Directional Taboos, no. 1
In “The Tale of Genji,” Lady Murasaki’s timeless masterpiece about court life in eleventh-century Japan, the titular nobleman’s favorite excuse for going where he isn’t expected, or not going where he is expected, is the “directional taboo.” What it means is that a god has blocked him from traveling in a certain direction—say, northwest, compelling a detour that happens to include a married lover’s gate. Much like the subway malfunction, it’s an all-purpose alibi, an evergreen answer to the question, “What are you doing in this neighborhood?”
Recently, I’ve been wanting to invoke directional taboos myself—not socially, though that would be nice, but in writing, as an excuse to ignore the strictures of journalism and wander as I please. Editors are always asking “why here” and “why now,” pruning digressions while insisting on readability and relevance. Sometimes, though, the writer longs to sneak off, like Genji the “night gallant,” and follow the distant music of some unsanctioned theme—one too foreign, provincial, niche, newfangled, old-fashioned, or simply too eccentric to be received at court. It’s an impulse related to what Brian Dillon calls “essayism,” the errant aspiration to create “something so artful it can hardly be told from disarray.” [Ed: What if we cut the Dillon and just said plainly that you’re starting a blog here? And can we trust that readers will be familiar with the etymology of “errant”?]
Directional Taboos will be an online home for my unedited thoughts on books, music, art, video games, and, occasionally, my own life. I plan to publish essays, recommendations, and outtakes; previews and postscripts from my journalism; and, finally, notes on my in-progress book about death and the digital, which I’ll be starting this spring as a Franke Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. If you’re a friend or have enjoyed my writing in the past, I hope you’ll subscribe; it’s free, and I don’t have time to impose on your inbox more than once or twice a month. And if you don’t know me…
Who Am I?
The business card version: I am a thirty-two-year-old writer from Montclair, New Jersey who lives in Brooklyn. I started my career as an editor at Cabinet and an occasional literary critic at NYRB. My interest in the afterlives of slavery led—inadvertently, at first—from criticism to reporting, beginning with a feature on Underground Railroad Reenactments for The New Yorker, where I was hired in 2021. There, I’ve written a number of author and artist profiles as well as features and reviews, becoming a bit of a beatless generalist; in the last two years, I’ve baked a cake with “Oh, Mary!” star Cole Escola, dived to the wreck of a slave ship, and reported on the grassroots effort to recover government data purged by the Trump administration.
Some Recent Work
Over the summer, I profiled Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, following him from Massachusetts to Canada to pester him about the increasingly dismal future of his creation. He’s spent his laudable career trying to keep the internet free and open, giving up untold riches in the process, and overcoming his natural reserve to campaign for utopian ideals like “Raw data now!” But his latest plan to save the web, which involve a startup called Inrupt and A.I. chatbot named Charlie, didn’t give me much hope:
Like Dorothy confronting the Wizard of Oz, I wanted Berners-Lee to explain how, exactly, we were all going to get home. Did he really think monopolistic tech companies could be constrained without government intervention? How could Charlie—a mere intermediary between users and L.L.M.s—prevent A.I. from hollowing out the open web? And was anyone, anywhere, actually using Solid Pods?
Next, I reviewed MONUMENTS—an extraordinary exhibition of vandalized Confederate monuments, juxtaposed with works by contemporary artists, at the Brick and L.A. MOCA. The most arresting is by Kara Walker, who took a plasma torch to an equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson, and turned him and his horse, Little Sorrel, into a monstrous chimera. As the great-great-great grandson of a man who escaped from slavery and joined the Union Army, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of schafenfraude. It was almost as much fun as the time I marched past a plantation—and startled all the blithe tourists wandering its grounds—as part of Dread Scott’s “Slave Rebellion Reenactment.”
Finally, I flew to Chicago to interview the painter Kerry James Marshall—long one of my favorite artists—for RA Magazine. (His first U.K. retrospective is on view at the Royal Academy in London.) Zealously committed to figuration, he was delightfully combative on the subjects of abstract art, which he disdains, and Afrocentrism:
He has long looked askance at Afrocentrism, or, as he put it, ‘this crazy idea that before white people came we were like Adam and Eve.’ Vignette (2003; above) depicts a Black man and a Black woman running naked through tall grass among bluebirds and butterflies – an idyll belied by a wedge of sidewalk in the corner. ‘That’s not Eden,’ he told me, laughing mischeviously. ‘It’s Washington Park, down by the University of Chicago.’