Category: Reviews

In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?”

But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of.

Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as public events pressed in on his imagination.

Baldwin’s imagination remained passionately connected to the destiny of his country. He lacked the guile and watchfulness that might have tempted him to keep clear of what was happening in America; the ruthlessness he had displayed in going to live in Paris and publishing Giovanni’s Room was no use to him later as the battle for civil rights grew more fraught. It was inevitable that someone with Baldwin’s curiosity and moral seriousness would want to become involved, and inevitable that someone with his sensitivity and temperament would find what was happening all-absorbing.

Baldwin’s influence arose from his books and his speeches, and from the tone he developed in essays and television appearances, a tone that took its bearings from his own experience in the pulpit. Instead of demanding reform or legislation, Baldwin grew more interested in the soul’s dark, intimate spaces and the importance of the personal and the private.

In 1959, in reply to a question about whether the fifties as a decade “makes special demands on you as a writer,” Baldwin adopted his best style, lofty and idealistic and candid, while remaining sharp, direct, and challenging: “But finally for me the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject—his key and ours to his achievement.”

Baldwin was interested in the hidden and dramatic areas in his own being, and was prepared as a writer to explore difficult truths about his own private life. In his fiction, he had to battle for the right of his protagonists to choose or influence their destinies. He knew about guilt and rage and bitter privacies in a way that few of his white novelist contemporaries did. And this was not simply because he was Black and homosexual; the difference arose from the very nature of his talent, from the texture of his sensibility. “All art,” he wrote, “is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”

Baldwin understood the singular importance of the novel, because he saw the dilemma his country faced as essentially an interior one, as his fellow citizens suffered from a poison that began in the individual spirit and then made its way into politics. And his political writing remains as intense and vivid as his fiction, because he believed that social reform could not occur through legislation alone but required a reimagining of the private realm. Thus, for Baldwin, an examination of the individual soul as dramatized in fiction had immense power.

***

Baldwin’s reputation as a novelist and essayist rests mainly on the work he did in the decade before 1963, a decade in which he was passionately industrious. The year 1963 seems to have been a watershed for him. He wrote hardly any fiction in that year. It was a time in which “the condition of truth” could not be achieved by solitude or by silence or by slow work on a novel.

Baldwin began the year by going on a lecture tour for the Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE. In the first few days of January, he met James Meredith, the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi despite being denied admission by the state’s governor. Meredith noted how quiet Baldwin was, but he was also amused by Baldwin’s version of the dance known as the twist.

Also in January of 1963, Baldwin met Medgar Evers. They began to travel together in Mississippi, investigating the murder of a Black man and visiting the sort of churches that Baldwin’s stepfather, the model for the Gabriel of Go Tell It on the Mountain, would have preached in.

When Baldwin returned to New York, where he lived in a two-room walkup on West Eighteenth Street, he became involved, with Lorraine Hansberry and others, in various protests. He also had a busy social life. His biographer David Leeming writes: “He still had the ‘poor boy’s’ fascination with the rich and famous … and they were just as fascinated by him. He found it difficult to refuse their frequent invitations. In short, the work was not getting done.”

In the spring of 1963, to find peace, Baldwin traveled to Turkey, which had become one of his havens.

In May 1963, back in the U.S., Baldwin spoke in nine cities on the West Coast over ten days, earning around five hundred dollars a speech, all of which went to CORE. In that month, his face appeared on the cover of the mainstream magazine Time. Three days later, when a friend gave a party for him at a restaurant in Haight-Ashbury, “literally hundreds of people struggled at the windows … to get a glimpse of him,” Leeming reports.

Two days later, Baldwin was in Connecticut, and then, on two hours’ sleep, he went to New York for a meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. On May 12, Baldwin had wired Kennedy, blaming the federal government for failing to protect nonviolent protestors who had been beaten by police in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, on May 24, Baldwin and other activists, including Hansberry, Lena Horne, and Harry Belafonte, met Robert Kennedy at his home. The meeting went nowhere. Its main result was to increase the FBI’s interest in Baldwin.

In this same year—1963—as Baldwin made speeches, attended meetings, and stayed up late, he had many plans for work, including a book on the FBI. James Campbell writes in his biography: “Baldwin never produced his threatened work on the FBI, but he had, as usual, a multitude of other plans in mind, including the slave novel—now retitled ‘Tomorrow Brought Us Rain’—a screen treatment of Another Country, a musical version of Othello, a play called ‘The 121st Day of Sodom,’ which [Ingmar] Bergman intended to produce in Stockholm, and a text for a book of photographs by … Richard Avedon.”

Baldwin worked on the Avedon text after the assassination of Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963. It has all the hallmarks of his best writing: the high tone taken from the Bible, from the sermon, from Henry James, and from a set of beliefs that belonged fundamentally to Baldwin himself and gave him his signature voice: “For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.”

In August, Baldwin flew some members of his family to Puerto Rico to celebrate his birthday. Then he went to Paris, where he led five hundred people in a protest to the U.S. embassy, returning to the U.S. in time for the March on Washington at the end of the month. In September he went to Selma to work on voter registration. The following month he went to Canada. In December, he traveled to Africa to celebrate the independence of Kenya.

When Baldwin was asked how and where he had written his play Blues for Mr. Charlie, he replied: “On pads in planes, trains, gas stations—all sorts of places. With a pen or a pencil. … This is a hand-written play.” It was the only writing he completed in 1963.

***

Part of James Baldwin’s fame arose from his skill as a television performer. On camera, he used clear, well-made sentences. At times, he spoke like a trained orator, channeling his views into sharp wit, fresh insight, irony, with impressive verbal command. What he displayed was an intelligence that could quickly become grounded and combative and political once the television lights were on.

In some early appearances such as one on The Dick Cavett Show with the Yale philosopher Paul Weiss, Baldwin’s arguments were too complex for the short time he had been allotted. Because his delivery was slightly halting—he was articulate in bursts—he was too easy to interrupt, and he was always at his best when he could speak without interruption. It was as though he was sometimes too thoughtful for television.

This, of course, also gave him an edge. It meant that he was not mimicking politicians or TV regulars. He sought to challenge, and to set about thinking aloud. There were moments when he loved a simple question so that the answer could be ruminative and complicated. He used a context such as a talk show to state the most difficult truths in a style that belonged to the sermon or the seminar more naturally than the television studio.

He knew how to slow down, so that the camera lingered on his face as he prepared himself to say something difficult. He had a way, when he was about to offer an opinion that might seem extreme or unpalatable to his host or his audience, to hesitate, to let the camera see him thinking, and then to return to fluency.

At times, Baldwin’s manner in television interviews and in public debates could be scathing and indignant. But he could also be calm and self-possessed. In a 1963 debate in Florida, for example, even though his fellow panelists were hostile, Baldwin remained polite. He was ready to talk about the private life, the creation of the self, in a way that no one could argue with, since he himself had set the tone and the terms. He was also ready to make clear that the lives of white people, too, had been maimed by segregation. But what was most notable is how he moved his face towards the light, how he spoke with authority, and how at home he seemed to be in a television studio.

There were times when Baldwin appeared like a method actor playing out the part of thoughtfulness, working out as the camera rolled how a man considering things carefully might appear.

While he could be provocative, he was also measured. He exuded a sort of melancholy wisdom. At times, he managed to sound optimistic, especially in a panel discussion in August 1963, at the time of the March on Washington, when he was in the company of Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, and Charlton Heston.

When Lionel Trilling wrote of the “extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives” and wondered how Baldwin might find “the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer,” Trilling was still in a world where it was presumed that writers should be quiet and stay home. And Trilling was not alone in believing that Baldwin was destroying his talent by going on television, writing articles, giving speeches, and being distracted by whatever was happening on the street.

But Baldwin belongs to a group of writers, born in the twenties and early thirties, who wrote both fiction and essays with a similar zeal and ambition; they did not see nonfiction as a lesser form or reporting as a lesser task. It was not easy to make a judgment on whether they were mainly novelists or, more likely, essayists who happened to write fiction. Also, it was often hard to make a judgment on what constituted their best work.

For example: Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night and his Miami and the Siege of Chicago, both works of imaginative and original political reporting, may equal his best novel, The Executioner’s Song. So, too, V. S. Naipaul’s long essay on the dictatorship in Argentina, “The Return of Eva Perón,” and his autobiographical essay Finding the Center may match in power his novels A House for Mr. Biswas and The Enigma of Arrival. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album may be better than her novels A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy.

These writers—Baldwin, Mailer, Naipaul, Didion—traveled, took an interest in life, and accepted commissions from editors. And all four understood that if writing is a display of personality, then their literary personality was, no matter what form they used, lavish enough to blur the distinction between reportage and high literary fiction.

But there were also times when all four of them took on too much; their interest in a subject was sometimes not equaled by their account of it. Baldwin’s book on the child murders that occurred between 1979 and 1981 in Atlanta, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, is slack and rambling; Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself and Marilyn: A Biography are not quite readable now, their egotism bloated and out of control; Naipaul’s travel books often present someone too mean and irascible, more interested in showing off his own crankiness than in exploring the world outside. And Joan Didion’s book Salvador might have been helped by more research.

What is fascinating about Baldwin’s occasional journalism and speechmaking is how uneven it is, and how rapidly this can give way to insights and sharp analysis and then a glorious, sweeping, seemingly effortless final set of statements and assertions.

While he worked fast on these stray pieces for magazines, Baldwin refused to settle for a simplified version of his own oppression. Instead, he combined irony and urgency in the same thought, seeking a manner that took its bearings from somewhere high above us, perhaps even from his own unique access to the word of the Lord.

“In a very real sense,” he wrote, “the Negro problem has become anachronistic; we ourselves are the only problem, it is our hearts only that we must search.”

In “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” a New York Times Book Review article from January 14, 1962, when others might have been concerned about the police or about housing, Baldwin wrote about private loneliness as though it were the most pressing problem facing Americans: “The loneliness of those cities described in [the work of John] Dos Passos is greater now than it has ever been before; and these cities are more dangerous now than they were before, and their citizens are yet more unloved … The trouble is deeper than we wished to think: the trouble is in us.”

Sometimes, in his journalism and in his speeches, Baldwin was amusing himself. He took words such as equality or identity and concepts such as whiteness and examined them with a mixture of mischief and a sort of Swiftian contempt.

For example, in an address to Harlem teachers in October 1963, he sought to explode the myth of the original, heroic, white settlers in America: “What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go some place else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower.”

In an essay called “The White Problem,” published in 1964, Baldwin wrote scornfully about the vast difference between the white and black American celebrities. He wrote, “Doris Day and Gary Cooper: two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen. And the other, subterranean, indispensable, and denied, can be summed up, let us say, in the tone and in the face of Ray Charles. And there never has been in this country any genuine confrontation between these two levels of experience.”

He sought to elevate what was complex, multifarious, intricate. In 1966, he wrote: “Much of the American confusion, if not most of it, is a direct result of the American effort to avoid dealing with the Negro as a man.”

Since he had it in for easy and fixed categories, he was bound eventually to become eloquent about how his society dealt with the idea of men and masculinity.

In the early sixties, Baldwin spoke in an interview with Mademoiselle magazine about sexuality in his customarily challenging tone: “American males are the only people I’ve ever encountered in the world who are willing to go on the needle before they go to bed with each other.”

While early in his career Baldwin did not speak directly about his own sexuality, others were ready to offer hints and innuendos. A 1963 Time magazine profile, for example, described Baldwin as a “nervous, slight, almost fragile figure, filled with frets and fears. He is effeminate in manner, drinks considerably, smokes cigarettes in chains.”

When Lionel Trilling worried about Baldwin’s “extravagant publicness,” the implications of the word extravagant would not have been lost on many readers. And when Norman Mailer wrote of Baldwin that “even the best of his paragraphs are sprayed with perfume,” he would not have been easily misunderstood. Also, the extensive FBI file on James Baldwin includes the sentence: “It has been heard that Baldwin may be a homosexual and he appeared as if he may be one.”

Baldwin, in his own writings, was often careful. He liked complex connections, strange distinctions, ambiguous implications. Thus, even in a time when gay identity was becoming easier to denote or define, Baldwin resisted the very concept of gay and straight, even male and female, insisting in an essay in 1985 that “Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.”

Religious elements in the civil rights movement were suspicious of both Baldwin and Bayard Rustin, a prominent organizer and activist who was close to Martin Luther King Jr. While King was not personally bothered by Rustin’s homosexuality, some of his colleagues were. One of them suggested that Baldwin and Bayard “were better qualified to lead a homosexual movement than a civil rights movement.” Baldwin’s homosexuality may have been one of the reasons why he was not invited to speak at the March on Washington in 1963.

It would have been easy then for Baldwin to have gone into exile, disillusioned and sad, to have written his memoirs and become nostalgic about the glory days of the civil rights movement. Indeed, he was planning to write a book about the murdered leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King.

But this is not what happened. As the sixties went on, Baldwin became energized and excited by the Black Panthers, whose leaders he first met in San Francisco late in 1967. The three leaders—Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and (despite their antipathies) Eldridge Cleaver—were, David Leeming writes, “as far as Baldwin was concerned, the future of the civil rights movement. … Baldwin admired the radicals; he saw them as part of the larger ‘project’ of which the old civil rights movement had been only a stage.” Baldwin wrote a preface to one of Seale’s books and supported Newton when, soon after their first meeting, he was arrested and imprisoned.

He also became more militant in his television interviews. For example, in an interview with Dick Cavett aired on June 16, 1969, he said: “If we were white, if we were Irish, if we were Jewish, if we were Poles, if we had in fact, in your mind, a frame of reference, our heroes would be your heroes too. Martin would be a hero for you and not be a threat, Malcolm X might still be alive. Everyone is very proud of brave little Israel, a state against which I have nothing—I don’t want to be misinterpreted, I am not an anti-Semite. But, you know, when the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles or the Irish or any white man in the world says, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of [him] so there won’t be any more like him.”

***

Two weeks before he died, the poet W. B. Yeats wrote a poem called “Cuchulain Comforted,” which began with a series of statements free of metaphor. The poem was written in terza rima, a form that was new for Yeats. Unusually, this poem did not need many drafts. It seems to have come to him easily, as if naturally. In earlier Yeats poems and plays, Cuchulain, a figure from Irish mythology, had appeared as the implacable, solitary, and violent hero, prepared for solo combat, free of fear. Now he has “six mortal wounds” and is attended by figures, Shrouds, who encourage him to join them in the act of sewing rather than fighting. They let him know that they themselves are not among the heroic dead but are “Convicted cowards all by kindred slain // Or driven from home and left to die in fear.”

Thus, at the very end of his life, Yeats created an image that seemed the very opposite of what had often given vigor to his own imagination. His heroic figure has now been gentled; his fierce and solitary warrior has joined others in the act of sewing; instead of the company of brave men, Cuchulain seems content to rest finally among cowards.

This poem is not a culminating statement for Yeats, but a contradictory one; it is not a crowning version of a familiar poetic form, but an experiment in a form—terza rima—associated most with Dante. Instead of attempting to sum up, it is as though Yeats wished to release fresh energy by repudiating, by beginning again, by offering his hero a set of images alien to him, which served all the more to make the hero more unsettled, more ambiguous.

How fascinating to see a writer abandon bold self-assertion and, however briefly, find a tone that is compassionate and genial and tender.

There was, however, no such moment in Baldwin. From the beginning, he displayed his own vulnerability, his own softness, sometimes as a weapon but mostly as a way of transforming an argument so that it was not a contest to be won but rather a question to be reframed—to be moved from the narrow confines of the public realm back towards the unsettled (and unbounded) space of the self, the questing, uneasy spirit.

Adapted from On James Baldwin by Colm Tóibín, now available from Brandeis University Press.

Colm Tóibín’s most recent book is The Magician. He was interviewed by Belinda McKeon in issue no. 242 of The Paris Review.

The Russian artist Aleksandra Skochilenko was released on Thursday as part of a prisoner exchange between Russia and several other countries, reports the Art Newspaper. In November 2023, after a year-long trial, Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years in prison after being found guilty of spreading disinformation about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The artist had replaced price tags in a supermarket in St Petersburg with labels that criticised the war. (One of the labels read: ‘The Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol. About 400 people were hiding in it from shelling.’) Skochilenko’s release was confirmed by her partner. The exchange of 15 prisoners held in Russia and another in Belarus for eight held in the United States, Norway, Germany, Poland and Slovenia is the largest of its kind since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among those released is the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. However, many political prisoners, including the journalists Natalya Filonova and Maria Ponomarenko and the opposition politician Aleksei Gorinov, remain in Russian jails. Skochilenko told the BBC that she was ‘in shock’ and ‘on adrenaline’ and said, ‘This is the happiest day of my life.’

The UK government has scrapped the Stonehenge road tunnel. After years of legal challenges, the new Chancellor of Exchequer has cancelled the controversial plan to divert the A303 motorway into a tunnel near the ancient monument in Wiltshire. The termination of the £2bn project comes as part of other cuts to infrastructure projects due to a ‘black hole’ in the public finances. The project’s supporters, which include the head of English Heritage, argued that the tunnel would have significantly eased congestion on A303, and that concerns about archaeological damage were overstated. Wiltshire Council said that it was ‘extremely dismayed and disappointed’ by the cancellation of the project.

More than 750 artists and public figures have signed an open letter accusing the Royal Academy of Arts in London of ‘anti-Palestinian censorship’. The Royal Academy (RA) withdrew two works from its Young Artists’ Summer Show after the Board of Deputies of British Jews wrote to the institution, alleging that the art in question contained ‘anti-semitic tropes and messaging’. Among the signatories of the letter, which was published by Artists for Palestine UK, are Nan Goldin, Adam Broomberg, Brian Eno, Asif Kapadia and a number of Royal Academicians. The letter argues that ‘British arts institutions have the ethical, historical and legal duty to uphold freedom of expression’. The RA issued a statement saying that it ‘should not have chosen to display two works that relate to the Israel/Palestine conflict’, adding that ‘an exhibition for young people and children aged 4 to 19, without opportunity for real context and discussion, is not an appropriate environment to invite volatile public discourse’.

Bonhams has appointed Chabi Nouri as its new global CEO, reports Artnews. She succeeds Bruno Vinciguerra, who served as chief executive from 2018 until February this year. Bonhams did not give a reason for his departure. Nouri arrives from the Swiss private bank Mirabaud Group, where she is a private equity partner. She was previously CEO of Piaget, part of the Richemont group, between 2017 and 2021. Asked whether Nouri would expand Bonhams’ interests in the luxury goods sector, a spokesperson told the Art Newspaper: ‘Nouri has enormous experience in the luxury field and will doubtlessly explore this area when she arrives in post in October.’ Bonhams has been owned by the private equity firm Epiris since 2018.

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York has repatriated the remains of 124 Native Americans as well as 90 artefacts. It follows what the museum’s president Sean Decatur described as ‘more than 400 consultations, with approximately 50 different stakeholders, including hosting seven visits of Indigenous delegations’. Earlier this year, the museum announced its intention to return the remains of 2,200 Native Americans and thousands of Native funerary objects. The decision came after major revisions in January to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) (1990). Before the changes, to the act, museums were able to delay repatriation by several means, including labelling certain Native items as ‘culturally unidentifiable’, ProPublica reported in 2023.

In more restitution news, the Fowler Museum at UCLA has returned 20 objects to the Warumungu people in Australia. The handover ceremony took place on 24 July, reports the Art Newspaper, and was attended by representatives of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), a government agency that searches internationally for Indigenous artefacts to be repatriated. The objects will ultimately be shipped to the Nyinkka Nyunyu Arts and Culture Centre in Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory of Australia. In February this year, the Fowler Museum repatriated seven Asante artefacts to Ghana.

UNESCO has added 26 new sites to its World Heritage list. These include 20 cultural sites, such as a series of outdoor sculptures by Constantin Brancusi in south-west Romania. The Via Appia, an 800km road that was built to connect Rome to Capua, near Naples, and later extended to the city of Brindisi, was also added to the list. It was constructed from the 4th century BC to the 4th century AD. Other new inscriptions include the abandoned city of Gedi in Kenya and two sites in the Ethiopian highlands, which, according to UNESCO, contain footprints that ‘testify to the area’s occupation by the hominin groups from two million years ago’. UNESCO has also given $235,520 to Colombia, Mauritius, Laos and Tanzania to finance new conservation work in those countries.

To pick up from last time on “Coal + Ice at Asia Society, photographs out front document each step in the narrative, from coal to ice. Geng Yunsheng photographs Chinese miners dragging their burden across dry hills and at rest underground, with no certainty that they will ever see the light of day.

Camille Seaman has icebergs from both the earth’s poles, her photos saturated in blood red and ice blue. Gideon Mendel adds the consequences of climate change for India, where flooding has left homeowners literally underwater. Yet he means to show not despair but a return home. One man has begun to ladle out the water with a steel tub.

Is it a good start or a sadly comic ending? Such is the dilemma of climate change. A man in water up to his neck recalls a young black male popping up from a manhole in a classic photo (now in the Dean collection) by Gordon Parks, with much the same mix of comedy and fear. Parks himself puts in an appearance, with his own photographs of miners, as do Lewis Hines and Bruce Davidson, while shots of factory towers include Bernd and Hilla Becher. And here, too, something may sound all wrong. What is one to make of a group show of nearly forty artists, some who have never set foot in Asia?

A step inside provides a breathtaking answer. Credit the enormous photo and video collage to the curators, Susan Meiselas (a Magnum photographer in her own right, now on view at the International Center of Photography) and Jeroen de Vries. Identifying the contributors for each image is next to impossible, even with a plastic card just outside. If the show is flawed, it is less by dogmatism than by just that cinematic flash. As a poster upstairs asks, “What good is the house on the hill when the valley is on fire?” Here not just the landscape is fiery.

That poster belongs to one of a handful of special projects, which are immersive in a very different way: they serve as hopes for the future and actions for you, in the present. They can be as modest as a poem, by Jane Hirshfield, or as extravagant as a vision of New York in 2050, by Superflux. Make that two visions, of shortness of breath and long relief. They open with dark skyscrapers consumed in a deep red mist. And then a second chamber imagines a greener, wetter New York, with every boulevard now a waterway or a beach.

Both chambers place you at their center, facing your own reflection in a mirror. It can be a proud or embarrassing encounter, and it is not the show’s final demand. Jake Barton sets out postcards with still more fiery, futuristic images—not just for your enjoyment, but for your signature on the back and an invitation to “chat with your future self.” Pull out your phone, text “The Accelerator,” and read what you can do in reply. Maya Lin is more welcoming still, with an interactive Web site for global climate information. Lin, whose credentials as an Asian American include her architecture for New York’s Museum of Chinese in America, has been committed to the intersection of art and climate change for some time.

Their technology leaves what once were “new media,” in Asian video and photographs, in the dust. Still, for all their optimism, the projects raise their own doubts for the future. Has New York in 2050 converted automobile traffic into a day at the beach, or has it made the best of rising seas? Jamey Stillings takes his video camera to renewable energy, but the windmills look eerily close to white crosses in the mega-video a floor below. Clifford Ross, whose questions about climate line the stairs, headed straight for the New York coast for a hurricane—a seeming tidal wave aimed at him. “Coal + Ice” wants to supply an antidote to fire and despair, but neither is all that far away.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

When I get dressed, I become a philosopher-king—not in the sense of presiding over utopia, but in the sense of trying to marry politics and intellect in the perfect imitation of God. Political considerations might include: destination, company, self-image, self-regard, in-group and out-group arrangements. The intellectual ones might involve: the weather, the way I am always too cold no matter the weather, the subway, the blisters on my feet, the laundry. When I get dressed, I have never once considered whether to add a belt. Belts have never struck me as a thing to “add”; pants either need a belt or they don’t. But some girls like to “add” one, and that’s fine too. I do consider the area where a belt might go—that stretch of midsection where the top of my pants meets the bottom of my shirt. It means a lot (to me), where exactly on my body that convergence takes place. If it’s lower, say a few inches below my belly button, I might get slouchier when I stand around, might remember being a kid in the early aughts, and I might in general feel more weighed down by the pull of gravity. If it’s higher up on my torso, I sit up straighter in my chair, I prefer a more substantial shoe, I feel more compact, more professional, more like my mother.

When I get dressed, I think about the last time I washed my hair and whether I’m going to wear my glasses or not. I am too much of a germophobe to wear shoes in the house, so I have no choice but to imagine the theoretical addition of a shoe, which I’ll put on last, when everything else is already a foregone conclusion. Lately, I can’t stop buying socks; it’s a compulsion. Wearing socks with no holes, that haven’t yet become limp from untold numbers of wash-and-dry cycles, has recently become crucial to my feeling of being able to face the world. On the other hand, I wear the same bra every single day, and it is such an essentially bland item of clothing that it feels like putting on my own skin. Nights are a different story: it’s important to invite spontaneity into your evening in whatever way you can.

When I get dressed I am confronted with the protean ecosystem of everything I have, everything I want, and why I have things that I’m not sure I want. Some things that I almost never buy, no matter their purported “quality,” are: dresses or skirts with slits, matching sets, sweaters with puffy shoulders, V-neck cardigans, Birkenstocks, tops where the pattern is only printed only on the front and not the back, jeans that are ripped at the knees, and anything described as a “tunic.” I’m not saying that you shouldn’t buy these things, I’m just telling you that I don’t want to. One thing I do want is to compose an ode to the tank top. The tank top is the shortest route to luxury—one of the only designer items affordable to those of us on a budget. A beautiful sweater or a handbag from wherever is out of the question, but you might, if it’s your birthday or you take an extra freelance gig, treat yourself to the flimsiest, paper-thinnest $200 tank top, knowing that the construction and the material is worth a fraction of that and feeling unreservedly that every dollar of difference is a delicious indecency. There’s nothing noble about being frivolous. But it can be wonderful to choose to be part of something bigger than you, which has a history and an artistry and—in the best case scenario—a point of view. It can even be worth an inordinate amount of your hard-won money. Anyways, when I get dressed, I reign over my little shelf of needlessly fancy tank tops and I feel alive.

There are some eternal quandaries. If I have to wear a sweater, a button-down shirt becomes untenable. (I don’t ever pop the collar neatly above my sweater, though I have nothing against prep, per se). If I have to wear tights, the prospect of choosing a skirt and a top and a sweater and socks and shoes becomes monstrous to me. If I choose to inflict tights upon myself, I will end up in a longer skirt so that I can avoid at least fifty percent of the lines that all those layers will generate on my body. I want to wear a pointed-toe kitten heel, but it feels impossible to do. If I have to wear a hat for warmth, I usually don’t.

When it’s time to take myself and my outfit into the world, I observe the doctrines of wilderness backpackers: I carry everything I could possibly need but no more than twenty percent of my body weight, as a general rule of thumb. This means I need a bag. When I see a woman without a bag or an extra layer somewhere on her person, I ask myself where on earth she could possibly be going. I think that she must live close by, and I wonder what her apartment looks like. When I see a man without a bag or an extra layer or anything else in his hands, his appearance of being untethered to a place or a purpose adds to his general unpredictability, and I cross the street.

I’ve noticed that most of my bags are green or blue. I’ve noticed that the most tempting thing to buy secondhand or vintage is a light jacket. They are often leather or suede or some other material that stands the test of time, and they’re less commitment than a coat, and they’re cheaper and more inoculated against trends. Most styles of light jackets from every recent era can be worn in the year 2024 without anyone batting an eye.

I’ve noticed that when I get dressed, I have to scrunch down my shoulders and shift my weight back on my feet so that my whole frame can fit in my mirror for the purpose of scrutiny. I don’t think I ever stand like this in my normal life, and I wonder if that makes any difference. It’s possible I only believe I like this dress because I only ever see it at this exact, awkwardly recessed angle. My nightmare is to appear like I’m wearing a costume of any kind. A friend once told me that blondes shouldn’t wear red, sending me into a monthslong deliberation. I think, now, that I can pull off an orange-y shade.

When I get dressed, I avoid at all costs thinking about how I might be doing something called “gender presentation.” As you can tell, this is all complicated enough as it is, and I am already running late.

I don’t have a closet in my little room. Instead, my clothes are all hanging, folded, or stuffed above and below me and on all sides. They are an immersive phenomenological experience, creeping out of every attempt at containment, constant, physical objects that I have to contend with as soon as I open my eyes in the morning. And in this way, it’s impossible for me to see my clothes as first and foremost a collection of textual emblems that others can read to decipher my social class, my taste, my upbringing, etc. If you interpret them in that way, once I am dressed, that’s your business. But the only time they feel full of symbolism and yet-unmade-meaning to me is when they’re shrouded in that floaty plastic, fresh from the dry cleaner. Otherwise, they are extremely literal. At the end of the day, they are in a heap on my floor and they have a mysterious stain on them, and there’s nothing metaphorical about that.

The reality is that there is a right answer when it comes to the question of what I should wear. I don’t mean that anyone else would notice if I got it wrong. But if I’ve just left the house and I’m waiting for the uptown train and I remember that I bought a long-sleeve dress two months ago that can only be worn with tall boots, and soon the season for long sleeves and tall boots will be over, and I have no plans in the foreseeable future to wear this dress, and the occasion for the dress was in fact tonight but it’s still dangling from a hanger in an overlooked corner of my bedroom, it will break my heart. Usually I can avoid this problem by making a dinner reservation, which offers another opportunity to get it right. However, if the long-sleeve dress is white (it is), and therefore wearing it to dinner means that I would fly too close to the sun, then I will wear it to a museum instead.

Isabel Cristo is a writer and researcher. She was born and raised in Brooklyn. 

A few miles outside Oxford, a hulking baroque edifice stands amid 12,000 acres of sprawling parkland. Blenheim Palace has been in the hands of the Spencer-Churchill family since the early 18th century, when the land on which it stands was given by Queen Anne to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough as reward for a military triumph at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. The Duke is memorialised in a 40m-high victory column in the surrounding grounds, but the most notable member of the family is Winston Churchill, who was born in a small bedroom in the Palace and buried 90 years later in a churchyard just outside the grounds. Blenheim is grand and maximalist, many of its rooms tightly crammed with objects including portraits, busts, tapestries, ornate clocks, porcelain and glittering candelabra. The place is a paean to bombast, war, aristocracy, imperialism and great man history; in other words, an emblem of a certain kind of Englishness. Wandering round can be awe-inspiring, claustrophobic and alienating all at once.

For those not immediately charmed by Blenheim’s interior, the exhibition currently being hosted there is a balm. ‘Mohammed Sami: After the Storm’ is a show of 14 paintings by the Baghdad-born artist, an intelligent takeover of the house through works that reframe and reinterpret the palace’s history and mores. Sami is the ninth artist to be commissioned by the Blenheim Art Foundation, following, among others, Jenny Holzer, who in 2017 projected LED testimonies by war veterans on to the facade and throughout the interior, and Maurizio Cattelan, who in 2019 staged a provocative show that included a model of Hitler in the library and a plumbed-in solid gold toilet in the loos.

Sami grew up under Saddam Hussein’s regime and witnessed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, before moving to Sweden and then London, where he now lives and works. His skilful paintings are often marked with motifs of conflict, but in subtle ways that bring in shadows and trompe l’oeil. Sami likes to play with perception and fuel ambiguity: the show opens with The Grinder (2023), a view from above of a round table and four empty chairs, with an eerie shadow – a ceiling fan, or perhaps helicopter blades, or something else altogether – splayed over the scene. The Statues (2024), hung in the First State Room next to one of the lavish Blenheim Tapestries, which were woven in the workshop of Judocus de Vos between 1707 and 1717 to commemorate the battle, is a different kind of war memorial: an exhilarating study in dynamism filled with falling objects, which the title suggests are covered statues but could equally be bombs or body bags.

Sami’s paintings are not just site-specific but room-specific, many of them gently subversive responses to the very space itself: a canvas of deep red, with shards of broken plates scattered on the floor and a broom – or is it a gun barrel? – propped against a wall, hangs at the end of a corridor flanked by cabinets of Meissen and Sevres porcelain. A portrait in the grand manner by George Romney of George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough (1739–1817) has been removed from its usual spot in the Green Drawing Room and replaced with a sheet of linen, painted to match the wallpaper of the room and riddled with bullet holes. In the Red Drawing Room, what seems to be a piece of MDF with a shadow of a chandelier painted over it and the date of the invasion of Iraq, 03/2003, printed in the corner has been hung on the adjacent wall to Sargent’s elegant portrait of the 9th Duke and his family (1905). Such interventions are so well-camouflaged amid the decor that it takes a few seconds to spot them. The curation is, by contrast, somewhat underwhelming in the Saloon, which visitors will enter to find a large painting of the Baghdad skyline bathed in radioactive orange plonked in the middle of the room – a pleasing work to look at, but conceptually disengaged from the space around it.

Installation view of Stiff Head (2024) by Mohammed Sami in ‘After the Storm: Mohammed Sami at Blenheim Palace’, 2024. Photo: Tom Lindboe; courtesy Blenheim Art Foundation; © the artist

Portraits are the lifeblood of Blenheim, and many of them are lovely, but seen together they are so numerous that the individuality of each is lost, all blending into one unwieldy mass of aristocrats. Perhaps that excess is intentional, part of a shoring up of the family lineage by prizing clanship over individuality. Sami’s portraits – or perhaps anti-portraits is more accurate – hint at this odd sensation of anonymity, threaded through as they are with ideas of absence and dissemblance. There are three depictions of men in military dress throughout the show, each one’s head obscured by a rude smear of paint. And then there is Immortality (2024), a painting of Churchill, his face and body completely blacked out as if in photo-negative, but the posture – based on the ubiquitous portrait of him by Yousuf Karsh – instantly recognisable. It’s the simplest and most effective work here, hinting at the ways in which Churchill has to a large extent become a blank canvas on to which various people project their own feelings, desires and dogmas, and alluding to the proscription in some branches of Islam against depicting people. Here, Sami also mounts a gentle but serious challenge to Britain’s ideas about itself, performing an act of reinterpretation for a country in which, for many, the wartime prime minister has become close to an idol.

Installation view of Immortality (2024) by Mohammed Sami in ‘After the Storm: Mohammed Sami at Blenheim Palace’, 2024. Photo: Tom Lindboe; courtesy Blenheim Art Foundation; © the artist

‘After the Storm: Mohammed Sami’ is at Blenheim Palace until 6 October.

Sesame Street premiered in 1969, the same year that my eldest sister, Kate, was born. The genre of children’s television was in its infancy; Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood had premiered just the previous year, joining Captain Kangaroo and Howdy Doody on the limited roster of shows meant for the very young, and the idea of using gimmicks from commercial TV—a variety of segments, a sense of humor—to support children’s development (not just to keep them quiet or sell them toys) was revolutionary. In 1969, the Sesame Street universe was inhabited by Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, and Bert and Ernie—all Muppets—plus the humans Gordon and Susan, who were married to each other; Mr. Hooper, who ran the corner grocery; Bob—apparently, according to Wikipedia, a music teacher; and a rotating cast of kids, who seemed to have happily wandered in from the real world.

By the time I was born, in 1984, Sesame had grown. There were more Muppets, including the Count, Snuffy, Elmo, and my personal favorite, Grover, and more humans, including Luis, Maria, Linda, and Gina. There was merch: I took some early steps in Bert and Ernie slippers. And there were studies bearing out what the show’s creators had always claimed: watching Sesame Street could help little kids learn to read and count, improving their chances of success in school and potentially their entire lives. I watched Sesame Street every morning in my Bert and Ernie slippers and my jammies, sitting as still as I could in the rocking chair, hoping against hope that the cat would join me.

My mom had watched Sesame Street with both of my older sisters, and she liked watching it with me, too, which was no accident. The creators knew the value of co-viewing for children’s development, and they wrote the show to entertain parents as well as kids, with on-the-nose parodies of contemporary prime-time TV (among the most memorable, Miami Mice and Monsterpiece Theater), celebrity appearances (Judy Collins sang the alphabet with Snuffy; Jesse Jackson recited poetry on a stoop), and recurring sketches (who could forget Grover as the incompetent restaurant waiter?). Obviously, the Muppets, with their strangely expressive mouths and sophisticated sense of irony, were preferable to any cartoon, and particularly to the Disney-princess franchise—in which any human mom can recognize certain heteronormative toxins, of which my mom, child of one bad marriage, party to another, then finally and perhaps hesitantly in the one that would last, was perhaps even more acutely aware. She dressed all her daughters in overalls. One year she sewed me a cape like the one Grover wore to play Super Grover.

My first salaried job, in 2008, was at an uptight nonprofit run by an oil family in Washington, D.C. I disliked the job, which required me to wear nylons and organize policy “convenings,” the point of which I could not see, and I hated D.C., where irony seemed to have been smothered by earnest, middlebrow ambition. I wanted to move to New York, and I often took the bus up for the weekend. Coming back one Sunday, in the middle of Union Station, I saw an exhibition about Sesame Workshop: it, too, was a nonprofit, which I now considered my area of expertise; surely it wouldn’t require nylons; and it occurred to me that I should try to get a job there. After a couple of tries, I did. It was 2010, and I was twenty-six years old.

As an employee, my relationship with the Muppets became complicated. My job was to convince funders of the Muppets’ impeccable, unparalleled value for children’s cognitive, social-emotional, and even physical development; their unique ability to entertain while educating; the trust they commanded from parents. I believed in most of that, based on my own experiences with Grover and the gang, and I appreciated present-day Sesame Street’s increased emphasis on certain curricular themes in response to children’s changing needs. For example, in response to the childhood obesity epidemic, healthy eating had become a focus. This was not as radical a change as some reactionaries seemed to think at the time; Cookie Monster rapped about healthy foods, with backup vocals from Muppet fruits and vegetables, as early as 1988. More concerning to me was a certain new character who had been added to the cast I remembered.

In the early nineties, the producers had decided to introduce female Muppets to help balance the cast of mostly males; hence Rosita in 1991 and Zoe in 1993. Both of these characters had matted monster fur (turquoise and orange, respectively) and followed clothing-optional personal style guidelines, like the rest of the Muppets. But in the early aughts, they decided they needed a lead female character, and that this character should wear a dress. According to the creative director at the time in a New York Times interview, the show had been missing a certain dress-wearing aspect of being a girl. According to me, they must have thought a girly girl could help them compete with the kinds of characters that had kids’ and adults’ attention in those days. At any rate: enter Abby Cadabby, a literal fairy princess, humanoid-leaning and distinctly less hirsute than Rosita and Zoe—clipped pink fleece on her body and long hair with bangs on her head—who unfailingly appears in a dress, pigtails, and, I’d argue, mascara. At twenty-six, I still loved Oscar, Cookie Monster, and Grover. I felt neutral toward Big Bird, Elmo, Rosita, and Zoe. And I hated and disdained Abby Cadabby.

Why? I’d always liked dresses as much as jeans. Would I not have related to Abby, back then, as a kid? Maybe. But I hadn’t had the opportunity. Watching an all-male monster cast—wry, goofy guys who never seem to think about gender at all—I saw no difference between them and me. If I’d seen a pink, nonmonster princess next to them, I think I would have realized that my guys were guys and that I was supposed to be more like her; she was my assigned teammate, and our role was not to be goofy but to be pink. I was grateful to have identified instead with Grover, who, while male on paper, expresses no particular gender and is rarely referred to by pronouns. The cape—one-size, all-gender—suggests only valiance and flair.

Like most reactionary anger, mine contained a hypocrisy. When I argued, in my head or to coworkers, that all the “classic” Muppets—a slippery term that obviously changes with each passing decade—were effectively nonbinary, I did not think about Bert and Ernie, who were humanoid and masculine in a way that the others were not. Their tufty hair, their sweaters, their voices, and their dynamic as a gay couple—perceptible on some level, I think, even to young children—gave them a much more specifically gendered energy than Grover and the gang. Yet now that I think carefully about what makes them different, it isn’t their gender but their age. Most Muppets have an age—Big Bird is five, Grover is four, Elmo is three—but Bert and Ernie mysteriously don’t. Presenting as somewhere between thirty and seventy, they are certainly adults, because they live together on their own, in the garden-level apartment of Gordon and Susan’s building. With the exception of Oscar, other Muppets aren’t typically shown keeping house. They exist on the street or on the liminal space of the green screen. Bert and Ernie are adults, and they are human, and I suppose I accepted that these two conditions made gender unavoidable.

It’s funny how children’s media riles us. We all think we own it, that our own particular memory is the authentic one, and that any change is ruinous. A few years ago The New Yorker ran a piece by Jill Lepore bemoaning the twin plagues of commercial competitiveness and “ed-school fads”—which, she seemed to think, had ruined Sesame Street—and pronouncing the spirit of the early seasons dead. (Lepore made a curious exception for the international coproductions, of which she seems unlikely to have seen many.) The piece did not quote any current Sesame Workshop staffers, and it seemed to have gone un-fact-checked, an unusual editorial oversight that might indicate the contagious appeal of this kind of nostalgic rage. I was a few years out from Sesame then, and despite my own issues with the show, I was annoyed with Lepore and The New Yorker on behalf of my former colleagues. I knew how much research went into every decision. I’d spent five years telling funders about that research and getting money to do more of it. Wanting Sesame Street to stay the same is about as reasonable as wanting your childhood home to stay as you left it even after a new family moves in. Yet, to this day, I consider Abby Cadabby a betrayal of the show’s core values.

Sometimes, back at Sesame Workshop, when I started up my rant about the unfairness of Abby being human while the guys got to be monsters, someone would mention Rosita or Zoe. Sure, Rosita and Zoe were legitimate monsters, I’d say, but the gender-monster balance remained unfair because they were only minor characters. While that’s a disservice to Rosita (who appears in many segments, often singing and playing her guitar), I do think Zoe has been a bit in the wings, and the reason could be her shifty relationship to girliness. Apparently, when Zoe first joined the cast she wore only “light jewelry”—a clothing-optional look that makes perfect sense for a three-year-old, which she is. But in 2002 she began wearing a pink tutu every time she appeared. Ostensibly this was because she was, or became, obsessed with ballet like many girls her age, but also the aughts were an era of “postfeminism,” that dangerous idea that stereotypes are ancient history and thus ripe for revival. In retrospect, the monster in the tutu merely heralded the pink fairy. By the time I started working at Sesame, Abby had more airtime, more lines, and more merch than Zoe ever had.

Still, Zoe’s continued presence in the cast, as well as her current costume situation, calms me. Since 2018 she wears the tutu only sometimes, when she feels like it, often appearing in her natural state. She also, I read, drives a soapbox car around the neighborhood, accompanied by both a doll and a pet rock. This Zoe feels closest to the kid I was, a product of my own imagination as well as outside influences, a small person to whom the gender binary is interesting but not yet particularly relevant. A girl but not definitively so.

I called my mom to fact-check a few things and told her about what I was writing. She got it. At that age, she said, you are a Muppet.

Jane Breakell is The Paris Review’s development director.

I said, What does it feel like in there? What do you mean, she said. I said, For example, is it light or is it dark? She said, It’s light by the windows. And then she said, It’s airy if the windows are open. Is that all?

She said it was a bad time. She would rather I not come inside the house. Boxes were everywhere. Everything was in the boxes. She said that her brother had died on New Year’s Day. More boxes. And that it was fine. She said she really didn’t have anything to offer me. She said she knew nothing about the previous resident Joseph Cornell, other than that he’d existed—and that a different man had lived in the house in between them. That it had been remodeled in the nineties. She had moved there for the street’s flatness—she appreciated flatness in a street. Utopia Parkway.

The artist Joseph Cornell lived a lot of his life at her home at 37-08 Utopia Parkway. Age twenty-six onward. The house is still small and gray. Gambrel roof. Clerestory windows. Sash windows. Tin door. Shingles and clapboard. Familiar, symmetrical face. Like the current resident, Cornell had a brother who died first, who lived there with him, in addition to his mother. Cornell, too, had had boxes everywhere.

I had knocked on a door to no answer and then left a note between the wipers and the windshield of a silver car in the driveway, overlaid on the glass above the inspection/registration and a sticker of Padre Pio—the friar, priest, stigmatist, and mystic. Just after I drove off, it snowed, then it rained, and I assumed the message had run off its page.

I got a call a few days later, around 10 p.m., from a no-caller-ID number. A voice said, Did you leave a thing on my thing? I knew it was her because she spoke like my mother’s family who’d once inhabited that same corridor of Queens.

I told her I was interested in the house itself. I asked if she would mind sending me photographs of the walls; or of the stairs to the basement, where Cornell had collected and organized materials (the clippings, the curios, the dolls); or of the view from the garden, where he took his visitors. Anything, really. She said, Sure. She never did.

***

The house is a Dutch colonial (revival)—fittingly, in Flushing, a part of Queens named after Vlissingen, a city in the southwestern Netherlands, a former island. It is believed that the word Vlissingen is in one way or another related to the word fles, which means “bottle,” fittingly, a recurring object in Cornell’s assemblages. Behind the house, there’s still a one-car garage, where Cornell often sat in a chair on wheels with the door rolled up, an object himself in a shadow box like one of his own—his open-faced homes for flecks of life, little chambers where sense and nonsense make temporary truce.

After I left the note on the windshield, I drove in a confused half snow to New Lake Pavilion for Cantonese dim sum. Waiting for the food, I swiped past little images of Cornell’s shadow boxes on my phone and I thought of the word cathect. I had just learned it the night before, from a poet who’d told an anecdote about her mother, who, while she was in medical school and raising two young children at once, would arrange flowers on Saturdays to calm herself down, to not think—it was a repetition that indexed feeling. She talked about cathecting flowers.

Cathect comes from cathexis: “an investment of energy”—libidinal, of course—“in a person, object, idea or activity.” It’s a word that was created by an analyst who was trying to translate Freud’s gestural use of a common German word: Besetzung—a word with a mutable definition: “(1) the occupation or invasion of a country; (2) the occupation of a building without permission (a squat); (3) casting in a play or a film role.”

I thought of the little eddies of Cornell’s infatuation concretized, translated into the arrangements of ephemera: the keys, the die, the maps, the seashells, the clocks, the birds, the book pages, the dime-store toys. The boxes seem to conjure the sequels to the lives of familiar objects. I swiped through more frames of the boxes as I waited for my check—and I thought, There goes Joseph, cathecting again …

I felt then that somehow each box I swept past was a room in the home on Utopia Parkway. That each box he made was an addition to the house. Expanding each day, a perpetual renovation. That he was his own architect, contractor, decorator, and dweller. Cornell lived with his mother in the house on Utopia Parkway; in his last phone call to his sister on the day he died, he said that he wished he “had not been so reserved.” Part of him wished he had left the house.

***

The current woman of the house didn’t send any photographs. I had no way of calling her back—she’d dialed with a vertical service code. I looked for any photographs of the house’s interior but instead came upon a series of comments spanning four years, left almost fifteen years ago, on a blog post that featured nothing but an image of the home’s facade. The softness of the blue light and the wholeness of the tree behind the house and the certain weather of its green suggested it was taken from a moving car, windows down, by someone passing the home at the end of a near-perfect end-of-summer day, the green so full you know it can’t hold on much longer.

First, a woman had commented on the image, saying she had lived next door to Mr. Cornell as a child, that he had given one of his pieces to her parents as a gift, and that after he died her parents had sold it to John Lennon and Yoko Ono for a thousand dollars. She said that at the time, this had been a lot of money to her parents, who had immigrated to the United States from postwar Germany. That she had just visited the Phoenix Art Museum and saw one of his pieces. “It brought back so many fond memories,” she said.

Then, five months later, in the fall, another woman added that she’d never known Joseph Cornell, but that her family had, and that her mother had often cooked for him and did light housecleaning. Her sisters Fran and Jeanette also did little things around the house for him, and her now-brother-in-law used to make the box frames for his art pieces. She was sorry she’d never met him. “His art was simple in material, but beautiful and complex in meaning,” she said.

In the spring, eight months later, a man added that he grew up about one block down the street. His brother used to help Cornell with yard work, and he was very lucky to have gotten a private showing of his art when he was around twelve, although not as lucky as the first commenter. He said Cornell was something of an éminence grise in the neighborhood. A very good man, but a recluse. No one had had any idea how important he would become.

Six months later, a new woman said to the first commenter that she thought she was her childhood friend who had lived next door. Was your father Gary and your brother Eric? Do you remember me? she asked.

Four years later, almost to the day, in the middle of spring, the first woman had replied. You are correct, she said to the third woman. My father, Gerhard, Gary for short; my mother, Ida; my brother, Eric; and I lived at 37-06 Utopia Parkway. She was trying desperately to put a face to her name. Did she live to the left of them in the beige house? She said that we live in a small world.

An hour later, she asked the third commenter, the man, if he had lived on Crocheron Avenue and Utopia Parkway with his mother and brother in the white apartments. He never responded.

***

After a few months of no word from the current woman in the house, I decided to go by the house again. I was driving from the airport. I looked for the white apartments at the intersection of Crocheron and Utopia, which must be a new color now. I also looked for the quince tree in the yard—there’s a story about Yayoi Kusama and Cornell embracing beneath a quince tree in the little yard behind 37-08 Utopia Parkway. Kusama says that as they kissed, Cornell’s mother threw a bucket of cold water over them, ordering them to stop. That she told him not to touch women. That they were a disease. Kusama said that it was an ideal relationship for her, that he was the romance of her life. That she disliked sex and that he was impotent. That they suited each other well. That he wrote to her many times and called her many times each day. That people would think her telephone was broken, and that she would say, No, no, it’s only Joseph Cornell calling me so often—but given the tree’s barrenness (it was late winter), I was unable to identify whether it was the quince tree at all.

I knocked. After a handful of seconds, a very small woman in a very long robe opened the wood door, and then the second tin door very slowly. She was wearing very furry slippers, red—and behind her there were no lights on at all. I told her who I was. The sun had barely set but she had the look of an animal just after waking. She said, Oh yeah. She spoke very slowly and quietly and her voice had no ring inside it—her words were almost toneless. She said that she’d send pictures to my email address. I handed her a box of sfogliatella, the pastry that looks like a lobster tail, filled with almond paste and candied peel of citron.

Driving down Utopia Parkway, I found myself guilty of cathecting. I found myself casting this woman with the toneless voice, in red slippers and a robe, in the role of Cornell’s mother, maybe, or of Cornell himself. I thought about the house with the woman inside and then about the invasion of a country, or squatting in a building without permission.

The interaction reminded me, later, of something I had not thought about for a long time. When I was seven, we moved into an apartment where the previous tenant had been an only child like me, exactly my age, and who, like Cornell’s brother, had had cerebral palsy. He was blind. There was braille on most of the door frames. At night, when I would get up to pee before bed, I would walk to the bathroom through the dark apartment with my eyes shut, and pass my right hand over the door frames and pretend that I was the boy who’d lived there before.

A few days after, the woman on Utopia Parkway sends me these four photographs and says that she hopes these will suffice, that she is sorry but the house is in disarray, that she is just trying to clean up, to just make repairs, to just get over death.

Eliza Barry Callahan is a writer and filmmaker from New York, NY. Her first novel, The Hearing Test, was published by Catapult. She teaches at Columbia University and is a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow. 

From the June 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

‘I am nothing – “another” speaks in me,’ declared Jean Cocteau in a Paris Review interview published in 1964, just a few months after his death. ‘The Juggler’s Revenge’, at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, illustrates the accuracy of his self-assessment: his imagination resembled a hall of mirrors, an infinite machine of collage and juxtaposition. The photograph on the cover of the catalogue depicts the artist as a six-armed figure holding a book, a fountain pen, a pair of scissors, a cigarette, a paintbrush, while one hand rests upturned at his waist as if awaiting his next task. Cocteau was a polymath, a protean conjurer of worlds, a juggler – and, if the curators are correct, this exhibition offers revenge on all the critics who called him a dilettante. Despite his near-Warholian embrace of surface, celebrity and everything new (‘I myself do not’ read anything serious, he said in the same interview), he inhabited a world of ancient myth and melodrama, creating a friendly environment for both his sexuality and his desire to identify as a poet.

The films of this restless maker were poésie cinématographique, his drawings poésie graphique. And what a beautiful hand he possessed. Profiles, penises or the dome of La Salute in Venice – Cocteau could bring anything to life in unerring curls and swerves. Portrait of Raymond Radiguet (1923) is alive with a delicacy of touch: the young writer (he was 20 and would die that year) with small, sensuous lips, looks down at his hand, knuckles gently pinching a cigarette. In his Mandrake series (1936), Erotic Scene (1937–39) and Sailor Couple (1947) the drawings are marked by a mix of classical poise and uninhibited eroticism. As a colourist – even as a painter – he was tin-eyed. Oedipus, or, The Crossing of Three Roads (1951), has a cartoonish goofiness, its hues sickly and unharmonious, like some outtake from The Simpsons.

At the age of almost 70, he drew a Sphinx (1958) as a creature afflicted by desire. Recalling the polymorphic sensuality of his Mandrake drawings, her head looks like a sentient mass of genitalia, with two eyes extending like penises, its bulging jaw a scrotum. The sphinx (she also appears in Testament of Orpheus, 1960, Cocteau’s final film) puffs out her chest, her breasts like cathedral domes, and even her anus, revealed as she lifts her tail, participates – its dark, circular form indistinguishable from the penis-eyeballs on her head. The faint outline of a Greek temple in the background and an asterisked signature complete the image: classical culture, life as a hermaphroditic riddle, and the artist’s name, all delineated with a sense of exquisite fun.

Despite Cocteau’s flair as a draughtsman, most of the drawings come across as playful ephemera that punctuated his life as a storyteller. Cocteau was a magnificent thief, adapting old stories and ideas – the poet doesn’t invent but listen, he said. Yet as a film-maker he was supremely inventive, with scenes from The Blood of a Poet (1930), such as when the poet splashes through the surface of a mirror, enduringly sublime. The ascension in Beauty and the Beast (1946), or Orpheus penetrating a mirror to enter the underworld (Orpheus, 1950) – these are beautifully rendered moments that honour the tone of the myths while taking up with ardent glee the latest tricks offered by modernity. The exhibition, above all, provoked in me a desire to rewatch all of Cocteau’s films. Or indeed see them for the first time: Les Parents Terribles (1948), based on his play of 1938, is often cited as his best film among cineastes, but I haven’t seen it, and it seems less celebrated – in the art world – than his Orphic trilogy.

Movies transported the artist into a world beyond the Parisian avant-garde. A room of film posters, a gallery devoted to jewellery and other objets d’art that he designed, and shots of the artist cavorting with celebs (Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas) are reminders of his restless promiscuity across high and low. But even in his twilight years he made wonderful drawings, including a felt-tip doodle titled Poetry (1960): an Orphic profile with a green-and-yellow fish for an eye, surrounded by a kind of manifesto: poetry does not come from inspiration, but expiration. The artist’s hand and eye were one with the poet, his body and his breath.

Orpheus’s Mirror (1960), Jean Cocteau. Collection Kontaxopoulos Prokopchuk, Brussels. © Jean Clement Eugene Mar Cocteau, by SIAE 2024

In his catalogue essay, curator Kenneth E. Silver opens with an anecdote recounted by Peggy Guggenheim in her memoirs. Planning to inaugurate her Cork Street gallery with an exhibition of Cocteau’s work in January 1938, Guggenheim plucked him from his opium-soaked apartment and took him out for dinner in a Parisian restaurant, recalling that the artist couldn’t keep his face out of a nearby mirror. Where the gallerist saw vanity, Silver senses insecurity. But perhaps something else was afoot. Sitting in a restaurant, his head abuzz with opium and the flattery of his gallerist, he perceived his reflection as a foreign object, ultimately unknowable, yet something his imagination could appropriate and use. I too exist in a hall of mirrors, he confirmed to himself.

Mirrors open the exhibition, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Orpheus Twice) of 1991, a pair of mirrors the dimensions of doors leaning against the wall, and Cocteau’s own Orpheus’s Mirror (1960/89), a small bronze sculpture. The wall text refers to ‘narcissistic doubling’ and the artist’s Orphic trilogy. In The Blood of a Poet, the sculpture (played by Lee Miller), roused from its ‘secular sleep’, encourages the poet to enter the mirror, which he drops into like a bath. Returning from the abyss, the poet remarks that ‘mirrors should reflect a bit more before sending back images’.

If the line surprises with its comedic tone of annoyance, as if a mirror should offer something more substantial than a fleeting reflection, the sentiment shines a light on Cocteau’s obsession with mirrors and doubling. The artist is a ‘nothing’, a collagist who redeploys a vast compendium of images, from a snippet of his visage in a Parisian restaurant to Greek myth. If his hero returned from the underworld frustrated, Cocteau was right: there is nothing beyond this existential hall of mirrors. And, like Orpheus himself, he couldn’t help but turn around to take another look.

Poetry (1960), Jean Cocteau. Collection Kontaxopoulos Prokopchuk, Brussels. © Jean Clement Eugene Mar Cocteau, by SIAE 2024

‘Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge’ is at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, until 16 September.

From the June 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

I named her Holy Jemima when I was nine, or thereabouts. I liked the way the words sounded and it was meant cruelly. Holy Jemima was two years older than me, and her family—her mother, father, two sisters, and brother, making six—were in a cult.

I did not know they were in a cult. I just thought they were crazy Christians. The turbo type. I was forced, occasionally, to interact with Holy Jemima, because her little sister, Jessica, was friends with mine.

The whole family had this shark-eyed stare. Holy Jemima would fix me with it and tell me that Harry Potter was evil, that they did not celebrate Halloween in their house because of Satan, and that the school church was getting it all badly wrong.

“You’ve got to come over,” she told me once, “and watch these videos. You have no idea about the world. The school is not telling you about the real miracles that are happening. There is a preacher in Africa, a Black guy, and he is curing people. His name is TB Joshua.”

“You watch videos of church?”

“He has cured AIDS. On video. Exorcisms too. Have you ever seen a demon leave someone’s body? They go like this.” She rolled her eyes back in her head and waved her arms about as if having a seizure and started going aghnaghnahgnghgnghgnhgnhgn.

A thing about growing up: you do not know what is strange until after. This was suburban England and the Holy Jemima’s hobby seemed about the same, to me, as my parents’ doctor friends’ African masks mounted on the walls above their CD towers of world music. Six streets down from them was Bellybutton Man, whose hobby was watching us leave school whilst silently smiling and lifting his blue T-shirt to finger his navel. And Bellybutton Man seemed about the same as Andy, eight minutes across town, who ran a pub and was a chess savant, who showed you newspapers and explained where the grandmasters were making mistakes. And Andy seemed about the same as Jake, whose hobby was that his parents let him drink as much Sunny Delight as he wanted. When you’re a kid it’s all just flora and fauna. You learn prejudices slow, like which plants are poison.

***

I met Dr. Mike Mew at the house next door to Jake’s. This house had been a house, but now it was a dentist. It was called the Smile Centre. Outside was a laminate board that said so, accompanied by a fading photo of a perfect and disembodied grin.

Mike Mew is the head of the closest thing dentistry has to a cult. This was not true when I was nine but it is now. Mike and his father, John, believe that in humanity there is currently an epidemic of ugliness. They promise that you can build yourself a new and strong and masculine jawline, basically just by swallowing different. They call this mewing. His New York Times profile calls him a “celebrity to [the] incels,” but girls like him too. He has obtained adoration on both 4chan and TikTok. Mewing is a big thing, a real phenomenon.

Mike Mew also has, at time of writing, an ongoing misconduct hearing for, among other things, making a six-year-old boy wear head, neck, and inside-mouth appliances that allegedly led to the child being in so much pain he had “seizure-like episodes.” I was Mike Mew’s patient from ages nine to fifteen, or thereabouts. This all started in 2005.

Over Christmas last year, I showed my new fiancée around where I grew up. All the sights: Bellybutton Man’s spot and Jake’s house too. We then passed the Smile Centre, which has changed its name now.

“Oh my God,” she said, “you saw Mike Mew? Are you serious?”

This was how I learned that he was famous, that he had a Netflix documentary, and that my fiancée had seen him on TikTok and had been secretly mewing the whole time.

***

The waiting room of the Smile Centre subscribed to the most boring magazines in the world. Titles I remember being like “Interior Design for the Middle-Aged Wives of Small Business Owners” and “Regional Tatler.” There were leather sofas which were somehow always hot. There was a fish tank I once saw blue food coloring being added to.

Behind the desk was the person responsible: a sixtysomething white South African woman whose hair oscillated wildly between visits from gray to jet black and back again. She would say “Gibri-il Smitt” meanly, unsmilingly, and then I would go into the examination room, where her son was waiting for me.

The son was called Jeff, pronounced “Jiff.” It was a family business and Jeff was the main onsite dentist. I think I was there for a routine NHS visit when Jeff noticed my teeth were misaligned.

“His teeth are very misaligned,” I remember him telling my mother, who came into the examination room with me. I remember her saying: “Oh, dear.”

There was a second dentist present. This was Mike Mew.

Mike Mew’s practice was in London. Not the suburbs. He was the glamorous dentist. He had descended,

Jeff explained, a guru in the field of “orthotropics” (a word he made up), and I was very lucky that he was visiting.

At the next appointment, in a different room in the dentist house, Jeff filled my mouth with putty while Mike watched. At first, Mike mostly just watched. The bottom half first, then the top half. I had to bite down hard. I remember gagging on it, and the clay taste. It had to stay in my mouth for the longest time.

When Jeff took the top half out, one of my teeth came with it. This was very painful but I didn’t show it because I’m really brave.

Jeff pulled the tooth from the clay and inspected it, then handed it to Mike, who did the same.

“Don’t worry,” Mike said, to my mother, who was worrying. “It’s just a baby tooth. It would have come out in the next year or two anyway.”

“If you’re sure,” my mother said.

“We’ll have to redo the mold,” Mike said, smiling at the tooth, “once he stops bleeding.”

***

After this, Mike took over. Mike Mew made us look at some before-and-afters. He narrated these. He had a big laminated photo album and flipped through it.

“Look at this one. His face is long and thin, like Gabriel’s. His mouth was too small and his teeth were too crowded. Now look. His face is short and square and handsome. Look at the jawline. More handsome, right?”

“Uh,” I said, not wanting to say some gay shit.

“More handsome, right, Mum?” said Jeff.

“More square, definitely,” said my mother.

“That’s right!” said Mike, and he put the book down and smiled with lips closed, because he thought he’d convinced us.

***

Later, in the bathroom, I inspected my teeth in the mirror, and wondered why I was meant to care about which way they pointed.

Then I looked at some family photo albums, at photos I was in. Then I looked at myself in the mirror again to compare my current head with my previous head.

I wondered if the two dentists were right—whether my body was becoming ugly. And if it was, why it would do that to me.

This was something I had not thought about before.

***

Alongside the cast of my ugly teeth, and promises that I’d look that way forever unless action was taken, a bill was presented to my mother. I remember the number two thousand. I remember that we were broke. We couldn’t afford a car sometimes. Researching this, I asked my mother recently how we’d paid for it.

“We didn’t,” she said. “Your grandmother did.”

The clay version of me was used to shape the first appliances. They were made from translucent blue plastic and metal wire. One sat in the roof of my mouth and the other sat underneath my tongue. The metal wire was wrapped around my teeth on either side so that each appliance would stay in place.

Neither of them fit right at first. I lay on the hydraulic chair with my mouth open. Mike placed his hand in my hair and tried to force the upper appliance around my teeth.

When it didn’t go in, he handed it to Jeff, who went at it with pliers. Then Mike tried again.

They kept doing this until it did.

Both appliances had a miniature cog inside, right in the middle. Mike gave me a tiny key and some instructions.

“Give the key a quarter turn every night, before bed. The appliance will get wider, very slowly, with each turn. It will force your teeth apart. It will make your mouth wider. Got it?”

I nodded but didn’t say anything because my mouth was full of plastic and tiny cuts from being poked by the wires. It hurt to move. In my head, I called it the Crank.

My main memory of this period of my life is being unable to eat because my teeth and jaw hurt so much. And the appliance was so disgusting—it felt so embarrassing to remove before a meal—that I made up increasingly bizarre excuses to avoid eating in public. I did not want to look like a nerd.

In 2005 they hadn’t really invented anorexia for boys. So no one minded.

***

I gave up turning the Crank pretty quick. By this point Mike Mew had taken a special interest in me, or acted as though he had. He would say how perfect it was that I was starting puberty. Because my face was still growing—not fixed, like an adult’s—he could mold it to his desired proportions. And so he was coming to town for all of my sessions.

Mike became increasingly confused at the lack of progress. It didn’t seem to occur to him that I might be cheating, that I was a preteen boy, and might, on some fundamental level, not care enough about which direction my teeth went in.

He and Jeff tried removing some of my back teeth to make more room inside me. He operated. I was delighted to be fucking up their system, to be making them do exciting, unnecessary, time-consuming procedures.

It felt like revenge for the Crank.

I had just learned about communism from a cassette of a Clash album. I’m Che Guevara, I thought. I am the Che Guevara of Dental Appliances.

 When the teeth were removed from my head I spat so much blood. My mother made a gasping sound.

“Don’t worry,” Mike said, “the blood mixes with the saliva. It looks more dramatic than it is.”

He turned on the miniature dentist tap and the blood began to wash slowly down the tiny sink.

The spiraling water turned from red to pink, then to nothing. I remember watching it, equal parts benzocaine-curious and horrified.

***

The operation, of course, did not work either. They changed tack, Mike and Jeff. They decided my chin was too far back in my head.

So they gave up on the Crank and recast my teeth and made a single appliance. This new appliance sat at the top of my mouth, its wires wrapping around my remaining back teeth. It had two long teeth of its own, the appliance, almost like fangs, which came down from the roof of my mouth, around my tongue, then curved, so that the pointed end of each was aimed at the inside of my gums.

Mike Mew explained this above my head. He would never raise the chair to speak to me.

“He’s a mouth breather. So he holds his jaw like this.”

He opened his mouth and retracted his chin and made a duhhhhhh sound.

I wanted to explain to Mike Mew that it was hay fever season. But his finger was in my mouth.

“So when he opens his mouth too wide, or doesn’t hold his jaw correctly, the appliance will give him a little prick on his gums.”

***

“Little prick” is an understatement: Mike Mew is a small and bizarre-looking man. He has a perfectly square head which, when Mike was a child, his dentist father molded using prototypical orthotropic methods. He is very short, and very slim, which gives the impression of his skull being about the same width as his waist. He wore, during our sessions, a tight shirt tucked into tight trousers, paired with square-framed glasses. He is bald, but fashionably so, and his manicured remaining hair frames the top of his strange little head very neatly. The impression he leaves is of an almost total cubeness, like a minor antagonist in a PlayStation game. He undoubtedly believes that his own physical format is somehow inherently correct, and in what he is selling: he has made himself into an example of it. “Look at your lips,” he said in one session. “Too big, too droopy, ugly. Now look at mine.” He turned to my mother. “This is how lips are meant to look. Firm and tight. Attractive.”

***

A few years passed. The fangs did work. I watched my face change. My chin went forward by the millimeter. I forced my teeth to stay together as long as I could, even while talking. I held my lips open to breathe when I had to. And each time I went to see Mike Mew and Jeff, they got out a tub of some kind of air-drying molten plastic and made the spikes on the fangs slightly longer, to force my chin farther and farther forward.

At the same time I had become six foot and skinny. I cycled everywhere and was tan all the time from the sun. I could buy cigarettes and lie on the grass and smoke them with my friends and people would sort of slide up and speak, then retreat. And once I worked out what was happening—which took a very long time, because I had never previously been cool, let alone attractive—all I could feel was a great unearnedness, a fraudulence of self, a deeply troubling sense that I was an accomplice in some great dental scam, and that anyone who was nice to me was being fundamentally misled, and that the only recourse I had was to make my personality as abrasive and unpleasant as I knew my body secretly was.

But also, when I stopped thinking about all that—when I could just let good things happen to me—life ruled. It ruled so much lol.

***

Mike Mew was delighted with my new fourteen-year-old face, and I thought that would be the end of it. But he didn’t stop there. Having fixed my jawline, he became concerned about my cheeks.

“His face is still very round,” he said. He put his gloved hand across my mouth and squeezed my cheeks so hard it hurt. “It feels like there’s too much muscle there.”

“He’s a bit mixed-race,” my mother said. She still came to the appointments, mostly. “He is kind of meant to look like that.”

Mike Mew looked at Jeff and said, “We need to give him cheekbones.”

***

The next part I can’t remember so well, partly because what Mike Mew says about mewing now is different from what I remember and partly because I had just discovered smoking weed and most long-term memories I’ve committed since are dreamlike and intangible, and trying to lift them from my brain feels, in a very pleasurable way, like lifting sand from a shimmering ocean I’m standing in.

Aside from their chemical effects, the suburban obtainment of drugs provided perhaps the first hint that my world was not what it seemed, of how it might be recast, of the impending strangeness of adulthood.

When buying drugs, you are asked to wait at street corners whose names you never knew. You see, for the first time, the insides of houses that do not belong to people with children. You learn fresh words, like ten-bag or cro, and find that language is the admission fee to new parts of your universe. You learn that all things have many secret sides to them, which were there all along.

***

Amid all this I remember Mike Mew and Jeff becoming very confused—again—even more so than before, about why there was too much muscle in my face. They theorized I was slacking in my sleep. They tried taping my mouth shut at night. Nothing worked.

There is a certain kind of depression that strikes people who reach the limits of a sales pitch they’ve treated as gospel. Mike Mew became distracted, grayer, more desolate. Less hyperactive and talkative. He trudged in his shoes that I remember as orthopedic. I remember feeling really bad for him.

But eventually, after some months, Mike Mew came into a session elated. He was engaged and curious. He had what seemed to be a new idea. When he was like this, he was charming, in his way. Boyish.

He gave me a tiny plastic dentist cup with water in it. He asked me to swallow while he watched.

He made me repeat this so many times. With my mouth open and his face very close to it. With my mouth closed. Until I could barely swallow any more.

“The problem is,” he said, “that you’re swallowing wrong. You’re swallowing with your tongue in the bottom of your mouth. It’s working the muscles in your cheeks. It’s making them too strong. Your tongue should be at the top, firmly. Watch me.”

Then he made me stand up and go to a mirror with him. And we took turns swallowing until he decided I was swallowing the way he wanted me to. This is the thing—the seed of the technique—that became known as mewing.

The Mews’ literature tells it differently. They say that Mike’s father invented the technique in the seventies. My guess is it’s somewhere in-between: based on the amount of time I spent lying open-mouthed in the hydraulic chair while Mike and Jeff hypothesized and pontificated about my teeth, Mike Mew was doing what is known in medical terms as throwing shit at a wall to see what stuck, and “swallowing different” was, when he was treating me, a semi-forgotten trick that he dusted off. That mewing was simple and cheap enough to preach online, thus catapulting Mew to viral dental superstardom, strikes me as a happy half-accident. Or, less than happy, depending on your view of Mike Mew.

***

Mike Mew cast my mouth in clay once more and made a new appliance that would allegedly force me to mew—to swallow correctly—the whole time. This time its fangs pointed at the insides of my cheeks.

I did not bother wearing it. I did my assigned at-home in-front-of-mirror swallowing practice maybe once if ever. I was fifteen and I did not want to become more of a cube. I was so bored of thinking about my own face. I had visions of being about to kiss girls and pausing to remove the blue plastic from my mouth, strands of my saliva following it like cheese on an advertisement pizza. This would not do.

So I told my mother that I’d had enough. And I never saw Mike Mew again.

***

I’ve not seen a dentist since. I tell myself that I’m English, that my teeth are meant to be terrible. For example, I did not go when, during a particularly dark heroin winter, my mouth began   to fill with blood from an unknown source every couple of days. And I will not go for the tumor-shaped thing currently growing on my lower gums, either.

Once, in a particularly philosophical moment, Mike Mew told me: “Everything is discipline. You can apply what I’m teaching you now to anything you choose.”

I do not hate Mike Mew, because how could I? He was right. I love to grind away at my mouth, which was his work. To yellow it, to watch it chip. To make my body   fat and flabby and then to bring it back to the bone. This, the learned and painful discipline of writing or sculpting a differently mangled self—of becoming compelling in spite of, or even because of, an ugliness—this is what I am grateful for. And the nicer jawline, too. Obviously.

***

Showing my beautiful new high-cheekboned, correctly swallowing fiancée around my hometown after she told me about Mew’s fame, I learned other things too. All the parts of the past that fresh eyes and hindsight had cast strange.

I learned that Andy the Savant’s pub had closed down during COVID. And that Bellybutton Man, who was actually harmless, had died some time ago.

And that the African church of the Holy Jemimas’ had been some kind of cult compound, and that TB Joshua had been faking exorcism seizures and miracles on video to obtain donations from gullible Europeans, and then raping a good deal of them, until the compound   burned down in a potentially godsent fire. And that Fitzcarraldo had put out an acclaimed book by a reformed cultist, which the BBC was turning into a documentary.

And that perhaps my own face had once been strange enough to launch two billion TikTok views, from all the incels and looksmaxxing boys and girls who wanted to stop looking exactly like I had. And I was going to have to process that, somehow.

But what I’m actually saying is: it’s not that deep. It’s all about perspective. How much you see depends on what face you’re looking out of. And how much time you’ve had to look into it.

Gabriel Smith is the author of the novel Brat.

Two activists representing Just Stop Oil have been arrested for spraying Stonehenge with orange powder. The protestors – a 21-year-old student from Oxford and a 73-year-old man from Birmingham – carried out the act on Wednesday, two days before thousands of people visited the megalithic site to celebrate the summer solstice. Video footage shows members of the public wresting the spray cans away from the activists. The orange powder, which according to Just Stop Oil was made of cornflour, has since been removed from the stones. Experts will inspect the monument to see if any lasting damage has been done. Just Stop Oil is demanding that the UK government ends the extraction and burning of fossil fuels by 2030, which the protest group argues ‘will result in the death of millions’. In recent months, Just Stop Oil activists have also damaged a case surrounding a copy of the Magna Carta at the British Library and thrown soup over the glass screen protecting Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) at the National Gallery in London.

Matthew Teitelbaum, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, has announced his retirement. He joined the museum in August 2015 and will step down next August, meaning that he will have spent precisely a decade in the role. Before joining the MFA, he had spent 17 years as director of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. His accomplishments at the MFA include refurbishing and reopening permanent spaces for highly respected collections of Japanese and ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman art. In 2021, the MFA opened its Center for Netherlandish Art, which comprises a library, a research centre and a significant collection of Dutch and Flemish art. But Teitelbaum’s tenure has also been marked by challenges. In 2019, a group of visiting honours students accused museum security guards and a gallery-goer of mistreatment, including racial profiling, which led the museum to hire its first senior director of belonging and inclusion in 2020. That same year, during the coronavirus pandemic, the museum terminated the employment of 57 employees, with an additional 56 taking early retirement. ‘These are challenging times, but my God, people need museums more than they ever have,’ he told the Boston Globe upon announcing his retirement. ‘The MFA’s best days are ahead of it.’

The art dealer Barbara Gladstone has died at the age of 89 after a brief illness. She was a teacher of art history until her forties, at which point she set up Gladstone Gallery in Manhattan, which went on to expand significantly: it currently has two large premises in Chelsea and another space on the Upper East Side, as well as outposts in Los Angeles, Brussels and Seoul. She is known for the close professional relationships she nurtured with the artists she worked with. She exhibited artists including Matthew Barney, Alighiero Boetti, Rosemarie Trockel, Carrie Mae Weems and Arthur Jafa; she gave Barney his first solo show in New York in 1991 and co-produced his film series The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002). Gladstone Gallery represents more than 70 artists and estates, including those of Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe.

The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) has announced that it will return a 12th-century pilaster fragment to its place of origin in Thailand. The stone piece, which depicts the Hindu deity Krishna lifting up the sacred Mount Govardhana, has been traced to the doorframe of the Phanom Rung temple in the eastern part of the country, despite being previously thought to have originated in Cambodia. In a statement, the AIC said that it had ‘proactively reached out to the Thai government’ to initiate the return after ‘conducting new research on this object’. Phnombootra Chandrajoti, director-general of the fine arts department at the AIC, said: ‘This act serves as a model for ethical collecting practices and strengthens the bond of cultural respect and collaboration’. In 1988, the AIC returned a lintel engraved with the figure of Vishnu to the same temple, one of the most significant monuments built by the Khmer people in Thailand.

The Centre Pompidou has announced the architects it has chosen to lead its redesign. Nicolas Moreau and Hiroko Kusunoki of the practice Moreau Kusunoki, which designed the Guggenheim Helsinki and Sciences Po’s new Paris campus, along with the architect Frida Escobedo, who redesigned the modern art wing of the Met in New York, will lead the redevelopment of the centre, which houses the Musée National d’Art Moderne, a public library and a music research space. Moreau Kusunoki has said that it ‘aims to rationalise and simplify the spatial organisation’ of the space while preserving its original ‘spirit and DNA’. The project is part of the €262m refurbishment of the centre, intended to remove asbestos and renovate the building’s structure. The centre will be closed for five years from September 2025.