BERLANT, Lauren; STEWART, Kathleen
The Hundreds

After a while a ''Me and Mrs Jones'' voice came up behind us, and said, ''Hey sugar, I didn't know you came here!'' And she said, ''I do'', and he said, ''So what's been up?'' She says, ''help ... help'', all quiet, looking straight ahead without object. Her voice is flat, her face poised in exact parallel profile to mine. ''Help, help.'' Like that. I say, ''Do you need help, do you want help?'' He says, ''She doesn't need help, I wouldn't be like that!'' I say, ''When a wman says 'help, help' you've got to help her.'' She: ''Go on now and do whatever it was you came here to do,'' with no imagination at all, flat like those medieval chants where everything's equally weighted. She had to say it twice like that before he left. I said, ''Is it OK that I said that? Are you OK?'' ''OK, OK, OK, OK.'' She kept on pumping, and after a minute I turned my face away. Soon she was gone. [Excerpt from Today in Political Emotions]

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen write texts of a hundred words or multiple hundred works.

Published by Duke University Press, 2019
Literature