What we lose in the piles
Autumn in New York is too much, really — film festivals, an unending stream of Broadway shows and operas opening, museums previewing their fall shows, the weather shifting from lethargic unmovable heat to an invigorating early-morning chill. I partake in it all, forgetting what it’s like to be able to spend an evening at home. It’s far, far too much, and I love it. I live for it. It doesn’t last forever.
This year, though, I skipped a week of fall (which also meant missing a week of the New York Film Festival and a week of Broadway press previews and what felt like a thousand readings and parties) to go to California. I’m writing this book, and books mean research, and research means archives and libraries. I was in Berkeley for three days to sift through a dozen boxes of manuscripts and notes scribbled decades ago on scraps of paper, then Los Angeles to attend the opening of a museum exhibition.
It was mostly a good trip though also a strange one. I’ve spent a lot of time in Los Angeles over the years, but I hadn’t been there in a long time, and was reminded that though it has its bright spots (running on the beach, lots of interesting people), it is just not my favorite city. Which is fine. Plenty of other people love it, and there’s room for them there.
I had never been to Berkeley, and spent very little time in the Bay overall, and I do love it there. It’s the only other area in the US that’s easy to see myself living in (even if it’s costlier than where I live now and I also can’t imagine leaving my home for any reason, anyhow). I went to Chez Panisse with friends, a lifelong goal; I got to have dinner with my literary agent in person for the very first time; I chatted for a long time on afternoon with the only other youngish person at a historic cocktail bar housed in an old “social club” where the drinks were okay but the atmosphere was great.
And I dug around in the archives of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and thought about writers’ archives generally, because I of course live among increasing stacks of papers and notes. A lot of it is electronic, but a lot of it is not, because I work best with paper myself. Yet my archives will never have folders full of questions to myself written on the corners of shopping lists, or fifteen printed and painstakingly annotated versions of my manuscripts. I don’t have metal filing boxes full of index cards or business cards on which I’ve scribbled “this is a good name” next to an undertakers. In fact, most of my short-length work generates nothing on paper at all, since everything is researched, drafted, edited, revised, and published in pixels. I think I have two printed versions of the Salty manuscript somewhere, all of which contain Tom’s edits and very few of my own.
And there won’t be letters. Or scribbled notes from editors with pleas to just “look these over and give me a call on Tuesday, as I have a wedding in Nantucket this weekend,” or random sheets of paper with a child’s scribblings stuck in between clippings about grisly murders serving as plot fodder. We lose knowledge of some of the steps that come in the long germination of written work.
Strange to realize, a bit sad, probably inevitable — but I feel sad for future researchers of 21st century writers. History will be a little bit impoverished.
Tiny review corner
Topdog/Underdog: Tom and I went to previews for the Broadway revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2002 Pulitzer-winning play. When it premiered, it starred Mos Def and Jeffrey Wright; this version stars Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen. Having never read the play, I didn’t know what I was in for — a crackling two-hander about two brothers named Lincoln and Booth (a life-length joke played by their father) that starts with Booth practicing his three-card monte and ends with the whole thing tumbling down.
The play itself is, broadly, about the kind of hustle and con that success in America demands, and how even then any success comes with a lot of looking over your shoulder. It’s real good. But even better were the performances. I’ve seen Abdul-Mateen and Hawkins both on screen before, but in the room a tension that felt visible, like a rope made of rubber, stretched between them, and it kept changing color. A warm rose of affection went red-hot with passion, green jealousy, blue fear, grey misery. In one scene Abdul-Mateen, who is all muscle, performs the most graceful ballet in the city as he unpacks off his person a whole closet full of clothes for him and his brother, nicked from a department store. Hawkins telegraphs some sort of confidence that’s been bored into and hollowed out so brilliantly that I had to Google and check his age at intermission — didn’t I just see him as the kid in In the Heights?
I expect it’s easily one among the best shows I’ll see this year. If you’re in town, get a ticket.
Some movies: There are about a dozen terrific movies that came out this week, which is a little infuriating; it’s better when they get the breathing room needed to pick up steam (pardon my metaphors), but here we are. The best of the bunch are The Banshees of Inisherin (wrote about it here); All That Breathes (which I wrote about a little here; I did two Q&As at Film Forum last night with director Shaunak Sen last night, who is extraordinarily wise); Descendant, which is on Netflix now and which you can read about here when it goes live on Monday; and Aftersun, which I wrote about just a little bit here and here.
Banshees is the most well-covered of the bunch, but here is why you should also seek out the other three.
All That Breathes is a lyrical, poetic documentary about so many things, which usually is bad news in nonfiction. (Too many ideas make for flavorless mush.) But it works because Sen keeps paring things back, expecting you to lean in and do the work. The story in the center is about brothers in New Delhi who care for the birds, especially kites (majestic scavengers), who are falling out of the sky, literally, because the air quality is so poor. But it is also about people living on the margins of a city in turmoil, and it’s also about the interdependence of humans and animals in a man-made ecosystem. Perhaps most, it’s about what Sen called last night the brothers’ “quixotic” quest in the midst of obvious environmental ruin to save some birds. Something that seems almost deranged, but also is an act of some kind of hope in apocalypse.
I don’t want to spoil Descendant for you because the process of revelation in the film is as important as the outlines of the story. But in brief: the importing of enslaved people in the US was outlawed in the early 19th century, but it went on, illegally, for decades; slavery as a practice wasn’t outlawed until the 1860s. (For shame.) The last ship to — once again, completely illegally — import humans to be sold as slaves arrived in Alabama only a few years before slavery ended, and the ship was then sunk by the wealthy criminals who brought it here because they didn’t want to be caught. For 150 years, the existence of that ship, the Clotilda, has been both insisted upon by the descendants of the people brought over and denied by the descendants of those who did it, who are still wealthy and own much of the area. Descendant chronicles that story in stunning detail and with stunning imagery. It’s a must-see; again, it’s on Netflix now.
And I don’t know exactly how to express my love of Aftersun, another film that begs you to lean in and fill in the edges of the story. The whole thing is based on photos that director Charlotte Wells found of her and her father when she was about 11 and on holiday with him. In part it’s about the triggering of sense memory by physical media (a camcorder and a Polaroid camera are ever-present in the film). But it’s also about facing those memories as an adult — the images we look at all the time, but as different people, because we become different as we grow up — and starting to fill in the blanks that we couldn’t have understood as children. The title tells you how to watch it: it’s about dealing with the pain and pleasure that lingers on the skin, or in the mind, when we return from time in the light.
It’s really beautiful and funny, and also staggering, and I can’t recommend it enough.