Works in Progress, 3: Culinary Labor and Food Films

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Here’s what I’m working on lately: a paper on fictional chefs in contemporary food films for the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

A nineteenth century kitchen in The Taste of Things.

EATING ON SCREEN         

A January, 2023 article in Collider by Anthony Oleszkiewicz titled “How Movies Ate the Rich in 2022” lists films like Barbarian, Kimi, Infinity Pool, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion, and most notably The Menu as films that “found a lot of joy in tearing down the privilege of money.” Oleszkiewicz defines “eat the rich” movies by their ability to “[separate] the wealthy from the audience’s eyes.” But most of these films only portray rich people “eating” each other, with almost no working-class characters on screen. While these movies might be cathartic, they inadvertently obscure the working class.

Nevertheless, there does seem to have been genuine interest in working-class interiority in the last five years, most notably in fictional depictions of restaurant work. Like the FX series The Bear, films like First Cow, Pig, The Menu, Boiling Point, and The Taste of Things center culinary labor from the perspective of industry-wide cooks. Furthermore, the explicitly culinary settings help to situate the role of labor, and not just class struggle, in contemporary cinema.

FOOD FILMS AND FICTIONAL CHEFS

Writing that “[food] and media condition the consumption of each other,” Laura A. Lindenfeld marks Babette’s Feast (1987) as the point at which “critics began to use the term ‘food film’” to describe movies in which food and its preparation “provide the central driving force for the films’ narrative structure” (5-7). Steve Zimmerman echoes this trajectory, noting that “the preparation and cooking of everyday meals and the slow-paced, uninteresting process of eating” could only become central narrative elements after the technical refinement of color, sound, and the close-up shot (Zimmerman 1-3). Only in the 1970s could filmmakers employ these techniques in a “New Hollywood free from the practices of the studios” (18) that constricted recycled well-worn narrative templates.

Celebrity chefs follow a different trajectory. Krishnendu Ray describes Julia Child as “surrounded by the spectacle of domesticity” when The French Chef premiered in 1963 (52). Through television, Ray adds, Child “would become the epitome of the TV chef, which in itself is an intermediate position between the home cook and the restaurant chef” (53) to domesticate “the work of spectacular cooking” comparable to the spectacle of the nineteenth century surgeon performing operations in a theater for public consumption (54). As they adopted increasingly theatrical backdrops, celebrity chefs gravitated away from the domestic sphere and back once again into public realm of the market. Chefs like Mario Batali, Paul Hollywood, and Anthony Bourdain portrayed their own culinary labor as professional expertise for and among other professional experts, distancing themselves from the domestic origins of that very profession.

CLASS AND LABOR

Because food preparation is the defining element in the food film genre, these discussions about how to define that preparation—as a domestic chore, as an artistic craft, as skill in the workforce—contextualize the relationship between culinary labor and class status.

Working-class life appeared more often in Hollywood during the 1970s, with films like Norma Rae, Saturday Night Fever, and Blue Collar. Derek Nystrom contends that “the new visibility of working-class characters in the 1970s was generated by a series of middle-class concerns” (5). Depictions of working-class life served to stabilize the middle-class status of independent filmmakers. More pointedly, Nystrom’s description of middle-class audiences during this time resonates with the presumptions underlying food films today. “What is at the heart of the middle-class’s fascination with representation of working-class life and experience” he writes, “is the forms of political association, resistance, and struggle these cinematic subjects bring to life—forms of political being that the middle class has trouble imagining itself inhabiting” (178).

Oily cakes ready for the market in First Cow.

Under capitalism, workers sell their labor in units of time to bosses. What matters in this formulation is that capital compensates labor quantitatively through hourly wages, but uses labor qualitatively as a resource. Fredric Jameson writes that “it is the use value of the worker’s commodity of labor power which is disengaged from its exchange value and suddenly made to produce more value than it is worth” (50), addressing the thorny question at the heart of Marx’s own analysis, “how is surplus value possible?” (52). David Harvey’s explanation is that there “is a key distinction between what labor gets and what labor creates. Surplus-value results from the difference between the value [that] labor congeals in commodities in a working day and the value the laborer gets for surrendering labor-power as a commodity” (124). In restaurant work, there is even a saying that exemplifies qualitative exploitation: “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.” If a restaurant serves one customer or 200, cooks still make the same hourly wage at the end of a shift.

If movies about working-class characters in the 1970s allowed middle-class viewers to entertain ideas of solidarity and community-building practices that were absent from their day jobs, what experiences do contemporary audiences see in depictions of culinary labor?

A CORPUS OF CHEFS

Left to right, top to bottom, five protagonists in Boiling Point, The Menu, First Cow, The Taste of Things, and Pig.

Five food films in the last half-decade provide a cursory sampling. Kelly Reichardt’s 2019 First Cow follows a pioneer outfit’s cook, known as Cookie, as he settles into life in an Oregon territorial outpost in the 1820s. At heart, Cookie is a baker who finds joy in making a type of donut that his new friend, Lu, convinces him to sell for profit. Because the key ingredient is milk, Cookie and Lu resort to secretly milking the territory’s only cow, owned by a wealthy colonialist.

In the same region two centuries later, Michael Sarnoski’s Pig (2021) features Chef Feld, who abandoned his restaurant in Portland’s fine dining scene after his wife’s death to live as a hermit in the woods, accompanied only by his truffle pig. When a restaurant owner steals the pig, Feld stumble back into the scene, only to be told he “doesn’t exist.” In order to regain his in-group status, Feld enters an underground wrestling competition with other chefs. Scarred, bloodied, most likely concussed, he earns his “existence” in the culinary world again.

Debuting the same year, Philip Barantini’s Boiling Point (2021) portrays Chef Andy Jones after a food inspector has downgraded his high-end restaurant from a 5 to a 3 for violations he is legally responsible for, while juggling the specific needs of individual customers and in-house tensions among the staff he oversees.

The pressures of high-end cuisine likewise set the stage for Mark Mylod’s “eat the rich” horror comedy The Menu (2022), in which Chef Julian Slowik delivers one final course to a patronage of elite diners. As part of his revenge, he reveals to these same customers their own selfish contradictions and abuses, at one point imprinting tax records onto fresh tortillas. Chef Slowik’s judgment is a product of his contempt for his peers rather than the system they support.

Bringing culinary labor back to the nineteenth century, Trần Anh Hùng’s 2023 The Taste of Things follows the gourmand Dodin and his cook and romantic partner, Eugénie, in rural France in the 1890s. Emphasizing the physical intimacy inherent to culinary labor, Dodin uses food to woo Eugénie into marriage, resituating culinary labor back in the domestic sphere as a skill for workers to use for their own delight. Customers, titles, and kitchen hierarchy are almost entirely absent. Furthermore, the film portrays Eugénie as a head chef and Dodin as a home cook, reversing the culinary gender roles prevalent in many other food films.

Unlike the working-class films of the 1970s, there is little solidarity here. Rather, these five chefs—Cookie, Feld, Jones, Slowik, and Dodin—wrestle with their own isolation. Pig, The Menu, and Boiling Point depict gourmet chefs confronting the emptiness of their own success, while First Cow is about the impossibility of achieving success in a world of privatized resources. Only in The Taste of Things does culinary labor act as a form of consolation against the challenges of ordinary life.

Each film depicts culinary labor as distinct from the brutalizing power of capitalist exploitation, which the protagonists inevitably extend to their own bodies, their own selves, to sell their labor value. Still, the culinary world suggests to audiences the possibility of class mobility, which most of these chefs manage to achieve by commodifying not just their labor, but their identities. Even Chef Slowik is not immune to the sentimentality of his first love—flipping burgers.

There are, of course, many other food films in the last five years that add even more layers of nuance. The Welsh-language horror film The Feast (2021) introduces environmental revenge into the culinary scene, while Fresh (2022) takes another stab at the role of gender in class exploitation.

What I find compelling in these films is the possibility that labor can be seen in sharp relief from the forces that exploit it. By centering the experiences of cooks, contemporary food films can draw a distinction between labor and capital, thus pinning the blame for class disparity on an exploitative system rather than the exploitative actions of bad actors in an otherwise fair system. In contrast to the class commentary underlying Triangle of Sadness or Infinity Pool, the recent trend in food films suggests that filmmakers are once again curious about the real, complex lives of working-class characters, a curiosity that I think has far too often been reserved for the wealthy.

Harvey, David. A Companion to Marx’s Capital. Verso Books, 2010.

Jameson, Fredric. Representing Capital. Verso Books, 2014.

Lindenfeld, Laura A. “Feasts for our eyes: Viewing films on food through new lenses.” Food as Communication, Communication as Food, edited by Janet M. Cramer, Carlnita P. Greene, & Lynn M. Walters, Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2011, pp. 3-21.

Nystrom, Derek. Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Oleszkiewicz, Anthony. “From Glass Onion to The Menu, How Movies Ate the Rich in 2022.” Collider 19 January, 2023, https://collider.com/movies-class-criticism-2022/. Accessed February 8, 2025.

Ray, Krishnendu. “Domesticating Cuisine: Food and Aesthetics on American Television.” Gastronomica vol. 7, no. 1, 2007, pp. 50-63, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2007.7.1.50. Accessed January 13, 2025.

Zimmerman, Steve. Food in the Movies, 2ned Edition. McFarland Books, 2009.

Fixing Hearts or Dying

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A trail in south-central Indiana.

Ancient alchemy, as Erin Vachon described it to a handful of writers over Zoom for a workshop through SmokeLong Quarterly, began with a process of decomposition called Melanosis. Transformation is a long procedure in this sense, and it begins with fragmentation. For writers, as Erin put it, this extends to our understanding of the assumed form and content of what we seek to revise. This could be as simple as writing from the perspective of another character. For nonfiction writers, this might be an exercise in empathy. As they walked us through this workshop built on the esoteric, I understood what they meant as I found myself writing from the perspective of Irish bog bodies looking up from the water, scolding the living.

Somewhere in my notes, I wrote the word subcutaneous to describe the underlying thematic concerns in a story, which are baked into the language at the sentence level. The story I selected to revise was an older work from almost a decade ago, and the prose was embarrassingly self-explanatory. This realization would have been mortifying were it not for the necessarily destructive first step. Like water from a sponge, I compressed the story to see what meaning would drip out between the lines.

The further along I walked, the more decrepit the signposts became.

I’ve been working to revise the story so much that it has become something else entirely. Maybe this means the loss of one story, and maybe it means the creation of something new, but if the logic of alchemy holds, the transformation is more of a visible realignment of what appears on the surface. The energy is the same, but metabolized differently.

I have not written anything new in a long time. I have been stuck in a revision-spiral reexamining my work, squeezing it, seeing what I can extract from it and then losing sleep over not writing anything new.

But I did have the pleasure of seeing an interview I conducted with another writer friend, Cavar, be published in Archer Magazine. Describing their process for writing a speculative, dystopian novel, they said something that has stuck with me: “I realised that part of writing a book like this means writing up to the very point at which I don’t know enough to write anymore, which is why you see so many crumbling syntactical moves and blanknesses in the novel.” The narrator in Failure to Comply gets around the challenges inherent to their world by dodging the inevitably limited power of language to convey meaning. Even if everything is knowable, it is certainly not all expressible.

After this point, the trail vanished beneath overgrowth and fallen trees.

Blankness and absence are confronting when they lack a clear explanation, when language offers nothing to describe what isn’t there. Shouldn’t it be obvious what needs to be said? Shouldn’t the words be abundant?

As much as I try not to lean too hard into esoteric mysticism in describing writing, there’s comfort in being able to attribute its power to something obscure. The late David Lynch described his own process similarly: “A film or TV show is like a magic act,” he said in 2018, “and magicians don’t tell how they did a thing.”

In grad school, colleagues told me my writing style was intentional and precise, which I attributed to the dry but grounded historians I read so much. Lately, to help me sleep or because I have rotted and decomposed into my elements through melanosis, I have been reading Vladislav M. Zubok’s Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union before bed, which I got over a year ago after seeing that Noah Kulwin, of the podcast Blowback, recommended it. The language in historical writing is intentionally unambiguous, which is a false comfort. Writing against ambiguity is like eating to never be hungry again.

The mystical veers uncomfortably close to the diagnostic. I discourage my students from thinking of revision as a way of “fixing” their writing, but I’m susceptible to that language, too. It suggests a wrongness, and more wrongly, it suggests that the removal of that wrongness is all that good writing needs. But fixing is more urgent than alchemy. Heaters and plumbing and bigots need to be fixed. Writing is in a constant and gradual state of change.

Because there is no “correct” form that a piece of writing will take, there is no predictable future for an artistic vision. What I want to write could become anything, and it takes confidence to give up so much control that I might constrict what my writing can become.

What Breaks Open the Seed

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“Nature reinvents itself over and over again. This process of constant creation leaves behind a track record of successes and failures, new life forms that live or die depending on their innate genetic flexibility, their ability to find and fit into their own niche. This learning to live with others may take seconds or years or millennia.” – Diana Beresford-Kroeger, Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests, 41

A second year in Indiana has not prepared me for how startling winter is in the forests, how completely the deciduous woodlands shed their leaves and transform into quiet, desolate fogs of spindly twigs. I am still too used to the coniferous evergreens of the west, where the ponderosas only shrug at the changing seasons.

I started 2024 with two goals in mind: To write more and to read more books. I didn’t keep track of these goals, of course. Famously, I dislike quantifying previous years. I’m more interested in qualitative reflections on the past. This has been a very difficult year for me for a lot of reasons; I know this year has been exceptionally horrifying for so many. A new year won’t change that. Instead, I want to attend to the quality of the days ahead, to the slowness of winter and what possibilities I can find in that slowness.

Maybe it was fitting, then, that the last book I read in 2024 was Our Green Heart, by Irish botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger, about forest ecology, Celtic history, growth, and the strangeness of forest ecosystems.

I appreciate (and am jealous of) the sense of wonder in Beresford-Kroeger’s prose. Her description of seeds was particularly striking: “Most seeds,” she writes, “carry a dormancy factor, the proteins of their endosperm food supply coiled and folded into resting states that wait for a particular signal. These signals are a form of divination, an assurance strong enough that the seed bets its future on that message. They are not properly understood in science and have not been studied in great depth” (85). Here, there is poetry in unexplained biology. Some seeds evolved to sprout in reaction to heat from wildfires; others evolved to travel far distances, to be eaten and carried off by birds and rodents. Dormant seeds are hard and singular for months or years until the right external prompt cracks them open and they grow into roots, trunks, branches.

When I teach, I emphasize revision as the more important process in writing, more than drafting or research. Recently, I have brought in a novel-revising technique from Jane Smiley’s notion that sentences are either seeds or pebbles. Matt Bell elaborates on this idea in his craft book Refuse to be Done, writing that “If it’s a pebble, it’s just the next sentence and it sits there. But if it’s a seed it grows into something that becomes an important part of the life of the novel. The problem is, you can’t know ahead of time whether a sentence will be a seed or a pebble, or how important a seed is going to be” (Bell 77).

I’ve never before thought of this exercise as an exploration of dormancy. If a sentence, a paragraph, or even an unspoken idea is a seed, that means it is awaiting something external to activate it, to bring it out of its shell. This is not that far from artistic inspiration, almost all of which, I believe, comes from external experience: long walks, a healthy community, traveling someplace new, the changing seasons. At least, these are the things that put me in a writing mood. It’s true that when I’m writing, I never know which ideas will take root and grow. Maybe all writing is secretly fertile in this way.

This past year has felt thoroughly dormant, but this is also normal for me. I live in a shell that I rarely come out of, and for such painfully long periods of time that I think dormancy is my natural state. But I have also been rootless for a decade now, following grad school programs and jobs from town to town, leaving behind friends and family for other valleys. What spark am I waiting for? What divination will finally break me open?

Beresford-Kroeger also finds comfort in the secret and illegal hedge schools that existed in Ireland for “those five hundred years during which the Penal Laws made it illegal for the Irish to teach their children” (35). She describes one school as having been nestled in the wilderness, protected by the landscape. It is partly through these hedge schools that Irish language and culture were passed on from generation to generation, where old knowledge was stored, sustained, kept safe like the dormant trees preserved within seeds. These secret schools were a long-standing form of resistance to the occupying British colonists, who could not stamp out Irish identity through force or erasure, an important lesson for the coming year.

Maybe I’ll take this to heart: Dormancy is protective, not restrictive. In writing, this is true of the stories we want to tell and those that need more time.

In the town I grew up, at a museum of regional history, there happened to be a poetry display I had the privilege of visiting last week. A local poet had her typewriter stationed there, along with post cards, paperclips, fancy paper. When she offered to write me a poem, the prompt I gave was full of the obvious cliches: a new year, getting back into a healthy routine, trying to break out of a sense of stagnation. The poem, of course, was much more thoughtful than my jumbled words. The museum display was full of poems commemorating the beauty of the Coconino National Forest, the huge and ancestral evergreens that loom over my hometown.

This year, I intend to slow down, take my time, pay attention. I don’t want to toss out any seeds thinking they’re only pebbles. I don’t think there’s a magical break between one year and the next, but I do think growth continues, even if that growth only takes the form of preservation. Eventually, once winter has stayed its welcome, the spindly, empty trees in Indiana will sprout their leaves again.

Bell, Matt. Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Revise a Novel in Three Drafts. Soho Press, 2022.

Beresford-Kroeger, Diana. Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests. Random House Canada, 2024.

Season

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“I thought moving here had largely been a gesture of love. For the desert. For the lion man. But in that move, I was looking at the horizon, and my imagination ran romantically wild. I forgot how tightly people drew together against everything outside themselves. And I hadn’t realized how ethereal things were—my identity, my beliefs, my life. ” -Amy Irvine, Trespass, 197

Amy Irvine’s memoir about moving to San Juan County with her partner to write and join him as a wilderness conservation advocate is ultimately a story of growth through isolation. Irvine returns to Mormon country despite her father raising her out of the faith. She outgrows her partner and grows into a deeper sense of herself, drawn in stark contrast to the LDS anti-government ranchers despite her intense desire for some, any, social life with the very people who treat her with suspicion.

Isolation invites introspection, and Irvine even explores this fact at an anthropological level, writing that evidence of increasingly elaborate “attention to the dead and to the rituals performed on their behalf actually point to a life that had diminished so much in quality that its participants were looking to the afterworld as an escape. Perhaps too they saw the spirit world world as a place of reward, a place where they would live well for having endured the terrestrial plane—for all the endless labor, the constant vigilance, the pervasive violence, the stifling immobility” that resulted from the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures to settled domestic agriculture (229).

I am now settling into my second year in Indiana. It is isolating be design. My neighborhood has no sidewalks, for example, and there are very few bike lanes. It is impossible to be a hunter-gatherer here, so life is very settled, interior, rife for introspection. For a memoirist, this is should be a good thing.

Summer was nomadic for me, but now I am ready for a routine and a place to write and cook. I am engaged in a research project about food and agriculture in folk horror movies. I am back to making soup every Sunday (despite the lingering summer heat). I have peaches I want to make into a pie. Ancestrally, I understand the impulse to settle into an agricultural life, despite the isolation involved. Maybe writing, reading, and researching are all rituals for a life to come, another season in the near future.

Irvine, Amy. Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land. North Point Press, 2008.

Writers Are Against Forgetting

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The poet Aaron Abeyta spoke these words in his keynote address at the 37th Annual Fishtrap Gathering of Writers near Wallowa Lake in eastern Oregon. This line, more than anything else, has stuck with me for almost a month. Writers are tasked with remembrance. Writers are responsible for carrying ancestral memory, childhood memory, cultural memory, everything that might be easily forgotten. Writing is a way of taking an experience, preserving it in a jar, and handing it to someone else, saying “Here, hold onto this while I’m gone.” Abeyta made it clear that in his view, remembrance is an act of love, as painful as it can often be.

I spent July recollecting the 1990s. I had the chance to see a defining ’90s creature-feature from my childhood, Tremors, in theaters. The hours I spent in a car driving from Indiana to Oregon to Arizona, I listened to podcasts, often movies and books and culture from the ’90s. Because of a last-minute schedule change, I spent a few days in western Washington after Fishtrap as an accidental tourist. I’ve driven past the turn to Roslyn a dozen times before, but never realized that it was the same Roslyn where Northern Exposure was filmed until eating cherry pie in North Bend, where Twin Peaks was filmed, and happened to overhear a customer behind me mention the other cult ’90s show filmed an hour away.

I can’t really claim proper nostalgia for the show. I watched Northern Exposure on DVD when I was in high school in the late aughts, more than a decade removed from the show’s original audience. The town of Roslyn remembers the show, though, and it was surreal to walk the same street that became familiar and mysterious to me on screen. I have a stronger emotional attachment to the fictional town of Cicily, Alaska, than other fictional towns. Northern Exposure luxuriated in the inexplicable, forcing its logic-driven protagonist to accept his limits, the meaninglessness and disorder of life, first for comic relief but later in the show with a more serious attention to the stakes of that mystery. It was the one artifact I remember from adolescence whose message was to confront impermanence rather than attack, deny, or confine it.

The truth is that lately, I’ve lost my appetite for TV. It was always on when I was a child, often when nobody was watching. It’s not that I find it bad or not worthwhile, but something about episodic structures turns me off these days. I’m reading more books, and watching more movies, and often thinking to myself at the end of a movie, that needed at least twenty more minutes. I want things to take time. I want to be slower.

The last night of Fishtrap, I talked with familiar writers from the Northwest. I met writers from Butte, Spokane, Moscow, Portland, Eugene. Every night, writers used their platform to discuss the importance of investing their time and energy into something larger than themselves, into a community that will outlast them and probably forget them.

Still half-asleep on that last night, I ran into another writer where I camped, who was packing her things for an early departure. She Bugs Bunnied a tarot deck from an impossibly small backpack pocket and asked if I was up for a reading. I drew the Three of Cups, the High Priestess, and the Princess of Pentacles. Her advice, after interpreting the cards, was to embrace feminine energies and be courageous in going through weird doors, to walk confidently into the unfamiliar.

Three days later, I found out a friend of mine had passed away two months earlier. Hers was the second funeral I should have gone to this year, but missed.

As easy as it is to talk about mining the past for stories, the phrase “writers are against forgetting” took on a very different meaning at the end of the month when I saw an image of Al Jazeera journalists mourning 27-year-old Ismail al-Ghoul, one of the most recent of the 165 journalists Israel has killed in Gaza since October. In the image, journalists hold up their PRESS signage, otherwise a symbol meant to protect war correspondents, writers, keepers of memory.

Roslyn, Washington, is also a coal town. There is an immense memorial to coal miners killed in the extraction process, overlooking the town’s main intersection. The names go on and on, and because the monument is located where tourists will stop to see the storefront used as the radio station in Northern Exposure, the town has proven that it, too, is against forgetting.

That’s a memoirist trick. There is a narrative thread on the surface and a hidden thread below. There is the town where a cult TV show was filmed, and then there’s a memorial to the town’s working class. Essayists remember everything all at once, all the time, because everything reminds us of everything else, because our job is to remember everything. This is an essay about traveling in July but it’s also about memory and TV and grief. It’s about writing, and writing about writing, and a willingness to disavow conclusion.

Myths

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“Besides, again, it was not part of my disguise, which I’d myself become convinced by. I was there to write nonfiction, ostensibly cultural reportage on the cranes, something about migration and the diaspora, border states, not art criticism, and certainly not the poems littering my little green notebook.” – Jed Munson, 21.

In the London Review of Books, Eric Foner reviews historian Richard Slotkin’s new assessment of US history, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America. Adding Slotkin to the slew of historians who have examined the centrality of myth-making to US historiography, Foner writes, “I vividly recall Richard Hofstadter’s remark in a graduate seminar at Columbia University that Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’ was the only truly original idea ever developed by a historian of the United States.”

Originality and myth-making seem contradictory, and Foner even suggests that, in Slotkin’s assessment, most US historians are invested in “identifying the origins of the current moment, not charting a path to an uncertain future.”

I am increasingly invested in the idea that mass media is a more productive reflection of collective memory than the work of historians, despite the obvious necessity of archival research. This month, I read two two books that attest to two different forms of collective memory.

First: Jed Munson’s Commentary on the Birds, from the always good Rescue Press, is about the art installations, TV shows, and ecologies related to the Demilitarized Zone dividing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the Republic of Korea to the south. Munson reflects on his own biracial identity in a bifurcated space where history is filtered through geographic boundaries. He writes that “the DMZ builds imaginations of Korea. It makes imaginable not only a Korea without it, but also other Koreas with other DMZs, views into other worlds” (65). The DMZ is not just a historical myth-making tool that organizes the past into presentist camps, but an allowance of imagination. It invites counterfactual history that I simply do not see in US collective memory, in which America must follow the path it has followed, and any imagined deviation is implicit treason.

Second: The French crime novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette legendarily maintained that his chosen genre was “the great moral literature of our time.” In his 1977 pulp novel Fatale, an unnamed woman rides a train to a small coastal village, embeds herself into the town’s fishing industrial elites, and waits for the inevitable tensions to emerge, to exploit for profit. In Manchette’s world, crime is a necessary output of history. French national myths are less apparent than they are in, say, the works of Victor Hugo, but localized history is necessary in creating the conditions the novel’s main character can exploit.

Third: My view is limited, but I think that history is deliberately left out of US culture, in a marked departure from other cultural media. Munson writes at length about a South Korean television show, Crash Landing on You, about a South Korean woman who ridiculously lands in the DMZ and falls in love with her North Korean captor. Manchette’s femme fatale rips morality from an otherwise quiet fishing village, to the point that one local official exclaims desperately, “We are choirboys compared with our ancestors” (87). History does not shape the plots in contemporary US fiction the way it does in so many other canons. When US fiction utilizes history, it is almost always military history. This includes Westerns, and even those should be understood in the context of the Cold War and the Space Race. Most war fiction centers victories in Europe, rather than defeats in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. My country cycles through national myths so often, I think, because tradition itself is an unstable concept, decided in the moment in which someone deploys it. What is and is not traditional, or foundational or mythic, depends entirely on who needs to use history to achieve present ends.

As far as national myths go, World War Two lingers more pervasively in US culture than the Revolution, the Civil War, the Lost Cause, or the conquest of the frontier that Slotkin and his predecessors value so much. World War Two has metabolized into mainstream US culture at an intractable level, infiltrating video games, cinema, and electoral myths about “the good fight.”

Like a lot of millennials, I became interested in history because of the influence of Band of Brothers contextualizing America as a global military power. World War Two is by no means the beginning of that presence, nor was Easy Company’s experience ubiquitous, but World War Two serves as such a loud nexus between old European and nascent American imperial institutions that it provided me with two doorways. One led to the Cold War, the other led to the Great War.

I am interested in Slotkin’s views of US history, but I am still skeptical of any historiography that centers myth-making. Mythology and history are strange bedfellows, and any effort to pair the two without a material perspective (like Manchette’s) or a geographic realism (like Munson’s) seems doomed from the start.

My sense is that for a lot of Americans, the Second World War was a moment of national unity paired with an unchallenged series of victories, both globally and locally. If mass media remains a marker of collective memory, the success of Oppenheimer is a testament to historical memory about US global relevance, but the film’s box office success also suggests an interest in an actual, critical interrogation of what this country actually is. To be fair, actuality is not the realm of literature, but it serves, nonetheless, as an operable means of discussing US history in real, material terms.

Manchette, Jean-Patrick. Fatale. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Editions Gallimard, 2011.

Pastiche

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“Alice Munro saw it all. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve never eaten nanaimo bars sitting on the shag carpet at a Grey Cup Party, or carried a pitcher of beer to a table of tipsy grown-ups at a bonspiel, rink rafters thick with cigarette smoke; just as one need not have felt the summer sun fading on a dacha five-days ride from St. Petersburg to metabolize the truths of Chekhov (to whom she is rightly compared) one need not ever have set foot in Canada to understand Munro. 

Because she wrote for all of us, everywhere.” –Jonny Diamond

Describing a collage of particular styles, I shouldn’t be surprised that pastiche shares a root with pasta and pastry and paste. There’s nothing in the word that suggests a process. Paste is cruder than pasta, which is comparatively cruder than pastry. A pastiche might be a paste of references mashed together or the flaky layering of stylistic choices, dependent on the audience’s familiarity with the style imitated.

My familiarity with the Midwest is mostly external. I have lived in Indiana for less than a year. By Midwestern standards, that makes me still a tourist. I don’t know how to imitate the deeper sensibilities of this place. A pastiche of southern Indiana might include corn, basketball, tornadoes, cicadas, and politeness. All superficial images, borderline cliche.

Jonny Diamond, writing in Literary Hub about the similarities his mother shared with the late Alice Munro, creates a pastiche of the Canadian Midwest to demonstrate Munro’s independence from such references. Munro’s fiction looks inward. As a writer, I struggle to stop looking outward at my surroundings, at the billboards and forests and empty storefronts and the enormous sky.

The biggest cliche about the Midwest is the supposedly rampant politeness. Kaveh Akbar even describes it in his debut novel Martyr! In one scene, he writes:

“At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilizing compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else. Cyrus thought about this a lot. You cooed at their ugly babies, nodded along at their racist bullshit. In Iran it was called taarof, the elaborate and almost entirely unspoken choreography of etiquette that directs every social interaction. Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you” (134).

Martyr! is another story that looks inward, to an almost painful degree. It is a character study, layers deep and rich and raw, and though it is neither about Indiana nor Iran, the main character’s presence between both places constitutes many of those layers.

I spent May revising the last dregs of a novel I started writing just shy of ten years ago, shortly after I started this blog. In fact, the first iteration of this novel came to me when I visited Ireland in the summer of 2014. Then, it was a shapeless pastiche of my hometown. Building on feedback from an agent who saw promise in it but declined to represent me, I added layers and layers to the characters. The novel didn’t need more where, but more who and why.

Pastiche is a comfortable place to write from, I think, because it allows me to direct the reader’s attention to something else, a subject outside the text. It replaces layers of interiority with vibe curation, which is certainly enjoyable, the way a good detective story can be. But I also want to practice writing through the layers, rather than skating across a single, flat plane.

Akbar, Kaveh. Martyr! Knopf Publishing Group, 2024.

Kairos

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“Imagine you’re at a bookstore. In one section are time management books that give advice for adapting to a general sense of time scarcity and a world always speeding up: either counting and measuring your bits of time more effectively or buying time from other people. In a different section, you find cultural histories of how we came to see time the way we do and philosophical inquiries into what time even is. If you’re scrabbling for time and feeling burned out, which section would you turn to?” (Odell xiii).

It may be the least understood rhetorical appeal. My students come to class with at least some understanding of ethos, pathos, and logos, but kairos is mysterious, abstract. I sometimes describe it as comic timing, the ability to know when a punchline will land or when to add a joke in an otherwise serious speech. This makes it granular, syntactic, probably reductive.

In the introduction to Saving Time, Jenny Odell distinguishes kairos from its sibling ancient Greek word for time: “Chronos, which appears in words like chronology, is the realm of linear time, a steady, plodding march of events into the future. Kairos means something more like ‘crisis,’ but it is also related to what many of us might think of as opportune timing or ‘seizing the time'” (xvii).

Seizing the moment make more sense to me. Supposedly, Vladimir Lenin said, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” It’s still not clear to me if the quote is accurate or apocryphal.

I bought Saving Time on a whim in a one-room basement bookstore on Independent Bookstore Day. It was in a “general nonfiction” section alongside history, memoir, science, psychology, and self-help.

I only started reading it today (fittingly, May Day), but because I did not manage my time well this month, the one book I finished in April was Alexandra Teague’s memoir Spinning Tea Cups, about family, time, kitsch, tourism, grief. One line that I keep returning to is the first sentence of an essay titled “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” that reads, “The deadest of all the dead people in our family was my mother’s father” (152).

The sentence is syntactically simple, just a subject (the deadest), a verb (was) and an object (my mother’s father). It is the first sentence in an 18-page essay about the narrator’s grandfather, who died in 1944 aboard the USS Mount Hood. The last phrase, my mother’s father, effectively shrinks seven decades and three generations into three words, while The deadest of all the dead people in my family is an epigenetic treatise, a genealogy. But it’s not the construction of the sentence that gets to me so much as the moment, the atmosphere, in which I read it. This, too, is how kairos works. No matter how much time one spends revising and polishing and perfecting, timing, in the end, is everything.

The Lenin quote is easy to utilize for anything that feels momentous. Venture capitalists pushing new tech have even used it to sell their hype. If it’s not apocryphal, it’s probably about identifying resonance, patterns. Seizing the present crisis and holding firm, not backing down. Odell maintains that kairos is more hopeful because, unlike neatly demarcated and sold units of time, kairos allows us space for contingency, for possibility.

That writing moves away from the author once it has an audience is difficult for a perfectionist like me to contend with. Perhaps writing is to chronos as reading is to kairos. On one side is a long, repetitive process of self-interrogation, of trial and error. On the other is the singular opportunity to collaborate with someone else’s craft, to seize the moment and allow oneself to be moved. And being moved, being open to the contingency that other writers open up to me through their experiences, is the reason I want to read so much in the first place.

Odell, Jenny. Saving Time. Random House, 2023.

Teague, Alexandra. Spinning Tea Cups. Oregon University Press, 2023.

Works in Progress, 2: Cyborgs, Puppets, and AI Writing

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Here’s what I’m working on lately: a presentation for my university’s Interdisciplinary Colloquium.

Left: Geppetto and Pinocchio, Bemporad & Figlio, Firenze 1902. Right: Jim Henson and Kermit, 1979.

It has not been uncommon for college instructors to repeat, sometimes word-for-word, the same hype around generative AI that the very companies selling AI have pitched to potential investors. Increasingly, though, I share Ed Zitron’s assessment that the internet is undergoing a process of “economic rot” which he describes as “conditions where we celebrate people for making ‘big’ companies but not ‘good’ companies,” or as Cory Doctorow more pointedly calls it, enshittification.

The more I read about generative AI, the more I find myself aligned with pedagogy scholars who have voiced skepticism about the ongoing panic about it. Gavin P. Johnson invites us to “(re)consider a few things we already know about teaching with and through technology” (Johnson 169), most intriguing of which is that new technologies “do not exist in isolation from cultural practices but rather reflect and reify the practices and ethics of the designers” (170), and that “the never-ending, lose-lose arms race to prevent the crisis of (possible) plagiarism” tends to treat students as hostile would-be criminals, and mutates pedagogy into a form of policing (172). Meanwhile, Sandra Jamieson writes that “A pedagogical response calls on us to trust students; to teach them the work of writing and include AI in the process instead of focusing our efforts on ways to catch those who use AI or reject it as unethical” (Jamieson 156). This includes a reframing of form, genre, structure, and convention.

The problems that generative AI present us with are not problems of cognition, but of articulation. Any creative writer knows this to be true. This is perhaps what Kazim Ali means when writing that a “text is a body because it is made of the same flesh and blood and breath as the writer. The ‘mind’ which declares intention is a collection of senses, sense-responses, and memories. Chemically it is invented in the brain. Thought is matter” (28).

Artificial intelligence is essentially a form of branding for the commercialization of a series of genuinely complex, advanced algorithms that are impressive as far as algorithms go, but the word intelligence is too often mistaken as a synonym for cognizant, just as generative is not the same thing as creative. As Ed Zitron has repeatedly pointed out, programs like ChatGPT don’t actually “know” anything. Instead, in his words,

Modern AI models are trained by feeding them “publicly-available” text from the internet, scraped from billions of websites (everything from Wikipedia to Tumblr, to Reddit), which the model then uses to discern patterns and, in turn, answer questions based on the probability of an answer being correct (Zitron, “Bubble Trouble”).

Peter Elbow asserts that “writing with no voice is dead, mechanical, faceless. It lacks any sound. Writing with no voice may be saying something true, important, or new; it may be logically organized; it may even be a work of genius. But it is as though the words came through some kind of mixer rather than being uttered by a person” (Elbow 287-288). I liken this style of writing to a puppet without a human hand. The language is there, the form is there, the structure and shape are all there, but on its own, it is no different from any other iteration of the same structure.

To what extent is all genre, all formula, all socially constructed literary expectation, not just a form of puppetry? AI writing consists of formulaic estimations of correct form and structure that are recognizably fraudulent without the intervention of a human touch.

As an extension of this metaphor, I want to bring in the 2023 video game Lies of P, a gothic steampunk adaptation of Pinocchio in which the player emerges half-formed in a fictional Victorian city that has created animatronic puppets as a servant class. Because of a malfunction, the puppets turn on their masters.

The player occupies an ambiguous space as a puppet capable of the uniquely human skill of lying. To progress through the game, the player must repeatedly lie about his social authenticity to gain access to human spaces, and this is such a central part of the game that telling the truth even once can change the game’s outcome.

I like this metaphor more than robotics or cyborgs because it gets at the technical accuracy of what students seemingly try to accomplish with the use of AI writing, which is to pass off inorganic thought as their own. We should not teach students to simply imitate collegiate writing, but to write as a reflection of their organic thought processes.

After the creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson, died in 1990, another performer filled the vacuum and animated Kermit the Frog in his place, and viewers recognized the obvious distinctions despite the fact that the puppet was the exact same from one puppeteer to the next. Student writing should be, and I use this word intentionally, revered for its originality in the exact same way. The form of a student essay might not change, but the voice a student brings to the form is in every instance unique, and it is that authenticity that we should help to cultivate, now more than ever before.

Ali, Kazim. “Genre-Queer.” Bending Genre, edited by Margot Singer, Nicole Walker, 2016, pp. 27-28.

Elbow, Peter. Writing With Power. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Jamieson, Sandra. “The AI ‘Crisis’ and A (Re)turn to Pedagogy.” Composition Studies vol. 50, no. 3 (2022), pp. 153-158.

Johnson, Gavin P. “Don’t Act Like You Forgot: Approaching Another Literacy ‘Crisis’ by (Re)Considering What We Know About Teaching with and Through Technologies.” Composition Studies vol. 51, no. 1 (2023), pp.169-175.

Tree of 40 Fruits

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“To write of the self is to write not the story of one’s journey through the labyrinth—it is to write the labyrinth itself. To write of the self is to write in the shape of a wound that never stops healing” (Tudor-Sideri 125).

The former utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana, is today a living museum of nineteenth century visions of what the twenty-first century could have looked like. It is a time capsule of previous generations’ hopes for the future. It is layered with iterations of its namesake project, a place of harmony. There are centuries-old cabins along the Wabash River, two labyrinths, low brick walls around deliberately patterned gardens. There is a roofless church, a library, a once-futuristic Atheneum.

The Tree of 40 Fruits is one of the newest editions. Created by a sculptor at the University of Syracuse named Sam Van Aken, New Harmony planted (transplanted, installed, relocated) two such trees in 2016. Each Tree of 40 Fruits is grafted with multiple branches from many different stone fruit trees, yielding a wild assortment of plums, peaches, almonds, cherries.

I have visited New Harmony once per season so far, and I will have to come back again to see what fruits the tree will boast. It is too early to show even a hint of its produce, but its branches are already awash with different leaves of lime green, crimson, and eggshell. Some branches are flowering already, while others sprout green-red bulbs.

The tree itself is another vision of the future, a new limb grafted onto the town’s foundation. It fits with many of the other ill-fit features the town has accumulated, the collection of golf carts, the alley-narrow beer garden, the Twin Peaks-themed coffee shop where I get a sunburn reading about theories of tourism and kitsch in Alexandra Teague’s new memoir.

I am still making my way through the pile of books I brought back from AWP. It is a wild assortment of memoirs, chapbooks, zines, slim volumes and limited runs. All of them are from small presses, most of which have been adversely affected (if not outright betrayed) by Small Press Distribution‘s sudden decision to not only shutter their doors, but to, at least momentarily, restrict presses from accessing the books currently in their possession.

Writing that “it is unclear when and how we will be able to access the 18,289 Black Lawrence Press books that were in the SPD warehouse as of last week,” Black Lawrence Press editors created a GoFundMe to cover such an apparent loss of inventory. Elsewhere, presses like Gasher Press and Malarkey Books and Sarabande Books have noted that the best ways for you, as readers, to support independent publishing are to 1) buy books directly from publishers (which ensures writers get a bigger cut of the profit), 2) request independent books at your local library and local bookstore, and 3) support presses and writers by per-ordering books, getting ahold of ARCs to write reviews, and share indie titles and presses with your peers. In other words, you need to participate in the literary community, much the same way you need to participate in democracy and gardens and family.

These are hardly sustainable solutions. If anything, these are only the seeds of a better publishing system that we could build. Usually, such discussions are about procuring the fruits of workers’ labor, so that the workers who produce commodities no longer need to relinquish the majority of exchanged funds to bosses and landlords who produce nothing. Art is slightly different. It is produced to be shared rather than used, not to be eaten or rendered or plastered, but to repeatedly be enjoyed.

One such indie book I have repeatedly enjoyed (or been pleasantly baffled by) is Christina Tudor-Sideri’s Under the Sign of the Labyrinth. Exploring memory, folklore, self, reflection, and probably ten other themes I’m not smart enough to pick up on, I still find comfort in the language she uses to perplex, at one point writing that “if ecstatic blissfulness represents the sole possibility of tending to the ontological rupture between consciousness and life, between the individual and the world, then achieving it can only happen when I have embraced the agony caused by that rupture, for a painless wound does not crave healing” (93).

I don’t know what a utopian vision of indie publishing will look like, but I think it’s imperative to move through the growing pains of web decay and bear markets by enacting, continuously, our own visions of what it can look like. What I do know with absolute certainty is that market forces or big tech will not save publishing, and that venture capitalists who treat presses as “assets” have only ever been, and should permanently be regarded as, vampires on the publishing industry.

Written language has existed for five thousand years, spoken language for about thirty-three thousand. I write and read for the exact same reasons that every religion and every culture in human history is grounded in the cyclical reiteration of our favorite stories.

I think there’s something utopian about fruit trees. It’s not just the biblical imagery of a garden or paradise, but the symbiosis of fruit that has evolved to be delicious to so many species. We get fructose and glucose, fiber and potassium, vitamins and pleasure from eating fruit, and in turn we toss the rock-hard seeds into other meadows and riverbeds or pocket them for other gardens.

Tending to trees is a matter of cycles, not trends or endless growth. There’s no boom and bust market, but the reliable flow of extremes in summer and winter so that atmospheres and organic matter can find harmony in spring and autumn. It’s not utopian to want harmony in publishing, but harmony between writer and reader is, at least, a necessary starting point.

Tudor-Sideri, Christina. Under the Sign of the Labyrinth. Sublunary Editions, 2020.