The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018

by Sheila Heti

  FW: Well, the master is everyone else, whites and their junior partners, which in my book are colored immigrants. It’s just that colored immigrants exist in an intra-human status of degradation in relation to white people. They are degraded as humans, but they still exist par-adigmatically in that position of the human. So yes, I am saying that. Now part of the reason is that one of the things that we are not doing is talking about the different ways in which different Black people live their existence as slaves. I’m willing to do that, but what’s interesting to me is the kind of anxiety that this theory elicits from people other than yourself. I mean this is the calmest conversation that I’ve had on this subject [laughter]. You could say to someone that you are a professor at UC Berkeley and there is a person in a sweatshop on the other side of the Rio Grande. This person in the sweatshop is working sixteen hours a day, cannot go to the bathroom, dies on the job from lack of medical benefits . . . and you are a kind of labor aristocrat. And they could say, “Okay, well that’s interesting.” And you could say to that person, “But if you read the work of Antonio Negri, the Italian communist, you come to understand that even though you live your life as a proletarian differently than a sweatshop laborer, you both stand in relation to capital in this same way, at the level of structural, paradigmatic arrangement.” That person would say, “Oh yeah! I get that, I get that.” You say to someone that all Blacks are slaves and that we’re going to change the definition of slavery because the other things are not definitions, they are actually anecdotes, and your teacher in third grade told you that you don’t use an anecdote to define something. And that person says, “Oh wait a minute, I know a person who’s richer than me and also Black and they live in the Tenderloin . . .” and it just goes off to the races. It’s a symptomatic response primarily because they understand that what Black people suffer is real and comprehensive but there is actually no prescriptive, rhetorical gesture which could actually write a sentence about how to redress that. Most Americans, most people in the world, are not willing to engage in a paradigm of oppression that does not offer some type of way out. But that is what we live with as Black people every day.

  CSS: Let me ask you a personal question, which you can of course refuse to answer. So your wife is white; given what you were telling me about the position of Blacks, what’s your sense of whether she could truly ever understand your consciousness, your positioning within society? And if she can’t, then what are the prospects of a relationship that could reach as deeply as, for example, two Black people or two white people together could?

  FW: Well, she can’t. She tries, but what’s interesting and important is that I would never put my marriage out there as a kind of example of what people could aspire to. As a kind of shorthand, I call her my wife and she calls me her husband. But the reality is that I’m her slave. And that doesn’t change because we have sentimental—as I would say, contrapuntal—emotions to the contrary. In fact, oftentimes those contrapuntal emotions are mechanisms or means of disavowing the true nature of the relation. Now, I will give her a lot of props for the past eight years that she has actually inculcated this logic. She did her best at that Santa Cruz conference I talked about to tell the white people in that room, “We’re not here to think about how we think about ourselves, we’re here to think about our complicity as whites with policing. Not as women, not as gays, not Armenians, not as Jews, but as white.” On the other hand, if you read my book Incognegro, you’ll see that in the first eight years, there was nothing but resistance to that. So that resistance is as traumatizing as the second eight years are regenerative and I will say that the first eight years are what Black people should take away from that. There’s no way in hell we should have to go through the kind of resistance that white people and non-Black people have to this particular logic because they know it’s the truth. They know their own anxieties about the question, Where is Blackness?, but they can’t approach it because what it would mean is a kind of confrontation with people who are intimate to them that they don’t know they could withstand. And so the real question is, Will these people do all they can to fall into the abyss of nonexistence?, not about how they will perform as partial allies while keeping their cultural presence.

  CSS: Why would a Black person, why would you, choose intentionally, consciously, to enter into a life relationship in which you perceive yourself as the figure of the slave?

  FW: I don’t think it’s a fair question because the question implies that, knowing what I know, I can actually change my life in an essential way. The question actually takes us away from the problem that I’ve outlined and actually puts the responsibility of correcting the situation on me when actually it should be on you.

  CSS: I hear that, and I think that prompts me to ask the final thing I want to bring up with you, which is regarding how we hear a lot about groups and people who are victims. There is this victimhood frame and so these people have been victimized by, let’s say, another group of people and then the critique is that, by focusing on that, by concentrating on that, you then deflect attention away from their subjectivity, from their agency, from what they can do about their circumstance. Are you concerned that the master/slave relation, which is positioning Blacks as foremost a victim, in my mind, and then focusing only or mainly on a group status as victim, tends to deny—and we’re speaking here now about Blacks—the kind of agency that, I think you would admit, they have at least some semblance of, and maybe some more than others based on their position in society?

  FW: I don’t agree with that and we don’t have the time to actually get into this, but my book Red, White and Black is a critique of agency as a generic category. What I’m saying is that, okay, I’m not Elijah Muhammad, I don’t believe that the white man is the devil and that this is all divined by god. I do believe that there is a way out. But I believe that the way out is a kind of violence so magnificent and so comprehensive that it scares the hell out of even radical revolutionaries. So, in other words, the trajectory of violence that Black slave revolts suggest, whether it be in the 21st century or the 19th century, is a violence against the generic categories of life, agency being one of them. That’s what I meant by an epistemological catastrophe. Marx posits an epistemological crisis, which is to say moving from one system of human arrangements and relations to another system of human relations and arrangements. What Black people embody is the potential for a catastrophe of human arrangements writ large. I think that there have been moments—the Black Liberation Army in the 1970s and 1980s is a prime example—of how the political violence of the Black Liberation Army far outpaced the anti-capitalist and internationalist discourse that it had and that’s what scares people; and as Saidiya Hartman says, “A Black revolution makes everyone freer than they actually want to be.” A Marxist revolution blows the lid off of economic relations; a feminist revolution blows the lid off patriarchal relations; a Black revolution blows the lid off the unconscious and relations writ large.

  CSS: I have to ask you: When you talk about this violence, in maybe the ideal situation of a Black revolution, what are we talking about concretely? Who or what is the violence directed against? Are we talking about literally the elimination of the master threat physically?

  FW: Well, the short answer is that’s for me to know and for you to find out [laughter]. And the long answer is that as a professor I’m uniquely unqualified to actually make that answer. I rely on providing analysis and then getting those marching orders from people in the streets.

  ANDREW LELAND, CHRIS WARE, DANIEL CLOWES, AND ANDERS NILSEN

  ■

  A Tribute to Alvin Buenaventura

  FROM The Believer

  For the last five years, the editor and publisher Alvin Buenaventura curated a recurring two-page column for this magazine. Called, simply, “Comics” (scare quotes included), it was often the funniest, strangest, and certainly the most disgusting and most beautiful two pages in any given issue. It was always the first spread I looked at when the
new issue came back from the printer. When we learned that Alvin, only forty years old, had suddenly passed away in February of 2016, we asked for remembrances from his stable of regular contributors to the “Comics” pages as well as from his collaborators in his other often marvelously oversize and otherwise uncompromising projects. This issue has endured a long delay, but it’s the first to go to press since Alvin’s passing, and looking back through these tributes, I am reminded of Alvin’s mysterious—and sometimes mystifying—generosity and genius.

  —Andrew Leland

  Alvin Buenaventura was the most important person in my life outside of my immediate family. He was, to me, among many other things, an art representative, a production assistant, an archivist, a monographer, a tireless advocate and champion, a media representative, a technical adviser, a troubleshooter; but far beyond that, he was my dear and beloved friend, a daily, constant, essential presence in my life.

  I said this to anybody who asked about the mysterious Alvin: he was inexplicable, the most singular human being I’ve ever met. There’s nobody else in the world even remotely like him. He can’t ever be replaced in any way. He was born into a nondescript, suburban So. Cal. army-brat childhood that could in no way have indicated his future, magically gifted with what can be described only as a perfect eye. It was as apparent in the stuff he found at flea markets and hung on his bathroom wall as in the entirety of his publishing empire, a remarkable series of choices in which there was not a single artistic misstep among the many logistic, personal, and financial ones. All of it had a certain something that often only he could see at first, but once he saw it, you saw it, too. Just two weeks before his death, he and I sat talking on the phone, staring at the listings in an online illustration art auction. We decided to go through and pick our favorite pieces. I went for some obvious stuff, big names like Charles Addams and Heinrich Kley, but Alvin’s number one pick was a weird, moody painting of a guy in a cave by an unknown mid-level ’50s illustrator. I had completely blipped over it, but he was 100 percent right—it was the best thing in that auction. That painting is now in the mail, headed toward his empty house.

  Alvin was a complicated man. He was as kindhearted and generous a person as I’ve ever met, but he also held deep, complex, immutable grudges. He had what seemed to be a debilitating shyness, barely speaking above an inaudible mumble (I used to pretend I’d heard what he said—with very mixed results—so I didn’t have to keep saying What? like an old man all the time), but he was weirdly comfortable around famous artists, difficult lunatics, celebrities, assholes. He felt a parental protectiveness toward his artists to the extent that this soft-spoken, nonaggressive Buddhist once bought a plane ticket to LA to beat up a plagiarist on my behalf before I talked him out of it. He suffered terribly from depression and had gone through some bad spells in the fifteen years I’d known him, but had always managed to get himself back on track. This time was different—he had been in increasing and agonizing pain from an autoimmune disorder and was feeling especially hopeless. All of his close friends and loved ones—and there were many—would have given anything to make him feel better, and we all will wonder what more we could have done, while recognizing that we could never really understand his anguish.

  He was as loyal a friend and advocate as I’ll ever have. He was the first person to read my books, often by many months, and his generous, idiosyncratic, ramblingly unpunctuated comments are the ones I’ll most treasure. I hope to extend a similar loyalty to him in his passing, to uphold his memory, and to be forever inspired by his beautiful and tragic human spirit.

  —Daniel Clowes

  PS: I had intended to post this to my own website, but I just learned that Alvin carried all my social media passwords to his grave.

  Alvin was the one comic-book publisher who was more like a cartoonist than a publisher: shy, riddled by self-doubt and recurring depression, he privately suffered despite always trying to bring some cheer into other people’s lives. He also brought more interesting, experimental, and unusual artists to the eyes of new readers, and changed more cartoonists’ lives for the better than most, if not all, of his contemporaries.

  I don’t know of any experimental cartoonist of my generation who didn’t at some point receive an unannounced package of books and valuable items from Alvin only because he thought we might like it, the parcel arriving with a note dismissively describing its contents as just “cleaning house” or “managing his collection” even though the stuff it contained was rare and, one knew, obtained at great effort and cost; frequently, the notes would go on with detailed, heartening encouragement about one’s recent work (which in my own case I greatly treasured, as I have my own tanglings with self-doubt). That he could not, however, always manage his physiological difficulties and his own inner turmoil is now our great loss.

  I first met Alvin in the 1990s, when he and his then wife, Carleen, used to take annual cross-country trips across the United States, stopping at various cartoonists’ homes to visit and, occasionally, and as they could afford it, buy original artwork. Alvin was one of the very earliest such “drop-ins” (and contributors to my monthly rent) that I can recall. He’d always phone days in advance to make sure he wasn’t intruding, and his voice over the telephone was barely audible, like the pope’s: quiet, midrange, apologetic, all lowercase—“hi, chris, this is alvin”—a timidity that never changed in all the years I knew him despite our long-cemented friendship. In fact, in the years before caller ID, if I picked up the phone and couldn’t make out what was being said, nine times out of ten I knew it wasn’t a bad connection but Alvin.

  The weird part was that after a few minutes his volume and tone could change considerably, rising to a hearty guffaw if the right quip or bit of gossip was dished up. For all of his pathological shyness, he seemed to be able to get along with anyone after finding the right connection point. And connect he did; he befriended and published dozens of the best cartoonists of our time, both from my generation and the one following, sometimes acting as benefactor to them in ways that were incalculably generous. Alvin curated the comics for Arthur and this very magazine with a divided largesse that seemed to express a frustration that space couldn’t be as infinitely divided as time, divvying up a double-page spread into slots that more often than not made the standard newspaper daily strip appear generous. Clearly, he wanted to give as many cartoonists as possible the exposure he felt they all deserved.

  As we all got to know him, he hinted that he suffered from maladies that were as physiologically altering as they were psychologically debilitating, and he’d adjust his exercise or dietary regimen to try to deal with them. In the months or years that passed between our seeing each other, he could physically transform, sometimes wildly: at one point a soft, almost unfocused teddy bear, at another a surprisingly buff, heroic-looking fellow, his mop of black hair veering between tousled and shaved clean. Though he always hid behind those thick, round black glasses and his gentle, generally hesitant voice, he was always—perhaps despite his wishes to the contrary—Alvin.

  That he leaves behind a newly resuscitated publishing business is a conundrum that my friend and Alvin’s closest friend, Dan Clowes, might cite as one of the many contradictions that made up “the Alvin Factor.” Lately, things were definitely on the upswing for him; ever the irrepressible collector, he’d just bought more comic artwork and was in the midst of planning a book tour for Dan and had published Tim Hensley’s latest fine work, along with arranging other possible art exhibitions and books. My own emails with him had been only a day or two before he died, and two large boxes from him had appeared on my porch, which I hadn’t had time to open before Dan called me with the horrible news.

  The boxes, filled with items he’d known I’d like, from Japanese comic collectibles to pristine framed original Little Nemo and Gasoline Alley pages to his most recent publishing efforts, were accompanied by an unassuming note addressed to “Mr. Ware” (it was always to “Mr. Ware”), wishing me the
best and hoping that I was well. When he wrote the words—which he sent regular Priority Mail—he would’ve had only six days to live.

  He was an ally, a kindred spirit, and a benefactor to us all. And, Alvin, though I know you’ll never hear me now: you were a good person, a generous person, and you will be greatly missed, my friend.

  —Chris Ware

  I first met Alvin Buenaventura at APE in San Francisco in maybe 2003. I remember there being some buzz about this guy who was making letterpress prints of some of my friends’ work, but also with some famous people like Dan Clowes and Chris Ware. It felt very mysterious and cool. At some point I went over to his table and found an extremely quiet, humble guy who spoke almost in a whisper, and a very gregarious and friendly woman, all smiles—his wife at the time, Carleen. They acted as if we had all been friends for years. They were both unassuming and welcoming.

  When he did eventually invite me to do a print, it was one of a very few moments in my life that felt like I’d been included in some elite, secret club. That feeling had nothing to do with any promise of money—there basically wasn’t any—or of notoriety. It was because it was very clear that this person had extremely good, very particular taste—much better and more broad than mine, for example—and his vision of what was worth his time now included something of mine. His remarkable taste and enthusiasm for art were themes for me in hanging out with Alvin, in a couple of ways. I was repeatedly struck by the clarity of his vision. I remember him showing me some Le Dernier Cri books at his house in Oakland once, and being struck by how sure he was of his opinions and enthusiasms about them. I was busily trying to sort out being overwhelmed visually, slightly grossed out, fascinated, jealous, and wanting to seem cool and to like the right things. Encounters with other artists’ work often feel compromised in this way: it can occasionally be difficult to set aside my own biases, jealousies, and artistic concerns and see another’s work on its own terms. Alvin was one of those rare people whose taste felt immediate, singularly uncomplicated, and clear. It was at once rigorous and generous. It was inspiring to me, and a challenge. It made him a very good publisher, but it also meant that going to his house was like entering a little museum crossed with an incredibly well-curated yard sale, full of treasures. Going to his table at a show promised a lot of new and very compelling work. I always spent too much money at his table, and always wished I could spend a bit more. If all he’d done for me was introduce me to the work of Helge Reumann and Lisa Hanawalt, I’d owe him a debt.