potatos
wrote about ~home~ for PBS, notes on juvenilia (feat. Zadie Smith + Kazuo Ishiguro + Olivia Nuzzi)
Hi hello,
I write to you from…not my childhood bedroom, but my room at my family’s home in Illinois. I did a year and change of high school in the States before leaving home, and the bedroom has always had a strange, not-wholly inhabited quality, partly because of this.
The bedroom is painted egg-blue. Its walls are clean and bare. It has an Amish wood bed and beige carpeting and a bookcase. The bookcase is a time capsule, peopled with volumes from Half Price Books, Family Bookshop, pilfered loans from libraries and friends, and paradise—otherwise known as Barnes & Noble. Its shelves function as a partial snapshot of the romantic, lightly odd teenager I was. Here’s Tristan and Iseult by Rosemary Sutcliff. Asimov and L.M. Montgomery, Lahiri and Tolkien, Zadie Smith and Marcus Aurelius. The Bible, the Gita, J.K. Rowling, Amy Tan. Books on parenting and medicine and physics and Christianity.
Here’s The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, which angered me so much that I set aside my then-profound shyness to speak to my English teacher after she assigned it in class—an event for which I prepared hand-written notes with quotes from a book I’d never heard of, but made sophisticated-seeming arguments useful to my cause when I skimmed its PDF online: Orientalism by Edward Said.
And here’s All Too Human by George Stephanopoulos, a memoir of the Clinton administration, and the first book about American politics I ever read. A few years ago I thumbed through the Stephanopoulos book and thought its gesturing toward the (known) Clinton scandals seemed quaint in a post-2016 world. In the light of the Epstein files being released a few days ago, quaint no longer seems like the word.
The right ones, conveying the correct admixture of impunity, corruption, darkness, and flesh-eating disgust, are for me, still to be found.
This morning, I ate breakfast and then looked at my phone. One of the first things I saw, without searching it out, was the postcard (and functional suicide note) Jeffrey Epstein purportedly wrote to Larry Nassar from prison, remarking among other things, on “our President’s” dealings with “young, nubile girls,” and then I felt it again, after years: the old rush of rage. The kind of anger that, in its upwelling, allows you to remember yourself, remember others, remember the world as it should be. It surprised me; I guess I believed myself more desensitized than I am.
But here it was: cosmic, cleansing, clarifying anger.
And then, having no good place to put it, I went upstairs to write.
white teeth, meditation on juvenilia
