All Each Other Has

The sisters conclude their death and spectacle series with further thoughts on the dead deprived of commemoration.  From the repository of graves on New York City’s Hart Island to the erasure of historic Black cemeteries in the American South, they explore the ways in which human remains are stratified, relegated and discarded in ways that lay bare the injustice of life.Or, in the case of Body Worlds, forever plastinated and displayed for public view—without their owners’ consent—in what Edward Rothstein described as an act of “aestheticized grotesqueness.”  What makes certain land and bodies sacred (or literally, saintly) while rendering others disposable? What can the living learn from the politics of remembering and forgetting remains? Sources cited include Joan Didion’s South and West, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Eliza Franklin’s Lost Legacy Project for the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative, Susan Sontag's "On Photography," the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project, Jacqueline Goldsby’s A Spectacular Secret, Dorothea Lange’s 1956 photographs of California's Berryessa Valley, Marita Sturkin’s “The Aesthetics of Absence,” Seth Freed Wessler’s 2022 ProPublica investigation “How Authorities Erased a Historical Black Cemetery in Virginia,” Robert McFarlane’s 2019 New Yorker piece “The Invisible City Beneath Paris,” Melinda Hunt’s Hart Island Project (www.hartisland.net), Nina Bernstein’s 2016 New York Times piece “Unearthing the Secrets of New York’s Mass Graves,” “Young Ruin” from 99% Invisible, and NPR’s 2006 reporting on ethical concerns over Body Worlds.Cover photo of Hart Island's common trench burials is by Jacob Riis, 1890.

In this VERY special episode, Ellie and Carrie speak with The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’s Heather Gay about her brave and beautiful new memoir “Bad Mormon.” The book chronicles Heather’s journey from a devout Mormon to a disillusioned apostate to an ass-kicking mother, businesswoman and reality star. Born in the covenant—a Mormon flex—Gay grew up determined to prove she was a “good girl” worthy of a spot in the celestial kingdom. But time and time again, her big personality and even bigger ambitions conflicted with the expectations of Mormon womanhood. A BYU education, a mission in Marseille, and a temple marriage to “Mormon royalty” should have strengthened her commitment to the church and its expectations of her. But at long last, Sister Gay came to realize that the church’s love was conditional on her being someone she wasn’t. After her divorce, she found a new “community of misfits” that brought this dissonance into sharp resolve. She was done “performing reality” on the straight and narrow and ready to value her own inherent worth. And that, dear listeners, was Heather’s true destiny.

In part three of their Death and Spectacle series, Carrie and Ellie explore the inequity of American commemoration and how it deprives the marginalized, even in death. They discuss the corrupt dealings behind public works projects such as Lake Eufaula, which led to the forcible removal of native peoples and the flooding of their history. In the context of the discovery of countless children’s remains near residential schools and an official record of 9/11 fatalities that excludes the undocumented, the sisters ask – how do we choose what and who to memorialize? What makes some ground holy and others deserving of desecration or erasure? Who has the right to rest in peace?Texts discussed include: Edmund Morgan’s “American Slavery, American Freedom,” Jefferson Cowie’s “Freedom’s Dominion,” The 1965 James Baldwin - William F. Buckley Debate, Walter Johnson’s “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850’s,“ Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s “The Undocumented Americans,” Jason de Leon’s “The Land of Open Graves”, Alicia Elliott’s short story “Unearth,” and Annette Gordon Reed’s “The Hemingses of Monticello” and Walter Johnson’s “The Strange Story of Alexina Morrison: Race, Sex, and Resistance in Antebellum Louisiana.” 

In Part Two of their series on spectacular death, Ellie and Carrie speak with sisters Jessica and Leila Murphy, who lost their father Brian in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  He was 41 years old, Jessica 5 and Leila almost 4. Since that terrible day, Jessica and Leila have had to grow up not only without a father but also with the complexities that come with losing him in the attacks.   From their inability to grieve privately to the invocation of their father’s name to justify two wars and countless acts of violence, Jessica and Leila have struggled with the meaning and responsibilities of victimhood. Now 26 and 25, they are part of 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, which advocates nonviolent options in pursuit of justice, including closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay.We discuss Leila’s 2021 piece in The Nation “I Lost My Father on 9/11, but I Never Wanted to Be a ‘Victim,’” Jessica’s 2019 essay in The Indy, “Among the Iguanas: On life and the pursuit of death in Guantánamo Bay,” and a 2003 Brown Alumni Magazine profile on their mother Judy Bram Murphy's widowhood.  The sisters also offer thoughtful insight into successes and shortcomings of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum as a force of public instruction.Other works cited are “The Aesthetics of Absence” by Marita Sturken, Ambiguous Loss by Pauline Boss, The Land of Open Graves by Jason De León, Julia Rodriguez’s 2017 op-ed for the New York Times “Guantanamo Is Delaying Justice for 9/11 Families,” Rachel Kushner’s 2019 feature on Ruth Wilson Gilmore and prison abolition for the New York Times, The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. Films mentioned are World Trade Center (2006), United 93 (2006), The Mauritanian (2021), and The Report (2019).

CW: Sensitive content regarding 9/11, terrorism, genocide, racial violence, spectacular death, dark tourism.The sisters return from winter hiatus with an episode about atrocity, human suffering, spectacular death and how we choose to memorialize and regard the pain of others.  Focusing primarily on the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, they ask — can we look back on catastrophe without becoming voyeuristic consumers? Can we honor victims without turning them into commodities?  Can morbid curiosity and empathy coexist?  When will tourists visit places like Ground Zero or Auschwitz in the way they visit Pompeii? Using Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003) as a critical framework, they dissect the role of images in memory making and the tension between private memory and public instruction.  Other topics include images of torture at Abu Ghraib, Lynndie England as a specter for white women in lynching photography, Kerry James Marshall’s "Heirlooms and Accessories," and willed white innocence.  Readings include works by Jacqueline Goldsby, Eduardo Cadava, Philip R. Stone & Alex Grebenar, Marita Sturken, Jennifer Senior, Mary Marshall Clark, and as always, our ultimate, Susan Sontag. Cover is Robert Capa's "Falling Soldier" (1936)

In the third and final episode in their Taylor Swift retrospective, Ellie and Carrie examine the seven songs that comprise the 3am Version of the Midnights album. They discuss the artistic differences between songs produced by Swift collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner and the merits of pop versus more naturalistic music. They pull excerpts from Taylor’s highly personal, thoughtfully constructed NYU address and consider the role Taylor continues to play in their sisterhood and young/not so young adulthood. This episode features voice notes from two loyal listeners and the discussion their reflections inspired. Topics explored include Taylor’s anglophilia, miscarriage as metaphor (TW), the role of fate versus free will, the intractability of emotional trauma, and a brief meditation on the 2020 film Promising Young Woman (spoiler alert!).

This week, Ellie and Carrie continue their exploration of the Taylor metaverse by dissecting tracks 1-13 of the Midnights album.  They discuss Taylor’s favorite images and leitmotifs — cages, towns, rain, the color gold, etc. — that recur throughout her discography and contextualize this album as part of a larger body of work.   They mine her sonic imagery to examine how a song’s style might reinforce its substance and search for hidden meaning behind her poetic expression.   But most importantly, they unpack the “sexy baby” conundrum and Taylor’s unapologetic embrace of both her carbon footprint and her cringe-y era.  Topics discussed include the Lavender Scare and Gaylor theories, the body positivity movement’s reclamation of the word “fat,” Lana del Rey and the hyper-normative-feminine, and the enduring power of the inimitable Laura Dern. 

After a monthlong reprieve, Ellie and Carrie return to discuss their all time favorite artist, Taylor Swift, and her lasting hold over American music and popular culture. The sisters discuss their relationship with Taylor over the past twelve years, from the release of her eponymous album in 2006 to her latest studio album Midnights, which, in the month since it was dropped, has shattered records and quite literally, broken the internet. Or Ticketmaster, at least. They chart a musical history that mirrors that of Taylor — from childhood and adolescence to young and not so young adulthood. The multifaceted Taylor is examined through a variety of lenses — musical wunderkind, pop star, celebrity, icon, deity, activist, storyteller, trickster, arbiter of angst, wizard of words, and mistress of reinvention. Taken as a whole, Taylor’s discography is the ultimate bildungsroman of an artist who shirked the cloak of likability to become her own flawed and messy person. Topics discussed include Horse Girls, media witch hunts, the toxic aughts, #KanyeGate, and the cathartic power of the inimitable T.Swift bridge. Articles are: “You Belong With Me: How Taylor Swift made teen angst into a business empire” by Lizzie Widdicombe (2011), “Taylor Swift Is Confusing” by Curtis Sittenfeld (2015), Pitchfork’s “Midnights Review” (2022), “In Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’, The Easter Eggs Aren’t the Point” By Lauren Michele Jackson (2022).

In this special spooky episode, Ellie and Carrie discuss the cultural logic of hauntings in both American history and their own lives. They grapple with childhood notions of their late father's ghost, something Carrie feared and Ellie denied. Understanding hauntings as living loss, they bring in the work of historian Tiya Miles, whose book Tales from the Haunted South offers ghost stories as potentially radical works of historiography that often deal with narratives left out of the official record. But such narratives are also taken less seriously because they are ghost stories. For Miles, the Native American ghost and the enslaved ghost play twin roles interrogating trauma in the American gothic. Ellie offers a brief history and social explanation of the Salem witch trials, undergirded by patriarchal prescriptions and the anxieties of Puritan predestination. Meanwhile, how have misogynistic conceptions of women as vessels prone to hysteria colored female possession narratives from Dido to Bertha Mason to Regan MacNeil (a.k.a. the Exorcist girl, who's chained to a bed while the Devil makes her say "Fuck me! Fuck me!")? During the Victorian era, women spiritualists used such stereotypes to their advantage, finding their own voices while speaking for the undead. Other topics include the role of inherited trauma in the most powerful horror stories (see the Graham family in Ari Aster's Hereditary), queerness and ghosts (see Dani in The Haunting of Bly Manner), and the relationship between 19th-century spiritualism and technology, especially when it came to the new medium of photography. In addition to Miles, books referenced are Judith Richardson’s Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley, Renée L. Bergland’s The National Uncanny, Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad, and, of course, Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others. Articles are “Most witches are women, because witch hunts were all about persecuting the powerless” by Bridget Marshall for The Conversation (2019), “Why Did So Many Victorians Try to Speak with the Dead” by Casey Cep for the New Yorker (2021), and “What Ghost Stories Taught Me About My Queer Self” by Nell Stevens for the New Yorker (2022).

Last month, a faculty member at Trinity School NYC (Ellie and Carrie's alma mater) left the school after being secretly filmed by Project Veritas during what she thought was a date. In the widely disseminated video that was catnip for CRT-fearing conservatives, she reveals that she takes her full self—including her leftist political agenda—to her job, where she says “white boys … a huge contingent of them,” are “just horrible.” The latest pendulum swing back toward tradition in private schools (see Ginia Bellafante last month in the NYTimes), the headmaster's email announcing her departure claimed it was the school’s responsibility to “nurture children as they become responsible citizens" by rejecting “discrimination of any kind” and espousing the importance of “a diverse, inclusive community.” In this episode, Ellie and Carrie speak with friend and fellow Trinity alumna Sara Frost (@spooningwithsara), unequivocally That Girl—albeit with a heart of gold—in high school. The faculty member's political statements did not surprise (or particularly disturb) us alumnae, who recall parents labeling the history department “socialist summer camp" (we read Howard Zinn) when we were students. As for her thoughts on wealthy white boys—well, we lived them. When we were there, Trinity, despite its academic leftism, fostered neither a nurturing nor progressive student culture. Looking to Amia Srinivasan’s “The Right to Sex,” Ellie, Carrie, and Sara discuss the politics of sexual surveillance in “the swamp”—the student lounge to which white male students (largely those not on financial aid) felt entitled. In retrospect, they realize that many girls who spent free periods in the swamp were welcome there partly due to their "fuckability." But fuckability, Srinivasan reminds us, “is not some good that should be distributed more fairly. It isn’t a good at all.” Citing sociologist Katherine Cross, she implores us to ask ourselves what certain women get from topping white men’s hierarchies of desirability. In other words, what are the wages of being in someone else’s pecking order? Meanwhile, what happens when one is implicitly (or in Ellie’s case, explicitly) unwelcome in the swamp? And why are girls wronged by boys often ostracized when those boys are punished? Other topics discussed include Trinity’s insularity, owed in part to its prison-inspired architecture, and its inability to handle students who learned differently or were unwilling to make themselves sick in pursuit of perfection. "Labore et virtute" is fine to a point—but what ever happened to curā?