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22 Dec, 2023

- The Sphere

- On Sven Holm’s Novella of Nuclear Disaster

Dispatch

The Sphere

Elena Saavedra Buckley   9:00AM, 22 Dec, 2023

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley.

Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple seconds later, when we realized the light was only the shining moon rising over the peaks, we began laughing so hard that my parents heard and stumbled out into the front yard.

I thought of this memory a few weeks ago while in a Lyft in Las Vegas, also at twilight. A man named June was driving me to the Sphere, the giant 20,000-capacity arena built just off the Strip by the Madison Square Garden Company and designed by the firm Populous, which opened earlier in the fall. The Sphere is (mostly) its titular shape, 157 meters wide, and covered in what is reputedly the largest LED screen on earth, and inside is a smaller sphere, holding a lobby and an arena with a curved screen that bears down at and envelopes the audience, a massive take on a planetarium with 4D features. The globular animations on the outer surface are what first captivated the attention of online viewers; since the Sphere turned on, it has featured rotating basketballs, mercurial ripples, AI-generated washes of color, and advertisements that cost brands nearly half a million dollars per day to display. Its most iconic exterior images are all the kinds of things middle schoolers like to draw in the margins of their notebooks: an eyeball, an emoji face, and, yes, the moon.

I first latched on to the Sphere in mid-2021, when architectural renderings had already been circulating for a few years. During the 2022 midterms, while election forecasters were waiting for late-breaking votes from Clark County, Nevada, where Las Vegas is the county seat, I remember thinking that the Sphere would be the right place on which to beam the same consequential results in the future. If the electoral college was always going to turn random populations into oracles, why not enhance the effect and ground the abstraction with the most cosmic of shapes? At that point, the structure was still a giant salad bowl of curved steel beams just off the Strip; Madison Square Garden had been building the thing since 2018, and inflation had pushed the projected cost to $2.2 billion, nearly double the original budget. By September of this year they finished it, and U2 started its forty-show residency. I booked a trip to Vegas and bought a ticket to Postcard from Earth, the Darren Aronofsky “movie” that had been made for the venue. (Cheaper than Bono’s show.) It was all I could think about for weeks.

Then I began having dreams that punished me for my enthusiasm. In them the Sphere was a pathetic size, the circumference of a backyard trampoline, languishing in roadside parking lots like a sheepish dumpster with a vending machine’s tepid glow. People whizzed past it in their cars as they would highway billboards for personal injury lawyers. And I guess that was the outcome I was afraid of. For me, the question of the Sphere was not really about the subjects that other journalists had focused on—the state of live entertainment, or what screens do to our attention spans—but about whether a physical object could still truly excite us, siphon and sustain our normally starved collective passions. (For the majority of human history, this type of adulation was mostly aimed at entities that were sacred, cosmic, or both, like comets.) That the Sphere was owned and operated by sterilized companies didn’t really matter to me; perhaps this increased the effect of the thing as a smooth, vacuous singularity of the masses. Once I got there, and once I went inside it, would the energy I had generated thinking about it have anywhere to land? I was hoping—and this might have been the optimism that the Sphere was brazenly promoting at a time when everyone seemed to be shorting it—that if you tore away all the facts about its content, you would still be left with what moved me against all odds: the shape, and the light.

I arrived in Vegas on the final day of the Las Vegas Grand Prix, a Formula 1 event that was taking place on the Strip itself. Its construction had bottlenecked the city for months, and casino and hotel workers had been told to leave home three hours early during the event to make their shifts. (Tens of thousands of those workers, members of the Culinary Union, had just secured a historic contract after threatening the city with what would have been the largest hospitality strike of all time.) Roads were closed from 5 P.M. onward, so I decided to get to the Sphere just before. In the Lyft I was leaning forward, clinging to the empty passenger seat to get closer to the windshield, straining against the seat belt like a child. We turned right and it appeared before us, again at what looked to me to be the end of the road. Behind the shadowed cutouts of stoplights, telephone wires, and emphatic fronds of palm trees, and in front of the mealy, bruised residue of the completed sunset, sat the expectant thing, curling wildly with sky-blue light in mosaic. I realized that the animation was a disco ball in motion, the rows of mirrored shards twisting against one another with the glide of a Rubik’s Cube. June and I gasped and wowed repeatedly while he took videos to send to his wife. It became bigger as we approached Paradise Road and the parking structures that surrounded its nestled position beyond the thoroughfares. The disco ball by now had turned into a stack of quivering ice cubes.

And then, rotating clockwise on the equator of the Sphere from the far side, it arrived: the Heineken logo, a green and red neon icon rendered in LED. June and I laughed, much harder than I think either of us expected. This whole time, while we gawked, it had been waiting to show us that it was something familiar, something of this world. And this amazed us too.

* * *

The story the Madison Square Garden PR machine uses to illustrate the Vitruvian genius of its chief executive, James Dolan, is that the Sphere started as a simple drawing he made seven years ago in a notebook: a circle with a stick person standing inside of it. (This has now been framed.) And it’s true that Dolan understood something primal: we are, whether from the womb, or the firmament, or the telos of the atom, or the pleasure of throwing a ball into the air, innately pulled toward the form of the sphere. “The globe is, mathematically, the form that encloses the maximum interior volume with the least external skin,” Rem Koolhaas wrote in Delirious New York. “It has a promiscuous capacity to absorb objects, people, iconographies, symbolisms; it relates them through the mere fact of their coexistence in its interior.” Domes are some of our oldest structures; in 1965, a farmer in Ukraine dug up in his backyard remains from at least four domed huts, constructed from mammoth bones, that could date as far back as 12,000 BC. Then came the basilicas. There were igloos; pueblo ovens; wigwams; maybe some sort of outhouses, all halfway spherical. But tugging the full shape out of the ground, and dedicating whole edifices to its isolated drama, suited a more secular, industrial age. “In most cases,” the urban historian Ernestyna Szpakowska-Loranc has written of spheres, “they remain within the realm of utopian projects.” Naturally, many never happened, like Étienne-Louis Boullée’s planned globular monument to Isaac Newton from the 1780s, which was only ever sketched in ink. After World War I, spheres were erected more triumphantly and deflated more spectacularly than their predecessors.

There was, for instance, the Perisphere at the World’s Fair in 1939 in Queens, a gleaming white sphere with a plaster facade, eighteen stories high, and next to it a spindly pyramidic tower named Trylon. Visitors entered the Perisphere on an escalator and rode a moving walkway around its interior circumference while looking down at “Democracity”—a model of a harmonious, anonymous American settlement set in 2039, in which workers spend their days in factories and live in satellite towns surrounding a cultural center, all connected by broad and efficient highways. This vision of the World of Tomorrow, the fair’s motto, was nonspecific, despite all the effort; E. B. White described struggling to remember more than “only a fragment” after he visited the exhibit. (But tomorrow always arrives in some form, and in 1941, the Perisphere was destroyed, its materials used for armaments in the war.) As we know now, the real cities of the future would sprawl not by design but by demand, much like Vegas, which initially grew to satisfy the gambling laborers who built the nearby Hoover Dam. It was never a town of austere white structures but one of ornament. By the sixties you could look down the Strip and see a montage of layered neon casino signs, meant to be looked at through a moving windshield. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, the architects who in 1972 published Learning from Las Vegas, one of the most influential urban theory books of the twentieth century, wanted more architects to embrace the lessons of the city’s signage, its “roadside eclecticism,” which they thought representative of the chaos, improvisation, and consumption of the real world—and therefore a more exciting and inclusive way of imagining what could be truly new.

These are the contradictory ancestries of the Sphere: the modernist utopia imagined by its shape, and the vernacular idioms of its advertisements and screens. When videos of it began going viral, people scrambled to defend it, though I was never sure against whom exactly. Perhaps it felt hard to believe that anything it might project or hold would live up to its own ambition, that the dream of galvanizing mass culture is dead. In later writings, which fewer people read, Venturi offered naive enthusiasm for the democratizing possibilities of technology, for an “electronic age when computerized images can change over time, information can be infinitely varied rather than dogmatically universal, and communication can accommodate diversities of cultures and vocabularies.” Yet in 1994, he and Scott Brown returned to Vegas and found the city, which had once projected a “wickedness or vulgarity” that seemed instructional, to now be enclosed like a theme park. Parking lots had become parking structures; errant lots were landscaped; the hotels were bigger and only ballooning. “This promotes expanded markets and bigger profits, but will its wholesome scenography end up as ‘blandly homogenized good taste,’ ” they wrote, “ ‘boring as only paradise can be’?”

I saw all of this on the Strip during F1 weekend, where people without high-dollar tickets to the event, including me, had to strain to see the racecars beyond the privacy screens and barriers that had been put up along the roads and pedestrian bridges. I killed time before the final race started by hanging out with a group of lanky boys in jagged chrome helmets, their many dirt bikes leaning up against the doors of an establishment offering IV therapy. One of them, Landon, told me that they were all fifteen years old and had driven in on those bikes from Henderson, a suburb thirty minutes to the east. Usually they meet under the Welcome to Las Vegas sign and ride the Strip, or they go down to areas on the outskirts of town to use dirt jumps they’ve built. Like everyone else on the sidewalk, they had tried to evade the race barricades. “We were originally going to climb a roof and watch it. We’d been planning it,” Landon said. “I’ve gotten to the top of the Aria”—he pointed in the direction of one of the Strip’s tallest hotels—“because I know about the latches and the fire stairs.” But the extra security had made this impossible. Instead someone had brought a pocketknife and sliced through the vinyl mesh screen covering the fence. When the cars zipped past every few minutes, the whole group would hurry toward the window of their own making to meet them.

I asked him over the roar if he liked it in Vegas. “It’s too much,” he said, gesturing at the throngs. “A lot of times my friends and I will drive out to the lakebed and have bonfires, and we’ll look at the sky.” He’d decided that he wanted to become a wildland firefighter in Colorado or Utah.

“Well, I’m here for the Sphere,” I said. “Do you care about that?”

Landon thought for a second and nodded. “I do think the Sphere is cool,” he said, looking me in the eye. “But it means more light pollution. I’m trying to see the stars.”

* * *

I was standing on top of a parking garage the morning after F1, a cloudless moment in high desert winds. Across the street, crews were disassembling the racetrack boundaries and grandstands while private jets gained altitude overhead. The Sphere, looming just above, was showing one of the first animations since I arrived that wasn’t purely an advertisement: a collage of blinking retro neon patterns on a black background, the Welcome to Las Vegas sign in the center. Later that weekend I would visit the Neon Museum, where these kinds of iconic Strip signs of yore, which have mostly been replaced with screens, are displayed in a dirt lot. In this way the Sphere seemed to be doing a land acknowledgement for all the displaced iconography.

I had just visited a dispensary called NuLeaf, a block down the road, where the manager, Daniel, told me that they’ve had a steady influx of customers since the Sphere opened. “It’s my understanding that they want to have their minds blown,” he explained. Daniel thought the Sphere was great, as did many other people I spoke to who live in Vegas and see it as often in real life as on their phones. It wasn’t changing the logic of the Strip, really; it certainly didn’t make it worse. It mostly drew more focused attention to the area, and that seemed like a net good for the status quo. That being: the Vegas metro area as home to nearly two million people and counting. More of its residents live below the poverty line than the national average. At least 6,500 of them are homeless, and hundreds of that group live in 600 miles of tunnels underneath the city, which can flood, causing mass drownings. (Otherwise, there isn’t enough water.) And a smaller number live in Siegel Suites, a chain of dreary flexible-lease apartment complexes, one of which is also in the immediate halo of the Sphere. This was the home of a man named John Penley, one of the few militantly anti-Sphere voices I heard about. He’s a Vietnam veteran who spent his early life as an anti-war activist, but while living at the Suites, the Sphere became a talisman for his worsening quality of life—his rent was apparently raised four times in a year, and the pool at his complex had been closed for months. As it was being built, he was afraid of becoming homeless. “I can throw a rock and hit the fucking thing,” Penley told the Village Sun, a small newspaper in Manhattan, about living in the penumbra. “I don’t feel safe here anymore. I’m the only one here yelling about it.” He packed up a U-Haul and left for Arizona a few weeks before I got there.

My other conversations with friends, and friends of friends, were more circuitous. I spent time in the backyard of a house talking to an artist named Nima and a writer named Clement, who live in Vegas and can see the Sphere from their neighborhood. They had recently both been to the Aronofsky movie I was going to see there. “What’s cool about the Sphere is not that it’s a giant screen,” Nima said. “What is cool is that, for everything that they display, the whole world is watching.” He thought that should be taken seriously, and also that the best use of it would be to show us genuinely new images, things we would never think of ourselves.

Maybe, we thought, taking a human decision-maker out of the process entirely would be the most compelling way to do this. I suggested a chance operation global experiment, where normal people all over the world are given cameras that beam their lives into the venue and onto the exterior at random intervals. There were always long-term projects; maybe it could continually live stream a full year in the life of a nesting albatross. It could advertise something more pedestrian but impactful, like proposals for neighborhood improvement projects resident audiences could vote on with handheld devices. Or maybe it should peddle in material that doesn’t even exist, Nima offered, like AI-generated philanthropic pitches about fake orphans, just to see how many people would donate money. He thought there should still be advertisements, especially for any supposedly good cause. “I want the advertisements to disturb it,” Nima said. “People would feel horrible—that I can guarantee.”

“And none of this is going to happen,” Clement said. We paused. The ambient sadness in the air was reaching condensation point, as it does in conversations about what is possible.

“But, also, the great thing about leaving the Sphere was being like, this is much better,” Clement said, gesturing around vaguely at the yard, the sprawling city beyond it, the unenclosed world. “There are smells here, I can talk to that guy over there. Here’s this shitty area with traffic cones, a parking lot. It’s all very immersive.”

* * *

My turn. What did I see inside? The soft blue glow and the sense of sound controlled, absorbed by the walls and piped in through hidden speakers. There is facial recognition technology at the entrances; drinks were thirty dollars. It’s a cashless place, so there are “reverse ATMs” tucked awkwardly against walls, where you feed money into a machine that spits out a plastic card. Even there, in a two-billion-dollar venue, you have to swipe your hand under the automatic soap dispensers in the bathroom three to five times to get them to work. The lobby is tented by mighty escalators and ornamented with obscure dangling rings, which I thought looked like something you could buy at Target, just supersize. There are five robots programmed with a single AI named Aura scattered in the main space, and you can push through the crowds and ask their handlers to direct her attention toward you so that you can ask a question. I met a boy around the age of ten standing in line to see her, and he told me that he wanted to ask her who would win in a fight: Bart Simpson or Young Sheldon. When he made it to the front, I found it touching that he specified Young Sheldon “from CBS’s Young Sheldon,” just to make sure she understood. (Her answer was awful: Young Sheldon, because he’s a real person and Bart is a cartoon. This, coming from her!)

My seat was on the left side of the Sphere’s main arena, which I entered through a small hallway separating it from the lobby, one of the most silent stretches of space I’ve been in in recent memory. Like with cathedrals or caves, the first thing I noticed when I got to the main space was not exactly the structure itself, but all the air it held above my head, empty space I could feel and hear. And then, immediately beyond that, the structure: seamless gray that stretched from the floor to back behind my head, and a small phalanx of bullet-shaped fans aimed at the audience nestled near the floor; maybe someday they’ll figure out how to hide the 4D tools. They packed us into a dense cluster in the middle of the available seating, either to improve sight lines or to make sure the videos people took would make the venue look more crowded than it really was. While we waited for the show to start, people looked at their phones. Two separate groups were checking up on the Eagles playing the Chiefs in Kansas City; one older couple repeatedly watched a short video of what must have been their young grandchild babbling on a wooden porch at sunset. When the lights dimmed and everything began, the opening scenes took place on a limited rectangle of the Sphere’s skin in front of us—and when the entire interior turned on at once, with shots gliding over snowy mountain ranges, people cried out in awe.

In Aronofsky’s movie, two astronauts wake up in a lush and brandless spaceship from cryogenic sleep, and before full consciousness is resumed, they are shown a narration of what happened on Earth: humans existed on the planet among other organisms, found religion, did art (once—only one scene of that), then spread all over the globe and industrialized in urban Koyaanisqatsi timelapses. We (all?) took too much, we (all?) didn’t listen to the warnings, and the Earth died. While we couldn’t figure out how to stop climate change, we did engineer long-range spaceships and organize mass departures, and a scene shows many rockets taking off at once, depositing Adams and Eves on habitable zone areas around the universe and giving them magic little kernels that, when placed on the desiccated land, turn the planets into verdant Edens.

After I left Las Vegas, I initially told people as shorthand that I found the outside of the Sphere more compelling than the inside, which quickly began to feel like any other performance venue as my eyes adjusted. Everyone seemed to understand this intuitively; I didn’t have to explain why entering the bubble might burst it. But at some point I decided that I wasn’t really telling the truth.

Grasslands, animals, brewing storms, oil fields, hordes of moving people, they washed over me and the other viewers, and of course there were moments that stunned me as they were meant to, even though the movie is basically a screen saver. But I found myself looking to my right, across to the other side of the seating, where the screen ends and is flush with the wall, and the dull materials that do not glow trace a jagged border up the globe. There the images had velocity. They slammed into the dividing line and disappeared, and I could not look away. This was the place that I feel to be the center of the Sphere—where what was imagined, directed, and awesome met the stuff of our world, concrete and plastic and trudging through time. This was where how things might be and how they really are collided, and it let me see that each charge the other with a thin and hot current. They are so close together that there is only a painful space between them. You have to zero in on this glittering edge. You have to look at where the light begins and ends.

Elena Saavedra Buckley is an editor of Harper’s and The Drift.

The Review’s Review

On Sven Holm’s Novella of Nuclear Disaster

Jeff VanderMeer   8:30AM, 22 Dec, 2023

Vedbæk, Denmark. MchD, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Halfway through Sven Holm’s taut unfolding nightmare, Termush, the unnamed narrator encounters “ploughed-up and trampled gardens” where “stone creatures are the sole survivors.” Holm describes these statues as “curious forms, the bodies like great ill-defined blocks, designed more to evoke a sense of weight and mass than to suggest power in the muscles and sinews.” Later, a guest of the gated, walled hotel for the rich from which the novel takes its name relates a dream in which “light streamed out of every object; it shone through robes and skin and the flesh on the bones, the leaves on the trees … to reveal the innermost vulnerable marrow of people and plants.” The same could describe the novel, which accrues its strange effects via both this stricken, continuous revealing and the “curious forms” of a solid, impervious setting, in which the ordinary elements of our world come to seem alien through the lens of nuclear catastrophe.

Long before the sanctuary of Termush becomes visibly unsafe, these tears at the fringes of reality signify the truth of the narrator’s situation. The very texture of the world becomes unknowable, imbued with a potency, vibration, or sheen that alters reality. Holm’s Termush is both a realistic chronicle of a microsociety’s collapse and a surreal journey of a man confronted by crisis, remaking his surroundings as a way of coping.

The detritus and decisions of the past may still affect our future, in that the threat of nuclear holocaust has not left us, though it is far less pronounced than in the 1960s, when Holm published Termush. But in the interim, other disasters that manifest in largely “invisible” ways have overtaken us: our fear of radiation and immolation has led to climate crisis fear, which has led to pandemic fear. The grappling of minds with these threats leads to derangement and odd visions, because the elements of infiltration and contamination baffle the brain. Our hauntings in the modern era so often now are not ghosts but simply the things we cannot see—but that radically affect us.

Little wonder then, that, read now, the lucid logic of Termush feels more like lucid dreaming, imbued with a new relevance in which unseen monsters creep through the same rooms as the narrator, studying his movements. The stark deficiencies of emergency management become hyperreal because of the overlay of self-inflictions in our modern times. For Termush—unlike some vintage classics, cult or otherwise—has waxed, not waned, in relevance. The accuracy in the calm description of becoming undone by disaster, and the anonymity of place and character, ensure the novel’s timelessness. It’s a curious book in this regard, with its dispassionate prose that eschews, in large part, the sensory detail of taste, touch, and smell, yet gets to the heart of living through such a situation. At that heart is the disconnection that occurs, laid bare by a certain level of detail—or lack of detail. Amid the banal recitation of procedure and the understated but sharp satire about privileged people, such a strong sense of feeling about the world rises from these pages.

A highly honored literary realist in Denmark, Holm may not have expected or even intended to create a speculative novella that reads so well to a modern audience. His other works contain no such element, but many do feature similar grand gestures, and all of them critique modern society, seeking ways to, for lack of a better term, wake the reader up to the evils of capitalism and other consumptive ideologies.

In its treatment of the aftermath of nuclear war, Termush distinguishes itself from the so-called disaster cozies of the fifties, like the novels of John Wyndham, to occupy more urgent territory. In this genre, the dangers of some calamitous situation become entwined with an almost cheery disaster-tourism tone; more importantly, civilization always wins in the end, even if in an altered form. The militias may hold sway for a while, or the plague lay waste to whole towns, but by the novel’s close, equilibrium and balance, logic and order, always return to human endeavors. Not so much in Termush, which also eludes, through its particular focus and narrative velocity, echoes of Cold War conflict that otherwise might have dated the novella. Instead of a pervading sense of “the other” about to storm the gates, Holm delves into the psychology of the holed-up survivors and the hazards of societal breakdown.

In this sense, and with its surreal touches, Termush feels more like a bridge novella between the return-to-normalcy of the cozy and the extravagant, mind-bending dystopias of J. G. Ballard, which ushered in the modern era of this kind of fiction. The right excerpt from Termush could easily have appeared in New Worlds, the seminal sixties magazine for the New Wave, of which Ballard was a part. This speculative movement ably applied a rigorous intellectual attitude and sometimes formally experimental approaches to hybrid fiction; novels that had a gritty, realistic feel while at the same time trading in unsettling images and devastating portrayals of the psychological effects of the wrong future on human minds.

Holm definitely meant to access the psychological reality of his situation, and the novella contains much subtle character insight, despite his characters often existing at the same sparse level of detail as their surroundings. The hotel doctor, for example, asks a woman for a urine sample to check the guests’ health, but she collapses “across the table … in a fit of hysteria,” while repeating that “nothing was wrong with her urine.” In a lesser novel, this would function for the modern reader as a gendered signpost of the times. But Holm proves more insightful, with his narrator’s observation that “the woman’s reaction is understandable. What is less understandable is the way the rest of us keep such an inflexibly stiff upper lip without relaxing in argument or giving way to laughter or irritation. Her outburst seems to me more natural,” because it means “that neither her imagination nor her sensibility is gagged and bound, as ours are.” Holm shows that, in trying to cope by stifling such impulses, the very landscape becomes distorted and unfamiliar, while the invisible malady continues to infiltrate and surround the hotel.

Few dystopian novels focused on a privileged group’s reaction to disaster lack some societal critique, and if Termush’s commentary seems basic, well, perhaps the modern monoculture needs to become more complex. As ever—before, during, and after Termush—rich people tend to be more able to escape the effects of an event, for the obvious reasons. Yet Holm’s portrayal of radiation refugees storming the hotel has a logic and humanity that is deeply thought-provoking, as the hotel management tries to act ethically, with some guests agreeing to support them and some not. His deft touch inhabits sentences like “The groaning of the sick people in the library has died down, as if they too were issued with brandy or had been asked not to disturb the festivities on the hotel’s anniversary.”

Late in the novella, as conditions worsen and deepen, the narrator’s imagination widens to contemplate the entirety of what cannot be seen and what has not yet been fully felt within their privileged sanctuary: “We see the day when the fish leave the water and push through the sand and earth to the trees, where they bite into the bark with their skinless jaws and drag themselves up into the branches to live according to new instincts. We see the trees bare of leaves, festooned with fishy skeletons, their skins rustling like a death-rattle.” From this phantasmagorical beginning, the narrator’s vision spreads outward to encompass the Earth and the humans within it. While Termush admirably conveys the reality of living through nuclear apocalypse, Holm’s triumph lies in conveying the psychological strangeness and derangement of such a situation. If the novella can be termed a kind of classic, it is for these unexpected and unique elements, which are, in a sense, more real than reality.

“Our fear is no longer a fear of death but of change and mutation,” Holm writes.

Onward, to Termush! Perhaps, one way or another, we can make it there in time.

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander, the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts), and The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. He speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change as well as urban rewilding. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, on the edge of a ravine, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and their cat, Neo.

20 Dec, 2023

- A Memory from My Personal Life

First Person

A Memory from My Personal Life

Hebe Uhart   11:00AM, 20 Dec, 2023

Photograph by Agustina Fernández.

Hebe Uhart had a unique way of looking—a power of observation that was streaked with humor, but which above all spoke to her tremendous curiosity. Uhart, a prolific Argentine writer of novels, short stories, and travel logs, died in 2018. “In the last years of her life, Hebe Uhart read as much fiction as nonfiction, but she preferred writing crónicas, she used to say, because she felt that what the world had to offer was more interesting than her own experience or imagination,” writes Mariana Enríquez in an introduction to a newly translated volume of these crónicas, which will be published in May by Archipelago Books. At the Review, where we published one of Uhart’s short stories posthumously in 2019, we will be publishing a series of these crónicas in the coming months, starting with one of the most personal.

About thirty years ago, I had a boyfriend who was a drunk. Back then, I was full of vague impulses and concocted impossible projects. I wanted to build a house with my own two hands; before that, there’d been another project, involving a chicken hatchery. I was never cut out for industry or manual labor. I didn’t think that alcoholism was a sickness—I believed he would be able to stop drinking once he decided to. I was working at a high school and had asked for some much-needed time off to improve my mental health, and I spent my days with my drunken boyfriend going from club to club, and from one house to the next. We paid countless visits to the most diverse assortment of people, among them an old poet and his wife who would receive guests not at their home, but in bars. Some turned their noses up at the pair, whispering that it took them a week to get from Rivadavia Avenue to Santa Fe Avenue, as they spent a full day at each bar. It was a year of great discovery for me, learning about these people and their homes, but sometimes it was boring, because drunks have a different sense of time and money. It is like living on a ship, where time is suspended, and as for my boyfriend’s friends, they were always destined for the bottle and stranded at the bar (or so they claimed) until someone could come rescue them. I used to get bored when drunk poets began counting the syllables of verses to see if they were hendecasyllabic, trochaic … it could go on for hours.

The whole time I was mixed up in all of this, nobody ever knew where I was going. I would only come home to eat and sleep—I didn’t tell my family anything. They became concerned. My mom had a cousin follow me and report back to her:

“They sleep at a different house every night. My advice—buy her an apartment.”

My mom gave me all her savings (one million pesos, the equivalent of twenty-five thousand dollars) and told me to find an apartment. So my boyfriend and I went together to choose. I would confront people and ask them questions while he hung back, watching me work. Before long we came to an old but giant apartment with a long hallway. “Look at all this space!” I said, thrilled. But there was something strange about it—the wall dividing the apartment from the one next to it was very low (about ten observers looked at us from the other side). I thought: “No big deal, we can raise the wall later. With all this space, we could get new wallpaper, remodel …? Right?” He said yes to everything because being around so many people terrified him—neither of us knew how to remodel anything. As usual, he looked on fearfully, with admiration, as I confronted people. I felt strong and confident, like an executive. So I hadn’t built the chicken hatchery after all, but I had discovered an interesting hobby. Luckily, I was advised not to buy the apartment. I bought a very old two-bedroom, with a telephone and an elevator that had never been used. A piece of the ceiling had crumbled, so we put the bed in a small foyer beside the front door, a decision we’d agreed upon. The owners had sold me the apartment without cleaning it: when I swept, a cloud of dust would form. So, I told myself: “No need for sweeping. After so many years, it can’t help but stay dirty.” I had already gone back to work and was performing well, but I was tired of coming home to two or three drunks who had kept me awake the night before arguing about the poetry of Góngora or Quevedo, sleeping on the floor of one of our vacant rooms. I could never bring myself to say, “Get out of my house.”

Instead, I began to focus my energies on curing my boyfriend: I would take him to the doctor and the psychologist, and buy his vitamins for him. After much preparation, he was finally ready for his first job interview; he had agreed to everything, but it didn’t progress any further than that. He never did sober up, but I at least learned how to buy and sell apartments.

Anna Vilner’s translation of “A Memory from My Personal Life” will appear in a forthcoming collection of Hebe Uhart’s crónicas, A Question of Belonging, to be published by Archipelago Books in May 2024. The original Spanish version was collected in Uhart‘s Crónicas completas, published by Adriana Hidalgo.

19 Dec, 2023

- ’88 Toyota Celica

Car Crushes

’88 Toyota Celica

Sam Axelrod   10:30AM, 19 Dec, 2023

Photograph by Stefan Marolachakis, courtesy of Sam Axelrod.

I turned nineteen and moved to Chicago. Three weeks later, Dave and I bought a silver Celica for five hundred bucks, which, even in 1999, didn’t seem like much for an entire car. Dave named her Angie (short for Angelica, inspired by the elica on the grille, the C having gone missing sometime in the previous eleven years). He was a sophomore at the University of Chicago, and I was his deadbeat friend who had moved to Hyde Park to get out of my parents’ apartment and go be a dropout eight hundred miles away. We liked to think Angie resembled a low-rent DeLorean. The headlights opened and closed—creaking up and down like animatronic eyes—but shortly after the big purchase they got stuck in the up position.

When we test-drove the car around Ravenswood, the steering wheel felt disconcertingly heavy. Oh, that’s just a minor power-steering leak, said the seller. Easy fix. We didn’t know what power steering was, or that the leak was actually expensive to fix, and that we’d have to refill the fluid on a weekly basis. Plus, the hood stand had broken, or disappeared, or anyway no longer existed, so it was necessary to hold up the hood with one hand and refill the cylinder with the other, which was quite difficult to do. Thankfully, there were two of us. We’d been friends since third grade, and with our easy dynamic, splitting a car didn’t seem odd—only convenient.

Growing up in Manhattan, we weren’t allowed to practice driving within the city limits, and most of my friends failed the test once or twice. I’d gotten my license a few days before moving to the Midwest (third try), and was thrilled to be a license-holding car owner. I’d go out at night—sometimes with Dave, sometimes alone—and drive around the neighborhood. Do laps up and down the Midway, blasting Born to Run or Hüsker Dü. That year was probably the freest I’ve ever felt, though I’m not sure I appreciated the freedom. Or maybe it was dampened by loneliness, and feeling like I had little to do with my time. I’d saved up from being the errand boy at a rock club the previous couple years and decided to be work-free in Chicago for as long as possible, with vague ambitions of starting a band. But I didn’t meet many potential bandmates, and my guitar grew dusty. That fall, I’d stay up till five, six in the morning, and sleep till three. Our lives were small. On Sunday nights, Dave and I would go to our favorite Italian restaurant, where we had a crush on the waitress, and then see a movie. Once a month, we’d hand-deliver our insurance payment to Bill, our friendly rep at the InsureOne office in a strip mall on Fifty-Third Street. The Obamas supposedly lived down the street.

When the money ran out, I answered an ad on a bulletin board in the U of C student center. Far East Kitchen was now my employer. Three or four nights a week, Angie and I would deliver juicy Chinese food across the neighborhood: from Forty-Seventh Street to Sixty-First, Cottage Grove to the lake. No matter how I arranged them, the bags of food would often topple over on the floor of the back seat and ooze “gravy” into the carpeting. I got paid by the delivery—on a slow night, I could finish a shift with sixteen bucks in my pocket. Despite the frequent disrespect and lowly social status, I found it satisfying to race around the neighborhood, making my drops. Less so during ice storms. (When, twenty years later and low on funds, I had a brief stint as a DoorDasher in Eugene, Oregon, the satisfaction, unsurprisingly, flagged. By then, Dave was living in a midsize Canadian city with a wife and child. Our dynamic had gone through some uneasy times.)

I was on duty from four to midnight, and spent most of those hours in my office, a.k.a. the car. It’s hard to imagine what I did in there for the longer stretches, especially without a phone. I smoked at the time, and would often extinguish the cigarettes directly into the velour paneling of the driver’s-side door. I did this with as much angst as possible, while listening to Modest Mouse, Cap’n Jazz––the more moody, premillennium boy rock, the better. The car had only a tape deck, and it liked to eat tapes.

Sometimes I’d be parked in my office for a couple hours straight, waiting for the boss, Mrs. Moy, to jut her head into the alley behind the restaurant and beckon me with a finger. I’d walk through the kitchen to get my deliverables, traversing an olfactory obstacle course. When it was too cold to sit in the car, I’d read in a nook in the alcove outside the kitchen. I read The Jungle. I stopped eating meat. Mrs. Moy looked at me funny when I ordered the same free meal every night: noodles and vegetables. No meat, she said. No meat, I said.

I remember leaving my DJ shift at the campus radio station at 4 A.M. one night, driving on several inches of fresh snow, sliding through the spooky South Side streets, listening to Slint’s Spiderland, feeling like the only person alive. I remember gas rising above two dollars a gallon for the first time in history, and worrying this was going to seriously hurt my profit margins. I remember, at the end of the academic year, moving my stuff back to New York, and then, with two other friends, driving Angie to Los Angeles. A low moment: creeping up I-70 at the foot of the Rockies, flooring it but going only twenty-five, cars blowing by us on both sides as the engine started smoking. I remember falling out of the car, 6 A.M., the morning we got to LA, in the most pain of my life. Kidney stone. I remember falling in love for what I thought was the second time, failing to donate sperm, being a sitcom extra, and driving back to New York less than two months later, worrying every few minutes that Angie wouldn’t survive another cross-country trip. She did, but the end was near. In October, a year after she appeared in our lives, with a hint of gravy still in the floor mats, I dropped her at a salvage lot in Hell’s Kitchen. They said she was worth fifty bucks. I made sure to get Dave his half.

Sam Axelrod is at work on a novel, Brief Drama. He lives in Upstate New York.

18 Dec, 2023

- Madeleines

First Person

Madeleines

Laurie Stone   12:38PM, 18 Dec, 2023

A madeleine. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The other day, I graduated from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone 15. The iPhone 6 needed to be plugged in all the time, same as me. The next day, when I woke up with the iPhone 15, I didn’t recognize the house where I lived, or the room where I was sleeping, or the person beside me in the bed. Richard said, “I think you should get the wireless earpods. You’ll like them.” I said, “How do you know?” He laughed.

The difference between learning a person and learning an iPhone is that, eventually, you learn the iPhone. You even forget the learning part. Once human beings know something, we think we’ve always known it—like the discovery of irony by a child, it’s a one-way door.

Going back to 2007—it was Richard’s and my second Christmas together—and the way I got the catering job was the chef who usually cooked dinner for the Murphys got sick. Or maybe it was that the catering company I worked for had overbooked the chefs, and suddenly there weren’t enough to go around. Alice, the booker, called me and said, “You do private parties, right? Can you please do Christmas dinner for the Murphys?” I said, “Sure.” It was the thing where you’re a movie actor, and they say, “You know how to gallop on a horse, right?” Or, “You know how to do a triple axel on ice skates, right?”

In the past, I’d worked as a server at the Murphys’ apartment on Park Avenue. They were a warm, easygoing couple, and they tipped well. At their holiday events, there were lots of kids and adults, a mix of Catholics and Jews. Lots of wrapping paper piled up on the living room floor, and each year, Ted Murphy made an appearance as Santa.

The Christmas before this one, our first as a couple, Richard had found himself alone—he was in Arizona and I was in New York and he’d tossed his life into the air. He found himself feeling so alone that he spent the day missing the marriage he’d left, all the friends he’d ever known, his family back in England, and even England itself.

Not to kill the suspense, Christmas dinner for the Murphys came off—and I mean a sit-down dinner for twenty-six preceded by two hours of drinks and passed hors d’oeuvres, and followed by a showstopper dessert and hot madeleines served as the guests opened presents. Christmas dinner for the Murphys came off with the help of my friend Patrick and with the help of Richard. We’ll get back to Richard in a moment, but just to say, for the record, whatever else Richard is or is not in terms of a comrade, I once had a boyfriend who wouldn’t play tennis with me because he thought I wouldn’t be good enough to make it fun for him.

Patrick had gone to culinary school in Switzerland. He was young, gorgeous, European, and headed to the world of fashion. Before that, we were mates in the world of catering, and for the Murphys’ dinner we basically copied menus we’d served in the catering branch of Daniel Boulud’s restaurant empire, centering the main course around braised boneless short ribs that took two days to prepare. For the hors d’oeuvres trays, we even designed our own versions of Boulud’s trademark topiaries—little parks and forests in which to set down, let’s say, a fried wonton crisp filled with fresh crabmeat salad and finished with a frond of chervil.

Richard was spending a few weeks with me during his winter break from Arizona State University. I had a shopping list as long as our childhood memories, and together we pushed a cart through the shark-infested aisles of Fairway, schlepped to Chinatown for shrimp, crab, and vegetables, and visited five shops in the Flower District.

He was okay with all this, or he pretended to be. After seventeen years together, I still can’t read what lurks beneath the charming, English, usually affable home screen of the iPhone 15 of him. Who knew he cared about Christmas? He’s an atheist, so it’s not a Jesus thing or even a family thing. It’s a Labour Party thing. Christmas Day, no matter what, you’re supposed to have off work! Also, he dislikes being where he feels he doesn’t belong. I said to him, “Well, you have two choices: you can either stay in my apartment and feel as lonely as you did last year, or you can hang out with us in the kitchen and help with the meal. Those are your choices.”

He said, “It’s not my ideal sense of Christmas to be considered a servant in the home of strangers.” I said, “The Murphys don’t see us as servants, and even if they do, who cares?” He said, “I care. I’m not a princess of the bourgeoisie who can disregard the markers of class whenever she wants.” I said, “The people I come from are closer to the shtetl than to the crown, but I take your meaning. Also, I’ll need you to make the madeleines. There’s no way Patrick or I will be able to mix the batter and bake them in time to serve them warm.”

In Albany the other day, when we were buying the iPhone 15, it felt like stepping off a pier into water where I could drown. The store was pretty quiet. We’d just missed the Black Friday sales, damn it. My iPhone 6 was an ex-parrot, lying limply on the counter, and my sense of having a phone—I mean of the way I live with a phone—is the same as having a body and a brain. How would life be with the iPhone 15?

Who knew that once Richard assumed a responsibility—or had one thrust on him—he would just kill it? I can cook, but I’m not a baker. Susan Murphy bakes, and she had tins for the madeleines. Richard researched recipes, decided on one, followed the instructions carefully (a reason I don’t bake), and voilà, his madeleines, dusted with confectioners’ sugar, were crispy on the outside, beautifully shell-shaped, and meltingly sweet and tender on the inside.

Have you ever prepared a dinner for twenty-six people that had to look professional? There were two servers, in addition to Patrick, Richard, and me. You have to lay out the plates and move around them, each person following the person ahead with a different meal component, setting down the protein and the veg and the carb in exactly the same place on each plate, wiping off drips and making sure that everything is hot and ready at the same time.

It’s a deep joy to bring pleasure to other people with food. That night, we gave the Murphys what they expected as well as a few surprises. And there was Richard in the middle of it, sleeves rolled up, circling the plates behind me with mashed potatoes or wiping crumbs off the dessert plates. After the desserts were set down—slices of Maida Heatter’s flourless chocolate cake with raspberries and a dollop of whipped cream and mascarpone on the side—he began preparing the madeleines. No sooner were they plated and passed than the guests wanted more. Did he ever sit down to have his Christmas meal? He did not. Cooks eat standing up during a job, and he was one of us.

I felt exhilarated. I loved the days of planning and inventing things on the spot. I loved not knowing how it would come together, because how could I know? I loved falling into a life with Richard, who, I could see, would jump with me off all the piers we came to. If you ask for his memory of that night, he’ll tell you he’s glad he’ll never have to do that again, knowing full well another time will come when he’ll bake perfect madeleines.

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing that is Happening, which was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes a column for Oldster Magazine, and the Everything Is Personal Substack.

Table of Contents

The Paris Review - Daily: 22 Dec, 2023

22 Dec, 2023

The Sphere

On Sven Holm’s Novella of Nuclear Disaster

20 Dec, 2023

A Memory from My Personal Life

19 Dec, 2023

’88 Toyota Celica

18 Dec, 2023

Madeleines