When writers are in the position to write a sequel, they’re often faced with a dilemma. How do you continue a story that was successful enough to warrant a sequel? To give the story a new narrative engine, you probably have to change a few things. In a genre story, you might need to create a new villain and mystery surrounding them for your hero to confront (the format of every successive James Bond film). But at the same time, you’re also mandated with meeting the expectations of retaining the elements that made a story “successful.” You have to reproduce the feeling, themes, and elements of the first story, while delivering a story that is new enough to surprise and satisfy.

This is an almost impossible task. Season 2 of The Wire (2003) famously shifted the focus of the plot from the Baltimore task force stinging the Barksdale drug-dealing organization to a mystery about human trafficking on the Baltimore docks, sidelining many of the series’ established characters for an entire season. This season was polarizing—on the one hand, it demonstrated narrative courage and inventiveness for trying to reinvent the show so broadly while retaining its investigative DNA. On the other, it had drifted far from what the show was sold as—a flailing police force tries a last-ditch task force as a salve on the war on drugs.

In hindsight, The Wire’s second season may go down as one of the most successful, critically speaking, attempts at a sequel. Because then we have shows that try to have it both ways—try to reinvent the show but slavishly reproduce the dynamics of the original series. And here we have to discuss the second season of The Night Manager.

John Le Carré’s 1993 novel The Night Manager is one of his last truly great novels, in which he managed to shift his espionage fiction into the disorienting world that emerged after the Cold War. The titular hotel employee, Jonathan Pine, is radicalized after he helps a whistleblower fax some sensitive documents at his hotel, leading to the woman’s murder. At fault is a nefarious arms dealer named Richard Roper.

MI6 operative Leonard Burr persuades Pine to join the agency and go undercover to expose Roper, leading to a quest in which Pine infiltrates Roper’s inner circle, falls for Roper’s mistress, and becomes something of a surrogate son to Roper himself. But Roper will not be defeated so easily, as it turns out he’s working for a rival faction of MI6 that Burr must confront.

The original Prime series that adapted the novel (2016) casted Tom Hiddleston as Pine, Hugh Laurie as Roper, and Olivia Colman as a gender-flipped Angela Burr, and delivered a unenviable product—it was a faithful adaptation that also updated the setting to be more current (swapping Curaçao/Colombia for Turkey/Syria) and improved upon the original novel’s convoluted, inconclusive ending, so much so that even Le Carré praised the adaptation.

But after that, with The Night Manager a hit for Prime, and with the original source material exhausted, came the inevitable dilemma: if this were to continue, how would you go about it? Start anew, or reboot the old? (Spoilers below).

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In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian speaks with architectural historian Kostas Tsiambaos about his new essay anthology, The Architect and the Animal (MIT Press, 2025). Structured as a whimsical “abecedarian” collection of essays, in which each letter of the alphabet prompts a short essay about an animal and its place in the imagination of a noteworthy architect, The Architect and the Animal is an engaging collection that reexamines how animal images and biological forms have entered the imagination of modern architects. Since the dawn of modernism, the conventional narrative states that architects have drifted away from ornamentation of animals in support of a house as “a machine for living,” but Tsiambaos’ book, featuring contributions from 26 different architectural historians and experts, reveals that animals have never been too far from the mind of even the most forward-thinking modernists.

You can order the book directly from MIT Press, Penguin Random House, Bookshop, and Amazon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: In the acknowledgments, you mention that this book came out of research you were doing on animals in modern Greek architecture during your fellowship at the Princeton Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies. What drew you to the subject of “The Architect and the Animal?”

KOSTAS TSIAMBAOS: It started with my work on this Greek architect, Dimitris Pikionis, who’s one of the most important architects in 20th century Greece. And because a considerable part of my research, including my Ph.D. and part of my postdoctoral research, was focused on Pikionis’ work, I knew that he often referred to and represented animals in his work—not only in his buildings, but also in many of his texts, drawings, and sketches.

I also had in mind architects like Le Corbusier who made multiple references to animals in his work. He identified himself with “the crow,” but other times he was identified as a donkey or dog.1

Why did these important architects have this interest in animals? What is the argument they’re trying to make? And what makes it even more interesting is the fact that we’re talking about some of the most important architects of the 20th century. The most interesting and creative public intellectuals like Le Corbusier or Pikionis have this interest in animals.

Unlike previous eras in architecture, when animals were always present, in modern architecture animals seem to disappear. Go back to Göbekli Tepe, in Turkey, considered the first monumental architectural construction (5,000 years before Stonehenge), representations of animals were found everywhere at that site, but they gradually disappeared from the architecture of the 20th century.

The research that I did as a visiting fellow at the Princeton Seeger Center2 was focused on Greek architecture, but I already had in my mind that I wanted to extend it to a global history of animals in architecture, and the academic resources and the colleagues available at Princeton were an ideal environment for such a project.

TU: In the introduction, you explain the idea of the book through the example of Noah’s ark as envisioned by Diderot and d’Alembert’s Enlightenment-era Encyclopédie—a piece of architecture, the first (at least in various religious traditions) designed specifically to house animals. How does your abecedarian book of essays resemble the ark, and in which ways does it differ?

KT: It’s true that few theorists of architecture have written about Noah’s ark in general and Noah’s ark in the Encyclopédie in particular, even since the 19th century. For example, architects like Joseph Gandy had written that the ark is the origin of architecture in general, because it was the first architectural construction of the new world after the flood.

One thing that I found interesting about the ark as it was depicted in the Encyclopédie is the ark’s abstract form, which is also almost like a simple 3D grid. And this grid expresses this kind of rational formality related to the Enlightenment, in contrast with the freedom of the nature which surrounds it, which is also represented by the trees, the sea, and the mountains, as well as the animals that inhabit the ark. The fact the animals are inside this kind of rational grid suggests to me that their protection is also a kind of detention, or a kind of disappearance from the world.

In other words, it’s not a coincidence that animals gradually disappeared from architecture since modernity, because animals were all over architecture in ancient Mesopotamia, in Egyptian and Greek temples, in Hindu shrines and Gothic cathedrals, but they’re missing from the modern design.

However, I also realized that they’re not completely missing from modern or postmodern architecture. They’re just not in plain sight. Of course, they’re not appearing as ornamentation on buildings. But they are everywhere as references and representations, despite the prevailing belief that modern architecture was related to the machine and not to the animal.

But no matter how much we as architects want to be rational, factual, and have everything under control, there are important aspects of architecture that we cannot explain or cannot control. Very often, these are architecture’s most interesting aspects.

TU: How did you assign the specific animals, some mythic and real, some extinct and abstract, to the particular contributors?

KT: That was the most challenging part of the work. To create this abecedarian was challenging. Initially, I had in mind some specific architects, animals, and case studies of animal representations, references to animals in various texts by architects—and often more than one animal per practice.

For example, Superstudio represented many animals in their work, and even wrote about animals, cows, horses, tigers, and baboons. Architects like John Hejduk also represented many animals in their projects, whether sketched or included as mythical/imaginary animals; he had even illustrated a book of Aesop’s Fables. I had also read some texts by architectural historians who had written something about an architect and an animal as part of a case study.

So my initial proposal to Thomas Weaver, then the art and architecture acquisitions editor at MIT Press, was for a more traditional book, with 10 chapters by 10 authors. Now Thomas, who had a huge experience as an editor of the AA Files, the Journal of the Architectural Association in London, and sent me more case studies of architects and animals over the years and he finally proposed that we make an abecedarian with 26 architects and 26 animals. We were almost at 26, so why didn’t we give it this form?

It proved to be a very challenging and demanding task, and almost impossible in some aspects. We had to be imaginative and inventive, and match the right authors, animals and their letters. We had to find an architect who writes or represents a specific animal, and together with other animals, make a continuous queue. And this is why it took me almost four years to complete this project. So it was complicated, as every book project is, but specifically it was complicated because of this decision to make it as an abecedarian.

TU: The essays themselves are all sort of trifles, with just enough time to sketch out a concept to inspire thought without overstaying their welcome. Was this part of your intent, or how did it end up that way?

KT: Since we agreed that this was going to be a book with 26 chapters, they had to be shorter. Each chapter would start from one illustration—just one sketch, a drawing, a collage, or a photograph. And this image would trigger the discussion and would pose the question about the purpose or intent behind the animal in the image.

After the author explains the context of each one of these visual artifacts, the text opens to more theoretical directions regarding the specific architect.

I really appreciated structure as an editorial concept in Tom Weaver’s approach. Particularly, I appreciated the value that he attributed to the quality of writing. He was always telling me that what is more important is to invite people who are good writers, have interesting ideas and can write an interesting text.

Of course, all of the contributors are distinguished professors in very well-established schools all over the world; they are also good writers. In the last few years, I had been experimenting with this hybridity between architectural history, fiction and narrative; I also believe that writing is important to the promotion of architectural history. Now, I’m more and more persuaded by this because artificial intelligence can produce traditional adequate academic writing. Many academic journals would publish something that is produced by AI, and nobody would know. So what is left for us?

Architectural historians must find other ways, themes, topics and new ways of writing. So this book not only focuses on the fresh theme of architecture and animals, but it proposes a way of writing that is less formal and more playful, less explanatory and more inviting and addressed to a wider public.

It was very important to me to have a book that someone who is not an architect or historian could read—instead, any person who has many interests would enjoy reading it.

TU: Your own essay on the Vulture in regards to Dimitris Pikionis’ Church of Saint Demetrius, I found very interesting. How does the vulture (and I guess we are actually talking about the eagle) figure its way through antique Hellenic, Roman, and finally modern Greek architecture?

KT: In the case of Pikionis, he does not really explain which animal he represents. Of course, the eagle is the common symbol for many architectures and for many cultures and civilizations, especially the Romans and the Christian Byzantines. And the eagle is related to the etymology of the Greek word for the gable, which is aétōma, aetós being the eagle in Greek. However, what Pikionis draws looks more like a vulture than an eagle because of the bird’s bald head. In my opinion, he intentionally did not want to be precise. Of course, the eagle is important as a cultural symbol for Greece as the symbol of the god Zeus.

But the vulture is also important. And in antiquity, the word vulture had multiple meanings, so it meant both what we call the vulture and the eagle today. In some cases, the vulture is often mentioned as the bird that Zeus sent to eat Prometheus’ liver, but it could also be an eagle.

There is an ambiguity, and I remembered that as I was writing this chapter. But to make it short—in the end, I had to find an animal starting from “V,” and “vulture” was convenient.

TU: I won’t hold it against you, but your book also takes some liberties with the alphabet, choosing King Cobra for “K”, “Queen Bee” for “Q” and “X-tinct Dodo” for “X.” Are you telling me there wasn’t an animal that actually started with “X?”

KT: Actually, there are very few animals that start from “X” or “Q” or but the thing is that there’s none that appear as a reference or representation in the architecture of the 20th century, at least that I’m aware of.

This is a book about animals in architecture, and not animals in general. One of the anonymous reviewers, I would guess that they were not an architect or an architectural historian, they made the point that a unicorn is not an actual animal, or that the word dog is vague because it describes many different breeds of dogs that are very different from one another, etc. For example, Manuel Orazi, who wrote about Yona Friedman and the unicorn, explained that the unicorn was really important to Yona Friedman. He had produced many drawings and paper figures of unicorns. He had described a land called “Unicornia,” etc. So if there is this fantastic animal that is that much important for an architect like Yona Friedman, it had to be in the book. I would also struggle to convince my three-year-old son that the unicorns aren’t real.

TU: Some of the animal motifs and the architects they describe feel immediate—the crow and Le Corbusier (and as M. Christine Boyer reveals, the ass), the nautilus and Frank Lloyd Wright in reflection of the Guggenheim design, Aldo Rossi and his dead horses, Rem Koolhaas and the giraffe. Others dig up stories that feel quite obscure—like Eduardo Iglesias and the fish in related to the history of canneries, the “polochon” pig-creature created by Lina Bo Bardi. As an editor, what were you looking for to guide this kaleidoscopic quest to understand how animal forms have inspired architects?

KT: Most of the books on animals in architecture or in architectural history see animals as formal inspirations. So the form of animals, or sometimes the form of the constructions that animals do, become formal inspirations for architecture. Of course, I included some prominent examples, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum.

But in general, my intention was to go beyond this formalistic approach. So even in these cases where there is an obvious formal analogy, authors explain how there are also other meanings. There are various esthetic, social, cultural, ethical, and even environmental issues. Lina Bo Bardi is a great example, because she produced this kind of imaginary pig, the “polochon,” which has an actual formal presence that is very intense with its form, its color, its two heads or two tips. But there are also a lot of things that one can discuss in relation to Brazil—the wild, the surreal, the cannibalistic, even in the meta-colonial framework that Martín Cobas poses in his chapter.

For example, the horse in the case of Aldo Rossi, is a kind of formal influence. I can imagine Rossi admiring the form of the skeleton of the horse, but at the same time, it is something that opens a discussion about the symbol and its power. I had recently read All the King’s Horses by Indra Kagis McEwen, which actually focuses on the horse as a symbol of Italian Renaissance and as an imperial symbol generally, and how it was almost necessary for artists and architects in the 15th and the 16th century to represent the horse as this official representative of power, carrying a cultural burden that goes back to ancient Rome. So from ancient Rome and Vitruvius to, Renaissance-era Florence and Alberti, the horse is a constant symbol, and not just a beautiful form.

TU: What surprised you the most about the research from this project? What did you learn? What do you want to uncover next?

KT: I was surprised to see how little has been written about this subject, which proved to be so interesting and productive and multivalent.

A few weeks ago, I sent the final manuscript of a second, more traditional book on the subject to be published by Routledge later this year. But it’s interesting that what we called “critical animal studies” are everywhere in the humanities, in art history, in philosophy, in cinema, and critical theory. This is a topic which is very hot in the last 15 years or so, but in the history and theory of architecture, few books have been published. There are a lot of things left to be said and written about this topic.

Another thing that I also find interesting—and there are also very few things mentioned about this—is how animals serve as a kind of a machine in architectural construction. Of course, we know that animals were always used in architectural construction. Since prehistory, builds have used animals to lift weights with various technologies, but animals were used also in 20th century construction sites. So this discussion—involving an examination of animal labor, energy consumption, animal rights in architectural history—would be very important.

Societies who have idealized animals are at the same time societies who have exploited their power the most. One would argue that this is the same for us humans as well. I believe that a discussion on animals is always a discussion about humans.

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Kostas Tsiambaos is an architect and Associate Professor in History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University in Athens (NTUA). He studied in Athens (NTUA) and New York (GSAPP Columbia University). He is Chair of do.co.mo.mo. Greece and member of the board of the Hellenic Institute of Architecture (EIA). His research has been published in international journals (The Journal of Architecture, Architectural Research Quarterly, Architectural Histories, APENA Journal of Architectural Research, etc.) and edited volumes. In the fall semester of the academic year 2019-2020, he was a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University. His books include The Architect and the Animal (MIT Press, 2025) and From Doxiadis' Theory to Pikionis' Work: Reflections of Antiquity in Modern Architecture (Routledge, 2018 and 2020).

In January 2025, the Santa Ana winds whipsawed through the canyons and mountains of Los Angeles, spurring 14 fires and burning 90 square miles of land, an area larger than the entire District of Columbia.

The fires devastated the L.A. communities of Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, but it wasn’t the only recent disaster to afflict the Los Angeles megaregion of 18 million people. The COVID-19 pandemic was one thing, the 2023 WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes another, unsettling a film industry already on the AI-and-streaming rocks. Then came the 2025 ICE raids and the unrest that followed. A couple of Dodgers World Series wins may be sweet, but those don’t rebuild neighborhoods.

So when my friend Anthony Shu told me he, Jeffrey Liu and Haylie Chan were founding a charity zine about Los Angeles food culture, I jumped at the opportunity to join the editorial team.

To-Go Zine’s first issue, “Care Package,” spotlights the stories about how food bridges culture and crises. From stories about servers dealing with the first night the pandemic became real, to reflections of how Altadena’s devastated restaurant scene has shown its resilience, to investigations of how phone calls during late-night drive-thru visits can build community, To-Go Zine showcases a panoply of stories centered on the thing L.A. is best known for, outside of the pleasant climate and the botox—incredible and delectable food.

We’re hosting a launch party Saturday, April 11, from 4 to 7pm at Good Neighbor Bar in Altadena, one of the surviving Altadena venues featured in this issue.

If you aren’t in L.A. and can’t attend the event, you can buy our issue on shopify and also in select stockists in Los Angeles (we’re still working on the second part).

Our beautifully-designed issue is $30. It also features some interactivity—a crossword puzzle! Personality quizzes! Remember when print media was fun?

Profits from sales until 5/31/26 will benefit The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), a non-profit advocating for and supporting immigrants, the lifeblood powering the kaleidoscopic diversity of the City of Angels. We can also offer free shipping for two copies until 4/25/26.

We hope that this issue is the first of many.

So… why don’t you be an angel and buy a copy here?

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As I look up, the Middle East is in a renewed round of war yet again, and this time the conflagration has reached all the way to the Eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, with Iranian drone attacks on the UK Sovereign Bases in early March.

These bases, typically enlisted by RAF surveillance flights over Gaza and strikes on Iraq, have drawn increased controversy for the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities in Cyprus. However, because their existence is engraved into the 1960 Cypriot constitution, these bases are not going anywhere anytime soon.

In quick succession, two Greek warships were dispatched to Cyprus as a show of force, and at the same time, the Turkish military deployed more F-16s to the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (“TRNC”), the unrecognized state in the north of the island, known internationally as the “Turkish-occupied area” and home to most Turkish Cypriots (as well as an estimated 30,000 Turkish soldiers). The move, like that of the Greek ships, seemed to be part of a defensive posture toward Iran.

While in this case the moves are arguably defensive, the renewed armament of the divided island—where British forces, United Nations Peacekeepers, the Greek Cypriot National Guard, and Turkish armies are all clustered on a landmass half the size of Connecticut—reflects the ingrained nature of the conflict, a stalemate so broadly accepted that the competing geopolitical interests remain at loggerheads.

Which brings me to my next point. Last month, I had the privilege of seeing a fascinating exploration of this inexorable conflict—and the seeming unending nature of Middle East wars—through an exhibition of Ali Cherri’s 2024 short film “The Watchman”1 at the Giovanni’s Room gallery in Hollywood, California.

Cherri is a Lebanese artist and filmmaker based in Paris whose work, per his website, engages with “geographies of violence.” His film explores the experience of a Turkish soldier on guard in a watchtower of the Green Line outside the village of Lourijina / Akıncılar, a village almost completely surrounded by the Green Line that separates the two sides of Cyprus.2

I visited the village in 2022, when I met older Turkish Cypriots at a gas station who were completely fluent in Cypriot Greek; I also attended a festival where I’ve had some of the best baked lamb I’ve ever had.3

Louroujina / Akıncılar serves as an eerie setting for the film, where the bleary-eyed guard watches the “Dead Zone” in earnest through Cyprus’ hot, oppressive days. On his break, he meets an old woman in the village who tells him about how long the conflict has been going on—a de facto division since 1974, with origins even earlier, during the Cypriot troubles between the two communities in 1963 and 1964.

In the night, the guard witnesses mysterious lights along the Dead Zone and though he informs his superiors, they dismiss his reports. As the guard goes to investigate, he is shocked to encounter a troop of soldiers marching along the path. The soldiers, strangely dressed in mid-century uniforms and caked in dust, are not real people, but phantoms. When they reach the soldier, they stop, open their mouths, and emanate a menacing, Lynchian howl.

The film is only a half-hour, but it’s a poignant, magic realist representation of how long this form of conflict has been going on—not just in Cyprus, but across the Middle East. Generations have lived and died, been destroyed or defined by these wars. The Watchman is a singular and insightful way to drive at that truth.

Though “The Watchman” exhibit has concluded at Giovanni’s Room, the film is available on Mubi to stream.

Five years ago, when I lived in the old city of Nicosia, Cyprus, I would park my Honda Jazz in a dirt parking lot atop one of the Venetian battlements. A lot of people parked there — truck drivers, tourists, visitors, and there were no restrictions on leaving your car overnight. After all, in this country, people parked on the sidewalk, so I was actually doing the city a service.

One day, as I walked from my apartment to my car, headed out to buy groceries at the supermarket, I was approached by a Greek Cypriot woman wearing Apple headphones, the old-fashioned wired kind. She introduced herself as a casting agent, and she insisted that I must appear in a commercial she was producing, suggesting I film an audition tape in a nearby office building.

What followed was my brief encounter with the strange contours of a peripheral film industry.

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As they zip and bobble down the sidewalk, they turn heads. Little coolers on wheels, food delivery robots from Coco appear like colorful automated coolers, their standard design subconsciously evoking the classic toy little red wagon for Radio-Flyer. The net effect might be—here’s a friendly bot straight out of Pixar’s WALL-E.

They also can nearly impede first responders. A few months ago, as an ambulance and police car—sirens blaring—advanced along Olympic Boulevard in West LA, motorists pulled over to allow the emergency vehicles to proceed. But the Coco crossing the street? It kept going across a crosswalk — nearly striking the police car as it approached the intersection.

Outside of the radar-spinning Waymo driverless taxis, food delivery robots are the most visible sign of Los Angeles at the forefront of being a Clanker City. But it’s important to note that many of these robots aren’t actually autonomous. Assisted by remote operators, they’re more akin to drones.

That hasn’t stopped the general feeling of amusement around the robots’ whimsical design. Once I encountered a group of children “bullying” a Coco robot, surrounding it so that it could not continue on its journey. (This may be prove to be bad juju for Judgment Day, when Skynet becomes self-aware and the robot revolution commences.)

Some of these robots (including from Coco’s competitor, Serve) feature product placement — topical ads for Prime Video’s apocalyptic video game adaptation Fallout, Netflix’s The Electric State (a sci-fi film about robots), and, well, TNT Sports.

And that ad placement comes with wide coverage. According the Los Angeles Times, Coco has completed more than 500,000 deliveries and plans to expand from its current field of operations in Chicago, Miami, and L.A., launching 10,000 more robots to service in 2026.

But Coco is a L.A.-specific project, founded by a UCLA student in his dorm room, and headquartered in Santa Monica. Notably, Coco robots only have about a 2-mile range, and they partner with specific restaurants that use them as an alternative and supplement to human delivery drivers from DoorDash or Uber Eats.

One wonders if food delivery robots may face the growing pains of other efforts to “disrupt” the sidewalk. When Lime scooters launched in 2018 in Northern Nevada, they were faced with a cease-and-desist for violating state law, and had to pull out of the market. And given Los Angeles’ large unhoused population, it seems like only a matter of time before desperate people start cracking them open for the hot dinners inside.

The frequent obstructions on L.A. sidewalks — like construction and homeless encampments — might also impede Cocos from fulfilling their deliveries. Then there’s the inclement weather that might prevent the success of Cocos in colder climates. But, in a landscape often choked with traffic, there are cases where robots might be speedier on the sidewalks than human-piloted cars on the roads.

If you want to order to receive food from a Coco specifically (as I did for the purpose of this post), that’s a little bit harder. Coco partners with existing food delivery apps like Uber Eats, so you have to select a restaurant that you know uses Cocos, and roll the dice hoping the restaurant will enlist a Coco rather than a human driver. The economic benefit to the consumer (but not to the delivery driver)—is that a Coco doesn’t expect a tip.

For my experiment, I ordered from a nearby burger joint I knew used Cocos, because I had seen Cocos parked outside their storefront.

To my great fortune, my Uber Eats order was met with the notification that a Coco would handle my delivery. Like a conventional ride-share situation, the robot’s progress and route were displayed on my phone, as well as its ETA.

When the Coco arrived at my apartment, the app asked you to unlock the Coco by pressing a button. And voila, the Coco’s lid opened, my now-lukewarm burger inside. Once I had done that, the compartment closed and the Coco waited for commands for a moment before it returned, presumably, whence it came.

Coco seems to make sense for the college campus market, as the hungry college student might be the most likely customer of fast-food on delivery.

But, not unlike a debate inspired by robotaxis, if we as a society can’t give bad jobs to people (like being an Uber driver), what are the societal costs of automating food delivery? Surely, there must be maintenance teams for the bots and people to clean their interiors when a food container inevitably spills. We may be trading one form of labor for another, with benefits that are hard to perceive.

One thing is for certain. At present time, food delivery bots are not the correct shape to transport a standard-sized pizza. So the pizza delivery guy can rest assured his or her job is safe for at least a little while longer.

This is the twenty-fourth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with John Gardner’s classic craft book The Art of Fiction, influential but perhaps in need of an update.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

On September 14, 1982, John Gardner died in a motorcycle crash. He was only 49. At the time, his third marriage was fast approaching—and his career was falling apart. Through his harsh criticisms of his contemporaries, such as Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, Gardner had alienated himself from the literary community. Today, his most remembered novel is Grendel, his subversive retelling of Beowulf. Of his few books which have remained in print, it is somewhat ironic his craft book—in which he expressed his disdain for his fellow writers—has withstood the test of time. The Art of Fiction was published posthumously in 1984, and has since become a staple text for writers starting out.

Notwithstanding Gardner’s opening note expressing the apparent futility of teaching writing to an audience that may not have the “gift” (“What is said here, whatever use it may be to others, is said for the elite; that is, for serious literary artists” (Gardner x)), the haughty author did offer some useful craft observations. Gardner’s text is split into two parts. The first section is characterized by Gardner’s opinions on literary theory; the goals a writer for which a writer must strive. These most prominently include his emphasis on “fiction as dream”:

If we carefully inspect our experience as we read, we discover that the importance of physical detail is that it creates for us a kind of dream, a rich and vivid play in the mind. (Gardner 30).

I agree that a lot of good fiction creates this “dream” in the mind, but in my experience, I would describe it more akin to seeing a movie in your head. When I write, I see a movie in my head that I am then trying to transcribe and translate into prose so that others can “watch” the movie I’m witnessing. That being said, for the purposes of this piece, I will focus mostly on craft techniques detailed in the second section of Gardner’s book, because that section focuses on mechanics. It explains how writers can craft this dream/movie with their prose—and the “common errors” of novice writers that disrupt the ‘dream-weaving’ process.

“In bad or unsatisfying fiction, this fictional dream is interrupted from time to time by some mistake or conscious ploy on the part of the artist,” Gardner wrote. “We are abruptly snapped out of the dream, forced to think of the writer or the writing. It is as if a playwright were to run out on stage, interrupting his characters, to remind us that he has written all this” (Gardner 97). Gardner used this concept, that of a writer interrupting his own work, in his explanation of the problems of the ‘common errors’ of novice writers. But I think the idea also applies to metafictional techniques that, when sloppily executed, alert readers to the artifice of the work in general, an opinion Gardner expressed at a later moment in his book:

On one hand, showy technique is thrilling… On the other hand, cleverness can become its own end, subverting higher ends, as when style overshadows character, action, and idea. (Gardner 134-135)

I think about this problem a lot. Once I wrote a neo-noir story in the voice of Raymond Chandler. My writing instructor at the time recommended I read Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, a work of literary fiction that satirized Chandler’s voice and put it in the head of a detective with Tourette’s.

I ended up disliking Motherless Brooklyn because the text was constantly acknowledging that the whole thing was an extended joke—that Raymond Chandler’s iconic hardboiled voice was nothing more than something to mock, a ridiculous tone that only a narrator with a disability could possess. By constantly acknowledging its own artifice, Lethem’s novel seemed to shoot itself in the foot. But since the time of Motherless Brooklyn (1999) (later adapted as a much-maligned 2019 film)—the whole “meta” thing has gone mainstream, and now most popular movies, especially Marvel and Disney ones, constantly make jokes at dramatic moments. In an echo of Gardner’s sentiments, the effect was concisely summed up by YouTuber Sage Hyden:

“What moments like these signal to me is that the creators don’t have confidence in their own stories. They’re using the joke to distract from the film’s dramatic shortcomings.”

Because my fiction is often playing with genre tropes, whether they be pulp thriller, gothic horror house, or hardboiled detective, the key for me then becomes how to balance “subject and presentation,” as Gardner points out (135). To deal with genre clichés in a way that is smart, but not overly clever or drawing attention to itself—ways in which lesser Thor–type movies get away with, well, lackluster narratives.

The element of what Gardner calls psychic distance—the level of identification the narrator takes with a character—comprises an important way the “dream” can be effectively expressed, or alternately, disrupted. As Gardner expresses:

In good fiction, shifts in psychic distance are carefully controlled. At the beginning of the story, in the usual case, we find the writer using either long or medium shots. He moves in a little for scenes of high intensity, draws back for transitions, moves in still closer for the story’s climax…. A piece of fiction containing sudden and inexplicable shifts in psychic distance looks amateur and tends to drive the reader away. (Gardner 112)

It is interesting that Gardner describes psychic distance’s levels in the language of film (“long or medium shots”). In so doing, he expresses the need to vary distance between what is told more abstractly to the reader and what is demonstrated in scene, and to also vary where the camera is positioned, whether the camera is from one character’s immediate perspective or zoomed out entirely.

What does Gardner have to say about suspense, then?

Ideally, every element in the lead-in passage should be a relevant distraction that heightens the reader’s anticipation and at the same time holds, itself, such interest…that the reader is reluctant to dash on.

I like how Gardner refers to supporting detail as a “relevant distraction,” and I think it might be useful to think of all ancillary details as “relevant distractions.” Relevant in that they set up or support the plot or character at hand, but also in that they fill in the gaps in the reader’s dream. Also key to Gardner’s analysis is that suspense is not just the motivating urge to keep reading, but suspense in the sense of suspended—the reader cannot go forward or backward without following the path of ropes and pulleys you’ve laid out for them. It is as much keeping the reader involved in the relevant distractions as getting them to turn the pages.

In a further elaboration of Gardner’s conception of suspense, I wanted to highlight what Gardner characterizes as the “Sartrian anguish of choice:”

That is, our suspenseful concern is not just with what will happen but with the moral implications of action. Given two possible choices, each based on some approvable goal, we worry, as we read, over which choice the character will make and, given the nature of reality, what the results will be.

To be involved in the suspense of the story or dream, a reader must worry about the consequences of what may happen to a character. The stakes of a character’s decision help crystallize the reader’s concern about the character’s fate. Another one of my writing mentors called this the “hope–dread” axis. A reader may hope a character makes the “right” decision, but he or she must also dread the consequences of the “wrong” one. In this way, a reader is involved on two emotional levels: fear and hope, both extremely powerful attachments crucial to supporting the dream.

When I write, I try to keep the hope–dread axis in mind when establishing stakes. What should I want the audience to hope? What should the audience know to fear? Often when a story isn’t working—the dream flawed and distracted—it is usually because one of these elements is not clear enough.

Gardner may have left the world unceremoniously and on bad terms, but aside from his potshots at other authors, much of his advice still holds. As long as novice writers such as myself struggle with psychic distance and suspense, The Art of Fiction and its advocacy of the “fiction as dream” will have its uses.

Works Cited

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. Vintage Books edition. New York: Vintage. 1991.

Hyden, Sage. “What Writers Can Learn from Wonder Woman.” JustWrite. YouTube. June 23, 2017.

Pfeiffer, Ben. “John Gardner’s Tricky Death and Tangled Legacy.” The Paris Review. September 14, 2017.

Lethem, Jonathan. Motherless Brooklyn. New York: Vintage. 1999.

Stanton, David. “Between the Lines.” The Washington Post. July 16, 2006.

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I originally wrote this story in 2018 for Medium. Eight years later, it’s still evergreen — and given the Winter Olympics, it’s high time to bring it back — on the Usonian platform.

The year was 1924. The place was Chamonix, a French Alpine town just below the snowy slopes of Mont Blanc. There, a global sporting tradition began—albeit modestly. At the time, the event was called La Semaine Internationale des Sports d’Hiver — International Winter Sports Week. The following year, the International Olympic Committee retroactively christened Chamonix 1924 as the first modern Winter Games.

Nearly a century later, the Winter Olympics’ outsize influence is readily apparent. For 16 days every four years, winter sports — many of which attract only niche audiences during the other three years and 349 days — capture the attention of the world. These include the glamorized sports of downhill skiing, figure skating, and ice hockey — alongside the decidedly less–romanticized events of bobsled, biathlon, and curling.

Of course, today’s wall–to–wall NBC coverage of the Winter Olympics would probably be unfathomable to the small audience of 10,000 spectators in Chamonix. It begs the question—just how did these ice–themed Olympics come to be?

As it turns out, part of the answer lies in the story of a fierce competition between rival international sports championships—the Olympics and the little–remembered Nordic Games. In this fight, you could say that the Olympics took home the gold — and the Nordic Games didn’t even medal.

And to understand that conflict—we’ll have to go all the way back to Ancient Greece.

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In July 2025, a curious attraction opened on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, California, mere blocks from landmarks like the TCL Chinese Theater. That venue was the Tesla Diner, a vision of the retro-future from America’s most controversial tech billionaire.

Elon Musk conceived of the diner in 2018, back when he was a darling of the media and a seeming leader of a green, high-tech future. Now, of course, his star has fallen under his laissez-faire (except when the insults were directed at him) stewardship of Twitter (rechristened X in 2022), the overall market failure of Tesla’s Cybertruck, his participation in the incompetent and calamitous “Department of Government Efficiency” (D.O.G.E.) at the outset of the 2nd Trump Administration, and his apparent fascist overtures, including his seeming Nazi salute at the 2025 presidential inauguration.

All of the fresh, Trump-Musk chaos didn’t exactly stall the Tesla Diner’s rollout last July, when hundreds queued up in lines that snaked around the block to sample the diner’s cuisine, buzzy for the involvement of local star chefs like Bill Chait (of popular L.A. French restaurant République) and Eric Greenspan (who created the formerly James Beard-honored The Foundry). Diners were greeted by a parking lot dressed as a drive-in movie theater, playing old movies and Jetsons cartoons, (though the spots were reserved for Tesla charging only, of course) and even a popcorn-serving robot, one of Musk’s Optimus models which began development in 2021, according to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 Musk biography.

The D.O.G.E. protesters were quick to join the party — including an inflatable Musk giving the Nazi salute, reminiscent of union rat-inflatables during picket lines — but in the months that followed the diner’s buzzy launch, the restaurant faded into the rest of the sun-cooked L.A. landscape. Greenspan disassociated himself from the restaurant, and even the protesters vanished. So too did the popcorn-serving clankers.

I came to visit the Tesla Diner in the spirit of understanding Los Angeles’ status as a Clanker City, but the only Tesla robots I saw on my visit in January 2026 were behind glass, as the popcorn-serving Optimus had been already retired.

Instead, what I did find was basically a glorified, overpriced Shake Shack. After you order and pay on a tablet screen, browsing through a menu of standard café and fast food fare, — i.e., Shake Shack — you wait to pick up your drink and order on the counter. Reminiscent of a Happy Meal, the food is served in Cybertruck-shaped boxes. What did Yoda say? “Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is.”

A single soda, smashburger and fries will cost you $25, before California taxes and tip. While the burger was solid, the fries I found bland, making the meal wildly overpriced. Remember, the commensurate product — an In-N-Out combo — still goes for about $7.50.

Now, the reason you might want to tip is because there’s a literal army of people working at Tesla Diner. They are constantly scrubbing the circular glass doors, which would otherwise be coated in L.A. dust and water-spots, another sign of the inefficiency of the design. The retro-future styled booths and tables are intriguing, and to give credit where credit is due — they are clean.

On my visit, most of the people at the diner were Japanese tourists, families with small children, and even a man who asked for non-iced water, a request that the staff-member behind the counter fulfilled. But the main business they might be doing is selling merch, including an In-N-Out-styled t-shirt and a $150 Tesla Optimus action figure — selling the image of a robot that isn’t even currently functioning in the store.

I wondered why Tesla Diner was located here, in Hollywood. On the one hand, it had a Universal Studios / Disney quality — here was a novelty branding exercise, in a neighborhood completely defined by billboards pretending that people still watch movies in theaters. On the other, here was a burger joint in the literal land of burger joints, in a neighborhood at the center of the SoCal freeway vortex, making it extremely inconvenient to reach for anyone living in any of L.A.’s satellite cities of the megalopolis.

Come to think of it, Tesla Diner would make much more sense in the Bay Area, where techies would eat up the design and strange virtue-signaling. (Inside, a Tesla banner advertised the slogan: “Accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable abundance,” an idea that seems more aligned with Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s 2025 Abundance book than the current Musk doctrine.)

At present, Tesla Diner seems destined to a slow death or — depending on the billionaire’s hot-and-cold relationship with President #47 — open up a kiosk within the forthcoming White House ballroom. Say what you will about the powerful pair — they both have a keen sense of tastelessness.

CLANKER CITY is a new miniseries from THE USONIAN. Consider supporting the Substack to receive monthly essays exclusive to paid subscribers.

The following is a feature story I wrote in 2016 for a college journalism seminar about the 2001 dismantlement of the Princeton Guyot Hall museum. Now that it’s been ten years, a few of the subjects have passed on (Henry Horn and Jerry Ostriker among them); meanwhile, the famous Antrodemus skeleton (above image) has been relocated to the new earth sciences complex in 2025, as the historic Guyot Hall has begun its conversion from an earth science building to one devoted to computer science.

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY—In late May, Princeton is often hot and humid. In 2000, it was strangely pleasant, with temperatures barely reaching 75 degrees, weather somewhat unusual for Reunions, a three-day long celebration filled with startling displays of inebriation. Apocryphally, it’s known as one of the largest beer orders in the world. But for a few geoscience department alumni, it was a crystallizing moment of a crisis. Following the departmental reception, a half-dozen alumni sat down and wrote letters to the then-University President, Harold Shapiro.

“People were very distrustful,” Geoff Feiss said, class of 1965, and a former provost of the College of William and Mary. “There was this feeling, I think Princeton was being a little too elitist and not too concerned with school-kids.” In March 2000, the University presented architectural plans to a Geoscience faculty meeting that announced the Guyot Hall Museum would soon close its doors for good. Over the summer the exhibits would be boxed up to make way for office space for the then-new Princeton Environmental Institute, a decision that aimed to radically changed the character of Guyot Hall, designed to be a museum at its construction in 1909.

“It was kind of a rebellious feeling, taking a stand on this,” Nancy West said, Feiss’ wife, and a geosciences major from the class of 1979 who took part in the letter-writing campaign. “It was a welcome break. You don’t go to Reunions hoping to accomplish something.” West contrasted the action to writing to a congressperson. “Senators don’t pull heartstrings, but Princeton does.” Over the summer of 2000, the conflict between museum supporters and the University erupted into a controversy that divided the community and attained national media attention. At stake was an illustrious legacy in natural science and a treasured local resource. Facing extinction, only a few relics survived.

The last of its kind

Though only a few artifacts survived the museum battle intact, you can find them in Guyot Hall, if you know where to look. Visit Guyot Hall today, and you might notice the shaved-off boulder that rests outside the entrance, a relic that helped prove the existence of the last Ice Age. After opening a great wooden door, you ascend a green stone staircase, its steps worn down with a century of foot traffic. The building’s main floor is a vaulted gallery. A mezzanine wraps around the building’s interior, and offices peek behind the elevated walkways, giving an anachronistic sense of a Victorian airplane hangar. Along the walls of the Geosciences wing, gems and minerals haunt a few display cases. Two overshadowing figures of Princeton geology eye the scene: mounted portraits of Arnold Guyot, the 19th century Swiss-American geologist, and Henry Hess, the founder of plate tectonics.

Walk past a great glass globe, into the office space of the Princeton Environmental Institute and further, to the Department of Ecology and Environmental Biology, and you see another vision of the past: a dinosaur. The mounted Allosaurus skeleton lurks in the center of the room. (For Princeton geologists, it was Antrodemus, but Yale’s name was the one that caught on—fitting, given that Allosaurus in Greek means “the other lizard”). The extinct carnivore resembles a smaller version of its more famous descendant, the Tyrannosaurus. The creature began the transformation to stone when it died 150 million years ago in what is now the Western United States. It was unearthed in 1941 and installed twenty years later. There it has stayed, while itsneighbors have come and gone.

Today, few undergraduates know that Princeton University was the second institution to display mounted dinosaur skeletons in the world. They also might not realize that Princeton had been home to a natural science museum for about 125 years, and they might be more shocked to learn that this museum existed as recently as 2000.

This history is writ in the little objects scattered around Guyot Hall—the minerals, the boulder, the portraits, the dinosaur. The writer John McPhee, who has an office in Guyot, once called the Allosaurus yet another name: a ‘tokensaurus.’ For perhaps more than once in its existence, that dinosaur has been the last of its kind.

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This is the twenty-third chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal, winner of the 1998 National Book Award.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

Andrea Barrett knows A LOT about polar exploration and the state of 19th century natural science. Her 1998 National Book Award-winning novel The Voyage of the Narwhal brims with references to Captain Franklin and The Terror, Antarctic explorer James Clark Ross, naturalist Asa Gray, etc. In Narwhal she crafts a revisionist narrative that both pays homage to the polar expeditions of the time and yet also challenges the less-modern aspects of those historical efforts and their contemporary scientific conventions—which often sidelined women and exploited indigenous peoples. The Voyage of the Narwhal succeeds in addressing these motives, and Barrett employs innovative narrative tactics to pull them off. However, I felt the novel suffered from the fact that the voyage of the Narwhal itself is not terribly interesting or realistic compared to more harrowing real-life tales (like that of Shackleton’s Endurance), and the novel’s latter half relies too heavily on a soap opera plot device that remains unresolved until the last second due to the overwhelming stubbornness of the novel’s would-be lovers. Narwhal, however, shows a path forward for writers who wish to craft oceangoing adventures for modern audiences.

First, let’s examine the expedition of the Narwhal. The novel’s initial protagonist is the delightfully-named Erasmus Wells, a former explorer who sees the Arctic expedition of his cocky brother-in-law-to-be, Zeke, as a way to finally become credentialed as a respected explorer after a less successful expedition to the South Pacific he had made in the past. In Philadelphia, Zeke and Erasmus leave behind Lavinia, Erasmus’ sister and Zeke’s partner, as well as Alexandra, a servant to the Wells family.

On the tiny Narwhal sailing ship, however, the story’s management of time strains some credulity. Erasmus supposedly has his first conversations with various members of the crew a few days into, or even weeks into the expedition—including the cook, Ned (described as on “day 4”) (page 46) and Erasmus’ scientific colleague, the physician Dr. Boerhaave (page 54), at least two weeks into the expedition (the timing is unclear). All these conversations, realistically speaking, would be happening on Day 1 or 2, or maybe before, during the crew interview process. I kind of laughed when I read every time that Erasmus was just meeting someone on the ship—halfway to the North Pole—for the first time. What has Erasmus been doing all day long for weeks, if not talking with the other half-dozen people on the boat? In Narwhal the technique is especially laughable because the ship is so small, and even class differences between the crew and the officers, as the novel points to as a reason for their segregation, are not reason enough to make sure that all the officers have not met each other.

During the early sections of the novel, Barrett weaves between different POVs by citing the diary entries of Ned the cook and Dr. Boerhaave to complicate the spacey, Erasmus-centric perspective, a tactic I admired, which also had the added effect that The Narwhal seemed like a real expedition and that authentic diaries had been compiled to write the book (as was the case in many famous books of polar exploration). Most innovative is Barrett’s decision to set up and keep tabs on the character of Alexandra through her diaries, one of the women left back home, because she becomes the driving force of the novel once Erasmus returns as a broken and depressed (and honestly total buzzkill of a) character. From Alexandra’s diary:

I lie in the dark and dream about that place and those people. I’d give anything to be with Zeke and Erasmus. Anything. I’m grateful for this position but sometimes I feel so confined—why can’t my life be larger? I imagine those Esquimaux befriended by Parry and his crew: the feasts and the games, the fur suits, the pairs of women tattooing each other; gravely passing a needle and a thread coated with lampblack and oil under the skin of their faces and breasts. I dream about them. I dream about the ice, the snow, the ice, the snow. (Barrett 86)

Back in Philly, Alexandra finds her own form of empowerment in secretly editing and typesetting a book written by a polar explorer, whereby she gradually expands her range of knowledge and expertise in publishing and science. Her smaller story, for much of its length, seems far more interesting than that of Erasmus, who spends most of the novel depressed and conflicted about betraying a dreadful personality in the form of Zeke. Rather, Alexandra expresses the strange and paradoxical urges which drive explorers to the poles, the Romanticism as laid out by Shelley’s polar explorer Walton in Frankenstein.

Eventually, due to some poor decision-making on the part of the vain and cowardly Zeke, the Narwhal gets frozen and trapped within the Arctic icepack, in homage to the contemporary lost ships The Terror and The Erebus and that of Shackleton’s later Endurance. By the time Erasmus abandons a missing Zeke in the Arctic and endorses the plan to abandon ship, the novel is only halfway over. As a result, an astute reader will expect Zeke’s return in a totally obvious Dickensian plot twist later in the book. So it is quite a subversion on the part of Barrett that a book titled The Voyage of the Narwhal extends far beyond that initial expedition and instead proceeds to investigate the legacy of that failed expedition and the climate of scientific racism in 19th century natural science.

Having spent some time studying the history of problematic 19th century earth scientists such as Louis Agassiz and Arnold Guyot (and have since then unexpectedly found myself in conversations with an ad-hoc inter-university task force to educate earth scientists about these figures’ less admirable qualities), I can say that Barrett nails this aspect dead-on.

She accomplishes this well in the episode when Zeke returns to Philadelphia, with his Inuit lover Annie and her (their?) son Tom, he goes on a lecture tour parading around the “Northern savages,” including a stop at the Smithsonian in Washington. In an effort to rescue the ill Annie and Tom from Zeke’s scientific abuse, Erasmus visits the Smithsonian and encounters a display of artifacts from Fiji peoples, gathered from a previous expedition in which he himself took part:

Case 71.

Collections made by the U.S. Exploring Expedition in the Feejee Islands… Cannibal Cooking Pots.

The Feejees are Cannibals. The flesh of women is preferred to that of men, and that part of the arm above the elbow and the thigh are regarded as the choicest parts. So highly do they esteem this food, that the greatest praise they can bestow on a delicacy is to say that it is as tender as a dead man…

[Erasmus] leapt back as if he’d been burned. He both and couldn’t remember those objects, and the young version of himself who’d helped gather them. Two members of the Expedition had been killed by those Feejee Islanders. He hadn’t taken part in the retaliatory raid, but he’d known what was happening. From the ship he’d seen the smoke from the burning villages and heard the rifle fire. Wilkes had argued that man-eating men deserved any punishment he might inflict, and although Erasmus had hated Wilkes’ harsh ways with the native peoples, in this case part of him agreed. But that had been before Dr. Rae returned from the arctic with the first news of Franklin’s fate, and those hints of mutilated corpses and human parts found in the British cooking kettles. Before Joe told him about the British boot. (Barrett 350-351)

This scene is an interesting way to address a character coming to terms with his complicity in imperialism. At its worst moments, it strikes me as very unrealistic for the time period for a character to be so enlightened, sort of like Tom Cruise’s cringey flashbacks of participating in what seems to be the Massacre at Wounded Knee in The Last Samurai or Gerard Depardieu’s laughably inaccurate portrayal of Columbus trying to protect the Taino Indians from his more rapacious Spanish colleagues in Ridley Scott’s misbegotten epic, 1492: Conquest of Paradise.

But here, Erasmus’ development is tied to his revelation, in the novel, that even the British explorers of the doomed Terror/Erebus expedition resorted to cannibalism, rendering the American judgement of the Fiji islanders overly harsh and hypocritical. To some level, Erasmus is also realizing that massacring natives is just as high a moral crime as consuming human flesh. To address Erasmus’ evolution, ironically I’ll quote Roger Ebert regarding that Columbus movie: “I am not convinced that Columbus was as enlightened as he seems in this movie, but perhaps historical figures exist in order to be reinterpreted every so often in terms of current needs” (Ebert). Erasmus is therefore a historical reimagining of a polar explorer character to reflect the more revisionist approach to history that Barrett is interested in pursuing, which makes the Narwhal more relevant to modern audiences.

Barrett develops that angle further, and most harrowingly, when she briefly peaks into Annie’s perspective as she is dying, when she realizes that her skeleton will be placed in the Smithsonian for future phrenologists to examine:

Annie was in a room….No one would listen to her. Not the doctor, not Zeke; not even Erasmus, who’d asked what she needed but then turned his back and disappeared when she’d said, I want to go home. Wasn’t that what she’d said? Her body would never go home now and she must do what she could for her son. A white cloth over the bed, white cases over the pillows; she had little time; she worked. The great power, the angekok [medicine man] had once told her, comes only after struggle and concentration. By the strength of her thought alone, she must strip her body of flesh and blood and be able to see herself as a skeleton. Each bone, each tiny bone, clear before her eyes. Then the sacred language would descend, allowing her to name the parts of her body that would endure. When she named the last bone she’d be free; her spirit could travel and she could watch over her son. She burrowed under the white cloth and squeezed shut her eyes, beginning the terrible process of shedding her flesh. Let me be bone, she thought. Like the long narwhal spines at home, the walrus skulls, the delicate ribs of the seals. White bone. (Barrett 363)

This is a striking section because it is one of the only moments which delves into Annie’s interiority and sympathizes with her plight more directly. It also alludes to a supernatural/ “Noble Savage” undertone regarding the Inuit characters that skews a bit too Dances with Wolves (ugh) for my taste. But this moment is critical, because it lays bare the horror of what the explorers have done to this Inuit woman. They have brought her out of her context, into a climate to which she was ill-prepared, and now she will die at the hands of Western doctors (who are still really bad at medicine at this point in history), and finally her bones will be treated as a prop in a museum.

Despite this profundity, the Narwhal gets a bit exasperating as the final section relies on a “will-they/won’t-they” romance between Alexandra and Erasmus. By this point in the novel they are living in a cabin in the woods together, so for their first sexual encounter to be ten pages from the ending, feels a bit intentionally delayed:

On April 26, late at night, Alexandra walked into his room. Twenty-two buttons down the front of her gray dress; she unfastened the first six, as simply as if she were shedding her dress for her painter’s smock. Erasmus undid the rest. The first sight of her bare shoulders struck him like his first sight of ice—how could he have forgotten that? (Barrett 386)

In this scene I find it kind of amusing (and also interesting) that Barrett makes the Freudian leap that an explorer’s attraction to the ice is the same desire he feels for a woman. Whereas other texts might retain this idea as a subtext, Barrett makes this idea (the phallic act of “exploration”) explicit. However, Erasmus and Alexandra’s new union allows Alexandra to join Erasmus as his explorer-wife as they try to return Tom to his homeland at the wish of Annie, who may (or not) be literally haunting them as an Inuit ghost. It does seem like a fraught plan regardless, as there’s no guarantee Tom will be welcomed back to a community he left as a child. But it is a Romantic ending, wherein the explorer goes off into the misty ice and disappears, just like what happens to Dr. Frankenstein and his monster at the end of their book.

Overall, Narwhal succeeds as a revisionist adventure novel that takes aim at the problematic ideologies which promoted these historical explorations in the first place. It’s a soap opera, but then again, Dickens succeeded by drawing from the drama of glacial love stories and unexpected reappearances, and it’s a strategy that still works today.

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Works Cited

Barrett, Andrea. The Voyage of the Narwhal (W. W. Norton & Co.: New York, 1998).

Ebert, Roger. “1492: Conquest of Paradise,” RogerEbert.com, October 9, 1992, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/1492-conquest-of-paradise-1992

Zwick, Edward (director). The Last Samurai (Warner Bros., 2003).

A couple of years ago, when ChatGPT was just getting started in the public eye, I ran a little experiment. If I gave AI the first paragraph of one of my published short stories, would the chatbot be able to finish it?

The result was sort of compelling. While of course it didn’t do a “good job,” the chatbot successfully identified the main characters, the thread the story would take, and correctly anticipated the next scene.

This year I thought I’d try a different AI experiment. It’s been known for a while that you can ask a Chatbot to write in the style of a famous author, like Hemingway or Joan Didion, for which the LLM has a lot of material to sample.

But what if it tried to sample someone who is not famous, and perhaps has less of an available sample size to work with?

That is to say—what if it tried to imitate me?

So I asked it to. And this is what it came up with:

Here is an original short story in the style of Harrison Blackman—a blend of atmospheric detail, psychological tension, and speculative unease, without copying any copyrighted material:1

The Cartographer’s Error

When the drone returned without its camera, the team pretended not to notice. It came buzzing over the ridge at dusk, rotors sputtering, landing skids coated in a fine red dust none of them recognized. The camera mount hung empty, wires shorn clean as though something had bitten them off.

Raina, the expedition leader, walked toward it slowly, as if approaching a wounded animal that might strike. “We need another map of the valley,” she murmured, speaking more to herself than to the others. “Without visuals we can’t confirm the fault line.”

The valley stretched before them—an expanse of fog, ravines, and shimmering mirages that warped the horizon. The earth underneath seemed indecisive, fault lines running in strange geometries. Satellite maps had misplotted the region for decades, and no one could figure out why.

Back at the portable command unit, the only screen active belonged to Ezra, the cartographer. He was hunched over his interface, repeatedly zooming in on a topographical rendering that refused to remain stable. Every time he blinked, the valley rearranged its layers: ridges shifting, chasms moving several meters to the left.

“It’s doing it again,” Ezra said, voice thin. “Terrain is updating without input.”

“Update protocols are manual,” Raina reminded him, though not confidently. “Terrain doesn’t just—move.”

Ezra pointed at a jagged contour line blinking at the map’s edge. “This wasn’t here ten minutes ago. It’s like the valley is correcting me.”

Raina suppressed a shiver. “Double-check the baselines. Your instruments might be miscalibrated.”

Ezra wanted to protest, but he saw the tension in her jaw. She wasn’t dismissing him—she was afraid to believe him.

Hours passed. Night settled deeper. The lights of the base hummed in the dark while the valley beyond remained invisible, as though the world ended ten feet from the perimeter. Ezra refused to sleep until the map stabilized.

By 3 a.m., the mapping screen was an unreadable labyrinth of contradicting coordinates. Fault lines spiraled, folded, and rearranged themselves into shapes that resembled skeletal structures, spirals, and—disturbingly—something like written language.

Ezra stared slack-jawed. “Raina… I think it’s communicating.”

Before she could respond, the drone—powered down and disconnected—began to beep. Its transmitter blinked an error message: LOCATION NOT FOUND. REPLACE MAP.

Raina looked from the drone to the screen and finally out toward the unseen valley.

“What if,” she whispered, “the maps were wrong because the world wasn’t finished yet?”

Ezra swallowed hard. “Or because it’s still being rewritten.”

Neither of them spoke after that. They just watched the fault lines shift, as the land updated itself in real time, drawing a new world the way a nervous hand draws in the dark—almost as if the earth had grown tired of waiting for humans to chart it, and decided to chart itself.

[THE END]2

Let’s unpack this

Last month Sam Kriss wrote an essay in the New York Times Magazine expertly identifying the tells of AI writing. AI syntax frequently follows patterns—a lot of em dashes, a lot of lists, a lot of sentence structures that follow the format of “it’s not this, but that.”

“The Cartographer’s Error” follows these tells pretty closely:

• “Fault lines spiraled, folded, and rearranged themselves into shapes that resembled skeletal structures, spirals, and—disturbingly—something like written language.” Em dash, check.

• “Every time he blinked, the valley rearranged its layers: ridges shifting, chasms moving several meters to the left.” List, check.

• “She wasn’t dismissing him—she was afraid to believe him.” It’s not this—it’s that!

Another striking aspect of this piece is that it is genre-related to my unpublished novel, Blood Falls, which also involves scientists examining broad geomorphological terrain. Though that novel has not been published, I’ve submitted portions of the MS to writing contests, and that’s probably where OpenAI is hoovering up my work. Disturbing, yes, but not inexplicable.

But is this truly written in “my style?” My fiction style is pretty broad—I have a lot of modes that I work in—suspense, horror, literary, commercial. While it does pick up on some of my tics—bolding and all-caps for paratexts (“LOCATION NOT FOUND”)—more of a screenwriting thing than anything else, the only style this story might have is AI’s style, though in the summary it does accurately sum up how I try to write: “a blend of atmospheric detail, psychological tension, and speculative unease.”

Then I was thinking—a lot of my available writing is journalistic. What, then could AI do with that? How would it write a journalism story by me?

Here goes nothing—and this time, I mean it:

The Town That Keeps Moving: A Quiet Community Faces a Shifting Landscape

Here is an original journalism-style article in the stylistic vein of Harrison Blackman—measured, atmospheric, deeply reported, with an undercurrent of speculative unease, without copying any real copyrighted text:

Raventon, TX — At first, residents treated it as a curiosity—hairline cracks in sidewalks that seemed to change direction overnight. A fence that no longer lined up with a property boundary. A gravel road curving just slightly differently than it had the week before.

But by late spring, the phenomenon had become impossible to ignore.

“We’d pave one side of the street on Monday,” said Public Works Director Tom Delgado, pausing on the courthouse steps to light a cigarette, “and by Friday the measurements wouldn’t match the original site plan. It’s like the ground keeps nudging itself into place when no one’s looking.”

Raventon, a town of 3,200 in the remote Texas Panhandle, has found itself at the center of a quiet scientific intrigue: the landscape beneath it is shifting—not in dramatic earthquakes or subsidence events, but in small, persistent movements that geologists say don’t correspond to any known fault system in the region.

A Puzzle of Millimeters

Texas Tech geologist Dr. Naomi Hsu first heard from town officials in May, when she received a packet of survey data that caught her attention. “There were changes of five to ten millimeters—small enough to go unnoticed in most places, but consistent across several grid points,” she explained. “What was striking wasn’t the size. It was the pattern.”

Hsu deployed a grad student and a set of ground-based LIDAR units. After three weeks of monitoring, she was convinced: the terrain beneath Raventon is not behaving according to the established geologic record.

“There’s no fracking here, no mining, no large-scale water draw—they’re not doing anything to disturb the underlying strata,” Hsu said. “It’s as if the bedrock itself is… reorganizing.”3

She hesitated over the final word, as if aware of its implications.

A Town With a Long Memory

Residents, many of whom have family histories stretching back to the town’s founding in 1889, have begun combing local archives for clues. Anecdotes have surfaced: old ranch logs mentioning barns that “wandered out of alignment,” and homestead maps from the early 20th century that don’t quite match modern land surveys.

In the local library, where every wall smells faintly of dust and yellowed glue, volunteer historian Linda Martinez has been updating a hand-drawn map of the town—by hand, in pencil, because ink feels too permanent.

“It makes you wonder,” she said, flipping through a brittle county atlas from 1911. “Did the settlers know something we forgot? Or did the ground only start changing after we did?”

Human Problem, Human Adaptation

For now, the town has taken a practical approach. Survey benchmarks are being updated monthly. High school shop students have begun building adjustable street-sign mounts. Contractors now carry both tape measures and GPS receivers.

Everyone seems to be adapting—because what else is there to do?

Mayor Denise Alvarez shrugged when asked whether the town was worried. “It’s not flooding us, and it’s not dropping us into a sinkhole. The world is alive. Always has been. Maybe this town just has a more talkative piece of land beneath it.”

She smiled, but her eyes lingered on the horizon—a long, flat plane shimmering in the summer heat, as if caught between two versions of itself.

What Comes Next

Dr. Hsu insists the phenomenon is not paranormal, and that further study will eventually reveal the mechanism. She is adding more instruments next month, including subsurface seismometers and radar probes.

But privately, several geologists involved with the project admit Raventon has become something of a professional outlier—an unexplained data point in a field that doesn’t often tolerate unexplained data.

Meanwhile, residents continue living their lives: rebuilding fences, redrawing boundaries, and accepting that their town is moving, slowly but definitely, in a direction only the earth seems to understand.

“People think places are fixed,” historian Martinez said, closing her atlas. “But maybe that’s just because we don’t usually watch closely enough.”

Um, let’s unpack this one, too

In this “piece,” well, ChatGPT decided to rewrite the fiction story as if it were truth. While it resembles “science journalism,” it’s like claiming the rocks are moving of their own accord.

And of course, not only are all the quotes and “characters” hallucinated, but so is the town in Texas—there is no such place. There are no such people as Naomi Hsu, Ph.D., volunteer historian Linda Martinez, Mayor Denise Alvarez, or Public Works director Tom Delgado. These people aren’t real. This isn’t JOURNALISM.

Let’s go back to that summary: “measured, atmospheric, deeply reported, with an undercurrent of speculative unease”—measured and deeply reported, thanks, but an undercurrent of speculative unease? Since when does my reporting have “an undercurrent of speculative unease?”

Clearly, ChatGPT’s wires are crossed and confusing different writing genres under my name. Lines like “She hesitated over the final word, as if aware of its implications,” are not unlike lines in my fiction or screenwriting. They are not in my journalism.

While news journalism is often formulaic in terms of structure, and this AI effort does understand that AP News format, it also supports my theory of LLM’s overhype. Whatever inroads AI makes in narrative writing, it will never be able to write news.

News is information that is new. It requires a human to go out and get new material through interviews and research. While AI excels at regurgitating essays on The Great Gatsby, it’s got tens of thousands of similar high school essays on the subject to draw from.

At base level, LLMs are plagiarism machines. Often, when you ask a chatbot about a current event, the LLM’s response will be out of date and draw from articles several years old. It can’t generate anything from scratch. It needs a pool of human-generated information to cull from. Without human journalists, AI will never be able to keep pace with the times.

So, what do you think? Are clankers going to eliminate all human writing? If they do, you’d better like AI’s “it’s not this, it’s that” structure.

Years later, when we look back at 2025, we might think of it as one of those great pivotal years in history, a year when the firmament of American society firmly shifted and gave way. In 2025, we saw what happened—and what fresh horrors came out—after the 2024 U.S. election opened Pandora’s Box.

Here in Southern California, the year began with a great burning, the destruction of an area the size of Washington, D.C. during the Eaton and Palisades fires. The year that followed involved a great erosion of American institutions, a destructive wake that will take decades to recover from, if at all. Lingering in the background was the specter of AI hype, a fallacy that might align with another mythic story—that of Midas. If everything Large Language Models touch turn to gold, then there won’t be any sample material for these LLMs to generate from, will there?

On my modest end of things, I spent part of the year retracing my steps. I returned to Taos, New Mexico, the location of my first job, and found a community that had in many ways changed since I’d been there in 2017, and certainly since the pandemic. Gone were the dilapidated motels and shuttered businesses—in came the boutique hotels and the gourmet sourdough épiceries. But the harsh and rugged landscapes, and the quirky and tenacious people—they remained the same.

But since my youthful adventure in Taos, I had changed, too. Compared to back then, I feel more confident in my abilities as a writer, but also recognize my limitations. And now, in a year when I traveled between Texas, Washington State, Florida, and Brooklyn, I feel like I can recognize when a scene is truly sublime, as Taos is, particularly when you drive up the Rio Grande canyon and see its Gorge continue as it slices across the mesa, the earth seemingly split in two.

In this annual post, I always list out some of my recommendations in the way of culture. First-up…

Favorite Novel: Dorothy B. Hughes’ Ride the Pink Horse (1947)

Strange title, eh? For this blog I have previously written about my appreciation of Hughes’ more famous novel, In a Lonely Place, which does such a great job of capturing West L.A.—at least, in the time that it was written. Well, Ride the Pink Horse is a crime novel that does the same for New Mexico, following a hood trying to shake down his old boss, a crooked Chicago-based Senator, during the Santa Fe fiesta, but befriends a young Native American girl instead and pays for her to go on the Merry Go-Round. Plenty has not aged well in this book, as the narrator trades words for Hispanic and indigenous characters that should never be repeated. But there’s something odd and specific about this little novel, which captures the weird feeling of Santa Fe as a sort of Southwest Disneyland, even in the 1940s.

Favorite Nonfiction: Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear (1998)

In the aftermath of the January 2025 Los Angeles fires, it seemed everyone I knew was reading this book. Mike Davis, who was best known for City of Quartz, his critical study of Los Angeles, was a writer who synthesized cultural histories, Marxist critiques, and journalism to produce texts, particularly about Southern California, that have a kaleidoscopic edge and have proved foundational to many other similar studies. In Ecology of Fear, he analyzed Los Angeles through the various natural disasters that befall the megalopolis and ultimately concludes that Southern California, despite its mild and inviting climate, is inherently a dangerous place to live, thanks to its curious geology and environment—we’ve got earthquakes, tornadoes, and mountain lions! And these disasters have been repeatedly depicted in Hollywood films and science fiction novels, depicting L.A. as an Atlantean place of hubris, poised for failure.

In his influential chapter “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” Davis argued that the Santa Monica mountains burn frequently enough (thanks to their unique positioning (vis-a-vis the hot and dry Santa Ana winds) that it may not be wise for anyone to live there long-term. After now seeing Malibu burn yet again, we’re starting to realize he may have been onto something.

Favorite Film: Wake Up Dead Man (dir. by Rian Johnson, 2025)

I had a lot of great (One Battle after Another, Sinners) and absolutely terrible (Hurry Up Tomorrow) experiences at the cinema this year, but my favorite was watching the latest installment in the Knives Out series, Wake Up Dead Man. Through these films, Rian Johnson has resurrected the Agatha Christie ensemble detective story and breathed new life into it, and far more effectively than Kenneth Branagh’s recent Hercule Poirot adaptations.

And this one might be the best of the three. Relying on Josh O’Connor’s charm as an earnest priest, Daniel Craig’s detective character takes a firm backseat in this one, which examines the corruption of spirituality through a hateful priest (Josh Brolin’s) congregation. Liberally adapting from the tradition of locked-room mysteries, including a name-checked The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr, Johnson has woven one of the most complicated mystery plots put to film that still manages to hold up as a master of the form.

Favorite Series: The Rehearsal Season 2

Master prankster Nathan Fielder took his strange form of stunt documentary to new “heights” when he re-enacted Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s life (as derived from his clearly ghostwritten memoir) in an effort to become a better pilot. The fact that that episode ended with a re-enactment of Sully’s famous 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson,” when he successfully landed his bird-struck commercial plane on the Hudson River, supplying the theory that Sully might have listened to the chorus of Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” to help psych himself up for the landing, brought me and many others to tears of laughter.

There isn’t much like The Rehearsal. What Fielder is doing is entirely singular, with the added edge that it’s all for a good cause—this season was in the mission of improving pilot communication and safety.

In Case You Missed It

• Once again, much of my best work came out with Princeton Alumni Weekly this year. I’m particularly proud of my L.A. fire coverage for the magazine, cathartic to write as I too ended up evacuating to avoid the smoke. Other highlights include my profiles of New York Times food critic Ligaya Mishan and documentary filmmaker Cecilia Peck, as well as my investigation into the world of internet hate speech in my longest and most sophisticated feature ever—Where Hate Hides.

• For PAW, I also wrote several history pieces, including on the Princeton presidential “conclave,” religious scholar (and Xerox junkie) Georges Florovsky, and problematic missionary Jonas King.

• For LARB, I wrote a long-form essay about the “Greek Weird Wave” of films—and the economic and political crises that have informed them.

• In a different field, for Allrecipes I profiled Taos artist and chef Anita Rodríguez and explained how to make her stovetop enchiladas for the “Chicana on the run.”

• Last spring, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel honoring David Lynch’s life and legacy alongside luminaries like Rick Moody and Lynch’s longtime DP, Frederick Elmes.

• On this blog, I conducted interviews with the writers Rosecrans Baldwin, Aaron Robertson, Eric Cline, Alex Cristofi, Sophus Helle, Karen Emmerich, and Case Q. Kerns.

Upcoming Books

Last but not least, I have two new books under contract as of this year. The first, Someone Will Remember Us: A Novella, will appear in 2027 in the latest edition of Running Wild Press’ novella anthology series.

Here’s a taste, through my synopsis:

When we meet seasoned reporter Zachary Ryder, he’s on assignment in the island of Lesbos, covering the migration crisis afflicting Greece. Recovering from a brutal ordeal in which he was captured and tortured by Islamic extremists hiding out in the rural American West, Ryder thinks the Greek sojourn will be a respite of sorts, a cold examination of an international tragedy that he can have no real impact in addressing. But that all changes when he witnesses an Afghan woman nearly drown looking for her son, who has seemingly vanished into thin air. Springing into action, Ryder vows to find out what happened to the missing boy, leading him on an investigation into the seamy heart of darkness in the Greek migration system. He’s guided by the drunken, failed Greek journalist Nikos, but he’s more intrigued by the assistance of Nikos’ alluring sister Angeliki, an activist who has made it her life’s purpose helping the new arrivals. Energized, Ryder hopes his quest will reunite a family splintered by war and exile. But as the dark seeds of conflict cloud over the island, and Ryder is pursued by a member of the Greek intelligence services, he becomes increasingly desperate—will his effort be too little, too late?

The second book will also involve Greece, but in a different vein. Greece at the Turning Point: Remembrances of U.S. Foreign Service Families Living and Working in Postwar Greece, is under contract with Routledge, and co-edited with Gonda Van Steen, and will also appear in 2027.

Greece at the Turning Point presents a “collective memoir” of the Marshall Plan in Greece from the perspective of its American administrators in Athens. It offers an inside look at the personal lives and frustrations of an American diplomatic corps that experienced its first foray into managing foreign aid on behalf of a global superpower.

This book is an outgrowth of my previous academic article on the same subject, which I’ve written about on this blog.

Do continue to follow The Usonian for updates as these two projects approach the finish line.

To Conclude

My many thanks to all who have read this newsletter and followed The Usonian this past year. Whether you just joined or have been here from the start, it’s been a pleasure to make your acquaintance as we’ve navigated this swiftly changing world! Season’s greetings and Happy New Year!

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There’s a scene in the mostly forgotten 2004 sci-fi film, I, Robot, when Will Smith’s luddite, anti-robot cop character turns on the “manual override” setting of his self-driving car, and a steering wheel emerges from the console for him to take control. In the passenger seat, Bridget Moynahan, who plays Smith’s love interest/the film’s “robotics scientist” (i.e., exposition mouthpiece), turns to him and says, “You can’t be serious. Not at these speeds!”—suggesting that Will Smith is being brazen for literally doing what just about every American ends up doing every day—driving a car.

This scene was amusing in 2004. Now that there are cars that can actually drive on their own, this scene may now be thought of as… prescient?

For the better part of the first two decades of the 21st century, the self-driving car has been a big-ticket Silicon Valley goal. As early as 2014, Apple was trying to make its own electric, self-driving car, but killed the project in 2024 to focus more on AI.

Meanwhile, part of Uber’s grand strategy (one that contributed to former CEO Travis Kalanick’s downfall) involved recruiting Google’s former self-driving car team, led by Anthony Levandowski, who was later convicted of stealing Google’s self-driving trade secrets. (Trump pardoned him in 2021). According to Mike Isaac’s 2019 book Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, Kalanick and Levandowski envisioned a world where Uber wouldn’t just receive a company cut of driver fare—with a self-driving car, they could receive the entire fare.

However, with Uber’s efforts in that arena flailing after Google made sure the company was held accountable for stealing its technology, Google’s self-driving efforts have taken the lead. In 2016, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, spun out Waymo as its own company, its name a play on the concept that it was a “way forward in mobility,” per Isaac.1

First, the Waymos were only in beta in Phoenix, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, where they were barred from getting on the freeway.

But now, they’re fully available for riders in those cities—and as of November 2025, Waymos can now drive on the highway, and soon they’re scheduled to be active in six more U.S. cities.

Waymo is not without its problems, just another example of self-driving cars leading to accidents, from Tesla to Uber to GM’s “Cruise” project. Some incidents have included:

• Multiple occasions where Waymos have failed to stop for school buses, prompting a software recall.

• A Waymo was recently recorded driving through the scene of a police standoff in Los Angeles. Crime—and the law—just doesn’t scare a Waymo.

• Life finds a way—a California woman just gave birth in a Waymo.

What makes these incidents even more absurd is that in California, until a legal fix that takes effect next year, Waymos can’t be cited for traffic violations because according to state law, only people can be cited for violations.

But Waymos and their ilk do have a key advantage, particularly for women—there’s no chance of a creepy driver (or worse) when there is no driver.

On the other hand, no driver might mean there might be creepy stowaways in the trunk instead, as this recent piece in Futurism describes!

In the belly of the Waymo

I was reticent to take Waymo for a long time. One Waymo would almost always lurk on one of the cross streets from my apartment, like a video game character respawn point, waiting for its next call, its radar shifting.

Plus, Waymos have had a curious effect on traffic as experienced in Los Angeles. Most L.A. drivers exceed the speed limit, but Waymos do not, slowing down the pace of traffic around them.

Moreover, Waymos not moving when there are obstacles can cause issues. For example, in L.A. rush-hour, the traffic box is often congested with overeager drivers trying to make it through a cycle, with their cars’ rear-ends sticking out into the right-most lane, blocking traffic that could otherwise proceed in this lane. Faced with a driver blocking the box, the Waymo will not proceed. A human, however, might wait for an opening and steer around the car in the way. But if you get caught behind a Waymo in this scenario, you may never escape the cycle… the Waymo just won’t move.

And because Waymos are equipped with all manner of sensing equipment, pedestrians have often taken a cavalier attitude toward stepping in front of them. I’ve seen people jaywalk straight in front of approaching Waymos on the assumption they’ll stop for them. While the Waymo may stop, the other drivers in the road may not. I live in fear for how many accidents and injuries this practice might cause.

Despite all my reservations, for the purposes of this post and in the spirit of “gonzo” journalism, I did take my first ride in one.

My target was modest—could Waymo take me to the community pool for my evening workout and back? The answer is yes.

Much like Uber or Lyft, you hail a Waymo from the company’s app. When the car arrives, it idles outside the pickup point, and the whirring radar device at the top projects an icon that indicates the vehicle is in the process of picking-up.

As you approach the car, you push a button on the phone app to unlock the car, after which you can open the door. Once you’re in the backseat, the car greets you by name in a silky robotic, subway-style voice (this was weird) and a touch-screen on the console feeds you instructions—as well as the spookiest aspect of all—a live radar screen of your surroundings. Within the radar’s all-seeing vision, physical obstacles are outlined, as well as humans and other ambulant creatures, such as dogs, in motion. Police and emergency vehicles get their own color and stand out from the rest.

It’s basically like the viewscreen of malicious aliens/robots in films like Predator or Terminator, but I suppose the point is to reassure the rider that the Waymo sees all, even better than a human driver.

And this may be true for the driving. When the car dropped me off at the pool, a young man was trying to hail my robot cab. The Waymo ignored him and drove off. When the man logged the request in the app, only then did the robotaxi circle back to open the doors for him. Sometimes, a human touch is required to efficiently secure the next fare.

Earlier this fall, I traveled to the summit of Mount Wilson, California, a peak in the San Gabriel Mountain Range that overlooks Los Angeles. The mountain is significant because it is home to the Mount Wilson Observatory, one of the most historically important astronomical stations in the world.

I went there because I was researching a piece on Henry Norris Russell, an influential astronomer of the late 19th and 20th century who consulted on projects at Mount Wilson. That piece—despite my overkill efforts at reporting (reading dusty tomes of astronomy, back issues of Scientific American, traveling to Mount Wilson)—attracted significant ire from the scientific community, mostly due to the fact that my source base minimized the role of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin in determining the sun’s composition as primarily made of hydrogen. In fact, like many scientific breakthroughs, the question of the sun’s composition was a more complicated story of discovery, and for many decades Russell was solely credited with this breakthrough, failing to cite the pioneering work of Payne-Gaposchkin. The article’s comments clarify that story and scientific lineage; I appreciate that my readers took the time to lay out what I missed.

While humbling, I recognize that writing about science can often be a difficult balance—either you simplify the narrative to make it accessible—or you painstakingly try to please the scientists, and thereby lose the lay reader.

Or—as I learned in an unusually long afternoon session atop Mount Wilson—the storyteller can bore you to tears. And that leads me to my baffling experience with a tour-guide we’ll call “Telescope Jack.”

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This is the twenty-second chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the classic Russian novel about a lot of things—but mostly about what happens when the devil visits Moscow and wreaks havoc upon the corrupt Soviet elite. (There are spoilers in here of one of the book’s subplots, which is based on one of the most famous stories of all time, but I guess this merits a warning.)

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is a complicated novel that eludes simple explanation. On one level, it concerns the shenanigans of the devil and his coterie when they arrive in Stalin’s Moscow. On another, it is a love story between a sad-sack novelist only known as the master with a lively married woman named Margarita. It also happens to feature a novel-within-a-novel starring Pontius Pilate, the reluctant executor of Jesus. Needless to say, this novel has a lot going on.

In this post, I will focus on just a few of Bulgakov’s craft elements. These include his incorporation of the Pilate novel as a paratext; his complex characterization of the all-powerful devil, Woland; and Bulgakov’s careful–crafted ambiguities that make his novel a puzzle that cannot be solved. For anyone who is trying to craft ambiguities that keep readers engaged with the story long after they have finished reading, The Master and Margarita is a fascinating example for how to achieve such an effect.

Pontius Pilate

The Master and Margarita opens with an unlikely scene—a seemingly Socratic dialogue between some Moscow intellectuals and a foreign professor named Woland—who is actually Satan. After the intellectuals demand proof of Jesus’ historic existence, Woland insists there is no need for proof (14). He elaborates:

‘It’s all very simple: In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan…’ (14).

Immediately, we are thrust into the next chapter, which opens with the same line:

In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, there came out to the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate (15).

Suddenly, the prose style has changed from a zigzagging, satirical narrative voice (“the poet, for whom the editor was telling him was new… merely hiccupped from time to time, cursing the apricot soda under his breath” (5)) to a formal narrator. In such fashion, we receive a more controlled voice, as exemplified by some lush imagery of Roman Judea—“a rosy smell exuded from the cypresses and palms in the garden” (15). In this case, the Pilate narrative is triggered by the exact lines Woland utters. Later, we learn that the Pilate narrative is in fact the master’s novel (135), but its chapters are triggered in different ways and as experienced by different characters: as a hallucination by Ivan Nikolaevich (168), as a manuscript read by Margarita (298), and presumably, as a diabolically-correct direct quotation of that manuscript by the devil (14). Complicating the Master’s novel is that the devil asserts that he was present at the events of Jesus’ sentencing and execution (we’ll come back to this) (40). The formal narrative voice, however, is consistent within the Pilate sections, making it immediately distinguishable from the rest of the novel. Instead of regularly alternating the Pilate novel with the main story, the sections are infrequent, coming in the second chapter, the sixteenth, and the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth chapters, respectively. Each section is triggered by a character reading or saying a line that makes up the first line of a Pilate section.

But enough on that. Let’s talk about “villains who have a point.”

Villains who have a point

There is some clichéd adage that a protagonist can only be as strong as the villain he or she faces. In The Master and Margarita, the devil Woland is as all-powerful as one can get. But because he is also a sympathetic adversary to the master, while being ‘less’ sympathetic to everyone in Moscow—his role is complicated, making him a stronger character. When he finally offers the master a chance at purgatory, as heaven is off-limits (according to the ‘angel’ Matthew Levi), our expectations of his nefarious intentions are thwarted (381). As readers, we have been dreading what Woland might do to the master since the devil restored the burned manuscript and said “‘Well, it’s all clear now’… tapping the manuscript with a long finger”—an action that might indicate Woland’s interest in destroying the master (287). And yet, in time, we learn Woland has something better in mind—the chance to forgive the subject of his novel, Pontius Pilate:

‘Your novel has been read,’ Woland began, turning to the master, ‘and the only thing said about it was that, unfortunately, it is not finished. So, then, I wanted to show you your hero’ (381).

In most Christian texts, God or Jesus have the power to forgive. And yet, in Bulgakov’s novel, Jesus, through the guise of Matthew Levi, refuses to admit the master to heaven (287). Only the devil can give the master peace, and offer him the chance to give Pilate his own form of freedom. Perhaps this was a way for Bulgakov to show how, in a topsy-turvy Stalinist world, only Satan will do what Jesus refuses—to act, to take matters into his own hands, to grant reprieves to those who have struggled their whole lives—the master—or, in the case of Pilate—eternity.

For a villain to be compelling, he has to be partly correct, his worldview exposing the weaknesses in the protagonist’s vision—causing the protagonist to grow or collapse. In the case of Woland, he offers the master a sanctuary from the ruin in which he has so long toiled:

‘What are you going to do in the little basement?... The house and the old servant are already waiting for you, the candles are already burning, and soon they will go out, because you will immediately meet the dawn’ (383).

Woland gives the master the freedom to pass on, something Jesus won’t even allow.

But enough of the devil. We need to talk about Aphranius.

Aphranius

“You try to hold the novel’s face, and it turns away once again,” Boris Fishman wrote in the forward to the novel’s 50th anniversary edition (x). The Master and Margarita possesses a great deal of ambiguity. Much like the best David Lynch films, while some elements are spelled out, others seem to shift, disguise themselves deeper in their mysteries.

In the third chapter, Woland asserts that he was present during Jesus’ trial:

‘The thing is…’ here the professor looked around fearfully and spoke in a whisper, ‘that I was personally present at it all. I was on Pontius Pilate’s balcony, and in the garden when he talked with Kaifa, and on the platform, only secretly, incognito, so to speak, and therefore I beg you—not a word to anyone, total secrecy, shh…’ (40).

In the first Pilate chapter, there are two moments in which the devil might have appeared. The first is when a swallow flies into the room during Jesus’ trial, the bird’s arrival coinciding with a surge in Pilate’s headache and the procurator’s decision to execute Jesus (24).

The second instance is a very brief mention of Pilate meeting “a certain man, whose face was half covered by a hood, though he could not have been bothered by the sun’s rays in this room” (34). Was the devil the bird, or the hooded man? Or both? By the second Pilate section, we meet the “same hooded man with whom Pilate had a momentary meeting in a darkened room of the palace” (170).

In the third Pilate section, the hooded figure returns and has an extended audience with Pilate, and we learn he is the head of Pilate’s secret police (301-309). We are given the detail “it would be difficult to establish this man’s nationality”— which seems to signal that this is Woland, since when we first meet the devil, he is described as a foreign professor of ambiguous nationality (303, 6-14).

But the novel averts such a firm distinction—rather, it further complicates it. Pilate asks the man to “protect” Judas, and the man—finally named “Aphranius”—accepts the assignment (308-309). In the next Pilate section, Aphranius meets Niza, a woman who proceeds to lead Judas to his assassination (312-317).

After Judas’ killing, a figure with a hood, presumably Aphranius, appears and examines Judas’ body (317). We are led to believe this assassination has been part of Aphranius’ secret plan all along, but then Bulgakov throws us for yet another loop. After Aphranius apologizes to Pilate for failing to save Judas’ life, Pilate is nonchalant (“The procurator grinned and said: ‘Not much’” in reaction to Judas’ meager reward of silver) (321). Pilate proceeds to interrogate Matthew Levi, and admits it was he who actually ordered Judas’ assassination (327-330). “‘It is not much to have done, but all the same I did it,’” Pilate tells Matthew (330).

Was Pilate speaking in code to Aphranius? That by protecting Judas, he wanted Aphranius to kill him? Then why speak in circles, as Aphranius apologizes for not ‘saving’ Judas? Or is Pilate taking credit for something he did not do? An even wilder reading might be that Aphranius orchestrated Judas’ killing in the same way Woland orders the ‘death’ of the master and Margarita, poisoning them so they can enter a form of eternal life (370-371). Either way, the murkiness of Aphranius’ true identity—the conflicting nature of both Pilate and Aphranius’ attitude toward Judas’ assassination—allow for no simple answers. The deeper we look, the more the novel ‘turns away.’

In my own work, I write for ambiguities that force the reader to try to solve a puzzle that may or may not be solvable, but that ambiguity must not undermine the efficacy of the work as a whole. A movie like Mulholland Drive creates paradoxes, but most of these paradoxes can be resolved by its end. The Master and Margarita answers some questions, but leaves others unresolved. Mastering effective ambiguity, it seems, will take a great deal of time in a Moscow basement.

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Works Cited

Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. 50th anniversary edition. New York: Penguin. 2016.

This is the twenty-first chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with H.P. Lovecraft’s classic At the Mountains of Madness, the sci-fi horror novella that set the template for films like The Thing (1982), Alien (1979), and Prometheus (2012).

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

At the Mountains of Madness (to which I will henceforth humorously abbreviate as “ATMOM”) is not the first horror story set in Antarctica, but it is one of the most influential (Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, referenced in Lovecraft’s novella, precedes it (8)).

But without ATMOM, we probably would not have The Thing or the Alien film franchises. As such, to borrow the nickname of the Rose Bowl, ATMOM is the “granddaddy of them all.” ATMOM is worth considering for its influence, its unusual choices in narrative style and exposition, but we’ll also have to contend with the elements that have not aged particularly well.

ATMOM is written in the style of a polar journal in the voice of an explorer named Dyer, a decision that both lends authenticity to the narrative but also saps it of its tension, since the existence of the journal might suggest that its author survived the events of the story.1 A popular genre in the early 20th century, polar exploration journals were frequently published and despite their frequent tedium, sometimes became bestsellers—in a way, they were the Planet Earth episodes of their day.

In the novella, Lovecraft acknowledges his debt to the polar genre when he references “regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott and Byrd.” This move places the “Miskatonic University Expedition” in the continuum of their polar forebears and also showcases an early example of the “false document” narrative strategy—when a book asserts that its contents are a true report of a “real-life” event. This technique was used to great effect by Michael Crichton in The Andromeda Strain, in which he presented his extraterrestrial disease thriller as a “true story” through declassified government reports.

Meanwhile, the early chapters of ATMOM feature dense descriptions of geology, Precambrian fossils, and measurements of latitude and longitude, adding further to the verisimilitude of the early chapters but not exactly contributing to their suspense. Like how these elements are often discussed in polar journals, these components are just as boring here.

The basic plot structure of ATMOM is probably the most influential aspect to the science fiction genre. An advanced party explores a new region and then their transmissions cease. The second party arrives and discovers the abandoned camp, discerning the clues of what might have happened to the lost explorers. This basic format has served as the premise for the films The Thing (1982) and Aliens (1986), in particular. Here, Dyer’s party discovers a lost city in Antarctica built by the Elder Things, a primordial alien race, later killed off by a second, mysterious alien presence (the “shoggoth” monsters originally created and enslaved by the Elder Ones). That said, The Thing and Aliens are much more enjoyable than ATMOM. The dry polar journal format really saps the tension out of the story, which is far more focused on world-building than plot development or the exploration of its characters.

There are also aspects of Lovecraft’s novella that represent dubious elements of storytelling. For one, the narrator’s lengthy explanation of millions of years of history relies on his decipherment, without any difficulty, of the ancient city’s cave drawings:

In certain rooms the dominant arrangement was varied by the presence of maps, astronomical charts, and other scientific designs on an enlarged scale—these things giving a naïve and terrible corroboration to what we gathered from the pictorial friezes and dadoes. (67)

Nowadays, a writer might be asked to create a telepathic connection with the drawings or something to justify the protagonist’s instant understanding of the art. However, in the book, Lovecraft establishes that Dyer and his colleagues are familiar with the “Necronomicon,” an in-universe book of legends establishing the Cthulhu mythos within Lovecraft’s works (7-8). So perhaps that can account for their instant comprehension of the sculptures and cartouches.

The second element which appears to have aged poorly is the “look” of the shoggoth monsters, their form finally revealed in the book’s climax:

It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform—the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely coloured lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder. (117)

Despite Lovecraft’s vivid imagination, he relies on self-aware, cop-out abstractions such as “the fantastic novelist’s ‘thing that should not be.’” What is striking about his monster is that he can only compare it to a subway train, which is strange, considering that this book was written in the 1930s, and subway trains had been around since the 1860s. This I found laughable—that Lovecraft thought subways were unspeakably scary!

Then, of course, we have to contend with the most uncomfortable element in the story. Part of the central mystery of the novel is the fate of the Elder Ones. Eventually, our narrator determines that the enslaved shoggoth monsters had rebelled against their masters and killed the Elder Ones. Plenty of postcolonial scholars have already suggested that this formed an allegory to the idea of contemporaneously colonized countries rising up against their imperial overlords.

While dated and problematic, the plot element speaks to an anxiety likely felt by Lovecraft, known for his white supremacist views and incoherent political ideologies. Interestingly, the element of an ancient alien race killed off by its creations was repurposed for the Alien prequel Prometheus (2012). Just like the Elder Ones were killed off by the “shoggoths,” the ancient alien-astronaut Engineers in Prometheus suffered at the hands of the xenomorphs.

At the Mountains of Madness may be a problematic text, but its legacy on speculative fiction is massive. It is unlikely that the current genre of sci-fi horror would look the way it does today without Lovecraft’s vision.

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Works Cited

“At the Mountains of Madness,” Wikipedia, January 13, 2021.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness

Lovecraft, H. P. At the Mountains of Madness (Penguin English Library: London, 2018).

A wanderer advances through a desert—well, on a treadmill—to the synth-pop tune of “Alone in Kyoto” by the French band Air.

The performer sports a Bedouin-esque costume, an example of the vaguely Orientalist-meets-Mad Max theme of The Cortège, an utterly singular show currently presented on weekend evenings at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank, California.

The Cortège is a little hard to explain. Its name refers to a funeral procession, and the show’s marketing describes the show as a “festive funeral for our times.” Conceived by artist Jeff Hull, a pioneer of participatory experiences, as an ebullient expression of grief, the procession synthesizes a variety of styles that makes it feel oddly timeless.

Combining New Age, jazz and New Orleans-styled marching band music with contemporary street dance, the show’s visual language is equally stunning. Performers wear extravagant costumes that seem pulled from the wardrobe of a Dune movie against a backdrop of drone light shows, fog machines, animatronics, and Waterworld-esque scaffolding. The show follows the aforementioned wanderer through his life—as he finds love, is imprisoned, breaks free, and is eventually hunted own by an oppressive regime, before the titular Cortège honors his memory—featuring fuzzy Muppet-like creatures, a Santa Muerta figure, and Dune-esque mandarins.

This story is completely told in pantomime—and did I mention everyone in the audience, sitting on the grass or the grandstands, is wearing a headset? The show culminates in a silent disco where the audience joins in the procession, before being invited into a neo-Arabesque big tent to place a flower on the deceased and reflect on the experience over herbal honeybush tea. While dark, the tone of the story and performance, as LA Times critic Todd Martens wrote, is thoroughly jubilant. In the climax of the performance, the announcer reads from the names of recently deceased loved ones submitted by the attendees (though celebrities like Robert Redford also made the list).

I was dazzled by The Cortège, but what I found most fascinating about it was its incorporation of robotics. When the hero of the story is pursued by the villainous authorities, he is hunted down by soldiers and their robot dogs—whose “heads” are formed by screens broadcasting the images right in front of them. The quadrupedal robots are ominous at first, but in the show’s final movement—the silent disco involving the audience—the dogs become a source of joy, and audience members can dance “with” the robot dogs, accompanied by their human operators.

The Cortège’s robot dogs thus form an apt metaphor for humanity’s ambivalence to the rise of automation. On the one hand, robots and other automated machines represent a threat to humankind. On the other, they might be useful, and in The Cortège’s final act, they form a wellspring of jubilance.

The fact The Cortège debuted in Los Angeles County is even more telling, but not exactly surprising. Whereas Silicon Valley comes up with these technologies, Los Angeles is often the tech giants’ experimental proving ground. In LA, we have self-driving cars from Waymo and automated food delivery robots from Coco. We have a Tesla Diner (in which robots are involved), and it’s here, like Austin or San Francisco, that we see changes that will shape the rest of the world soon. As a friend from Cyprus told me when I tried to explain Waymos to him—“we’ll see all that stuff on the island in five to ten years.”

So, in that vein, I’d like to introduce The Usonian’s latest miniseries—Clanker City—an exploration of how automation is impacting urban life in Los Angeles. “Clanker” is a satirical derogatory term for robots that was first introduced in Star Wars, and recently the term has become an online meme.

Given that the sci-fi film Blade Runner anticipated Los Angeles would become a hub of robotics in the year 2019, it’s only fitting to explore the automated world of LA in 2025. Over the next few months, we’ll take a look at how automation is rubbing up against America’s most unusual, multipolar megalopolis.

Welcome to Clanker City. Hope you enjoy the ride.

This is the first post in a new Usonian miniseries— “Clanker City.” New posts will come out on about a monthly basis. Become a paid subscriber to support this initiative and our other feeds, plus receive one exclusive Usonian+ article per month. Thanks again, and cheers!

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This is the twentieth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Kirsten Bakis’ novel Lives of the Monster Dogs, a modern classic that combines elements of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau and throws them into the blender—before tossing the concoction into the Instant Pot.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

This is a book that should not work. There’s a reason Lives of Monster Dogs (LoMD) has been pretty much forgotten since its publication in 1997—it’s off-puttingly WEIRD. As Jeff VanderMeer notes in my edition’s introduction, this novel reimagines H. G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a freakish saga of what happens after the events of the Island of Dr. Moreau, after animals with genetically enhanced intelligence escape the laboratory and try to integrate within human society. The twist is that Bakis’ “monster dogs,” equipped with handy steampunk voiceboxes and mechanical humanoid hands, move to New York and build a castle in Manhattan. Having been raised in the remote polar community of Rankstadt—which possessed a 19th century Prussian culture—the dogs dress in a Victorian fashion and speak in arch, antiquated sentences. There’s a ticking clock, too, as the dogs are progressively losing their intelligence, foreshadowing future catastrophe. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot to talk about in regards to this novel—probably too much.

Today I’ll focus on the novel’s most flashy rhetorical flourish—the in-text opera Mops Hacker, which reveals the backstory of the monster dogs at a critical moment—or, actually, it reveals the backstory of the monster dogs as interpreted by the monster dogs, packaged as a propaganda entertainment.

There’s a note at the beginning of the embedded paratext Mops Hacker: The Opera which tells you all you need to know about the tone of LoMD: “Place: Rankstadt, an isolated town in the Canadian wilderness… Time: September 1999, but the culture resembles that of Prussia about 1882” (190).

Bakis expects a great deal of readers in this book. Not only does she hope we’ll go along with the idea of a 19th century Prussian mad scientist—a somewhat familiar archetype—who manipulates the genetic structures of dogs, but that we should accept that this scientist does this for the purpose of creating “perfect soldiers” in the mold of a campy proto-Nazi. Then we are supposed to swallow that this mad scientist successfully relocates his laboratory to the remote Canadian Arctic, where his followers continue on with his project for the next hundred years, retaining the same cultural mores despite the passage of time. Here, Bakis is playing on so many levels that she expects us to approach this “remix” of Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau not just on the level of camp (though there is that, of course), but also as a serious novel more generally. As Vandermeer explains in his introduction:

…hybrids tend to be misunderstood and often have trouble finding an audience or sympathetic reviewers. Because hybrids are composed of both new thought and old parts, they seem to exist, on an elemental level, in uneasy contrast…. And yet over time this seeming lack of harmony gathers its own kind of symphonic powers.

In that sense, I think it is a miracle that LoMD was ever published and received so well.

One of the most successful elements of Monster Dogs is the aforementioned opera script, which comes at a climactic point in the story. The paratext is particularly interesting because not only does it offer exposition—the secret to the final mystery of the dogs’ revolution—but it also offers a mediated message. The opera is propaganda for the dogs, a literary interpretation of historical events that no one but the dogs themselves can verify. So while it offers an answer, it doesn’t point to a definitive one, and there is certainly some ambiguity in the telling.

One of the most fascinating ways Bakis uses the opera script is how it both celebrates and condemns its protagonist, Mops Hacker, as a revolutionary savior driven by madness, a psychopathic outcast who is also something of an “incel” (unrequitedly pining for the pivotal female dog character Lydia). In the opera, at least, Mops is demonstrably monstrous in character before he attacks, even compared with his compatriot monster dogs:

MOPS (Stirring but not waking). Cursed master, this morning I won’t answer you./But if only once I would answer you properly, with a sword!/Oh, what joy!/What joy to split his ugly head/And leave him lying there for dead,/To burn his house and all that’s in it,/To stand up finally to fight, and win it!/Oh, how I long to kill him (194).

To name an antihero as murderous within the text of the play is a choice, either reflective of how the dog-authors want to distance themselves from their genocidal liberator, or reflective of the “true Mops.” Either way, it is not the heroic protagonist we might expect in a traditional opera or play, as usually in this sort of tragedy, we might expect someone with potentially good qualities to eventually turn evil, rather than remain statically bloodthirsty the entire story.

Despite this deviation from convention, aspects of the opera seem to align with Shakespearean tropes. Just as Mops is about to kill himself, he sees the ghost of Augustus Rank, his creator (in the same way that Hamlet ambiguously “sees” the ghost of his father):

A golden cloud of smoke appears. In the center of it is AUGUSTUS RANK.

RANK. My son, stop.

MOPS falls to the ground in amazement.

MOPS. Augustus Rank! You have returned.

RANK. You call me master,/You alone among the dogs/Reject the feeble man who owns you/And long to serve me. (Bakis 196)

Notably, the opera is consistent with the previously-seen excerpts of Rank’s journals, which allude to Rank’s gold-tinged visions, such as after Rank murdered his romantic rival Vittorio:

Third, I saw a flash of light so brilliant that it blinded me for a moment, the same moment that the blood began to spurt out of Vittorio’s neck. I then saw that the luminescence was of a golden color, but brighter than anything I had ever seen, and it was only thanks to my newfound strength that it did not sear and permanently damage my eyes. For my body is stronger, too, since my enlightenment. (95)

Bakis’ interlocking narratives achieve some impressive synergies. Throughout the novel, the dogs are suggested to have inherited Rank’s soul, and that their pathologies might also be a result of Rank’s psychoses, which have passed along to his “descendants.” So when the dog opera references elements previously featured in “historical sources” also excerpted in the novel, it adds layers of complexity and verisimilitude that continue to build out this universe.

Adding additional complexity to the opera is the very Greek tragedy-type of dialogue between Lydia and Mops in the final sequence (which, naturally might also remind the reader of Star Wars):

MOPS. Lydia, snow-white Lydia, how beautiful you are!/For years I’ve desired you./Lydia, how I long to make you mine./The time has come./We’ve won./Together we can rule, we two, as one,/The victorious, free Nation of Dogs.

LYDIA. Never, Mops. (Bakis 214)

It seems very Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker for Mops to ask Lydia to join him and rule over the dogs—which goes without saying this exchange is unbelievably campy! It is an opera, however, a genre not given to subtlety. Bakis’ text-within-a-text can be ridiculous without notice because the premise of the entire novel is so absurd that this seems familiar enough to keep us going. In typical overwrought opera fashion, Lydia stabs Mops and ends the revolution, but only after all the humans in Rankstadt are killed.

And finally, one last point on the Monster Dogs. After the opera concludes, the book’s primary human narrator, Cleo, asks Lydia if the opera was factually accurate:

“And was that how it happened?” I asked Lydia, one evening after the opera… “Yes, more or less,” Lydia said. (219)

So while Bakis has sowed doubts about the opera’s accuracy, she also wants us to rely on the opera as the definitive origin story for the dogs in the book. Or, at least—that Lydia wants Cleo to think of her as the hero who killed Mops and limited the damage of the dog revolution.

Bakis’ paratexts are so complex, they are tour-de-forces when it comes to the very idea of paratexts.

However, it still seems curious as to why, then, did Bakis go to the trouble of writing an opera for the monster dogs? To my mind, the narrative decision represents the sheer experimentation of the book and Bakis’ commitment to making her book as hybrid a text as possible. I think this contributes to both the cult success and popular failure of LoMD.

As Vandermeer suggested, though the hybridization of genres makes LoMD exciting, the remixing can also turn people off, and makes LoMD lose its own identity as a footnote to the more famous works which have inspired it.

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Works Cited

Bakis, Kirsten. Lives of the Monster Dogs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1997).

NORTH BEND, WASHINGTON— The dense pines sparkled in the summer sun. We weren’t more than an hour from metropolitan Seattle, but North Bend and its sister town of Snoqualmie felt like places apart.

It was probably these qualities that led Twin Peaks co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost to situate most of their landmark television series here. A panoramic picture of a small town riven apart by the death of Homecoming queen Laura Palmer, to simply call Twin Peaks a “murder mystery” does a disservice to its unique blend of melodrama, offbeat humor, surreal images, and horror. In its scale of ambition, it laid the groundwork for the prestige TV era—long narrative arcs, huge casts, varied geography—an ambition that doomed its initial run, but made its eventual patchwork of stories even more compelling: a network TV series, a prequel film, and a Showtime revival, all richer as viewing experiences in the streaming age.

For me, Twin Peaks encapsulated why I got into writing in the first place. With its sharp turns between wry humor and sublime horror, it situated melodramatic story steeped in mystery, all suffused with a sheen of neo-noir and Lynchian Americana. It’s hard for me to get invested in story without intrigue, without hope and dread, but Twin Peaks has all of these elements—storytelling pieces I’ve tried to incorporate in my own narrative writing, fiction or otherwise.

So when a friend of mine invited me to join his group running a half-marathon in the North Bend area, I jumped at the chance to see the filming locations for myself.

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