Germans Have Decided Nude Bathing Is Passé

★ To sleepy eyes, the light seemed stronger than the sloshing sound of traffic suggested. The ears were right, though; the rain was real and steady all morning. After it passed there were low gray clouds moving under higher whiter ones, with big gulls flapping and gliding beneath them, fading in and out. From the far side of the avenue, stroller wheels rolling over wet grit made a rattling sound like a burst of new rain. Dog turds had melted into round, chunky puddles. Breathing outside made the latent cough down in the lungs come wheezing back into action. Even as the misplaced summer air was still rotting over everything, though, the summer light was unequivocally gone. Before 6:30, lamps shone in windows in the blue of full evening.

Photos by Renée Lynn Reizman

My first Nebraska fair of the summer was Franklin County, a farm town with a population just under 3,000 that could rival my former high school in the Chicago suburbs. Their fairgrounds were modest, with the majority of the layout dedicated to barns, a showmanship ring, and a small arena for the open-entry ranch rodeo that would take place later that evening. In an exhibition hall, the 4-H displays overshadowed the adult open-class entries, and I maneuvered through plates of homemade apple crisp and chocolate chip cookies covered in plastic wrap, searching for the purple ribbon quilts, jams, sweet corn, and roses that would join more than 100 other categories at the State Fair at the end of August.

I came to Nebraska as an artist in residence on a farm in Marquette (pop. 232) to research the impact internet infrastructure may have on the aesthetics of quilting in rural America. Transplanted to a place where I knew practically no one, but determined to interview quilters and see their work firsthand in some of the most sparsely populated areas of the state, I visited county fairs. Over the course of eight weeks, I went to 17 fairs, plus the Nebraska State Fair.

I was expecting a lot of diversity in the fair circuit, with each county featuring their particular quirks in an exaggerated, kitschy celebration. But instead I witnessed the opposite, a county fair aesthetic that was consistent and manufactured, colorful yet banal. Contrary to what I was expecting, the diversity of attendees was apparent—Nebraska’s demographics are rapidly changing. Between 2000-2010, the minority population grew by 50.7% while the non-Hispanic White population went up by only .04%. In 2015, around 38% of the children born in Nebraska were minorities. And in 2016, Nebraska resettled the most refugees per capita in the nation.

I’d like to say an extremely sincere congratulations to the very first reader’s writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. What is a reader’s writer? A term I’ve potentially just made up—I didn’t bother to Google. But the gist is, all writers fall into three categories, listed here in increasing order of enjoyability: intellectuals’ writers, writers’ writers, and readers’ writers.

First, intellectuals’ writers. This group writes books for people who don’t really seem to…enjoy reading, per se? Intellectuals’ writers don’t care about story or character much, or world building at all—or maybe it’s that they just care about things like style and structure and Pushing The Boundaries of Literature so much more. “Smart” people think these writers are “the best” but I don’t fuck with them unless they’re assigned in a class, and even then, I never finished Moby Dick. Life’s too short.

Don DeLillo is in this category. So’s Roberto Bolaño. W.G. Sebald. Doris Lessing, maybe. Djuna Barnes, definitely. Thomas Pynchon is like the president of this category, and his Veep is Cormac McCarthy. A certain type of male reader reads these books almost exclusively—as far as I can tell, for the sole purpose of gaining status as part of some weird male reader pissing order that’s not visible to me. It’s boring, is what I’m saying.

Next, writers’ writers—you’ve heard of them. This category is great! They write beautifully crafted books with well developed characters and believable dialogue and extremely gorgeous prose. No one reads them but other writers. They enjoy a brief window of Celebrity Fawning at things like the AWP conference which they keynote once a decade because they actually do need the speaker’s fee, and then they fade back into Midwestern obscurity to continue producing novels and short story collections that are technically and emotionally perfect but often weak on plot and tension and therefore very easy to leave on one’s nightstand for a year or more only partially read.

Image: Eden, Janine, and Jim via Flickr

“I get depressed when the seasons change from Summer to Fall. What can I do?”—Bummed About Autumn

Who wouldn’t get depressed? The days are getting shorter. The nights are getting longer, and are already full of terrors. Everything’s getting colder and darker. There’s no good TV shows running. The only comfort in the entire cruel world is like pumpkin-spiced things. Beers, coffee, pumpkin-spiced pumpkins, whatever. Your baseball teams are probably not contending. Leaves are dying and smelling a little like poop. Football players are all injuring each other.

The light changes ever so slightly. As if it was not there to send you warmth or illumination. It is “light” in scare quotes. Just enough to remind you of everything you’ve lost and are slowly but surely losing a few minutes at a time. Sure, I’m right there with you, Bummed. Even if Fall is your favorite time of year, even if this is a particularly warm Autumn so far, you know in the back of your mind how this movie is going to end. We’re all headed straight for another Winter.

In Winter it’s dark all day and all night. This lasts for like 5 months. Or it seems that way. No one understands you. There’s few reasons that seem worth emerging from the warmth of your blankets every morning. At this point you’ll yearn for anything pumpkin, but it will be gone. All the pumpkins are frozen. Their little pumpkin faces filled with frost and regret. They once smiled so joyfully but now they feel nothing except cold and dark and helpless.

Weren’t we just here? Wasn’t it moments ago that we were waking up to a new week, full of dread and barely able to drag ourselves to the starting line? Didn’t we just complain about how exhausted we were and wonder how much more we could take? I guess the good news is I can copy and paste this exact block of text over and over again until it finally all comes down, because we live in a world where it’s always like this now. Here’s some music. Enjoy.

★★ Ever-brightening blue showed through the gaps in the purple clouds till the purple itself had turned silver. The breeze was not cool enough to bring the hoodie out of the six-year-old’s backpack. A late arrival to the schoolyard, wearing a sweatshirt, asked the other gathered boys in their t-shirts if they were cold, and when they said no, ditched it. The chill aded to an intermittent clamminess, under a cloud-glazed sun. The thick and humid air was hard to draw in through the remains of fall’s first head cold. The sky got bleaker and bleaker. Children emerged from the afterschool sports program with their hair clumpy and damp with sweat. Something less than rain fell for a moment.

Image: Tomer Gabel via Flickr

[It’s been a terrible week at the White House, even correcting for the fact that this is the Trump White House, and incompetence, evil and spectacle have been normalized to a degree once believed unattainable in America. JARED, IVANKA, their DAUGHTER and SON, GENERALS KELLY and MATTIS, and GARY COHN are sitting at a round table like a group of knights, only if knights didn’t believe in primogeniture (because that would mean DON JUNIOR gets everything). GENERAL KELLY has finally arranged a conference call with the Supreme Court regarding how to activate the Twenty-fifth Amendment. He has kept the purpose of the call from most of his colleagues but the wisest ones have intuited something is up. JARED is thinking that sitting in a circle is stressful because there are so many opportunities to make eye contact.]

GENERAL KELLY [perfunctorily, even though he is staging a coup]: Does anyone have the number to the Supreme Court?

[IVANKA learned at a young age that exploiting the laziness of the men around her pays dividends, sometimes literally, so she dials the phone. JUSTICE GORSUCH answers, exactly who GENERAL KELLY did not want.]

IVANKA [powerfully]: Justice Gorsuch, hello.

JUSTICE GORSUCH [obsequiously]: Hi Ivanka. If this is about wearing pink to raise awareness for breast cancer, I did get to talk to the Chief Justice about that.

[IVANKA smiles fakely to GENERAL KELLY, proud that she has defiantly ignored his request to stop selling branded clothing to other branches of government.]

Sitting proudly in the psycho-biddy film canon—there is one, you know—is 1971’s What’s the Matter with Helen?, in which Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds play incognito mothers whose sons committed a headline-seizing murder. According to a Los Angeles Times story that ran at the time, Winters’s behavior while making the film was so erratic that at one point she was threatened with replacement by Geraldine Page. You’d better duck now, because I’m about to throw something. When Page won her long overdue Oscar in 1986, for The Trip to Bountiful, presenter F. Murray Abraham was bloody right to call her “the greatest actress in the English language,” and the idea that this acting colossus would fill in for Shelley Winters is risible; that Page would sully even the soles of her shoes on a mid-level piece of genre kitsch is unthinkable. Yet what am I to do with the fact that nestled in the above-cited canon is 1969’s What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?

(You should know that the “psycho-biddy” designation is slightly off, given that the actresses poached for the genre—which was largely a 1960s and early ’70s phenomenon—tended to be in their late forties and early fifties. For accounting purposes, the only chronological “biddy” starring in What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? is Ruth Gordon—seventy-two when the movie came out; Page was all of forty-four.)