Maya Chen (she/her) is the social media director/list-maker for Los Angeles Review of Books.

Maya Chen

In 
 
GIFs 
Mismatched celebrity couples (Jeremy Allen White x Rosalía) 
Crocheting (unavoidable) 
Twunks 
TikTok recipes 
Animation 
Chicken Shop girl 
Hot Ones as award season press 
Knitwear discourse 
True Earnestness 
Aquaphor 
Tank Air 
Alt-lit 
Public radio 
Snoopy AND Woodstock (could potentially boost Knott’s Berry Farm) 
Noah Kahan (early 2024) 
Ayo Edebiri awards winner 
Tooth gems 
One 2000s-era in-store retailer haven’t decided which yet, potentially Old Navy 
Local politics 
Photo booths 
Sports? 
Trolls (movie and the phenomenon) 
Crossbody bags that aren’t fanny packs but almost are 
Zendaya film star acclaim 
Barre adjacent classes 
Zip-up hoodies 
Hōjicha 
Microdosing 
Canned alcohol 
Claw clips shaped like things 
Charm necklaces 
Quilt jackets 
Mary Janes 
Athletic fashion shoes 
Mid-rise 
Bootcut jeans 
Mini tote bags 
Dad bods 
Marfa, Texas 
Desert tones 
 
&nbsp; 
¤ 
Out 
 
Paul Mescal 
Jeremy Allen White 
Astrology 
Twinks 
TikTok food challenges 
Trader Joe’s 
Disney animation 
Netflix originals/adapted media 
Brittany Broski 
Jack Harlow 
Martin Scorsese TikToks 
HBO … 
The disaffected youth 
Amateur DJs 
Aritzia 
Indie sleaze 
NPR brand 
Noah Kahan (late 2024) 
Line tattoos 
Blue wave (spiritually) 
Film photography 
Lisa Says Gah 
Low-quality tote bags 
True crime 
Politicians 
Stranger Things 
Lifting 
Pullover sweaters 
Asian minimalism 
Poppers? 
Oat milk 
Hard seltzers 
Pickleball 
Mullets 
Wolf cuts 
Regular claw clips 
Ribbons 
Pendant necklaces 
Kitten heels 
Mega platforms

Ins/Outs of 2024

LARB Quarterly, no. 40: Water

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Frank Bergon is a novelist, critic, and essayist whose writing focuses primarily on California and the American West. He has published 12 books, most recently a memoir about his Basque American heritage, The Toughest Kid We Knew (2020). His novel Jesse’s Ghost was selected in 2024 for The New York Times’ “Best Books About California.” He is an emeritus professor of English at Vassar College.

Frank Bergon

APRIL IS NATIONAL Poetry Month, and on April 23—celebrated as National Talk Like Shakespeare Day in honor of the dual anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and death—we’re encouraged to speak like the Bard and his characters. This playful task becomes both challenging and illuminating in face of perhaps the most puzzling speech in all of Shakespeare’s plays, typically heard as gibberish except in a few places, like rural California. 
 
Shakespeare toys with numerous European languages throughout his work, including Italian, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Often, these are spoken in thick accents, with comedic pronunciation. The same holds true for his use of the various British dialects—Scots, Welsh, Cornish, and Irish—heard in scruffy taverns or high courts. In Henry V, soldiers fracture the King’s English while the king himself and a French princess descend into a comical Franglais courtship. Yet, no matter how garbled the speech, playgoers can usually identify distinct languages and dialects—that is, until they bump up against what scholars have called the “invented language,” “unintelligible gabble,” and “‘Boskos thromuldo boskos’ mumbo-jumbo” in his comedy All’s Well That Ends Well. 
 
Here’s the situation: seeking to fool a potential traitor, a French lord and some soldiers make what seem to be nonsense sounds, as though speaking a foreign language only they can understand. While the possible traitor, Parolles, “hath a smack of all neighboring languages,” he’s unable to make sense of the lord and soldiers’ conversation, and mistakenly concludes that his captors are Muscovite mercenaries speaking Russian, which he doesn’t know. He wishes a soldier would use German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, or French so he’d be able to understand: 
 
ACT IV 
SCENE I. Without the Florentine camp. 
Enter Second French Lord, with five or six other Soldiers in ambush. […] 
Sec. Lord. Throca movousus, cargo, cargo, cargo. 
All. Cargo, cargo, cargo, villianda par corbo, cargo. 
Parolles. O, ransom, ransom! do not hide mine eyes. 
They seize and blindfold him. 
First Soldier. Boskos thromuldo boskos. 
Par. I know you are the Muskos’ regiment; 
And I shall lose my life for want of language: 
If there be here German, or Dane, low Dutch, 
Italian, or French, let him speak to me. […] 
First Sold. Boskos vauvado: I understand thee, and can speak 
thy tongue. Kerelybonto […] 
Par. O! 
First Sold. O, pray, pray, pray! Manka revania dulche. 
Sec. Lord. Oscorbidulchos volivorco. […] 
First Sold. Acordo linta. […] 
Exit, with Parolles guarded. A short alarum within. […] 
SCENE III. The Florentine camp. 
Enter the two French Lords and some two or three Soldiers. 
First Lord. Hoodman comes! Portotartarossa. […] 
First Sold. Bosko chimurcho. 
First Lord. Boblibindo chicurmurco. 
Some of these invented words in the play may correspond to actual neo-Latin words from Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish, but these are few. Yet several phrases strike the ear as Basque, a language I grew up hearing in the San Joaquin Valley. 
¤ 
In Shakespeare’s time, Basque was spoken on both sides of the Pyrenees, as it is now in four provinces of Spain and three in France. It survives today as the oldest language in Europe, with no connection to any other language in the world. Basques call their language Euskara; a speaker of Basque is called an Euskaldun. 
 
Like many Basque Americans, I came late to a clear understanding of my heritage. I knew from a young age my ancestry was Basque, and published a short story in my high school magazine about a Basque sheepherder who lost his band in a San Joaquin Valley flood. I’ve since written four novels about Basque American characters. In a book of essays and a memoir, I wrote about Basque friends, as well as my own Basque family—in Nevada, where I was born; in the California ranch country where I grew up; and in the Basque Country itself, where I continue to visit and keep in touch with relatives. 
 
Still, a broader understanding of Basque history and culture eluded me until recently, and my awareness continues to expand with ongoing discoveries. Just as a recent genealogical test interpreted my DNA as 98 percent Basque, archaeologists in 2015 discovered that <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509851112">some modern Basques share DNA links with ancestral Basque farmers</a> buried 3,000 years before the Roman Empire. When Romans encountered these ancient people in the first century, they identified them with Latin terms like Vascones or Vasconum. (I didn’t know why the Romans came up with these names for the inhabitants in my grandparents’ ancestral homeland until I started work on my memoir. Then, I dusted off my high school and college Latin and Greek to discover that early Roman historians were phonetically reproducing what the local inhabitants called themselves.) 
 
Two thousand years ago in his Geography, the Greco-Roman historian Strabo recorded the earliest surviving names of these pre-Roman people as Οὐασκώνων and Οὐάσκωνας. The Roman historian Livy called them “Vasconum.” In the next century, Ptolemy wrote “Ouascones”; others wrote “Vascones.” Despite differences in appearance, the words have similar sounds if we remember that v in Latin was probably pronounced like a soft w or ou. Both the Greek (Ouaskonas) and Latin (Vascones) become close phonetic spellings of what an early 20th-century Basque woman like my grandmother might have called herself in her Markina dialect: “Ouskunan,” or “Euskunan,” meaning someone who speaks Euskara. 
¤ 
Even now, the survival of this ancient language remains as mysterious as its origin. As recently as the summer of 2021, archaeologists discovered the oldest authenticated writing in the language of ancient Vascones <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/words-etched-into-an-ancient-bronze-hand-hint-at-the-mysterious-origins-of-the-basque-language-180981153/">on a flat bronze hand</a> probably hung from the door of a house 2,100 years ago. The artifact was inscribed with approximately five words; the first word, “sorioneku,” is a forerunner of “zorioneko,” spoken by modern Basques to mean “good luck.” Except for a few other surviving fragments of early writing in the form of letters, songs, charms, and proverbs, Euskara remained primarily an oral language for centuries. The first book in Basque, a collection of religious and secular poems by Bernard Dechepare (Bernat Etxepare in Basque), was published in 1545, only 19 years before Shakespeare was born. 
 
During the 16th century, Basques were known less as writers than as Europe’s earliest whalers, who taught the skill to the English, Dutch, and Danish. Basques fished for cod as far away as the Newfoundland coast and maintained tryworks for processing whale blubber in Labrador. In 1534, after the French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and claimed the “New Land” for France, he encountered natives who knew Basque words and expressions. Most ships sailing across the Atlantic from Spain to the Americas were built in Basque shipyards. Iron mines and foundries south of the Pyrenees, especially those of Bilbao (Bilbo in Basque), had long been the main European suppliers of metal for shipbuilding, as well as for nails, anchors, farm tools, firearms, and swords. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare uses the Basque word “bilbo” to denote the famous sword of flexible steel. In Hamlet, iron shackles are called “bilboes.” 
 
An early comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost, takes place in the Basque areas of Basse-Navarre and Béarn. The main characters in the play are based on historical figures—namely Henri of Navarre, later King Henry IV of France, whose mother, Jeanne d’Albret (Joana Albretekoa in Basque), not only had the New Testament translated into Basque for her subjects in 1571 but also tried to institute Euskara as the region’s official administrative language. 
 
Basque regions again play a role in All’s Well That Ends Well when the heroine, Helena, shadows her runaway husband from France to Italy. The fanciful plot of Shakespeare’s folkloric source requires Helena to be in Florence, disguised as a barefoot penitent. The source doesn’t mention, yet Shakespeare does, that she’s purportedly on her way “To Saint Jacques le Grand” at Compostela in Spain—that is, the Camino de Santiago and its trails through the Basque Country to the shrine of Saint James the Apostle. In the mid-12th century, the French cleric Aymeric Picaud circulated a travel guide for pilgrims and recorded in his journal the earliest known glossary of what was, in his censorious view, the “barbarian language” of Basques as opposed to “Christians.” By the time of Shakespeare’s birth, pilgrims had encountered Basques for seven centuries on their way to what had become the most visited shrine in Europe. 
 
Meanwhile, north of the Pyrenees for 250 years until the mid-15th century, Basque ships and sailors from Bayonne hauled wine from Gascony to England. (The words “Gascons” and “Vascones” share the same Latin root.) Gascon merchants and Basque shippers stayed at ports and fairs in the cities of Bristol, Sandwich, and especially London for up to three months to sell wine and salt before sailing home with grain and hides. Despite English suspicions about aliens and their unintelligible tongues, the lucrative wine trade allowed “Gascon-speakers” to stay longer than other foreigners—and to live where they wanted. By Shakespeare’s time, some remained permanently as “Gascon émigrés.” 
¤ 
Until now, the mystery of Shakespeare’s “gibberish” has gone unsolved in part because it doesn’t look like Euskara. For starters, the Basque alphabet doesn’t use the letters c, q, v, w, or y. Transcribed into the Basque alphabet, though, the babble in the play begins to look like misspelled Euskara: 
 
Troka mobutzus, kargo, kargo, kargo. 
Kargo, kargo, kargo, biliando par korbo, kargo, 
Boskos tromuldo boskos. 
Boskos baubado. 
Kerelibonto. 
Manka rebania dultxe. 
Otzkorbidultxos boliborko. 
Akordo linta. 
Portotartarotza. 
Bosko tximurtxo. 
Boblibindo txikurmurko. 
I sent the original passages to native speakers, professors, and translators in the Basque Country and in the United States. Everyone confirmed that, while they couldn’t hear any actual Euskara words, they did hear its sounds. At Mondragon University, Professor Monika Madinabeitia read the lines to six colleagues and 10 students from places in the Basque Country with differing dialects. The professors noted nine places in the reading that sounded Basque. The students agreed, particularly on those with the tx-sound of ch. “Euskara is a very sibilant language,” Monika emailed, “and there are loads of [z] [s] [tz] [tx] sounds. These are the ones that sounded like Basque to my students.” Amaia Gabantxo, a translator of several Basque books, summed up the consensus of my various respondents by observing that “some of the syllabic progressions in those ‘words’ do sound like Basque to someone who doesn’t understand or speak it. It would seem that it is an attempt at something that sounds like Basque.” 
 
For me, the clincher is the way Shakespeare emphasizes the word “Boskos.” From Latin came the words “Vascos” in Spanish and “Basques” in French and later English. Their similarity in sound is apparent when we remember that v in Spanish is pronounced much like b. Growing up in rural California, I regularly heard those of my ethnicity called “Bascos.” In All’s Well That Ends Well, Parolles, “the manifold linguist,” thinks the soldiers are Russian-speaking “Muskos.” But he’s wrong. Their shouted response implies the correction: No, we’re “Boskos.” And, in case we miss the phonological significance of “Muskos” and “Boskos,” Shakespeare repeats the word four times: “Boskos […] boskos […] Boskos […] Bosko.” 
 
I think he knew what he was doing: capturing the sound of a rare, ancient language, surviving nearly intact today—the speech of Basques. On National Talk Like Shakespeare Day, it might be best to listen. After all, Shakespeare had a good ear. 
¤ 
Some context has been adapted from Frank Bergon’s The Toughest Kid We Knew: The Old New West (2020), <a href="https://unpress.nevada.edu/9781948908641/the-toughest-kid-we-knew/">available now</a> from University of Nevada Press.

I Understand Thee, and Can Speak Thy Tongue: California Unlocks Shakespeare’s Gibberish

Melina Moe is the curator of literature at Columbia University’s Rare Book &amp; Manuscript Library.

Melina Moe

“I FOUND IT extremely honest, forthright, and moving in ways I had not expected it to be,” Toni Morrison wrote to an aspiring novelist in 1977, “but it is a shuddering book and one that offers no escape for any reader whatsoever.” Still, Morrison, then a senior editor at Random House, liked the manuscript so much that, before responding, she passed it around the office to drum up support. The verdict was “intelligent,” but also “very ‘down,’ depressing, spiritually abrasive.” Whatever the merits of the writing, Morrison’s colleagues predicted, the potent mix of dissatisfaction, anger, and mournfulness would limit the book’s commercial appeal—and Morrison reluctantly agreed. “You don’t want to escape and I don’t want to escape,” her letter concludes, “but perhaps the public does and perhaps we are in the business of helping them do that.” 
 
During her 16 years at Random House, Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters. Usually typed on pink, yellow, or white carbonless copy paper, and occasionally bearing Random House’s old logo and letterhead, these are now filed among her correspondence in the Random House archives at Columbia University’s Rare Book &amp; Manuscript Library. While many of the letters were mailed to New York, Boston, and even Rome, others were sent to writers in more obscure places; some are addressed to “general delivery” in various small towns across the United States. 
 
Regardless of destination, Morrison’s rejections tend to be long, generous in their suggestions, and direct in their criticism. The letters themselves—generally one, two at most, exchanged with a given writer—constitute an asymmetrical archive. On one end of each communiqué is the ghost of a submitted manuscript (absent from the archive after being returned to the sender, although in some cases survived by a cover letter). On the other is a rejection from Morrison, sometimes brusque yet typically offering something more than an expression of disinterest—notes on craft, character development, the need for more (or less) drama. But also: Autopsies of a changing, and in many ways diminishing, publishing industry; frustrations with the tastes of a reading public; and sympathies for poets, short story writers, and other authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres. 
¤ 
Most of Morrison’s surviving rejection letters date to the 1970s, a period that saw rapid changes in New York book publishing. This was especially true at Random House: a decade after going public in 1959, the company used the influx of cash to fuel a wave of acquisitions and two mergers, purchasing Alfred A. Knopf and Then, in 1965, Random House itself was acquired by RCA, an electronics company, only to be sold a few years later to a media conglomerate owned by the Newhouse family. Under this aegis, Random House went on to acquire a slew of imprints that expanded the company’s global footprint and generic range. 
 
In short, like Pangaea breaking up in reverse, the publishing industry underwent the dramatic, global consolidation that produced today’s “Big Five”: Simon &amp; Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. Recently, this would have shrunk to the Big Four had <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/industry-deals/article/85004-bertelsmann-to-buy-s-s-for-2-2-billion.html">an attempt by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann</a> (owner of Penguin Random House, the largest US publisher) to buy Simon &amp; Schuster from its parent company, ViacomCBS, not been blocked by a US federal judge on antitrust grounds. Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/penguin-random-house-simon-schuster.html">celebrated the collapse of the deal,</a> claiming: “The proposed merger would have reduced competition, decreased author compensation, diminished the breadth, depth, and diversity of our stories and ideas, and ultimately impoverished our democracy.” 
 
Kanter’s statement may seem grandiose, but the underlying anxiety is and was real; Morrison herself voiced similar concerns 40 years earlier. In her 1981 keynote speech at the American Writers Congress, she warned that the business had already tipped too far away from the work of writers and editors, so that “the vitality in the arts which promoters like to talk about is false. Beneath the headlines of blockbusters and bestsellers, underneath the froth of the book fairs,” she averred, “something is terribly wrong.” 
 
It’s perhaps unsurprising that the conditions of for-profit cultural production tend to reward the precisely honed, predictable commodity. Literary scholar Dan Sinykin recently argued that the conglomerate era in publishing has transformed the fictional works that get acquired, published, and placed (strategically) on store shelves. “Conglomerate fiction,” which is often genre fiction—that is, more or less easily labeled as mystery, romance, or science fiction—is less distinguishable by its formal characteristics than by its origins within a “conglomerate superorganism” of marketers, acquisitions editors, dust-jacket designers, and many others whose jobs are on the line and therefore have a stake in a given book’s success. The shift hasn’t been unique to fiction. If the conglomerate era produced corporate authors, <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=21461">the studio system</a> churned out Hollywood blockbusters, while <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674062092">creative writing programs</a> shaped a distinctly reflexive MFA style. Even so, Morrison’s warning about the state of publishing in 1981 didn’t advocate a return to the solitary, romantic toiler. Instead, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/10/arts/writers-congress-opens-with-calls-for-solidarity.html">her keynote address called for movement building</a>: “We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writers movement—assertive, militant, pugnacious.” 
¤ 
Morrison’s letters are unexpectedly forthcoming. Often, she supplements her rejections with diagnoses of an ailing publishing business, growing frustrations with unimaginative taste, the industry’s aversion to risk-taking, and her own sense of creative constraint working at a commercial press (especially in the late 1970s and early ’80s; Morrison left editorial work to be a full-time novelist in the early 1980s). They sketch a “road not taken” in mainstream publishing, as experimental volumes, poetry, and short story collections were increasingly treated as suspect investments of editorial time and publishing house resources. Current market conditions made for “a losing proposition for the publisher and a hopeless one for short story writers,” Morrison informed one author, and unless they were penned by famous novelists, short story collections were “almost like the publication of poetry”—that is, “practically impossible to make a profit from.” In another, lengthy letter from 1977, Morrison outlined how the economics of a book project depended on the mechanisms of distribution. It wasn’t just that casual readers didn’t buy short story collections, but that the major institutions responsible for generating widespread enthusiasm and name recognition were also uninterested: “Book clubs do not make offers for collections of short stories; mass paperback houses do not make offers for collections of short stories by single authors and so we are left with the hope that ten or fifteen thousand people will go into a bookstore and ask for a particular author by name.” The rejection concludes with Morrison’s admission that “[t]here is no point in my being other than honest with you, you should continue to publish in magazines and if you ever decide to write a novel, I’d be delighted to look at it.” 
 
With other projects, Morrison tried to tap into available marketing networks. She wrote to Good Housekeeping in the hopes they would select Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976) for their book club, as well as to dozens of Black cultural organizations to see if they would organize reading clubs for Angela Davis’s autobiography. Despite being met with middling success, these campaigns—as well as Morrison’s work on the genre-bending Black Book (1974)—fueled an increase in queries from West Coast, experimental voices. Morrison was humane even with the most hopeless of proposals, like those she received from aspiring crossover academics. In 1978, Morrison told a Berkeley professor that the “commercial requirements of Random House are such that literary research and criticism does not figure in its plans.” Still, Morrison’s letter suggests that she’d read the entire manuscript, providing suggestions and the consolation that “unless you have some very ‘hip’ (and probably inaccurate) sociological view to tag on to the literary criticism, it is received with very little enthusiasm.” Similarly, Morrison wrote an apologetic note to Wayne Daniels and Ishmael Reed after passing on a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1976/02/01/archives/four-yardbirds-the-guest-word.html">Yardbird</a> reader in 1974, explaining that “the financial crisis that has swept the country has now gripped everybody in publishing and any project on which there is a modicum of risk is heavily discouraged.” She nonetheless offered to “do whatever [she could] to promote it,” asking for copies she could use to “generate some enthusiasm on this coast.” 
 
Morrison was keenly aware that the publishing world, like other areas of business, is a place where it helps to have friends and connections, industry contacts and people who may owe you (or someone you know) a favor. To that end, she occasionally ended a rejection by offering her name as a kind of passport with which hopeful authors might navigate the borders erected by other cultural gatekeepers. In 1977, she advised one young writer to find an agent and directed him toward the legendary literary agents Georges Borchardt and Peter Matson, adding, “When you write to them you may say that although I could not take your manuscript myself, I was very much in love with it, and I’m willing to put it in writing.” She pointed another young radical in the direction of Jules Geller, a former colleague of Morrison’s who went on to work at the Monthly Review, and sent yet another to Charles Harris—a Black editor who overlapped with Morrison briefly at Random House before leaving to become a founding editor at Howard University Press. Even in her rejections, Morrison was building a network of Black writers and editors who might, one day, work to redraw the contours of commercial publishing. 
¤ 
Above all else, Morrison’s rejection letters focus on craft—that is, on the experience of reading a work under review. In one 1978 rejection of a modern Western, she wrote that “it simply wasn’t interesting enough—the excitement, the ‘gut’s, just weren’t there. I am returning it to you herewith.” This sustained desire to explain her rejections elicits a decades-long, fragmentary discourse on style, on how to advance a plot, on when a manuscript’s structure needs to be more unexpected, or—more commonly—on when it needs to be simplified. Readers are needy creatures, Morrison’s letters suggest, demanding both drama and organization, the space and information to make discoveries themselves yet a clear enough path so as not to feel lost. In 1975, she described one manuscript as “put together in a way that made it difficult to enjoy. The scenes are too short and packed too tightly. Motives were lacking.” She forestalled any possible rejoinders about the virtues of avant-garde abstraction by professing her awareness that “the subject itself is about disorder and confusion” but maintaining that “the book should create order for the reader, to help him understand more than simply what happened. He needs to know why.” In other words: Attempts to capture the condition of modern life are no excuse for leaving readers miserable, directionless, or bored. 
 
Editorial advice often boils down to show don’t tell, and literary critics like Ted Underwood, Andrew Piper, and Sinykin have argued that the language of sensory and embodied perception sets fiction apart from other genres, like biography. Morrison’s letters often bear this out. In 1979, she informed one writer that their “story is certainly worth telling,” but they “describe people and events from a distance instead of dramatizing them, developing scenes in which the reader discovers what kind of people they are instead of being told.” Vivid scenery and precise details offer readers room to maneuver, a way to discover a world that resonates. A couple of months earlier, she gave similar advice to a young Bebe Moore Campbell (who went on to become a best-selling author). And, addressing one colorful character who had evidently dropped by the Random House offices unannounced to pitch their memoir, Morrison warned about conflating an eventful life with a well-crafted story. “Your manuscript was no less interesting than you were,” she noted; however, to make it publishable, “you would have to add the artifice (or art) that you said you decidedly would not do.” 
 
What Morrison repeatedly stressed, trusting her exceptional acuity as both a reader and writer, is that writing is a skill of its own—one that doesn’t automatically follow from intellectual brilliance, nor from simply being an interesting or important person. She told one young writer that his ideas were good, but warned that concept was the first and lowest hurdle he would face: 
Your work needs force—some manner of making these potentially powerful characters alive and of giving texture to the setting. Giving details about the people—more than what they look like—what idiosyncrasies they have, what distinguished mannerism—and details about where the action takes place: what is in the room, what is the light like, the smells, etc.—all of that would give us texture and tone. 
Characteristically, this detailed rejection ends with encouragement, as Morrison told the author, “I hope you are able to work on [your manuscript] to give it the vitality it certainly deserves.” 
¤ 
Morrison left Random House in 1983. In the years leading up to her departure, she sought to make more time for her own writing by commuting to the office only once a week. Yet she continued to read unsolicited submissions. She apologized to one author for responding almost a year after her manuscript landed on her desk. (She found the submission “messy and disjointed” and had “no idea what or where a novel might be,” but nevertheless concluded that “there is such power and grit and a funny kind of lyricism that I have to tell you to try to make something of it”—and instructed the author to send it back to her when she had.) To an unpublished writer from South Webster, Ohio, Morrison observed that “there is a great deal of vitality in your writing and a freshness that is welcoming,” though, she warned, “it needs a lot of work with structure and dialog.” Even so, she promised to “give the entire manuscript a reading” if he finished. 
 
Remarkably, this was an offer Morrison extended repeatedly, to unpublished, unknown writers—some of whom had sent only a handful of what she believed to be promising pages. Unsurprisingly, her rejection notes are a practiced repertoire of graceful ways to say “no” and “goodbye”: “Enclosed herewith”; “I decline”; “Please accept my genuine regrets”; “Best of luck”; “With regards and regrets.” But they’re an archive of Morrison’s faith in and sheer love for the written word—and of her kindness. 
 
Throughout her career, Morrison balanced her literary commitments, her commercial responsibilities, and her concerns about the industry overall. The increasing friction between these likely contributed to her eventual decision to leave publishing entirely. Morrison’s rejection letters represent perhaps her clearest articulation of this tension, often for the benefit of young authors who had no claim on her attention other than throwing a piece of writing over the Random House transom. Such writers, she warned, faced uphill battles to get their words into print. “The material is interesting,” she concluded in one letter, “but not the writing: it needs a lot of work to give it the energy a story must have.” 
¤ 
Featured image: Alfio Giuffrida, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wandtoepfe_A-exp11_Alfio_Giuffrida-AG_Sinnwerke.jpg">Wandtöpfe A-exp11</a>, 2020, is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en">CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed</a> by the creator. Accessed February 26, 2024.

There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters

Katie Kadue was born and raised in Los Angeles.

Katie Kadue

The Funny Thing About Misogyny

Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (2006); The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize; and Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (2021). For her work at The New Yorker, where she’s a staff writer, she has received two National Magazine Awards, a National Academies Communication Award, and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Elizabeth Kolbert

H Is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z

Bill McKibben’s 1989 book The End of Nature is often regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change. He has written 20 more books since, and founded <a href="https://350.org/?r=US&amp;c=NA">350.org,</a> the first global grassroots climate change campaign, and <a href="https://thirdact.org/">Third Act,</a> which organizes Americans over 60 for action on climate and democracy.

Bill McKibben

“D Is for Despair” Didn’t Sound So Good: A Conversation Between Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert

<h4 class="tb f173">David Hering is a critic, novelist and senior lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Guernica, The Point, The London Magazine, and others. He is currently writing a book on haunting in contemporary culture.</h4>

David Hering

A MAN IS being murdered outside a child’s window. A prisoner of Auschwitz, he was caught fighting with another captive. As punishment, he’s being drowned in a river. We can’t see the incident, but the child can. He moves over to the window and looks out beyond our field of vision. Almost immediately, he withdraws back into the room, and utters a gnomic phrase: “Don’t do that again.” 
 
To viewers watching this scene, it’s unclear to whom this is directed: to the prisoners, to the toy soldiers with which the boy has been playing, or to himself. If it’s the prisoners, he has inculcated the values of the murderers who live in his house; he is the son of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, whose home lies on the other side of the camp wall. If it’s the toys, his revulsion at the murder has been redirected to miniature avatars of those outside his window. Most likely, he is talking to himself, and the thing he must not do again is look at what’s happening next door. Better to stay indoors, on the other side of the wall, and withdraw into the make-believe narrative of his toys. The window, as so often occurs in The Zone of Interest (2023), the film from which this scene is taken, is a blinding white square covered by a gauzy curtain. Something awful we cannot see is happening, just out of sight. 
 
The Zone of Interest focuses on the everyday lives of the Höss family. We never see what happens inside Auschwitz, which appears only as a backdrop. Its towers loom above the concrete garden wall, the smoke from its chimneys spreads upwards into the sky, and human bones are washed downstream into the nearby river. We hear sounds of gunfire, screams, barked orders, and machinery, all of which play out over the Höss family’s domestic lives. Each day, Rudolf Höss leaves his house, murders countless prisoners, and comes home to read his children a bedtime story. There’s a word we might use for this juxtaposition of the domestic idyll and the death camp: “obscene.” But the word captures more than the camp’s utter depravity. It derives from the Greek, “ob-skeen,” which means offstage or out of sight, and Glazer’s film relies as a structural principle on a strict division between what is on- and off-screen. There is no on-screen act of violence in the film. Instead, its mise-en-scène is suffused with the horror of the systematic genocide taking place just out of sight, and Glazer uses the dramatic language of the “ob-skeen” to view the Holocaust—a historical obscenity whose visual depiction has been fraught with difficulty—from a new position, one in which viewers are unavoidably enmeshed. 
 
The titular zone, in the 2014 Martin Amis novel that Glazer adapted, is a space that incorporates the Höss residence and the death camp. However, as with his 2013 adaptation of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), Glazer has reworked the source material into something only tangentially similar. The film, most of which takes place in the Höss house, is viewed in mid and wide shots, and the focus on interpersonal relationships in Amis’s novel is abandoned in favor of a surveillance aesthetic. During filming, Glazer covered the house set with cameras, Big Brother–style, some hidden, some visible in every room. The actors moved around the house, aware they were being filmed but not which cameras were filming them. As a consequence, viewers feel as if they’re watching secretly. While the events taking place in the death camp are obscured from view, the house and garden are subjected contrapuntally to a radical visibility—everything the family does is on show, the very opposite of “ob-skeen,” hyper-visible. 
 
Glazer originally trained in theater design, but despite his stated dislike of films that simply stage drama, theater-like, in front of the viewer, the mise-en-scène of The Zone of Interest insists upon the formal idea of the stage, with Glazer calling the house an “arena.” The film is not stagy; rather, it’s acutely aware of the limits of its frame, and of the tension that derives from our awareness of what lies beyond it. Take the Hösses’ garden, a well-kept area directly next to the death-camp wall. The obsessive planting and cultivation of the space has a sickening counterpart in the unseen ethnic cleansing yards away; an early sequence has Rudolf Höss looking over plans for a circular incineration chamber, whose carefully delineated areas recall visually the garden’s layout. 
 
The Höss house and the death camp participate in a larger dynamic of putative cultivation. The film is well aware, to recall Walter Benjamin, that “[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” But it resorts to a curious formal literalism when delineating its so-called civilized and barbaric spaces, one which becomes bound up with the psychological well-being of the Hösses, and the form of the film itself. When Höss is summoned back to Germany in the second half of the film for possible relocation, we find ourselves transported from a scene of mass murder to the scene where that murder is planned. Despite the acclaim that greets him, Höss appears uncomfortable in Germany, and his wife, Hedwig, who lives unfazed alongside genocide, is distraught at the prospect of leaving her house and garden. The closer Rudolf Höss gets to the original scene of the Holocaust’s conception, the weaker he gets physically. He sees a doctor for an unspecified medical problem; he stumbles around retching; he sits alone in his room. It’s as if the stability of the Hösses is reliant on the scrupulous maintenance of their home in Poland. At times, the form of the film itself can appear on the verge of collapse when its scenic integrity is under threat. As Hedwig Höss tends to her well-kept garden, a shot of a flower—one of the film’s few close-ups—is suffused suddenly with the color red, which obscures the entire screen. The sounds of murder and terror from behind the wall increase, and Mica Levi’s soundtrack judders abruptly in and out, as if coming in on the wrong cue. It’s as if someone has put the film in the wrong gear, and we can hear the grinding of the mechanism as it tries to reassert itself. Sure enough, a few seconds later, the original mis-en-scène abruptly returns. 
 
Glazer’s use of the obscene here occurs within a broader question of what one should or shouldn’t show when depicting this particular historical moment. Concerns about dramatizing the Holocaust on film have regularly come up against at least two objections. Firstly, that no dramatization can do justice to the scale of industrialized mass murder, and secondly, that to use the tools of cinema to dramatize Nazi genocide is to become implicated in the cinematic propaganda that was, of course, a key tool of those who propagated that genocide. Should these films embrace a therapeutic humanism, as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) does? Should they assiduously avoid the dramatic in favor of spoken testimony, as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) does? Juxtapose contemporary documentary footage and wartime images, as with Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), or more recently Steve McQueen’s Occupied City (2023)? Or go beyond the camp wall, but keep most of the horrors around the protagonist out of focus, as in László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015)? 
 
Critics of Holocaust films often cite Theodor Adorno’s admonition that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. But after watching Glazer’s film, I’ve been thinking about his later reconsideration of that statement: 
[I]t may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz [one] can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz. 
The Zone of Interest adopts this position, specifically Adorno’s alignment of “bourgeois subjectivity” with both the perpetrators of Auschwitz and the position from which one moves on from it, looks back on it, views it. One of the most troubling elements of Glazer’s film is that the viewer is not allowed to withdraw from the film’s radically circumscribed scene. Much of what disturbs us in the film comes from our preexisting knowledge of the Holocaust, with which we fill in the information that takes place out of shot. We can imagine the death camps because we have already seen what happened inside them. But The Zone of Interest follows Adorno’s line further. It makes bourgeois subjectivity, which elides both survivors and perpetrators, the necessary frame from which “we” view the film itself. What a horrible prospect, this indivisible position. And it’s this horror that suffuses so much of the film, the idea that the bourgeois cultivation of the scene, and the unspeakable ob-scene, are somehow inextricable, one the obverse of the other, with the viewer the bloody thread that connects them. 
 
I was struck by this sense of indivisibility during two scenes that take place at night, depicting a young Polish girl, a neighbor of the Hösses, discreetly leaving food for the prisoners by secreting apples in the trenches where they labor during the day. These scenes are shot without lighting and in infrared, so the girl’s body appears as white against the sheer black of her surroundings. It’s a startling, uncanny reversal of the daytime scenes, and the only act of compassion we witness in the film, which must necessarily take place out of sight. It’s hard here not to be reminded of the famous scene in Schindler’s List in which Schindler sees a young child visually distinguished from a crowd of people, her red coat the only color in an otherwise black-and-white scene. We learn nothing about the child as a person, but this is the point. She could be anyone and stands for everyone. In Spielberg’s film, the gesture is fundamentally humanistic. By isolating one individual through the subjectivity of the film’s “hero” as he views the scene, Schindler’s List centers a viewer’s understanding of common humanity, one fulfilled dramatically by a moment of human success: Schindler’s climactic rescue of Jews from the death camps. Aligned with Schindler’s vision, viewers ally themselves with humanist action: I view like him, and I would do as he does. With The Zone of Interest, we’re not permitted this position. As the illuminated girl plants apples equal distances apart in the dirt, we realize what we’re viewing is an inversion of the planting of Hedwig’s garden. One scene is the twin of the other. The implication in these matched, intertwined gestures—that good and evil are qualities of which any human is, in the right circumstances, capable—is considerably more discomfiting than Spielberg’s assumption of the viewer’s separation from the atrocities taking place on-screen. 
 
These night sequences are made more discordant by the soundtrack that plays under them. The film has no music other than at the opening and closing credits, but during these infrared scenes, the action is accompanied by a loud guttural sound, almost like a belch but deeper and less identifiably human. Watching these scenes, I felt as if I was hearing some vast repressed thing erupting, pushing up and out and into the world of the film. It’s a deliberately incongruous noise, clearly not coming from anything on-screen. It’s messy and untidy; it’s at odds with the scrupulousness of the mise-en-scène, and it appears when things oppose or undercut Höss’s vision. Later, these noises, which initially accompany only the night-vision scenes, increase in frequency and recur when a clearly uncomfortable Höss is in Germany. He’s examined by a doctor, and their dialogue suggests that his problem is digestive, that something is not breaking down properly, is threatening to explode out of Höss’s body. It feels as if the film is moving not toward resolution but cataclysm, eruption, and breakdown. 
 
Sure enough, in the final sequence of Zone, this tension cracks the film open. Höss, drunk and stumbling out of a party, walks down a stairwell. When he reaches a landing, he starts to physically retch, but doesn’t vomit. He walks down another set of stairs to an identical landing, and dry-retches again. He looks down the corridor and sees a tiny point of light in the darkness. A door opens, flooding the room with light; we’re in Auschwitz, 2023. For 10 minutes, we see workers entering and cleaning the museum that now stands on the site of the camp. The effect is startling, uncanny. That tiny point of light is a portal through which we see the future, a scene out of time. This breakdown of time and space is the eruption that’s been coming, and for the first time, we find ourselves on the other side of the camp wall. We view this scene through a different mode: documentary. The sequences in the museum play out in long fixed takes. We see the ovens being cleaned, the gas chambers being swept, piles of clothes and shoes from dead prisoners, and a corridor lined with photographs of those murdered in the camps. What has been concealed from us, the ob-scene, is now visible. The cleaning and cultivation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum creates a new scene, one of remembrance and testimony, in which the lives of those millions murdered are brought into sight. 
 
Is this abrupt shift to documentary an admission of the failure of Zone’s dramatic form? No, because the juxtaposition is the point, and in these final moments Glazer opens and extends the scene of Zone to something larger: the visual representation of other historical scenes of mass murder (“It’s about now,” he said of the film in a recent interview at the British Film Institute). This climactic breakdown recalls the endings of two recent films, Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), in which a final change of viewing position, a bringing-into-view of something previously unseen, is revelatory to an understanding of an atrocity. Folman’s animated film ends with the simultaneous realization by Folman of his complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, and the removal of the film’s animation filter to show real, uncensored footage of the killing. Oppenheimer’s film ends with war criminal Anwar Congo watching a reenactment of tortures he himself carried out, only now he plays the torture victim. Viewing, Congo appears to undergo a moment of realization, and—exactly like Höss in Glazer’s film—repeatedly retches but is unable to vomit. In these formal shifts, these films acknowledge that the obscenity of the act of mass killing can only be fully rendered through a hybridized way of seeing, one in which the documentary form catalyzes a clarity of vision. What’s unsettling about the end of Glazer’s film, though, is the continuation of that entwining of those preceding acts of cultivation, of staging and scene creation, from atrocity to act of kindness to memorial. The viewer isn’t allowed to step outside of this entanglement. Instead, the film asks, against the abominations of the contemporary world, what do we bring into view and what do we push out of sight? What scene would we make? What scene are we making right now? 
 
But The Zone of Interest doesn’t end there. Instead, it cuts back to Höss, staring down the corridor toward the camera, before he turns and walks down the stairwell into total darkness. It’s impossible to read Höss’s reaction—whether he sees and doesn’t care, or whether he attains some understanding of his actions, of what has erupted into his vision. Ultimately, though, what we witness is Höss leaving the scene. His disappearance into darkness prefigures his infamy and execution, while the lives of his victims are illuminated with ever more clarity. And we watch, implicated. The credits roll, over darkness.

Viewing the Ob-scene: On Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”

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