Trading tradeoffs: In the final response to The Harper Review’s fall letter prompt, Ted Kwee-Bintoro leaves progress ambivalent. “Progress” and “problem,” after all, share a prefix. Every step forward swings back in equal proportion; each new invention will “fulfill our old yearnings” and spur “yearnings anew.” The response to such duality, Kwee-Bintoro argues, is not to hold ourselves still, warding off both the engine of progress and its exhaust. There is a finish line, however indeterminate and indiscernible, where history might finally rest. Our role is to run towards it.
Emily Sun, senior editor
Writing for witnesses: Last June, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value received the Grand Prix, the second-highest honor awarded by the Cannes Film Festival. The film relays the narrative of two sisters—Nora, the actress and Agnes, the historian—and their relationship with their preciously absent father, Gustav, the screenwriter. A story on the delayed confrontation between one’s self and one’s familial history, the film ties years of intergenerational narrative to the troubled situation of its characters with satisfying fluidity. Said fluidity’s success is, in part, due to the emotional valence attributed to one recurring object in the film: a dragestil house, the characters’ heirloom home. Indeed, the house stands in as an emotional receptacle for each family member, from Gustav’s parents to Gustav to Nora and Agnes.
With his career on the decline, Gustav tries to produce a swan song about their family history, with the house as a witness. He casts Nora, but she refuses to act in it. In her reading-turned-rehearsal of her father’s manuscript, she says: “Praying isn’t really talking to God. It’s really just you acknowledging your despair.” While raising theological implications, the quote also gets something right about creativity. It inclines us to recognize instances of making as attempts to ground what would otherwise be unbearable tension. The body cannot help but to delineate its conflicted state, work it out, and embody it through creation—that is, the body requires a witness.
Maximiliano Mendoza, contributing editor
Quadrangle (sex) club: It used to be that every generation complained about the sexual depravity of the next. Last Wednesday at the Quadrangle Club, filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell reversed this time-honored tradition. “Get laid,” he smirked, “that’s your homework.” Pant-suited undergraduates crossed their hands over huge china plates and asked questions about the nature of trust and truth in legacy media while a t-shirt-wearing Mitchell dodged with anecdotes about his Scottish dyke-nun aunt, sliding a massive condom over the house of a homophobic senator, and adventures with international boyfriends. He gave diatribes against digital hegemony (“Let’s IRL this!!!”), woke culture (“problematic is problemagic”), and resigned laziness (what he called our generation’s “fondness for slippers in winter”). Between winking attempts to read gossip off of audience members’ phone screens, he offered a simple, prescriptive solution: a new rebirth of punk.
Certainly, the polemic against incel culture felt played-out and there was something highly ironic about a finger-pointing command to “REBEL!” But just as sex is never just about sex, rebellion is never merely about disobedience. When asked by a (presumably celibate) undergrad why he insisted on sex, he replied that his sex injunction has a double-meaning. It is a call for actual sex, yes, but also for a higher, metaphorical sex: the messy, generative interpenetration of radical ideas. Students exchanged looks: Was this an homage to Freud’s theory of libidinal investment? An argument for artmaking? For bravery? For shoving ideas up our ass? Regardless, his argument had reached a climax… and we laughed and applauded and clinked our decidedly un-punk sterling silverware in carnal excitement. Mitchell complains that young people have lost their sense of adventure, and we’ve heard the argument before—that somehow these goddammed screens or late stage capitalism or maybe just way too much fucking porn has sapped our bravery. We left dinner full on three-cheese-ravioli and talk of our own depravity, still without courage but starved for the new pleasures that might help us get it back.
Zoë Feigelson, assistant editor & Liam Eifert, production editor
Road to Rouen: Stuck on the bus in between Joan of Arc and the skull of John the Baptist, there was really nowhere else to go. Fortunately, there was nowhere else I terribly wanted to be. Unfortunately, with the hills of the French countryside between Amiens and Rouen extending out in all directions, there was nowhere else I could. My phone, nearly dead and reticent to help, was a rather poor travelling companion, so I opened my book up and tried to make myself comfortable.
Mémoires de Dirk Raspe, the seething, starry-eyed posthumous novel of French writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, is a conundrum. Drieu La Rochelle, known for several poorly-disguised autobiographical apologiae and for being the most notable literary proponent of fascism in France, wrote the Mémoires while hiding out in the countryside from Résistance fighters and his personal ghosts. Viewing, gleefully, his life as an unresolved contradiction, he set out to write a novel about another misunderstood genius, Vincent van Gogh. Continue reading here.
Brady Santoro, senior editor
Image: Francisco de Zurbarán, The Young Virgin, oil on canvas, 1632–33 (Museum of Metropolitan Art, New York).