On this week’s episode of Start Making Sense, conversations from our archives, where Rachel Kushner reports on Palestinian refugees and Adam Shatz talks about Edward Said.
‘The Hard Crowd’ Reveals Rachel Kushner s Literary Life Through Death
Her latest book, a collection of 19 essays that spans art criticism, journalism and memoir, is an exhaustive examination of what it means to write
‘Neither tragic nor legendary, I myself will never die,’ writes Rachel Kushner in ‘Made to Burn’. She means that no one will write about her death. Her subjects, though – the rough-housers, activists, nihilists and stoics that people her first nonfiction collection,
The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–
2020 (Simon & Schuster, 2021) – are another story. Her dope-using neighbours from the Tenderloin in San Francisco are dead. So are the bartenders and regulars at the Blue Lamp, a dive where she poured drinks before she moved to New York to be a real writer. Her father-in-law, a lifelong trucker, died at 48, and his trucker brother died, too, still trying to shift gears on his gurney: their deaths haunt the kindness of strangers she encount
There’s a minor character that appears in Rachel Kushner’s
The Flamethrowers, one of many artists the novel depicts. But the woman Giddle, as she’s called is nothing so recognizable as a sculptor or filmmaker. Rather, her art consists of taking a job as a waitress and becoming “a girl working in a diner, glancing out the windows as she cleaned the counter in small circles with a damp rag.”
A cousin to the fictional Giddle is the real-life Johnny Sherrill, a friend of Kushner’s parents who she describes in her essay “Tramping In The Byways” as an “itinerant carouser, joker, drinker, wordsmith, and lady’s man.” Johnny wrote “action poetry,” which could be any number of things, including pissing on someone’s brand-new Cadillac or the time he left a lit joint on the hood of a parked car before going into a Goodwill, then picked it back up and resumed smoking it on his way out. There are those who “possess a talent for life,” Kushner writes, “people wh