally.
At the time, I got all those Peter Owen hardbacks from used booksellers online for less than seven dollars (my max budget for a single book, then). The same books now sell for hundreds of dollars. But in my idiot youth, I had marked up my copies with pink and blue highlighter pens thinking that they were mine forever since no one else would want these books but me.
It’s important to read writers when they aren’t in that moment. Because when the moment comes you are reading them a different way: with and against the flow of people’s impressions. I probably won’t enjoy Clarice Lispector quite the same now, as I did in my twenties, on the other hand, my fondness for the peculiarities of Anna Quin’s fiction hasn’t wavered. Maybe it’s a working class thing—there’s always something missing in new appreciations of her work.
Anyway, my recommendation in this vein—still favoring the unknown—these days is Josephine Saxton. A novette-length story in The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by VanderMeers, is a very good place to start with her work. But to dive head first into the weird, I think Vector for Seven, which I read last month, is where to go. A real triple-decker cake of bizarre. Don’t expect to understand what’s going on half the time (but that’s not what anyone reads these books for).
I’m obsessed with this cover:
She was published by The Women’s Press, which means something to at least five of you (and I love all five of you). On my list of things I keep meaning to write is an appreciation of the Women’s Press SF list.
Oh, I also reread We Who Are About To, which holds up amazingly well twenty years later. I forgot how incredibly funny it is: it’s about a woman on a space voyage who spends the entire book complaining about the other passengers. They get marooned and she hates them even more. The Netflix adaptation would star Lauren Oyler, I bet. But Joanna Russ wasn’t just a hater, she had a sense of humor about herself, which is why the book works.
Right now I want a book that will grab me by the shoulders and shake me and force me to decide whether there is a god or not, whether reality is true, humans can be just, what history is for—all those questions I have been to lazy to think about (but strangely I thought about all the time in college because I was lazy). I guess I should be reading something like The Brothers Karamazov or whatever.
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My latest in Filmmaker magazine is proper tech criticism, which I haven’t written in while. It’s about what Apple has become in the 2020s, the company’s transition from a “fastidiously minimalistic underdog to a Procter & Gamble-style octopus of a conglomerate,” and why, despite its size and power (3 trillion market cap!), it continues to evade criticism.
I was on the Team Human podcast talking a little bit about Wrong Way and a lot about what it means to be a writer now. It was really wonderful to talk with Douglas Rushkoff about how to defend the arts from corporate interests and what—in a tricky moment to be an artist—does give me hope.
Thanks again for reading.