EDITOR’S DESK the Voice Coming From?” as well as her novels Still, what you see in the pages of this issue and photography, Welty left an indelible mark of VQR represents what I want to do as editor: on American letters. The modesty Welty dis- publish a range of writers with a diversity of plays in her interview should in no way serve as voices on a broad number of topics. It is my a distraction from her significance as a writer. firm belief that each issue must have content Casting a Light on Beneath her self- deprecation and lithe South- that is timely. With an eye toward the future, ern manner lies a genuine breaker of artistic I also want to make sure that what we publish Iconoclasts and Ideas barriers. in the pages of VQR will stand the test of time. Wider and wider perspectives have been That may seem like a tall order, but it is clear a leitmotif in the art of David Hockney. Con- that this was part of the editorial mission of W. Ralph Eubanks tributing editor Lawrence Weschler examines my predecessors and is part of our tradition as Hockney’s work over the past thirty years, a pe- a journal of literature and ideas. This tradition riod of productivity and change for the artist. is a statue to keep and preserve rather than one n the 1960s, poet W. S. Merwin decided to Around the time Belafonte marched with Hockney is renowned for using new technolo- to render into pieces. abandon the use of punctuation because he King in Washington, and later from Selma, gies in his art, from Polaroid cameras to faxes, Putting together each issue of VQR is a bit Ifelt periods and commas merely affixed or “sta- Alabama, to Montgomery, Berry Gordy set the iPads, and iPhones. “Trying to depict the world like solving a puzzle. The poetry, prose, and pled” a poem to the page. He wanted his poetry foundation for a commercial and cultural em- as it is actually experienced, or more precisely photography must flow rhythmically for the to evoke the spoken word instead of adhering pire known as Motown Records. Gordy took to capture the experience of advancing into all reader, even if he or she is not reading the issue to a convention he felt better suited for prose. a tip from the automotive industry that was that space” is the animating focus of Hockney’s sequentially. For each issue, our talented staff Because of his rejection of poetic formalism, then the lifeblood of Detroit: Quality control current work, Weschler explains. The format or examines how the issue’s content connects so Merwin was labeled an iconoclast. Now, many is key to selling your product. Since most of medium is less important than the sheer visual that each piece fits as part of a whole. We don’t volumes of poetry later, it matters very little the songs recorded at Motown would be heard intensity of the art or the time when a work was force the puzzle pieces into spaces where they whether Merwin’s poems are punctuated. As for the first time on tinny AM car radios or created. That is why Hockney’s art may be best don’t belong. As we expand to provide more critic John Freeman notes in this issue, it is not cheap transistor sets, the first stage of quality understood as “timescapes,” since it captures online content to complement our print edi- the sheer amount of poetry in Merwin’s collected control was to play a song through a speaker both the moment and passage of time. tion, we will be looking at making those two works that transports the reader, but the “radical that was the same as one found in a car. Given formats align as part of a whole as well. evolution arcing through its pages, like an explo- Gordy’s obsessive tendencies, every element of In every issue of VQR there will be some- sive chemical reaction that is still ongoing.” the record had to be perfect, including the way Since this is my first issue as editor of VQR , I thing that will capture the attention of our Being called an iconoclast today is more a it was manufactured. Gordy famously said, “If know that some might see the focus of this issue devoted readers. At the same time, there will badge of honor than it was half a century ago it ain’t in the grooves, it ain’t got it.” on iconoclasts as a not-so - subtle message of my be a few things that are new to these pages, when Merwin chose to break with poetic tra- The music of Motown endures because desire to break a few sacred marble statues of starting with three standing columns. We open dition. For our fall issue, VQR features men of Gordy’s unorthodox path to achieving a editorial content. But it is more my style to im- with “Amateur Hour,” in which an assortment and women, past and present, who jolted so- sound that would hook the listener, as Garret prove upon tradition than smash things apart. of tinkers and zealots talk about their obses- ciety with the shock of the new, advocated for Keizer makes clear in his eloquent essay “Love After years spent acquiring and developing il- sions. In this issue, writer Jack Hitt interviews social change, created a fresh musical sound, Is Here and Now You’re Gone.” Keizer looks lustrated books of nonfiction for the Library of a thirteen- year- old inventor. “Talisman” will or stretched artistic boundaries. Our first fea- at Motown without the veil of nostalgia that Congress, I know that editorial flamboyance feature brief essays from writers about objects, ture is VQR contributing editor Jeff Sharlet’s sometimes obscures the artistry of the music. means little to readers; it is the strength of the places, or activities that inspire them, and this fascinating profile of Harry Belafonte, a man Most important, there is a rhythm and a beat content that attracts them, particularly to a fall we feature Francine Prose on Ganesh, who has broken the artistic mold numerous to the writing that fits with the spirit of the publication like VQR. That’s why our fall issue the writer’s deity. Finally, “Mapping,” by Reif times. Fifty years ago, Belafonte was forever Motown sound. contains a stimulating array of content—con- Larsen, will offer an inventive exploration of changed by his friendship with Martin Luther Eudora Welty may not be considered an tributing editor Elliott D. Woods on the Key- concepts and places. King Jr., a relationship those close to the two iconoclast to some, but, as William Ferris’s stone XL Pipeline, fiction by Allan Gurganus, The focus of the new will not be to shock; men described as one connected by electricity. interview reveals, she quietly pushed the poetry by Linda Pastan and Rachel Hadas, criti- instead it will be to provide a perspective that That bond, both infused with and propelled boundaries of writing and art. Welty believed cism by Michael Dirda—that grasp the reader’s may have been missing from our pages or by sparks, eventually led Belafonte to use his that the writer must not crusade, yet she was attention because of the depth and thoughtful- needed to be brought into the light. As an edi- fame and fortune to support the Civil Rights indeed a crusader and trailblazer, though not ness of the writing. We are particularly honored tor, it is casting light on new ideas that moti- Movement that transformed America and in a conventional way. With powerful stories to include The Jacksonian, a new full-leng th play vates and drives my work. And I also hope that American life. such as “The Demonstrators” and “Where Is by Pulitzer Prize- winner Beth Henley. it is what will keep you coming back.
12 EDITOR’S DESK 13 AMATEUR HOUR
Rad Scientist
At thirteen, Gabriel Mesa has half a dozen inventions under his belt.
n February 27, 2013, Gabriel Mesa joined Jack Hitt onstage at the Institute Library in New Haven, Connecticut, as part of the ongoing series “Amateur Hour,” in which various tinker- Oers, zealots, and collectors discuss their obsessions. Mesa, who is thirteen, began inventing in grade school. He was a finalist in the 2012 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge and has won several awards at the Connecticut Invention Convention. The conversation that follows was recorded live and has been edited for brevity and meaning.
Jack Hitt: When did you decide to become man’s- latch thing. But then I saw a soap bottle an inventor? with a screw- on cap. I was looking for connec- I moved to Connecticut when I was eight and tors, something that could be easily taken off started inventing with what I call the Breath and put back on. Another problem with trache- Saver. One thing I learned when inventing is otomies is bacteria. The screw- on is supposed that you can use anything and it will work at to help keep the bacteria away, too. least for something you need. So stockpile on a lot of stuff that seems irrelevant. This thing Did you show this to anyone? here is a doll stand. I used pillow casing and I brought it to the Invention Convention here Gabriel Mesa in the basement of his grandfather's building, designing a shoe for diabetics that improves circula- stapled leather to make a model of the neck. in Connecticut. tion. (christina paige) My invention was to help stop the pain and infection from a tracheotomy. Instead of hav- What happens after a convention like that? watch to bring them back. They would see im- Patient Runs Away.” I thought, What would be ing a tube that would be pulled off and pushed Usually I just start working on something new. ages that would restore them to a calm state an invention to help, you know, kind of soothe back on, which can be painful, I invented a of mind. Images of family members or sooth- someone like that? Now it could be an app in, screw-on connector for the tube that’s attached So, what came next? ing images. The guidance watch notifies you like, four minutes. to the neck. Next I made a guidance watch, a kind of iPhone that you’re not thinking rationally. And stud- on your wrist that would prevent patients suf- ies show that hearing this from a machine is Have you talked with doctors to see if it What happened that you even came up fering from dementia or schizophrenia from much easier for people with schizophrenia to would work? with this idea? running away or forgetting their families. It comprehend than from a human. I actually have, and they thought it was a good Well, my grandfather has a tracheotomy, and sends them pictures and other images to re- idea. And then, you know, the next year the one day I was researching it because I didn’t mind them who they are. What happened in your life that made you iPhone comes out and the idea’s outdated. know what a tracheotomy was, and I found think to invent that? all these problems. I asked him about it and A guidance watch for schizophrenics? Well, I have a relative with schizophrenia, and Have you ever invented something that didn’t he said it really was painful. At first I thought Right. When patients with schizophrenia were one day I was looking through the paper and have a medical application? about making an overcomplicated business- being delusional, they’d get a message on the saw a story that said something like, “Dementia I built a trebuchet out of paper.
14 AMATEUR HOUR 15 Voice and Hammer Harry Belafonte’s Unfinished Fight
Essay by Jeff Sharlet
Harry Belafonte, New York, 2011. (mark seliger/management + artists) 24 nce, more than half a century ago, One day Belafonte says, “I’m taking you to a on’t get stuck on the bananas. You know the sponsor’s hostess in ball gown and pearls he was the handsomest man in the movie.” There’s a recent documentary about his the bananas. Day- o! Day- o- o- o. Come Mr. and white gloves up to her elbows amidst crys- world. A radiant man. It was a mat- life called Sing Your Song, a brightly inspiring DTally Man, tally me banana. “The Banana Boat tal cases of Christmas possibilities, introduc- ter of bearing, of voice and gesture companion to his 2011 memoir My Song (written Song” was the hit that made Calypso, Belafon- ing “the exciting Mr. Belafonte,” the dreamiest Oand timing. He had that high, buttery baritone, with Michael Shnayerson). They’re both elegant te’s third album, the first LP in history to sell and safest Negro in America, sweet as Nat King nothing special really, except, he says, “I knew testimonies, both surprisingly candid, and yet a million copies—1956 , the same year a white Cole and so much prettier. how to use it”; and that smile, the genuine plea- neither quite bridges the peculiar gap between boy from Mississippi released a record called At least part of that was true. “From the top sure that seemed to roll off the so- called King Belafonte’s past, when he was labeled “subver- Elvis Presley. Belafonte outsold Elvis. This fact of his head right down that white shirt, he’s the of Calypso in soft little waves; and those eyes, sive” and spied on by the FBI, and his present: is important to him. Even now, eighty- four most beautiful man I ever set eyes on,” said Dia- bedroom eyes but darker, almost cadaverous a nice old man who used to sing folk songs with years old, his left eye wandering, his right hand hann Carroll, who costarred in Carmen Jones. but alert, ready. The eyes revealed the simmer a Jamaican accent, a “national treasure.” “Our curled around the head of his walking stick, his His beauty was like a kindness, golden, encom- inside. “This hard core of hostility,” a director heritage.” How did that happen? To him? To us? still- great frame folded into the front row of a passing. He’d outsold Elvis by offering a gentler once said, comparing him to Marlon Brando. “I’ve seen Sing Your Song,” I tell him. film archive’s darkened screening room, just us thrust. Elvis stood center stage and pushed. Be- That mesmerizing anger. “He’s loaded with it.” “That’s not the movie,” he says. He won’t tell and Pam this time. lafonte, a bigger man— six- two, 185 pounds— And now? In a diner he asks a kid in a ball me its name. He and Pam and I pile into a cab Belafonte was first. First black man to win curled his shoulders around his Cadillac chest cap where he’s going to college. Kid raises his and shoot downtown to a theater on West 23rd. a Tony; one of the first to star in an all- black and seemed to be promising the spotlight to brim and squints up at him— who are you? At Invitation only: the families of the movie’s Hollywood hit (Carmen Jones, 1954); first to star Miss Barbara Britton, to Mrs. America, to the a museum he tries to chat up a guard from Ja- stars, there for a special screening of a docu- in a noir (Odds Against Tomorrow, 1959—“best married white womanhood of the nation, if she maica, where down by the docks he learned to mentary, Zero Percent, about a prison- college heist-gone -wr ong movie ever made,” says James could gather the courage to come up on stage sing as a boy. The guard murmurs and smiles. program at Sing Sing called Hudson Link. The Ellroy); first to turn down starring roles To( Sir, and join him. An offer, not a proposition. Old man, the guard says with his eyes. program’s director, Sean Pica, is waiting. “Mr. With Love ; Lilies of the Field ; Porgy and Bess ; But that’s not what made him a star. It was One day we’re walking up Broadway with B!” Pica says, bouncing on his toes. Pica is a Shaft) because, he said, he’d play no part that this: Elvis was going to seduce you. No, that’s his wife, Pam. She admires a Porsche, antique graduate himself. He earned his high school, put a black man on his knees or made of him a a euphemism. Elvis, legs jittering, wanted to and teal. “What year do you think it is?” she college, and master’s degrees inside. “I grew up cartoon. We’re here in this screening room to fuck. Belafonte, fingers snapping, seemed like asks. Sixty years old, nearly a quarter century in the town of Sing Sing,” he likes to say. That’s watch a forgotten hour of television for which he’d be seduced by you, and then you’d make his junior, she’s his youthful bride. He walks where he learned about Harry Belafonte. “I’ll he won the first Emmy awarded to a black man love. over to the car’s owner: rumpled and pasty, tell you about Mr. B,” he says. At Sing Sing, five for production, for being in charge. That pisses him off, even now. “People say- wearing shorts and an Izod, plugging coins times a day, every man’s in his cell for a head When I found the show in the archive, I ing it in line,” he rasps, sweetening his voice into a meter. count. One man missing, the whole prison thought it would be more of what I believed I to mimic the white women who presumed he The old man takes out his money roll. It’s shuts down. Belafonte’s there one afternoon already knew about Belafonte. The albums I’d was some Mandingo for the taking: “ ‘I’ll tell fat and bound by a gold clasp. “How much?” to meet about thirty inmate-students . The su- bought were labeled “easy listening” or “folk,” my husband, ‘I’ll leave you in a minute, he’ ”— he rasps. His voice sounds familiar but scraped perintendent has turned over his conference as in harmonizing trios who wore matching Belafonte— “ ‘can put his shoes under my bed down, sharp pebbles beneath sand. room for the gathering. All he asks is that he be sweaters. Then I watched. My eyes went wide. anytime.’ Never stopping to debate whether I The owner looks at this stranger, his skin allowed to sit in. “Huge Mr. B fan.” I started shaking my head in disbelief. I think I would like to do that.” He was a sex symbol, the color of dark honey, with a half smile of Almost 4 p.m. Head count approaching. gasped. I was wearing the archive’s cheap head- he got that. But what kind? A man or a “boy”? alarm. “Uh . . .” “Gotta wrap up,” the deputy of security tells phones, sitting at a monitor in a dark room. Lover or servant? The old man grins, a shining, slightly Belafonte. “Gotta get these men back to their Other researchers hunched over screens, all Tonight with Belafonte opens: a harsh char- crooked expression. It’s like a light turning cells.” our faces flickering blue. I laughed. I slapped coal drawing of a man so twisted, so fixed in on; you can almost hear the pasty man think, Belafonte waits a beat before giving the the desk. My eyes watered. Goddamn. I felt like nothing but pain, that he’s barely recogniz- Wait— you’re still alive? deputy the smile. I was watching a different past, one in which able. Belafonte. The music begins. Ca- chink. “How. Much.” “We’ll take another fifteen minutes,” he says. the revolution had been televised. Goddamn. As A beat. Ca- chink. A beat. Not a drum but a The pasty man twitches, excited now. “One “But— ” goes the deputy. if that was what TV was for. A signal. This, I tool, like metal striking stone. Ca- chink. hundred thousand dollars?” he says, just in case “We will take another fifteen minutes.” thought, this. Ca- chink. Eleven times the hammer falls, Harry Belafonte— it’s Harry Belafonte!— isn’t And that’s how it happens: 4 p.m., no December 10, 1959, 8:30 p.m., live. Kids and then the light comes up, a spot on Bela- joking. Belafonte pats his shoulder and moves count— not at Belafonte’s table, not anywhere across America are groaning because the fonte. “Voice and hammer, that’s it,” the old on, keeping time with his carved wooden cane. in the prison. Pica couldn’t remember anything night’s entertainment, Zane Grey Theatre, white man murmurs now, watching himself then. “I’m going to tell my wife you tried to buy my like it. “I love Mr. B,” he says. “He’s the guy who men with six-guns , has been displaced by, of all Behind him, seven bare- armed black men, car!” the pasty man chirps after him. stopped the clock.” things, Revlon. Makeup. Miss Barbara Britton, biceps like cannonballs, faces in shadow, let
26 VQR | FALL 2013 JEFF SHARLET 27 their hammers fall, shoulders heaving. Their I say, “You changed the lyric.” On the origi- chains hang from the darkness above, huge nal recording, it’s “jet- black woman.” heavy links like anchors. Belafonte’s center Belafonte looks at me like I’m a fool. “I stage, his signature outfit— high, tight mohair changed lyrics on everything. Like that thing pants, a sailor’s double- loop belt buckle, a tai- upstairs?” Earlier, we’d watched a happier lored shirt of Indian cotton open almost to his Harry, singing a song called “Hold ’Em Joe” on navel— made over into a prisoner’s rags. His Jackie Gleason’s Cavalcade of Stars, Caribbean right hand is a claw, his left is a fist, his eyes costume and the all- white June Taylor Danc- are blackness and his legs are wide, his feet ers prancing as Belafonte leads a donkey on planted. He begins to sing. A hard dragging the stage. It made me wince. A donkey. But I snarl. I don’t want no bald- headed woman, she wasn’t reading the code. “You know what ‘Hold too mean lord- lordy, she too mean . . . ’Em Joe’ is?” He grips his stick. “It’s a phallic “Bald- headed woman,” Belafonte snickers song. ‘My donkey’? Here I was, doing the song now, in the screening room. “Perfect for the known by millions of people in the Caribbean product. Revlon.” He snorts. as one thing, and I’m on the most popular show It’s a chain-gang song. Belafonte had found in America singing the same song. I made ’em it ten years earlier, and he had been waiting think it was a song about a donkey.” He laughs. to sing it ever since. He found the song on a Cackles. The donkey’s a metaphor, but so is the record nobody listened to back then, a chain phallus for which it stands. Metaphors all the gang recorded live. Found it in the Library of way down, from donkey to defiance to the root, Congress, flat- broke Harry bumming his way humanness. Not in the abstract but in the flesh: down to Washington to sit in a room with big a body: a human being. black headphones framing his temper, soaking Belafonte nods toward the screen. “Let’s up songs that made more sense to him than the play it.” pop on the radio. “Folk music,” with its echoes The hanging chains tumble down and the of coffeehouses and college boys, doesn’t con- first number ends with a close- up of Belafon- vey what Belafonte heard, unless you cut away te’s boot on the iron heap. But the next song’s the dull virtue that’s come to pad the term folk, a whisper, the guitar behind him just a little cut it down to the gristle. strum. Sylvie. Pause. Sylvie.
I don’t want no sugar in my coffee, I’m so hot and dry. make me mean, lord- lordy, Sylvie . . . make me mean. Sylvie . . . Can’t you hear, Sylvie say she love me Belafonte at Palais des Sports. Paris, 1966. There’s a twitch in his narrow hips. The Can’tcha hear me cryin’? But I believe she lie (pierre fournier/sygma/corbis) hammers behind him swing. “How simple,” he She hasn’t been to see me murmurs now. “How very simple.” On-scr een, “ ‘Sylvie,’ ” he says now. “When I heard this Since the last day in July. could drive nails into the cross. The camera his hands plunge down as if grabbing on for life at the library, by Leadbelly, it was a children’s cuts to her in a spotlight, and the visual alone to something that burns. song.” Leadbelly was Huddy Ledbetter, from “I made no connection with purism,” he makes your breath stop, because she doesn’t whose twelve- string guitar not just Belafonte says. “I looked at the art of it and I said, ‘God- look like anything you’ve seen on television. I got a bulldog, he weigh five hundred, but Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and dozens damn. How long has this room been here? Because she’s fat. Not fat like a gospel singer, in my backyard, lord-lor dy, of others absorbed the musical truths of the Why didn’t I ever see this wing of the house that ready role for a big- voiced big woman in my backyard. ex- con Life magazine once called “Bad Nig- of life?’ ” on TV, but too fat, beautiful but probably not ger.” Leadbelly really had worked on a chain For the rest of the show, Belafonte roams healthy, angry-eat -too -much- because -y ou-hur t Belafonte bangs his stick on the screening gang, but what Belafonte took from him wasn’t the house. Ballads and kids’ songs and comedy fat, and she stands on the stage in that stark room’s carpeted floor, his grin gorgeous like it’s “authenticity.” His “Sylvie” doesn’t sound like songs and work songs, “Jump In the Line” and spotlight in a plain A-line frock, her shadow her 1959 but stripped by age, plain now as what it Leadbelly’s; it’s slower, sadder, sharper. “Mo Yet” and “John Henry.” Odetta’s national only accompaniment, and she plays her guitar was then: a kind of fury. debut singing a version of “Waterboy” that like it’s the rock and she’s the hammer.
28 VQR | FALL 2013 JEFF SHARLET 29 GREG ALAN BROWNDERVILLE On Friday and Saturday nights, white daughters sneaked “behind the bank” with black sons, and disheveled white fathers sat in their cars Song for a Kiss with handles of whiskey, shotguns pointed straight at Plantation Subdivision.
Something quick and wet on my neck. No peace. No peace in quiet. I whipped around, and right behind me And so I speak. Confess. Testify. in the lunch line: Mary-Arkansas Greene, grinning shy mischief One morning when I was seventeen, and maybe adoration. I heard about Mary-Arkansas. The dark, exciting news, The girl who always stared at me like dirty drugs from a syringe, during penmanship. coursed through the halls of tiny McCrory High. Anger went all over me like fire ants. “Remember Mary-Arkansas Greene?! Imagining a smear of mud on my nape, She got shot in the head last night in Little Rock! as if she had stained me with her blackness, They say she might not make it through the day.” I reached back and tried to rub it off with my collar. I wanted to drive to Little Rock, I felt like blessing her out find the hospital, find her room, but didn’t speak a sound. walk in slow, and touch her hand. Her grin was gone. Lean down and kiss her. I rubbed my neck again, but I could tell: At once I felt ashamed The kiss was there. for dreaming that my kiss—belated blessing— would be worth a good goddamn. Third-grade year, Mary-Arkansas That it could heal, heal anything: her, me, home. moved to Little Rock, and I never saw her again. I sometimes thought of her kiss But Mary-Arkansas’s kiss. when the days dragged themselves Soft and urgent on my neck, like doomed soldiers through the Delta. Towns dying, sweet opposite of rope, it never left me. blacks and whites forever fighting. I think it never will. Sweet Willie Wine lashed to a light pole and stoned. Sheriff’s home bombed. A young father mobbed and kicked to death at a track meet.
One high school night, “the races” were set to rumble in downtown McCrory. The Bloods were coming from Little Rock, the Klansmen from the Ozarks. This had to be settled. But nothing happened. I drove dead easy down the main drag at midnight. Calm, deserted. The wind’s nonchalance. The quiet was violence, too.
42 43 PORTFOLIO
David Hockney’s Timescapes
Reinventing Modern Art in the Shadow of Mortality
Lawrence Weschler
n the train out of London King’s Cross Don Bachardy, or Billy Wilder and his wife, or toward Bridlington via Doncaster one Stephen Spender by himself— commenting on Ocold gray morning this past January— on my the amount of time and focus it took to work way to visit with David Hockney once again, out that room- wide backdrop if he were going this time regarding his upcoming San Francisco to succeed in bringing out the piece’s true sub- show of portraits and landscapes—I was watch- ject and his heart’s true passion, which was to ing the snug small towns and winter- idled say all that human clay. fields stream by, punctuated by the occasional How remarkable, I found myself thinking, copse of bare trees, and I found myself recalling that over the past ten years, the culmination in some lines of W. H. Auden’s that David used to many ways of a passionate journey of aesthetic cite when we were first getting to know each inquiry that had really begun with those grid- other (around the time of his Polaroid collages ded Polaroid collages, so much of the work had in the early eighties). A crisp vivid stanza from come to focus on an engagement with land- Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron,” to be exact: scapes entirely emptied of any people. As the train now began to home in on its To me Art’s subject is the human clay, coastal East Yorkshire Bridlington terminus, And landscape but a background to a torso; the thus far relatively bland landscape began to All Cézanne’s apples I would give away take on character. It began, that is, to look like For one small Goya or a Daumier. “a Hockney.” And no wonder—scor es of David’s watercolors and paintings and blown- up iPad How he loved decanting those lines as he drawings of these very wheat fields and slop- splayed out the Polaroid tiles into yet another ing wolds and tight-gr ouped stands of trees and portrait of this or that other fond dear friend— blowsy cloudscapes had recently held center his studio assistants David Graves and Richard stage at the Royal Academy in London. (A re- Schmidt and Gregory Evans, for example, or his cord 650,000 rapt visitors had traipsed through longtime sidekicks Christopher Isherwood and the gallery- wide exhibition, which then went on to draw similarly unprecedented crowds in Stephen Spender, April 9th 1982. Composite Polaroid, both Bilbao, Spain, and Cologne, Germany.) 34.75 µ 30". Images courtesy of David Hockney, Inc. Someone in London had commented that unless credited otherwise. (richard schmidt) Hockney had managed to turn this previously
63 ignored corner of East Yorkshire into a virtual But what had really upset him, I now came national park, so familiar had people become to understand as he took me on a short side Surely Hockney’s brush with his own mortality must have intensified with this particular vantage or that particu- trip down the Woldgate Road just outside town lar view, and so treasured had those views in (the undulating, tree- dappled two- mile coun- the pall of his response to the assassination of that Totem. turn become. Indeed thousands of people had try lane that constitutes the spine, as it were, started making pilgrimages to the environs of of Hockney National Park), was something al- this otherwise fairly dilapidated onetime sum- together more savagely unexpected. As I say, mer coastal resort situated across the North Sea those of us who have been following Hock- two of them.” Again David’s crew had hesitated from northernmost Holland. Having been no- ney’s landscape passion over the past decade, to tell him; he only found out on the Monday ticed, the landscape sliding by—the dendrite- or else have re-experienced it across the recent of his return. Shattered, he withdrew to his spreading trees, the sky- reflecting puddles, the museum shows, have gotten to know many of bed and didn’t get up for two whole days. “Very dense brambly hedgery—began to look worthy these swerves and swells almost by heart. We dark,” he now intoned. “I felt about as bad as of notice. No longer bland, it seemed to take recognize this thistle- choked hedgerow along I have in many years. Why would anyone do on promise, veritably to breathe it out. “Look the roadside here, for example, or right over something so spiteful?” That Thursday, though, at me,” it seemed to boast (not unlike certain there, the leaf- tramped paths perpendicularly he’d climbed out of bed, newly resolved, and fields outside Arles on other hillscapes in the bisecting the road, the spot where David used headed back to the scene, sketchpad in hand. lee of the Montagne Sainte Victoire east of to set up his easels season after season back in “I couldn’t really speak still,” he now recalled Aix), “look at me, for I have been seen.” 2006–2007 as he built up the nine separate as we turned onto his side street. “But I could six- canvas combines portraying the changing draw, and I could even concentrate.” And over play of air and light, month by month, across the next three days of intense concentration, David was there to greet me in the parking the spreading forest floor. And then, coming he’d proceeded to produce five charcoal draw- lot at the Bridlington Station, all bundled up, up here, the stretch of timberland thicket that ings of his felled hero. smoking, snug in the driver’s seat of his Lexus was thinned out the following year, in 2008, He now eased the sedan into the garage sedan. He was, as I had been forewarned, some- the felled logs dragged out onto the roadside of the onetime bed- and- breakfast he’d origi- what less voluble than usual. Granted, over the and stacked in piles, subject of countless draw- nally bought as a residence for his then- years he has seemed to follow a regular, almost ings (indeed some of the most poignant pencil nonagenarian mother (and into which he and tidal, pattern: five or six years of intense and drawings of Hockney’s entire career, especially Felled Woldgate Totem (2012). (rob robel) his studio crew had moved in the wake of her ever more intense activity (and the past half- a sequence capturing the hauntingly emptied passing, at age ninety- nine, back in 1999), dozen years had seen perhaps his most intense expanse once the felled trees had been re- He restarted the car engine and we headed and we made our way into the lodging’s cozy productivity ever), followed by several months moved), as well as a whole suite of epic color- back toward town, David relating how shortly kitchen (“cozy” having been a favorite word of of almost prostrate collapse. Only this time, as I besotted oil paintings. And now, round this after his little stroke, while he’d been down in Auden’s as well), where David showed me re- was now given to understand, things had been next bend, yes, we’d doubtless see the Totem, London getting checked out, a group of prank- productions of the five drawings. “The people a bit more serious than that. In fact, within as David called it, the person- tall magisterial sters one night had apparently defaced the at the Guardian heard about the tree’s having weeks of each other, he’d suffered a minor tree stump by the side of the road that Hockney famous Totem, slathering hateful graffiti all been chopped down—wor d of the event made stroke that had initially left him almost un- had convinced the foresters to leave standing across its flanks in gaudy, bright pink paint— it down to London” (the Totem had been one able to speak, though his thinking and ability and that over the years had become one of his the image of an erect phallus at waist height, the of the standout stars, after all, of the previous to draw had gone largely unscathed, and then favorite subjects. Only—w ait, where was it? It word “CUNT” in a sloppy scrawl. David’s own year’s Royal Academy show, its image plas- four nights in a hospital for a substantial op- wasn’t there! Where’d it gone? crew had been hesitant even to tell him, though tered all over town), “and they called up to ask eration to clear some arteries in his neck. (It David pulled the sedan to a stop and lit up in the event he hadn’t proven all that upset, if I had any comment. In response, I e- mailed was the first time in his seventy- fiveyears that a cigarette, allowing me to take in the full di- figuring that the coming rains would wash the them images of some of the drawings”— David he’d ever undergone anesthesia, let alone spent mensions of what had happened: somebody, vileness away. But then a few weeks later, in rummaged around piles of old papers, spearing the night in a hospital!). His ability to speak probably more than one somebody, had come the period following his operation while he was a copy of the daily—“ and, see, they put it on the seemed to be filling back in, and doctors were along and simply toppled the thing, sawn the in the hospital, the hooligans had apparently cover.” Indeed they had, and above the fold at predicting he’d soon recover completely, but main body clean through a foot or two from come back in the middle of another night to that, with a whole other spread on the inside. his discourse that weekend was still somewhat the ground, abandoning the felled bole where chop the whole thing down. “You could see,” Major news. Hard to imagine anything like that more halting than usual, and the experience— it had come crashing down. “Vandals,” David he now said, “it can’t have been an easy thing happening in the United States. Who was it— a brush, after all, with mortality— had clearly muttered, exhaling a drag. “I mean, the sheer to do. It was quite thick there at the base. Must Ezra Pound?— who described poetry as news left him fairly shaken. meanness of it all.” have taken a good hour and involved at least that stays new? On the other hand, famously,
64 VQR | FALL 2013 LAWRENCE WESCHLER 65 FICTION loose and floats over the patchy grass into the “Papa’s on all the mailers! Papa, Papa, Papa!” stand of elms. “He sure is,” I say. “Right there for the world Travis, our son, turned four last week. He’s to see.” wearing a karate gi and his father’s boots, clomping behind me, dispensing deer corn from a plastic pitcher. He fusses if he’s not the Most people around here will say we live out - one to feed them. Flat slabs of limestone line side of Comfort, or in the Hill Country, but re- our property. Travis calls them deer plates. He ally it’s just the middle of nowhere. Unless you takes care to distribute their food evenly. After count the Dairy Queen inside the truck stop pouring each mound, he steps back and as- on the highway, the nearest restaurant is thirty sesses his work like a painter. miles away. When Travis starts kindergarten, I’m halfway to the mailbox before I can read it will be a ninety- minute round- trip drive. My the flyers. Everything seizes up. It’s as if the big plan is to volunteer as a teacher’s aide or world has turned its full attention on me. A get a job at The Dollar Tree. I go into Kerrville ragged cloud passes over the sun. Somewhere, once a month for groceries; we have an extra the thin odor of kerosene. Then Travis is freezer in the garage. If we run out of aspirin bounding beside me, then ahead, chopping and or peanut butter, I bolt for the truck stop. It’s kicking the air like a miniature ninja. He does a also where we rent movies and buy salt blocks lopsided cartwheel and one of his father’s boots for the deer. There’s a minor- emergency clinic flies off. He cackles, smiling like he planned the an hour away, but for big trouble, people out move. I laugh, too, for him. Our voices carry. here use HALO flights. When Wild Bill Garza I snatch the flyer from our mailbox. The accidentally shot his nephew in the leg last words above the headshot are bolded black: year, the helicopter landed in the scrub behind sex offender alert. our house. For the rest of hunting season, the Travis jumps up and down, trying to see. He Comfort Compass was inundated with letters to says, “Is that for my party?” the editor complaining that the chopper had “Not this time, chalupa,” I say. “Your birth- scared away all the game. We lived in Corpus day was last week, remember?” for years, but the city felt claustrophobic. We His party was a karate- themed affair, a huge wanted acres between us and our neighbors. success; all the neighbors brought their kids. Hector, my husband, works at Holiday To a Good Home Ever since, he’s been wearing his gi and break- World, selling rifles and propane and camper ing twigs with hi- yah chops. trailers. In Corpus, he sold lumber, then meat “Then what are they for? All the mailers at a butcher shop, then used tires. “Wetback Bret Anthony Johnston have them.” He calls mailboxes “mailers.” work,” he called it, jokingly, because he’s Mexi- “It’s grown- up stuff.” can. On his drive home every Friday, he stops He surveys Up River Road, the rutted gravel at The Dollar Tree and buys gifts for us: plas- rimson flyers feather the mailboxes on Sika. Maybe Uno is with them, maybe not. and the flyers that, without a breeze, hang like tic fire trucks, boxes of chocolate, compilation both sides of Up River Road. There are When Old Man Landry drives by in his pickup, drying meat. He says, “Are there a million of CDs. One time he showed up with three Styro- Cacres of tall blue-stem grass sprawling between the flyers lift and fall like they’re on disturbed them?” foam pith helmets and we wore them all week- the houses, but the emptiness seems to have water. If he waves to us, I miss it. “There’s plenty enough.” end. “Let’s go on a safari,” he said. We drove the contracted with the chilled air. November in The wind carries cedar smoke from a far- He nods once, slowly, which makes him back roads and used binoculars to look at mules Texas. In the morning sun, the hills are ochre away chimney and the flyers twist. They look to seem uncomfortably wise. and squirrels and a red-tailed hawk flying with and rust and dry green. My husband is already be affixed with a single piece of tape. Tomorrow Then he yells, “Karate chop!” and whacks a dead snake in its talons. Hector loves animals, at work, an hour’s drive away. My son and I is the deer harvest. There was a notice in our the flyer out of my hand. In the brush, the deer especially wolves. At least half of his T- shirts have come out to scatter corn and sunflower weekly paper, the Comfort Compass, remind- watch us. Their ears twitch. have wolves on them. He also tends to anthro- seeds for the deer. They’re waiting in the brush, ing everyone not to feed the deer or go outside Travis picks up the flyer and studies the pic- pomorphize things. Eighteen-wheelers remind over a dozen of them, mostly whitetail doe and until the shooting ends at dusk. A mile down ture, then says, “Papa!” him of whales, and pump- jacks in oil fields their fawns, but also bucks and dark, huffing the road, the flyer on the Ulrichs’ mailbox flaps “That’s right,” I say. make him think of whinnying horses. Before
130 / EEI_TONY ISTOCKPHOTO BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON 131 we left Corpus, we carried what we couldn’t fit on his patio every Wednesday night, requires “Uno means one.” cause the joke sounds so forced, I say, “People in our car and truck to the curb, and he made his boys to call him Sir, and recently installed a “That’s right.” keep calling and hanging up. Travis’s asleep.” a sign that read: free to a good home. As if massive flagpole in his front yard. Every morn- “Uno only has one horn,” he says, mashing “Y’all should’ve told us,” she says. “That’s the the old armchair and chipped plates were kit- ing he hoists two flags: one for Texas and one his cheek to the glass. “There are a million deer consensus in these parts.” tens. He’s a decent man, a good man. Trust me. for POWs. in the world, but they don’t look like Uno.” “He registered with the county. That’s the When we moved in, the Ulriches brought us “He’s special.” requirement.” a loaf of Amish friendship bread and the HALO “He’s mighty fine,” Travis says. “We just don’t “Everyone is thinking about the birthday The law requires convicted sex offenders kit. The kit consists of paperwork you fill out know where he is anymore.” party, how Hector was in such close proximity to register with the county when they move. with your family’s medical history and a large “He’ll be back,” I say. to the children.” Hector is religious about it. He heads to the Ziploc bag to hold it. You store the kit in your Old Man Landry drives by again, heading up “No one had anything to worry about.” courthouse and files the paperwork, almost im- icebox. When the HALO crew arrives, the first the hill. There’s a .308 with a scope on the rack “I guess whoever printed up those flyers patiently, as if he’s working toward a prize. As if thing they do is rush to the fridge to grab your in the truck’s rear window. disagrees.” he thinks someone will notice his vigilance and information, checking for drug allergies and “Mama?” “How is Mark?” I say before I can stop admit the whole thing was a mistake and strike such. After the Ulriches left, I told Hector that “Yes, chalupa?” myself. his name from the hideous list. Really, people Mark would be the one to stir trouble. “The turkeys are coming.” His voice is timid “Mark? You think Mark had something— ” just look at him aslant. They assess him, memo- “Not a chance,” Hector said. “He’s probably and small. “Is he excited to wage war on the deer? Is rize his eyes and gait and wolf shirts, seeking running, too. He’s probably got a panic room Then I hear them, their noises like some- he organizing an emergency Bible study to pray out all the ways he seems comfortingly unlike filled with canned food and gas masks.” thing being choked. that we’ll hit the road?” them. They whisper and put their hands on “Exactly,” I said. “You’re in no position to cast stones, their children’s shoulders, as if he might lunge Rhonda. I called to be neighborly, to give you for them. Hector has never lunged at anything For most of the morning, Travis and I play a a heads- up.” in his life. I’m the lunger. In each new place, I Travis is standing at the window, watching the game he invents on the fly; it amounts to my “A heads- up on what?” ask him not to register. I beg him to just lay low deer blend into the brush after eating. Soon the chasing and apprehending him, then him bust- “Just that everyone’s in a lather, and to re- and coast, to give us a chance. He never budges. turkeys will come to peck at what’s left behind. ing loose with a karate flourish and leading me mind you that y’all are all alone and the cavalry Then some bored housewife or unemployed The birds are the size of German shepherds. into a different part of the house to begin again. has to be flown in by helicopter.” Republican goes online and searches the data- I’ve started thinking of them as a gang of gro- In each room, I can’t stop myself from consid- “We don’t need the cavalry. We haven’t done base. Then the flyers appear. Then the phone tesque hooligans, the way they strut around ering which things Hector and I will cart to anything wrong.” calls start. Then the bricks crash through our with their terrible heads held high. They scare the curb before we move. Louisiana? Florida? “I probably agree with you,” she says, sound- windows. Then we move, foolishly thinking the Travis. Or somewhere with snow. Colorado or Utah or ing gentle, conciliatory. “But there’s a bunch next place will be safe. I wipe the counter with a sponge. I glance Wyoming. When Travis gets tuckered out, I set of hairy- legged men who see it differently, and Mark Ulrich. My bet is he’s behind the fly- outside, and now that the sun is higher, the him up on the couch with a DVD Hector’s par- come tomorrow morning, they’ll be creeping ers. He comes on like the mayor of Up River, flyers seem a more lurid shade of red. When ents sent us. The cartoon follows a stowaway behind your property with rifles and hollow- leading the deer harvest and policing the neigh- I look away, they stay in my vision. Like I’ve mouse and a peg-leg ged pirate and a whale, but tipped bullets.” borhood to see who’s watering their grass dur- stared into an eclipse. The flyers will sink Hec- beyond that I’m clueless. It’s in Spanish. I turn ing the drought. Ulrich’s a welder who tucks tor. They always do. up the volume and dip into the kitchen. I call his camouflage T-shir ts into camouflage pants “Uno must not be hungry yet,” Travis says. Holiday World, but Hector’s with a customer. This year’s goal is to harvest forty-tw o white- and wears mirrored sunglasses and chews on He’s pressing his forehead to the windowpane. The hang- ups from blocked numbers com- tail doe and twenty- seven Sika. Those num- cinnamon toothpicks. He and Lynnette have Uno is a small buck with one three- point mence after lunch. Travis naps in our bed, and bers came after a wildlife- management team seven- year- old twins, Dallas and Houston; at antler. Hector named him. We tell Travis I pick up each call before the second ring to surveyed the soil and vegetation, factoring in Travis’s party, he took them aside to practice stories about him at night, and Travis draws keep from waking him. After the first few dial the drought and the weights of deer that were roundhouse kicks in a way that seemed hateful. pictures of him that we hang on the fridge. At tones, I answer every call by saying “Longoria tagged last season. Then they ran an ad for vol- Lynnette and I are close by default. Neither of Travis’s birthday party last week, there was a residence, go fuck yourself.” unteer harvesters in the classified section of us works and we’re about the same age. She’s present from Uno. I wrote a card that said To “Somebody must have gone to finishing the Comfort Compass and put Ulrich in charge. told me she’s getting him a radio- controlled Travis, Love Uno and beside the name, Hector school,” Lynnette Ulrich says on the line. Her He’s the one who sent out the notice about not helicopter and an embossed Bible for Christ- drew a hoof print. I saved it. We haven’t seen voice rattles me. I stopped checking caller ID feeding the deer in the days before the harvest. mas. “Those things only last about a year over Uno in days. half an hour ago and hadn’t expected anyone By depriving the deer of our food, we’ll force here,” she said, and I couldn’t tell which one she “He might be sleeping,” I say, “or he might to speak. them to venture into the shooting lanes. An- was talking about. Ulrich hosts a prayer group be off having adventures.” “I have a GED in etiquette,” I say. Then, be- other harvest goal is to target any “inferior”
132 VQR | FALL 2013 BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON 133 REPORTING
Three-Stone Fire Designing Better Stoves for Africa
Andrew Beahrs
Zeritu’s Eucalyptus
fter more than 2,000 climbs up Mount Entoto on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, AZeritu Zerga knew every step of the ascent. It began in the marketplace, where women set out pumpkins and avocados beside dresses, chat leaves, and jebena coffeepots along a road crowded with taxis and minibuses. Soon pave- ment changed to dirt, curving up and back, and back again, until Zeritu and her friends aban- doned the road to cut uphill on a well- worn path. They entered the forest suddenly and completely as through a gate. In the shadows of the eucalyptus, the Ethiopian capital’s smoke and exhaust gave way to the scents of menthol and earth. Zeritu had miles to go before she could gather wood legally. She walked over bare forest floor, past guards leaning on trees or walking staves. the late afternoon, tourists in the market saw Though the task of gathering fuel is an ancient In the mountains surrounding Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, The guards were supposed to ensure that a scene that had been repeated for as long as one, the Addis Ababa market and the eucalyptus the eucalyptus forests are not able to provide no one cut living eucalyptus, but they often people had cooked with wood. trees are both relatively new. In fact, their gen- sufficient fuelwood to heat the vast number of levied “fines” even on properly gathered fallen For anyone who relies on an open fire to esis can be dated to the day in 1886 when Queen inefficient stoves. (photographs by andrew beahrs deadwood. It was six hours before Zeritu cook daily meals, the need for fuel rivals that Taytu Bitul stood on slopes draped with juni- unless otherwise stated.) passed them on her descent, now burdened by for food itself. Staples from wheat to potatoes per, acacia, and kosso trees, looked down on the a bundle of firewood half her weight. She was are inedible without cooking, while other foods watered valley below, and declared that a city of African agriculture and foodways James Mc- fifteen, strong and energetic enough to use the require heat to release their greatest nutritional would bloom there. Addis ababa: a new flower. Cann, for four days tej honey wine flowed “like grade to her advantage. The younger carriers value. Save for raw foodists (who generally rely Zeritu’s path threaded past the magnificent rivers,” and the aroma of some 5,000 roasting kicked out almost playfully with each step, each on the wide-r anging food choices of the mod- mountain church of Entoto Maryam, site of the beasts brought “faintness to the heart.” kick bringing them further downslope. Zeritu ern world), human life requires cooking, which feast that Queen Taytu held to commemorate At the feast, the most irreplaceable smell was one of hundreds. When they filed back in means having access to fuel. Addis Ababa’s founding. According to historian and flavor of all was that of injera, the sour,
182 ANDREW BEAHRS 183 platter- wide pancake common to royal and nearly treadless plastic sandals heaped for sale humble tables. The injera baked and steamed in yellow- or plum-color ed piles on Addis street under the domed covers of innumerable mitads corners. Where fuelwood could still be found, (clay griddles), constantly replenishing some there were leaves in slick mats, and carriers 500 wicker baskets to overflowing. Then, as often fell. A short slide could easily become a now, Ethiopians ate with their hands, and tumble under a bundle’s weight. every bite, whether of humble chickpea sauce The last time she climbed Entoto as a carrier, or chicken spiced with the secret royal berbere Zeritu came home empty- handed. She’d gath- blend of peppers, was lifted to a hungry mouth ered her load, bound it, and set it on her shoul- within a folded pinch of injera. ders when a guard confronted her. The slope was As the capital grew, the amount of firewood steep enough that her head scarcely reached to used at spectacular state dinners was dwarfed his waist; he stood over her, demanding a fine by that used in the cone-shaped, thatched-r oof, for the wood he claimed she’d cut. Zeritu re- mud tukul huts of the commoners. Soon the fused to pay. Before she could turn, he struck receding forest represented a true crisis, for the her with his staff, beating her about the legs. slowly, evenly heating clay that makes a mitad As the guard wound back for another blow, perfectly suited for baking injera also gives it she reached over her shoulders with both arms, a voracious appetite for firewood. The forests leaning forward to half-dr op, half-hurl the wood of Entoto were vanishing into Addis Ababa’s into his chest. The weight was enough to bring hearths so rapidly that Queen Taytu’s husband, him down and, for the moment, to pin him King Menelik, considered moving the capital there. Zeritu fell backward. She tumbled down west, to the more wooded Addis Alem. Only the slope, falling for once without wood, sliding the introduction of Australia’s fast- growing eu- down, and down, and down on leaves. calyptus saved the city from abandonment by Ethiopia’s political elite. By the time Zeritu first went into the for- Black Onions, Sweet Rice est a century later, the juniper and acacia were stoves gave way to canisters of liquid petroleum In an Addis Ababa market, bundles of eucalyptus long gone. The eucalyptus had been cut and enowned physicist and engineer Ashok gas and finally to piped natural gas. Some el- sell briskly. regrown, then cut and regrown again, so that Gadgil sat before his Berkeley, Califor- derly people complained about the changes: coppices sprouted like fistfuls of whips from Rnia, office’s wide, fogged window, remem- The onions weren’t smoky enough with gas; the as assida (also spelled aceda). When he landed, what had once been single trunks. In an at- bering roasted onions. When he was a boy in new tin pans had hotspots and couldn’t give the Gadgil was thinking about rape. tempt to break the cycle of cutting and burn- central Mumbai, Gadgil’s parents cooked with slow, even simmering needed to blend rice and In November 2004, Chuck Setchell of US- ing even degraded second growth, new laws piped gas; his uncle, who lived in the suburbs milk into sweet basundi. For that, one needed AID’s Office for Foreign Disaster Relief had ap- restricted the carriers to gathering deadfall. a twenty- minute train ride away, cooked with thick cast iron. Sometimes the elderly didn’t proached Gadgil about developing a solid fuel Eucalyptus sheds enough branches, bladed charcoal. That simple difference made his recognize the food of their youth. If it didn’t for the stoves used in camps for Darfur’s inter- leaves, and snakeskin- like bark to choke out uncle’s house an exotic culinary world. “At my have the same flavor, Gadgil says, it simply nally displaced persons, or IDPs (the term refu- undergrowth. But the carriers soon picked over uncle’s house the favorite thing to eat was a wasn’t the same food. gee is properly reserved for people who have the ground so diligently that the forest floor fresh onion, cooked with charcoal,” Gadgil says. In 2005, Gadgil traveled to Darfur with En- fled across international borders). The IDP and appeared raked, even swept. “Buried in charcoal.” The onions were charred vironmental Energy Technologies division en- refugee crisis was worsening on the African On her way to find leaves and limbs, Zeritu on the outside, juicy within—and never, Gadgil gineer Christina Galitsky in hopes of instigating Horn; Ethiopia was virtually ringed by camps walked over woodland earth bare save for an remembers more than four decades later, dry. a change in the cooking of western Sudan like for refugees from Somalia, Eritrea, Kenya, and eerie webbing of roots. The wood she gathered Now director of the Lawrence Berkeley Na- the one he’d experienced growing up in Mum- of course Sudan. For the IDPs, Setchell said, was too small to split—just twigs and branches tional Lab’s Environmental Energy Technolo- bai. When he landed in Khartoum, though, he one need in particular was as essential as it was that she bound into a rough cylinder. Before gies division, Gadgil is a charming, balding, wasn’t thinking of roasted onions or basundi; seemingly pedestrian. Many of them lacked the hoisting the bundle on her back for the long de- spectacled man of sixty- two. When he was a that would come later, as he began to reflect fuel necessary to cook. scent down the treacherous slopes, she padded boy, food was changing across India, especially on the assumptions that shaped his work. He The Sahel— the band of ancient, dried salt the outside with leaves. Like the other carriers, in urban centers such as Mumbai. Charcoal wasn’t thinking about Ethiopian injera or Su- sea that runs from Eritrea and the Indian Ocean Zeritu wore the kind of inexpensive, open-toed, that had already supplanted wood- fired mud danese sorghum or the millet porridge known to Senegal and the Atlantic— has always been
184 VQR | FALL 2013 ANDREW BEAHRS 185