When I first came to New York City as a twenty-four-year-old writer with one published short story to my name, my friend Scott, who had already published a book and was writing for Harper’s, brought me to a party that was being thrown by a fact-checker at The New Yorker who was gaining some renown for her ability to make connections in the literary world. “She has a Rolodex,” Scott told me.
A hint of blue on the horizon meant morning was coming. And as they have for the past fifty-four years, Audrey and Gary Revell stepped out their screen door, walked down a ramp, and climbed into their pickup truck. Passing a cup of coffee back and forth, they headed south into Tate’s Hell—one corner of a vast wilderness in Florida’s panhandle where the Apalachicola National Forest runs into the Gulf of Mexico. Soon, they turned off the road and onto a two-track that stretched into a silhouette of pine trees. Their brake lights disappeared into the forest, and after about thirty minutes, they parked the truck along the road just as daylight spilled through the trees. Gary took one last sip of coffee, grabbed a wooden stake and a heavy steel file, and walked off into the woods. Audrey slipped on a disposable glove, grabbed a bucket, and followed. Gary drove the wooden stake, known as a “stob,” into the ground and began grinding it with the steel file. A guttural noise followed as the ground hummed. Pine needles shook, and the soil shivered. Soon, the ground glowed with pink earthworms. Audrey collected them one by one to sell as live bait to fishermen. What drew the worms to the surface seemed like sorcery. For decades, nobody could say exactly why they came up, even the Revells who’d become synonymous with the tradition here. They call it worm grunting.
At Clownchella, I expected circus-variety clowns, red noses and big shoes. I had figured that the history of clowning had reached its terminus; from ancient Greek mimes to commedia dell’arte, Charlie Chaplin to Bozo to Krusty (my personal favorite). The clowns most relevant to our times seem to be the old-fashioned scary ones, the Jokers and the Pennywises. But I’d heard that Los Angeles has a diverse and burgeoning clown scene that’s innovating the form. Independent teachers are developing their own clown pedagogy, nurturing a new generation of performers and borrowing from European clowns, who, apparently, are way ahead of the curve. This summer, Hannah Levin, the host of Clownchella, and some other LA clowns are traveling to Étampes, France, to study with the French clown and pedagogue Philippe Gaulier, who for the past fifty years has taught clowning using methods like mask play, Greek tragedy, and the study of Chekhov, all with the goal of finding the clown within. The clowns here take silliness very seriously. Standing outside the Elysian, I watched as the goats jumped around and let out cute little bleats.
Writing in the early 2000s, intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb lamented the conflation of what was fundamentally a course on historiography with a course on historical methods that she had endured as a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1940s. Instead of reading and discussing other historians, she had received an education in the nuts and bolts of the profession. Her assignments focused on seemingly rudimentary exercises involving primary and secondary sources, such as determining the time the sun rose on a specific day during the French Revolution (and why it mattered), or fact-checking every source cited in a few pages from a notable work of history. "It was a painful experience," she noted, "but also an exhilarating one."
As Himmelfarb understood it, history fell somewhere between an art and a science: It was "a craft that was patently not infallible but that did aspire to high standards and could be tested against those standards." Her training as a historian inculcated in her an enduring respect for the "hard evidence" that forms the bedrock of the field. It also set her apart from the political scientists, sociologists, and journalists constituting the neoconservative intellectual community that she and her husband, Irving Kristol, built and called home.
For years, I had a vision of how I’d celebrate a major milestone in my life—that milestone being the sale of my first novel. The vision goes something like this: It’s the afternoon, and I walk into a bar. A mix of blue-collar guys and a couple of businessmen, three or four Manhattans deep before they head back to Westchester to resume their John Cheever existence, occupy the stools. I post up at the bar, slip the bartender a Ben Franklin, and give a grandiose speech about accomplishing my dream. Then I buy everyone a round of drinks. I am sharing an intimate moment with strangers by practicing a lost art: buying a round.
But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. This isn’t simply a response to consumer preferences. The housing crisis—and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it—are killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans. If dining space keeps dying, the U.S. might not have a chance to get it back.
I always assumed I’d be a father. I like kids, and they tend to like me, too. Not having them had never occurred to me. Talk about a potential deal-breaker. After all, as Emily said, “You can’t have half a kid.”
We turned to therapy. Once a week, we trudged downtown to a couples therapist in Greenwich Village, who taught us to listen to each other and argue with decorum. I knew Emily couldn’t give birth because she’d suffered from Crohn’s disease and ensuing complications since her early twenties, but I thought she might still be able to parent. Now in her early thirties, she explained that even before her illness she’d never wanted to be a mother.
Paul Tremblay's Horror Movie is a peculiar horror novel that takes a refreshing look at the haunted film subgenre, while also eliminating the line between novels and movie scripts.
Dark, surprisingly violent, and incredibly multilayered, this narrative is a superb addition to Tremblay's already impressive oeuvre that shows he can deliver the elements fans love from him — while also constantly pushing the envelope and exploring new ways to tell stories.
In this author’s highly original voice, language writhes into new, ultra-sensual imaginings and leads us into an uncanny world where the familiar is made strange.