Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated. And indeed this is all expressed not in full round tones but softly, in whispers, confidentially, sometimes a little hoarsely. Of course it is a kind of piping. Why not? Piping is our people’s daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while. We certainly should not want to do without these performances. —Franz Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”

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I.

A musicology professor once offered my class the only definition of jazz I’ve ever thought truly apt. He said: “Jazz is the music jazz musicians play.”

You are listening to a piece of music. You wonder: is it jazz? You have only to ask yourself: what kind of musician is making it? Is it a jazz musician, or several jazz musicians? Very well, you’re listening to jazz. If it isn’t? Then you’re probably listening to something else.

The circuity is the point. Since it’s an idiom, a tradition, a world mostly to itself, jazz should not really be defined (if that can be helped). And yet—we’re certain that there was, sometimes still is, something called jazz. It was already conscious of itself as different from other kinds of music, early on. There are many moments we could point to as evidence of this difference. So I’ll choose the best I know: that moment when, in 1926, Louis Armstrong dropped the lyrics from the lyric stand while cutting “Heebie Jeebies” with his Hot Seven band, and covered for the mistake with the first official scat-singing on record. So Louie became the first Jazz Singer, not only because he scatted but because as a singer, he understood his voice was no different from his horn—and what both were really meant to do, was to take up all the dim, repetitive variations he’d encountered in his life and spin them into a different plane altogether.

Other jazz musicians played perfectly well. Jelly Roll Morton played, Fletcher Henderson played, and King Oliver played. But Louie sang—with his horn and his own natural instrument alike. And his precise genius for a kind of magical reinterpolation gave every soloist who came after him their own signature difference, too. Not just to play the thing over, with enough variations to scrape by, keeping the attention of the dancers and booze drinkers in the joint, an audience always dangerously ready to get on to the next scene. But to root people to the spot, to show them, to tell them something—to make it about the music itself, music and not decoration. Where others heard “St. Louis Blues,” or “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” or “Stardust,” Louie heard a dozen other things: harmonies, alternate melodies, moods. Your normal popular performer—Al Jolson, for instance, whom Hollywood enshrined as the face of the new talking jazz age—might sing those melodies, embellish them a bit, lean into the words, and be a decent interpreter. But for Louie the words were a pretext, a way to get him into the real thing, which was spinning off from the center and establishing its own free ellipse in orbit around it. Louie made music essentially about music—the same way every great play is really about plays, and every great movie is really about movies.

This is what his singing was, too, with scatting at the abstract extreme. First the words: start the verse, let the meaning of the song come through, establish the center. Then roll outwards, in potentially infinite variations, streams of new melodic and harmonic ideas which in Louie’s hands were as full and complex as whatever original piece he’d picked up and toyed around with. For decades afterward jazz musicians would go on building an unbelievably rich scaffolding on top of these principles—expanding into denser arrangements, more sophisticated harmony, improvisations of dazzling virtuosity and invention. But the basic difference was the same: jazz was music that had somehow built a space, nested within the full tradition of American Song, where the point of the music was to build on music, in a kind of exegesis on its own workings: it was reinterpretation raised to a fine art; a moment of singular, incendiary reinterpretation. It would expand beyond mere genre, develop its own standards and classics, its own idiolect, its own rhythms, yes—but the point of it all would always lie in the way these things were used, to burst wide open the repetitions and limitations of the popular music of their day. To make a new world of music out of it.

For the great jazz singers, the jazz difference is a bit slipperier. And this is for one simple reason: The Great American Songbook, the thousand or so songs in the canon of primarily Jewish and Black songwriters, which emerged just as the new jazz language was becoming the substrate of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley tunes, in the Thirties and Forties. Men like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and the Gershwins weren’t jazz musicians. But jazz informed the songs they were writing for the masses. And jazz musicians paid them back in turn for their material, taking those songs and transforming them into sandboxes, little zones of exploration, which would be transposed and re-done by musicians for decades afterwards as if there was no way to really exhaust their essence (since, frequently, there wasn’t).

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Late last year, I spent the better part of a week combing through episodes of the old MTV program 120 Minutes, which ran from 1986 to 2000, and all but defined what “alternative” music was, in its heyday. Despite being a worthy term—a name for a literal radio format and a Billboard chart—there’s always been something unwieldy and dumb about “alternative” as a musical category. We know the usual story: the Velvets and Iggy Pop get raw, invent punk; punk gets dumber/better in the Seventies; gets arty and weird in the Eighties; then in the Nineties the whole underground finally blasts itself upwards into the mainstream, via the missile Kurt Cobain (a great pop musician, never let anyone tell you otherwise), and reigns for a decade or so, under that unwieldy, dumb epithet: “alternative.”

A subsequent story says that from there the old punk spirit haphazardly resurrects, in the revanchist rock of the early Aughts (see: The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs; Toronto and NYC; “indie sleaze,” “garage rock” et al., ad nauseam). Then it goes off the rails. By the 2010s, alternative stations are playing Imagine Dragons, classic rock stations are playing Nirvana, and MTV is more famous for Snooki than the moon-man. The Gen-X Slacker is superseded by the Millennial Hipster, poptimism reigns triumphant, and “indie” supplants “alternative” as the meaningless descriptor du jour, as in: “I prefer indie music, like Lana Del Rey.” (Lana, whose Born to Die is admittedly important to any alternative Millennial canon, was released on Interscope Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group: not indie.)

Now, that second paragraph’s too simple—I’ll get to why. But the first? Alarmingly, one of the things I discovered watching 120 Minutes was just how expert the alternative media men and women of mid-period MTV were at constructing a context for the music they brought to televisions all over the world. As early as 1992 (just one year into the world’s brief courtship of Cobain & Co.), 120 Minutes was larding its year-end countdowns with a considerable history of the new insurgent underground, in terms exactly like what I just wrote above. Solid music journalism, blended with an obvious commercial imperative, yet also straddling the real cutting-edge of a youth culture that needed a mirror for itself. To watch 120 Minutes now is to gaze into that mirror: you see how, for a moment, a door was opened, and a lot of formerly subterranean stuff escaped into the world. A lot of it was dross, sure. More often, another convenient new market category for the major labels to exploit. People had to sort through all the Collective Souls and Blues Travelers and 4 Non Blondes to get to the best stuff. But a lot of groundbreaking music got through, too.

These days it’s hard to imagine a broadcast on a major channel, reaching millions of people, putting artists like Kate Bush, Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, Björk, or PJ Harvey on normal people’s televisions, interviewing these artists while playing their videos. It’s hard to imagine any established and highly-trafficked channel like that whatsoever, let alone one that could quickly organize a canon of the not-quite-popular, vaguely-counter-cultural mass-art of its time, the way 120 Minutes did. For someone like me (born in 1994, a few weeks after Cobain’s suicide), it’s hard to watch the program without feeling truly sad. Not only were things seemingly more diverse and open, those people understood exactly what they had. They knew they were curating something different from the mainstream—a genuine alternative—through which a generation of kids would experience something other than what the Billboard Top 40, or else their parents, might’ve shown them.

So of course I got to thinking: if only my own generation (young Millennials, elder Zoomers) had had something comparable! Because it seemed to me, pretty much from the time I started high school in 2008, that there was an alternative, though no one ever called it that. In the late Aughts and early 2010s (stretching across both Obama terms, more or less), there was something akin to an emerging alternative. Often it was heavily electronic—a music, or even just a general vibe, which could only have been created by a generation in thrall to the infinite cratedigging properties of the Internet, handed an unprecedented democracy of accessible synthesis and cheap production software. Except that there was virtually no central place, no kept gate like 120 Minutes, via which all this foment might be properly gathered, curated, and beamed out towards any widespread youth culture. Pitchfork tried hard, and there was a time when their lovely snobbishness really did seem capable of setting a canon for this era of alternative Millennial music. But that vague dream was scuttled as soon as the publication sold out to Condé Nast in 2015 (and it was a sell-out).

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Much ado has been made recently about the usefulness, or pointlessness, of the term “poptimism.” Kelefa Sanneh had his hedging moratorium in the New Yorker last summer. Freddie DeBoer writes a piece a month about it. W. David Marx tangled with the term throughout the 300-odd pages of his Blank Space book last year. I fully accept the contention that when Pitchfork changed, it changed in a defanged and generally poptimist direction. Rolling Stone went that way, too—and went harder. Many others followed suit. Presumably, the reigning argument in music journalism since the later 2010s was that the field is still far too white and male and rock-obsessed, and that genres like hip-hop, R&B, and high-charting pop were still overlooked in favor of more overtly “album-oriented” genres (though I’ve never really bought this characterization when it comes to Pitchfork). Still, I remember these sentiments being fairly common even back in 2012, and well before that. There was a lot of Tumblr-woke, campus-social-justice ferment feeding into the journo-sphere, and this led to a lot of passionate thinkpieces about how Rihanna should be taken as seriously as Radiohead—that kind of thing. Plenty of people wanted to seem very hip, and non-elitist, so there was a lot of circuitous talk about how major-label pop and rap should be treated softly, in the highest possible intellectual-academic register, with much less time spent condescending to obscure or difficult artists. It was exhausting from the start, and only it helped to hobble music journalists, in the end.

But I’m not here to parse out that particular rhetorical battle—only to consider my proposed Millennial alternative. This is where I think “poptimism” does become a useless idea, since the music I have in mind (much of which was assuredly “Pitchfork-coded” for a time), was unique. Though the ever-poptimizing world of music journalism never remarked on it, or even seemed to realize it. What had made the underground music of decades past “alternative” was its oppositionality. The mainstream trafficked in cliches and plasticky sounds, using the newest technologies to smooth out edges instead of experimenting. Meanwhile, the underground deliberately courted old avant-garde styles of shock, weirdness, queerness, noise—or just general aesthetic discordance. It was resolutely not pop, and didn’t aspire to be. It might want to be more than pop, or broader than pop, or perhaps anti-pop. But it was not the same thing as that which, in the mainstream, was understood broadly as just “pop.”

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Though much of the great alternative music of the late Aughts and early 2010s still fits those distinctions—particularly where niche internet subcultures were involved—a lot of it simply doesn’t. This was what I found so exciting about it, what I thought was really new, especially when compared with the general history of the mainstream vs. the underground. It struck me, perhaps around 2010—certainly I knew it by 2012—that, in an inversion of all previous eras, there was a boom of less-than-popular artists who were in fact making our best unapologetic pop music. Now it was a faction of the underground which aspired to make the huge, triumphant pop music of its times, and was doing so, while the mainstream doddered on, pumping out the worst glitzy, infantile crap any generation had ever been subjected to. Had there been anything resembling a 120 Minutes for the era, anything beyond the endless decentered diffusion of the World Wide Web, a few worthwhile sites, and a few good festivals, this might have been articulable. It might even have been collectively available to a significant number of people as an idea, a style, or a genuine counter-culture.

In a sense, this is a eulogy.

There were precursors to this internet-native alternate underground vision. Many were genuine independent artists, at least initially—though some weren’t. The main wave of the best Millennial alterna-pop (roughly 2009-2018) was similarly split. Though there were plenty of artists on the major labels who belong in this loose canon, most of the interesting stuff bubbled up much less dramatically, online, before going bigger. A lot of it was made up of independent bands, duos, or producers on great historic indie labels like 4AD, Domino Recording Co., Sub Pop, Captured Tracks, Jagjaguwar, Polyvinyl, XL Recordings, Modular Records. And a lot of it started within emerging niche microgenres with ridiculous names, like vaporwave, chillwave, witch house, or hypnagogic pop—deliberately hazy, nostalgic music that toyed with what Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds kept calling “hauntology” (to varying degrees of accuracy). But then sometimes it was just outright pop, better and richer than anything the mainstream was offering.

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The first precursors I’m thinking of include Cut Copy’s first record Bright Like Neon Love (2004), the best of Hot Chip, Annie, Robyn’s self-titled album (2005), and LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver (2007). Nothing like the overly sleek mid-Aughts rock bands (Bloc Party, The Killers, Franz Ferdinand) they shared festival billings with; yet also nothing like the folky (Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes) or arty (Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective) bands whom they shared year-end best-of lists with. Rather, these were artists working at the confluence of electronic music and pop, savvy musicians who had absorbed things like house music and hip-hop, beginning to fuse together something as accessible as it was smart. Gothenburg geniuses The Knife are especially relevant here. Though they were too weird (and frequently too harsh) to really cross over, their influence has hung around for decades. Listen to “Heartbeats,” and you’ll hear one of the first examples (in 2003!) of an electronic pop that feels unmistakably 21st-century. It’s hard to imagine that the 1990s were only four years in the past, impossible to think of “Heartbeats” as having existed in anything but the present millennium. It still sounds tremendous. Classic.

Perhaps the first major turning-point in this foment came in 2007 with MGMT’s first and only good record, Oracular Spectacular. Nowadays their music is the kind of thing that shows up in films when people try to do a Naughties period piece (see: Saltburn), and their highest Spotify stream counts are in the billions. MGMT had a relatively big success at the time for the kind of group they were (indie-coded but really on a major label), and Pitchfork itself didn’t quite approve. “Kids” ended up on Gossip Girl, went to #91 on Billboard, becoming a kind of sleeper anthem. The record itself went to #38 on the album charts. These days I find the record charming, often dated, except for those justifiably beloved singles: “Kids,” “Electric Feel,” and especially “Time to Pretend,” which is one of the great Millennial pop songs. I felt as much when I first heard it: finally, here was something that didn’t sound like any other era, that belonged to the young people of its own time. Plus it sounded great. Though that hardly mattered in 2007: “Time to Pretend” didn’t even crack the Billboard Top 100. I still harbor a fantasy where it was as big a hit that year as “Irreplaceable” or “Umbrella”— good pop songs to be sure, but ones that now sound completely of their time, while “Time to Pretend” feels outside it. In fact I might just be hitting on one main difference between truly great Millennial pop and the stuff mass audiences were listening to: it signifies its time, but isn’t trapped by it.

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This fantasy of mine is, essentially, where my present canon begins. Since there’s nothing which actually separates a song like “Time to Pretend” from the big hits of its time, only that it was produced differently. Yet it’s just as anthemic, memorable, catchy, and totally accessible. But it has little to do with the flattened-out, dumbed-down, dynamic-free landscape perfected by mega-producers from Max Martin to Benny Blanco. Not only is it nearly impossible for an artist to crash the pop charts in this century without the backing of the industry’s biggest monopolies—would audiences really know what to do with something like that if they heard it? Audiences need to listen to something a lot in order to get used to it, and eventually to prefer it. The whole scheme of the music industry relies on the assumption that audiences are essentially passive and will accept whatever is given to them. One of the dirty tricks of the “poptimist” turn in music journalism is that it gives audiences tacit permission to accept passivity in the name of fighting snobbery. But every snob has always wished the radios of the world could be filled with songs like “Time to Pretend,” instead of songs like Jason Mraz’s interminable “I’m Yours.” Yet mass audiences—unfortunately, painfully—have tended to prefer the latter. I often suspect it’s simply because they’re so rarely given an actual alternative. (Then again, in 1965—a year that gave us “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Norwegian Wood,” “My Girl,” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”—the number one song was a little ditty called “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs; maybe things never change.)

Across 2008 and 2009, there was more of this new alternative pop. The extraordinary first Crystal Castles record stood at the less-accessible end of the spectrum; The xx’s (mostly anodyne) debut stood at the most-approachable one. Phoenix’s “1901” became the next song in this nebulous stream to crack the charts (peaking at #84). I also count Passion Pit’s great singles “Sleepyhead” and “Little Secrets”, and Empire of the Sun’s “Walking on a Dream,” which particularly enchanted me when it came out. Put aside the band’s stupid costumes and dumb album covers, and here was another huge pop song, successful in the U.K. and Australia but not the States, which wouldn’t reach a mainstream audience until it was featured in a car commercial years later. In fact, this kind of music breaking out via some TV show, commercial, or later Tik-tok virality, is another theme of the alternative music of the era. This always stunned me, since I understood from the moment I heard it, “Walking on a Dream” was the kind of song previous generations surely would have recognized as an inescapable hit. In 2009, I remember walking around, actively wondering why this unstoppable, essentially perfect electropop song wasn’t everywhere. When I think of 2009 today, I don’t think about “Poker Face,” “Use Somebody,” “Boom Boom Pow,” “Love Story” or any other mega-hit of the year—I think of “Walking on a Dream,” which said so much more about being young, yearning, and alive at that time, than any of those empty songs ever did, and sounded better doing it.

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From there and onwards, into 2010, came the first classics of that unfairly-lampooned genre “chillwave.” This included Small Black’s “Despicable Dogs” and Toro Y Moi’s “Blessa”; Wild Nothing’s “Chinatown,” and, of course, Washed Out’s “Feel it all Around.” Here was another completely new, unmistakably internet-derived Millennial creation: vague, psychedelic, like a warping, smeared memory of an older time’s pop music—but resolutely contemporary. Most of it still sounds great, and none better than Neon Indian’s first record, Psychic Chasms (2009). Listening to its first single, “Deadbeat Summer,” which flips a Todd Rundgren sample into one of the purest pop songs of the era, conjures up for me only more fantasies of that alternative pop world. Again, there’s nothing even remotely inaccessible about it—it’s totally accessible, infernally catchy, even if it comes from a slightly more sun-baked and woozy dimension. “Deadbeat Summer” is precisely the kind of thing a Millennial 120 Minutes might have introduced to those millions of weird kids, desperate for a refuge from the nonsense spanning the charts.

In 2010, Arcade Fire released The Suburbs and ended up winning the Grammy for Album of the Year, one of the last times that award went to anything deserving of it. I saw them live not long after, and the experience of witnessing “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” with the full stage show they had going then, made me feel as if this alternative vision might actually go somewhere. That it might turn into a proper vibe, or a culture, or anything, really. “Sprawl II” is another of the best, grandest pop songs of the era. The same year, I bought Tame Impala’s first record, Innerspeaker, an out-and-out rock album that blew The White Stripes, The Strokes, and every other “alt” band out of the water. LCD Soundsystem released their near-perfect third record that year, This is Happening. I also remember discovering tracks from the first Best Coast record and Beach House’s blissful Teen Dream, as free downloads on iTunes (if this doesn’t date me, I don’t know what else will)—all of which felt completely fresh. Though I could hear plenty of clear touchstones and influences in that music, I’d still never heard anything quite like it.

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But more than anything, 2010 brought Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” to the world—the anthemic pop song of its time—and it still astounds me to this day that it didn’t even crack the Billboard Top 100. Go listen to it again, and ponder just how on earth that track didn’t become the biggest song in the world. Robyn was the pop star that should have been: a million times more soulful and cooler than anybody. “Dancing On My Own” should have been her breakthrough. The music video alone feels like a different vision of the decade that followed: dreamier, capital-r-Romantic, less trashy, less empty. Unless you were plugged into that particular strain, what you got from the mainstream was, frankly, a lot of junk, with some occasional hip-hop or R&B classics mixed in. But this is the point I keep hammering: what was that strain? Who was there to define it, curate it, and show it to enough people to matter? It’s typical of the digitalized experience of my generation that the mainstream was continually narrowing, divided up between the same repetitive stars, while the internet diffused everything else into niches too specific for most people to know about. If you didn’t encounter something like “Dancing on My Own” through a music blog or on a TV show years later, then you simply had little chance of encountering it naturally.

In 2011, Nicholas Winding Refn’s movie Drive was released. I’ve heard people call it a cult classic in recent years; frankly it’s nowhere near as good as it seemed at 17. But the soundtrack—with songs like Kavinsky’s “Nightcall” and College’s “A Real Hero”—made it the first film of the decade to feature up-to-date electronic pop music, and fit in exactly with the alternative styles I was observing. That year, Neon Indian released “Polish Girl,” M83 released “Midnight City” (which did chart, eventually), and the first James Blake record came out. Great, classic pop music, all. But the real revelation that year was Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” Though she’s obviously hugely popular today, when “Video Games” came out she was still a cipher, who until just before that had been performing under her real name, Lizzy Grant. Her first massive record, Born to Die, wouldn’t even be released until 2012, at which point “Video Games” would just crack the charts, peaking at #91, as the record shot her into legitimate stardom. Still, the mere presence of that mysterious song in 2011 seemed seismic, another vision of an alternative to all that glitz and autotune and over-the-top “soul” numbers. But in this case exquisitely coy, ironic-but-not-ironic, certainly Romantic. Like all that hazy underground pop, it was doing something interesting and productive with Millennial nostalgia.

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The wave only accelerated into 2012. Though the year belonged above all to Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. Cityand Frank Ocean’s channel ORANGE, we also had songs like Tame Impala’s “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards,” Blood Orange’s “You’re Not Good Enough,” Solange’s “Losing You,” Grimes’ “Oblivion,” Chromatics’ “Cherry,” and Purity Ring’s “fineshrine.” These were massive pop songs which, again, took years to actually reach large audiences. But there were even more egregious examples of tracks which a healthier, saner world would have turned into hits: Chairlift’s “I Belong in Your Arms” and Sky Ferreira’s “Everything is Embarrassing.” Both sparkling examples of gorgeous pop-that-might-have-been, the Millennial equivalent to the biggest synth-pop anthems of 1980s England. Ferreira’s perennially-delayed career was one of the saddest results of this era’s inability to figure out its most promising pop figures—one that still feels like a loss. Her first and only record, Night Time is My Time (2013) sounds like a distillation of the era, and was produced almost entirely by Ariel Rechtshaid, who that same year helmed Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City, much of Charli XCX’s debut True Romance, and the Haim sisters’ first record—all examples of indie-coded major-label acts trying to approach pop success from an alterna-pop vantage.

2013 also brought the first real examples of successful popstars finally capitalizing on this vague alternative sensibility: Lorde’s debut record Pure Heroine and Drake’s “Hold On We’ve Going On,” both of which still sound much more at home in alternative territory than they ever did alongside Imagine Dragons, Macklemore, the Lumineers, Katy Perry, or Bruno Mars—the most-played artists that year. I myself still have trouble believing something like Lorde’s “Team” (the first Top 10 hit clearly influenced by The Knife—coming exactly one decade after “Heartbeats”) came out the same year as “Thrift Shop.” That year also brought CHVRCHES’ wonderful “The Mother We Share,” Disclosure’s debut record Settle, and the accidental leak of several demos by the mysterious British producer Jai Paul. Not officially released until 2019, these rough tracks should have ushered in a new wave of their own. That didn’t happen, though more than a few great producers and singers since then have had a clear unspoken debt to Paul’s experiments.

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To listen to “Jasmine” or “BTSTU” now is to hear the Millennial alternative reconstituting itself again as genuine future-music: a mutant, genreless advance that could only have come from a fluid, internet-native producer. But then to listen to “Str8 Outta Mumbai” is to hear one of the most pathbreaking, original, and undeniable pop songs of the 21st century. In less than 3 minutes, Jai Paul crams together things never interlaced in a pop song before—earwormy vocal hooks, tablas, strafing arpeggiators, absurd noise-gates, percussion that sounds like a cash register. By the time the final verse gives way to that extraordinary Bollywood sample, he’s taken you through a series of sounds so new they still sound futuristic. I’m beginning to repeat myself. But still: this, too, should have changed the world.

2014 brought two of the greatest electronic-pop records of my lifetime, Caribou’s Our Love and Jessy Lanza’s Pull My Hair Back. It also brought the first real cresting wave of dreamy indie rock beginning to achieve its own kind of accessible pop. Perennially twee Canadians Alvvays put out “Archie, Marry Me,” a generational sing-a-long classic; Mac DeMarco released Salad Days, maybe the most outright pop record yet made by a tiny bedroom-based artist. In the years since then, that record’s “Chamber of Reflection” has gathered up more than a billion streams—just as songs by Tame Impala, Beach House, and many other once-alternative artists, whose haphazard viral success came years after their best work. Some R&B or hip-hop artists belonging in the same alternative stream—Frank Ocean, Tyler the Creator, FKA twigs—emerged eventually as genuinely popular artists on their own. Yet others like Solange, How to Dress Well, Ravyn Lenae, dvsn, Kelela, Kllo, and Nao, who all made excellent critically-praised records, never managed to do the same.

I’ve already mentioned how Pitchfork’s selling out to Condé Nast in 2015 eventually transformed its ability to argue for this music. Pitchfork had always been limited in how much contour and context it could give; by its middle years, it tended to get lost in criticizing microgenres and over-apologizing for its erstwhile snobbishness. But it could be a genuine champion for a lot of this music, premiering music videos and promoting certain smaller artists. Its move towards hosting and curating festivals in Chicago and Barcelona created one of the few actual venues where the shared vibe of so many disparate artists could be set on actual display. When I attended in 2014, the lineup included an ascendent Kendrick, Earl Sweatshirt, St. Vincent, pre-fame Grimes, Cloud Nothings, Real Estate, DIIV, Sharon Van Etten, Empress Of, tUne-yArDs, Danny Brown, SZA, Isaiah Rashad, FKA Twigs, Kelela, and others. It was hard not to feel that a widespread alternative to the mainstream (one that embraced indie rock bands, singer-songwriters, electronic musicians, and rappers alike) was on its way to being properly expressed.

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2015 and 2016 marked the high point of the wave. Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly were both watershed moments, transforming many audiences’ expectations that R&B and hip-hop could handle genuine and committed artists with highly specific visions, without losing popularity. Even more important to my eyes were songs like Thundercat’s “Them Changes,” Japanese Breakfast’s “Everybody Wants to Love You,” or Ravyn Lenae’s “Free Room”; records like Neon Indian’s VEGA Intl. Night School, KAYTRANADA’s 99.9%, Porches’ Pool, and Empress Of’s debut record Me. All of this was the kind of adventurous pop music a healthier era would have elevated to the top of the charts. Above all, there was Jamie xx’s first record, In Colour, which summed up the era, projecting a stadium-sized utopian vision of electronic music, pop, and hip-hop brought together in the warmest dance music I’ve ever heard. It’s still difficult for me to listen to the album without dreaming of that fantastical alternate past, where it might have poured out of every car, bar, and nightclub, soundtracking a generation. Difficult not to feel this past would have been much, much better than the one we actually got. Rose-tinted glasses, to be sure.

There were other artists who carried on some of this spirit and sound through to the end of the decade, particularly indie artists: Sharon Van Etten, Alex G, Angel Olsen, Men I Trust, Mitski, Soccer Mommy, Phoebe Bridgers, and The War on Drugs all released songs that could have been hits in a different world. Charli XCX and Caroline Polachek kept making great alternative pop, and still do. My favorite track from the later mid-decade was one by the bedroom-pop musician Melina Duterte (recording under the name Jay Som) whose 2017 song “Baybee” proved just what all this music was pointing towards. Duterte was a self-sufficient indie artist on a small indie label, recording every instrument on her own, in her own home. And yet she had none of the old oppositional underground ethos of former DIY punk days. Instead, she’d set about writing and recording an effortless, smooth, hook-filled, timeless pop song—in her own particular way. And it really is another of the great Millennial pop songs: sounds like no other era, like no other decade, and certainly nothing like whatever was going on in the charts. In the Millennial 120 Minutes of my mind, “Baybee” would have been on constant rotation, and young people all over would have been learning just what they’d been missing, as they nodded along to the newest miserable Ed Sheeran soundalike.

So: what to make of all this? Is it really possible to propose a canon—since it’s diffuse and difficult to tie together, based on anything more than a vibe, or a personal experience of the music? I don’t believe most of these artists consciously thought they were proposing an alternative pop vision. Mostly, they’d grown up on the internet, with very few boundaries between the genres and decades of music they encountered there, and ended up wanting to make music that combined all the things they loved best. A few blogs and sites and music critics understood what they were doing, and argued for them: almost none—least of all the avowed poptimists—seemed to recognize these artists constituted the actual great pop music of their time. And as the 2010s wore on, even those few blogs and sites and critics increasingly abandoned championing any upstart underground visions (along with the defense of any ideals of artistic authenticity whatsoever), and celebrated victorious artists who savvily exploited their stardom, commercial success, and popularity. We’re now somewhere near the breaking point of that process, with seemingly nowhere else to go.

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Still, I’m hardly the committed doom-monger I may appear to be. All throughout the Aughts and 2010s there was even more extraordinary music being made which didn’t fit into this loose vision of an alternate pop. There was tons of great hip-hop, experimental electronic music, folk, jazz, indie rock, etc. There’s still a stunning amount of great music being made in this decade, too: last year I encountered so many excellent new records, I didn’t quite know how to keep up. Almost none of those, however, reached sizable audiences, and remained far off from the kind of reach the biggest artists of our time have (though here I’ll admit I do feel that young pop phenoms like Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Olivias Dean and Rodrigo are an enormous improvement over the days of Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Adele, Sia, and the rest). We face the same problem today, but worse: there’s simply no way to get an alternative across to a big enough audience to matter, no mechanism for putting across any different vision of the possibilities of popular music in our time.

In my own haphazard way, I hope that trying to articulate what bound together so much of my generation’s truly classic music—which only occasionally got the chance to compete against monolithic pop brands—might redeem it from being totally elided into history. I think there’s a lesson in it: frequently, the biggest music is not the best, and the best lasting music of an era might be completely neglected, might in fact need to be argued for. In nearly all departments, Millennials have generally sold out or professionalized too soon to make much great art. We were given more than our fair share of the worst hit songs ever made by human beings, while collectively we’ve contributed precious little of lasting quality to the worlds of theater, film, classical music, fiction, poetry, or the visual arts. But one thing we did right was popular music. For the first time in the modern era, what was once a counter-culture actually articulated a better, deeper vision of popular culture, showing just what was lacking in the desiccated mainstream its generation was sleepwalking through. If there’s one thing that might be able to shift the trajectory of contemporary popular culture, even slightly, it might be the recognition that this really happened—we simply haven’t named it yet.

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Well, I propose that it happened, that there is an alternate canon, and this is something to build on. What’s necessary is to find a way to reach people again—crazy as that sounds—a project most music journalists seem to have little faith in anymore. Last year, Pitchfork ended its music festival for good; a few weeks ago the site itself went behind a paywall. It no longer considers itself important enough to be read by just anyone, let alone bearing responsibility towards any serious readership—it’s been absorbed into undifferentiated nothingness along with most of the internet. So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu. Perhaps whatever comes next to take its place can learn from its mistakes, and admit that while it got half the story right, it never went far enough, never fought for the best, or advocated any genuine alternative vision. The music had to do that on its own, even when there were only scattered groups of people to listen to it. It’s up to fools like us to make sure that never happens again.

—

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1.

How far would you go to escape bad news? The answer for me was about 300 kilometers, by foot. And not just any walk, either, but a pilgrimage. The pilgrimage, if you’re Christian or living in Europe. The Camino de Santiago is a network of roads leading to Santiago de Compostella in northwest Spain, whose cathedral holds the relics of St. James the Apostle. Hundreds of thousands walk it every year, following in the footsteps of its medieval pilgrims, minus the poverty and hunger and dying along the way.

The bad news I was escaping was about my book manuscript. For months, I’ve been receiving a disheartening stream of rejections by agents. Finally, I’d given up and sent it directly to a few publishers willing to consider unagented manuscripts, where it would languish in slush piles. My confidence having taken a blow, I was anticipating rejections from them as well. Sitting around waiting for them wasn’t doing much for my mental health, so I thought: why not just go? A pilgrimage would be a good distraction and give me something new to write about. And who knows, it might even furnish me with a new perspective on life as a failed writer, at that point indistinguishable to me from a failed life. Living in Lisbon, the logistics were simple: if I took the Portuguese Coastal Route, I’d be back home in two weeks.

I discussed the plan with local friends. Most have already done the Camino and so have their next-door neighbor, their old high-school teacher and every member of their knitting circle. What they robbed me of in cool, they gave back in advice. I bought ear plugs, a sleeping bag liner, and good socks. I also watched movies and read books. The best-known movie about the Camino de Santiago is The Way (2010). It stars an aging Martin Sheen, walking the Camino with the ashes of his only son, who died on the same path. He’s joined by three pilgrims with issues of their own. They quibble and make up through such adventures as a near-robbery by a Gypsy kid, which leads to a Gypsy party, complete with a bonfire and fiddlers and sage advice from the kid’s father. It’s as cringe-inducing as every movie of healing and redemption you’ve ever seen. Needless to say, I cried.

Nothing prepared me, though, for the most famous literately depiction of the Camino de Santiago, The Pilgrimage by Brazilian writer Paulo Ceolho, of The Alchemist fame. I only skimmed it and, before you judge me, I defy you to read it word for word. I tried to evade even the skimming by asking ChatGPT for a summary and choice quotations, but it pulled some of those straight out of its ass. For example: “The simplest things in life are the most extraordinary.” Coelho’s actual words turned out to be far sillier.

The book is a fictionalized account of Coelho’s own Santiago pilgrimage, led by a mentor whose musings on life and love include “When you have an objective in your life [it] will turn out to be better or worse depending on the route you choose to reach it”; or the folksier “Miracles are very important, don’t you think?” Miracles do happen, attacks by talking dogs and whatnot. Coelho thinks what he’s looking for is a sword (don’t ask), but in reality he must find himself. Interspersed are spiritual exercises that beckon readers to join, for example: “Rise above and beyond the details of the problems that may be bothering you.” Coelho finally does and then insists that “the search for happiness is a personal search and not a model we can pass on to others.” What was all that for then? I wondered, having failed to rise above and beyond the problems bothering me.

I skimmed memoirs by other famous Camino walkers, such as Shirley MacLaine, who complains about a man staring at her braless breasts, and an unfunny bestseller by a German comedian that mysteriously increased the number of Camino walkers. I also skimmed memoirs from unfamous people published by vanity presses. I know because I’d gotten into the habit of checking where any book patently worse than my unpublished one was published. They weave through minor adventures like a painful blister, getting lost, wanting to give up but soldiering on — all about as exciting as your uncle’s 1980s vacation slide show.

The memoirs cautioned that you had to expect the unexpected and make yourself vulnerable, which sounded risky and unpleasant to me. As it was, I was hanging on by a thread. Vulnerability was supposed to lead to the transformation I sought for myself, but the lessons learned —to appreciate small things, to accept yourself— could easily have been picked up from a Hallmark card without walking a single step. Hell, they could’ve been picked up from Coelho’s book, or from a ChatGPT summary thereof.

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2.

You had to procure something called a “pilgrim passport”, and get it stamped at the pilgrim hostels along the way, if you wished to receive a credential at Santiago. I found out that such passports were available at the Lisbon cathedral, which suited my sensibilities better than the idiosyncratic mail-order alternative. When I got to the cathedral, I was directed to a booth selling religious trinkets. I proclaimed grandly that I wanted the pilgrim passport, as I was about to embark on a pilgrimage. Barely raising her eyes from her phone, the saleswoman said, “two euros.” It gave me my first inkling that I would not, in fact, be the pilgrimage’s main character.

I took a bus to Porto, spent the day with a local friend, and set out early the next morning. The trail was set with wooden planks at first, snaking through a picturesque landscape. There were trail signs with explanations on biodiversity that I lacked the patience to read. The air was fresh, the day bright, and locals greeted me with a handwave and a bom caminho. I was all but skipping, pausing only to send photos to family and friends and to post quips on Twitter, having promised to live-tweet my pilgrimage. A friend wrote “that’s the happiest I’ve ever seen you near a beach.” Another commented that I was off to an early start, to which I replied: “That’s how I win.”

A few hours in, it grew notably less fun. My shoulders ached and my back and legs grew sore. I thought everything in my backpack was indispensable when I packed it, but now more and more of its contents seemed highly dispensable. I forwent my favorite snacks, but I still made some rookie mistakes. The sunscreen was one: thinking I’d need a lot of it, I bought a family pack. People snickered at its size every time I pulled it out. When I offered to share, one person said, “You’d like that wouldn’t you.” The condoms, too, remained unused, but they didn’t weigh as much, except on my ego.

At the first pilgrim hostel, I spent a long time talking with an outgoing American walking with his reserved son. It was something “spiritual, ya know?” that they could do together before the kid went off to college. Then there was a Canadian couple that shuddered when I asked them if they were also from the USA. There were also lifelong friends from the UK who had been through so much together —studies, marriage, the birth of their children, the empty nest— that they wanted to share this, too. One of them was under the weather and I offered her ibuprofen from my stash. “Oh, I would never put that poison inside my body,” she said, “but that’s very kind, thank you.”

Early the next morning, as I prepared to head off, a Ukrainian woman I’d also talked to the previous day climbed out of bed. I asked if she wanted me to wait for her and she said no, she would have breakfast first but maybe we’ll see each other on the way? Sure, I thought, if you sprint and I die. I did see her on the way. It was after I got lost trying to track down a coffee shop that turned out to be closed and spent over an hour backtracking.

The Camino paths are well marked, and you can also track your progress on the “Pilgrim Ninja” app, as pilgrims across the centuries have done. But the people who claim that you cannot get lost on the Camino de Santiago have never met me. I have, in fact, gotten lost on multiple occasions, for example when walking right up to a bright yellow arrow pointing left and then turning right because of a condition I have whereby I don’t see things that interfere with the scenarios in my mind.

On that second day of walking, I developed a limp. It caught me by surprise, but I knew what set it off. When I was nineteen, I toured some caves with a group. You had to jump to get through one of them, and I, with my fear of heights and general cowardice, volunteered to go first and smashed my right foot. Not wanting to make a fuss, I agreed that we should go see a lookout next. By the time I got to the hospital, my foot was so swollen they had to wait a few days before fastening the dislocated bones with screws. In the end there were no lasting effects, and I had long put the incident behind me. But the foot must have been retraumatized on the Camino. It swelled and sent little jolts of pain whenever I stepped on it.

A German named Dirk was already there when I arrived at the next hostel shortly before the 2pm opening time. He’d been walking for a couple of weeks already, from the South of Portugal. When I told Dirk this was my second day on the pilgrimage, he regarded me with a look I couldn’t make out. It would come into focus only later, after seeing it repeatedly: the serious pilgrim’s scorn for the slacker counterpart. I found it comic until about ten days into the pilgrimage, when I saw people who started walking a day earlier from a place so close to Santiago they may as well have been parachuted down to the cathedral. I and the woman I was walking with commented on their fresh clothes and tiny little backpacks with hyperbolic disdain.

Since Dirk was so seasoned, I asked him if a hostel was ever full when he got there. Public pilgrim hostels are first-come first-serve, and are known to fill to capacity. It was a nagging concern for me and one of the reasons I set out at daybreak. No, Dirk said: he was cautious and always arrived before the opening time. He showed off his log listing every place he stayed with precise arrival and departure times (“I like zingz organized”). I found it only a little bit ridiculous. The fact is that people like Dirk and I would be guaranteed a spot and get to choose our beds, while loser pilgrims had to settle for top bunks.

I walked the standard twenty-some kilometers per day, sometimes with others but, as my limp slowed me down, mostly alone. I didn’t mind as there were always people to chat with while slumping on rocks or fueling up at coffee shops. Early afternoons at the hostels, a shower and then food, either in the hostel kitchen or, after crossing the border to Spain, a sumptuous set-menu lunch at a local restaurant. Evenings, I spent at the hostel communal space, online or chatting with whoever was there. Then, early to bed: lights were out by 10pm and the chorus of snoring and farting began.

There were few amenities on the Camino and no privacy at all. Clothes were handwashed, toilets and showers shared, and sleeping was in dorm rooms on plastic mattresses. Outdoors it was raining or sweltering, indoors loud and stinky, the body tired and sore. And I had a blast. I say this as a set-in-her-ways homebody with no attraction to nature and limited social batteries. Still, I was happy on the pilgrimage every day. Downright chipper, humming tunes and cracking jokes.

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3.

It did me good to distract myself from my manuscript, but there was more to it than that. The very act of walking towards a destination —which is all a pilgrimage boils down to— was salutary. You wake up in the morning and you have one job. You’re always making linear, measurable progress. It may not be easy on your body, but you don’t want it to be. Whatever your reasons for doing a pilgrimage, if you’re expending unremitting physical effort, it has to be meaningful somehow. Each day is a challenge met with its little celebrations and preparation for the next day’s walk. I had no problem imagining Sisyphus happy.

The limp, too, made me the object of attention, of which I cannot get enough. Are you okay? Can I help? I was offered painkillers and other remedies. A Dutch guy suggested sheep’s wool, and I agreed just to see what would come out of his backpack. Turns out he meant actual sheep’s wool. He tore out a piece to place against a pressure point and, lo and behold, it did nothing for the pain. A French woman found me a branch to use as a walking stick. It was huge and gnarly and twisted, making me look like an evil pilgrim on her way to worship Satan. I tossed it after she disappeared because I needed my hand for that far more important crutch — my phone. Many praised me for pushing through the pain, which I accepted with proper humility. Then, a few days in, I was upstaged by a pilgrim with a prosthetic leg. I never saw him, but I heard about him plenty. Him again, I muttered every time he was mentioned.

About halfway through the pilgrimage, it struck me that I still hadn’t discovered a new perspective on life. All I had were my problematic old ones. I needed to be more deliberate about it. As I set off the next morning, I was laser-focused on my predicament. My book might never get published. Could I live with that? No, no, I would die. But, okay, probably? If it came to that, though, how would I distinguish myself? As my aching foot reminded me, I was as needy now as I was at nineteen, jumping in a cave and suppressing the pain for everyone to see. Or maybe I could become one of those self-validating people, instead. How, though?

A couple of days later I met exactly one of those people: a thirty-something seminarian from the Midwest named Kyle. I’d never met a seminarian before, and I had questions. I swear they were more than just about taking the vow of celibacy (not a problem: he believed in love shared with God and the community). How he decided to become a priest was one. He heard the call when he was thirteen, he said, but resisted it: nothing in his upbringing would have led him to it. His parents were opposed, as was everyone else in his life. To please them, he went to medical school, then dropped out as the call grew louder. Now it was strong enough that he no longer needed anyone’s approval. He knew he was on the right path.

“But are you 100 percent sure?” I asked, because I’m never that sure about anything. He was. I said I was jealous and shared my publishing woes. Kyle said he knew how I felt but proved otherwise by adding that if I was meant to be a writer, I would write no matter what. My distress wasn’t about writing, though. It was about publishing, wishing to inhabit that larger and more interesting world of published writers. Not being admitted to it felt like limping along a well-trodden path whose protagonist was a guy with a prosthesis. I could hardly say all this to redeemed, needing-no-one’s-approval Kyle, though.

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4.

I read a beautiful essay in preparation for the pilgrimage by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, about the pilgrim as a symbol of modernity. In contrast to the experience-seeking tourist, the pilgrim is a pursuer of truth and constructor of identity. And since truth and identity always resided elsewhere —projects whose realization required ongoing effort— the person who sought them had to walk and then walk some more. For Bauman, the pilgrimage was an oblique assertion of our inadequacy and incompleteness, a projection into the future of a protean and ever-unfulfilled ideal self.

But if that were so, wouldn’t you need milestones indicating that you were on the right path — in case, I don’t know, you strayed for coffee or were too self-absorbed to spot an arrow? God knows I meandered plenty. Since He wouldn’t disclose my destiny to me as He had for Kyle, I relied for guidance on family and friends, on my colleagues and parasocials, and on people who didn’t know me yet but maybe one day would, if I ever had something to show for myself.

In the beginning of the pilgrimage, I took pictures and shared them, but they’d grown too tedious even for my family’s WhatsApp group. Then I saw a woman taking pictures of the coastline and I asked her if she wasn’t sick of it already (the Coastal Route is called that for a reason). She said: “No, and I live on an Island!” She meant one of Portugal’s Azores. She introduced herself as María. “In Portugal, when in doubt about a woman’s name, just say María and you’ll almost always be right.” She was walking alone after chucking a group with an overbearing leader. Alone was definitely the way to go, but she might repeat the pilgrimage next year with her two adult sons, “because they do as they’re told.” I wrote all this down after we parted ways, as I had with every amusing conversational snippet.

One morning I met Miguel from Mexico. I asked if I could join him because it was still dark out and he had a headlamp. He said yes and then proceeded to get us both lost (he didn’t notice the arrow, and I did this little thing I do when I’m with other people, namely cede all responsibility to them). As we backtracked, I confessed that I’d used Google Maps the other day to shorten the route and he didn’t judge me. Miguel had been walking since Lisbon and met a bunch of evangelicals on the way. He said the Camino was like Christian Tinder for them. This rang true to me: I’d also shared a coffee-shop table with one who was walking with a sexy tattooed lady he met on the way. He said they’d been up half the night because of a loud snorer at their hostel who’d got people so crazed that they were trying to shush him from the other end of the room. I shared the story with Miguel, who said: “oh, the snorer,” like this was a celebrity.

I also walked for a stretch with an American whose Camino app glitched. “It keeps telling me I’m in the wrong place,” he said, and showed me the screen. He was right — the app showed him so punitively far off the trail that I suggested he searched his soul. He was the only one I could keep pace with at that point, only because he paused so frequently to take pictures and make videos. While we stopped for coffee, he showed me the videos he took of his latest trip. I was eager to get going again but there were still more of them. “Don’t worry, I won’t bore you much longer,” he assured me. I’m nothing if not agreeable so I said: “Don’t be silly.”

One morning I caught up with a 20-year-old Briton whose fish tattoo I had admired a couple of days earlier. She told me that her mother hated it, which made me fear she pegged me as being of her mother’s generation. I probably was, but I didn’t like her thinking it. When we met again, we spoke about blisters. I know I’d mentioned that they were boring to read about in the memoirs but here’s the thing about blisters: when you have them yourself, they’re a fascinating topic of conversation. She said a woman at her hostel had cut her pilgrimage short and flew back home because her blisters got infected. “Ugh, if that happened to me, I wouldn’t tell anyone,” I said. “I know, right?” she said. “Cringe.”

A Korean woman had been walking for sixty-six days when I met her at a hostel. She started in Switzerland, had already been to Santiago and was now walking down to Lisbon. She was a bundle of energy and told anyone who cared to listen that it was thanks to fresh fruit. She loved fruit and it was so much cheaper in Europe than in Korea. Every day she bought a load of it, all different kinds, and ate it on the way.

The next morning I started walking with an Italian named Francesca, who turned herself into the most popular pilgrim on our route by randomly distributing Kinder chocolates. Whenever she was not around, people would ask, “Where’s Francesca? Has anyone seen Francesca?” Francesca told me she heard a noise from the bathroom early that morning. She went to check and saw the Korean lady vomiting her guts out. We snorted: all that fruit!

My arrival at Santiago would have been anticlimactic had I not already read so much about it being anticlimactic that I was expecting zero climax. The hostel here was better, as I was to share a room with two people I already knew: Kyle the seminarian and Miguel from Mexico. Kyle said there’d be a special mass for pilgrims at the cathedral that afternoon. After a shower and food, Miguel and I went to check it out, but stayed for all of five minutes because it was boring. Then, over drinks, Miguel told me about his recent personal crisis. He was doing online therapy twice a week now, even during the Camino. He connected with his inner child and it changed everything: he was nowhere near as insecure and needy as he used to be.

He also had a different pilgrimage experience than I did, having laughed and cried almost every day. It made me feel like I’d missed out, never having been nearly so overcome by emotion while walking. “Because you weren’t really looking for it,” Miguel said. “You can’t both have the emotional intensity and stay inside your comfort zone.” He was teasing me after I said therapy wasn’t for me, as it would force me out of my comfort zone, which I like on account of the comfort. He said he couldn’t understand how I could write a whole-ass book without digging deeper inside myself.

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5.

I told Miguel that my book was supposed to be funny, and he saw right through it. Not leaning into pain was a mistake, he said. I might get a laugh, but then people would move on to the next joke and remember nothing. Comedy was a defense, it’s also what kept me from discovering precisely the new perspective I was after. All I’d gained was a two-week respite. I would return home as needy as I was when I left. I suspected he was right, though I’ve never been unaware that things could get worse. Better funny and needy, I felt, than serious and miserable.

The next morning, I filled out the details of my trip and waited in line at the pilgrim’s office. Finally, a clerk checked my pilgrim passport, now full of stamps, and then handed me my pilgrim credential. I thanked her and paused with an ear-to-ear grin until she clapped good-naturedly. Before I left, I had someone take my picture to share with family and friends and to post online.

The plaza in front of the cathedral was full of pilgrims, and I spent the next hour eavesdropping on their conversations. A few compared routes. “Oh, so you were taking it easy,” said one to another who clearly didn’t think he was. Two women spoke about how their walking shoes had been too small and they had to buy new ones on the way. They showed each other the bruises on their heels like Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters. One man was giving his family a blow-by-blow account of his walk. I stopped listening when I realized it was going to be longer than the actual pilgrimage. A couple of pilgrims had just arrived, sweaty and dusty. Pausing to observe the cathedral, one of them asked if they should go inside. “Nah, fuck that” said the other.

Then I saw Kyle. He was on his way to a debriefing for newly arrived pilgrims, and I asked if I could tag along. We arrived just as people pulled up chairs in a circle. They shared their experiences in the kind of religious language I hadn’t heard at all during the walk. Kyle must have been in his element because when his turn came, he spoke with unusual confidence. He was lonesome at first, he said. Everyone but him was walking away from something rather than towards something. He was walking for people he knew but found the responsibility daunting, given the lives those people led. Then he prayed on it and realized that all he could do was offer himself to God on their behalf.

I slipped out after the debriefing to avoid him. I liked him so much the first time we met, when he was normal and self-effacing, but this! Was this where not being needy got you? God might make you more secure but at least insecurity forced you to pay attention to people who could alert you when you went off the deep end.

Miguel was at the hostel when I returned to pick up my backpack. I told him I had received my pilgrim credential that morning and that it was fun; the clerk had clapped for me. “No one clapped when I picked mine up,” Miguel exclaimed. “Because you weren’t really looking for it,” I shrugged.

While waiting for the bus back to Lisbon, I spent quality time on my phone, going over the likes and congratulations for completing my pilgrimage. I knew rejections were forthcoming too, and I failed to gain insight as to how to handle them. Still, at that moment, I fully appreciated the small things. I pulled out my notebook and pen. Returning home as I’d left it also meant returning to comedy, defensive as the impulse surely was. “I’ve risen above and beyond the details of my problems,” I wrote. “Don’t ask me how though. The search for happiness is a personal search and not a model we can pass on to others.”

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« J’aime tout ce qui coule », écrivait Henry Miller, avant de recourir à une métaphore graphique — et finalement misogyne — pour appuyer son propos. Parmi les choses qui coulent, il faut assurément compter l’écriture de la romancière belge Daphné Tamage (voir notamment son roman récent, Le retour de Saturne, que nous adorons). De son propre aveu, la sensibilité littéraire de Daphné a été profondément façonnée par Miller, aux côtés de John Fante et d’autres représentants américains du milieu du XXᵉ siècle de ce qu’on appelle parfois le « dirty realism ». Que signifie communier avec ces mauvais garçons — ou avec leurs fantômes — quand on est européenne, femme, fille d’un père d’une telle rare douceur ? Pourquoi les poursuivre, après tant d’années, à travers tant de distance, géographique comme tempéramentale ? Laissons Daphné répondre elle-même, dans cette réflexion poignante sur son récent pèlerinage littéraire en Californie, son papa juché sur le siège passager comme le Charley de Steinbeck. — Les Éditeurs

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« Un jour, je deviendrais une légende de la mythologie crustacée. » —John Fante, La Route de Los Angeles

Juste avant la réélection de Mr. T., j’ai trainé mon pauvre père de San Francisco à Los Angeles en passant par Carmel, Big Sur et Cambria : l’idée était de descendre la Highway 1 en une dizaine de jours pour visiter les incontournables. Dans le souci d’épargner à mon père apiculteur une violence citadine à laquelle il était notoirement impréparé, j’ai décidé que nous dormirions, une fois arrivés à L.A., sur les hauteurs de Topanga Canyon. Plus honnêtement, mon but était de me trouver à mi-chemin entre Pacific Palisades et Point Dume, où s’étaient établis mes deux indétrônables héros de jeunesse : Henry Miller et John Fante. Héros ? Il s’agissait en fait – et c’était pire, dans un sens – de mes modèles, mentors, qui allaient, plus tard et dans une improbable filiation, donner une sorte de forme prémâchée à mon écriture et une direction à ma niaque. Je devais donc un paquet de choses à ces deux auteurs ambivalents, autocentrés, mégalomanes et tout à fait contestables. Des hommes, de surcroît.

En arrivant sur le promontoire de Point Dume, le ventre plein à craquer de clam chowder du Malibu Seafood, papa s’est affolé de voir des pancartes « Armed Security » ornées d’un pistolet noir sur fond blanc et plantées dans tous les gazons taillés à ras de Cliffside Drive.

—Chérichou, je ne me sens pas très à l’aise ici, a dit mon père en ralentissant, alors que je cherchais des yeux une place de parking.

—Ce n’est pas un quartier privé, papa, on a le droit d’être là.

—Je ne le sens pas. Et je croyais que ton écrivain était pauvre, a-t-il ajouté en désignant une propriété cossue.

—Il a été pauvre, mais il a travaillé pour Hollywood et il est devenu riche. C’est le concept du rêve américain : partir de rien et atterrir ici.

Après un temps de réflexion, papa a demandé :

—Mais pourquoi tu veux voir sa maison ?

—Parce que c’est un génie.

—Son génie est dans ses livres, non ?

—Je n’en sais rien. Peut-être que j’ai besoin qu’il sache que je suis venue jusqu’à lui. Peut-être que son âme est restée à Point Dume.

Une petite voix me disait que l’âme de John Fante rodait plutôt sur le terrain de golf d’à côté, chez Musso & Frank ou, plus probablement, au casino.

—Et tu crois qu’il en a quelque chose à faire, que tu cherches son âme ?

—Affirmatif.

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Mon père, pour qui les écrivains étaient des gens troublés, mais qui m’avait promis ce voyage depuis quinze ans en le reportant sans cesse, n’a pas moufté est a obéi à mon désir de faire le tour du quartier. Après avoir tourné trois fois dans Point Dume à la recherche d’une place de parking, il sérieusement craint qu’on nous prenne pour des voleurs et qu’un propriétaire zélé finisse par appeler son onéreuse sécurité privée. Je lui ai fait signe de laisser tomber, et je n’ai pas insisté pour nous arrêter chez Joan Didion, détour qui aurait définitivement achevé papa. J’ai tout de même demandé, avant de rejoindre les oiseaux et la nature sauvage de Topanga, de faire un détour par le 444 Ocampo Drive, en guise d’hommage à Henry Miller. C’était juste avant les incendies, le quartier était fadasse et propret, mais j’ai été émue de voir que les deux arbres reconnaissables sur les photos d’antan s’épanouissaient toujours contre la façade. Papa a pris une photo de moi devant la maison et nous sommes partis.

Mon plan initial était sensiblement plus ambitieux qu’un rodage dans deux quartiers d’un ennui mortel : il s’agissait en fait de trainer mon pauvre père jusqu’au port de Long Beach dans le but de trouver la plage de ladite « scène des crabes » de La Route de Los Angeles. Mais mon père s’était indigné, la veille, de voir que des gens dormaient par terre entre Marina del Rey et Venice. Il ne comprenait pas comment « c’était possible que personne ne fasse rien pour eux », « comment on pouvait laisser les gens mourir sur la plage », « comment c’était possible de vivre dans ces maisons si chères qui bordent les canaux (faux, en plus), et de savoir que des éclopés perdent leur vie à quelques mètres de leur jardin à arrosages automatiques », etc. J’ai répondu que je n’en savais rien, que les États-Unis avaient leur façon à eux de faire le tri entre les êtres humains, et que ce tri s’opérait en fonction de leur portefeuille, mais que nous n’étions pas forcément meilleurs chez nous même si, il fallait l’avouer, le contraste entre le luxe et la misère, à Los Angeles, était particulièrement sinistre.

J’ai donc raboté mes plans de la soirée, et nous avons pris la route de Topanga. Mon père en a été instantanément ragaillardit et j’ai dit adieu, dans ma tête, à l’idée de grimper jusqu’à Bunker Hill le lendemain matin. Nous irions voir les vieux escaliers d’Hollywoodland et l’Observatoire. Là-bas, tout irait bien. En attendant, nous étions coincés dans les embouteillages.

—Pourquoi tu voulais voir ce port en particulier ? a soudain demandé papa.

—Une scène mythique s’y déroule dans La Route de Los Angeles. Le double littéraire de John Fante, Arturo Bandini, massacre des crabes sur une plage de rochers.

—Mon père, qui aimait les animaux, a blêmi.

—Tu voulais te rendre sur les lieux d’un massacre ?

—Un massacre imaginaire, papa. Il n’a pas vraiment tué ces crabes.

—Tu veux voir un lieu où quelqu’un a écrit qu’il a tué des crabes mais où, en vérité, il n’a pas tué de crabes ?

—J’ai hoché la tête.

—Et pourquoi c’est important ? Enfin, le Hearst Castle, j’ai compris pourquoi tu voulais le visiter, même si... Enfin, je ne dis pas, le lieu est impressionnant, le type y a vécu et tout, puis Rosebud, blablabla. Mais une tuerie imaginaire, Chérichou, sérieusement ?

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Nous sommes restés silencieux, lui se disant qu’il avait décidément du mal à comprendre la fille qu’il avait mise au monde, moi à me poser une question de premier ordre : pourquoi, de tous temps, les écrivains faisaient-ils des pèlerinages sur les traces d’autres écrivains ? D’où venait cette tradition que nous perpétuions malgré nous ? Et surtout : pourquoi la perpétrions-nous vainement ? Est-ce que l’âme de Fante était venue parler à mon âme à Point Dume ? Et celle de Miller à Pacific Palisades ? Non, aucune n’était venue. La seule chose qui venait à moi, en ce moment, était les relents du pot d’échappement d’en face.

—Je crois, j’ai fini par dire, que la colère délirante de cette scène nous habite tous. Fante, qui a 21 ans à l’époque où il l’écrit, veut devenir le plus grand écrivain américain de sa génération, et se laisse aller à cette violence. Il a lu Nietzsche, nous sommes dans les troubles de l’entre-deux-guerres, il délire complètement. Et même si c’est tout à fait discutable, quand tu as le même âge et que tu lis ça…

—Tu as envie de massacrer des crabes ?

—De devenir écrivain. Parce que cette liberté qu’il s’accorde est tellement inouïe, son débordement si tonitruant en toi, que tu pressens que l’écriture offre une sorte d’ivresse inatteignable autrement que par l’écriture, et qu’elle ne se transmet que par la lecture.

—Et tu l’as atteinte, cette fameuse ivresse, en devenant romancière ?

—J’ai fait non de la tête alors que nous zigzaguions dans le canyon.

—Mais je la pressens, j’ai ajouté.

—Et ça suffit pour bâtir une œuvre ? Un pressentiment ?

—Ces sept pages de pure colère ont été assez fortes pour que je m’en souvienne encore avec précision dix ans plus tard. Je me dis que si je travaille assez dur, ce pressentiment, ou cette prescience d’une forme de joie, peut se transmettre comme une lanterne et éclairer n’importe qui, n’importe où dans le monde. C’est la force de la littérature, et celle de la traduction.

Mon père a haussé les épaules.

—Je ne comprends toujours pas comment tu peux prendre plaisir à lire un type qui tire à la carabine sur des crustacés.

—C’est la puissance de son imaginaire que j’admire, papa, pas son acte. Tu comprends quand même que l’autoportrait déformé de Van Gogh est une vision du peintre sur lui-même, et non pas la réalité ?

—Bien sûr, Chérichou, je ne suis pas débile. Ce que j’aimerais comprendre, c’est pourquoi tu veux te rendre dans un lieu où il ne s’est rien passé en dehors de ce livre ?

—Parce que Bandini qui dézingue des crabes, c’est mythique. Pourquoi des gens dépensent des fortunes pour des croisières qui les déposent sur l’île d’Ithaque où il n’y a rien, papa ? Parce qu’ils veulent voir où Ulysse aurait accosté ! Ulysse !

—Oui, bon, ce n’est tout de même pas comparable. Les gens visitent le Colisée parce qu’il y a vraiment eu des combats de Gladiateurs. Ils peuvent les imaginer.

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Je comprenais ce que soutenait mon père, mais il devait prendre autre chose en compte :

—À la fin de sa vie, Fante ne voyait plus rien, et avait été amputé d’une jambe. Mais alors patratra, voilà que Charles Bukowski le sort de l’anonymat à la fin des années 70, et que toute une génération le redécouvre presque quarante ans plus tard ! Il finira par devenir, après avoir été cet homme teigneux, cruel, colérique et hystérique, l’écrivain qu’il s’était imaginé être en écrivant cette scène. Le rêve qui se transforme en réalité. C’est ça, le mythe. Et approcher ce mythe, symboliquement, c’est quelque chose. Je ne peux pas te dire quoi, mais je sais que c’est important.

—Et si c’était juste un fantasme ? Que tu n’approchais rien du tout en suivant ses traces ?

Papa s’est garé, nous avons rejoint la cabane de location. Il a sorti du frigo une Chimay Rouge dénichée au supermarché hippie du coin et qui, par hasard, était brassée à quelques kilomètres de chez lui, en Belgique, de l’autre côté du monde.

Le soleil se couchait derrière la terrasse.

—Tu crois qu’il y a des coyotes ? a demandé mon père alors que je consignais les détails de la journée dans un carnet.

—Non, mais je peux décider que oui, si tu veux, j’ai dit pour le taquiner : « Il était tard, le père et la fille s’étaient installés près du jardin pour admirer les derniers rayons sur le Pacifique, quand… »

—Vous vous croyez vraiment tout-puissants avec vos histoires, hein ? Tu sais qu’en dehors des personnes qui lisent des livres, tout le monde s’en fiche des écrivains et des crabes-morts-pas-vraiment-morts ? Tu sais que le monde de la finance s’en fout ? Tu sais que le monde du luxe s’en fout ? Tu sais que la politique s’en fout ? Tu sais que…

J’ai hoché la tête. Je savais.

—Moi je crois, a-t-il dit, que vous vivez dans un monde parallèle parce que vous refusez de regarder la réalité en face, et parce que vous êtes incapables de l’accepter.

—On la regarde. Mais elle ne nous suffit pas. Et dans cette insuffisance, seul le statut d’écrivain nous protège. C’est notre salut. Enfin, c’est ce qu’on croit. Tu sais, comme ces enfants qui veulent devenir pompiers avant même d’être montés dans un camion, ou bien d’avoir appris à maîtriser le feu. L’écriture, c’est pareil. Pour la plupart d’entre nous, le rêve de devenir écrivain précède l’envie d’écrire.

Mon père a levé les yeux au ciel.

—Moi, j’ai aimé la pêche à partir du moment où j’ai attrapé ma première truite. Pas avant.

—Mais si tu es allé pêcher, c’est que quelque chose en toi soupçonnait que ça pourrait te plaire.

—Mmh.

—Tu as donc eu une sorte de vision. Ou alors ton inconscient…

—Chérichou.

La conversation touchait à sa fin. Mon père saturait. Je me suis quand même levée pour aller chercher l’exemplaire de Mon chien stupide que j’avais tenu à relire dans l’avion, et je suis restée debout pour lui déclamer un passage.

« Je savais pourquoi je voulais ce chien. J’étais las de la défaite et de l’échec. Je désirais la victoire, mais j’avais 50 ans, et il n’y avait pas de victoire en vue, pas même de bataille, car mes ennemis ne s’intéressaient plus au combat. Stupide était la victoire, les livres que je n’avais pas écrits, les endroits que je n’avais pas vus. La Maserati que je n’avais jamais eue. Les femmes qui me faisaient envie, Danielle Darrieux, Gina Lollobrigida, Nadia Gray. Stupide incarnait le triomphe sur d’anciens fabriquants de pantalons qui avaient mis en pièce mes scénarios jusqu’au jour où le sang avait coulé. Comme mon bien-aimé Rocco, il apaiserait la douleur, panserait les blessures de mes journées interminables, de mon enfance pauvre, de ma jeunesse désespérée, de mon avenir compromis. »

Après un certain temps, mon père a levé la tête :

—Danielle Darrieux ?

Pour lui, c’était une dame de la génération de son grand-père. En dehors de cette incongruité qui avait capté son attention, je ne savais pas si mon père comprenait le souffle qui se logeait dans cet extrait, sa vitalité. Est-ce qu’il mesurait l’espoir délirant que cet homme mettait soudain dans son chien ? Le pouvoir de changer non seulement son futur, mais aussi son passé ? Mon père comprenait-il comment la littérature venait sublimer la vie ?

—Papa, ai-je commencé dans une tentative d’explication, mais il m’a interrompu d’un geste de la main et s’est levé pour arpenter le sous-bois. Papa ? ai-je répété.

Mon père s’est contenté de poser un index contre sa bouche. Comme le soleil s’était couché, je l’ai vu disparaître et j’ai attendu, dans le silence, qu’il revienne m’expliquer qu’elle mouche l’avait piquée, et de quel droit il sabotait ce passage génial du livre que je tenais entre les mains.

—Regarde, Chérichou, a-t-il murmuré dans l’obscurité.

J’ai levé la tête vers les fourrées. Deux yeux qui reflétaient la lumière de la véranda me fixaient, immobiles, à une trentaine de mètres.

Mon père a fait craquer une branche en voulant s’approcher. Le coyote s’est enfuit.

—Tu vois, a-t-il dit en versant le fond sa bière dans le verre. Tu n’as pas eu besoin de l’écrire pour le faire advenir.

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“I love everything that flows,” Henry Miller once wrote, before turning to a graphic and ultimately misogynist metaphor to drive his point home. Among things that flow we must surely count the writing of Belgian novelist Daphné Tamage (see, notably, her Le retour de Saturne, which we love). By her own account Daphné’s literary sensibility was significantly shaped by Miller, alongside John Fante and other of those mid-century American purveyors of what is sometimes called “dirty realism”. What is it like to commune with these bad boys, or with the ghosts of these bad boys, as a European, as a woman, as the daughter of a supremely gentle father? Why chase after them, after all this time, across all this distance, geographical and temperamental? Let’s let Daphne explain, in this poignant reflection on her recent literary pilgrimage in California, dad perched in the passenger seat like Steinbeck’s own Charley. —The Editors

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“One day I’ll be a legend of crustacean mythology” —John Fante, The Road to Los Angeles (1936)

Just before the reelection of T., I dragged my poor father from San Francisco to Los Angeles by way of Carmel, Big Sur, and Cambria. The idea was to drive down Highway 1 over the course of ten days and to tick off all the must-sees. Wanting to spare my father, a beekeeper, the sight of any of that urban violence for which he was constitutionally unprepared, I decided that once we reached LA we would sleep up in the hills of Topanga Canyon. More honestly, my aim was to place myself halfway between Pacific Palisades and Point Dume, where my two unassailable heroes of youth had settled: Henry Miller and John Fante. Heroes? In fact —and in a sense this was worse— they were my models, mentors who would later, through an improbable lineage, give my writing a kind of pre-chewed shape and my drive a direction. I owed a great deal, then, to those two ambivalent, self-absorbed, megalomaniacal, and questionable authors. Men, at that.

When we reached the Point Dume promontory, our bellies distended with clam chowder from Malibu Seafood, my father panicked at the sight of the “Armed Security” signs —black pistols on white backgrounds— planted in every close-cropped lawn along Cliffside Drive.

“Chérichou, I don’t feel very comfortable,” my father said as he slowed down, while I scanned the street for a parking space.

“This isn’t a private neighborhood, Dad. We’re allowed to be here.”

“I don’t like it. And I thought your writer was poor,” he said, pointing at some stately property.

“He was poor, but he worked for Hollywood and became rich. That’s the American Dream: starting from nothing and ending up here.”

After a moment’s thought, my father asked, “But why do you want to see his house?”

“Because he’s a genius.”

“His genius is in his books, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I need for him to know that I came all this way to see him. Maybe his soul stayed at Point Dume.”

A small voice inside me said that John Fante’s soul was more likely hanging around on the neighboring golf course, at Musso & Frank, or at the casino.

“And you think he cares that you’re looking for his soul?”

“Affirmative.”

My father, for whom writers are deeply unsettling people, yet who had nonetheless been promising me this trip for fifteen years while endlessly postponing it, didn’t say a word and went along with my wish to circle the neighborhood. After driving around Point Dume three times in search of a parking spot, he seriously began to fear that we’d be taken for thieves and that some overzealous homeowner would end up calling upon his expensive private security. I motioned for him to let it go, nor did I insist that we stop by Joan Didion’s place, which would have finished him off for good. Before heading back toward the birds and wildness of Topanga, I did at least ask for a detour past 444 Ocampo Drive, as a tribute to Henry Miller. It was just before the fires; the neighborhood was bland and immaculate, but I was moved to see that the two trees recognizable from old photographs were still flourishing against the façade. Dad took a picture of me in front of the house and we got back on the road.

My plan at the beginning had been far more ambitious than mere passage through two terribly dull neighborhoods: it had been to drag my poor father all the way to the port of Long Beach, in hope of finding the beach from the so-called “crab scene” in The Road to Los Angeles. But the night before he had been outraged to see people sleeping on the ground between Marina del Rey and Venice. He couldn’t understand “how it was possible that nobody did anything for them,” “how people could be left to die on the beach,” “how it was possible to live in those outrageously expensive houses lining the fake canals knowing that broken people were losing their lives just a few yards from their automated sprinkler systems,” and so on. I told him I didn’t know, that the United States had its own way of sorting human beings and that the sorting was done according to the size of their wallets, but that we weren’t necessarily any better back home — even if, it had to be admitted, the contrast between luxury and misery in Los Angeles was particularly jarring.

So I scaled back my plans for the evening and we headed toward Topanga. My father perked up instantly, and in my head I said goodbye to the idea of climbing up to Bunker Hill the next morning. We’d go see the old Hollywoodland stairs and the Observatory. Out there, everything would be fine. In the meantime, we were stuck in traffic.

“Why did you want to see this particular port?” my father suddenly asked.

“A mythical scene takes place there. John Fante’s literary double, Arturo Bandini, massacres crabs on a rocky beach.”

My father, who loved animals, went pale.

“You wanted to go to the site of a massacre?”

“An imaginary massacre, Dad. He didn’t actually kill those crabs.”

“So you want to see a place where someone wrote that he killed crabs but where, in reality, he didn’t kill any crabs?”

I nodded.

“And why is that important? I mean, Hearst Castle — I get why you wanted to visit that, even if… well, I’m not saying anything, the place is impressive, the guy lived there and all that, then Rosebud, blah blah. But an imaginary slaughter, Chérichou — seriously?”

My father didn’t press the point. We stayed silent — he telling himself that he was clearly having trouble understanding the daughter he had brought into the world, I asking myself a more fundamental question: why, throughout history, have writers made pilgrimages in the footsteps of other writers? Where did this tradition we were perpetuating despite ourselves come from? And above all, why did we perpetuate it in vain? Had Fante’s soul come to speak to mine at Point Dume? Miller’s at Pacific Palisades? No — neither had come. The only thing reaching me at that moment were the exhaust fumes from the car in front of us.

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“I think,” I finally said, “that the delirious anger of that scene lives in all of us. Fante was 21 when he wrote it; he wanted to become the greatest American writer of his generation, and he let himself go in that violence. He’d read Nietzsche, we’re in the turmoil of the interwar years — he’s completely unhinged. And even if it’s all rather problematic, when you’re that age and you read something like that…”

“You feel like massacring crabs?”

“Like becoming a writer. Because the freedom he allows himself is so unheard-of, the excess so thunderous inside you, that you sense writing offers a kind of intoxication unattainable by any other means — and that it can only be transmitted through reading.”

“And did you reach it, that famous intoxication, by becoming a novelist?”

I shook my head no as we zigzagged through the canyon.

“But I can feel it, a sort of anticipation,” I added.

“And that’s enough to build a body of work? A presentiment?”

“Those seven pages of pure anger were powerful enough for me to remember them exactly ten years later. I tell myself that if I work hard enough, that presentiment —or that foreknowledge of a certain form of joy— can be passed on like a lantern and light up anyone, anywhere in the world. That’s the power of literature, and of translation.”

My father shrugged.

“I still don’t understand how you can take pleasure in reading a guy who shoots crustaceans with a rifle.”

“It’s the power of his imagination that I admire, Dad, not the act itself. You do understand that Van Gogh’s distorted self-portrait is the painter’s vision of himself, not reality, right?”

“Of course, Chérichou, I’m not an idiot. What I’m trying to understand is why you want to go to a place where nothing happened except in that book.”

“Because Bandini blowing away crabs is mythical. Why do people spend fortunes on cruises that drop them off on the island of Ithaca, where there’s nothing, Dad? Because they want to see where Ulysses would have landed! Ulysses!”

“Sure, but it’s still not the same thing. People visit the Colosseum because there really were gladiator fights there. They can imagine them.”

I understood what my father was arguing, but there was something else he needed to take into account:

“At the end of his life,” I continued, “Fante could no longer see, and he’d had a leg amputated. And then —boom— Bukowski pulls him out of obscurity in the late seventies, and an entire generation rediscovers him almost forty years later! He ends up becoming, after having been that snarling, cruel, angry, hysterical man, the writer he had imagined himself to be when he wrote that scene. A dream that turns into reality — that’s the myth. And getting close to that myth, symbolically, means something. I can’t tell you what, but I know it matters.”

“And what if it’s just a phantasm?”

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Dad parked the car and we walked over to the rental cabin. He pulled a Chimay Red from the fridge, picked up at the local hippie supermarket and, by sheer coincidence, brewed just a few miles from his home on the other side of the world.

The sun was setting behind the deck.

“Do you think there are coyotes?” my father asked, as I was jotting down the details of the day in a notebook.

“No, but I can decide there are, if you want,” I said, teasing him. “It was late, father and daughter had settled near the garden to admire the last rays over the Pacific, when…”

“You really think you’re all-powerful with your stories, don’t you? You know that outside people who read books, no one could care less about writers and dead-but-not-really-dead crabs? You know the world of finance doesn’t give a damn? You know the luxury world doesn’t give a damn? You know politics doesn’t give a damn? You know that…”

I nodded. I knew.

“I think,” he went on, “that you live in a parallel world because you refuse to look reality in the face, and because you’re incapable of accepting it.”

“We do look at it. But it isn’t enough for us. And in that insufficiency, only the status of the writer protects us. It’s our salvation. Well — that’s what we think. You know, like kids who want to become firefighters before they’ve ever climbed into a truck, or learned how to master fire. Writing is the same. For most of us, the dream of becoming a writer comes before the desire to write.”

My father rolled his eyes.

“As for me, I liked fishing from the moment I caught my first trout. Not before.”

“But the fact that you went fishing at all means that something in you suspected you might enjoy it.”

“Mmh.”

“So you did have a kind of vision. Or else your unconscious…”

“Chérichou.”

The conversation was drawing to a close. My father was saturated. I still got up to fetch the copy of My Dog Stupid that I had insisted on rereading on the plane, and I remained standing to read him the underlined passage:

I knew why I wanted that dog. It was shamelessly clear, but I could not tell the boy. It would have embarrassed me. But I could tell myself and it did not matter. I was tired of defeat and failure. I hungered for victory. I was fifty-five and there were no victories in sight, nor even a battle. Even my enemies were no longer interested in combat. Stupid was victory, the books I had not written, the places I had not seen, the Maserati I had never owned, the women I hungered for, Danielle Darrieux and Gina Lollobrigida and Nadia Grey. He was triumph over ex-pants manufacturers who had slashed my screenplays until blood oozed. He was my dream of great offspring with fine minds in famous universities, scholars with rich gifts for the world.

After a while, my father raised his head.

“Danielle Darrieux?”

To him, this was a woman from his grandfather’s generation. Apart from that incongruity, which had caught his attention, I didn’t know whether my father grasped the breath that ran through that passage, its vitality. Did he sense the delirious hope that this man was suddenly placing in his dog? The power to change not only his future, but also his past? Did my father understand how literature, here, was transfiguring life?

“Dad,” I began, trying to explain — but he cut me off with a wave of his hand and got up to pace through the undergrowth. “Dad?” I repeated.

My father simply put a finger to his lips. As the sun had already set, I watched him disappear and waited, in silence, for him to come back and tell me what on earth had got into him, and by what right he was sabotaging this brilliant passage from the book I was holding in my hands.

“Look, Chérichou,” he murmured in the darkness.

I raised my eyes toward the thicket. Two eyes, reflecting the light from the porch, were staring at me, motionless, some thirty meters away.

My father snapped a branch as he tried to move closer; the coyote fled.

“You see,” he said, pouring the last of his beer into the glass. “You didn’t need to write it down—it was already there.”

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And falling, as Erin Endrei shows in her first contribution to The Hinternet, is a variety of motion in space heavy with philosophical significance. Spinoza says somewhere that if a falling stone could contemplate its own plight, it would tell itself it was falling of its own free choice. Do the leaves have a similar thought, we wonder? Or do they recognize the necessity of their circumstances? And if their fall is in fact necessary, why does the word we use to describe it have such a complex historical and conceptual connection to contingency? In her elegant and surprising juxtaposition of Aesop’s fables and of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Erin helps us to go some way towards answering these impossible questions. —The Editors

0.

There are no primary sources for Aesop’s fables, if the emphasis here on the proper name is taken to imply that the name’s supposed referent wrote them down. If he existed, he almost certainly did not do so. Socrates knew the fables attributed to Aesop well enough to versify them in his last days, according to Plato in the Phaedo, but written compilations are not known to have been produced until the following century.1 Of modern editions, it is Ben Edwin Perry’s Aesopica: A Series of Texts Relating to Aesop or Ascribed to Him Or Closely Connected With the Literary Tradition That Bears His Name, Collected and Critically Edited, In Part Translated From Oriental Languages, with a Commentary and Historical Essay (1952) that contains the sources closest to “primary” in this context, being a compilation of the earliest written versions of the fables in Greek and Latin.

Perry was not the first to exercise caution with respect to the fables associated with the subject of the popular ancient biography Vita Aesopi.2 His earlier monograph had devoted considerable scholarly attention to the Vita, presenting one of the earliest codices of it, the Vita G, in edited form.3 According to Lloyd W. Daly in Aesop Without Morals (1961), a work itself heavily indebted to Perry’s scholarship, it was not always assumed in the ancient world that all fables of the kind today called “Aesop’s” originated with the same person.4 They were termed Aesopic, as Perry also approves of calling them in the General Preface to Aesopica and in his earlier work on the subject.5 Both he and Daly avoid applying to them the possessive form of Aesop’s name. To do so without qualification, their scholarship suggests, is to run roughshod over the history of the fables’ formulation, variation, and supplementation down the centuries as tradition.

However we refer to the short tales by which that tradition is composed, most of us today have probably thought about them only rarely since our earliest school days, perhaps turning our attention to such apparently childish stories (or, as Daly puts it, “moralistic pap”) only on the odd occasion when we have witnessed, if not levelled or suffered, accusations involving the phrase “sour grapes”. The most special and important kindergartener of my acquaintance, for her part, has no favourites, as she does not yet abide any of them at all. On the last occasion of my trying to read “The Tortoise and the Hare” to her—quite a while ago indeed now—she was appalled by the ending, despite my attempts to explain its heartening moral. This was because she “wanted the hare to win”, a desire she justified in turn with the claim, entirely true in a sense, that it was he who “was supposed to win”. Neither did the next fable we tackled, “The Vain Jackdaw”, successfully “land”. For once one puts beautiful feathers upon oneself, then how can one fail to be beautiful? And the bird had put beautiful feathers upon herself. In what some may call didactic defeat, others gentle parenting, the volume has since remained in its place on the shelf.

One fable from Aesopic tradition that is less a favourite of mine than something that has burned itself in my memory, like Larkin’s jauntily tetrametric advice about having kids, is indexed 230 in Aesopica: “The Tortoise and the Eagle.” It may be read in several languages on the academic Laura Gibbs’ impressively detailed website, and in early twentieth-century English at Standard Ebooks in a translation by the little-known Cambridge classicist V. S. Vernon Jones. According to the Greek in Perry’s edition, a partial screenshot of a facsimile of which is provided below, the fable shows that “many human beings harm themselves in their rivalries”:

But another lesson appears to me quite clearly deducible: some things are bound to fall.

Beginning this essay with “The Tortoise and the Eagle” was not a purely arbitrary or self-referential choice, but an attempt to clear the way for the reader to see my point about something quite different, something indisputably a matter for adult and perhaps even scholarly consideration.

1.

The thing in question is the translation of the first line of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1921 under the title Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. As Wittgenstein died in 1951, the original text entered the public domain in 2021, and by 2025 three new English translations had appeared. For perspicuity and later reference, below is the first line in its original language, followed by various translations of it, mostly into Indo-European languages.

Wittgenstein:
Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

English translations:
Ramsey-Ogden (1922): The world is everything that is the case.
Pears-McGuinness (1961): The world is all that is the case.
Beaney (2023): The world is everything that is the case.
Searls (2024): The world is everything there is.6
Booth (2025): The world is all that happens to be the case.

Other Indo-European translations:
Dutch: De wereld is alles, wat het geval is.
French: 1: Le monde est tout ce qui a lieu.; 2: Le monde est tout ce qui est le cas.; 3: Le monde est tout ce qui se produit là.; 4: Le monde est tout ce qui advient.; 5: Le monde est tout ce qui arrive.
Icelandic: Heimurinn er allt sem er.
Italian: 1: Il mondo è tutto ciò che accade.; 2: Il mondo è tutto ciò che si verifica.
Modern Greek: Ο κόσμος είναι όλα όσα συμβαίνουν.
Portuguese: O mundo é tudo o que ocorre.
Russian: 1: Мир — это все, чему случается быть.; 2: Мир есть всё то, что имеет место.
Spanish: 1: El mundo es todo lo que acaece.; 2: El mundo es todo lo que es el caso.

Non-Indo-European translations:
Hungarian: A világ mindaz, aminek esete fennáll.
Finnish: Maailmaa on kaikki, mikä on niin kuin se on.

It would be interesting to conduct a comparative investigation of the nuances of the various English and non-English renderings. Lacking the relevant expertise, I cannot attempt to do such a thing; the translations are intended to serve mostly as a reminder that there are many more renderings that might be considered than just the various English ones, even without leaving the comfort of our own language family.

That reminder is necessary, because it is the relation between the English and German versions to which I am admittedly concerned to devote my attention in this short essay. In particular, there is a claim concerning the difficulty of translating Wittgenstein’s sentence into English about which it is my aim to raise a question.

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I

If you spoke to the Sun, what would you say?

II

We’re forbidden, as children, from staring up at it. Its power lies beyond safe measure. It dominates our world: all our cultures, all our lives. Every second it generates billions of times more energy than our species uses in a year. We exist as a rounding error in its flow, a tiny after-effect. In that sense, the only concept the Sun resembles, philosophically, is God. And those artists, writers and theorists who’ve tried to deal with the Sun, even to speak back to it, seem haunted by the same sense of incommensurate scale – by the knowledge of their powerlessness and enthrallment to a higher power.

III

We hide from sunlight by making corners. In any city built on a grid, or at monuments from Abu Simbel to Stonehenge, the Sun will twice a year be perfectly framed. Thus, Le Corbusier, in Vers une architecture (1923): “Architecture is the learned, correct, and magnificent game of volumes assembled beneath the light.”

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It appears we have a proper poetry series going here at The Hinternet — and now my job grows difficult. JSR continues his pressure on me to hunt for interesting new voices, and I am forced to confron…

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With the recent success of The Hinternet’s first feature from an English-language poet, Maria Theresa, our founding editor reached out to me again to see if I might be able to furnish forth any other…

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Two weeks or so ago, our Founding Editor received a text from one of his —how to put this politely?— one of his overabundance of acquaintances:

This was followed by a series of surprisingly …

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At the time of his death in 1956, the Polish classicist Władysław Radziwiłł was widely reputed to be the greatest scholar of Aristotle’s philosophy in his generation. This reputation was …

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1.

If you’ve been paying attention to the culture recently, you may have noticed that the people who spent the last ten years saying “let people enjoy things” are now fairly intent on making sure people don’t enjoy things. The prevailing sensibility seems to have shifted from “we should all slurp our gavage of mass entertainment with indiscriminate eagerness”, to “the more swathes of the culture you deride or dismiss out of hand, the cooler you are”, almost overnight. This is not, in itself, remarkable: aesthetic goal-posts have always moved, and if this particular development means the next decade will subject me to slightly fewer superhero movies and long exegetical pronouncements on the love life of Taylor Swift than the last, it can’t be entirely negative. Recently, however, the sneering has taken a distinctly literary turn. The world-spirit is on its high horse, and the new target is something called “brodernism.”

This causes me a degree of concern, as on first inspection “brodernism” sounds like the kind of thing I would like. The term was coined in a review of an obscure Hungarian novel for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and refers to what is apparently a common fetish among young men for difficult fiction in translation, an indiscriminate greediness for anything that could be described as “maximalist”, “avant-garde”, “speculative”, “modernist”, etc. I not only quite like works often described by these adjectives, but I am male, and twenty-seven years old, which is perhaps the age at which the literary bloke is at his most repellent.

To cap it all off, I am deep into a doctorate on the work of Jorge Luis Borges — who is, perhaps more than any other author, the founding patriarch of brodernism. Indeed, I suspect that much of the LARB reviewer’s antipathy can be chalked up to the fact that he is himself Argentinian, and has therefore grown up in the shadow of the novela borgesiana — a terrifying genre in which young men like me hold forth on some combination of sex, classificatory systems, computers, Nietzsche, Kafka, and sex again for, on average, about eight-hundred pages.

Still, when I first read the offending review, I did indeed experience a little pang of shame. There was something about the “brodernism” coinage that rang true, some intimation of a natural kind that might exist beyond one critic’s grumpy taxonomy. Why young men? Why these books? Of course, I’m not suggesting that we take the idea that difficult, foreign stuff is for boys and easy, vernacular stuff is for girls at all seriously: any reader of The Books of Jacob, or The Golden Notebook, or the Camino de Perfección, knows that this is not a legitimate division, as does anyone who has set foot in the distinctly boy-free zone of a university modern-languages department. But even if there is no perfect gender split here —it’s simply 2025, and the internet has decreed that any big division in the culture has to be gendered— there is a discernible divergence of sensibility. Some people compulsively seek out foreignness to such a degree that they become caricatures; other people have come to mistrust foreignness so much that they see it as a kind of aesthetic smoke-screen, a fancy new way of saying nothing at all. I suspect I belong to the first camp. So what is it about me that’s so annoying?

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