thenation--2020-06-09--It’s Time for White NFL Players to Take the Knee

The NFL season , come pandemic or revolution , will almost certainly begin this fall—and it is going to be “ put up or shut up ” time for the league ’ s white players .
Here ’ s the reality : Many black players will be taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence and racial inequity .
After a remarkable video made by black NFL players condemning the league ’ s tepid support for the Black Lives Matter protests , Roger Goodell said in a video statement , among other things , “ We , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest.
” Whether Goodell made this speech to head off a players ’ revolt in a league that is 70 percent black or for some other reason is an interesting query .
But whatever you make of Goodell ’ s sincerity , there is no mistaking his intention : to admit that there should be no punitive or even rhetorical action condemning players for taking that knee in the future .
Even if you are as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s inability to admit that Colin Kaepernick was forced out of the league and denied the ability to earn a living because of his protest , the line the NFL commissioner is drawing is clear : No longer will he cower behind the shield , caring more about Donald Trump ’ s Twitter finger than the demands of the league ’ s players to dissent .
Sure enough , Trump—always seeking an opportunity to use the NFL as his own personal racist and nationalistic football—put out a tweet saying : The answer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He was giving Trump a tentative , quivering middle finger , yet a middle finger nonetheless .
Now , pardon the sports mixed metaphor , the ball is in the player ’ s court .
To put a finer point on it , it is in the white players ’ court .
Half a Century Before Colin Kaepernick , Jackie Robinson Said , ‘ I Can not Stand and Sing the Anthem.
’ In 2016 and ’ 17 many white players made clear that they did not believe people should “ disrespect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as if that is what Kaepernick was doing .
Only after Trump called the protesting players “ sons of bitches ” who should be kicked out of the sport did we see white players kneel , and that was done with the approval of ownership .
It was staged , and it had far more to do with standing up to Trump than solidarity with black lives taken by police violence or allyship with their black teammates .
This is a far different moment .
White players like Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their black teammates while recognizing their own privilege .
Other white NFL players have made their own statements of solidarity .
The Denver Broncos and Jacksonville Jaguars teams and coaches even marched in the protests .
But the proof of the pudding is going to be whether their knees hit the ground the first time that anthem plays .
No hands on shoulders , no linked arms , no raised fists , but actually taking the weight and scrutiny off their black teammates by taking a knee .
As Full Dissidence author Howard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kneeling gesture is the spot where America comes apart , where all the post-9/11 pro-police messaging and militarism at sporting events collides with the reality of the cops and military .
In no other element of our culture is there such a clear and defiant single gesture like taking a knee .
Where else are we allowed the space to say we disagree with our police ?
Where else can we register with one gesture , dissent with the alleged ideals of this country ?
America is getting called out with this one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anyone using it.
” Take the knee , white players .
That will show that this is more than just performative anti-racism , more than just tweets and Instagram statements , more than just fear of alienating your teammates .
It ’ s time to show true allyship and demonstrate in practice that all the rhetoric about a football team ’ s being family isn ’ t bullshit .
Take the knee to show Donald Trump and the world that you will not be divided .
Take the knee as a way to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lives do in fact matter .

The NFL season, come pandemic or revolution, will almost certainly begin this fall—and it is going to be “put up or shut up” time for the league’s white players. Here’s the reality: Many black players will be taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence and racial inequity. After a remarkable video made by black NFL players condemning the league’s tepid support for the Black Lives Matter protests, Roger Goodell said in a video statement, among other things, “We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest.”1
Whether Goodell made this speech to head off a players’ revolt in a league that is 70 percent black or for some other reason is an interesting query. But whatever you make of Goodell’s sincerity, there is no mistaking his intention: to admit that there should be no punitive or even rhetorical action condemning players for taking that knee in the future. Even if you are as put off as I am with Goodell’s inability to admit that Colin Kaepernick was forced out of the league and denied the ability to earn a living because of his protest, the line the NFL commissioner is drawing is clear: No longer will he cower behind the shield, caring more about Donald Trump’s Twitter finger than the demands of the league’s players to dissent.2
Sure enough, Trump—always seeking an opportunity to use the NFL as his own personal racist and nationalistic football—put out a tweet saying:3
Could it be even remotely possible that in Roger Goodell’s rather interesting statement of peace and reconciliation, he was intimating that it would now be O.K. for the players to KNEEL, or not to stand, for the National Anthem, thereby disrespecting our Country & our Flag?4
The answer is that Goodell was more than intimating. He was giving Trump a tentative, quivering middle finger, yet a middle finger nonetheless. Now, pardon the sports mixed metaphor, the ball is in the player’s court. To put a finer point on it, it is in the white players’ court.5 Sports Activism Half a Century Before Colin Kaepernick, Jackie Robinson Said, ‘I Cannot Stand and Sing the Anthem.’ Peter Dreier
In 2016 and ’17 many white players made clear that they did not believe people should “disrespect the flag” during the anthem, as if that is what Kaepernick was doing. Only after Trump called the protesting players “sons of bitches” who should be kicked out of the sport did we see white players kneel, and that was done with the approval of ownership. It was staged, and it had far more to do with standing up to Trump than solidarity with black lives taken by police violence or allyship with their black teammates.6
This is a far different moment. White players like Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz have made eloquent statements in support of their black teammates while recognizing their own privilege. Other white NFL players have made their own statements of solidarity. The Denver Broncos and Jacksonville Jaguars teams and coaches even marched in the protests. But the proof of the pudding is going to be whether their knees hit the ground the first time that anthem plays. No hands on shoulders, no linked arms, no raised fists, but actually taking the weight and scrutiny off their black teammates by taking a knee.7
As Full Dissidence author Howard Bryant said to me, “The kneeling gesture is the spot where America comes apart, where all the post-9/11 pro-police messaging and militarism at sporting events collides with the reality of the cops and military. In no other element of our culture is there such a clear and defiant single gesture like taking a knee. Where else are we allowed the space to say we disagree with our police? Where else can we register with one gesture, dissent with the alleged ideals of this country? America is getting called out with this one gesture and they are determined to punish anyone using it.”8 police brutality This Law Keeps Police Misconduct Secret Ross Barkan
Take the knee, white players. That will show that this is more than just performative anti-racism, more than just tweets and Instagram statements, more than just fear of alienating your teammates. It’s time to show true allyship and demonstrate in practice that all the rhetoric about a football team’s being family isn’t bullshit. Take the knee to show Donald Trump and the world that you will not be divided. Take the knee as a way to say once and for all that black lives do in fact matter.9


thenation--2020-06-09--Liberals: Don’t Be Afraid of Calls to Defund the Police

As The Nation ’ s designated liberal hand-wringer , I admit I ’ ve been concerned about the rapid spread of the demand to “ defund the police , ” which sociologist Alex S. Vitale argued for persuasively in our digital pages last week .
I have worried that its radicalism jeopardizes the growing mainstream support for police reform in the wake of George Floyd ’ s apparent murder by Minneapolis police two weeks ago , and the subsequent police violence against those protesting that crime .
It has , of course , become a simplistic “ gotcha ” question @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shoot at Democratic politicians , especially since a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to disband its police department Sunday .
But I ’ ve decided to calm down and trust the wisdom of the activists , as well as some of the leading politicians , who ’ ve been working on this issue far more closely , and with far more on the line , than I have .
There is right now a productive tension between liberalism and radicalism , as well as establishment insiders and activist outsiders , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : labor unrest in the 1930s ( and earlier ) helping to lead to New Deal reforms ; civil rights unrest in the ’ 60s culminating in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts .
Of course , the white backlash to ’ 60s civil rights progress , as well as sometimes-destructive protest and rising crime , led to the election of Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan—and now Donald Trump .
And some of us older folks are still living in the shadow of those traumas .
I ’ ve come to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much of the liberal Democratic establishment came of age politically , as I did , in the shadow of the Reagan revolution , when Republicans came to dominate not only policy but language itself , especially around crime , welfare , and the role of government .
After Republicans won the White House in five out of six elections , with a brief pause for Jimmy Carter , some Democrats worried that they ’ d never get it back .
President Bill Clinton led us out of that wilderness , partly by making @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worldview that progressives now loathe , or at least lament .
But even Barack Obama , like me , graduated from college into cramped , fearful Reagan-era political activism .
That partly accounted for his ( justified ) fear of a GOP backlash and ( futile ) determination to work with Republicans .
Now , some of us cringe at every slogan that might potentially frighten off the elusive swing voter , from “ Medicare for All ” to “ Abolish ICE ” to , now , “ Defund the police.
” But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going to doom Democrats in 2018 ?
And they took the House ?
Even Scott Walker , not the GOP ’ s brightest bulb , framed the issues on Twitter this way Sunday night : Thus making “ reform ” the default conservative position .
( Georgetown public policy professor Don Moynihan immediately demonstrated the authoritarian Walker ’ s deep hypocrisy . )
But the ever-centrist Politico Playbook reported Tuesday morning that some congressional Republicans say they are seriously considering whether they can support any of the police reform tenets of the bill @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker on Monday .
Senators Mitt Romney and Tim Scott are said to be looking at what they might back , and even some House Republicans are , too .
Politico reports : I ’ ll believe it when I see it , but… it ’ s not nothing .
I ’ m not going to pretend I don ’ t still worry about the slogan ’ s being confusing and potentially chasing away Americans who are otherwise open to serious police transformation .
( So does Senator @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) But I also worried that the violence on the fringe of the George Floyd protests last week would alienate the public—only to see public support for the demonstrators , and police reform , soar in that same period .
Part of that is thanks to cops themselves : The violent police riots we saw in cities from New York to Minneapolis to Austin to Los Angeles opened the nation ’ s eyes , belatedly , to the lawlessness of too many of the men and women who are paid to enforce the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Defund the Police And I think liberal and progressive Democrats are mostly handling the question well .
The View ’ s Meghan McCain tried to corner Senator Kamala Harris on Monday by professing support for police reform but opposition to “ defunding the police , ” and insisting that Harris say whether she supports that demand , “ yes or no.
” Harris did something deft—I think she learned a lot from her failed presidential campaign—and turned the question around on McCain : “ How are you defining funding the police ?
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ answer .
Noting that many cities spend “ more than one third ” of their budgets on police , Harris said she thought the actual task was “ reimagining how we do public safety in America , which I support.
” Incidentally , that ’ s the same formulation used on Sunday by Representative Ilhan Omar , who is to Harris ’ s left .
For now , I ’ m going to let those running for and holding public office sort it all out .
And there ’ s a lot to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to support “ defunding ” the police mean different things .
For many , it starts with demilitarizing urban police forces by not investing in the armaments of war .
For others , it ’ s putting significant chunks of police budgets into social services treating homelessness , mental health issues , and substance abuse .
It can also mean disbanding police forces , as the Minneapolis City Council seems to envision—but even that proposal remains admittedly vague .
And though he only uses the word “ reform , ” Minneapolis SEIU leader @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to break the power of conservative , often brutal police unions that have blocked attempts at change in many cities , including his own .
In an interview last week , The End of Policing author Vitale acknowledged this : Democratic nominee Joe Biden , elected to the Senate in 1972 , grew up in the shadow of Nixon , which was in some ways more withering to the political soul than Reagan , especially on racial issues .
Biden says forthrightly that he doesn ’ t support defunding the police .
Of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the former vice president is coming along on these and other issues .
Can we move him to “ systemic questioning ” of the roles police perform ?
Or even “ reimagining the police ” ?
We ’ ll see where Biden lands .
The only remaining worry I have is if it becomes a litmus test for activists , and they spurn a presidential candidate like Biden who won ’ t go that far—yet .
But I ’ ll worry about that later .
I ’ ve finally realized : It ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grew up in the shadow of the Reagan revolution either to shut up and listen , or exit stage left .

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As The Nation’s designated liberal hand-wringer, I admit I’ve been concerned about the rapid spread of the demand to “defund the police,” which sociologist Alex S. Vitale argued for persuasively in our digital pages last week. I have worried that its radicalism jeopardizes the growing mainstream support for police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s apparent murder by Minneapolis police two weeks ago, and the subsequent police violence against those protesting that crime. It has, of course, become a simplistic “gotcha” question for some reporters and news anchors to shoot at Democratic politicians, especially since a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to disband its police department Sunday.
But I’ve decided to calm down and trust the wisdom of the activists, as well as some of the leading politicians, who’ve been working on this issue far more closely, and with far more on the line, than I have. There is right now a productive tension between liberalism and radicalism, as well as establishment insiders and activist outsiders, the kind we talk about in history: labor unrest in the 1930s (and earlier) helping to lead to New Deal reforms; civil rights unrest in the ’60s culminating in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
Of course, the white backlash to ’60s civil rights progress, as well as sometimes-destructive protest and rising crime, led to the election of Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan—and now Donald Trump. And some of us older folks are still living in the shadow of those traumas.
I’ve come to realize part of the problem is that much of the liberal Democratic establishment came of age politically, as I did, in the shadow of the Reagan revolution, when Republicans came to dominate not only policy but language itself, especially around crime, welfare, and the role of government. After Republicans won the White House in five out of six elections, with a brief pause for Jimmy Carter, some Democrats worried that they’d never get it back. President Bill Clinton led us out of that wilderness, partly by making the many compromises with the dominant GOP worldview that progressives now loathe, or at least lament. But even Barack Obama, like me, graduated from college into cramped, fearful Reagan-era political activism. That partly accounted for his (justified) fear of a GOP backlash and (futile) determination to work with Republicans. Now, some of us cringe at every slogan that might potentially frighten off the elusive swing voter, from “Medicare for All” to “Abolish ICE” to, now, “Defund the police.”
But remember when “Abolish ICE” was going to doom Democrats in 2018? And they took the House?
Even Scott Walker, not the GOP’s brightest bulb, framed the issues on Twitter this way Sunday night:
Thus making “reform” the default conservative position. (Georgetown public policy professor Don Moynihan immediately demonstrated the authoritarian Walker’s deep hypocrisy.) Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
But the ever-centrist Politico Playbook reported Tuesday morning that some congressional Republicans say they are seriously considering whether they can support any of the police reform tenets of the bill proposed by the Democratic House along with Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker on Monday. Senators Mitt Romney and Tim Scott are said to be looking at what they might back, and even some House Republicans are, too. Politico reports:
The low-hanging fruit for Republicans includes a ban on chokeholds, declaring lynching a federal crime, creating a national reporting mechanism for police officers who get in trouble and beefed-up training programs for law enforcement. Republicans are even holding open the possibility that they could rework liability protections for police officers.
I’ll believe it when I see it, but… it’s not nothing.
I’m not going to pretend I don’t still worry about the slogan’s being confusing and potentially chasing away Americans who are otherwise open to serious police transformation. (So does Senator Bernie Sanders, by the way.) But I also worried that the violence on the fringe of the George Floyd protests last week would alienate the public—only to see public support for the demonstrators, and police reform, soar in that same period. Part of that is thanks to cops themselves: The violent police riots we saw in cities from New York to Minneapolis to Austin to Los Angeles opened the nation’s eyes, belatedly, to the lawlessness of too many of the men and women who are paid to enforce the law. Defund the Police Making George Floyd’s Life Matter Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, The Nation and Magnum Foundation The FBI Finds ‘No Intel Indicating Antifa Involvement’ in Sunday’s Violence Ken Klippenstein The Only Solution Is to Defund the Police Alex S. Vitale
And I think liberal and progressive Democrats are mostly handling the question well. The View’s Meghan McCain tried to corner Senator Kamala Harris on Monday by professing support for police reform but opposition to “defunding the police,” and insisting that Harris say whether she supports that demand, “yes or no.” Harris did something deft—I think she learned a lot from her failed presidential campaign—and turned the question around on McCain: “How are you defining funding the police?” Of course, McCain couldn’t answer. Noting that many cities spend “more than one third” of their budgets on police, Harris said she thought the actual task was “reimagining how we do public safety in America, which I support.” Incidentally, that’s the same formulation used on Sunday by Representative Ilhan Omar, who is to Harris’s left. For now, I’m going to let those running for and holding public office sort it all out.
And there’s a lot to sort out. Even those who profess to support “defunding” the police mean different things. For many, it starts with demilitarizing urban police forces by not investing in the armaments of war. For others, it’s putting significant chunks of police budgets into social services treating homelessness, mental health issues, and substance abuse. It can also mean disbanding police forces, as the Minneapolis City Council seems to envision—but even that proposal remains admittedly vague. And though he only uses the word “reform,” Minneapolis SEIU leader Javier Morillo laid out seven tough moves— to break the power of conservative, often brutal police unions that have blocked attempts at change in many cities, including his own.
In an interview last week, The End of Policing author Vitale acknowledged this:
I’m certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police. What I’m talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them. And my feeling is that this encompasses actually the vast majority of what police do. We have better alternatives for them.
Democratic nominee Joe Biden, elected to the Senate in 1972, grew up in the shadow of Nixon, which was in some ways more withering to the political soul than Reagan, especially on racial issues. Biden says forthrightly that he doesn’t support defunding the police. Of course he doesn’t. But the former vice president is coming along on these and other issues. Can we move him to “systemic questioning” of the roles police perform? Or even “reimagining the police”? We’ll see where Biden lands.
The only remaining worry I have is if it becomes a litmus test for activists, and they spurn a presidential candidate like Biden who won’t go that far—yet. But I’ll worry about that later. I’ve finally realized: It’s time for those of us who grew up in the shadow of the Reagan revolution either to shut up and listen, or exit stage left.


thenation--2020-06-09--Can the Russian Health Care System Cope With the Coronavirus?

Moscow ’ s tree-lined Rozhdestvensky Boulevard was almost deserted .
Behind a barrier , a litter-picker was at work while another rested on a bench .
These municipal employees in Day-Glo orange overalls were among the few Muscovites who could enjoy the tulip display .
Russia ’ s capital normally returns to life in spring , but this year has stayed dormant : shops , restaurants , and cafés closed , public spaces padlocked .
People go out to buy food or walk their dogs , but this mega-city of 12 million , on lockdown since March 30 , is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ old people in the streets , as they are forbidden to leave home except to go to the family dacha .
Translated by George Miller .
This essay continues our exclusive collaboration with Le Monde Diplomatique , monthly publishing jointly commissioned and shared articles , both in print and online .
To subscribe to LMD , go to mondediplo.com/subscribe .
Russia managed to delay the coronavirus outbreak by a few weeks through early preventive action : It closed its land border with China on January 30 , banned Chinese nationals from entering the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from high-risk countries , and began disinfecting public transport and taking the temperature of Moscow school pupils daily .
But the virus began to spread throughout the country .
In May new infections rose steeply , with almost 31,000 registered during the long May 1 holiday weekend .
Just before it , Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin was hospitalized with the virus , as were two other ministers and the president ’ s spokesperson .
By May 19 there had been 300,000 infections but only 2,837 deaths , which caused western media to speculate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ death rate by as much as 70 percent ( The New York Times and Financial Times , both May 11 ) .
The Russian authorities acknowledged that a patient who tested positive for Covid-19 but died of another cause would not be included in their figures , but denied any manipulation .
Even if revised upward , Russia ’ s Covid-19 deaths remain below those of Italy , Spain , and the United States .
But if the infection rate grows , will Russia ’ s medical infrastructure be able to cope ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ diseases may help explain the authorities ’ swift initial response .
It dates from 1918 when the Narkomzdrav , the People ’ s Commissariat of Public Health , was created .
The Narkomzdrav , led by medic Nikolai Semashko , developed the world ’ s first unitary national health system , known as the Semashko system : free , universal , and founded on a multi-level organization of care according to the severity of the condition .
District polyclinics were the first link , offering outpatient treatment for common ailments and ensuring coordination @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clinics , patients could see general practitioners and specialists such as ENT doctors , urologists , and dentists .
Semashko wrote , “ The organization of the health system on the district principle gives health care providers a chance to know their patients ’ working and living conditions better , so the district doctor becomes the ‘ local ’ doctor , a friend of the family.
” The family practice was the forerunner of similar systems later adopted in other countries .
Particular attention was paid to infectious disease prevention .
In 1922 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Service , was created , with intervention teams that could be deployed nationwide , from factories to villages .
Their vigilance , together with mass vaccination , allowed the USSR to eliminate tuberculosis and malaria .
Average life expectancy in Russia , just 31 at the end of the 19th century , rose to 69 by the 1960s ; the Soviets had closed the gap with Western nations .
Today ’ s successor to Sanepid , Rospotrebnadzor ( Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing ) is in daily @ @ @ @ @ @ @ directly to President Vladimir Putin , who is in charge of Russia ’ s overall anti-Covid-19 strategy .
According to Ivan Konovalov , a researcher in the department of childhood infectious diseases at Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University , this organization has helped alleviate the burden on hospitals , using large-scale CCTV surveillance and policies that discriminate by age .
On March 23 a mayoral decree in Moscow forbade anyone over 65 who suffers from a chronic illness to leave home .
As a result , 85 percent of Russia ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ average experience less acute symptoms .
Russia boasts of one of the lowest Covid-19 death rates in the world ( 0.9 percent , according to April 25 data ) , but this might be due to its comparatively low national life expectancy , which averages 72 years overall , 67.6 for men .
Russia ’ s mass testing strategy is another contributory factor .
Rospotrebnadzor said it had carried out 2.5 million tests by April 24 , the second-highest figure in the world , which allowed early isolation and treatment , and brought @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people with asymptomatic forms .
Russia retains significant hospital capacity from the Soviet era .
This anomaly in a country that devotes just 3.5 percent of GDP to public health , compared to an OECD average of 6.5 percent , has been ascribed to organizational shortcomings from the 1960s .
At that time , the health system began prioritizing hospitals over primary care .
A sharp increase in cardiovascular disease and cancers , poorly treated by the Soviet system because of a lack of investment in expensive technology , explains the fall in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and 1974 .
Judyth Twigg , a US expert on Russia ’ s health system , said , “ To fulfill the objectives of the plan , there was a tendency to open as many beds as possible and hospitalize people for as long as possible .
There was little regard for quality and innovation .
Only quantity counted.
” Prevention , the strength of the Semashko system , was relegated to second place .
Despite a drastic reduction in numbers of health care institutions—the number of hospitals halved between 2000 and 2015 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inhabitants was reduced by a quarter—Russia still has one of the highest beds-per-capita rates in the world , with 8.1 for every 1,000 inhabitants compared with six in France and 2.8 in the United States , according to OECD figures .
This capacity will be an asset during the pandemic , especially as Russia is also well equipped with ventilators and respiratory equipment—around 40,000 according to the authorities—but behind these figures the reality of health care provision is highly variable .
Between Us , We Cover the World What ’ s Really Happening @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never really recovered from the collapse of the 1990s , when the brutal decline in economic and social conditions led to the reemergence of tuberculosis and other previously eradicated infectious diseases .
The introduction in 1993 of an Obligatory Medical Insurance scheme , which currently takes 5.1 percent of a worker ’ s net salary , as part of every employment contract has made it possible to improve the system over time , at the cost of widening inequalities in access .
Consultations with a GP and hospital stays remain free , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Regional inequalities have grown too .
The restructuring that began to optimize expenditure in the 2000s led to rural hospital closures and the construction of high tech facilities in big cities .
Many Russian health care workers complain on social media about a lack of equipment and medicines , outdated technology , and low pay .
In 2019 there were strikes and collective resignations in several cities , often with support from the Doctors ’ Alliance .
Last August , at a hospital in Pyatigorsk , near the Georgian border , doctors resigned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ resources ?
This anger is not confined to outlying regions .
In Tarusa , a town of 10,000 inhabitants more than 90 miles south of the capital , health care workers say they lack such basics as disposable gowns and disinfectant .
Twigg points out , “ Putting someone on a ventilator requires not just a qualified doctor but also anesthesiologists , lab technicians , and , in particular , intensive care nurses .
It ’ s not certain that Russia has such resources.
” Even if the system holds up against Covid-19 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ primary care is being neglected .
The number of district doctors nationally fell from 73,200 in 2005 to 60,900 in 2016 .
In 2017 just 13 percent of Russia ’ s doctors were GPs , compared to an average of 33 percent across the OECD .
Russians are rejecting public polyclinics when seeking treatment .
According to a study in August 2019 , 57 percent of Russians self-medicate rather than go to the doctor .
The better-off are turning to a booming private sector .
Since MD Medical Group opened its first private @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the big health companies have accelerated their growth , targeting the upper middle class in big cities .
In 2016 private health care providers ’ share of the Obligatory Medical Insurance sector was 29 percent , compared to 16 percent just three years before .
Medsi , owned by the Sistema holding company , already does 8 million consultations a year in Russia and this year planned to open a 365,000 square-foot multi-speciality medical center in Moscow .
Igor Sheiman , a researcher at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ basics of the Semashko system , based on affordable care and the central role of polyclinics .
“ Unfortunately , that ’ s not where efforts have gone , ” he concedes .
He believes the 550 billion rubles ( $ 7.55 billion ) earmarked for the national health program ( one of 13 national priority projects for 2019–24 ) is not enough to modernize primary care .
And these funds are at risk of cuts .
The Russian government , obsessed with the stability of the ruble , is reluctant to increase @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dipping into its sovereign fund to finance emergency measures .
The modernization of the health care system may have to wait .

Moscow’s tree-lined Rozhdestvensky Boulevard was almost deserted. Behind a barrier, a litter-picker was at work while another rested on a bench. These municipal employees in Day-Glo orange overalls were among the few Muscovites who could enjoy the tulip display. Russia’s capital normally returns to life in spring, but this year has stayed dormant: shops, restaurants, and cafés closed, public spaces padlocked. People go out to buy food or walk their dogs, but this mega-city of 12 million, on lockdown since March 30, is quiet. There are no children or old people in the streets, as they are forbidden to leave home except to go to the family dacha. Translated by George Miller. This essay continues our exclusive collaboration with Le Monde Diplomatique, monthly publishing jointly commissioned and shared articles, both in print and online. To subscribe to LMD, go to mondediplo.com/subscribe.
Russia managed to delay the coronavirus outbreak by a few weeks through early preventive action: It closed its land border with China on January 30, banned Chinese nationals from entering the country soon after, quarantined citizens returning from high-risk countries, and began disinfecting public transport and taking the temperature of Moscow school pupils daily.
But the virus began to spread throughout the country. In May new infections rose steeply, with almost 31,000 registered during the long May 1 holiday weekend. Just before it, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin was hospitalized with the virus, as were two other ministers and the president’s spokesperson.
By May 19 there had been 300,000 infections but only 2,837 deaths, which caused western media to speculate that the Russian statistics understated the true death rate by as much as 70 percent (The New York Times and Financial Times, both May 11). The Russian authorities acknowledged that a patient who tested positive for Covid-19 but died of another cause would not be included in their figures, but denied any manipulation. Even if revised upward, Russia’s Covid-19 deaths remain below those of Italy, Spain, and the United States. But if the infection rate grows, will Russia’s medical infrastructure be able to cope?
Russia’s experience of fighting infectious diseases may help explain the authorities’ swift initial response. It dates from 1918 when the Narkomzdrav, the People’s Commissariat of Public Health, was created. The Narkomzdrav, led by medic Nikolai Semashko, developed the world’s first unitary national health system, known as the Semashko system: free, universal, and founded on a multi-level organization of care according to the severity of the condition.
Free district clinics
District polyclinics were the first link, offering outpatient treatment for common ailments and ensuring coordination within the system. In these free clinics, patients could see general practitioners and specialists such as ENT doctors, urologists, and dentists. Semashko wrote, “The organization of the health system on the district principle gives health care providers a chance to know their patients’ working and living conditions better, so the district doctor becomes the ‘local’ doctor, a friend of the family.” The family practice was the forerunner of similar systems later adopted in other countries.
Particular attention was paid to infectious disease prevention. In 1922 Sanepid, the State Sanitary and Epidemiological Service, was created, with intervention teams that could be deployed nationwide, from factories to villages. Their vigilance, together with mass vaccination, allowed the USSR to eliminate tuberculosis and malaria. Average life expectancy in Russia, just 31 at the end of the 19th century, rose to 69 by the 1960s; the Soviets had closed the gap with Western nations. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Current Issue View our current issue
Today’s successor to Sanepid, Rospotrebnadzor (Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing) is in daily contact with the health ministry but reports directly to President Vladimir Putin, who is in charge of Russia’s overall anti-Covid-19 strategy. According to Ivan Konovalov, a researcher in the department of childhood infectious diseases at Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University, this organization has helped alleviate the burden on hospitals, using large-scale CCTV surveillance and policies that discriminate by age. On March 23 a mayoral decree in Moscow forbade anyone over 65 who suffers from a chronic illness to leave home. As a result, 85 percent of Russia’s Covid-19 patients are under 65 so on average experience less acute symptoms. Russia boasts of one of the lowest Covid-19 death rates in the world (0.9 percent, according to April 25 data), but this might be due to its comparatively low national life expectancy, which averages 72 years overall, 67.6 for men.
Russia’s mass testing strategy is another contributory factor. Rospotrebnadzor said it had carried out 2.5 million tests by April 24, the second-highest figure in the world, which allowed early isolation and treatment, and brought down the percentage mortality rate by identifying people with asymptomatic forms.
Soviet-era hospital capacity
Russia retains significant hospital capacity from the Soviet era. This anomaly in a country that devotes just 3.5 percent of GDP to public health, compared to an OECD average of 6.5 percent, has been ascribed to organizational shortcomings from the 1960s. At that time, the health system began prioritizing hospitals over primary care. A sharp increase in cardiovascular disease and cancers, poorly treated by the Soviet system because of a lack of investment in expensive technology, explains the fall in life expectancy by three years between 1965 and 1974. Judyth Twigg, a US expert on Russia’s health system, said, “To fulfill the objectives of the plan, there was a tendency to open as many beds as possible and hospitalize people for as long as possible. There was little regard for quality and innovation. Only quantity counted.” Prevention, the strength of the Semashko system, was relegated to second place.
Despite a drastic reduction in numbers of health care institutions—the number of hospitals halved between 2000 and 2015 and the number of beds per 10,000 inhabitants was reduced by a quarter—Russia still has one of the highest beds-per-capita rates in the world, with 8.1 for every 1,000 inhabitants compared with six in France and 2.8 in the United States, according to OECD figures. This capacity will be an asset during the pandemic, especially as Russia is also well equipped with ventilators and respiratory equipment—around 40,000 according to the authorities—but behind these figures the reality of health care provision is highly variable. Between Us, We Cover the World The Soccer Fans That Toppled a Government Mickaël Correia Florida’s Flooded Future: ‘Retreat While There’s Still Time’ Laura Raim What’s Really Happening to Uighurs in Xinjiang? Rémi Castets
The system never really recovered from the collapse of the 1990s, when the brutal decline in economic and social conditions led to the reemergence of tuberculosis and other previously eradicated infectious diseases. The introduction in 1993 of an Obligatory Medical Insurance scheme, which currently takes 5.1 percent of a worker’s net salary, as part of every employment contract has made it possible to improve the system over time, at the cost of widening inequalities in access. Consultations with a GP and hospital stays remain free, but prescriptions have to be paid for.
Regional inequalities have grown too. The restructuring that began to optimize expenditure in the 2000s led to rural hospital closures and the construction of high tech facilities in big cities. Many Russian health care workers complain on social media about a lack of equipment and medicines, outdated technology, and low pay. In 2019 there were strikes and collective resignations in several cities, often with support from the Doctors’ Alliance. Last August, at a hospital in Pyatigorsk, near the Georgian border, doctors resigned en masse.
Does Russia have the resources?
This anger is not confined to outlying regions. In Tarusa, a town of 10,000 inhabitants more than 90 miles south of the capital, health care workers say they lack such basics as disposable gowns and disinfectant. Twigg points out, “Putting someone on a ventilator requires not just a qualified doctor but also anesthesiologists, lab technicians, and, in particular, intensive care nurses. It’s not certain that Russia has such resources.”
Even if the system holds up against Covid-19, structural problems remain. Provision of primary care is being neglected. The number of district doctors nationally fell from 73,200 in 2005 to 60,900 in 2016. In 2017 just 13 percent of Russia’s doctors were GPs, compared to an average of 33 percent across the OECD. Russians are rejecting public polyclinics when seeking treatment. According to a study in August 2019, 57 percent of Russians self-medicate rather than go to the doctor.
The better-off are turning to a booming private sector. Since MD Medical Group opened its first private maternity hospital in Moscow in 2006, the big health companies have accelerated their growth, targeting the upper middle class in big cities. In 2016 private health care providers’ share of the Obligatory Medical Insurance sector was 29 percent, compared to 16 percent just three years before. Medsi, owned by the Sistema holding company, already does 8 million consultations a year in Russia and this year planned to open a 365,000 square-foot multi-speciality medical center in Moscow.
Igor Sheiman, a researcher at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, has long advocated a return to the basics of the Semashko system, based on affordable care and the central role of polyclinics. “Unfortunately, that’s not where efforts have gone,” he concedes. He believes the 550 billion rubles ($7.55 billion) earmarked for the national health program (one of 13 national priority projects for 2019–24) is not enough to modernize primary care. And these funds are at risk of cuts. The Russian government, obsessed with the stability of the ruble, is reluctant to increase its budget deficit and is only unwillingly dipping into its sovereign fund to finance emergency measures. The modernization of the health care system may have to wait.


thenation--2020-06-09--How We Can Start Dismantling Systemic Racism

We are in the midst of a health crisis , an economic crisis , and a social crisis—and systemic racism is at the heart of each .
The day after George Floyd died in Minneapolis police custody , the Covid-19 death toll in the United States passed 100,000 .
Two days after that , the unemployment number passed 40 million .
Throughout the pandemic , black people have been infected and have lost their jobs at higher rates than white people .
If we are to have any hope of creating real solutions to these three crises , we must @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that allow it to perpetuate .
This is , of course , a complex task .
But Dorian Warren , the president of the Center for Community Change Action , has put forward an important idea for how we can begin : redistribution for reconstruction .
According to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman , the United States spends twice as much on “ law and order ” —prisons , courts , and police forces—as we do on cash welfare programs such as food stamps and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of fixing that imbalance .
Read the full text of Katrina ’ s column here .

EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
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We are in the midst of a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a social crisis—and systemic racism is at the heart of each. The day after George Floyd died in Minneapolis police custody, the Covid-19 death toll in the United States passed 100,000. Two days after that, the unemployment number passed 40 million. Throughout the pandemic, black people have been infected and have lost their jobs at higher rates than white people.
If we are to have any hope of creating real solutions to these three crises, we must dismantle systemic racism by restructuring those systems that allow it to perpetuate.
This is, of course, a complex task. But Dorian Warren, the president of the Center for Community Change Action, has put forward an important idea for how we can begin: redistribution for reconstruction. According to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the United States spends twice as much on “law and order”—prisons, courts, and police forces—as we do on cash welfare programs such as food stamps and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. The events of this year highlight the urgency of fixing that imbalance.
Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.


thenation--2020-06-09--Harry Dodge’s ‘My Meteorite’ Is Like a Wonderful Sculpture

In the early 1990s , Harry Dodge cofounded Red Dora ’ s Bearded Lady , a community-based performance space that served as a hub for an emerging DIY literary and arts scene in pre-gentrified San Francisco .
Soon after , his buddy film By Hook or by Crook ( which he directed with Silas Howard ) premiered at Sundance and quickly became a queer cult classic .
Along with the film , Dodge ’ s video work , writing , drawing , and sculpture make up an ongoing investigation into questions about materiality and consciousness—what he has called the “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recently , his sculptures have been exhibited in solo and group shows , including the New Museum ’ s 40th-anniversary exhibition “ Trigger ” in 2017 and ’ 18 . )
His new book , My Meteorite : Or , Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing , an experimental memoir of sorts , feels like a natural continuation of this long-standing interdisciplinary practice .
It is yet another sculpture , with his words and thoughts pushed around as if they were aluminum or clay .
The book not only extends @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that our practices of love must expand beyond the human—situates itself in a long history of philosophers interested in what love means .
Loosely structured around five nonlinear vignettes ( the decline of Dodge ’ s father into dementia ; Dodge ’ s rekindling a relationship with his birth mother ; his relationship with his sons , Iggy and Lenny ; an investigation into AI ; and a detailing of the gallery acquisition of his art ) , My Meteorite defines love in a broad sense , using it as a springboard to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bonds , family ones , encounters with nature , and even attractions to everyday objects .
While My Meteorite has been called a genre-defying memoir , those words don ’ t entirely fit this wonderful , inexplicable book .
Narrated by what Dodge refers to as “ the character of the author , ” it uses autobiography to ground itself as a piece of idiosyncratic philosophical inquiry .
His main interests—the invisible threads that sew us together , the meaning found in randomness—do not yet have names , allowing My Meteorite to naturally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Blade Runner to Fred Moten to Prince all in one swoop .
I spoke with Dodge by phone a few days after calls for social distancing had left him holed up with his family in Los Angeles .
Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length .
Taliah Mancini : It feels somewhat odd to interview you about My Meteorite , because in it you make clear that you are more interested in questions than answers—and you have even expressed distrust of language ’ s ability to capture indeterminacy .
Harry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fails , which is to say , when it fails to represent exactly—our feelings , our lived experiences .
It ’ s such a profound tool , the promise of it alone can be agitating , and a glob of words often comes sort of wrapped in an equally profound set of expectations .
But I also find using language to be super-ecstatic .
We know the words may be imperfect .
There is no doubt that we lose some specificity in trying to frame or reframe our thoughts , but I think @ @ @ @ @ @ @ likely lose precision , but what we gain is a sense of having communicated , changed something .
Altogether , I think of it as a kind of loving .
And I ’ m excited by that .
I find that when I ’ m writing , I ’ m actually much more capable of generating , I guess , more shareable thoughts .
For me , writing is fertile , a way of growing things .
And those written items are sculptural .
They arrive in the world as active—things that take @ @ @ @ @ @ @ failures .
In the distant past , I didn ’ t yet appreciate the positive aspects of what language knits , its features .
I ’ m not like that anymore .
Now I ’ m a logophile , but in certain situations , I felt like the book was some sort of manifest act that showed my faith in language and its related ecstasies .
TM : You insist that everything , including language , is material .
I was interested in how your writing process relates to your art practice .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ sculptures .
I ’ m a matter lover , and when writing , I tend to address thoughts and words like they ’ re objects , found or made .
It ’ s weird , though , because , as I said , with language , there ’ s an expectation of eventual clarity .
Or maybe what I mean to say is , in reading prose , we often wrestle with a desire for mastery .
In viewing sculpture , we bring a very different set of expectations .
But my experience @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other than represent awesome , terrible , amazing things , and sequencing in time is also powerful as a tool , and it feels sculptural and also poetic .
And by poetic , I mean to say , so specific that it ’ s still moving , still alive .
TM : The book moves through time in ways that refuse the linear progression of a traditional memoir .
Were you thinking about genre when writing ?
HD : I mean , I wanted to make a book that I myself would like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t like anything too straightforward .
This has always been the case for me .
I was not thinking about genre .
I was not thinking about breaking rules .
Over decades , I ’ ve sort of trained myself away from fighting with categories .
Mostly , now I just sort of forget to remember them .
I think having an art practice in which I ’ ve spent years trying to track what I call my hot spots and to find manifest forms that will work has done that .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ worth , I ’ m just trying to stay exactly on top of my best weirdest thought .
To tell you about the questions and also live the questions .
And regarding the correlation of the history of philosophy and scientism and rationality , I believe , in the book , I was actually trying to poke a stick into those linkages as truisms , explicitly and implicitly or formally .
As I see it , My Meteorite is like a very large-scale sculpture .
It takes 18 hours to see it all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ look at everything , it ’ s not going to add up .
Like a long poem , it accrues and by that action becomes itself .
That said—and maybe it ’ s not as obvious as I thought—there are two linear threads in the book , the years 2016 and 2017 , and both move forward , so my dad dies at the beginning but also at the end .
The momentum is familiar , in a way .
I mean , time moves in one direction there , and it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ care about , keep turning pages .
TM : The various texts you pull into My Meteorite felt like a way of pushing back against familiarity , too .
What did your research process look like ?
HD : I love being right on the edge of a thought that I can ’ t quite reach , a weird about-to-sneeze feeling .
Ideally , as an artist or writer , I want to stay there , on that raw frontier , cultivating a condition of bewilderment shot through with curiosity .
For me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ foods .
[ Laughs . ]
I tend to be overcommitted , maybe to a fault , which is to say that , with everything I do , I intend for it to collide with and inform the problem I ’ m puzzling out .
In other words , I ’ m always working .
My Meteorite is the result of decades of thinking about matter , its habits or intelligences , and by correlation , remote connectedness .
My desire to communicate about these subjects , these questions—that ’ s what kick-started @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work is concerned with the possibilities of editing .
What did the editing process of the book look like ?
HD : Editing the book was similar to editing video in many ways .
Grappling with time , with duration , and in all cases I build first .
Hunt and gather , if you will .
It ’ s a process of getting some stuff onto the page or onto the timeline .
For me , it works better to say “ yes ” a lot at the front end of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no ” too soon .
I can ’ t go backwards in a sculpture , but creating video , I can , and in writing a book , this is obviously possible , as I keep iterations by making new files .
That allows a kind of fecund courage to just go crazy , keep building .
TM : It makes me think about your author ’ s note , in which you say the book was “ drafted , in large part , using unaugmented recollection as a primary source.
” There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a true story and also that it ’ s shaped by problems of distinction , classification , and familiarity .
HD : The book is generally true , whatever that means .
And I ’ m sure it means something—just not sure what .
A reader has to consider the force of the frame , the force of distillation , the force of literary license .
And to your question , the fact-checker did great work , tons of important stuff , corrected quotations and sources , but for example , they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tree in the world , how many rings it had .
I said , “ No I ’ m doing this from memory.
” Misremembering is generative .
Sort of a paradox , the sum of presence plus absence .
A false memory can set life into a certain groove .
It has effects .
This is partly what the book is interested in .
The figure of the misremembered sculpture in the book serves to remind us of that .
And this idea of thoughts bearing force or , you know , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the imaginary and , obviously , the virtual .
TM : It was an eerie coincidence that I was preparing for this interview while we are collectively moving away from public spaces and social settings .
I keep returning to your line “ We are porous and we are dependent , and the fuzz of that interdependence is specifically the site of a paradoxical resistance to capitalism.
” HD : It ’ s awful and awesome realizing , on any level at all , the extent to which we ’ re penetrated , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world , a world we conventionally consider to be outside of our skins but which , of course , is not strictly—or maybe in any sense at all—the truth .
One thing that ’ s happening right now is that , collectively , we ’ re being starkly reminded of just how interconnected we are .
A virus moves from creature to creature , surface to creature , reproduces , and in a matter of months has encountered hundreds of millions of other creatures .
The magnitude of that spread , by actual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other thing that ’ s happening is a kind of endgame experiment with socializing remotely , socializing by screen—a version of remote connectedness that messes with the distinction between presence and absence .
TM : Mechanophilia—the love of machines—seems important here .
Throughout the book , you suggest that attraction to everyday objects might help us reimagine how we relate to the matter around us .
HD : Yes , there ’ s the AI relationship [ I write about ] in [ Spike Jonze ’ s ] Her and the instance I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the tailpipe of his car .
Those examples are meant to be hyperbolic or poetic versions of , you know , loving matter , being in love with matter .
[ Laughs . ]
Which is—well , let ’ s say it ’ s on a continuum with how I feel , as a sculptor , as a thinker , as a body sensitive to other bodies .
TM : To circle back to my first question , I can ’ t help but wonder if you feel you broke out of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is to ask , while writing , did you find any answers ?
HD : The experience of writing really shifted something about the way I thought about my relationship with my birth mother .
I wouldn ’ t characterize the epiphanies as answers , but the process has definitely shed some light , definitely transformed my emotional realities with regard to that relationship .
I had been so troubled , you know , really confused , and by the time I finished writing the book , my experience of that relation was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , more tenderness .
I didn ’ t know that was going to happen .
I didn ’ t think of the book as therapeutic in the least , and I ’ m not sure I would characterize it as such , but things shift when you make art and you ’ re touching it in some honest or raw way .
That ’ s not why I make art .
I make it primarily to make social objects .
I ’ m often creative because I ’ m trying to say something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some company , so I hole up alone for a year or whatever , and I do these things , and then I present them , thinking somehow they ’ re going to function as really effective , clear mediating objects that people feel loved by .
[ Laughs . ]
While I now know that is definitely not the case , it ’ s still the case that I do that to try to be legible or to try to make offerings or try to be social or try to offer auspicious @ @ @ @ @

In the early 1990s, Harry Dodge cofounded Red Dora’s Bearded Lady, a community-based performance space that served as a hub for an emerging DIY literary and arts scene in pre-gentrified San Francisco. Soon after, his buddy film By Hook or by Crook (which he directed with Silas Howard) premiered at Sundance and quickly became a queer cult classic. Along with the film, Dodge’s video work, writing, drawing, and sculpture make up an ongoing investigation into questions about materiality and consciousness—what he has called the “pursuit of the in-between.” (Most recently, his sculptures have been exhibited in solo and group shows, including the New Museum’s 40th-anniversary exhibition “Trigger” in 2017 and ’18.) His new book, My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing, an experimental memoir of sorts, feels like a natural continuation of this long-standing interdisciplinary practice. It is yet another sculpture, with his words and thoughts pushed around as if they were aluminum or clay.
The book not only extends Dodge’s sculptural work but also—insisting that our practices of love must expand beyond the human—situates itself in a long history of philosophers interested in what love means. Loosely structured around five nonlinear vignettes (the decline of Dodge’s father into dementia; Dodge’s rekindling a relationship with his birth mother; his relationship with his sons, Iggy and Lenny; an investigation into AI; and a detailing of the gallery acquisition of his art), My Meteorite defines love in a broad sense, using it as a springboard to examine different types of connections: quantum bonds, family ones, encounters with nature, and even attractions to everyday objects.
While My Meteorite has been called a genre-defying memoir, those words don’t entirely fit this wonderful, inexplicable book. Narrated by what Dodge refers to as “the character of the author,” it uses autobiography to ground itself as a piece of idiosyncratic philosophical inquiry. His main interests—the invisible threads that sew us together, the meaning found in randomness—do not yet have names, allowing My Meteorite to naturally seep across disciplines and letting him jump from Blade Runner to Fred Moten to Prince all in one swoop.
I spoke with Dodge by phone a few days after calls for social distancing had left him holed up with his family in Los Angeles. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
—Taliah Mancini
Taliah Mancini: It feels somewhat odd to interview you about My Meteorite, because in it you make clear that you are more interested in questions than answers—and you have even expressed distrust of language’s ability to capture indeterminacy.
Harry Dodge: Language is agitating when it fails, which is to say, when it fails to represent exactly—our feelings, our lived experiences. It’s such a profound tool, the promise of it alone can be agitating, and a glob of words often comes sort of wrapped in an equally profound set of expectations. But I also find using language to be super-ecstatic. We know the words may be imperfect. There is no doubt that we lose some specificity in trying to frame or reframe our thoughts, but I think of it as a trade-off. We likely lose precision, but what we gain is a sense of having communicated, changed something. Altogether, I think of it as a kind of loving. And I’m excited by that. I find that when I’m writing, I’m actually much more capable of generating, I guess, more shareable thoughts. For me, writing is fertile, a way of growing things. And those written items are sculptural. They arrive in the world as active—things that take up space, not as privations or failures. In the distant past, I didn’t yet appreciate the positive aspects of what language knits, its features. I’m not like that anymore. Now I’m a logophile, but in certain situations, I felt like the book was some sort of manifest act that showed my faith in language and its related ecstasies. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
TM: You insist that everything, including language, is material. I was interested in how your writing process relates to your art practice.
HD: I make a lot of sculptures. I’m a matter lover, and when writing, I tend to address thoughts and words like they’re objects, found or made. It’s weird, though, because, as I said, with language, there’s an expectation of eventual clarity. Or maybe what I mean to say is, in reading prose, we often wrestle with a desire for mastery. In viewing sculpture, we bring a very different set of expectations. But my experience of words is that they do things other than represent awesome, terrible, amazing things, and sequencing in time is also powerful as a tool, and it feels sculptural and also poetic. And by poetic, I mean to say, so specific that it’s still moving, still alive.
TM: The book moves through time in ways that refuse the linear progression of a traditional memoir. Were you thinking about genre when writing?
HD: I mean, I wanted to make a book that I myself would like to read, and I really don’t like anything too straightforward. This has always been the case for me. I was not thinking about genre. I was not thinking about breaking rules. Over decades, I’ve sort of trained myself away from fighting with categories. Mostly, now I just sort of forget to remember them. I think having an art practice in which I’ve spent years trying to track what I call my hot spots and to find manifest forms that will work has done that. Anyway, for what it’s worth, I’m just trying to stay exactly on top of my best weirdest thought. To tell you about the questions and also live the questions. And regarding the correlation of the history of philosophy and scientism and rationality, I believe, in the book, I was actually trying to poke a stick into those linkages as truisms, explicitly and implicitly or formally.
As I see it, My Meteorite is like a very large-scale sculpture. It takes 18 hours to see it all, but if you don’t look at everything, it’s not going to add up. Like a long poem, it accrues and by that action becomes itself. That said—and maybe it’s not as obvious as I thought—there are two linear threads in the book, the years 2016 and 2017, and both move forward, so my dad dies at the beginning but also at the end. The momentum is familiar, in a way. I mean, time moves in one direction there, and it’s something for readers to track and care about, keep turning pages.
TM: The various texts you pull into My Meteorite felt like a way of pushing back against familiarity, too. What did your research process look like?
HD: I love being right on the edge of a thought that I can’t quite reach, a weird about-to-sneeze feeling. Ideally, as an artist or writer, I want to stay there, on that raw frontier, cultivating a condition of bewilderment shot through with curiosity. For me, equilibrium and certainty are not delicious foods. [Laughs.] I tend to be overcommitted, maybe to a fault, which is to say that, with everything I do, I intend for it to collide with and inform the problem I’m puzzling out. In other words, I’m always working. My Meteorite is the result of decades of thinking about matter, its habits or intelligences, and by correlation, remote connectedness. My desire to communicate about these subjects, these questions—that’s what kick-started the book.
TM: Your video work is concerned with the possibilities of editing. What did the editing process of the book look like?
HD: Editing the book was similar to editing video in many ways. Grappling with time, with duration, and in all cases I build first. Hunt and gather, if you will. It’s a process of getting some stuff onto the page or onto the timeline. For me, it works better to say “yes” a lot at the front end of a project than to introduce the word “no” too soon. I can’t go backwards in a sculpture, but creating video, I can, and in writing a book, this is obviously possible, as I keep iterations by making new files. That allows a kind of fecund courage to just go crazy, keep building.
TM: It makes me think about your author’s note, in which you say the book was “drafted, in large part, using unaugmented recollection as a primary source.” There’s a feeling that My Meteorite is a true story and also that it’s shaped by problems of distinction, classification, and familiarity.
HD: The book is generally true, whatever that means. And I’m sure it means something—just not sure what. A reader has to consider the force of the frame, the force of distillation, the force of literary license. And to your question, the fact-checker did great work, tons of important stuff, corrected quotations and sources, but for example, they wanted to correct facts about the oldest tree in the world, how many rings it had. I said, “No I’m doing this from memory.” Misremembering is generative. Sort of a paradox, the sum of presence plus absence. A false memory can set life into a certain groove. It has effects. This is partly what the book is interested in. The figure of the misremembered sculpture in the book serves to remind us of that. And this idea of thoughts bearing force or, you know, having effects, maps onto ideas of the imaginary and, obviously, the virtual.
TM: It was an eerie coincidence that I was preparing for this interview while we are collectively moving away from public spaces and social settings. I keep returning to your line “We are porous and we are dependent, and the fuzz of that interdependence is specifically the site of a paradoxical resistance to capitalism.”
HD: It’s awful and awesome realizing, on any level at all, the extent to which we’re penetrated, formed, and continually reformed by the world, a world we conventionally consider to be outside of our skins but which, of course, is not strictly—or maybe in any sense at all—the truth. One thing that’s happening right now is that, collectively, we’re being starkly reminded of just how interconnected we are. A virus moves from creature to creature, surface to creature, reproduces, and in a matter of months has encountered hundreds of millions of other creatures. The magnitude of that spread, by actual contact, is just breathtaking. The other thing that’s happening is a kind of endgame experiment with socializing remotely, socializing by screen—a version of remote connectedness that messes with the distinction between presence and absence.
TM: Mechanophilia—the love of machines—seems important here. Throughout the book, you suggest that attraction to everyday objects might help us reimagine how we relate to the matter around us.
HD: Yes, there’s the AI relationship [I write about] in [Spike Jonze’s] Her and the instance I mention in which a guy is fucking the tailpipe of his car. Those examples are meant to be hyperbolic or poetic versions of, you know, loving matter, being in love with matter. [Laughs.] Which is—well, let’s say it’s on a continuum with how I feel, as a sculptor, as a thinker, as a body sensitive to other bodies.
TM: To circle back to my first question, I can’t help but wonder if you feel you broke out of the trappings of language. Which I guess is to ask, while writing, did you find any answers?
HD: The experience of writing really shifted something about the way I thought about my relationship with my birth mother. I wouldn’t characterize the epiphanies as answers, but the process has definitely shed some light, definitely transformed my emotional realities with regard to that relationship. I had been so troubled, you know, really confused, and by the time I finished writing the book, my experience of that relation was more peaceful. I felt more compassion, more tenderness. I didn’t know that was going to happen. I didn’t think of the book as therapeutic in the least, and I’m not sure I would characterize it as such, but things shift when you make art and you’re touching it in some honest or raw way. That’s not why I make art. I make it primarily to make social objects. I’m often creative because I’m trying to say something to somebody so that I can have some company, so I hole up alone for a year or whatever, and I do these things, and then I present them, thinking somehow they’re going to function as really effective, clear mediating objects that people feel loved by. [Laughs.] While I now know that is definitely not the case, it’s still the case that I do that to try to be legible or to try to make offerings or try to be social or try to offer auspicious objects or loving things.


thenation--2020-06-10--The Singular, Undeniably Unusual Life of Anna Kavan

In the foreword to the new collection of Anna Kavan ’ s short stories , Machines in the Head , the book ’ s editor , Victoria Walker , argues that “ Kavan ’ s deliberate neglect of fictional plot…seems to have encouraged an impulse to embellish her life story , and during the fifty years since her death her biography has been expansively embroidered.
” A statement like this usually leads to an assurance that the author ’ s exciting or tragic life was actually not that exciting or tragic : She was ordinary , disciplined .
She worked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t just live .
I admit I rarely find this a comforting prospect .
However , what follows Walker ’ s framing caveat—this life is not as unusual as it has been made out to be—is a detailed description of one of the most singular , undeniably unusual lives I ’ ve ever encountered , ricocheting between capacious mundanity and extreme risk , faithfully untethered to place , people , or name .
The character Anna Kavan was introduced as the protagonist of the 1930 novel Let Me Alone , by the writer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A grim semiautobiographical story , it follows a young woman ’ s traumatic , itinerant upbringing marred by her father ’ s suicide , British boarding school ennui , and her volatile marriage to an older administrator posted in colonial Burma .
Anna Kavan is a great name for such a character : wide-eyed ahhs bridged by sturdy , architectural consonants , whittled into a sharp point .
A name that splits open , cleaved along an invisible seam .
Let Me Alone is astonishingly gloomy in content but formally conventional , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ publishing , the author was known personally as Helen Edmonds ( a name I can describe only as floppy ) .
She was 29 years old , in a crumbling second marriage after her father ’ s suicide and a failed union at 19 with Donald Ferguson , an older administrator posted in… well , you can guess .
Between marriages , she was introduced to heroin , allegedly by a congenial community of race car drivers on the French Riviera , by her tennis instructor ( he said it would improve her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who prescribed it for unrelenting depression .
There ’ s an assortment of mercurial origin stories for what would become the most fixed element of her life and her work .
After the death of an infant daughter and the swift adoption of another , a suicide attempt , and her hospitalization in a Swiss psychiatric clinic , she left her two surviving children in boarding schools in order to move between Europe , New York , California , Mexico , the Dutch East Indies , New Zealand , and various waylaid ocean @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was published , a collection of strange , brittle short stories that circle the drain of psychiatric internment .
She settled into a routine of heavy drug use , brief hospitalizations , sobering stints of romantic bliss , sudden departures .
She bleached her hair alabaster blond .
And she began to introduce herself as Anna Kavan , her formerly fictional proxy—a copy of the copy .
All the stories in Machines in the Head were written after Helen Woods/Ferguson/Edmonds was shed , a glassy crumple on the floor , and Anna Kavan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ transformation in her writing as well as her person .
Plot lifted , like a weight .
Dreamscapes became more than interludes , offering permanent residence .
Kafka—rather than her previous favorite , D.H. Lawrence—presided as the reigning influence .
Machines in the Head is a greatest hits album , a welcoming primer for the uninitiated , chosen from her post-1940 story collections—Asylum Piece ( 1940 ) , I Am Lazarus ( 1945 ) , A Bright Green Field ( 1957 ) , Julia and the Bazooka ( 1970 ) , and My @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one previously unpublished piece .
Kavan died of a heart attack in 1968 , at 67 years old , after 25 years of continual heroin use .
The projected mythologies of 20th century junkie lit ( dangerous boys , dying young ) falter over the image of the little old lady who carried a boiled reusable syringe in her handbag and renovated rental properties for supplemental income .
Another reason Kavan glitches under the category of more lionized drug writing—like her contemporary William Burroughs , whose genre-defining Junkie came out in 1953—is the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of her characters .
She pushes “ bleak ” to its superlative edge ; as a character declares , “ I am the enemy of this indestructible , pitiless hope which prolongs and intensifies all my pain .
I would like to lay hold of hope and strangle it once and for all.
” Sometimes this also seems to be the aim of her writing .
A recurring scenario , especially in the earlier pieces , is a desperate person pleading for help and being deemed unworthy of it because of mysterious or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ notification ” arrives in the mail ; an “ Adviser ” or “ Patron ” shakes his head with admonishment ; a man with a briefcase appears to take her away .
Strip away the layers of deadening , mystical fog or the unnamed labyrinthine city that holds many of her stories , and you hit the bare reality of survival hinging on profit-based bureaucracy .
Machines in the Head is filled with small fragments of a treatise on doom , half-paranoid , half-realist , sunk in “ the end without end , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Repeatedly , a character leaves the house to unexpectedly discover that spring has arrived .
This is taken not as a pleasure but as an affront .
Even flowers can be evidence of despair .
As the collection progresses , Kavan veers toward specificity , spinning out into the soft , cold crush of narrative .
These footholds allow a wider reach of nuance , and we even glimpse her self-aware humor , twinkling in the expanse .
In my favorite story , “ Ice Storm , ” an afflicted young female writer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ couple in Connecticut for the weekend , her inner monologue intercut with headlines about an incoming nor ’ easter ( a classic Kavan landscape ) .
The writer asks , “ Is it possible that this is really happening to me ?
” ( a classic Kavan inquiry ) and is answered , in cheeky bold , “ PEOPLE WERE SURPRISED AT THE WEATHER , ” “ COUNTRY SLAPPED IN THE FACE BY BEAUTIFYING YET MOST DESTRUCTIVE RAIN SLEET , ” “ STORM-NUMBED PIGEON FOUND WITH FEET FROZEN TO PARK BENCH.
” After @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in .
Her friend ’ s girlfriend , with “ a vinegary kind of smile , ” dismisses her agony , “ I don ’ t understand you… .
If you really feel as badly as you say , how can you be so articulate about everything and write about everything the way you do ?
” All the pieces are in place for a moment of epiphany—extreme weather , existential crisis , rude acquaintance—but in the end , our narrator simply returns to the city .
“ Except that I had seen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same for me.
” I felt sharply moved by Kavan ’ s obstinacy .
In her stories , no one shall ever , under any circumstances , feel better .
Kavan ’ s later stories , particularly from Julia and the Bazooka , are missives from deep within entrenched opiate addiction .
Inverting convention , their narrators see the outside , nonusing world as blanched by an aura of science fiction .
Time thrums and shudders .
Every piece pulses from a magnetic center—the “ bazooka , ” as Kavan called her syringe—and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ toward and away in their small situations but always within its system of cosmic organization .
It ’ s rare to encounter explicit descriptions of heroin use that are not written from the vantage of eventual sobriety ( and implicit redemption ) , especially from a woman .
Today , Jade Sharma ’ s inimitable novel Problems ( 2016 ) and Cat Marnell ’ s How to Murder Your Life ( 2017 ) glow with the same quivering honesty .
I don ’ t think it ’ s a coincidence Kavan ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the opioid crisis and its echoing devastation .
Her writing pulls up the roots of today ’ s emergency , the pale arterial web of context , and offers essential political perspective .
Her refusal of treatment did not preclude her from writing or living ; in the language of contemporary harm reduction , she was met where she was .
Reading her late work , I can only wish that Sharma , who died last year at 39 years old , could have written for three more decades .
And how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 60s ?
It wasn ’ t luck , fortitude , or restraint .
Her survival was purely structural .
From 1926 to the late 1960s , the United Kingdom was unique in its system of medically prescribed heroin for state-registered addicts .
A doctor—for Kavan , it was her close friend and psychiatrist , Karl Bluth , an anti-fascist who fled the Nazis to England in the 1930s—could legally administer safe amounts of heroin to those determined physically dependent .
In the United States the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act , which outlawed medical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 1914 .
Afterward , the black market bloomed , and heroin use became purposefully wedded to criminality in the public imagination , building towards the cataclysmic war on drugs decades later .
In the United Kingdom , Kavan was able to access her supply without risking her immediate safety .
When Bluth died in 1964 , this tenuous security collapsed .
Simultaneously , shifting attitudes , under pressure from the United States , were chipping away at her legal protections , and Kavan was forced to go to a public clinic to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , she began stockpiling heroin , fearing the state would alter or rescind its policy altogether ( which it did in 1971 ) .
After she died in her apartment in 1968 , the repeated legend has it that police found enough heroin to kill the whole street—which is still seen as evidence of a death wish rather than urgently anticipated precarity .
Her perennial sense of alienation and mistrust was mutely confirmed .
Happiness—or even liberation—was never Kavan ’ s aim .
In the story “ At Night , ” she writes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no justice for people like us in the world : all that we can do is to suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame.
” Her stories are often described as plotless , which maybe reveals how our traditional understanding of narrative arc relies on a curve of absolution : We dip into bad feeling , bad behavior , only to pull out again .
Kavan holds the note , winding that bend into a spiral , a knot .
Climax loops .
This commitment to stasis forgoes the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ For Kavan , life was a place , a landscape that can be described but never moved through .
Frozen , as if under snow .

In the foreword to the new collection of Anna Kavan’s short stories, Machines in the Head, the book’s editor, Victoria Walker, argues that “Kavan’s deliberate neglect of fictional plot…seems to have encouraged an impulse to embellish her life story, and during the fifty years since her death her biography has been expansively embroidered.” A statement like this usually leads to an assurance that the author’s exciting or tragic life was actually not that exciting or tragic: She was ordinary, disciplined. She worked, we promise; she didn’t just live. I admit I rarely find this a comforting prospect. However, what follows Walker’s framing caveat—this life is not as unusual as it has been made out to be—is a detailed description of one of the most singular, undeniably unusual lives I’ve ever encountered, ricocheting between capacious mundanity and extreme risk, faithfully untethered to place, people, or name. Books in Review Machines in the Head By Anna Kavan Buy this book
The character Anna Kavan was introduced as the protagonist of the 1930 novel Let Me Alone, by the writer Helen Ferguson (née Woods). A grim semiautobiographical story, it follows a young woman’s traumatic, itinerant upbringing marred by her father’s suicide, British boarding school ennui, and her volatile marriage to an older administrator posted in colonial Burma. Anna Kavan is a great name for such a character: wide-eyed ahhs bridged by sturdy, architectural consonants, whittled into a sharp point. A name that splits open, cleaved along an invisible seam. Let Me Alone is astonishingly gloomy in content but formally conventional, a rote bildungsroman. At the time of publishing, the author was known personally as Helen Edmonds (a name I can describe only as floppy). She was 29 years old, in a crumbling second marriage after her father’s suicide and a failed union at 19 with Donald Ferguson, an older administrator posted in… well, you can guess.
Between marriages, she was introduced to heroin, allegedly by a congenial community of race car drivers on the French Riviera, by her tennis instructor (he said it would improve her game), or by a doctor who prescribed it for unrelenting depression. There’s an assortment of mercurial origin stories for what would become the most fixed element of her life and her work. After the death of an infant daughter and the swift adoption of another, a suicide attempt, and her hospitalization in a Swiss psychiatric clinic, she left her two surviving children in boarding schools in order to move between Europe, New York, California, Mexico, the Dutch East Indies, New Zealand, and various waylaid ocean liners. In 1940, Asylum Piece was published, a collection of strange, brittle short stories that circle the drain of psychiatric internment. She settled into a routine of heavy drug use, brief hospitalizations, sobering stints of romantic bliss, sudden departures. She bleached her hair alabaster blond. And she began to introduce herself as Anna Kavan, her formerly fictional proxy—a copy of the copy.
All the stories in Machines in the Head were written after Helen Woods/Ferguson/Edmonds was shed, a glassy crumple on the floor, and Anna Kavan slid out. This marked a major transformation in her writing as well as her person. Plot lifted, like a weight. Dreamscapes became more than interludes, offering permanent residence. Kafka—rather than her previous favorite, D.H. Lawrence—presided as the reigning influence. Machines in the Head is a greatest hits album, a welcoming primer for the uninitiated, chosen from her post-1940 story collections—Asylum Piece (1940), I Am Lazarus (1945), A Bright Green Field (1957), Julia and the Bazooka (1970), and My Soul in China (1975)—plus one previously unpublished piece. Kavan died of a heart attack in 1968, at 67 years old, after 25 years of continual heroin use. The projected mythologies of 20th century junkie lit (dangerous boys, dying young) falter over the image of the little old lady who carried a boiled reusable syringe in her handbag and renovated rental properties for supplemental income. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
Another reason Kavan glitches under the category of more lionized drug writing—like her contemporary William Burroughs, whose genre-defining Junkie came out in 1953—is the impossibility of romanticizing the psyches and situations of her characters. She pushes “bleak” to its superlative edge; as a character declares, “I am the enemy of this indestructible, pitiless hope which prolongs and intensifies all my pain. I would like to lay hold of hope and strangle it once and for all.” Sometimes this also seems to be the aim of her writing. A recurring scenario, especially in the earlier pieces, is a desperate person pleading for help and being deemed unworthy of it because of mysterious or arbitrary criteria. A “fatal pale-blue notification” arrives in the mail; an “Adviser” or “Patron” shakes his head with admonishment; a man with a briefcase appears to take her away. Strip away the layers of deadening, mystical fog or the unnamed labyrinthine city that holds many of her stories, and you hit the bare reality of survival hinging on profit-based bureaucracy. Machines in the Head is filled with small fragments of a treatise on doom, half-paranoid, half-realist, sunk in “the end without end,” “a garden without seasons.” Repeatedly, a character leaves the house to unexpectedly discover that spring has arrived. This is taken not as a pleasure but as an affront. Even flowers can be evidence of despair.
As the collection progresses, Kavan veers toward specificity, spinning out into the soft, cold crush of narrative. These footholds allow a wider reach of nuance, and we even glimpse her self-aware humor, twinkling in the expanse. In my favorite story, “Ice Storm,” an afflicted young female writer living in New York City visits a couple in Connecticut for the weekend, her inner monologue intercut with headlines about an incoming nor’easter (a classic Kavan landscape). The writer asks, “Is it possible that this is really happening to me?” (a classic Kavan inquiry) and is answered, in cheeky bold, “PEOPLE WERE SURPRISED AT THE WEATHER,” “COUNTRY SLAPPED IN THE FACE BY BEAUTIFYING YET MOST DESTRUCTIVE RAIN SLEET,” “STORM-NUMBED PIGEON FOUND WITH FEET FROZEN TO PARK BENCH.” After she arrives, they are quickly snowed in. Her friend’s girlfriend, with “a vinegary kind of smile,” dismisses her agony, “I don’t understand you…. If you really feel as badly as you say, how can you be so articulate about everything and write about everything the way you do?” All the pieces are in place for a moment of epiphany—extreme weather, existential crisis, rude acquaintance—but in the end, our narrator simply returns to the city. “Except that I had seen the ice storm everything was exactly the same for me.” I felt sharply moved by Kavan’s obstinacy. In her stories, no one shall ever, under any circumstances, feel better.
Kavan’s later stories, particularly from Julia and the Bazooka, are missives from deep within entrenched opiate addiction. Inverting convention, their narrators see the outside, nonusing world as blanched by an aura of science fiction. Time thrums and shudders. Every piece pulses from a magnetic center—the “bazooka,” as Kavan called her syringe—and the characters maintain ceaseless orbit, rotating toward and away in their small situations but always within its system of cosmic organization. It’s rare to encounter explicit descriptions of heroin use that are not written from the vantage of eventual sobriety (and implicit redemption), especially from a woman. Today, Jade Sharma’s inimitable novel Problems (2016) and Cat Marnell’s How to Murder Your Life (2017) glow with the same quivering honesty. I don’t think it’s a coincidence Kavan’s work is being reissued in the midst of the opioid crisis and its echoing devastation. Her writing pulls up the roots of today’s emergency, the pale arterial web of context, and offers essential political perspective. Her refusal of treatment did not preclude her from writing or living; in the language of contemporary harm reduction, she was met where she was. Reading her late work, I can only wish that Sharma, who died last year at 39 years old, could have written for three more decades.
And how did Kavan make it into her late 60s? It wasn’t luck, fortitude, or restraint. Her survival was purely structural. From 1926 to the late 1960s, the United Kingdom was unique in its system of medically prescribed heroin for state-registered addicts. A doctor—for Kavan, it was her close friend and psychiatrist, Karl Bluth, an anti-fascist who fled the Nazis to England in the 1930s—could legally administer safe amounts of heroin to those determined physically dependent. In the United States the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which outlawed medical opiates for addiction management, was passed in 1914. Afterward, the black market bloomed, and heroin use became purposefully wedded to criminality in the public imagination, building towards the cataclysmic war on drugs decades later.
In the United Kingdom, Kavan was able to access her supply without risking her immediate safety. When Bluth died in 1964, this tenuous security collapsed. Simultaneously, shifting attitudes, under pressure from the United States, were chipping away at her legal protections, and Kavan was forced to go to a public clinic to receive her dose. Panicked and grieving, she began stockpiling heroin, fearing the state would alter or rescind its policy altogether (which it did in 1971). After she died in her apartment in 1968, the repeated legend has it that police found enough heroin to kill the whole street—which is still seen as evidence of a death wish rather than urgently anticipated precarity. Her perennial sense of alienation and mistrust was mutely confirmed.
Happiness—or even liberation—was never Kavan’s aim. In the story “At Night,” she writes, “No, there’s no justice for people like us in the world: all that we can do is to suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame.” Her stories are often described as plotless, which maybe reveals how our traditional understanding of narrative arc relies on a curve of absolution: We dip into bad feeling, bad behavior, only to pull out again. Kavan holds the note, winding that bend into a spiral, a knot. Climax loops. This commitment to stasis forgoes the temporal for a more spatial mode. For Kavan, life was a place, a landscape that can be described but never moved through. Frozen, as if under snow.