Our third print issue features Catherine Lacey on worthless pictures; Elif Batuman on Miranda July; Chris Kraus on girlhood; the drawings of Daniel Johnston; poems by Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles; and dispatches on undersea rifts, baby-making on Mars, and climbing Stone Mountain. 

Florence Griffith-Joyner at the 1988 U.S. Olympic Trial Quarterfinals 

Sometimes technology malfunctions and the transcendent peeks through. Sometimes we get it on film. Watch closely: When the gunshot sounds, the only thing distinguishing the runner in lane five is a grainy flair of dark hair as she leaps from the blocks. For the first 50 meters she is level with the pack; a beat later she’s ahead by a stride. Then, at seven seconds, the footage seems to skip: her gait lengthens, the other runners fall away, and she is all alone, way out at the far edge of the frame, with a bare track stretching at her heels.

Indianapolis, 1988. In the first heat of the U.S. Olympic trial quarterfinals, the American sprinter Florence Griffith-Joyner, a.k.a. “Flo-Jo,” set a world record for the women’s 100-meter sprint that stands to this day: 10.49 seconds. In a sport where advances are made by mere hundredths of a second, Flo-Jo’s time—a full 0.27 seconds faster than the previous world record—seemed impossible. There had to be an explanation.

As it happens, there was: Flo-Jo had the wind at her back.

In track and field, the results of short sprints and horizontal jumps are only allowed record status when the wind is blowing less than two meters per second. At the time of her historic race, the mechanical anemometer at the triple-jump runway across the stadium clocked a wind speed of 4.3 meters per second; in the footage of the race you can see the white flag fluttering behind the starting line. Even before the gunshot, one commentator warned, “the wind will mean that it won’t count.”

But when her winning time appeared on the scoreboard, the official wind measurement beside it read 0.0 meters per second. The commentators grappled with disbelief. “It can’t be,” one said. “No one can run that fast.” But Flo-Jo had. Her record held.

Seven years later, the International Amateur Athletics Federation released a report concluding that the anemometer at the 100-meter track had malfunctioned. The wind speed, the report said, was likely between 5.0 and 7.0 meters per second. But the governing body did not revoke her world record, and in a sense, it hardly mattered: In Indianapolis the day after running 10.49, Flo-Jo ran the 

-fastest time ever, a 10.61. Over two days and four rounds of the 100-meter sprint, she clocked the three fastest times in history. And then, for good measure, she went to Seoul and won an Olympic gold.

Was Flo-Jo’s record a technical fluke? Did the wind meter lie? Does the footage of her race jump a frame? Maybe. Call these glitches, if you like. A glitch is what we invoke when the world does not obey the rules we have assigned to it. But glitches are revealing; they show us the limits of tech's ability to determine reality, and gesture at different forms of authority and truth. There is another word for such an event; you might call it a miracle. When we watch Flo-Jo fly on that windy Indiana day, what we see is not the failure of our technology, but the triumph of our divinity.

Sports enchant us by combining two popular stories about what it means to be human: We are like machines, and we are also like gods. The history of athletic achievement and how we perceive it is a story of the shifting balance between these visions. In the earliest work of what is now called physiology, Aristotle characterized the movement of animal bodies as “those of automatic puppets, which are set going on the occasion of a tiny movement; the levers are released, and strike the twisted strings against one another.” By contrast, human bodies were propelled by something intangible in Aristotle’s view: “It remains to inquire how the soul moves the body.”

When we watch Flo-Jo fly on that windy Indiana day, what we see is not the failure of our technology, but the triumph of our divinity.

Ancient athletics favored the model of the god over the model of the machine. The lyric poet Pindar, whose 

 lauded the athletic champions of his time, wrote that the glory of a big win “is the highest one that comes to every mortal man.” Victory lifted the winner up, perpendicular to the worldly plane, in the direction of the divine.

, Aeneas and his Trojans are forced by squalls to stop in Sicily, where Aeneas honors the death of his father with a series of competitions, including a footrace. The Trojan arrivals and the Sicilian locals send their finest to the starting line, including the young soldier Nisus, his younger lover Euralyus—“a boy of blooming years, / With sprightly grace and equal beauty crown’d”—and the Greek Salius. When the race begins, Nisus takes the lead, with Salius and Euralyus far behind. In the final turn, though, Nisus slips on the blood of a sacrificial bull. Thrashing about in the gore, he manages to trip Salius— clearing the way for his lover Euralyus to cruise to victory.

Euralyus crows. Salius, predictably, calls foul play:

. . . and, exclaiming loud
For justice, deafens and disturbs the crowd;
Urges his cause may in the court be heard;
And pleads the prize is wrongfully conferr’d.
But favor for Euryalus appears;
His blooming beauty, with his tender tears,
Had brib’d the judges for the promis’d prize.

Euralyus doesn’t win because he is the fastest; he wins, in the final analysis, because he is beautiful. In a culture where beauty is the mark of divine favor, his victory bears the trace of the gods.

Fair? Perhaps not. But if ancient judgment skewed in favor of heavenly gifts, modern judgment skews in favor of rational rules. A mechanical understanding of the body informs how runners train and mechanical timepieces arbitrate their results. At the highest level of contemporary athletics—right up next to the gods, as Pindar would have it—tech is our model and our measure.

The mechanistic paradigm presents challenges. To understand a machine you take it apart, and the tricky thing about a moving body is that it does not stay still long enough for you to break down how it moves. This was a paradox that troubled the sleep of Leland Stanford, the business mogul, university founder, and equine enthusiast who was determined to see if horses at a trot or gallop ever lift all four hooves off the ground at the same time. In 1872, Stanford famously commissioned an English-born photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, to conduct a photographic investigation of whether horses do in fact “fly.”

This esoteric inquiry, under less moneyed auspices, might never have shifted history. But Muybridge’s invention of the “automatic electro-photograph,” and his published work, 

, seemed to resolve a timeless paradox. His pictures arrested moving horses in the form of photographic stills. But when the photos were displayed in rapid succession, with the help of Muybridge’s subsequent invention, the so-called zoopraxiscope, they miraculously created the illusion of movement. That dusty racetrack in Sacramento is often credited as the birthplace of film. Which is to say that the blurry footage of Flo-Jo’s Olympic race marks a return of photography to its original purpose: the capture of bodies in motion.

To understand a machine you take it apart, and the tricky thing about a moving body is that it does not stay still long enough for you to break down how it moves.

Film facilitated the growing dominance of the mechanical model of human bodies. While a runner’s footfalls could now be preserved for eternity with a level of detail that would make Pindar blush, those same steps could also be deconstructed, analyzed, and put back together. Runners had a shot at godly posterity, but only if they submitted to increasingly precise mechanical tuneups. Consider this report on the film analysis of runners, published by Wallace Osgood Fenn in the 

The angles of the upper and lower arms and legs are first measured from the films when projected on a screen, one measurement being made at every second frame. This was done simply by laying a protractor long [sic] the long axis of the limb and reading the angle by means of the plumb line. These angles are then plotted for each limb against the frame number (i.e., time) and smooth curves are drawn through the points in such a manner that they return to the starting point . . . 

It’s far from Virgil. Yet this kind of quantitative analysis produced results. Over the past century, the increasingly sophisticated marriage of tech and technique has reshaped the world of athletic pursuit for professionals and shuffling mortals alike: A recent 

 explores the applications of machine learning and wearable sensors for instructing a sample of non-elite undergraduates in track and field. An excerpt from that highly technical paper shows the mechanical model’s propensity to make the simple act of running almost unthinkably arcane:

The technical and transcendent views of the runner aren’t mutually exclusive, but they are irreducibly distinct. A Greek 

 max, and calculus cannot tell us why, in the 

 of one YouTube commenter, Flo-Jo’s gait is “poetry in motion.” We are always like gods, and we are always like machines.

 suggests) we seem to be more and more like machines, which is why Flo-Jo’s world record sprint has something important to teach us. In the face of the tech industry’s conquest of nearly every zone of human experience, temporarily suspending the authority of quantitative measurement can help us to remember that we are not, in the end, reducible to numbers. Fortunately, this is not so hard to do: At the level of precision that distinguishes 10.76 seconds and 10.49 seconds—the point at which we call on “quantum timers” to decide the reigning champ—a record margin is nearly imperceptible to an unaided viewer. But the beauty of a human taking damn near to flight? Plain as day.

Flo-Jo understood that beauty was a kind of divine favor. She ran 10.49 with her curls loose, in four-inch tiger-print acrylics and a candy-colored one-legged track suit that she stitched herself. She was nearly as famous for her fashion as she was for her fitness, and her race-day glam paved the way for the long lashes and jewelry of Sha’Carri Richardson and the Jamaica-yellow hair of Shelly-Ann Fraser Pryce.

We’ll see how long Flo-Jo’s record stands. The Jamaican sprinter Elaine Thompson-Herah nipped at her heels in 2021 with a 10.54 finish in Eugene, Oregon. Forgiving the pun, it’s only a matter of time. But even when it falls from the top of the chart, Flo-Jo’s race in Indianapolis should be remembered as the rare instance in modern sports in which the mechanical and the transcendent views of athletic achievement come cartoonishly uncoupled. In just over ten seconds, she struck an enduring blow to the false supremacy of the machine model of the human.

Faulty tech isn’t always bad; sometimes an error signal points us back to ourselves. In this view, we can be grateful to the (supposedly) glitchy anemometer that sat and watched Flo-Jo fly by, just as we do, over and over again. By flouting its assigned task, perhaps the machine meant to tell us something else: about what we are, and what we are not. The Greek root of anemometer, 

—what the machine is meant to measure—means wind. But some things can’t be measured, and 

“Glitches and Miracles” is part of Embedded, a series of writings on the moving image. Artists, musicians, and writers choose a piece of media—embeddable on a web page—and elaborate on why it has lodged itself in their psyche.

Peter Schmidt is a writer and organizer from Missouri living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the editor-in-chief of The Empty Cup and the co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention. 

mus-basteleur

Glitches and Miracles

, a magic eye of a book, is a novel preoccupied with middles: a woman’s experience of middle age, the midpoint of a romantic relationship, midlife crisis, mid-career creativity, and a surreal shift, mid-book, that has thrilled and perplexed readers trying to make sense of the novel’s multiple realities. The question of how incompatible truths can coexist, even form a cohesive story, seems less important than what the bifurcated narrative itself can do.

This exploration has taken shape for Kitamura across a trio of books, beginning with 

 in 2021. Each narrator—a translator, an interpreter, and an actor—is a woman who works with other people’s language, and the narratorial voice, which feels more shared than not and is often described as cool and precise, possesses a contained and solitary quality. Reading Kitamura, for me, is like following a twenty-first-century flâneuse, alone in the crowd. In different ways, each book is textured by the difficulties of relationality; the perplexing, dividing experience of living among others is always central, never resolved.

I spoke with Kitamura at the New York Public Library while she was on a fellowship at the Cullman Center. We sat in a wood-paneled room and drank black tea. She spoke about her work openly and generously, even when I asked slightly embarrassing questions, like what if anything did she wish she’d known earlier about love.

Lucy McKeon

 In each of your last three novels, an unnamed narrator “speaks the words of others,” as you’ve put it, for work—she is a literary translator in 

. I wonder if you could say what interests you about this position, how this relates to questions of authorship or authority, and what you see as the dynamic between what these narrators do for work and the romantic relationships they’re navigating in the books.

Katie Kitamura

That’s interesting. I don’t think there is a strategic or conscious parallel between those two dynamics, which do tend to be the kind of poles around which the books are organized. The central character and her work are adjacent to the role of authorship or authority, rather than in the role of authorship or authority. It’s not a mistake that in 

, the central character is in a role of interpretation or translation, and the male characters are writers. And they occupy this role of authorship very comfortably.

So there must be some question or some tension about authorship and control of narrative in their romantic and marital lives as well. There is a level of disavowal on the part of the central characters. I think they actually have a great deal of control over what is happening to them, but there is a certain amount of proclaimed passivity. And I think that becomes increasingly the case over the course of the three books.

, one of the slow realizations the narrator comes to is that, in fact, she has impacted other people a great deal. She has thought of herself as an instrument of other people’s authorship, but she has actually created the weather that the entire family or the entire constellation of characters, however you think of them, are living inside.

All of the books are interested in estrangement, from the self and from others, and in 

, estrangement from familial roles and dynamics. You write, “What is the family if not a shared delusion, a mutual-construction.”

It turned out to be far more controversial than I expected. 

A lot of people take issue with that statement.

We’ll return to that. But I’m interested in that moment you mention, when 

’s narrator realizes she is actually the problem, the force of disturbance in the trio of characters, in a way she hadn’t seen before.

, the character does all kinds of questionable things—but often without taking full responsibility for them. The most obvious example is she accepts a lot of money that she’s not really sure is hers.

, I was interested in a character who would initially think of herself as being passive—but then would come to feel increasingly implicated in the machinery of the institution she is a part of, which is a war crimes tribunal.

, I really wanted to write about a slightly dramatic character who feels herself to be impinged upon all the time, then, at a certain moment, understands that she acts upon the world. It’s a kind of parallel realization to the one the character in 

 has, where she realizes that she changes the language as it passes through her body [interpreting for the court], and it changes her, and there is a kind of constant—I don’t want say contamination or co-contamination, but there’s the way in which you do not pass through the world without changing it.

, I wanted that to be heightened. The novel is structured so that the two male characters have these very clearly defined narrative arcs that are quite traditional. The young male character has a kind of bildungsroman arc where he starts as someone who doesn’t seem to have a voice or direction, then ends as a writer who has a fully articulated creative voice. The older male character has a fairly classic midlife moment of collapse.

’s narrator as being a character in the middle of all of that, who doesn’t change. I’m really interested in writing characters who don’t change because I feel that’s kind of the tragedy of all of us—that we change much less than we would like to be able to change. But I did want to give her a moment of perception; she is not unaware. And so, there is a moment where she has this realization. That’s the greatest moment of change for her, and she has this realization that she is the boulder that everybody has been maneuvering around for the entire book.

Right. It’s like the stage lights go up and she can see herself, as if both in the audience and on stage, at once.

 starts with a very clear sense of what her story or narrative arc is—she’s on a mission to ask her husband for a divorce. (For unknowing readers—spoiler alert—first she has to find him. He’s missing, and his mother, the narrator’s mother-in-law, who doesn’t know they’re separated, has asked her to find him in Greece. Turns out, he’s dead.) The novel is interested in performativity and the speech act, per J. L. Austin’s famous example of the marriage ceremony’s “I do” enacting the state of being married. In the case of the narrator of 

, she is on a mission to officially enact “I don’t.”

But by the end of the novel, that story has unraveled, and she’s lost control of her own plot. I wonder if you could say a bit about what you were interested in exploring, especially as it intersects with this idea of speaking ourselves into being.

That’s kind of the tragedy of all of us—that we change much less than we would like to be able to change. 

Thanks for noting that reference to Austin. I have these jokes in my books that end up being more or less private because almost nobody notices them. 

Like, there’s a nerdy reference to [John] Cage in 

 that I think exactly one person noticed.

I’ve been interested in performance certainly since 

. I think what I wanted to think about in that book was how the performance of a role constructs a kind of reality, and then the gap between the performed self and the “real” self collapses, to an extent. The character performs the role of grieving widow, even though that’s not exactly what she is. Then, at a certain point, it subsumes her actual sense of who she is in the world.

When I was writing that book, I was thinking a lot about the role performance plays in all of our most intimate relationships, and the degree to which it’s activated by this sense of being observed by another person. That’s why exchanging vows seems to matter, you’re doing it for some other observer, whether it’s an institution or family, which is an institution as well. This sense that a relationship between two people can’t really flourish or survive in and of itself interests me. It always acquires that supplement of something else, whether that’s fantasy or being witnessed in some way.

And I suppose that became literally the case in 

—that a third person [makes possible the relation of the couple]. In 

, I was thinking about how the narrator is actually, in a weird way, the third person, rather than one of the two primary [characters]. She’s always observing other couples. She is herself alone, but she’s constantly making herself the third.

She even becomes a kind of third to her (dead) husband and the young hotel worker who was his lover before he died.

One of my favorite parts in the book is the scene where the narrator has dinner with this younger woman—it is incredibly uncomfortable and interesting, their dynamic—and you juxtapose it with the revelation that begins the very next chapter: “Christopher’s body was found in a shallow ditch.” Right in the middle of the novel, we learn that the narrator’s husband is dead.

I’ve always been interested in writing these bifurcating narratives. I’ve been trying to do it for years. I really wanted the narrative to change in the middle of that book. That dinner scene was so much fun to write.

That comes through. The narrator is observing the total spell of fantasy the lover has been under while she’s also almost being bullied by her. Ordering the most expensive and decadent things on the menu, on the narrator’s dime. Glistening lobster . . .

She’s kind of scathing about it, but she is also almost titillated by it. I think there’s a frisson there, but there’s a lot of sadness and maybe even disgust as well.

I often like to write a character who is able to be direct in a way that the narrators are not. In almost every book, there’s somebody who is able to articulate what they want, which is difficult for the narrators.

, the fraught intimacy between the narrator and the man she’s interpreting for, a war criminal who has overseen a genocide, comes to a head. There’s this fascinating moment where the narrator articulates to herself that his comfort around her comes from seeing her as this “pure instrument, someone without will or judgment, a consciousness-free zone into which he could escape, the only company he could now bear.”

I mean, that’s chilling enough, but coupled with the way they’re the only two people in a full room who can understand the words being said, there’s something really horrifying but undeniably close about their relation. And then they have this exchange. He calls out her complicity in the institution, which feels like a kind of intimacy too, because she doesn’t disagree.

This man she’s working with that has perpetrated war crimes, one of the reasons they’re close is this shared language and the passage of language. But he really sees her very clearly, in a way that none of the other characters do—and possibly, depending, even the reader [misses]. The character is Japanese-American which is not overt at all. It kind of sits slightly dormant after being flagged in the beginning. And then at that moment, the man on trial is articulating a doubled legacy of imperialism. He sees much more clearly where she is from and what that means, the context she’s coming from, even beyond the immediate environment of the court. And there is something very intimate about that moment of recognition.

A moment of recognition that is profoundly destabilizing for her, and it’s implied that, after that moment, she can’t carry on with her work. She kind of can’t believe in the myth of neutrality that the court trades on, that all ideas of justice trade on. Maybe she doesn’t think of it as a neocolonial force, but certainly the official languages of the court are imperial languages or colonial languages. She can’t really escape this anymore. The fact that any language that is not English or French goes through multiple layers of translation before it’s rendered fit for the record. I think that is percolating through the book and through her experience, but it’s only really after that moment of recognition between them that she feels she can no longer live with that dissonance.

The heat of their relationship, and the complexity of all of these layers of power and complicity, flares in that moment of recognition.

I think the novel is such a forgiving form, the perfect novel really doesn’t exist, and is probably not that good if it does. 

Yes. And that was the hardest scene to write. I always had the feeling that this moment of reckoning had to come from this person who is a narcissist—beyond being a perpetrator of terrible crimes, he is also superficial and vain. And yet, in that moment, because he is somebody who is skilled at manipulating other people, he’s able to isolate and identify the thing that is making her most uneasy.

There’s another interesting moment in that novel, a quieter moment of reckoning, where the narrator encounters a painting and her response is that only a woman could have made this image. It’s something about the irreconcilable subject position of the two figures and the two ways of reading what is happening, which is now making me think of 

. Though the narrator comes down on a reading of the painting.

What was important for you about that painting’s tableau, and about the narrator encountering that work at that moment in the book?

It was intuitive. I went to The Hague for research, and I went to the Mauritshuis Museum because I knew I wanted to write a scene there. I had the institution of the court, and I wanted to think about an institution of culture. And think about how they are formed in many similar ways. The Mauritshuis of course was founded by a Dutch slave trader in Dutch Brazil. And I wanted to think about how canons are built and how cultural power is accrued and articulated. In a cultural institution like a museum, you really feel the exclusion of women and people of color, particularly showing older work.

I didn’t even know the history of the painting or what it was about. I just felt it had a really uncomfortable vibration, and I think it was only really when I went back and I was thinking about it, and I looked at it and thought, This is clearly an image of sexual harassment. There’s so many images of sexual violence, but [fewer of] sexual harassment. So I wrote the [scene], and then afterward, when I read the whole book, I was like, “This book is full of sexual harassment.”

That made a lot of sense to me. It’s a book that is interested in power, and sexual harassment is almost always about the articulation of power. I think I started out wanting to think about the exclusion of women from the art historical canon, but then it just ended up being a kind of motif that threads its way through the book—the character’s constantly being both harassed and intimidated by the various male characters in the novel.

The character doesn’t consciously or explicitly make this connection, but she knows it, on some level.

I wrote it in 2016. It was a really interesting moment as well with #MeToo. A lot of women, particularly of my generation, were suddenly looking back, thinking, “Oh, that’s what that was, I thought that was just how it is. But there’s another name for it.” And I suppose there is a way in which she’s not able to name what is happening, but her unconscious or whatever is drawing her to these images knows exactly what’s happening to her.

You’ve said that for you, risk in writing is less about the characters and more about feeling the writer is taking a risk in their work.

I think the real drama is taking place in the relationship between the writer and the work rather than between the characters. And I don’t think that means it’s [necessarily] an increased difficulty [in the writing process]. In some ways, 

 is the book where I took the biggest formal risks, but it was a much easier book for me to write than 

, which came together over many, many drafts. It was a slightly grueling process. With 

, I felt really exhilarated when I was writing it, and I think that’s because I was taking a risk and it brought a lot of energy to the project. Failure is very invigorating in a lot of ways. I think the novel is such a forgiving form, the perfect novel really doesn’t exist, and is probably not that good if it does. I mean, every time I return to a classic novel, I’m really struck by how eccentric the storytelling often is. I was reading [Joseph Conrad’s] 

, and the storytelling completely does not follow the standard of what we think of as tight narrative, that’s for sure. Same with something like, I don’t know, 

 [by Ford Madox Ford] or everything that [Henry] James wrote. It’s really a capacious form that allows for failure.

So I think the most interesting novels often have sections that don’t work, but you can see it. One example for me is 

—Javier Marías, who is able to write these unlikely scenarios in a way that is so utterly convincing that you step into the kind of reality of the character and their decision-making, and you believe it completely.

, where he starts the book saying he’s a non-believer, he’s never really understood Catholicism. And then 50 pages in he says, “I suddenly remembered, when I was 19 or 20, I was devoutly faithful, and I would pray for a couple hours a day.” How did you forget? But I like those moments because it’s much more interesting, to see him trying to persuade the reader of that, than a more ordinary segue.

Most of the writers I really admire, 95 percent of the time, they pull off this unlikely proposition. And then there are a couple times that it doesn’t, to me, completely work, and that’s equally exciting.

Similarly unbelievable, but a real question in 

: Could you not be totally sure whether or not you might be someone’s mother?

You said something about this earlier, but I wanted to ask how you understand desire in your work, for your characters and yourself.

I really write for pleasure. I really write toward pleasure for myself. I think I give terrible advice to my students because I honestly don’t write a scene unless I want to write a scene. I’m sure sometimes in novels you have to write things that you don’t want to write because that’s what the narrative requires, but I almost never do it.

I almost never write a scene unless there’s something that is intriguing or interesting to me. For example, I’m not interested in backstory, so I never write backstory. I just don’t do it. So I’m very oriented towards pleasure in my work because it’s the one part of the process that is entirely for you and is entirely private. Sitting down with your manuscript. It has to be something you want to return to.

There has to be a world you want to step into that’s seductive to you in some way. If it’s not, it’s very hard to finish a book. I think in that sense, my own relationship to writing is completely fueled by pleasure and by desire. And a book ends when that’s gone. Until then, I keep editing and reworking and reformulating and moving things around and then at some point, the sponge has been wrung dry, and I have to turn it in and get feedback on it.

For your characters, desire is a bit more complicated.

I know. What is going on with my characters? 

Each of the narrators seems to experience desire differently . . . 

Yeah. It’s usually disavowed in some way. Even in 

, if on the one hand you read the novel as about a woman who desires a child and conjures that into being in some way, that desire is so profoundly disavowed that the story has to take the structure it takes.

What do you wish you’d known about love 20 years ago, either as a person or as a writer?

Love as a writer is something I’ve not figured out. I would love to write a great love story, but it’s really hard. I mean, it’s really, really hard. I would love to be able to do it. I would love to be able to write one that just runs on tracks. Do you know what I mean? That just runs smoothly and hits the beats it has to hit. Like 

 [the 1945 film based on Noël Coward’s play], such a great piece of work. I would love to be able to write something like that.

What do I wish I had known? I think I mistook complication for passion. I think sometimes when it works it’s very easy. There’s no complication and there’s not much narrative. When I was younger, I thought there had to be a lot of narrative and a lot of impediment, and now, being older, I find that to be utterly not the case.

That reminds me of what you’ve said about the formal concerns of 

—and its interest in mid-life—intersecting with your interest in a love story (as between the narrator and her husband Tomas) where the question is not will-they-won’t-they, but something else. What does the question become, or what does that space allow, for the narrator and Tomas?

tec-boecklin

Katie Kitamura: Writing Pleasure

Paramin. Lalibela. Delft. Years before arriving at each I carried the echo of the strange beauty of their names in my ear, so being in these places, short though my visit to each was—a night only in their different light—felt like a long spiritual pilgrimage.

The air, the dust, the light—especially the light—pulled me towards a sense of their history. I could read it on roadside bushes and on walls and I heard it in evening fires when the most important, untranslatable words were passed from shirtsleeves to the hems of skirts until even the most anxious of hearts slowed, right then, to a complete rest. Those evenings were intervals of benediction. It was almost too painful to look directly into the eyes of whoever was seated next to me, but I did. I saw the deep ancestral country I didn’t see (because of haste) in the hills and valleys where I was lost in the thick prose of trees, rivers, birds.

Paramin. Lalibela. Delft. Other names are blurring through the poem—Boston, Santa Cruz—places where I have stayed long and to which I have returned many times over two or more decades. There are the names of places which are home because they are the places of my childhood: Stoney Hill, Port Antonio. I have seen things I thought would outlast me vanish—for instance, the great bamboo passage leading into the town of Port Antonio from the east, taken not by the sea or by a hurricane, but by the vicious leveller Progress.

Gone like Emmaus, a place lost to time. Perhaps that is why, from that geographic loss, the poem is an elegy, or it has elegiac shading, even though, ultimately, it is an attempt to celebrate with oceanic clarity and indistinctness the difficult joy of homecoming. To once again, before it is gone, scale the devil’s altitude of Paramin, in Trinidad, and see the bawled-out blue of the Caribbean Sea.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the W.E.B Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University and the acclaimed author of three volumes of poetry and a collection of essays. “The Mariner’s Progress,” the title poem of his forthcoming volume, first appeared in 

ser-baste-b

The Mariner's Progress (Revisited)

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America runs on Adderall. From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, through prep school and grad school, in ad agencies and magazines, many of our most powerful minds are flying on prescription-grade speed. And all these uppers do a lot more than increase productivity. They induce a particular set of behaviors—a passive-aggressive management style, a manic discourse, a sarcastic affect—that can fuse into a culture when the number of users reaches critical mass.

This culture is only becoming more pervasive. The last few years have seen the 

 since Adderall first passed FDA approval in 1996. If Adderall were not considered a productivity drug—economically beneficial, on balance—we would almost certainly be talking about an amphetamine epidemic. And maybe we should be. Adderall’s efficacy for treating ADHD, and its popularity among the Professional Managerial Class, has helped obscure what a strange and deleterious drug it can be. Adderall is highly addictive, the returns it delivers are steadily diminishing, and the risks of heart disease and psychosis increase by the year. In the meantime, it just makes you kind of annoying.

The drastic increase in Adderall use hasn't raised nearly as much uproar as the national shortage it helped cause. The consternation at the peak of the drought was understandable: our country was suddenly lacking one of its key ingredients. Productivity declined by 3%. Twitter started to suck. People raised on Adderall started unwittingly dabbling in meth. At 

, we took this as an opportunity—a kind of pause—to reflect on the impact this pervasive drug has had on our culture. While Adderall use is widespread and normalized among a certain class of Americans, almost no one talks about it publicly. We were curious: What cultural shifts have come out of this incredibly upbeat epidemic? What are the short- and long-term consequences of millions of people getting hooked on speed?

To get to the bottom of this, we asked some of our favorite writers to each explore a particular facet of the culture that has evolved around this powerful drug.

The History of Adderall

The History of Adderall by Daniel Kolitz

There was a time in my life, ten years ago now, when I did almost nothing but take Adderall and write about Adderall. These were complementary pursuits. The more Adderall I took, the more fervently I investigated Adderall—its culture, history, and collision with my life. While an alcoholic writing a history of alcohol might struggle to stay on the ball, in my case substance and subject were perfectly matched. Night after night I brought myself to the verge of a heart attack paging through abstruse FDA documents; mid-morning after mid-morning I went to bed assured of the rightness of my project. I was cornering the facts. I was blowing the doors wide open.

This project was personal to me. I was an early adopter, first prescribed Adderall in the third grade. At the time I felt that it was mostly poison. The come-up was great: there are layers to "Californication" you simply cannot hear unless you are nine years old, flying on pharmaceutical speed, and listening to it on your discman, ideally on the short-bus to Jewish day school. But

the drug drained me of the one thing I cared about most: my prankish 

. No one likes a drugged class clown, except perhaps for that clown's teachers, school administrators, and parents. So I refused to take it. The jokes were more important. Later, a child psychiatrist would tell me that many people who hate Adderall as children wind up liking it in adulthood, after developing the kinds of worldly ambitions for which the drug was intended. He was right. At twenty-three—a postgrad burning for self-advancement—I suddenly couldn't get enough of the stuff. You could almost say it was a problem.

Certainly, taking Adderall all night and drinking to fall asleep and then taking more Adderall to pretend to function at my largely fake job promoting various lifestyle products had its pleasures. But more and more often I just felt haunted and unwell. Even at the height of my mania I knew that this was no way to live. I also knew that I was far from the only person living this way. At hedge funds and media startups, coffee shops and WeWorks, the signs were plain to see: an entire generation grinding its teeth to dust, wrecking its posture, struggling to blink. How had we landed in this weird bind? Who exactly had allowed it to happen?

To help me answer those questions, I contacted preeminent speed historian Nicholas Rasmussen. His classic 

 sheds valuable light on the period, in the 1950s and ‘60s, when amphetamine’s ubiquity as an antidepressant and diet aid helped to usher in America’s first speed epidemic. I was nervous to talk to him, partly because of his book's formidable intelligence and range, and partly because I'd taken a bunch of Adderall about twenty minutes before our scheduled Skype call. The call went poorly, as you can see from this excerpt:

It seems, obviously, that most cases of amphetamine use don't ultimately end in psychosis or heroin addiction, although many do. And that's not to say that widespread amphetamine use isn't a social harm—but sometimes it seems like the consequences might be a bit more subtle or pernicious, especially when it's being taken by, say, a working professional, who might actually be sticking to low doses, and not necessarily escalating and taking ten then fifteen then twenty milligrams...so I'm wondering what you think the downside of amphetamine is when it's used, maybe the word isn't responsibly, but when it's used in relatively low doses over an extended period of time.

RASMUSSEN

I'm basically wondering, outside of the extreme cases of psychosis or heroin addiction, and escalating usage, what are the downsides of amphetamine use among the general population, if they're taking it in low doses over an extended period of time?

I believe that it's an addictive drug. So for those who don't get addicted—that is to say, those who only use it occasionally—there won't be any particularly great negative consequences. But since most people who are prescribed the drug seem to develop a dependence on it, at least adults, it strikes me as too dangerous to be used in this way.

So, what's the downside of being dependent on a drug like Adderall?

Rasmussen

If you're dependent on amphetamine, you will develop amphetamine psychosis eventually.

Amphetamine psychosis just being defined as taking so much that you kind of go off the deep end, or—

It is a paranoid psychosis indistinguishable from schizophrenia.

Joke's on Rasmussen: I never went insane. Instead I developed a chronic tension headache that plagues me to this day, half-heartedly dabbled in the opioid epidemic (how else was I supposed to sleep?), and emerged, after ten months, with a strikingly unpublishable 12,000-word melange of memoir, broad-strokes cultural theorizing, and in-the-weeds regulatory analysis. In a way, the essay was a tortured account of the conditions—historical, political, neuro-pharmacological—that allowed for its creation. Reading it for the first time in almost a decade, I ache for the boy who wrote it. I also sympathize with his mission. Because he was onto something. The details of Adderall's FDA approval really are, I still think, a scandal.

Adderall’s precursor, Obetrol, was cooked up in a converted Queens garage sometime in the 1950s. Back then, pharmaceutical regulation was laissez faire.

Becoming a large-scale amphetamine manufacturer was, more or less, a matter of buying the equipment and getting to work. You had to prove your drug was safe—a low threshold at the time—but no law stipulated that it had to work as advertised. Here’s how William Goodrich, chief legal counsel at the FDA, described the situation:

The way drugs were investigated, a physician from the company would go out in the community with some samples and say to the doctor, "I've got this new drug for so-and-so. Here's some samples. Try it out and let us know how you like it." And they would get back a letter from him: "I tried it out on eight patients and they all got along fine." That's the kind of stuff that was coming in for science.

Goodrich was a virtuous public servant: on his retirement, he was hailed as the FDA’s “most influential figure and guardian of its institutional memory.” In an era when the agency was a public joke, lacking even basic enforcement powers, he made it his mission to harass profiteers—among them, notably, Rexar Pharmaceuticals, Obetrol’s manufacturers. In a complaint to the DOJ, he accused the company of selling high doses of Obetrol with no license, and promoting the drug with the “unsupportable and illogical” claim that it was safer and more effective than other amphetamines (a theme Adderall would pick up a few decades later). 

The FDA finally banned Obetrol in 1973 as part of the agency’s broader effort to curb the speed crisis, declaring the drug “ineffective” and “lacking in proof of safety.” In response, Rexar reformulated Obetrol, swapping out the methamphetamine it contained for various amphetamine salts—the soon-to-be patented Adderall recipe—and resumed distribution, albeit in small enough quantities to evade regulatory notice. The drug’s circulation in the 1970s and 1980s is hard to trace, although it had a way of popping up in huge quantities at random doctor’s offices across the country. One news report in the 1980s highlighted the work of Ohio doctor Mattie Vaughn, whose practice was described in a court memo as “nothing more than a thinly disguised drug-trafficking operation,” and who in eighteen months dispensed nearly 140,000 of these new Obetrols to 4,500 patients.

By the early ’90s, the market had largely dried up, Rexar’s owner was dead, and his family had put the company up for sale. A Kentucky-based high school football coach-cum-pain pill entrepreneur named Roger Griggs examined its meager assets and seized on a surprising detail. Almost all of Obetrol’s minimal sales—$40,000 a year—were attributable to a single child psychiatrist: a Dr. Robert Jones based in Provo, UT. Griggs made plans to visit him. Over lunch in Provo, the enterprising doctor reported that he had been prescribing Obetrol to ADHD kids who couldn’t tolerate Ritalin. The results, he claimed, had been spectacular. Griggs was sold. He bought the drug, changed its name (ADD for All: Adderall) and began marketing it at scale with his company Richwood. By the middle of 1994, just a few months into this campaign, 30,000 children were on it.

Unfortunately, Griggs had apparently skipped an important step. He soon received a call from the FDA, informing him that his flagship product had never received the agency’s approval. It was "devastating," Griggs said, to learn their product was technically illegal. Nonetheless, Richwood promptly initiated a marketing campaign in a prominent child psychiatry journal, triggering a warning letter from the FDA restating that Adderall was an unapproved new drug, the continued marketing of which may result "in seizure and/or injunction."

There were good reasons to not approve the drug. Contra its early advertising, there was no evidence it was any more effective than Ritalin in treating ADHD. Its component parts had been generically available for decades. Asking for the “exclusive” right to manufacture Adderall was equivalent to asking for the “exclusive” right to manufacture a combination of peanut butter and jelly. The drug’s chemical makeup and subjective effects were functionally indistinguishable from Dexedrine, which had lost its patent decades ago. Had Adderall been submitted as a completely new drug, rather than as a “supplement” to Obetrol’s 1950s-era application, it would never have been approved—no company would even think to try in the first place.

And yet—after months of mounting tensions—the FDA's tone abruptly brightened, and in a surprise about-face the drug was granted full approval and market exclusivity in January 1996, without a single substantial clinical trial submitted to demonstrate its effectiveness. Why? As 

journalist Alan Schwarz reports in his book 

, a senator's son had been taking Adderall before the FDA intervened; the senator "pitched a fit" and the agency rushed to approve it. Who that senator was Schwarz doesn’t say, but my research suggests it was Orrin Hatch, who took a curious interest in Richwood’s plight around this time.

Sensing an opening, pharma giant Shire purchased Richwood for $185.7 million in 1997, and from there worked to advance a paradigm shift in psychiatry, one which would posit ADHD as an underdiagnosed scourge tanking the potential of not just millions of children but—once that market was saturated—millions of adults. In the meantime, Adderall has spawned multiple blockbuster sequels: Adderall XR, Vyvanse, and, most recently, Mydayis, a long-release version of Adderall which lasts, incomprehensibly, for sixteen hours.

“We defined the attention deficit disorder market,” Roger Griggs told me, ten years ago, as I struggled to extricate myself from both my dependency on Adderall and the mountain of Adderall-related documents, reports, statistics, and interview transcripts I had frantically compiled. “There was nobody promoting it. We were the first people to do that.” By every conceivable metric, they succeeded. Per the most recent data, prescriptions of amphetamine—a chemical whose alleged therapeutic benefits were more or less entirely discredited at the start of the 1990s—have increased by roughly 2,500% since Adderall went on the market.

There is a robust, well-funded ADHD advocacy movement which insists that this is a good thing—that millions of people who would otherwise be struggling to read restaurant menus or walking blindly into traffic are now able, with Adderall, to live healthy, fulfilling, productive lives. And maybe they’re right. User reports are so variable that generalizations are useless: few experiences are more epistemologically destabilizing than scrolling a heated Adderall-related Reddit thread.

I can say that, in my case, Adderall broadened my ambitions to the precise degree that it thwarted any possibility of achieving them. This had something to do with the quality of attention the drug generates, which is, above all, value-neutral. On Adderall, everything is interesting. This is one reason my Adderall essay was doomed from its inception. Whenever I seemed close to wrapping things up, another vital avenue of inquiry would materialize, until I found myself—not entirely without reason—compiling material on minor figures surrounding the Kennedy assassination. Adderall, I eventually had to acknowledge, had destroyed my Adderall essay, and was on its way to destroying me.

The drug’s influence has since escalated dramatically. As the recent shortages have demonstrated, there are hundreds of thousands of people who cannot function without it, owing perhaps to a deficiency of norepinephrine (the leading neurological theory for the basis of ADHD), or (as likely) to a form of iatrogenic chemical dependency, or both, or neither. Does it matter that the US is the only country where this happens? That, however complex the rise in speed use, not to mention opioid use, might appear, these phenomena are effectively mono-causal?

The FDA approved OxyContin just one month before Adderall, and allowed Purdue Pharma to claim it actually 

addiction, thus creating that company’s fatal marketing advantage. Likewise, Adderall was the first new amphetamine granted market exclusivity since the ’60s speed epidemic—inexplicably, the agency granted Richwood a reason to get as many people as possible hooked on amphetamines. If Adderall’s pushers have since evaded Sackler-style comeuppance, this can be largely attributed to the fact that it’s basically impossible to fatally overdose on it. Entire desolated towns can testify to the destructiveness of OxyContin; all that Adderall leaves behind are the phantoms of lives that might have gone otherwise, my own included.

My Party Drug of Choice

My Party Drug of Choice by Geoffrey Mak

In my twenties, I thought I could live like a god. I snorted coke by the pool at the Standard Hotel, did pull-ups the first time I popped ecstasy at Berghain, snorted an entire gram of K on a Tuesday night, dropped acid at Documenta, smoked meth from a dealer who fucked me in a bathhouse, passed out the first time I did G and chipped my front tooth on concrete. As you can see, I’ve put myself through a lot, so these days I keep it simple. I rave on Adderall.

One 15mg pill gives me a clean, steady hum that energizes me from midnight to dawn. It never makes a moment something other than it is. I might not get the jolt of energy, as if on speed. I just feel alert. Like I’m the only one at the party paying this much attention to everything.

I’m thirty-five years old and have been raving for ten years. I feel like I just announced, “I’m Geoff, an alcoholic,” because I know about that life. I did the Twelve Steps, found God in the wisdom of the Third Step Prayer, but these days I stick to a harm-reduction regimen with friends who hold me accountable. Addicts are my people. My “Harm Reduction Buddy” and I text each other if we ever have cravings. We don’t convince the other not to do drugs—we just listen. If he calls me, I drop whatever I’m doing. Like the night he called me after he relapsed on meth, I came over and we flushed the syringes and then I trip-sat with him for thirteen hours and we cried in each other’s arms until the sleeping pills kicked in. Real love.

Adderall doesn’t merit a call to my Buddy. This pharma-grade amphetamine doesn’t intoxicate me as much as it infects me with a kind of discerning mania. On Adderall, I can’t tolerate music unless it’s excellent. I hear it all. Hi-hats pattering like fingernails tapping on glass. The terrifying serenity of a kick drum tuned to a minor key.

While ketamine had me riding chariots of fire no matter how shitty the set, Adderall demands an intentional approach. I require a regimen to get into the music. If the beat is slow, I rock my shoulders to my alternating two-step, as if passing an invisible ball in a Z shape across my body. If the rhythm is higher, something like 160 BPM, I rotate my arms, in a pinwheel, ducking my head like I’m in a washing machine. I spin around until I’m dizzy because it reminds me of being high. Grace is a gift from God you know you don’t deserve, and I take what I can get.

Most nights, I hit what I refer to as The Wall: the measure of my soul. Despair comes down and I face the limits of my own interiority. I used to dissociate from this feeling with various powders, but now I confront it, unblinking. Defeated, I get up and walk upon the dance floor. Now it’s just me and the speakers. I don’t ease into it this time—I thrash around, flailing against my body’s aching inertia. People clear away, and I find myself in a circle of my own. Lunging my arms, I can hear my throat lurch in grunts and cries, and sometimes, I 

 crying. My head swings low, jaw unhooked. This is the moment I know that a party has turned into a rave. Humbled with gratitude, my eyebrows smash together and I turn up, eyes rolled back, mouth open as if ready to receive rain. 

Lord, relieve me of the bondage of self. 

I am on this dance floor and this is what I am made of. A freezer burn ripples across my muscles, and it feels like pleasure. I am judging everyone.

Glitches and Miracles

Glitches and Miracles

Katie Kitamura: Writing Pleasure

Katie Kitamura: Writing Pleasure

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