1. When I first started taking my dog on long walks in Chicago, 1-2 times a day, she was fresh from the wastelands of backyard life in suburban Utah. She had negligible experience with a leash or the city she was in. Everything excited and agitated her: cars, squirrels, rats, food dropped on the pavement, the notion of a corner. The leash wasn’t slack for a second. I had barely recovered from two consecutive and debilitating ankle sprains, first my left foot, then my right, and it took all my strength and resolve to stay upright while ensuring my dog did not go on a rampage. It was miserable. There is something degrading about hitting the absolute limit of your strength and being locked in battle with a creature half your weight who is stronger than you. Whither the meditative walks that would clear the cobwebs of my mind and let in the light of poetry!

2. Now, we work in a kind of charming unison. This is especially apparent when I run with her. She maintains a gentle trot with me even though she could break into brilliant streaks of speed any time (with one exception, as I go on to share). I’m moved by this considerate self-temperance because she still has plenty of fight in her. I need it too, because the project of running is hazardous. I have to anticipate several disruptions on our route—shards of glass, vomit, construction work, and particularly other dogs, since mine doesn’t do well with them. The more precisely I can spot them and swerve, adjusting the leash with a flick, the more satisfying and rhythmic the run. It feels like being in a video game sometimes, all the darting and weaving and winding. True story: when the train goes rattling past, she instantly billows into bounding leaps, compressing and expanding, as though the sights and sounds awaken some ancestral husky-memory of running in concert with a wheeled contraption. In those moments, I feel like I’m flying and it’s exhilarating. (I wrote a poem about this, and I hope somebody publishes it someday).

3. I did not see myself as a runner at all two years ago. There’s a simple reason why most of my friends (who are women and South Asian) do not enjoy running, other than being raised in a culture where it wasn’t common: breasts are fundamentally hostile to running and vice-versa. I was also an archetypally phlegmatic teen. The flood of hormones immediately killed any proclivities I had for sport and and opened up a yawning chasm in my soul that could only be filled by endless conversation with other girls. This relationship to physical activity did change over time, and I picked up the most consistent yoga and martial arts practice of my life in the pandemic like many members of the lockdown leisure class. But some of that discipline dropped off when I moved to Chicago and dedicated my stamina to my job instead. Two years ago, I got a cholesterol scare that spooked me so badly I decided I needed to turn things around. My partner was already running our dog and recommended I try it. Now, there’s nothing else that works as instantaneously on my anxiety. I sometimes even get the nod of acknowledgment from other runners when I’m in the zone. I just have to don a sports-bra that would probably remind some women of the history of captivity in asylums.

5. My neighbourhood is dog-crazy. It makes sense—Chicago is the kind of city where you would want a dog to survive the winter. Our area is a mix of bougie and working-class in a way that fosters a variety of dogs serving different kinds of public presence: kids’ playmate, retirement companion, security dog, trophy dog, streets-to-house underdog, fellow athlete. This also means a range of human tomfoolery is on display, from the negligent to the overindulgent. Too many people have clearly invested their identities in their dogs going leashless. Some have too much hope in their leash with no visible history of dog-training because every so often, I’ll see a huge, unruly dog yanking a tiny woman absorbed in her phone, with nary a glance at her path. Almost as frequently, I encounter the reverse in the form of tiny yapping dogs led by burly gay men who I wish had control of the big dogs instead. I know I sound like a conservative but I’m tired of the threat this poses to my physical safety on a regular basis (I’ll confess that I too am a tiny, distractible woman with a big and once bad-mannered dog but we have moved past the days of me abjectly scrambling behind her so I have a right to judgement now). Some memories stand out. In what felt simultaneously like slow-motion and a flash, I witnessed a woman get steadily dragged against her yelping protestations by not one but two pitbulls—one of them red-eyed and rumbling—towards me and my dog. My own dog was worked up by this and straining for a fight so I too, struggled to get away. It felt in the moment that I actually stared death in the face (someone had to intervene to get them away). There’s another freakishly aggressive dog on a choke-chain walked by an old woman with a limp and while I wish her the best (she’s clearly got the dog for self-protection and not out of main-character whimsy), the very sight of their dyadic lunge-and-wobble from half a mile away makes me mutter prayers to any god who happens to be hanging around in the area. There’s German shepherds slavering behind modest fences that invite no faith in their preventive heft. And don’t get me started on whippets—I looked them up recently and learned they’re called “the poor man’s racehorse,” which is really sad, but those skinny motherfuckers raise such a ruckus every time we encounter them that for the first time in my life, I feel more hostile towards the animal than the human. I’m not proud of any of these sentiments but I’ve embraced them—if I don’t make space for my hate, I can’t survive the onslaught of risk and irritation. Incidentally, I like chihuahuas; something about their fury feels ancient and venerable to me.

6. Another type of dog that goes wild when it sees us is the corgi. Maybe because I am stupidly responsive to small-round cuteness, my annoyance at them is milder compared to what I feel about whippets. There’s the fact that one of the funniest sights in my neighbourhood is a second-floor window from which juts a glass or plastic case, frequently occupied to its maximum capacity by a classically fat corgi who stamps on its floor with unmitigated hysteria when my dog and I walk by. He does this while suspended in mid-air, two floors off the ground. I fear for him each time but boy does it makes me laugh. My theory is that the box was built for a cat (of much more appropriate size and temperament for such a fixture) by previous owners of the apartment and the corgi-people just let it remain because he fits enough.

7. I have also looked through windows at my eye-level because my dog did first. When my partner referred to her as nosy once, it really brought home where the idiomatic term came from. Dogs are all nose. They are rich in world, despite whatever Heidegger might think, because the world is rich in smells. But my dog is also visually curious; she likes to look into any threshold or portal. And so I became mildly voyeuristic. There is one apartment where I could see, every evening, the lower half of a young man on a couch, with a cat on the lap. The stability of their postures made me suspect the man was watching TV. It struck me as especially sweet because I rarely see just a dude with his cat! But one day, I glanced in that direction and there was no man, just the cat. I found it oddly melancholy. Then another day, there was no cat but there was a woman on the couch! Betrayal. Or metamorphosis?

8. I’ve learned through the seasons that not everyone is as committed to walking their dog as my partner and I are. On a good day, the streets are teeming; in the dead of winter, I’m usually the only one walking my dog for minutes on end. I wasn’t even built for this—I come from hot, humid climes—but I take my parenting seriously. We are not fairweather friends to our dog. And you get what you give, because the walking does help with my seasonal depression.

9. Though there is something unholy about a steaming turd whose warmth you can feel through the plastic bag, accidentally picking up someone’s uncollected dog-poop or picking up my allotted portion after a few moments of fumbling for the bag on the coldest days has taught me: there is something even more viscerally offensive about cold dog-poop. And I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, all parenting is about the management of shit.

10. Speaking of which—the children are my favourite part. Occasionally, my dog breaks a child’s heart by being too absorbed in smells or a vision of prey to pay their cooing invitations any mind. Mostly, she adores children and greets them with a rare wag of her rather ornamental tail. We frequently greet a wiry little girl who ran straight towards us the very first time she saw us walking in the neighborhood park (not the dog park, we don’t trust it, but the one with the kids’ playground). Let’s call her Nazia. Her eyes are among the brightest and darkest eyes I’ve ever seen, and she has frizzy black hair coerced into a tense plait when it’s not a bushy ponytail. When Nazia sees us coming outside her school, she breaks the queue or whatever group formation the students have been assigned to step out and pet my dog. She proudly reassures her teachers and friends, “I know that dog.” No matter where we are, when I see Nazia, the image of our first encounter overlays the present. I picture her coming towards me at a diagonal, moving with a sense of vast space ahead of her she’s determined to cross without sacrificing her light step. It’s also how I imagine her when she isn’t there. Nazia has roasted me for dropping my phone and also let me know that she can recognize the dog in my absence. “I saw her the other day with your husband, or boyfriend, whichever,” she said. I’m curious how she’ll take in their gender transition. It’s not as though she hasn’t surprised me with her own family. After months of encountering her in the park, I suddenly saw her accompanied by her double. “This is my sister Nasira,” she said. “Twins?” They nodded. There was no doubt about it but how had she kept a whole twin from me? Recently, I saw them walking with their mother. It was the first time I’d seen either of their parents so I was excited to introduce myself. As I chatted with the mom, Nazia caught my eye with a sense of purpose. “Do you want to see the new baby?” Somehow, I’d missed the existence of a stroller (maybe this is how I missed the twin as well). I peered in and saw a small bright-eyed figure swaddled in girlish colours. “Her name is Nafisa.” Hello, Nafisa. Someday, I hope to see all three of you running towards my dog. I hope my dog is still running.

I am reading John Berger. Some months ago I was reading Gillian Rose and Henry James and Fernanda Melchor and I wanted to write about them on Substack but I didn’t because I had to write a conference paper on William Faulkner. Then I wanted to write a Substack post about William Faulkner because I love him and I wanted to prove that I understood him after I failed to recognize an excerpt from his writing prankishly presented as AI,1 but I didn’t write that post either, mostly because I have to develop my conference paper into a real chapter which is more urgent than licking my wounds in public. But now I am reading John Berger and I am finally moved to write here, because I want to remind myself of the range of reasons I read and write.

Back in my undergraduate days, I used to be a voice-y writer with no real arguments. I knew how to recognize profundity from the brilliant lectures my professors conducted and the mostly pre-80s literary criticism and philosophy we read but I was never trained to generate ideas and pursue them with an interrogative spirit. It’s a wonder I got into graduate school at all but there, I was suddenly faced with the humiliation of realizing that for all my cultural snobbery, my American peers were not only more efficient at churning out end of term papers than I was, but that they were better papers: purposeful, focused, punchy. I hated the idea that I produced pretty, filigreed prose with vapid substance (it felt like affirming orientalism in some way). In an attempt to painfully forge a research sensibility, which required zooming outwards for a lay of the land, a hawkish eye for gaps and dilemmas, and a technical mastery of how to move along an argument, I lost my voice a little bit. I think it was worth it because you simply can’t be a good scholar without a slightly interventionist attitude towards what is, ugly as it may sound, a territory of ideas. I also never entirely lost my voice but it became much more strenuous to produce beautiful sentences while I had to get good at other, very difficult things. And so the inevitable pendulum swing occurred.

In my introductory Substack post, I said I wanted to revive blogging because that’s when I did some of my most unburdened writing. I think that sense of freedom is key because what I feel increasingly hostile to in academic writing—especially when it’s unmoored from a history of ideas as in some wacky theory and even when it’s rigorous and conscious of lineage—is bloat. There’s so much throat-clearing, so much cumbersome coinage and without any of the giddiness of early postmodernism. I’m constantly struck by a sense of how we can’t seem to just say the thing, but even if I grant that the thing is complicated and Chat GPT-ing it would strip it of analytical richness, we also can’t seem to look straight at the thing under discussion: the primary literature. Scholarship should never be fandom and shouldn’t be too deferential or beholden to the impulses of its object but when it obscures the sensibility of the work of art, I think it has gone off-track. The energy, the texture, the tics and tricks, the debts and defiances of the work have to come through and if it takes a more unguarded approach to the literature, so be it. This is why I’ve been reading some essayists lately, because they’re much better at it than scholars, even if they can’t always excavate the dense network of forces that have shaped a text or make a genuinely surprising argument about its posture and commitments.

John Berger is one of my favourite public intellectuals (I can be basic) but I had read startlingly few of his essays. The two that I had (“Why Look at Animals” and “Men Look at Women”), I’ve taught and admired for their bracing polemic as well as clarity. Insight into injustice seems to come so easily to him without any self-pitying, defensive bow to feminism or any wokism’s authority. I find this eludes most male intellectuals who seem so dreadfully encumbered by a world of scolds that they complicate the truth sitting right in front of them. Anyway, this is all to say that I knew the Marxist humanist John Berger of Ways of Seeing but less so the stylist, the critic, the artist. And then along came Verso. Or I should say, along came Verso’s broke era and the splashiest seasonal deals I’ve ever encountered from a publisher, let alone a leftist one (I joke but I would be distraught if it went under). You don’t have to tell me twice to jump at a discount, which is how I ended up with Landscapes.

I wanted to round up this post, and also take a break from Substack (because I need to save my resources for the daunting task of finishing and pitching an academic book, UGH) by sharing the following moments of extraordinary grace and acuity from Landscapes. If you stick around, you will also find a picture of me presenting my paper at a conference to prove that I am a very serious scholar indeed.

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Berger talking about his mentor and friend, Ken in “Kraków” (a piece that threads spectral memory so deftly through the present that you almost don’t notice it. I’m still wrapping my head around its temporality even as it made me unabashedly cry at the end):

For such a gift to be possible the giver and receiver need to be equal, and we, strange incongruous pair that we were, became equal. Probably neither of us understood how this happened. Now we do. We were foreseeing this moment; we were equal then as we are equal now in the Place Nowy. We foresaw my being an old man and his being dead, and this allowed us to be equal.

The opening lines of “Revolutionary Undoing,” his essay on Max Raphael (who I now desperately want to read):

Some fight because they hate what confronts them; others because they have taken the measure of their lives and wish to give meaning to their existence. The latter are likely to struggle more persistently. Max Raphael was a very pure example of the second type.

The rat-a-tat rhythm of the following lines as they hammer out both a singular and a type of life is exquisite:

His life was austere. He held no official academic post. He was forced several times to emigrate. He earned very little money. He wrote and noted without cease. As he travelled, small groups of friends and unofficial students collected around him. By the cultural hierarchies he was dismissed as an unintelligible but dangerous Marxist: by the party communists as a Trotskyist. Unlike Spinoza he had no artisanal trade.

And later, paraphrasing Raphael’s scientific analysis of the artistic process so CLEANLY:

What are the methods of figuration?

1. The structuring of space.

2. The rendering of forms within that space effective.

The structuring of space has nothing to do with perspective: its tasks are to dislocate space so that it ceases to be static (the simplest example is that of the forward-coming relaxed leg in standing Greek figures) and to divide space into quanta so that we become conscious of its divisibility, and thus cease to be the creatures of its continuity (for example, the receding planes parallel to the picture surface in late Cezannes).

And on Walter Benjamin. Who among us has not attempted to write about him and ended up producing something inadequate? Even a genius such as J.M. Coetzee’s piece on him (in Stranger Shores if I remember right) is distinctly underwhelming. But Berger’s talent for distillation saves him:

I do not wish to give the impression that Benjamin used works of art or literature as convenient illustrations of already formulated arguments. The principle that works of art are not for use but only for judgment, that the critic is an impartial go-between between the utilitarian and the ineffable, this principle, with all its subtler and still current variations, represents no more than a claim by the privileged that their love of passive pleasure must be considered disinterested! Works of art await use. But their real usefulness lies in what they actually are — which may be quite distinct from what they once were — rather than in what it may be convenient to believe they are.

Berger’s is my favourite type of mind: an orthodox Marxist without dogma, methodical but aroused by unruly idiosyncracy, steeped in and trained by the European tradition but wholeheartedly excited about the traditions all over the world marginalized by canon-worshippers; a lover of people, of labour, of culture, of nature. A lover, not a fetishist. Only someone like him could have written the following, lines that Faulkner would have liked, I suspect.

Contrary to what is usually said, peasants are interested in the world beyond the village. Yet it is rare for a peasant to remain a peasant and be able to move. He has no choice of locality. His place was a given at the very moment of his conception. And so if he considers his village the centre of the world, it is not so much a question of parochialism as a phenomenological truth. His world has a centre (mine does not).

That parenthesis—the gentle cosmopolitan pride and recognition of alienation and loss that quietly undergirds it! I think this is a good place to wrap it up, and here (below) is the promised photo. Now I go off to write about mules and perambulation.

This was us returning from the hospital:

Chucha. Once Julieta. Now also Chucharrones, La Chucharracha, La Chuchadora, Chuchacabra, Chuchita, and when she’s extra rad, Xuxa (you’d say it the same way but the spirit is suddenly more subversive). Our half-husky, half-something beauty we snatched from my in-laws when we moved to Chicago, because she’d already run away from their yard upward of ten times and without my partner to chase her for miles down the wasteland of suburban Utah, who knew what would happen to her? When we first neared Chicago and the highway suddenly swarmed with cars, she’d started breathing heavily, her tongue hanging lower and lower in shock. Now, she’s a city dog. She knows what corners she wants to turn, which squirrels are worth pursuing (most). She has independent friendships with numerous children at the park, and because of her, I do too. She wasn’t supposed to make it even close to this far but has somehow tolerated the surgeries and chemo extraordinarily well and overshot her predicted lifespan by well over a year now. People on the street regularly stop us to tell us how gorgeous she is, and are shocked when they hear she’s almost 9. Just a few days ago, a woman said to me, “Your dog is majestic.”

In a comical turn I never saw coming, she’s also become my muse. After she recovered from her second surgery, I remember watching her hurtle through the world on her walk, nose-first, and feeling big swooshing winds of grief, love, and awe at her vitality, and thinking, I have to do something with this feeling. I ended up writing a poem to her and getting it published within weeks, and it started one of the more creatively fruitful phases of my life at a time when I thought all my energies would go into academic work. And as much as I joke about her being a delusional dumb ho, I think this false pregnancy thing is fascinating, as is the phenomenon of animal dreams. We think that only humans are capable of these things because we associate them with an unconscious. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Predictably, but not entirely irrationally, I feel a low thrum of guilt too. She only had the false pregnancy because she went through a heat cycle, because she never got spayed. If she had, she likely would never have had this form of cancer. It was only when my partner and I moved to Chicago that we took official charge of her. She was already 7 by then. Spaying her was high on our list, I was just happened to be fresh out of grad school and W had taken a lesser paying job than before in a more expensive city—we were broke and overwhelmed and needed a few months to adjust. Spaying clinics were busy and had some fussy requirements. After our first trip together to my homeland in the winter, when we had our Indian wedding, right upon return, we did take her to the vet to resume the process for spaying and that was when the first tumor was detected.

Then again, caring for her through the last two and a half years has been peculiarly good for me. I’m not a very competent person, and I’m not saying it to be cute. I was raised very sheltered, likely with raging undiagnosed ADHD, in a culture where people already do very little domestic labour unless they’ve really got the short end of the class and caste straw. In ambitious families with a regard for education, it tends to produce a sort of hyper-introspective, emotionally attuned and rigorous thinker who is also inept at most walks of life outside of academia. Coming to the US for grad school did whip me into shape but very slowly, and at quite a cost. So witnessing myself evolve into a successful dog-parent through difficult, gnarly challenges has given me a kind of self-respect that nothing individualistic could have. It has not, however, given me a thicker skin. W & I try to laugh about our situation, as one does in the face of the grimmest things. We joke about literally turning her into Chucharrones, and our last group text for organizing the drive to the hospital and back announced itself as the occasion for “the slicing and dicing of Chucha.” But every single time, it wrecks me because my emotional barrier—questionable at the best of times—simply doesn’t exist when it comes to animals. I was lamenting this to a friend who said it was natural we didn’t feel the need to build up defences against animals—why should we? I thought of an answer only later: to take better, more unflinching care of them. I wish I could be the kind of person who offers life-changing, abundant love with steely fortitude, not experiencing any porosity of emotions but that’s not who I am. Yet.

But I wrote another poem about navigating this feeling—not just about our loved ones but about entire communities fighting against the status of victimhood—and to avoid getting superstitious or extra sensitive about sending it out for publication, I thought I’d share it here first! So here goes (my intention is to introduce a more cryptic and challenging third stanza in the vein of Auden):

Lullaby

(after Auden)

Lay your sleeping head my love,
heavy on my human lap.
Clocks do not concern you, though
one ticks away within your lung;
we do not know what law it heeds,
what god, what sense of right or wrong.
We only know your shape of breath,
the little mist that ghostlike, comes
and goes upon our sheets and skin,
in and out, out and in.

It tempts us to predict your exit,
when to ease and when to brace,
sprout a doctor’s second sight
by force of hawkish vigilance.
Is this not love, to be prepared,
or does it stink of cowardice
to deem one dying in advance,
before they even feel afraid?
I will not rush to birth your dread.
I will sit still instead.

Sleep your light and limpid sleep,
raise your head when you are done.
A stubborn country stumbles on,
never falling to its knees;
maimed but armed with memory,
it bends the world towards its cries
this very minute. None may name
it dead. You have no plans to die.

I can’t bear to be seen while crying at art. It’s not a sentiment I often encounter, which has led me to wonder where it came from in my case. I’m by no means stoic—I leak tears at the lightest pressure and I haven’t worked terribly hard to hide it. If you took any locality I’ve lived in for a few years and marked each spot where I’ve publicly cried, I think you’d have a map that could reasonably help a newcomer to that area. I suppose on some level I must welcome the empathy from strangers or the abject glamour of being swathed in my glistening tear-streaked cocoon. Crying in righteous rage (rather than indignant frustration) can, I hate to admit, feel validating too. I once teared up while moderating a panel on Kashmir and the Citizenship Amendment Act and I saw, in real time, how it shut up the Sanghi who sneaked in and tried to ambush the conversation into Hindutva talking points. Afterward, everyone complimented me on handling the whole thing gracefully but it felt like I was being complimented for my emotions and they weren’t not doing that. It’s a strange realization—it’s not like I planned to cry, that would be psychopathic of me, but I know now that it can play out with a picturesque or galvanizing edge. Why then does the idea of someone noticing me cry at a movie scene, or a poem, or a painting, make my stomach turn?

It wouldn’t be outrageous to assume that this squeamishness about being moved by art comes from a Platonic suspicion. By that logic, art is fundamentally deceptive. Poor cousin thrice removed. Tried to cop a feel on you a party and you gave in and now you have art-itis and you can’t tell your mom or she’ll freak out. While that would be a handy explanation, I don’t actually think of art as a hollow experience or a sham at all. The problem might be on the opposite end—that I allow it to access emotional depths and pockets of unsparing self-knowledge that nothing and no one else gets to enter. It exposes me to such private depths that the thought of spectators for it feels obscene. Though this isn’t the whole story.

My Lacanian college professor once recounted with a smirk, the horror on his friends’ faces as they saw him remain implacable in the face of a movie that had reduced them to a blubbering mess. Of course they were horrified, I thought, I bet they weren’t judging you as much as sensing the implicit condemnation of their fragility at the whims of fiction. So yes, I believe—or I suspect that I believe—art overcompensates in my life for a lack of actual living. If I had acquired more real experiences, moved through grittier worlds, maybe I’d have built up something more nobly calloused in me so that I wouldn’t be quite so porous to representation. Or I wouldn’t seek out the experience of being undone and remade, over and over again, because my real-life suffering would suffice. There is something to that, but I’ve come to accept a slightly more gracious position towards this youthful susceptibility that’s extended into my adult life.

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When I was in my mid-late teens, I sought out emotional rawness with a gluttony that betrayed spiritual sickness (not that I was aware of it). I watched videos of Nina Simone at Montreux over and over again, meeting every voice-crack and defiant glare with my own rapturous sighs and stares. I sent my friends links to Billie Holiday’s rendition of “My Man,” telling them how I shouldn’t, as a feminist, love this song as much as I do but that the abjection felt almost spiritual. A young Abida Parveen’s ecstatic dissociation while singing “Tere Ishq Nachaya” was like a talisman for me. I realize now, looking back, that there was something grimly sado-masochistic about that impulse. I had imbued those signs of coming undone with a far too simple evidence of authenticity, and it thrilled me to be privy to it. How special it is to witness someone sacrifice their shell of dignity and propriety to give me a taste of their essence! There was something I wanted from the world that I could only encounter in these performances but without any critical framework, I let it devolve into mere sentiment. I found only what I hoped to find, affirmed what I already believed—a commonsense perception of artists as madmen or tortured souls—and wasn’t truly rattled into a paradigm shift. I can recognize that impulse in people who describe too much of the poetry they encounter as “searing,” or at the other end, as soft, tender, liquid, celebratory, wonderstruck. Without resistance to some tugs on our heartstrings, how will we recognize a true melody, one that’s earned the breakdown of our rational tools? Still, given how controlled and sterile the conditions of my youth were, I think there was a genuine libidinal need there that might have festered without being fed by the archives of YouTube (and the confessional cascade in the comments that never shied away from divorce or cancer or dead pets or an eternal optimism that India and Pakistan’s love would survive the partition).

Now, my experience of emotional intensity in response to art feels less extractive, more textured. When I go through periods of heightened sensitivity to it—especially something as repeatedly accessible and immediate as music—I often become aware of undergoing some kind of metamorphosis or transition that unlocks a plasticity in my system. I’m readily overcome, not because of a gaping void in my critical apparatus but because I chose to let something in through all the mediation. Even as I acquire a thicker skin, I want to remain supple and open in my encounters with life and you can’t do that without some internal churning. If art whips up your interior into a froth, let it—that’s not so bad, is it? Some deep, almost ancient embarrassment persists, though. It is risky and unseemly to flirt with emotion that voracious. It never loses the whiff of juvenile excess. And perhaps my teenage fixations aren’t even the source of my wound here. Remember, when you thought you'd stop crying someday and that's how you’d know you've finally grown up? Look at you now. The same oversensitive child who would feel the terror of welling tears merely by stumbling upon the living room TV and witnessing some made up character in trouble, and would have to leave because no one around would know what to do with you.

2.

So begins Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall.” We have the addressee right away—Margaret, a little girl, who is crying at the sight of trees losing their leaves to approaching winter. That legendary use of “unleaving”: Maya C. Popa on the Close Reading podcast points out how it marks the undoing of something, the taking and stripping bare, but also how it’s not-leaving because the trees aren’t going anywhere and they’re not even dying! But what strikes me this time about the poem’s opening isn’t that masterstroke—it’s the sprung rhythm (marked by Hopkins’ unique system of placing stresses) which I usually take in all at once, like I would calligraphy or an illuminated border, but tend not to scrutinize. The line about Goldengrove doesn’t need the accents because the consonants suffice. On the other hand, no one would have thought to stress the girl’s name as Mar-ga-ret. That emphasis on the last syllabus makes the address so profoundly personal. It couldn’t be directed at anyone else. Are you grieving? Margaret. Margaret. Are you grieving? Are you? Grieving?

If this sounds existential, it’s because it is, but this might take some working through. Margaret is not unique, or uniquely at risk. The threat if, anything is that she will become—as all children do—particular. What the speaker explains to Margaret is that when she grows up, all her sorrows will stem from concrete sources:

So were we deceived? Is Margaret not crying at something concrete—the unleaving of Goldengrove? Does she not know it? There’s a catch: “Now no matter, child, the name: / Sorrow’s springs are the same.” Margaret might name her sorrow, might point to a catalyst, but they all come from the same source, which she can only unconsciously intuit but the poet knows: “It is the blight man was born for / It is Margaret you mourn for.” What she mourns, is her own inevitable death. But this is unlikely the same death that all living beings experience. It is the blight man, in particular, was born for. So it is the death of childhood innocence, uniquely human because it is the only phase in which humans come close to their animal (or plant?) selves. In fact, it is the death of Margaret’s obliviousness to the narrow paths of sorrow and the death of her instinctive feeling for the universal wellspring of all childhood grief. What she mourns is her future ability to name, contain, shrink and rationalize her sorrow—a time that will actually reflect what she currently, anticipatorily, mourns. The poem is a loop but even the best critic can’t confidently close it. There are small contradictions and mysteries in it that continue to ask for interpretation. One of the proudest achievements of my life is getting an undergraduate class to fall so in love with it, that several of them voluntarily produced 5-7 page close readings of that poem alone. I’ve never had that happen before or after.

To try and probe “Spring and Fall” for psychological accuracy would be blasphemy. Philosophical and poetic truth can’t be exhausted by data. But because specific truths exist alongside universal truths and demand their own place, we need other kinds of poems too. Hopkins himself wrote “Binsey Poplars,” a wail of a poem directed at the cutting down of aspens he knew and loved. We know that while Hopkins gets at something profoundly true in the transition from a clawing, universalist childhood grief that also folds back on the unique experience of childhood itself, we can’t always name our griefs even when we grow up. Big Thief’s song “Cattails” also starts immediately with an address:

Caroline, Caroline
I never could leave you to struggle
Hold the line, hold the line
I’ll be there on the double
In time, in time
Everyone does see trouble

And you don’t need to know why when you cry
You don’t need to know why
You don’t need to know why when you cry

Here we have permission not to know, which is only not lazy because of how much we suffer from the knowing. When I first heard this song, I felt that it emerged from the recesses of my deepest past. The melody doesn’t close, the riff just flows and flows, pushing forward into a clearing of hard-earned, generous tranquility. I tried very hard to get my partner to fall in love with it during the time we were stuck in their house because of the pandemic. Somehow, this proved to be harder than teaching Hopkins to twenty-year olds. No matter how often I played it around W, they seemed distracted, indifferent, or mildly soothed which was probably the most insulting response to something that felt like a spell to me. I gave up, and was playing it for myself one afternoon while W napped on a small couch in the room. Midway through the song, they woke up and blearily asked, “Wow, what is that song? That’s amazing.” Reader, I almost punched them.

“Cattails” works its magic anytime but I think it is meant for afternoons. It reminds me of a literary image very close to my heart: the ending of the last Winnie-the-Pooh story where Pooh and Christopher Robin traipse through the woods on a lazy afternoon, talking about the whole wide world as a child and their best friend do, with the steadily growing knowledge that this would be one of the last times they did this, if not the last. Milne writes: “And by-and-by Christopher Robin came to an end of the things, and was silent, and he sat there looking out over the world, and wishing it wouldn’t stop.” It will stop. But he offers this consolation—“So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”

Hopkins offers no such consolation, and that is his greatness. Adrianne Lenker, the writer of “Cattails,” offers a different consolation. Not the fantasy of unsullied childhood but of ageing as grace:

All three of us go back over a decade to our college days, which is ideal for enjoying this kind of pseudo-sentimentality so I’m sticking with the narrative that Tito spiraled because his girlfriend went to a conference. Despite the parodic impulse, Tito has always had a knack for rendering the Beatles well. He has a certain immaculacy in his phrasing that suits the clean lines and sweetness of a classic Beatles composition. We ended up chatting about how he’s the only person who’s ever recorded music with me and made me feel at ease about my amateur singing. He encouraged me to get a guitar so I could do for myself what he used to do for me, and when I said “I think I will,” he burst into hysterical laughter at the idea that The Beatles might have had a song called “I Think I Will” instead of “I Will.” Another Paul tune so pretty, so honeyed, that it would be an unbearable conduit for the waffling of a loser—unless it was sung with the wretchedness of “I’m a Loser.” I suppose there are a few different ways to do the Beatles after all. They have a touch of desperation, of grit, that peeks through the candied gloss—both in terms of songs that stand out in haunting relief against their catalogue (“Julia,” “For No One,” “Because”) but also bruised, seething spots lurking within a deceptively smooth track.

What happens when the music that inspired the Beatles takes back the Beatles? When I first discovered Wilson Pickett’s cover of “Hey Jude” and shared it with a friend, she said, “It’s like the Beatles came home.” I found that unexpectedly moving. We agreed that it was genius, the way they could meld all their influences into something timeless—that’s what we liked about them. But when an artist puts their Blues roots front and center, a deeper spirit wells out of the music, as though this metamorphosis was the point all along. Pickett delivers the whole song in a raspy yell that simultaneously floats and crackles at breaking-point. It sounds—I have to say it—like freedom.

I used to get defensive about the Beatles once. I got into them because of my first boyfriend who I met when I was 19 (late, I know but that’s another story) on the campus of Jadavpur University, Kolkata. An almost cartoonish manifestation of a tortured musician, he also gave me an enduring taste for the violin and antipathy for rum and coke. You never forget the smell of Old Monk leaking through the pores of human skin in the height of summer. If people dismissed the Beatles as kiddie happy-birthday bullshit, I would say my boyfriend understood classical music, he could make the violin sing with unearthly pain, and he thought they were the best band in music history. I had other reasons for my loyalties too. My department’s acronym, as we’ve obnoxiously paraded many times, is JUDE (for Jadavpur University Department of English). “Hey Jude” was our unofficial anthem and an invariable closer at department events, with everyone holding their breath for the moment when we could collectively go wild at “NANANANAAAA HEYYYY JUDE.” The nostalgia Paul’s voice on “Hey Jude” induces would take a lot to dethrone, but the deeper sense of mythic roots dug up by Wilson Pickett did it for me. Cover and original had become one.

Paul may have excelled at churning out The Beatles’ poppiest confections but the one people usually think of as the band’s pure heart, was George Harrison. And it’s true, subpar sitar-work notwithstanding. He could distill the clearest feeling from a tragic or ecstatic situation and take it to its peak without overburdening the ear. That irony-free lightness of spirit doesn’t sound like there’s much original bluesy grit to recover but then there’s the fact that Nina Simone covered him. And not only she did cover him, she did the song of George Harrison’s solo career.

You can read a lovely piece on it here that takes you through the audience cries of “We want Nina!” to her entrance and opening of “My Sweet Lord” punctuated by a chorus and rhythmic claps, all the way to her oscillation between the song and David Nelson’s spoken word poem “Today is a Killer,” their pairing full of tension rather than the amity typical of a medley, her desire for a divine vision cresting into the defiance of confrontation (not just “I really want to” but “I’ve got to see you!”) and falling in fatigued trails but not relenting, the hope of Harrison’s lyrics continuing to twirl into the grimness of Nelson’s words until the close: “today today today today / today who are you lord / you are a killer” as the chorus rings out with one final hallelujah—ironic? Or is it the joy of clarity? Either way, it’s so chilling you almost don’t notice that there’s some rollicking notes on the piano still, and Nina Simone scatting on “my sweet lord” before the song fades out completely. This was one of Nina Simone’s offerings against the war in Vietnam. Was it bringing one of the Beatles back home, or taking him somewhere painfully new? This much is true: if you had to call America your home in that moment and really mean it, really earn it, you would have to give up every shred of entitlement over others’ homelands. No one knew that better than those who had to fight to be free in the land they’d never wanted to lay eyes on.

Pudding

Pudding is sixteen or seventeen-years old. She is our family’s only surviving cat. At our peak, we had about eight, a happy meeting point of several successive and parallel generations all tracing back to Martha. She was an elegant cat but not as British as the name would suggest. It’s that we referred to her constantly as “maa-ta” (the mother, that mother) and switched it to Martha for a laugh. They were all indoors-outdoors cats, as is the norm here, but some managed to embed themselves deep into our house while others lived around it in the lawn and driveway. Pudding, who belonged to the second group, was always desperate to cross the threshold. She would stake out by our front door waiting for it to open a crack and then dart in but had absolutely no idea what to do once she got there. She would pace restlessly with frantic dilated eyes, jumping on random furniture, her form stiff with anxiety rather than liquid as it was outside. Age has finally given her an instinct for domesticity. She’s seen her kin survive colds, disappearances and returns, festering fight wounds, a hole in the head from a car accident (her brother), and limited intelligence (her mother). She’s seen them succumb to some of those things but mostly because of old age. Last year, she nearly died. Her salivary gland got infected, causing a gaping painful abscess in her mouth. She couldn’t eat. After repeated efforts to drain the abscess, the vet decided to surgically remove her salivary gland. A cat’s salivary gland! I wonder how tiny it was, how fine the operation. Pudding’s ordeal (and my parents’) still wasn’t over. There was a lingering infection, requiring more daily visits to the vet for flushing it out. Her ear, due to too much sun exposure, got a hematoma and collapsed in on itself, a crumpled leathery bit. My parents describe having to feed her by syringe for weeks, and almost giving up hope when they saw her walk zig-zag like a drunkard and simply fall over, so sapped of strength was she. Thanks to modern medicine though, she’s got a new lease of life. She runs up the stairs with no drag in her step. Despite her protruding pelvis and shoulder blades, she feels luxuriously soft to the touch. Maybe it’s because she sunbathes all morning (hematoma be damned) and drinks water about ten times a day from a plastic container in the bathroom, demanding a fresh pour each time. She’s still got her neurotic ways. When you call her, she approaches and stops a fraction from your body, staring at you unblinkingly. She’ll curl up against you only when you’re sleeping, so she can impose her will on you, not the other way round. She loves it when you hold out a hard object so she can scratch her head against it. When she’s gone, my family will no longer have an animal in the house.

Vinod

Vinod irons clothes for a living in the unused plot of land next to our house. He arrived from Bihar, lean and wired in pursuit of work. It was here in Kolkata that he met and married Pramita, a tiny vociferous Bengali woman. Their relationship, though sincerely romantic, was not without acrimony. My father had to bail him out after he got jailed for vengefully biting his wife during a blow-up in the local park (typically full of retirees on their evening walk and children practicing for school assembly or team sports). I believe my dad argued that it was a crime of passion, but being a man of thundering rage and convictions himself, he put the fear of god into Vinod for it afterwards. He was guilty of a chastising slap or two himself. After years of eating rice in the afternoon, Vinod is now soft and curved at the edges. His son has entered a more than typically troubled teenage. He’s worried but too busy and mild-mannered to do much about it. He takes care of every injured animal in our neighbourhood, from applying betadine on infected wounds, to bandaging limps and cleaning out eye-gunk. He does not do this without flinching and tutting. Without him, we would have had to witness much more death than we already have. It is unlikely that that would have made us much steelier.

Shalini and Nawaz

Shalini and Nawaz are a married couple, belonging to that category of people we call “family friends.” They fell in love young over a string of parties, in the hopeful era of post-liberalization India. They are both good looking—she, dark and lustrous; he, flamboyant and solid, with his heavy shoulders and curls. Over time, Nawaz became increasingly pious but his sweetness remained unchanged and Shalini didn’t mind, just as she hadn’t raised a fuss about converting at the time of marriage. Religion has never been the stage for their emotional theatre. No, where they complement each other with fearful symmetry, is their insatiable need for existential reassurance. Shalini is obsessed with illness and health. All her fears and dreams, bubbling inside her like pesky chemicals, become manifest in the sublime monument of modern medicine. She goes to the doctor to get tested at the slightest twinge, compelling them with sheer force of her will to read risk into her mostly tame reports. What science is to Shalini, every possible form of belief is to Nawaz. Devout Muslim though he is, his love of prediction outstrips every possible qualm about superstition and there is not a single faith-peddler or alternative health practitioner—no jyotish, parrot sage, tarot reader, dealer in gems, homeopath, hakim, tantrik, palmist—he will not visit for a promise of future happiness. He approves of dogs because they bark the evil spirits away, so naturally, he is thrilled at the prospect of ritually cleansing one’s home: when my mother broke her hand at the gym and dropped a knife on her toe the same year, he told her to toss bay leaves, cloves, and cardamom into a fire, at which Shalini said one might as well be making biriyani. It is likely that Nawaz’s romantic drive exceeds his life choices. He was convinced for years that he was being haunted by the ghost of his ex-lover who killed herself because she couldn’t have him. Shalini loves to tell his stories so she can laugh at them while enjoying their lurid details. Recently, though, he went a bit too far for her. His all-male birdwatching club was set astir by the entry of a woman—a lady, who went horse-riding in the city’s most elite club. Fanned by a few Facebook exchanges with her and an astrologer’s prediction of grand passion in his future, Nawaz suddenly decided he would marry this woman (no one knows what she’s actually said on the matter). After a thorough dressing-down from Shalini, he is—they are—back to normal. It’s doctors, prayer, and the more cautious astrologers for now.

A Louis Wain image that serendipitously combines cats with convalescent behaviour and marital strife.

There’s something obscene about being so far away from a place that shaped you for over a quarter-century, where you get clocked and clock shit with unconscious ease, where your hates are intimate and immediate; in the absence of all that you’re doomed to hauling around a nugget of opacity. There’s a relief to that opacity too—many immigrants end up treasuring it over the transparency they’re locked into in their homeland—but there’s so many indignities to the distance as well. If you miss the morning window for the family call on weekends, you won’t catch them on the same day anymore. Your parents are two years older every time you come home to them. You treat your memory like a sport the entire time you’re there—names of streets, relatives, anything at all in your native language is a glistening fish that must be netted as it swims downstream or you will have to face your psychic malnutrition. And Americans still say “wow, long trip!” when you tell them you’ll be gone for three and a half weeks (my partner, who couldn’t accompany me this time and will miss my birthday and one of our anniversaries, never says that to me even though they could, and that’s the pleasure of real comradeship I suppose). This is the baggage I hate to confront: that I signed onto this. And being mad about it, and the fact that most people don't get it, casts me in the role of a sulky teen.

But this post isn’t meant to be a pitiful wail at all. Against all my disbelief of the material conditions I’ve chosen for myself, the laws of science and average luck have prevailed: I made it to my city! As always, I feel my body click into place in the density, the human scale of the city. I also feel in my sinuses the air’s aggression, which always made me slightly sick even prior to leaving. There's a new density of commodities too. Not stuff—there was always stuff—but specifically commodities. Home delivery in this country is now sublimely, dreadfully easy. It’s a social malaise. Everyone be shopping for everything. There’s no killing the markets though, not yet anyway. They stay churning with ritual greetings, nosy questions, and wanted and unwanted advice.

The house next to mine has had a makeover. When I was growing up, it was occupied by an ageing man with invisible children who were professionals somewhere out in the world. Mr. Ghosh, or Ghosh babu had a vague genteel dignity but Subhadra di, the woman who worked for him had a ferocious personality that I mistook for authority. She did will some real power into life though, and was perennially at war with stray kittens (many of which she came very close to snuffing) and with anyone who wanted to take guavas from their prolific tree, which she technically didn't own. She was pretty scary as proxy authorities tend to be but I never really hated her, her antagonisms were reassuringly on the surface. We just rescued those kittens and stole those guavas whenever we could. Ghosh died several years ago, Subhadra left, and his children eventually sold the house. This time, I noticed that it’s been freshly painted white and a grimacing pink—a palette that screams something but not necessarily its new identity, a management school! Its classes focus on cruise ship hospitality in particular. So many degrees, so much hunger for a job. My family, which can hear and see a lot of what goes on there, is locked into the lore of this school. Apparently there’s one instructor who handles almost everything, from lectures to pep talks. Ma makes fun of the way he drones on, musty Oxonian style, about the holy tenets of management such as having a positive attitude and keeping things where they can be found. My brother, who is usually withering about scammy education, has tried to defend him because he can tell the students really like him. The cook for the canteen whispers gossip to my mother while they’re both on the roof of their respective houses—her angling up, ma down—and students scuttle below. Ma clings onto whatever fragments she can hear. Did you know, a bigshot lawyer lives somewhere in that fancy house, the cook asked once, naturally assuming our building was partitioned into multiple uses and occupants. Once meant for a large intergenerational family, it only houses my parents and brother now. Yes, I’m married to him, ma said. This guy is our son.

Meanwhile, my other life has by no means abated. I’m still finishing up my grading, planning on telling people that I promise I’m not hiding from them, I just need to work on my third-year review file (the big one). And I’ll have to put final touches on my course syllabi for the Spring, all before I return to the US with just enough time to sleep for two days straight. Of the two courses I’m slated to teach, one’s on Metamorphosis. It has Ovid and Kafka and John Donne but also contemporary literature on physical decay and the horror of gendered caregiving, and Marxist-themed science fiction. There’s a bit of grim absurdity baked into my experience of this course that’s been my own private joke so far. I designed it in grad school and carried it to my current job. I’ve been interviewed for two different campus publications about it, which could give the impression that it’s one of my best offerings, some real cutting-edge pedagogy the department can boast of. Now, I clearly believe I was onto something with this course, but the truth is, the class has sort of bombed both times I taught it. That might be a slight exaggeration (unfair to the students who were all in and let me know it) but when you’re used to sparky classes or even slow burns that end up being hard-earned but radiant victories, you just know that what you had wasn’t… that. And there’s nothing you want more than to figure out why. While I have guesses I want to neurotically inspect over and over with a mortician’s lens (but I won’t), I’m mostly unsure if there’s a single clarifying answer. My students and setting were radically different in both cases, but so was my syllabus, so I can’t say I’ve tested the same thing in different conditions! It’s especially funny to have to concede defeat when your course is all about profound transformation. The conversations you dream you’ll have, only to be thrown by thirty odd Gen Z faces that slowly coalesce into a stony facade as they aren’t getting what they think they want from you. As this happens, you under the spotlight slowly spiral trying to give them what you think they think they want from you, and sometimes arguing with yourself about whether that object of desire (which you anxiously invented on their behalf) is what they actually need. The impossibility of solving this situation haunts most of your semester, corroding a rich range of experiences into the acrid tang of unrewarded effort. Apparently, love is giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it. Well, Jacques Lacan, love stinks then. But I am determined to make the Spring semester work. Not in a desperate, “I’m trying to love you why won’t you be loved” way, but with calm conviction and dedication. I will not retire this course tail between my legs, goddammit. I mean if it doesn’t work this time, I might just have to. But I believe there’s life in the old dog yet.

(An image from Haeckel’s imagination of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, i.e. the embryo going through evolutionary stages in the womb. One of my favourite examples of mistaken science / weird transformation. Probably still too continuous to be a metamorphosis though?)

I have big plans for myself in 2026. I’m going to use more months of my planner, after successfully using one for the first time ever this year and experiencing remarkable relief for a 3-month stint (after that I got too overwhelmed by life to systematically consider my schedule but life with a compass was undeniably better than powering each day with coffee and the willfully suppressed knowledge of things I needed to get done). I’m going to launch a full fledged military operation on seasonal depression and AI use in assignments. I’ll send out my book proposal and get that famous Bengali painting inspired tattoo I’ve been holding off on getting. I might quit drinking. I will write and publish more poems, perhaps playing more with form. I will believe in what my book was trying to be and I will make it good with the new clarity I’ve acquired since I first conceptualized it. I will become a formidable Marxist. But who knows what my emotional baseline will be and if it’ll suffice as a springboard for all these ambitions—after all, my dog has cancer and my parents are almost 70, and we’ve already established that I wasn’t fully built for the psychic pressures of an India-US doubling. But I’m not going to fearfully deny in advance, the strength that each of us us (myself, my partner, dog, family etc.) have.

There’s a song by Angel Olsen called “Sister” that closes out with the refrain, “All my life I thought I’d change.” I don’t know if there’s a sadder sentiment (I love Angel, she’s not to everyone’s taste but I think she is a true, classic sadgirl in the best way where that sadness is hefty enough to be the bedrock for well-built musical architecture). But both musically and lyrically, the song actually reverberates with the optimism of finally knowing that one has fallen in love, and a gloriously queer love at that. So there’s a chance that the unspoken thought at the end is, “and that change is finally here, everything led to this.” It’s still a masterstroke of restraint not to spell it out and to end on the ache of believing with stupid, neurotic hope that one will break free of one’s patterns. But, as theoryheads know, all repetition has the potential for difference.

And yet our capacity to feel is something we hesitate to surrender. Whenever I encounter a demand to feel less, I find it sinister. What I dislike is the implication that empathy is scarce and runs only in one direction, or that we’re perfectly in control of it and can, and should, portion it out. In fact, I suspect that I dislike this picture, not only because I fear the heart’s hardening but it’s likelihood to feel in ways that are self-preserving, narrow, reactionary.1 It’s useful to navigate this legitimate crisis by thinking of literature that compels us to feel despite ourselves, but not through through the satisfactions of sentimentality or virtue. What if flat affect, restraint, and hollowness were meaningful catalysts of ethically motivated feeling?

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Remains of the Day is one of the quietest entries in the canon for World War II literature. The narrator is a stodgy, diligent butler who has subordinated his will to his increasingly fascist employers. He loses perhaps the two most important things a person can have: the chance at love, and self-respect. Without giving away too much, this novel’s climactic scene—which involves no more than a charged confession landing on impotent ears—uses one of the most cliched phrases to devastating effect: “my heart was breaking.” To this day, I associate that phrase with this novel, which is not a trivial achievement on Ishiguro’s end considering that heartbreak might be the most common subject of art across mediums. I don’t think I can name another author who uses mundane idiom without parodic intent or naivete this artfully. Though Ishiguro is a deeply sincere writer, he is always oblique, sly, evasive in the way his sincerity exposes truth. In my first ever (VERY amateur) published paper, which was on Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, I quoted James Wood on the peculiarly unremarkable style. He calls it “flatly narrated, in a style of almost punitive blandness.” I had no real understanding of Global North academic convention back when I wrote that paper and only a meagre grasp of the demands of argument, but was motivated by the urge to put the deep, nameless feelings the novel had raised, somewhere. How could self-effacing, studiedly polite prose produce such a sense of catastrophe?

I hadn’t thought about Ishiguro for a while, partially because of my desire to protect my spotless image of him based on the two perfect—perfect!—novels by him I’d read. It was while reading Gillian Rose’s philosophical work, Mourning Becomes Law, that I found a discussion of Remains of the Day. Speaking of the novel’s denouement, Rose (more on her in a bit) says:

Instead of emerging with sentimental tears, which leave us emotionally and politically intact, we emerge with the dry eyes of a deep grief, which belongs to the recognition of our ineluctable grounding in the norms of the emotional and political culture represented and which leaves us with the uncertainty of the remains of the day.

The political culture and world order Rose refers to is Nazism. It tracks that something apocalyptic does seep into the sakes of the novel, making an inability to reckon fully with those stakes feel like the true disaster. This is Ishiguro’s masterstroke: to see how consequential it is when one stifles one’s mind and soul with norms. To assert one’s will is actually to reawaken one’s conscience and desire (typically pitted against each other) at once.

The context in which Rose introduces her commentary on Remains of the Day, is the limits of Holocaust art. She—Jewish herelf—finds Spielberg’s Schindler’s List repugnant because of its refusal to situate and implicate itself in what it knows about the violence of politics. Its perspective is that of the “ultimate predator” who can empathize with anyone it chooses because the crisis is always at a distance. Instead of starting in the painful remains of the day, she says, the film chooses to start at daybreak, when it’s all over, and Schindler is safely and honourably buried. For a critic and philosopher who was invested in Jewish mysticism and the now totally opaque pro-Palestine Zionist movement, this is remarkably astute.

Rose’s critique of Spielberg tracks with what others have critiqued about the film, but she suggests that Ishiguro is able to pull off something even the great, beloved Primo Levi could not do—while she admires greatly Levi’s tremendous drive for humane restraint and clarity, she recognizes with a sense of tragedy that his painfully distilled poise did not save him from the feeling of contamination. Levi was an Auschwitz survivor who, like many of his kind, did not in fact survive after he left the camp, taking his life instead. Ishiguro obviously did not have close to the same demons to fight, but perhaps because of that privilege, did not try to write a book where he would have to valiantly fend off the contagion. Instead, he is able to take a scalpel to “the link between emotional and political collusion” by making it the beating but cankerous heart of his novel. Her word “collusion” is a striking departure from the one we’re more used to from Woke 1 (I kid, I kid): “complicity.” Just semantically, I think the difference in meaning is negligible, but what matters is that Rose belongs to a different discursive pocket from our focus on privilege, complicity-guilt, allyship-solidarity. Collusion makes you think of large structures of political nexus, not just individual, unwitting participation in oppression. It also, as Rose implies with her comments on Levi, avoids the burden of the victim who feels “contagion” as an existential threat.

The thrust of Rose’s argument is about relationship between the aesthetics of collusion and law. Her takeaway from much of her analysis of art is that you can’t turn away from the legal sphere. It’s all a way of saying that you are embroiled in the business of the polis. Fascism is not the law fulfilling its linear, in-built logical arc of tyranny—if that were true, it would justify discarding the law altogether. However, fascism is that which grants itself the exceptional right to abuse the law, but for that reason, needs the law. Every system needs a ground or a territory but those that disavow this truth are likely to either overrun the ground with lawless, particularized violence or concede it to the most forceful. There is no escaping danger. If you run from society, you’ve already let the killer pursue you to the badlands. As Rose says:

If fascism is the triumph of civil society, the triumph of civil society, the triumph of enraged particular interests, then the subject of representation does not need to be superseded: the danger of its experience needs to be exposed. And the same danger will be the means of exposition.
Otherwise we remain at a beginning of the day.

A digression: it surprised me somehow, to find a reference to a novel that was “cool” among my college peers in a work of such old-world philosophical stateliness. But Rose’s publication actually came out six years after I was born, whereas Remains was published the year before. I’m tickled by the idea that contemporaneous entities can have such different cultural inflections that they feel like productions of different moments brought together into the same present by magic. It feels even more discombobulating to find out that the famous scene, where the narrator lets us into his broken heart, was inspired by something straight out of popular culture—Tom Waits’ “Ruby’s Arms.” There, Waits’ weathered hobo persona sings about his heart breaking at having to leave his lover and resume his nomadic life. Tom Waits—the most overbearingly charismatic, theatrical, gruffly tender foil to Ishiguro’s cultivated flat style. It’s a gorgeous song nonetheless and Ishiguro has a pretty cool interpretation of the singer’s effort to transcend his own emotional resistance in admitting to the heartbreak. He makes the song not corny or ham-fisted but full of tragic self-exertion. (For the Hegelians in the house, and Rose was one, dare we say, a sublation?)

There’s another, less surprising figure who may have inspired some aspects of this novel. The title (and what a good one it is) has a clear connection to Freud’s use of the phrase “tagesreste” or day-debris (less poetically translated as the residues of the day). In my hasty proto-research, I haven’t been able to determine if Ishiguro used it with that reference in mind. (CourseHero mentions how Ishiguro apparently discovered the phrase, but sans citation. Boo.) Freud used it to describe those traces of the day that carried over into dreams, while Ishiguro echoes the phrase to evoke the dying embers of an entire world order defined by Nazism and the flickering, tainted self-knowledge this produces. Crucially, the self-knowledge the novel is most interested in belongs to a self-effacing servant that Rose directly links to the self-consciousness of Hegel’s mastery-servitude dialectic.

Even if Ishiguro casts “tagesreste” in a more political mould than Freud, repression and fantasy remain two unspoken but powerful strains of logic driving The Remains of the Day. What we feel in the novel isn’t quite empathy for a victim of an oppressor, imagined or otherwise, but pain at bearing witness to a shrunken life. This isn’t the classic pang of guilt faced with dilemma either, which makes you imagine your inadequacy at a hypothetical crossroads and sends you into agonized spirals wondering if you really are ignoble. Rather, Ishiguro makes the structures and seductions of complicity collusion legible, and tells us—this is the cost, are you sure you want it?

Anyway. Satyaki was on campus and he was playing a string of our folk favourites—the ones that existed at the intersection of abyssal wistfulness and cosmic play. Tomar Ghore, Hrid Majhare, his special version of Kabir’s Ud Jayega. The ones you wanted to cry and laugh and move to at the same time. And of course ma and I had to pause and listen for a bit with everyone else because you don’t just walk by when Satyaki is singing like that. This kind of access to unfussy cultural icons, this privileged place given to music and sociality, was a staple of our university life (I don’t know that I learned anything more important there than the knowledge of what it was like to live). An evening of song could happen just like that, but even so, some evenings felt different. Satyaki was different from most and he was different from his usual self that night. Within a few minutes, people had formed a circle around him and were dancing. I can’t remember how long it lasted or if I/we had joined the circle. Probably not, both my parents are painfully shy about dancing and I’ve inherited that from them (though I’m slowly sloughing it off). I don’t even remember if Satyaki was playing an ektara or dotara. But I know we felt bathed in the same glow of lamplight and the same stream of alchemical music as the dancers.

I don’t think One Battle After Another had a single true explanatory thing to say about our world but it didn’t falsify anything either! PTA’s vision reminded me a lot of how my parents used to represent their college life in communist Bengal. Communism was just a fact of life. My parents weren’t leftists but they weren’t against communism either (not at that point anyway). They even voted for the party regularly because it was the best option we had for over a decade at least. And they had lots of friends in the youth wing of the party who were always up to their necks in strikes, pamphleteering, rallies, gheraos and other theatrical disruptions. My parents admired their integrity and were fluent in the language of their politics but never fully got it or internalized much of it. At the end of the day, their position was liberal but not liberal in the way we’ve come to recognize in post Red Scare America, where there’s outright repression of the country’s communist eruptions and squeamishness over anything with a whiff of mass organizing. It was liberal as in the things they thought were admirable, strange and funny about their communist friends were accurate, but they were never going to be as admirable, strange and funny as the total and intense picture you’d have of the movement if you were in it (or studied it with intimate scholarly zeal). Is it funny, as my parents loved to say, that these kids seemed to care more about Cuba than Behala? Sure. But my parents wouldn’t know the funnier thing—the particulars of the argument that led to the party splitting off into 5 organizations each based on very specific strains of Marxist-Leninism and Maoism.

Similarly, PTA is comically, satirically, precise about how annoying and precious anarchists can be with their woowoo codewords and monikers, how cringe yet endearing the “spicy” whites are, how much the older revolutionaries were fucking (just read The Country Under My Skin by Gioconda Belli). What he doesn’t get and simply isn’t interested in, are any mechanics and motivations of revolutionary organizing. Why do people do it? What are the different ways of doing it and how do they appear feasible at different moments? What makes it so hard? Beyond the glaring fact of white supremacy and persecution, there’s zero causality explored in the film. That’s what makes it such a simultaneously high-adrenaline and relaxed watch.

OBAA does something really cool—it takes our American world of white supremacy and constant but scattered direct action at face value. It has none of the liberal moral anguish that tries to wrestle with violence and “illegality” in half-assed and circuitous ways. It just accepts things like sanctuary cities as vital parts of our life today without coyness. There’s something powerful about that coming from a film with such a mainstream cast. Most American films simply don’t represent the world we live in—it’s all glossy overproduced hyperreality. OBAA’s visual language is undeniably electric, tactile, imaginative. Typical liberal works of art also squish political issues into bourgeois morality, getting you emotionally involved in a political crisis only to resolve it through the language of interpersonal goodness and harm, and of heroes and villains (that woman wasn’t in it for the right reasons, that guy abused his friendships). Despite OBAA’s focus on one guy and his family, it doesn’t pretend that Bob’s story is a container for the entire world of politics (though as a piece of the puzzle, it’s probably treated as a way in). It’s the age-old narrative of someone inept being chosen through the tricks of fate and their own prior commitments, for a task that’s much grander than them. It’s actually just a cool story, bro! But because OBAA doesn’t want to wrestle with revolutionary logic on its analytical terms, it also seems a bit comfortable with the state of things. You get the feeling that this is part of an indefinite, organically self-replenishing ecosystem, not a political system whose internal contradictions have taken it to the point of near-collapse.

I’ve been seeing some neat observations by Luke McGowan-Arnold that effectively map schisms between Black radicals onto the film. It’s clear to me I don’t know half as much about this history as he does. I do think though that while the film gives you enough texture and detail to read those historical traces into it, it ultimately formally does not support stitching those traces into anything coherent, even by satire’s own standards. The film’s sociopolitical content is all vibes, immediate observations, and mere impressions of history, all excavated with a single-minded focus on good stories and nothing else. PTA also revels in two of the most politically evasive and beloved elements of American culture: a) a narrative of intergenerational healing through a Taken-style quest. He roots it entirely in a specific political world but the form of the story is ultimately trans-historical; and b) the sheer thrall of personality. Perfidia and Bob really don’t tell us much about how torture and snitching, a will to power and bloodlust, racial fetish combined with political earnestness, all work as structures. They’re just incredibly sexy and ridiculous personae respectively. There’s no density of logic or rhetoric from revolutionary spaces that would let you follow the dynamics of movement work. There’s also a lot of straight up silly fantastical stuff, like the Christmas Adventurers, which again was really funny and masterfully woven into realist portrayals of the police state.

I wouldn’t fully let PTA off the hook for some liberal affective sop though. The end, which was the most earnest and optimistic piece of it, felt deeply unconvincing and it was because that was the place he tried to reconcile the nonpolitical form of the movie with revolutionary possibility. He just isn’t interested enough in the latter for this to work. I agree with Sam Bodrojan’s excellent and measured piece that this is probably going to end up being the most important US film of the year, not because it's the best one but because it springs so directly from the zeitgeist. It’s self-assured, has heart, and its mockery of the left isn’t malicious. For most of the time you’re watching it, you feel in very capable hands. It’s not a political film but it belongs in a real way to our political moment. But because it doesn’t confront the moment, I suspect it just isn’t going to live deeply in my brain. A film that shows politics, even if it does so with some courage and tenderness, isn’t the same as a film that is politically animated. I’m going to need more from the moment than loving mockery, mild hope, and some breathing room for rage. I think I need to see the shaking-fist-at-the-heavens kind of rage you find coming out of postcolonial art and its sense of betrayal and despair. The last time I saw that in a contemporary film was probably in Sorry to Bother You and that was also incredibly funny! So yeah, I’m waiting for a truly feminist version of that film—a girl can dream.

Especially when excerpted, the book produces a lot of “well actually” statements: actually, that’s not love that’s possessiveness; that’s not love, that’s lust; that’s not love that’s sentiment. Other than being trite, this constricts the sphere for who does love correctly—most immigrant/global south parents fail by this standard, for example. Which is not to normalize abuse or cynically throw out aspirational models of loving. Better material conditions have a higher shot at producing better love, there's nothing mysterious about that. But something in me fiercely rebels against saying XYZ is not love. I think upheavals of raw, clawing feeling—however greedy, however delusional—are portals to complex, humbling experience, leading to failure and ultimately, wisdom. Some seeds of the ethical practice were always there in the feeling. Also, I don’t think I ever stopped believing in the classical practice of categorizing kinds of love. Attempts to define, such as hooks’ are profoundly necessary but I like it when variations in quality aren't tossed out of an entire category for being inadequate, or for threatening to corrupt the precious part of a value we hold dear. In the face of centuries of art and human history, I dare anyone to deny that a significant part of what we experience as and are tempted to call love is a kind of madness and feels like nothing else on earth. It’s pretty hysterical.

That’s what the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song “Hysteric” evokes so gorgeously—a sort of deranged calm and certainty, a feeling that everything on earth has been scrubbed clean and rendered transparent, and that there’s nothing you can’t do. These are the lyrics of the first half:

No longer, no longer
What you ask
Strange steps
Heels turned black

The cinders, the cinders
They light the path
And these strange steps
Take us back, take us back

Flow sweetly, hang heavy
You suddenly complete me
You suddenly complete me
Flow sweetly, hang heavy
You suddenly complete me
You suddenly complete me

Hysteric

Hysterical

It’s fascinating that this is a declaration of hard-earned commitment—walking over cinders suggests that work has gone into it—but appears as a moment of hysterical suddenness. Things that should feel difficult and painful no longer do; the body discovers unimaginable endurance in itself. And I’m struck especially by the first two lines: “no longer / what you ask”. At some point, you’re responding to the desire of the other without even knowing it. It doesn’t feel like you’re being asked, or tasked with, anything. (Lacanians, tell me what I should be appropriately quoting here.)

There’s a podcast I enjoy called 60 Songs that Explain the 90s; it did so well that it blew up way beyond 60 songs and has now moved on to the 2000s but it’s still called 60 Songs that Explain the 90s (I find this very funny). The host Rob Harvilla describes Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as simultaneously the most sentimental and the coolest of indie rockers. It’s true. “Maps,” with its tear-streaked music video and context is so vulnerable it’s almost claggy. But Karen O’s delivery never is, which is why the whole thing works. Whether she’s belting or gliding through soft, whispery realms, her phrasing maintains the precision of a carving knife. There’s also a nerviness that animates all her music, which reminds you that taut performances rely on repressed energy. Sometimes it is pleasurable when you notice the tightrope quiver, the walker's calf muscles strain. I mentioned Alynda Segarra’s leather jacket in an earlier post on watching Hurray for the Riff Raff live, but a leather jacket is a good example of something that’s cringe and cool at the same time. So are sunglasses. It’s too much, it’s tryhard; it’s effortlessly sharp and opaque. That’s what I get from Karen O.

To come back to “Hysteric”—I think what it describes is love, even if it’s not particularly edifying. I’m genuinely curious about how we’re going to start relating to embarrassingly large or ugly emotions in art as we all learn the language of therapy or analysis better. There’s an emotion I think about a lot: obhimaan or abhimaan. I can’t really translate it because the closest equivalent in English is a kind of petulant ressentiment and it really doesn’t capture the dignity or tenderness it’s allowed in our (Bengali) culture. It’s a tight-lipped, bristling woundedness that comes from the sheer unnameable pain of having to articulate the original injury to begin with. To feel and express it is usually the woman's lot. I would argue it’s the central emotion in Tagore. It’s certainly one that muddies love rather than makes it possible, and it is very much a function of heteropatriarchy at a given time and place, but it is the form given to emotional life in so much of the literature and it feels like potent stuff. I fear that it simply won’t be read the same way by a generation where the emotion itself is either minor or seen as something to be transcended. But why should it be so important to me that the obhimaan be taken seriously? Something to think through in another post, or on the couch, perhaps

The cover for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ It’s Blitz! album, where Hysteric is hiding out as a lesser-known gem

Something new and puzzling has definitely happened to my brain. Until very very recently, when I got depressed, all I wanted to do was vegetate and watch stupid reels, or message my friends, or luxuriate in touch—pet my dog, be held by my partner. These days, I find myself itching to read more of Capital. The seminar that’s holding me accountable and helping me compile my notes is at the end of a teaching day and I still look forward to it. I mentioned to another friend that reading Capital is healing my synapses. There’s a few reasons for this. One, is that I’m finally on the other side of decades-long anticipation and deferral. I’ve met my maker. All the excuses I made for myself earlier, for not reading it yet, are suddenly irrelevant and I don’t need to ready myself for anything more. That’s bound to be thrilling. I’m also doing this on the heels of reading Jameson, Lukacs and Hegel in a fairly sustained way, so the shape of dialectical thought is finally starting to feel somewhat tangible to me. But the other, perhaps most important reason is that it’s fucking GOOD.

I always knew Marx was a writer of great prose. Reading the Manifesto is all it takes to know that. I also read The Eighteenth Brumaire over the summer and was dazzled by the wit, elegance, prescience and lingering enigma of its historical analysis. The first few pages of it are certainly among Marx’s best writing—most of his iconic quotes are stacked in these 5 pages—and reading now about the “hog-headed” Louis XVIII, the nephew clown who won through bourgeois fear (of the proles) and subsequent capitulation to fascism, feels nothing short of uncanny. But when I think about the text as a whole, I’m finding Capital to be even better. It’s much slower, more technical, more abstract—but precisely for that reason it is also more magisterial, more generous to my train of thought, simultaneously a gentler guide to its own methods and more full of startling revelations and exposures. Characters bluster, lament, betray and assert themselves. Objects dance and dissolve, while substanceless phenomena congeal. I should clarify that Capital itself (the text) isn't necessarily more abstract. Capital, the subject matter, is. So the analysis itself lifts the veil of abstraction. The Eighteenth Brumaire also offers piercing insights into the confusing devolution of the French Revolution, refusing to leave it as a shapeless bog of incoherent crises but it is so thick with proper nouns, so charged with immediacy, that it can be hard to wade through that density into revelation. Moreover, the tools of narrative, when applied to what is already event, can feel so deliciously harmonious that it makes me ever so slightly wary, and reinjects seductive mystery against Marx’s own efforts. In the case of Capital, you start with the peculiar aura that hovers around commodities and get to the bottom of that uncanny appeal. Narrative technique gives you answers for the constant feeling of being askew, offbeat, a bit seasick in our society. If the Brumaire makes you laugh about the indignity of serving a clown monarch, then leaves you haunted by the nightmare of history we’re still trying to wake up from, Capital starts with sheer perplexion at a commodified existence, then relief at finally having an explanation, and then angry laughter at the unfair absurdity of it all. At least this was the order of my experience in both cases.

Marx’s moral indignation only makes him funnier and more powerful. The whole thing (capitalism) is absurd and sublime. It is tragedy and farce in the very same moment. It is an endless unraveling of yards of linen, no less urgent or full of near-fatal chasms than Holmes chasing Moriarty. It really is novelistic.

All of this is to say—I wish someone had told me that it’s THIS good. Maybe I wouldn’t have been ready for it before, I don’t know if this is hindsight tricking me. But I think the sheer power of the prose would have pulled me along even when I was younger. I’m still not great at time management and even worse at math/economics. My reading is erratic, I’m not always able to keep up with the seminar. But I’m having the time of my life. Vol. 1 really should be compulsory reading for English departments, and if the nature of our semesters and courses thwart such a course, more fool us! If you’re thinking of diving in, just do it. Especially if you have a literary sensibility. I promise you it’ll be worth it.

P.S. It’s funny that this is the summer I started running and reading Marx seriously for the first time and at the same time decided to mostly get off Instagram and Facebook. Any other year I would have been posting my way through my personal hot girl summer. If a tree falls and no one hears it etc. But I shall simply have to preserve this power for people around me <3 (Before any of you run away with ideas, there’s been plenty of heartbreak and bullshit too. I am humbled by life just like anyone else. I just happen to have found a nice thick raft for now.)

It was inspired by Mary Toft, the woman from the 18th c. English countryside, who pulled off one of the greatest medical hoaxes ever known. She convinced doctors that she was giving birth to rabbits. But they were dead rabbits that only emerged in sorry mutilated bits. What the doctors thought of as a series of miscarriages (plausible, given the monstrous aberration) was actually Mary pushing out severed rabbit parts that her husband had previously helped her stuff up her vagina. I know, Holy Kegels, and everything else you’re probably thinking. This post writes engagingly about it—one of the wildest details it mentions is Mary’s talent for faking contractions, giving the impression of a seething uterus. Turns out the woman could clench in multiple places! Dexter Palmer also has a rich, if not entirely successful historical novel centered on the incident. They’re both worth reading.

That poem, though. All I can concretely recall is that it was gorgeously musical and spilling over with rabbit puns—phrases like “lapful of lappins” come to mind. It was also the first poem I read that I thought used the word “cunt” to marvellous effect. There was something so profoundly mystical and profane about it, or I suppose the mystical has always harboured the profane in a way orthodoxy cannot. I’m not even sure if the poem indicated that the rabbits were dead. It may have taken some romantic liberties and reimagined Mary as someone who was actually birthing whole, limber, live rabbits. Fluffy white rabbits who leaped about her with the jittery vitality that rabbits have. The bleakness of the original story is probably more politically interesting. It’s haunted by wealth disparity in an age of faltering early modern science and industry, and torn apart into the classic realms of town and country, while conveying a subtler seepage between belief, superstition, and empirical observation. (I wish a novel on it had existed early enough for Raymond Williams to write about.) In fact, what I remember about Palmer’s novel the most is a scene, not involving Toft at all, but set in the London Liberties, where a man signed up to eat a live cat for a ridiculous sum of money. Of course no human had ever bested the cat and this was no different. The economic desperation and grotesquerie of the scene is seared into my brain. But there’s something to be said for the dreamy folktale vision of it too, that the poem offered—the physical excesses of rabbit upon rabbit bursting forth from a woman conveyed something about the strangeness of actual pregnancy and birth. I use past tense for a reason. After years of browsing contemporary lit mags in the quest for original gems, this random find still lingers in my memory as singular, but Softblow is now gone and so is the poem. I really really want to retrieve it!! If anyone can help me retrace it, I’ll be so grateful.

This got me thinking about how the weirdness of rabbits makes for excellent literature beyond the Mary Toft mythology. I see rabbits all the time in the midwest and there is something disconcerting about the perfectly spherical staring eye, the sheer skittishness that somehow belies as well as sets off all that long-legged muscle. Uncanny, like a softer version of the ripped kangaroos. There’s that Roald Dahl story, “Georgy Porgy,” where a child watches a rabbit mother swallow her babies whole (maternity horror once again, playing off rabbits’ propensity to reproduce)! He grows up to be a man who is eventually swallowed by a woman and lives out his years in her stomach, even meeting other men in there. Is this an indulgence or a skewering of male self-fulfilling anxiety? Hard to say without taking up the text more closely but it is one of Dahl’s more interesting adult stories I think, getting at the horrifying textures of life more than trafficking in gratuitous cruelty.

My favourite creepy rabbit story however is Virginia Woolf’s “Lappin and Lapinova.” It's propelled by a yarn that a newlywed couple lovingly spins together, assigning each other the characters of King and Queen Rabbit and narrating their own lives through the magical prism of these creatures. I don’t want to spoil the story but I also don’t believe great literature can be spoiled so I’ll go all the way and quote the ending (if you want, though, you can stop here and go read the story. It’s only a few minutes’ reading, and the turn in atmosphere from swooning romance to clammy terror is splendid):

“Sitting in the dark?” he said.

“Oh, Ernest, Ernest!” she cried, starting up in her chair.

“Well, what’s up, now?” he asked briskly, warming his hands at the fire.

“It’s Lapinova . . .” she faltered, glancing wildly at him out of her great startled eyes. “She’s gone, Ernest. I’ve lost her!”

Ernest frowned. He pressed his lips tight together. “Oh, that’s what’s up, is it?” he said, smiling rather grimly at his wife. For ten seconds he stood there, silent; and she waited, feeling hands tightening at the back of her neck.

“Yes,” he said at length. “Poor Lapinova . . .” He straightened his tie at the looking-glass over the mantelpiece.

“Caught in a trap,” he said, “killed,” and sat down and read the newspaper.

So that was the end of that marriage.

This image lasted in the cultural imagination for a long time. At least long enough for the diagram to update the central zone as “umami,” which was an unknown term for me when I was growing up. It’s also really funny that this enhanced cosmopolitan precision was still, at its core, fake science. I love the idea that a big central stretch of juicy tongue was just going unused through huge parts of the Americas and Europe, according to the western norms of biology 101. Not a good look for those cuisines in the taste wars. Whenever either my brother or I bring up this diagram with each other, and it’s been years now, we reliably dissolve into cackles of disbelief.

I understand the taxonomic and cartographic impulse. Yes, it’s a lowly form of science (and sometimes, as in this case, not science at all though, today’s science is tomorrow’s pseudoscience). Yes, it’s rigid and reductive and is without a doubt the bedrock of casteist and racist thinking. No categories exist entirely free of a value system and values tend to fall into high-low arrangements. There's always a type that is more of a social and economic liability than others. But I get the need to understand the world’s overwhelming swirl of substance in terms of category differences or zones of distinction. Differences that are at least somewhat predictable; boundaries that are just distinct enough that we can talk about preferences, variations, transformative interactions between different entities. That is to say, these are all paraphernalia for systemic thinking, and allow us to narrate and refine the conditions of our knowledge and sensibility. There are few people who don't find it fun, either to argue over the fine lines between genres or to simplemindedly sort the world into them.

And yet, some forms of pseudoscientific categories feel more commonsensical than others. Even though I’m a hater of most things woowoo, I have no doubt that I would have been really into humour theory if I were born into a time when it had capital, or more likely, the ayurvedic theory of dosha if I had less reason to be allergic to Hinduism (the religion I was born into, just to clarify). To be a hormonal body at all is to experience yourself as an ongoing chemical equation. You so rapidly lose the sense of physical integrity (which seems to be a necessary container for psychic integrity) that you reimagine your boundaries as a competition between fluids that churn and simmer at different moods. It is so seductive to declare yourself a sluggish servant of phlegm, or possessed for a moment by a flaming leap of blood. For years though, I simply couldn’t understand why we were so committed to the fake tongue-science. Maybe it’s because the tongue is, if you really think about it, a nightmarishly weird object. It is at once imbued with an outsize power to bring entire worlds and laws into existence, and a floppy, fleshy, salivating pink thing with which we feel out matter that sustains us. I suppose to mark it and map it provides a sense of safety. After all, the human relationship to food and speech is kind of mad, in the way it mixes necessity with the most gratuitous excesses for their own sake.

What I really want to do with all of these thoughts is write an episode for a Derry Girls-style TV show set in an Indian, English-medium all girls school. I’m never actually going to make that show because I couldn’t be further from the world of TV if I tried , but the way I imagine it is as follows:

Word goes around in school that the entry level science textbook has it wrong about tastebuds—there’s no zones on the tongue for different flavours! This sets off a crisis. Half the students insist that they’ve experienced it themselves, that their candy tastes sweeter near the tip of the tongue, that they know a freak addicted to sour who squeezes lemons onto the designated sites to experience the acidic kick more fully, that they make sure never to let medicine or a bitter gourd stew linger at the back of their mouth. The other half explode into righteous triumph—they knew it was bullshit all along! Lunch break burgeons into a full-blown experiment. Students all across classes 3-8 participate in setting up tasting booths armed with survey material. Those in class 9 and upwards are too cool to care about any of this but the secretly curious sneak into the scene anyway. Some kind of chaos ensues, teachers get involved, the whole affair provokes some compelling if gnarly insights into bodies, etc. etc. I think it would be a lot of fun! If such a TV show never happens (and Mindy Kaling you’re not allowed, you’re colonized by the current overlords not the old ones) maybe someone should just write it as part of a Ruskin Bond-esque short story collection. That’s something I may actually do someday. You saw it here first.

Doing something new this time! This is a piece I half-heartedly tried to publish but I’m not sure it fits into most lit mags and I think this is a better place for it. It’s a lightly fictionalized account of a colourful character in my life, in a particularly transitional phase for both of us. I hope you enjoy it!

I don’t exactly remember the sequence of events when she ran away for the first time. To be honest, she’d started this habit of running away when I wasn’t around, but it never felt real from afar. The news would travel to Julio from his parents and then to me, and it took a while to seep through the clutter of my student life into my deepest pit of horror. By then, she was usually home again. This was before our whole dynamic changed. Julio got a new job in his hometown of Roy, moved back with his parents for a bit, and was able to give her the attention they couldn’t after nightshifts and side hustles. She would have been about three years old then.

Julio was weighing the perks of renting an apartment soon or waiting to buy a house that would serve us in the long run. When I flew in to visit Julio a few months after his move, we debated the options. I didn’t want to live in Utah all my life and property scared me. We had a nice set up, really, but the idea of living with your boyfriend’s parents for years was slightly discomfiting. As we tossed our options around, the pandemic hit. News of the virus streamed in from everywhere and when my classes went virtual, I decided not to fly back to Indiana. We wound up spending months together—the whole family, including her. It gave Julio and me a lot of comfort to lie in silence, hearing her breathe next to us as our streets lay empty and our minds raged with thoughts of contagion in every corner. I started loving her like she was my baby. Julio told me that he started loving her more after watching me. She prefers him to me because she’s an asshole.

Her name was Carmencita—the product of parental whimsy. It was a lot to say all at once so we started calling her Chucha. It was slang for dog. Just dog, no descriptor, which I thought was hilarious until we discovered that this simplicity lends itself to some extreme uses. A quick Google search would have told us that among some speakers of Spanish, it means vagina or body odour, or both. Apparently, people also use it to curse out loud when life isn’t going their way. Chucha! A fellow Bengali pointed out that it sounds like the word for rat in our native language. Do some syllables sound obscene in every culture? Anyway, I remember the time Julio called her Chucha when it was still new, and she came bounding from the next room. His dad scratched his head and simply said, “You changed her name!” I thought it was a one-off moment, but Chucha was smart enough to grow into her new name and still respond to the original. It’s easy to forget how smart she is because she acts like such a fool.

She moos, for one. I suppose you could call it a grunt, but a moo is a more accurate description for the sound. Drawn out, dramatic, and mildly disgruntled. You would think it came from the depths of a big leather pouch. She rarely barks and when she does, it tends to be one sharp burst of indignation. She used it whenever she was left out in the backyard for being mean to Rosa, the older dog who couldn’t figure out why a brash young thing had been sent to plague her in her final years.

Chucha has other sounds in her artillery. If anyone walking near her ends up a few steps ahead, she dissolves into a flurry of tugs and pitiful whines until she’s allowed to catch up. These days we try not to humor her but we’re grateful for all the progress she’s made, in that we’re thankful she walks at all. When she was younger, she wouldn’t put her feet in front of each other but instead do a series of little leaps that jolted the leash, as though she were a rabbit trapped in the body of a dog. More than one passerby has paused with the intimation of saying hello to her, only to look baffled and shuffle away. It was a shame because a dog as pretty as Chucha would have been the pride of the neighborhood under any other circumstances.

A black double-coat and luxury-tail, white feet, a slim, vertical white streak between the eyes that spread around the snout, where it was tinged with blushing pink. White chest and belly too, with an almost galactic abundance when she lay on her back. In her infancy, her colours were a little more confused but she was a winning combination of smallness and heft in a soft furry body. No wonder Julio’s parents, holed up in a large, dark house mid-winter, rushed to say yes when some distant relative sent them photos of this puppy up for adoption, thought you might be interested no pressure. Rosa had been a dream dog after all—happy to run around or chew on bones in the spacious backyard, able to communicate her few and dwindling needs by thwacking her tail at a steady beat against a nearby door or wall. Could a new dog hurt? Chucha, or Carmencita as she was called at the time, was a quiet and affectionate puppy. We petted her during the holidays and watched her frolic in the snow from the other side of a misty glass pane. Rosa hovered around her with furrowed brows, ready to retreat when her annoyance peaked. Julio and I took several cute photos of the dogs (but mostly of the puppy) and went back to our own lives when the holidays were over.

As Carmencita grew up, it was clear that she’d been passed onto Julio’s parents with scant to questionable information. Those relatives told us later that she had a brother who bullied her a lot and was having trouble getting adopted because of his vigour. Both the bullying and the separation upset her. We relegated this small sad detail to a blurry past but once she started running away it seemed like significant backstory. Also, Julio’s parents were told that their new puppy was a mix of Husky and German Shepherd. This was unlikely. Her face was distinctly bear-shaped rather than sharp and wolfish like either of those breeds, and her ears stayed floppy into adulthood. Not that it was an issue. If anything, we would have done well to treat her like the high maintenance dog that they said she was. Instead, she spent the first two years of her life running half-wild in the backyard, chasing birds and digging holes, and alternating between the roles of Rosa’s victim and bully.

She didn’t really lack much outside. There was always a bowl full of dogfood, and another with reasonably fresh water. There were plenty of shaded nooks in the backyard where she could attend to nature’s call in privacy. But Julio’s parents never trained her. In addition to their jobs, they worked almost every waking hour maintaining the house that had once held around ten people and now weighed heavy on its three occupants. And there were always ailing relatives who, no matter how distant, had familiar stories about the war and fears about visas. The truth was simply that Julio’s parents were too tired for any kind of hothouse caretaking.

They didn’t think of animals as friends either. Julio’s mom (or Hermana as I call her) grew up in the campos, as she keeps reminding us, where animals lived strictly within the borders of the farmyard and its atmosphere of bustling pragmatism. Julio’s dad (who remains unshakably “Julio’s dad’ in my head) had more experience of pets in the city but not so much of explicit tenderness towards them. That was the territory of rich white people. I suspect Julio’s dad has some unresolved questions about this premise because we frequently spot him talking to the dogs when he thinks no one is around. Who knows what he says to them. Around us, he always jokes about putting the dogs to sleep. In my home planet we did not act so sweet with dogs, he tells us, right before giving them a juicy bone from the beef he had carved the night before.

When Julio moved back home and I ended up there during the pandemic, we were surprised at the now full-grown dog’s capacity for intimacy. Whereas earlier she was content to explore the backyard, she would now hurl herself against the door in her eagerness to join us inside. Julio and I could not so much as cuddle on the bed without her springing onto the pillows and towering above our heads, her hot breath reaching us in the force of excitement. It was appalling, but also a symptom of an otherwise gratifying attachment. Who knew she had so much love to give, I kept saying. Julio, we can’t abandon her if we go somewhere else. She knows what it’s like to be loved back. She’d be miserable if we snatched it away from her. Julio nodded sagely. The evolution of Carmencita into Chucha felt symbolic of the tenderness we’d introduced into her life. So when she ran away after that, I felt almost breathless from betrayal.

It had happened when Hermana was out in the backyard with Chucha and Emilio (her two-year old grandson). The pandemic was still on. Emilio’s family was working from home and got their groceries delivered to their doorstep, so Hermana insisted that it was safe for her to spend one day of the week with her grandson. How many times could she clean the house or cheer for the blue team on Excatlon without losing her mind? The arrangement was risky, but I was glad Emilio got to make these little excursions because he was growing up to be such a hermit. He was a small, solemn child with almost translucent skin that had to be slathered thickly with sunscreen before he spent time outdoors. If anyone aside from his parents made eye-contact with him, he would try to fling himself on the floor in order to block out their existence entirely. His abuela was a notable exception. With her, he was quick to break into a smile, displaying both rows of his distinct little teeth with even gaps between them. The only other recipient of this smile was Chucha. Emilio was mesmerized by her lush coat and how her nose resembled a big black button. He learnt to transform his tight little grip on her fur into a calm caress, but nothing could dissuade him from trying to feel out the mechanics of her nose.

Emilio, Chucha, and Julio’s mom were a perfect trio. Emilio loved both human and dog, Hermana loved Emilio and tolerated Chucha, and Chucha liked Hermana but adored Emilio. On the child’s weekend visits, all three of them would enjoy their mornings in the backyard. Julio’s mom trimmed the bushes, adjusted the sprinklers, and scooped up the waste while Emilio and Chucha wandered happily in the vicinity, sometimes colliding and sometimes taking cues from each other, like the time they both snapped their jaws in an attempt to eat a bee. On one of those mornings, someone had approached the backdoor—most likely a missionary.

The door was far enough across the yard that Hermana didn’t feel comfortable leaving the child unattended. She lifted him up and approached the visitor. As she fumbled with the bolt of the gate, two-year old in tow, she felt something heavy shoot past her. She didn’t see much. The gate, swinging wildly, the bolt jutting out at an awkward angle, a minor collision in black and white. Chucha!

My first instinct on hearing this report was to retreat into the bedroom, while Julio and his mom resumed the search. As I heard their anxious voices bounce off each other, I could feel a shapeless lump of anger well up inside me. I wasn’t sure who it was directed at—Chucha, or Hermana, or Mormon missionaries. I knew none of those options were entirely fair. By the time I emerged from my sulk, Julio had already gone out with his car. My anger then turned to guilt. When Julio returned with no news, I insisted that he take me with him for another round of searching. Go slower, I hissed, how will I see anything at this pace? Julio reminded me he’d already searched the area several times over. We contemplated walking. It was extremely hot, but wasn’t this the least we could do for her?

When we returned home, we realized the mood had changed. Sure enough, there was Chucha sitting next to a bowl of water. She was panting and there were foamy splotches of water all around the bowl, hinting at the speed with which she had lapped it up. She had come back herself once she was too hot and exhausted to keep exploring. I wanted to hit her but if anyone else had done it, I would have hit them instead. How do you punish a runaway dog? Send her outside, and relive her disappearance? Ignore her, and defer the joyous reunion? She had the better of us and there was nothing we could do about it.

You really could take like, 10 more minutes to be mad at her, Julio said. What? I haven’t even done anything! Julio rolled his eyes. It’s written all over your face. You’ve already forgiven her.

***

The next time was worse. It was winter and I was leaving Roy. The universities had stubbornly defied the pandemic and reopened in the Fall. Thankfully, I didn’t have to teach that semester but life was slowly trickling back into the campus. Much of it was forced, much of it cautiously willful. From what I could gather, a new and special warmth fuelled these voluntary motions—advisors met with their students over cups of tea on their back porch, my roommate who I’d left alone for months got together with our friends for little lunches at a random table in the field between our apartment blocks. The Shelter, they called it, giggling at the morbid, clandestine sexiness of the whole affair. I wanted to be a part of it. At some point, I knew Julio and I would end up in the same place but we didn’t want to be rushed into exclusivity by the pandemic. These thoughts were brewing in both of our minds when we travelled two hours out to Logan to see Runa in the week before my departure. We drove till the papery blue and silver of the distant Wasatch mountains drew closer and rounded out into domes with knotted bushes.

Runa was a new friend—an international student like me and the only person I’d met in Utah who shared my mother tongue. She was radiant, aggressively affectionate, always itching to do something new, and had a knack for probing conversations when you coaxed her away from the conventional self-introductions that presided at American gatherings. I knew how important those headlong conversations were to intimacy and how important true intimacy was to survival in America. Our night at Logan was more or less what I expected. We drank a lot, talked about exes and sex and mothers. We argued a little about our relationships to the homeland—Runa said she was starting to identify more and more with the diaspora, and it made me pricklier than I expected. I tried to charm her skittish cat into friendship. Somewhere at the back of my mind I knew this was all building up to something. I was giving myself intimations of a life in this country, one that would include Julio as an essential piece but stretch beyond him, beyond expectations of an American rebirth, even beyond mawkish longing for a singular home. We slept in the same bed for warmth, with Runa’s cat darting around the house like a poltergeist.

The three of us rose early next day, immediately and thoroughly awake in the way one is after a giddy night. We decided to grant ourselves a mellow morning—just scrambled eggs, coffee, and some leisurely work before we said our goodbyes. That’s when Julio got the call. He didn’t have to translate for me after he hung up. I knew Chucha had run away again. Our car ride back was the longest two hours I’ve experienced. I could feel all my petty instincts bubbling up again, threatening to spill over into questions like, How could she do this to us?, and How could we do this to her? and Why is Runa so important to you anyway?, and How do Americans live like this, driving for half their lives? I swallowed the bile and suggested a podcast to fill the vacuum but it almost sent Julio to sleep and we switched to his usual hip hop instead. I was sick of it, and sick of the mountains too. I imagined Chucha having a good time rolling in the snow, maybe even making friends with some children. I imagined her sprawled and bleeding by the highway. I wished I knew that it was the first one for sure so I could make my peace and move on. Julio sensed my shifting mood. Do you want to listen to something else? No, I sniffed, the rapper angst is kind of cathartic actually.

When we got to Roy, we decided to search on foot from the start this time. We went up and down the highway that Chucha would bolt on unswervingly each time she escaped. I was stunned to discover how many pawprints punctured the snowy pavements. I looked around at the houses and almost every single one looked like it could have a dog. Most of them did. When we went on walks in the summer, we would pass by many a yard with a huge dog and an American flag, menacing even when veiled by watery arcs shooting from sprinklers onto uncannily green grass. Now, only the flags and sprinklers were out. What a strange world I had entered, one of Utahn homeowners with front yards like empires, who walked their dogs for a few minutes by the bald highway with cars murderously whizzing past, before retreating to their dominions. I still wanted to believe I could track the pawprints. Surely all those years of reading Holmes and Christie had done something. I tried to gauge size, direction, clarity, all the crucial clues, and it impressed Julio a little but brought us no closer to truth. After following a variety of trails down different alleys, we gave up. It was almost entirely dark.

Collapsed on the bed from exhaustion and entwined in our mutual misery, Julio and I began the dreary task of posting on social media pages for missing animals. It was all spectacularly depressing, and I tried my best not to look at the other posts. Hermana came to check in on us. Carmencita is very smart, she said. She still used the old name. She is fine, don’t worry so much. She narrated something with gusto in Spanish and they laughed together before she left. This one time Chucha ran away, he translated for me, and she didn’t return the whole night. Turned out she was just fine, someone found her going in and out of the automatic doors at the gas station store and took her to the shelter. They called us the next day and we went and got her. I had to admit it, the image of Chucha going in and out of the doors like a wind-up toy was ridiculous. As I giggled to myself, Julio glanced at his phone and yelped. Someone had found Chucha.

The rest of the evening was a blur as we pieced together the whole story of Chucha’s disappearance before jolting back into immediate action. Last night, as we were on our way to Logan, a young lady had almost hit a large dark shape on the highway. Unnerved but also conscience-stricken, she’d pulled over, appealed to Chucha’s curiosity, and somehow got her into the car and took her home. She posted about it on social media with a photo of Chucha, and it was only when we did the same, almost 24 hours later, that someone connected the dots. The rescuer (or abductor if you will) wasn’t home when we called but she told us to get in touch with her dad, who sent us fresh proof that Chucha was with them. A photo of a skinny teen, sitting with her arm around a familiar black and white bulkiness. My younger daughter is in love, the man texted me. Your dog is adorable. Come get her anytime. What’s her name again?

We arrived at the house in a few minutes. It was an imposing structure, and as we approached the door, we heard the sounds of barking. It wasn’t Chucha. The door opened and a tall, elderly white man opened the door. Behind him, a lady of similar age gently restrained a sleek but agitated hound of some kind. One minute, the man said. Alice! They’re here. He had shouted out the last bit across the room and he now turned to us with an indulgent smile on his face. As you can see, we already have a dog but Alice isn’t satisfied with that anymore. She wants one “for herself.” Alice came out a room with… yes it was Chucha alright! Neither her face nor her frame showed traces of regret. She’d had a great day and was now happy to see us. I don’t see the problem, her stance said. You’ve clearly done a good job with me, people love me and I’m happy to go back home with you.

We have something for you, the dad said as we put the leash on Chucha. He handed us a small round metal piece. It had Chucha’s name engraved on it, and what I recognized as my phone number. Julio and I looked back up at the man with wonder and gratitude. 3-D printed, he said proudly. Have a great evening. Right before we left, I caught a glimpse of Alice’s expression. Her mouth was a curly line of suppressed sorrow. It was right out of a cartoon. Maybe it was forgivable to like rich people for a month, or a week—however long the sense of gratitude bubbled beside the memory of temporary loss.

***

I was back in Indiana. As I started teaching and writing, Julio started training—or learning how to train—Chucha at a group class. A bit of research had shown him that running away was often a result of insufficient training. Doordashing, they called it. Julio had initially signed her up for puppy classes, so effectively had she crushed his faith in her, but the trainer had told him he was being stupid. Does she poop in the house?, she had asked. No, no she doesn’t, Julio had conceded. Well then… don’t get ripped off through your own efforts!

I always looked forward to the post-training phone call. About eight people and their adult dogs of varying sizes gathered every week inside a PetCo, navigating the aisles under the guidance of Nat. Nat had short, hot-pink hair and an irreverent warmth. She and everyone else soon noticed that Chucha was more easily distracted than average dogs. Birds had a magnetic pull on her, and small dogs too. Once a person turned up with a group of guinea pigs at PetCo during the training and Chucha lost all semblance of self-possession. Apparently she wanted to herd them—a noble instinct but it only made her look ridiculous in the moment.

Nat was very nice about it all, Julio told me. So much so, that she occasionally sounded like the leader of a workshop in progressive pedagogy. I think your dog is neurodivergent, she’d said to him. I couldn’t believe it. Nat said what? Julio was deeply amused. Yeah, neurodivergent. Not my words. I wasn’t sure how I felt that about that. Would we need a diagnosis? Was it fair to use the same terminology for dogs as we do for humans? Fair to whom?

She was learning things though. Every second or third class she walked through the aisles a little longer before going off track. She was able to slow down. Julio personalized some of the instructions into Spanish. “Sigue!” for leave it. And “atraz” shortened into “tra!” for come back. He borrowed that one from reggaeton where it meant back it up, a little inside joke which gave him far too much joy. To give him credit, the gunshot force of tra tra seemed to work like magic on Chucha. Julio was proud of her halting progress. We now had a dog full of personality who wouldn’t bring shame and only shame upon us.

Once Chucha crossed a few milestones, Nat recommended walks in the dog park. The idea was to keep her on the leash as she slowly got used to the presence of other dogs—the sight, the variety, the rough woof and tumble of them. I was reminded of my friend’s dog Elsa back in Kolkata, a dainty Spitzer who used to go on walks in the park and pause at the precise corner where she ran into Sher Khan, a male Alsatian. The way my friend described it, Elsa would sit on her hind legs and close her eyes in bliss as Sher Khan drooled on her lightly from his magisterial height. I was curious who Chucha might befriend. It would take a while, perhaps long enough that I would be settled in Utah by then. It was something to look forward to, although American dog parks unsettled me a little with their spirit of bright bourgeois affability.

Julio didn’t account for one thing: that no matter what Chucha’s state of training was, others might want to befriend her. She received a flattering amount of attention, especially when people were eager to show off how sociable their dogs were. Once Chucha had proven herself capable of handling the sniffs and glances, Julio grew less tense. Why don’t you take her off the leash for short periods of time?, Nat recommended.

One afternoon my phone buzzed violently for a minute and I saw Julio had sent several voice notes to the family group chat. That was rarely a good sign. Sure enough, the minute-long audio recordings built up an agonizingly choppy narrative of what I would call attempted murder if we had a clear social contract for dogs. Chucha was off the leash at the dog park. She had wandered towards a group of small dogs, also untethered, who found her a striking presence. Some of them circled her curiously, the braver ones darted back and forth in play, a couple were on the verge of brawling but thought better of it when she looked at them. Elated, Chucha moved towards a chihuahua slightly further away. A middle-aged lady hovered benevolently over their introductory rituals but despite her encouragement, the chihuahua wasn’t thrilled. As Julio got closer to the two dogs, he could tell the chihuahua was barking with the full existential force of his miniature frame. Then someone snapped first, most likely the chihuahua in a fit of misguided daring, but any possible error on his part was outdone by Chucha’s aggression. Without making a sound she had him in her grip and the sanguine atmosphere of the dog park transformed into a blood-flecked blur. Julio wasn’t sure how long it took him to react. He remembered stepping in and prising Chucha’s jaw away while concerned onlookers circled him and screams of Sammy! floated in from what seemed to be a great distance. At some point, the lady had the bleeding dog in her arms and the crowd interrogated Julio. They turned sympathetic fairly soon. It’s not your fault, we can tell she’s a dog in training. You had to take a risk. Julio nodded, dazed. He gave the lady his number. I’ll pay for any treatment. Back in his car, he heaved, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Chucha sat by him, puffed with pride until he elbowed her face away in anger.

I hadn’t heard Julio this dejected in a while. The gloom lasted through the week despite a conversation with his therapist. She’s a bad dog but a good animal, you know?, Julio said. I mean, she has a sense of pride and curiosity, those are good things right? I just didn’t think she’d attack a dog that much weaker than her. The therapist told him that his tortured oscillations sounded uncannily similar to parents of children stigmatized for their behavioural issues. If anything helped shift the mood, it was the news that the injuries weren’t fatal or disabling. The lady was mostly grateful for Julio’s decency, she just needed to vent a little. It happened on his birthday too, she texted. Poor Sammy Davis Jr. That was his whole name. The whole incident was so bleak that it took us ages to recognize that the chihuahua was named after the famous entertainer from the mid-twentieth century’s Black arts scene. Now that we know, we feel ashamed, as though we called Sammy Davis Jr. a dog. It has however added a surreal glaze to the whole event.

***

I wish I could say that things got better from there. They did in a sense because Chucha hasn’t hurt anyone since but she never stopped running away. It happened several more times, when I was away and when I was in Utah for visits. Once, Julio saw her dart out of the front door and chased her for two miles before his tenacity startled her into submission. Another time when we had gone to bed after a fruitless search, she returned at midnight, waking us up with unusually furious barking. She was caked in mud, desperately hungry, and her spirits seemed wilted. Julio suspected that she’d fallen into the dried-up creek. We hoped that would teach her a lesson. It didn’t. Another time she slipped out of the door during a Christmas party when some elders were performing a classic immigrant goodbye. A group of us split up, with Julio running straight after her and the rest of us overtaking her in a car and trapping her between us. She returned four minutes before the New Year, shame-faced and spilling gracelessly out of Julio’s arms. Everyone who had stayed back, cheered. We asked them not to encourage her so they immediately booed. Chucha never knew the difference. She started wagging her tail.

One morning, Julio and I were in the backyard with her, Hermana, and Emilio. Chucha had disappeared for a bit the previous day. It was as uneventful as it could be under the circumstances. She spent the whole night in the backyard as punishment and things were now back to normal. It was a dazzling summer day with a breeze that softened the sun to perfection. I sat on the grass stroking Chucha’s belly as Julio and his mother talked about the incident. Hermana was bewildered by Chucha’s perverse proclivities. We give her everything. La perra tiene todo. Que mas quiere? Without thinking, or maybe forced by my limited Spanish, I found myself making a more dramatic defence than I’d anticipated: el mundo. The world, she wants to see the world.

Because of that, it was a pleasure to discover recently that Alynda Segarra, who fronts my beloved Hurray for the Riff Raff, is another such artist. They performed in the city I live in now, and though I’ve been watching their live show schedule like a hawk, I had no idea they’d moved into this city last year and now call it their own! Segarra, with their leather pants and enviable muscles, can make bangs look badass. They also have a palpable sweetness! They embody the very intersection that makes archetypal folk-rock: the warm timelessness of one and the brash urgency of the other. Folk, while being scrappier—maybe because it’s scrappier—produces the lean, feather-light melodies, while rock, with its access to technological cleanness allows for more edge and clashing layers. At folk-rock’s best, which hinges substantially on shared politics, the two catalyze each other. The venue was clearly more used to acoustic setups, which worried me for a minute because in the first song, it felt like the instruments were going to drown out Segarra’s voice but they found their balance very soon. Like I said, they perform with their whole mouth, and it makes a difference.

For anyone who was new to this band, it was imperative that they got to listen to the writing. This was especially true for “Precious Cargo,” a song from 2022 that straddles first-person narrative and vignette, about immigrants being detained at the border. I thought Segarra pulled off a truly transcendent version of this—easily their quietest song of the set since it rises just barely above a whisper and has the faintest hint of a melody. I taught its lyrics in a class once, where we talked about the artist’s choice to say ICE not as one word, but by spelling it out in letters, one by one: “I-C-E” the chorus goes, “I hate you oh I-C-E.” Students initially went to the obvious place, that it reflects the speaker’s estrangement from English and enhances how alienating the US can be, but we ended up at what I think is the more powerful effect, which is how it estranges us from the humdrum familiarity of the word “ice” itself and reintroduces the terror and deliberation behind its construction. It’s a song that allows life-altering confusion and resentment to breathe in quiet fury, without being hamstrung by sentimentality.

My next words probably constitute a betrayal of my scholarly commitment to literature, but I typically don’t care about lyrics when I’m listening to an artist or album the first few times. If I love the sound, I’ll love the music, and if I then also love the lyrics, it’ll catapult to my personal hall of fame. If the sound can’t reel me in, I’m not sure I’ll stick around for the words. I think songwriting follows different principles from most other literary techniques—for example, I think you can write a truly great song with stupid or sparse or repetitive lyrics; I also think bad spoken word poems can become good songs with the right introduction of melody and percussion. It’s the alchemy of the whole, and how one’s body receives the song in its totality, that counts. Of course there’s such a thing as a facile melody, or a beat that fails to galvanize, in which case it’s a failed song (to me). But it has little to do with complexity per se.

I saw an article floating about here that was using the word Sally Rooney-fication to describe a phenomenon of hailing talented, perfectly fine artists as pathbreaking, but using it to talk about the indie musician MJ Lenderman (who the writer enjoys—just not as much as Lenderman’s inspirations, primarily, Neil Young). I had trouble with that argument because the sheer duration of a novel makes the experience of a perfectly fine novel very different from a perfectly fine album. Also, a novel I think is just fine in the slightly bloodless, glazed, disaffected way that a Rooney novel is fine, simply isn’t comparable to an album that’s also ultimately just fine but makes me move or sing along or feel a little choked up. “Not great” is a giant umbrella, with room for works where that tag is a complaint, and others where it’s irrelevant because they’ve hit the libidinal goal. I don’t think Agatha Christie is as great a novelist as Charles Dickens, or that Charli XCX is as great a musical artist as Cyndi Lauper, but it’s not an argument I’d bother making even against people who think otherwise, because of the ways the former’s work thoroughly satisfies and even invigorates me. Sure, it can be alienating for everyone to talk about an artist like the next Neil Young when you’re simply not convinced that’s true, but I have two questions for them: a) Would you always rather listen to Neil Young? (Isn’t the lilting “Heart of Gold” also unbearably self-indulgent at times? Bob Dylan hated it, gotta give the old bastard credit where it’s due.) Do you have no relationship to the present that you need satisfied differently? And b) do you think anyone in the contemporary version of industry and markets could be the next Neil Young? Would fame simply even work the same way?

Here’s a thought. There’s a clear rhetorical pathway for declaring someone doesn’t deserve their greatness (capital can confer iconicity, it’s true), but it’s actually tricky to say you’re convinced someone is truly great if there isn’t social consensus on it. Just as there’s “lyric shame” (Gillian White’s theory of American subject-driven poetry and its inherent embarrassment), there’s shame in loving indie. It feels foolish to believe that a niche little darling of twee publications actually is making some of the greatest songs of the generation. But I really truly believe that of Hurray for the Riff Raff! Their last album, The Past is Still Alive, was my partner’s gateway to white people music. We gifted it to each other, magi-like, for Christmas and one of us had to return it!!

I want to just throw out some moments from The Past that shock me with how good the writing is. Combined with the band’s musicality, the songs are nothing short of anthemic. I was sitting in the audience reliving these convictions and feeling a little crazy that I wasn’t surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of people who felt that way. Compared to another folk-rock powerhouse, Waxahatchee, who I also adore and who has a much bigger fanbase/media support, I think Hurray manages to escape being buried by the gorgeous cascade of personal detail and that they filter their songs through a more historically profound and large-hearted vision of the world. All this without being precious. The problem isn’t in propaganda but in bequeathing a smug little protective halo on it. Segarra did grow up as a Nuyorican after all, and voluntarily led the hobo life. I believe them when they sing about finding treasure in trash and exhort us to “kill … the landlords in our cracked skulls!”

My maybe favourite song from them, “Hawkmoon,” has this little section starting at the third verse, which gets me every time:

And you'll never know the way I miss
Miss Jonathan
She was beaten in the street
And then I never saw her again

She opened up my mind in the holes of
Her fishnet tights
Dildo waving on her car antenna
And I coulda ridden shot gun forever

She'd say "Oh baby, where do you wanna go?
I know a place no one will ever know"

What audacity to go from “miss” to “Miss;” the name Miss Jonathan itself (which could easily be a prim schoolteacher designation or a punk drag name in the UK. Then there’s the loving minutia of the holes in fishnet that have already been granted an almost cosmic expansiveness. The road-trippin’ conversational ease of the lines flow through the whole song and ugh it’s just so good.

My other maybe favourite song from the album is “Buffalo,” which now makes two alarmingly good indie songs about buffalos that I know (the other being Mitski’s “Buffalo Replaced”). There’s something mystical about these creatures, and if you’re confronting poisoned American narratives about the frontier, the soil and authenticity, it makes sense that buffalos become an evocative image to wrestle.

Then there’s the choice to open the last song with, “Hiding from the cops / In Ogallala Nebraska.” When they sang the last two words, someone in the audience goofily shouted “WHERE?” It could have been an obnoxious display of big-city attitude but it revealed, once again, the audacity of the singer to locate themself in an unknown little town with a clearly indigenous name, against the forces of surveillance. The song has all the thrill as well as desolation of an American highway, ending in this searing crescendo:

I used to think I was born
Into the wrong generation
But now I know
I made it right on time

To watch the world burn
To watch the world burn
To watch the world burn
With a tear in my eye

The past is still, is always alive. No one is ever actually born in the wrong generation, and that is both our blessing/tragedy and our curse/farce.

She was also fond of critics. ‘They are so gentle,’ she would say. ‘They defend Words fiercely against Abuses, and yet not one of them in my protracted reign of observation has ever pointed out that Good Usage differs from Good Use as Good Behavior from Goodness. The trouble is, they do not defend Words against Abuse, but only against Abuses, and instead of demanding Good Use, they demand only Good Uses, that is, Good Usage. That is, they demand only specimens. The result is Classics.’

Experts Are Puzzled is famously opaque. The short, rhythmic prose pieces that comprise its chapters feel like a mix of Lydia Davis’ wit and compressed narrative, Gertrude Stein’s delicious linguistic dead-ends (in Riding’s case, more to do with thwarted logic than grammar), and a touch of Borgesian mysticism. The book would have an oracular quality, lyrically conjuring meaning through its spectres, if its sentences did not take sudden irresolvable reroutes as they reflect on bewilderment, inaccuracy, and conflict. Reading her, one accumulates the impression of meaningful distinctions while losing the locus of one’s last insight—the tension in the subject matter seeps into the foundation of the text. In this sense, Riding’s book mocks philosophy through an architectural uncertainty rather than pure prophesy or outright Nietzschean iconoclasm.

It also draws company for itself in a way that’s almost occult (come ye and sit in this sacred circle if ye dare) but ultimately worldly. Navigating a cast of scholars, political parties, and sex workers, among others, it cold-shoulders everything familiar with quintessential modernist contempt even while inviting you into its urbane intimacy (its puzzled experts, for example, are always oscillating between we/they). The book’s community is global in odd ways, one of which echoes modernism’s tryst with primitivism: there’s a whole chapter on a dainty and narcissistic explorer’s relationship with “black” and “yellow” people, over whom she takes creative ownership and I wish I could tell you exactly how to read this allegory without looking for stale virtues such as “this stages the theatre of racecraft and hence deconstructs it!" I’m not there yet. But the bit on critics I quoted above was the first moment where I felt at no remove from the stated thing or its milieu. My recognition of the situation was direct and immediate. Even though it was addressing her contemporaries, it cuts straight through to what we call discourse these days, with the weariness of the internet denizen (netizen, as the global south loves to say). The more things change, etc.

I don’t really want to close-read the distinction between Uses and Use, or Abuses and Abuse, since it’s self-evident.* The local vs. the structural. The technical vs. the conceptual. The stakes of satisfaction (taste) vs. those of fulfilment (principles). It’s possible to keep proliferating these categories but even when restricted to the original terms, something tangibly shifts on either side of the divide. I just know that there’s a fundamental difference between (a) going after individual examples of language in the hope that we will relate to language better, and (b) putting language’s total, absolute integrity front and center. And so I can’t help thinking that this a rare glimmer of accessible wisdom in Riding’s work. It’s very funnily ironic of course, to call the critics gentle and profess love for their failure, but failure it is. Embracing this as a real pedagogical moment, then, I too declare that I believe in turning our focus to Good Use from Good Uses.

I’ll readily admit that there is something useful and necessary about knowing what “Good Uses” look like and being ready to fight for it. I admire those who can explain why one author’s style is compellingly extravagant and another’s is riddled with redundancy, or why X’s satirical voice loses itself in the attempted joke and consequently, also loses our trust. This hawkishness is perhaps the first sign that one cares about language at all and to declare it irrelevant is perverse (derogatory). But it is short-sighted, even destructive to let “Good Use” fall by the wayside or to think one is automatically fighting for Good Use by fighting about Good Uses. The latter, especially, is ugly to me because of its delusion. Compared to the sincerely diligent myopia of focusing on uses and abuses, it’s smug to think one is addressing Use without actually doing so. It keeps us locked in a state of thrilling fury with a vague background awareness that there must be more to all this, that mere gestures towards past greatness can’t be enough, that the values can’t be this obvious, this dualistic (earnestness good, say the poet’s defenders; sentimentality bad say the detractors)! Feels bad, y’know? An interesting case study for this argument might be Orwell’s famous essay on language. His gun is pointed squarely at Uses & Abuses (I’ll never forget his example of mixed metaphors: “the fascist octopus has sung his swan song”) to make an explicit commentary on Use (the moral inadequacy of propaganda). There’s many ways Orwell “failed” his movement. But did he perhaps set up a genuine relationship between Uses and Use, Abuses and Abuse, that would serve the cause of anti-fascism? Or did he blunt the political edge of his argument by going after all bad language equally, and maybe being even harder on the left? I’m inclined to say that in this instance he was right but the ambivalence around him might actually be generative.

I agree with Riding too, that the goal of criticism is all too frequently to produce “classics,” an intention that trips itself up in its discomfort with both the present and the past’s aliveness.

I’m going to throw in a passage from Georg Lukacs who I re-read at length after years.

The ‘half-art’ of the novel, therefore, prescribes still stricter, still more inviolable artistic laws for itself than do the power in the world if men did not sometimes fall prey to the more indefinable and unformulable they are in their very essence: they are laws of tact. Tact and taste [emphasis mine], in themselves subordinate categories which belong wholly to the sphere of mere life and are irrelevant to an essential ethical world, here acquire great constitutive significance: only through them is subjectivity, at the beginning of the novel’s totality and at its end, capable of maintaining itself in equilibrium, of positing itself as epically normative objectivity and thus of surmounting abstraction, the inherent danger of the novel form. (The Theory of the Novel)

And a little later,

The outside world today has become so exclusively conventional that everything, positive or negative, humorous or poetic, can take place only within the sphere of convention.

Dear Georg (or György, the cuter spelling) believed that all novels were at risk of confusing taste with ethics because of the form’s alienation from natural or organic laws (unlike epic), and its need to compensate. Taste is about turning personal preferences into norms—as the dominant environment of modern life, it lords over other compulsions. Prioritizing taste is a way of investing in these projected norms; if not trendy ones then other, equally dubious ones. Now, there is something a little scary to me about people who only ask big ideological questions of art, and seem to have no views at all on the technical effort that has gone into a work, and into living upto the genre’s standards. There is something going on at the sensory level that is itself potent. But, I think too many people are ultimately caught up in matters of tact and taste while feeling like they’re holding art accountable in big, zeitgeist altering, anti-alienating ways, and I think it’s a gross overestimation of their historical attunement. Such a PoV is also likely to glorify all classics and flatten the conflicting ways they were held to task by the Lukacs-es and Adornos and Brechts, or to go no further than declare someone a hack or “overrated”. To bring it back to Laura Riding: do critics want to be puzzled? Are ideology-critique and claims of “weak,” descriptive (so called good-faith) reading both ways of evading genuine puzzlement? I’m so tired of the academic phobia of “unmasking” a text and thereby fetishizing mere reproduction of a text, but I wonder how many critics nowadays honestly confront their/our own confusion. So how does Riding elaborate on the problem?

Experts are puzzled by the legacy for the purpose of the handing down of which we seem to exist successively and respectively. We seem to exist to correct, in proper order, the minute derangements caused in the legacy by our existence. We on whom it is temporarily bestowed find it strange and make it familiar and then find ourselves strange. The legacy has been handed on and we left behind, strangers of a fixed old age. We stop here while the legacy passes on to the eternal puzzlement of experts.

I’m stuck on the idea of legacy—a loaded word which, if we press upon it, may dredge a lot of repressed anxieties in this discussion to the surface. Can we think legacy without the brittle and ossified idea of classics?

Here’s a picture of Riding’s very beautifully made book, whose cover has the odd effect of being almost unreadable except in broad daylight or white light.

*Maybe the one thing that isn’t self-evident in the Good Uses vs. Good Use distinction is that Riding treats “Uses” and “Usage” as interchangeable. Just linguistically speaking, it would be interesting to think about why “Uses” is captured just as effectively by “Usage”, which is a totalizing abstraction and so superficially closer to “Use.” For one, “-age” represents a kind of habitual dimension (adage, carriage, verbiage, blockage) that is at once mundane and temporary, so it doesn’t represent the concept at its most distilled and ideal.)

What’s funny is I’ve done one better than write an essay about her. I’ve written a whole poem. It’s one of the handful of things I’ve produced that I’ve consistently liked since, but I have never shown it to her. I’ve come close but I just can’t do it. I’m only starting to realize how neurotically unsentimental I am with my family which isn’t true for my personality overall: I rhapsodize over my friendships, affectionate touch is second nature to me (though years in the Midwest have slightly cramped my style), I cannot last minutes without dewy-eyed harassment of my dog. Love to discover psychic blockage all of a sudden. I was starting to think I’ve solved the problem of myself in my thirties.

Some stray thoughts on age and women and difficulty:

I think pop culture is moving towards greater interest in deranged older women. We’ll never not love an insane woman, I think, but consider the pattern in our highest rated shows lately: Jennifer Coolidge of White Lotus; Patricia Arquettes as Ms. Cobel in Severance; and the Zionist loser who happens to be blessed with great histrionic ability i.e. JLC as the mesmerizing trainwreck of a mother in that generally substanceless show, The Bear. The (deserved) hype around these older women's roles make me think that we’re less in the era of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and more the Manic Gorgon Nightmare Lady. I would argue this is also different from the MPDG’s immediate successor. That person is whom Asa Seresin and others locate in the heteropessimist blueprint: an abject white woman, typically a 30-something adult baby who is sometimes given a compelling reason for her abjection and sometimes not; who exists on the borders of normative attractiveness but feels like she’s way in the backwoods of it; who regularly fucks up her life but never her charm; who hates men but is obsessed with them. Fleabag and Crazy Ex Girlfriend come to mind. But anyway that’s not who we’re talking about. We’re talking about the compulsively watchable trainwreck of an older woman who exudes something through her rapid implosion that the self-deprecating and cyclically stuck millenial version could never—authority. I’m curious about why we’ve latched onto this type now. Maybe we’re just cycling through tropes, maybe there’s brewing discontent with classic feminine fragility, even when it wears a warty mask.

Personally speaking, I’ve always loved a stern older woman although they often draw from culturally elite models for their authority. In my own context, the ethos is often very what we’d call zamindari or darbaari, which are just words for “feudal”. Crisp silk saris, well-groomed silver hair, suavely accented English, and a whole life’s ease with bossing one class of people around while also fighting for every inch of space among the other class. They’re loyal to their favourites but god knows you have to debase yourself to even be a contender. The glamorous dose of crazy swimming in their system can be iconic for sure, but its gendered subversiveness usually explodes into a tyranny I can’t condone. I love the relatively modest versions of a scary woman though: when their commie monasticism neutralizes nepotistic tendencies, or when the twinkle in their eyes belies a worldly-wise humour. Can’t say much more without starting to profile too many people I’ve known, so let’s leave it here. But to be consistent with the musical focus of this substack, I did want to flag that there’s another upcoming album this year that means the world to me (in addition to the now freshly released one by Simz and the one due by CMAT I mentioned in my opening post). And that’s the Lebanese musical artist Yasmine Hamdan, whose avant-garde edge was especially prominent in her early work and never really left even when a more classic sensuality blossomed in her career peak. Anyone who’s watched Jarmusch’s chic, shadowy Only Lovers Left Alive will remember Hamdan appearing out of nowhere and stealing the show in the final scene/closing credits. After disappearing for a long time and on the cusp on turning 50, she’s back and in clear solidarity with her Arab kin. I don’t know if I’m being fanciful but I detect a renewed, firmer authority in her voice. Check out her two excellent singles, “Hon” and “Schmaali” and if you get there, definitely don’t miss the music videos.

P.S. I dislike how the spread of Americanized vocabulary has started to make “mum” feel antiquated for me but the switchover to “mom” has definitively taken place. Blech. It’s fine though because neither are actually relevant beyond English writing of this nature. It’s always ma. Arabs, Irish people, American Southerners and South Asians unite!

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What’s giving me big feelings lately (but also a newfound restraint)

For over a decade now, I’ve wanted to revive blogging, which is how I first arrived on the internet. I’m only half joking. It gave me more than one lifelong friendship and while I’m agog at some things I used to think and say (and not in a good way), I did do some of my most adventurous writing in that loose form/at. Attempts to revive it through the 2010s have gone disastrously. Partly because I couldn’t keep it up through the demands of grad school but also because something about my voice in these later attempts felt forced and inert. I think it’s because I was confused about audience. I wasn’t writing with a sharp focus for a specific base but having lived in a world of feeds for too long, I also wasn’t just freestyling for whoever might show up and be into it, as I used to once. Conscious of all the social groups and taste wars, I was trying to do organic intellectual culture critic, erudite agony aunt, part-time poet, and general humourist all at once and without the ease necessary to coalesce them with grace. Lurking in this attempt was the embarrassing fantasy that my non-academic writing might somehow get me hired. I don’t know what to tell you, I was desperate!

Getting employed, I confess, has changed me pretty dramatically in one way. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to not just wing it anymore, to not mistrust myself and keep dreaming of alternate ways to be better, because I want my students to trust me in the role I occupy right now and not be disappointed. I also want to not churn out mediocrity while pretending that this job—something I genuinely wanted—is somehow a ball and chain. I discovered in the process that no one talks about how difficult and time-consuming it is to become a truly dependable scholar and teacher like one’s own professors? So I’m strapped in I guess. I know this comes with the risk of identifying too hard with one’s profession and underprioritizing other, more furious struggles. It’s going to be a psychic and ideological battle to not slip into that attitude but one I find invigorating for now.

Anyway, all of this is to say, that I’m no longer trying to write on the internet in the hopes that it will somehow mysteriously work out for me. I just want to have fun and craft my voice without going insane, and I do go insane, every time without fail, on traditional social media. So thank you for giving me an excuse to do this! I’ll wrap it up with a couple of random things from my life that are also giving me big feelings.

1. My dog hasn’t died yet and it’s the best and most terrifying thing that’s happened

Very early in 2024, our beautiful dog was diagnosed with the highest grade of cancer and we made the decision to do surgery and then chemo with the understanding that the median rate of survival was 6 months to a year. I experienced what I can only describe as an unprecedented hurricane of grief inside me and worked through it to come to terms with a dog-less life after that year. She’s still here, still on chemo, it’s been well over a year now. She’s strong as a horse, grunts like a grandpa and sighs like a diva (actual grunts, no barks). She’s subtly becoming more affectionate each day, and I could probably count on my fingers the number of times a year she doesn’t get compliments when we walk her. My feelings about her now mysterious fate come and go in shapeless sprawling waves that turn my insides into a soggy sponge. Some days I muster up the capacity to be grumpy about how hard she works us and think about what I could do with all the free time I’d have in her absence (especially after winter walks which is an exercise in windchill-flagellation). Most times, I’m positively excited to see her, touch her, talk to her, and witness the steadily deepening texture of our relationship. It’s almost pathological—I keep asking my partner to look at her because she’s doing something exceptionally cute and they tell me she’s exactly the same as she always is (my point exactly).

2. One of the two albums I was most excited about this year is out and it rules

British hip hop queen Little Simz just came out with Lotus, and I cannot recommend it enough. It’s being marketed as a raw breakup album about her ex producer/bestfriend and it is, but that undersells how varied and fun it is at several moments. Her flow has never been more fierce and there’s everything here, from an authoritative anthem on radical love (Free) to dance-y bangers (Lion, Enough) to a deeply exposed but immersive rap duet (Blood). The other album, slated for August is sexy Irish legend CMAT’s Euro-Country. I do cop to having a soft spot for the UK music scene. TERF Nation though it may be (and that’s England in particular), there’s a way it allows more templates for female performers that feels like a corrective to the boring gendered strictures of North American celebrity. More on that some other time, bye now!!