Our third print issue features Catherine Lacey on worthless pictures; Elif Batuman on Miranda July; Chris Kraus on girlhood; the drawings of Daniel Johnston; poems by Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles; and dispatches on undersea rifts, baby-making on Mars, and climbing Stone Mountain. 

In high school, the sheer amount of vocabulary in biology class was driving me mad. I came across a magazine ad that promised help. I mailed a check and they sent a self-hypnosis cassette tape. I turned off the lights in my room and a soft voice told me to take deep breaths. The voice was supposed to put me into a trance and prime my memory to retain long lists of terms—making me like 

, except that I would kill not a politician but a test. After a few sessions without noticeable improvement, I gave up on biology and decided to study physics instead.

Long thereafter, I regarded hypnosis with suspicion, but my interest was recently reawakened when I went to a talk by Zoltan Dienes, a psychologist at the University of Sussex. A lot has happened in hypnosis research since my failed youthful experiment. The practice has proven itself useful in pain relief and psychotherapy. YouTube is awash in videos that are entrancing, literally. Although movie depictions still tend to be unfavorable (not to mention unrealistic)—beware the teacup in 

—surveys find that most people now have a favorable or at least neutral view of hypnosis. But Dienes, as both a leading researcher on and practitioner of hypnosis, goes further. He proposes that hypnosis is just one aspect of a much broader mental capacity that he calls “phenomenological control.”

As a rebranding exercise, this may not be the best choice of words. “Control” sounds menacing, until you realize that he means self-control. “Phenomenological” is philosopher-speak for subjective experience. In hypnosis and a wide range of other situations—spirit possession, ASMR, the flow state in martial arts, certain illusions—you are exerting control over your experience of the world. You can basically give yourself a DIY hallucination that involves no drugs or psychiatric disorder and, indeed, is uncorrelated with those other sources.

In this framing, hypnosis creates a special context in which people feel safe to exert phenomenological control. A hypnotist typically brings it on through an induction procedure that puts the hypnotized into a trance, and in this focused state of mind they become open to suggestion, including modifying their perception of reality. Some version of the procedure dates at least as far back as the 

 and Ancient Greek healing rites, but it began to take its modern form as a method of exorcism in eighteenth-century Germany. Franz Mesmer, a doctor in Vienna, speculated that these rituals were a type of magnetic healing that dispensed with the actual magnets, instead redirecting the body’s innate “animal magnetism” using a penetrating gaze, the laying-on of hands, and sundry props such as iron rods. 

The theory was quickly debunked, but Mesmer’s methods were taken up by doctors, quacks, spiritualists, traveling showmen, and would-be manipulators. In the early days, mesmerists tended to bring on convulsions in their subjects; later, a “nervous sleep” became the norm. The word “hypnotism,” coined in 1843, is derived from the Greek for “sleep.” The evolving responses were an early clue that people had certain expectations for what hypnosis should do to them, and constructed experiences accordingly. In general, phenomenological control requires no sleeplike trance. “You can have people peddling on a bicycle and give them suggestions and it works just as well,” Dienes told me.

A year after first hearing Dienes speak, I went to see him in Brighton. After outlining the theory, he asked: “So, do you want to try?” He didn’t swing a pocket watch or tell me I was getting very sleepy, very sleepy. He didn’t even turn down the lights. He just gave me a series of tasks to engage my imagination.

First he asked me to stretch out my arms and imagine a magnetic force between my hands, pulling them together. My palms duly moved together, just a little. They seemed to be doing so on their own, as when I’m standing on the subway and find myself leaning into the motion of the train without meaning to. “Simply imagining the hands moving isn’t quite enough in itself,” he said. “What you need to imagine is that you’re not aware of intending to do it.” This is the essence of phenomenological control: imagining something and then further imagining that you didn’t imagine it, so the products of your imagination seem real.

I soon learned that I am almost totally lacking in this imaginative power. My hands may have moved together, but his subsequent directives had less effect. Dienes asked me to imagine that I was holding a heavy ball. That a helium balloon was attached to my hand. That I couldn’t bend my arm. That I heard a fly buzzing. That I couldn’t see anything blue. That I forgot certain words. I just sat there, wondering how to take in any of his instructions. “You are just very determined to see the truth,” he later reassured me.

I confess it crossed my mind that phenomenological control might be bs, but I read other studies that convinced me that, even if I couldn’t experience it, other people do. For instance, hypnotized people who are prompted to ignore pain really do show muted brain responses to painful stimuli. I’m an outlier—in the fifth percentile of people his team has surveyed, Dienes estimated. A friend of mine who is a cognitive scientist took the online version of the 

 and said about half of the challenges worked for her. Dienes told me about one woman who could go all the way. “We’re sitting at the table and there was a bottle—a green bottle,” he recalled. “And I said to her, ‘Did you know, because you’re high [in phenomenological control], you can turn that bottle red?’ And she said, ‘No, I can’t do tha—my god, it’s turned red!’”

For Dienes and other researchers I talked to, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. It’s a process done not to you, but by you. A hypnotist guides you like a meditation coach, but it’s up to you to suspend your sense of authorship over your own experiences. Amanda Barnier, a psychologist and hypnosis researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney, described how many people can achieve this state on their own and make use of it in everyday life. “They deploy it in different situations—in their creative practices, in their ability to focus attention,” she told me. This can be as simple as becoming carried away by a movie or absorbed in a book.

Why you can’t tickle yourself? An age-old question from Aristotle. Last year, Barnier and her colleagues found that hypnotized participants 

 able to tickle themselves on the palm with a soft brush, because they could convince themselves they weren’t the one doing the tickling. “It’s a really interesting way to explore fundamental issues of human consciousness, human agency, memory, action,” Barnier said, seeing hypnotism as an entry point to mysteries, both small and large, of human psychology.

, in which people come to think a glove lying on the table is part of their body. In a study of 353 people, he and his colleagues found that susceptibility to the illusion correlated with hypnotizability. Unlike other psychologists, Dienes doesn’t think the illusion has anything to do with redrawing the boundaries of the self; he thinks it implausible that your sense of your body could be reprogrammed so easily. Rather, he thinks it is a case of phenomenological control. People know they are supposed to feel the glove is their hand and make it so. “They create the experience with a general-purpose experience-creating mechanism,” he said.

This is the essence of phenomenological control: imagining something and then further imagining that you didn’t imagine it, so the products of your imagination seem real.

Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, told me she likes how Dienes places hypnosis in the broader context of phenomenological control. “As a framework, I think it’s intriguing,” she said. She observes an even more general tendency of the brain to mistake an internal process for an external occurrence. “You don’t know if something is happening inside or outside of your mind,” she said.

Other cases in this category include rotating-snakes visual illusions, which look like they’re 

; the ideomotor effect, in which you move a hand unawares (this is how neuroscientists think Ouija boards work); and the medical placebo effect. But these are distinct from phenomenological control; they do not correlate with hypnotizability, and they do not involve intentional self-deception. Still, all invert a standard narrative in psychology. It is common knowledge that people think they have agency when they don’t—this is the core of neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s argument that we lack 

—but the opposite also occurs. “There are a number of situations in which we have agency, but we are not aware that we do,” Martinez-Conde said.

Dienes connects phenomenological control to a leading theory of consciousness known as higher-order theory, which proposes that consciousness is thinking about thinking. In this view, to have the experience of a happy face, it is not enough for the visual information to register somewhere in your brain. You also have to have the thought that you are seeing it. Phenomenological control is also predicated on a hierarchy of thoughts and perceptions. But it adds the twist that you might never have the lower-level perception, only the higher-level thought.

Dienes has been recruiting people with strong phenomenological control—who are as rare in the population as I am at the other extreme—to see what defines these levels of thought. “We’re getting people to look at a happy face and see it as an angry face,” he told me. When they say they see it, what does that mean? At what stage of visual processing does happy get taken for angry?

Almost everyone has some degree of phenomenological control. The ability is prevalent enough that Dienes thinks it is not incidental to our mental life, but evolved in humans for a purpose. He speculates that it has to do with the cultural cachet of religious visions. Who needs peyote if you have phenomenological control? You can create for yourself a thoroughly convincing vision of a spirit world. And by convincing yourself, you can convince everyone else, too. In many societies, that makes you special, so your imaginative power can be evolutionarily advantageous. Whether or not Dienes is right about this, his conjecture fits into a general framework for why self-deception is ubiquitous in nature. As the late evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers wrote, “We lie to ourselves the better to lie to others.”

Were I so inclined, there’d be one way to improve my phenomenological control score: alcohol. In the early 2010s, Dienes and his colleagues concluded that getting drunk does in fact make you slightly more hypnotizable—which is perhaps less surprising in itself than the mixological challenge of conducting a controlled experiment on intoxication. They gave study participants either a mocktail or the real thing, using a mix of tonic water and Angostura bitters to make them taste the same. The subterfuge worked: Three-quarters of the placebo group were convinced they’d been served spirits. But although I feel hypnosis FOMO and want to see what all the fuss is about, the idea of getting drunk to gain experiential self-control seems self-contradictory.

Maybe one reason hypnosis wasn’t working on me is that I fought it, still associating it with Jedi mind tricks. All the researchers and practitioners I talked to sought to reassure me. Their basic point was that phenomenological control involves something that you want to do—even if you then forget that you did—so it’s always coming from your volition. Asking someone to do something they don’t want to do will break the trance state that hypnosis involves for most people.

The fragility of trances, along with the wide variation in people’s hypnotizability, makes hypnosis iffy as a method of mind control. There are plenty of other manipulative techniques that everyone responds to. Martinez-Conde co-wrote a book, 

Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Brains

, about how stage magicians hack our minds, and she said they don’t bother with hypnosis or anything like it. “It's not reliable,” she said, whereas age-old sleight-of-hand techniques work every time. Many scholars think this is why the CIA’s notorious MKUltra brainwashing program of the 1950s and ’60s ultimately gave up on hypnotizing people to become sleeper assassins.

People may cluck like chickens or croon like Elvis when called to the stage in a hypnotist’s show in Vegas, but that’s a setting where people want to act out, so the context, rather than the procedure, is the driver. In 1960, hypnosis researcher Martin Theodore Orne and his team hypnotized people and asked them to throw acid at a lab assistant or pick up a venomous snake. They complied. But so did a control group whom they asked to pretend to be hypnotized. “All the fakers did it as well: They threw the acid; they picked up the snake,” Barnier said. The acid was harmless and the snake was safely constrained, so the whole thing was an act, and participants later said they had assumed as much. 

Nevertheless, I don’t feel convinced that hypnosis is entirely benign. Although I might not do anything under hypnosis I wouldn’t otherwise do, that is not altogether reassuring, since a capacity to do harm resides within each of us. My cognitive-scientist friend described her experience with the online phenomenological-control test as a lowering of conscious resistance. “It didn’t feel so much that I was being compelled to do it, but that it would take more energy to not do it,” she said. She added that it made her feel “a bit alarmed.” As for the CIA, Rebecca Lemov, a historian at Harvard and author of 

, told me the agency destroyed most of the MKUltra records, so we can’t be entirely sure what it concluded about hypnosis. “It’s not straightforward mind control, but it could be a component of coercive control,” she said.

, a Finnish artist and hypnotherapist who completed a residency at Pioneer Works in the spring of 2026, and who takes striking portrait photographs of people he has hypnotized, combined reassurances with caution. Hypnotic induction, even if not manipulative itself, overlaps with manipulative techniques. “I watched one speech of Trump’s, because I’m quite interested in how he uses language,” he said. He was struck by how Trump repeats words, lowers his voice for emphasis, and prefers a vague word to a specific one, so that his audience can hear what it wants to hear. “He does use similar patterns and similar tricks of voice that I would use,” he said. In fact, when I first spoke to Nikkanen, on Zoom, his vocal technique—the way he . . . paused . . . and then resumed—was tranquilizing. It took some force of will for me to keep my interview on track. I began to see how certain rhetorical styles can hack our brains. I also began to think maybe I wasn’t so immune to hypnotic suggestion after all.

Hypnosis has no special power to flip a switch in your brain, but it can introduce people to new emotional tools. 

When Nikkanen arrived in New York for his residency, I made my way to the third floor of Pioneer Works and he drew the blinds of his office.

He asked me to clasp my hands, extend my index fingers, and imagine a magnetic force pulling the fingers together. “I don’t want you to force it; I don’t want you to fight it,” he said. “Just let it happen.” And it really did feel as though my fingers moved together on their own. He asked me to close my eyes and to take deep, even breaths. He raised my lower right arm and said to keep it suspended above the armrest. That was the only thing I did that even vaguely resembled a Vegas show trick during the session. I never felt that the arm was floating by means of some external force, so I had already reached the limits of my phenomenological control. But I kept it suspended to see how things would play out.

With this and his subsequent directives, Nikkanen seldom just told me to do something. He prepped me by describing something I should do or imagine, and then gave me a cue to begin. This setup made the whole process feel very deliberate. He had me move my attention around my body, imagine I was made of wax and melting, count backwards from 100, and recall a happy memory. After about half an hour, he counted to five and asked me to open my eyes. Overall I’d call the experience a cross between meditation and the twilight preceding sleep. Throughout, I was aware of, but able to ignore, two women who began to talk loudly in the next office. I felt serene for several hours afterwards. So, I may not have as much control over my subjective experience as others, but still benefited from releasing myself into a trance.

Nikkanen said he conducts hypnotherapy sessions to help people stop smoking or manage anxiety. Hypnosis has no special power to flip a switch in your brain, but it can introduce people to new emotional tools. Whenever they crave the taste of tobacco, they can learn to distract themselves by thinking of some alternative sensation. In fact, Nikkanen helped himself quit this way. “I really, really like the smell of citrus fruit,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite smells. So, I was like, every time you want to smoke, from now on, you think of the smell of citrus.” Maybe he could have helped me overcome my fear of biological nomenclature, too.

In his artistic performances, Nikkanen has sought to reimagine stage hypnosis, guiding groups of 20 or 30 people to turn inward and feel time move differently together. In an era when each of us feels our consciousness is under siege, as 

 recently told a crowd at Pioneer Works, and other people’s thoughts flood in and displace your own, it is a pleasure to carve out time to “reacquaint yourself with your own mind.”Attempting this in concert with others, as in Nikkanen’s practice, shows us how we might try to live more easily with our external reality—noisy, interdependent—while protecting, even fortifying, a space within ourselves. ♦

George Musser, Jr. is a contributing editor for

 The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory

art-mckloud

Entranced

The Sonic Eye

Madlib Finds the Heart

Few writers of English prose have shaped our understanding of how language lives in landscape—of how earthly places shape human minds, and how our minds shape the planet—like Robert Macfarlane. The author now of over a dozen books, Macfarlane is a beloved professor at Cambridge whose learned and lyrical work is steeped in modern science and 

 but drawn inexorably to more ancient ways of knowing—to animist ideas, once prevalent in his native British isles and which nurture many indigenous cultures, about the complex power and role of non-human beings in our myths and in our lives.

His far-reaching intellect and trekker’s soul have brought him from Earth’s highest peaks (

, 2003); to the ancient paths we’ve etched onto its hills (

, 2012); to the caves and underground spaces where we’ve long sought to bury our fears and engage a deeper sense of time (

, 2019, now a film by Robert Petit, executively produced by 

 (2015) an ode to antique words from his native islands—from 

 (the name, in Devon, of the fine silver frost that coats all foliage when a freeze follows a thaw) to 

(as folks in Exmoor call bucket-sized islands in a bog)—by which people attuned to their ecologies’ rhythms describe them. The same impetus nourished 

, a cherished collaboration with the artist Jackie Morris, with whom Macfarlane also has a new book out: As I type, 

The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss

Wonder, for Rob, is about much more than whimsy: It’s a necessity for survival on a planet where our own well-being, and our fate as a species, is tied up in the flourishing of others. Wonder is also at the heart of his remarkable book, 

, which landed last year and which is out in paperback this spring. Like many of Rob’s books, 

 is a journey through an idea that becomes one through space, as he visits riverine landscapes and their stewards around the world. Braiding those journeys is a meditation on the ancient, imperiled chalk stream that courses near his house in Cambridge—and a venture into what amounts to novel territory, for this “nature writer” par excellence: the earthly realm of laws and jurisprudence by which a growing number of advocates and lawyers are arguing, before courts around the world, that forests and rivers be seen as rights-bearing subjects deserving of the same legal protections as people.

A year ago this week, I hosted Rob at Pioneer Works for the official U.S. launch of 

 It was an edifying joy to do so. Talking with him always is. And it’s a joy, now, to revisit our conversation about what’s really at stake when, as he puts it, we “deepen and widen the category of 'life.'"

JOSHUA JELLY-SCHAPIRO

In this remarkable book, you take three journeys. You go to Ecuador, to a cloud forest where a river begins. You go to Chennai, India, a city built on a riverine system that’s been deeply damaged—maybe beyond repair. And then finally, you go to northern Quebec, where many rivers have been dammed to make electricity, but where you locate one that hasn’t—and find a kind of fluvial euphoria. You've done mountains, you've done caves, you've done paths. Why rivers? Why rivers now?

ROBERT MACFARLANE

There's an old answer and there's a young answer. The old answer is that mountains are river-makers and rivers are mountain-makers, and if you grow up climbing and with mountains in your heart, then you grow up with rivers running through you as well, even if you don't realize it. So I spent a lot of time following rivers up mountains and swimming in them on the way down. The young answer is that rivers are dying. I live in England, on 99 million-year-old chalk, and the chalk stream ecology of southern England is one of the rarest riverine ecologies in the world. There are about 200 to 300 chalk rivers in the world, and 80 percent of those are in England. On current trajectories, that network will barely survive ecologically until 2050. This isn't an abstraction. This is a drought we’ve created. In England, only 14 percent of our rivers are in good health.

The spring that rises near my home and flows throughout this book is on a life support system, and I mean that very literally; there is an augmentation pump fitted to the spring that draws up groundwater from further down in the earth so the spring can keep flowing. It is as close to a ventilator or heart pump as a stream can get. A stream can die. A river can die. But they can surely live as well.

Early on in this book there’s a very charming but very deep moment where you're talking with your son Will, who’s nine or 10. You're talking about this new book you're writing. You tell him it’s called "Is a River Alive?" and he says, "Well, that's a short book dad. Duh. A river’s alive. You’re really going to write 300 pages about that?"

It was one of those times when a child is feigning interest in what their parent actually does. While the question—even the asking of it—is deceptively simple, the answer is immensely complex. It took me four to five years of following rivers—following river people, river ideas, and then something like unlearning—to answer that question in the affirmative.

It's hard to think of a city which is not a river city. 


In this book, you explore the ways in which various traditions around the world have regarded not just rivers but the landscape and the world that we live in as animate, as 

. This has profound legal, political, and ethical implications. Talk to us a little bit about this rights-of-nature movement, which draws on ancestral wisdom and indigenous tradition, but also the rubric of Western jurisprudence, of law. The argument that a river is a subject deserving of rights seems to be gaining steam.

The book is not called "Should a River Have Rights," nor is it called "A River Should Have Rights." It’s a book about life, and what Jacques Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible.” He means that in the full French sense of 

—that which is alive, that which is lively, that to which life inheres. I’m interested in the 

 of the sensible, between what is allowed by power to be audible, to be visible, to be animate, and what is not allowed to be. Humans are pushed to the far side of that partition, to the alive side, while rivers have historically—certainly within Western philosophical traditions—been pushed to the dead side. In the hierarchy of Aristotle’s great chain of being, angels are at the top, followed by anima, which is in life, and at the bottom is water and rock, the dead stuff of the world.

Our entire water system [in England] was privatized in 1989, which has left us with a dying river system. It treats rivers as a resource, liquified and simplified into an asset. The assetization of everything is exactly what we're now seeing, here in the U.S., through the revisions of the EPA and the rollback of its regulations. How do we go about re-storying rivers and re-storying the law? With this book I’ve tried to revive old ideas about rivers being alive—being 

, rather than undrinkable, unswimmable, untouchable.

 is also through line in the book—you speak of rivers as companions. You relate these extraordinary experiences of being with living rivers, or defending them. You say they "remind me that we are companioned in the world." There’s a lot of human companionship in this book, too. Something I've always loved about your work is that it's full of rich and vivid human characters. Many of the people in this book are grieving in one way or another, but find solace and peace and nourishment in being 

, as you put it. But that’s not an experience available to all—in terms of the overall amount of water on this planet, rivers are not a vast amount.

Tiny. No more than 5 percent of all water on the planet flows through rivers as freshwater.

Despite—or alongside—that fact, these fragile waterways have been profoundly important to human civilization, to our cities, and to our lives. I think about New York. We ask, "Why is there a city here?" It’s here because of the harbor, and because of the Hudson River. It’s a city built on an estuarine landscape, crisscrossed with streams. Chennai, India, is another city that exists because of rivers. But you write about how the rivers there have been erased.

Yet we settle on rivers. Their health is profoundly important to our settlements and our culture.

They become historical agents—they’re actors, rather than a passive presence in the landscape. We know from recent archaeological work that the little spring that flows near my house was a place where Mesolithic hunter-gatherers stopped; they cooked, knapped flints, and left charred hearth stones. And then you move through the Neolithic causewayed enclosure here, a huge Iron Age ring fort, Bronze Age burial sites, the Romans, the Celts, the quote-unquote Dark Ages, and then all the way through to the building of [Cambridge]. Suddenly, you see history as told by a river. It's hard to think of a city which is not a river city. Thoreau has a beautiful line: "A river town is a winged town." A river gives it motion. Understanding this helps us start unlearning notions of a river’s passivity, of a river as pure resource. And as soon as you start talking about memory, emotion, grief—some of the remarkable people I met to write this book were drawn into the shadow of death, and then water drew them back. When we recognize river relations historiographically, emotionally, spiritually, and linguistically, they suddenly leap into our lives.

You’re fond of quoting that line from Emerson, as I am, about how the writer’s task is “to fasten words again to visible things.” All writers love language, but you've always been interested in the language we give and lend to landscape. The form that this book takes is part philosophical treatise, drawing on varied knowledge traditions, but it's also a work of reportage, of lived experience. It comprises three journeys: one to Ecuador, one to India, and one to Quebec. Let’s talk about these.

The forest in Ecuador is the Los Cedros Cloud Forest, in the country’s northwest. A cloud forest is a river maker. In a process known as continuous fog drop, the enormous, composite surface area of the forest’s epiphanic plant world—the plants that grow on other plants, feeding off moisture and air—condenses saturated mist and fog into droplets, which continuously fall and feed into rivers. Los Cedros was threatened with near total destruction by gold-mining interests, which still prowl the forest’s perimeter. In 2021, a remarkable, cussed man called Jose Duku brought a case against a mining company that drew on new articles in the Ecuadorian constitution, which was revised in 2008 after the election of [democratic socialist] Rafael Correa. The articles recognize the rights of nature to exist, to flourish and to persist, and made the state the guarantor of those rights. In the book, I call this a small country’s great act of moral imagination.

Duku was the rudest human I’ve ever met, but his cussedness was necessary—if you're gonna live in a tent in a remote cloud forest for 35 years and fight off all those who want to destroy it, being rude's fine. The case escalated in the court system until a remarkable judgment was handed down during COVID by head judge Agustin Grijalva Jimenez, who ruled in favor of the forest’s rights. It had such consequence and force that the mining companies were compelled to leave the area. The river still lives. After the ruling, Agustin, the judge, went with us to the forest as we searched for fungi with this remarkable mycologist Juliana Ferci.

She's this wonderful person who has a way of discovering new species of fungi wherever she goes. In the book and in the forest, she speaks of “hearing” fungi, she points to a glowing log of phosphorescent mycelium. She helps you talk about what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “two-eyed seeing”, by which she means tapping into animism, into indigenous knowledge about the ways in which the landscape and nature are alive, but also the ways in which the discourse of science can reinforce and shape these arguments so that you can believe in the magic of a glowing log but also can say, "Oh, this is fungi."

In the cloud forest, Juliana drops to the ground like she had just been hit by a big fruit dropped by a howler monkey. But no, she's just greeting this single, two-inch mushroom. It’s her way of recognizing the aliveness of the forest. And then you have Agustin, this dry, beautiful, reticent constitutional lawyer.

It could be easy for some to dismiss Agustin’s jurisprudence—to say that his decision reflects a radical, wild idea. But as you point out, in our legal system plenty of non-human entities have the rights of subjects—corporations, for example.

Yes, and this decision has gone right into the heart of European thinking. In fact today there was a big story in 

 about how Anne-Marie Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, has demanded that the assembly pass a law recognizing the rights of the River Seine. The Goldman Prize, which is sometimes called the Nobel for nature, has for the last two years gone to water rights defenders using rights-of-nature frameworks. The Spanish lawyer and activist Teresa Vicente achieved recognition for the Mar Menor, the great saltwater lagoon in southern Spain, as a rights-bearing body. Of course, rights declarations are one thing, implementation is quite another.

Tell us about the next place that you traveled to, why you went and what you found. You speak, in Chennai, about ghosts, monsters, and angels.

Chennai is a river city that’s built on marsh where the Kosasthalaiyar, the Cooum, and the Adyar rivers meet. Water seeks a body. Sometimes that's a river, sometimes it's a human body. Sometimes it's marsh. [In that chapter,] the “ghosts” are these rivers, which have been spectralized in Chennai’s landscape as the city’s erupted—a process that began under British colonial planning and management, when Chennai was known as Madras. The “monsters” are the monstrous forms these disappeared rivers take when the monsoon returns, and especially when cyclones hit. Chennai lives in cycles of drought punctuated by calamitous floods. This region’s hydrological literacy has been lost very, very rapidly. So I went partly to understand more about this, and partly to spend time with one of the “angels’ of the chapter's title, a young man called Yuvan Avez, who I'd been friends with for years. He’s one of the many water guardians, one of the many people who are trying to reimagine how water and people might thrive together in the future.

At one point Yuvan says to you, "Cities grow along riversides, then slowly forget their ecological, hydrological genesis. They slowly collapse under their own weight—unless…there is a powerful reinvocation of what birthed a city in the first place: a river."

He's brilliant, and it's so true. The effects of Chennai’s extreme droughts and extreme floods are unevenly distributed—they afflict the poor most. The speed and the consequence of that oscillation has made it a very urgent place to be. When you look at the Buckingham Canal, which joins the three rivers, you can see the entanglement of poverty, waste, and the absence of infrastructure that people like Yuvan are dealing with there. And meanwhile, the state government of Tamil Nadu vanished an entire section of one of Chennai’s other rivers, the Ennore Creek, from the map. The national government was rezoning the relationship between fresh water and heavy industry. And that was going to cause all manner of problems, because heavy industry and the river were both in one place. They couldn’t move the heavy industry, so why don't they just erase the river?

So this map came out which is now known as the fraud map or hoax map. People started posting photographs of themselves up to their necks in a river, saying, "River, hi."

 I saw the most despair and the most hope there.

At one point Yuvan says to you, discussing the Indian government’s drive to build more dams, "A river's a fantastic form of development." There's so much that's loaded into that assertion.

In many parts of the world, to be a water defender is a perilous task. You act at the risk of your life. India is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist. It's also one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be an environmental activist. The stakes are really high. They're high in Ecuador too. The night we arrived in the cloud forest, we got word that a young, pregnant female water defender who'd been shot dead the day before. In India under Modi, anyone who stands in the way of development is shouted down as an anti-national.

The last place you take us is Quebec, to this extraordinary river known in English as the Magpie, and in Innu as the Mutehekau Shipu. You have an incredible journey there.

 Language will always be late for its subject, especially when that subject is water or light or world. The question is how it fails. Does it fail interestingly? 

Yes, with my friend Wayne and three companions we nicknamed the Salmon, the Bus, and the Bear—with whom I ended up going down the river with for 10, 11 days. We were dropped by a float plane about 100 miles up the system at the head of a massive, long lake. We paddled that and then the river took us. The transition from flat to flow was something I'll never forget—a phase shift of astonishing power and consequence. But before that, I went to the small Innu community of Ekuanitshit to meet Rita Mast-Tohkooshoo, one of the great North American writers and an Innu poet who writes in Innu-aimun and French. In 2021, Rita was the co-author of a declaration recognizing the rights of the Mutehekau Shipu to flow and to reach the sea unimpeded and without pollution. It recognizes the river as a living entity. And so I was drawn there because this river was so spectacularly alive even though it was threatened by a multi-dam complex that would, in theory, drown it. Life, rights, activism all converged there. When I saw Rita, I asked her permission to go down the river. If she had said no, I would’ve turned around and left. She laughed and said, “You need to ask the river's permission." I was like, "Okay. Is that something I do on paper?” She looked at me and said, "You look too much with your eyes, you see too much with your head, and you don't feel enough with your heart. You're not taking your notebooks on the river." I was a little offended.

Yeah, we came to a negotiated settlement on those, which was that I wouldn't write on the water, only on land. She then gave Wayne and I a set of remarkable instructions and tasks. I realized later that what she was doing was readying me to think differently, to unlearn, and to meet the river and be opened by it. And that is emphatically what happened. I've traveled a lot in big mountains, but I don't think I've ever known anything quite like this.

It comes through in the prose. You write so exultantly of this experience and of being on this water. And you write even about the ways in which language starts to feel like it's failing. You write, "The river so long anticipated has already begun to dominate my attention, my perception, my waking thoughts, already begun to frustrate language's short reach." It becomes this occasion, again, for meditating on language.

I've always felt very at ease with language's failure. The question is not if language can meet its subject. Language will always be late for its subject, especially when that subject is water or light or world. The question is 

 it fails. Does it fail interestingly? Does it form a shatterbelt? What happens to language when it is rivered, and when thought is rivered? Abandoning that quest for perfect correspondence was thrown out of the kayak early.

The quest for perfect correspondence may have been tossed from the kayak, but in that tossing you achieve something else. Why don’t you read us from where this happens—it’s a passage I love, about how the Mutchekau Shipu’s mode is “purely flow”.

“...and its grammar of animacy is one of 

, aura not edge, of compounds and hyphens and fusings, silver-blues and gray-greens and mist-drifts and undersongs, process not substance, 

, always onrushing, always seeking the sea and here and there turning back upon itself, intervolving, eddying in counterflow to cause spirals and gyres that draw breath into water, life into mind, spin strange reciprocities, leave the whole world whirled, whorled.”

Gorgeous. And you know, all that puts me in mind of another sentence of yours I love, from an essay I often teach, in which you reflect on a recurrent question: “

” You answer by insisting, as we must, that 

-writing isn’t dead, and never will be, and by invoking one of your favorite books. You write, of Nan Shepherd’s 

"It vibrates dazzlingly between the specific and the universal, and between matter and metaphysics. Shepherd describes the ways in which human presence, creaturely life, elements and weather are co-extensive. She does so in prose that is deeply wise, avidly sensual, and we might say committed to uncertainty…Always, in Shepherd, movement across landscape has its corresponding inward journey, and place is somewhere we are in and not on."

The same, always, can be said of your work, too. ♦

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is the Director of Publishing at Pioneer Works and co-editor-in-chief of

sys-tnr-std-cond

Robert Macfarlane: Rivers Are Alive! 

As part of Dripping Festival in 2025, PW Resident alum Colin Self performed in the Main Hall alongside Sun Ra Arkestra, Young Boy Dancing Group, and Cel Genesis.

Colin Self is a multidisciplinary artist working across music and performance, creating work that explores new modes of engaging the human spirit. Their practice centers on the temporary formation of communities and unfolds through collaborative, dialogic experiments shaped by play. ♦

Colin Self | Pioneer Live

Change the frequency. Subscribe to Broadcast.

Ben Lerner on Parents, Ghosts, and Transcription

Ben Lerner’s new novel is filled with silences: factual and dramatic lacunae; conversations in which one participant seems to be all but missing; hinted-at mysteries that go unsolved. This is particularly striking because the premise of 

’s action is speech. As the book begins, Lerner’s unnamed, first-person protagonist—a familiar one for his readers, who are used to encountering the writer’s alter ego in his prose—is traveling to Providence, Rhode Island to conduct an interview with his mentor, a polymath professor at Brown University named Thomas. The narrator is in the middle of his life. Thomas is nearing the end of his. The premise of the interview is that it will be his last, an important record for future generations. Then, in his hotel room, the narrator drops his phone in a sink full of water, breaking it. He can’t record the conversation—and somehow can’t admit this to his interlocutor, even as he sits in Thomas’s living room, listening to him recount his earliest memories, pretending that nothing is amiss.

In short, the narrator lies. Someone always does, in a Lerner novel; lying is one of his great subjects. In his first novel, 

, the narrator, Adam Gordon, wrings sympathy from a romantic interest by telling her that his totally healthy mother is dead. In 

, we meet the same character during his adolescence as a champion debater, so skilled at taking any position on a given topic that facts twist and turn upon themselves, flexible and weightless. “The lie described my life better than the truth,” a character says in 

 might claim something similar. When it is revealed, in the novel’s middle section, that the conversation that has been published as Thomas’s last was, in fact, recreated from his own memory, people are furious at having been misled. The narrator is indignant. Yes, their conversation is a fiction, an imagined representation of the ineffable real, but it has captured reality better than any recording could.

I have always loved the intelligence and irony of Lerner’s novels. 

 has those qualities, but it has something else, too: a disarming sincerity. Lerner’s narrator is gentler than his previous incarnations, if no less confused by life’s puzzles. How do we care for a child who refuses our care? Why do we fail the people we love, and how do we love the people who have failed us? What does it mean to live alongside digital devices that ceaselessly demand our attention? The book is short enough to read in a single sitting, which I did, twice, surrendering to the music of its various voices. That’s by design. The novel, as Lerner said to me on stage at Pioneer Works, is its own kind of technology, and a powerfully transportive one. For better or worse, our conversation has not been recreated from memory, but transcribed (with light edits) exactly as it happened.

Alexandra Schwartz

When we were emailing very briefly about this event, you called 

 a weird book. I want to know what is weird about it to you.

Ben Lerner

I mean, I think it's weird for me because my memory of writing it is a little dreamlike. The book is about dreams, in part. And Thomas, the crucial character in the book, has this line about how waking does not finish a dream.

Part of what the book is about, maybe, is the contagion of Thomas's voice—that the characters start speaking in his voice or that his voice speaks through them. And when I try to talk about it, sometimes I feel like I'm channeling semi-fictional characters.

I wanted to write a really short book that kicked out a lot of issues, but had a lot of felt silence and weird angles. I wanted it to be more haunting than explanatory. And I think “weird” is a word I associate with the uncanny or the haunting or the doubling or the repetitions that happen.

I'm glad you say that because I thought about the “weird” that exists in the American vernacular, where everything can be weird—a word that can kind of come in when you don't have another word. But I also thought about this haunting and incantatory effect that I think this book has.

In the opening scene, the narrator is on a train and he's facing backwards, or what his daughter calls “the past.” He's facing the past because he's returning to Brown, his alma mater, and has the feeling that a younger version of himself could still be there, existing in a parallel reality. This book bridges the narrator's current middle-aged world, as you say, with this college world. What drew you back into that past?

That's an interesting question. Part of it is just the power of mentorship. I had influential teachers, but college was the first time where there were people who seemed like they might be channeling voices of the dead. It was the first place I was really thinking about intergenerational artistic transmission. And also where I encountered people who just had capacities for attention and reading that were totally otherworldly to me, like Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop. These people introduced me to deeper relationships with media, with the book as a form, or the painting as a form, or whatever. And college was also very formative in all kinds of other ways, as it is for everyone—it's where I met my wife.

I was also thinking about the similarities and differences between mentorship and fatherhood. The narrator of this book describes having a very serious, nervous, maybe psychotic breakdown in college. He starts hearing voices, and Thomas, his mentor in the arts, helps him move on from that experience and offers a kind of care that he never offered his own son. The narrator loses his mind and gets it back and it’s all caught up in art, or how art can channel forces from different times and make them feel present.

There is a sense, because you bridge this time in the novel between the present and the past, that the narrator has made it through. He can look back at the terror of that time of total disorientation, and he's made it through to the other shore.

You can't choose your parents, which I think many of us feel enraged by. But when you're a parent, you also know you can't choose your kids. Maybe Thomas tries to choose, in his way of mentoring.

Yeah, I think he does. I knew a lot of people who lost their purchase on reality in college, and some didn't make it. It had to do with many things, and they were always individual, but mainly: you're away from home, you're exposed to a whole lot of new languages, and you're either finding the self you already are or constructing a whole new self. It's quite confusing.

In the moment where the narrator has his most serious, pathological break with reality, Thomas opens up the possibility of redescribing the reel as a fiction, as a changeable fiction. And so there's a way that this moment of artistic encounter is intimately related with one of psychotic collapse. And the way that Thomas helps him is by playing an auditory illusion, which the narrator calls “art therapy.”

Basically, if you listen to a vocal track, and then convert it to a MIDI file so it all becomes flattened into computer piano notes, you’ll still hear the voice, even if it isn’t there anymore. Your brain assumes that the voice is present, and you unconsciously infer it. Thomas plays this for the narrator to normalize and socialize his experience of aberrance. He means to say something like, “See, we can all hallucinate and have auditory illusions in the right context. It’s just a question of the conditions.”

A lot of my life is organized around the idea that there’s something really important about imagination’s capacity to redescribe reality. It’s also a horrifying capacity, because it shares a wall with psychosis. And I think that’s part of what’s happening in college. I don’t know if that’s an advertisement for college or a reason to avoid it.

I think that's so true. In fiction, writers remake the world and sometimes they want to make it totally unrecognizable. In college, the same thing is happening—there are exceptions, but most people who go have never had the independence to create a life. And so there you are, doing fiction that's actually real. You're a character who's real.

I want to ask you about Thomas. Talk about the MIDI illusion, you can really hear his voice in your head as a reader. It's very distinctive. It has a German inflection, and that amazing grammar where there's total fluency in English, but something magical about how the speaking happens because it's not totally idiomatic English. Who went into making that character?

I mean, the voice is really Alexander Kluge's voice. It's his English. He died a few weeks ago, and he was a hero of mine. He was Adorno's favorite son. I don't know when he became a lawyer, but he was the lawyer for the Frankfurt School. And he was this major philosopher and filmmaker who studied film with Fritz Lang. When he spoke, it was this weird mixture of erudition and prose poetry, and you couldn't quite tell what was fabricated and what was the fruit of his bizarre archival research. It was really exciting to be around him. None of the familial stuff bears any resemblance to Alexander Kluge, and I didn't know him in college, but the voice is his voice.

How did you get it? Did you have it in your head already? Were you watching videos, or listening to your own recordings of conversations with him?

That voice is just really in my head. I often have trouble recalling voices. Some people really feel like they hear a voice as a material sonic event, and I don't. When I say I hear a voice, I mean the way I hear something when I read. I'm aware of the sonic shape, but there's no sound, though Alexander Kluge's voice is one I actually can kind of hear. So it was just really available to me.

 And why did you want to put your narrator in a situation where he would not be able to capture that voice on tape, where there was going to be no way to have a technological record of this conversation? What about that scenario appealed to you?

One thing that I've noticed in almost all my writing is that the dialogue tends to operate under the sign of something that destabilizes its claim to realism. I think dialogue for me has always been this really interesting problem because it's the biggest mimetic claim in fiction. You aim to just write down what people say, but of course, usually what happens is it's really cleaned up and can feel quite artificial—sometimes to great effect, like the way that Ivy Compton-Burnett's characters speak in these perfect, mean English sentences. There are other experiments in depicting all the fragmentation and incoherence of how speech usually functions. And neither of those work for me exactly.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I think in each book I've written, there's some way that dialogue can happen and also be destabilized at once. That's a condition of my being able to write. So to be able to write Thomas's voice and say, "There's no record of this," was just enabling for me as a condition.

On the one hand, the narrator has made it up or reconstructed it from memory, but on the other, it's a testament to the power of Thomas's voice that it could be reconstructed and passed through the narrator. This is a book, in part, that tries to establish a relationship between media like phones, or radio, or cinema, with the way that the individual human is a medium: you speak 

 someone and not just to someone. And there are specific perils or potentials of transcription when it's a human doing the writing and the voice that's being transcribed is resonating with the particular stuff of that human.

Not having that technological recording was a way to let me write dialogue, and it also became a way of actually amplifying the power of Thomas's voice and how it travels. The voice is all the more powerful for not being captured by the phone, the way they capture those ghosts in 

 in that thing. Instead, the haunting happens because the voice is not in the thing, it's still in the people.

A lot of my life is organized around the idea that there’s something really important about imagination’s capacity to redescribe reality. It’s also a horrifying capacity, because it shares a wall with psychosis.

It reminds me of when I started reporting and I didn't know what I was doing, and I would just let my recorder run because I was so afraid of missing anything. And then when I listened back, I was always overwhelmed by the nothingness of what was happening. It was too much, and it required a human intelligence to decide when to click start and stop. It’s such a great moment when your narrator walks around the campus after dropping his phone in the water. He describes an unusual experience of presence, where he feels super charged by both the past and the present because he's not stopping to consult this device. Reading that, I thought, "I'm going to put my phone in that little box that they're always advertising to me on Instagram. I'm going to live my experience of unusual presence."

Later, I do think it becomes complicated that he doesn't have his phone. This book isn’t just a manifesto for screens down, unless I missed the message? Should everyone leave here thinking that Ben Lerner says, "Put your phones away"?

No. It would be a really boring book if I just said that phones are bad, because we know they’re bad. First of all, the narrator does have this reverie that's produced by being phoneless, and I think that's real, but by the time he gets to Thomas's house, he's having withdrawal symptoms.

The book is less about putting away media and more about what it would mean for us to restore our wonder before all the different kinds of media that there are, including people or glass flowers or other works of art. But it's unpredictable. In the third section of the book, there’s Thomas’s granddaughter, who has a very serious eating disorder. Her parents have been fighting one of these conventional parental battles about not eating in front of the screen, but then when they let her watch the iPad, she actually eats. Max, Thomas’s son and the girl’s father, is very disturbed by why it helps or why she needs it. But it's an unpredictable use of the screen that would be hard to say is just bad, even though she's watching unboxing videos, which scandalize her father and surely have their own consequences.

There's also this scene where Max thinks he's saying goodbye to his father. And this is when Thomas is hospitalized with COVID, which actually happens before the narrator visits him for that last interview which the book opens with. Max says all these meaningful things to Thomas that he would not have been able to say in his physical presence, nor on Zoom, which they first tried in the hospital.

When a nurse calls him on the phone, and he can be a disembodied voice, that mixture of distance and proximity allows a kind of intimacy that otherwise had never been available in their relationship, which is just to say that the book is not about how “technology is bad” or whatever. Yes, it is about the atomization and the destructiveness of all these things, but it's also about little pockets of possibility in media configurations that are difficult to foresee.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part is this visit that the narrator makes to Thomas's house. The middle part takes place in Madrid, where the narrator has given a talk after Thomas has died to a group of people who all knew him really well, and he’s confronted by the consequences of his decision to publish an interview that he didn't technically record. And the third part of the book is about Thomas's son, Max, who is a foil to the narrator. They both went to college together. They were friends in college. It's implied that they have not kept up their friendship, certainly not to the degree that they had when they were young. And Max has a really difficult relationship with Thomas, which is not that surprising—it's hard to be the son of a great man.

As I was reading the book, I wondered if you had even a physical shape in mind for its structure. I'm sure it wasn't the same for you, but it made me think of Virginia Woolf writing 

 and drawing her “Time Passes” section as a little artery between these two bigger passages. And then I thought maybe the narrator is a phone, in a way. The book is a conversation between Thomas, who monologues in the first section, and Max, who monologues in the last section. In each case, the narrator is the interlocutor between them, but once you're out of his thoughts, you're not hearing his voice very much. They're speaking to each other through this human phone medium and their messages are not going to reach one another. They're just going to be stored in the person who's in between.

Really legitimate reading. There are other things too, but the narrator is primarily a medium. Thomas speaks to Max through the narrator. I mean, he also speaks to the narrator through Max.

And Thomas confuses the two of them in his mind.

Yeah. In the first section, Thomas is talking about ending his life and assisted suicide in a way that the narrator doesn't quite track. And so there's also this kind of specter of last words. But I think you're totally right, except for what you said about the messages never reaching each other.

I think Thomas is making a kind of contact at the very end of the book, even though he's dead. I think the book does believe in the idea that messages survive in the ether and might be received in unpredictable ways. Thomas's voice definitely survives his body in the book and goes on speaking through these other people.

Max says these hard things to Thomas when he thinks he’s dying, and then Thomas survives and doesn’t remember the conversation. But there are things that Thomas says in the first interview that imply that maybe he did register or transcribe aspects of the conversation, whether or not he remembers it consciously. I guess I'm just saying, I think you're absolutely right that the narrator is like a phone. And I think the book is kind of agnostic about whether those messages reach who they’re meant for.

Let's talk about the parenting aspect of the book a bit. Parenting has come up in all of your work, but never as explicitly as in 

. And we have three different models of parenting here. We have Thomas, the “great man,” who was not so hands-on. A lot of boarding school involved, a lot of family trauma that went unacknowledged, abandonment stuff. And then we have these two modern dads who really want to do right by their kids. Their kids' problems are really their problems. They each have one daughter, and both of their daughters are dealing with refusal. The first daughter of the narrator doesn't want to go to school, and it's a big drama in the narrator's life.

Every day is a real challenge. Is she going to go to school? Can we get her through the day? And then Max’s daughter, as you've said before, does not want to eat. It's not anorexia, it’s something else called ARFID, and it’s just a refusal to eat and not wanting to deal with food. Understandably, Max and his wife find this a totally harrowing and destabilizing experience.

Why did you write fathers of daughters? And why did you choose these particular conditions for the girls and their dads to confront?

This is a good question. Part of the daughters thing is a boring extratextual answer, because I have daughters. And then part of it is that I got interested in a book that was once about fathers and sons and fathers and daughters. I was interested in that difference, which I haven't seen represented so much. I mean, I'm sure there are lots of books that I'm not thinking of that do it. I don't mean to make a claim for its originality, but it felt like something new for me to think about.

On the question of those refusals, I've always been very drawn to the literature of non-participation. I mean, think about Bartleby or 

. They allow you to watch a world that's organized around growth and productivity collapse in the face of a refusal that it doesn't know how to assimilate. Literature itself is constructive and can intervene in situations, but it's also always caught up in the refusal of other kinds of discourse and other kinds of activities. So I became interested in these very contemporary conditions of refusal—both of which were apparently really accelerated by COVID, according to the psychologists I know—that bring out parental powerlessness like nothing else. When your kid won’t eat or won’t go to school, what do you do? Every parent has some version of that.

That refusal is at once very contemporary—linked to devices and screen time and Instagram and the deadening effects of Zoom—but then it's also very literary and mythic and ancient. When Max takes Emmy to meet a specialist, he says she looks like an angel, but he’s not happy about it. She looks so calm, like some emissary from another world who’s just kind of forgiving us because we don’t know what we’re doing. It's terrifying for him.

What you said about how the narrator and Max have ingested the problems of their girls and made them their own problems, that resonated with me. A lot of parenting is also figuring out that your kid can have a difficult time without you internalizing the intensity. There are more options than just the authoritative father and someone like Thomas, who, as the bad counterpart to his art therapy with the narrator, would just aestheticize Max’s experiences when his son needed support.

And there's also an intergenerational thing that's quiet. Max's mother killed herself, and so the battle over Emmy’s eating is also about Max's loss of his mother and his fury at Thomas for being totally absent in the wake of that suicide. That's the other thing about parenting: You're relating to your daughter, but you're also relating to the way you were raised. Different generations are speaking through you, or you’re speaking the things that you wish a parent had said. Things can get refracted in a strange way, or they have a misplaced intensity that the kid senses, so that you could be saying the right thing—and a transcript might show that you said the right thing—but the intonation is something else entirely.

It doesn't really matter if there's a future, but you have to produce the fiction of one to live because it textures the present.

What you're making me think of is how novels and parenting are both ancient forms that need to be revitalized and rediscovered and reinvented each time around. These are things that have to do with transcribing how life is, how people are, and how we relate to one another, but we have to find our way through and invent a new way each time, even though they've happened forever.

Parenting and novels are also two areas of life that people are really pessimistic about. And as this book documents, there are a lot of reasons not to want to engender life on earth.

You're a practicing novelist and a practicing parent. Are these things that you see in parallel? Do you have hopeful feelings about them, despite the discourse of decline?

I've thought a lot about how for thousands of years, there's been this proclamation of the death of poetry. There's been something productive about always claiming that the form is in crisis, because it’s allowed people to say something about society. So what I try to do is be more interested in what people are proclaiming, exactly, when the ones who claim to love novels are proclaiming that they’re dying. Are they saying that it's not the default mass cultural form? Are they saying it's in the hands of the wrong people? Or can they work their way to an argument about what new possibilities of the form might emerge?

I try to get interested in what the claim of decline is for, but I feel the assault on my capacity for attention and thought from a media configuration and from a political configuration. I feel it really intensely, and I do think one should be alarmed. But again, what are you going to do with the alarm? It's just not very interesting to despair.

I could stop writing novels, but it's too late to stop the parenting thing. My literary education was really invested in this modernist idea that your readers were displaced into the future, and you made your weird, complicated works of art that resisted the present because they were messages to the future. The future has never been assured, obviously, and the mind is always at the end of an era, but I don't really have an imagination of the readers of the future. It doesn't mean that they don't exist. I just mean that one way I register the pressure is that the modernist fantasy is much less available to me. And I think you have to always parent with the future "as if." Maybe that “as if” is part of the meeting place between parenting and literature, because it’s the technology of fiction. It doesn't really matter if there's a future, but you have to produce the fiction of one to live because it textures the present.

You mentioned at the very start of our conversation that you felt comfortable with leaving things unsaid in this book. And certainly as a reader, you sense things that belong to a deep underhistory of the book that you can’t totally access. You're a poet as well as a novelist, and some of what was unsaid reminded me of tendencies that exist maybe more so in poetry.

For a while the book had a long second section, and I kept thinking that the solution would be going deeper into experiences of Spain, and giving the narrator a different family relation. I thought there needed to be more of that, and that it demanded more writing. I don't think I've ever shot up in bed with an insight into writing, but I actually did shoot up. I was just like, "Oh, all of that has to go. I just have to cut all that.”

It can be hard if you've worked on something for a while to cut, because the problem wasn’t the sentences. It's easy to cut bad sentences. It was just that there was too much of the narrator, so it was getting in the way of that dynamic that you really eloquently described, which is actually the formal tension of the work.

I think the thing is kind of about resonance: the way a voice resonates in you or how an experience resonates. And that required the book to be more of an echo chamber than [something with] cascades of writing, even if the writing could be eloquent or whatever. Once I cut all that from the middle, then I could tune it. Lots of my readers—of course Mitzi, my wonderful editor, and Ariana and Anna—helped me with subtle modulations in the form that changed the resonance. So it was a different kind of instrument.

There's also a suspicion, in the book, of eloquence. Thomas is the great talker, but while that talk has beautiful effects and can cast spells, it can also be a technology of obfuscation. When I cut that middle section, I realized that I wanted a very short book because I wanted it to feel handheld in a different way, so that you really, in reading it, would be thinking about the embodied experience of being with this device in its codex form that is the book, and thinking about its relation to the phone and the other screens that are described within it.

I didn't know about the presence of this middle section, but when you cut it away, it is a lot like the MIDI experiment you describe, where actually the reader's mind fills things in. It's fascinating how the novel allows for the same kind of embodiment to take place, even if it's off the page.

In preparing for this and knowing how important Alexander Kluge was to you, I was watching a video of him interviewing Michael Haneke and saying, “What you don't see is what you imagine the most intensely.” That’s a rule of cinema, of course, but it turns out to be true here as well.

Entranced

Robert Macfarlane: Rivers Are Alive!

Colin Self | Pioneer Live

Ben Lerner Speaks to the Dead

Ben Lerner Speaks to the Dead

Entropy Plot

Entropy Plot

How You Sound?

Big Apple Sky Calendar: April, May, June 2026

Issue 03, Available Now