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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/brian-dillon-affinity/"></div>This past summer, I started writing down sentences that I encountered and liked (in my reading, in conversation, in the wild) and collected them in a little digital sticky note on my desktop. Here are eight:
<blockquote>1. “Everything tasted like an almost epiphany.” — Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
2. “These people — they adore me, and I couldn’t care less.” — My grandmother over FaceTime
3. “It tastes like burning.” — Lip gloss review by Amazon user horror_lover
4. “Hard to feel you are too tragic a figure when tears mix with snot.” — Heather Christle, The Crying Book
5. “We’re at the Coffee Bean, and there is no solution.” — Nicole Kidman, Bewitched
6. “Even in crisis I maintain.” — Andrea Martin, Difficult People
7. “How come you no hello me when you know me so easy.” — Slang phrase used in Michigan (heard on the podcast A Way with Words)
8. “Writing was holy and he made the girls cry.” — Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level</blockquote>
Looking back over this list, I tried to identify some kind of pattern or deeper meaning. All eight sentences, for instance, are declarative. Three contain similes. Their mean and median sentence lengths (9 and 10 words, respectively) are considerably shorter than <a href="https://medium.com/@theacropolitan/sentence-length-has-declined-75-in-the-past-500-years-2e40f80f589f#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20sentences%20today%20range,per%20sentence%20in%20some%20years.">average</a>. From these observations I deduce that I’m probably attracted to directness, contrast, and concision — in prose, in art, in life.
But what more clearly connects these sentences is harder to quantify — what writer Brian Dillon would call “affinity.” Dillon himself has been doing this sentence-culling exercise for longer than I’ve been alive, and he’s filled some 45 notebooks with countless turns of phrase that have caught his attention over the years. In the introduction to his recent book Suppose a Sentence, Dillon considers what this decades-long practice has revealed to and about him: “Unconnected to duty or deadlines, to projects per se, [the notebooks] compose a parallel timeline — of what? I suppose the word is: affinity.”
Reading that word affinity felt like turning on a defroster, clearing a windshield I didn’t realize was fogged. I’ve been instructed ad nauseam, in these precarious post-collegiate months, to formulate a rough plan or purpose to  lend some shape to my future. Since reading Dillon, I can think of nothing I’d rather do than dedicate myself to the pursuit, study, and appreciation of my affinities. This is too obvious and unoriginal an intention to be profound: the idea of a life rooted in affinity is a close cousin of the KonMari tenet of surrounding yourself with that which “sparks joy,” or the Campbellian mandate to “follow your bliss.” We do and want to do the things we like — duh. Nothing epiphanic here. But in taking seriously my affinities, I want to apply Dillon’s sentence exercise to my life as a whole: to actively seek out and surround myself with the words images colors textures sounds patterns people that I love, and then try to glean something from them. This, of course, is why I and many others write: to share and celebrate the things that I love most, and in doing so understand them better (and in understanding them better, in theory, understand myself better).
This is to say that I love that Brian Dillon loves things and then writes about the things that he loves so that we can love them too, because I also love things, and I love to love things, and maybe the best plan or purpose that I can really formulate for myself right now is just to keep loving things and sharing the things that I love and learning about the things that other people love and thinking about why I love the things I love and why they love the things they love and ultimately just putting love at the center of everything I do always. And maybe that starts with filling up some notebooks with sentences that feel special.
In Suppose a Sentence, Dillon writes 27 essays about 27 sentences, many plucked from his vast notebook collection. The sentences he chooses look nothing like the eight from my sticky note; most are long and dense, full of commas and em dashes and semicolons. They’re the kind of sentences that daunt me, many of them penned by authors (Shakespeare, Donne, Brontë, Woolf) whose work has historically alienated me. This made me all the more excited to read Dillon’s case studies of each one. The second half of Suppose a Sentence features writers whose names, when I spy them printed in the table of contents, make my heart leap: O’Hara, Didion, Hardwick, Malcolm. Funny how the unexpected appearance of a beloved name can inspire excitement or put you at ease, like a familiar face in a crowd of strangers. These are the writers for whom Dillon and I share an affinity, and nothing creates trust quite like shared taste.
I’ve recently developed an affinity for (see also: addiction to) TikTok, and one of my favorite videos floating around there is of a young man passionately defending his love interest to a bus full of skeptics: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WkaInfV-DQ">“She is very gorgeous to me!”</a> he declares, waving a resolute forefinger in the air. The clip cuts off right then, but I really want to hear the rest of what he has to say. What I mean is that Suppose a Sentence is a masterful, meticulous book, at the core of which is Dillon thoughtfully telling me, a sometimes-skeptic, why these sentences are very gorgeous to him.
¤
Prior to Suppose a Sentence, Dillon wrote Essayism, a book-length ode to the essay that blends literary criticism and personal memoir with a care and precision that I haven’t yet seen replicated. In Essayism, Dillon infuses genuine emotion into the serious business of literary criticism and brings a refreshing seriousness to the emotionally indulgent tendencies of personal memoir. It’s one of my very favorite books.
Essayism intimidated me at first. At the back of the book is a syllabus of works referenced, filled with the names of writers that I felt I should know better or like more than I did. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this book — I wasn’t even an English major. But I’ve always loved essays. My bookshelf, even now, skews inordinately toward essay collections; essays are all I’ve ever written, all I’ve ever wanted to write. So I was pleased to quickly discover that, in its 164 exquisite pages, Essayism is mostly about how Dillon shares my affinity for essays. He deconstructs the genre and, equipped with staggering analytical ability, tries to figure out why it moves him so much. Dillon tells me about “the essayists I admire — no, love” with the authentic excitement of a child who takes you by the hand to show you their treasured rock collection. (To clarify: Dillon’s rock-collection-equivalent is an expertly curated compendium of some of the best writing to ever appear in the English language.) Essayism is free of artifice, devoid of pretension. Dillon simply excavates his unique “aesthetic and intellectual enthusiasms,” as he writes, in an attempt to not only better understand the essay as a form, but also to better understand the ineffable qualities “that I am drawn to in essays and essayists.”
And what is it that he’s drawn to? “Vulnerability,” which he especially admires in Barthes. “Curiosity,” which he sees taken to its extreme in the work of Sir Thomas Browne. And “style,” which he admits might be “what I value, what I love, in essays and essayists,” above all else. “What exactly do I mean by ‘style’?” Dillon asks. “Perhaps it is nothing but an urge, an aspiration, a clumsy excess of admiration, a crush.”
A crush! Crush-having is my area of expertise, the means by which I chronologize my life. I was in fact first introduced to Essayism by a crush. We were talking one evening at the writing center where we both volunteered when he pulled Essayism from his backpack and handed it to me. When he said I could keep it, I knew I’d bestowed my crush wisely. I interpreted this as an act (or was it a performance?) of affinity — for literature, for Dillon, for me.
It felt good to like someone. It feels good to like someone. But crushes on people — for example, on this particular person — can obscure my sense of self. On the other hand I’ve found the kind of crush Dillon describes — on a writer, on a style, on a form — does the opposite; it helps clarify and crystallize. So why do I reserve the language of crushing for people? I feel the same giddy, intense devotion for so many non-people things. I look to Susan Sontag, who, Dillon writers, harbored delightfully specific crushes and catalogued them with care. They included: Venice, tequila, Dürer, silent films, top hats, Bach, ship models, pocket watches, Louis XIII furniture, sushi, and the opera Ariadne auf Naxos. It feels unsurprising that Sontag had such a clear sense of her affinities; she had, at least on the page, a remarkably clear sense of herself. Knowing yourself requires knowing what you like. I’m scared of people who don’t know what they like, and I’m disappointed when people can’t articulate why they like what they like — or worse, when they feel ashamed of what they like. In a life rooted in affinity, there is no room for obligatory consumption or guilt-tinged pleasures. “Anyone who’s worth anything,” Woolf writes in Jacob’s Room, “reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.”
Dillon writes in Essayism that, as he was coming into his own as a writer, he was “thrilled and consoled by the idea of writing about something you loved [&#8230;] so fiercely that you had to uncover whole new worlds of tone and thought in order to describe it.” This feels like an apt thesis for the diptych of Suppose a Sentence and Essayism. Dillon takes his own affinities — those natural, spontaneous, and purportedly inexplicable affections — and mines them for beauty and meaning. I realize now that this is also what I’m attempting, now and always, whether I’m compiling sentences in a virtual sticky note or writing an essay about an author I really like or even just trying to figure out with a friend why I saw A Star Is Born nine times in theaters. I want to document my affinities, understand them, and, with luck, melt them down to make something new. Isn’t that what some of the best works of criticism do?
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On Brian Dillon and Affinity

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/11-months-reading/"></div>November 2018
Northern California is on fire when he tells you he doesn’t love you anymore. There’s no sun the day he leaves — too much smoke. The air is too poisonous to breathe, so you have to stay indoors. No matter. You order books to keep you company: Olivia Laing’s <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250118035">The Lonely City</a>, Joan Didion’s <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/40771/the-year-of-magical-thinking-by-joan-didion/">The Year of Magical Thinking</a>, Lane Moore’s <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-to-Be-Alone/Lane-Moore/9781501178832">How to Be Alone</a>. Meditations on loss and loneliness, grief and alienation. They don’t teach you how to handle your pain as much as they remind you that this pain is not unique, that loneliness, as Laing writes, is “a populated place.” Laing tells you that you are not alone in your aloneness; Didion, that your irrational thoughts are part and parcel of it all; Moore, that this solitude is impermanent.
“My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness.” (The Lonely City)
 
December 2018
You’re finally going to finish Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Joan Didion, <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250105943">The Last Love Song</a>. Fat and exhaustive, it’s always intimidated you. But you power through it because you are sad and lonely and you need a distraction. Daugherty is a thorough and compelling biographer, and he keeps you interested through all 586 pages. But you quickly realize that, though you admire her work and are enthralled by her aura, you would not like to have a beer with Joan Didion.
“Now here she was at Berkeley, wrapped in a bedspread, nibbling chocolate in the dark in the middle of the night.” (The Last Love Song)
 
January 2019
For Christmas, your mother gives you a book you’ve never heard of. Remember when we were at that spa, she says, and you were reading The Best American Essays 2015? And you kept laughing and laughing and leaning over to me to tell me about this one essay, the one about the cat? Well this book is by the writer who wrote the cat essay, the one you loved very much. What all of this means, of course, is that your mother truly sees you, which means she loves you. The book is <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/I-Wrote-This-Book-Because-I-Love-You/Tim-Kreider/9781476739014">I Wrote This Book Because I Love You</a>, by Tim Kreider, and it immediately becomes your favorite thing you’ve ever read. It’s funny and sad, a keen consideration of love and relationships, and Kreider is relentlessly witty. You tear through the book in a couple days, with your cat always slumbering at the edge of your bed as you read.
“A man who is in a room with a cat — whatever else we might say about that man — is not alone.” (I Wrote This Book Because I Love You)
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February 2019
You read Kreider’s first book, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-Learn-Nothing/Tim-Kreider/9781439198711">We Learn Nothing</a>, and it scratches a different itch than I Wrote This Book Because I Love You. It’s a little less literary, a little more conversational. It moves you relentlessly. But now that you’ve read both of Kreider’s books, it’s time to find a new idol. You pick up Ariel Levy’s memoir <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/240527/the-rules-do-not-apply-by-ariel-levy/">The Rules Do Not Apply</a> because it’s about a young woman writer’s whose life is falling apart, and that’s how you feel most of the time. It’s a quick read, devastating in the moment, though it doesn’t really stay with you. Still, Levy’s resilience sparks something, perhaps a resilience of your own. “As everything has fallen apart,” she writes, “what has stayed intact is something I always had, the thing that made me a writer: curiosity. Hope.” Indeed, the book ends optimistically, though messily, with the promise of new and unexpected romance.
You meet someone. Talking with him feels a little bit like an intellectual joust, but in the best, most exciting way possible. He has an extra copy of a book he likes, so he gives it to you: Brian Dillon’s <a href="https://www.nyrb.com/products/essayism?variant=6835799064628">Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction</a>. Every time you sit down to read it you get flustered. He makes you feel so much: curiosity — hope.
“Being in love is one of the only times when life is anything like art.” (We Learn Nothing)
 
March 2019
You loan him your copy of I Wrote This Book Because I Love You because it’s still your favorite book and because you want to give him something, everything. Meanwhile, everyone on Twitter has been talking about Esmé Weijun Wang’s <a href="https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/collected-schizophrenias">The Collected Schizophrenias</a>, so you pick up a copy. The book is just as dazzling as you’ve heard — a harrowing and incisive look at living with mental illness and disability. You recognize many of your own struggles in Wang’s experiences, and you feel invigorated to write them down. Maybe you could write a book someday. It’s the first time since November you’ve considered there being any future at all.
“I cling to the concept of being high-functioning.” (The Collected Schizophrenias)
 
April 2019
You see his apartment for the first time, and its perimeter is lined with tall stacks of books. A great, impenetrable wall. You rifle through the books, and one catches your interest. You read the first page and are hooked, so you buy it for yourself: <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611797/white-girls-by-hilton-als/">White Girls</a> by Hilton Als. Its first essay, “Tristes Tropiques,” bowls you over. The essay is a long and dense reflection on love and belonging, and it deploys language like you’ve never seen before. How’s this for an opening line: “Sir or Lady (as I shall call him) sits on the promontory in our village, deep in movie love.”
He and you go to bookstores together now. You like to watch him as he examines the selection, how his fingers graze the book covers. The book you’ve picked up has an essay in it about the O.J. trial, a perennial interest of yours, so you buy it right away. <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/553581/see-what-can-be-done-by-lorrie-moore/">See What Can Be Done</a> by Lorrie Moore proves to be an illuminating and instructive read, a master class in thoughtful, succinct criticism. You thumb through it while splayed out on the campus lawn under the sun. You’re happy, like you were before the fire.
“I was attracted to him from the first because I am always attracted to people who are not myself but are. It was less clear why he was interested in me.” (White Girls)
 
May 2019
He leaves. You don’t read anything that month.
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June 2019
You start a new job that you’re really passionate about, where you get to write and think about books and language all day. You start reading more poetry. You’re ravenous as you rip through <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520201668/the-collected-poems-of-frank-ohara">The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara</a>. “Lana Turner Has Collapsed” gives you persistent chills, and it’s clear in an instant that it’s the most beautiful poem you’ve ever read in your life. Next you order Morgan Parker’s <a href="https://tinhouse.com/product/there-are-more-beautiful-things-than-beyonce-morgan-parker/">There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé</a>. Parker knows your soul, and it scares you when she says things like, “When I drink anything / out of a martini glass / I feel untouched by / professional and sexual / rejection,” or “I am not loved / the way I want to be” because oh my god how does she know your secrets? Then your best friend shares with you her favorite poem, Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment.” You love her and the poem so much that you buy <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/24953/all-of-us-by-raymond-carver/">All of Us: The Collected Poems of Raymond Carver</a> and fill it with little blue sticky notes. Carver’s language is refreshingly direct—it cuts to the heart of things.
“Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern.” (“Mayakovsky,” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara)
 
July 2019
You read Zadie Smith’s <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317074/feel-free-by-zadie-smith/">Feel Free</a> on your lunch breaks. Her essay about Anomalisa stands out as a particularly smooth and shiny work of film criticism. Smith makes Charlie Kaufman and Schopenhauer duet in perfect harmony. The book doesn’t move you, but it impresses you as a technical achievement. Then you move on to Hanif Abdurraqib’s <a href="https://twodollarradio.com/products/they-cant-kill-us">They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us</a>. In one essay, Abdurraqib tackles Carly Rae Jepsen, and the timing is perfect, as you’re currently obsessed with her new album. The essay, “Carly Rae Jepsen Loves You Back,” is compact and insightful, a study of how a performer can infuse a space with warmth and generosity and intimacy simply with their presence. “Under the spell of Carly Rae Jepsen,” he writes, “love is simply love. It is not war.” You miss being in love.
“I am hoping, mostly, that we all get better at wishing on the things we need, even in darkness.” (They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us).
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August 2019
At work, you’re needed, essential to the operation, and that feels good. Another perk of the job is access to lots of free books. This month, you grab a copy of Heather Christle’s <a href="https://books.catapult.co/products/the-crying-book-by-heather-christle">The Crying Book</a>, and it changes your life in part because it’s stunning but also because you had no idea another human being could cry as much as you do. Christle cries so very much — in the bathroom, on the floor, on the bathroom floor — just like you! You also receive your pre-order of Emily Nussbaum’s <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/563025/i-like-to-watch-by-emily-nussbaum/">I Like to Watch</a> in the mail one day after work. Reading Nussbaum always manages to thrill and soothe you simultaneously, a feeling akin to watching a great sculptor chisel away at an imposing block of marble.
“Despair wants me not to know the difference between itself and me.” (The Crying Book)
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September 2019
Once you finish The Crying Book, you start Maggie Nelson’s <a href="https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/bluets">Bluets</a>, which you’ve been hearing about for ages. You decide that The Crying Book and Bluets are two halves of a diptych. They share a lot: both are collections of prose poems, written in the throes of depression, with a fragmented structure, associative thought pattern, and central fixation (crying, blue, respectively). Like with Levy, you are drawn to the books’ authors because they are both women writers struggling as you are.
“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.” (Bluets)
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October 2019
You read an advanced copy of Carmen Maria Machado’s breathtakingly brilliant <a href="https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/dream-house">In the Dream House</a>. The book is innovative from every angle — formally, structurally, stylistically. It splits you and your imagination wide open. Things are getting better, little by little. You find beauty in that. There is work to be done, and there are books to be read.
“But this story? This one’s mine.” (In the Dream House)
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11 Months in Reading

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/frank-ohara-everywhere/"></div>I had never heard of poet Frank O’Hara until four months ago, when he wandered into my life by way of a friend. One night over drinks, I ask that friend how he hears the last two stanzas of the first O’Hara poem he ever showed me, “Morning,” which features breathless, unnatural line breaks. I pull up the poem on my phone and slide it across the table, asking him to read the stanzas aloud. He complies, quiet but earnest:
<blockquote>Last night the stars
were numerous and today
snow is their calling
card I&#8217;ll not be cordial
&nbsp;
there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
do you know how it is
&nbsp;
when you are the only
passenger if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go</blockquote>
I watch his lips part to read each word. I admit I fell irrevocably for him when he reached that last line break, which he enunciated with a rumbly murmur — “if there is a / place further from me / I beg you do not go.”
Then he shows me his favorite of O’Hara’s poems, “Why I Am Not a Painter.” He muses over the poem for a moment before handing his phone to me. He watches me read it silently, my eyes flitting back and forth, and he searches for my response. The poem does not move me, I tell him, but it delights me to see that it moves him. Of course, in truth, it more than delights me — it changes me. I had just fallen in love thanks to Frank O’Hara.
After that night, O’Hara begins popping up everywhere. First, he shows up in my favorite weekly column, film critic Sheila O’Malley’s “Present Tense,” which reflects on the intersections of film, literature, art, and culture. The first week of May, O’Malley writes about “Frank O’Hara at the Movies,” chronicling the poet’s deep and well-documented love for the silver screen. She begins her column with an epigraph from O’Hara’s poem “To the Film Industry in Crisis”: “You, Motion Picture Industry, / it’s you I love!” Suddenly, O’Hara and I share more in common than I initially thought; he’s a poet who writes about film, who loves actors and movies as much as I do and without shame or pretension. I want to sit down with him and ask him his favorite films and film stars. I bet he has great taste.
“Movie stars traipse through O’Hara’s poems,” O’Malley writes, “used as comparison, wielded as similes, or showing up as they show up to all of us, as looming public figures.” Indeed, Ginger Rogers, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean all make appearances in O’Hara’s poetry. And it is in O’Malley’s column that I discover my very favorite O’Hara poem, “Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” in which O’Hara sees a tabloid headline reporting that Turner, one of his favorite starlets, has just recently lost consciousness at a Hollywood party. Its final lines go like this:
<blockquote>and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up</blockquote>
With that last line, I picture Romeo, hunched over an unconscious Juliet — “O my love!” I adore all of it — his unabashed grief, his genuine love, his gasping rhythm. Quickly, O’Hara becomes a staple of my poetic diet.
Then, O’Hara comes up over and over in my copy of Heather Christle’s The Crying Book, which I start reading in July. First, Christle invokes O’Hara as she considers the act of crying in the nude: “It is especially hard to witness a person crying naked, like Frank O’Hara ‘standing in the bathtub / crying. Mother, mother / who am I?’ Crying is its own nakedness and to see both kinds at once elicits a panic of pity.” O’Hara’s emotional transparency prods at my chest until it finally punctures me — he cries, naked, in the tub, like I have before, and yearns for his mother at his lowest moments. I want to cut through the poetry and clothe him, kindly.
And again, in that same book, Christle recalls an email exchange with a friend she recently lost to suicide, summoning O’Hara yet again: “Once [my friend] wrote to tell me he was memorizing ‘Steps,’ one of his favorite Frank O’Hara poems, which flits its way through New York, watching dancers in the park”:
<blockquote>who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we’re all winning
we’re alive</blockquote>
In August, at the bottom of a Wikipedia rabbit hole, I discover Jasper Johns, an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. His work doesn’t particularly affect me, until suddenly I discover the piece that changes everything — oil paint on two canvas panels hinged together. Dark grey and blue strokes that make the abstract shape of an American flag. A spoon and fork tacked to the center of the left panel. The work’s title: “In Memory of My Feelings &#8211; Frank O’Hara,” 1961. I learn Johns and O’Hara were good friends. I find there is an O’Hara poem of the same title. With his title, Johns borrows O’Hara’s language to ascribe meaning to his own visual expression: “My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent / and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.”
Soon a chasm opens and Frank O’Hara appears again and again in Johns’s oeuvre. “Skin with O’Hara Poem” is a lithograph, with smeared imprints of the artist’s face and hands on a large, cream-colored sheet. In the corner, a poem in courier print — “the clouds go soft / change color and so many kinds / puff up, disperse / sink into the sea.”
“Memory Piece (Frank O’Hara)” moves me to tears. The sculpture was completed four years after O’Hara’s sudden and untimely death in 1966, and it is the most striking artistic elegy I have ever seen. “Memory Piece” is a wooden box with three small stacked drawers; in each drawer is a layer of sand, taken from Edisto beach in South Carolina, where Johns had a studio that O’Hara visited in the summer of 1961. Inside the lid on top of the box, is a rubber impression of Frank O’Hara’s foot. When the top lid is closed, the footprint is impressed into the sand, making a footprint; the drawers allow for footprints to be stored and saved.
“Memory Piece” is an interactive memorial, a chilling way to keep a lost loved one physically present, to fight against the sweeping sands of time. It is more than a mere memory piece — it is a memory machine, a footprint-maker that can conjure up the dead with a movement of the wrist. Heather Christle describes “Memory Piece” as Johns’ “bittersweet, faux-naive act of keeping his friend near, just barely gone, and then — as the sand inevitably settles — vanished.”
Now Frank O’Hara seems to go everywhere I do. He comes up in nearly every conversation about poetry, appears on bookshelves at every bookstore I frequent, weasels his way into my nightly thoughts. I’ve considered that this may simply be a trick of the mind — perhaps I didn’t see him there before because I did not know he existed. But I like to think O’Hara came to me at a particular moment — through a friend loved and lost — and decided to hang around for a while, sending me sporadic greetings through language and art. So, hello to you too, Frank. You found me when I was ready for you and pried me open to the world:
<blockquote>in a world where you are possible
my love
nothing can go wrong for us</blockquote>
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Frank O&#8217;Hara is Everywhere

national

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/nationals-anthem/"></div>Sometimes I feel like I know Matt Berninger better than my own father. He could be my father — the math checks out. He’s 47 now, but a cool 47, with fat black-rimmed glasses and a bushy beard. In the seven years I’ve known him, he’s told me so many of his secrets, although sometimes it’s hard to distinguish truth from delusion. I know he drinks too much (“Day I Die,” Sleep Well Beast, 2017; “Lemonworld,” High Violet, 2010) and he reads John Cheever (“Carin at the Liquor Store,” Sleep Well Beast, 2017). Sorrow, he says, found him when he was young (“Sorrow,” High Violet, 2010). He’s afraid of disappointing everyone — or just plain afraid of everyone — and he loves his wife Carin very much (“Conversation 16,” High Violet, 2010; “Afraid of Everyone,” High Violet, 2010; “Carin at the Liquor Store,” Sleep Well Beast, 2017). I know all this because he’s told me so — he’s howled it at me from a distant stage and he’s grumbled it into my ear through my headphones.
The National look like they sound: they are harbingers of white, male, middle-age malaise. But in their dexterous hands, mid-life crisis has never sounded so good. They’re a quintet: one pair of brothers, one set of identical twins, and Matt, the lead singer. They’re all from Cincinnati, and they’ve been doing this for almost 20 years.
Over the course of seven albums and two EPs, The National have refined their sound considerably, buffing the lyrics and burnishing the rhythms — so much so that their latest album, Sleep Well Beast, earned them a Grammy, the ultimate symbol of mainstream digestibility. I entered their world when they released their fifth album, High Violet, and had fine-tuned their formula to near-perfection. Describing any piece of music as formulaic is usually meant to be derogatory, but The National’s consistency — the lyrical patterns they sew and the sonic landscapes they frequent — is what’s kept them so good and made them so easy to love.
Formulas, if followed correctly, require precision. The National’s instrumentalists make their careful musicianship look facile, spontaneous. But it took time to achieve that effortless precision, to perfect the formula. I listen to their first, self-titled album. It’s almost 18 years old now, anchored by generic strummy guitars and spangled with slipshod harmonies. Most disappointingly, Berninger hasn’t yet discovered the delicious depths of his lower register; his vocals strain a bit. Traces of the band’s best selves are palpable, but unrealized.
Then, six years and two albums later, the mechanism clicks and locks into place on Boxer. The National, as I know and love them, are born in 2007, and they’ve been doing everything right ever since. Their most notable evolution is Bryan Devendor’s drumming. Devendor’s brother Scott, the band’s bassist, <a href="https://www.moderndrummer.com/article/november-2017-nationals-bryan-devendorf/">describes</a> his style as &#8220;machine organic;&#8221; the band&#8217;s producer says Devendor &#8220;has an almost aggressive precision, but without sacrificing feel.&#8221; These assessments aptly describe the band’s percussive style, but they also encapsulate the band members themselves: they’re artists that work in constant tension. With Devendor on the drums and Berninger on the mic, the band actively negotiates forethought and impulse, refinement and rawness.
“When I walk into a room, I do not light it up / Fuck,” Berninger bellows, cradled by the lush, balanced instrumental of “Demons,” off their 2013 album Trouble Will Find Me. This is what The National do best: Berninger mines the depths of his psyche while the rest of the band nestles him in tight, dense, glossy accompaniment. Wandering stream-of-consciousness lyrics grind beautifully against meticulously arranged instrumentation. Here’s a verse I love from “Conversation 16” from their 2010 album High Violet. The lyrics, scattered and tortured and talk-sung, float above grounded, steady percussion and full, simple guitar:
<blockquote>It’s a Hollywood summer / You’ll never believe the shitty thoughts I think
Meet our friends out for dinner / When I said what I said I didn’t mean anything
We belong in a movie / Try to hold it together ‘til our friends are gone
We should swim in a fountain / Do not want to disappoint anyone</blockquote>
I am jarred by how much I understand him. (You really would never believe the shitty thoughts I think — they’re just so shitty. And disappointing people? That’s a proposition that keeps me up at night.) But I am also taken with his vulnerability, by how willingly he shares his fears and how honestly he loves. When Berninger offers these kinds of confessions, I want to reach through the dense music and hold him. Thankfully, the music’s stability — like clean and perfect scaffolding — keeps him safe from himself.
A friend of mine recently asked me, as I was playing selections from Boxer during a drive across the Bay Bridge, how I can stand to listen to The National for so long — they’re so gloomy. Initially, I was surprised by this impression — gloomy is not the first descriptor that springs to mind when I think of the band.
Reading Berninger’s lyrics in silence is a truly somber exercise, something I didn’t realize until I tried it myself. His thoughts can be as inscrutable as they are depressing. “You and your sister live in a Lemonworld / I want to sit in and die,” he mumbles on one track. I can only guess what a Lemonworld is, but his pain is lucid. In another song, he surrenders himself to sadness: “Sorrow that put me on the pills / It’s in my honey, it’s in my milk.” On an earlier album, he’s uneasy and disturbed, confessing, “I’m having trouble inside my skin / I try to keep my skeletons in.”
What I glean from Berninger’s lyrics is not so much gloom as it is honesty, a profound candor that he’s saved just for me, someone who knows what he means without further explanation. And once his secrets are buried by such lush, propulsive accompaniment, they’re sapped of some of their melancholy. But I suppose the distinguishing factor in the band’s gloomy sound may be Berninger’s deep baritone. The rumbling, languid voice that launched a hundred think pieces, described as everything from “slurring” to “sonorous,” is understandably divisive; he can really only moan or shout, almost always in some kind of pain. Yet where one may hear misery, I hear sincerity. I hear dusky, tender beauty.
I’ve seen The National three times in four years. They don’t change much with each new venue or each passing year. Every time we reconnect, they are just as I left them but a little bit wiser, the same and better at once.
Onstage, Berninger always has a drink in his hand. I’ve wondered often what’s in the cup he’s clutched at all the shows I’ve been to. I think it might be wine; twice he’s thrown the cup high above his head to let its contents explode in the air, and twice the exploding liquid has looked like a crisp, white wine.
Although I know him so well — his fears about fatherhood, his tumultuous marriage, his social anxiety — Berninger baffles me as a performer. He’s so selfish and so generous: he ignores us for long stretches, then the next moment, he will literally hand his body over to us, flinging himself into the audience to drift on a sea of steady hands. He seems to scoff at the tacit social contract between performer and audience — he goes on weird tangents and sings mostly to himself. When I saw him at Panorama, a festival in New York City, he was drunker than I would have liked; it created too much space between us. But when each song began and he grabbed hold of the mic, he sang with vigor and intention and, yes, total precision.
He also doesn’t believe in a performer-audience barrier. At the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, an 8,500-seater, he jumps off stage and lumbers into the crowd, wandering up the aisles and down the rows. He takes a man’s phone and starts filming himself as he tools around the amphitheater. He returns to the stage, brisk but relaxed: “If I take your phone, you’ll get it back. Promise.”
I find Berninger impossible to shake, especially on the warm summer nights that I see him in person and he tells me his secrets. He’s always so comfortable up there on that stage, so indifferent to my presence. But I can tell he wants me to enjoy myself. That’s why he ended our night at the Greek with a venue-wide singalong of “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks.” He glided through the crowd and led us in anthemic prayer:
<blockquote>All the very best of us / String ourselves up for love
All the very best of us / String ourselves up for love
All the very best of us / String ourselves up for love
All the very best of us / String ourselves up for love.</blockquote>
Berninger understands self-destruction better than most people I know. That’s why he doesn’t judge it. That’s why we feel so safe singing along with him. Even the best of us, we all admit in unison, have strung ourselves up — humiliated ourselves, hurt ourselves, lost ourselves — for somebody’s love.
Love is a common word in Matt Berninger’s vocabulary — it’s something he has an abundance of, a fact he admits openly: “Everything I love is on the table / Everything I love is out to sea,” he sings on “Don’t Swallow the Cap.” He continues: “Tiny bubbles float above me / It’s a sign that someone loves me.” Maybe that’s why he ended our night like that, with such an intimate and communal ritual. Maybe it’s a sign that he loves me.
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The National’s Anthem

fleabag-screenshot-1

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/doesnt-need-us-anymore-look-fleabag-season-2/"></div>Writing about the second season of Fleabag feels, in a way, like an act of desecration. So much of the season’s beauty and brilliance are found in the unsaid: split-second glances and fixed gazes, silent Quaker meetings and portraits falling off church walls. There’s magic in the moments when we as viewers are tacitly acknowledged and those when we are quietly ignored. By putting all that power into words, I fear I run the risk of diminishing it — cheapening it, even. But the scribes of the Bible knew better than anyone: some experiences are so moving and revelatory, they demand to be written down.
Of course, that’s not exactly how the Priest (or, the Hot Priest, as Twitter has officially named him) tries to sell Fleabag on the Bible. “They’re just words,” he tells her offhandedly, as he gives her a copy with some thoughtfully marked passages. “It’s just, I think I know what happens,” Fleabag tells him. She takes the Bible anyway, and reads it in her bathtub, gesticulating as if it were a smutty novel.
Giving the Bible a good once-over isn’t the only way Fleabag has been trying to dig herself out of her nadir from last season’s finale. She’s been doing squats with a personal trainer, eating toast with avocado and veggies on top, and even stopped having casual sex. We know all of this because Fleabag tells us. The night of her father’s engagement dinner, Fleabag looks us right in the eye, in that intoxicating way that she does, and insists she’s “done everything” to be better.
At that same dinner, Fleabag is unwittingly seated next to the Priest (“Don’t know who this guy is,” she snidely tells us.) Sparks fly when the two stumble into each other for a smoke outside. “Fellow smoker,” he re-introduces himself. “Do you have a spare one?”
Volumes could be penned on the romance that follows. I won’t belabor the artistry and chemistry and honesty that merge to animate their love.
But I can tell you that this season’s brief but profound love story ripped me apart, then stitched me back together. The stitches hurt, too. I watched the entirety of season two sitting cross-legged and recently heartbroken on the floor of John Wayne Airport. I don’t recommend watching all of the second season of Fleabag on the floor of John Wayne Airport. I do, however, recommend watching the second season of Fleabag with a broken heart. What the six episodes — and especially the final episode — offer is acute emotional catharsis.
Creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge has confirmed that Fleabag’s second season will be its last, making the series, as Alison Herman<a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2019/5/20/18631686/fleabag-season-2"> observed</a>, a diptych. Finality always puts undue pressure — particularly emotional pressure — on works of television, and often final seasons fracture under that pressure. But sometimes, finales stick the landing, striking the perfect balance of narrative closure and emotional resonance. Fleabag is one of the few, hallowed series to pull off the latter.
Fleabag’s first season ended with our titular antihero wandering the streets of London alone, black mascara tears streaking her cheeks. She had lost everything: her best friend was dead, and her lover, sister, and father had all rejected her in the course of a single night. Watching her drift ghostly through the night, I wondered why Fleabag didn’t heave herself in front of traffic, like her best friend Boo did.
The series’ final episode also ends with heartrending loss. But this one is bittersweet, destructive, and productive all at once. We hurt for Fleabag, but Fleabag assures us — us! — that it’ll be okay. It’s here that I circle back to that broken heart I mentioned earlier — the pain of holding it, the act of nursing it, and the weirdly specific catharsis Fleabag offered me and, hopefully, other broken-heart-holders.
¤
Fleabag spent the first season of her TV-life avoiding the crushing aloneness that came with losing her mother and best friend. And, as we’ve now learned, her asides were also part of that effort, as her dissociation also provided quick but needed respite from aloneness. For as long as we’ve known her, Fleabag has been “just a girl with no friends and an empty heart,” her therapist divines from her new client’s own self-description.
Then the Priest wanders into that empty heart. There’s the dinner, the Bible-giving, the bathtub-reading, and lots of talk about the constraints of celibacy. Ultimately, the pair end up knowing each other, in the Biblical sense. But not without a constant simmering of guilt and shame and desire and coveting thy neighbor’s priest — all rather Biblical feelings.
After their first and only night together, all is precariously well for Fleabag and the Priest. They steal full-bodied kisses at her father’s wedding, which the Priest is officiating. It’s all very forbidden, but what makes their relationship more exciting to witness is its honesty.
Things end as they must: the Priest chooses God over Fleabag. Their time together will be archived as a series of memories, the kind we flash back to, twinges, every so often. The inevitable dissolution of their relationship is tough enough to swallow. But the hope that comes in its wake is even harder to fully take in — not because it is disingenuous, but because it was so honest and relieving that it was hard to fully accept for myself. To borrow a phrase from<a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/5/22/18634838/fleabag-season-2-review-amazon-phoebe-waller-bridge"> Emily VanDerWerff’s astute review</a>, “I almost couldn’t look right at it. It was too bright.”
For Fleabag, hell — in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre — is other people. She’s gone to great lengths to avoid them, forgoing meaningful connection in favor of casual flings and a secret affair with us, the viewer. So naturally, the second season of Fleabag points to other people — meeting them, knowing them, loving them — as a kind of salvation, no matter how fleeting our connections may be.  “People are all we’ve got,” a sagacious, older businesswoman named Belinda tells Fleabag over drinks.
¤
“I love you,” Fleabag tells the Priest at the bus stop where they part. He tells her, softly, “It’ll pass.” That’s when I thought, on the floor of John Wayne Airport, I might just die.
This is a fundamentally comforting sentiment, reminiscent of the old adage “This too shall pass.” Her feelings for the Priest will fade — a loss — but so will the pain of their separation, the ache of his absence. And losing that hurt can be painful in itself — hoarding the hurt can be a way of holding onto the memory of the person. “I don’t know what to do with it,” Fleabag tells Boo at her mother’s funeral. “With all the love I have for her. I don’t know where to put it now.”
Anais Nin once declared that “love never dies a natural death,” and this rattled around my mind as I boarded my plane, awash in the dark and dull hues of the final scene. What hurts most about the Priest and Fleabag’s end is how unnatural it is; their candle didn’t gradually burn itself out — it was snuffed out by circumstance. My chest buckled in recognition.
But then there is the painful, nourishing, fortifying catharsis that wrapped up the series — the moment that launched a thousand essays. After the Priest leaves the bus stop, Fleabag sits for a long moment. Then she turns to us, close up, and grins a soft, teary grin. She looks away, breathes in, and packs up to leave. We follow her until she turns back and with a delicate shake of the head, tacitly tells us to hang back. We do. She walks away, leaving us at the bus stop just as she was left moments before and gives us a coy wave from down the block. Then she’s gone.
In this final moment, Fleabag doesn’t just break the fourth wall; she blows it up. It’s a loss for us — we’ve lost Fleabag and Fleabag — but it is also comforting to know she doesn’t need us anymore. She can make it on her own. This is painful, but she’s going to make it out the other side. “I almost couldn’t look right at it.”
Watching her walk away from me, I exhaled. I was blistered and soothed simultaneously. She’s hurt, she’s hurting. She’s going to be okay. I’m hurt, I’m hurting. I’m going to be okay.
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&#8220;She Doesn’t Need Us Anymore&#8221;: A Look at Fleabag Season 2

&#8220;She Doesn’t Need Us Anymore&#8221;: A Look at Fleabag Season 2

Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television

Sophia Stewart is a writer, editor, and cultural critic from Los Angeles. You can find her writing&nbsp;<a href="https://sophiastewartwrites.wordpress.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-auth="NotApplicable">here</a>&nbsp;and follow her on Twitter&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/smswrites">@smswrites</a>.

Sophia Stewart

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Sophia Stewart is a writer, editor, and cultural critic from Los Angeles. You can find her writing&nbsp;<a href="https://sophiastewartwrites.wordpress.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-auth="NotApplicable">here</a>&nbsp;and follow her on Twitter&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/smswrites">@smswrites</a>.