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Number 123 / Spring 2013 EDITOR’S CHOICE

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BOMB SPECIFIC Beverly Semmes

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THE WICK Tom Neely

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ARTISTS ON ARTISTS AKI ONDA

by Michael Snow

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HALSEY RODMAN

by Ulrike Müller

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CHRISTOPHER DEETON

by Raphael Rubinstein

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INTERVIEWS 26 ART — GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE AND VERNE DAWSON Opposites attract—one looks to the past; the other looks to the future. One paints; the other makes almost everything but paintings. Both are visionary artists.

38 ART — STANLEY WHITNEY

by David Reed Stanley Whitney came to NYC in the ’70s. Whitney’s answer to painting’s “hard times,” as David Reed calls those years, was composing with color as a jazz musician plays with themes and variations. on the cover: Beverly Semmes, from the Feminist Responsibility Project , 2013, ink on paper, 6 1/2 × 10 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Düsseldorf. Photo by Taylor Absher, Advanced Media Studio, NYU.

48 THEATER — FEDERICO LEÓN

by Richard Maxwell Federico León’s recent Las multitudes was staged last year in Argentina. For Richard Maxwell, the playwright-director’s production is a “brokenhearted humanity tale.” A heroic one, at that, with 120 actors.

56 ARCHITECTURE — STAN ALLEN

by Nader Tehrani Stan Allen’s seminal essay “Field Conditions,” written almost 15 years ago, still resonates among architects.

He confers with Nadar Tehrani on landscape urbanism as well as building and teaching “from a position of uncertainty.”

72 LITERATURE — ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS

by Lina Meruane translated by Valerie Miles Enrique Vila-Matas’s characters include James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Auster, and even Enrique Vila-Matas. The Catalan author talks with Meruane about his distinct method of interlacing reading, writing, fact, and fiction.

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CONTENTS

104 LITERATURE — RACHEL KUSHNER

by Hari Kunzru Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, The Flamethrowers, is out this April. Kunzru focuses on the novel’s relationship to the ’70s art world and Italian politics during the time of the Red Brigades.

120 FILM — COLEEN FITZGIBBON

by P. Adams Sitney In the early ‘70s, Fitzgibbon made a series of radical films and then put them aside . . . .” thus P. Adams Sitney begins to unravel the story behind Fitzgibbon’s early, seductive flicker films to her latest iPhone movies.

136 ART — KATRÍN SIGURDARDÓTTIR

by Eva Heisler Katrín Sigurdardóttir’s sculptures and installations merge embodied experiences of place with conceptual constructions of space. She reflects with poet Eva Heisler on the early memories that inspire her work.

FIRST PROOF BOMB’S LITERARY SUPPLEMENT SETON SMITH EVA HEISLER CARMEN BOULLOSA DIANA HAMILTON T COOPER ELENA ALEXANDER CLARICE LISPECTOR TOM HEALY

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Routine Spectacles of Andy Kaufman and Stuart Sherman When asked to write about Stuart Sherman and Andy Kaufman, two performers whose careers I followed, lost track of, and was recently reintroduced to through a slew of exhibitions and screenings at various art venues around New York City—On Creating Reality,

by Andy Kaufman at Maccarone, Andy Kaufman’s 99cent Tour at Participant Inc., and Spectacles: Stuart Sherman Preserved! at Anthology Film Archives—I could not help but think how different yet similar these two middle-class Jewish boys were. Working at opposite ends of the performing-arts spectrum, both carefully constructed public personae to adapt to and assimilate the culture that formed them. Kaufman, a comedian with a huge fan base from appearances on network television, became notorious for the seemingly innocent yet unpredictable behavior that continually caught people off guard. Sherman, an artist known to devoted avant-garde art and theater audiences for his hermetic, small-scale spectacles, performed with no affect whatsoever. With Kaufman, it was unclear if he was playing you or just playing. Sherman, on the other hand, kept up the neutral, poker-faced demeanor both on and off the stage. He was an incredibly private person; it was not until I heard he died from AIDS in 2001 that I found out he was gay.

The first time I saw Stuart Sherman perform was in late 1975 at his apartment in Chelsea in New York.

After being buzzed up in the elevator, a friend and I were met at the landing by a woman with heavily made-up black eyes. She led us to Stuart’s apartment and directly into the living room where three chairs were facing an empty TV tray. Stuart, a short, dark, and somewhat serious man, appeared almost immediately and introduced himself and the woman, Black Eyed Susan, to us. After some conversation, Susan, my friend, and I sat in the three chairs facing Stuart, who was standing behind the TV tray a few feet away.

He set up another tray, placed a black suitcase on top, opened it, took a white index card from his shirt pocket, and looked at it as if he were reviewing a performance punch list. He then proceeded to take objects out of his suitcase and place them on top of the TV tray in various configurations, creating a kind of rebus that shifted meaning with each move. Stuart performed several different routines, each starting with the index card and followed by a new drill of objects and actions.

His demeanor was always matter-of-fact as he made processions of flashcards, trinkets, dime-store novelty items, string, and scraps appear and disappear from the table. I was mesmerized—he animated these objects like some kind of tabletop magician with nothing up his sleeve.

At the time, I was doing performances with a lot of props, and to see someone else treat a bunch of crap and discarded detritus with careful attention was encouraging. I also felt an immediate affinity with his deadpan expression, even though in comparison I felt like I was chewing the scenery with my attempts at 12

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humor. The work’s hidden messages, puns, gags, and visual jokes engaged, amused, and kept me guessing.

If I looked to him for guidance or help, I was on my own. He had his objects to look after.

Sometime in the early ’80s, Stuart and I went to see Henny Youngman, king of the one-liner, at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. Youngman was in his seventies and still holding firmly to his crown. Though perhaps not as rapid-fire as I remembered from his appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, he put on a great performance. Signature violin in hand, he delivered his shtick, occasionally breaking up the stream of one-liners with a quick pull of the bow across the strings. Many of his zingers I had heard over the years, but the famous, well-worn “Take my wife—please!” was crowd rousing. Told live, the dated joke became fresher than ever. Youngman was a recycler, as a little time spent on YouTube confirms. Neither Stuart nor I minded as we studied his moves and reveled in watching the seasoned pro give the Eveready Bunny a run for his money.

It was only recently, while watching Kaufman’s 1977 ABC special, Andy’s Funhouse, with my students in Austin, that I remembered my outing with Stuart. Hearing Kaufman’s Foreign Man character butcher for the umpteenth time that famous line and twist it into “Take my wife, please take her!” I finally made the connection between Kaufman and Youngman. The reference got me thinking about comedy on network television back when the boob tube was the only game in town for baby boomers.

For Kaufman, me, and almost every other boomer, it set the standard for just about everything. It was our generation’s exciting portal to the world, if not quite the Internet. For Youngman and many other entertainers who got their start in vaudeville, burlesque, and radio—if they were able to literally clean up their acts—opportunities to transition to variety TV were in the offing, which meant a steady paycheck. Live TV for programmers, however, meant danger, a breeding ground for the unexpected, a potential offense to desired demographics, and the inevitable loss of future sales. Risk-averse executives quickly paved the way for canned, middle-of-the-road programming that pushed variety TV, with its oddballs and outsiders, out to pasture.

Fortunately for posterity, Kaufman was one of few TV performers able to mine the fine line between stability and chaos, forbidden zones accessed in seconds, while networks added up their losses and audiences struggled to comprehend the unpredictable, trying to distinguish ideas from mistakes, the fake from the real.

Kaufman used this strategy brilliantly with his on-air shenanigans, whether provoking a fight with another panelist, refusing to cooperate with fellow performers in the middle of a sketch, deliberately reading aloud from a book, or professing his love to his parents in front of millions of viewers. Kaufman played in front

Promotional card for never-realized lecture tour “On Creating Reality, by Andy Kaufman,” 1984.

Courtesy of Maccarone, New York City.

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EDITOR’S CHOICE

Verne Dawson and Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE

Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE, If, Thee Shoo-T Fits A-T. . . “Where is I.T.?”, 1999, mixed media, 16 × 12 inches. Images by Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE courtesy of the artists and Invisible-Exports.

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Verne Dawson, Untitled , 2010, ink and acrylic on paper, 17 × 29 inches.

Images by Verne Dawson courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown Enterprise.

I met Verne Dawson while sitting beside him at Table 23 at the celebration for Dream Machine: Brion Gysin at the New Museum in New York. Dawson revealed a cosmic process previously unsuspected by me: the genii of the 22 paths of the Kabbalah and their correspondence to the 22 major cards of the Tarot. He spoke also of inspiring entanglements and structures of linear time, of folkloric tales and myths disguising moon cycles and astronomy. He opened all three of my eyes to entire waves of sacred geometries and internal structures of our enveloping universe, changing my means of perception irrevocably, just as Brion Gysin had done in Paris in his quaquaversal conversations with me, gifting me knowledge that we shall all ways value.

— GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s reputation preceded her.

S/he founded the legendary band Throbbing Gristle and has a deep association with magic including the dark arts and arcana of the occult. S/he is a living example of a cut-up and has a fierce intelligence.

I must admit to being a little uneasy, and not about which fork to use. Instead of hostility I found a very sweet, sympathetic, engaged, and engaging person and artist. Magic can be very disarming and evolution continues apace.

— VERNE DAWSON

Verne Dawson, Small Blue , 2011, oil on canvas, 20 × 16 inches.

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ART — VERNE DAWSON AND GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE

(Unrecorded prologue in which Verne Dawson tells Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE that he saw a girl reading Thee Psychick Bible on a plane to Asheville, North Carolina.)

the ground, sparkling throughout the orchards on my old decrepit farm.

GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE So did you speak to the woman on the plane?

VD In your travels, do you find that some places have more . . . that word energy is a really trite one to use, but—

VERNE DAWSON I did. She said you were thinking of moving to Asheville.

GBP I wonder if that was Hannah, who went to Asheville to check if it was a place to move to.

VD Beautiful stately young woman, close to six feet tall, long, straight dark hair— she looked like she could’ve been a bass player in a rock band.

GBP Hannah’s hair isn’t all that long but I can’t think of who else it might be.

VD You know, my wife, Laura Hoptman, curated the Brion Gysin show, and that’s how you and I met.

GBP At the New Museum, yeah.

VD It all started coming together in an odd way. This woman sits next to me on the plane after I’d been learning a great deal about Gysin and about you in the previous couple of years. She was talking about what it meant to her to be going to this important place in the world of culture—from Black Mountain College to Robert Moog of the Moog synthesizer being there, not to mention F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. There’s a real New Age contingent there too that sees Asheville as a place that’s going to survive the— GBP The apocalypse; we read a book about that. There’s a movement of post– Grateful Dead, rainbow-traveling people who started centering around Asheville.

One of them was adamant that those are the oldest mountains on the planet.

VD That’s what the geologists say regardless of where they are from. Apparently, geologically speaking, the Blue Ridge Mountains are the oldest on our planet.

GBP The first boil on the surface of the boiling potential planet that solidified.

VD There are a lot of gemstones around there. An abandoned opal mine is near my place. You walk around and there are quartz crystals strewn everywhere about 28

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GBP It sounds like a place we should reconsider.

GBP Definitely, every summer before we left England we’d rent an old Volkswagen bus and take my two daughters all over Britain to stone circles and prehistoric sites. There was one site in particular up in Dartmoor built on a great bed of quartz granite. In the center were these two vertical stones—a portal to another dimension, according to local legend.

Whenever you stood between these stones, even if there was a raging wind, it was completely still, as if there were some unusual interface happening.

VD It’s interesting that a microclimate feels spiritual, in a way.

GBP Back in the ’80s when we were doing Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY) we met these people living in Glastonbury. They were called the English Kabbalah and were obsessed with Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law. To them it was actually a coded message transferring English letters to Kabbalistic symbols, so they were retranslating it.

Through English Heritage, an organization that supervises historic sites in Britain, they got permission to spend 24 hours in Stonehenge to do the ritual of the Silver Star. They invited me and a few others from TOPY to go along. It was a great opportunity because at that time nobody was being allowed into Stonehenge.

VD What are the origins of the ritual?

GBP The group said that for Crowley it was an ancient ritual to create a priestess, a direct representative of the goddess power of this universe. A woman in the English Kabbalah group would be the female who’d be empowered, and we were the plebs in the congregation. We were all chanting—naked, of course—and sending earth energy to her by thrusting our genitals into the ground until we went into a trance state. Being somewhat skeptical, my mind started drifting. Suddenly I had this vision: the vertical stones were the thighs of a primal female goddess and the lintels across were her pelvis. We were within a circle of female energy, a huge vagina.

VD The womb.

GBP Exactly. As I looked up from inside this circle all the stars started to go out until the sky within the circle was totally black. We had the sense of it being a pathway that would connect us to another place. A kind of psychic wormhole.

It was very powerful. For once we’d had no drugs, so it was actually a pure experience from this trance situation.

It’s interesting: Computers are using silica to store information, when all the quartz beds where these stone circles are could just as easily be storing information. Maybe sacred spaces are a millennial recording device.

VD Same with tarot cards, which are also a device to track time. I’ve gone to many caves in France and Spain, and also visited a few of the prehistoric and Neolithic sites in England. I once spent a day in Salisbury, where there are standing stones right in the middle of the village green. It’s very beautiful, like a lot of other places in that area. In town there are these Georgian houses, and what’s right over each door but a radiating sun.

You know, the half-circle window above the door. That’s got to come from eons prior to that, when the sun rising over a heel stone was an important calendrical event. It amazes me that it shows up in architecture 2,000 years later. Prehistory and pagan belief pop up in England so frequently!

GBP Why do you think we have this fascination with stones? All through my childhood I would balance stones on each other and make dams and circles of stones, obsessively.

VD I’ve read a little bit about your Christian upbringing. Were you devout?

GBP I guess so. I got confirmed when I was about 11. Then when puberty hit, I started to be interested in what I wasn’t being told.

VD Did you think of yourself as in a tribe?

GBP I’ve always looked for the rest of my self-chosen family, my tribe. I bumped into one of my cousins when I was doing a workshop in Santería at Lancaster University, in England. She said, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to meet you because at all the family reunions this name would be whispered: Genesis. You were the black sheep.” (laughter) But what about tarot—I want to know more about that.

Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE, Coagularis , 2012, C-print mounted on Plexiglas, 30 × 40 inches.

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ART — VERNE DAWSON AND GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE

Stanley Whitney by David Reed A painter colleague, Fabian Marcaccio, uses a phrase to describe a certain kind of artist. He says that they are “long runners.” Stanley Whitney is a long runner.

Stanley and I have been colleagues for over 40 years, and I closely follow his paintings. We are almost exact contemporaries, both born in 1946. We developed our approach to painting in the ’70s, a time when attempts at innovative painting were under attack from all sides.

Traditionalists wanted to go back to what painting had been. Others didn’t believe that any kind of painting was possible. Minimalism was an influence on his early work and mine. Despite Donald Judd’s and Dan Flavin’s discoveries in color, minimalism was seen then as a rejection of color. (David Batchelor analyzes this situation in more detail in his book Chromophobia.)

Color at the time seemed a false direction, superficial and superfluous to more important concerns.

However, it turns out that color was the great opening for painting and other forms of art as well. Color within painting has its own history of meanings, and these meanings can be combined with the new artificially produced colors in our environment, “found color,”

DAVID REED So Stanley, you have that wonderful Bob Thompson drawing up on the wall. I first saw his work in a show at the New School in ’69— STANLEY WHITNEY Yeah, ’69. On my way over to the Village Voice to check out the listings, because I was looking for a place to live, I encountered this small show of Bob Thompson’s work at the New School. I didn’t know who he was and I didn’t realize he was African American. Seeing his work, I was just blown away, I couldn’t believe it—the color, the drawing. Here I was looking at Goya, here at Velázquez, and I thought, That’s just what I’ve been thinking about.

DR It was a memorial exhibition.

SW Done fairly soon after he died. Before I moved to New York, when I was in high school and lived in Philadelphia, I used to come to New York on the weekends.

I had decided to go to art school in the Midwest to beat the Vietnam War draft.

Going to the Midwest was probably a good thing for me. It got me out of the confusion about the race stuff and the drug thing. I don’t know if I would have survived if I had met Bob Thompson.

What interests me about Bob’s work is his use of color, which really came out of black American music, and his love of European painting. He developed a great combination of Western painting and 38

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and experiences of new technologies such as portable electronic screens. Fresh meanings can emerge from these combinations of old and new, meanings that are powerful but hard to articulate.

It takes a lot of experience and self-reflection to begin to understand color. Looking back, it is clear that color was the possibility for the “long runners,” those willing to spend time and thought working on this problem. There are many references inside and outside art through Stanley Whitney’s use of color, and yet it’s always original.

Working on this interview, I realized that Stanley and I have never had our paintings together in an exhibition. I have missed out—I always learn about my work when I see it contextualized by that of my colleagues.

How could this have happened in New York where we both live? But this will change this summer when each of us will have a painting in a group show curated by Raphael Rubinstein, Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s, at Cheim & Read Gallery.

— DAVID REED

color as sound stemming from music, especially the music of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Ornette Coleman. Those were really, really tough times, and I was very confused about art and race, you know— how to really negotiate them.

DR There are very few painters exactly our age, and I think it’s because of the draft.

It was hard to get a deferment to go to art school in those years. I was at the New York Studio School while on a fellowship through Reed College, so I was safe.

SW How to beat the draft was always on top of your head. Finally, in ’68,’69, I got out on a medical deferment because I had asthma as a kid. Late in the war, there were antiwar doctors, and I went to one and got a letter saying I still had asthma.

At the draft physical here in New York, I went to the last guy at the table, handed him the letter, and thought, If he says I’m going to be in, I will kick this table over.

But he said, “You’re out.”

DR I had a similar experience. I took the physical in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I had starved myself so I weighed about 90 pounds. When the doctors couldn’t draw blood, I was separated out from the others. When we first arrived at the induction center, we filled out forms that asked if we had belonged to a long list of “subversive” organizations. I had been involved in a lot of antiwar and

protest demonstrations and had tried to be a conscientious objector, so I was able to check off a lot of boxes including the NAACP and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Being a member of those organizations and my weight kept me out. Like you, I remember going to an officer at a desk and being handed a slip of paper that said I had the 1-Y deferment. The officer threw my forms in a trash can and said he was glad they didn’t have to bother with investigating me.

SW When I went to the draft physical, there was not a single white person in the place. I didn’t wear any underwear on purpose. I walked up nude and they said, “Put your pants back on.” And everyone laughed at me. There were guys in there with gunshot wounds and all kinds of things, and they were taking everybody.

I was really worried. But luckily I had my letter from the doctor. I just wasn’t going to go. It’s funny that my son’s first trip abroad with his high school was to Vietnam. I’m paying to send my son to Vietnam! But back to Albuquerque, were you painting there?

DR I was living near Abiquiú, New Mexico, on some land in an adobe house that I had bought from Georgia O’Keefe’s adopted son. I was painting the landscape.

SW Are those the paintings from your catalog? Those are beautiful. The techno

Goya’s Lantern , 2012, oil on linen, 72 × 72 inches. Images courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery.

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ART — STANLEY WHITNEY

Federico León by Richard Maxwell

Interview translated from the Spanish

by Mónica de la Torre I was in Buenos Aires in July of 2012 and kept losing my handle on the place. What’s down is up, summer is winter, and vice versa. (As my de facto Jim Fletcher exclaimed, “It’s just like Borges!”) You’re in Latin America at times; at others, in New York City. If you squint at certain cityscapes, you would swear you were in Brussels or Vienna. We like to mash people and places into what we want them to be when, in fact, things are what they are.

The Argentine playwright-director Federico León has been recognized internationally for his rigorous and heartwarming work in theater and film for over a decade. I thought maybe I had a handle on his work, given that we might be the same age and we both direct the plays that we write. I thought this especially after seeing him premiere his show Las multitudes in La Plata, an hour’s drive from Buenos Aires, during my time there.

Here, I saw a brokenhearted humanity tale on stage.

Las multitudes is a fable. The characters are archetypes: the grandfather, the mother, the ingenue ... Yet, in León’s play, each character is played by a dozen people, with one designated leader for each character doing most, if not all, of the speaking.

In December I was able to chat with Federico for the first time. With Mónica de la Torre translating back and forth, I discovered the gaps in my knowledge and the fate of my assumptions. One thing I still think I’m right about: León is to theater what Springsteen is to music.

First of all, I love Bruce. When I listen to his songs, I have a picture of who the heroes Frankie or Johnny are. Yet the creator himself is the personification of heroism. The same happens with Federico León: he doesn’t perform, but his realness as writer and director comes through in the work, heroic and unapologetic.

— RICHARD MAXWELL 48

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Performance view of Las multitudes , 2012, Centro de Experimentación y Creación (TACEC) del Teatro Argentino de La Plata, La Plata, Argentina. Photo

by Sebastián Arpesella.

BOMB’S THEATER INTERVIEWS ARE SPONSORED IN PART BY THE SELECT EQUITY GROUP FOUNDATION. 49

THEATER — FEDERICO LEÓN

RICHARD MAXWELL You know, you and I came on the scene kind of about the same time. I remember seeing a show of yours in Buenos Aires in 2001.

FEDERICO LEÓN Yes; 1,500 metros sobre el nivel de Jack (1,500 meters above Jack’s level).

RM And then I was able to see Las multitudes. I feel fortunate that I happened to be in Argentina when you were doing this show. It seems so crazy because it was an hour away from Buenos Aires, in this seemingly desolate place.

FL In the city of La Plata.

RM These are the only two shows of yours I’ve seen, and we have, what, 11 years in between? I guess we can talk about it, you know: What you been up to?

FL Of yours I saw House when it came to Buenos Aires. I really liked the play. I was making Jack at that time.

Is that something that is consistent with every show that you do?

FL In the case of Las multitudes some of the actors—the elderly men and women, for instance—had been inactive and then returned to acting in the play. The same goes for the elderly actors in Yo en el futuro and Jack. It’s people who hadn’t acted in a while. In general, all of the actors I work with have studied and worked in theater. I even met the children at different acting schools.

RM Oh, interesting.

FL In 2007 I made a film at a villa miseria [slum] in Buenos Aires: Estrellas (Stars).

It’s a mix of documentary and fiction in which I did work with nonprofessional actors. Julio Arrieta, the film’s protagonist, is a manager of actors from the villa miseria. He had a production company there; his job was to supply actors from the slum for different television programs and films.

but with whom I come together through the creative process. That’s what I am interested in—despite our apparent differences, there is common ground between us.

RM Regarding being with or against the government?

FL The common ground—regardless of whether someone is in favor or against the government—is the artistic process, meeting in the same space for a year to rehearse and speaking a common language.

RM Do you consider yourself a political artist?

FL My plays don’t directly address politics, but I think all artists are political in terms of their commitment to what they make. A lot of plays are not political except for the independent way in which they are made. Does this make sense?

RM Yeah.

RM Family figures large in the work, as a theme and as a structure for making statements. I’m curious . . . well, first of all, if I’m right in this assumption.

FL Yes, Jack was about a family. With Las multitudes a sort of family took shape during the rehearsal process. I rehearse most of my plays for a year or a year and a half, so after a while we all start interacting like a family. The other thing that relates to Jack, and maybe also to some other plays of mine, is that there are people in the cast who are very different from each other, who vary in age and have diverse theater backgrounds, and whose views of the world are distinct from mine also. It’s people with whom I otherwise wouldn’t interact much in life.

The plays end up being the result of the encounter of all our different viewpoints.

RM Yo en el futuro (I in the future)—did you make it after or around the Rolex program? You won a Rolex Mentor & Protegé Arts Initiative award, yeah?

FL Yes, I worked with Robert Wilson.

RM And, it seems like Yo en el futuro is consistent with this theme of assembling people, a cast, and letting a family dynamic emerge out of the rehearsals. I just want to confirm these themes and find a way in to talk about the impetus for making a show. You work, like I do, with people who are not trained performers.

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RM That’s wild. But this was not something you fictionalized; this was a documentary.

FL It’s a documentary with some fiction in it. A lot of it was our own fabrication, but based on true facts. In the film, Julio Arrieta says things like, “Don’t look for actors who can play a poor person, look for a real poor person, since he will play the part best.”

RM Wow. It sounds like there’s a political statement behind making a film like this. You know, we have a delineation in this country politically between the Right and the Left, conservative and liberal, and consciousness is outlined by this delineation. When I was in Argentina, I felt like these political distinctions don’t carry over as they do in Europe, for example.

I’m a little flummoxed hearing about this film because I’m not really sure if there is a political agenda, and if there is, what it would be.

FL What you see in Argentina right now is that people want to know whether you’re with or against the government.

Relating this to Las multitudes: in general, the differences between people are very clear to me but not their points of agreement. That’s what Las multitudes is trying to find. I mean, I am working with some people whose worldviews are not the same as mine, who may come from different socioeconomic backgrounds,

FL In Buenos Aires there is a lot of theater production. Independent theaters abound.

Also prevailing is the idea of working together on a specific project just in order to go through a creative process together, regardless of how much it will make at the box office and where it will be staged.

This might not be as common anymore in other countries. A project elsewhere might only take off once you’ve gotten the funding and venue in place.

RM I’m really impressed with the theater scene in Buenos Aires. A lot of people go, first of all, which is unique, but also, like you said, there’s a lot of work being made. It’s so rare in my travels to find this kind of fervor for seeing live theater.

FL There’s a longstanding tradition here in Buenos Aires . . . I live in the neighborhood of El Abasto where there are many independent theaters. There are also a lot of theater and playwriting workshops, and an informal way of making theater here. There may be actors who start writing and then direct their own plays, or playwrights who start directing also.

RM So there’s more freedom.

FL Yes. There aren’t many productions in which a playwright writes a play and then looks for a director. You have actors who work regularly with the same directors, directors who act—it’s all mixed up.

Stan Allen by Nader Tehrani

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opposite: Taichung InfoBox , 2010, temporary exhibition pavilion, Taichung Taiwan. Photos by Iwan Baan. this page: Sagaponac House , 2008, single-family house, Sagaponac, NY. Photo by Michael Moran.

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ARCHITECTURE — STAN ALLEN

Stan Allen has been an active and vocal force in architecture over the past 25 years. As the former dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton, the principal of SAA/Stan Allen Architect, and the author of numerous books and articles (among them the essay “From Object to Field: Field Conditions in Architecture and Urbanism,” to which we refer repeatedly in this conversation), his impact has been felt from the realms of practice to the academic world. In the “Field Conditions” text, he articulates new ways in which “difference” can be accommodated in compositional strategies that do not resort to figural, typological, or iconic variations and he unearths a series of aggregative strategies that demonstrate the wide range of spatial, formal, and material possibilities immanent in the systemic logics of the field itself. Protean in many ways, Allen’s mission has been to define some of the irreducible aspects of the architectural discipline on

NADER TEHRANI Your 2010 book, Field Conditions Revisited, helped refresh my memory, and I also read some new material that put a lot of your work in context for me. Moreover, I realized the historical affinity we share. In fact, the historical era to which we were both reacting was almost identical. You were doing it, I believe, from a broader “organizational” point of view, if I can say that, and I was doing it almost at the scale of a unit—a slat of wood, a brick, a sheet of glass—without a concern for the scale of planning or the landscape implications of what I was doing. But I realized, reading these things, that you were also somehow a teacher to me, though I didn’t understand it at the time. So although your articles have been out there, seeing them all together was very instructive.

STAN ALLEN For better or worse that’s my legacy: it’s going to be on my tombstone that I’m the guy who wrote “Field Conditions.” (laughter) It’s an older essay, but it keeps coming back to haunt me.

For example, I was flattered and a little surprised when Joseph Becker, a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, based an exhibition on the essay just last year, which included both artists and architects. When I was originally working on “Field Conditions,” I was looking as much at examples from art and music as I was from architecture, so I’m glad to have that favor returned. Clearly, that essay, which was written almost 15 years ago, continues to be very important to me.

With the field conditions idea, I wanted to preserve the double sense of working “in the field,” open to change, accident and improvisation, and at the same time, the more abstract sense of a “field of forces”—organizational systems and material 58

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the one hand, while on the other he has used his experience with the arts—painting, film, sculpture, and beyond—to expand the intellectual terrain on which architects walk.

As one of the original voices of landscape urbanism, Allen is also its most potent analyst, critic, and interlocutor; his most recent book, Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain, establishes a provocative critique of landscape practices, while helping to unlock the potential of architecture beyond its dialectic other, opening up a wide array of discussions about urbanism, geometry, aggregation, and composition—all the discrete practices that impact the field from bottom up. While his personal manner is nuanced, diplomatic, and soft-spoken, Allen has a bold and polemical presence in the architectural discipline.

— NADER TEHRANI

assemblages that are serial, expansive, non-hierarchical and open-ended. But you identified a dilemma in the piece: if the proposition is that you create difference not by starting with a single form and breaking it up, but by accumulating small differences over many, many iterations, you will always come to an impasse with the smaller scale. I thought at the time (and still do) that you could not do a “field conditions” house, for example; you needed a larger scale, more repetitions.

But if—as I learned from your practice and others—you were to say that the repeated units are not the larger, compositional elements of architecture but, in fact, construction elements, you can make that transposition to the smaller scale.

postmodernism. We were all a little bit skeptical of that. But in some sense we threw the baby out with the bath water.

And this embrace of heroic originality—if you look at the world of visual arts or writing, it’s a highly suspect idea—architects are susceptible to these traps. So I very much see what I do in the present as a conversation, both with recent history— Stirling, Kahn, and so on—but also with my peers. To have a good conversation you have to acknowledge your common ground. You have to be speaking the same language. But you also need to bring something new to the table. Which is for me exactly what you do when you teach: your job is to bring students into that conversation.

NT The other thing I appreciated in the book was the genealogy it offered. Often architects either don’t acknowledge such things or they don’t realize the power of building discourse through history and the conversation that specific buildings create between each other. The theoretical nuances that emerge out of this dialogue are not only critical to advancing architectural discussions, but offer an intellectual generosity on the process.

Having James Stirling next to Louis Kahn, or next to Frank Gehry—there’s a level of obviousness in terms of their formal affinities but actually the ideas do vary quite a lot, and that’s indispensable to a good debate. So I also appreciated that.

NT How do you describe your role in the last 20 years? You’re a designer, you’re an architect, you are an educator, and you have been an administrator. These activities involve very different things, and you certainly don’t have to choose one over the other. All of us sometimes do a bit of all of that, but where do you see your prejudices? What’s crucial to you, and what are you willing to abandon?

SA You know, frankly it puzzles me why architects are hesitant to acknowledge their sources. I think you and I had fairly parallel educational experiences and, as you recall, one of the things about the ‘70s and ‘80s was the attention to precedent, which became associated with

SA It’s true that teaching and writing have been a major part of what I do, but I have always seen that as an extension of the work I do as an architect. You have to teach from a position of uncertainty; you can’t pretend that you’re the one with all the answers. I’ve always seen the work in the school as a kind of laboratory, an extension of what’s happening in the studio. After 20-odd years of doing this I am still figuring it out, and if I can have that conversation with students, we both learn something, which is what makes teaching worthwhile.

FIRST PROOF — BOMB’s Literary Supplement

CONTENTS Portfolio 68

SETON SMITH by Catherine Grout

Interviews 72 ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS by Lina Meruane, translated by Valerie Miles 104 R ACHEL KUSHNER by Hari Kunzru Fiction 82

91 102

CARMEN BOULLOSA The Insult: “Shut up, you dirty greaser.”

From Tejas, translated by Samantha Schnee T COOPER Details Inside CLARICE LISPECTOR Clandestine Happiness, translated by Rachel Klein

Poetry 80 88 99 110

EVA HEISLER DIA NA HAMILTON ELENA ALEXA NDER TOM HEALY

This issue of First Proof is sponsored, in part, by Amazon and the Thanksgiving Fund.

Additional funding is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and readers like you.

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Enrique Vila-Matas by Lina Meruane

Photo by Lisbeth Salas.

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Translated from the Spanish by Valerie Miles Speaking with Enrique Vila-Matas is like peering into an endless labyrinth in which all forks lead to literature.

A labyrinth where we might encounter dazzling literary innovators such as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Georges Perec, Apollinaire, Kafka, von Horváth, Melville (and his obstinate Bartleby), and Hemingway. We read Vila-Matas’s works—20 novels and several collections of short stories and essays—to be carried away by the adventures, both made up and real, of these writers and their fictional characters. Inevitably we become entangled in the extravagant web of digressions of men who always fail at the things of this world but whose singular visions shine through in the writing. Vila-Matas leads us to revelations that can only be found in literature. There is more to his work than astoundingly original prose, unexpected discoveries, pervasive parody, and an ironic worldview; more than the writers he brings back to life.

Vila-Matas not only studies the literary scenes of yore, he also includes the present and its complications—a present that contains a Catalan writer whose last name happens to be Vila-Matas. When it appears in his fiction, the novelist’s own name is a device that heightens his writing’s characteristic ambiguity—Vila-Matas’s art is born within the confines of fiction but insists on blurring its borders.

During his visit to New York late last year, the award-winning novelist and I met at the Hotel Avalon in Midtown. We delved into the complex machinery that sets his narratives in motion. Before the recorder was turned on, Vila-Matas mentioned several ways in which he can talk about his books. Reducing them to their plots seems “somewhat horrid” to him; he prefers instead to speak about them as if he were in dialogue with a close friend. Hence he referred expansively to the “melancholic gravitas” and “sublime tone” of a novel like Dublinesque, recently published by New Directions—a book he deems “autumnal” since in its pages many writers take a stroll along “the path of all great literature.”

— LINA MERUANE LINA MERUANE Do you have the reader in mind when you write?

ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS Never. I think of myself as the reader. It isn’t selfish, though; it’s about needing to like what I’m doing.

LM The idea of the journey is at the core of your books: a writer travels and narrates his displacement. Looking back, how did the journey begin for you? How did your point of view find its place in Paris, New York, Dublin, those places you’ve traveled to that have become the settings for your work?

EVM I always feel that I belong to the place where I am.

LM When in Paris, you’re Parisian, when in New York, you’re a New Yorker?

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EVM Yes, you could say that. That explains why Rodrigo Fresán said that I was the most Argentine of Spanish authors. Though in Portugal someone else said that I am the most Portuguese of Spanish writers. That also explains why I’m not even remotely a nationalist. I belong to the place where I am going. And my journeys, they are mental. All my novels are journeys of the imagination, and nothing more.

LM Are the journeys associated with the books from these places or with the writers who were there before you? Are they included in this journey of the imagination?

EVM Writing about a place or about a subject allows me to read about it and research it in tandem. Dublinesque, for example. While I was writing the novel, I did research on Irish culture and Dublin, about which I knew nothing at all. And to write Doctor Pasavento, I forced my dear friend Andre Gabastou, my French translator, to drive me around Montaigne’s castle because that’s where the essay and the modern idea of selfhood were invented and I wanted to write about the creation and later disappearance of the subject in the West. So I went to Montaigne’s castle to begin these reflections and, while at it, start writing. I could have read Montaigne and not bothered with writing a novel. Instead, in order to read Montaigne, I began writing a book dealing with the issues he had raised. Perhaps it’s a little odd.

LM As a method it’s undoubtedly odd, but one writes not only as a result of experience, one also writes from books. Reading becomes part of a person’s biography.

EVM Dublinesque allowed me not only to travel—I went to Dublin 14 times in a very short period—but also to get involved in something that is fascinating and limitless: Irish culture. I just discovered the author of a book about the Aran Islands, John M. Synge. This man went to Aran following the advice of the poet Yeats, who told him, “They only speak Gaelic on these islands. Do an anthropological piece on the people who live there.” But this man listened to the conversations in Gaelic and couldn’t understand a word, so he made them up. He spied on the people talking down below from a hole in the second floor of the inn where he lived. He really thought they were saying what he thought he heard. And he wrote down what he imagined he heard. Later Synge wrote the plays that were staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin for 40 years. There were many vagabonds, many wandering characters, and people lost on the islands in them.

Beckett comes out of what he saw at the Abbey Theatre.

LM Didn’t you have a similar experience at Documenta 13 recently? You were exposed to languages you didn’t understand but suddenly imagined that you could decipher?

EVM Yes, Chinese and German. I’m studying Synge because I’m writing about my experience this summer in Kassel. It’s going to deal with the absurd situation of being in a Chinese restaurant, where I heard German and

EVA HEISLER from Drawing Water

Take the horizon line, for example a mirage— that marks the limit of sight.

I spend much of my writing time seeking the horizon line. I know that there is no such line but I see the line when I look up from small blocks of text and squint at the sea. To write prose poems is to resist the horizon line—

The line break is hesitation or resistance or acquiescence or a tiny rip in the mesh of a screen door.

Lines may multiply as cracks across the surface of an old painting or lines may measure and slice like a butcher’s cleaver.

White synonyms.

to seek thick thin straight curved broken wavy lines among crumpled pages.

K’s aberrant periods revoke transparency.

I work with little ink in my pen and hardly make a mark.

This must be done with a brush, but a brush, soft at the point, causes such uncertainty in the touch of an unpracticed hand that it is not possible to make a last dark certain mark .

I shade squares while I wait for the phone to ring. I draw boxes while I listen to a lover complain about his bowels. I draw circles inside boxes. I divide circles into quarters; I add a circle to each quarter; another square.

The patterns, like the carpet pages of Irish monks, mean to bewilder evil thoughts. □

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. This line is rational. . This line is irrational.

memory: kneeling beneath a table trying to cover the underside with blue crayon

CARMEN BOULLOSA The Insult: “Shut up, you dirty greaser.”

From Tejas Translated from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee It’s high noon in Bruneville. Not a cloud in the sky. The sun beats down, piercing the veil of shimmering dust.

Eyes droop from the heat.

In the Market Square, in front of Café Ronsard, Sheriff Shears spits five words at Don Nepomuceno: “Shut up, you dirty greaser.”

He says the words in English.

At that moment, Frank is crossing the square, muttering to himself, “and make it snappy, make it snappy”—in English, which he speaks so well people have changed his name from Pancho Lopez to Frank. He’s just delivered two pounds of meat and one of bones (for stewing) to the home of Stealman, the lawyer. Frank is one of the many Mexicans in the streets of Bruneville who run errands and spreads gossip, a “run-speak-go-tell,” a pelado. He hears the insult, raises his eyes, sees the scene, dashes the last few feet to the market, to Sharp, the butcher, to whom he blurts out the burning phrase at pointblank range, “The new Sheriff said, ‘Shut up, you dirty greaser,’ to Señor Nepomuceno!”—syllables almost melting together, and continues immediately, in the same exhalation, to relay the message he’s been rehearsing since he left the Stealmans’ home, “Señora Luz says Mrs. Lazy says to send some oxtail for the soup,” adding with his last bit of breath, “and make it snappy.”

Sharp, standing behind his butcher’s block, is so startled he doesn’t respond with, “How could a jumpedup carpenter dare speak that way to Don Nepomuceno, Doña Estefanía’s son, the grandson and great-grandson of the owners of more than a thousand acres, including those on which Bruneville sits,” nor does he take the 82

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opposite stance, “Nepomuceno, that no-good, God-damn, cattle thieving, red-headed bandit, he can rot in hell for all I care”—two perspectives that will soon be widely debated. Rather, in his eagerness to spread the news, he (somewhat melodramatically) claps his left hand to his forehead, and glides (dragging his long butcher knife, which scratches a jagged line on the earthen floor) two steps to the next stall, which he rents to the chicken dealer, shouting, “Hey, Alitas!” and repeats in Spanish what Frank has just told him.

It’s been three weeks since Sharp has spoken to Alitas, supposedly they had a disagreement about the rent for the market stall, but everyone knows that what’s really pissed him off is that Alitas has been trying to win his sister’s heart.

Alitas, happy to be on speaking terms again, enthusiastically broadcasts the news, shouting, “Shears told Nepomuceno, ‘Shut up, you dirty greaser!’” The greengrocer, hearing the news, repeats it to Frenchie at his seed stall, Frenchie passes it on to Cherem, the Maronite at the fabric stand, where Miss Lace, Judge Gold’s housekeeper, is examining a swatch of recently arrived cloth, a kind she hasn’t seen before but it’s perfect for the parlor curtains.

Sid Cherem translates the phrase back into English and explains to Miss Lace what has happened; she asks Cherem to save the cloth for her and hurries off to relate the news to her employer, leaving behind Luis, the skinny kid who’s carrying her overloaded baskets. Luis, distracted from his duties by the rubber bands at a neighboring stand (one would be great for his slingshot) doesn’t even realize Miss Lace has gone.

Miss Lace scurries across the market square and is half way down the next block, where she sees Judge Gold coming out of his office, heading to Town Hall just across the street.

It’s important to explain that Judge Gold is not a judge, despite his name; he’s in the business of stuffing his wallet; his métier is money. Who knows how he got his name.

“Nepomuceno’s goose is cooked,” Judge Gold tells Miss Lace because he’s just received another report and, with both bits of news in mind, he continues to the Town Hall, which Sabas and Refugio, Nepomuceno’s half-brothers

from Doña Estefanía’s previous marriage, are exiting angrily.

Sabas and Refugio are proper gentlemen, the region’s crème de la crème.

Wagging tongues can’t understand how Doña Estefanía could produce two such jewels, and then produce the roughneck Nepomuceno, who doesn’t even know how to read. Others claim Nepumuceno’s illiteracy is a blatant lie and consider him the most elegant and best dressed of the three, with the manners of a prince.

Sabas and Refugio owe Judge Gold a lot of money. They’ve just testified before Judge White (who is a real judge if, though not necessarily just); the town’s Mexicans of the town call him “what’s-his-face” instead of Judge.

Nepomuceno preceded them but they waited until their messenger, Nat, told them that their half-brother had left the premises, so that they wouldn’t run into him. Nat was the one who reported to Judge Gold that the legal proceedings would be delayed “until further notice,” bad news for Sabas and Refugio, who want a ruling soon so they can get the payoff promised by Stealman, and even worse news for Nepomuceno.

A shot is heard. No one is particularly alarmed by the sound, for every 500 head of livestock you need 50 gunmen to guard them, and each of those gunmen will pass through Bruneville; each of them are capable of lawless acts, all sorts of violence. Shots are nothing.

Judge Gold hurls the sheriff’s words at Sabas and Refugio, thinking, they won’t be able to pay me for who knows how long, but at least I have the pleasure of delivering bad news. But he immediately feels uncomfortable: the taunt was unnecessary, and he has nothing to gain from it. That’s Judge Gold for you, callous impulses and heartfelt regrets.

Nat, overhearing this interchange, rushes off to the market square, to check out what’s happening wit h Nepomuceno and Shears.

Sabas and Refugio would have celebrated the humiliation of their mother’s golden boy, but they can’t because the news has been delivered by Judge Gold with intent to wound, so they continue on their way, as if nothing of consequence had been said.

Glevack, arriving from Big’s Café, is about to approach Sabas and Refugio

DIANA HAMILTON from Universe

If you stop me from cutting your hair, there is a sense in which you are interfering. * But, since you are entitled to determine whether I cut your hair or not, you do not wrong me. * I make your trip to the store a waste. * I buy the last quart of milk before you get there. * But, this interference is not wrong

to you.

You wasted your efforts.

I wrong you if I interfere with your person— pushing you out of the way as you reach for the milk. * If I force you to work for me I wrong you. * In the same way, I wrong you if I take something that belongs to you. * The bear-baiter does not really imagine what it is like to be a bear.

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If he did, he would think and act differently. * If the thing that I take is something you have made. * I wrong you if I take your property even if it costs you no effort to acquire it. * The claim that I have also taken your effort adds nothing. * Why don’t we get together and have me offer to cut your hair, and you accept my offer. * If I take your property and you like it, I wrong you. * Unless you like it and also consent to it, I cannot take your property, though I can take your effort, and I can cut your hair. * You force me to cut your hair, while begging me to stop cutting your hair. *

T COOPER Details Inside The sight of a handsome girl in too tight cut-offs sent the reels in Travis’s slot machine brain scrambling. He spotted her over the shoulder of the long-haul trucker standing in front of him in the chip aisle, where Travis was attempting to impart to the gentleman the word of God. At once Travis lost his place in the scripture in his mind.

(It was some combination of remaining steadfast down the road to victory, and step four, making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.)

“Those legs,” he thought and might’ve even said aloud, the mulling over of which made him further blank on whether the bloodshot-eyed, dandruffy gentleman standing before him palming an unbelievably loud bag of French Onion Sun Chips struggled with methamphetamine or alcohol.

She held the glass cooler open at the end of the aisle, considering a cascade of Gatorade flavors and sizes, the frosty air whooshing in and around her dirty blonde hair, which was up in what, Travis observed from a recent scan of the tabloids, was being called a “messy bun,” and was being sported by women and men alike in Hollywood these days—though he didn’t love when you’d see some of these leading men types f lipping their heads in that girlish, mindless way women did sometimes.

Travis’ eyes tumbled down her body and noticed that her right bare leg was twisted around the back of her other leg, toe vaguely scratching a spot on the top of her foot that probably didn’t even itch. She wore some sort of pilled, tiger-print ballet slippers with flexible soles. Hardly a shoe at all.

“I think maybe I’m past where Heavenly Father will forgive,” the trucker said, staring into Travis’ eyes, the intimacy snapping Travis’ attention out of his pants, where an erection was just starting to consider onto what side of eighteen the Gatorade girl fell.

“My friend,” Travis began, wiggling (hopefully) imperceptibly to adjust his member, “Jesus died so that you can always find forgiveness. But could you excuse me for a few minutes, and we’ll continue this back in your cab?” Here 91

T COOPER

Travis rested a steadying hand on one of his beefy shoulders. “I have some minor business to attend to, and I’ll be right out, son.”

It seemed like the trucker might be wondering how he came to a place in life where a man likely half his age and considerably more than twice as goodlooking was calling him “son.” But if it bothered him, he didn’t betray it, instead just dutifully headed over to pay for his chips, where Travis saw Omar behind the counter, verging on irate on account of the pretty girl holding the cooler door open so long.

“Wasted energy!” Omar said to no one.

Travis waited until the trucker was mid-transaction with Omar before turning his full attention toward the girl, who by now had a 20-ounce purple Gatorade in one hand while the other still propped the door, her head poking into the case trying to soak up any remaining cold she hadn’t already allowed to escape.

Travis placed a hand just above the girl’s. She flinched slightly, and glanced up at him. “Oh, sorry, miss,” he said, as though just noticing her.

She released the door then, switching the Gatorade from one hand to the other. “Quite alright,” she replied. He could taste the oily scent of her skin in his mouth. It was not unpleasant.

“Fierce Grape,” he began, smiling at her. He shut the freezer door, vacuum seal back in tact, the glass completely fogged. “Actually . . . ” he trailed off.

“Cute,” the girl said, turning on one of those slippers and walking slowly back down the chip aisle toward the register.

Travis hesitated until she glanced back over a shoulder, and then followed. She paused, almost precisely where the trucker Travis had been ministering to stood a few moments earlier, deciding upon his poison. She surveyed the bags too, but Travis knew she wasn’t interested in buying any.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“I don’t make a habit of giving my name to strangers at the Pilot.”

“What about the Flying J?” Travis suggested, nodding toward the truck stop across the street.

She looked out the front window of the shop. Closer now to that perfect skin, Travis realized this was the precise kind of girl his father declared

would never again be within his purview. It was the last time his father said anything to him (albeit through marred, grafitti-covered plexiglas and a feedbacky intercom phone).

“Well, is anything stopping you from receiving handsome strangers’ names at the Pilot?” Travis asked the girl.

“I never said ‘handsome.’ Jalapeno, or Harvest Cheddar?”

“Neither seems adequate.” When she remained silent, he volunteered, “Travis,” and held out his right hand, more palm up come with me than vertical nice to meet you. She looked at it, possibly surprised (delighted?) by how soft it looked. Travis was glad he moisturized no less than three times a day. He was also glad that he never felt ashamed to say that name aloud; it was a solid, undeniably attractive name, unlike the one his parents put on his birth certificate. Travis couldn’t think of a Travis he’d ever come across who wasn’t appealing in some compelling way, like being ruggedly good-looking, a hard worker, or having a thick head of hair. Always showing up on time.

Keeping promises.

Travis saw the girl’s eyes pause on the shiny gold cross pinned to his shirt collar, and then she rested her hand atop his outstretched one. He closed his fingers around it, squeezing harder than he’d intended. But she didn’t seem to mind, didn’t pull away. They stood there joined like that for an easy ten seconds, Travis assuming the girl was debating whether to share her name.

Or give a false one. Their hands swayed side to side. Two strangers touching under the fluorescents, not a flicker of awkwardness.

Both glass doors into the shop swung open then, and Travis felt the pressure change as outside heat bumped up against the conditioned air indoors.

The ding-dong Omar insisted on installing despite the truck stop being occupied practically 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on this busy strip of middle Tennessee, jarred Travis and the girl, causing them to release their grip on one another. Her eyes trained on the door, and Travis discerned a fine crack in her porcelain as she saw who’d just entered. The girl beelined for the counter and handed the Gatorade over to Omar, who was arguing with another trucker over a refund. “Tell me what kind of a person wants a hot shower

ELENA ALEXA NDER

MINDING THE ELEPHA NTS (03/20/2003 – 12/18/2011) Like a lion he breaks all my bones . . . cry until morning . . . moan like a dove . . . from day to night you bring me to an end.

— Isaiah 38:13 I hear you are bitter

my sweet.

Recent events have not worked out

as intended. Expectation,

a prick. A salted wound.

Send cool air across my clavicle.

Help me catch the ants.

Here you are

bled dry. Anger

hot as veldt. Thicker hides than mine ruffle, try to raise their dead:

Long supple muscle of trunk

props up babe, lifeless

against leathery foreleg—

babe falls again, babe falls again.

Farther off, a riffling of bones.

Failed resurrections in progress.

(Elephants trumpet rumble basso, scat in diminishing cords.

They do not grow bitter, though known to get testy. Piercing weapons disarmed. Disarming, they dance round us, wrinkled, ringing deep their old gray song.)

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Now watch: Lioness drags elephant calf

across harsh grass.

And what might we mean by hunger?

Kill to kill. Best cut sharp;

light, as though we knew what we were doing. Torturers’ chambered paradise.

Passions’ eye, contused.

Limbs racked

tight to climax makes one feel big, the other—

broken. Spills all he ever knew.

Sever ropes.

Let crumple

a great weight.

Burrows, furrows. Ants will

travel; grubs.

Listen to the trumpeting.

The rumble.

CLARICE LISPECTOR Clandestine Happiness Translated from the Portuguese

by Rachel Klein She was fat, short, freckled and with sort of reddish excessively frizzy hair.

She had an enormous bust, while all of us were still flat chested. As if that weren’t enough, she filled the two pockets of her blouse, above her bust, with caramels. But she possessed what any child who devoured books dreamed of: a father who owned a bookstore.

She didn’t take much advantage of it. And the rest of us even less: on our birthdays, instead of at least a cheap little book, she hand delivered to each of us a picture postcard from her father’s store. To top it off, it was a scene of Recife, where we lived, with more bridges than you could ever see.

On the back, she would write in the most highly embroidered script words like “birth date” and “fond memories.”

But what a talent she had for cruelty.

She was pure vengeance, noisily chewing her caramels. How this girl must have hated us, we who were unforgivably pretty, thin, tall, with smooth hair.

On me she practiced her sadism with a calm ferocity. In my longing to read, I didn’t even notice the humiliations to which she subjected me: I continued to beg her to lend me the books she didn’t read.

Until the great day came when she started to practice her Chinese torture on me. As if by chance, she told me that she had The Adventures of Little Nose,

by Monteiro Lobato.

It was a thick book, my God, it was a book to live with, eating it, sleeping it.

And it was completely beyond my reach.

She told me to come to her house the next day and she would lend it to me.

Until the next day I became the very anticipation of joy: I wasn’t living, I was swimming slowly in a gentle sea, the waves carrying me to and fro.

The next day I went to her house, I literally ran there. She didn’t live in an apartment like me, but in a house.

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But things weren’t that simple. The secret plan of the bookstore owner’s daughter was quiet and diabolic. into my eyes, she told me that she had lent the book to another girl, and that I should come back the next day to get it. Open mouthed, I left slowly, but soon hope took hold of me again completely and I started leaping along the street, which was my strange way of going through the streets of Recife. This time I didn’t fall: the promise of the book led me on, the next day would come, the days that followed would be my whole life, love of the world was waiting for me, and I went leaping through the streets as always and I didn’t fall even once.

But things weren’t that simple. The secret plan of the bookstore owner’s daughter was quiet and diabolic. The next day I was at the door of her house with a smile and a beating heart. Only to hear her calm reply: the book still wasn’t there, I should return the next day. I could scarcely have imagined how later on, in the course of my life, the drama of “the next day” was going to repeat itself accompanied by my beating heart.

And so it continued. For how long?

I don’t know. She knew that it was an indefinite time, so long as the bile hadn’t drained completely from her thick body. And I had begun to guess, which is something I do, that she had chosen me to suffer. But, actually guessing it, I sometimes accept it: as if the person who wants to make me suffer wickedly needs me to suffer.

For how long? I went to her house every day, without missing a single day. Sometimes she said: well I had the book yesterday afternoon, but you didn’t come till this morning, so I lent it to another girl. And I, who didn’t normally have dark circles under my eyes, felt those dark circles digging themselves in beneath my amazed eyes.

Until one day, when I was at the door of her house, listening humiliated and silent to her refusal, her mother appeared. She must have been puzzled by the daily mute appearance of that girl at the door of her house. She asked the two of us for an explanation. There

was a confused silence, broken by words that didn’t explain much. Each time the woman found her inability to understand stranger. Until that good mother did understand. She turned to her daughter and exclaimed with great surprise: But this book has never left the house and you didn’t want to read it!

The worst part for this woman was not the discovery of what had happened. It had to be the horrified discovery of what kind of daughter she had.

She observed us in silence: the power of her unrecognizable daughter’s perversity and the blond girl standing at the door, exhausted, in the wind of Recife’s streets. It was then that, finally pulling herself together, she said to her daughter in a firm and calm voice: “You are going to lend this book right now.” And to me: “And you can keep this book for as long as you like.” Do you understand? It meant more than if she had given the book to me: “for as long as I would like” is all that a person, big or small, can dare to want.

How can I describe what happened next? I was stunned, and that’s how I took the book in my hand. I don’t think I said a thing. I got the book. No, no I didn’t leap as usual. I walked away very slowly. I know that I held the thick book with two hands, pressing it against my chest. It didn’t matter how long it took to reach home. My chest was burning, my heart pensive.

Once I got home, I didn’t start reading. I pretended that I didn’t have it, only so that later I could feel the shock of having it. Hours later I opened it, I read a few wonderful lines, I closed it again, I made a pass through the house, I postponed things even more by going to eat some bread and butter, I pretended not to know where I left the book, I found it, I opened it for an instant. I created the most unbelievable difficulties for this clandestine thing that was happiness. For me happiness would always be clandestine.

It was as if I already sensed it. How I dragged it out! I dwelt in the air . . .

I had pride and modesty within me. I was a delicate queen.

From time to time I sat in the hammock, swaying with the book open on my lap, without touching it, in the purest state of ecstasy.

I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover.

Rachel Kushner by Hari Kunzru

Photo by Gale Harold.

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I first met Rachel Kushner in Toronto McCarren airport in, I think, 2007. We were both there for the International Festival of Authors (IFOA). I’d just spent several hours in US immigration detention (the asshole border guard had opined that I “didn’t deserve” my visa) and I was heartily pissed off at missing a flight to New York. Rachel allowed me to rant at her for at least ten minutes, before heading off to catch her own plane to LA. Since then, I’ve gradually become aware that, not only is she a good listener, but our preoccupations as writers coincide in many ways—we share interests in art, politics, and using the novel to get a sort of multidisciplinary purchase on the world that other kinds of writing don’t allow. I was happy to have the opportunity to talk about some of this with her on Skype, on the occasion of the release of The Flamethrowers, her latest novel.

— HARI KUNZRU

national liberation movement and American dominance.

My emphasis in college had been American foreign policy in Latin America. Suddenly there I was doing all this research into the Cuban Revolution and the role the Americans played in their quasi-colonial society there.

But I was new at figuring out how to balance research with the very delicate mechanism of character, the organic unity of fiction. I did a lot of research and then I had to de-cathect from it in order to actually write the novel. With my new novel, The Flamethrowers, I was merging different fields I sensed were connected, but not in overt ways. I did some research, but the various strands of the book were mostly realms I’d learned about over the years just by personal interest.

HARI KUNZRU So what’s your story about how you

RK I lived in Italy as an exchange student when I was

got from being born to publishing a novel?

18, in the crass and conservative era that, as a reaction to the radical ’70s, paved the way for Berlusconi. I was astonished to learn that Italy almost had a revolution in the 1970s. Through my husband I got introduced to the Autonomists—he has written about that milieu. We know people who had been involved with that movement, and it seemed like it was ripe to be made into fiction, partly because of renewed interest. But it’s also very dramatic and complex, and full of intrigue that seems right for the novel. There is a darker armed side. There’s this great reader that Semiotext(e) reprinted that was originally published in 1980—

RACHEL KUSHNER It would be something if I had a one-sentence answer to that, right? My parents were beatniks who had a lot books around the house, and it was instilled in me that I was going to be a writer of some kind from a young age. So I did what was expected of me, which is a bit lame, but there you have it: I have much more admiration for sui generis people who come from homes that don’t respect art. My trajectory did, however, have deviations to it. I ended up studying political economy at UC Berkeley, rather than English.

I was politicized. I was 16 when I went to college and I had an antiauthority outlook and personality, and I couldn’t imagine going into academia and having a job.

Eventually I realized that the only thing I was suited to was the novel, because it was the one project that could answer to my various interests, incorporate all the different aspects of life that I care about. After college I lived in San Francisco, a few “remedial years” that followed my accelerated education. I worked at nightclubs, rode a Moto Guzzi, and then finally got bored with that scene and wanted to be serious about writing. At 26 I enrolled in the fiction program at Columbia. I didn’t get the idea for my first novel, Telex from Cuba, until after I had finished my MFA. Then it took me six years to write it.

bikes, and Italy down in some sense.

HK (Holds up the book.)

RK Exactly. I don’t claim to be an expert on Autonomia, I should say, especially the theoretical origins. As a fiction writer, in any case, I wanted to understand aspects of the movement that cannot be fully apprehended from reading about it. It was important to go to Italy and talk to people and get them to explain things to me—the difference between Autonomia as an open movement and the much more clandestine armed movements in Italy at that time, for instance. Did they overlap? There are a lot of gray areas that you won’t ever hear about without someone talking off the record.

HK So your first interest in fiction as a project has to do

HK When I was researching My Revolutions, I real-

with a way of talking about the complexity of the world that other disciplines don’t capture. That’s similar to my sense of why I do it. It allows me to connect lots of things together in a way that is not legitimate academically. That leads us both to these heavily researched books. Talk me through how the research sits alongside the writing.

ized that, being a novelist, I wasn’t going to be able to represent anybody’s political stance in a way that was accurate or faithful to some way they’d want to be represented. There were issues, you know—people had done things that are illegal, people’s lives had been very much changed by their participation in social movements . . .

I decided not to do interviews even though there were people I could easily have gone to. I was spending a lot of days in a squatted café near my house, which had been occupied as part of a local antigentrification campaign. At the time I was researching the Angry Brigade [1970s UK terrorist group], and I realized one of the guys in the café with me was one of the people I’d been obsessively reading about. I knew every publicly available

RK Yes—“the complexity of the world.” My whole trajectory as a novelist is maybe about finding the form and through line of a constructed world that can hold in it what I really think about . . . everything. With Telex, it was funny to realize that I’d come full circle to write a book that took as its fictional context a mid-20th-century 105

HK You probably already had the ’70s art world, the

LITERATURE — RACHEL KUSHNER

TOM HEALY

QUIET HA NDS

TUR NING INTO HER

My nephew is stimming this morning, marching in place, grinning at the parade only he knows is passing.

There is a spelling bee on television and a soft, elaborated boy in a cardigan sweater is faltering on the word “bedizened.”

There are audience reaction shots, a knowing mood and murmur, smirks among the other parents, even the judges. It is as if this boy has been caught at home in his mother’s mirror, a mother who doesn’t have the jewelry or dresses he’d want her to have.

And so he’s put on her nightgown through which he can see and touch himself. Then he takes a pilled winter scarf that scratches his neck and he doesn’t know what to do with it. Over his head or draped as a shawl? Or sashay and have it float around and around him as he dances in her dull, muddy lipstick and her sneakers. Enough because they are hers, because people already think he is his mother when he answers the phone and he has her eyes and he’s never told her she’s beautiful.

As if his adornment could protect them both. As if his silent turning into her could ever be enough.

Now rocking like a monk.

Now fluttering his fingers into the wing beat of a hummingbird.

Why is he so patient with our infirmities?

We don’t see the flowers he drinks from, the garden we’re foolishly trampling.

To m Healy i s ch ai r m a n of t h e Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, which oversees the Fulbright program worldwide. He was appointed to the board by President Obama. Healy is the author of What the Right Hand Knows (Four Way Books, 2009) and Animal Spirits (Monk Books, 2013).

He is a visiting professor at the New School.

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Year-round 2–12 week residencies for artists and writers. Residents receive individual studios, private rooms and all meals, plus access to prominent Visiting Artists and Writers offering slide talks, readings and studio visits. Three annual fellowship application deadlines: February 15th, June 15th, and October 1st. MFA program available with Johnson State College.

Building on the esteemed reputation of the Art Students League of New York, Vytlacil gives support and space to emerging, established, and teaching artists through an international residency program (4 or 8 weeks). Just 20 miles from NYC, the 15-acre pastoral setting provides 24hour access to individual studio spaces along with a sculpture studio, bronze foundry, kilns, forging and welding facilities. Scholarships available.

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THE MACDOWELL COLONY The MacDowell Colony nurtures the arts by offering creative individuals of the highest talent an inspiring environment in which to produce enduring works of the imagination. Fellowships of up to eight weeks are offered. Artists-in-residence receive room, board, and exclusive use of a studio. There are no residency fees. www.macdowellcolony.org

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18TH STREET ARTS CENTER 18th Street Arts Center’s mission is “to provoke public dialogue through contemporary art making.” The Visiting Artist Residency Program hosts emerging and mid-career international and national artists of all disciplines. Residencies are between 1 to 3 months. Intermittently, we work with curators and musicians, although we primarily support visual artists. www.18thstreet.org

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Still from BEACH , 2012, digital video.

Images courtesy of the artist.

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Coleen Fitzgibbon by P. Adams Sitney In the 1970s, American universities and art schools began to include filmmaking in their curricula. Generally, the charismatic teachers they hired to conduct such courses were a generation of avant-garde filmmakers.

They were mostly brilliant autodidacts (such as Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, George Landow a.k.a. Owen Land, Hollis Frampton, Lawrence Jordan, and Ernie Gehr), or, if they had formal educations, they had taught themselves cinema (Robert Breer, Larry Gotheim, Paul Sharits, and Tony Conrad were examples of this).

From these schools there emerged the first generation of artists who had been taught how to make avant-garde films. Most of those who survived as filmmakers became teachers themselves: Saul Levine, Marjorie Keller, Bill Brant, and Louis Hock all came out of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They were steeped in the history and aesthetics of American avant-garde cinema; in short, they worked within an artistic tradition.

Coleen Fitzgibbon shared their training at the Art Institute but not their aspirations. She did not see herself as a filmmaker but as an artist who made, or used, cinema among other media. She did not aspire to produce a corpus of work like that of her teachers. She was familiar with the parameters of the avant-garde cinema that her peers had inherited, but she was not

P. ADAMS SITNEY I didn’t know that you went to Boston University! Did you know you were going to be an artist?

COLEEN FITZGIBBON No, my dad wanted me to be a secretary. He said, “You’ll never make money in the arts.”

So after six months of writing 25-page papers, I realized I wasn’t cut out for the humanities and transferred to the art department. It was Renaissance training—life drawings, anatomy, perspective . . . In ’69, I had a summer job in Southampton, where I met Roger Welch, Dennis Oppenheim, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, gallerist John Gibson, and his wife, Susan.

PAS How’d you meet all those people on a job in Long Island?

CF I was the personal assistant for a Prokofiev musicologist named Florence Jonas. One day I biked to the Parrish Art Museum and there was Roger Welch organizing an avant-garde art exhibition. “It’s gonna be great, you’ve got to come back,” Roger told me. Even the DeKoonings showed up.

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emotionally committed to it. Her ironic stance was her strength. In a few years in the early 1970s, she made a series of radical films and then put aside the medium to focus on other modes of artistic invention. Her FM/ TRCS transformed the then-dominant genre of cinematic self-portraiture into something visually unique, from which the indices of selfhood had been erased.

Then, in an astonishing gesture, she made the most reductive of all flicker films, Internal System, exposing the color temperatures of the projection apparatus itself and the auditory “heart murmur” of the motionpicture camera as it exposed film. Later, at a time when Michael Snow, Frampton, and Landow were exploring the power of words on the screen, she found a way to make utterly original films out of microfiche.

Two generations of film students passed through the schools. The second of these included young scholar-filmmakers interested in film preservation and in the exhibition of lost or forgotten filmmakers.

The rediscovery of Fitzgibbon’s philosophically radical cinema of the 1970s, 30 years later, reawakened an enthusiasm for the medium in the artist herself, who then embraced the latest technologies, including the iPhone, to make new films and reshape her “forgotten work.” We talked of these matters in January 2013.

— P. ADAMS SITNEY

CF My mom, a painter and biologist, encouraged me early and my high school art teacher, Gerry Rinaldi, a Vietnam vet, took us to every modern art show in the Tristate Area. My dad was more pragmatic about surviving as an artist.

PAS What did he do?

CF He was a first-generation American.

After leaving Ireland, his parents worked their cousin’s farm in Illinois. The GI bill allowed my dad to get his PhD in education.

My mother’s family moved by covered wagon to Illinois in the early 1800s.

PAS He was a teacher?

CF Teacher, guidance counselor, and intelligence-test salesman, then publisher. We moved ten times by high school through Illinois, California, and New York. I attended BU for three years, then transferred to the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1973 I went to the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.

PAS You didn’t have to be in a department?

CF It seemed very informal. SAIC was small and had young teachers, and very little money. Their then laissez-faire attitude was similar to that of the Whitney ISP (we’re talking early ’70s). I took film with Stan Brakhage and George Landow and video with Phil Morten.

They had a lot of visiting artists—Carolee Schneemann, Lynda Benglis, Alex Katz, Mary Heilmann. Landow’s class was my first film class; three weeks into it, after watching hours of educational library films, I asked the quiet teenage projectionist when Landow was showing up to lecture. Of course this was Landow.

PAS There’s this story that you participated in kidnapping him at one time?

PAS You went to the Art Institute as a sculptor?

CF (laughter) Christa Maiwald and I were friends at SAIC and often collaborated making art. George really liked Christa, and when his birthday came up we told him to expect a special day. We planned to bring him to a fortune-teller, to a stripper, and then back to the house for cake.

CF No, I was painting in Boston. Chicago offered film and video so I tried it.

PAS His birthday was September 10. He was my oldest friend. His recollection of

Aki Onda by Michael Snow

Performance view of Cassette Memories , 2011, Cour Carrée, Louvre Museum, Paris, May 14, 2011. Photo by Sandrine Marc. Images courtesy of the artist.

opposite: Images from Diary , 2011, artist’s book and multiple, published by Unframed.

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Halsey Rodman by Ulrike Müller

Detail of The Wolves from Three Angles , 2011, acrylic paint, MDF, aluminum tube, magnets, gouache, and pencil on paper, 107 × 42 × 99 inches. Images courtesy of the artist.

The Wolves from Three Angles , 2011, acrylic paint, MDF, aluminum tube, magnets, gouache, and pencil on paper, 107 × 42 × 99 inches.

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Christopher Deeton by Raphael Rubinstein

Number 192 , 2010, acrylic on canvas, 84 Ă— 72 inches.

Images courtesy the artist and Steven Sclaroff, New York City.

Photos by Tom Powel Imaging.

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Installation view of Boiserie , 2010, mixed media, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Courtesy of the artist and Eleven Rivington, New York City.

Katrín Sigurdardóttir is a New York–based Icelandic artist whose sculptures and installations explore entanglements of body, perception, and memory. I first met Sigurdardóttir in January of 1998, shortly after I arrived in Iceland on a Fulbright grant. I remember sitting on the floor of the artist’s Reykjavík flat as she opened a small wooden case and began removing shallow wood boxes, each containing a miniature landscape. Just when I thought she was finished, another landscape would emerge. The nested landscapes—17 in all—reproduced public parks in cities where she’d lived (including San Francisco, New York City, and Reykjavík). Sigurdardóttir’s work—with its conflation of home and public space—sparked a conversation, ongoing still, about sculpture and experiences of place.

Over the years, Sigurdardóttir’s work has repeatedly explored the relationship between embodied experiences of place and imaginary or conceptual constructions of space. The artist often uses hobbyist miniatures or architectural models to set up contrasts in scale. High Plane V (2007), at MoMA PS1, was a large structure with steps leading to a platform through which the viewers poked their heads into a landscape of mountainous islands. The visitors’ heads became part of the landscape and invaded the panorama of uninhabited nature. Home, as an elusive braiding of memory and fantasy, was evoked in the artist’s 2012 exhibitions at Eleven Rivington in New York City and Meessen De Clerq in Brussels with works from the series based on scale models of sections (facades, halls, doorways) of the artist’s childhood home on Langahlíð 11 in Reykjavík.

In 2010 to 2011, Sigurdardóttir’s site-specific project for the Metropolitan Museum, Boiserie, reproduced two of the museum’s 18th-century period rooms. The artist’s meticulous rendering of decorative surfaces was bleached of color and reduced in scale, conceptualizing the museumgoer’s encounter with historical objects. As Iceland’s representative at this year’s Venice Biennale, Sigurdardóttir’s project (which will travel from Venice on to Reykjavík and New York’s SculptureCenter) is an architectural intervention that furthers the artist’s interest in scale, embodied experiences of place, and the staging of views.

— EVA HEISLER

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Katrín Sigurdardóttir by Eva Heisler

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ART — KATRÍN SIGURDARDÓTTIR

I might end up with “before-image” or “before-painting.”

KS The closest English equivalent of fyrirmynd is model. Yet the etymology and meaning of these two words are not the same. Fyrirmynd could be translated as “the image that comes before.” In painting for example, the apples on the table would be the fyrirmynd of what is painted. But fyrirmynd could also refer to a model citizen or to anything to be imitated or used as an example. But it doesn’t describe a hobby model. I liked the slippage between the two languages.

EH Fyrirmynd grew out of research into memory and perception. You were adamant in addressing memory in general and not a particular memory. Later, with a work such as Impasse II – Ísaksskóli (2003), a model of the facade of your elementary school, and the 2012 series of scale models of sections of your childhood home, you appear to be more willing to approach specific memories.

What are your earliest memories of space?

KS My early memories of space were generally memories of surfaces: the coolness of cast bronze, the relief of the wallpaper in the bedroom, the buildup of paint layers on a windowsill. All this seems to have made its way directly into my work, which still deals much with the “skins” in a space, like the surfaces that divide structures and what they contain.

Installation view (below) and detail (above) of High Plane , 2005, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, polystyrene, wood, steel, 20 × 24 × 13 feet. Courtesy of the artist. Photos by Tom Van Eynde. aloud from an Icelandic pronunciation guide while a leaf blower blew away each paper after you read it. The sheets would then stick to the wire and, by the end of the reading, you were covered in a cage of Icelandic language.

KS This was a very primitive and unresolved performance that maybe I will remake one day. It’s the only work of mine where sound plays a role. You couldn’t really hear me speak because of the leaf blower. So it was sort of doubly incomprehensible, because as the paper 139

ART — KATRÍN SIGURDARDÓTTIR

started to clutter up the wire, it became impossible to read my lips.

EH The first piece of yours that I wrote about was Fyrirmynd/Model (1998–2000) in its early incarnation in the fall of 1998.

In this work, a miniature road traverses and climbs the gallery space. The road is based on a neurological model of the electrical impulses involved in perception and memory. The Icelandic term for model, has different and more complex connotations than the English word. If I translate fyrirmynd literally,

EH You grew up in a two-story Reykjavík rowhouse that was built by your family.

There was a lot of construction and new building going on in the city during this time. Do you have memories of observing construction sites? I’m wondering if the ongoing development of Reykjavík wove itself into your imagination.

KS The construction sites from childhood that I remember are the church steeple of Hallgrímskirkja (of which we had an uninterrupted view from our west windows) and a senior citizens’ home in a lot next door. As the steeple of Hallgrímskirkja was finished, construction of the senior citizens’ home began.

One of the differences between Iceland and, say, New York, is the level of publicsite security and, in the 1970s, even more so. We would climb through the windows of the senior citizens’ home, claiming the half-built space as our own.

Once the electricity was in place, we would go down into the control room and

Tom Neely, 2011, www.iwilldestroyyou.com 144

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