Summer 2017 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

 



*“And oh..*



*Maybe mother told you true*



*And there'll always be somebody there for you*



*And you'll never be alone*



* *



*But maybe she's wrong*



*And maybe I'm right*



*And just maybe she's wrong…*



*and if so, here’s this song!” *



* *



*LCD Soundsystem, New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down.” *



* *



*“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” *



* *



*- Revelation 21:4 *



 



 



Between New England and the Tri-state area there exists a kind of no-man’s land, about three and a half hours of solid, uninterrupted, good old American highway punctuated only by tire stores and vegetation in varying states of decay. If there is an ideal for a highway - the highway as endless possibility, the highway as inter-state connectivity, the highway as a backdrop for a Subaru with zero down - then the I-93 would be a perversion of that ideal. The pavement is cracked, the guardrails are rusted and the landscape is dominated by Jiffy Lubes.



The word “godforsaken” comes to mind.



Presently, I am doing around 50 mph on this sorry excuse of a highway, freshly eighteen and freshly graduated from boarding school. I had spent the rainy ceremony alternating between thanking God for my blessed four years and replaying the beginning of Easy Rider in my head, looking forward to the journey that lay before me. As the car chugs along the broken pavement I try my best to block the scenery from defiling my memories of the ceremony.



I am also thinking about The Plan, which has been gestating for around three months in the back of my head. The Plan was simple: New Hampshire to New York City to LaGuardia Airport to Manchester, TN. At Manchester we would strike gold and find God. The Plan was intentionally loose, to allow ample time for detours and “just living, man.”



“Yo, what’s the name of that band you’re going on about?”



My best friend and travel companion Andrew asks me from the passenger’s side. (N.B. I asked him whether he wanted to be called Karlo Marx in the piece but he just told me to print his real name (“Who cares? We didn’t murder anyone.”))  



“What?”



“That band we’re going to see in Tennessee. LED Sound or whatever.”



“LCD Soundsystem.”



“I don’t know why we’re going all the way to fucking Tennessee just to see this band. It’s like you worship them or something.”



      



I have an obsession with the Second Coming. I guess it was something I absorbed, one of those qualities you take in from eight years of Christian school and fourteen years of methodist services. In sixth grade Bible class we used to read the Book of Revelation and I remember trying to picture what the day of reckoning would look like. For some reason I would always think about the ending to Independence Day where the alien spaceship fires a poorly-rendered CGI laser beam into the heart of Washington, D.C. This seemed like a rather blasphemous take on the whole affair, so I kept it stowed away, one of many guilty thoughts.



The other guilty thought I had was that I was afraid of heaven.



In sixth grade, my English teacher - one of many Good Christian Men in my life - gave us a monthly reminder about the horrors of hell.



“The scary thing about hell is that it lasts an eternity,” he said.



“Picture a bird with a tiny spoon tied to its leg that flies over a mountain range, scraping off tiny bits of rocks with it as it goes. You wait for that bird to level all of Mt. Everest and eternity hasn’t even begun.”



For my sixth grade self, this was a pretty effective sales pitch for waking up early on Sunday morning and getting to services on time. The thing was - and this was the unposed question that still sticks with me today - couldn’t the same logic be applied to heaven? Isn’t heaven also scary because it lasts forever?



When I was trying to get through sermons without nodding off as a kid I would mentally autopilot my life forward to its conclusion (where I was invariably an eighty-something, happily married ex-basketball player-slash-nuclear scientist) and imagine my own ascension into heaven. They would check ID there, and I would pass because I had gone to Sunday school and never killed anybody, not even that asshole Brian from kindergarten who picked on me during recess. When they let me in I would sit on a cloud in between M.L.K. and Mother Theresa and the realtor lady from California who died when I was six and wait for nothing much at all. That was the part that always got to me: the crushing absence of a future.



If I really wanted to scare myself good during sermon I would simulate the feeling of waking up every morning to the same scenery - clouds, angels, pearly gates and M.L.K. - forever and ever, like some ever-respawning video game character, until I got to day sixty-five or so and cold sweats would pool in my palms and I would secretly - in my heart of heart of hearts - wish that I could forgo heaven, that I could simply roll the end credits on my soul before it disintegrated into television static.



In that sense, it’s funny that The Plan began on a Easter Sunday and started with a second coming.



The apocalypse took the form of a two-line Facebook post at 2 AM.



“LCD Soundsystem will rise from the dead this Easter Sunday at Webster Hall.”



I don’t remember my exact reaction to the news, but I do recall it being physical, some awkward hybrid between a guttural shout and a high five to no one in particular.



LCD Soundsystem was one of many mid-2000s Brooklyn bands that enjoyed moderate mainstream success. Their sound was a bizarre mix of dance beats, hypnotic Krafterwkian synthesizer lines and frenetic punk vocals. The band only released three albums before abruptly breaking apart in 2011 with little in the way of explanation.  My father said they sounded a bit like the Talking Heads if no one knew how to play their instruments; my mother once referred to them as a headache. Both are fair assessments.



To me, however, LCD was my sonic adolescence. I discovered LCD Soundsystem on a fluke, during one of my many trips to the newsstand during the seventh grade. I had about four saved numbers on my phone during middle school and struggled to hold eye contact for more than forty seconds. Unsurprisingly, I was rarely invited to social gatherings, and as a result I spent an ungodly amount of time in seventh grade reading British music magazines cover to cover. This particular issue happened to contain a fairly in-depth story on LCD Soundsystem, a band I’d never heard before at the time. Within twenty minutes of Googling I was irreversibly hooked. I could spout the conventional music journalist jargon about “infectious grooves” and “eighties new-wave influence” but that would be taking away from the real reason I found LCD so irresistible: James Murphy.



James was many things: he was a rock frontman that looked like an overweight P.E. teacher. He made dance music for people who were too self-conscious to dance. He played the cowbell on stage and always seemed awkwardly unsure of what he was doing or verging on unnecessary emotional excess. I had found a kindred spirit. He was everything that I - a friendless kid stuck in South Korea who spent weekends churning out home-recorded songs - wanted to be: a New Yorker, a cowbell player, an unlikely symbol of cool.



I remember the first song that really sold me on James was “All My Friends.” At the climax of the song, James simply sings “where are your friends tonight” three times. It begins as a question that becomes an angry rebuke and finally a cathartic statement of purpose: at least we can be lonely together. “All My Friends” was James Murphy as the pied piper - he was going to round up the awkward, self-loathing misfits from New York to Seoul and lead them all to the promised land where they could all stare at their phones until the sun came up.



 



Never stay near Times Square if you’re in New York. The whole place is basically rats and souvenir shops and vape stores, with a few larger souvenir shops that have been elevated to the hallowed realm of the tourist attraction.



Andrew and I are here, however, because this was the cheapest place we could find for the night. It’s almost two in the morning, and we are sitting at a filthy slice shop somewhere on 46th Street. We’ve been sitting here for almost three hours now, reminiscing about the terrible time we had in high school.



Andrew - like most of my paternal family younger than fifty - is quasi-Catholic, which means every so often God would become a topic of conversation.



“You know what I think is annoying? The fact that religion was seen as this terrible thing at our school. Like spirituality became some kind of half-assed accessory you put on to make yourself more unique, like it was cool to say ‘yeah, I’m trying to find meaning and meditate and find God’  but that going to church on Sunday was the worst thing someone could do,” Andrew says.



“Everyone gets to have their opinion,” I say, trying my best to pull the plug on the topic altogether.



“I mean of course, but I don’t get why it’s hip to shit on the whole concept of religion.”



“I guess.”



“I mean, aren’t you also Christian?”



“I don’t really talk about that kind of stuff.”



We let the cabs go by for a few more minutes. Times Square is a few blocks to the east and all the puddles are bathed in garish billboard colors - blood reds and Gatorade blues.



“Are you going to that party?” Andrew asks.



“The graduation thing tomorrow?”



“Yeah.”



“Maybe.”



 



Solitude goes undetected in Seoul - it seeps into the water supply, it drones in the subway stations and hangs thick everywhere like some slow gas leak. Once you notice it, the whole city starts to resemble a continuous attempt to be less lonely: the day-drunk nine-to-fivers buying beer and anti-hangover drinks at convenience stores, the thousands of midnight eateries that only have tables for one, the nightclubs that don’t close until eight in the morning, when you start craving bacon and eggs and the constant barrage of “party all night!”s sound less like a rallying cry than a death sentence.



A brief example: one of the most popular types of online videos in South Korea is the so-called “muk-bang,” in which a host consumes an unconscionable quantity of food alone (usually in some dimly-lit bedroom) and live-streams the meal out to thousands of equally dim bedrooms. Muk-bangs are something of a massive in-joke in the country: everyone knows how absurdly depressing the concept is, but the collective laughter is muted by the tacit recognition that it’s better than eating alone.



I’ve seen this unique brand of South Korean-loneliness described as many things over the years by my fellow (usually inebriated) compatriots: The curse of a country that got bossed around all its life, an expendable Chicken McNugget-shaped bargaining chip in the Cold War that never got to decide anything for itself. A product of homogeneity and cultural inbreeding. A communist plot. Sexual frustration: we all need to start fuckin’ fucking more! A 21st century ailment (damn millennials on their damn phones). A cancer brought on by the information revolution. The lingering chokehold of Confucianist values. The refuse of a broken economic system. Whiny kids inventing problems to feel validated in the face of their elders, who actually had to do things like, y’know, run away from North Koreans and Soviets and all that.



But what matters, ultimately, is that loneliness is a phenomenon. It exists, and you - a well-adjusted adult - deal with it quietly and laugh about it and eat a lot of drunk breakfasts and grind on strangers for hours at nightclubs and go on virtual dinner-dates but you never acknowledge it.



When my cousin and I went off to boarding school at fourteen, my grandparents held a celebratory send-off dinner in our honor. I remember that after the meal, my grandmother -the most strong-willed person I’ve ever met - got up and daintily clinked her wineglass before delivering a speech about her own experience studying in America. Back in the fifties she had boarded a transatlantic plane to go to school in Virginia, knowing full well that she probably wouldn’t see her family for the whole four years and had to go to a college where East Asians were mostly viewed as subjects for anthropological research.



“I had to work in the local shopping mall in the summers to pay my way,” she recounted nostalgically. “They used to come from out of town to touch my hair and see me work. They'd never seen jet-black hair before.”



Apparently my grandmother never got to call her parents during her time at university. She wrote them a long letter a few months after she arrived, but due to some mix-up with the post service it was never delivered.



“I was really homesick. I had spent a lot of time on that letter, you know. I was hoping they would get to read it.”



Her words came slower now, and she caught herself halfway through a slight break in her voice, one which she hastily transformed into a labored laugh. After the address she returned to her seat and asked my older cousin about what his room would look like next year. I could tell in her mind she was still replaying the end of her speech, that there were still questions there to unpack, that maybe a part of her was still stranded somewhere in a shitty Virginia shopping mall desperate to call home. But of course, she changed the subject, because that’s what we were taught to do. After all, solitude goes undetected in Seoul.



A few of my great-grandparents lived until their late nineties, which meant I got to see four generations of my family - mostly quiet people who never kept diaries and stopped uncorking wine when the room got too honest - spill their guts to God and God alone. When my friends ask why Koreans are so hyper-Christian when other East Asian countries are known for being non-religious, that’s the answer I usually give: because when it’s Sunday morning and you find yourself squeezed in between two paunchy middle-aged men and the blasts of organ and choral music are just loud enough and everyone screams amen you can feel pleasantly lost in an excess of warmth and sound and outstretched arms.



After church, it was tradition for my family  to jam into three cars and  go to a tiny Italian restaurant for lunch.



“You know, this is something you’ll probably be grateful for when you’re older,” my mother always told me on our drive there.



It’s been about ten years since I’ve last been to  the restaurant. Like most significant endings, our final Sunday lunch appeared to be nothing more than a hiatus at the time. We’ll start doing this again when the kids are less busy with school. Then people moved away and died and drifted ways and stopped going to church.



I find it somewhat depressing that I can’t remember a single moment from any of those lunches - from the bits and pieces I can recall, the conversation was engineered to be as polite and as boring as possible, my cousins spent most of the time playing video games and I would always leave the table before dessert was served. We never told anything deeply personal at the table: those stories were for God and God alone.



 



“Dude I think this is like, what you’d call a fucking spiritual crisis, man.”



I can’t really make his face out - can’t make out to many faces at the moment (note to self: fuck Fireball) but I see he is wearing salmon shorts and is blending in seamlessly with the demo of this party.  I don’t really know the guy who’s throwing it but I asked a few guests about him and the word “trust fund” came up a lot. Anyway, Spiritual Crisis is smoking from a poorly-rolled joint and educating the occupants of the surrounding couches about the spiritual bankruptcy of 21st century America.



“We can’t like…what is it, we can’t believe in anything, trust in anything anymore. What’s the point? Everything has happened. The pioneers have come and gone.”



I need to consolidate my brain energy, so I decide to break down my immediate reality into a series of goals. 1. I need to find a bathroom to vomit in 2. I need to get away from this guy 3. I need air 4. I need to find a bathroom to vomit in 5. I need water.



To my horror, Spiritual Crisis turns and stares me in the eye.



“Hey you’re Joon, right?” he asks.



“Yeah,”



“What’s your take on the whole thing, my man?”



“On what, sorry?”



“Y’know. God. The afterlife. Where the fuck are we going? Like where are we headed?”



I try to give a thoughtful response but Spiritual Crisis is already making out with some girl from my Physics class.



The party lights and sea of red solo cups - or maybe this is just the heat of the Fireball churning in my stomach - gives the impression that the entire room is on fire, like everyone here is damned. Voice in my head now: it’s my sixth grade Bible teacher. “I ask a lot of people your age a question: were you ever closer to God then you were now? 99% of people tell me yes. Was there a time when you were closer, Joon?”



Yes. But the Old Testament still makes me scared. I am still deathly afraid of hell, even if sometimes I doubt if it exists. I am just better at ignoring guilt, or more accurately, living in spite of it.



I stumble into the bathroom and empty myself of the Fireball and try to rinse out the taste from my mouth. I think about the first time I ever tried alcohol - a tiny dip of communion wine at church in kindergarten. I was with my mother - the wine tasted terrible and I spat it out immediately. She wiped the dregs off my lips and laughed along with the rest of our pew. Soon I was laughing as well, and then it was time for the final hymn, which I made a big show of belting out all the words to, and after that it was time for cupcakes on the front lawn of the chapel.



It was a sunny day. I often wish I was back there.



 



Ever since it was established to me that bad people burn forever, my religious experience has always been marked by some degree of guilt. It didn’t help that I went through puberty in a hyper-evangelical middle school, a place where we were taught Intelligent Design in biology class and where teachers were surprisingly comfortable with the idea that the majority of the world’s population was destined for eternal suffering.



April was always reserved for something called Spiritual Emphasis Week - the school would invite some atrocious Christian rock group to campus and we would spend two to three hours a day talking about the war the world was waging for our souls. The Friday of every Spiritual Emphasis Week had a few hours blocked out for students to cry. That was not an official designation, of course, but it was common knowledge that Friday was crying day. They would gather the whole school into the auditorium, and someone would play somber music and ask us if we were finally willing to give our lives over to God. At which point we would say yes, and the whole school would come together in a cathartic moment of group prayer. Sorry, God, for getting into a fistfight with Jim and stealing pocket change from my mom’s handbag and sneaking a glance at Jessica's breasts during lunch. I want to be your servant forever and ever. I really mean it. Amen. and for the next four or five days even the most hardened classroom bullies would be seen reading the Bible in between classes and there would be a strange quiet in the hallways until we all inevitably spiraled back into spiritual decay.



It was easy to get addicted to the thrill of temporal surrender, of giving your life to God for a few days knowing you could still transition back to the person you were before, that you would make the same mistakes and find yourself caught in a cycle as old as time itself, that you were just a tourist, just visiting, just dipping your feet in transcendence.



As much as I deluded myself every year that this would be the moment I finally got right with the Lord for good, the fact was that I enjoyed the feeling of throwing myself into the open arms of some classmate and forcing myself to cry by replaying clips from “The Passion of the Christ” in my head. For someone who had spent his middle school career gawking from the fringes of social events, it felt good to have an excuse to feel connected.



During Spiritual Emphasis Week my eighth grade year, however, the stakes were a little higher. I had just gotten accepted to boarding school, a place where there would be no mandatory chapel services and no Bible classes. My teachers kept telling me things like “don’t lose your way” and “keep up your faith.” I felt especially guilty, because by this point I - like virtually everyone in my grade - had become deft at keeping up the appearance of being devout while secretly skipping church and spending Sundays playing basketball, watching Tarantino movies and listening to punk records.



Either way, I decided that this would be the year where I would finally pull the trigger and give my life over to God. It couldn’t hurt, after all. It would be like getting life insurance, just in case.



The auditorium was packed by the time we arrived for our crying hour on Friday. There were five chairs laid out at the front of the stage, and behind them the pastor was gently noodling a constant C-Em-Am-F progression on a guitar.



“So I want to be honest today,” the pastor began. “I know a lot of you have been in rooms like these before, you’ve been through it all haven’t you? You’ll go to church and live the “Christian life,” check all the boxes, volunteer and read the Bible. But I know that deep down a lot of you are still uncertain about things, that you’re still caught up in this world. Remember: we are not of this world. And you can’t have it both ways. I remember a friend always told me, there’s nothing worse than being lukewarm for God. If you faith is lukewarm, God will spit you out.”



There was a pause for these words to sink in.



“So, Yongsan International School, I’ve really come to love your school and the wonderful people you have here over my week, and it’s been an honor to lead this Spiritual Emphasis Week. At this time, I want to give you guys a chance to really reflect on where you are with God. I’ve laid out five chairs - one is for people who don’t believe in God, who haven’t started their journey yet. Two is for people who have started, but still want to know more. Three is for those people who want God to take a more active role in their lives. Five is for people who are fully committed to God and want to retain and further develop their relationship.”



At this, a few try-hards began flocking to the chair marked “five,” while a couple of degenerates reluctantly made their way to two and three. One was empty. To admit atheism or agnosticism of any variety at my school was like admitting to necrophilia. The pastor continued.



“And here’s the most important one: four. I suspect a lot of you are fours. Four is for those people who are sick and tired of committing to God only to be torn away from Him again. Four is for those people who want to ask God, once and for all, please enter my life.”



I joined the massive crowd of students migrating to the four chair. This was what I had been waiting for. Within minutes I found myself  sandwiched between a mess of bodies, all kneeling on the carpet with their hands to the ceiling. Soon, the lights dimmed, and the guitar crescendoed into triumphant strums. The pastor walked to each chair, praying for all the students who were there, thanking God and his powers of salvation. Eventually, he got to our chair.



“Lord, here I see many of your children. These students, Lord, are tired of being lukewarm. They want to be on fire for you, Father God. Thank you for giving them the courage…”



At this point, some girl a few bodies down from me drew first blood by breaking into tears. I was on the clock now.



“The courage to desire to be all in for you Lord. We’re tired of playing the Christian game….”



I was trying my very best to remember every tragic story from the Bible I could. When this failed, I tried picturing myself as the prodigal son, returning home after being lost for years. I still felt nothing.



“We want the blood of your salvation upon these young men and women today…”



I could already hear several people, including the six-foot-two, alpha-male center of the basketball team, bawling. I began to panic: when would my transcendent experience come? When would I feel the blood of salvation? When would the tears of catharsis come? I cheated a little by recalling the part in Bambi where the mother is shot. I could finally feel something resembling a tear in the corner of my left eye. Was it working?



“We pray for these students as they continue their journey…”



It soon dawned on me that I was one soul in an entanglement of souls desperate to be saved, desperate to get to heaven, desperate not to be spat out by God. That this community was motivated, if anything, by a deep sense of fear. That while you could hold hands and sing hymns together and hug each other all you wanted, you would still be alone on Judgement Day, salvation would still be a lonely path.



“In Jesus’ name…”



I was really running out of time now. I tried my best to focus on being transformed, on feeling different, on feeling liberated -



“we pray…”



- it wasn’t working -



“Amen.”



The amen fell over the room like the dull thud of a heavy door closing. Amen, the group responded. I said it as loud as I could, loud enough that I could forget where I was for a few moments.



When I first told my psychiatrist that I constantly felt guilty and deserving of divine punishment, he asked me why it is that so many people would follow God if God were such a destructive force. I told him I didn’t know. What mattered was that I had been taught that God was a disciplinarian, and that would probably be a lesson that stuck with me whatever I did. I would still have the image of the bird with the tiny spoon, of God spitting the lukewarm out. Most of my friends from middle school are now completely lapsed, and over drinks we would always laugh about how terrible our three years together were.



In between laughs, however, we could all sense the edges of an unanswered question materializing against our will. Maybe it didn’t have to be this way. Maybe our time at school had taught us a version of faith that set us up for loneliness. Perhaps this loneliness had been clawing at the corners of every church service, every Sunday dinner, every Spiritual Emphasis Week, every nighttime prayer I had ever been a part of. Perhaps being together meant finding a way to momentarily shut off this realization. The question, of course, went unposed. Solitude goes unnoticed in Seoul.



 



I have a habit of making of lists when I’m waiting for flights, and seeing as how I have now missed my original flight to Tennessee (mostly due to my hangover) and the LaGuardia gate staff is refusing to grant me even service-industry-manual kindness, it appears I now have at least two and a half hours on my hands to do just that. This is a hitch in The Plan. Andrew’s flight - which left earlier in the morning - has already landed in Tennessee, and I am supposed to be meeting him in Nashville in twenty minutes, Instead, I’m anxiously wasting time in the departures lounge, where the air smells like Clorox and Cinnabon wrappers.



Anyways, I decide to make a few lists to pass my time. Top 3 LCD Soundsystem songs? 1. All My Friends 2. Someone Great 3. Losing My Edge. Or maybe it should be Dance Yrself Clean. Top 4 best chain restaurants in the LaGuardia food court: 1. Panda Express 2. McDonald’s…..



Soon, I start making a list of everyone I hadn’t seen in a while and the last conversation I could recall having with them.



 



Ben from Hawaii: “Safe travels, Joon. Korea is a long way, isn’t it?”



John K.: “Yo, fucking pay me back for that cab ride.”



My psychiatrist: “You’ll get over this, and once you do, you’ll have the courage to get over any other fear you may have.”



My mother: “Give me a call during your trip. Stay safe, alright? God bless.”



The guy who worked at my high school cafeteria that I talked to all the time: “Yeah, I got a new job about twenty minutes from here, but I’ll visit often, don’t worry.”



Tess, who I had a crush on for like two years: “Uh, yeah, well I didn’t know you that well but I’m glad we had English together!”



Mr. Allen from eighth grade: “You’re one of my favorite students Joon. It’s good to see someone young with so much faith. You have a great time at high school, okay?”



Deb from eighth grade: “Heaven sounds fucking boring dude. I’ll take hell. Fuck it.”



 



At this point, I stop typing the list and close my computer. I put LCD Soundsystem on shuffle again and tap along the drum pattern on the side of my seat.



 



I guess I thought high school would be an escape of sorts. I could stop going to church, I didn’t have to memorize Bible verses for class, I could stop talking about religion and let people assume whatever they wanted about me. I spent my freshman year reinventing myself as a hip rebel and waited for the fear of damnation to slowly filter out of my body.



But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that it never really does. I still prayed before every meal, although I did it in secret. I still felt bad waking up late on Sundays, even though I no longer had a church to be late to. There was guilt that I would be punished, of course - the feeling that I was constantly evading rebuke and was therefore headed for some massive, impending reckoning down the road. I sometimes felt that every part of my spiritual being had been gutted and all I had left were the Pavlovian fear I had to sin, a fear I held on to lest I lost God altogether.



Or I would think about my grandmother, how for almost twenty years she would leave to go to church at 10:25 AM every Sunday, and how every week she would see my grandfather still in his pajamas on the couch watching the morning talk shows. How when she crossed the living room to leave the house, there would be a brief moment of expectation, the small, ever-lessening hope that this would be the week where my grandfather would come to his senses, that this would be the week where he would stop her and ask if he could come along. That this would be the week where he got to heaven. Or I would think about my mother, how every day without fail she would ask God to lead my father to church. Then there would be guilt: guilt that if I abandoned God I would be perpetuating this cycle of Sunday mornings spent in quiet desperation and continuous disappointment.



So I never got to let go of spirituality: if anything, it came to color how I thought of everything else in my life, including music. Perhaps that’s why LCD Soundsystem appealed to me so much - while the great majority of LCD Soundsystem’s songs are performed with James Murphy embodying the hyper-ironic, aloof Brooklynite caricature he has fashioned for himself over the years, their best songs come when this facade begins to break apart. Every truly great LCD Soundsystem track is a plea for transcendence, for redemption, for transformation and companionship. It’s music that is simultaneously too world-weary and freewheeling for faith and community but at the same time deeply nostalgic for it. It’s dance music that realizes that the act of dancing all night is usually nothing more than a distraction from some deep emptiness, yet quietly holds out the deluded hope that one perfect song, one perfect guitar solo or synthesizer crescendo can make everything make sense, can serve as a break from the cycle of self-conscious wisecracking and empty hedonism, can get you to heaven. You can hear it when James’ voice cracks as he begs to “give me just a little more time” on Dance Yrself Clean, or when the band swoops in to harmonize the lyric “it won’t get any better” on Home, or when Nancy Whang assures us that we can all normalize on “Get Innocuous” or when a decidedly cheesy guitar solo reluctantly introduces itself at the end of “New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down.”



I told my friend once that LCD Soundsystem is the sound of being in front of a bathroom mirror at a house party at five in the morning, watching the sun slowly rise and realizing you hate most of the guests when you’re sober and missing your childhood home while simultaneously realizing how stupidly precious you are being.



 



My shirt is soaked by the time J. Cole’s set is over.



“Wasn’t that fucking sick?” Andrew asks.



“Yeah.” I reply.



“I can’t believe we made it, man.”



“Uh-huh.” I don’t mind J. Cole, but at this point, my mind is elsewhere. All I can think about is when James Murphy will finally take the stage. Unlike a lot of festivals crowds, the audience for LCD’s set seems to be mostly be there by themselves or in small groups of two or three.



A frenzied snare roll announces the first song of the set, “Us Vs. Them.” I am nearly beside myself as I chant along to the opening lines.



“The time has come! The time has come! The time has come today!”



When the song ends I look around and realize that Andrew has left to watch the Chainsmokers set next door. Before I can try to find him, however, the band is off, and I scarcely have time to breathe. After nearly two hours of breakneck dance-punk, there is a slight pause. The air is humid and you can hear crickets in the distance as the entire crowd waits for the inevitable with bated breath. Then, it comes: Nancy Whang starts playing the piano riff to “All My Friends.” The drums and bass fill out, and soon James - whose voice is completely hoarse at this point - begins stumbling through the opening lines.



Everyone begins singing together, hands up to the sky, the pot-smokers desperately trying to catch their breaths in between choruses. The mood is not unlike a church, or that cramped auditorium in middle school. Several people around me are in tears. In the pit of my stomach, I feel that glowing catharsis I used to feel when I cried during Spiritual Emphasis Week - the suspicion that maybe I am changing, maybe this feeling of transcendence is permanent. Maybe everyone in this audience is learning to be together in their solitude, united by loneliness somehow, as crazy as that sounds. It took them three albums and a long hiatus and a second coming, but perhaps James has actually cracked the code: maybe there is a way out from crippling self-consciousness, maybe music can actually bring about a state of complete ecstasy, even though it’s 2016 and we’re all fucked and we’re in the middle of a farm in rural Tennessee…maybe it’s all about putting our hands up in surrender together and collectively asking where our friends are tonight, whether we will ever see them, whether we ever really did,maybe….



And with that, the song ends, as quickly as it began.



“Thank you!” James shouts. “Good night.”



The stage goes dark, and the crowd lingers on, desperate to sip the last dregs of the concert, desperate to keep the camaraderie alive for just a minute longer. Then, as if in agreement, everyone - myself included - stares down at the ground. The spell is broken. I text Andrew - wya man? I sigh and slowly make my way towards the bass rumblings of the Chainsmokers as the transcendent glow in my stomach begins to fade.



 



I had a pretty vivid dream once in eighth grade, right after LCD Soundsystem announced their breakup and played their final gig in Madison Square Garden. In many ways, I feel betrayed by James: I had somehow developed this delusion that every LCD release was intended for me, and I am devastated by the prospect of having to navigate high school alone. James was supposed to take me to the promised land - the breakup seemed like a copout with no discernible reason.



In my dream, I’m in my bedroom when a large bear-like figure suddenly blocks my doorframe. It’s James Murphy.



“Wake up, kid,” he tells me. “We’re gonna fly.”



I get up and get changed, and soon I am on a private jet with the whole band. Nancy Whang tosses me a bag of pretzels. It’s all I’ve ever dreamed of. The plane doesn’t seem to have a pilot, but I don’t mind - if the band is going down I’d go down with it.



I do have one question, though.



“Hey James?” I ask. “Will you, like, ever come back?”



He gives me one of those super self-aware grins and opens his mouth to say something but I wake up before I hear any reply.



It’s Sunday, so I get out of bed to the sound of the hymn CD my mother has put on every Sunday morning without fail for the past five years. I can sing the first three tracks - instrumental accompaniment and all - by heart. It’s a beautiful day outside, and for once Seoul is not the color of soot. I hear the sound of breakfast being served and see my father eating pancakes in his pajamas. My mother is already dressed and is furious when she sees that I have only just gotten up.



“Do you realize how late we are?” she demands.



I take my seat and leisurely unload a few pancakes onto my plate. My mother, needing a new target for her frustration, locks eyes with my father.



“You’re not going to church today, are you?” she asks, her voice piercing with sarcasm. I can tell, however, that part of her still holds on to the absurd belief that my father will say “actually I am,” that this would be the day that has made all her other days of prayer worth it. There is a split-second pause before my father gives his usual response. “Not today. You guys have a good time.” My mother gives her best I-knew-it face and rushes to grab her car keys. The hymn CD is on track three now, my favorite one.



I wonder if my father ever considers going to church as a favor to my mother. My mother would probably be aware that his attendance was not caused by a deep stirring within his soul, but she would probably play along, and either way it would be a useful delusion. The two could hold hands during hymns, and perhaps my mom would lock eyes with my father and wonder if he really had been transformed, and perhaps for a fleeting moment she could convince herself beyond reasonable doubt that he had. Then we could all go to lunch together and have polite conversations, and the Seoul skyline would look a little less barren and desolate. It wouldn’t be spiritual transcendence but it would be a pretty good imitation of it, and that might be the best we can hope for sometimes.



My father and I eat our breakfast in silence as my mother puts her shoes on, careful to leave some time for my father to change his mind.



 

 



What I remember most about Lydia—her skin. Golden-brown, a few shades darker than my mother’s pale yellow, her fingers on the piano keys, legs tucked back beneath the cushioned bench. The way she smelled, like hair salon, like black soap and makeup, semi-sweet and comfortingly Nigerian. Her face was so soft. I reached up, often, to touch it; she would bend down, sending a warm gust of hair-salon-soap-sweet scent into my eyes, and let me pinch her cheeks. I was eight years old and ever-skeptical of her adulthood, marveled aloud at her youth: “You’re such a baby, Lydia, so cute,” was my daily announcement. “You’re so young and adorable.”



Lydia was eleven years older but she put up with me, let me sit on her lap and bat her shiny brown braids, sang Black-Eyed Peas (“Do ‘Where is the Love,’ ” my sister and I demanded, every time), and read us stories. Over the long summer during which she babysat us we took many naps, most of them preceded by either a game or a story. Wedged between my sister and me in my twin bed, she told us about little village girls and forests and tigers and mangoes, her arms in the air like an artist, illustrating scenes with her hands. When she fell asleep she snored. Wide awake beside her, I’d listen for her deep breathing and then sit up in bed, leaf through books on the shelves, look down at her sleeping face and wonder if this is what my mother looked like coming to America at nineteen years old--soft-skinned and babyfaced as Lydia.



***



She had only been here for about a year, moving into the yellow house down the block with her two older sisters, Christiane and Vivie, Christiane’s husband Emil, and their little sons Raphael and Samuel. We saw them come in with their U-Haul in June, watched them from our driveway where we sat barefoot on the hood of my parents’ minivan. My sister and I had never met anyone from Cameroon before.



“They make the best rice,” we concluded, standing in their kitchen, barefoot on the oil-stained linoleum, watching the pot rattle on the stove. “Onions underneath, all the time.”



While my sister studied the art of rice-making, eagerly tiptoeing alongside Lydia or Christiane or occasionally Vivie, I played with baby Samuel on the floor and entertained three-year old Raphael. During the summer, the Biya house was alive as a marketplace, Emil stomping through the back door with his absentminded hellos and how-is-your-fathers; Christiane sucking her teeth, her eyes swallowed by her tiny wire-rimmed glasses; Vivie breezing in and out of the house; the kids screaming above Kaïssa and Henri Dikonguéhumming brightlyout of the kitchen CD player; and Lydia, watching Oprah on the sofa, or Lydia at the piano, singing.



“We used to perform as a group,” Christiane told us, showing us photos. “All over, we sang. For the church, especially.”



They had a famed mother, this grand matriarchal figure who ran a church and had once managed her daughters’ childhood music careers. They had made a gospel CD. When the three of them sang together one night, crowded around the piano, my mother got up and said she had tears in her eyes.



My mother loved the three of them almost as much as my sister and I did. Peeling plantain on her little stool in our kitchen, she could not stop talking about Christiane and Lydia and Vivie, invited them over eagerly for moin-moin and akamu and Ovaltine on Sundays, watched Nollywood movies with them in our living room. Quickly she and my father became good friends with the Biyas, taking on the roles of auntie and uncle for Christiane and Emil. The adults hung out in the living room frequently that summer while I looked after baby Samuel and my sister actively eavesdropped. She told me, “They talk a lot about green cards.”



We didn’t know what those were, but they could talk about them for hours, Christiane, Lydia, Vivie, Emil, and my parents, sitting there clamoring about visas and green cards past nightfall.



“What can they do, my brother? They can’t do nothing, nothing o,” my father insisted, aggressively, and my mother would say to them in high pitched emphasis, “Abeg, no worry o, God is in control.”



Then Christiane would suck her teeth and touch her forehead. “Lord have mercy, I don’t know.”



The summer ended on one of those nights. My sister and I returned to school the next morning, Lydia and Vivie to the local college. We would meet Lydia standing on the front porch of our house once we got off the bus, tiny in her long skirt and oversized sweater, red-eyed and fidgety. She supervised our homework quietly and declined our requests to play Monkey-in-the-Middle and TAPS outside. Instead, she leaned over the sink, watched us mess around in the backyard until it got late and there was rice on the table. In the evenings she lay on the couch drowsily, blinking slowly, allowing me to read to her if only I wasn’t too loud: the voyages of Sinbad, Ramona, Boxcar Children, Lemony Snicket.



“Sing? Please?” I’d murmur, bouncing onto her lap in our living room, raising my hands to pinch her cheeks.



She was listless, cold-palmed, yet she complied. “Sit next to me,” she said, patting the cushion. But slowly her voice would grow startlingly shaky, and then all of a sudden she would stop. Sigh. Stroke the edges of my hair.



She wore winter coats in September, grew purple under the eyes, wouldn’t eat. We began going straight to Lydia’s house instead of ours, where she was perpetually absent; Christiane said, “Lydia’s sick.”



Vivie was sick too. Vivie was sick first. One time I saw her come down the stairs from where I was playing on the floor with Samuel, painfully skinny, smiling only when she saw me: “Have you eaten yet?”



There was rice, cold on the stove, and my sister and I ate it with red stew and bananas and did not know what to make of Vivie, speaking hysterical French in the living room, disappearing back up to the bedrooms for the rest of the week. We missed Lydia badly. My mother said, “Lydia is sick, remember? They had to bring her to the hospital.”



One day after school they took us to her—it was a white, white hospital, everything pristine and shining. I was, initially, ridiculously excited, first to see my mother (in the daytime! on a weekday!) and second, to visit Lydia. I remember getting lost among the lack of color, looking for her in vibrant yellow and green, walking around for what seemed like hours and feeling unbelievably tired.



“It’s this room,” Christiane announced finally, pointing down the hallway.



Somehow the door opened. In my Mary Janes and school uniform, moving in front of my sister, I thought, hesitantly, Lydia is not herself.



There were wires. There was maybe a tube. She was puffy, her face, her exposed arms. I wanted to climb onto the bed but I was afraid. She was excited to see us, raised her hands weakly for us; we skirted solemnly over to the bed, clinging to her sheets.



“I am coming home soon,” she whispered, pulling us in, as if we were about to take another summer nap. “Don’t worry about me, I am coming home soon.”



Then she started to cry, and my mother swooped in with her hands, flat as paddles, shooing us up and out of the room.



***



Lydia returned the next week, her face and arms and legs swollen from all the medication she had to take in order to be well. She walked slowly and erratically around the Biya house, shaking, feeding us potato bread and beans, watching Oprah on the couch with us and shaking. Every motion was slurred, like the world was a daze. She could not stop moving her hands. Most of the time she could not speak, her mouth couldn’t form any words, she stuttered even trying to laugh, and when she tried to laugh she would begin to cry, and then Christiane would appear to take her upstairs.



In the beginning I kept asking questions: what’s wrong with Lydia? why does she look like that? how does medication make you look like that? what’s wrong with Vivie? what kind of sickness do they have?



My mother was vague. “She’s just sick with something,” she’d respond, as if she herself didn’t know, and eventually I just stopped asking.



Of course, I did not ask Lydia anything, not even if she was feeling better, because clearly she was still very unwell and I thought it was best to leave her alone. My sister and I spent sullen, somber nights on the Biyas’ sofa, cartoons flickering blue into our faces. The adults crowded in the living room again, this time quietly, carrying out tense conversations I couldn’t understand, or tried not to hear. There was Lydia on an armchair, wrapped in a quilt, trembling violently from the medication, slurring; Vivie with her eyes gigantic, rimmed with black, bruise-like shadows, collarbones jutting out of her skin; Christiane, arms crossed, sucking her teeth, snapping; Emil in his exhausted silence; and my parents, the elders, the know-it-alls, the halfway-Americans, facing Christiane on the couch. One night the famed mother was called up and put on speakerphone, her voice so loud the whole neighborhood must have heard her declare, “Just wait, my daughters—I will be there!”



My mother cooked the day she arrived, egusi and fufu and jollof rice, and cut up watermelon and pawpaw and pineapple. There was an elaborate dinner set up in our dining room, the famed mother designated to the head of the table opposite my father, a spot usually reserved for an uncle. My sister and I brought out the bowls of water and towels and waited nervously for her to finish washing her hands. We were not sure what to call her because auntie felt more appropriate but she looked like an old grandmama with her big headwrap and shimmering ankara, blue and orange. She didn’t seem to care what we called her; “You’re so well-behaved,” she told us, “so well-mannered, so pretty.”



My mother was overjoyed by the compliments. Made us play piano for her and sing.



There are very few substantial memories I have of the Biyas beyond this. All of a sudden it was June and I was sweating in my uniform, bouncing off the schoolbus for the start of summer vacation. My mother sent my sister and me to day camp and when I was not a member of the nine- to ten-year old Junior Wolves program, trading lanyards and playing Nok Hockey till I couldn’t feel my knuckles, I was in my parents’ bedroom watching Avatar on Nickelodeon, reeking of chlorine.



“Don’t worry,” my mother said often then, out of random, “everything will be okay with Lydia.”



My sister and I were aware of the fact that my parents visited the Biyas without us and invited them over when we had gone to sleep. But I could hear my mother talking to my father about them early in the morning, when I woke up to watch Ben 10 at six thirty before summer camp. And when we came downstairs to eat cereal at eight, the chairs in the living room always smelled of them; the famed mother more than anyone else.



So, of course, then we knew that she was leaving.



***



The famed mother decided to take her daughters away in the middle of a storm. I was out on my front lawn, pulling flowers in the rain out of boredom, shivering in a t-shirt and shorts. It was a dark evening. The street lamps glowed orange onto the wet streets and sidewalks, highlighting my mother in the haze of fog and gloom, a huge looming shadow approaching the house. She was wearing a black rain jacket. From the mudroom, through the window screen, my sister hissed, “Get inside.”



And then in the car my father drove us all to Lydia’s house, which is the last time I played with Samuel, which is the time I tried to teach him to walk, and distracted by Lydia’s crying, let him go, which is when he fell down and lost a tooth, blood on the wood, nobody turning around fast enough for his screams—Christiane picking him up off the floor as slowly as if she were in a dream. The last time I saw the famed mother in her headwrap, green and blue, sitting at the front of the room like majesty, Lydia in her blanket unable to sit still, Vivie crying and laughing…



At nine there was nothing I knew about deportation, but I heard the famed mother tell us, “We will go back to Cameroon, all of us, before this nonsense begins,” and I didn’t know this had anything to do with green cards, or visas, or fear.



“Lydia and Vivie,” my mother said, years later, “They were so scared. Sometimes when you get so scared it can make your mind sick…”



What I remember least about Lydia—her hands, wiping away our tears. Whatever she said, stammering, to comfort us, what she did, how she looked. The final few minutes.



Saying goodbye.



 

Gaborone is the capital city of Botswana. It resides to the South-East of this small, landlocked country in Southern Africa. Looking at a political map of Botswana might convince you that there does, in fact, exist more than one city or town or village within it. This is not the case. In scientific data sets, we tend to ignore outlier points that don’t align with our line or curve of best fit, and, in a country where almost half of its citizens live within a hundred kilometres of its capital, it is also easy to ignore anything else outside that radius, so we do.



A zebra burns to ashes by the Marina traffic circle.



The University of Botswana was built by cows.



Chickens sang songs in the nighttime.



A goat glittered in the sky.



In the middle of Sir Seretse Khama International Airport, an elephant stands.



Do you like worms?



A zebra burns to ashes by the Marina traffic circle. The circle isn’t too far from Main Mall, and its name stems from its closeness to the biggest public hospital, Princess Marina, where one can spend the whole day waiting to see a doctor. This doesn’t matter to most of us anyway, since the citizen visit to government institutions is the habitual holiday all Batswana are obliged to take. Of course, we all complain about bureaucracy, but the ones who genuinely and seriously complain about it are mostly the wealthy, who say things like how the mediocrity of our civil service is why our labour force is so unproductive, that this is the reason why we’re a third world country. The Marina traffic circle was adorned with ornaments of blue, black and white, the colours of the national flag, in commemoration of our 40th year of independence from the British. One prominent decoration was a steel wire zebra statue, now affectionately called ‘Zebbie’, in memory of its public cremation. Protesters from the University of Botswana set the zebra ablaze because the government once again failed to pay living allowances to its students. Botswana has the second highest level of income inequality in the world. Tertiary education in Botswana is free for those who qualify. Youth unemployment remains above thirty percent. We are considered the ‘success’ story of Africa. Botswana was once one of the poorest countries in the world. Sixty percent of our gross domestic product is reliant on diamond mining. We’re running out of diamonds. Our economic diversification policies include rapidly expanding our tourism sector. Tourists like zebras. A few more  zebra-related thoughts: The Zebras are the national football team of Botswana; the zebra is the nation’s flagship animal, most likely chosen because of the co-existence of its black and white stripes, which represent the vastly different racial history we have from neighbouring South Africa (our first president married a white British woman); a zebra was burnt to ashes in the heart of the city that is the heart of the country in a manner reminiscent of the ongoing students protests in South Africa, in which faeces in plastic bags were thrown at the statue of the god of all colonialists, Cecil John Rhodes, which used to stand at the centre of the University of Cape Town. I don’t like South Africa. I feel blacker there than I do in America.



The University of Botswana was built by cows. The story goes like this: in my grandparent’s generation, to fund the local university, families brought a cow with them to where it would be built. At least that’s how I remember the story being told to me. It sounds both beautiful and absurd. I’ve always underestimated the importance of cows. I vaguely remember my mother telling me that my grandfather gave me a cow for my eighteenth birthday. Of course, I didn’t know what to do with it- the cow and my grandfather live past that hundred-kilometre radius outside Gaborone. It’s likely that I’m creating this next vague memory, but I think that the cow was slaughtered and eaten for Christmas or New Year’s or something like that. In high school, the girls I tended to like weren’t Batswana, so I didn’t worry much about the one inevitable day when an uncle or aunt from the village would eventually find me and ask, ‘How many cows will you give us for her?’ With the one Motswana girl that I did like, I used to make jokes about lobola, bride price: ‘Do you think your family will let me pay them in poetry instead of cows?’



Chickens sang songs in the nighttime. During the school holidays, my sister and I were sent to live with our grandparents outside Gaborone and for weeks we would cease to exist. Many of us were often sent off to our respective home villages so that we could spend time with extended family, which is to say to help out on their farms. Luckily, we didn’t have to do much. My grandparents lived in a city, and, even though it was not Gaborone, it still wasn’t a farm. My grandmother still managed to run a small chicken selling business, and every so often two truck-fulls of chickens would arrive with my grandfather to be neck-snapped, plucked, boiled and frozen. There were always a few nights before the big day where tens of my grandmother’s friends would come over to help her, a little community factory of feather-tearing, family-talk chuckling, and wiping off various chicken remains off their gumboots. In their cages the chickens clucked and clucked before the dawn. It did not make for good lullabies. I did not feel particularly sorry for them. They would soon become tasty. Years later, after the last of those holidays, back in Gaborone, where I was once again a being that existed, I would dream my last dream of leaving Botswana. I heard that Americans would ask me if I rode lions to school. They don’t. But I don’t really think to tell them, when they ask what it’s like actually, that even Gaborone, where the first skyscrapers have finally appeared, has chickens occasionally crossing its busiest roads. I did not register them clucking past the traffic lights with my little cheek pressed slimily against the backseat window, my mother reprimanding me for not waking up on time for school. Nor am I sure if I saw the twisting acacia trees with small leaves and pin-prick thorns. I maybe saw grandaunts wearing blue headwraps at the side of the road selling airtime for cell phones. I perhaps saw minibus --no, combi-- drivers wearing bucket hats and chewing toothpicks.  I might have been wearing that khaki school uniform. But I do see the chickens now, clucking by the traffic lights.



A goat glittered in the sky. No, this didn’t happen, at least not like that. Every one of us looked at the stars when we were younger. Many too checked their horoscopes. But not many could point up at the night and say that a particular constellation was theirs. I’m a Capricorn. I couldn’t tell which stars were which and I still can’t. Specifically, I couldn’t tell you which stars were which in Francistown, where my grandparents lived; though this is where I remember them, because they came out after we untied the dogs’ leashes from their small houses. It was the same time when friends had to return home, soccer balls put away, last errands to the little shop to buy bread for dinner were made, outside lights switched on. And a little look up before they locked the doors. None of this happened though, because Francistown is not Gaborone, and therefore does not exist, especially on my Facebook timeline, where a zebra burns to ashes by the Marina traffic circle. There was no little look upwards before my grandparents locked the doors. I did not see any goats glittering up there, which are important to us Batswana too. They’re just not as important as cows or chickens.



In the middle of the Gaborone International Airport, an elephant stands. It is a sculpture constructed of many elephant tusks. I don’t remember if the tusks were recovered from poachers, or were taken from the remains of elephants that died of natural causes. It’s pretty big. It helps me resent the airport a bit less, which has been swallowing up my loved ones for a while now: my father (a commercial airline pilot), my sister (a scholarship student), an old lover (there will be no receipt of any cows or poems from me), an almost lover (another scholarship student), my best friend (yet another scholarship student) and now me (just another scholarship student). For most of the year, my mother lives at home by herself in a large double story that was meant to house my whole family. My parents worked hard for it. My sister lived in it for less than a year. I don’t how my mother feels about the elephant statue.



Do you like worms? Mophane worms have stripes, of blue, yellow and orange that seem to vary with each wriggle. When dehydrated, they turn a dark, moody green of sorts and taste like potato chips made out of cashew nuts. I don’t like them in stews, because their yellow insides become mushy instead of powdery, and because the spikes on their skin prick sharper when warm. I mostly ate them when I was with my grandparents; very rarely in Gaborone. My older sister used to watch this show called Fear Factor and my parents watched documentaries of people in Southeast Asian countries. In Fear Factor,young and gleaming Americans face frightening challenges (to win tens of thousands of dollars, always), including a section where participants consume a bowl of cockroaches, earthworms and other critters. In some documentary of some Southeast Asian country, another young, gleaming American tries out deep-fried grasshoppers at a local food stand. With each juicy crunch, we asked ourselves, why would anyone eat something like that? Brian Wilson, the frontman of the Californian surf-rock band The Beach Boys, wrote a song in the sixties during his period of mental instability called ‘Do You Like Worms?’ I’ve been thinking about how weird and whimsical that song title is for a few years now, what a strange dude, but yes, yes, I do like worms, I like them quite a lot actually.  



Tsamaya sentle.



Sala sentle.



Ke tla go bona.



Go siame.



“Mooooorrrwaaaa.”



“Mmmmmmooooorrrrrrwaaaaaaaa.”



“MMMOOOOORRRWAAA...”



“MMMMOOOOOOOORRRRRRRWWWWWAAAAAAAAAA.”



Muted lights. A man saunters past a stage-door.  His walk is chastened by his work suit. It is tight. He steps up to a coat-rack. Briefly glares at it. Closes his eyes. Breathes. He places his hands to the knot of his tie, breathes. Unties it slowly, lifts the length of it against his neck like a noose, coughs, strangles, breathes. He places it on the coat rack and slowly undresses the rest of himself, breathing still. It takes him an unbearable forever to strip down to his underwear. His breaths sounds like sex, or like a struggle of birth. He then saunters to a wide circle of clothing and fabrics on the stage floor, a brown-plastic washbucket at its centre. The circle cocoons him like a womb. He stares inside the bucket, then grabs a shirt and begins to scrub for a while. After another while, he begins to tell us about himself as the spotlight softens. Morwa. Son. He grew up just on the edge of that hundred-kilometre radius. Sometimes, a particular piece of laundry leads to a monologue memory: He ties a towel to his neck and flies across the circle, screeching with childish glee, ‘I AM SUPERMAN! PFFFFEWWWW! SHHHFFFWWWOOOSSSHHH!’. Or he puts on a flat-cap and swaggers with his hands to his balls while telling us about the girls he hit on when he was in high school, “u no wat im sayin u no wat im saying dawg ya feel me?”. Or he picks up a collared shirt and talks about his father, the perfect archetype of a strong Motswana man. His father takes care of his family. His father caught him watching porn and beat him with a belt. His father’s joy when he was accepted to university in South Africa. His father advice--warnings really-- about leaving home. Pain and suffering comes to those who forget the lessons that their parents taught them. Only fools try to run away from where they are from. Focus on your studies and nothing else. Don’t you dare disappoint our family. The play reaches its climax as Morwa recounts his troubled experience coming to manhood in the South African city of Johannesburg, a much different creature from Gaborone entirely. In Jozi, women eat men alive, guns are legal, drugs easy like candy, money everything. “WHO THE FUCK AM I?” he cries as he splatters his fists into his dirty laundry-water reflection. Morwa. Son. At the end of it all, the actor playing Morwa steps up again to the coat-rack, puts on his suit, nooses his neck into the tie, and walks towards to a free seat in the audience. He sits down, the lights go off, and we applaud. A year later, when I come back home for the summer, the sun is setting and my body slumps on the passenger seat of the actor’s car.  The actor used to be my drama teacher in high school.  I called him when it hit me that I wouldn’t be giving any cows or poems to that girl’s family. So we drove towards the edge of the hundred-kilometre radius, because it’s nice to not exist sometimes. He talked to me about becoming a man in Botswana; I talked to him about the play. I left home again not too soon afterwards. I did not leave home a man. I don’t remember how the actor said goodbye. There are many ways of saying goodbye in Setswana. Go well. Tsamaya sentle.



A friend of mine once posted on his Timeline, “Botswana is a big Facebook group. Not a country.” This is true. For about two weeks the most important news in the entire nation was whether or not Miss Botswana deserved to have won her crown. Detailed arguments were made in the comments section of her Facebook: her (modest) tattoo should have immediately disqualified her; she publicly said that her favourite food is Japanese instead of traditional Setswana cuisine (the obvious right answer); her suspect answer to the question of how to address youth unemployment, “ESP” (referring to the ‘Economic Stimulus Program’ which nearly the entire population acknowledges as another government failure). Just recently, widely shared sex tapes of underage girls have become the foundations of memes and hashtags. I hope it is obvious that this is not what I mean when I tell Americans that Botswana is far more community-orientated than America. Nevertheless, Botswana follows me even here. Not that I ever wanted to, but I will never be able to say goodbye to it truly and fully. I can only do so half-heartedly, by liking all my Batswana friends’ pictures and statuses while not replying their messages. There are many ways of saying goodbye in Setswana. Remain well. Sala sentle.



The centre of Gaborone is known simply as ‘station’. Every form of public transportation on wheels, from no matter what part of the city or the country, always ends up there. If you climb up to one of the two bridges, preferably the newer one connecting to a freshly opened shopping mall, you can watch the entirety of Gaborone walk and talk in ways that make New York look boring. We all squeeze together into the same combis, tiny minibuses which carry the weight of the city all around it like a frustrating, inefficient circulation system; we always get to where we needed to go later than we needed to get there. The private school kids avoid station because they think it’s shady. It is. But it is also beautiful. Full disclosure: I was a private school kid. My Setswana is so thoroughly mangled by years of neglect that I try to avoid talking aloud at station as much as possible. There’s another bridge a bit further off which some of my competitive debater friends call ‘Sunset Boulevard’. The first time I went there was with them and we argued, we joked, we tried to fix my Setswana (...we had chicken for lunch). This was also the first time I had been to station for more than half an hour without my older sister and after five p.m.  It shouldn’t have surprised me that the sunset felt more orange, more purple than through my bedroom window. It shouldn’t have surprised me that it doesn’t do one any good watching sunsets alone in one’s room, that mouths crying open together and teeth gleaming is what really makes a sunset a sunset. Nor should it have surprised me that at the end of this, when the orange and purple of the sky stiffened to a deep blackness, that this memory would stick to me after I long left Gaborone with the word ‘maybe’ in my mouth. Maybe I’ll come back years from now. Maybe. There are many ways of saying goodbye in Setswana. I will see you. Ke tla go bona.



I don’t like diaspora poets. I saw an annoying Twitter post while stalking the girl-who-will-no-longer-receive-cows-or-poems’ profile back when things were good between us. It reads, ‘diaspora poet starter pack buzzwords: tongues, womb, mother, homeland, broken.’ I laughed when I first saw it. How true! So relatable! It becomes increasingly less funny the more that I look over my old poems: ‘I helped them cut off my tongue’; ‘I graduated fresh and bloody from my mother’s womb’; ‘Home is where the heart is but the heart is a broken place’; ‘Diaspora children know not what to do with their dark, dark skin.’ Diaspora poets annoy me because they are always saying goodbye to things. Goodbye to a self that exists only in the homeland. Goodbye to a homeland that will always be more than the self that tries to hold it in its tongue.  I am tired of saying goodbye to things. I am tired of saying it to people, to girls, to memories that never existed in the first place because they were not in Gaborone, to various versions of myself that each ask themselves who the fuck they are, and most especially to cows and chickens. And there are so many ways of saying it. At some point the flights become blurs. I’m lying on my bed one night, staring at my bedroom wall from the side of it with my head on a pillow, and then maybe I imagine my face facing some film camera; then the scene shifts, an obvious edit, but my face faces the camera still with the exact same blank expression, just a different background, another country; the bedroom wall a different colour with my same head on another pillow. The memories all the same, not sleeping, still thinking:



A zebra burns to ashes by the Marina traffic circle.



The University of Botswana was built by cows.



Chickens sang songs in the nighttime.



A goat glittered in the sky.



In the middle of Sir Seretse Khama International Airport, an elephant stands.



Do you like worms?



Sala sentle.



Tsamaya sentle.



Ke tla go bona.



There are many ways of saying goodbye in Setswana. It is okay. Go siame.



 

Introduce me first as a victory

of grain measurement. ‘Here is a man made

well, wheat flour packed without overflow.’

Introduce me next as a miracle.

‘At a dry desert wedding short of wine

this man here is like a large stone jar filled

to its stable brim with pure water turned

to wine.’ Please introduce me thus, then turn

and run, for like a young boxer fucking

the judge before the big fight, like the judge

with a gun but no pants, like a trespass

or a good vigilante, I let law

spill. Yes, I am force and in full force, both

the fullness and the panic of measure.

Look at the sad people barely putting up



with the flight patterns of pollen.



Look at them troubled by one more



irritation in their lives.



They will be the last ones standing



when the great forests are felled



and the imperious sunflowers are finally uprooted



and the petulant grasses are tamed to law-abiding highways.



Some poet will rise up to speak on behalf



of the Bornean orangutan and the Ili pika



and some Hollywood director will find the great composer



of metaphors and the camera will worship



her fingernails and eyelashes before he lets her fade



behind the closing credits. He will whimper



in the darkness, and like us, stumble towards



the nearest pharmacy and run his hands



pensively over the boxed nasal sprays



knowing how difficult to read real estate reports



when your eyes are stone and gravel and how



difficult, too, listening to impenitent developers,



styling their bejeweled class rings and tie-clips,



whisper *property, property, property*.

Under a waning moon, the climber climbed. We sat in the shadows, not twenty feet away, holding our breath. All things considered, a very fitting image, we thought: here was this perverted creature, putting left foot right foot left foot right foot on that porous rock, on which the Lord is my witness he did not slip once. The dull moonlight turned the image positively grisly, and we hoped that it was not only the half light of the day we were witnessing, but God willing also the last half hour or so in the life of this cursed being.

The vacation was Charles’s idea, insisted upon despite – or more accurately because of – the fact that I was still waiting for my diagnosis. He’d always been quietly of the opinion that my illness was all in my head. Not that he said so, but the thought slipped in between us. In bed when he ran his fngers down my back and told me that my skin was beautiful, my skin was so perfect. When he handed me a cup of tea, along with a small dish of ice cubes to cool the water, and asked not how I was, but how I felt. It sat in that small sea of wrinkles between his eyebrows, giving him what looked, to all the world but me, like an expression of genuine concern.

Sam looks mean enough and he’s taller than most boys, but his arms don’t reach past the row of seats in front of us. I think he’d punch like a joke. If he got up in that ring I think he’d run himself out of balance, put his weight behind the wrong arm, maybe just trip up and duck back out through the ropes. It’s not his fault but he’s a controlled person, slow and careful with his movements, no explosiveness in his entire body. Seems like the ring’s too big for a fourteen-year-old with thin arms. These men we’re watching, they fight in jumps. They’re sweating like the match is deadly and their punches are stinging through the boxing gloves. The view is patchy from our seats but the top-lights are sterilizing and I can see shadows on the boxers’ cheeks as they dodge. I can’t stop watching them move, twitch, spin. They jump around like it’s random. They fight like it’s not the arms but the timing’s what matters.

Interview with a rock-star, a celebrity icon. The mischievous and bashful expression of someone who seems like a fun guy who all the same distrusts strangers, other people, the ager publicus, someone who lives enclosed in his own world of references and connections, his own clichés. He showed up to the televised interview in pajamas, a sample of what I heard:

There are enough uncertainties here that to do anything other than face them head on would be, at worst, disingenuous and at best, cowardly. This could all be hearsay, sort of. The leveling of voices brought on by the Internet has made it possible to peer across the room and eavesdrop on a conversation between strangers –– only the room is much bigger, and it may turn out that the strangers are estranged even to each other; they may not even know they are talking. This story follows one of those conversations, albeit a conversation in the most literal sense, as in the word’s latinate root, derived from the verb *conversari* meaning “to live with, to keep company with,” or literally, “turn about with.” This could be hearsay in the sense that it is my account of how two distant stories came to turn about with each other in the far reaches of the web, and that there is little other than the turning in question to go off of. 



 



When you eavesdrop on a conversation, there’s usually a key word or a loud noise that catches your ear and suggests you zero in on the exchange. For me, this was an email I received in the spring of 2011 with the subject line, “LAY YOUR LIFE INTO OUR HANDS AND WE WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY, TARPLEY HITT” and the discovery that alongside its promise of “MIRACLE INSTANT PENIS GAINS,” the email contained a second, hidden layer of text –– an entire, invisible swath of story taken from the pages of the semi-prominent Christian Romance e-novelist, Judith Bronte. 



***



There is little information about about Judith Bronte available online, but this is what I know. Bronte, a forty-maybe-fifty-something white woman with brown, chin-length locks (just about all you can see in her closely-cropped author photo) has been publishing christian romance e-novels since 1998. Bronte was born in South Carolina, but grew up and currently lives in Southern California. She has two brothers, was homeschooled and is very close to her parents. Bronte’s father, in fact, was the person who inspired her to write and her mother encouraged her to pursue it as a career. The mother passed away a few years ago. Bronte’s family subscribes to a set of deeply Christian values. On her author page Bronte writes, “My mother said that as soon as I was old enough to understand that Jesus Christ had died for my sins, I was claiming Him as my Savior.” Although her narratives are often religiously inflected, Bronte tries not to “hit her readers over the head with her beliefs.” Notably, Bronte has never had any extended romances herself. “The model I use time and again of a healthy marriage,” Bronte writes, “came from observing my parents' strong relationship.”



 



Bronte says her penname blends her favorite writer and her favorite Bolshevik: “Bronte” from the the eldest Bronte sister, Charlotte (*Jane Eyre,* not *Wuthering Heights*), and “Judith” from a young Russian girl, allegedly martyred for her conversion to Christianity during the October Revolution. I say allegedly because, although Bronte claims the girl was known only by “Judith,” presumably in a Madonna or Cher one-name fame kind of way, her existence is undocumented anywhere else online, save for a self-published novel called *Judith, Martyred Missionary of Russia: A True Story*, whose dearth of cited sources and Google hits makes “true story” seem more like a plea than a promise. Judith Bronte’s real name is Sarah Fall, and her pseudonym is a hardly a secret. Fall reveals her double identity at the very top of her homepage: “Hi, I'm Sarah Fall, and I've been writing free love stories under the pen name of Judith Bronte since 1998.”



 



Sarah Fall’s pseudonym resembles her writing: archetypal bildungsromans with blends of Christian mythos and chaste romantic intrigue. Her titles share a predilection for the word “journey” (*Abigail’s Journey* or *Terry’s Journey* or *Journey of the Heart* to name only a few), and her repertoire is narrow in scope: damaged ingenues, burly love-interests, nostalgic Americana, always against the backdrop of unwavering faith. Say what you will about romance novels, but Fall has no delusions about her work, which she reveals in her sole interview, a twenty-minute clip on a now-defunct radio show called *Love-a-licious.*™1“Some people call it ‘wish gratification,’” Fall says in her girlish falsetto. “It’s being able to put yourself in another place to be able to have your Prince Charming say whatever you want to your heroine.”



 



On the homepage of her website, beside the dancing animation of a brunette in maryjanes, Fall advertises her newsletter: “Keep up-to-date on all the announcements and website news!” Beneath the sign-up slot, Fall writes in tight script: “My policy is to follow the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12); I hate spam too, and will never sell or give away your email address.”



***



To earn the label “spam,” a moniker inspired by a Monty Python sketch in which normal conversation is crowded out by strings of nonsense (“spam spam spam spam”), an email has to be two things: unsolicited and en masse. In other words: you didn’t ask for it, and it went to a ton of people. As a result of the latter criteria, pretty much anyone initiated into email account membership is familiar with spam –– it ranks among modern certainties, alongside death and taxes. The first criteria, on the other hand, is more slippery than it seems. It is easy, for example, to confuse spam with advertisement email: coupons or newsletters you unwittingly subscribed to during one e-purchase or another. This is not spam, as technically, there was an act of solicitation, however nefariously subtle it might have been. The Department of Justice’s explainer on spam is broken into four sections –– Africa-Based Investment Schemes, Medical Products and Devices, Financial Investments, and General –– which succinctly sum up the gamut of law-breaking spam styles.



 



Because of spam’s ubiquity, these categories should be fairly self explanatory.2 But the second group, by far the most extensive, is slightly coded. “Medical Products and Devices” is bureaucratic euphemism –– the category includes the range of “miracle cures” and scams praying on the medically desperate, but most of it is sex (a lot of sex). 



 



Like Fall, spam trades in wish gratification –– but what the former says in subtext, the latter puts in the subject line. Any given junk folder is likely to be filled with offers for porn, dildos, penis enlargement procedures, Russian escorts, French escorts, escorts “only TWO miles from YOU!!,” and medications from Canadian Pharmacies, for bigger, longer, faster erections. Still, if you take a moment to browse through this veritable buffet of sworn sexual enhancements, you may notice that the genre is, on the whole, distinctly un-sexy. The majority arrive in a narrow palette of beige colors, from senders as subtle as “Mrs. Paulette Hersman” or as loud as “Enlarger Pills 389!!.” The messages are concise and direct: maybe just “Buy penis enlargement pills here!” with the requisite “Click on the attachment below.” The emails channel the graphic design of a skeezy injury lawyer –– aggressive fonts, bad pictures, and a few too many exclamation points. 



***



Before writing full-time, Fall worked as a website designer, a revelation which is somewhat surprising because her online presence seems frozen in an early-aughts digital style and because the actual reading of Fall’s books requires some virtual gymnastics. On the 15th of every month, Fall uploads a new chapter of her latest series, *Dandelion Skies*, on to the homepage of her blogspot site, judithbronte.blogspot.com.3 The website has almost no text –– only links to the chapters, and a note crediting the page’s peach floral frame to Blogspot’s “ethereal” theme. The links lead to a URL of still pinker design (a fuschia page with purple cursive script) –– this is Fall’s main website, judithbronte.com, where fans can find chapters, snippets of her biography, FAQ’s, and the comments page. Fall has three other web pages to my knowledge, and a facebook group called “The Works of Judith Bronte,” for her various religion-inspired literary projects. I mention the multiple pages because their inconvenient, user-un-friendly, disparateness captures what is immediately apparent upon visiting any one of them –– that Judith Bronte, an author who has made her name on digital platforms, does not really know how to use the internet. 



***



The spam email I received seemed equally inexpert, but nondescript. It didn’t have much text –– only a short promise of penis enlargement at half the going-rate, written in bold red. But if you dragged your cursor to highlight the text, clusters of words in white ink appeared. Most of these hidden sentences were garbled compositions of simple words: “Nothing to wait until you ready,” for example. Others alluded to characters: “Maggie and jerome was waiting.” Near the bottom of the email, the sender had also camouflaged their source: “homegrown dandelions by judith bronte.” 



 



What most don’t know about messages like this one is that they aren’t scamming the receiver as much as the *vendor*. According to the Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO), 80% of Western spam comes from around 100 senders. These operations are sort of like advertising agencies. They approach small businesses and promise promotional campaigns with millions of viewers. After contracts are signed, what the vendor thought to be an aggressive ad-strategy ultimately translates into a half-hearted spam email that goes straight to junk folders. According to a recent study conducted by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), this method is effective for fewer than 12% of viewers. So while the spammer makes a tidy profit, the vendor makes next to nothing.



 



It’s because the spammer has no interest in his emails’ success, that their design is, like Fall’s websites, exceedingly dated. More often than not, the messages make as little effort as possible to sell you on their product. 



***



Sarah Fall is not particularly interested in selling either. For one, her work is free (although Kindle versions go for 99¢). And she isn’t after fame. Fall has refrained from interviews or other forms of promotion, except for her newsletter and singular appearance on *Love-a-licous. *In fact, it’s unclear whether Fall writes for any of the other usual reasons –– inner necessity, improvement, inspiration –– either. 



 



By her own admission, Fall doesn’t edit much. In one FAQ, she writes: “...the thought of going back and rewriting my old work is a little daunting. I have so many projects going on, I'd rather use my time writing new material.” She doesn’t seem keen to evolve either. Between her first novel, *Journey of the Heart* and her most recent, *Dandelion Skies*, Fall’s style never strays from a familiar band of stock characters and storylines. I initially found her writerly impulse baffling. It seemed to produce constant, unreflective ejaculations –– a spam-ish triumph of quantity over quality. 



 



I remained skeptical until, at the end of *Love-a-licious*, I heard Fall hint at her endgame. As she explains why, exactly, she so loves *Jane Eyre*, Fall pauses for a moment. “Her dialogue,” she says. “She makes everyday life interesting.” Fall’s own drive might be exactly this. Maybe the quick and continual output is a strategy –– an effort, perhaps poorly conceived, but trying nonetheless, to capture the spontaneity and average-ness of everyday conversation. 



***



Everyday dialogue is the spammer’s gold, and junk folders are their poison. Although spammers don’t need you to buy the product, they do want you to see it –– and in order to succeed, spam messages need to pass as authentic human exchange. Unfortunately, a spam filter is a simple, but wickedly effective piece of technology. It is so slick, in fact, that the contemporary filter is largely the same as it was in 1996, when MIT computer scientist Jason Rennie first developed a program called “iFile.” 



 



iFile was conceived to parse spam emails from normal emails (or “ham,” as they’re called in filtering communities), and it operated on a simple rule of probability known as Bayes’ theorem, after its inventor, the 18th century English priest, Thomas Bayes. With Bayes’ theorem, iFile crunched the likelihood that an email was spam by scanning its text and determining the “spamliness” of each word. “Sildenafil,” for example, a kind of generic Viagra, is more likely to show up in a spam email than a ham email: iFile would tally that. A person’s name, on the other hand, is far less likely to appear in spam: iFile would tally that too. After determining the spamliness of each word, the program would run the numbers on the email as a whole. If the ratio of spam to ham words was high enough, the recipient would never see it -– iFile would send it to the Junk folder, where it would wait to be deleted. 



 



For spammers, this posed a problem –– most of their language (buy, purchase, penis) raised red flags. But like any pest, spammers evolved alongside their vaccine. They developed methods to fool the filters. The iFile process was simple, and so was the spammers’: all they needed was to upset the spam-to-ham ratio –– to masquerade as conversation, not ad copy. 



 



Spammers developed dozens of offensives, but among the most popular was something called “word salad.” These programs scraped text from the internet, minced it, and camouflaged the garbled words with small, white fonts in the background of emails. The added text diluted the concentration of spammy words like “viagra” or “medication” and offset the ratio, tricking the filter into finding an email more conversational than it really was. 



 



Since the Internet is filled with free writing, word salads were easy enough to cook up. For a few years, a common source to scrape were the classics: novels whose copyrights had expired, poems and essays that had been reprinted ad infinitum. The public domain provided an endless source of salad to feed a growing supply of spam. 



 



This strategy had a minor pitfall. It attracted attention. As people started seeing Shakespeare alongside their escort ads, the media tuned in. In 2006, the New York Times published an article called “Literary Spam” by Meline Toumani, about precisely this phenomenon and other outlets followed suit.4 After the publicity, the prominence of literary spam waned: it was too flashy. As Toumani points out in her article, “most legitimate e-mail exchanges don’t sound like Shakespeare.” Filters caught classics, because often their language was out-dated: it didn’t sound like “ham.” It didn’t sound “everyday.” Toulani makes another good point –– modern spam filters also factor in repetition. An email packed with passages from *Oliver Twist* is bound to find matches all over the internet, whereas even the most banal conversation will prove to be relatively unique.  



***



The problem with eavesdropping, particularly of the Internet kind, is that it comes with holes. In a room, you can walk over and ask questions if necessary, but online, it’s easier to avoid being found. So, I’m not sure who first sourced Fall for word salads or when –– only that they did. And I don’t know how many filters have been tricked or how many people received Fall spam in their inboxes –– only that mine was and I did. But I suspect that the reason I still receive messages filled with Fall’s words is that somewhere down the line, she did something right. 



 



Shakespearean salads, for example, might stand out with the odd “thy” or “vassalage,” but Fall’s language is simple, plain, and conversational. Her vocabulary is narrow and laced with names. Fall’s works are obscure and unlikely to turn up matches online –– their arcanity approximates the uniqueness of real dialogue. With her monthly deadlines, Fall offers a wellspring of new material and it can’t hurt, of course, that it’s all free. I suspect that Fall, in her seemingly sterile narratives, managed to approach average conversation –– to capture the incessant banality of everyday “turning about.” And I suspect it is precisely this everyday quality which makes her so appealing a source.



 



1. *Love-a-licious ™*,  hosted by Candace “The Loveista™” Chambers-Belida, is sponsored by a product which deserves a mention. The short ad, which at runs at the beginning of most episodes, opens with the gruff voice of an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator. “Hey up there,” the voice says, “it's me, your crotch. My living conditions down here are deplorable –– the itch and burn are too much. Scrub me with Medicated Fungicure Wash when you shower and say, ‘hasta la vista’ to jock itch. Get Fungicure Wash at Walmart and Rite Aid. Do it Now!” When the ad’s 19 seconds are up, elevator muzak comes in and Chambers-Belida opens with her signature line: “If you’re feeling...*love-a-licious...*you’ve come to the right place.” 



2 “Africa-based” is code for the “nigerian prince” schemers, so-called because the first wave of emails of this variety were sent from a server in Lagos by a scammer who claimed to be an imprisoned prince. These messages seek out gullible readers to lend them money with the promise of massive compensation. “Financial Investments” promise the same without the theatrics, often offering doomed business opportunities. The last group, “General,” allows for categorical wiggle-room. 



3 Although Fall has always posted regularly, she has changed her publishing style over the years. When she first started, Fall published her books directly to the web in full. After 2001, Fall began writing her novels in monthly serial. She wrote chapter by chapter, posting each immediately after completion. “With God's grace, I never missed a posting deadline,” she claims on her author page. After 2014, Fall switched to a different method: penning her novels offline and, once finished, releasing the chapters by month. Mostly recently, Fall released the ninth and final chapter of her latest novel, *Dandelion Sky* on June 15, 2017.



4 NPR followed up with a Morning Edition feature of their own, called “Spam Goes Literary;” and by the end of the year “Empty Spam,” or an odd variant of spam comprised of *only* scraped text (all lit; little spam), made it into Wired Magazine’s “Jargon Watch.”