Internet Time Capsule #41: A Soundsuit Goes To The Supermarket
Salman Rushdie had the right to write The Satanic Verses. The next Salman Rushdie will have the right to write the next Satanic Verses. The Salman Rushdie that follows after that will have the right to write their version of The Satanic Verses. Pity and contempt are reserved for state actors and state-influenced actors who might hear the words of the Prophet (PBUH) — “Powerful is not he who knocks the other down, indeed powerful is he who controls himself in a fit of anger” — and decide to head in the opposite direction. Empathy is reserved for the breadth of time Rushdie has spent as a geopolitical pawn at the expense of the nameless quietudes that make up an otherwise lived life.
A well-informed thread on the matter can be found here. A brief, sweet note from a former research assistant.
A CHAT WITH BROOKE RANDEL ABOUT THE STORY ‘THE STRUCTURE UNDERNEATH’ —
Evan Fleischer: Hey, Brooke! So what were the origins of “The Structure Underneath?”
Brooke Randel: Someone asked me to read a (bad) poem. I read it over and over, torn between encouragement and critique. I knew I wanted to write about this feeling of being out of your depths, but placed within a sibling relationship. There’s so much invisible weight that falls on older siblings, especially the eldest daughter. In “The Structure Underneath,” the narrator is aware of everything that needs work—her brother’s poem, her family, her coursework—but has no idea how to change anything.
EF: I wonder — does the narrator think there’s pedagogical value in being kind, even if the narrator doesn’t necessarily believe in it/has complicated feelings about it?
BR: Oh, yes. She’s worried about her brother becoming closed off. A poem slipped under a door is a tricky thing. Is it a request for feedback or validation? Or witness? She sees his vulnerability in that action and thinks the worst thing she could do is stomp on that. We don’t learn or grow when we’re in a defensive state. So she opts for kindness as a way to encourage and protect him. Of course, in trying to get him to open up, she ultimately shuts down.
EF: Something of a pyrrhic victory.
What are you reading at the moment?
BR: I just finished reading a chapbook from Fruit Bat Press called “A Very Chicago December,” an ideal summer read. I also read a lot on the Holocaust because I’m working on a memoir about Holocaust survival and silence (to be clear, I did not survive the Holocaust, my grandma did) so I have Questions I am asked about the Holocaust by Hédi Fried and An Estate of Memory by Ilona Karmel on my nightstand as well. My tastes are pretty far-reaching.
EF: What’s your take on the interplay between memory and silence, then?
BR: Oh no, I really set myself up there, didn’t I? This is such a monstrously big question. The shortest answer I can give is to say that silence can feel like a way to protect yourself from memory. And it can work! Until it fails. There’s a power struggle between the two and they feed off each other. They require each other. Both can be hard lessons to unlearn.
AN INTRODUCTION TO DECOLONIAL THINKING FOR PEOPLE WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN WONDERING WHERE TO START WHEN IT COMES TO STARTING TO LEARN ABOUT DECOLONIAL THINKING AND FIGURED THAT A VIDEO AND A PARAGRAPH IN A NEWSLETTER MIGHT BE AS GOOD A PLACE AS ANY —
Modernity isn’t just an aesthetic summary — i.e., ‘That’s a modernist work of art’ — it’s also an act of persuasion. An act of rhetoric. Modernity also hides within it something called coloniality — that is, colonial thinking. (And you all know what I mean when I use the phrase ‘colonial thinking,’ right? I don’t have to quote from Fanon or Césaire?) So runs the summary of the argument from Walter Mignolo in this lecture at the Guggenheim Museum from 2016. If you know someone in your life who is aware of concepts like ‘decolonizing the classroom’ but isn’t aware of the historical lineage of this argument, this video might be as good a video as any for them.
Every once in a while, we are reminded of the endlessly bizarre and disappointing ways in which we decide to construct a narrative to engage with the present. Years ago, I once turned on local New England television news and was surprised to see the main story be a story of a man firing a crossbow bolt at a swan in Alaska. Yesterday, I felt like the kind of person who would complain about spotting typos in the newspaper when I saw The Atlantic publish an article called “Stop Putting Laser’s in Joe Biden’s Eyes” and NPR run an article for some reason trying to find the negative of Beto O’Rourke rightly cursing someone out for not taking the slaughter of schoolchildren seriously, of which I feel the need to turn all Andy Rooney-like to the camera of your reading eye and go, What are we doing? What are we doing here? To pose a question more or less taken from the pages of No One is Talking About This: what kind of day are we hoping will crack open? Will subsequently reveal itself to us?
AN EXCERPT FROM A CHAT WITH ROBBIE HERBST ABOUT ‘SO WE BOUGHT A HEARSE.’
Evan Fleischer: I’m not going to say, ‘What was the first line of the story,’ but … where did the engine that became this story — where did it begin?
Robbie Herbrst: It quite literally began when I was driving and I saw this very old hearse on the road. (Evan laughs.) I was like, ‘Damn — that’s cool.’ I think I wrote the first line or two of the story, and then I had no idea what I wanted to do with it. I left it on my drafts folder on my computer for several months and then returned to it. And the heart of the story really is — camaraderie with friends in nature, as well as a feeling of freedom that is specific to adolescence.
EF: Yeah. And I definitely picked up on that, which — being the editor — thank god. (Laughter.) And I agree with everything that you’re saying, but there’s one thing in that description that — for me, at least — almost feels like it’s being omitted, and it’s the sense that adolescence is messy; that — to borrow the title of a movie made by someone I know — [adolescence is] a little bit of everything, everywhere, all at once, you know? And so — did you see that as being a matter of obvious course putting this story together, or … because you take a very quick pivot very early in the story, where you talk about the roller derby training the mother has, and there’s an element to that where I can say to myself that — ‘Okay, he may be writing this to surprise himself or make himself laugh, etc,’ but — from my perspective — it’s almost as if there’s a strategy of approach, a methodology of attack, or however you want to phrase it, where there’s a kind of intriguing amount of mess at play as well. And I was wondering what you thought of that and how it intersects with the idea of adolescence and friendship.
RH: In early attempts, it felt like I was spelling out too much, and it felt like the place where I found success [with this story] was — to use your term — in the messiness. I found success in the voice. And the voice is what makes or breaks a piece. And this aspect of adolescence is so sketchy and undefined. There isn’t always clear motivation. There isn’t always a ‘narrative arc.’ Things just sort of happen — going by the seat of your pants, figuring out the world one thing at a time, and that’s what I ultimately wanted to get to — this sense of inchoateness.
EF: The thing you’re getting at — the thing you just said that I appreciate — is the idea of … there’s narrative newness afoot for these kids in this moment, so of course they’re not going to say, ‘Here’s how I want to have a cleanly delineated aesthetic experience with my friends.’ It’s — ‘I know meaning is in that direction. Come on. Let’s go.’
RH: Yeah. Sort of like moths to the light.
I wonder what it would be like to go to a baseball game in Japan with Murakami. I wonder what Patti Smith — who loves detective shows, who probably feels enthusiastic about Orwell’s essay on murders — thinks of the fact that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once wrote an episode of Veronica Mars. (Which we’ve mentioned on this newsletter already.) I wonder if there’s anyone involved in surveillance capitalism who believes in ‘the public sphere’ or ‘a commons’ in an unqualified sort of way. I wonder why I had to learn that Biden has brought drone strikes to a virtual standstill in a tweet. I wonder what it was like to see the old double-header games at the Dunk, with Russell’s Celtics coming on and playing before the Bruins.
There’s something strange about the way in which Obama’s 2004 DNC speech was the thing in the narrative landscape that — as someone said in a YouTube comment — ‘got him elected four years in advance.’ And I wonder about that dynamic when I watched the way in which something clicked for people who watched the way AOC first campaigned for elected office and how deeply disciplined she was in recently addressing the Postal Workers Union.