As often happens in writing between invention and arrangement, I had other plans for this dispatch. I’d thought, perhaps, to write on the narrator’s hawthorns and the imminent blossoming of spring in the city, or of (my beloved) Aunt Léonie’s death, or of Josef Czapski’s Proust lectures,1 or even of the first appearance of lesbian desire in the text, but, in any event, my plan had been to write about—and only about—Swann this time round.
I was interrupted—life got in the way, which is, I know, the way of life. I’ve found, in writing, that blockages, unanticipated borders, and intrusions must be got over or else bored through in the work—they require proper attending to. Recently I reviewed a book I’d tried, in drafts, again and again, to be gentler to. Here I should say I’m uncomfortable with the literary scene’s tendency toward paranoid reading—I bristle at simpering glorifications of The Takedown. I favor further divestment from this mode of criticism, because I think it’s far easier (and much lazier) to be cruel than to be generous, to cede invaluable energy and intellectual territory to the broad cynicism of our contemporary than to be en-pleasured, earnest, or open to the revelatory possibilities of art. More or less as a rule I don’t hate-watch, I don’t hate-read, and I’m deeply bored by ‘the hater’ as a cultural category.
This complicated reluctancy, however, was also what was keeping me from being honest in my writing on that book, which is to say, my critical faculties had been plugged up by an unexamined desire to remain bounteous in kind feeling—a desire that is, let’s face it, also about being likable, about not tilling soil where silent enemies might sprout at the time my own next book publishes. I had to disentangle these anxieties from the rigor of my criticism, to fashion a way of letting the hammer fall where it needed without, in turn, becoming closed off to what the book was actually doing.
Writing, for me, is first and foremost a kind of labor—passionate and often thrilling work, but work nonetheless. Although I wish I could say differently, I am rarely possessed by The Muse. Poetry on occasion demands its space, emerging fully formed, but mostly the process is kin to how I’ve heard sculptors discuss their craft—seeing a strange shape in some blank expanse of marble and scrupulously, incrementally determining how to chisel it loose. The vast majority of my practice is unraveling the knots in a necessary thread.
As I set out to work on this dispatch I again found myself stuck. Much of the time it’s like this: in any given review or essay, for example, I’ll spend 7k words on inanities and elsewheres, circling the True thing like a vulture for weeks before fathoming where it is I need to get to. Sometimes the elsewhere that precedes the real writing is its own beautiful bauble; at others, it’s just what must be purged to make room. The reading mind—and needless to say, the writing one—is interruptable; it is (at any rate, for me) temperamental, easily hooked on other summons. I hadn’t planned to write about a recent, unsettling event, but found it had become my awful clot: for several days I could think of little else. This is often the case with uncanny happenings, moments where you are unmoored—they gather experiential detritus about their shape, growing too large for their frame, taking on the asphyxiating heft of fixations or specters.
I was transferring between the R and L trains at Union Square two weeks ago when I realized a man was following me. Ten minutes before this I’d passed him on the stairs leading down into Prince Street station. I’m tall, leggy, a notoriously fast walker—which is to say I am often passing by other people who are, like me, perpetually between destinations in this city. There was ample space for me and the man both, no bumping of shoulders or bags, no beef to speak of, and as we crossed paths he said “after you” affably enough. I said “thank you” and moved along. I’d thought he was being friendly, or (sure, whatever) “chivalrous”—certainly, I didn’t feel he was responding to me from a place of malice—but as I waited on the platform, reading my book, I looked up and saw him walk by me again, except now he was staring oddly into my face, like I was a surprise or an affront, not a person but a thing. He continued down the platform, and I thought little of it—just one more peculiarity of being continuously mired, in transit, in the thick porridge of other strangers’ lives.
When I exited the R train to transfer to the L, I looked up and saw that, now, that same man was walking fast, and hunched forward, and straight at me, holding his iPhone up, as though capturing the moment on it. I thought—as I often do about this gesture that has become unavoidable in the texture of daily life—the smartphone screen held up and at a downward angle to one’s own image—of course, one more front-facing video hopeful, some subway-vibes tiktoker. I’d place him in his early 20s, though neither of us could fully see the other’s face—we both were masked. Like it or not, I told myself, we are all background figures in the content creations of others. But I veered rightward and crossed the width of the platform, because if I’m able to avoid having my likeness circulate in some unpredictable, possibly viral fashion—if I can elide being mercilessly dissected by people who presume that, with a ubiquitous screen separating their world from the quite real life of the other, there is no ethical obligation there—I’ll certainly try.
What I soon realized, though, was this man wasn’t taking just any video—he was trying, and increasingly desperately, to take a video of me. So suddenly he was chasing me, like some sad-sack, out-of-work paparazzo. Instinct kicked in, that contradictorily intoxicating rush of anxious adrenaline, and I began weaving rapidly through the crowds. I kept thinking I’d lost him, but then would sense that uncanny shift in the quality of air, that heaviness, an eerie electricity. It’s the hair-raising feeling. You know when you’re being followed. You know when you are in a precarious state. It’s an animal capacity—this preternatural understanding you are being hunted. I don’t think it’s an experience that is the sole domain of women, but I do believe our recognition of it snaps more rapidly into place.
The perhaps two or three minutes it in actuality takes to walk the length of the platform leading to the L bound stairwell had become—in the way that fear, pain, or pleasure stretch and reknot time—20 minutes, 30, an hour, and my breath felt labored, and I kept becoming ensnared amidst tourists milling about in walkways, and I couldn’t shake the man, and finally I was trapped and he was on me and he was aiming his camera in my face and I was shouting “PLEASE STOP—WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?” and I felt his weight on me and I had nowhere to get to and so I looked at the largest man in the pileup of people I couldn’t squeeze past and met his gaze and said to him “Can you please help me? This man is harassing me, and I’m scared.” And that man, too, just stared unblinkingly at me, so I shoved my book in front of my face and positioned my other arm across where my post-surgical incision wounds were (are) still healing, shoved through the mass and began to run.
And either I finally lost the man or he’d finally gotten what he wanted, but in any case, I didn’t see him anymore after that. To make certain, I silently scanned the face of everyone with me on the L-train car. Emerging from the underground at my station, I looked around, too, to be sure he hadn’t followed behind, out of sight, hadn’t tracked me here. Walking to my apartment I began to question what it was I’d been so afraid of. So what if he’d gotten a picture or a video of me—he hadn’t stabbed me, he hadn’t groped me, he hadn’t pushed me onto the tracks.
So I did the easy thing. I posted about it on twitter, making the event small, twisting it into a slantwise joke, and then people were telling me how sorry they were it had happened and how scary it must have been and I started to wonder, in the starkness of the contrast between the concern of others and my compulsion for feigning imperturbability, if I’d blown the whole thing out of proportion.
What unsettled me most about the incident was how motiveless it seemed, which in turn escalated my paranoia for the remainder of my journey home. But maybe, I considered, he’d mistaken me for someone else, some woman he’d encountered online or at a bar, or he’d assumed I was some F-list celebrity, an instagram persona, some insufferable woman from tiktok. (Possibly I had been identified accurately as a woman who’d made him angry online, or at some bar. Possibly I’d cut him off at my own bar, kicked him out, told him he was acting like a dick. I can’t count the number of men who’ve threatened me in my years bartending—I can hardly count the number of them who’ve tried to make good on promises of retaliation. A few have succeeded.) Or maybe he’d been somehow offended by my walking more quickly down the stairs than him. Maybe it was I was being punished. Possibly I’d crossed some invisible boundary, perhaps I’d exceeded my allowable space.
But I am also always in the process of learning to curb my impulse to undercut myself or delegitimize my quite rational upset in situations like these. The fact of my history with violent trauma does not, consequently, mean a survivalist response to frightening circumstances is outlandish or unhinged. A man chased me and no one helped. I didn’t lose my mind. I didn’t reciprocate with further violence. I simply tried to get away from him, and did. It is an entirely usual thing to be scared by an event such as this. And yes. My body remembers—it has adapted to awful knowledge, and incorporated that into how it reacts to navigating an occasionally perilous world.
I write Kate that the atmosphere on public transit seems more disturbed than usual. I clarify to say I don’t mean this in the way terrible talking heads lately love to render NYC as an urban warzone, a place in the thick of an unprecedented crimewave (the facts just don’t bear this out—shit, even the “official” statistics released by the NYPD demonstrate a continuing decline in crime, despite the broad fearmongering made fictively justifiable by minor and temporary upticks). It’s something else: we’re all on edge; the mood is heightened. I suspect it’s in no small part due to (and of course not mitigated by) increased police presence within the MTA.
The anticipation of perpetual surveillance has been made manifest, all over the city the ticketing is more out of hand than ever, officers are stony sentinels on each platform, appraising and profiling the riders of each car. I don’t need to belabor the point that they do this not to serve and protect the people of this city but to consolidate the power—duh!—of the state. And it feels this way, you see it in how the energy field of the public shifts in proximity to them. Their presence does not reassure. It instantiates further fear. I notice more and more, too, that the familiar faces of particular houseless people in certain stations have vanished—the sweeps are invisible, but the people are gone, and to god knows where. (We might recall that in November, Mayor Adams announced his plan to expand the powers of NYPD officers and EMS workers to involuntarily hospitalize the some-3,400 people who sleep on the streets and the subways of this city.2)
It’s likely I won’t ever know why that man followed me, or what it was about my person he’d meant to capture. His method was intimidation, and he was victorious in this project. I was cowed by him, and riding the train the rest of the week I carried with me a kind of porous, fearful affect. To Harron and Charlotte I say that part of what threw me was being in a state of physical incapacity. Being still fresh from surgery, I felt I’d be unable to fully defend myself if anything came to a head. I’ve bartended in New York dives for over a decade; I’m a trans woman who grew up in Virginia—the bitch knows how to brawl. I wouldn’t have survived so far if I didn’t (which is also not to say we should have to comprehend defensive violence to withstand our movement through the world). But in the moment with this man my body seemed somehow infinitely fragile, some delicate thing that I needed, urgently, to extricate from the situation—and every path I turned to was blockaded, stopped, intervened in and interrupted.
For the better part of a week the event infested my daily luxuriation in Proust. It colored my sense of the reading’s articulations, say, of the separation between the Méséglise and the Guermantes way; it was the tunnel through which I was able to see Marcel’s glorious hawthorns or Françoise’s “terror” of Léonie’s “harsh words, her suspicion and her anger” (216); it cast the narrator’s spying on poor Mlle. Vinteuil in a more sinister light. All of this got me thinking about how often memoirs of The Reading Life underscore the transportive nature of being inside narrative. This quality is an indispensable facet of my love of books too, but I found myself curious about the ways our reading itself may be transported by the interventionist powers of our lives—how experience transforms the books we have with us when interrupted. Will I always think of Lorrie Moore’s new novel as the object I held up to protect my face, does this memory become assimilable into the matter of the text?3 Will Swann always be bound up in my recovery from surgery—is it, in some hilarious and sublime way, my Boobs Book?
This interruptedness is of course (and get ready for this gorgeous final pivot) also the way of Marcel’s reading life, which seems to be always broke in on: by his grandmother, demanding he go outdoors (where he only continues to read beneath the shade of a tree); or by the gardener’s daughter, who “came running wildly, overturning an orange-tree in its tub, cutting a finger, breaking a tooth, and screaming” (121); or by the fact of his not being able to “pay a visit to the region [the books] described”—which, if such a thing were made possible by the narrator’s parents, would have helped him to make “an enormous advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth” (119). Perhaps the trouble with invoking truth-as-achievable-conquest or invoking the “real matter” at the heart of interrupted writing is that these lines of thought disclude our paths of progress.
I’d wanted to write about something other than I have but life happened. What else is there?
xo
Jamie
What happened in Swann?4
In Proust’s synopses of this section:
Aunt Léonie’s nightmare (152); Saturday lunches (154); The hawthorns on the altar in combray church (155); M. Vintueil (155); his “boyish”-looking daughter (157); Walks round Combray by moonlight (159); Aunt Léonie and Louis XIV (165); Strange behavior of M. Legrandin (166-186); Plan for a holiday at Balbec (182); Swann’s (or the Méséglise) way and the Guermantes way; Swann’s Way: View over the plain (189); The lilacs of Tansonville (190); The hawthorn lane (193); Apparaition of Gilberte (197); The lady in white and the man in white “ducks” (Mme. Swann and M. de Charlus) (199); Dawn of love for Gilberte: glamour of the name “Swann” (202; cf. 586); Farewell to the hawthorns (204); Mlle. Vinteuil’s friend comes to Montjouvain (206); M. Vinteuil’s sorrow (208); The rain (211); The porch of Saint-André-des-Champs, Françoise and Thédore (211); Death of Aunt Léonie; Françoise’s wild grief (215); Exultation in the solitude of autumn (218); Disharmony between our feelings and their habitual expression (218); “The same emotions do not spring up simultaneously in everyone” (219); Stirrings of desire (219); The little closet smelling of orris-root (222; cf 14); Scene of sadism at Montjouvain (224)
What else is on the docket?
Girls is on pause while my boyfriend is out of town (but we’re in the last season—devastating)…
…which meant I watched the first three episodes of Daisy Jones & the Six, which is perfectly fine. Her Stevie drag is fun, the show is very crisp, but—as Rax King inquired recently on twitter—why is there hardly any fucking? Anyways let’s face it. I’ll watch Riley Keough in anything. I tried the premiere of the new Drag Race season and, while I recognize the performers remain deeply talented, I realize there’s nothing I find particularly remarkable or fun about the show anymore.
Most of my reading the last couple weeks was oriented around a last-minute assignment I received—hopefully I’ll be able to share more information on that (and the piece itself) very very soon. Let’s just say I was racing through the backlist of a very prolific author, and I think it will be exciting for us all. Beyond this, a lot was on pause. I read Camonghne Felix’s new memoir Dyscalculia, galleys of Kate Zambreno’s next book The Light Room, as well as of the forthcoming Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home, and have been continuing my slow re-read of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Then dabbling in some Dionne Brand and Mavis Gallant, as well as the journals of Pat Highsmith, although I haven’t found my “in” there yet. I worry no diaries will prove a match to Helen Garner’s, which I spent the last year submerged in.
I saw One Fine Morning a second time, and would love to write about it, possibly here. Meantime, you should read Garth Greenwell on the film in his substack, which was marvelous—as Greenwell’s substack invariably is. Hoping also to see Emily before it leaves theaters, but that probably won’t be until late in the week.
Excited to listen to the new Fever Ray and Kate NV records.
À bientôt!
Probably I’ll get to a few of these things in next week’s post for paid subscribers.
Lest we forget, Eric Adams was in all likelihood living in New Jersey prior to and during his mayoral run, and “his” Bed-Stuy brownstone has been overrun by rats for months, as former mayoral hopeful Curtis Sliwa never fails to remind us.
Moore’s novel is much more than this, and I’m curious to see what others think of it—in many ways it’s classic Moore (pun-y, challenging ruminations on death and tragedy), and in others reveals somewhat baffling formulations of contemporary political concerns (particularly re: intellectual freedom and “free speech” in education, conspiracism, and the #metoo plot).
I’m going to try a new little formatting thing that I partly stole from the incredibly talented Alicia Kennedy—at the close of new letters, I’ll recount the events of the reading section vis-a-vis Proust’s own summaries of them, and then have a brief foray into other things that are lately occupying me—books, films, music, other essays or works I’m publishing, and so on.