Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
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From the Archives
Poetry • Spring 2016
it is fifty-fifty that she
ever gets it back. in
the gold room, the plaques
were all late for us, leafy
once, now fifty-plus
years overdue. had we
vaulted ourselves from the room, it
might have thinned, anxious
at the prospect of turn, of
crawl, of smoothing
that inability to burn. she
pulls her tendons tight for
the grass in these ways,
knowing only glare and, twice,
reflection. legs are
sectioned, heaving under wrap. shoulders
flake away in passing and
are gutted in the lap.
Poetry • Fall 2018
And then just like that, with hardly anyone
noticing, it became daily harder to remember when
this sense of being at sea had begun – at sea, as in
on a wave of doubt mixed with fear and yet no small
amount, incongruously, of fevered anticipation, not joy
itself but the belief, still – the half-belief – some joy
might come. Maybe
the beginning doesn’t matter anyway –
whatever wasn’t the case once, it’s the case now, long
days of jazz and drinks named after jazz, Give me a John
Coltrane, someone saying; another, I’ll take one more
round of these Take Fives…Not that there aren’t
those who suspect the headiness of this new weather
will soon enough dissipate, the holler-and-buzz
surrounding it will follow suit. We’re alike in that way,
you and I – comrades, if you will, in our shared
suspicion, whether you know it yet or not, says
the captain to the young man across the room,
who of course can’t hear him because the captain has
only said this to himself, not aloud yet. He looks at
the young man,
who hasn’t yet seen the captain. It’s as if
he’s trying not to look. Look at me, thinks the captain. And
the young man’s head starts to turn toward him. Any
moment he’ll see the captain for the first time. The way
all histories begin, apparently. What destroys finding
what will be destroyed, though which is which has yet to be
determined. Almost lavender, the captain’s eyes are, in this light.
Features • Winter 2017 - Cell
-*Venice, 2016*-
We met the soldiers twice that night, first at the bar and later at the pizzeria. They were American, stationed in Vicenza, and out of uniform for the night. We all lingered in the *campo* for a while, surrounded by old buildings that shrugged like sandwich bread in a backpack.
Talking small and drinking large, we organized ourselves raggedly, partaking in the rituals that make us human: mating and idol worship. The Harvard boys wanted the servicemen to know *just how much respect* they had for men in uniform. They would *never *have the guts to do *anything* like that. A strenuous week of training meant that the army boys were itching to talk to some ladies—particularly, the lovely Harvard ladies they were *so lucky* to meet that fine evening. I whittled the word “infantryman” with my tongue until it felt like a normal word that could exist outside of a history book. I feigned a shadow of interest in their guns. Then, laughably and inevitably, came the question.
First, the innocuous “Where are you from?”
Then, “New York is great. But your family, where did they—”
And lastly, “Wait. I’ll bet I can guess.”
There’s a dreary kind of comfort in the time-honored “ethnic dartboard” tradition. The army boys guessed quicker than most—Charlie’s brothers had both married Filipina woman, wink wink, and Ed had *a real thing* for Asian girls. I thought about my grandfather’s limp and the history of blue eyes on brown skin and then I laughed like 1848-1946 never happened. The soldiers bought another round of drinks and showed us their tattoos.
Soon, the other girls were gone and I felt their absence like a fishbone in my throat, and I watched the army boys and Harvard boys smoke their cigarettes, and it all swallowed me, that white American maleness that fills a room like steam in a shower.
-*Manila, 1945*-
The Republic of the Philippines took a 10-year breath of independence before the Americans came back in 1945. The whole thing (and by “thing,” I mean imperialism) really got started in 1521 after a visit from a fellow called Ferdinand Magellan, who led the first European visit to the strange little Eastern archipelago. Over the next four decades, other Spanish explorers came knocking, with Catholicism and a colonial regime tucked into their casserole tins.
The revolutionary stirrings began in the 1870’s, a Republic was formed in 1898, and said Republic was crushed by the end of that same year, after the Spaniards handed off the colony to the Americans. After a rocky adjustment (read: famine and war crimes) to American rule, the Philippines was granted Commonwealth status in 1935, marking the beginning of a supposed transition to full independence. This plan was thwarted by the worldwide ruckus of the 1940’s, and in 1942 the budding nation once again found itself under siege, this time by the Japanese. MacArthur and the rest of the American boys were back in 1945, recapturing the territory until July 4th, 1946, when the Philippines celebrated its first Independence Day.
My grandfather was born in 1937, and he limped for his whole life after being hit by shrapnel during Japanese occupation. He had been standing by a small bowling alley near his house when a bomb went off, and after some makeshift surgery in a makeshift medical tent, he never walked the same again. He was carried around on a stretcher until he could get back on his feet, and passing American servicemen would drop chocolate candies into the stretcher to cheer him up. He would make a peace sign with his fingers and shout, “Victory Joe!”
“Cute, right?” my mom quips as she relays this anecdote over the phone, and I say yes, because it’s as about cute as those kinds of stories get.
-*Cambridge - Harvard Kennedy School Library, 1962/2016*-
*SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY IN UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRIES: *
*The Philippine Experiment*
*by Roman A. Cruz, Jr.*
*a paper presented to*
*The Science and Public Policy Seminar*
*Government 260*
*Harvard University*
*1961-1962*
* *
* *My grandfather smoked cigars at the Manila Hotel with painters and politicians. He was Jesuit-educated and light-skinned—*mestizo*, meaning he resembled the colonizers, not the colonized. He studied at the School of Public Administration at Harvard, which wasn’t called the Kennedy School because JFK wasn’t JFK yet.
*A country would be capable of scientific research only after it has reached a certain “stage” of development. We shall be prudent enough to avoid a precise definition of this stage. It will be sufficient to suggest that India and the Philippines are among those who have reached it. Both are predominantly agricultural economies; their levels of literacy, while rising, are in general low by Western standards; their peasants are attached to unsophisticated and inefficient techniques.*
* *
There’s a portrait of him hanging in the National Gallery of the Philippines. His suit doesn’t fit him quite right, or at least the artist didn’t seem to think it did, and he wears boxy glasses. I stumble over his typewritten assessment of the *unsophisticated* ways of the *peasants* in the country he came from. He was *mestizo*. He was *guapo*. He was getting a degree at *Harvard*. Suddenly, the dapper man in the portrait is a doctor in latex gloves and a surgical mask, taking a scalpel to his own mother, pretending he never even knew her.
*The historical revolutions in science and technology in the West have produced a priceless heritage of knowledge and techniques from which the developing countries scan draw: transferring techniques outright or, where necessary, modifying them to suit their own conditions. And the vast resources being poured by the West into research today are continually adding to that heritage.*
* *
I hold his words in my mouth like cherry pits. He describes the American conquest of the Philippines as an *association* of the two nations, cites a *strong influence of American values on Philippine society*, as if the state filled with brown people had any say in the matter. An *association* of two countries, like the *association* between walking and then limping. *Values* on *society*, shrapnel on skin. *Primitive*, *parasitic*, *pedestrian*: I picture myself storming from a Thanksgiving table, yelling, “The Arabs invented algebra, asshole.” When I call my mom to say that I’ve found his old essays, she tells me she’s crying.
“I miss him so much.”
My grandfather became president of Philippine Air Lines when his dear friend Ferdinand Marcos became president of the Philippines in 1977—the company had been nationalized after Marcos declared martial law. My mom and her half-brother Gino grew up flying First Class. Smiling stewardesses pushed carts of ice cream and mashed potatoes through the aisles as my grandfather’s airplanes glided through the Eastern skies.
*Wall Street Journal April 10, 1981*
*PHILIPPINE AIR LINES TO GET $65.4 MILLION IN GOVERNMENT AID*
*MANILA — This week PAL reported a 1980 loss of $51.6 million on a 51% surge in revenue to $430 Million. Mr. Cruz blamed the loss on the higher cost of fuel and other expenses. But he predicted that the airline will make a profit in two or three years.*
* Mr. Cruz's optimism isn't widely shared. Since it began flying to the Philippine mountain resort of Baguio on the eve of World War !!, PAL has always envisaged a brighter future, and since Mr. Cruz took over management of the airline for the government in 1977, the promises have come as fast as the red ink. *
* *
-*Venice, 2016*-
The soldiers were paratroopers, and they were in Vicenza training to jump out of airplanes, and it wasn’t at all like skydiving, because you had 120 pounds of weapons and equipment strapped to your body. *It fucking sucked *and you were lucky not to break your legs while doing it*. *Most of them enlisted because of money issues and family issues and nodded to the idea of becoming a better man, whatever that meant.
“The army sucks dick,” Brandon said. He was nineteen too, and he would have been an English major if the army hadn’t gotten to him first. He touched my knee and smiled. “No offense.”
His fingertips didn’t go past my knee, didn’t even reach the soft stretch of brown thigh that I was too lazy to shave. I felt all my negative spaces, the gaps and gulfs and concavities that made him feel like he had to say sorry to me, because the army sucks dick and girls suck dick but girls and the army aren’t the same.
These are the good guys, I reminded myself, and he bought me a cocktail.
-*Cambridge - Harvard Kennedy School Library, 2016*-
The worst part of discovering my grandfather’s secrets was realizing that they were never really secrets to begin with. My mother’s siblings are of the “half” variety, born to three different mothers. The Philippines is the only country in the world, besides the Holy See, that does not legally allow divorce. My grandfather’s close friend was Ferdinand Marcos, Ferdinand Marcos was a military dictator who was convicted of murder at the age of 22, and the sentence was handed down by—wait for it—Roman Cruz Sr., my great-grandfather. A few cursory Google searches would have yielded all of this information, yet I did not make those Google searches until I was seated in the Kennedy School library, next to an old man who coughed loudly, wetly, and awfully.
We were so similar, everyone told me. He was a writer like I am, as American as victory gardens and gelatin and ham. I read the damning gossip columns and damning newspaper articles, and an inane but still damning blog post by his ex-girlfriend, my uncle’s mother, written nearly eight years after his death. The coughing at the desk next to mine remained loud, wet, and awful.
*Thursday, September 15, 2011*
* *
*What'll I do when you are far away and I feel blue, what'll I do?*
*What'll I do when I am wond'ring who is kissing you, what'll I do?*
*What'll I do with just a photograph to tell my troubles to?*
*When I'm alone with only dreams of you that won't come true, what'll I do?*
* *
*Those are the words of one of my most favorite songs that later on became the theme song of the film The Great Gatsby. I love that song. It reminds me of my life, which, come to think of it, was full of heartbreak. Some hearts, I broke. Others broke mine. We left a path cluttered with broken hearts so until one day I said, That's it! No more heartbreak for me. I am done with all that.*
* *
And I was done with all that too. We had little in common. The red portfolio that held his essay yellowed dimly at the edges. I handed it back to the archivist and left the Kennedy School library, which did not yet exist when Roman Cruz Jr. studied at Harvard. We had so, so little in common. I never told him that the Arabs invented algebra, asshole, and I never asked why he refused to call imperialism by its name in his paper for Government 260, and I never got to tell him that the army boys bought me drinks instead of chocolate candies. John F. Kennedy Street opened earnestly in front of me, and my mom filled my inbox with more stories while I cried on my way to class.
-*New York City - Terrace of His Fifth Avenue Penthouse, 2000*-
My grandfather and I shared this planet for four years. He liked to pronounce the double-L in my name as the Spanish would, foregoing the consonant sound in exchange for a “y” so that the “ella” ending became “eya.” I have exactly two of my own memories with him: confiding in him while sitting on a bench on the balcony of his Fifth Avenue apartment (I thought my mom hated me because she didn’t let me put ice cubes in my chocolate milk), and eating some white, starchy snack that the nurses gave me, the day before he died.
-*Cambridge - The Walk from JFK Street to the Science Center, 2016*-
Mom
4:22 PM
One more story: when he was growing up, he had a pet pig named Guapa. She was the cleanest and nicest smelling pig, and possibly the only indoor pig in Manila
4:23 PM
When food got scarce, they had to slaughter Guapa. They were all so sad. None of them could eat.
4:27 PM
Now you have me thinking maybe they’ve been playing us all this time and just made Guapa’s story more dramatic than it was hahah
4:30 PM
I think actually food shortage WAS an issue: google japanese occupation, Philippines, and food shortage
-*Manila, 2014*-
I was sitting in the backseat when my mom told me the wedding photos weren’t real. She and her father both got married within five years of one another, and my mother was forced to invite Emilie, the girlfriend who later became my grandfather’s wife, to the ceremony. (Emilie taught me the word “sexy” when I was four and bought me a velvet Juicy Couture purse after she lied to my mother when I was twelve.) Emilie and my grandfather had two children together and married at the same church a few years later. When the ceremony ended, the wedding photographer called out a roster of family members who would be posing for pictures. My mom, Gino, and their spouses and children were left off the list.
No, trembled my mother’s voice in the passenger seat. It wasn’t a mistake.
The wedding picture fiasco had caused such a rift in the family that the bride and groom announced a re-take. We staged a second photo shoot, several weeks after the nuptials. In front of an opulent backdrop of red velvet, we dressed ourselves in wedding clothes again, repinned the stiff white lilies and re-fastened the coquettish strings of pearls. My grandfather had always been called *guapo*, and the fake pictures from his fake wedding suggested nothing to the contrary. A *mestizo* man and his *mestiza* bride, and all of his and their children.
I sat in my mother’s lap for the pictures, and we were smiling and waxy-skinned as if we had been embalmed, and we all were dressed in a dizzying, iridescent shade of beige.
Poetry • Winter 2014 - Trial
That the sequelae of
such love has no
such effect can’t change
a bit where here
we are in this
coarse mood swing’s doldrums.
Tense is the season
where time usurps a
ginger snap, tachycardia enlists
the wrong man to
the job of whatever
job this really is—
a flank of venison
that outputs offshoots erratically
in tempered limb drop.
I fake back pain
and conceive of highjinks
suited to the rondure
of a crystal lapis
conference umbrella. There, love,
the park menu awaits.
Chilly denizens of fairy
bedtime stories do breaststrokes
in the heat of
fair espousal, gender removal,
plus and minus bargaining.
You must not love
me now nor ever
again says the creatine
injection with suave inflection.
Denuded for the evening,
suffering Bell’s Palsy, honored
by the draping hard-on
in the wind’s backtalk,
we settle up our
score and make way
on immobile yachts high
above the derby tides.
You move with prolix
spasms, inflated misdemeanors, even
a ringlet of pewter
that you place in
glass ashtrays for mother.
Today and tomorrow are
not polyandrous—in fact
suffrage comes in bins
on liners from token
deposits of a rough
Neanderthal mandarin. Oranges. Stencil
stashes. Sigh. Exhale. Scoop
the muscle tissue contraction
that has too its
Indo-European roots—we
all do, you know.
We all do. Yet
love has channeled the
age’s decorum into a
rare late-hour affect.
Pudgy bottom trawlers, all
of us and them.
When was it one
first heard the spray
at the back of
the throat that clicked
its graceshaped cap in
some kind of rhomboidal
romp? I don’t know.
O, verily, I don’t.
BP has continued setting
out its continued commitment
to environmental restoration efforts
in the Gulf region
despite the company’s legal
challenge to the misinterpretation
of the settlement’s agreement
with the Plaintiffs’ Steering
Committee. Arousal. Keystone Light.
Flick me with the
teeth of your smile
in the patchy dust
rigger you call home
my positive legacy love.
From small denomination bills
a wad is born.
And, your Highness, to
my utter amazement’s grotesque
patience, at least $4
billion donations a year
await gas development plans.
It’s Labor Day, 1935.
A tropical cyclone plunks
down its bushy arms
in Floridian climes, alas.
A flood burgeons its
safe bet, breaks its
belt, a statewide panic
claims anonymous residents lost
in their casual historicity.
Fire. Tornado outbreak. Exploitation.
Silicosis at Coconut Grove.
Explosion in Texas City.
Dam failure: Santa Clarita.
You can keep stemming
the laundry lists of
American disasters privately, which
is to say morosely,
or you can do
so in this poem
and be judged for
it—rightly?—I think.
USS *Indianapolis* goes
down—near Guam—direct
action (military)—drowning, shark
attack, hypothermia, 879 people
taken. The conceit is
plain, now, it exists
on a plain now.
A plane called Now.
Part of the tragedy
of dying in a
tragedy is losing one’s
dignity, one’s right to
personal, exclusive mourning—a
myth, yes, but one
we’d like not to
have robbed in front
of our very faces.
Rubbed out, the smokestack
plantation mill burned down
in the mudslide with
surprising caution, the witnesses,
onlookers, townsfolk, germs. Considerate.
It’s time. That terrible
time again. The scene
in the movie where
they must go and
part—and we’re not
even really sure the
tenuity of their... Bored
people are cruel because
now comes the momentum
of last resort. Hell
and habitude incurred by
salesgirls with failed aplomb,
pulling, milling, mulling, pilling.
I try to get
you to talk to
me and prop you
up and stuff you
with projected imagined speech.
The charming part is
you do not speak
even then what I
want you to—and
this is called something.
Junior jurors run away.
The fact seems to
be, however, a bullet—
a heart attack, company
dinners, unrelated fifteenths trying
to begin the enterprise
quite. Too many call
this something—this resort—
I try to get
even then what I—
resilient green and shaky
the lives lengthen custodial
bliss, worthwhile forays, unsaid.
Like the Jewish homosexuals
in Proust, we were
poison-ivy heroes, forgotten
on outer limits, played
badly by cameo Demerol
memorials. Is it right
for the dim vision
before me to salute
the end of my
qualities with a glass
of gin? Sometimes, your
voice, an imitation, a
thing said, a point,
is enough to let
gentle nature have its
most ungentle way. The
thriller is ending.
The thriller has ended.
The thrills are gone.
Most profound and subtle sense
be with me, tonight—
my love has evacuated
their sentimental fluids in
borrowed clothes from another
generation—one I hear
about so often, never
see, and this makes
me very lonely, depraved,
abject, foregone, a wasp
and wisp and gasp
with lisp. The cusp
of my love is
love, I think. A
kind of Calvinism in
reverse, if you think
about it. Love, goodnight.
Features • Winter 2014 - Trial
A specter is haunting the World Wide Web—the specter of smarm.
Or so Tom Scocca, features editor at Gawker, would have it. His bombastic opinion piece “On Smarm” took the online literary world by storm last December, drawing not just affirming nods from fellow smarm-conspiracy theorists but replies from big names like Maureen Dowd and Malcolm Gladwell as well. (It also drew a fair number of unique page views: more than “I Can’t Stop Looking At This Weird Chinese Goat,” but less than “Two Minutes Of Nothing But Goats Yelling Like Humans,” which is fairly strong on the Gawker scale of buzz).
In Scocca’s view, the proliferating complaints about snark and its dominance have got the whole thing upside down. We do not live in an age of snark, he says. We live instead in an age of smarm— and here, Scocca argues, in a succinct eight and a half thousand words, be the real dragons. Scocca is reluctant to explain just what he means by snark. He would rather talk about smarm, which he defines like this:
*Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves. *
The real danger of smarm, Scocca writes, is that it lets people off the hook: It uses niceness as a cover for evasion. Faced with any kind of criticism, the “smarmer” tries to silence the critic without addressing the content of the objection.
Armed with this exciting new term, Scocca’s essay assembles a formidable parade of smarmers for us to scrutinize—smarmers in literature, smarmers in journalism, smarmers in politics. Isaac Fitzgerald, editor of the newly created BuzzFeed Books section, cops a particular bruising for his determination to publish only positive book reviews, in adherence to the “Bambi rule”—*If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.* The “no haters” ethos of BuzzFeed, Scocca claims, has allowed that website to thrive in the “online sharing economy,” where agreeability leads to popularity and popularity leads to value. Other so-called smarmers are called out, as well: Joe Lieberman, Niall Ferguson, and Jonah Lehrer— Mayor Bloomberg even gets a look-in—not to mention Malcolm Gladwell, and from there, naturally, the whole political discourse of Bush-era foreign policy.
Special attention is reserved for Dave Eggers, the “most significant explicator of the niceness rule,” the “true prophetic voice of anti-negativity,” whose by-now half-famous “sell-out” rant in an interview with* The Harvard Advocate* in 2000 culminated in a feverish invocation to create rather than dismiss: “Do not be critics, you people,” Eggers fumed. “Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.”
Scocca uses Eggers as his point of entry and exit in the piece. Eggers’s rant must surely be the epitome of smarm. *Don’t call me a sell-out*, Scocca’s puppet-Eggers seems to say. *You have no right, because I am out here doing real work, whereas you are simply sniping from the sidelines*. Such a glass-jawed refusal to be criticized must no doubt be an act of bad faith. And surely, if the world is run on smarm, then the only right response is to rebel—to defend at all costs the right to criticize and interrogate.
Except that Scocca doesn’t really make this case in his article. For one thing, he is wrong about Dave Eggers. (For another, he seems to misrepresent most of his sources.) Scocca’s essay is strongest where it critiques the ways in which the politically powerful make appeals to niceness as a way to silence debate. But only very few of his examples fit this framework. Throughout the majority of his piece, Scocca is actually on the defensive: He conceptualizes snark and smarm as opposing forces, hoping to use the ubiquity of smarm as a justification for snark. By stretching smarm so thin, however, Scocca fails to articulate a useful or coherent sense of the concept.
I found Scocca’s essay to be rather appealing when I first read it through, and this appeal is what makes “On Smarm” worth returning to—the article has the potential to operate quite forcefully, as long as its sources are not double-checked and as long as its rhetorical tricks remain unexamined. Scocca earns his supporters through an extensive use of double-negative: Anti-negativity is smarm, which is bad (because Bush!), so we must prefer its opposite—negativity, and therefore snark. But this double-negative hinges on a false set of alternatives. One can refuse smarm and refuse snark as well. In fact, snark and smarm are not so incompatible, as Tom Scocca’s lengthy screed confirms. “On Smarm” reveals itself to be a botched manifesto for snark—and in its dreary and self-interested botching, it begins to take the form of Scoccan smarm.
One must argue back against Scocca’s piece, not for the sake of positivity, but for the sake of the real casualty of Scocca’s argument: all the useful and productive forms of negative speech.
*
“On Smarm” was met by an odd reception. Malcolm Gladwell posted a reply that insisted on the value of “niceness.” Maureen Dowd affirmed her conviction of the need for negativity. Ryan Kearney at *The New Republic*, meanwhile, jumped in to defend Scocca’s pillorying of Dave Eggers. A strange ambiguity characterized the whole debate, propelling it ever further into abstraction. This unease was neatly captured by Dylan Matthews, Tom Scocca’s interviewer at the *Washington Post*, who confessed that he “kind of” sympathized with one of his readers who complained that he or she was “completely unable to construct ideas out of those words” that had been published.
If the categories at play in Scocca’s argument—snark and smarm, negativity and criticism—are proving difficult to mobilize in the snarknado’s aftermath, then this is not because they are overly intellectual or remarkably intricate. It is because they are bullshit categories, or at least poorly defined ones. This vagueness in terms is not incidental to the thrust of “On Smarm.” It is integral to the logic of the piece, and to the scope of its ambition.
The key misdirection at the heart of the essay is Scocca’s unwillingness to address the question of snark. At first, he appears to accept the definition he lifts from Heidi Julavits’s essay in* The Believer*: “a hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt.” But then, without any explicit justification, it becomes clear that defending snark is his real intention. “On Smarm” is even framed around the rhetorical question: “to what is [snark] responding?”
The answer, of course, is smarm. And what makes smarm appealing is the fact that it justifies snark. “Some snark is rotten and harmful and stupid,” Scocca confesses. “Smarm, however, is never a force for good.” Changing the subject to smarm allows Scocca to avoid the task that he seems remarkably eager to avoid: Not once in the over 8,000 words of this *snark de triomphe* does he give a positive example of snark.
Scocca’s trick lies in suggesting that every one of his critics is necessarily a smarmer. Smarm, then, begins to mean “resistance to snark.” Which Scocca wants to quash, for all of the obvious reasons, but he refuses to do so by arguing directly with his critics—foremost among them David Denby, who wrote a book on the topic called* Snark*. He does not argue for the merits of snark, nor does he attempt to show a difference between what he and his colleagues do and what Heidi Julavits has identified. Scoccan snark, like Scoccan smarm, would rather talk about anything except itself. And so we are taken on this ponderous journey through time and space-breaks (with, admittedly, a few solid insights along the way), only to find out that the destination is an outdated, indirect justification for what the former Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio has decried as “snappy snarky snarking snark-snark shit.”
The double-negative that lends “On Smarm” its rhetrical force is enabled by this cultivated ambiguity of terms. If smarm is anti-negativity, then we should opt for anti-anti-negativity—that is, plain old snarky negativity. So unless you believe that every gesture should always be positive, congratulations! You have just joined Team Snark. No, you don’t get a free t-shirt.
After Scocca’s initial attack on Dave Eggers, he takes a second to anticipate the reader’s objections. His response to these is telling. “That’s it,” Scocca writes. “You’re getting it. That’s smarm.” By insisting on snark as the natural alternative to smarm (and vice versa), and by keeping the argument locked in abstraction, Scocca can claim any ideological ally he likes—and he can smear just about anybody he likes, whether or not he has the necessary evidence.
David Denby’s book on snark, which was one of the inspirations for the essay, is never addressed in the piece. Instead, in a section lumped in near the end, Scocca recounts a review Denby wrote on Spike Lee’s* Do The Right Thing* back in 1989, which (in Scocca’s retelling at least) made a problematic stance on race and violence. “Keep this in mind,” Scocca writes, “when David Denby puts himself forward as an expert on the terms of appropriate and inappropriate response.” Denby on “snark” goes completely unaddressed. Scocca tries to disqualify him by attacking him ad hominem, using a completely tangential point to mobilize the reader’s moral suspicions and to make Denby seem not up- but downworthy. Does this open Scocca up to criticism—for using snideness and suggestiveness instead of actual argument?
*That’s it*, Tom Scocca might reply. *That’s it. You’re getting it. That’s smarm.
* Scocca also proposes through a suggestive parenthetical aside, devoid of any context, that Chris Jones—with whom he has previously had a public spat—is a sexist. What if one took Scocca to task for this laziness, as well?
* Yes, yes*, Tom Scocca cries, triumphant. *You’re getting it.* These objections are not smarmy at all, however—they are an argument back against poor, unfinished, self-serving criticism. Scocca’s use of “smarm” permits the kind of evasiveness that he associates with smarm in the first place. *Stand back,* he seems to say, *in the pose of the smarmer. What I’m doing is important, and it’s us against them. If you argue with me, then you are part of the problem, not the solution. So hush now, people, hush. *
***
Tom Scocca’s screed feels decidedly out of place on the pages of Gawker.com. It doesn’t fit the web design; it doesn’t fit the tagline *Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news*. It also sits uncomfortably in Scocca’s own writer’s profile: days before “On Smarm,” he published a literal ranking of the sauces. Such diversity of output is an asset, not a liability, to Scocca and his employer. Still, the curious placement of this essay is part of the story of its production, and there is something to be gained by reading “On Smarm” in the context of Gawker’s current identity crisis—which is also Gawker’s branding crisis, since content and marketing are never too far from each other in the Gawker Media empire.
As Scocca’s argument builds to a crescendo, he connects the alleged smarm of Dave Eggers to the marketing discourse of personal branding. Spuriously linking Eggers’ *Advocate* rant to an essay called “The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters, Scocca associates the style of smarm with the “credentialism” of the marketer. (Remember that Scocca has linked BuzzFeed to marketing, as well, through the currency of agreeability.) What Scocca brushes aside, however, is the fact that negativity can also be a brand, as long as it works in predictable ways. And he should know, since the best example of this kind of branding happens to be his employer, Gawker Media. In fact, one of the products available on Gawker’s advertising page is something called a “Partner Post,” which offers companies the following proposition: “Your message, our signature tone.” As Chris Matthews at CNET puts it:
*Here is a brand that is very open about what it is. And it is very open about where its priorities lie. Every customer of Gawker knows precisely what the product is, why they are using it and what to expect…The relationship between brand and user is clear, consistent and, therefore, functional. *
Snark is imperative to the Gawker Media empire; it is the “signature tone” of the Gawker brand. If we are going to accuse Dave Eggers of smarming back at his critics, in the interests of defending his brand, then we might level the same accusation at Tom Scocca.
The Gawker brand is currently faced with a unique set of pressures, a situation which makes Tom Scocca’s screed all the more valuable as a rare moment of insight into the self-understanding and the worldview of a senior Gawker editor. It would be unfair to demand that Scocca be consistent with the priorities of his employer: By no means is “On Smarm” necessarily *the* Gawker manifesto. Still, we can read it as one possible Gawker manifesto for the moment. Scocca does, after all, refer to his “personal stakes and connections,” and his piece is listed at the top of Gawker’s “The Best Gawker Posts of 2013.”
Gawker’s identity crisis is an enviable one: As the world’s most successful blog over the last decade, it no longer fits its underdog image. Gawker Media (which also owns Deadspin, Lifehacker, Jezebel, and io9, among others) enjoyed over 100 million unique page views in November couldn’t find this. With ultra-low costs and high advertising revenues, the Gawker bloggernaut is one of relatively few consistently profitable media enterprises. An anti-establishment bent gave the cheek of early Gawker a sense of rebellious moral purpose. But the original Gawker concept—snarky, pitiless, shamelessly ratings-driven—is increasingly under pressure from its size and its influence. As Carla Blumenkranz at *n+1* has convincingly argued, the sarcasm that is charming from an underdog can seem bullying in the mouth of a top dog. “You could say that as Gawker Media grew, from Gawker’s success,” Blumenkranz wrote, “Gawker outlived the conditions for its existence.”
Another threat to Gawker’s traffic dominance comes in the form of the cat-crazy BuzzFeed and the choir-preaching feelgood factory of Upworthy. Gawker’s dedication to both popularity and seriousness has seen it tugged in two different directions. As Andrew Phelps at the Nieman Lab reports: “Half of people think Gawker is diluting its high-quality material with Chinese goats; the other half think Gawker should stick to Chinese goats and stop trying to do real journalism.”
Last December, after BuzzFeed’s November traffic had surpassed that of Gawker, Gawker’s chief Nick Denton responded with a surprising defense: “The crowd will eventually choose the juicy truth over a heartwarming hoax,” he told the *Financial Times*. Denton also complained about Upworthy: “even smarmier than BuzzFeed.” The happy union of snarkiness, traffic, and truth-telling appears to be unraveling for Gawker. After years of cultivating snark as a way to keep the bastards honest, what ever is Gawker to do when its editors wake up one morning and realize with a shock that now they are the bastards? Hence Nick Denton’s appeal to the moral high ground— and hence Tom Scocca’s too, perhaps.
Gawker’s proud fixation on page views has an immense influence on its content—which need not pose a problem to a small, snarky gossip blog. But this fixation becomes problematic when Gawker begins to take on real news, and when the interests of virality begin to clash with newfound claims of journalistic responsibility. As Felix Salmon has reported, when a suspicion arose that one of Gawker’s viral posts had linked to a fake (“Grandpa Writes Letter Disowning Daughter After She Disowns Gay Son”), Gawker’s editor John Cook had the following to say:
*I’d rather be calling bullshit on stuff like this than calling attention to it...But we are tasked both with extending the legacy of what Gawker has always been—ruthless honesty—and be reliably and speedy on top of internet culture all while getting a shit-ton of traffic. Those goals are sometimes in tension. *
Caught between responsible journalism, gossipy snark, and an army of viral cats, the Gawker brand is facing serious pressure. Thankfully, Tom Peters has a pointer for moments of crisis: “Go back to the comparison between brand You and brand X—the approach the corporate biggies take to creating a brand.” For Gawker, there is nothing so priceless as an opportunity to carve out distance from BuzzFeed on the grounds of its own seriousness. At best, Tom Scocca uses Isaac Fitzgerald’s comments at the launch of BuzzFeed Books as a token excuse for timeliness. At worst, it is a cynical tool for defensive self-branding.
But this is snark that we are talking about, here. Snark doesn’t position itself in the marketplace: Snark flips the bird and wanders off. Snark doesn’t respond to David Denby with a many-thousand-word treatise, smarming its way out of real criticism. Snark, at its best, has no time for the moral high ground.
Tom Scocca makes the case that smarm is usually the weapon of the powerful. What would a world look like where the beleaguered Gawker Empire continues to snark but adds smarm to its arsenal? The comments sections for “On Smarm” gives some indication. When one commenter objects that the problem of snark in reviews has not been addressed in Scocca’s essay—and adds that the affected world-weariness of young Gawker writers seems “unearned, and cheap”—he is met with the following reply from Scocca: “‘Unearned’ is on the Smarm Bingo card.”
In reply to Malcolm Gladwell’s rather dashed-off response, which challenged Scocca’s selective use of quotations from the Eggers interview, Scocca wrote:
*Malcolm Gladwell deepens our understanding of smarm by explaining that when Dave Eggers wrote the words ‘Do not be critics,’ he meant people should be critics. *
By this point, Scocca is simply pointing and accusing. Yes, you’re getting it, he is saying. That’s smarm. And he is using that accusation as a way out of the argument.
*
What Scocca seems to ignore in all this is the difference between gratuitous negativity and valuable criticism. Scocca wants to take the world’s fact-checkers and conscientious objectors as his allies— though it is unclear whether they would choose him as their ally. When he conflates negativity (the saying of negative things) with negativity (a stance of sneering dismissal), he erases the possibility of a productive or creative kind of criticism—something different from critical-ness. In either case, the task remains to rescue productive criticism from Scocca’s sinking ship.
Luckily, as it turns out, a good start on this difficult task has already been made by Scocca’s own sources, in the many parts of their works that he neglected in his quest for incriminating evidence. David Denby’s Snark spends a vast number of pages sorting through exactly which kinds of negativity he finds unhelpful and which kinds he supports. Far from being opposed to negativity as such, Denby ends his book with a note of praise for Stephen Colbert’s critical powers and with a plea for his readers to go out and commit some “vituperation that is insulting, nasty, but, well, clean.” Denby, it turns out, is not opposed to negativity at large (I certainly got the impression he was while reading “On Smarm”).
In her own Believer essay, Heidi Julavits is not out to trick you when she writes: “To be perfectly clear—I am not espousing a feel-good, criticism-free climate.” She goes on to confess an “intellectual crush” on the “curmudgeonly” critic James Wood. Even in his overwhelmingly negative book reviewing, Julavits argues, there is a positive belief in the better possibilities for contemporary fiction, along with “room for a dialogue with Wood, which indicates there’s something to wrangle over.” Taken in full, Julavits’s essay is much more a plea for productive criticism than it is an attack on snark itself. Tom Scocca quotes her with the following line:
*“If snark is a reaction to this sheer and insulting level of hyperbole, fine—” *
but then he cuts her off there, removing the second half of the sentence, which asked why the writer (who has not chosen the book cover or written the PR copy) should have to receive the disdain. Scocca silences a voice that does believe in the uses of negativity: He would rather paint her as one more member of the worldwide Smarmy Army.
The difference between takedown negativity and productive negativity was exemplified in that other great drama of last December, the *Love Actually* saga. Christopher Orr of *The Atlantic* came out with a ruthless critique of the much-beloved Frankenstein’s Monster of a rom-com. After much online grumbling, Orr clarified his point. He held disdain for *Love Actually*only because he thought it missed all the important parts of love: his negativity, under pressure, clarified the possibilities that the film left out. In doing so, Orr was making a set of positive, descriptive claims about love. He was telling a love story of his own.
Over at Jezebel, meanwhile, at the girl-targeted holding of the Gawker Media empire, Lindy West produced a breathtaking, hilarious takedown of the film. Her intentions were clear from the get-go: the piece ran under the title “I Rewatched *Love Actually* And Am Here to Ruin It For All of You.” West was in no mood to cut Richard Curtis any slack, and her piece admitted no quality to the more successful elements of the film. (In her frenzy, West also denounced something that was actually fairly realistic in the film, and fairly easily double-checked: the presence of Portuguese guest workers in rural France.) West’s piece makes for enjoyable reading, but she has approached the film with different aims from the aims of a critic. She came to snark, and she took no prisoners.
By no means do I believe the Lindy Wests of the world should have their keyboards taken from them. West’s piece is certainly not without value. Yet it is not a meaningful contribution to criticism in the way that Christopher Orr’s essays are. Tom Scocca defends the role of snark in messianical terms, as if it is the only available answer to BuzzFeed’s Bambi Rule and his smarmy opponents. In the field of arts criticism, at least, this is plainly not the case. There, negativity certainly has its place—but we should be careful not to confuse the playful vanity of the takedown rant with the productive critical output of those who will stand hard by their claims. And if Scocca wants to refute the criticisms of snark that are posed by Denby, Julavits, and Eggers, then he must do so on terms more specific than his essay presents.
*
Which brings us back to poor, poor Dave Eggers, victim now of not one but two attention-seeking takedowns, if we count Tom Scocca alongside his old mates and allies who launched* n+1* in 2004 with a vitriolic—and since partially retracted—attack on Mr. Eggers and the “Eggersards.”
“Do not be critics, you people.” It is certainly no coincidence that Dave Eggers was speaking to *The Harvard Advocate*when he made this argument. Eggers was offering specific, pragmatic advice to a group of undergraduates. He was also provoked by a line of questioning that was grating and self-satisfied in tone. The* Advocat*e interviewer began by communicating his hopes that Eggers was finally free from the “perfidious yoke of those Massachusetts McSweeneys. Talk about a McFaustian bargain!” It is also important to read the Eggers interview in terms of the very specific discussion that was being entertained. The *Advocate* president was not arguing about the quality of Eggers’s work—he was questioning Eggers’s legitimacy purely on the grounds of the material conditions of how Eggers was publishing. This discussion is a familiar one for young people who are interested in alternative culture and suspicious of the influence that mainstream success might have on an artist’s integrity. Does success alone make you a sell-out? Is Dave Eggers, then, a sell-out? The crucial point here is that no one was asking questions about the honesty or the quality of Dave Eggers’s work. He was not being fact-checked by the *Advocate* president. He was on trial for complicity with power, and the punishment was tossed on the don’t-read pile. So, when Dave Eggers says, “Do not dismiss a book until you have written one,” he means exactly what he is saying: Do not dismiss it, out of hand, without having read it. He is arguing specifically about the proposition that mainstream success might make somebody unreadable. Against that proposition, he says: No. Read them.
And then, of course, you can do whatever you like to them. Dismissal is not the same as negative feedback; dismissal means not even thinking about it. Eggers clearly admits the existence of “fair and helpful book critics.” What he is arguing against here is specifically the kind of negativity that knows it’s out to get you in advance: the kind of negativity that won’t even listen. He is arguing specifically against snark, not against negativity at large.
The overblown tone of Eggers’s speech in this interview is certainly worth criticizing. Nevertheless, his words take on a different meaning when they are read in their proper context. The “sell-out” accusation was never targeted at Eggers’s work—it was targeted at the fact of his success and his activity.
As a former* Advocate* president myself, I feel inclined towards Eggers’s words in the context of undergraduate literary culture. The line being adopted by the Eggers interviewer is one that brings out the worst in us, as student editors: It prefers the easy gains of ridicule to the real rewards of the learning that goes on when one exposes oneself to new and alternative ways of thinking. If anecdotal evidence is worth anything, then I shall be the first in line to testify that snarky talk from college *literati* finds its roots, more often than not, in one’s own creative insecurities. I have seen it, and I have done it myself.
By structure and by necessity, the *Advocate *staff must make negative decisions: stories must be rejected from the issues, and would-be editors must be rejected from the masthead. Although our authority is scant, we find that we need to be critics—which is fine, for the most part, because we do believe in criticism. But the exercise of that criticism must take place in a creative community of young people, a community where vulnerability is necessary if anything interesting is ever going to get done. What kinds of criticism we might permit ourselves in such a field is a difficult question to answer. There is a value to open-mindedness and generosity, here, which goes above and beyond the responsibilities of established writers. And there is a value to giving each other the benefit of the doubt. In national politics, ambition is a danger. Among young artists, we could show a little more patience for each other’s ambitions, as long as they are honest.
The debate on snark and smarm has been dominated by the kind of thinking that maintains that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It is easy to like Tom Scocca’s essay on these grounds: He doesn’t like racism, he doesn’t like sexism, and he doesn’t like Upworthy. This kind of opposition, though, is a false one. If criticism really were a case of balancing Boo against Yay, mixing snark in with smarm, then it would be an easy job indeed. Leon Wieseltier of *The New Republic* seems to accept this binary at face value when he says, in Maureen Dowd’s column: “I never thought I’d utter a sentence like this, but I stand with Gawker against BuzzFeed.”
God forbid that those should be our options. Awesome and Yuck are not a ying and yang for online journalism—they are a Scylla and Charybdis. Snark and smarm alike should be treated with suspicion by truly thoughtful criticism. They are evasive, self-congratulating techniques, both of which are anathema to the needs of a productive creative community. Snark and smarm are friends who pose falsely as enemies, and one can stand against both of them at once.
The snafu over “On Smarm” poses serious questions about what might be missing in this phony set of undesirable alternatives. In a new media landscape that is increasingly obsessed with counting page views, meeting quotas, and delivering “the perfect feed,” the answer might be something like thoughtfulness. Or perhaps, in this brand-dominated online space, which specializes in figuring out what we want and then giving it to us, the answer lies in something like surprise. Something like courage.
Features • Winter 2018 - Noise
My first TV was the size of a microwave, with one of those bubble-like screens. It was relegated to the family Volvo after we got the new one (which was somewhat larger). My dad strapped it to a milk crate with bungee cords and permanently converted its signal to induction. It stayed there for years, lodged in the space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. All of this so that my siblings and I would stay quiet on the five hour drives to my grandparents’ house in Baltimore.
We watched VCR tapes of Teletubbies reruns on those drives, long after it was no longer age-appropriate. There was something really weird about watching them watch each others’ stomachs light up, with the camera zooming into a screen within a screen, especially when that screen was someone’s belly. I was obsessed with the red one, Po, especially. This was during the era when food brands were paying royalties to put the faces of TV characters on their child-targeted products. For two years, I would only drink apple juice that had Po’s face on the bottle.
At my third birthday party a few years earlier, my parents had surprised me by paying a full-grown man to come strolling down our driveway in an eight foot tall Teletubby suit. While hiding behind the legs of several of the adults floating around my backyard in rapid succession as I moved away from this man, it occurred to me that the Teletubbies were in actuality men and women wearing eight-foot-tall suits. I had made an error assuming that their bodies, collapsed into the screen, were just my size.
PBS had duped me and all of my friends. I didn't care if Santa was real: the fact that Dipsy was actually substantially larger than my father seemed to represent a hairline fracture in the integrity of my personal universe. I was smaller than I had thought.
Besides: didn't my parents understand? I didn't want to meet Po (let alone an eight-foot version): I wanted, desperately, to be her. I wanted to belong to the world of green vistas and tubby-toast where the sun had a babyface and I had three technicolor friends who would hang out with me for 425 episodes straight. If my parents understood me, they would have carved a rectangle out of my torso and replaced it with a television screen.
***
I spent my freshman year of college trying to decide whether this deliciously narcissistic brand of desire where you want to become someone rather than to sleep with them was psychoanalytically legitimate. I took a queer theory course. My professor encouraged personal papers, so I thought I’d write about the time when I was thirteen and developed a massive infatuation for a movie star playing a sexy and mysterious doctor. She was female, and her primary character trait was that she was bisexual, a fact which other characters frequently mocked. *I want to be a beautiful intern*, I wrote in my diary in between eighth-grade science and eighth-grade math, forgetting the last syllable of “internist.” I made a spreadsheet detailing everything I needed to do in high school to get into medical school. I attempted to grow taller. I bought a dark purple nail polish, because the doctor often wore that color. “I want to be a closed book,” I wrote, and tried to develop a repertoire of facial expressions that communicated mystery.
“Listen,” said my professor quickly when I proposed this paper topic. “You like her because she’s a rich pretty white girl. That’s not especially queer of you.”
“*Liked*,” I corrected her.
My best friend Lucas was, at the same time, taking a course on intimacy more broadly. This one was mostly about straight people. His professor, who was a rich pretty white woman like my doctor, asked him to dinner after grading his final paper, but he turned her down.
Meanwhile, outside of the classroom, I was discovering whole new modes of intimacy through Lucas’ platonic presence. We spent most of 2015 at cafes dispensing nuggets of thought and memory for each other like Pez candies. I would put these tablets of information on my tongue and let them dissolve there. It was a good way to be friends. Each time he and I sat down to coffee, we both compulsively removed everything from our wrists and fingers. A certain kind of intellectual undressing for one another.
***
We say a relationship occurs between two individuals, as if it’s physically located in the space between their bodies. Affection is like some kind of invisible goop that fills out the negative space between two personalities, bringing the contours of each into sharper focus.
Joseph Beuys cast the spaces beneath brutalist German underpasses in hot beef fat, taking a perfect print of the empty space left by the cold fascist architecture in organic matter that refused to cool. Obviously my friends and I are not fascist infrastructure (at least I hope we aren’t), but I like to think of friendship as the tallow that fills up the cold gaps between us. It’s a warm metabolizing filling, a kind of adipose tissue that stores affection rather than glucose.
There's that classic Scott Fitzgerald line about how personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures. Sociality is a kind of a gaming streak. This line still raises my blood pressure. I’m still trying to get just one gesture exactly right.
Besides, he’s wrong. Personality is always a collaboration. Other people elicit the words and gestures that define us from our lips and our bodies. We spend a lot of time rooting out and chastising the social chameleons in our midst. Really we’re always, always, fitting ourselves around the shapes of other people, drawing our respective selves out of each other.
Moreover relationships of all stripes are nothing more than an ongoing sequence of collaborative gestures clumped into encounters, encounters that become a shared history, a communal lexicon of inside jokes and memories. Intimacy is when a language with only two speakers develops slang.
***
With my friend Castle there was never undressing. We did a lot of sleeping in his large bed together in pajamas, changing in the bathroom, trying to entangle (covered) limbs without leaving open the possibility of entangling ourselves. We wanted impossibly innocent intimacy from one another. Instead we spent a lot of time unpacking the insults his ex had levied at him before leaving. “I know I am not good at women,” he said. I guess we are a skill.
He had this way of making you feel like there were some people who were essentially worthy and some who weren’t, and that the more time he deigned to spend with you the more likely it was that you were in the former category. He knew how to make you feel special in the light of his attention, and to make you think he felt special with you. We were never dating and we only very occasionally slept together in the proper sense of the idiom, but he managed to get me hooked on an IV-drip of partial validation. Nonetheless I was feeling somehow both smaller and fatter by the day and we were quickly running out of television to watch side by side, and all the while his mother was slowly dying of cancer in another country.
The lack of television really did us in. Television was a way of avoiding eight hour debates about how to conduct our quasi-relationship. These were coldly aggressive encounters where we debated what constituted reasonable behavior toward one another in both theory and practice. If one of us gets hurt by the other behaving in a way that technically is not prohibited according to the terms of our relationship as presently defined, does that person have a right to be upset with the other? If I hurt you romantically, can you then reasonably deprive me of your friendship because I am not interested in you? Is one of us a sociopath?
We were trying to write a rule book while holding fast to the fantasy that what we had didn’t need one. “We’re not even in a relationship!” he would say incredulously every twenty minutes. “We’re not even really having sex!” I would say back. We both worshipped logic and verbosity as some common god of objectivity. “I’ve never argued with anyone so good at articulating their emotional reasoning,” he said once at 4 am when we ran out of steam and started pulling our verbal punches. “It means I have to be especially on my game.”
At first it was perversely fun to strain the emotion out of intimacy and hold whatever was left up to the light. And then we would strain out the emotion (which at that point was mostly anger and hurt) and be left empty-handed.
Television meant we didn't have to do this. We watched *Bojack Horseman* and *Friends* and *Rick and Morty* and *Game of Thrones* and *Big Little Lies* and *The Young Pope* and *Lizzie McGuire*. It was a way of spending time together without having to deal with each other. We could share the space of Hilary Duff’s mind without fighting. We could experience emotions together safely by proxy of the larger-than-life people on his laptop screen. Hating each other, we could be together in other people.
***
You try to get the people around you to hurt yourself for you, my friend Margot told me five hours into a Megabus ride. When you feel insecure you instigate these conversations where you try to corner your friends into verbally confirming for you that you suck. This is your worst quality.
Your worst quality is your tendency to calmly inform other people of their worst qualities, I told her.
I know, she said.
***
In my nightmares there's always a voiceover narrating why I am totally screwed. I think this is common, but nonetheless it’s remarkably disturbing to be informed of your imminent violent dream-death by a voice of authority only you can hear.
One time I googled “Dreams with voiceovers,” hoping Carl Jung would inform me in dense, comforting sentences that these narrators were doing the crucial work of integrating my conscious and unconscious minds. I wound up on a mental health forum for people who hear voices that aren’t there while awake.
There are three kinds of voices: the Narrators, who describe your behavior in the declarative, as if keeping a transcendent live studio audience posted on the situational comedy of your existence. There are Interrogators, who progressively nibble away at your confidence with intrusive questions, keeping you up late into the night. Then there are the Commanders. They give commands. “It is important that you stick to your normal pattern of doing things,” the forum says. “Otherwise it could cause you doubt yourself and Commanders might take advantage of your indecisiveness.”
In a section titled “There is Hope,” we are advised to not stay silent:
If a voice is harassing you, you could start by calmly but firmly stating, “I hear you. Thank you for letting me know how you feel. Right now, I need to [insert important task] but I would like to discuss this matter with you later.” Then make a time and keep it. Keeping your word will become very important as the relationship grows.
It could be worse. I could have to reckon with dissenting parts of myself out loud, to make all of my internal conflict manifest sonically.
***
Lucas and Margot didn’t approve of Castle. They didn’t get why I continued to spend time with him when the six-hour verbal boxing matches left me badly existentially bruised.
I didn’t get it either. I was starting to feel like I was playing a fighting video game where my avatar had a special maneuver called "consider your thoughts and feelings and life decisions from an outside perspective." This was one of those moves that has to charge up over a period of time and then you get to do it once and there's a cool cut scene where you watch your opponent (my demons?) get shredded to ribbons or whatever. The move was my avatar's dynamite and without it this avatar was totally useless, limp, subjected to the facile violences of its opponents. And here I was with Castle, mashing on the controller, hitting the combination for "consider your thoughts and feelings and life decisions from an outside perspective" again and again, but the move hadn't sufficiently recharged.
Seven months later the console stopped glitching and I blocked his number.
“I miss you,” said Castle in an email a few months later, “And I want to know if you cried at the end of the second to last episode of the new season of Bojack Horseman like I did.”
***
I spent the summer when I was eighteen running around the Nebraska prairie with a gaggle of feminist artists. I bleached the tips of my hair and started wearing bandanas. On the prairie we were trying to learn to capture beauty and keep it. Everyone wanted to work with the figure, so we all had to take our turn as the model.
The first time was the hardest. “Here,” my photographer-to-be said, pushing her laptop towards me. “You can see my body before I see yours.” On the screen were a series of images of my new friend reclining nude around a tastefully decorated apartment with a glass of wine and a coy smile.
Earlier, she had shown me black and white images she had taken back in Tel Aviv. Her friends were anonymous bodies, leggy and well-crafted women who stared past the camera. They smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, easily folding their bodies into strong lines and pleasing arcs.
I had short legs and razor-burned knees. I smoked my first-ever cigarette a week earlier and hadn’t liked it. I cared, a lot, about what other people thought of me and my body and what I thought of myself and my body, and about making sure no one knew this. I also had this idea that I could be the kind of person who would agree to model naked without hesitation. My new friend made me feel special, like I too could be a striking twenty-something Israeli-American journalist with a fascinating sex life.
I thought she was beautiful. She was calloused and well-spoken and certain of her right to take up space in the world. She had been a drill sergeant in the Israeli army, spoke Chinese, and had once tried to illegally cross the Nepalese-Tibetan border alone on foot. She focused on you with sharp eyes and surprising warmth and never made small talk.
She said she prided herself on her ability to show her models the beauty of their bodies, and I wondered if she thought I was pretty. I was worried about bruises and scars and hairs. I thought about what underwear I would wear as if she was somebody I hoped to sleep with.
She handed me whiskey and loaded the film into her outmoded camera. Later I would nervously knock the empty copper cup out her window. “Ready?” she asked.
I wound up hating these images of myself. I had hoped that teaching myself to strip on command would teach me to be comfortable in my own skin, an expression which always gives me hope that my skin is a thing I could maybe someday get out of. I didn't trust mirrors for a minute: they all told me different things. I hoped photography might pin down a single and absolute image of my body, which I could then interrogate once and for all: are you beautiful? In reality, the photographs were as fickle as the mirrors. You would question the images and they would smile back and say what do you think?
***
When you draw a naked body from life you're supposed to look at the negative shapes––the curved quadrangle comprised of torso, upper arm, forearm, the hand meeting the hip. The swoop of the neck, when your visual field is flattened into two dimensions, makes contact with the straight line of the by the window pane behind. Only the spaces between body parts are impartial: we have so many laden expectations about the ways bodies look that they interfere with the way we see them and then we can't draw them right.
Various friends of mine have been employed as life models for figure drawing courses. “I feel like I’m professionalizing my ability to be vulnerable,” one of them told me, which happens to also be how I feel about writing. But in reality the life model becomes almost entirely desensitized to his or her nakedness. It’s strenuous work, holding a position. You pick up the skills and then nudity is a kind of a clothing: you are doing your job. It’s not that vulnerability has become banal, it’s that the pathway to vulnerability nudity once provided has closed. Your skin has become an impermeable cover stretched tightly and securely around your self. There are no gaps: you can be all surface.
Confronted with such a surface, we infer the presence of something like us somewhere in there from the behavior of cloth and skin and eyes and invisible vocal cords. We accumulate evidence of interiority, collecting gestures which we connect like dots to approximate what someone is like, how they experience themselves, how they experience us: who they are, really.
We’re always making these predictions, trying to hone our prediction-machines into 99.9% accuracy. We want to achieve knowledge of someone, which looks a lot like intimacy. We want to arrive at a place of absolute comprehension, to reach through our companion's sternum and pull out a struggling wet bird-like organ, the atom of their personality, which we can then hold in our hands and examine (or better yet, X-ray it, sequence its genome, dissect it, bring it to show and tell, and then maybe sew it up and put it back for someone else to check out later). We want to say, "Oh, that's what you are," and then possess that information permanently.
I used to wish for a concrete end to the process of getting to know someone. I hoped for a grand finale to the scary undertaking of progressively revealing the authentic and easily bruised pieces of yourself. If you peel back enough layers of tasteful clothing and casual charm, maybe you find a core nugget of individuality, the atom of the personality. Or maybe there will be nothing left.
***
Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington were in love, kind of. Their relationship was dramatized in a 1995 Emma Thompson biopic that focused mostly on Dora. It was subtitled: “She had many lovers, but only one love.”
In addition to a lover, Dora was an underappreciated painter. She went by her surname and had a pageboy haircut before its time. All the boys and girls at art school were at in love with her at one time or another.
Lytton was a member of the Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers. He was also gay. In the movie he met Dora at a house in the country in 1916 and thought she was a boy. He was disappointed when he found out she was not, but they moved in together all the same. Then Lytton fell for a man named Ralph Partridge. Ralph fell for Dora, and she agreed to marry him to keep the three of them together. Lytton died in 1932 and Dora committed suicide the next spring. Lytton, the world learned in 2005 from some letters, was a sado-masochist.
They say Virginia Woolf based the character of Neville on Lytton in her play-novel *The Waves*. There’s a scene I love where Neville and his best friend Bernard are quarreling. Neville sees Bernard walking up to him and starts to thoughtfully chew his metaphysical cud:
How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody—with whom?—with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?”
It’s a novel where everyone’s always thinking at everyone else, speaking to each other without actually speaking aloud. Woolf hops between the insides of their respective heads:
Bernard: You wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover. But the splendid clarity of your intelligence, and the remorseless honesty of your intellect... these qualities of yours make me shift a little uneasily and see the faded patches, the thin strands in my own equipment... I become, with you, an untidy, an impulsive human being whose bandana handkerchief is forever stained with the grease of crumpets.
Neville: I hate your greasy handkerchiefs—you will stain your copy of Don Juan. You are not listening to me. You are making phrases about Byron. And while you gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, I am trying to expose a secret told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love?”
Neville doesn’t get his answer, and, pissed off, hurls his poem in Bernard’s direction and leaves the room. Bernard thinks to himself, simply:
“To be contracted by another person into a single being—how strange.”
2026