John McPhee, who turned 92 in March, would like to keep at it for a while — the writing, and the breathing. In his lively new collection, “Tabula Rasa,” the very longtime, very long-form journalist writes of “old-people projects,” the kinds of things we feel compelled to do when the end is a lot closer than the beginning. His favorite example is Mark Twain’s autobiography, which the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” author dictated when he was in his 70s. Such projects, McPhee writes, give us purpose. “Old-people projects keep old people old,” he writes. “You’re no longer old when you’re dead. If Mark Twain had stayed with it, he would be alive today.”
In short order, Jackson became the de facto manager of about fifteen volunteers, offering a shoulder to cry on, keeping protective watch over the offerings to the dead, and, four days after the mysterious artist began work on the site, organizing a candlelight vigil for which the 24-foot-long, 7.5-foot-tall public mural he’d worked on was the centerpiece. “Every day was a day of pain and love,” Jackson says.
Who was that black-hatted man, anyway? His name is Roberto Marquez, and he’s a self-taught immigrant artist who lives in South Dallas. Over the past few years, countless people who have visited ad hoc memorial sites in the raw, brutal days after major tragedies in Texas have likely met him. He was there after a gunman killed nineteen children and two adults in Uvalde in May 2022, after 53 migrants baked to death in the back of a container truck in San Antonio in June 2022, and after two planes collided at an air show in Dallas last November. He also has ventured outside the state’s borders, traveling to Ciudad Juárez this March after a fire at a migrant center left forty dead and dozens injured; to Surfside, Florida, after the 2021 condo collapse; to Turkey, in the aftermath of the recent earthquake; and to Ukraine, in the early days of the war.
There’s also a great deal of academic literature on Disney World. This is true even if you’re someone, like me, who feels that there is a great deal of academic literature on almost everything. Type “Disney World” into JSTOR and you will unearth many pages about how the theme park is not a Rabelaisian carnival (glad that’s been cleared up), or about how it is a monument to death, or about how it is somehow in dialogue with synthetic Cubism or Mecca or Hegel’s end of history. Plus much discussion of simulacra and fascism, naturally.
What was the point in adding to this surplus? No point. Except, after I’d settled in to our time-share and signed up for the Disney Experience app and started visiting the parks, several puzzles for which there had been no solutions in Greil Marcus or in “Walt Disney World: Bounded Ritual Space and the Playful Pilgrimage Center” et cetera did present themselves.
Smart, self-aware, fun, creepy, and strange, The Beast You Are is even better than the outstanding Growing Things — and it further cements Tremblay as one of the finest voices in modern horror fiction as well as dazzling innovator of the short form regardless of genre. This collection shows an author at the peaks of his powers doing everything he can to push the boundaries of the short story.
After a chance meeting with a recruiter at a dive bar in the winter of 2005, Kate Flannery walked into American Apparel’s Los Angeles headquarters wearing tight surf shorts and her mother’s floppy felt hat. That day — as Flannery writes in her first book, “Strip Tees,” a racy, thoughtful memoir of her tenure during the rise and fall of the controversial company — she watched garment workers produce “quivering piles of kelly-green men’s underwear”; posed for Polaroids in a leg-baring velour romper; and encountered the company’s brash, charismatic founder, Dov Charney, “a flip phone pressed to one ear while another waited in a holster on his belt loop.”