Health and Safety: A Breakdown - Hardcover

Witt, Emily

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593317645 ISBN 13: 9780593317648

Verlag: Pantheon, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex (“introspective and breathtakingly honest”—New York Times Book Review), a memoir about drugs, techno, and New York City

In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.

In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City’s dance music underground. Emily would come to lead a double life. By day she worked as a journalist, covering gun violence, climate catastrophes, and the rallies of right-wing militias. And by night she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could stave off the squalor of American politics and the cataclysm of 2020.

Affectionate yet never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall. Sparing no one—least of all herself—Witt offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Emily Witt is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has covered breaking news and politics from around the country, and has written about culture, sexuality, drugs, and night life. She is the author of the books Future Sex and Nollywood. Her journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in n+1, the Times, GQ, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books.

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In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her. In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City’s dance music underground. Emily would come to lead a double life. By day she worked as a journalist, covering gun violence, climate catastrophes, and the rallies of right-wing militias. And by night she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could stave off the squalor of American politics and the cataclysm of 2020. Affectionate yet never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall. Sparing no one―least of all herself―Witt offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

I remember a date: the first of July, 2016. That afternoon I came home after a few days on Fire Island, back to Brooklyn, to the brick building off the intersection of Myrtle and Broadway. The air was humid and the streets smelled of trash. The steel door of my apartment fell shut. The bed, the table, and the chairs were all where I had left them. I had a suntan that I wanted to show to someone, but there was no one to see it. I lived alone.

The apartment was a studio. It had brick walls, exposed pipes, and wood floors marked with paint. It had my teakettle, my pots and pans, and a table that was also my desk. It had my solitude. The studio was on the third floor, in a corner of the building. I had moved here a few months before, in winter, when the heat blew from a giant vent like a desert wind. Now it was summer, and the city’s noise poured in through windows that were taller than I was. On one side they looked out on a white-painted warehouse next door, and in the afternoon the room would illuminate with flashbulbs from a photo studio there. On the other side I had a view of rooftops and a redbrick housing complex on Bushwick Avenue. In the evenings, the complex’s walls would turn pink for an hour in the setting sun. The unencumbered sky rose up above it, impervious to the city and everything humans had ruined below. Pigeons and seagulls flapped in slow orbits. The jets flew north to LaGuardia in a steady, unceasing line. The colors of dusk would make a gradient of orange and lavender, the rooftops would turn gray and dowdy, and my private domain, my apartment, would be bathed in soft evening light.

The day before, lying on the beach on Fire Island, I had been looking out at the Atlantic Ocean and wondering what would happen next. Maybe I would be invited to a party. Maybe a relative would die. Maybe an unexpected writing assignment would arrive. Maybe there would be another mass shooting. Maybe something would happen that would indicate the arrival of a new historical epoch, a sign that we were living in an era of meaning and purpose that would be remembered for many decades to come.

I lay in sunlight that had traveled through the vacuum of space. I sensed I was on the cusp of a change. I pictured each cycle of life—friendships, relationships, phases of experience—as an arc that emerged from a horizontal line. At any point along the line, a tangle of arcs hovered above like the ribbed vault of a cathedral. Some curves were in the process of rising, and some in the process of falling.

2

I had met Andrew on a cold evening in late April. That night, I had given a lecture in Brooklyn for a series of talks called IRL Club. In his invitation, the organizer had described IRL Club as “a casual evening of slideshow presentations by cool people, ‘from the internet.’ ” The theme of the evening was “altered consciousness.” The other presenters included the author Tao Lin, who was writing his book Trip, about psychedelic drugs, and a woman who spoke about autonomous sensory meridian responses, the bodily sensations some people experience when watching women with long nails pressing buttons on cash registers, or hearing crinkling paper. The speaking fee was $150.

The event was held in a warehouse event space near the polluted Gowanus Canal. In preparation for my lecture about altered consciousness, I had made a digital slideshow on Google Slides. I titled my speech “How I Think About Drugs,” which I typed out in twenty-four-point black Arial font. I arrived early, then waited in the wings offstage, drinking a beer and watching Tao give his lecture, “Specific Effects of Psychedelic Drugs on Me.” The effects included “advertisement for a Don DeLillo reading showing his face seemed like a powerful non sequitur” (psilocybin mushrooms); “said incoherent things about Harry Potter then passed out” (cannabis); “realized I’d convinced myself while unconscious to go to the beach” (salvia); “alien occupation” (mushrooms again); and “sobbing” (cannabis, ingested, baked in an oven). After DMT (“my life a vague myth”), it was my turn.

I began “How I Think About Drugs” with a slide showing an advertisement for an antidepressant. In the ad, a smiling blond woman in a pink shirt poses with a beach behind her, as if she were out at sea on a boat. “I’m ready to experience life,” reads the text floating next to her head. I hadn’t tried very many drugs before the age of thirty, I explained, referencing the ad, because of my commitment to this single drug, the antidepressant called Wellbutrin.

I took Wellbutrin (I continued) from 2003 to 2004, and then again from 2006 to 2012. I started taking it the year after I graduated from college because I wanted to be as decisive and active as those I perceived to be more successful than me. Wellbutrin had an amphetamine-like effect. It confirmed my love of stimulants. On Wellbutrin, my hands shook slightly. I slept less, I ate less. The chemical in Wellbutrin, bupropion, is also used to help people quit smoking. It deactivates the part of the mind that craves small sources of chemical solace in the middle of the afternoon. My sweet tooth disappeared. The pill made me skinny, impatient, quick to anger, productive, multiorgasmic. The drug seemed to raise my heart rate. It made my body weak in a way that was unfamiliar. It made me dizzy. It made my ears ring. Its effect on me was immediate and tangible. I stopped crying on the subway. I could get out of bed in the morning. I could get all the same things done that the people around me were getting done. I turned forms in on time. I wrote emails. I made decisions.

I avoided other drugs in the seven years that I took Wellbutrin, I explained in my lecture, because I worried about interactions, but also because I had little interest in them. I switched to a slide with a collage made of photographs I had found on the internet: images of a 1960s-era hippie; a 1990s-era kandy raver; Nancy Reagan; Hunter S. Thompson; a hemp necklace; Ewan McGregor crawling out of a toilet in the movie Trainspotting; an antidrug ad that read “Ecstasy Today; Agony Tomorrow”; psychedelic art by Alex Grey; and other images meant to convey the myriad negative impressions of drugs I had received as a young person, all of them specific to my generation. Drugs, I explained, were incompatible with my ideas of success, good health, and the clear exercise of reason. The druggiest kids I knew in high school had in fact ended up living out the nightmares that the propaganda had promised, and spent their late twenties and early thirties cleaning the bathroom in Goodwill, stuck in halfway houses, and trying to regain custody of their children. I knew all this because of Facebook, where they testified on their anniversaries of getting sober. Addiction could generate a war within a person, a struggle of life and death, a storm of trauma and debasement, but one we had been taught to see as self-imposed. This could happen even to a person with every advantage in life, who has the good fortune to live without fear of poverty, hunger, fascism, bombs, drone warfare, or an especially dysfunctional family. In avoiding drugs, I thought I was avoiding that kind of self-generated squalor.

Not taking drugs was easy (I continued, squinting out into the darkness of the audience but unable to discern any faces) because I had not been the kind of young person to whom anyone offered drugs. Had they offered, I would have taken them, but my friends were like me, bookish and obedient, exploring their maladjustment through literature, music, art, and film, and not shifts in consciousness, sexual adventure, or alternative living arrangements. My chemical...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pantheon
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593317645
• ISBN 13: 9780593317648
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: PANTHEON; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland