When Labov moved to New York City in the early 1960s, he noticed that some working-class New Yorkers sounded different from middle and upper-class dwellers. One feature stood out to him: the pronunciation of the r sound, which working-class people tended to drop. Labov suggested that the difference in pronunciation can be linked to a speaker’s class, as our social differences manifest in speech. To show this, he chose three department stores—a high-end Saks Fifth Avenue, a middle-class Macy’s, and a now-defunct discount store S. Klein’s—and spent several hours pestering employees with questions.
“He’d go up to employees working in the store and say something like: ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where to find men’s ties?’ ” explains Cecelia Cutler, professor of linguistics at the City University of New York. “The employees would say ‘fourth floor.’ Or they might say ‘fauth flaw’—with no r.” Labov would rush around the corner, pull out a notebook, and scribble, marking whether the person used or dropped the sound. He always chose questions that lead to a single answer, “fourth floor,” and in two days, surveyed 264 people. “He found that the working-class store had the greatest rates of r dropping,” says Cutler. People in the discount store dropped the r sound eight times more often than in the luxury store.
It was a little dramatic, but as she spoke, I realized what set Madonna apart: Her career had not only been about ambition, or ratcheting up achievement. It had been one long process of meaning-making, of understanding herself through her art. Some of it wasn’t for public consumption anymore; she might not tell us as much about herself as she used to. But she was always crafting a narrative, whether the story was about young women’s empowerment or biblical salvation, being reborn in sweat on the dance floor or in motherhood.
Most of us realized, as we aged, that we couldn’t make the puzzle pieces of our lives fit and made peace with that. Madonna kept reaching into the past to discover more and more about herself. There was no one truth, only the deepening of your own understanding. At one point, she said to me rhetorically: “What is the truth? Your truth when you’re 18 is not going to be your truth when you’re 28 or when you’re 38. Life is not black and white. It’s gray, and one minute you’re going to feel so strongly and believe in something so strongly, and then maybe you won’t in five years.”
Like many other residents, the Vallons were lured to this small city on the lower Colorado River by the low cost of living, the nearby casinos, and the outdoors opportunities. Craig and Denise were educators, and Craig liked to give talks costumed as Jedediah Smith, the legendary Mojave mountain man who helped blaze what would become part of the Oregon Trail. After his retirement, Craig enjoyed sitting in the back room of the house, which was stuffed with hunting trophies, and watching the river flow by through floor-to-ceiling windows.
In the spring of 2015, Craig began to notice a few moth-like insects flitting around under the lights outside. They were about the size of houseflies, dull brown in color with long fuzzy wings, big black eyes, and whiplike antennae. With each passing evening, their numbers grew. Soon they became an uncountable mass, a swirling, kinetic cloud that hung over the river’s edge like a new state of matter.
Simply calling these stories “horror” wouldn’t be right not only because they shift from genre to genre but because that label is too grandly boisterous for what is, in many cases, an extremely intimate sort of unraveling. Indeed, the title of this collection might make it seem that Evenson has turned his inimitable talent to the fate of the “world” at large—focusing, perhaps, on the ruin of public discourse, global order, or ecosystems. But instead the “world” repeatedly undone belongs to one character or maybe two, minor key visitations of reality fraying in ways undetectable to someone standing even at arm’s length. These precise calibrations are paradoxically extending in their own right, as the act of turning away and turning inward evokes everything lurking just out of sight.
The evolutionary history of bone reaches back much further in time than the scant few million years that hominins have walked bipedally and that Homo sapiens have spread around the globe. We share the same basic skeletal structure with other members of the vertebrate phyla and have for over 400 million years. For centuries, philosophers, scientists, and natural historians have looked to bones to help explain similarities between different groups of organisms as well as variation between members of a particular species. Because bone preserves so well over long periods of geologic time, it is one of the most omnipresent materials in the paleontological and archaeological records. Skin and muscle, for example, usually decompose, while an organism’s bones gradually turn to stone over millions of years. Consequently, what we know about the deep past is built in no small part out of the bones that scientists have found and the narratives they have spun around them.
In a society that appears as “an immense collection of commodities,” to borrow from Marx, what distinguishes a work of art from being merely a part of this collection, especially those works like novels, films, and records that circulate in mass production but make aesthetic claims? Or do we reject this distinction and accept the insight offered by what we now broadly call “postmodernism,” which among other things laid bare art’s status as a commodity no different from the pandering kitsch from which it distanced itself?
For Nicholas Brown, these two interpretations are not necessarily at odds: “We are wise enough to know that the work of art is a commodity like any other,” he wryly notes at the outset of his new book, “[w]hat is less clear is whether we know what we mean when we say it.” Like Kaufman, Brown is interested in how, given the limits of a totalizing market that demands “the Hollywood thing,” the work of art is still possible today.