Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989) was digitally restored and rereleased in theaters across Taiwan earlier this year. Running two hours and thirty-seven minutes, the melancholic art-house film shows in painstaking detail the dissolution of a Taiwanese family prompted by political regime change following World War II. In 1945, the Japanese surrendered Taiwan; soon after, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang party (KMT) would retreat from China to the island, violently suppress native uprisings, and officially claim the island as its own in 1949.

“This island is so pitiful. First the Japanese and then the Chinese. They all rule us but none take care of us,” one of the film’s protagonists says in Taiwanese, a language that the KMT banned from schools. The English subtitles were less subtle: “They all exploit us and no one gives a damn.”

I attended a sold-out showing on opening weekend. In a somewhat surreal coincidence, the rerelease date coincided with the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Just hours before I saw the film, I’d biked to a public square where a crowd of mostly Taiwanese people waved Ukraine’s blue-yellow striped flag. When Ukraine’s anthem was played, everyone put their hands on their hearts. One Ukrainian mother said to me, “Taiwanese people know what it’s like to have a crazy neighbor.”

Today China claims it will take Taiwan by force; the threat of regime change is never far. In Hong Kong, where the film was also rereleased this year, protesters, among them high schoolers, have been imprisoned and sentenced for subversion. But to be fair, in Taiwan—a country ruled by six successive colonial powers—it would be difficult to find a release date that didn’t take on a deep sense of resonance and foreboding. The year City was released, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party killed thousands of nonviolent protesters in Tiananmen Square. In contrast, Taiwan was on the cusp of freedom. It burst with national awakening. Soon, activists who read Mandela in prison would be released and run for election—and win.

She would say that driving a big car on a highway crossing the American desert was like doing calligraphy in her notebooks. She said that if you look at a mountain carefully and faithfully each day, you can become its friend. And this is what happened to her. Each thing that existed in the world provoked her curiosity, and often her wonder. She was never weary and always alert, as if to be alive were in itself such a stroke of luck that nothing must be let go of. She loved wild buttercups and blood-red anemones. She was friends with the flowers too.

Born in 1925 in Beirut, Etel Adnan was a poet and an artist. (A portfolio of her work appeared in the Review in 2018.) She died in Paris in 2021. I met her nine years ago in somewhat worldly circumstances, surrounded by famous artists and important gallerists. Everyone was talking but her. She had planted herself with her back to the crowd, facing an enormous fireplace. And she watched the fire without moving. She watched it with such intensity I didn’t dare approach her. I had read some of her writing: remarkable poems, and an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist that had impressed me with her point of view on the world. Here was an artist, to be sure, but as young people say these days, “not just that.” It was this “not just” that I wanted to understand.

I first came to Etel to ask questions. Very soon I was coming back to see her, to be with her, to be in the delight of being with her.

ADLER

On October 3, 2023, The Paris Review published “Free Everything,” an essay by Miranda July, on the Daily. We were not aware that the essay had previously run in The New Yorker, and have removed it from our website. We regret the error. The original piece can be found here.

I remember reading Peter Pan as a kid, a version based on the 1953 Disney movie—based on J. M. Barrie’s story. It turned me on. I’m six or seven, and I’m flipping through the pages, and there’s a picture of Peter with his arms crossed and his back to Wendy. He’s angry with her for some reason, and it turned me on. The words, the image, the anger? All of it, some kind of thrill-ball a kid has no words for.

All kinds of people become aroused, in one way or another—when we’re children and when we’re old. It doesn’t start or stop. Aliveness is erotic, the senses awakened. Everyone knows kids get turned on by this thing or that thing without instruction by adults. If you want to know why people lie about this fact and pretend that children—and often female humans along with them—start out sexually “innocent,” I can refer you to Nietzsche, who blames Christianity. Sexual feeling is anarchic, sudden, and sometimes inconvenient. It can’t really be contained.

What to call the feelings you don’t have words for? A kind of fainty, oh my God what is this sensation I wouldn’t have spoken about. It wasn’t because I was masturbating. I didn’t learn to masturbate, so I could come, until after I’d had sex. I’m twenty, maybe, when one day I say to myself, “If he can do that, so, probably can you.”

As a child, I wouldn’t have spoken about my “funny feelings” perhaps because shame moves in early. Also, in childhood, secrecy is all we have—our private inner lives—in a world where adults control so much of us. Maybe, as children, we keep arousal to ourselves because we don’t want anyone tampering with our pleasure. Also, in childhood, there’s no end of feelings we don’t have language to describe—grief, fear, and anxiety about things we anticipate, come to mind. Secrets are sexy.

In an office-building lobby in San Francisco, there is a wall where about one hundred lava lamps simultaneously flow. They are not just decorating the wall; they are helping to encrypt the internet. 

The lava wall is owned by a software company called Cloudflare. A camera photographs the lava lamps, whose patterns are constantly shifting. Each image is then digitized and stored as a series of numbers. This analog process produces sequences that, in their organic variance, are more unpredictable than anything a computer could generate on its own. With the help of its lava lamps, Cloudflare encrypts at least 10 percent of global web traffic.

As the owner of fifty lava lamps, I felt validated when I found out about Cloudflare’s wall. I bought all the lamps within a six-month span I now refer to as my “lava period.” It started when I broke my lava lamp of eight years by leaving it on for two weeks. The lamp had survived the dumpster I found it in, and two cross-country moves, but it couldn’t endure its own heat. Many things went wrong at once: the wax (the “lava,” the substance that moves) started sticking to the glass, the liquid lost its color, and the spring that sat at the base of the globe broke into pieces. Little bits of metal bobbed at the surface, as though drowning and reaching up for help.

Bereft, I went on the internet, where I quickly learned that we were in the midst of a lava lamp shortage. It was 2022 and Schylling, the leading U.S. manufacturer of lava lamps, had temporarily shut down the LAVA® online store, citing supply chain issues. I turned to eBay, where price gouging meant that most of the available lava lamps were going for hundreds of dollars. In a panic, I made lowball offers on the only three listed for under thirty. I didn’t expect to, but I won them all. 

“He’s dead.”

The voice on the phone belonged to Joshua, a friend with whom I had gotten sober years ago. Back then, in the nineties, driving to and from twelve-step meetings held in smoky church basements across Rochester, New York, in a rickety station wagon with my drum set in the wayback, we kept ourselves focused by improvising sketch comedy and working out stand-up routines that Joshua would then use in his fledging act, which he’d eventually abandon in order to become a travel writer specializing in Southeast Asia. He was calling from Portland.

“Who’s dead?” I asked, trying to think who from our past might have relapsed.

“The actor, the guy you’re writing about. Overdosed on heroin.”

One spring evening I pulled in and saw my neighbor Stefanie was sitting on her car, which has the next spot over, with a friend. It was possible to worry for a second that I’d hit her.

“Hi, my neighbor,” I said as Stefanie hopped down. She and I had a project to one day go in on compost pickup.

We had something else in common, we realized that evening. Neither of us had been told about apartment four.

And the vacancy had filled so quickly. We both may have had reasons for considering a move—mine being I have mold—and that apartment, I happened to know, was a two-bedroom, with a bay window, beautiful gold-and-cream striped wallpaper, and decoratively ribbed molding that pooled, at the corners, in concentric circles. It was not, however, perfect. “It’s really loud in there,” I said to Stefanie. “That’s why Alex”—my ex-boyfriend—“had to leave.” I had started seeing Alex during the pandemic in 2020, a month or two after my arrival in the Northampton, Massachusetts, building. He was there already.

Recently, I read Virginia Woolf’s first published novel, The Voyage Out, for the first time. There, I made a discovery: it features a character named Clarissa Dalloway. This encounter initially provoked delight, surprise combined with double take, like bumping into someone I thought I knew well in a setting I never expected to find them, causing a brief mutual repositioning, physically, imaginatively. (Ah! So we’re both here? But if you’re here, where am I?) Then my feelings went strange. For some reason, I felt disgruntled, almost caught out: as if the world had been withholding something important from me. How was I only just now catching up on what—for so many readers—must be old news? Yes, there’s a Clarissa Dalloway in The Voyage Out. She’s married to Mr. Richard Dalloway: the couple have been stranded in Lisbon; they board the boat and the novel in chapter 3. She is a “tall, slight woman” with a habit of holding her head slightly to one side.

I was impressed by the boldness of this move: for Woolf to initiate a character in a minor role and then, years later, to return to her, to open out a whole novel from her private intentions and in this way continue her (Mrs. Dalloway was published a decade later, in 1925). It made me think of E. M. Forster’s two lectures on “character,” published in Aspects of the Novel in 1927. The first is titled “People.” The second: “People (continued).” Then I remembered why I’d had that “caught out,” “I should have known this” feeling: this same technique of novel-growth was also of great interest to Roland Barthes. In his lecture courses at the Collège de France in the late seventies, he named it marcottage.

It’s a horticultural term. A process of plant propagation, working for instance with trees or bushes. It involves bending one of the plant’s higher, flexible branches into the ground and fastening it there, a branch-part under the soil, to give it the time and energy to root. It was also, for Barthes, a method of novel composition, one practiced by Balzac, by Proust. In an article (translated in 2015 by Chris Turner) on the discoveries that initiated Proust’s writing In Search of Lost Time, Barthes defined the method as that “mode of composition by ‘enjambment,’ whereby an insignificant detail given at the beginning of the novel reappears at the end, as though it had grown, germinated, and blossomed.” The detail could be an object, a musical phrase, or the first mention of a character: the point is that it recurs, appearing again in a later volume, connecting several books of a life’s project—only that, each time, it is allocated a different amount of attention, provided with more or less space to develop (to grow). Marcottage. The plant example Barthes reached for to illustrate this in his lectures was the strawberry plant. Strawberries do it spontaneously, “asexually,” sending out long stems called runners from the “main,” or “mother,” plant. The runner touches the soil a small distance away, takes root there, and produces a new “daughter” plant. Together, the plants form a pair, eventually a network of mature plants, making it hard to distinguish daughters from mothers. The generative paths run backward as well as forward.

Marcottage could be a possible metaphor for translation. This work of provoking what plants, and perhaps also books, already know how to do, what in fact they most deeply want to do: actively creating the conditions for a new plant to root at some distance from the original, and there live separately: a “daughter-work” robust enough in its new context to throw out runners of its own, in unexpected directions, causing the network of interrelations to grow and complexify.

I was thinking, recently, of a scene from the animated movie Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The island of lost toys, I remembered, was a place in the North Pole where the stuffed bears and Hot Wheels cars and waddling wind-up penguins that disappear from children’s lives ended up. They lived happily in their own colony, tinged only slightly with the sad shadow of their severance from their human caretakers. I went to look up this scene, and it turned out I had misremembered it and had been doing so for years. There is no island of lost toys. In the movie it is the island of misfit toys—all the more poignant, for the toys are not lost but abandoned, because they don’t quite belong. Children don’t want them and so they find one another. Eventually this odd cast of characters comes together to teach Rudolph a lesson about the beauty of being a misfit; as we all know, that particular story ends happily ever after. But if the misfits have found one another, where do the lost toys go?

That question sort of answers itself: they’re lost. They’re unaccounted for. There are some possible explanations. Perhaps that treasured stuffed lion, worn around the ears, was forgotten on the red banquette at an Italian restaurant where the child was drawing in crayon on a paper tablecloth. Perhaps it fell between the seats of a Land Rover, or worse, into the bottomless netherland of “under the bed.” But even if these scenarios are plausible or true, they might be unverifiable, and so some things simply seem to be erased from earth. I lose things all the time—credit cards, keys, jackets, sunglasses, books, a necklace, two necklaces—actually, three necklaces, all of them gifts from people who loved me. Sometimes I joke that I practice nonattachment, the Buddhist thing, though the real explanation is that I am clumsy and careless. I do wonder where it is that my things have gone. I have always been bothered by this, so much so that it seems I invented and sustained a belief in a fictional Arctic island populated by reindeer where lost things might one day be restored.

I went a few weeks ago to the bowels of Penn Station. Squeezed underneath the A/C platform, behind a door decorated with colorful sketches of tennis rackets, cameras, basketballs, guitars, purses, light bulbs—all manner of cartoon odds and ends—is the MTA’s central lost and found. Normally, one sidles up to a glass window manned by an attendant and requests an item. If the item is there, you receive it and depart. Accompanied by Ron Young, who runs the New York City Transit lost and found and has been with the MTA for seventeen years, I was able to go behind the door. This area is the sort of purgatory where every single item that has been recovered from a New York City bus or subway is awaiting its possible return. On average, five to six hundred items come in each week.

In the front office, at desks with plastic dividers between them, four men and women were working in a way that I can only describe as methodical without even understanding the method. A man at the first desk was counting dollar bills. The woman behind him had sets of keys on her desk to be slipped into plastic sleeves along with identifying information. (Usually with keys there is none.) Someone else was typing into a massive spreadsheet.

Although book censorship impacts every single one of us — it impacts our democracy on a nationwide level — it is the students who are most impacted by decisions made by school boards, library boards, library and school workers, politicians, local officials, and right-wing bad actors. They are the ones who lose the ability to access materials that educate, enrich, and entertain and more, given that the vast majority of books being banned right now are those by or about people of color and queer people, students know, see, and feel the impact of these decisions on them beyond the covers of those books. Marginalized teens see themselves being labeled inappropriate, disgusting, and more, all of which takes a tremendous toll on their mental health.

This week, let’s look at some of the student-run, student-organized groups fighting back against these book bans. These student groups against book bans are happening in response to situations in their own schools and communities, as well as in places that have yet to see such censorship. The list below was developed through submission, meaning that students, educators, parents, and/or library workers shared the information. It does not include the PARU group from Central York School District (PA), which you can read about here.

Take the opportunity to get to know these teenagers doing important, relevant, and vital work in their schools and communities more broadly. Follow them on social media and offer them the encouragement and support they deserve.

I’m not big on regrets, but sadly, I regret a lot about my reading life. Most of this wasn’t revealed to me until I spent some time as an adult rereading books from my childhood and early adult years. Now that I have some time in the world and some perspective on how things are, I realize that a lot of things I think are normal, interesting, or even plain okay have been skewed by things normalized in the books I’ve read.

My first realization did not dawn on me immediately. As a teen, I preferred adult literature, and I think I might have borrowed my mother’s copy of Fortune’s Rocks by Anita Shreve. I loved this novel. Taking place at the turn of the 20th century, the book follows a precocious young teen as she falls in love and pursues a sexual relationship with her father’s 40-year-old friend. We continue to follow Olympia as she lives with the aftermath of the affair being uncovered and claws her way back to life after being marked by the scandal.

It’s a gorgeous book, with beautiful descriptions of everything from the meals to the setting to the lovemaking. I reread it every summer. Eventually, I stopped and thought, “Why is this okay?” You can make comments about Olympia’s maturity or how the book takes place in a different era, but at the end of the day, it glamorously romanticizes statutory rape. Full stop.

While I came to that realization through understanding more about grooming and appropriate relationships in real life, my next regret was more of a slap in the face. I came across a book from one of my favorite childhood series: the Anastasia Krupnik books by Lois Lowry. I remember loving reading her thoughts on life, and I was charmed that she lived in a city. I was also thrilled when she shared snarky insights about the different kids and even adults she interacted with throughout her day. Now an elementary librarian, I was curious to see if these might be books I could recommend to 4th and 5th graders, so I decided to reread. It was a mistake.

Right away, Anastasia starts making comments about a friend’s mother, who has put on weight. In my reread, I clocked three fatphobic comments disguised as maturity in the first 20 pages. That was as far as I got. I definitely hated the awful comments at face value, but even more, it stung that these blows were framed as a sign of Anastasia acting like an adult, as if judging bodies is a sign of growing up. Putting this book aside, I started thinking about other books I read as a child. I cannot remember the title, but I have a burning memory of a scene taking place at summer camp where two boys are discussing a girl. One of them said something like, “She’s fat, isn’t she?” and the other replied, “Nah, she has a great personality!” The first boy responded, “Of course she does. Fat girls always have a great personality.” The way that simple exchange has stayed with me for decades is chilling. I understood everything I needed to about my body, my perceived attitude, and my chances of having a romantic relationship by the time I was eight or nine years old. Because of books.