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I was surprised that “Why Is Everything So Ugly?” didn’t actually argue or demonstrate how the visual culture of New York City is symbiotic with “neoliberalism.” The only contention was that the apparent popularity of five-over-one mixed-use apartments coincides with a period of low interest rates (compared to what?). Some attention was given to the environmental and labor problems with fast furniture, fast fashion, and the circular economy, but these were given far fewer words than the piece’s aesthetic commentary.
It would have been helpful to consult a construction expert to understand whether the “Josh” apartment building is actually decaying and whether the old “perfectly serviceable” building it replaced was actually such. I know from other news stories that rainproof paneling is a new technique to protect buildings, and that new apartments of any price point usually have more efficient and healthy HVAC, better insulation, double-pane windows, and none of the asbestos/mold/lead residue that plague so much of our country’s substandard urban housing.
Without any strong attempts to actually prove new visual cultures and built environments are inferior beyond the eyes of the beholder, your criticism is indistinguishable from archconservative attacks on brutalism and modernism. What unites both types of criticism is knee-jerk cynicism.
Time marches on. I’m afraid that derogatory insinuations (“behemoths” and “monoliths” governed by insidious “logics”) and winking callbacks (“all that is solid . . .”) will grow ever poorer as a substitute for deep, patient inquiry.
by Cameron Wilson. good letter
I knew about the union effort before I started (ten of my MFA classmates also worked as Brendas), and although I had no organizing experience, I started attending union Zoom meetings in my first month. My coworkers pushed me to think about the job beyond collecting party anecdotes (my favorite was about a prospective renter who encountered a boa constrictor at a self-guided tour) and consider its context at the intersection of tech and real estate.
The union platform was focused on better pay, benefits, and a path to career advancement, but the organizers also wanted Brenda to be better, for example by requiring the properties Brenda worked with to be transparent about whether they offered wheelchair-accessible units or accepted Section 8 vouchers.
Like ChatGPT and DALL-E, Brenda the chatbot depended on the work of writers and artists. The company hired opera singers and creative-writing adjuncts because these professions tend to draw perfectionists accustomed to precarious work. Then, the software engineers designed and adjusted conversation flows in response to operator feedback. I’ve come to resent phrases like “human fallback” and “chatbot operator” that obscure that we were underpaid bot trainers and technical writers.
Maybe it was naive to think a union could address that. The company announced its intent to outsource Brenda operators to an international staffing company at the very first bargaining session. Still, the union secured a tech stipend for all remote workers at the company, pushed the company to comply with state paid-sick-leave laws, and became a resource for career advice. An increasing number of former BOT union members now hold full-time jobs in the tech industry. A union can’t make the uncanny valley beautiful, but it meant something that we tried.
by Irina Teveleva. sweet! (Brenda, the real estate chatbot described in issue 44 by Laura Preston)
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I cite this as evidence of the longevity of my connection with the magazine, but in fact the link goes back even further, pre-dating the acquisition of the missing Granta 1. In 1979 I was living in Oxford trying to finish a doctoral thesis and teaching in various Oxford colleges as a jobbing lecturer. I had just had my first novel accepted by a London publisher, but I was going to have to wait until January 1981 to see it published. I was reviewing books, writing short stories, and was seized with a sense of being engaged with literary life in a way that I haven’t fully replicated since. I read everything. I bought all the little magazines. Nothing stirred in the undergrowth of the literary world that didn’t attract my beady-eyed attention. At the same time, Susan, my wife, was working at Oxford University Press, running the publicity and marketing for the English Literature and Oxford Poetry lists. One night she came home from work with news of a new literary magazine that was starting up: she had met the editor, some American guy, who was looking for advertising, and she had decided to take a page in support.
<3
ne day I discovered that my uncle also had a library. Or at least there was a room called ‘the library’, which contained a wall of books, and a long table and several chairs. The room was musty but clean. No one ever used it, like front parlours in the suburbs.
I took in the books, which were hardbacks. Poetry, literature, a lot of left-wing politics, many published by Victor Gollancz. They’d been bought in London by one of my uncles and shipped to Pakistan. The uncle, who lived in Yasir’s house but now ‘roamed around all day’, had developed schizophrenia. In his early twenties he’d been a brilliant student, but his mind had deteriorated.
I sat at the library table and opened the first book, the contents crumbling and falling on the floor, as though I had opened a packet of flour upside down. I tried other volumes. In the end my reading schedule was determined by the digestion of the local worms. As it happened, there was one book less fancied by the worms than others. It was the Hogarth edition of Civilization and Its Discontents, which I had never read before. It occurred to me, as I went at it, that it was more relevant to the society in which I was presently situated than to Britain. Whatever: I was gripped from the first sentence, which referred to ‘what is truly valuable in life…’
What was truly valuable in life? Who wouldn’t have wanted to know that? I could have ripped at those pages with my fingernails in order to get all of the material inside me. Of course, I was maddened by the fact that whole sentences had been devoured by the local wildlife. Indeed, one of the reasons I wanted to return to London was that I wanted to read it properly. In the end, the only way to satisfy my habit—if I didn’t want to ask my father for books, which I didn’t—was to read the same pages over and over.
<3<3
Najma had married a Pakistani who came here to study engineering, and the two of them were living in Watford, with twins. I went out to see them a few times.
One kid had a fever, the other was perhaps a little backward. The couple had been racially harassed, knew no one, and the husband was out all day. Najma would cook for me; she knew I loved her food, and we’d sit together, chastely, while she talked of everything she missed ‘back home’. Exiled, she continued to curse the West for its immorality, while blaming it for failing to dispense its wealth to her family with the alacrity her fantasies demanded.
I took the husband out for a drink, and had to listen to him complaining about the excessive price of prostitutes in Britain.
I could only say that Britain might turn out to be more expensive than he thought.
oh god
She half smiled, but without a smidgen of humour. ‘Only, I was to lie facing the artist…’
Two yards away, Hugh fidgeted in his sleep.
She leaned further forward, her chin almost to her knees. ‘Like I said, we loved each other very much—well above a passion.’ Her voice was growing softer and softer. I moved my head closer. We were breathing the same air in front of her face. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with sex. Oh, it was in a way, but also not part of it at all. When you pose for people, you’re sharing with them. Bhero never talked while he worked, but afterwards he’d say: “When I’m painting you, I feel I’m touching you. I know what the texture of your skin is like. I know the texture of your hair in the way your husband does. I feel the bone under your forehead, I’m running my fingers over it…”’ Her hand mimicked the motion. ‘He taught me that turning someone into art is one of the most intimate things you can do.’
‘How did it end?’
‘Horribly.’ Her arm fell back slowly. ‘Hugh came home and it was only with great difficulty that I returned to him. But he had been in the war…’
‘Did you see Bhero again?’
She shook her head. Her face had taken on a painful, obscure look. She stared down at her gleaming shins, then at her husband—before hoisting her eyes up to me. ‘But I saw his painting.’
he first time they had come to the island, they weren’t yet married. She had worn a wedding ring as a concession to…what? — to how they imagined the island morality to be. It made them feel both superior and hypocritical at the same time. Their room at Calum and Flora’s B&B had whitewashed walls, rain drying on the window, and a view across the machair to the sharp rise of Beinn Mhartainn. On their first night, they had discovered a bed whose joints wailed against any activity grosser than the minimum required for the sober conception of children. They found themselves comically restricted. Island sex, they had called it, giggling quietly into one another’s bodies.
Flora had taken out of a drawer an old sweater which had belonged to her grandfather. She laid it on the kitchen table, ironing it with her palms. In the old days, she explained, the women of these islands used to tell stories with their knitting. The pattern of this jersey showed that her grandfather had come from Eriksay, while its details, its decorations, told of fishing and faith, of the sea and the sand. And this series of zigzags across one shoulder — these here, look — represented the ups and downs of marriage. They were, quite literally, marriage lines.
Zigzags. Like any newly married couple, they had exchanged a glance of sly confidence, sure that for them there would be no downs — or at least, not downs like those of their parents, or those of friends who were already making the usual stupid, predictable mistakes. They would be different, they would be different from everyone who had ever got married before.
ahhh
There was one time that I almost told Claire about Thanksgiving — in fact I tried to tell her. It was one night just after sex when I was feeling particularly close to her. As I started to tell the story, Claire sat up straight; she pulled the sheet tight against her body and I backed away from what I was about to say. I changed it. I left out the kiss. And I just mentioned something about Jane brushing against me.
‘You were in her way and she was trying to get past you and not get to you,’ Claire said.
I didn’t mention that I felt the head of my cock pressing against my sister-in-law’s tight skirt, her hips, her thighs pressed together.
‘Only you would think she was making a pass,’ Claire said, disgusted.
‘Only me,’ I repeated.
he pulled me to her; her hips were narrow. My hand slid down into her panties. It was a new jungle, new wildlife. She sighed. The feel of her, this private softness, was incredible. I remember thinking, This is not really going to happen — is it?
Her mouth was on me. She reached for something, some kind of cream; it started cold and then went warm. She stroked me, looking me straight in the eye. And then again her mouth was on me and there was no way of saying no. She pulled my trousers out from under, quickly had me down and was upon me, riding me. It was like nervous heaven. I exploded.