LIT Alive!

The Man in the White Suit

Economist novelist Jonathan Wight makes a statement

Jonathan Wight, April 2026 (courtesy of the Wight)

I was at a wedding in April when a man in a striking white suit walked down the aisle and sat among the guests. The next day I caught up with him at the wedding brunch.

“Mark Twain?” I asked, referring to one novelist who always wore a white suit.

“Tom Wolfe,” he replied, referring to another.

The man was Jonathan Wight, a just-retired economics professor from the University of Richmond who mentioned that he had published a novel in 2001 called Saving Adam Smith. This information threw me for a loop.

How well I remember Adam Smith from my one and only economics class in high school in Palo Alto! The teacher beat it into us that “time is money” and that an unfettered free market is necessary because Smith’s “invisible hand” would sort everything out in the most beneficial way to society. When Ronald Reagan became president, I understand where those ideas came from.

Adam Smith, author of *The Theory of Moral Sentiments* and *The Wealth of Nations* (WN). This year, 2026, is the 250^th anniversary of WN. (Public domain, CC0 1.0 Deed)

“A lot of what you hear about Smith is wrong,” Wight said, munching on his bagel. “This idea that it’s all about unfettered greed and allowing people to do whatever they want and somehow the magical outcome for society will pop up at the other end, that is just farcical.” He later explained that one of the main proponents of this depiction is Ayn Rand (author of The Fountainhead): “Ayn Rand inspired a lot of people from the 20^th century to think that Adam Smith endorsed greed and zero government, and that’s just a complete misreading.”

The woman in the black suit – Ayn Rand (public domain)

In Wight’s novel, the 18^th century Scottish economist Adam Smith rises from the dead in protest and resurrects himself inside Harold Timms, a Romanian automobile mechanic living in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Smith commandeers Timms over to the closest accessible economist, a young ABD graduate student, Richard Burns, who knows all about Smith (the caricature) even though he’s never read him. Burns, who is under the thumb of an arrogant laissez-faire economist, is about to reveal a formula at a conference to be attended by a multinational corporation who wants to buy the formula for a privatization deal in Russia. Adam Smith interrupts all that. After Smith convinces Burns that he is the real thing, the duo go on a cross-country road trip together to California where the conference will be held. On the road Smith dissuades Burns of the cliches about him and gives him a primer in Enlightenment ideas. It turns out that instead of reading Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, people should start with Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the more important foundational text. Smith’s “invisible hand” assumes a competitive marketplace and no harm to people (like pollution). While on the road, the duo narrowly miss a number of terrorist attacks aimed at them. Amusingly, both characters egotistically think they are the target – Burns because of his formula and Smith because of his actual (moral) ideas that enemies (like Ayn Rand) would want to suppress.

Wight thought that Saving Adam Smith and other writings have corrected the Smith caricature to the point where the novel would not need to be written. Today “you have to be very ignorant to hold onto the caricature view of Adam Smith,” he said. But since I had not gotten that memo, I appreciated Wight’s novel and the context he provided. It was also a stroke of luck just to sit next to an economist and be able to ask about the economic situation we are now in today. What about our world Smith would approve of?

Well, what’s very Smithian would be globalization over the past 50 years. That has dramatically raised a lot of people out of poverty. Hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians have been lifted out of poverty by accessing the global trading system, and that’s quite deliberately Smithian. At the same time, he would not at all be happy about, for example, Russia invading Ukraine because he wrote about how deluded rulers were to think that they could make money by invading other countries and he wanted them to wake up from their delusional dreams. He thought that imperialism was a big waste of money and a benefit of the elites at the expense of the poor. So there’s a lot going on in the world that he would like and there’s a lot he wouldn’t like. He wouldn’t like how modern tech companies have become monopolized to the extent that they have.

In Wight’s novel I appreciated the amusing juxtaposition of the lofty Adam Smith inside highway truck stops and dive bars. When Wight showed the full gamut of social classes by having Richard and Adam Smith visit the Chicago opera and skewered pretentious attendees, he brought Tom Wolfe to mind.

Tom Wolfe (Image by leyla, licensed as CC BY-SA 2.0)

“I’m thrilled that you mention me in the same paragraph as Tom Wolfe,” Wight replied. “I love and admire Tom Wolfe.”

Tom Wolfe himself was born and raised in Richmond, and Wight heard him give a reading at the University of Richmond on his architectural critique From Bauhaus to Our House (1981). Wolfe later turned to writing journalistic novels such as The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), The Man in Full (1998), and I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004). Wight appreciates the immediacy of Wolfe’s “new journalism” as well as his satire – “he pops people’s bubbles of pomposity, which I appreciate.”

Yet after the wedding Wight claimed that the literary allusion of his white suit was purely unintentional; the suit was his wife’s idea. After all, a white suit is completely impractical: “I mean you can only wear it once and then it has to go to the dry cleaners cuz it’s a white suit, it picks up everything.” People who have written about the white suit such as Inigo Thomas make this same point: the white suit is wildly impractical and that is part of its allure.

In the 1951 British film The Man in the White Suit (starring Alec Guinness) a chemist invents an indestructible fiber and turns it into a white suit that repels all dirt. Instead of being hailed as a hero, the chemist is vilified by factory owners and factory workers alike for threatening everybody’s livelihood – they rush to suppress the news of the fiber – not unlike the terrorists rushing to suppress the real, moral version of Adam Smith in Wight’s novel Saving Adam Smith.

“The Man in the White Suit (1951)” by Susanlenox is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0

But is a white suit ever just a white suit? When I mentioned the white suit to friends, they brought up other white suits that came to mind – Colonel Saunders at Kentucky Fried Chicken being the most common. Runner-ups were Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Elvis Presley. No one mentioned the Pope or Hillary Clinton. All mentions were white southern American men. As most of the mentions were also literary, I content the white suit emits a strong literary signal.

In recent decades there have been twists on the white suit, as the New York Times’ “The Return of Justin Jones and The White Suit” details. If the white suite stands for a southern gentleman, anybody else wearing it – suffragettes, black men, and Democratic Congresswomen – are making both a comment about that power and claiming the power for themselves. When you wear a white suit, you will be noticed.

I am now thinking of the rhetorical power of using dress deliberately and creatively to signal what you stand for and whom you admire. Who would you signal?

My delightful discussion with Jonathan Wight raises other big recurrent questions: What is a literary sighting? How much of a literary sighting is in the eye of the creator? And how much is in the eye of the beholder?

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Dinner at Table & Main

William Faulkner & Susan Rebecca White join us

Not long ago I made an outing to Roswell, Georgia, with Parul Kapur (author of Inside the Mirror). We’d been going on literary outings OTP (outside the perimeter of Atlanta) but this one was just an outing. We had a lovely walk along the Chattahoochee River, popped in at the consignment store Board of Trade, and landed for dinner at the esteemed restaurant Table & Main, where Parul wanted to go because of its Michelin Bib Gourmand designation. That’s why it was so surprising when after a delicious spread of meatloaf, shrimp & grits, the vegetable plate, and wine, and after a nice literary conversation, the checks arrived tucked inside southern novels. The restaurant’s owner-operator Ryan Pernice later explained the gesture: “We find it makes guests happy at what would otherwise be a low point. No one likes getting the bill!”

Our dinner checks delivered in southern lit at Table & Main (courtesy Parul Kapur)

Parul’s check was inside Absalom Absalom! (1936) by William Faulkner, which she hadn’t read. Mine was inside Bound South (2009) by Susan Rebecca White, which I hadn’t read but which, aptly, Parul had once reviewed.

The books had some interesting comments written inside them by patrons at the restaurant. It turns out these “love notes” are a kind of tradition encouraged by the management.

Table & Main’s collection of southern lit, with an example of a “love note”
(courtesy of Ryan Pernice)

While someone else might see the delivery of checks inside books as just a novelty, I took it as an assignment! After all, it’s rare to take home substantive inspiration from a restaurant meal. I proposed to Parul that we each read the novels and have a conversation about them for this blog. She paused. “That would mean I’d have to read another book,” she reflected. As the 2025 winner of Georgia Author of the Year award for debut novel she was in the process of judging the 2026 nominees. “So no….”

Instead I took the challenge myself and proceeded to read both books. And it was a challenge, as anyone who has tried to slog through Absalom Absalom! knows – 300 pages of dense prose from successive points of view slowly revealing the components of a convoluted plot, Biblical in scope – Quentin Compson’s story. In my college Faulkner course I’d thrown in the towel at Absalom Absalom! – I simply didn’t have the reference points, the literary maturity, or the understanding of how haunting legacies of the south are relevant today. It was so worthwhile to see the way it all comes together at the end, and I now am compelled to read it a second time to go deeper and also return to Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, a connected book. So thank you, Table & Main.

Pernice was impressed. “I don’t know that anyone would ever say that they were ‘delighted’ by Absalom Absalom!, and I applaud you for finishing it outside of college.”

Another literary sighting can be had at the Anderson Bridge in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the place where Faulkner’s character Quentin Compson famously killed himself (in another Faulkner novel). The plaque reads, “QUENTIN COMPSON / Drowned in the odour of honeysuckle / 1891-1910” (public domain)

In a breach of etiquette I’m going to quote the book’s end, because honestly I see it more as a trailer than a spoiler for this now probably not-enough-read novel. The novel ends with Quentin’s damning words:

I don’t hate it [the South], he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!

Sacred Harp Gimlet Cocktail at Table & Main (courtesy of Randi Curling)

More concretely, as a creative restaurateur, Pernice finds inspiration in the creation of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, where many of Faulkner’s books are set:

What I love about his novels in relation to our restaurant is he created his own universe, that was very much based on facts but wasn’t a factual place … and so he’s another example of world building, where we talk in the restaurant a lot about every decision’s intentional, and every aspect of the art in the novel is intentional, and of course the food, the wine we choose, is all intentionally geared to make people feel a certain way in this world that we’ve created.

The beautiful interior of Table & Main (courtesy of Randi Curling)

After Absalom Absalom!, reading Bound Sound was a refreshing breeze. And, again, I have only the restaurant to thank for inspiring me to read the book. White’s humorous reckoning read like a primer on how to interpret white upper-class Atlanta. The novel speaks both to enduring customs (e.g., private schools, country clubs, black maids, keeping up appearances, glossing over the truth to maintain an illusion, and racial tension) and change (e.g., embracing gayness, outsider art, and a stint in San Francisco). I read many parts of Bound South aloud to my husband Les, and we laughed at the aptness of the references. Then Les asked if people would understand if they were not from Atlanta or had not lived there. Very good question.

I asked Pernice what he thought.

Well, isn’t that another hallmark of southern lit? There’s so many winks and nods to people who understand. To use a trope, the old southern ‘Bless her heart’: an author may write that and anyone not familiar with the south may take it at face value that they’re saying something kind when (in fact they aren’t). So it’s funny that southern lit has such a clubby mentality to it.

I had a frisson of revelation. “Clubby” struck me the word I’ve been looking for ever since moving to Atlanta. Is southern lit clubby? That’s a very interesting question. But I do know that Atlanta and its environs are clubby. They run on clubs. And I’ve been asking around: Do others agree, is Atlanta a particularly clubby city? Yes, said the well-traveled Parul. Yes, said Les. Yes, I believe, said Susan Rebecca White. And yes, said others.

Ann & Parul on a literary outing to Milledgeville, GA (Flannery O’Connor country) 2025; at the ruins of the massive Central State (psychiatric) Hospital

I confess that clubby is perhaps my least favorite word. Where it might conjure to some the warm and cosy sense of belonging, to me it conjures the possibilities of exclusion. There is Atlanta’s old-money blue-blood club, for example, and then the many specific luxury golf and country clubs with entry fees ranging from $25,000 to $100,000+ with histories of excluding Blacks, Jew, and others. Tell me about a club and my first instinct is to run the other way.

So it was very interesting to me that when I asked Pernice what world he was building at Table & Main, he said:

I would describe it as simple seasonal southern. That’s our mantra there. Between that, which is our guiding north star, and the idea of creating the neighborhood clubhouse, which is a pretty Faulkner idea in and of itself, Table & Main was always supposed to be a gathering place by and for the community and I think we’ve delivered on that. At 15 years old I’m proud to see us come through with that vision. That’s our world, the neighborhood club house of Roswell.

Here “club house” I think suggests a fun, not-too-fancy local gathering spot for people to come back to time and time again. I think that Pernice means “club house” in the best possible sense of the word. It made me think deeper. Want to or not, we all belong to clubs. There is the zip code club. The job club. Going to college has become an elite club. Zodiac signs and Myers-Briggs personality types are clubs, not to mention sports teams. To set about building a world that welcomes all is a mighty aspiration in our present world. And indeed, Parul and I felt completely comfortable and happy lingering at this lovely restaurant. I went home with an assignment and ended up with a better understanding of the south.

Bourbon Sweet Potato Cake at Table & Main (courtesy of Randi Curling)

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Crossings

Harold Meltzer sets Aracelis Girmay’s poem “You Are Who I Love” for choir and percussion

In 2013 the composer Harold Meltzer was crossing Manhattan in a subway car when he saw Aracelis Girmay’s poem “Noche de Lluvia, San Salvador” on the wall as part of the Manhattan Transit Authority’s Poetry in Motion series; he copied it down word for word by hand, missing his stop. Three weeks later, across the Atlantic, he found himself with Girmay at the artist’s colony Civitella Ranieri. The poet recalled, “I was aware of this beautiful mind and spirit in the room. When I said I wrote poems, he did not look at me with grief and bewilderment.” Meltzer asked Girmay’s permission to set her poetry and years later it was her poem “You Are Who I Love” that he chose. The piece was commissioned by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting for The Crossing and The Sandbox. This February 25, poet, poem, composition, and performers met up at the West Coast premiere at Stanford, where participants recounted these stories on stage. I crossed the US to attend.

Harold Meltzer, August 2024 (courtesy of Hilary Meltzer)

The performance wasn’t the culmination of a simple trajectory but something much deeper and more personal. Girmay wrote “You Are Who I Love” for Split This Rock after Trump’s first presidential election in 2017. In 2019 Meltzer was in Rome en route again to Civitella Ranieri to work on the composition when he had a major stroke, followed by many smaller strokes over the next five years that would challenge his ability to move and work, but he continued even as he went in and out of care. As an old friend of his wife Hilary, I had the privilege of visiting him at Village Care in the spring of 2023 and seeing the score. That day he told many happy stories of his days playing bassoon and mentioned toying with the idea putting a “bicycle wheel” as a percussion instrument into the score. It sounded charming to me. Meltzer finished the piece in January 2024 and attended its premiere in Philadelphia in March; he died five months later. The Stanford concert, then, was a coming together of many friends and family in tribute to the composer on the West Coast. Although Girmay’s line venerating “You … crossing the desert and trying to cross the desert” alludes to immigrants attempting to cross out of danger and into safety, it could also speak to Harold’s long journey to cross the desert of his disease to bring forth what he considered his greatest musical achievement.

GIRMAY EXPLAINED, in a pre-concert talk, that the impetus for her poem was grief amidst the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017: “The poem was really about learning to look in a different direction, to look elsewhere and to learn to look elsewhere.” The act of writing was a discipline of “turning my eye to who I love.” You can hear of the poet’s insights about this work here. A version of the poem is included in her 2025 poetry collection Green of All Heads.

The poet loves individual people going about daily activities, especially in care of others – “cheering the bees,” “delivering babies,” “reading your patients’ charts,” “carrying your brother home,” “sharing your potatoes and greens,” “braiding your child’s hair,” and “wanting to listen.” Her use of the continuous present puts the emphasis on people surviving, continuing, going about the important things in life, doing what they can, feeding love, not hate. In this long poem I counted 99 instances of continuous present verbs.

In Girmay’s reading at Stanford, the word “You” punctuated the air percussively, so that I walked away from all the individual details with the memory of the repeated “you” as the main point of the poem. The point of the poem is not I the speaker but you beyond me who I see and recognize as important. The echo of “who” with “you” throughout amplified coyly in my mind afterwards into a suggestion of “you-hoo” – I’m calling you, I see you, I’m reaching out, let’s connect, let’s cross over to each other and join together. I wonder if Bad Bunny took a page out of Girmay’s book a few weeks earlier in his unusually decentered Superbowl show.

The Crossing and The Sandbox following the February 25, 2026 concert,
Bing Concert Hall, Stanford University (courtesy of Stanford Live)

The full 40-minute 2024 East-Coast-premiere version can be heard here, courtesy of The Crossing, which is currently working on a CD for future release.

MELTZER’S SCORE shows the choral and percussion parts stacked. On stage there were in fact four percussionists (playing about 100 percussion instruments total) standing in a wide horseshoe ring around approximately 25 choral singers who sang their parts solo or in groups.

First system of Meltzer’s composition (courtesy of Hilary Meltzer)

The score departs from the poem in looping back to certain passages from the beginning, each their own musical theme, namely:

1 – “You selling roses out of a silver grocery cart”

2 – “You, in the park, feeding the pigeons / You cheering for the bees”

3 – “You dancing in the kitchen, on the sidewalk in the subway waiting for the train because Stevie Wonder, Hector Lavoe La Lupe

4 – “Teaching your parents how to do The Dougie, counting to 10, reading your patients charts”

5 – “You struggling to see / You struggling to love or find a question”

The last loop back is about a third of the way through and then the work quickens and carries the poem straight through to the end.

The score features many directions: note the word BLOOMING on the opening score above, which returns at the end with a return to the opening musical theme. Most mysterious, near the end, are references to a “wall” (sound familiar from 2017-2020?): “THE WALL BEGINS TO COLLAPSE,” “THE COLLAPSE OF THE WALL CONTINUES,” and finally “ONE AT A TIME, THE PERCUSSIONISTS SIT AMONG THE FALLEN WOODEN PLANKS, HANDLING THEM IN A DESULTORY WAY.” Hilary told me that Meltzer’s original conception was to have the percussionists build a wall with their pitched wooden planks to silence the choir; too impractical to enact. Through the story of the wall, I came to see the percussionists and the singers at times in tension with each other. The most ardent passages, beginning about midway through the piece, are sung without percussion accompaniment, for example:

Excerpt from Meltzer’s score (courtesy of Hilary Meltzer)

Meltzer directs this passage to be VALEDICTORY and sung in unison, whereas in other passages the lines from the poem are layered and sung simultaneously. This gorgeous passage, preceding the collapse of the wall, suggests that the people singing together is powerful enough to collapse the wall.

We should listen to all of this advice, from Aracelis Girmay’s original poem that models how to give attention to what we love rather than what we hate, to Meltzer’s musical work which amplifies and dramatizes a collective act of solidarity. As we cross a desert from one era to another, we need to make sure we carry what we love along with us or it may be lost forever.

The Premiere of Meltzer’s “You Are Who I Love” in March 2024 at the
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia (courtesy of The Crossing)

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Zanka’s Assistaff

Storm Murray believes fandom is a gateway for student writing

Storm as Zanka from *Gachiakuta* with her hand-made Assistaff,
Anime Weekend Atlanta, December 2025
(photo by Gabe Freeland @gabefreeland on Instagram)

A few years back I asked a doctoral student at Georgia State University to help me set up my English course on the learning management system there. Her name was Storm Murray and incidentally, her own course landing page was the most beautiful I’d ever seen. In gratitude for the help, another instructor and I took her to lunch. What Storm talked about was her love of cosplay, or the art of dressing up as characters from manga (Japanese graphic novels) and anime (Japanese animated film), either within an online community or at an in-person “con” or themed fandom conference. It was the first time I’d encountered someone who brought books to life through cosplay.

In November Storm and I met up at The Rookery in Macon, Georgia, where she lives and currently teaches English composition at Wesleyan College. She told me about her dissertation, cosplay, the overlap between the two, and her latest cosplay foray at the Anime Weekend Atlanta (AWA).

Storm Murray as Storm Murray (courtesy of Brian Henderson)

As an academic who has insider cultural knowledge (Henry Jenkins’ “aca-fan” perspective), Storm is tracing the history of fandom to argue that “English scholars need to recognize and reconceptualize what fandom is because we have historically looked down on these communities as unworthy of scholarly concern and because of that have missed valuable lessons that these communities can teach us as instructors of writing.” Discourse communities form around fandom, she says, and members become highly literate in their discourses, making arguments and using evidence, for example, in ways that can transfer to the college classroom. From the 1880s followers of Sherlock Holmes and Jane Austen “Janeites”, to the birth of modern fandom with Star Trek in the 1960s, to physical zine exchange, Usenet bulletin boards, Internet archives, and social media, these communities demonstrate resilience over political and technological change and highlight opportunities for knowledge transfer.

Upcoming in December was Anime Weekend Atlanta where Storm was planning to cosplay several characters, including Zanka from Kei Urana’s manga Gachiakuta. After our meeting, I read the first of 17 volumes of Gachiakuta (2022, translated into English by Jennifer Ward in 2024) and watched a few episodes of the anime on the anime streaming service Crunchyroll, where you can sign up for a 7-day free trial.

*Gachiakuta* pp. 6-7. Mangas are read opposite western books, starting from the back to the front, right to left page, top to bottom, and right to left within each page

In Gachiakuta, the 15-year-old hero Rudo lives on the tribesfolk’s side of a wall in the segregated world known as “The Sphere.” He rescues objects thrown in the trash by those on the privileged side of the wall. This practice is considered a transgression in this overly hygienic homogenous town; Rudo is chased and shot for saving a slightly ripped teddy bear, which he gives to a girl Chiwa. Ultimately all trash is thrown off the Sphere into a world below known as “The Ground” or “The Pit,” including people who are considered trash. Soon Rudo is falsely accused of murder and thrown into The Pit. There he encounters a whole other world of toxic air requiring gas masks and enormous “pseudo-living things” or trash monsters that have to constantly be fought by The Cleaners. The Cleaners recruit Rudo to their team because he is a Giver, someone who through love and care imbues a particular object with soul that can be harnessed by them as weapons (“vital instruments”) to decimate evil. Rudo’s assigned trainer is Zanka with his vital instrument: the Assistaff.

After the conference, Storm and I talked again. Storm sees Gachiakuta as cutting edge:

I think it’s a really great reflection of right now, where the wealthy can throw away without even thinking about it. When you can’t do that, things come to mean more to you than perhaps they would otherwise because that’s the only thing you have. The vital instrument, you come to find out, is not just the thing you had with you the longest, it’s the thing that you’ve poured yourself into and is representative of you and your values. So you think about a pair of scissors, why would that be a vital instrument? Or Enjin’s umbrella, why would that be a vital instrument? But it’s because, for whatever reason, it’s the thing that person sees as a part of themselves, and that is where it gets its power, the meaning that’s placed onto it, not because it is just an umbrella that is a useful tool, it’s the meaning that gives the thing value, and you can’t throw that away.

Storm as Zanka, AWA (courtesy of Brian Henderson)

Another reason that Gachiakuta “blew up a little bit” in popularity last year, she says, is because unlike most traditional manga and anime it features different races and ethnicities. Semiu Grier, the administrative assistant of The Cleaners, whose glasses are her vital instrument, is Black, as is the leader of the Cleaners organization. The one Japanese character, the author has stated, is Zanka, yet he too is played in the English dubbing of the anime by the Black voice actor Corey Wilder. Storm notes that anime and manga fandom comprise “a very white-centric space … just like the industry behind anime and manga in the US, and so Gachiakuta is a really refreshing change from that.”

Storm as Zanka with a fan playing Semiu Grier (courtesy of Brian Henderson)

In addition to pointing out class callousness and expanding representation, Gachiakuta also critiques consumer culture in general:

To be involved in society there’s a flagging technique, where if you have a Labubu you’re in on the trend, you know about it. Or you have a Stanley Cup, you’re up to date on the cultural moment. It’s true about fashion, it’s true about accessories, it’s the kind of clothes you’re wearing, and it’s all because of social media, especially TikTok, I think…. Now I think there’s been pushback because it promotes spending money, and people are realizing that we can’t afford it anymore, which is why I think there’s been such a resurgence in (I can at least attest to my own social media algorithm) people who are really getting into gardening again to grow their own food, getting into sewing so that they can make their own clothing, or thrifting, and stuff like that. So the story of Gachiakuta is really tapping into that, seeing the value of the things that we have and not just what the culture attributes their value to be.

These trends apply to the world of cosplay itself, where fans try to stay up with the most current shows and cosplay them; there is starting to be more awareness of “fast-fashion” waste and the need to slow down consumption and encourage an aftermarket for cosplay costume resell, according to Storm.

Gachiakuta representations, AWA (courtesy of Brian Henderson)

Gachiakuta Book 1 ends when Rudo meets his assigned trainer, the cleaner Zanka. Why did Storm choose Zanka to cosplay and not, say, Rudo, Enjin, Semiu Grier, Rio, or one of the other Cleaners? She says she was intrigued by Zanka’s nonchalant facade, his rigidity about cleanliness, among other things, and his deep caring underneath it all. She also liked his recognition that he isn’t a genius and his steadfast work ethic to be better than a genius. Finally, Storm said, she can’t resist “a big prop”: “The first time that Zanka activated his Assistaff, which is the name of the weapon, I was like ‘Oh my God, I gotta make it, it’s so cool,’ it has the glowing elements to it and stuff, so I was like ‘I have to make it.’ I put LEDs in it; it did light up.”

Storm meets another Zanka at AWA.
Note the different interpretations of the Assistaff (courtesy of Brian Henderson)

While the prop creation was a big motivator for Storm, she bought the costume online from the Chinese website Holoun. Zanka sells for about $150, not including boots which Storm already had, the wig which she bought separately and styled herself, and the Assistaff, which she made. China is the epicenter of fandom manufacturing, according to Storm, with nothing equivalent in the US outside of private commissions. I asked about tariffs and Storm mentioned that the announcement of tariffs was “a really big scary thing” in the cosplay world and that prices have jumped, making people scale back their hobby. On top of buying the costume, registration for the conference is about $100, and Storm and her husband rented a hotel room for the duration of the 3-day conference. The online schedule made the event look like a 24/7 slumber party to me, with watch parties, panels discussions, events with Who’s Who of AWA, games, concerts and parties all night long in the World Congress Center, so to get your money’s worth you’d want to stay close by.

Storm herself was almost destined to get deeply involved with fandom. She is named after a character in The X-Men, as is her younger brother Phoenix; while their younger sister is named Ryder after a character in Ghost Rider. Their Dad collected comics, their grandmother Gone with the Wind memorabilia, and their mother is a football fan.

But what does Storm get out of cosplay?

Community is a big one. I really like when I’m cosplaying a character and somebody is like, ‘Oh my God, can I take a picture of you?’ or ‘Oh my God, are you so and so? I love that show,’ and then we get to talk about it. It’s just a really wholesome moment of shared passion and love and a moment of community. Another piece is I really like that I get to stretch a lot of muscles in that cosplay requires so many skills; instead of being a master of one I’m a jack of all trades. So I get to play with hairstyling, I get to play with building, crafts, painting, I mean every kind of craft material you can imagine … and I have skills that I never would have thought I would learn because of this hobby. And then I just really love being these characters. While I’m not playing them at full send, I do get to embody them, I feel pretty powerful in this outfit or I feel a little more confident in my body in this outfit because this character is very pretty and every time I pass somebody they’re like ‘Oh my God, I want to take a picture of you, you look so pretty,’ it’s nice, you know what I mean? … I really do think that me being in the anime community and being in the cosplay community was a big shaper of my perception of gender and sexuality and things like that because I went to a very small conservative Christian white private school. I was not at all exposed to that in any way shape or form, except through my online channels and media but I’ve been cosplaying and dressing as a dude since I was 17.

Trash boxes in Sapporo. MIKI Yoshihito from Sapporo City, Hokkaido, JAPAN, 2009 by MIKI Yoshihito, licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0, Creative Commons.

Storm’s manga and anime choice took me back to Tokyo in the early 1990s when I taught English there. Having spent time in the famously and elaborately polite Japanese culture, I was surprised by the foul language and violence of this manga, but it goes with the genre, a shonen, written to appeal to boys from around age 11 to 16. Rudo is particularly foul-mouthed but he has reason to be, and it is clear to me that he is a surly protagonist with a heart of gold.

The manga also reminded me of the tremendous ironies and confusions I experienced as an outsider to the Japanese culture decades ago. I knew about the sanctity of cleanliness in Japanese culture within Shinto and Buddhism, and I remember the scalding-hot sento (public baths) tucked into every little neighborhood. But how strange it is also to remember the way we gaijin foraged in the gomi (trash) near apartment buildings after Christmas and New Year’s holidays for the pristine brand-new objects and, even better, that famously sumptuous, gorgeous, elaborate packaging (boxes, crates, baskets, paper wraps, etc.) left there; this practice does appear to be illegal now. Packaging of any kind was always stunning and so were the umbrellas (like Enjin’s) that danced about above the narrow streets in the rain to avoid hitting each other. Yet I remember doing laundry in a public laundromat while a smoker sent clouds of smoke into the air and wondering, when he refused to budge, how I was going to whisk my sheets from washer to dryer and out again without getting that nightclub scent. I remember salarymen shaving on the train on their way to work and others throwing up on the sidewalk after a night’s carousing. How bizarrely delightful were the noise machines in public bathrooms to hide sounds of bodily functions. And, incidentally, I do remember the rockabilly cosplay at the Harajuku subway stop and the bar where Japanese bartenders wore dredlocks; I just didn’t know the name for it.

Here are a few burning questions that make me consider continuing with Gachiakuta: Does Rudo find his father in The Pit? (That is, was Rudo’s father also falsely accused of murder and thrown over the side of The Sphere like Rudo?) Does Rudo ever make it back to The Sphere? What happens between him and Chiwa? How does Rudo use his power as a Giver? What are the trash monsters, what gives them power; is it neglect and scorn, the opposite of love and care? What, ultimately, does “gachiakuta,” which is slang for “legit trash,” refer to within the story?

See more at Lit-alive.com

A Chaos of Nonconformity

Ian McEwan joins a debate about the novel’s impact today

Screen shot of novelist Ann Patchett at Parnassus Books, Nashville, TN,
delivering **News to You: Literature Isn’t Dead**

A few months ago, a friend texted me News to You: Literature Isn’t Dead, Ann Patchett’s impassioned defense of literary fiction’s centrality to American culture today. The novelist, who runs the bookstore Parnassus in Nashville, Tennessee, was responding to an op-ed in the New York Times by the conservative political commentator David Brooks called When Novels Mattered about a period in American history ending in the 1980s when, he claims, literary authors were audacious, big in scope, unconstrained by political correctness and liberal conformity, and therefore actually mattered to the culture – unlike now.

Patchett hit back with 15 titles that she considers audacious and significant to culture today. They are (with my annotations added on when they were published and when they were set):

Shiloh: A Requiem (April, 1862)

Margaret Vetare, Herman Melville, and WNYC’s Public Song Project

Margaret Vetare at West Point Foundry Preserve, Cold Spring, New York, USA (photo by Susan English)

In May the singer-songwriter Margaret Vetare, a college friend, told me that she’d submitted a song to WNYC’s “Public Song Project” which showcases new recordings of songs made from works in the American public domain. The songs can be based on poems, books, films, existing songs, and even fictional characters. The Project announced six winners at the end of July and performed them on August 2 in front of the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City. All songs can be streamed from the “Public Song Book” online.

Simon Close, the creator of the Public Song Project for public radio station WNYC, introduced the project’s mission and ethos in a radio special he emceed on July 26th:

March!

Civil rights graphic memoir author Andrew Aydin says the way to take back power is with our feet and our stories

Andrew Aydin speaking at the Waynesville, NC, courthouse in the “presence” of invited but absent North Carolina Republican Representative Chuck Edwards to the right.

The author Andrew Aydin was spotted Saturday, June 14^th at the “No Kings” rally in Waynesville, North Carolina, where he was the final speaker at its protest against authoritarianism. He will also be speaking this Tuesday, June 17^th, at 6 p.m. at the Pigeon Community Cultural Center in Waynesville, NC, to introduce his Appalachia Comics Project.

Revelation

Flannery O’Connor’s fervid following

The Flannery O’Connor look-alike contest in Lafayette Square, Savannah, Georgia, on March 23, 2025. Denise Flojo (the lady at center in brown polka-dotted dress) was declared the winner, beating out the “Flannery O’Connor Spice Girls” quintet to the left.

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) had her biggest-ever annual birthday celebration in Savannah, Georgia, last weekend, on the occasion of her 100^th birthday. The Southern Gothic writer from Savannah was feted with three days of events, starting with soirées on Friday night and ending with a New Orleans-style procession through Lafayette Square led by Savannah’s Sweet Thunder Band late Sunday afternoon. It was a blast.

Meridian: 6.(a) a place or situation with its own distinctive character; (b) a distinctive character

John Lewis’s funeral and the civil rights novel dedicated to him

John Lewis Memorial 1A — Neighborhood John Lewis memorial, Atlanta

(Updated March 2025)

I was just finishing John Lewis’s three-book graphic memoir March when on July 17^th John Lewis died. The representative from Georgia’s 5th Congressional District (Atlanta; ours) for 33 years was expected to die of pancreatic cancer but he had also just been elected to a 16th term starting in January 2021 and so the timetable was unclear. Memorials sprung up instantly on our street, made out of still warm election signs. One was draped in black tulle with sunflower vase and flag offerings. Another featured a metal rooster, referencing the chickens Lewis would preach to growing up in Troy, Alabama.

Love in the time of coronavirus

Timely contents of a Little Free Library

(Updated March 2025)

Coronatime, life during COVID-19 pandemic, is transforming everything, multiplying the many forms of love. We are clinging to those we take for granted. Many of us are reaching out to long-lost friends and family members. Across the world people are singing in solidarity from their confined apartments in adjacent buildings. Others are cheering for exhausted healthcare workers who are risking everything. Healthcare workers are applauding patients coming off ventilators. Citizens are appreciating all the suppliers along the food chain. Some are venturing to shop for the frail or quarantined. Over and over we are seeing the meme of love expressed through window panes. We are dreading the grieving love of passing life. At the same time, people are falling in love. From isolation to the dance of facial masks in public space, the thrill of fear and danger, it’s a Mardi Gras unlike any other. Symptoms are timeless: fever, shortness of breath, and a nervous cough. Continue reading Love in the time of coronavirus

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