Borges said the writing of Kafka was so original it created its own precursors. It made us read Kierkegaard and the 9^th Century Chinese writer Han Yu as Kafkaesque. Without Kafka, we would not notice their calm ability to make strangeness ordinary and the ordinary strange. The writing of Chris Kraus is so layered and witty, it is causing things to look Krausian. The best way to read the writing of Kathy Acker is as a precursor to the writing of Chris Kraus.

Acker still won’t give you pleasure. No one including Kraus claims they feel pleasure reading Acker. In a recent phone conversation, Kraus said that, as an aspiring, some-kind-of-artist in 1980s New York, she got high on Acker’s chutzpah to place her own subjectivity at the center of her sentences. That, Acker does, as well as her menstrual blood, bad fucks, ambition to be famous, torture porn, and rich-girl stealing from better writers to pay herself. On the phone, Kraus said, “I would see her at an art opening or a party, and my palms would get sweaty, and I’d be frozen with awe and terror.” Years later, Kraus reports in the autofiction I Love Dick (1997), she was browsing through the books of Sylvère Lottringer, whom she would marry, and found a volume inscribed, “To Sylvère, The Best Fuck In The World (At Least To My Knowledge) Love, Kathy Acker.” So there is that link, too.

Acker died in a Tijuana alternative health facility in 1997, at age 50, from breast cancer she chose not to treat with chemotherapy. Five or so years later Kraus thought of writing a biography of Acker but hesitated, sensing she didn’t have the detachment she would need to find a story worth telling and a voice to tell it in. The story worth telling could not celebrate Acker’s artistry, although there is daring and invention in what she wrote. She was an avatar of the great, Lower East Side do-it-yourself art camp, where anyone can put on a show in a hole in the wall café and anyone can be an artist with a patchwork of found objects. Acker spliced her letters and diary entries between slabs of appropriated texts from Dickens, Propertius, Emily Bronte, and scads of others, producing surprising formal effects and willing her experience into the body of Literature. No detail of corporeal existence was out of bounds. She could be rude, occasionally funny, and stark. Sentences here and there jump out with simple truth and wit. “Intense sexual desire is the greatest thing in the world (Eurydice in the Underworld).” “Murderers know nothing about fashion (My Mother Demonology).”

Still, overall, the writing is dull in its sameness. The narrators look in, not out. They feel, feel, feel, but we do not see, see, see what they are looking at. Their pronouncements are melodramatic, their images overblown. They ask for love, a pat on the head for their erudition, and agreement with their analyses and summaries. It’s exhausting to keep having to say okay.

Wisely, Kraus turned her attention to the circus of Acker’s life and to her disciplined march to a place in the world. Wikipedia lists 26 published titles in Acker’s entry. By the time she was 32, she was the subject of an hour-long documentary as part of the prestigious British South Bank Show. She began by self-publishing and eventually formed a relationship with Grove Press. She became a literary superstar in 80s England and in the States and elsewhere a punk glam luminary, performing on state to large, appreciative crowds, marketing herself as a gender outlaw with her tattooed, pierced biker body and Comme de Garcin clothes.

She lived like a man without pregnancy; she lived like a woman by putting her body at risk of pregnancy and having five abortions. She lived like a man by ignoring women; she lived like a woman by focusing on men. She lived like a man by putting work at the center of her life; she lived like a woman by asking men to advance her career. She was the smartest girl in any room, her hand darting up to answer all the questions and nab all the boyfriends. If you, too, were a cannibal, Kathy would eat your friends and then eat you.

In After Kathy Acker, Kraus nails this persona as a crafted calculation: “Just as the twenty-three-year-old Acker trained herself to heighten the emotional pitch of her diary by deleting conjunctions and adjectives, throughout her life she consistently sought situations that would result in disruptive intensity for all parties involved. Almost all the emotional tributes and essays penned in the wake of her death by friends speak of her ‘vulnerability’. Yet, like most of the rest of her writing and life, her vulnerability was highly strategic. Pursuing a charged state of grace, Acker knew, in some sense, exactly what she was doing. To pretend otherwise is to discount the crazed courage and breadth of her work.” [p. 176]

After Kathy Acker is a brilliant meditation on female ambition in the second half of the 20^th Century. Note to humans: Do not stop writing, even when you are suffering from an STD, recovering from an abortion, pining for the most recent schmendrik who, after that morning’s fuck, cast dead eyes upon the space above your head. Kraus’s book is fun, fun, fun. It reads like a performance monologue you don’t want to end, layered with her trademark descriptive powers, exhaustive research, personal revelations, and gossipy eyewitness accounts of the Downtown scene. Like Acker, Kraus is interested in the female body and the female mind in a world that reviles them. Like Acker, Kraus is interested more generally in power granted and power denied. And Kraus, too, combines genres with anarchic flare, but where Acker is pounding, abstract and grandiose, Kraus is comic, speculative, and compassionate.

With typical fluidity, Kraus here sketches the freewheeling dance scene of the 1970s and Acker’s intersection with it: “Soon after arriving back in New York [in 1976], she discovered the open dance/movement classes that were held in loft studios with wood floors and huge rattling windows, in apartments and theater spaces rented on an hourly basis by soon-to-be-legendary dancer/choreographers Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, and Kenneth King. No formal dance steps were taught. . . . King shared Acker’s background in philosophy and Latin. His ‘grid dances’ . . . must have seemed to Acker like an embodied analogue to her own texts. . . . Acker embraced the community’s grueling regime of back-to-back classes preceded by two hours of yoga and followed by marathon jams.” [p. 119]

Most enjoyably, After Kathy Acker is a love letter to all the sexually abject, bookish, hungry girls who have ever looked for a way to get to the party, and it invites you to the party you wish you had been cool enough to attend in the first place. Kraus forms a bridge to Acker, even arousing tenderness for a person who, by all accounts, was as self-centered and demanding in life as her narrators are on the page. 

In I Love Dick, Kraus writes, “What happens between women now is the most interesting thing in the world because it’s least described.” [p. 214] Kraus looks out. Acker tries to make an impression. In My Mother Demonology (1993), she does a mash-up between her personal writing and Wuthering Heights, taking on the role of brooding, sadistic Heathcliff, who has been abused as a child. Kraus, on the other hand, echoes the rebellion at the heart of Jane Eyre. When Charlotte Bronte’s sisters Emily and Anne warned her that no one would read a book about a heroine who was plain, Charlotte said, in effect, Just watch me. Kraus, too. (In reality, she is quite attractive, but her narrators call themselves “hags.” We feel what we feel about our bodies.)

Acker strove to be singular and to become a star. When she controls the narrative of her life, we see cartoons, meat, and pain. The power of Kraus’s book is in the way it looks at Acker as an example of a collective condition. By focusing on Acker’s desires—whether fulfilled or thwarted—Kraus is in her element and Acker becomes human.

Suppose, Kraus invites us to imagine, you are a waify, Jewish girl who does not think she is pretty and who other kids think has cooties and smells bad and does smell bad because her parents don’t notice how often she bathes and do not trouble themselves to buy her nice clothes. Suppose you are a girl who reads all the time and carries her books spines out so everyone can see she is devouring Dostoevski, Gogol, and Turgenev. Suppose your mother does not love you and your father has left before you were born. Your mother will commit suicide in a hotel rather than learn to spend less money on clothes and food. Suppose you mistake sexual desire for interest in you and discover you like sex or at least seducing people because it makes you feel connected and powerful in a way you will never put your finger on. Suppose you feel rejected almost as soon as sex is over, and you become a student of abjectness, turning the subject this way and that in various lights. Suppose you find a voice by combining your love of books with the subject of sexual abjectness, and suppose you observe that males have power. You situate yourself with them, identify with them, get them to teach you, introduce you to people with jobs, money, places to stay, because males have been trained to say yes to almost anything a female asks if he thinks he will get laid.

In Kraus’s rich account, the story of Acker is also the story of Kraus and the story of all females who will continue to scratch at the gate until the gate has been burned down. For all Acker’s cyber punk stylings, she comes off a throwback to women such as Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag, who wanted to be glittering exceptions rather than runners in a pack. Everywhere in Acker’s surround the women’s movement was rethinking how women are represented and how women represent themselves. Acker did not engage in activism. In terms of creating an alternative female model, she wound up inventing fire in her own small room while outside crowds had already built a bonfire.

What makes a book? Whatever wakes up desire—and not necessarily good romance—both Kraus and Acker believe. Kraus turns the idiom of Fatal Attraction on its head. In the movie, Alix, the opera-loving predator, is meant to be a monster. In the literature of Kraus and Acker, the fevered, infatuated stalker/lover is the hero and every man is at risk of finding the family bunny cooked in a pot. And why not? Who wants to wait to be chosen when it is never going to happen?

http://shop.oldcitypublishing.com/womens-review-of-books-volume-35-issue-2-pdf/

I have been watching the HBO show “High Maintenance.” Its effects are difficult to pin down, and that is part of its charm and aim. You feel off balance when you are watching it. Your focus shifts. You are not sure what you are looking at and what you are being shown. Richard remarked, “The style of the show produces the feeling of being stoned on pot.” Style holds the show together as well as several other elements, chiefly the central character, called “the Guy,” who deals pot and edibles on his bicycle to customers in his home turf of Brooklyn. It is a soft-edged, high-hazed shaggy Brooklyn of graffiti art and sub cultures bleeding into each other. One episode entered the world of pot-smoking orthodox Jews. (They speak Yiddish, and I felt a pang for the kitchen banter of my mother and grandmother. I could understand much of it!!) The Guy (Ben Sinclair, one of the creators of the show with Katja Blichfield), is the candyman who arrives with his metal-corned little suitcase. My favorite aspect of the show is the way it substitutes character for plot. It is interested in watching people be themselves, not in their arriving anywhere. Usually each episode brings us into the apartment of one of the Guy’s customers. We enter the scene before he does. He’s a Rosencranz or Gildenstern, dropping into a drama-in-progress he has to piece together. In media rez is the method of the show, and it feels like going on a long walk without a destination, a walk for its own sake. In one episode a friend suggests a partnership that would involve meeting customers in a car, and the Guy declines the offer saying, “But then we wouldn’t see the apartments.” Sadness or melancholy or vague yearning hovers over the show. Happiness almost always requires a drug. Life without it is hard to bear, and this seems especially apt during the past 18 months of shared helplessness. The first episode of Season 2 takes place on the day after the election. It isn’t named, the way the Guy isn’t named. The characters wake up to an apocalyptic upheaval, the big one, the beginning of the end. The Guy is getting on in years, nearing his late 30s, and he’s still dealing pot, as he did in college. What does he want? Does he need to want something other than what he has? Is he bored by the repetition of his routines? He is wary of involvement, yet he becomes involved. He helps one customer who is agoraphobic leave his apartment. He helps a pregnant woman get a ride to the hospital. He listens to people. Above all, he isn’t judgy. It appears to be his temperament and his offering. He wants to stay in one piece by the end of the day, which isn’t always possible. In one episode he’s robbed, in other knocked off his bike. His arm is broken, and he’s homebound for a while. He stays stoned almost all the time. The most recent episode centered on a teenaged girl, the daughter of a woman still dining out on her East Village sexual conquests of the ’90s. It’s the daughter’s birthday, and three of her female friends spend the night in her house, drinking and using drugs paid for by her mother. They dance. One girl gives another a tattoo. They smoke and one girl passes out. The camera lovingly follows the birthday girl, who finds herself often in the role of cleaning up after people. She is sad and also yearning for something. She draws, alone in her room. Late at night she slices a large piece from an uneaten birthday cake. Later, she serves it to a blond woman her mother’s age who is visiting from a Scandinavian country. In a surreal and beautiful moment, the girl kisses the blond woman passionately, and the woman responds. They stop shortly and go their separate ways in the house. It is a large event and a mysterious event that does not bring resolution but moves us.

Before feminist criticism, It used not to be a thing to consider if female characters in the stories of men were portrayed as separate human beings, with agency and desires of their own, or whether they figured exclusively as functions of a male character’s sense of his identity or were his obscure objects of desire and hatred.

We have been thinking together about the works of art produced by people who do shitty things to women. How to encounter them, classify them, or quarantine them. Today Richard pointed out a review of Kurt Vonnegut’s short stories in the current “London Review of Books” that speaks to some of these issues. I am going to quote from it at length. It makes an argument for work that is defunct in the present cultural turn. The present cultural turn is a widespread acknowledgement that feminist criticism is a way to sift through experience and art. Is this story I am reading or film I am seeing rapey in its consciousness or its obliviousness? Does it portray female characters as creatures women feel themselves to be? Yes, I can generalize. Of course there is such a thing as “how women feel themselves to be.” That thing powers the new surge of feminism expressed in the “Me-too” and “Times’s Up” movements. It’s expressed in the anti-gun movement as well in that the central figure who has emerged as a voice people want to listen to belongs to a young woman.

Back to Vonnegut. The following, written by J. Robert Lennon, details the way, when mass consciousness shifts, some writers, artists, and works of art are left atop the trash bin of history with no hope of restoration.

“‘I can never get a woman into my stories’, he [Vonnegut] wrote to a friend; later, in a “Playboy” interview, he said that he’s given up trying ‘to do women well’.” Dan Wakefield has written the introduction to the collection. Lennon quotes Wakefield: “Every girl[!!!] in this book is either ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful’, or the opposite; they are never not characterized by their degree of attractiveness. They marry, which is a happy outcome, or they don’t, which isn’t; a bad marriage is a miserable end, but it’s never an opportunity to break away into an independent life. . . . In “Shout about it from the Rooftop,” a woman writes a roman a clef about her town that becomes a surprise bestseller; her notoriety and her sudden affluence begin to destroy her marriage. Vonnegut recognizes the gender inequality that gives rise to the woman’s problems, but can’t think of anything for her to long for other than to be a ‘dumb, shy, sweet little housewife again’. . . . [T]he dystopian “Welcome to the Monkey House” . . . presents rape as a therapeutic solution to female frigidity. In 2014 . . . Kathleen Founds wrote in “Buzzfeed” that the story embraces ‘the myth that a woman who dresses provocatively shouldn’t be surprised if a man forces her to have sex. The myth that women unconsciously desire to be raped. The myth that proud, stuck-up women must be humbled through rape. The myth that rape is corrective, a cure’.”

Lennon explores other aspects of Vonnegut’s dated attitudes, including some about race. The point is not to ban any work. The point is to see that it is already dead. It has disqualified itself from our interest. The point is to allow it to be buried. By buried I mean ignored.

Today on Facebook a writer wondered if she should in good conscience continue to teach a story by Sherman Alexie. I have been thinking about category mistakes. The writer found value in the story before she learned about the author’s actions in the world. When experiencing art, we need to test the art against our hearts, not the person. When we are naming crimes and acts of coercion, we are naming crimes and acts of coercion. People who do very shitty things to women and others in their power also make art that is larger and more complex than would seem possible, given their personalities and histories. These people generally have worked hard at craft. They have experimented to create lies that touch us. That mystery is partly what we enter art to contemplate. I do not want a world of artists whose actions need to pass a morality test or a criminal test. Very humane and decent people are hopelessly drab and inept artists. When I write stories, I purposely create narrators who are funnier, more open to the world, kinder, and less solipsistic, hungry, and larcenous than I am. If I wrote everything as me, it would all be “Notes from Underground” revisited. The songs you want to hear are composed of artifice, smoke and mirrors, tricks.

It rained in Scottsdale a few days ago. Not that much rain for a place that is not a desert. It rained for one day and part of another, and the power cut out. I had a backup charger for my phone. I decided to walk to the nearest shopping center to see if there was power there. I wanted to walk, anyway. I walked along Arabian. All the streets in this area of McCormick Ranch are named after horses. I have learned many horse names I otherwise would not have learned. A man was on his phone in front of his house. We confirmed the power was off for a large area. I picked two lemons off a branch hanging over a wall. The traffic lights were out. Drivers had to organize themselves at intersections. I saw myself standing in the road at Shea Blvd and 84th Street. I thought I would do a good job directing traffic and it would be my civic contribution. I watched for a while. The cars seemed to be doing okay without me. I wasn’t afraid but thought I should be. I asked myself what a normal person would do and walked on, feeling I had missed an opportunity. Now that I have gotten this into my head, I will be on the lookout for another intersection during another power outage. Two cops were directing traffic at the 101. They were waving at cars in a way that looked professional. I would not have done anywhere nearly as well. I arrived at the shopping center, and the power came back on. I passed a Marshall’s. I had never been in a Marshall’s. I needed a pair of Reef flip-flops. My ankle is still fucked up from backing into the barrel cactus. The Reef’s were sold out. A tall woman with yellow hair encouraged me to try on a pair of Nike flip-flops that were marked down from $35 to $13. I was so excited, I twirled around like a dog. The woman was excited, too. She could have been high. I think it was her personality and the culture of the Marshall’s in this part of Scottsdale. I did not have any money or credit cards. She put aside the flip-flops until I could return. Today I walked in them around the man-made lakes and picked two grapefruits. It was windy, and the sky was overcast as if it were a beach day. These conditions occur here once in a blue moon.

Often I  remind myself: Don’t apologize, don’t translate yourself, and don’t ask for love. Maybe I am wrong to think female humans need especially to train themselves away from these tendencies. These tendencies are probably common to all humans to some extent. On my posts and elsewhere, I find myself asked to take it down a notch. To explain myself. To be nicer with the suggestion I will attract more flies with honey than vinegar. I don’t want flies, or maybe I do. I find life confusing. Lately I have noticed women fearing for the men I satirize. They feel anxious liking a post where a woman says, “We want you to stop talking, and running things, and having opinions about us. You have to shut up and go away. Take your balls and leave.” I wrote this in response to the remark made by Steve Bannon that women want to cut off the balls of men. Michael Hanake piped up the other day in a Guardian interview claiming the “Metoo” movement was an expression of man hating. I remarked that “man hating” was the term men used when they were hating women with an especially fine point. Several women have wanted me to modify the exaggerations in my posts. Exaggeration is what makes satire satire. They have said things like, “Well not all, men, surely.” Or “They can speak as long as they tuck away their balls.” I think, wow, you believe I have the power to shut men up! You think a post is going to hurt their feelings or their amour proper. You think liking posts like mine will consign you to the nest of writhing man haters. I say to these women: Hey, girlfriends, you don’t need to protect men from me. They are at no risk from me. I wish they were, but they are not. They can take care of themselves. Look how great the patriarchy is working!

I feel a need to clear up something for some men about balls. Steve Bannon said of the women he observed at the Golden Globes: “If you rolled out a guillotine, they’d chop off every set of balls in the room.” We are not interested in your balls, and if we were interested in your balls, we would not need something as large as a guillotine. You are interested in your balls. Castration anxiety is another term for male supremacy. We want you to shut up. We want you to stop talking and stop running things and having opinions about us. You have to shut up and go away. Take your balls and leave. We don’t care where you go as long as it’s over there. Please stop talking and sitting, you know, that way on the subway.

Bill Cosby was a shitty comedian. His material on stage was smug, take-my-wifeish, and dated long before reports surfaced of his sexual predation. I covered a dreary concert he performed at Carnegie Hall, and I believe it’s in “Laughing in the Dark.” Louis CK’s riffs on masturbation in his sets were more flashing than revelation. He is a complex artist, and I am not reducing him to bits I found repellent and that dovetail with personal behavior that has come to light. Phillip Roth’s inability to look at the resentment his male characters feel toward women shrinks his world view. What his books think or feel about anything in the world is reduced by these blinders. Feminist criticism of art, theater, books, movies–everything we have looked at–has been thinking for decades about how conscious and unconscious expressions of patriarchal values mute, maim, and trivialize works of art. That is still our contemplation. The other day a writer asked on FB what people thought of the movie “Rosemary’s Baby.” I said I loved it. I thought the casting of John Cassavetes as the lout husband was genius in that he combines the solipsism of the New York actor with the ordinary inobservance of the male-baby husband to produce a man who believably pimps his wife to the devil to get better acting parts. In the case of “Rosemary’s Baby,” Polanski’s wit and brilliance steer the enterprise, perhaps because in his heart he knows he would do the same thing as Rosemary’s husband. Perhaps because he also identified with the targeted and isolated Rosemary. The movie is great because it lampoons patriarchal values. Who better than Ralph Bellamy to play the beloved and fatherly doctor who is of course in league with the devil. The devil is not grand and majestic. He is not some offspring of Milton’s Lucifer. He is a guy celebrated by people with bad taste, who tell the same tawdry stories after dinner, and don’t speak French. They elbow you in Fairway. They are emanations of the rotting meat sack occupying the White House now. Melania would be a perfect addition to the coven. She would not need to get clothes from wardrobe.

Yesterday a man asked to interview me. He was referred by an editor I respect and have worked with amiably. I said sure. Before we began, he sent a picture of me posted on my page. I was much younger. He asked where it was taken. I told him. For the interview, I thought we would speak on the phone. He wanted to do it through email. Normally I do not write out answers to questions. It’s work. He told me English was not his first language and asked me to correct his English as we went along. It was a condition. I said okay. He sent his first question: “When I was young, my favorite female name was Laurie. I always wanted to meet Laurie. However, I never met her. She remained to my dream. My favorite band was the Rolling Stones. You are the living embodiment of my youth. Tell me and ours readers a little about yourself. Who you are is Laurie the girl from my dream?” I wrote back, “Have you read my work?” He wrote, “Is that important?” I wrote, “Why do you want to interview me?” He wrote, “Forget it. Sorry about my suggestion” He sounds aggrieved. He thinks something has happened to him. He has asked me to do his work, and he has asked me to enjoy watching him jack off to a fantasy about me. When I decline interest and in doing so call attention to his aggression, I become the aggressor. This happens all the time in large and small ways. No more brushing it off. No more fake smiling. No more quiet.

My friend was holding a coffee from Joe’s. It was noon. I said I wanted coffee from the $2 place. We were on Columbus and 86^th Street, heading for the march. At the $2 place, everything coasts $2 plus 18 cents tax. I ordered a decaf cappuccino. My friend said, “It costs $2?” I said, “Yes.” She looked at the pastries and sandwiches and said, “A salmon bagel costs $2?” I said, “Everything costs $2.” She said, “Quinoa salad!?” I said, “Let’s go.” We walked to Central Park West. It was banked with police gates, and the avenue was filling up. There were no sirens or construction sounds. The sun was shining, and we felt good. Two guys in front of us were wearing pussy hats. I said, “Guys in pussy hats are sexy.” My friend said, “It’s hot, or maybe I’m having a hot flash.” She had just returned from a meditation retreat. She said, “I became a hawk. I was looking out through black eyes, and I was flying around. I could feel where the feathers were attached.” By the time we reached the Museum of Natural History, the street was packed. People were feeding in from Columbus Avenue, and no one could not move. I said, “Let’s stand near the edge, so we can get out if we need to.” At the Washington march last year, I had gotten stuck for several house in a crush of people. Finally a woman got sick, and the crowd parted to allow her to leave. I slid in behind her like an ambulance chaser. My friend said, “I can open any police barricade or lift you over.” I said, “I don’t think you can lift me.” She said, “I can.” She is taller than me. Everyone was happy. A woman was holding a little girl in a pink hat and saying, “I believe in you.” I said, “I believe in you, too.” A man was handing out stickers. I took one. It was a drawing of Hillary that said, “You should have voted for me, bitch.” I missed Jessie on Breaking Bad. Jessie called everyone “bitch.” Nothing on TV is that good right now. My friend said, “Let’s walk on the street. At least we’ll be able to move.” I said, “Good idea.” A woman was sitting on a bench with a sign that said, “Impeach this motherfucker already!” A guy was beside her, looking at his phone. I said to the woman, “You are very pretty, and I like your sign. Can I take a picture of you?” She said, “Yes.” I said to the guy, “You are pretty, too.” He said, “Too late.” The park was filled with people. The march had grown fat, like a boa constrictor after a meal. My friend said, “I have to pee.” We were near Tavern on the Green. I said, “Pee in there.” She said, “Do you think they’ll let us in?” I said, “We can say we are getting married and considering it for the reception.” The doorman was young and friendly. He was letting everyone in. The bar was packed with marchers wearing pink somethings and carrying signs. It looked like the cantina in Star Wars. After my friend peed, we rejoined the march. A million people had taken over the center of the city. We were a human carpet, floating along. A woman on Central Park South was carrying a large flag she had sewn. Rows of naked female bodies represented the stripes. Another young women carried a sign that said, “No intersectionality without feminism.” I lifted my fist to her in solidarity. My friend said, “What do you think will happen with all this energy?” I said, “Everyone is saying, ‘No’. Everyone stopped doing what they were doing to show up, and women are leading. We will turn elections. Everything we have fought for about sex and race and gender and social justice now feels normal to these people. They are saying, ‘Don’t fuck with us’.” Police flanked the barriers, chatting softly among themselves. I said to a small female cop, “Join us.” She tilted her head down a little and smiled. I said, “You know you want to.” She said, “I’m enjoying this.” The march turned south again onto 6^th Avenue, and we passed 58^th Street, where my mother had lived. She was dead. My sister had died in July. I missed her. I said to my friend, “She would have loved this.” She put her arm around my shoulder. I said, “Let’s get a glass of wine when we get to the end.” She said, “Good idea.” We spilled onto 44^th and Fifth Avenue, and my friend and I decided to head up to the café at MOMA. I said, “I think I can get us in with my press pass. A young man at the desk said, “Usually you only get one ticket, but since you marched, you can have two.” The museum, like Tavern on the Green, had become an extension of the march. At the café, we sat beside marchers from the Bronx. They were eating crostinis. My friend had a glass of grigio, and I had rosé. A man said, “Everyone has a grandmother from the Bronx.” My grandmothers were from the Lower East Side, but hey. My friend left to see her mother, and I drifted to the Louise Bourgeois exhibit. The happiness of the streets mixed with the happiness of seeing art. They felt like the same happiness, and I was at home. I was in a gallery in a museum, alone in public space. I missed the old MOMA, where I had learned from artists how to see. The new MOMA reminded me of a department store with its swirl of bodies and sweeping dimensions. Never mind. There was Bourgeois’ crazy spider weaving her world out of her body. There were the architectural renderings of Bourgeois’ emotional states. The thin wood towers representing friends she had left behind in France and missed. The fabric collages made from clothes she had worn, each a small memory palace of the life lived in those clothes. “Art is a guarantee of sanity,” she said in an interview, and a moment later, “If you are an artist, you are already cuckoo.” For ten years, her father had installed his mistress in the house to live with his family. Her father had been critical and hard. She said she made trauma visible in order know it and move on. She said, “I transform hate into love. That’s what makes me tick.”