The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 16: Laura Poitras, David Bowie’s Last Band, and the Poet Brenda Shaughnessy

Episode Date: February 5, 2016

The Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras (“Citizenfour”) talks to David Remnick about her first solo museum exhibition, “Astro Noise,” which channels her investigations of government surveillance into immersive installation art. A group of jazz musicians recall how David Bowie found them in a hole-in-the-wall club and enlisted them to create “Blackstar.” And the poet Brenda Shaughnessy reads Hilton Als a poem about living in a loft full of lesbians, back when New Yorkers could still afford to smoke. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

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Thanks for joining us on the New Yorker Radio. filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitris is arguably the fiercest and most vivid chronicler and critic of the war on terror. When Edward Snowden copied countless NSA files about surveillance and he wanted to leak them to the press, he reached out to Laura Poitris. The stories that followed led to a Pulitzer Prize that Poitra shared with journalists at The Guardian and the Washington Post and her documentary film about Snowden, Citizen Four, won an Academy Award. But her newest project is quite a different thing. It's a museum exhibit installed in a series of mostly dark spaces at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It uses video and images, classified government documents, and sound

to tell a story about post-9-11 America and the War on Terror. But it's not at all what you'd think of as a documentary. I mean, all my work is about trying to use visual vocabulary to understand the world that we live in and to say something about it. I mean, as an artist, just to express. Like a writer expresses through words, I express through images.

And this is a way to work in a bit more abstract way. Working with images, working more abstractly, I think can get at different types of connecting to people and emotions. The exhibit is called Astro Noise, which was Edward Snowden's name for one of the encrypted NSA files he shared with her more than two years ago.

I visited Laura Poitris at the Whitney Museum as she and curator Jay Sanders were supervising the finishing touches. So this piece has a screen that hangs in the center and we're projecting on both sides and this is material that I filmed at Ground Zero right after the attack. I'll say, can you see?

Laura, in a sense, there's a narrative here. Right, so there's a double-sided projection and both images on both side were recorded in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. One side I filmed, which I went down to Ground Zero and filmed people gathering there. And on the other side

is a military interrogation that was conducted in November 2001. And so you enter, you see one image and then there's a screen hanging in the middle of the room and then the other image is on the other side. And you went down to Ground Zero in the same spirit as any writer or artists would go just to pay witness.

had nothing political in mind or even artistic in mind, I was assuming to, at that moment. It's just what you do. I definitely had something artistic, like I was drawn to document, but the images are not actually of the World Trade Center site. There are actually people looking at it. So it's an extended reaction shot. It's just showing faces. And that was a way to kind of capture something that's impossible to capture through looking at the faces. How do you mean?

I mean, representations, you know, at some point fail. You can't, you know, you can't comprehend that kind of loss or that kind of tragedy. It's actually very hard to represent. And you need other ways to get in. And so by looking in the other direction, by looking at people who are trying to process and trying to make sense of what had happened, and this was in the real immediate aftermath. This was before we started the war in Afghanistan. So this was in the really initial weeks.

And so I think you learn a lot from these faces. I'm really interested in the faces trying to comprehend something that's incomprehensible. We walk into a room and projected on the ceiling is a night sky. And if you know anything about the architecture of the world, you immediately see these buildings and it's pretty clearly Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. Tell me about when this was shot. And you meant to, I think really lie on your back.

and there's a kind of platform and you look up into the sky and there's rather ominous music that goes with it but it's not overbearing by any stretch of the imagination and you're meant to be in this sky almost and feel that you're right there.

The idea being to imagine living in places in the world where there are drones flying overhead and drones that potentially could kill you and it's not just filmed in Yemen we filmed in Yemen in Somalia and Pakistan and in the United States. We filmed at Creech Air Force Base where they test drones.

So there are drone images that come in at the end of the film before it loops around. What we're hearing from the night sky of Yemen and elsewhere around the world where drones play an enormous role, what's coming into our ears? What are the various parts of the sound design? So this is a collaboration. So, I mean, there are many pieces in the show that I've made in collaboration with other people. And so this is a collaboration with a sound designer, Jeff Bryant. And what he's doing is, so it never repeats itself.

There's cross-fading sounds of drones that are being cross-faded and being your inner room that's in a cube. And it's a 3D soundscape. And so we have eight different speakers. And both the audios are constantly being randomly, the fades are randomly. the fades are randomized and then the movement of the drones is being randomized. There are certain things that are locked

that are queued to picture and that's the sound of the pilots and the sound of some ambient noise that's synced to picture. So the idea is being sort of like an organic piece that's constantly changing. That's never the same. If you were to go in at any time of the day

you would never hear the same thing. The images would repeat but you'd never hear the same thing. So Citizen IV in a way is a complex but very simple narrative. It's you're contacted by Ed Snowden. You make your way to Hong Kong. You're in this incredibly claustrophobic hotel room. He's literally in bed, like Collette or something, and he's telling you his story, and he's guiding you through endless documents, and he's very

concerned about the way this will come out, and it unfolds, and then we see it all come out. That's the through line. Those are the materials. That's the visual material, the audio material. Here you're working with classified documents as your paints, as your video, as your artistic material. Tell us a little bit about that. Is the first time that classified documents have been used as materials of art? It isn't the first time, but it is an unusual set of circumstances that I work both journalism and visual art. And so after meeting Snowden and Hong Kong, I went back to. to Berlin and really felt an obligation that I had to work on news reporting, that this was

newsworthy information and that I had an obligation to report. But I really consider myself a visual storyteller, a visual filmmaker, and a visual journalist. And so when we were thinking about the show, I shifted my approach to looking at the materials and at the archive from into more of a visual perspective. And that's how a lot of these, some of the pieces in the show have emerged. So there's one piece that's called anarchist, which My colleagues, Henrik Maltke and Cora Courier at The Intercept just reported on, and it's looking at a program where GCHQ hacks into the drone feeds. The British intelligence agency.

Yeah, and is hacking into different signals, including drone feeds, Israeli drone feeds. But what's interesting about that for me is that it's a very visual images. So you see different things. You see signals that are being intercept. and processed and decrypted and decrypted by intelligence agencies. And in some cases, you're seeing the end result of a decryption. So you'll see an actual, for instance, a drone, an Israeli drone. And so it was a different perspective of how to approach the archive

to get at questions of mass surveillance and a hidden state. Are you concerned about aestheticizing the hard? or journalism or whatever it is you're trying to get at. In other words, we're not looking at a Vermeer painting here. We're not looking even at a video landscape that's meant to be beautiful as such. We're meant to be doing what you hope is happening. Yeah, I feel like that's the opposite.

I think it's the opposite. I mean, I hope it's the opposite, because what I'm trying to do is make people not numb to information. So to reach people in a different type of a way to actually move them more and not to gloss over to aestheticize. It's actually how do you get at different types of content,

how do you get at issues of war, of torture? We walk into the next room, and there's a series of, this is a much larger, narrower room, there are a series of slits, as if you're looking through a prison door into someone's cell, and we see someone testifying. Tell us about the person testifying. So there's an interview with Marat Kurnas, who was a prisoner in Kandahar in Guantanamo, and was tortured.

And he's talking about being tortured in Kandahar. So it was an interview that I filmed with him after he was released from Guantanamo. And then underneath that, there are drawings of, I don't know, did you look underneath? Yeah, sure. Okay. Good. And so those are confinement boxes. and a water board.

Like a pencil sketch. Yeah, that those are drafted by a former prisoner. Yes. So one of the things that I found obscure that I couldn't quite tell what it was, again, we're looking through into this, as if through a glass darkly, into the glimpses of the deep state, as you're putting it, of cement being spread, as if to create a floor or a wall.

What's happening there? You know what, I'm not going to translate everything, you know, just in terms of the work. But that image doesn't pay off. I don't know whether there's cells being created or prison or the road to Valhalla. I just don't know. That seems like a payoff to me. Fair enough. Fear enough. In May 2004, I traveled to Baghdad to make a film about the U.S. occupation of Iraq. At a certain point in the exhibition, your voice is heard. After returning to the United States, I was placed on a government watch list and detained and searched every time I crossed the U.S. border. It took me 10 years to find out why. In 2015, I filed a lawsuit against the government

to obtain my files. The documents reveal I was the target of a classified national security investigation conducted by the FBI and undisclosed intelligence agencies. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, so I filed a FOIA lawsuit with the help of EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, obtain my FBI files. And in October, I started getting redacted files back. And the FOIA case is ongoing, so I haven't received everything. So, but there is several that I'm publishing, are including as part of the exhibition. And yeah, they're actually, for me, it was pretty shocking to see the extent to which, I mean, it's pretty shocking to see that there was a grand jury. And this in particular is about your experience as a,

filmmaker in Iraq. Well, it's actually, the point of the piece, so what I've done in the piece is that I'm showing eight minutes of unedited footage. And that unedited footage is shown, you know, continuously on a monitor. And then it presents these FBI documents that presents a certain narrative. And what I'm trying to do with this piece is present information that the government actually never asked to see. I mean, if you look at these documents, they make a lot of assumptions of what it means to be on a roof. And it seems that I'm just filming kids and a family on a roof. And so

I'm bringing forward that footage in juxtaposition with these FBI files. There are aspects of the exhibition that dramatize in

one's own experience of going through the exhibition of the surveillance state, as if you're again intent on making sure that we don't get too comfortable with this, that we're walking through a surveillance state all the time. Yeah. That's part of the point, very much being driven home.

And at the end, toward the end of the exhibition, we reach a point. There's a screen, and from what I can tell, again, I'm not very sophisticated in this, it seems to be our phones are being read by something. It's showing you what your phone is broadcasting, what your phone is looking for. What networks is trying to connect. Yeah, yeah. And the idea, and it goes back to your question at the beginning, like, why do I do work in museum or what's the point of it? It's actually to make you think about it in a different kind of a way, to trigger something else.

So to, you know, to sort of show the viewer that actually they're broadcasting something that reveals, you know, a lot about them. And to do that in a way that's not just, you know, using text to say, we know their surveillance or certain things we know, but just how do you get at issues different kind of way. I can't help asking you, maybe you want to answer. We're meeting on the morning after the Iowa caucuses. Real politics are taking place at a National 11.

You're shaking your head no already and you're shrugging. The work you've done, the work you continue to do has had an enormous effect, and yet I haven't heard a single presidential debate, Republican, Democratic or otherwise, that has encountered any of these issues.

head on. What hope do you have politically for the work that you're concerned about, for the issues that you're concerned about? I mean, the hope that you have. I mean, so I lived in Berlin, and that's a country with a very dark history. And it happens to currently be a country that is very protective of privacy because of its history. And so that's, you know, we create the political landscape in which we live

and we can change that landscape. Laura, thank you. Thanks. Laura Poitris is the director of Citizen Four, the documentary about Edward Snowden. Her new exhibition is called Astro Noise, and it just opened, at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

These days, to be a jazz musician means more often than not, accepting a life of artistic integrity and public neglect. So how do you go from playing in little jazz clubs to being on the number one record in the United States? The story of David Bowie's last band. That's in just a moment on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. One of the many reasons David Bowie has been mourned and celebrated so intensely in the week since his death was his credibility as an older pop star. The man could have kicked back in about 1980 and kept coming out to big stadiums full of people to play the old hits. But in his 40s and 50s, even in his 60s, Bowie kept pushing, changing things up and finding new. ways to present his music. At the very end of his life, he co-wrote Lazarus, a musical theater work that just ran in New York, and he enlisted a brand new band to shape his final record, Black Star. Those musicians were four jazz guys who'd been living their musical lives almost entirely

outside of the limelight, the Donnie McCaslin group. Sarah Larson went to talk with McCaslin in the band. And when she arrived, they were setting up at a little hole-in-the-wall joint where Bowie came to first hear them in 2014. Thanks for doing this, guys. So we're in the 55 bar right now, which is a little space with Christmas lights and pictures of jazz musicians on the walls. And you guys have been playing here a lot.

Can you talk about your relationship with this place? Yeah, I think we've all played here for many years. And for me, it started. I moved to New York about 25 years ago. And so I've had this longstanding monthly gig here. So it's a really great place for us to just come and try things. Yeah. So one night you were playing and David Bowie walked in.

Yeah, I mean, that's true. And what happened was he, at that time, he was writing with an incredible composer and arranger, Maria Schneider. They were writing Sue together. It was working with him. I guess she played him a track off one of our records called Casting for Gravity. And then she suggested to him that he record with us. So it was during that period the summer of 2014 where Maria brought David down here to hear us play. Do you remember what you were playing?

Well, we were playing a lot of the music that is on Fast Future. So we would have played no eyes by a guy whose stage name is BAS. Stage name is what? Baths. Baths. Like the parole of bath. Like taking a bath? It's a good name.

Do you remember what that was like? Well, I think these guys will know. I don't think I told them that he was coming. Because it made me a little nervous. And I tried not to think about it, frankly. And I tried not to look. Frankly, I tried to stay in the music. But I did look up.

And they were sitting right in front. And I think he was very, you know, he just... So like five feet away then. Yeah, he blended right in and I think he had a knit cap on. And I glanced over once or something and then just try to focus on the music. Do you guys remember when he came in? I remember I saw Maria and then... Oh, so the guy next to Maria is David Bowie.

It was pretty... I mean, he really, even, you know, in the recording sessions too, he did have this ability to blend in and be so normal. I don't know if anybody knew he was here. We had a similar experience. He came to hear us at the Jazz Standard after the sessions for Black Star. It wasn't until after he left.

There was these rumors. Wait, David Bowie was here? I didn't even know. Even the waitress who served him, you know. Pretty cool. The waitress was like, there's this guy at Table 31 that looks like an old David Bowie.

That was his disguise. We have to talk now. That was really incredible. I just feel like I was on some crazy journey that you were all on. Did you talk to him after that night that he came here? Did you talk to him at all? Or did he just kind of come in and go out? They left.

We didn't talk to him. Yeah. But it was shortly thereafter. like it could have been later that night or the next night that I got an email from him. And he sent me an MP3 of a demo track that he had made and asked if I wanted to record with him. And you hit reply. I think I sat there in the stunned silence for a while. No, it was just, it was so exciting.

You know, and the track that he sent was Tizzy Pity. She's a whore. And the version he sent ended up being the B-side to sue. Oh, right, yeah. And then we re-recorded that song in the studio as part of Black Star. But the original version, David made it home. And so it's him playing saxophone and him playing all the instruments. And that's the first thing he sent me.

I interviewed Henry Hay last month. I talked to him about Lazarus. And he described a similar process where David would send him a demo. and then they would get together and then more spontaneity and stuff would happen there. But I like the idea of being able to have both the sort of individual intense focus and the collaborative vibe. Yeah, that's a similar dynamic. By the time we got to the first recording session in January,

I had maybe seven songs, demos that he'd sent. In my case, you know, I was thinking a lot about how I could orchestrate the horns with the different woodwind instruments I play. And then we got together. And then we went out there and we started practicing and he was singing. And, you know, immediately, Jason started playing something. And he said, oh, you know, I like that.

And so it was also very creative in the moment in terms of an intro to a song, like the intro to Lazarus, for example, was something that happened in the studio where we were, Tim was playing something or, you know, just sort of spontaneously happened. What do you think he was looking for, by bringing you in to work with him.

I know that Tony and David had talked about making a jazz recording of some sort, right? Jazz is a pretty umbrella term, especially right now. Yeah, Tony Visconti. Yeah. And what we're doing is, you know, exploring this territory of electronica music. You know, we're not playing straight ahead jazz. Right, yeah. Although we come from that.

And I think the energy that we play with, I think was appealing to him. Maybe a better way I could describe that, Sarah, as I remember the first day in the studio. And I think even prior to that in an email correspondence, he said something like, Donnie, I don't know what's going to happen with this. I don't know where this is going to go, but let's have fun. But I think you'd mentioned before that you'd heard some jazz influences on some of his earlier music, right? Yeah. Tony talked about that in an interview that we did together and was saying that in a lot of David's earlier

music, Tony felt that harmonic jazz influence was a little more hidden, but then on this, it's out there in the open more. And I remember, there's this particular song that we recorded that didn't make the record. And it had a lot of these chords that had minor ninth intervals in them, or half steps next to each other, or, you know, the tritone in there. So really, in the jazz lingo, we'd say crunchy chords. You know, crunch chords that have a lot of grit and tension and this song was just laden with it. You know, I remember as I was trying to transcribe it, I was just like over and it like,

what is that voicing? You know, and over trying to find it and stuff. And for me, that was a really clear example. I'm now realizing it's such a coherent sounding album. You would hear it and you'd assume these people had been playing together forever, you know? Yeah, what that is to me is our relationship together, the way we play together and the different combinations we've played in for years.

and then again as improvisers, us looking for that magic in the moment and how we play off each other. And then he steps in and the frame are these wonderful songs that he's written. But he's also interacting with us while we're tracking. And I think all of us have remarked as we've listened to it like, wow, that's what we played in the studio. You know, all the stuff you hear there, you know, it's beautiful that his vision was us playing and interacting with each other and that that's what you hear when you hear the record. It's not like we're, you know, an inconvenient backing track. Right. Have you listened to it since he died?

I listened to I can't give everything. That's a sad song. Yeah. And I just didn't, I can't, I haven't really been able to listen to it. I'm just in awe of the, you know, the last year of his life. I mean, to think about, did you see Lazarus? Yeah, we've all seen it. I felt like, you know, and I didn't know that he was sick or anything, but I, I wondered, you know.

And I just kept thinking, this is sort of preparing us for a time in which we're going to have this music. but he's not going to be here. Then when I thought about it after he died, and when I thought about this album after he died, I mean, I feel like he was so conscious of his mortality and that these were just such beautiful final projects. You know, something that I found out later was that in January, when we were recording,

we would record like 11 to 4 or so, and then he would go over to Henry Hay's place and work on Lazarus. Oh, my God. And then, but I didn't know that. And then I think at night, he was listening to what we'd recorded that day and going over it with a fine-tooth comb and stuff.

That's an amazing amount of output. I mean, and that's really inspiring. Yeah. Sarah Larson talking with saxophonist and band leader Donnie McCaslin about David Bowie's Black Star. We also heard drummer Mark Giuliana, Jason Lindner on keyboards, and bassist Nate Wood. And you can hear some more of the music they played for us that day at New YorkerRadio.org.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. There's more to come. I'm David Remnick, welcome back. Hilton Alls has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1994. Officially, he's the magazine's theater critic, but he knows about pretty much everything that goes on in the city culturally. In particular, he reads a lot of poetry. Recently, he went to visit a poet named Brenda Shaughnessy. Could this wall paper be any worse? At the house she had just moved into in New Jersey. Brenda, you have a whole house.

And there are four bedrooms on the first floor, so we all have a place. She lives there with her husband Craig Morgan Tyshire, who's also a poet, and they're two kids. How old is he now? He's eight. Oh, my God, Cal. Cal, Shaughnessy's eight-year-old, has cerebral palsy. and that's one of the reasons that they left New York City. If the landlady is like, oh, we're going to raise the rent $2,000,

we couldn't be like, well, let's find some place else. Like, we can't, you know. I mean, we had to have a ground floor apartment or an elevator building because this wheelchair you can't get upstairs, you know. Shawnessy wrote about living with and loving a disabled child in her last book, Our Andromeda. Her new book is about coming of age, and her life in the city is a young, gay woman,

before kids, before marriage. And I do want to mention in her conversation with Hilton, Shaughnessy does use some choice words to describe gay life in that period. So the book is a kind of a memoir, and she did a lot of her best thinking she told Hilton in the swimming pool. I do this thing when I go swimming, I do laps, and I count my laps, one, two, three, and each lap as I'm swimming it, I relive that year of my life.

Oh, wow. So I imagine... That's what you do in the first poem, of your new book when you do the time travel, right? Yes. And you say that when you time travel, suddenly you're just,

you're yourself consumed by shame and embarrassment for having lost a library book. Those little flashes of memory are ones that have come up when I've been swimming. And then right around the time I'm super tired around 11 or 12

is also when things get kind of bad. You know, like then pubescence happens and suddenly you're like, this is terrible, I got to get through these years. And so you are motivated to keep swimming and to get past that time and get to where it gets sort of more interesting again. So around 18, 19, around college time, things start getting a little more fun.

Over the years, different memories have popped up that I've used in poems. This new book of poems begins with a poem of The New Yorker published that has that kind of forward and backward movement at the same time that I love so much about your writing. Would you mind reading it? Sure. Okay. I have a time machine. But unfortunately, it can only travel into the future at a rate of one second per second,

which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant committees, and even to me. But I managed to get there time after time to the next moment and to the next. Thing is, I can't turn it off. I keep zipping ahead, well, not zipping. And if I try to get out of this time machine, open the latch, I'll fall into space, unconscious, then desiccated. And I'm pretty sure I'm afraid of that. So I stay inside. There's a window, though.

It shows the past. It's like a television or a fish tank, but it's never live. It's always over. The fish swim in backwards circles. Sometimes it's like a rear-view mirror, another chance to see what I'm leaving behind, and sometimes like blackout, all that time wasted sleeping. Myself, age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment at having lost a library book. Myself, lurking in a candled corner, expecting to be found charming. Me, holding a rose, though I want to put it down so I can smoke.

Me, exploding at my mother who explodes at me, because the explosion of some dark star, all the way back, struck hard at Mother's Mother's Mother. I turn away from the window, anticipating a blow. I thought I'd find myself an old woman by now, traveling so light in time. But I haven't gotten far at all. Strange not to be able to pick up the paces I'd like. The past is so horribly fast.

Gorgeous. How long did you work on that piece? I had a really strange experience last summer in which most of this book came to be, which is that I started taking singing lessons. That's so crazy. Yeah, it was a really weird thing because I'm not a singer and I'm not a good singer, and it's not like I want to be on the voice or anything. It's not like I'm trying to have a second career here.

I've never let it rip, you know, never once in my life. Maybe on like a roller coaster. Have I ever like really done that? But never really. And the other thing too is that I've always sang to Cal. He's always been very comforted. Even when he was a colicky baby, he's always been very comforted when I sing.

But I can't, he's not comforted if I phone it in. I have to bring all of it. He has to be the guts. He really wants me to like, he wants me to do like the full on like Broadway Annie kind of thing. And from the very first lesson, I started going home. and writing obsessively. It was like it unleashed my, I mean, it unclogged my voice.

I felt like I could say anything. I was no longer afraid of what I sounded like. Give us the title of your new book. The new book is so much synth. A lot of the book is set in pubescence and adolescents. And so when I was 12, 13, 14-ish, it was the 80s, it was the early 80s where, like,

all the music had, like, laser sounds and just full-on synth keyboards. And it was supposed to sound cold and robotic and futuristic, because we all thought we were entering this robot age. And the poem, this long poem is called, Is There Something I Should Know, which is a title of a Duran Duran song. It's interesting because in the second part of the book,

there's a sort of struggle going on between the narrator of some of the poems, those very intense short poems, and objects of desire, particularly a young, another girl, it feels like? Yeah, so the second part, and that's sort of tracing my sort of decade in New York as, you know, as an out lesbian, I moved to New York City with my college girlfriend because she was going to grad school for PhD program, and we were so in love. You know, of course I was going to move to New York with her. and I had $1,000.

And I was like, I'm going to be fine. I have $1,000. Like, what more can I possibly have in my suitcase? And I have $1,000, everybody. I have so much money. It just never even occurred to me that that wasn't, you know, my grandfather in Okinawa had given that as a college graduation gift. Wow.

And I'm like, I'm fine. I'm set. I'm set. I'm totally sad. I'm set forever. Yeah. And then six weeks in, she dumped me. So I had to find another place.

And the place I found was this dykeloft in Tribeca. Yes. And it was really fun. And we would go to all those great lesbian clubs that used to exist that don't anymore. Would you read another from that section? There's only a few. Yeah. One is about, as you know, that Melissa Etheridge song that was like on nonstop.

Do you remember this one? When everyone was playing, but I'm the only one by Melissa Etheridge all the time. It was just on everywhere. Yes. But it's too long to really. read. How about the first page? But I'm the only one. Who'd walk across a fire for you, growled

Melissa. That song blared from all four of our bedrooms' tape decks, often simultaneously as if that song was the only one we all loved. The only one we could agree on that summer in the Dycloth. Just when it all started to change. Catherine was moving out to Soho to live with

Melanie, so Shiggy's girlfriend, DM, took her room. But not for long. They broke up and Michelle moved in shortly after Cynthia came. Tonight, you told me that you ache for something new. This was way before we'd even dreamed we'd have to rent out Shiggy's office to Aaron as a fifth bedroom. Without Catherine, we couldn't afford the loft, but we didn't know that yet.

At the time, we thought everyone was poor like us. We weren't the only ones. We all smoked constantly. Anyone could afford to smoke back then. Catherine bummed my last butt, but I know I saw her new carton in the freezer. She didn't want to open it yet. She was trying to cut back. This was before we almost got the gas cut off, before we lost electricity, the first of

many times. After Justine had been bullied out with her three cats, but Kristen, whom we suspected was asexual and not really lesbian, was still hanging on even though she adopted yet another cat into the loft without asking. It was only one more, she reasoned, but we already had Seither, Amber, Balzac, Gigli, and now Eva Luna. Anna and Jackie came by. They were friendly to me, but Jet and Julie weren't. T and J were Clit Club, A&J were literary. Then Michelle and Shiggy secretly slept together, a disaster, and Cynthia got kicked out for being by and then bringing a guy to the loft. You then met Craig and your life changed.

Just in the poet circles? Yeah, just in the poet circles. Did you always feel that you wanted to have children, Brenda? I don't know. I think I liked kids and I wanted to have kids. I didn't think I would ever be stable enough to have a kid. And I didn't think I would ever have a partner that I could trust enough to have a child with. Yes.

But now that I have these two kids, I find myself more and more obsessed with time, with death. Because you're here to protect them from mortality in a certain way, right? Yeah. And wanting to make sure I give them what they need. Yes. You know, everybody, it's hard for anybody to reconcile the fact that your child is disabled. Yes. It's just like, you know, one of the key things of being a pair, you want your kid to be able to do all these things and have any, have their options. and when your child can't walk or can't talk,

it's sort of accepting those limitations on his behalf is very difficult. Yes. And then the older I get and the more of my friends and peers I see who have grown children who have various kinds of mental illnesses, I think, you know, we all have disabilities everywhere. And none of us really have all the options open to us. That's right. You know, Cal has these very specific major ones,

but it doesn't necessarily prevent him from living a full spiritual life from loving and feeling and he's mastered this other ability to like lift skirts it's a horribly embarrassing it's just to me and I know how to do it but he'll do it to people on the street

and I'm just that is not of all the things to use your limited motor skills on you just come up with something different than that that's funny but I don't know what his outlook is going to be And what's so shocking to me is that the same is true for my completely typically developing daughter. I don't know. I mean, she's going to go out into the world.

I don't know what's going to happen. And the whole thing is just horribly frightening. I have to feel hopeful and excited for my kids' futures. Yes. It's the thing that makes you get up and say. Well, you have to get up. They will yell and scream until you get up. someone, I don't know who said this,

it's very cruel, but like every kid you have, that's a book you didn't write. You know, some idea around how they take your energy. And they do take your energy. But I think even if you don't have kids, even if you only have one job,

even if you're only doing one thing, like how do we do it all? There's actually too much to do all the time. It's always been a huge mystery to be that we all have the same amount of time. Yeah. You know, when you say, I don't have time to do that.

It's like, well, you have the same amount of time as I do. So if I have the same, if I have time, then, you know, then why you're, not? The poet Brenda Shawnessy talking with the New Yorker's Hilton Alls. She teaches at Rutgers University, and her book of poems, so much synth comes out a little later this spring. Before we go, I'm going to check in on Emma Allen, who's an assistant editor around here, and she does an amazing job of putting together the Daily Shouts pieces on New Yorker.com. She's fantastic with young

writers, humor writers of all kinds. Let's go see what's on her mind. Well, one of the things I thought I'd bring up in this chat today. It's a board game called Cowgirls Ride the Trail of Truth. I'm saying nothing. I recently played it with a bunch of our cartoonists with Ed Steed and Tucson Adam Katzenstein and Con Stokes, the cartoon assistant. And none of them are cowgirls. It's a game for teen girls ages 13 to 17. You progress along the board. You have to cross the emotion ocean to get to Paradise Ranch along the way. Moodyn Ocean. Paradise Ranch. There are some other great landmarks, too, like courageous pass, but then also it's like Montana.

But you move along. So it's like Candyland for older people? Yeah. I mean, not that there's anything wrong with Candyland. Candy land is awesome. So what else you got? Okay. I have, in fact, a comedian, a Parna Nancharla. Nancherla. She has a bit about how no one can pronounce her name, so I feel a little less bad about mispronancing it. But she is amazing. She does a lot of stand-of-comedy around town, and she's got like a Mitch Headbergish quality to her.

She tweets a lot, one of which was recently, Blizzards always feel like nature going, no, this is white privilege. And what else did I have on there? Oh, one is this book that I brought to show you, which is a collection of recipes by artists who at times are reliable cooks and at times less so. Who's the reliable cook? Well, I mean. Is Marina Abramovich cooking for you? Oh, my gosh. Marina Bramovich is an aphrodisiac recipe, which is all about how many days to spend without eating, talking, sleeping in sexual intercourse before you bathe an almond oil and engage in itchquoise.

Wow. But other ones are for toast and stuff. Yeah, for toast. Sometimes toast is good, too. Yeah, but it's great because a lot of times cookbooks pretend like they're giving you all this objective information. and then it turns out that, like, you know, they're impossible to follow, and you might as well be looking at a drawing of an octopus. So what are you going to be making this weekend from the artist's cookbook?

This weekend? Well, one of my favorite ones is very vague, and is just for an egg. It's by Sarah Oppenheimer, and it offers no information, but I inevitably will be cooking an egg. Name of meal, egg, duration, six minutes, ingredients, egg, water. and then there's just a hole in the next page. It's like poached egg. I was thinking the other day about getting it, I poach a lot of eggs,

but I can never remember how long it takes, and I was thinking of getting that as a tattoo, which is the closest I've ever come to. You want to get a poached egg tattoo? Just the, like, basic outline of the, like, how long to do it. I'm recommending against it. Emma, thank you. Emma Allen, with some useful suggestions. And that's it for today's show.

next week the one and only Patty Marks tries out every sleep aid on the market and I'll talk as well with the great poet Clive James. I'm David Remnick. If you want to stay in touch, please subscribe to our Twitter feed at New Yorker Radio.

See you next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards. This episode was produced by Emily Boteen, Ave Carrillo,

Rianan and Corby, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sharon Meshihi, Sarah Nix, Paul Schneider, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Becky Cooper and Matt Fiddler. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.