The thing about Savage is that, in public at least, he still sometimes loves to play the asshole. (In person, he’s warm, generous, and scrupulously polite.) As I read through his vast archives—three decades of searching questions and anxious confessions and mores changing right in front of my eyes—it struck me that while he has undoubtedly grown and expanded his repertoire, his voice has remained remarkably consistent through the years. The big difference is that the onetime rebel who semi-facetiously needled “breeders” and lamented the intelligence of straight men has become an establishment figure of sorts, unwittingly ushering in a popular sexual revolution of his own. Three decades later, as the sexual landscape he confronts in his column has changed dramatically, Savage is still grappling with that responsibility.
In Seattle, when he talked through the famous controversies he’s faced and some less well-known ones, he was thoughtful and conciliatory but also seemed to be negotiating with me: Wouldn’t I agree he has a point about the erotics of power imbalances between young people and older people? Don’t straight men actually need a “safe space” for their sexuality more than ever? By the time we got to my own experience as a woman who regretted trying to be “good, giving, and game” when dating men, I’d found a new way to understand Savage’s power—and his limitations.
When he began to accept that the end was near, Amigo Bob called the founder of Recompose, Katrina Spade. He wanted to make sure she knew what she was doing. Compost is the basis of organic farming, so he knew a lot about it—he’d even served as an adviser for a few large composting operations. Katrina explained their process, and he seemed to find her account convincing, but it wasn’t until his final moments that he told Jenifer definitively: “This is what I want.”
He died the day after Christmas. His loved ones washed and anointed his body and kept vigil at his bedside. “He looked like a king,” Jenifer told me. “He was really, really beautiful.” She showed me a few photos. His body had been laid atop a hemp shroud and covered from the neck down in a layer of dried herbs and flower petals. Bouquets of lavender and tree fronds wreathed his head, and a ladybug pendant on a beaded string lay across his brow like a diadem. Only his bearded face was exposed, wearing the peaceful, inscrutable expression of the dead. He did look like a king, or like a woodland deity out of Celtic mythology—his gauze-wrapped neck the only evidence of his life as a mortal.
I had been thrown out of the raft at the top of the rapid, ambushed by some bit of rogue hydraulics, and recall attempting to swim against forces entirely beyond human control. I was using reserves of energy that, as it turned out, could have been better used later. Best really to just go with the flow. But the river seemed to yank me directly down as if by the feet, and I was looking up through about 15 feet of water at what appeared to be a perfectly still round pool, colored robin’s egg blue by the cloudless Arizona sky.
For a single moment everything seemed calm. I checked: my life preserver was securely strapped, good, and I was rising toward the surface, good, and there’d be a breath soon, thank God. I was low on air.
But as I rose, the calm water in the pool above began to stretch out in an elongated oval that I could see falling apart on the downriver side. And then I was tumbling unpleasantly in a lot of broken water downstream. A breath on the surface was out of the question. This seemed unfair.
“Of course, these are not literal criminal acts,” Roach writes, since “animals don’t follow laws, they follow instincts.” These natural urges bring certain animals (and plants!) into friction with human systems, with consequences ranging from the deadly to the merely annoying. In all cases, these are “simply animals doing what animals do: feeding, sh---ing, setting up a home, defending themselves or their young. They just happen to be doing these things to, or on, a human, or that human’s home or crops.”
The result is a quixotic and somewhat meandering journey of a book, but one powerfully propelled by the force of Roach’s unflinching fascination with the weird, the gross and the downright improbable.
Grau’s compilation of interviews essentially asks us not simply to rebuild, reorganize, or reconfigure the encyclopedic museum, but to conceptually reimagine such museums and their place in a globalized civilization divided into contentious nation-states.
Everyone is alive somehow
mowing dead grass and fighting
pizza boxes into a recycling bin.