The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018

by Sheila Heti

  Alvin and I worked on a few projects of various kinds, several of them better as ideas than they turned out to be as realities. He put out a skateboard of mine, of all things, and sold precious few—though he did actually try valiantly to learn to ride it, taking me to a couple of spots in Oakland to skate when I was in town. His enthusiasm for publishing seemed rarely to be inhibited by commercial concerns. He wanted a thing to exist, and so he would do what he could to make it so, the market be damned. Which was part of why what he did was so important, but I know that it became troublesome. We had been discussing doing a small book project this year, one that probably would fit very comfortably into the slot of “not commercially viable.” But it was a unique project that would make sense for probably no other publisher. As Dan Clowes wrote, that’s what he was: completely unique. There was a slot in the universe that he fit into, alone. That slot is now empty, and it matters a great deal. We are poorer for it.

  —Anders Nilsen

  The original tribute, featured in the August/September 2017 issue of The Believer, also included contributions from Jonathan Bennett, Lisa Hanawalt, Tim Hensley, Jaime Hernandez, and Clara Bessijelle Johansson.

  CHRIS (SIMPSONS ARTIST)

  ■

  Six Selected Comics

  FROM Instagram

  These six selected comics have been pulled from Chris (Simpsons artist)’s Instagram account.

  a helpful parenting tip:

  children make really good seats when you have tired legs

  * * *

  how to cheer up a miserable friend:

  hide inside your friends toothpaste tube to give them a mysterious minty fresh surprise

  interesting fact of the day

  the average person

  swallows 8 lobsters

  in their sleep every year

  * * *

  a spooky halloween bath trick to play on a friend:

  slowly appear out of your friends bath to give them a haunting wet surprise that they will struggle to forget

  why i love my cat

  KARA WALKER

  ■

  Artist’s Statement

  FROM sikkemajenkinsco.com

  This is kara walker’s Artist’s Statement for her September 7–October 14, 2017, show at Sikkema, Jenkins & Co. Gallery. Her show has a very long title, which should also be considered part of the work. The title is:

  Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season! Collectors of Fine Art will Flock to see the latest Kara Walker offerings, and what is she offering but the Finest Selection of artworks by an African-American Living Woman Artist this side of the Mississippi. Modest collectors will find her prices reasonable, those of a heartier disposition will recognize Bargains! Scholars will study and debate the Historical Value and Intellectual Merits of Miss Walker’s Diversionary Tactics. Art Historians will wonder whether the work represents a Departure or a Continuum. Students of Color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate her on social media. Parents will cover the eyes of innocent children. School Teachers will reexamine their art history curricula. Prestigious Academic Societies will withdraw their support, former husbands and former lovers will recoil in abject terror. Critics will shake their heads in bemused silence. Gallery Directors will wring their hands at the sight of throngs of the gallery-curious flooding the pavement outside. The Final President of the United States will visibly wince. Empires will fall, although which ones, only time will tell.

  Artist’s Statement

  I don’t really feel the need to write a statement about a painting show. I know what you all expect from me and I have complied up to a point. But frankly I am tired, tired of standing up, being counted, tired of “having a voice” or worse “being a role model.” Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche. It’s too much, and I write this knowing full well that my right, my capacity to live in this Godforsaken country as a (proudly) raced and (urgently) gendered person is under threat by random groups of white (male) supremacist goons who flaunt a kind of patched together notion of race purity with flags and torches and impressive displays of perpetrator-as-victim sociopathy. I roll my eyes, fold my arms, and wait. How many ways can a person say racism is the real bread and butter of our American mythology, and in how many ways will the racists among our countrymen act out their Turner Diaries race war fantasy combination Nazi Germany and Antebellum South—states which, incidentally, lost the wars they started, and always will, precisely because there is no way those white racisms can survive the earth without the rest of us types upholding humanity’s best, keeping the motor running on civilization, being good, and preserving nature and all the stuff worth working and living for?

  Anyway, this is a show of works on paper and on linen, drawn and collaged using ink, blade, glue, and oil stick. These works were created over the course of the Summer of 2017 (not including the title, which was crafted in May). It’s not exhaustive, activist, or comprehensive in any way.

  TONGO EISEN-MARTIN

  ■

  Wave at the People Walking Upside Down

  FROM Heaven Is All Goodbyes

  I am off to make a church bell out of a bank window

  “kitchens meant

  more to the masses

  back in the day”

  and before that?

  “we had no enemy”

  somewhere in america

  the prison bus is running on time

  you are going to want

  to lose that job

  before the revolution hits

  Somewhere I won’t be home for breakfast.

  Everyone out here now knows my name.

  And I won’t be turned against for at least four months.

  The cop in the picket line is a hard-working rookie.

  The sign in my hand is getting more and more laughs

  (something about a numb tumble).

  It says, “the picket line got cops in it.”

  “I can take care of

  those windows for you if you want,

  but someone else

  has to go in your gas tank”

  was clear to the man that

  rich people had talked too much this year

  go ahead and throw down that marble park bench

  everyone is looking up at,

  you know,

  get the Romans out of your mind

  Maybe a good night’s sleep

  would have changed

  The last twenty years of my life

  —Playing an instrument

  Is like punching a wall—

  What would you have me do?

  Replace the population?

  Give brotherhood back to the winter?

  Stop smoking cigarettes with the barely dead?

  They listen in on the Sabbath

  Police called the police on me

  —a white candlestick beneath my detention

  “I’ve ruined the soup again,”

  thought the judge

  as he took off his pilgrim robe

  behind a white people’s door (and more)

  “I didn’t get lucky. I got

  what was coming to me,”

  he toasts

  “fight me back,”

  the man says, of course, to himself

  washing windows with a will to live

  tin can on his left shoulder

  enjoying the bright brand new blight

  with all party goers

  (both supernatural and supernaturally down to earth)

  what, is this elevator traveling side to side?

  Like one thousand bitter polaroid pictures you actually try to eat

  All the furniture on this street is nailed to the cement

  Cheap furniture, but we have commitment

  This morning, an essay opens the conversation between enemies

  “why, beca
use you control every gram of processed sugar

  between here and a poor man’s border?”

  “because in the tin can on my left shoulder

  I can hear the engines of deindustrialization?”

  —You should get into painting,

  You know,

  Tell lies deeply—

  This month, I’m rooting for the traitor

  Carting cement to my pillow . . . “here we will build”

  I’m high again. Not talking much.

  Climb the organ pipes up to our apartment floor

  I’m high again. Calling everything church.

  Singing along to the courtyard.

  Thanks to a horn player’s holy past time

  Climb up to the rustiest nail

  —Put a real jacket on it

  Talk about a real five years—

  Keep memories like these

  In my pocket

  Next to the toll receipt

  That man lost a wager

  with the god of good causes,

  you know,

  stood up for himself

  a little too late

  (maybe too early)

  I can still see

  Twenty angles of his jaw

  Zigzagging through

  The cold world

  Of deindustrialization

  “there’s an art to it,” I will tell my closest friends one day

  GUNNHILD ØYEHAUG

  ■

  Meanwhile, on Another Planet

  Translated from Norwegian by Kari Dickson

  FROM Knots

  DIX24 IS SITTING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE when PUZ32 slides into the room. DIX24 is so beautiful you could die, thinks PUZ32, how, she thinks, hiding her head in her hands, can one hurt something so beautiful as much as she has to do? DIX24 looks at her astonished, then a Polaroid picture slips out of his head, he takes it out and hands it to her, it’s a picture of PUZ32 as she is standing now, with her hands around her head. Then he pulls out another picture, which is blank, but with this symbol: “?” PUZ32 shakes her head. Then she pulls out a photograph. It is of PUZ32, naked, against the same kitchen table, with DIX27 behind her. DIX24 slides back from the chair while he stares at the photograph that slowly dissolves in front of his eyes. PUZ32’s heart is hammering. Then she pulls out a picture of a small fetus. It’s so beautiful. It’s so small and the light around it is so red. It’s sucking its thumb. It looks like it’s dreaming. It’s impossible to know about what. DIX24 closes his eyes, because it hurts! He is both furious and completely lost. He pulls a picture out of his head: DIX24 and PUZ32 eating hot dogs by a hot dog stand. PUZ32 opening her mouth around an enormous sausage with far too much onion. DIX24 is laughing. Another picture: DIX24 has won a pink teddy bear for PUZ32 and PUZ32 is hugging it. Another picture: DIX24 and PUZ32 walking hand in hand on the sand, the sun is setting and they are not wearing shoes. PUZ32’s heart is about to break. She pulls out a picture that shows that her heart is about to break. But DIX24 doesn’t see it. He’s sitting with his eyes closed. He pulls out a picture that shows a water surface. He sits for a while. Then he pulls out another picture: a big bubble is about to break onto the surface of the water. PUZ32 throws herself at the picture in an attempt to dive into it, but too late, it dissolves, she shakes DIX24, but he has disappeared into himself.

  * * *

  What can we learn from this? That impossible situations can arise on other planets too. We don’t need to think that we’re the only ones who struggle and fight. Another striking feature is that they communicate through pictures.

  DAVID LEAVITT

  ■

  The David Party

  FROM Washington Square Review

  EVERYONE AT THE PARTY WAS NAMED DAVID. This was a deliberate choice on the part of the host, whose name was also David. The invitation went so far as to prohibit the invitees from bringing along friends, partners, or spouses unless they also were named David. Two exceptions were allowed, an Italian named Davide and a woman named Davida, though only after considerable internal debate on the part of the host, whose notions of perfection were exalted.

  It should be remarked, for historical reasons, that the party took place in 1987 in New York, in an apartment at the corner of West End Avenue and 103rd Street. David’s Cookies were served, along with Mogen David wine.

  “Is everyone at this party gay?” David asked David.

  “What makes you assume that just because David’s gay, all the guests at his party should be gay?” David said.

  “Is David gay?” David asked. “David the host? I didn’t know.”

  “If you ask me, David is just a very gay name,” David said. “Not as gay as Roger—the gayest name of all—or Gerald. Or Philip. Still . . .”

  “I object to that,” David said. “My brother is named Phil and he’s not gay.”

  “Phil, not Philip,” David corrected. “The diminutive makes all the difference.”

  “Hello, I am Davide,” Davide said. “I am from Milano.”

  “Its the decoration that makes the party gay,” David said. “What could be gayer than all these little replicas of Michelangelo’s David?”

  “Are you saying there’s something intrinsically homoerotic about Michelangelo’s David?” David said.

  “I don’t think that’s an untenable claim,” David said.

  David turned to David and said: “I probably shouldn’t have been allowed in. Everyone calls me Davey.”

  “If you call me Davey, I’ll punch you,” David said. “I only let my father call me Davey.”

  “What’s your father’s name?” David asked.

  “Hal,” David said.

  “Hal David?” David said.

  “No, Hal Kalmbach,” David said.

  ‘That’s a shame,” David said. “If you’d told me your father was Hal David, I would have been impressed.”

  “But then my name would be David David,” David said. “Promises, promises,” David said.

  “What? Who’s making promises?” David said.

  “I mean the show,” David said. “Promises, Promises. Music by Burt Bacharach, lyrics by Hal David.”

  “I am not understanding a cock,” Davide said.

  “Of course as a rule, straight guys don’t go to all-male parties,” David said.

  “But how could a David party be other than all-male?” David said.

  “Unless they’re bachelor parties,” David said, “and then there’s just the one woman, the stripper.”

  “Excuse me, I am not a stripper,” Davida said.

  “We also need to consider that in the early sixties, when nearly everyone here was born, David was the most common name given to boys,” David said. “David, followed by Mark.”

  “How funny! My boyfriend’s name is Mark,” said about thirty Davids.

  “Touché,” David said.

  “You see?” David said. “This really is a gay party.”

  “Too bad,” Davida said. “It kills my ego being the only woman in a room full of queers.”

  “I hear you,” David said.

  “My name is nothing but a burden to me,” Davida said. “People always assume that my parents gave it to me because they were disappointed not to have had a son, when really it’s because my mother’s Scottish. In Scots, Davida means ‘beloved.’”

  “That sort of thing does happen,” David said. “When I was in college, I dated a girl named Bruceen.”

  “In the Bahamas, where I come from, fathers will give all their children names that are variations on their own,” David said. “Hence Anthony’s children might be Antoine, Antonio, Antonya, Toinette . . .”