It’s 2:13 a.m. Isn’t that an odd time to do an interview?
Not for me.
Okay. What do you want to talk about?
Well, today I was struck by all the ways we try to control our world. How we like to test, to standardize, to codify and quantify and know. That seems like such a human thing to want to do—to impose order. Or to pretend that we have uncovered some part of the blueprint for the universe—or some integral part of ourselves—and now we think we REALLY know something.
And it seems to me that I used to use poems that way. I wrote as an antidote for the messy, chaotic, unpredictable world. I think I really believed that I could write my way into an understanding. I wrote a whole essay about it for An Elevated View: Colorado Writers on Writing, (Seven Oaks Publishing, 2011). At some point in the last few years, that changed. Now the poems that most interest me are ones that promote unlearning—tearing down the scaffolding we’ve put in place. Poems that lean into the mystery instead of trying to contain it or name it or convey some kind of Truth.
I turned fifty years old this year. I was a little kid in the Sixties. A teen in the Seventies. I had my first jobs and graduated from college in the Eighties. I settled down and did my first entrepreneurial things in the Aughts.
When I was a kid, among the biggest insults you could sling at another boy was calling him “faggot,” “queer” or “fairy.” We accepted without any discussion that homosexuality was a trait devoutly not to be wished upon oneself.
It’s about growing up in the early nineteen-sixties traveling with Brother David Terrell, one of the last of the big time tent evangelists. He started off as a folk hero who was beaten by the Ku Klux Klan for allowing blacks and whites to sit together under his tents. The white southern establishment hated guys like him and often trumped up reasons to shut them down. The book chronicles Terrell’s rise and eventual fall: womanizing, the abuse of money in later years and his evolution into a leader of an apocalyptic sect.
The 2012 Cannes Film Festival kicks off May 16, and if you aren’t sinking your soles in the pebbled beaches of the Côte d’Azur with roughly $3000 tucked in your pocket right about now, well, then, you aren’t talking to Brad Pitt. That’s the going rate for a Pitt interview, anyway, as The Globe and Mail reports. Sad? Don’t be. You’ve just saved yourself roughly $3000 worth of awkward silences and habitual lip licking. What you can do (or Cannes do, heh) is watch the trailers for the films in competition this year including David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLilo’s Cosmopolis starring Robert Pattinson:
Late in 2011, I typed “Van Halen” and “live” into YouTube’s search box.
I’d started this habit earlier in the year, diverting myself from whatever I was supposed to be doing by plumbing my rock fan past. I’d wasted entire mornings watching Kiss, Rush and Led Zeppelin videos, each filling me with a nostalgia that, all of a sudden, wasn’t nostalgia anymore. There it was, right in front of me, as close as it had ever been. I watched some of these videos obsessively, bookmarking them, feeling something of that original surge each time. ABBA, Uncle Tupelo, Fastway (Fastway!), the supply was bottomless. It was like finding long-lost friends and those friends having stayed as young and vital as ever.
The last two times someone has asked to interview you they gave up halfway through, yeah? What’s wrong with you? You think you can make it to the end of this one without doing whatever it is that caused that?
On this day of Mothers, let us not just remember flowers and cute cards, or Sunday Brunch. Let us remember:
Some women don’t want children. Womanhood ≠ Motherhood and vice-versa.
Some mothers love other women. Let them do it with the full authority of the state, and all the benefits and protections that the state gives women who have children with men.
Some fathers are the best mothers. Some fathers love other fathers. Let them do it with the full authority of the state, and all the benefits and protections that the state gives women who have children with men.
Douglas Light: Thanks for taking the time to read my story collection, Girls in Trouble.
Roy Kesey: A total pleasure! Now, full disclosure: correct me if I’m wrong, but I think our first contact was back in 2005 when you published a story of mine in Epiphany.
That’s right. I’d forgotten about that. Back in the day when I was working on literary magazines.
The tent waited for us, her canvas wings hovering over a field of stubble that sprouted rusty cans, A&P flyers, bits of glass bottles, and the rolling tatter of trash that migrated through town to settle in an empty lot just beyond the city limits. At dusk, the refuse receded, leaving only the tent, lighted from within, a long golden glow stretched out against a darkening sky. She gathered and sheltered us from a world that told us we were too poor, too white trash, too black, too uneducated, too much of everything that didn’t matter and not enough of anything that did. Society, or at least the respectable chunk of it, saw the tent and those of us who traveled with it as a freak show, a rolling asylum that hit town and stirred the local Holy Rollers, along with a few Baptists, Methodists, and even a Presbyterian or two, into a frenzy. Brother Terrell reveled in that characterization.
Writers are by definition concerned with words. And when it comes down to it, unless you’re really plucky, there are two or three words you’re stuck with for life: your name. Every other week we’ll ask a different writer five questions on the subject.
Unless your name is Axl Rose, then ten years is a hell of a long time to get something done. In fact, most people can accomplish terrific feats of mind and body in well under a decade. Hell, with only eight years, US presidents have repainted the entire cultural landscape of the planet. But if you’re not in a hurry and you don’t mind waiting for the right moment to find you, then ten years is perfect.
In 2001, Ohio-born Scott Shriner stepped into the job as Weezer’s bass player—a position he has comfortably helmed for six of the band’s nine albums, through the present day. With followers whose fervor rivals that of Southern snake handling cults, this is officially a “high-profile gig” and with a steady diet of touring and albums over the past ten years, Shriner hasn’t spent a great deal of time surfing QVC. Until lately.
First of all I’m afraid to read your book because the thought of reading it makes me feel the same way I feel when I’m notified that someone has tagged me in a facebook photo: simultaneously full of dread and incredibly curious to see what it is. What is the book about?
A man’s wife disappears and he thinks about who he thought she was versus who she might have been.
Jurgen Fauth has written a terrific new novel calledKino, the story of a silent film director in Nazi Germany and his granddaughter’s quest to redeem him. With a cast of characters including Joseph Goebbels, Fritz Lang and Leni Riefenstahl, Kino raises important questions concerning the nature and purpose of art at the intersection of politics and culture.
Jürgen Fauth is a writer, film critic, translator, and co-founder of the literary community Fictionaut. He was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, and received his doctorate from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. He lives with his wife, writer Marcy Dermansky, and their daughter Nina. Kino is his first novel. Follow him on Twitter at @muckster.
There’s always something left, isn’t there. Discarded short stories, novels begun and abandoned, shorthanded ideas on dried-up Post-it notes or scribbled in the middle of the night on a Kleenex. For a lot of writers most of this is discovered, in the brittle light of dawn, to be crap, though at the time of writing it always seems like deathless prose of staggering originality. But we hang onto it; or at least some do.
This week, Girls’ writer/director/actress Lena Dunham went on NPR’s Fresh Air to address criticisms that the show is a particularly whitewashed view of entitled twenty-something women emotionally adrift in New York City. Even before the show aired on HBO, Girls had garnered a tremendous amount of buzz as a series helmed, for a change, by a woman. Just a few episodes in, the buzz erupted in debate on Girls’ representations of gender, class, and race as well as its worthiness of being the focus of so much debate to begin with.
A conversation with David Rees, author of How to Sharpen Pencils, a practical and theoretical treatise on the artisanal craft of pencil sharpening, for writers, artists, contractors, flange turners, anglesmiths, and civil servants, with illustrations showing current practice, now available from Melville House. He is also the creator of the comic strip Get Your War On, which has appeared in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine.
The latest round of TNB Music Staff Picks. Dig it, baby…
PHILM
Harmonic
(IPECAC)
Stunningly complex atmospherics from an unlikely legend
When Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo recently talked to TNB Music about his three-piece side project Philm (with guitarist/vocalist Gerry Nestler and bassist Pancho Tomaselli), he gamely addressed the various sounds the band have incorporated into their forthcoming debut: “heavy,” “bluesy” and “diverse.” Having finally sat down with that record, Harmonic, we realize that words cannot begin to approach the spectacular brew of genius, madness, terror and ecstasy that fuel one of the more fascinating releases of 2012. Harmonic is a relentless 15-song campaign that storms through the fields of Coltrane, Santana, Gilmour and Hanneman, and while attempting to identify a singular sound is a fool’s errand, punk vocals, jazzy dissonance and of course, masterful drumming appear in ample doses.
When we were Cub Scouts, we spent months collecting spare change to buy the battleship Massachusetts from the Navy. On the bright August day when the old ship was towed up Mount Hope Bay to its new home in Fall River, my family was one of the thousands aboard the cabin cruisers, trawlers, sloops, catboats, frigates, and tugs that participated in the all-day cavalcade. At one point we came fairly close amidships to the battleship. All I could see was a gray wall of steel rising from the waves and disappearing into the clouds. This memory flashed through my mind a couple of weeks ago when a gray Dodge Ram 2500 towing a trailer swerved into my lane without warning and I drove straight into its passenger door.
A few months after Robert B. Parker died of a heart attack at his writing desk in January of 2010, his publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, approached Ace Atkins with a proposition. Parker’s family wanted Spenser, one of the most iconic private detectives in crime fiction history, to live on; and they were searching for the right writer to continue the series. Would Ace like to audition for the role by sending in 50 sample pages?
On the night of our mother’s first seizure, the one that leaves her on the living room floor with her right leg flopping like a fish out of water, my sister shows up to the ER with a newborn mouse in a pouch around her neck.
“We found it today,” her husband says to me. “Underneath my car, next to its brother or sister, who was smashed dead. She’s trying to save it.” It is just the two of us standing in the orange and blue hospital waiting area. I stare at him. “I’m not sure anyone is supposed to know, though. So maybe don’t say anything.”
Somewhere in this sprawl of sleepless hours is my father, and the destruction of his aging brain. Dad, now seventy-three, has been diagnosed with acute dementia. In the dementia, as it opened, he began to forget how to get to places he had been many times before outside our home. He would find himself driving deep into the country in his small car, with a cell phone he could often not remember how to use. I find the meatloaf in the cabinets with the clean dishes. Bowls of cereal wrapped under foil in the freezer. Many days he cannot answer any question. His eyes deep in his head–in the image of someone who has not at all been sleeping–though now sleeps more than he ever has. His usual bedtime of 10 PM drawn back to eight then seven. The other day he went to bed at four in the afternoon. My mother stopping him in the hallway, asking him to come sit with her, it’s not that time yet. “I know what I am supposed to do,” he said.
Mothers I love to fry
Mothers imparting feral logic
Mothers in lactation frenzy
Mothers iterating life’s fullness
Mothers in like flint
Mothers in lustrous fortitude
Mothers in lonely friction
Mothers in Lucifer’s foliage
Mothers in lockstep formation.
Mothers’ irascible leverage force
Mothers I’d like to fluoridate
Mothers I’d like to forget
Mothers issuing lyric phraseology
Mothers insipid loady frights Read More ⇓
Among contemporary poets, who are you reading and why?
I’ve just finished Macnolia, a wonderful collection of thematic poems by A. Van Jordan. Van Jordan’s work is a discourse on gender and race in the context of the life of a woman named Macnolia Cox Montiere. Macnolia’s life was shaped irrevocably when she, an African-American girl, was wrongfully denied top prize at the 1936 Akron Spelling Bee. Van Jordan does a wonderful job of exorcising ghosts in an effort to resurrect history and pay homage to an extraordinary individual. Additionally, the structure of his poetry, some of which is experimental, makes many of his poems truly haunting—and their message about the importance of revealing truth entirely vital.
Expatriates, I’ve found, don’t necessarily get along. Meeting someone from home who’s navigating the same foreign country as you are can be a source of mutual suspicion or rivalry just as often as it’s a springboard to friendship. Other times, there’s only that superficial common ground to briefly stand on, making it all the more apparent you likely would have nothing to do with one another back on native soil.
But then there are those moments that you do find a fellow expat, someone you wish you’d known back home before you left for this new place, and the person can become a long-lost life raft. Read More ⇓
I’m not going to waste precious time blabbing about how awesome the stories in Cul De Sac are. (You’re busy. I get it.) I’ll only say that I never intended to read the fucking thing. Why? Because I’ve got two small children at home and, like, six other books I’m supposed to read. I only read the thing because I couldn’t not read it. Which is annoying. And also kind of awesome.
TNB presents Late Night Library, the all-hours home of debut fiction and poetry. In this episode, Erin Hoover and Jada Pierce discuss Rebecca Lehmann's poetry collection Between the Crackups, winner of the Crashaw Prize, from Salt Modern Poets.
