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.

Well, I notice your house is pretty ordered.

Certain things I can control. Clutter is one. Plus, I have a couple of deadlines today—a poetry workshop description for a group of teachers, an article about a knitting circle for Telluride Magazine, an essay defending my versions of modern haiku, and then there’s this self interview. So before I sat down to the computer, I cleaned the house. Tonight, even the fridge. I think my habit of cleaning as procrastination has something to do with being able to see myself start and finish a project. Plus the whole time I scrub or vacuum, I’m thinking about what it is I want to write. Just don’t look in the kids’ closet, okay?

You write a lot about your kids.

I’m lucky. I spend a lot of time with them.

Your most recent book is a collection of conversations with Rumi, in which he comes to visit you—in the kitchen, the garden, the beach or the Walmart parking lot. What was the inspiration for this book?

A couple years ago I gave a poetry reading in Santa Barbara with the phenomenal (and very real) Barry Spacks. He read a poem in which Rumi was in a room full of cheerleaders. Really? I thought. How marvelous! I was enthralled with the notion that a 13th century Sufi mystic could show up anywhere. And he began to. In my son’s kindergarten class. The library carrels. While canning tomatoes …

But Rumi wasn’t really showing up, was he? You weren’t channeling, right?

No. It was literary and imaginary. I have been reading Rumi extensively for about five years, and I have taught classes on Rumi—and other mystics, too—around the state of Colorado. Now that I think of it, when I started to read Rumi is probably when I started to embrace not knowing. I think that’s when the walls started to come down, and when I started to think that perhaps the walls coming down was a wondrous thing, not a calamity.

Anyway, having read a lot of Rumi and having memorized quite a few of his poems in translation, many of his words have made a home in the back pocket of my mind (oh, how I love memorizing poems for this reason!).  And so it was that he “appeared” to me. Some of the poems in the book have “conversations” with translations by Daniel Ladinsky and Coleman Barks. They were both gracious enough to give me permission to use their work in the collection. And some of the conversations are purely imagined—I just heard what Rumi might have said.

In some way, the Rumi character in these poems is the part of myself that is much bigger than myself—a conscience. But that sounds too moral. Let’s say it’s an awareness not married to judgment. An unbiased noticer. That wise part of ourselves that we usually shut out in the interest of preserving our egos.

So who else do you have conversations with?

I like to think of writing poetry as “joining the big conversation”—a conversation that extends across continents and cultures, across centuries and conditioning. In some way, all writers are addressing this question: “What does it mean to be alive?” And look at all these myriad answers! So in my mind, when I write, I am conversing with everyone who writes. And everyone who reads.

Specifically, I suppose, I converse, informally, with my favorite writers, who include A.E. Stallings, Li-Young Lee, Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Louise Gluck, Jane Hirshfield, A.R. Ammons, and Ellen Bass. And so many more. But those are all people I have never met, or at least have never become friends with. In a very real way, I have poetic conversations all the time with poets I know and love: Art Goodtimes, Wendy Videlock, Danny Rosen, Jack Mueller, Ellen Metrick, Julie Cummings, Rachel Kellem, Barry Spacks, Jim Tipton, Jude Janett, Danny Ladinsky, Tony Alcantara, Cam Scott, Barbara Ford … I feel as if I might get myself into trouble here by naming a few and not all of them. There are more, many more.

Many more. It’s an incredible poetry community here extending out from Colorado’s Western Slope—a warm, supportive, encouraging, vulnerable, inspiring, heart-breaking group of poets. Am I gushing?

You’re gushing.

I wish I could gush louder, faster, richer, deeper, sweeter and more. So much about what I love about poetry has to do with community.

And yet here you are alone in your house, writing poems and writing about poems at 3:34 a.m.

Right. Ultimately, it’s a solitary endeavor, isn’t it. I once heard A.R. Ammons say to people who were considering becoming poets, “Why sit alone in a room, picking away at your own liver? But if you must write, I say to you, write.” There is something in me that must write. I’ve written since fourth grade. Why? For fun. For clarity. For an illusory knowing. For connection. For praise (ugh, I said it). For the pure pleasure/agony of writing and trying to say what I mean. For sound’s sake. For what? Oh I don’t know. Because I would be really, really lost without it and it feels like an anchor, like a kite.

My favorite answer EVER to the question why do you write came from Colorado poet Aaron A. Abeyta, who said, “I know it sounds romantic, but every poem I write I write to save someone’s life.” Yes! Yes. And sometimes that life is my own.

For seven years I’ve written a poem a day. It’s a practice, for sure, that I take on knowing I will never “get it right.”

And hey, I am so not alone. My kids are sleeping in the other room.

What question do you wish I would ask?

Ha. This is so funny, the self-interview. It’s so interesting all the places we didn’t go. But since you ask …

The other night in Durango, I gave a reading with Dave Mason, Pamela Ushuck (I am glad to finally know this is pronounced YOU-SHEWK) and William Pitt Root, and a woman in the audience asked me why I sing during readings. I was caught off guard, and mumbled something about it being fun and using it as a way to pull reluctant listeners into a poem.

The rest of the readers concurred later that singing in a reading was decidedly non-academic and was in fact much maligned by critics. I had never really thought about it. Bringing singing to poetry is more impulse than anything else. But here part of what I wish I had said:

Poetry is one way we express what it means to be alive. Singing is another. As is dance, painting, sculpture, theater, skiing powder snow, playing in the park with our children, canning apricot jam, making love outside … There are so many ways to explore this humanness. And it’s so darn sweet when we marry these so-called disciplines and engage with life as richly as possible. Why shouldn’t we sing with poems? Why shouldn’t we also dance? We like to draw these arbitrary boundaries. “This,” we say is poetry.  And “these” poets belong to “this” group.  And “this” is the style that this poet writes in. Ugh. All the shoulds. All the labels. All the wanting to make the world fit into the right box. I guess we’re back at the beginning, huh. Only it’s much, much later.

They whisper blessings, curses,
eyes raised to heaven,
which weeps, or hurls lightning,
or politely refrains from comment.

Meanwhile votive candles
burn coldly in blue glass.
Pews in implacable rows
promise discomfort, redemption.
Hymnals hum softly,
hug dirges tight
between dusty covers.

Irreverent woman, taking
notes on dust and dour
saints, doubting hellfire
and heaven, still closes
her eyes, imagines her life
extolled in hymns,
her portrait in blue stained glass.

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.

One of my mother’s sisters had four children. Though it didn’t come out until we were all adults, three of these four children are gay.

My wife tells me that two kids at her all-girls boarding school were once caught in bed together. It became the talk of the school at the time, but the girls remained in attendance, and they all stayed friends.

When I was fifteen I participated in a “teen tour” of the American west—twenty kids on a bus. One day, we went whitewater rafting. Panic, of course, was part of the fun. In the boat behind me, one of the counselors could be heard calling out, “Paddle, Robert, you faggot! Paddle!” Back on shore we all had a good laugh over that. For a week we endlessly repeated, “Paddle, Robert, you faggot!”

There were a few particularly effeminate boys in our public high school. As we progressed from freshman to senior year, their difference from the “normal” kids became clearer. All of us straight guys accepted that one could talk to the apparent homosexuals, but you never wanted to get too close, lest the stigma rub off.

There were two girls in high school rumored to be lesbians. By senior year they appeared to be a couple, but it was all something of an open secret. We made them the subject of endless discussion. Like something outré.

I had a distant cousin who was about twelve years older than me. He was flamboyant and had an active social life, living large in New York City, a big part of the club scene in the Seventies. One day, I heard that he’d fallen seriously ill. The next time I saw him, he had raised dark splotches all over his body. Though he’d always been thin, now he appeared emaciated. I overheard his mother talking. She said he had a rare form of cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. In less than a year, he died, an early victim of AIDS.

Toward the end of high school, a boy whom I didn’t know very well walked in front of a train. He’d always been a quiet and sensitive kid. The youngest in a very large Catholic family. We debated whether it was suicide or an accident. I think now, looking back, of the likelihood that he was gay and couldn’t live with himself.

Imagine that you carry a dark secret. It is only dark because your family, your priest, and all the people you know well tell you that it makes you a terrible person, a lesser human being. The only relief for you from this torment would be to find others like yourself who know what it means to be you, who might share their understanding with you—more important, who might share their love. But to join these other people, to be seen with them, would be an admission of guilt to those judging you. Can there be any lonelier feeling? Would you want to go on?

One of the lesbian girls from high school attended my university. During the first few weeks of college, when nearly every relationship was a new relationship, we hung out together a little. One weekend, her girlfriend visited. A kid on my dormitory hall came to me that Saturday night and said, “Someone saw your friend kissing another girl.” He said it as if this was scandalous behavior. I didn’t pile on, but neither did I correct him. At that moment, I knew how Peter must have felt, denying that he knew Jesus.

My senior year of college, I lived in a house off campus with two roommates. One was my best friend at the time. The other was a personable, bright guy with a lot of friends. He’d been dating a woman the year before, but they broke up. Now he was manifestly unhappy at times and going to counseling. He didn’t share the source of his unhappiness with me, but he let something slip to my best friend. My best friend and I lived carefree, all of us supported by our parents, hanging out, having fun, going to class. Everything was a joke to my best friend. He told me with a scarcely suppressed grin that he knew what had driven our roommate to therapy: He was having problems regarding his sexuality. I didn’t find that funny. When I was alone with the guy, I told him he could talk to me about it if that would make him feel better. He gave me a cold thanks and never did. But years later, quite successful in business, out of the closet, in a happy long-term relationship with another man, he thanked me again for that offer. Though he’d never taken me up on it, he said that my offer had given him hope at a time when he was feeling hopeless.

My oldest first cousin is ten years older than I. When I graduated from college and began looking at apartments, I fell in love with a little studio on Christopher Street. At the time, it was the center of gay activity in New York. Naively, I didn’t know that. My cousin told my father I shouldn’t move there because I would get “cruised” all the time. I bought an apartment in Soho instead.

That same cousin had once been engaged to be married to a woman. We never talked about his sexuality, but over lunch one day I asked him why he’d never gone through with the marriage. He said, “I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life making love to someone while picturing someone else.”

At some point after I fell in love with the woman who would become my wife, I learned that her father—who was divorced from her mother before we’d met—had come out of the closet a few years after the divorce as a gay man. He was a creative, brilliant, accomplished individual who had done some truly impressive things early in life. He’d grown up in a WASP family of significant social standing, the son of a war hero. His half-brother died a lifelong bachelor. My father-in-law, who is now gone, lived most of his life as an alcoholic.

Through my wife’s father, we became good friends with a gay artist who makes his living painting portraits. We hit it off as friends from the moment we met. I suppose that in another generation he may have managed to pass for straight. One summer weekend we invited him and another couple to visit a small cottage in the Catskills that we were renting. That Saturday morning, I initiated a game of touch football out on the lawn. The artist was game, though football was not his thing, and he never looked “gayer” than with his long arms waving in the air, attempting with all his might to defend against the pass. We all had a great time that weekend, but this moment of what I can only call “girlishness” on his part drew me even closer to him because he was totally unselfconscious about his lack of athleticism at that moment. He was entirely himself and was having fun. For our wedding, he gave us a pair of portraits of ourselves. They remain the most generous gift we have ever received.

One of my early bosses in publishing was a not particularly effeminate gay man who talked openly about his partner, a doctor. One day he hung up the phone and came into my office and said, “Some guy just called me a ‘fucking Canadian faggot’ because I won’t publish his book. ” I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “How did he know you were from Canada?”

Through her work, my wife met an old college classmate of mine whom I hadn’t seen in years. Coincidentally, she’d been the one whom my roommate had once dated. She was now out of the closet as a lesbian. Years later, she settled down with another woman and had a child, but we never met the child. Though we reached out many times, she always claimed to be too busy to have dinner with us. We never saw her again.

We had an acquaintance in our town in Westchester. He was a lifelong bachelor who lived alone in a cottage on a friend’s estate. He did odd jobs around town and sold his own pottery, which often featured painted pictures relating to horses. One day I ran into him in the grocery store. We were each just picking up a thing or two. He was wearing wellies and a raincoat and a cheerful smile. We had a nice chat. The very next day my wife called me and told me he had committed suicide. There were rumors that as a child he’d been abused by a priest.

I once had an employee who was openly gay and had recently overcome a bad drug habit. He had a long-term partner with AIDS, and he was deeply troubled. I couldn’t imagine not being able to make love to one’s partner without having to worry about acquiring a deadly communicable disease. Many years later, his partner remains alive. Last week, I received an email from the former employee, bragging about his promotion. Maybe he’s happy now.

In the town in Westchester, we knew a gay couple who were among the pillars of the community. One of them owns an old farmhouse that’s been in his family for generations. The other was our florist. When we still lived there, he’d spend hours in our house putting up Christmas decorations. He was outspoken and politically involved and something of an amateur historian. My wife used to tell me that he had a crush on me, but I didn’t believe it. Now that we’ve known him longer, however, he’s become more open about it, often telling me how good looking he thinks I am. He knows I’m not fair game, both because I’m married and straight, but he persists in these comments. It never offends me. In fact, I find this flattering.

We left the town in Westchester but we have many friends there. Among them are another gay couple. They invited us to come stay in their cottage with our daughter, and we did so when she was eight. We never spoke a word to her about the novelty of their arrangement because we don’t find it any more unusual than a tall man having committed his life to a short woman or an attorney living with an accountant or a million other possible human pairings. We stayed in their house and ate the breakfast they prepared and helped with the dishes as we would with any couple. It was all routine. My daughter never asked a question pertaining to their sexuality, but if she had, she would have received a matter-of-fact answer.

Ironically, our pied-à-terre in the West Village is a few blocks from Christopher Street. The neighborhood is much more mixed than it was when my cousin steered me away from an apartment there, nearly thirty years ago. But we do walk past lesbian and gay bars on a regular basis. Sometimes we point out drag queens to each other, only as a matter of curiosity. Is merely pointing someone out a kind of judging? I don’t know. Some of them clearly want attention. Others, however, appear to be mentally ill. What does it say about me that I feel compelled to make a note of these people?

One of the girls from my wife’s boarding school grew up to be an open lesbian in a committed relationship. She and her life partner have a child. The mothers are intelligent, caring, accomplished women, going about their lives as any couple does. They live in North Carolina and my wife’s friend vocally fought the constitutional amendment denying them their rights as a couple. She posted hourly on Facebook for weeks, begging people to oppose this amendment. Then she fell silent.

Now I think of this woman in North Carolina and of the casual idiocy with which we as children slung around terms like “queer” and “faggot.” And I am ashamed.

What is Holy Ghost Girl about?

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.

Why did you write the book?

After 20-plus years away from the Holy Roller environment, a family funeral brought me back into contact with everything I was trying to avoid. The main topic of conversation at the funeral was whether Terrell would resurrect his son. That experience raised questions I wanted to explore as a writer: why are people willing to give everything to such a man; what do they get psychologically and spiritually from following him; is there any real good that comes from him? I had a personal stake in those questions because my mother and Terrell were involved in an affair that lasted for decades.

Why did you write the book as though all of the “miracles” actually occurred?

I wanted to tell the story as I experienced it, and I didn’t see people who were planted to fake miracles or anything like that. Though, I am willing to believe that happened at times. I also wanted to explore the beauty and danger of absolute faith. When you get five to ten thousand people together praying the same prayer, remarkable things can and do happen. Those same remarkable things can lead to dark stuff, like being willing to sign over your life and critical thinking abilities.

Do you think you grew up as part of a cult?

I think I grew up in southern tent revivalism—which is a tradition, not a cult. I also think that when Terrell began calling himself a prophet, threatening people who questioned him with God’s wrath and urging followers to sell everything and move to “Blessed Areas” to wait out the apocalypse, we had ourselves a full blown family cult.

What do you think of the current debate between believers and secularists?

I think the U. S. as a whole is a country of fundamentalists, and that includes many believers and secularists. They argue for and against the most simplistic version of God and spirituality; God as the big Santa Claus in the sky, the absolute, verifiable truth of stories that are clearly about something much deeper than literal truth.

How would you like to see the debate change?

I’m interested in a conversation about what it is inside us that religion speaks to. How does it shape us, help us, hurt us?  Huston Smith pursued those questions, and Joseph Campbell too. Karan Armstrong’s book A Case for God raises them again.

What did you learn from writing the book?

I learned that the past goes on and on inside me. I thought I had put it away from me, through time and place and education. But once I started writing it was right there. Not simply the past recalled, the past mediated through what I now think and believe about it, but the past as I experienced it.

Are you a believer?

Yes and no. When I practice prayer and meditation, I feel as though I am in relationship with something that is much larger than myself. And that larger something often makes me less of a bitch, but not always. When I revert to thinking about God, I fall into a fundamentalist frame of reference, and I think, “Nah, I can’t believe that.” So faith for me is a matter of practice. 

_____________

DONNA JOHNSON found redemption in books and the University of Texas. She is obsessed with the big questions posed by religion and has written about faith for the Dallas Morning News, the Austin American Statesman, The Holy Ghost Girl Blog at Psychology Today and other publications. Her critically acclaimed memoir, Holy Ghost Girl won the Mayborn Creative Nonfiction prize and was awarded a Books for a Better Life award in the spirituality category. She lives and writes in Austin TX, where with the help of family and friends, she works at leaving behind The Elect and becoming a normal person.

You can also read The Hollywood Reporter’s interview with Roger Ebert on “Cannes’ Wild Past” in which Ebert dishes about brunches with legendary B-movie producer Samuel Arkoff:

Sam [Arkoff] would throw a brunch at Hotel du Cap for the English-language press. He always gave the same speech: “You all think my films are shit, so let’s forget business and have a good time.” Once, Rex Reed said of Q, his flying dragon movie: “Sam, what a surprise! A marvelous method performance by Michael Moriarty, right in the middle of all that dreck!” Sam replied, “The dreck was my idea.”

Or catch Stylist Magazine’s live-streamed shows featuring interviews with Brad Pitt (cha-ching!) and the like at Cannes by The Guardian’s Jason Solomons.

Total Film has compiled 50 Greatest Cannes Moments including that time Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson showed up for Easy Rider “acting like goddamned hippies.”

Digital Spy has likewise put together 65 Iconic Pictures from Cannes festivals past, which of course includes Brigitte Bardot in a bathing suit.

And there’s more of Brigitte Bardot in a bathing suit at Cannes from the LIFE archives at The Retronaut.

Get yourself a Cannes Film Festival-inspired limited edition bottle of S. Pellegrino.

And, finally, in honor of the recently appointed President of Un Certain Regard Jury Tim Roth, enjoy a Roth marathon. I suggest Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Hit, Reservoir Dogs, Little Odessa, Pulp Fiction, The Legend of 1900, and this clip of Roth as bellhop Ted in Four Rooms (note: it costs less to chop off Norman’s little finger than it does to interview Brad Pitt):

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.

Somewhere on the first page of results I found a video titled Van Halen – Live in Largo. A subheading revealed more: Van Halen Live in Largo Maryland (1982). A quick look at the counter revealed the video’s length: 1:55:22.*

I clicked “Play,” completely unprepared for the deluge that followed.

Watching this concert struck me on many levels–as will become apparent in this seven-part series–but three come to mind. First and most forcefully, it spoke to the teenager who spent a good chunk of his time worshiping at the altar of Roth, Van Halen, Anthony and Van Halen. Back then, my friends and I found only snippets of Van Halen footage on MTV and USA’s Night Flight, and the fare was frustratingly homogenous on each channel—the same three live segments from what I’m guessing was the Fair Warning tour. In our blue collar town of Moline, Illinois, I was the lucky kid with the VCR, which made it my job to sit by the thing, MTV on, fingers poised over the “Play” and “Record” buttons, until all three segments were captured. With each successful recording, I end zone celebrated in our living room. These three clips–“Unchained,” “So this is Love?” and “Hear about it Later” (order not random)–all but induced my friends and me to buy cheap instruments, pretend to practice them, and dream about someday escaping our lame hometown for the magical world of Van Halen.

We also managed to find three live songs from the US Festival in 1983, featuring a huge stage and David Lee Roth’s butt-less chaps. We had US Festival clips of two songs each by acts like Ozzy Osborne, Triumph and Judas Priest. Van Halen was the only one with three. This was as it should be–Van Halen always deserved more.

And I did see the band live once. It was in Peoria, Illinois, about three hours from Moline, during their tour for the album 1984. My friend’s mom drove my friend and me, and we screamed from the cheap seats of that 5,000 seater until the band quit taking encores. My first pass at the Largo video reminded me of that Peoria show, especially the Michael Anthony bass solo…but let’s save that for later because I have plenty to say about it.

The second level at which this concert spoke to me: It takes place after I had a short rock career of my own in a band called the Refreshments. The Refreshments had two albums out nationally in the 1990s that sold a combined 400,000 copies. We toured the country many times, had a hit single. I know a little more about rock life than I did back when I was glued to Van Halen videos. How did this film strike me almost fifteen after the break-up of my band?

And finally, there’s the level of the forty-two year old searching out rock concerts from his past on YouTube. What was I searching for? Was I trying to understand something? My youth? My rock and roll past? Had I lost something? Could it be regained? Didn’t I have something better to do?

This video spoke to each of these Arts at once, filling me with not a little joy and gleefully reacquainting me with some old memories that were long overdue for a visit.

Clip 1, 1:08

This is the first shot from the back of the venue as all the lights go up, which gives us a full view of the stage. A general breakdown might be helpful, especially for those who are unaware of how a Van Halen concert looked in 1982. Van Halen, even before their huge crossover sixth album 1984, was one of the biggest hard rock bands in the world. In this video, they’re on tour supporting their fifth album, Diver Down, which features the radio hit “Pretty Woman,” an amped up version of the Roy Orbison classic, and the stage is appropriately huge for a band of this magnitude. It’s maybe fifty feet wide, with stepped risers at stage right and left that take it another twenty or so feet–and ten feet higher–in both directions. The back of the stage is lined with what look like speakers–big, round woofers in large cabinets–on both sides of the drum riser, which is roughly four feet up and covered with an elaborate set of drums: rack toms, double kick, an array of cymbals, and a giant gong.

Alex Van Halen mans these drums, and with the exception of his bobbing white head-banded head, we see little of Alex during the film. I consider Alex a competent hard rock drummer, but there was always this sense his abilities were exaggerated because of some weird transference of having Van Halen as his last name. He is, of course, Eddie’s older brother, who is far more talented, which can’t be easy for an elder sibling. Still, if there’s envy it’s not apparent. Alex, a less compelling and less cute version of Eddie, seems to enjoy himself enough, working away at his skins, smiling here and there. His kick drums are accented with cylinders of various widths that jut out a foot or so from the main, and the overall effect is like multiple exhaust pipes coming from a motorcycle. Motorcycles seem to be an Alex Van Halen fetish, as the intro of the band’s 1984 hit “Hot for Teacher” features what sounds like a motorcycle’s idle along with Alex’s playing. That might be the best metaphor for Alex–idling along while the rest of the band blazes off in all directions.

Speaking of blazing, Eddie Van Halen, who mans stage left, has long been heralded as one of the best hard rock guitarists of his time, but Eddie’s appeal stretches beyond the music into the performance element of a show. In the video, he wears red and white striped overalls, which vaguely match his primary guitar: a red Stratocaster-style body with white and black stripes crossing it at varying angles. His signature stage move is a scissor splits that he springs to from an almost flat-footed position. Combine this with his skinny yet built frame and aw shucks smile, and you have something of a visual complement to the apocalyptic drag queen at center stage, who I’ll get to in a moment. Despite his crazy get-up, Eddie’s presence lends a more down-to-earth appeal to the band. Without it, Van Halen–at least to non-guitarists–would’ve long before become the David Lee Roth Show.

Van Halen’s bass player, Michael Anthony, whose primary position is stage right, is bearded and mulleted, with a scarf or multiple bandanas hanging from his neck, and what seem a precursor to Ugg boots on his feet. He’s always hopping around, or dashing from this side of the stage to that, even though his stocky frame seems to keep him more earth-bound than the others. He likes to give the thumbs-up to the crowd, and he sings his background vocals without ever losing his grin. Michael has always struck me as a happy secondary member of the band–like a guy in high school picked by the popular kids to be on their dodge ball team–knowing he’s no match for the visual smorgasbord of the others but damn glad to be there anyway.

Speaking of visual smorgasbord, manning center stage is Van Halen’s lead singer, David Lee Roth. DLR is tall, with a Statue of David-esque physique. He sports a chaos of blond hair that’s frosted at the ends to the point of looking white, and wears (at the beginning of the film) a sleeveless denim shirt with chain-like items running from front to back, roughly tracing his ribcage. He accents this with bright red tights and colorful bandanas tied around his wrists and shins.

So, let’s say you’re blond, well-built and dressed like some kind of Amazonian prostitute who just put her finger in a light socket. Plenty to look at, right? Surely no one needs to be any more ostentatious than that. Well, my friend, you’ve clearly never experienced the force that is Diamond Dave. What’s perhaps most memorable about Roth is the way he performs. His moves are so fluid they resist analysis–one flows naturally into the next, so it’s hard to imagine them as separate things–but let’s try anyway. Easiest to explain are his kicks, which run the gamut from standard college cheerleader fare to dramatic jumping air splits from the drum riser. Dave also uses the microphone stand to full effect, brandishing it like a baton, holding it upside down like a umbrella, or sharing a relationship with it similar to that of a stripper and her pole. This last is often accompanied by a gyration of the waist that would be the envy of most belly-dancers. The point is, Dave is going to do whatever it takes to get your attention, and with his arsenal of moves, it’s going to work. When performing, not only is it like he’s on fire. It’s like he likes being on fire.

It’s important to understand that, despite all apparent joviality amongst these three, they seem in constant competition–friendly or otherwise–to see who can create the biggest spectacle of themselves. Poses, kicks, oscillating instruments, brandished microphone stands, there’s nothing they won’t do to pull your eye to them. The result is a circus-like effect, and the winner, I suppose, is the audience, who get to watch these hams perform for their pleasure. If you like heavy metal, you like this kind of thing. I don’t know if I like it anymore as much as I’m fascinated by it, which I’ll start to tackle during Part II of this piece.

* Sadly, the YouTube video I used as a reference for this essay was set to private in the middle of its writing, which means you can’t see it anymore. This led to not a little panic on my part, and all entreaties to various parties went unanswered. Fortunately, a poster named guitarzforsale has posted the exact same Largo concert but in 24 segments, each segment the length of a song. The links in this essay refer to the guitarzforsale clip numbers and the time within the clip, even though these were not the clips I referenced when writing most of the piece. From what I can tell, the videos are identical.

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?

…

What is it about what you do daily that makes you cranky during the day all day? Is it in some way related to that sick pang that happens seemingly 40-80% of the time immediately after posting anything online? Is that guilt, or fear, or something else? Like why put so much thought into whether something should be shared or not shared, and where does that desire to immediately snuff it come from? Does everyone have that? It seems like everyone does not have that. Why not delete everything, or delete nothing, or not involve yourself at all?

…

Care to estimate the percentage of your life you’ve spent staring at a box? I know last night you were thinking something like “Why haven’t they invented 2D audio-video drugs yet, which then could be forced upon us through the machine?” though what makes you think they haven’t?

…

Read any good books lately?

I’m about 2/3rds of the way through The Recognitions now. I wish I’d read it 10 years ago like I meant to. I feel like I maybe should never read anything less than 500 pages again.

There you are. I knew you were paying attention.

I mean, I’m here. I’m always here. I think more than I should, I know. I feel weird about this. I don’t know how not to feel affected. It feels like the texture of some of what you were talking about above depends greatly on intention: do you believe this person believes that you believe them, or are they trying to get away with something? Trying to get away with something while pretending that you are not often seems like a corridor to bad art.

Art.

Art.

So why do anything?

It’s a fair question. I tend to often want to beat myself up for whatever gives me pleasure, especially when it is a solitary pursuit. I think that comes from always wanting more from myself, to feel that I am up against a puzzle that keeps shifting underneath me, and only in certain moments fits into a set up that seems clear, like coming out of a forest into a clearing all of a sudden, but then to go anywhere else you have to go back into the forest, and often it feels like you’ll never find another clearing, and so a lot of people tend to go back to the previous clearing to feel that again. Great metaphor, dickface. Anyway, to answer your question: I guess because there’s nothing else to do? And for me going in search of the clearing and finding those modes where the search makes time no longer exist because I am so caught up in the mechanics of negotiating the dark makes the moments of emergence more emergent, personally, and the moments of utter darkness that much more volatile. It’s the only world I have.

You didn’t say a lot last night.

I don’t tend to say a lot out of my mouth, at least in front of others. I’d rather watch and hold still, I guess unless I’ve been drinking.

Why so much typing, then, every day?

I guess I don’t feel like that’s me talking, at least when I’m working on a book or whatever. It’s also how I make my living. It’s what I’ve chosen. I’m really up against it. It’s hard to get out from underneath. I can be far too loyal to a tone, a practice. Almost to a fault. Or entirely to a fault. But faults sometimes are the nicest thing about a person. All those things they say in writing workshops that should be expelled for disrupting the dream, or that cause anomaly in the condition, those are often the greatest things.

How can you tell when something is true?

I don’t think you have to ask.

What do you wish you were doing right now instead of this?

I like laying on the floor. One line that has haunted me for as long as I’ve been doing this thing is in Infinite Jest: “I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.” Not that I wouldn’t like to be knocked down.

Do you think you will get to be what you want?

I always pretend I don’t know what that is or that I’m going there. That seems a safer mechanism than grandiosity or maintaining excess self assurance. I think part of self esteem is the ability to be silent, though here we are. I’ve been so lucky in so many ways and yet I often can’t stop myself from wanting more, from wanting there to be another level to the game so that the game does not end until someone pulls the plug on the machine. I should have maybe stayed in computer science, though I might by now have just become a virus writer, trying to destroy whatever thing I’ve ended up in the middle of. Maybe I wish I was a virus writer. But really I just spend all day on my ass. The nature of the want of metaphorical destruction comes from something like love, though that isn’t the right word, and I don’t ever want to know what the word actually is.

I’m going to go outside now, by which I mean I’m going to close this file and keep sitting here.

…

____________________________

BLAKE BUTLER  edits the lit webblog HTMLGIANT and reports weekly on books and literature for Vice Magazine. His most recent works are the novel There is No Year and the nonfiction Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, both from Harper Perennial in 2012. He lives in Atlanta, GA.

Though the water was clear.
Being dry felt, well, so dry.
And I liked it, feeling dry.

“You can’t be baptized
if you don’t get in the water,”
said Rumi, and he rushed

past me from behind, leaping,
launching himself into the waves.
Then he turned toward shore to splash me.

“But the water’s so … wet,”
I said, with a wince.
And he splashed me again.

And he splashed me again.
And I did not did not like it.
I scowled and used my foot to splash

Rumi back, but he already
was wholly glittering wet.
He just laughed and motioned

for me to come deeper in.
I didn’t want to go, so I can’t quite
explain quite why I did, except

there was somehow a larger part of me
already at play in the waves with him,
and it pulled in the smaller,

resistant part until all of my limbs
were diamonding in the sun. The ocean
smoothed me with lavish salts

and brought jellyfish to bloom
at my side. Rumi, he had
long since melted into the waves.

His breath was the ocean’s breath.
The white gulls creeeched and keeled
overhead, and for a moment I felt

such compassion for that fussy one
who was tying up her wind-licked hair,
hoping to keep at least that part dry.

Chapter 24

“Yes,” I said, “I am a member of Joseph DeLucca’s immediate family.”

“And exactly how are you related?”

“He’s my brother.”

“Why is it, then, that you have a different last name?”

“We’re half- brothers.”

“I’m skeptical,” the hospital Nazi said.

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“And why would that be?”

“Because I recognize you. You’re that reporter from the Dispatch.”

“Reporters can have brothers,” I said.

“I imagine so,” she said. “But this is the fifth time this year you have tried to get into a shooting victim’s room by claiming to be a relative.”

“The fifth that you know of,” I said.

“You mean there were more?”

“Would you believe my family is having a run of bad luck?”

“No.”

“Give me a break,” I said. “He’s a friend, and I really need to talk to him.”

“Get out of here before I call security.”

“By security do you mean the geriatric rent- a-cop with a limp who waved to me in the lobby, or are you talking about the fat retired beat cop who’s munching a cruller in the coffee shop?”

She reached for the phone. I shrugged and headed for the door.

It took a couple of hours, but I managed to piece together the story of what happened to Joseph by reading between the lines of the police report and chatting up three off- duty cops, two hookers, and a bartender. Of the sixty or so people who were in the Tongue and Groove when the shooting started, they were the only ones willing to talk to a reporter with a note pad. Logan Bedford, the asshole from Channel 10, had better luck. A few dozen witnesses had queued up for the opportunity to talk into his microphone. Anything to get on TV.

From what I gathered, it went down this way:

By the Budweiser clock on the wall, it was a little after nine P.M. when Jamal, King Felix’s nervous triggerman, entered the club, pimp-walked up to the bar, and asked where he could find Joseph DeLucca. Jamal’s full name, it turned out, was Jamal Jackson; and he was a little younger than I’d thought—just fourteen. The boy’s father wasn’t in the picture. His mother worked the day shift as an orderly at Rhode Island Hospital. Nights, she made beds at the Biltmore. No, she told police, she didn’t know Jamal hadn’t been to school all year.

Jamal made the bartender nervous. He didn’t like the tic in the kid’s left eye, and he especially didn’t like the fact that he was a kid.

“Far as I know, there’s no state law against a kid buying a blow job,” the bartender told me later, “but he’s not permitted to be in an establishment that serves alcohol. If the a.g. ever found out he was in here, the bitch would have another excuse to scream bloody murder.”

I didn’t like his choice of words for my friend, but I needed to hear the rest of the story, so I didn’t make an issue of it.

He told Jamal to get out, the bartender went on. His exact words, if he remembered them right, were, “Get lost and come back when you’re eighteen.”

“Ain’t leaving till I see DeLucca,” Jamal said, the twitch in his left eye growing more violent.

What the hell, the bartender figured. Joseph was the bouncer. He asked Chloe, the plump waitress with the green hair, to fetch Joseph from the all- nude room so he could throw the kid out. Two minutes later, Joseph walked up to the bar and said,

“Somebody lookin’ for me?”

“You DeLucca?” Jamal asked.

“Yeah,” Joseph said. “Who the fuck are you?”

Jamal didn’t answer. He just reached into his waistband and pulled out his little silver pistol.

He had not picked the best evening for this.

There were twenty- two hookers and roughly forty customers in the club. Eighteen of the customers were there for Mike Scanlon’s bachelor party. The festivities had just gotten under way, so the celebrants hadn’t drunk themselves into a stupor yet. They’d had one beer apiece, and the first round of tequila shots had just arrived at their tables. Most of the guys had strippers on their laps. The girl who called herself Sacha, a couple of the celebrants told me later, was on her knees in front of the groom- to- be, her head bobbing up and down.

“Can you keep that part out of the paper?” Scanlon asked me. “My fiancée would fuckin’ kill me.”

“Sure thing,” I said, “as long as you fill me in on what happened next.”

When Sacha’s work was done, Scanlon expelled a sigh of satisfaction, opened his eyes, and saw the glint of bar light on nickel as Jamal’s pistol emerged from his waistband. Scanlon shoved the hooker aside and reached for the revolver in his ankle holster. His pals weren’t sure what was happening at first, but instinctively they went for their guns, too.

Scanlon was a Providence cop. So were his buddies.

In the next fifteen seconds, approximately a hundred rounds were fired, according to the official police estimate. One slug grazed Joseph’s thigh. Another ricocheted off a metal post and tore a ragged hole through the impressive rump of a stripper named Jezebelle. Dozens more slammed into the mahogany bar and the club’s black- painted walls.

And some hit what the room full of sharpshooters were aiming at.

An assistant medical examiner was still counting the holes in Jamal’s body. Every time he counted, he told me, he came up with a different number. The cop who recovered Jamal’s gun at the scene told me the kid never got off a shot.

_____________________

Bruce DeSilva worked as a journalist for 40 years before retiring to write crime novels full time. At the Associated Press, he was the writing coach, responsible for training the wire service’s reporters and editors worldwide. Previously he directed an elite AP department devoted to investigative reporting and other special projects. Earlier in his career, he worked as an investigative reporter and an editor at The Hartford Courant and The Providence Journal. Stories edited by DeSilva have won virtually every major journalism prize including the Polk Award (twice), the Livingston (twice), the ASNE, and the Batten Medal. He also edited two Pulitzer finalists and helped edit a Pulitzer winner. His first novel, Rogue Island, was a Publishers Weekly selection as one of the best debut novels of 2010 and won both the Edgar and the MaCavity Awards. The sequel, Cliff Walk will be published in May of 2012.

Adapted from Cliff Walk, by Bruce DeSilva. Copyright © 2012 by Bruce DeSilva. With the permission of the publisher, Forge Books.

• 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.

• Seeking medical care is not a privilege–it is a right.
• Whatever happens in my body–whether it’s a baby or Human Papilloma Virus or scabies–is my business. If I choose to enter a dialog about what is happening in my body, I will do so. It will be with doctors and my family; anyone else will be at my discretion.
• I will not enter a dialog about what happens with my body with anyone who willfully ignores these parameters. I will shout and scream and yell at the top of my lungs that it’s my right to seek the advice of a doctor for any condition, including abortion and birth control. 
• I will seek birth control if I want it. I will fuck for fun if I so choose. If I want to mate to propigate the human primate I will do so. I will not stand in the way of anyone who chooses either one of these avenues.
• I will stand up for these rights to the end of my life, and in so doing try to protect other mothers and fathers in their future, including my own son.
• To be a mother is to be a radical. To be a radical is to fight for justice. To be just one must seek justice for all.

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.

You helped found Epiphany, right? Tell me a little about that.

I was going to City College New York for my masters and had come across an ad seeking a managing editor. Willard Cook, the publisher, was interested in launching a new magazine. After a lot of hard work, the premiere issue came out in the spring of ’04. It’s pretty exciting to look back on those early issues and see names like Edith Perlman, Nell Freudenberger, John Edgar Wideman, and Roy Kesey listed in the table of contents.

Such company! I remember when the issue my story was in finally caught up with me. I was in…

China?

Yes! And I remember that issue especially because there was a story on microfiche in it. Which, of course, was already ten years out of date. Pretty cool.

Microfiche. The 8-tracks of the digital age.

Exactly. So then the next common point in our timeline was when you came to a reading of mine at KGB in New York City. It was for my novella Nothing in the World, in May of 2006.

That was a fantastic reading. The place was packed.

It was. And I’d like to take credit for that, though the fact that Peter Carey and Wesley Stace were also reading might have had something to do with it.

(Laughs) Possibly.

That was a really fun reading. It was going to be my very first, and then I found out there’d been some mistake and I’d been bumped for Carey, which was totally understandable—he was in the middle of one of his Booker runs—but I freaked out because I’d already invited everyone. So I called my agent and she called KGB and in the end they made room for me. And there was such great energy, reading to that packed room. And then you and I got a drink afterward.

You won the Bullfight Prize for Nothing in the World.

Right.

It’s a beautiful novella.

Thank you. So, seeing as how we’ve already got KGB on the brain, tell me a bit about KGB Bar Lit and your involvement with it.

KGB is a great bar in the East Village that holds readings nearly every night of the week. They launched an online literary magazine some years back called KGB Bar Lit, and I’ve been doing interviews for them. I was fortunate enough to tap you for a great interview when Pacazo came out last February.

So you looked at me and said, “I’ll tap that.”

(Laugh) Well, now that I’m seeing you on Skype, I realize I got ahead of myself.

(Laughs) Okay, before we talk about Girls in Trouble, I want to briefly talk about you first novel East Fifth Bliss, which came out in 2007. It’s been adapted into a movie starring Michael C. Hall, Peter Fonda, and Lucy Liu. And it’s scheduled for release soon, yes?

It’ll premiere in New York on March 23, and then in LA on March 30, with a wider release to follow from there. It’ll also be on video on demand, iTunes, and Amazon at the same time.

Excellent. What can you tell us about the transition from text to screen? How did the narrative change, and to what extent, when the novel was adapted?

Writing a short story or a novel is a rather solitary endeavor. Screenwriting, I found, is more akin to writing for an orchestra. I’d never written a screenplay before, but was fortunate enough to work with the film’s director, Michael Knowles. He and I worked through the script and developed the screenplay. There were a lot of scenes and characters in the novel that didn’t make it into the film. With screenplays, it’s all dialogue. You don’t have the luxury of wandering into deep backstories like you do with narrative. You have ninety minutes to tell your tale and you have to keep the story extremely tight and focused and really rely on the actors to bring the emotional insight of the character to life.

Michael and I worked on the script over a four-month period during the spring and summer of 2007. Michael then took the script out to L.A. and showed it around. We got a ton of positive responses, though the production companies wanted to know who we had attached and the actors wanted to know if we had funding. One directly relied on the other.

We were fortunate enough to get the script to Michael C. Hall in the fall of 2008. He loved it and signed on. From there, things fell into place. We ended up shooting the entire film in twenty-one days in the spring of 2010. A very fun experience.

How would you characterize your interactions with the director and the actors?

The director is a friend of mine, so it was a great process. It’s funny because we’d been working together on the project for three years without any formal agreement. It was only a few days before we started shooting that we were both like, “Yeah, we should probably get something down on paper.”

I was on the set for much of the shoot. It’s an exhilarating and odd feeling watching the characters you’ve created come to life. It’s also strange to meet these people who you feel you already know, but in reality don’t. You know the characters they play on TV or in the movies, but not the true person playing them.

Awesome. Congratulations. I hope the movie does gangbusters.

Me too.

Let’s shift to your current book. Congratulations on Girls in Trouble, which won the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, sponsored by AWP and published by the University of Massachusetts Press. One cool thing, totally aside from winning the prize and having the book come out, is that you join a list of really great writers who’ve also won the prize. Bonnie Jo Campbell, Michelle Richmond, and David Vann, whose books went on to do very well in Europe and elsewhere… You’re in good company.

Definitely. It’s certainly thrilling. As you can appreciate, short stories are weird little beasts. When you pull them all together, you can be looking at a span of up to a decade of your life. They almost become signposts of who you were, where you were. Capsules of your life, I guess.

Peter Ho Davies judged the competition, right? He seems like a really good guy. Did you have any interaction with him?

He is a good guy. I emailed him a few times. The contest was a blind submission, no names on the manuscripts. Afterwards, he wrote saying that, based on the stories, he was startled to find out I was a male. (Laughs) I think that’s a compliment.

See there, you’ve hit on two of the things I want to talk about. One is writing about or through gender, and the other is writing about or through place. Now, the way I want to organize my questions is through patterns. As you said, short stories are weird little animals which we often want to talk about individually, but sometimes doing so doesn’t cast any useful light on the collection as a whole. It’s a version of the forest-versus-trees conundrum, I guess. But one way to beat that is to focus on patterns in the stories. Now, the first important pattern is right there in the title: you’re writing about girls—as opposed to whoever else—in trouble. Obviously that’s causal, an ordering principle, maybe even a creative principle, behind the book. The stories cover a lot of different kinds of trouble and all different kinds of “girls,” almost all of whom would take offense if you called them that to their faces. So my first question is, Why girls? How is it that you, Douglas Light, ended up with thirteen stories—or maybe twelve, which we’ll talk about in a minute—with this particular theme? Why not boys in trouble? Or elm trees? Honeybees? A bacteria of some kind?

When I was going to submit this collection to the contest, I was contemplating what the overall arc of the pieces were. I noticed that the majority of my work, story-wise at least, focuses on young females. Why? Well, for one, I had, for the longest time, difficulty writing in the first person. The first person “I” of the story would get tangled with Douglas Light the writer. I’d find myself thinking, “Well, I’d never do that or say that.” And I wouldn’t. But that didn’t mean the character wouldn’t. I initially wrote in third person from a female point of view because it provided a safety of distance for me. I could explore emotions and situations more freely.

Okay. But there’s also one story, “Separate”—I’m not sure if the title’s meant as a verb or an adjective or both—that isn’t a story about a girl in trouble. There are a couple of women in the story, but the man is in more trouble than any of them. How do you see that story fitting in with the rest of the collection, given the perimeters you just laid down?

Yeah, I definitely slipped that one in. It didn’t fit under the umbrella theme of girls in trouble, but I felt it was a strong story. It’s also a first-person story, which just blows up everything I said. I am consistently inconsistent, that’s for sure. Ultimately, though, I included the story because the contest called for a certain page count and, well, I put the piece in to make the page count.

(Laughs) Fair enough. So, item two. A full twelve of the thirteen stories reference either Indiana or New York City. Five of the stories actually name check both of those places—either a character moves from Indiana to New York City, or vice versa. So, Indiana, New York City, different places—discuss.

Full disclosure: I’m from Indiana and currently live in New York City. So it’s safe to say that a lot of the stories build from my experiences, my upbringing. The towns, moments, relationships, and people I grew up with serve as the foundation from which I launch the story. It’s what I understand, or strive to understand. It’s why I start writing any story—in hopes of understanding what often lives outside the realm of understanding. My experiences in Indiana and New York City have their own unique set of quandaries, their own meaning and import.

Okay. And beyond that, are there any particular ways you want this dichotomy to function in stories like “Echo Sounder,” the very good, very creepy story which opens the collection, or “Hit and Run,” or “Orient,” where both areas function as place within the story? Beyond nostalgia and present, big city and small town, is there anything else you’re hoping that dichotomy will accomplish?

That’s a good question, one that I didn’t necessarily think about consciously while writing the stories. I’ve always viewed Indiana as a very cloistered place, a place that offers perceived safety via its close-knit communities. Identities are set. It’s difficult to reinvent yourself in a town where everyone knows your history, your failures, your every action. You can’t get away with a lot.

New York City, on the other hand, is the opposite. You move to the city to become someone else. And while you can make your fame and fortune here, you’re also risking much, much more. Taking my characters from Indiana and moving them to New York, I move them toward something scary, something larger than themselves. I move them beyond the familiar, all in hopes of creating tension.

The next item I wanted to ask about isn’t actually a pattern, because it only happens twice, and obviously to have a proper pattern you need at least three instances. That said: in “Zebra” and in “Hit and Run,” you describe stains as being the size of a cat’s head. My question: Is a cat’s head a standard measurement, like joules or degrees Kelvin, in Indiana, or in New York City, or both?

(Laughs) A cat’s head is a good sized stain!

Indeed it is. Okay, a more serious question. I wanted to ask about your use of ignorance in defining or creating certain characters. They aren’t stupid or foolish, but they lack key information, and are thus relatively powerless in relation to characters who do have the information—and that power imbalance plays a role in the story. So that’s one possible dynamic. But then there are other instances where you’re doing something more complicated. As in the previous case, we expect the second character to provide the necessary information, and we expect to feel catharsis when that information is revealed. As before, we see the information- and power-holding characters as reference points in the story… but then it turns out that they don’t know either! It’s a really destabilizing experience for everyone involved. I’m thinking here of the father character in “Zebra,” for example, who does not know, or alleges not to know, why his wife leaves a glass of milk out every day. And I’m thinking of the parents in “Hit and Run,” who can’t agree on where Rory’s scar came from. And the list goes on—there are a lot of different situations like this, where there are spaces clearly created for creation myths to be laid out, but the characters can’t agree on what those myths actually are… This is turning into a really long-winded question, but how do you see these instances of unexpected ignorance functioning in the story? What do you want from them?

I think that the situations of confusion, of ignorance, of opacity mirror what we experience on a daily basis. Short stories sometimes need loose ends to provoke and intrigue the reader, to prompt readers to question themselves. That act of questioning mirrors what I experience when I’m in the midst of the writing process. It’s an exploration, a process of discovery.

I feel that we’re all fumbling and blustering our way through life as best we can. The successful people in life aren’t so much succeeding as merely failing less often than everyone else. As humans, we have a misperception of nearly everything—celebrity, intelligence, love. In my stories, as in life, the answers often aren’t clean or precise.

That segues nicely into the last question I have: the non-trivial uses of trivia. You’ve given us several characters who seems to have been raised by almanacs and the Guinness Book of World Records instead of parents. The spy-like character in “Matters of Breeding”; the husband in “Hit and Run”; Marco, the fake artifact dealer in “Orient”–all these people have amazing amounts of information on hand, which makes me wonder, what is the root cause of your interest in trivia and definitions as they appear in these stories?

I use trivia in my stories not only because I enjoy it, but because I like the foundation on which trivia is established. I have a line in “Echo Sounder” where the mother asks the daughter if she wants the facts or the truth. Trivia is the facts, but there is so much more in the truth. Facts and definitions are sterile when they are viewed in isolation. Injected into a situation, they take on new meaning, a new life, even though, technically, they haven’t changed. It’s the environment and people surrounding them that cast hues and shades on the unchanging. They can make you pause. They can make you think.

____________________

Douglas Light is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer.  His debut novel, East Fifth Bliss, received the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award for Fiction. The screen adaptation (The Trouble with Bliss), which he cowrote, stars Michael C. Hall, Lucy Liu, and Peter Fonda. It was released in March 2012.  His story collection, Girls in Trouble, won the 2010 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and was published by the University of Massachusetts in 2011. His stories have appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies as well as in Narrative, Guernica, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and Failbetter.  For more information, please visit www.douglaslight.com.

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.

“I know they’s people call me David Nut Terrell. I’m not ashamed of it.” He bounced up and down the forty-foot long platform with the pop and spring of a pogo stick. “I’m crazy for Jesus, crazy for the Lord.” The crowd was on its feet, pogoing with him.

The tent went up in all kinds of weather, but in my memory it’s always the hottest day of summer when the canvas rises. A cloud of dust hangs over the grounds, stirred by the coming and going of the twenty to thirty people it took to raise the canvas. Local churches sent out volunteers, but most of the work was done by families who followed Brother Terrell from town to town, happy to do the Lord’s work for little more than a blessing and whatever Brother Terrell could afford to pass along to them. When he had extra money, they shared in it. He had a reputation as a generous man who “pinched the buffalo off every nickel” that passed through his hands. He employed only two to four “professional” tent men, a fraction of the number employed by organizations of a similar size. The number of employees remained the same over the years even as the size of the tents grew larger. “World’s largest tent. World smallest tent crew,” was the joke.

The air smelled of grease and sweat. Men dressed in long pants and long-sleeved shirts (the Lord’s dress code) ran back and forth, calling to one another over the gear grind of the eighteen-wheeler as it pulled one of seven thirty-foot center poles into the air. I held my breath as the men wrestled the poles into place, praying that a pole didn’t fall and knock a couple of men straight to glory, but making sure I didn’t miss it if it did. With a couple of center poles secured, the men broke for lunch, mopping their faces with red or blue bandanas or an already soaked shirtsleeve. Pam and I brought out the trays of bologna sandwiches our mothers had made and walked among them passing out the food. I tried not to wrinkle my nose at the greasy imprints their fingers made in the white bread or the sour hugs that accompanied their thank-yous.

It took three to four days to put the tent up, and the site looked different each time we visited. Some days I picked my way through red and blue poles that lay on the ground in seemingly careless arrangements, imagining them as tall slender ladies who had fainted in the heat or young girls waiting to be asked to dance. Proof that a romantic temperament can take root anywhere, because the only dancers I had seen were believers who jigged in the spirit. The men rolled out sections of canvas over the horizontal poles, attaching the cutout pieces to the base of the now-raised center poles. They laced the sections together and swarmed the flattened tent like a team of tiny tailors stitching a ball gown for a female colossus. With the sewing finished, a man was stationed at the winch attached to each of the seven center poles. Someone shouted, “Go!” and the men cranked in unison. The canvas rose around them, and when it reached waist height, crew members hunched over like gnomes, scrambled underneath, and pushed up the secondary poles. A few more cranks and the peaks billowed thirty feet in the air.

With the tent secured, the crew hung spotlights and secondary lighting from the poles, hammered together the sections of the platform, unloaded the Hammond organ, and positioned the amplifiers and speakers. The expanse of the tent posed a challenge for the sound system, so it was important that the speakers be positioned in just the right places. The tent families unloaded stacks of wooden folding chairs and arranged them in orderly sections that fanned outward from the platform. Twenty-five hundred chairs for the first night, with a thousand more stacked in the truck to be squeezed in as needed throughout the revival. Long one-by-one boards were placed between the chairs’ legs to connect them and keep the rows uniform.

By seven o’clock on opening night, a dusty brown canvas and a collection of scuffed-up poles had been transformed into an ad hoc cathedral. People came from near and far. Black and white, old and young, poor and poorer. Women with creased brows and apologetic eyes as faded as their cotton dresses, clutching two and three children who looked almost as worn out as their mothers. Men, taut as fiddle strings, hunch-shouldered in overalls or someone else’s discarded Sunday best, someone taller and better fed. They came to find a sense of purpose and a connection to God and one another. They came because the promises of the beatitudes were fulfilled for a few hours under the tent, and the poor were truly blessed. They came for miracles, answers, and salvation. They came to see the show.

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Donna Johnson found redemption in books and the University of Texas. She is obsessed with the big questions posed by religion and has written about faith for the Dallas Morning News, the Austin American Statesman, The Holy Ghost Girl Blog at Psychology Today and other publications. Her critically acclaimed memoir, Holy Ghost Girl, won the Mayborn Creative Nonfiction prize and was awarded a Books for a Better Life award in the spirituality category. She lives and writes in Austin, TX, where with the help of family and friends, she works at leaving behind The Elect and becoming a normal person.

Megan Boyle:

Stephen Sturgeon:

Todd Zuniga:

Martin Lewis:

David Levithan:

Mira Gonzalez:

Scarlett Thomas:

Shane Jones:

Martin Elwell:

Bret Easton Ellis:

***Please be sure to follow The Nervous Breakdown @TNBtweets and Other People @OtherPeoplePod.***

Steve Almond is our guest this week. He’s the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently God Bless America and Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life.

MB: You’ve got a very memorable name. What’s your relationship to it?

SA: I didn’t like it much growing up, for obvious reasons. Now, though, I’m incredibly grateful to my great grandfather, the Rabbi David Almond, who ditched Pruzhinski. He changed the name to assimilate. So “Almond” bears no relation to my actual genetic stock (Jewish, shtetlish). It’s more like a vanity plate. Though actually the family lore is that this nutso rabbi choose the name because of its biblical roots. (In Jeremiah and elsewhere the Almond tree is known as the “waking tree” because it’s the first to blossom.) So: biblical roots, a yummy connotation, a chance to jump the line—it all kind of rules.

How about your first name? Any other Steves you identify with or are jealous of?

Yeah, Steve is pretty generic. Not a lot of history or vibe on that name. My parents named us all pretty straight (Dave, Michael, Steve). But our middle names are much earthier: Emmanuel, Isaac, and Benjamin. I’ve always felt like a Benjamin at heart.

Do you know what your name means biblically/traditionally?

I know there’s a Saint Stephen, who lobbied for Christ after his death and got stoned to death for his trouble. But that’s the “ph” spelling. I prefer the story of Saint Steve, the Irish monk who died after smoking way too much pot.

Did you have a foreign language name in school?

I took French, and my teacher called me Etienne, which is so totally macho that no one teased me. Ever.

What was it like to have your name as a kid? Any particular bothersome nicknames?

My brothers called me Stinkpot, or Stench. Sometimes Stenchpot. My mom calls me Stush, which I suspect means “Stinkpot” in Yiddish. So there’s that.

For TNB NYC on May 28th, we will open up Public Assembly for 4 performers and writers – Edgar Oliver and Elna Baker from New York, and TNB authors Chad Faries and Lenore Zion. The event will be hosted by TNB contributor Tove K. Danovich. 
 

Oliver and Baker are featured performers at The Moth, the national storytelling organization. Faries and Zion are both Emergency Press authors. Zion, out of Los Angeles, is one of the original writers at TNB, and author of the novel Stupid Children, due out in early 2013. Faries will tell stories at the center of his new memoir, Drive Me Out of My Mind. 
 

Public Assembly is located at 70 North 6th St. (Wythe) in Williamsburg. Event runs from 7:00 – 10:00, and admission is $5 at the door. Full, satisfying bar. 
 

Chad Faries is the author of Drive Me Out of My Mind, a memoir published by Emergency Press. His two books of poems are The Border Will Be Soon and The Book of Knowledge. A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, he lived and taught in Central Europe for many years. Currently he teaches at Savannah State University, where he also hosts a radio program on WHCJ 90.3. 
 

Lenore Zion is the author of My Dead Pets are Interesting, published last year by TNB Books. An original writer for The Nervous Breakdown (TNB), her first novel, Stupid Children, will be released by Emergency Press in early 2013. 
 

Edgar Oliver started performing in New York at the Pyramid in the mid-1980′s. As a playwright, many of Oliver’s plays have been staged at La MaMa and other downtown NYC theatres, including The Seven Year Vacation, The Poetry Killer, Hands in Wartime, Motel Blue 19 and Mosquito Succulence. As a stage actor, he has performed in countless plays including Edward II with Cliplight Theater, Marc Palmieri’s Carl the Second, and Lipsynka’s Dial M for Model. He is also one of the most beloved storytellers at The Moth. His film roles include That’s Beautiful Frank, Henry May Long, and Gentlemen Broncos. He is also the author of A Portrait of New York by a Wanderer There and Summer and The Man Who Loved Plants. 
 

Elna Baker is a writer, comedian, and storyteller who has performed with The Moth, on This American Life, Studio 360, Radiolab, BBC Radio 4, the Upright Citizens Brigade, and at many comedy clubs throughout New York. Her work includes the show, If You See Something, Say Something, and the book, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, published by Penguin in 2009. 
 

Tove K. Danovich is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. She is a contributor to TNB and an associate editor at Anderbo literary magazine. Her work has most recently been published in The Brooklyn Rail and Slushpile. She is also the author of the food blog Eighty-Sixed.

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.

Enter author Steve Abee and his new book, Johnny Future—a drug-injected stumble through the dark and wasted parts of Los Angeles that make the seedy parts of Los Angeles look upbeat and cheery. As a companion to this book, the publisher has commissioned a soundtrack, which is being released as a limited edition 7″ picture disc, with only 500 copies pressed. Presumably, a bald man with a handlebar moustache will then take the mold out back and batter it with a sledgehammer. 500 copies—that’s it.

The record, titled Lover of All that Exists, boasts another special feature—Scott Shriner’s solo debut. “(The publisher) approached me and said he was publishing this book for Steven and that he was going to do a limited number of picture discs,” says Scott.  “It just so happened that I was finishing up a small batch of songs in the studio and he asked if I’d like to have a song on it. I thought it sounded cool–only five hundred copies, a picture disc, and everyone likes Steven Abee, so I was really excited about it.”

Nonetheless, it is somewhat stunning that a musician of Shriner’s pedigree would last ten years without striking out in his own direction at some point. The august solo project is a rite of passage for many musicians and even within Weezer, various members have released numerous albums as side projects and with other artists. Shriner however, while admittedly feeling a gathering pressure to release some solo work, took his time and waited for the “burning bush” to signal him. “This was hanging over me. I’d done a couple songs on acoustic guitar that I’d submitted to Weezer for possible records, that got shot down, and I had a little instrumental piece of music that I wrote that made it onto a record, but this was the first piece of music where I wrote everything. And I’ve gotta tell you, it felt amazing. It’s been looming over my head for the last ten years and to finally get it done is a big deal for me.”

Shriner’s burning bush appeared in the form of his wife, author Jillian Lauren. “‘Pretty (aka Watch the Shadow)’ is a song that I wrote for my wife Jillian’s book trailer,” says Scott. “I had this piece of music that I thought was really cool, and it was around the same time that I read my wife’s book, Pretty. She asked if I could come up with some music for the book trailer and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve actually got a piece that I think will be pretty cool, and I’d like to write a whole song based on the character in your book.’ That’s what spawned the lyrical content—that and some cool riffs that I had come up with.”

“Pretty” is a marked and welcome departure from the Weezer sound. Dark textures and punchy grooves evoke the Jesus and Mary Chain or the more contemporary Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Gritty, moody and melodic, with sparkling accents and a crisp beat, “Pretty” suggests interesting prospects for Scott’s future free time. He will release a three-song EP in late June and after that, his full-length debut beckons.

In the meantime, Lover of All That Exists comes out on May 11, 2012, also containing songs from old school punk Christian Martucci (Dee Dee Ramone, Black President) and the legendary CJ Himawari (Tokyo’s Sex Machineguns). The limited edition record can be ordered directly through Rare Bird Lit.

A man’s wife disappears and he thinks about who he thought she was versus who she might have been.

Is it a mystery?

I always want to say yes, but then I worry that a more traditional mystery reader will read it and be disappointed because it doesn’t shape itself like a mystery.  But yes, it’s a mystery.

What next?

I’m working on a horror story.

Neat.  Will normal fans of horror like it?

Probably not. But who’s normal?

Good point.  Do you like to read that stuff? Mysteries and horror stories?

I did when I was a kid: scary stories and the Fear Street series. When I was in the third grade, I went to the bathroom and when I returned my copy of “Goodnight Kiss” was not on my desk anymore.  Both third grade classrooms were connected by a door and I saw the two teachers holding the book and talking about it in that door.  I thought they were proud of me for reading a junior high book in third grade, but instead they took it away from me and called my parents and told them I couldn’t bring books like that to school anymore.

Why were you reading such a racy book in third grade?

It wasn’t racy. It was about vampires.

Do you like vampire books now?

You mean like the Twilight books or Sookie Stackhouse? I’ve never read any of them, but I don’t think they’re my bag.  As I kept reading as I got older, I realized I love the feeling of suspense, but I don’t love all of the fantasy stuff and I don’t like the suspense to be resolved in conventional ways. When I was a kid I loved movies, but if I didn’t finish a movie in one sitting, I’d just start it over again, and maybe I never made it all the way to the end. I liked the exposition. I like watching the story get set up and complicated, but I hated when the story got resolved.  Or, I like imagining what could happen beyond the realm of what we think is real, but for some reason I’m turned off by all the recognizable beings, like vampires, zombies, werewolves, etc. I still love scary movies. I love that movie The Orphanage and I watched all of Hitchcock last year.  Over 50 Hitchcock movies and then all of Hitchcock Presents! That took some time.

What do you read now?

I’ll give anything a chance, and I like to venture outside of my box.  I’ve been reading some stories about hauntings because of what I’m working on now. I read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Kathryn Davis’s Hell and they are both so well formed.  It felt like they were throwing the gauntlet down, like: “If you’re going to do this, here’s the bar.  At least lift your hands up.” I’ve been giving the ladies a ton of attention lately: Roxane Gay’s Ayiti, Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!!, Tupelo Hassman’s Girlchild and Amelia Gray’s Threats. All knock-me-down good.

Can you tell me a little about how you decide what to read next?

I think that having been a bookseller for so long and also being involved in a really friendly lit community pushes me to want to read as much as possible all the time. I always want something new to recommend and I want to be able to take part in discussions about the newest stuff out there, but there’s so much older stuff to tackle, too.  It stresses me out to think about how much there is I want to read and how many books on my shelves I haven’t gotten to yet.  I have trouble diving into really long books because I know that I could read 4 or 5 books in the time it takes me to get through, say, Ulysses or The Sotweed Factor.

Do you ever abandon books?

Very rarely.  But I abandoned Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and I know there have been others. Mostly I hang in until  the end. I like to line up the next couple books I’ll read so I can push through to get to them.

So what will you read next?

Lined up right now I have Elizabeth Ellen’s Fast Machine, Jess Stoner’s I Have Blinded Myself Writing This, Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby and Ben Marcus’s Flame Alphabet ready and waiting.

Good list.

Agreed.

How often do you write?

I try to write 1000 words a week, which I know is a small amount, but it adds up.  And then I try to have a couple times a year where I try to write 1000 words/day.  Dedicated writing a week or even a month or whatnot.  Like writing bootcamp. It can be so hard to say no to socializing or relaxing in favor of writing. Making it a small thing I do every week, and then a larger activity I can book and look forward to works for me.

What about other writing stuff: submitting, correspondence? I know you’re the poetry editor of decomP.

That I sort of do as necessary.  I really love the nitty gritty stuff.  I enjoy it.  It’s mostly so cut and dry and you can get such an easy sense of accomplishment. That said, I’ve been submitting less than I was for a good while there.  I started working on this new novel, this haunting story, and decided to only send out the stories I had left, not to work on smaller pieces unless a great opportunity came up.  So less has been showing up in the world, but that’s okay because I’m building this other thing which feels great.

Both Christopher Higgs’s HTMLGiant review and David Allen Barker’s Nouspique review of My Only Wife mention what seem like they could be typos, but the reviewers trusted weren’t.  Were they typos?

They were both typos.  The one Christopher saw was fixed before the final version and the one David saw is in the final book.  What a strange thing to fixate on and to trust! There was something about being trusted for both of those that made me feel good, but they weren’t actually intentional. I was very nervous all the criticism of the book was going to focus on typos, but everything is ending up fine.

Is it hard to know what to ask yourself in an interview?

It is!  I know all the answers so it can be hard to think of the questions.  When you’re interviewing someone else, you have the luxury of curiosity.

Don’t you think you should be curious about yourself?

Good point. I think that’s probably what a lot of writing is: being curious enough to sit down with yourself and see what you can make.

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Jac Jemc lives in Chicago.  Her debut novel, My Only Wife, was just released from Dzanc Books.  Her work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Caketrain, Handsome and Sleepingfish, among others. She is the author of a chapbook of stories, These Strangers She’d Invited In (Greying Ghost Press) and the poetry editor for decomP Magazine. Jac blogs her rejections at jacjemc.com.

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.

Why did you want to write a novel about a Weimar filmmaker?

I’ve always thought of 1920s Berlin as one of those insanely fertile periods that would’ve been amazing to live through. If you look at the sheer number of great artists and thinkers working during those years, it’s staggering: you have Brecht, Einstein, Murnau, the Manns, the Dadaists, Gropius, Nabokov, Auden, Isherwood, Lubitsch, Reinhardt, Klee, Weill, Dix, Grosz, Kollwitz and on and on and on. An unbelievable flowering of the arts, happening before an extraordinarily volatile political landscape and huge changes in morals, technology, every aspect of culture. Of course now we know that it was all doomed. Everybody left the moment the Nazis took over —  one of the great overnight migrations of talent anywhere, anytime — but the sudden, violent end makes the period leading up to it even more fascinating.

Kino got its start when Marcy and I went to Berlin for New Year’s Eve a few years ago. It was freezing and dark, and it felt as if everything had turned black and white. One of the things we did was go visit the film museum. It’s a small place, comparatively, but crammed with stories. Letters from Marlene Dietrich to Ernest Hemingway, a model of the Olympic stadium showing where Leni Riefenstahl put her cameras in 1936, a special exhibit about Hildegard Knef.

On January 1, after a night of European techno and fireworks and borderline dangerous crowds, I sat down in the tiny, underheated kitchen of the apartment we were subletting, still hungover, and started writing a novel set in that world.

How did you walk the line between historical fiction and what Stephen Colbert might call, “truthiness?” As a novelist and a film critic, how do you understand the truth in fiction, or in art, generally?

You know that scene in the beginning of Sideways, where the Paul Giamatti character talks to his ex-wife’s new husband and mentions the novel he’s working on? And the guy says something along the lines of, “There is so much to learn about the world that I consider reading fiction a complete waste of time.” I often thought about him while I was writing Kino, and might have done a few things specifically to piss him off.

Which is to say, the book is fiction. It’s the kind of material that forces you to do a lot of research, but the paradox is that you’re using all these facts to tell a more convincing lie–the research is there to sell the fiction, but in turn, perhaps, the fiction is at the service of a higher truth. Throw in a few layers of unreliable narrators, and you have a real mess on your hands. That said, you might be surprised by some of the details that are, in fact, true.  At any rate, you probably shouldn’t read Kino in order to learn facts — that’s why it says “novel” right there on the cover.

For me, the emotional center of the novel seems to revealed in this excerpt from Kino’s journal, with the notion of inaccuracy rendering authenticity in art:



I was speechless. My films connected with Goebbels because the Nazis, too, wanted to bring about the world of their dreams. Yes, Goebbels recognized my incredible talent. Then again, the Reichspropagandaminister didn’t understand a thing. My utopias had nothing to do with perfection because perfection is not something to strive for. All my movies were flawed, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Mapmakers always insert one wrong detail into their maps — a lake that doesn’t exist, a county line that stretches a hilltop too far, a misspelled street name. It is a way to identify unauthorized copies, but it’s also an opening through which the infinite rushes in: if one thing is wrong, then anything might be wrong. It’s the same principle through which a single blank bullet calms the conscience of the entire firing squad.

As a film critic, I often see that word bandied about by colleagues: “flawed.” It’s usually accompanied with a lot of second guessing about how the director in question could’ve done a better job. Steven Soderbergh once compared it to shouting “Watch out!” a few months after somebody got hit by a car. They’re already out of the hospital, they want to forget about the whole thing, and there you are, pointing out what they might have done differently.

But Kino also questions the assumption that art could ever be anything but flawed. Of course it’s flawed–it’s a product of certain circumstances at a certain point in time. There are a million variables. Instead of double-guessing it, you might want to deal with what it is. That the hardest thing for a critic: to hold the judgment, do away with your expectations, and see something for what it really is.

That passage you quote is the counterpart to an earlier moment in the book where Kino comes up with the story of his first movie. He claims he saw a painting that gave him the idea. If he’d seen a different painting, the movie would have been about something else. There’s a lot of happenstance in making things out of nothing, and perfection is an overrated ideal at best. In the light of what happened in Germany, Kino sees it as dangerous, even. There’s a certain freedom in “bad” art. Look at what happened with beloved trash like, say, Rocky Horror. The cracks in the work allow for the audience to fill it in for themselves, to complete it. That’s liberating. Wouldn’t a perfect work — if it were possible at all — have the exact same, predictable effect on everyone? Kino would argue that that’s fascist. Instead, he strives to leave openings, “flaws.” Perhaps it creates authenticity, but it also makes the work humane.


What would Kino have thought of the “New Wave,” Godard in particular, and, while we’re at it (gasp), movies today? Here I have in mind the new Hunger Games movie, which I plan to see this weekend, but also, OK, let’s say the recent spate of “comic book movies,” led by the Spiderman franchise? Is Hollywood just another way of saying “the Bank?” Is an “Occupy Hollywood” movement thinkable?

Kino lived to see the very first New Wave films, and there’s a line in the book about his appreciation for “those kids in France who were breaking all the rules.”  He would certainly have loved the possibilities they opened up, but somehow I see him getting more excited about Truffaut than Godard.

His love/hate relationship with Hollywood would have intensified over the years as the industry engineered itself into an ever-greedier machine for the delivery of blockbusters. Kino was a risk-taker, and Hollywood now is more risk-averse than ever. He probably would have held on to a few guilty pleasures – Avatar perhaps —  because he understood that spectacle has always been an essential part of the movies. But overall, I’m sure he would have called most of today’s major releases Scheissdreck.

It its way, the book tries to suggest a few avenues for something like an Occupy Hollywood movement. After all, the economics of cinema are rapidly changing. We now all have HD video cameras in our pockets, your laptop is a powerful editing station, and you can distribute your movie to millions with a click. So on one hand, you have these superhero extravaganzas and endless remakes that cost ever-more outrageous sums to produce and to market, but on the other hand, we now have access to all the tools we need to make and distribute our own movies. And we do: didn’t we all watch the Davis pepper spraying from four or five different angles? In that sense, the Occupy movement is Occupy Hollywood.

Why Truffaut, more so than Godard?

Just a hunch. Truffaut has always struck me as the more accessible and emphatic of the two, and the way I imagine Kino’s films, they have a slightly naive air to them. He’s not an intellectual but someone who feels his way through his work, and I think that’s where this imagined affinity to Truffaut comes from. Godard’s politics would have turned him off — but he would have loved Breathless and Band of Outsiders anyway.


I’m wondering, is there any connection here, between your work as founder of Fictionaut, trying to create an alternative space for indie electronic publishing that bypasses the mainstream NYC based publication world, and the end of the novel?

Right. For a long time, I was working on Kino and Fictionaut simultaneously, and I’m sure they inform each other. Fictionaut is a place where people can publish and respond to fiction and poetry without first having to navigate the usual gatekeepers. I don’t want to give away the ending of Kino, but the book is certainly concerned with questions of community, collaboration, and distribution. I couldn’t even tell you anymore if it’s by design or by osmosis, but it dovetails nicely with what we’re trying to do with Fictionaut.

I’m struck by how clearly Kino’s films are described in the book. When you wrote this novel, could you see Tulpendiebe or the Pirate movie spooling in your head?

I wrote a lot about Kino’s movies that’s not in the book. The scene where Mina watches Tulpendiebe used to be much longer, and I had in-depth descriptions of most of his other films, especially The Pirates of Mulberry Island. At some point I had started a screenplay about a mysterious crew of pirates living on a fog-shrouded island, and I used parts of it in the book. I suppose some of that shows, even if it’s not on the page.

Will Kino have a sequel?

I consider Mina’s story finished and have no plans for continuing it, but there are other ways in which Kino is open-ended. Part of the idea was to write a book that is complete but overstuffed with people, places, and stories that are only alluded to. What exactly happened at Orson Welles’ party? What’s the deal with the plagiarism suit that’s mentioned? What happened during Penelope’s voice lessons when sound arrived? There are lots and lots of places where the book could be filled in or extended in some way….

You’re a novelist and film critic in love with the movies. Which do you love best?

That’s Sophie’s choice to me, and I’d only answer at gun point. The essential difference is that movies require so much more: equipment, cast, locations, money. It’s collaborative, which is both a blessing and a curse. With fiction, there’s just you and the page, which is a different kind of blessing and a different kind of curse.

I did an intensive study of Thomas Mann’s work back in the day, particularly Doctor Faustus. Mann, as you know, settled in Pacific Palisades, California, where he helped German artists and others looking to escape the Nazis, and aided in their resettlement. Paul Tillich did the same in New York. Tillich found teaching work at Union Seminary in Harlem. Union Seminary was also the place where the young pastor  Dietrich Bonhoeffer visited for a time, when he made his fateful decision to return to Germany and certain death. There is a “Bonhoeffer Room” at Union, where he struggled with his conscience over that decision; entering that room is like entering sacred ground. I was intrigued in the novel, about the way Kino is treated after his defection. He is sort of the anti-Bonhoeffer, in a way.

There are a million stories from that time, each more hair-raising and heartbreaking than the next. I almost gave up on Kino after reading a biography of Leni Riefenstahl — it seemed that the real stories were so much more outrageous than anything I could dream up. It was important to me that Kino’s relationship to the Nazis would stay ambiguous: did he remain in Germany for the sake of his wife and her family, or was it pure opportunism since the Nazis offered him movies and Hollywood didn’t? A little bit of each? I leave that judgment to the reader. Fritz Lang liked to tell the story about how Goebbels offered him to become “the Führer of Cinema” and how he fled the country on the same day — but it turns out there’s probably a good deal of self-mythologizing at work there, too.

I want to ask you about what Kant might have called the “architectonic” of this novel, about its construction, about your use of multiple unreliable narrators, and about your use of literary devices such as e-mail and Kino’s journal. The e-mails, in particular, were long. At times I found myself wishing that Mina, given her youth, would have just texted! When were you aware that these devices were necessary, and did you doubt their use, or calculate their benefits and limitations?

I’m very concerned with structure. The book’s basic shape is obviously borrowed from Citizen Kane, but there was never any question that Mina would be much more central to the story than the Newsreel reporter in Kane. So I took some liberties with that formula but tried to keep the pastiche feel by including other “materials” in addition to the third person narration. The e-mails happened naturally. Mina makes some odd choices, especially in the beginning, and hearing her explain them to her husband seemed helpful.

The original draft also included screenplay sections that covered some of the more noir-ish sequences, like the rooftop chase in Berlin. The first thing my agent, Rachel Vogel, said to me was that the screenplay sections had to go. In retrospect I realized how right she was. I’d been cheating, trying to get the scenes written faster, but it left too much work to the reader.

James Salter is a terrific writer, but as you know, he was also a screenwriter. He wrote the screenplay to Downhill Racer for Robert Redford. And Salter was once interviewed in Paris Review about movies, and he said this, which I’d like you to comment on. He said, “A movie is a single performance, and it’s remembered as a performance. Movies are never re-performed. They are not alive. They are sometimes remade years later, but everything in them is absolutely fixed and will always be fixed. They are not great prose, where, as one critic pointed out, seems to catch fire, first in one place and then in another.”

Respectfully disagree. I’d argue that the “performance” of each happens anew every time you read a book or watch a movie. It’s something that happens between you and the page, between you and the screen, and they’re both equally alive. Great books, great movies, at any rate.

For example, I watched Aguirre, The Wrath of God for the first time in a few years last night. It was a shoddy, scratched-up print, and seeing the dots flicker on the screen felt endearingly pre-digital. This was in Germany, so there were no subtitles — a first for me. I’d been stood up by not just one but all three friends who were going to join me, so I felt more sympathetic to Aguirre’s seething rage than I might have otherwise. Maybe because of that, the movie struck me as much funnier than ever before. There’s a note of absurd humor running through it that I hadn’t grasped the same way in the past.  I sat close enough to the screen to have to choose where to look (Kinski’s eyes, usually, but not in every shot), and I saw many details for the first time. Kino would say that the movies don’t really happen on the screen at all, they happen in your head — just like a book does.

What is it like for you, as native German speaker, to write in English? Why did you write Kino in English and not German, and how might it have differed if written in German? Or was the goal all along to write it in filmic images, try to transcend language. Is this even possible? Do you not think in German?

I don’t think in German, at least not when I’m in the US. I started learning English in fifth grade and picked up most of it through comics books, movies, and song lyrics. After I came to the US, I had this idea that my writing in English was similar to those athletes who train at high altitudes: when they compete at sea level, they win because they suddenly get so much more oxygen. Would I feel a similar boost if I started writing in German? As it turns out, that theory is bunk.

That said, I can never resist a juicy German phrase. The sounds just kill me, especially in juxtaposition with English. French tends to look pretentious (n’est-ce pas?), but German seems to amuse people — think Schadenfreude. There’s so much German in Kino we’ve added a glossary to the book, which, it turns out, is going to be 80% curse words. The hope is that you won’t have to look up every word because they fit into the text in such a way that they’ll make sense by themselves. That’s how I used to read English books — there was always a certain degree of noise, words I didn’t understand, but the trick is to just absorb them and keep reading. Understanding every word is overrated.

Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, whose posthumous career in the English speaking world, deservedly so for his two great novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666, and some remarkable short works of fiction, left behind a computer full of stories and poems and prose fragments, ideas for possible development, or incorporation into a larger project, and we’re now, I expect, reaching the end of these. (Though FSG will be bringing out a novel, Woes of the True Policeman, this November, continuing with a character from 2666, Amalfitano). The Savage Detectives and 2666 will always cast a shadow over the shorter works, but Bolaño felt he was first and foremost a poet, and many of his short novels and stories are very fine.

And so, now that The Secret of Evil has been published by New Directions, we open it with something bordering on dread: if these are half-thoughts and embryonic characters still to be given the fullness of a proper fictional life, are we about to be disillusioned about his gifts? I’m happy to offer a resounding No. Published by New Directions and variously and expertly translated by Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer (whose three contributions here were previously published in ND’s volume of essays and interviews by and with Bolaño, Between Parentheses) this volume of fragments, beginnings, sometimes finished stories and observations, contribute something more to our understanding of the author and his process. Although this isn’t the best entry into the universe of RB (for that I would suggest a volume of his short fiction, such as Last Evenings on Earth) this collection is well-suited for the hardcore Bolaño fan—the reader who’ll smile when Arturo Belano (the author’s alter ego and a main character in The Savage Detectives) appears (twice) or when the author devotes an entire fragment to V. S. Naipaul in what is both a work of fiction and a narrative of his intentions in writing about the prickly Nobel laureate.

One of my favorite pieces in this volume appeared recently in the New Yorker, “The Labyrinth,” a kind of a Robbe-Grillet dissection of and meditation on a photo (included in the New Yorker, but not in this volume) of a handful of celebrated writers sitting in a Paris café—Julie Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Pierre Guyotat, and others—lending each of these people motives, sexuality, an inner life, and a time before and beyond the moment of the photograph. It’s a tour de force, even for those who know nothing of the people of whom he writes.

As always with Bolaño there is no adherence to genre, no compartmentalization in this collection. He throws everything together—policiers, thrillers, zombie movies, philosophical disquisitions—into whatever he’s concocting at the moment. This isn’t to suggest that he’s a lousy cook, intent on cleaning out the fridge of all the stuff that’s about to go past its sell-by date. Instead, his mind is working on many different levels simultaneously, and though some of the pieces are clearly fragments, works started, then abandoned or set aside for future use, there is something we take away from each of them, some phrase that stops us dead with admiration, or a vision that plunges us far beyond the surface of the prose.

Reading Bolaño’s works, one gets a sense of the man—the first impression being there’s nothing extraordinary about him—which makes his writing seem all the more impressive. We know that he was married, had two children, and lived in the town of Blanes, an hour up the coast from Barcelona. He suffered from hepatitis C, and was awaiting a liver transplant when he died in 2003. His condition was so bad that when a friend brought him a pound of coffee from Bolaño’s beloved Mexico, all the author could do was smell it. Drinking it would have done amazing and terrible things to his already-shredded liver. Photographs of him at various times in his life show a skinny, bespectacled guy, often in a leather jacket, in his younger days with hair to his shoulders. But he wrote with a power and originality and a head for the enigmatic that keeps his books, stories and poems lingering on long after the volume is closed. They seem always to be vibrating with a kind of literary electricity that so much of the fussy, knitted works of literary fiction in contemporary America seem to lack. We know that he had lived far more than a literary life: he had seen the darkness, found the words for it, and returned to tell us the tales.

Which isn’t to say he’s not a funny writer. “You’re not going to believe this,” Bolaño begins his story “The Colonel’s Son,” “but last night, at about four a.m., I saw a movie on TV that could have been my biography or my autobiography or a summary of my days on this bitch of a planet. It scared me so fucking shitless I tell you I just about fell off my chair.”

Sounds a little like Holden Caulfield working off a head full of crystal meth, right? Except the film the narrator describes is a convoluted zombie story. And he describes it flatly, event after event, this bizarre cinematic world that could be the story of the teller’s life: “At this point four people come in. They’re Mexicans. It’s not hard to imagine them taking classes at a drama school, or, for that matter, dealing drugs on the corners of their neighborhood, or picking tomatoes with John Steinbeck’s farmhands. Three guys and a girl, in their twenties, mindless and prepared to die in any old alleyway. The Mexicans show an interest in Julie’s vomit too. The storekeeper says the money’s not enough. The colonel’s son says it is. Who’s going to pay for the damage? Who’s going to pay for this filth? says the storekeeper, pointing at the vomit, which is a nuclear shade of green. While they’re arguing, one of the Mexicans has slipped in behind the till and is emptying it. Meanwhile the other three are staring at the vomit as if it concealed the secret of the universe.”

Put it to music and you’ve got mid-Sixties Dylan, a spew of bizarre lyrics dueling with Mike Bloomfield’s guitar. But what appears to be an example of surrealism is nothing of the sort. Bolaño famously shunned the Latin American magical realist movement, believing that life itself was strange enough without the need for flying horses or talking trees. His characters—his narrators—see this weirdness interwoven with the ordinariness of everyday life as they snake their way through clichés and careless tossed-off expressions, inelegant words instead of more refined ones, and images that take five or six seconds to make any sense to the human brain. There’s an audacity to everything Bolaño turns his hand to, a boldness and a sense of risk that we don’t often see these days, that makes him somehow that much more of an artist. This is a man who wrote as though his whole life depended on it.

His work is firmly planted on the soil, mostly in Mexico, sometimes in Europe, rarely in the U.S., but his characters are always credible, and their situations, such as those endured by the protagonists of The Savage Detectives, Ulises Lima and Bolaño’s more-or-less stand-in Arturo Belano seem, to anyone who has ventured beyond the margins of their comfort zones, absolutely believable. There is madness out there, my friends, and Bolaño has seen it first-hand.

I arrived home late and she was lying on the couch listening to her warped records.

I saw the table elaborately set. Candles had burned to stubs in the candlesticks.

My wife didn’t even look up when I opened the door. She stared into the space ahead of her.

I smelled the faint scent of something rich and gourmet. I realized the food must be cold.

The smell was what had soaked into the textiles of the room.

Pillows held the buttery garlic scent of lobster.

Freshly baked bread wafted from the curtains.

The smell of chopped and sautéed vegetables clung to the simple black tee shirt my wife wore as she laid on the couch. Her pants were in a puddle on the ground beside her. My wife’s legs leaned on each other, knock-kneed and tired.

The aroma of white wine drifted from the tablecloth, where I saw one of the goblets had been spilled, still laying on its side.

A bowl of fruit sat in the middle, colorful, but whole and unscented.

“Something smells delicious,” I said, trying to cover up the fact that I knew I was late.

On the couch my wife continued to stare straight ahead.

“I didn’t know you were making such a fancy dinner tonight. What’s the occasion?” I said this in a way I hoped sounded appreciative and excited, rather than defensive .

I knew it was not one of our birthdays, our anniversary, or Valentine’s Day. This must have been a reasonless act of love and I had come home late, hadn’t called.

Now I think, But how was I to know? She hardly ever made dinner.

“I’m not mad,” my wife said.

To this I had no response. I had made no indication that I assumed she would be. She knew me too well. She could tell that my careful responses were apologetic rather than unknowing. I said nothing.

“Sit down here by me,” she said, scooting her legs up further.

I sat down by her feet, ran my hand from her knee to ankle repeatedly. I gave in like I always did. “I should’ve called. I’m sorry.”

“Not a big deal.” My wife smiled. “It was a silly idea I had. I thought I might try my hand at cooking a nice, fancy meal for the two of us. I can warm it up. Sit here by me for a while.”

“Were you going to paint the table after we ate?”

“I hadn’t even thought of that. I guess all that food’s still good for something. I could finally make that painting I’ve been going on and on about. Eh, I’m tired. It’s exhausting cooking a feast. Rest here with me and we’ll get to work in a minute.” Her eyes glazed again.

I was still uncomfortable. “Did you spill that wine glass on purpose?”

My wife looked at me confused, started to sit up and turn around. “Did one of the wine glasses spill?”

“You didn’t notice?” I asked. I assumed she’d knocked it over after having been seated at the table waiting for me a minute too long.

Her head turned, her eyes were trained on the spilt wine. I heard her suddenly smell it with a strong sniff. “No. When could that have happened? We need to clean that up before it stains the wood.”

“I’ll do it,” I said, standing, patting her knee. I crossed to the table and began to remove the settings, the plates of food.

My wife turned to watch me. “How could that have happened?” she repeated.

I finished clearing the table and bundled up the tablecloth. I dumped it in the hamper, but the wet spot had whitened the wood in an oddly-shaped splotch already. “Maybe the glass wasn’t flat on the table; maybe half of its base was on a piece of silverware or something. It could have tipped anytime. Maybe when I came in.” Whenever we shut the door, the whole apartment shook.

My wife’s face calmed a bit, but her hand lingered near her stomach, like something had jarred deep within her, like she might be sick.

I went into the kitchen to get a rag and some Pledge.

I heard my wife hum along with the record.

I rubbed at the splotch, but the white darkened only a shade to pale brown, still distinguishable from the rest of the table.

She stood, peculiarly still and meditative. “How odd,” my wife said softly. It didn’t feel like she was talking to me.

I walked into the kitchen and called to her. “I’m gonna start warming this up in here, alright?” I worked to restore the food to its original grandeur, added a few spices of my own, and my wife eventually joined me, watched me work while she leaned against the sink.

We ate the meal standing at the counter. We never returned to the dining room, never even settled at the kitchen table. We cracked into the lobster on its platter, which was balanced on the burners of the stove. We ate the vegetables from the large bowl I microwaved them in. We pulled off chunks of bread I had warmed in the oven, slathering on butter straight from the wax-paper covered stick, with dull knives. I poured another glass of white wine for each of us and we drank them down quickly; we poured again.

When we had demolished the countertop, the wreckage was severe. It looked as if an army of hungry scavengers had invaded our kitchen.

It was then that we sat down at the table and each pulled a piece of fruit from the bowl.

I took an orange, deftly peeling the skin off in two pieces.

My wife took an apple. She ate it with a knife in hand, slicing off chunks, piece by piece, instead of just biting in. The knife would meet her thumb, and I would watch for blood each time, but she remained unscathed.

We traded with each other, placing slices into the other’s mouth.

When we finished our fruit, I asked her, “Sure you don’t want to do a modern still life of this mess on the counter?” She looked tempted for a minute, but then I saw artistic ambition give way to the urge to have everything tidy again. She shook her head. We slid lobster carcasses into the trash. We wrapped up the remaining bread. We put the leftover vegetables in Tupperware. We poured out the little wine that was left in the bottle between our two glasses. I washed the dishes; she dried and put them away.

We wandered back into the living room. My wife eyed the spot on the table. “Did you try to get this out?”

I said, “Yes.”

“This is the best that can be done?”

I nodded the truth.

_____________________

Jac Jemc lives in Chicago.  Her debut novel, My Only Wife, was just released from Dzanc Books.  Her work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Caketrain, Handsome and Sleepingfish, among others. She is the author of a chapbook of stories, These Strangers She’d Invited In (Greying Ghost Press) and the poetry editor for decomP Magazine. Jac blogs her rejections at jacjemc.com.

Adapted from My Only Wife, by Jac Jemc. Copyright © 2012 by Jac Jemc. With the permission of the publisher, Dzanc Books.

To date, the non-white characters on Girls have been the scant flat or stereotypical characters largely relegated to the periphery of the story, and the descriptions on the casting call for nannies and receptionists certainly haven’t helped the perception of Girls as a series that lacks depth and diversity.  On this issue of race, Dunham told NPR:

Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting. If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African-American, I feel like — not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn’t able to speak to. I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls. As much as I can say it was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, ‘I hear this and I want to respond to it.’ And this is a hard issue to speak to because all I want to do is sound sensitive and not say anything that will horrify anyone or make them feel more isolated, but I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can’t speak to accurately.

It’s problematic if Dunham’s own insularity as a writer is such that she feels she “can’t speak accurately” to characters unlike herself or unlike the people she’s closest to.  Write what you know, sure, but maybe work on knowing a little bit more.  At the same time, there’s much that Girls does well.  It puts a woman in control of stories about women in a major forum.  It gives voice to the sort of woman we haven’t often seen depicted front and center elsewhere on television – a more realistic, more relatable sort of woman driven by something other than shopping and diets and Mr. Right.  And it’s as funny in its exploration of contemporary twenty-something existence as it is painful.

One of the most thorough and thoughtful responses I’ve read to Girls, the hype, the backlash, the expectations of women writers making inroads, and issues of representation across the board came last week from Roxane Gay at The Rumpus:

We put a lot of responsibility on popular culture, particularly when some pop artifact somehow distinguishes itself as not terrible. In the months and weeks leading up to the release of Bridesmaids, for example, there was a great deal of breathless talk about the new ground the movie was breaking, how yes, indeed, women are funny. Can you believe it? There was a lot of pressure on that movie. Bridesmaids had to be good if any other women-driven comedies had any hope of being produced. This is the state of affairs for women in entertainment—everything hangs in the balance all the time.

Do yourself a favor and read Gay’s “Girls Girls Girls” here.

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.

Slayer fans looking for a poor man’s version of Reign in Blood will be bitterly disappointed. There might be hints of his day job here and there, but Harmonic boasts considerably more depth than any Slayer album. Which is not a dig at Slayer—even Lombardo will cop to his primary band’s ruthless adherence to their thrashy blueprint. Harmonic is much more. It is the soundtrack to a spy film; it is what goes through the head of a man writing a conspiracy-riddled manifesto; it is the muffled suction of a syringe delivering its warm, narcotic payload; and it is the velocity of a hundred thousand bullets strifing a long stretch of highway. Opener “Vitriolize” suggests black metal pierced with jazz, yet a melodic undercurrent breathes vibrant life into its explosive finish. This same melodic sensibility not only unifies the remaining songs but elevates Philm from the dreaded “experimental” label.” The title track  is a gorgeous back hole of bluesy atmospherics with barely any drums at all—a testament to the strength of the collaboration. This is no vanity project for Lombaro—Nestler and Tomaselli enjoy acres of space to riff and improvise, with the songs ebbing and flowing with an organic ease, breathtaking in the range of emotions explored. Like Sigur Ros and Mogwai records, separating the songs into discrete experiences is a terrible disservice to both the listener and the music—the album must be heard in toto to reap the full experience. Resplendent in subtleties and accents, Harmonic will thoroughly enthrall the listener who sets aside expectations and who opens their mind to a new sonic experience. –Joe Daly

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Zang Tuum Tumb―The Art of the 12″, Volume 2
(ZTT/SALVO)

Revisiting the glory of the twelve inch

Musically speaking, the crowning achievement of the 1980s had to be the 12-inch single. Yes, the lowly 12-inch single. Though it started out in the late 70s as the format of choice for disco, it blossomed into something quite special in the following decade. Nobody explored or exploited the possibilities of the 12-inch quite like Trevor Horn and his ZTT label, using it for political manifestos, philosophical musings, and seemingly endless variations on just about every single they released.

For this second volume of The Art of the 12, an impressive roster of 80s veterans like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Art of Noise, Propaganda, Act, and 808 State all put in their expected appearances―but ZTT widen their scope to include mixes that follow the ZTT aesthetic. Specifically, we also get an Art of Noise remix of Paul McCartney’s “Spies Like Us”, extended versions of Godley & Creme’s “Cry” and OMD’s “Julia’s Song”, and Gary Langan’s B-side remix of Scritti Politti’s “Absolute”―all presented in the stellar sound quality for which ZTT are also famous.

If that isn’t incentive enough for you to rush to your nearest record shop, consider this: 20 of the 27 tracks here appear on CD for the first time… –Kevin O’Conner

Joecephus and The George Jonestown Massacre
Arockalypse Now
(JK47)

Insurgent country isn’t dead—it’s just hungover

If the early Nineties marked the rise of grunge and the mid-Nineties gave way to the amorphous “Alternative” movement, then the end of the Nineties will be known for rise of “Alt-country,” that fertile patch between old school country and 70s punk. Uncle Tupelo are generally credited as the forefathers of this genre, with its members splitting out into Wilco and Son Volt, but not before inspiring the births of thousands of “insurgent country” acts across the US. Musicians raised on punk, garage and even metal revisited the old standards of Hank Williams, Bob Wills and the Louvin brothers, injecting them with the distorted guitars, snarled vocals and machine-gun percussion. This new genre was anything but ironic—the sound was a sincere and often well-executed tribute to the country roots of modern rock and roll.

While the dive bar trendiness of alt-country came and went by the dawn of the new millennium, the genre continues to enjoy voracious support from its diehard fans and from a new legion of acts. Notable among these are the tongue-in-cheek-named Joecephus and The George Jonestown Massacre—a tip of the hat to country icon George Jones and the psychedelic warriors, The Brian Jonestown Massacre. The Memphis band’s latest effort, Arockalypse Now, is a 15 song assortment of energetic and relentlessly irreverent foot stompers. Unlike the Reverend Horton Heat, who endured justifiable accusations of one trick pony-ism, the GJM gleefully spin through country, punk, rock and even ska without losing a sense of coherence. “Love Song #666,” “Dope Smokin Song,” and “Pepper Spray” deliver precisely what the band’s name implies—amped-up, toe-tapping country on trucker speed. While this flavor persists throughout the record, ample doses of punk, garage and electric blues add enough depth to merit repeat listens. “Just Another Day” is vintage punk and “Pimpworth” is blistering biker blues that could easily appear in a Sons of Anarchy riding montage. The production could use some tweaking–the vocals come in too high on several tracks, suggesting that these songs are designed for the live show–but overall, Arockalypse Now deserves a spin for managing to celebrate the fundamentals of a number of genres without turning into a cliche. -JD

RUBY THROAT
o’ doubt o’ stars
(SLEEPLIKEWOLVES)

Doubt as beautiful as the stars

Living on the water clearly agrees with Katiejane Garside. The third Ruby Throat album, mostly recorded on a boat with bandmate Chris Whittingham, still surrounds her voice (oh, her voice!), with dreamy, noir-ish, folk-influenced soundscapes―but the overall mood is much lighter, in contrast to the American Gothic stories of The Ventriloquist, or the darker moods of Out of a Black Cloud Came a Bird.

This time around, the songs are more impressionistic than story-like, giving them an added layer of mystery. They’re very calming however, even where the lyrics would seem to suggest otherwise. There’s a sort of comfort-in-darkness, or even Sunday-morning-over-coffee, feel to the music that draws you into its world. However you might put it, o’ doubt o’ stars is a compelling album, one of those increasingly rare discs that rewards repeated listening. Chances are you won’t want to listen to anything else for quite some while.

The album is currently available (from katiejanegarside.com/shop.html) in a beautiful, hand-assembled limited edition of 500. If the established pattern holds, you can expect a less expensive “standard” edition a few months down the road.

In the meantime, “Stone Dress”, is available as a digital download from the usual outlets. –KO

RHETT REDELINGS
Songs from the First Half (EP)
(SELF-RELEASED)

Tune in, turn inward, release

Eight years since the last R-Three release, Rhett Redelings is back with a new EP—the six-song Songs from the First Half. Doing a Jackson Browne in reverse, Redelings has shifted his focus inward; instead of politics and the state of the world, he focuses on his experiences of “growing up and trying to make sense of it all.”

In the process, Redelings has stripped away much of the dense, cinematic R-Three sound in favor of sparser arrangements that support rather than overwhelm his voice, creating a more intimate setting that fits the material quite nicely. He’s also skillfully channeled his inner Thomas Dolby and Prefab Sprout to great effect, particularly in the vocal department. (That’s a compliment.)

The opening song, “Audrey”, concerns itself with shattered hopes and broken dreams, while “Sweet Sister of Sleep” describes a dream-encounter with Death (it’s almost hard not to picture Jessica Lange in All That Jazz); together with an excellent cover of Aimee Mann’s “It’s Not”, these are the highlights of the EP. One hopes Mr. Redelings will be back with more very soon. –KO

LEONARD COHEN
Old Ideas
(COLUMBIA)

Listen to The Voice

Thousands of words have already been written about Old Ideas, Leonard Cohen’s first album of new songs since 2004. The album has been dissected and deconstructed, its themes of love, sex, and mortality identified and analyzed, and its lyrics quoted. Moreover, let’s agree to simply acknowledge his advanced age and leave the dead horse beating to others. We do feel compelled to underscore this rather salient point regarding his latest record: Old Ideas may be Leonard Cohen’s best album since I’m Your Man.

The synthesizers that have anchored Cohen’s last few albums have been scaled back in favor of more acoustic arrangements, creating a warmth which richly complements The Voice. And that’s really what makes the album. Cohen may joke about “the four notes [he] can sing”, but his facility with The Voice―in all its gravelly, oddly soothing glory―gives it expressiveness far beyond its ostensibly limited range. To his credit, Cohen allows The Voice to sit front and center, dominating, but not overpowering the mix, or the songs.

Stacked with resonant, high-caliber cuts from start to finish, the album’s standouts include “Going Home”, “Darkness”, “Anyhow”, and the lovely, hymn-like “Come Healing”. In short, not bad for “a lazy bastard living in a suit.” -KO

DAVID SYLVIAN
A Victim of Stars 1982–2012
(VIRGIN)

Confounding expectations since 1958

David Sylvian has spent his entire career confounding expectations. His band Japan started slightly out of step with everyone else, suddenly executing such a dramatic transformation that they jumped slightly ahead of the curve (the New Romantics had to catch up with them)―eventually calling it quits just as they’d achieved real popularity.

Sylvian has tread his own path ever since (often to his audience’s chagrin), which A Victim of Stars documents quite nicely.

Disc one sticks primarily to singles, from Japan’s “Ghosts” (in its 2000 remix) through 1992′s Ryuichi Sakamoto collaboration, “Heartbeat”, with Sylvian gradually shedding the trappings of his old band along the way, even when they reunited for the one-off Rain Tree Crow.

Though “Jean the Birdman” and songs from Dead Bees on a Cake are present, disc two largely spotlights Sylvian’s more “difficult” material; nearly two-thirds of the songs come from Blemish, Manafon, and Died in the Wool, plus the more conventional Nine Horses disc Snow Borne Sorrow.
The obligatory new song, the stunning “Where’s Your Gravity?”, manages to capture in its five-and-a-half minutes the essence of Sylvian’s solo career to date. Does it signal a new direction? To be determined… –KO

POP WILL EAT ITSELF
The Pop Will Eat Itself Cure For Sanity
(CHERRY RED)

Intergalactic punk rock hip hop deluxe

These days, Clint Mansell is a respected film composer. Twenty years ago, he was still Clint Poppie, of UK miscreants Pop Will Eat Itself, and Cure For Sanity was their second album for RCA.

While its predecessor (This is the Day…This is the Hour…This is This!) may have been more popular, Cure For Sanity was PWEI’s crowning achievement. Containing four UK hits―“Touched by the Hand of Cicciolina”, “92º F”, “X Y & Zee”, and “Another Man’s Rhubarb”―the album came out at a time (1990/91) when it was still possible to use a plethora of samples without getting sued; though PWEI never achieved Bomb Squad levels of sample density, they managed to sample just about everything from “Christine” to “The Flintstones”.

This expanded, wonderfully mastered, 2-disc edition from Cherry Red restores the album’s original running order (RCA had issued a second edition that replaced LP versions with singles), and adds more than a disc’s worth of remixes, b-sides, and previously unreleased mixes. The only notable omissions are the “Electric Sunshine Style” and “Intergalactic” mixes of “X Y & Zee.” Highly recommended. –KO

CLASS ACTRESS
Rapprocher
(CARPARK)

Move along; this is not the Gaga you’re looking for

The promotional materials describe Class Actress’s Rapprocher as “an 11-song journey through the push and pull of a tumultuous love affair.” Based on song titles such as “Let Me Love You,” “Need to Know,” “Hanging On” and “Let Me In,” this sounds entirely likely.

Unfortunately, while vocalist Elizabeth Harper’s voice is thoroughly decent, and although cohorts Mark Richardson and Scott Rosenthal provide an intriguing, ’80s-informed musical backdrop of analog synths and disco-ready beats, the arrangements and production tend to overpower the songs. Additionally, the overall sound is very midrangey, with clipping and mild distortion evident throughout. As a result, every song sounds more or less the same―a generic blend of Goldfrapp and Lady Gaga, but without the variety. That said, the chorus of “Limousine” has a melody line reminiscent of the “diggin’ the scene with a gangster lean” line from the great William DeVaughn’s ’70s classic “Be Thankful for What You’ve Got.”

Rapprocher could be what Simon LeBon once called “a good old disco stomper,” but the production and mastering ultimately let it down. For mp3 players only. —KO

Sad news for anyone who was ever a kid.

Reactions and obits from around the web:

 
Over at The Telegraph, ten classic Sendak quotes:

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

Emily Bazelon reflects over at Slate:

The engine died. The air bags didn’t deploy. If they had, I would’ve been trapped. I couldn’t exit through my door because there was a gray wall of steel out there. I crawled out the passenger door and stood, bewildered, on the asphalt, which was littered with plastic pieces from my car. My heart was pounding away and my chest was bruised from the seat belt, but otherwise I was unhurt. Our 2001 Subaru Forester had given its life to protect me.

I had been behind the Dodge and its trailer at a red light. When the light turned green, we had both turned right onto a three-lane highway, the Dodge taking the middle lane, me taking the right. But the pickup’s driver was making a wide right turn over what he thought was an empty road. He almost immediately began his turn to the right for the first cross street. He neither heard nor felt the impact and had no clue what was going on until his dog started barking and he realized that something (my car) was impeding his forward progress.

This was my first car accident. I wasn’t sure what the etiquette was. Should we run away, at the last moment diving for cover in slow motion as our vehicles were consumed by fireballs? Or was I supposed to slug the other guy? We asked each other “Are you all right?” several times. We both were. We exchanged insurance information. His policy had lapsed two years ago. I called 911. My new acquaintance climbed back in his truck, backed it off my car, drove it around the block and parked in front of the derelict house he’d been aiming for, where he had a job as part of the demolition crew. Of course.

I’d been plucked from the forward rush of my day, violently but without harm. I was acutely aware of the gray sky, the smells of spring, the wet pavement. I kicked pieces of my car out of the road and noticed how much of it I couldn’t identify in this new context. Traffic slowed so everyone could study  me. I suspect they were reassuring themselves that they drove too well to let this happen to them, because that’s what I would’ve done. I wanted to say “Move along, folks, there’s nothing to see here.” A cop arrived, checked to see that I wasn’t dead, asked me where the other driver was, then returned to his car to call for a tow and to take an extended time-out. The tow truck arrived. The hoist wouldn’t work. The tow truck driver called for backup, shared a few stories from his nine years of hauling wreckage around town, and finished with, “It’s just a car.”

The second truck arrived, crewed by a garrulous old guy and a hip iPhoning young guy who hated the garrulous old guy. Off we went to my mechanic. I sat between them while the garrulous old guy drove and the hip iPhoning young guy who hated the garrulous old guy pretended he was anywhere but there and things rattled off my car in the bed of the truck behind us. The garrulous old guy had plenty of dumb jokes. (“Are you a city boy or a country boy?” “A city boy.” “Well, you might get this one anyway.” I didn’t.) The only thing my companions agreed on was the enduring stupidity of everyone else on the road. From our perch in the cab we could see every mistake every driver in front of us made, and whenever a mistake happened they abandoned the jokes and the iPhoning and together screamed STUPID MOTHERFUCKER!! as if they’d rehearsed it.

After they dropped me and the wreck off, they individually said it had been a pleasure riding with me and that they hoped things would get better. “It’s just a car,” each said, when the other one wasn’t around.

I don’t love cars. If you gave me my choice of any car in the world, I would take a vacation in Paris. But I didn’t expect the emotional jolt of stripping the Forester, which sat in my mechanic’s lot like a broken prop from Transformers: Dark of the Moon. What an ignominious end! That car had never let us down. It took us to and from hikes in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. It took us to work, to the ocean, to the river, to the desert, to our friends, to the movies, to dances and parties. I took plenty of naps in it (while my wife was driving). After 12 years, our car was like another room in our house.

We emptied the glove compartment, the side door pockets, everything in the back seat, and everything under the seats. We removed the jack, the spare tire, two walking poles, three pocket knives, four flashlights, a dozen road maps creased like cuts at the folds, an armload of canvas shopping bags emblazoned with the names of liberal causes, and all the survival gear we’d stashed, possibly for a road trip to the North Pole. I felt like a grave robber.

I agree with my friends in the tow-truck business: A car is just a car. But we humans extend our emotional lives to almost everything around us. When we write we eroticize the landscape. When we meet other dog owners we speak for our dogs. When our computers let us down we become enraged, as if the machines were doing it on purpose. And when you drive a car for 12 years, and it always gets you where you want to go, and one day it gets smashed by something like a dream from your childhood and you climb out of  it and you’re not only alive, you’re not even hurt, then you stand by the side of the road and stare at what’s left and guess what? You could almost cry.

This was not an offer to be taken lightly.

Picking up a master’s mantle is never easy. Parker, one of the greatest crime-fiction stylists of the last 40 years, provided his own proof of that. When he attempted to mimic the great Raymond Chandler, completing the latter’s unfinished novel, Poodle Springs (1989), and then writing Perchance to Dream (1991), a sequel to Chandler’s classic, The Big Sleep, the reviews were decidedly mixed.

Like Chandler, Parker seemed to be too much of an original to ever be replaced.

The appeal of Parker’s novels, after all, could not be explained by his smart-alecky hero, his gritty Boston setting, and his often thin plots. Readers treasured the Spenser novels primarily because of the author’s distinctive storytelling voice, a breezy style characterized by lots of ironic dialogue and crisp, short sentences that jitterbugged across the page in a cadence you could dance to.

Parker thought so himself. Some years ago, when I asked him why his work was so popular, he said this: “It’s the same reason that they like certain songs. . . . They like the way they sound.”

Atkins’ challenge, if he dared to accept it, would be to reproduce that sound. If he succeeded, readers would wonder if Parker were dictating the stories from the grave. If he failed, he would come off as a second-rate Comedy Store impressionist.

He had plenty of reasons to decline. His brilliant historical crime novels, including White Shadow and Infamous, had established him as a major figure in the genre. And he was about to launch a new series featuring a crime-busting former U.S. Army Ranger named Quinn Colson. The first book in that series, The Ranger, was a finalist for the prestigious Edgar Award for best novel this year.

But Atkins also had reasons to accept.

As a kid, he’d picked up a paperback copy of Parker’s first Spenser novel, The Godwulf Manuscript, at a second-hand store and was immediately hooked. By the time he entered Tulane University, where he was a good enough football player to make the cover of Sports Illustrated in his senior year, he was on his way to amassing a collection of Parker’s signed first editions. Parker’s Spenser novels, Atkins said at a recent book signing at the famous Mysterious Bookstore in Manhattan, were the reason he decided to become a writer.

But there was more to it than that.

During Atkins’ sophomore year at Auburn, his father died suddenly. At the time, he was an immature kid trying to figure out how to become a man, and he was utterly lost. His coaches, who didn’t understand how a kid could want to play football and read at the same time, were no help. Neither were his professors, who couldn’t understand how a kid who wanted to write could also be a football player. It was Spenser, Atkins says, who taught him how to be a man.

Some of the lessons imbedded in all those detective stories:  How to be your own man instead of the one others wanted you to be, the importance of tolerating those who are different from you, how to appreciate the finer things, and, most of all, how to live life well.

“You can stumble though life drinking Miller Light, or you can reach for the Sam Adams Winter Lager,” Atkins writes in In Pursuit of Spenser, a new anthology of meditations on Parker edited by Otto Penzler and published recently by BenBella Books.

So when the call came, Atkins didn’t hesitate. He wrote those 50 pages and sent them in. The publisher promptly forwarded them to Parker’s widow.

Joan Parker, the model for Spenser’s love interest, Susan Silverman, is a slim, charming woman with a quick wit and little patience for pretenders. At that recent Mysterious Bookshop signing, she sat at Atkins’ side and explained what happened when the publisher told her they had found the man to continue her husband’s legacy.

When Robert Parker was young, he was known as Ace, she said, so when she heard the name Ace Atkins, she had the feeling it was meant to be. Then she picked up those 50 pages, and the first paragraph convinced her it was so. In Atkins’ prose, she heard her husband’s voice.

She has a good reason to say that; she wants to sell books. But she also has a better reason. It’s true.

That first paragraph:

“I spotted the girl even before she knocked on my door. I was gazing out of my second-floor office window down at Berkeley Street, eating a cinnamon donut and drinking coffee with a little milk and sugar. The girl looked lost among the businesspeople and tourists hustling along the icy sidewalks. She wore a pink Boston Red Sox cap and an oversized down parka with a fur collar, and stared up at the numbers on the office buildings where Berkeley intersects with Boylston.”

Everything about that is pure Parker.

Read on, and it’s all there:  The crisp, rhythmic sentences. The ironic banter. The distinctly Spenserian attitude toward life that Atkins adopted as his own. And yet, those who have read both Parker and Atkins closely may also detect a muted, indefinable quality that’s pure Atkins. And that’s a very good thing.

The plot, which has more substance than you will find in most of Parker’s later novels, begins when Mattie Sullivan, a street-wise kid stuck with looking after her younger siblings, insists that the police botched the investigation of her mother’s murder. She asks Spenser to investigate. Spenser doubts that she’s right, but, being Spenser, there’s no way he can turn her down. As he digs into the case, the cops and some of Boston’s ubiquitous thugs try to discourage him.

Those familiar with Spenser know that’s something that cannot be done.

As the story unfolds, Spenser turns to his black sidekick, the menacing but loyal Hawk, for help. Fans of the series will welcome the return of Hawk, who had been largely absent from Parker’s recent novels.

After Atkins was chosen, the publisher offered to send him all of the Spenser books so he could fully acquaint himself with the ins and outs of the series. “Are you kidding?” Atkins replied. “I’ve already got them all.” At the Mysterious Bookshop, Atkins said that as he wrote the novel, he was always conscious of trying to create the next Spenser book that he wanted to read.

Ace Atkins is not the first writer brought on board to bring new life to a Parker series. Last year, Jesse Stone, the police chief of mythical Paradise, Mass., returned in a novel titled  Killing the Blues. But Michael Brandman, who had worked as a producer and screenwriter on the made-for-TV Jesse Stone movies starring Tom Selleck, made a mess of it.

He tried to recapture the ironic patter between Stone and the series’ other familiar characters, but the attempts at humor often fell flat. And Brandman’s attempt to mimic Parker’s musical style produced a stream of short sentences that plodded along with the monotony of a metronome.

Brandman is not the writer that Atkins is, but his failure puts an exclamation point on Atkins’ achievement. Parker lives. Spenser is back. And I can’t wait for the next one.

Discloser:  Ace Atkins wrote some words of praise that appeared on the jacket of my first crime novel, Rogue Island. Lately, I’ve gotten to know him, and I consider him a friend. But I value my reputation as a reviewer too much to praise a book as a favor to anyone. If I didn’t love this book, I would have just kept my mouth shut.

“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.”

“Got it,” I say, and move past him towards the nurse at the ER desk. She buzzes me back to see my mom. My stepfather is at her head, my sister at her feet. In the time it’s taken me to get there, they have already done an MRI.

“It’s a brain tumor,” my mother says, and then she swears as she often does. I echo her and bury my face in her neck. When I let go and stand upright, we are all silent for a moment.

“Well,” my sister says, “I think I have something that you’d all like to see.” She looks around for doctors or nurses or the like before pulling the pouch out from under her shirt. And there it is, all pink and puckered, no more than a few hours old.

“Do you guys want to see it eat?”

We nod as she takes out an eyedropper and lets it suckle. We all lean in and coo, marveling.

 ~

Ma is horizontal on the hospital bed that is now installed in my parents’ bedroom. I have to get her up to go to the bathroom, and to do that I have to reach across her to get to the button that will raise her up to sitting, so I say, “Ma, do you want to push the button?”

She lifts her head up off the pillow to look at me. “Why does everyone ask me that, ‘Bobbie, do you want to push the button? No, I don’t want to push the fucking button,” she says, as she pushes the button.

As she rises slowly, the mechanical squeak of the bed following her progress, she says, laughing, “Is it because it’s the only thing I can do at this point? Push this motherfucking button?”

 ~

I’ve just moved back into my parents’ house. In the previous six months, my mother has been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, my beloved pug died suddenly, and I gave up my apartment, my freedom and my privacy. I also, for the first time in almost eight years, have a boyfriend.  A very handsome, smart, lovely boyfriend. After the weekend I moved in, after he’d spent his previous visit helping me schlep nearly everything I own to a storage unit, I call him. He’s been gone a day or two and is back in Northern California where he lives.

“Now what do I?”  I say. I really don’t know. I feel entirely lost.

“You hang out with you Mom.  You love her. That’s the only thing you need to worry about right now.”

“Oh,” I say, but then think to myself:  I’m in a relationship, I need to work out, I need to write, I need to produce things, I need to be productive, I need to show the world that I’m doing something.

“There are only two rules for getting through something like this,” he says. “Don’t lose your shit and have no regrets.”

“That’s it?” I say.

“That’s it,” he says.

 ~

I make the mistake of telling L. what’s happening with my mom.  It’s a Saturday night.  I’m a few glasses of wine in at the bar next door to the restaurant where we work when L. stops in and sits at my table. I already know she is not going to know what to say when I tell her that my mother is dying, but there is nowhere to go and no one else to talk to, so out it comes.

Her face doesn’t change expression when I tell her, although there is a strange smile that creeps across it when she tells me some girl she didn’t know very well in some event group she used to go to had a sister who died of brain cancer.  “Hard stuff,” she says.  I sip my wine.

“You know,” she continues, “I am really worried about my fish, Fluffy.” I don’t know L. well, but I know her well enough to understand that she is being entirely genuine and serious. Along with waiting tables, she runs her own telemarketing business, cold calls people all day long. Sarcasm and irony would have to be absent from your life in order to do this for a living.

She continues:  “I mean, the other day I went into the living room and, well, he wasn’t swimming like this,” she says, and flutters her long white hand to indicate a horizontal position.  “He was swimming like this.”  Her hand then flutters vertically.

“Huh,” I say.

“I mean, I’ve had that fish for five years,” she says, taking a short sip of wine. “I’m pretty attached to him.”

 ~

Ma is waiting for the State of the Union address to come on TV, and she wants to watch it downstairs while she eats her dinner. This means Jim, my stepdad, has to bring the TV down to the living room, since I am making dinner.

Ma likes to watch me cook, and so is sitting at edge of the kitchen. A few minutes go by, then she cranes her neck towards the living room. Jim is sitting on the couch, on his computer, not getting the TV.

“What’s he doing?” she says.  I shrug. She rolls her eyes, and scoots herself over past the wall between rooms where he can see her. “Um, Jim?” she says.

“I’ll get it,” he says, and continues to sit on the couch.

She rolls back over to me and taps her good hand on her good leg. “Marriage,” she says.

“It doesn’t start for like 40 minutes,” I tell her.

“Oh,” she says, and is quiet for a moment. Then she leans forward and whispers, “I don’t understand why he just won’t go get it.”

I shrug again. “Just think of all the karma you are burning by waiting so patiently.”

“Bullshit,” she says.  She taps and taps and half-watches me.  Then she starts laughing. “Doesn’t anyone understand how much I’m suffering? I mean, I am really suffering here!”

We are still laughing when Jim bring the TV downstairs 37 minutes later. I tell Ma she’s going to have to suffer a little louder from now on if she wants everyone to hear.

 ~

Lately, I have been dreaming of my mother’s hands. Not as they are now, thin-skinned and swollen from steroids, covered in what look like deep bruises, only the spots are mostly blood red, forming from the slightest pressure on her skin. I dream of them as they were in India, covered in intricate patterns of henna, swirls of life.  She and Jim traveled there the fall before she got sick. She had wanted to go for 40 years, and it was a lifetime dream fulfilled. They spent a month going from Delhi to Varanasi, her guru Maharajji’s village in the mountains, back down to the Ganges. There, on the river banks, a few Indian girls henna’d her hands. She simply glows in the photographs, her short black hair framing the delicate bones of her face, a cream-colored scarf around her neck.  She sits surrounded by children on the desert-colored steps that lead to the water, rows of hot pink and electric blue and butter yellow laundry drying in the background. Radiant, she holds up her painted hands for the camera. Going to India, she said, was like finding her one true home.

 ~

The night of her biopsy, when the surgeon tells us that, although we have to wait for the pathology, he is 99 percent sure it is a malignant glioblastoma. He has grown fond of us in a short period of time, especially my mother, and as he hugs my stepfather and says he is sorry, I swear there are tears in his eyes. He offers us the option of telling her this news ourselves, and we do. My sister, stepfather and I surround her bed and say it. She knows from her hospice work that this kind of tumor is terminal.

She is shocked, still a bit loopy from the procedure, but clear-eyed as she says to us, “This isn’t the first time we have all been here together, you know. This is a heart connection, and it’s something that will always be here. We will always have this.”

Hours later, lying awake, unable to sleep, despite a few glasses of wine and an Ambien, I cannot access what it is she has said. This is the only thought I have: I do not exist without my mother.

~

Ma is pointing across the living room to a table full of photos of her gurus, Maharajji and Ram Dass. “Turn that picture over,” she says. “The one of Maharajji.” She is angry and frustrated, as in the last week she lost the use of her right arm, the tumor growing or swelling enough on her motor strip enough to leave it floppy and useless, much like her right leg.  “I’m so pissed right now,  I can’t look at him.”

Losing the use of her right arm means her last bastion of autonomy, writing letters or sending emails or making notes in the margins of the books she loves so much, is gone. It means she can do nothing for herself. She has told me again and again that this tumor is all part of her fate, her karma, her life’s bingo card as it were, and she has to accept all that comes with it.

But she is crying now, and unable to make sense of anything, which is how I feel nearly all the time.

“Asshole,” she whispers at the picture. I hold her bad hand as she cries.

Within a few days, she has moved through it, grieved what she can of this latest loss and decided there is no choice but to accept it. “What are my options?” she says to me when I ask her how this is possible. “I can sit here and wallow, feel sorry for myself, or I can keep living, right here in this moment.”

 ~

It is two years later now, and I have finally managed to leave her for California and my lovely, smart, handsome boyfriend.  She is miraculously still alive, and there are days when I sit in this house with rose bushes in the backyard and a mandarin orange tree outside my office window, and do nothing but ache for her. Once, when she could still talk on the phone, she called me and said, “I was lonely for your voice.”  It seems now I am always lonely for her voice or the touch of her hand or the sound of her laugh.

In the middle of moving, that feeling is all the more intense for the fact she will never be able to come here and see the orange tree or the rose bushes. While unpacking my desk, I find one of the last things she was able to write, a few shaky lines on a blue post-it note. My name is on it, underlined. Underneath, a quote, “From the preface in The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane: ‘The heart breaks and breaks and breaks and lives by breaking.’”

I am lonely for her voice and here it is, for me to listen to again and again and again.

Fear of Self

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.

Recent nights now, among his waking, my dad might not recognize the bed. Suddenly the room is not the room he’s slept in all these hours–my parents having been married more than forty years. He often does not remember the marrying, or what her name is. He talks of going back to the home where he grew up, a farm that since has been sold, the house dismantled. The house, though, still there on that air. The same roads leading to it, as a tunnel. The years he spent there, bodied as a boy. The negative house, in its destruction. The sleep-kill in the flesh. I honestly can’t say, as I write this sentence, that my father will be here by the time I finish with this manuscript, another book. When I say here, I mean in body, as he is already often gone inside the mind, except in moments, in slow glowing. More hours there seems not anyone there in those wet eyes–or worse, the someone once there trapped under many layers, some force within him repeating in reverse. The skin around his skull. The hair. How he will often, in the midst of worst forgetting, put his head down in his hands.

Sometimes standing in the same room with my father now when he looks at nothing and sees nothing and responds to my speaking to him with more gone, I feel as if I have been awake for many years all in one moment and there is nowhere else to go. But I do go. I leave the room, because honestly, I am frightened. And yet at night now I’ve been sleeping better than I ever have. The present terror, perhaps, of certain kinds, forms a kind of hands, enough to at certain presences hold you under water, even further down, more than the blank rooms overflowing, again, the houses and those years.

In the afternoons my father walks around the house holding keys that do not fit the car he is no longer allowed to drive. His dementia, which he does not believe in, and his recent glaucoma eye condition, which he does not believe in, have at last overcome his ability to respond in traffic, to find his way home. We have had to take his Corvette from him, hide the keys to all cars, as in his frustrated anger he will try to fit into the ignition anything that glints. His waking hours a series of nervous limbs and huffing, a spiral loop of thick obsession over the idea of when he will again be allowed to drive. That he will not, that his eyes aren’t legally okay now, brings furious terror to his skin–the breath and blood underneath his face skin welling as on days when I was adolescent and would test his nerves by saying stupid things. “I’m blind! I’m blind!” he shrieks into the house during day hours, throwing his hands up, in mockery of our concerns. His recent new glasses in their fabric-lined case, which he carries around the house as evidence, in his mind, that he is a prisoner in here, surrounded, though it is less his eyes and more the fact he often does not recognize where he is, that even my mother seems a stranger, that he speaks of his passed parents as if they are waiting for him in an old house that does not exist. We can’t bring up these things to him directly–try explaining a mirage to the air upon which it is formed. Instead, we hold ourselves around him in the air as best we can, try to lead him back in patient speaking to the body of today, paring down the drift with knots of logic–“This is your home.” “There is no one in the glass.” “I am your son.”–though you can see the drift of the machine inside him wavering between actual air and his phantasms. Sometimes when he thinks we are not watching he gathers the keys that fit the storage closet, the doors to underneath the house, going back and forth from where the cars are as if this time these other, tiny keys might fit, much in the way I would wander with the plastic key sets tight in my hands waiting for the day they would find the moving thing that they unlocked. Wishing I could take the childish sense of calm about them that I had then and touch my father’s forehead with it, let him rest. It has been the fastest longest year I can remember, bumping in old rooms where a suddenly descending veil of awful air crawls at the walls.

From the pharmacotherapy manual I borrowed from a friend’s mom to study sleep medications, there are further sections on stages of cognitive decline, which in their clinically emotional language read like the last year or two of Dad’s waking life, often not too far-flung from an extreme state of the sleepless, despite his now sleeping more than ever, day to day:

Stage 4 (Late confusion) Patient can no longer manage finances or homemaking activities. Difficulty remembering recent events. Begins to withdraw from difficult tasks and to give up hobbies. May deny memory problems.

My mother at the kitchen table certain afternoons with the reams of foreign paper spread around her, wearing reading glasses over the checkbook, the way I remember Dad had always done. The way the eyes change behind the glasses, larger, dimensioned outward toward nowhere.

Stage 5 (Early dementia) Patient can no longer survive without assistance. Frequently disoriented with regard to time (date, year, season). Difficulty selecting clothing. Recall for events is severely impaired; may forget some details of past life (e.g., school attended or occupation). Functioning may fluctuate from day to day. Patient generally denies problem. May be suspicious or tearful. Loses ability to drive safely.

The cereal bowl covered in cellophane inside the crisper drawer this time. The closet. The blue bowl of cranberry juice left on the counter. The way my father will return to the same common roles over and over, eating more than ever, sleeping more than ever, showers at 3 PM, glassed in inside how he cannot remember exactly what he’s already done.

And just beneath this, what is to come:

Stage 6 (Middle dementia) Patients need assistance with activities of daily living (e.g., bathing, dressing and toileting). Patients experience difficulty interpreting their surroundings; may forget names of family and caregivers; forget most details of past life; have difficulty counting backward from 10. Agitation, paranoia, and delusion are common.

And then:

Stage 7 (Late dementia) Patient loses ability to speak (may only grunt or scream), walk, and feed self. Incontinent of urine and feces. Consciousness reduced to stupor or coma.

The average period of onset herein being eight years. His mind inside him ending before the body, dragging the body behind it, in revolt. How of all the doctors my father’s seen in the past months, their most common observation is what great shape his flesh is in–how were it not for his gradually destructing synapses, he would seem so young for his age. If it were not for those holes.

That at first I’d begun to type these stages out for how their shift bumped against the strange glass of prolonged waking, and in the recitation finding my fingers stuck hard to the keys. Knowing only slightly, sidelong, how perhaps that shifting seems, as insomnia does, like being locked out of a large, comfortable house and into a mirrored room where air is heavier, under oil. Standing at that old familiar window seeing people passing, with each revolution seeming less and less like anyone we know. The tunnels of terror-walking growing tighter, warmer, leaner to the face, approaching a shapeless, shaking destination that seems further off the nearer it becomes. As if I could parse that, here, in my soft body. As if any inch of his descending, glazing mind could here be gleaned. My hours spent seated low in front of this machinic glow box typing these words out instead of standing with him, standing in the light of his remembrance while it remains.

Here I am not asking, not saying, moving past, for how these hours, new to him, for me repeat. That how, in my father’s blanking and often disoriented, disturbed flesh, in his forgetting, confusing ways he’d walked inside of so long now every day–how underneath that, in the moment, in the sheer bulk of his frustration, the bulge of his tongue pressed in fury behind his bottom lip, same as mine in the same spot–how in the deliberate way he chews, in all his pacing, staring, seeing, I see him still right there–caught or clogged inside a self of other self, a fully breathing body mask–how underneath that, at its center, beyond the fluttered veils, and no matter how gone–he is there. And in him I still see him, however tattered, however pulled apart in his own form. The food he eats and eats, in his forgetting of what he’s already put inside him, building the body’s rooms. Obsessed with how the house is empty. The hours seated, still. The two pairs of jeans he folded over his arm in the mind he’d be leaving to live inside “the homeplace,” his parents’ house, that phantom body, still packed inside there with his instances of bodies of the living and the dead, though even when he sees them in the human air arrived to visit, he doesn’t recognized they’re there. How it seems profane to mention the way for years my father said and said again he’d rather get turned off than be out of his control. How in his saying that, then, it seemed a joke almost, like some unmade day that would, could, never come.

The days continue coming anyway, regardless of how long off they are. Regardless of all these rooms hidden online or on film or in air, how many hours we could spit into machines. My father in the afternoons still watching NASCAR, younger men behind the wheels of cars he can no longer drive. How earlier this way it crushed me in my body to watch him stand before the TV with his coat on and keys still in hand as the race emcee shouted “Gentlemen, start your engines!” and my father’s arms did not move. The race being the Daytona 500, where my father would go each year with his brothers to watch the cars do circles live, and with them together eat and drink. The circling. The circling. Days coming. Night.

“Where is everybody?” my father asks most times I see him, in the strings of days, coming from rooms alone into rooms where there I am–as if in days before the rooms would teem with people who have since then become disappeared. Seeing the thinning returning to my sleeping recently now after long periods of better evenings seems, since my taking notice of it, to have reinforced its gait, as the last few days now in particular I’ve been up still when the sun rose, still thinking the same things. Seems like it’d been forever since that flopping grouse wound and unwound me, flopping unmeasured patterns on the bed–and yet familiar, like a room inside the house I’d been in a billion times until I’d forgotten it was right there on the air. The copying cycle returning cleanly as if it had never been gone. The familiar, but never less disruptive seize, that same blank awaking its unawaking in my brain.

With my head folded in the lip groove of the pillow, the contents of the skull seem heavy, warm. As if a fat field buzzing there between the skin, a bug light waiting to give zap. I do not want to think this thought, and so it thinks me, harder. Not that I could tell you better now, because of this, anything about it. Close up, the string seems even shorter. The knot of thoughts that eat the hours mostly circling that small series of ideas, which in removal seem a flat blur. Eight hours passed flat on the back, feeling like twenty hours minute to minute, but like two or three in retrograde. The longest, fastest night. The residual refrain: Please stop thinking. Please, this is the end now. I will silence myself and lie still. The clock will no longer continue rolling. When I stand up, I will feel real. Among the day here in the house with the forgetting man the blank spots stretching larger for each time I instigate them, and in the making. All the hands at all the buttons. All the brains. I write the paragraph and then delete it. I open and close files, staring at words. I can feel something stirring in me, in there, wanting out, and yet the doors at best revolve–pumping in and at themselves in want of wanting. Eating. Refreshing faster, faster, for more new. All those finite people in any image, cells in some black fabric, spreading, under night, dismantling the self in other aura, awake but not awake.

Most days, my father, recognizing mostly nothing, walks around the house for hours without pause. I have seen him walk in dark along the hall to the room where he has slept for years and years here, stand inside it staring, come back out. I have tried to ask him to come into a room where I am in here typing and stop and speak to me. When I ask, he asks me to take him back home. He says this is not his home, here–the house he’s lived in forty years. He says, “I’ve been around here all day and I’m ready to go now.” He does not recognize the backyard or the bedroom. The lights in the hall are often off. In his sleep in the chair before the TV he talks to no one, often laughing, speaking a language of somewhere far off and rolled. Shut in a dark of heavy nothing, a film made of no light.

Tonight inside the house I’m in nothing will stop. The air seems not air at all, made for our breathing, but empty space; the telephones inside the rooms and all the rooms of houses here surrounding about to ring; the bodies through the window sometimes passing and when not passing always about to be again, any of them someone who might turn and walk toward the window, press their face against the glass, see me seeing them, and say a word.

My father as a younger man. My father in the hours of the day he and my mother made me–what he ate, heard, what he said, what doors opened or songs sung. As in the people, minutes, in any body’s mind there buried, fit into a gray made flesh. As in along the hall the hand-sewn quilts hang parallel on the wall’s far side to, in many rooms, books in bookcases full of words, words rendered and waiting, never to be opened into light again, unless.

Tonight the night is still the night. The crush of no noise at all for right now that seems to permeate the air. The latch on the thin window. Bodies passing on the other side.

The skin that freed itself in friction from the arm of Borges as he walked from room to room on the day he first bumped upon the thought of a space containing all possible books.

Last night, abutting this one, predating whatever else, maybe, perhaps I grab a random book by its spine among the many lining my loft with its high ceilings, out of some drift where any book is any book. Perhaps I read from the page to where it opened up: “There are things you can think about,” the book says, or said, is saying, “where if you follow your thoughts in, no one will ever be able to get you out.”

____________________________

BLAKE BUTLER  edits the lit webblog HTMLGIANT (http://www.htmlgiant.com) and reports weekly on books and literature for Vice Magazine. His most recent works are the novel There is No Year and the nonfiction Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, both from Harper Perennial in 2012. He lives in Atlanta, GA.

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* on the vanity license plate of a traveling campervan

* to your dog, followed by a beef-and-cheese-flavored snack from pocket, counting on word of mouth to spread from there

* to your demons

* to your high school guidance counselor

* to your parents, not bothering with the new-fangled terminology that uses the prefix “self”

* during a writing workshop, in the margins of the pieces you’re peer-reviewing

* to the salesperson at local Nintendo Wii retailer

* to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

* prolonged resting on your laurels

* by running amok

* media-blasting a press release titled “Not Sure If I’m Supposed to Be Happy About This”

* immediately before Facebook IPO announcement, thereby undercutting the company’s news slightly and forcing outlets to make some difficult decisions over which story to place as the top item for the day

* having the book publicly decried by the Catholic League as an “abomination”

* with a public letter to Stephen King telling him that’s just NOT the way things are done, adding that you’re embarrassed for all of us

* querying publishers and agents with request to use kindly-worded rejection letters as cover blurbs

* sending eleven pounds of marijuana to St. Martin’s Press, hoping they’ll get the point

* sending announcement by mail in pastel blue envelopes with photo of book, discreetly enclosing details to a registry

* bundling into a McDonald’s Happy Meal (French market only)

* offering exclusive chiseled stone tablet version first

* holding an online contest where participants can guess the approximate weight of your own sense of self-importance, then declaring everyone’s guess “low-balling”

* uploading the book under its alternate title “The Sound and The Furie” to Amazon Kindle editions

* scratching title into the back of every iPad at the coffeeshop

* in roughly 70 or 80,000 one-word tweets

* getting Charlotte to spin a word into her web about the book in hopes of delaying inevitable slaughter

* subtly working it into lectures to toddlers

* through allusion

* changing title to something that includes the name of in-joke minimalist writer, riding indifference to glory

* creating a separate Facebook profile for the book, so that when readers ask you where they can purchase said book, you can direct them to a new page which they can “like” and just be done with it

* harnessing the power of hilarious things around your desk at Pinterest

* sending plans to the city of Orlando, FL for a theme park based on your book, including explanation that you’ll be happy to institute a Fast-Pass to cut down on lines for the triple-loop coaster, as long as kids appreciate the metaphor involved

* making it known to the general public that you might also be interested in running for president, if it comes to that

* getting Skrillex to do a remix version of the neurotically repetitive song you whistled during certain writing sessions

* creating “making of” documentary with extended footage of you fooling with title fonts

* with a post-Empire public humiliation that gradually takes places over four or five years

* more wedgies for Franzen

* stopping just moments before announcement to listen to the distinct silence of your book that exists only in your head before it slips forever into something to be ogled

* tweeting that silence

* starting over

* taking suggestions

Mothers inhaling lava frequently
Mothers in luxurious froth
Mothers I’d like to free
Mothers I’d like to follow
Mothers intellectual left fallow
Mothers of integrity forgoing liars
Mothers incorporating lust flutes
Mothers in luminous fecundity
Mothers inseminating Lilliputian freeloaders
Mothers in lower Fredonia
Mothers in French lace

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.

What do you attempt to achieve in your poetry?

Amity. I try to remind folks of what apples once tasted like, about the mundanity of those little details that are most organic and affirming to the solemnity of life—to do so without reliance on the motifs of romanticism or mysticism. All is nature after all. I try to convey an acuity that comes from my own sense of interconnectedness. In my youth, whilst trampling through farmers’ fields and woods filled with brooks and earthy skunk cabbage to abandoned orchards and where glade berries could be found—what wonderment. There is this thought that I’ve borrowed from Paul Bowles, and I think a valid one, about just how we often fail to appreciate that there are a finite number of sunsets and sunrises before us.

“To think, think, think” is a particularly useful piece of advice offered by Peter Oresick, a poet and publisher, an important fixture at Chatham University’s MFA program—a very kind and supportive man. Secondly, there’s a real gem given some time ago by a then young Diran Adebayo, an accomplished novelist from Britain; he said something to the effect that the best way—and I’m using polite language—to wallop the naysayers is to do good work and to focus on craft. To be honest, his example was an important one early on. I try to remember such advice in order to find spaces or entry points through which my audience  might gain access to something, I think, substantial.

I write to remind myself that I am not alone. I write to pay back debts to those who’ve inspired me and in order to assist others in finding their place. There is a willingness to affirm what might seem commonplace, yes. Without a voice, however, one remains invisible and, thus, meaningless—and that is, of course, everything and so much still, regardless of what syllables are pronounced and in whatever form, but that without a voice, the felled tree, remains inarticulate. I write to flush out the movements of my own thinking and to trace the course of life’s designs with what’s a sturdy vehicle. As culture reproduces itself, I want to toss my own contagion into the mix. I do this in both my textual and visual poetry.

The most modern of poetic forms, with the possible exception of cinepoems, it is the incorporation of words, typography, and images in an effort to augment a particular intention towards what’s visually expressed. Two important forebears of visual poetry are Apollinaire, responsible for visual poems known as concrete poetry, and the American poet Kenneth Patchen, who constructed what he called “picture poems.” Indeed, visual poetry has taken off in the last few years, with more and more journals devoting space to such works. Two contemporary visual poets whose work I particularly admire are Oceano-based Karl Kempton and Budapest’s Márton Koppány. And, yes, I am but one of many up-and-coming visual poets on the international scene.

I’ve been living outside the U.S. for many years—and my self-imposed exile began in Prague. I’ve lived in disparate places, been enriched by varying models of community and cross-cultural experiences. The world is rich and its wisdom’s a good gauge for one who’s looking to learn something about being deferential. There may be a bit of existential homelessness somewhere in my makeup—and there  certainly is an inexplicable yearning. I feel like a foreigner back in the U.S. I think it was John Lennon who penned the lines, “I wanted you, but you didn’t want me.”

Visiting the Himalayas in Northern Nepal a few years back: lush forests, exceptional trekking into remote areas, sparkling rocks and falls gushing torrents of “sweet water,” as it is called. At the time, Kathmandu was awash in violent demonstrations—storefronts on lock down, violent strikes, tires being burned and cars turned over, lots of angry demonstrations. In fact, my companion and I were pulled out of a taxi and threatened amid the chaos. The concept of struggle really was imprinted upon me and I realized then that I was not immune to those outside my immediate experience. While I may have been a traveler, or that is at least how I saw myself, I was perhaps little more than a tourist with a sense of entitlement—and, in fact, complicit in the Nepalese struggle; the area in which we stayed in Kathmandu was hemmed by slums. Later in that same trip, our bus crossing a pass into India, we would be held up by scarfed Maoist rebels.

It’s not so much that I am an angry poet. In fact, I think I gave up being angry some time ago. I’m matter-of-fact politically and, also, I think, sometimes a bit impatient. I believe in living my life with a sense of urgency and sharing what I’ve gleaned from the many unique experiences that I have had traveling around the globe. Finding myself in areas of turmoil, experiencing plenty of turmoil within my interior life, I want to live life robustly and substantially. For me, unhappiness is often a byproduct of stagnation and think there too many better reasons for living one’s life—among them intentionality. You know, in spite of what many people think, we don’t have enough meaningful conversations these days—do not dwell in enough philosophical locales.

Though I drink on the rare occasion, when I do what’s feral about me tends to come out—does so in ways that are often incomprehensible; it might be useful to consider the domesticated animal left to wander in a more competitive greater world. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties and on the road that I began drinking, did so in great expatriate communities that have changed substantially. There’s little adventure these days and, I suppose, I’ve become a bit anachronistic. I am working on this, suspect it’ll be another ravine crossed and conquered with my colors thrust into ground.

I wait.

Nobody.

I could have sworn he just gave you money, a stack of money rubber-banded together. Nobody just gave you a stack of money?

I dropped that. He gave it back to me. Besides, it wasn’t a stack of money. Only the top of the stack was money, and that was only a $2 bill.

You dropped a stack of money-shaped paper that was topped by a $2 bill, and a total stranger found it on the ground and gave it back to you. How does your honesty inform your writing?

Since I write fiction, I find that I don’t need to be honest. People expect lies when they read fiction, and I’m more than happy to oblige. If they wanted truth, they’d live alone and have mirrors on every wall. Nothing more truthful than that.

True. The title of your new book is Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions. You’ve got the word “Fiction” in the title.

It’s actually the subtitle.

Noted. But we’ve covered the “Fictions” part–what’s so dramatic about your work?

People love. People lose. People live. People die. It pretty much covers the entire human experience, save happiness, which doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “dramatic.” Had I subtitled it “40 Comedic Fictions,” I would have included happiness. Otherwise, I cover the human experience completely.

You could have had a mix. Are you averse to comedy?

Not at all. I see the comedy in everything. I just can’t relay it in writing form, or for that matter, interview form. In person, though, it’s my strongest emotion, happiness. No, check that: elation. Elation is my strongest emotion, but only in person.

Getting back to the money-shaped pile of paper, why do you have that?

Because that guy gave it to me.

But you said … never mind. Why Chicago?

I’m from Chicago.

But haven’t you actually lived inside the city limits for only five months? Aren’t you from the suburbs? Or more prominently, Ohio?

I was born in Chicago. There were those handful of days in addition to the other five months, but they were definitive days.

Fair enough. What’s your favorite neighborhood in the city? Is it Lakeview? Your bio says you work at Wrigley Field as a beer vendor.

I like the lake. I try to spend a lot of time there. As they say, it’s cooler near it.

Lake Michigan isn’t a neighborhood.

Is that what it’s called? Well, it should be a neighborhood. It’s the best place in the city, hands down. I’d live there.

Nobody lives there. It can’t be a neighborhood if no one lives there, by definition. Ravenswood is nice. Have you been there?

Yeah, that one, then. Sure. Ravensville. Lots of great restaurants. Good place to raise kids. No lake, but solid soil, good schools there.

Okay, time to finish up: If you could live one Chicagoan’s life, whose would you live?

It would definitely be Sean Combs, aka Puff Daddy, aka P. Diddy, aka Diddy. I’ve always admired him for what he’s been able to accomplish as a producer, performer, actor, and humanitarian. He also is a successful entrepreneur and has a wonderful family. Doesn’t everyone want to be Sean Combs?

Sean Combs isn’t from Chicago.

I know that. But if I’m imagining me living someone else’s life, being another human being, which is impossible, couldn’t we imagine Sean Combs growing up in Chicago? You defined the rules when you asked your question. I was only playing within them. I want to be Sean Combs.

That should about wrap things up. How far is the Brown line from here?

Take the bus instead–stop’s right there on the corner. The El is $2.25, and remember, we only have that $2.

_____________________________

Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of two story collections, Elephants in Our Bedroom (Dzanc Books, 2009) and Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions (Curbside Splendor, 2012), and a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  After many years at Bowling Green State University serving as Editor of Mid-American Review, he is now Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Missouri State University.

Photo Credit: Jacob S. Knabb

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.

Rosecrans Baldwin is that kind of expatriate you want to meet. In his new book, Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down, he proves to a good-natured narrator and a sharp observer as he recounts his two-year experience of living and working in the City of Light, France.

Even if I wasn’t residing in the country he chronicles and hadn’t explored much of his same cultural territory, I have the feeling I’d engage with this American bon vivant. But as I am and have, his writing resonates all the more.

In quick succession, the chapters of his book can be hysterically funny (with his Parisian coworkers: “They frowned at me with their whole bodies, leaning forward while exhaling poofs of air. What had they done to deserve this American?”), but just as often they end on notes of surprising sweetness, as in a moment when his wife comes home crying and explains that she just walked back and the city is so beautiful.

Even if you’re not over the moon for Paris, have never ventured into France or couldn’t tell a baguette from a Depardieu public urination incident, Baldwin’s book is worth checking out. It offers an honest recounting of a new generation reconciling the dream with the reality of this storied city.

I had the chance to speak with Rosecrans a week before the release of the book. He met me on a video chat after I sent him the message saying “salut.” He replied that he just needed to grab a “coca light” (Diet Coke, as it’s known for the extremely unsophisticated).

I’m here in Dijon, France. The flowers are blooming, it’s raining at the moment outside my window and the sounds of the city-wide new tramway construction have finally died down for the night. Tell me about where you are?

Well, I am sitting in my home office. I live in Chatham County, North Carolina which is kind of on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, where you find the University of North Carolina. The nice thing about living here is that you can be in the midst of a college town and then you drive for ten minutes and suddenly you’re in a semi rural, agrarian area. North Carolina is famous for being very green. So if you like that, it’s pretty magnificent. We’re semi-isolated. We live on a little private road and I can see out of one window my neighbor, who is sort of a hippie nurse, and her log cabin. We have a fig tree that’s as tall as our house. It’s just sort of an acre of land, mostly in the woods.

A slight change from Paris then?

A slight change. There’s actually town within Chapel Hill, called Carrboro, which likes to refer to itself as “The Paris of the Piedmont.” So I’ve gone from one Paris to another.

So, I once heard celebrity French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, BHL as he’s known over here, tell Jon Stewart on an appearance on the Daily Show that “a wall of clichés” exists between France and America. There does seem to be truth to his point. It seems that few national stereotypes are allowed to flourish as much as those held by Americans of the French, and vice versa. Did you feel like you ever fully scaled this wall, as he called it?

Yeah, those clichés and stereotypes abound and they aren’t going away. But I disagree with BHL in that I think his metaphor is off. I don’t think there’s a wall and I don’t think they get in the way of people understanding one another. But I do think it’s more like…oh, let’s say it’s a perfume. It’s a perfume that’s in the air and people are reluctant to open the window to air out the relationship. And I don’t think that’s all that unnatural or even odd. I mean, BHL himself has an identity and a stereotype that he promotes and doesn’t want changed. I would bet you the summer harvest of my fig tree, that during that appearance, BHL was wearing a white button-down shirt with at least two or three buttons popped (fact check: yep). That BHL look, his tan chest and hair flowing to the shoulder, has been there since the late-sixties protest. He does it, and he knows it. At the same time, Americans do it and we know it. So people who have been to Paris make a joke about French people having stinky armpits and the French joke about Americans being stupid bullies. The details are mushy clichés, but they don’t come from nowhere. Those ideas represent two countries that like to talk about their own ideas and their own national identity. In France, you’re French before you are anything else. In America, you’re free before you’re anything else. And we don’t shut up about either of those things.

So as an extremely long answer to your question, I didn’t feel judged. I didn’t feel like people thought of me as George Bush. If anything I was more likely to be the one who was apologizing, or making jokes at my own expense.

Did you get the sense, as you were saying with BHL, that people were playing up their Frenchness to you, to try to meet your preconceptions?

(laughs) I don’t think so. Shit. Maybe I just didn’t notice.

There’s the story of Jacques Chirac on visits to the States kissing women on the hand, something you never see people in France doing, but he later admitted he thought that’s what Americans expected him to do.

I don’t think it happened at work, because the people I worked with were in a global marketplace. There’s a global business mentality that’s turning everyone into the Borg. That gets its coffee to go, you know.

But in real life, I ran into numerous French dudes who played up their Frenchness, mostly to get laid. We ran into this guy at parties who would buy his T-shirts in Greenwich Village that had wacky sexual phrases on it, in order to get girls to talk to him. There was this macho Frenchness that was sort of highly insecure, while being aggressive.

On the flip side, did you feel yourself exaggerating or somehow playing to a certain kind of Americanness?

No. I’m the tourist who doesn’t want anyone to know I’m a tourist. When I travel I hate standing out, though it’s impossible not to. For example, most of my coworkers spoke a little English. But I insisted on speaking French from the get-go, even if that made the communication much worse. Because I thought it would be so stereotypically American of me to expect them to speak English in their own country, in their own city, in an office where they’re supposed to be speaking their own language. So I bent over backwards to be more French, so that I could pass or blend. Of course, the whole time A: it’s making it worse B: there’s no question what my nationality was.

But at the same time, in Paris, if you say bonjour or you ask for something with a “s’il vous plait,” you’re more likely to get a smile at the other end of the exchange.

Luckily, that does go a long way. You come out with a “s’il vous plaît” and people are surprised, where they were expecting an American tourist but here’s someone making an attempt.

People assume the stereotype in a stereotypical exchange. If you’re a waiter serving an obese man in a fanny pack, things will likely go a certain way.
But the joy of moving to another country, and also the terror, is how unique most every situation is at every second. The discovery, the confrontation, constantly having to solve things that at home were never problems. It’s great and I miss it now. I miss being provoked. Of course, it also drives you mad, and I don’t miss that part of it. But really, you feel alert and alive all the time. It’s so easy to be complacent.

Especially surrounded by a new language, you’re constantly challenging your entire world-view just with the new words themselves.

Yeah, the language part is really interesting. It makes you aware of how you create sentences. You start noticing the way that conversations are built. It doesn’t even have to be on a linguistic, philosophical level, but it’s more about what does conversation mean to them and what does it mean to us. There’s the French style of conversation, the idea that you can be at a table for six hours and it’s gossipy and sexy and angry and deep and very shallow for long stretches of time and there’s going to be one or two fights, but it goes on forever. It’s so rare in the American style of conversation where I’m going to communicate my information, pause, and then you’re going to communicate your information.

And you often get the sense in French conversation that the focus is on the enjoyment on the words themselves, which is a strange place to be when you’re the one learning the language.

Exactly. Well, let’s just wade into gross stereotypes. In some ways, the French can be disappointed if you’re not up to the banter of conversation. They seem to enjoy so much the back and forth, the interruption, and the jokes, and the referential jokes, that you can just keep bouncing off of one another. And if you don’t speak the language, let alone if you come from another style of discourse, you’re as wet a blanket as can be thrown on the situation.

And it’s not just for dinner, though if you watch French movies it does seem like it. For instance, the office where I worked was a lot sexier than anything I’d ever experienced in America. There’s was so much flirting, with much more fun and teasing to be had between the sexes in the office than I’d seen before in the United States, along with the sense that this was how it should be. Obviously, it can lead to other things, not all of them good. But it was remarkably different.

Let’s talk about the writing of the book. Americans writing about Parisian life has quite a history, with plenty of pitfalls of cliché. Did this present obstacles for you as you wrote?

I was determined to be anti-cliché. It really was part of the motivation to write this book. Not that there was some sort of record to set straight, but there are so many books about Paris, and memoirs about people living in Paris, particularly who are involved in the arts. So the story’s been told. The trouble is that the story has been told poorly many more times than not.

I mean, I grew up loving the ex-pat books. Some people just made the city come alive. One example for me would be The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy. And in college I read the letters from Paris by Adam Gopnik which then became Paris to the Moon. I thought those were fantastic, just lively and crackling. Then there’s other writing about Paris from Colette and André Gide…we could go on. But the point is all those writers were so great that if I wanted to jump in with a book- frankly to be lucky enough to do it- I wanted to at least tell my story as honestly and with as much close observation as I could.

The way it came about, at the time, I was keeping notes, just because certain moments were so sharp and vivid I had to write it down. I had no intention at that point of doing a book. But I would write down these little notes to myself as text messages and send them to my email account because the dialogue I overheard was so funny. Then I just started keeping a diary. When waking up in the morning to write my novel, I would warm up by transcribing the text messages I’d sent to myself the day before. I just had to write the story that I knew that was my own and if I stuck to the truth as closely as I could, cliché wouldn’t be possible. Then you go back to editing and you go “cliché, cliché, cliché” and end up ripping a lot of stuff out.

Or then you just write A Moveable Feast across the top and are done with it.

You know what’s funny, I just had a conversation with someone the other day, Allan Gurganus, a novelist and an incredible writer, and we were talking about how fucking great that book is. I mean some of the Hemingway I can’t stand to read again, but that book, just the style of the thing is blazing. Of course, its historical accuracy has been questioned. The clichés crop up.

In the book, you describe your inability to be funny when communicating in French and instead come across as earnest. Did you ever feel earnest became a role or persona you adopted?

(laughs) Yeah, as you’re acquiring vocabulary, you have to speak in baby talk- I love this. I like that. This no good.

Some of the comic timing is lost.

Right, the punchlines just don’t sound as good when they each have one-syllable words. The earnestness was unavoidable if I wanted to communicate at all. There’s also a feeling, you know, if you’re an introspective person, it’s hard to slip into yourself when you’re required to be constantly figuring things out. But you don’t have the chance to be introspective, because if you’re not paying 100% attention to what someone is saying you’re going to look like an idiot, or you’re not going to get dinner, or get home. All these little moments of daily survival hinge on you being an extrovert. I remember just feeling exhausted at the end of the day.

Yes, it forces you to fully engage, to focus completely in the moment, or on that person.

And if there’s any place to be in the moment, Paris is pretty highly ranked. But then you need to go home and take a nap.

Tell me then about the period immediately following the book, your reentry. As someone who’s been away for awhile, I’m always just as interested in hearing stories of readjustment back to home. Is repatriation as bad as they say?

Well, when we came back, we moved to North Carolina. I went and voted for Obama, my dream president, and he goes on to win. The same season the UNC men’s basketball team wins the championship. But also when we came back, we moved in with my in-laws. It turned out to be a good thing, but on the surface- I moved in with my in-laws. I wrote an article for Salon about the experience. The other thing is it was a crippling economy and work was hard to find, so there was definitely some difficult reintroduction.

So then does Paris still have a draw? And if so, is it now even stronger?

Oh yeah, for sure. Even stronger now is the desire to move to Paris and not have to work. I don’t think it’s happening anytime soon, but when it does I very much look forward to it.

Sometimes I think the more you’re away from Paris, the more magical and appealing it becomes. And even when you’re there, the action always seems to be just one block over. Or as you say in the book, “There should be a name for the syndrome that occurred when you were in Paris and you already missed it.” In that case you were speaking of your goodbye to the city, but you summed that up well, I think. It’s that sense that the true Paris is always not quite here, always just up ahead.

I think it’s absolutely true. And not only that it’s the place that if you haven’t been there, you should be trying to save up all your money to go there next. Ever since I had an idea about what Paris was, that’s where I wanted to be. I mean you walk around in a constant state of immersion in beauty. How could you not go?

I realize I sound like a tourist brochure. But I say that, I think, as a reaction to feedback I’ve gotten. I was talking to someone who’d heard of my book but didn’t know anything about it and he said “So it’s sort of a depressing book about Paris then?” No, that’s not what it’s about.

But of course it’s also a burden to carry for the city, having to cultivate that kind of beauty. Paris can at times collapse under its own weight.

They sacrifice a lot for it. Whatever is not being a theme park, that’s what it’s like. I knew a lot of young people at work who were angry about that. They would look at places like New York or London or Berlin, places that have seen upheaval, but also sort of seek out upheaval. Because if there’s one thing Paris doesn’t do is tear anything down. But the problem is if they don’t let in a little rawness, they’ll end up like Venice- an island of wealthy ex-patriates from other countries that is sinking.

Then I wanted to ask about the election. This is an election year in both countries, with France’s happening right now. My question is, what’s your prediction on which is more likely: a Sarkozy loss in France or an Obama loss in North Carolina?

Holy crap, I never would have thought of putting those two up against one another. I think I’ll have to say, unfortunately, it’s more likely that Obama will lose North Carolina. It was an extremely close contest last time. But a lot of changes are happening that are not looking good for Obama, I’m afraid to say. I mean, my view is basically French- I’m left but also kind of cranky. So yeah, I’m gonna say a Sarkozy win.

Yes, Sarkozy is the candidate this country loves to hate. So much so that sometimes I think they may not be able to vote against him. With the problems coming for the country, they may need someone to hate.

We can say this, if the country elects Sarkozy, it will be the Frenchest thing they could have done. To publicly denounce the guy, argue about him, protest against him, but in the end, give him another term.

Ok, one last question: do you ever wake-up in a cold sweat after a dream that you’re still biking around the Arc de Triomphe?

(laughs) It hasn’t happened yet. But it definitely could. In fact, I don’t think I’ve been on a bike since my time in Paris, possibly for that reason.

Well all that is to say, you’re a braver man than I.

_________________________________

ROSECRANS BALDWIN’s debut novel, You Lost Me There, was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2010, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a Time and Entertainment Weekly best book of summer 2010. He is a cofounder of the online magazine The Morning News. Learn more about him at his website.

Excerpted from PARIS, I LOVE YOU BUT YOU’RE BRINGING ME DOWN, by Rosecrans Baldwin, to be published in May 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2012 by Rosecrans Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Your stories are what I think of as funny/sad. You use comedy not to keep despair at bay, but to express forgiveness. Say something pretentious about this, please.

As Woody Allen once said, “Humor is a defense mechanism.” Or maybe it was Woody Hayes who said that (after he punched that dude in the throat that one time).

I’m grateful you think of my stories as funny and sad. Those are my main goals. Finding the right balance between humor and (approaching pretense) pathos is hard, but also the best way to deliver a story because it’s honest to the way humans are: complicated, troubled, and hilarious.

I believe, as an artist and therefore as a commentator on the human condition, that it is right and good for us all to laugh at the misfortunes of other humans, so long as we see their misfortunes as our own. That, I dare say, is the essence of empathy. (Is that decent pretentiousness?)

At the same time, I also mistrust art that idealizes humans because it sets the bar too high for unremarkable people like me. Humans are not all that special, as Mr. Rogers asserted. I love a lot of older literature and art and philosophy that idealizes people (the Greeks, the American pastoral painters, etc.) because it’s an honest reflection of the thinking in those times, but we moderns should know better by now. My suburbanite characters are barely functioning adults, and, as a great television theme song once asserted, “there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.”

As I was reading the stories, especially the ones where you’re breaking down the internal dynamics of a marriage (like how Gary’s wife Liz sighs all the time, and what those sighs mean) I kept thinking: what (the fuck) does Scott’s wife think about these stories?

My wife thinks the Liz character is based on this other lady she doesn’t like much, and so she gets a kick out of the scene where Liz complains about how overwhelmed her life is becoming due to the stresses involved in raising a son and managing a scrapbooking club. I think it was Jonathan Swift who once said that “Satire is seeing everyone’s face in the mirror but your own.” Or was it Jonathan Papelbon who said that?  I’m banking on the truth of the Swift/Papelbon supposition in order to keep my personal life stable after releasing Cul De Sac as “fiction” to my family. But seriously, my wife is more concerned about being confused for Betty, the grossly obese wife in “After the Lovin’” who tries to shed weight by reading self-help books that help train the brain to “think away” lipids. I am comfortable knowing I will spend my eternity in a lake of fire, like in that one Bob Seger song.

Back when Cheever was doing his thing, the suburbs held a certain allure. Now everyone’s embarrassed to be from the suburbs. Why aren’t you?

In addition to living in the suburbs and being freaked-out by them, I did a lot of reading about them and worked my way through the familiar arguments against suburbia, as breeding grounds of malaise, corporate materialism, racism, anti-intellectualism, religious conservatism, homophobia, fear of art and artists, resource-waste, sprawl, wetland destruction, and all the stuff in the Rush song “Subdivisions,” including the righteous synthesizer opening and Geddy Lee’s rolled-up blazer sleeves in the official video. I studied the sociological analyses of the American suburbs for quite some time but decided not to take too much to heart because I feared the “ideas” would seep into the stories and make them sound like I was trying to deliver a message.

Also, like I sort of talked about in the first question, I’m comfortable with the impossibility of realizing a perfect-world, and the suburbs are fascinating on that level alone. I’m still amazed at how the propaganda about the suburbs sold to people after the Big War as the solution to all life’s problems is still believed by so many even though reality indicates otherwise. Since I don’t have those unrealistic expectations about my setting and can find solace in other venues such as bookstores, meditation gardens, and pharmacies, I find the suburbs fascinating the same way I find Elvis fascinating; though the music is okay, it’s the story itself that’s truly amazing, the fanaticism and mythos and absurdity, the final slump toward the bathroom floor.

I admire that you’re able to break down your people, and yet remain compassionate toward them. Clearly you’ve had therapy. Yes?

Not outside of the court-orders, no.

I’m grateful for your compliment about compassion towards the characters. That’s a huge deal to me as a writer/person. I try hard to present the characters through action, dialogue and description and as a narrator try to stay hidden in the background so that the audience can deal with the characters directly without my interference. I don’t want to tell the readers how to feel about these people; I try to think of my narration style as follows: holding a video camera on my characters, pressing the record button, and keeping my mouth shut instead of providing commentary, which usually detracts rather than enhances, as evidenced by my family Christmas-videos where I voice-over narrate in order to come across as in-control and knowing, saying things like, “And here’s Jimmy opening his present. I wonder what Santa got Jimmy.” And then Jimmy will say, “Shut up, Dad. You’re the one who said Santa Claus was invented as a marketing ploy.” And I’ll say, “I don’t have a son named Jimmy. Who the hell are you and how did you get in my living room?” I think most storytellers know exactly what I’m talking about.

I also try hard not to idealize my characters. When I read books or watch movies that present characters as extraordinary hero-types through big-bang-ass drama and sentiment, I feel like I’m on the receiving-end of a time-share presentation rather than experiencing a sincere story that tries to show something truthful about human experience. Deceiving audiences by over-inflating human potential is the job of marketers, politicians, and corporate acolytes, and I try to cut through that skullduggery by presenting characters as troubled, complicated, and sometimes incapable of changing or “improving,” and delivering that reality is way more interesting and challenging than writing about healthy people. In the story “The Sac,” like life, there are a few winners and a whole lot of losers (to paraphrase George Carlin – but he was talking about children; I’m talking about grown-ups and kids). In my book, it’s okay for my characters to fail, or to just stay the same. No great heroic transformations are required of my characters.

Were you ever pressured to try to turn Cul De Sac into a “novel in stories”?

Yes, in the early stages I was nudged by some to market the book as a novel in stories, and even some agents, upon my approach, flat-out told me they wanted a novel instead of a novel in stories or a collection simply for salability. They were polite and direct about this, which I appreciated. But I intended for each story to stand-alone, and trying to weave them together into a standard Freytag pyramid sort of arrangement seemed false (the form didn’t fit the content, as they say). It was also hard to do, and I did attempt it by writing a Cul De Sac screenplay, trying to mimic the Raymond Carver/Robert Altman Shortcuts-style, but then the story became a different story, and as a result (approaching pretense), I “compromised my original vision” and thought about quitting trying to sell the book altogether, and right around then is when Paula Bomer of Sententia Books rescued me from the ledge.

Thankfully, Paula, who is not only a terrific publisher and editor but also a great writer, understood and supported the idea that the collection ought to remain as such. And then she helped make it better by strengthening the shape of the book by grouping the stories that tell the tales of the principal character, Gary, into a novella, with each story presented in chronological order. These stories comprise the second half of the book, “The Ballad of Gary Weigard.” And still, though each story is presented as a “chapter” chronicling Gary’s middle years, each remains originally titled and stand-alone. I’m fortunate to have a publisher who trusted me and “got” what I was trying to do and made it even better by seeing things that I couldn’t. Artistic integrity remained intact and was enhanced by an ideal publisher/editor/writer relationship. I am big-time grateful for that.

Have you ever tried the French dish Cul de sac?

No, I don’t eat food anymore because of the diabetes (“I can’t feel my toes!”), but I do know that one of the literal French translations of “Cul De Sac” is “The Ass of the Bag.” And speaking of Cul De Sac as the title, it is a metaphor. More pretentiousness: not only is a physical cul de sac the setting of the stories, the place where these men live and drink and complain, but the cul de sac is also emblematic of the larger “American-Suburb-As-an-Idea” and also connotes “death” in its “dead-end/terminus/no outlet Sartrean existential” definitions, as both the physical and mental space where men stagger about until their organs give out. Each story is about death in some form, each man fumbling through crises that involve real deaths, the death of the self (inner, psychic death), and/or the characters staring forward shock-eyed at approaching death. These are stories about men on the brink of physical/psychological/spiritual annihilation.

But my main goal is laughter. And in addition to writing high-minded literature, I want to selfishly announce that I am starting up a career in life-coaching in order to share my inner light with others.

What smartass question have we failed to ask?

I can only think of one:

Q: “What does it feel like to write about a character’s admiration for Engelbert Humperdinck without irony or condescension?”

A: The best way I can describe it is that it feels an awful lot like riding in a beautiful balloon, which is often suspended on a twilight canopy, and the balloon, to me, symbolizes the hopes and dreams of us all, driven by the strength, optimism and perseverance that was inserted into us by our forefathers.

Please explain what just happened.

I went out to get the newspaper, and the guy hadn’t come.

What is your earliest memory?

Coming downstairs from my bedroom into the kitchen where my mother was. Captain Kangaroo was on the television, and my mother said, “What are you doing up?” In retrospect, if she didn’t expect me up, why was Captain Kangaroo on the TV?

If you weren’t a writer, comedian, and actor, what other profession would you choose?

I would figure out a way to collect disability payments from the government.

Describe a typical work day.

Get up, get the paper – WHICH IS SUPPOSED TO BE HERE ALREADY – drink tea, read it, take a shower, fire up the computer, write, email, Twitter, email, write, Twitter, lunch, write, Twitter, see what my wife is doing, stall, write, Twitter, pretzels.

Is there a time you wish you’d lied?

When agreeing to answer to these questions?

What would you say to yourself if you could go back in time and have a conversation with yourself at age thirteen?

I’d say, “Dermatologists can treat that.”

If you could have only one album to get you through a breakup, what would it be?

I might go with Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks.

What are three websites—other than your email—that you check on a daily basis?

Huffington Post, CNN, Popurls. 

From what or whom do you derive your greatest inspiration?

The work of my peers.

Name three books that have impacted your life.

The World According to Garp by John Irving, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, What it Takes by Richard Ben Cramer.

If you could relive one moment over and over again, what would it be?

That night I took E with my wife.

How are you six degrees from Kevin Bacon?

I don’t know. It’s probably less than six degrees, but I will leave it to better minds than mine to figure it out.

What makes you feel most guilty?

When my professional schedule conflicts with personal obligations.

How do you incorporate the work of other artists into your own?

Microsoft Word has a “cut” function and a “paste” function.

Please explain the motivation/inspiration behind You’re Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations.

A desire to write something personal, cohesive, funny, and honest.

What is the best advice you’ve ever given to someone else?

There is only one professional piece of advice worth giving, which is this: if you want to do something, do it.

List your favorite in the following categories:  Comedian, Musician, Author, Actor

Comedian – Richard Pryor

Musician — Husker Dü

Author — Michael Lewis

Actor — Maggie Smith

If you had complete creative license and an unlimited budget, what would your next project be?

I’d like to make a movie with my friends.

What do you want to know?

What’s for lunch?

What would you like your last words to be?

“Oh God, don’t unplug me.”

Please explain what will happen.

We’re all going to die.

_______________________________________________________________________________

MICHAEL IAN BLACK is a writer, comedian, and actor who has created and starred in many television series including Michael and Michael Have Issues, Stella, and The State. He also starred in the NBC television show Ed and on Vh1′s I Love The… series. He wrote the screenplay for the film Run, Fatboy, Run and wrote and directed the film Wedding Daze. Black regularly tours the country as a stand-up comedian and is the bestselling author of the book My Custom Van (and 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face), the forthcoming I’m Bored, and the children’s books Chicken Cheeks, The Purple Kangaroo, and A Pig Parade is a Terrible Idea.

In You’re Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations, Black takes on his childhood, his marriage, his children, and his career with unexpected candor and deadpan wit in this funny-because-it’s-true essay collection.

Zach Braff:

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Molly Ringwald:

Drunk Hulk:

Bryan Cranston:

Damon Lindelof:

Zooey Deschanel:

Jane Espenson:

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***Please be sure to follow The Nervous Breakdown @TNBtweets and Other People@OtherPeoplePod.***

Once upon a time, three monsters walk into a bar: a mummy, a Frankenstein, and a creature from the black lagoon. They sit down and the bartender says, “What can I getcha?” The mummy, his face wrapped in bandages, can’t speak, so he wails and points at the whiskey, and the bartender pours him a shot. The Frankenstein, he can’t speak, either, so he grunts and waves his hand toward the beer taps, and the bartender pours him a cold one. Finally, the creature from the black lagoon, he could never speak, so the bartender pours him a glass of white wine and says, “So, Miss, what part of Berwyn did you grow up in?”

BERWYN!

Thank you folks! And don’t forget: Vote Koz!

______________________________

Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of two story collections, Elephants in Our Bedroom (Dzanc Books, 2009) and Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions (Curbside Splendor, 2012), and a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  After many years at Bowling Green State University serving as Editor of Mid-American Review, he is now Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Missouri State University.

Photo Credit: Jacob S. Knabb

Adapted from Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions, by Michael Czyzniejewski. Copyright © 2012 by Michael Czyzniejewski. With the permission of the publisher, Curbside Splendor.

Below are the author’s questions about her own book, and one reader’s answers.

AMY MONTICELLO:  Writer Rebecca Barry, who kindly blurbed CQ, once commented that the book takes an interesting risk regarding alcohol–that it contributed to my parents’ divorce, yet helped keep them bound to one another. It was challenging to write about the world of my father’s bar without inadvertently glorifying or demonizing alcohol. How do you see this operating (or not) in the book?

MARISSA LANDRIGAN:  The risk Close Quarters takes with regard to alcohol is to tell the truth about alcohol straight on – to show us the damaging potential inherent in soaking your heartbreak in alcohol, while being willing to admit we all fall prey to its consolation. The cool comfort of a beer bottle, the sturdiness of a thick-bottomed glass full of a couple ice cubes and two fingers of something dark, the warm headache of red wine. These are familiar sensations to all of us, and CQ doesn’t shy away from letting us see both the good and the bad.

One of my favorite moments in the book, a boiling point of its consistent pressure-cooker tension, centers on the blackness that alcohol can bring out. Late in the essay “The Other Woman,” Linda Jackson,  Danny’s ex-mistress, corners him and Amy-as-narrator in the kitchen of Danny’s bar, sloppy and drunk. Her consumption is ever-present throughout the essay, like a lapping wave building into a subtle roar. You know someone will say something their regret in that kitchen.

It’s Linda. She takes Amy’s face in her hand and whispers, “It’s sad you know… I could’ve been your mother.”

In moments like this, dropped with excruciating precision, we hate alcohol. We sneer at the despicable things people do when they’re drunk: the small missteps and big hurts that comprise so much of the damage in the story of this family.

But you don’t let us off the hook that easily. Because everyone has a glass of something in their hands most of the time, even at their most sympathetic (or pathetic) moments. We see the tenderness between Amy-as-narrator and her father when they can finally share a drink, the way they are able to talk to each other openly in the way fathers and daughters always struggle to do, and we cheer for alcohol in those moments. We see the heartbroken nurse themselves with alcohol, and we remember how we all need that blankness sometimes.

In many ways, this is the struggle — and success — of any good work of creative nonfiction. To give us raw humans, with their flaws, and their demons, and their broken hearts, to allow us to hope endlessly for redemption that only sometimes comes.

It was another risk to try and tell some of the narratives from one or another parent’s point of view. While all the major events in the book have been verified by my parents, I do often imagine the details–facial expressions, clothing–and, occasionally, motivations. How ethical or reasonable is it for nonfiction writers to slip into any POV other than their own? What was accomplished by looking at stories through my parents’ perspectives? What might have been lost?

One of my favorite things about the book was how fair the issue of point of view felt. I got the sense that at some point, you looked over the developing collection and thought: Okay, I need three for Mom, three for Dad, and they all have to have some good and some bad.

This may only be my writer neuroses. Perhaps the essays in the collection shook out this way on their own, perfectly naturally. In fact, I wonder if the equitable distribution of who-gets-what-story here is a product of your intimacy with the subject matter. You know these characters so well. They aren’t characters to you—they are your family, and who better than a daughter to let us see the dark sides and the light?

Though many of the essays are told from within the head of your mother or father, it seems to me that they are all truly from your perch on the shoulders of your parents. These are the perspectives you want your parents to have, hope they had, wish they had had, or need for them to have had. One of my favorites being the linked sequential thoughts your father has at the end of “Looking Forward”:

“He can’t be done living at thirty-one years old, looking back on the past with the kind of nostalgia only the hopeless can have, and he can’t miss this boat because there won’t be another one, though that’s the thing he doesn’t know, not even as he kisses her right there in front of everyone, in front of her brothers, and Bobby, who applauds, not even as he pictures the ring he’s going to buy tomorrow from Ruby and Sons on Washington Avenue, and all the days of the rest of their lives.”

The flip in there towards “though that’s the thing he doesn’t know,” floored me. It’s so honest and so quiet a revelation of the presence of you, the author, the daughter-to-be, in the midst of this internal monologue of your father. I think those little clues you give us (and others that are meant to be more obvious) keep the imagined, hoped, forgiven perspectives of your parents ethical. You’re telling us, even if you wish you didn’t have to, that this is all your version of the story, the one you’ve been trying to piece together your whole life.

Though maybe I’m completely wrong, and this is always my biggest fear as a nonfiction writer whose work often includes my family, my friends, my relationships. What do your parents think of your take on things?

When I was growing up, my family’s nickname for me was Sarah Bernhardt. It was meant to capture my penchant for melodrama–the tantrums and obsessions, the staunch belief that a situation with which I was unhappy would never change, never allow for happiness in a new permutation. As a writer, I always fear crossing this line into melodrama, or sentimentality, especially when writing about love. Does the book successfully toe this line? What strategies can writers take to capture the high emotions of our lives without sounding melodramatic?

You know, we have really similar approaches to nonfiction, and I think neither of us is afraid to become weepy, or celebratory, or enraged, when the situation calls for it. Life is big and messy and over-the-top sometimes. I might be an unreliable reviewer here, because I like sentimentality and melodrama.

Well, I guess that’s not entirely true. There must be a particular kind of it I like, because I don’t watch reality TV or read Harlequin romance novels, and both of those are pretty melodramatic genres.

My friend and former graduate school professor Dean Bakopoulos gave a lecture about the role of melodrama in writing once, and I think he captures what I mean well:

“It’s true that melodrama almost always relies somewhat on old tropes and stereotypes, and can therefore feel flat and predictable or forced. But the origin of the word is an interesting one: it comes from the Greek melos (music) and French drame (drama). It can then, perhaps … be described as a moment when we allow the music of drama, the unfettered melodies of high-stakes internal conflict, to take over our work.”

He goes on to describe a number of powerful literary moments that would be flat and dull without their use of melodrama — Hamlet’s descent into madness, Madame Ravensky mourning the loss of The Cherry Orchard, Bruce Springsteen’s plaintive “whoa whoa whoa” in the middle of the song “Badlands,” (that’s a literary reference!). These moments, Dean says, don’t just rely on melodrama—they require it. Without what he calls “the lyricism of upheaval,” we would never truly understand the pain these characters are so desperately fighting their ways through.

Now all that being said, I think the book is still remarkably restrained when it needs to be. The whole of “Christmas 1984” is just a silent observation — practically an ethnography of your family at a moment in time. You give the reader the indication of your presence. You tell us Amy-as-narrator is listening to this tape in the present, with her mother and husband, you comment on the events, tone, soon-to-be reality of the recording. You tell us that you all need wine to listen, and that you are ‘clutching’ those glasses, which tells us this is a difficult endeavor, the remembering. But you don’t tell us how it feels to listen. You don’t openly mourn the loss you know is about to happen. You don’t tell us you or your mother has tears beading up in her eyes at the tenderness of the memory.

You play the tape and then you shut it off. And that’s just as killer. So I think it’s in making those conscious choices — when to show us Amy-as-narrator railing and floundering against what’s happening to the stability of her world, and when to shut it off — that is the only strategy for writing this kind of internally-driven emotional narrative.

In an age where marriage as a cultural institution is undergoing a makeover, become more inclusive and complex in its possible definitions, why do I care about my parents’ divorce? What could it possibly teach me about going forward in my generation’s own version of partnership?

As a child of roughly the same age, whose parents are still together (though not easily, and not without great hurt — more on that later), I grew up in a world where divorce was ever-present, but distant. Separate from my own experience. I had lots of friends whose parents were divorced, who showed me a variety of versions of that: little girls who, at age 10, swore they would never get married; thirteen-year-olds who dated seventeen-year-olds and smoked cigarettes behind the Mobile station after school; perfectly well-adjusted high-schoolers. Some of my classmates married young. Some haven’t yet.

What I mean is that divorce seemed to me to be the norm growing up. So much so that once, after overhearing a particularly messy fight between my parents, I told my sisters I wished they would just get divorced already. I was fully prepared — some days, eager — for that to happen.

What does it mean that your parents did? What does it mean that my parents didn’t? I think in some ways, the rise and fall of the nuclear family is a great gift our parents’ generation gave to us (right here, I am confirming the worst fears of every right-wing PAC). They showed us we don’t have to do anything. I love the moment in “The North Side,” where you recall your mother telling you she left your father “because she could.” There is wonderful autonomy in this story, in the wide open spaces of anything’s possible, for all its heartache. Perhaps the redemption available here is the lesson that we can build love our own way.

Of course, I am capable of saying that, having only known divorce as an abstraction. I’ve never felt the slow burn of wishing-it-could-be,  or known the chaos of two houses. Am I being sentimental here, wanting to find hope in a sad song? Maybe. I think of the last line of “Suburban”: “What else is there but the life we have?”

What do you think of nonfiction chapbooks? Since essayists and memoirists lack a novella-length form, could the chapbook stand in? If so, should nonfiction writers consider writing them as deliberately as fiction writers do novellas, or, as chapbooks have traditionally been used, as a way to publish excerpts from longer works-in-progress?

I love the idea of the chapbook, and I’d certainly like to see nonfiction writers use them — but only intentionally. (Okay, I am well aware I’m not actually in charge of that kind of an absolute over the genre. It would just be my preference.)

I think the arc of Close Quarters is so precise, so accurate. I can’t imagine it in a form much longer or more widespread — which is strange, considering what an enormous story it truly is. Thinking back to the question of point of view, it would certainly have been ethically easier to handle had you accounted for all of the available perspectives on each memory, which would have ballooned the manuscript much larger. But somehow this doesn’t strike me as that book.

This book is the story, as I said earlier, of your take on how your parents loved and left and love each other. If it had attempted to be an essay collection about modern marriage, a memoir of your childhood as a product of divorced parents, a cultural analysis of the 1990s suburban family, it would have been much longer, but it wouldn’t be Close Quarters. It would be something else.

I think the chapbook then, offers us nonfiction writers a length and a specific boundary in which to place our stories just so. Rather than treating is as a sort-of scrap bin for the remnants of a longer work that just don’t quite belong, we can do more (and maintain a better reputation for the genre) by seeing those remnants as an entity. Perhaps the book began as a series of castoffs — but it should ideally develop into a thing of its own. A quilt, I guess, so as not to drop that metaphor.

I think every writer is interested in what their readers thought while reading their book. And I don’t mean this in terms of like/dislike. I mean, what do my readers think about from their own lives? Their own families? Their own ideas of partnership? Their own relationships with their parents? What, if any, memories did the book dredge up for you, Marissa?

I should’ve known better than to trust a nonfiction writer not to do this. This is the most subversive part of this whole exercise, here, where you, the author, have turned the tables, have insisted that I, the reader, reveal something of myself. Like an offering. What will I give you in exchange for all your hurt you’ve shown me?

I suppose on the one hand, your parents’ story offers me something of a “what could have been.” All those nights I imagined my parents divorcing — how I would want to live with my father and would get to re-do the décor of my bedroom in a second house; whether my sisters and I would be on the same schedule; worried my mother would become more volatile, or less, worried she would disappear; worried my father wouldn’t eat right — this is like that reality played out voyeuristicly, like at a drive-in movie, just far away enough to know that it’s not really happening to you.

But I’m a nonfiction writer, too, so I have to be honest here. What I thought of most while reading Close Quarters was the end of my last relationship. I will talk about it in abstractions, for the sake of others involved. I’m still lost in the mourning period of it, in the certainty that we came thisclose to figuring it all out, to getting it right.

Even more than a year after the end of that relationship, I am still consumed with thinking about it. He’s lodged in my brain like a puzzle – like, actually, a Rubik’s cube. Something impossible to understand but impossible to put down. Maddening. Compelling.

And that seems to me to be the enduring question of Close Quarters: where and when and how, exactly, did it all go wrong?

The whole chapbook read, to me, like a great wondering, a giant what-if. The first moment I cried while reading was in “Looking Forward,” right here: “Watch closely. This is a night, one of many, when it could all go another way.”

This is in some ways an answer to all the questions before this one:

Why you are so compelled by the story of your parent’s divorce—because you know there’s something for you to learn in there.

How to avoid being too sentimental—by looking critically, by treating the story as if it were an artifact, a specimen to be dissected.

What you gain and lose by going into your parents’ minds and switching perspectives—their inner lives, the true parts from which you sense they may have tried to shield you.

What role does alcohol play and how can you honestly deal with it—maybe the presence of alcohol is what allowed everyone here to say all that they needed to for you to write this book; or maybe, it’s what will keep you from ever knowing if you got the whole story, right.

That’s what I think of when I read Close Quarters, that’s why it aches so bad in me. It’s a question and the answer to the question: Why it works or why it doesn’t? You will never know. You will never know. You can’t.

____________

Amy Monticello’s Close Quarters is available for order from Sweet Publications.

It was mid-afternoon, and the train she rode first wrenched then eased around a bend in the track before it pulled into Bahnhof Dietlikon at thirty-four past the hour, as ever.  Cliché though it may be, the fact is absolute: Swiss trains run on time.  The S8 originated in Pfäffikon, a village thirty kilometers south.  From Pfäffikon, its route sliced upward past the Oberland, through Horgen on the Zürichsee’s south bank, through Thalwil, Kilchberg.  Tiny towns in which tiny lives were led.  From Pfäffikon, the train made thirteen stops before it reached Dietlikon, the tiny town in which Anna’s tiny life was led.  Thus the ordinary fact of a train schedule modulated Anna’s daily plans.  Dietlikon’s bus didn’t run into the city. Taxicabs were expensive and impractical.  And while the Benz family owned a car, Anna didn’t have a license.

So her world was tightly circumscribed by the comings and goings of locomotives, by the willingness of her husband Bruno or Ursula, Bruno’s mother, to drive her places unreachable by bus, and by the engine of her own legs and what distance they could carry her, which was rarely as far as she’d have liked to go.

But Swiss trains really do run on time and Anna managed with minimal hassle.

And she liked riding the trains.  She found a lulling comfort in the way they rocked side to side as they moved forward.

Edith Hammer, another expatriate, once told Anna that there was only one reason the Swiss trains ever ran late.

“It’s when someone jumps in front of one.”

*

Doktor Hediger asked Anna if she had ever considered or attempted suicide.

“Yes,” Anna admitted to the first question.  And to the second, “Define attempt.”

*

It was a drizzly afternoon. Swiss weather is mutable, though rarely extreme in Kanton Zürich, and typically not in September.  And it was September for Anna’s sons had returned to school.  From the train station Anna walked slowly the culpable quarter mile up Dietlikon’s center street, lingering over shop windows, biding small bits of time.  Her book bag hung limp in her left hand.  She’d left her German dictionary at Archie’s and the workbooks themselves were thin.  The bag felt almost empty.  Like Anna.  All post-coital euphorics had evaporated, and she was left with the reins of ennui, slack in her hand. This wasn’t a feeling she was new to.  It was often like this, a languor that dragged and jaded.

And so the optometrist’s on-sale eyeglass display dulled her.  And she yawned at the Apotheke’s pyramid of homeopathic remedies.  And the reduced-price dishtowels and plaster-molded garden gnomes that overloaded the bins in front of the SPAR supermarket bored her nearly beyond repair.

Boredom, like the trains, carried Anna through her days.

It was almost 3 pm when Anna reached her sons’ school. Primarschule Dorf was located on the east side of the town square between the library and a three hundred year old house.  Town squares mean much to small towns. A month earlier on the Swiss national holiday, Dietlikon’s was thick with citizens eating sausages and dancing to the live music of a folk band. Women dressed in dirndls and men wore Tyrolean hats and they all swayed like drunkards under a sky made bright with fireworks. During army maneuvers, soldiers parked supply trucks in sloppy diagonals next to the square’s central fountain which, on sweltering, summer days, would be filled with splashing, naked children whose mothers sat on nearby benches reading books or eating yogurt.  But that day the traffic in the square was thin.  Three women chatted in front of the library.  One pushed a stroller, another held a leash at the end of which panted a German shepherd, and a final one simply stood with empty hands. They were mothers waiting on their children. They were younger than Anna by a factor of ten years. They were milky and buoyant in places where Anna felt curdled and sunken.  They wore upon their faces, Anna thought, a luminous ease of being, a relaxed comportment, a native glow.  It was true.  Anna rarely felt at ease inside her skin. I am tight faced and thirty-seven years, Anna thought. I am the sum of all my twitches. One mother tossed her a wave and a genuine, if perfunctory smile.

Despite Doktor Hediger’s suggestion that she enroll in classes, Anna did know an elementary level of German. She could get around. But hers was a German remarkable only in how badly it was cultivated and by the Herculean effort she had to summon in order to speak it.  For nine years, though, she’d managed with rudimentary competence. Anna had purchased stamps from the woman at the post office, consulted in semi-specifics with pediatricians and veterinarians, described haircuts to effete Swiss stylists, haggled prices at flea markets, made brief chit-chat with neighbors, and indulged a pair of persistent though affable Zeugen Jehovas who, each month, arrived on her doorstep with a German-language copy of The Watchtower to give to her. But Anna’s grasp on grammar and vocabulary were weak, her fluency was clotted and idioms and proper syntax escaped her completely.  Occurring monthly, at least, were dozens of instances into which she commended a task into Bruno’s hands. It was he who dealt with local bureaucracy, he who paid the insurance, the taxes, the house note.  It was he who every year filed the paperwork for Anna’s residency permit. And it was Bruno who handled all the family’s finances, for he was employed as a mid-level management banker at Credit Suisse.  Anna didn’t even have a checkbook.  Anna was kept.

*

Doktor Hediger suggested she take a more active role in family matters.

“I should,” Anna said.  “I really should.”  She wasn’t even sure she knew exactly what Bruno did at work.

*

Anna had genuine reason and probable cause to approach the mothers, join them, share their small talk. Two of them she knew by sight and one by name, Claudia Zwygaert. Her daughter was in Charles’ class at school.

Anna didn’t join them.

*

By way of explanation, Anna offered the following self-summary:  I am shy and cannot talk to strangers.

Doktor Hediger sympathized.  “It’s difficult for foreigners to make Swiss friends.”

The problem runs deeper than a lack of command of German, itself problem enough. Switzerland is an insular country, sealed at its boundaries, bordered by a thick, beige line, and neutral by choice for two centuries.  It is non-belligerent and non-committal. With its left hand it reaches out to refugees and seekers of asylum. With its right, it snatches freshly laundered monies and Nazi gold.

And like the landscape upon which they’ve settled, the Swiss themselves are closed at their edges.  They tend naturally toward isolation. They neither trust nor talk to strangers, conspiring to keep them at a distance by appointing not one, two, or three, but four whole national languages. Switzerland’s official name is in yet a fifth: Confoederatio Helvetica.

It’s German, though, that most Swiss speak, and it is German that’s spoken exclusively in Zürich.

But it’s not precisely German that they speak.

Written German in Switzerland is standard schoolbook Hochdeutsch.  But the Swiss speak Schwyzerdütsch, which is neither standard nor schoolbook. There is no set orthography. There is no pronunciation key. There is no agreed-upon vocabulary. And the language itself leaps from the back of the throat like an infection, a diseased tonsil trying to escape. This is only a mild exaggeration. To the non-Swiss ear it sounds as if the speaker is construing made-up words from the oddest rhythms and the queerest clipped consonants and the most perturbing arrangement of gaping, rangy vowels. It is impervious to all outside attempts to learn it for every word is shibboleth.

Anna spoke the barest minimum of Schwyzerdütsch.

*

Anna didn’t join them. Instead, she scuffed the sole of a brown clog against the sidewalk’s curb. She fiddled with her hair and pretended to watch an invisible bird flying overhead.

It is hard to love a man outside his native tongue.

And yet, it was the Swiss one Anna married.

The school bell rang and children spilled from the building and into the courtyard. Anna noticed Victor first, roughhousing with two friends. Charles followed close behind, caught in the fat middle of a throng of jabbering children.  He ran to Anna when he spotted her, hugged her and began prattling about his day without Anna even asking.  Victor lingered with his pals and dragged his feet.  This was Victor being Victor—moderately aloof, standoffish. Anna indulged his reticence and settled on simply mussing his hair.  Victor grimaced.

As they walked towards the house, Anna experienced her first pangs of guilt.  Pinpricks of guilt really, and non-debilitating. This level of indifference was fairly new to her pathology.  It rendered her smug but nervous.

The Benzes lived near Primarschule Dorf. Their house lay no more than one hundred meters away and would be visible from the schoolyard but for the timber-framed parish hall of the village church, which stood exactly between the two.  Anna did not usually walk her children home. Most of the time, in fact, she didn’t. She waited that day because she wanted to.  She waited that day because she still felt Archie’s hands on her breasts and a moderate self-reproach seemed to be in order.

They moved to Switzerland in June of ninety-eight. Anna was pregnant. Any apprehension she harbored regarding the move, any discouragement or fear she possessed, she hid it inside one of her heart’s thousand chambers where it would be difficult to rediscover, and if it shouted out for attention, impossible to hear. Who, after all, wouldn’t snatch the chance to live in Europe were it offered?  Anna spent much of her childhood dreaming of the elsewheres her men would one day take her to.  In those dreams she was always nonresistant, limp and submissive.  She gave the men entire charge.  And, as it turned out, that was what happened: Bruno took charge.  He’d worked for Credit Suisse for years. They wondered would he take a Zürich post. And so they packed their household and they moved.  Anna was married and pregnant and more or less in love. That was enough. This will be enough, she thought.

Bruno argued a good case.  Living in Dietlikon would merit their child—their children—a wholesome, unbounded childhood, safe and stable.  Anna thought it would be more than enough.  And when it did happen (rarely in those first months) that she grew lonesome or wistful for people, things, or places she never dreamed she would miss, she consoled herself with visions of the child that grew inside: a ruddish-cheeked Heinz to call her Muti, or her very own milk-fed Heidi with blond and braided hair. And Bruno and Anna were, more or less, in love.

*

The qualification ‘more or less’ troubled Doktor Hediger.

Anna explained. “Is that not always the case?  Given any two people in a relationship, one will always love more, the other less.  Right?”

*

At eight, Victor was Anna’s eldest child.  Charles was six. They were indeed the ruddish-toned and milk-fed children Anna had imagined.  They were ash-blond and hazel-eyed.  They were all boy, rowdy, absolutely brothers, and without a doubt the sons of the man Anna had married.

*

“But you had more children, yes?  It must not have been entirely terrible.”

Anna gave her that.  She told Doktor Hediger that it hadn’t been terrible at all.  Not always.  Not everything had not always been terrible.  Anna doubled her negatives, tripled them.  Ten months earlier Anna had given birth to a black-haired, bisque-skinned daughter whom she named Polly Jean.

*

And so they were the Benz family and they lived at Rosenweg 1, in the town of Dietlikon, in the district of Bulach, in the canton of Zürich.  The Benz Family: Bruno, Victor, Charles, Polly, Anna.  Theirs was a plain and mostly temperate household on Rosenweg—Rose Lane—a private street that cul-de-sac-ed just in front of their house, which lay at the foot of a slow, sloping hill that crested a half-kilometer behind their property and leveled off at the base of the Dietlikon woods.

Anna lived on a dead end, last exit road.

But their house was nice and their yard was larger than nearly all the other ones around them.  There were farmhouses to their immediate south, whose properties abutted fields of corn, sunflower, and rapeseed.  Eight fully mature Apfelbäume grew in their side yard and in August when the trees were pregnant with ripe, heavy apples, fruit tumbled from the branches to the ground in a thump-tha-thump-thump rhythm that was nearly consistent with light rainfall.  They had raspberry bushes and a strawberry patch and red currants and black currants both. And while the vegetable garden in the side yard had for nine years been left untended, the Benzes had, behind a thigh high picket fence in front of their property, a spate of rose bushes, blooms of every shade. Everything comes up roses on Rosenweg. Sometimes Anna thought this to herself.

Victor and Charles barreled through the front door. They were greeted before they even passed the boot room by a sour-faced Ursula who pressed her finger to her lips.

“Stille!” Ursula hissed. “Polly schlaft.”

Polly Jean was in the middle of her nap. Anna was always grateful for Ursula’s help.  But Ursula, though usually never outright unkind to Anna, still treated her as a foreign object, a means to the end of her son’s happiness, the vessel by which her grandchildren—whom she deeply loved—were carried into the world.  Whatever help Ursula offered was for the children’s sake, not Anna’s. She had been a high school English teacher for thirty years. Her English was stilted but fluent and she conceded to speak it whenever Anna was in the room, which sometimes Bruno didn’t even do. Ursula shooed her grandsons into the kitchen for a snack.

“I’m going to take a shower.” Anna said.  Ursula raised an eyebrow but then lowered it as she followed Victor and Charles into the kitchen.  It was no concern of hers. Anna took a towel from the linen closet and locked the bathroom door behind her.

She needed the shower.  She smelled like sex.

*

“What can’t you live without?”

This, Anna asked Archie as they shared, incautiously, a cigarette in bed.  Anna never smoked.  She was wrapped in a top sheet.  It was Friday.

“Whiskey and women,” Archie said. “In that order.”

Archie was, quite literally, a whiskey man. He stocked it, stacked it, and sold it in a shop he owned with his brother, Glenn.

He laughed in an up-for-interpretation way.  They were new lovers, fresh lovers, ganz neue Geliebten.  Nearly virgin to each other, they still had reason to touch. Archie was ten years older than Anna, but his brown-red curls had not yet begun to thin and his body was taut.  Anna responded to his laughter with laughter of her own: the sad, empty laughter of knowing that the newness, nice as it was, wouldn’t last.  Newness never does. Novelty’s a cloth that wears thin at an alarming rate.  So Anna would enjoy it prior to its tattering. Because tatter, it surely would.

*

“If,” Doktor Hediger asked, “you are miserable, then why not leave?”

Anna spoke without reflection.  “I have Swiss children.  They need their father.  We are married.  And I’m not really miserable.”  Then she added, “He wouldn’t accept a divorce.”

“You have asked him.” This wasn’t a question.

Anna had not outright asked Bruno for a divorce, though she had, in her most affected and despondent moments, hinted around the possibility.  What would you do if I went away, she’d ask.  What if I went away and never came back?  She would pose these questions in a light and cheerful voice.

Bruno would smirk.  I know you’ll never leave because you need me.

Anna couldn’t deny this.  She did need him.  It was true.

And really Anna had no plans to leave. How would we split the children?, she wondered, as if the children were a cord of wood and the divorce, an axe.

“Anna,” Doktor Hediger asked, “is there someone else?  Has there ever been anyone else?”

*

That Friday there was time enough for Archie and Anna to share a small meal of fruit and cheese.  There was also time for them to set the plates and the mismatched glasses aside, time enough to pull away the sheet that covered her breasts, and time enough to fuck once more.  The sex was clumsy and aggressive.  They were drunk on the doing of each other.  It was good.  It gave Anna hope.

But all things move toward an end.

Later that night, after she had put the children to bed and washed the stack of dinner plates and scoured the sink to the impeccable shine that Bruno demanded, Anna opened her workbooks with the intention of at least going through the motions of studying.  Bruno was locked in his office.  Separate solitudes were not an unusual arrangement between them and Bruno retreated to his office most nights. Left alone, Anna would either read or watch television or put on a jacket and take an evening walk up the hill behind the house.

The house, when she was left to herself inside of it, often took on a pall of unbearable, catatonic stillness. Has it always been like this?  Anna would be lying if she’d said it had.  They’d had good times, Bruno and she. It would be unfair to deny it.  And even if he barely tolerated what he called her ‘melancholic huffs,’ or her ‘sullen temperaments,’ Bruno too, if pressed, would have admitted a love and fondness for Anna that, while often displaced by his frustration, held an irrefutable honor in his heart.

*

It was just the previous Monday that Anna steeled and sent herself to school for the first time since college.  The class at the Migrosklubschule was called “German for Advanced Beginners.”  This was the course intended for anyone pre-equipped with a minor to moderate knowledge of the language, but who lacked a rigorous understanding of grammar and a nuanced usage of syntax.

Migros is the name of the largest chain of supermarkets in Switzerland and Switzerland’s biggest employer. More people work for Migros than any Swiss bank worldwide. But the corporation has interests other than grocery stores. There are Migros-owned bookshops, Migros-owned gas stations, Migros-owned electronics outlets, sports stores, furniture dealers, menswear shops, public golf courses, and currency exchanges.  Migros also governs a franchise of adult education centers, or in German, Klubschule. There isn’t a Swiss city of significant population where at least one Migrosklubschule doesn’t exist. And it’s not just language classes they offer. You can study most anything at the Migrosklubschule: cooking, sewing, drawing, singing. You can learn to play an instrument or how to read the future with Tarot cards.  You can even learn how to interpret dreams.

*

Doktor Hediger, in an early session, asked that Anna bring a copy of a recent dream.  Anna did: I am very sick. I beg Bruno to help me but he doesn’t. Someone films a movie in another room, but I’m not in it.  A dozen teenage girls kill themselves for the camera.  I don’t know what to do so I do nothing.

Doktor Hediger arrived at an immediate interpretation. “It’s a sign of stagnancy.  The movie’s being made and you’re not in it.  This is why the girls do not survive. The girls are you. You are the girls. You do not survive. You are ill with inaction, a patron sitting passively in a dark theater.”

Anna well knew how passive she could be.

*

The hub from which most of Anna’s psychology radiated was her assailing tendency towards passivity.  It was a trait she’d never bothered to question or revise which, ironically, seemed to be its proof.  Anna was a swinging door, a body gone limp in the arms of another body carrying it.  An oarless canoe in a river.  Is it as malignant as that?  Yes, it sometimes seemed.  Volition was not Anna’s strong suit.

The move to Switzerland was entirely Bruno’s doing and Anna didn’t oppose it.  She went where he said she would go. Why wouldn’t she?  Is this not how married people behave?  As for the decision to have children, it wasn’t a decision at all.  Anna hadn’t longed to be a mother. It was nothing she yearned for in the way that many women do—in fact, a measure of anxiety and dread accompanied the very thought of motherhood.  You want me to be responsible for another person?  A tiny, helpless, needy person?  But Anna got pregnant.  And then again, and then again.  It seemed to just happen. She didn’t say let’s do this and she didn’t say let’s not.  Anna didn’t say anything at all.

But it wasn’t as terrible as she’d feared and for the most part and for most of the time, Anna was glad to be someone’s mother. Anna loved her children. She loved all her children.

Anna’s passivity wasn’t without merit, without use.  It made for relative peace at Rosenweg 1.  Allowing Bruno to make decisions on her behalf absolved her of responsibility.  She didn’t need to think. She followed along.  She rode a bus that someone else drove.  Order upon order.  Rule upon rule.  Where the wind blew, she went. This was her natural inclination.  And like playing tennis or sewing, or speaking a foreign language, it grew even easier with practice.

*

“What’s the difference between passivity and neutrality?”

“Passivity is deference.  To be passive is to relinquish your will.  Neutrality is nonpartisan.  The Swiss are neutral, not passive.  We do not choose a side. We are scales in perfect balance.” Doktor Hediger spoke with something that might have been pride in her voice.

“Not choosing.  Isn’t that still a choice?”

Doktor Hediger nodded deliberately, considering the implication.

*

Anna sat at the dining table for almost a half hour looking at her German notes before Bruno emerged from his office like a marmot from a burrow.  He came to the table, yawned and rubbed his eyes.  Anna saw their sons in that gesture. “How is your class?” Bruno asked.  Anna couldn’t recall the last time Bruno asked after her.  She surged with a momentary affection for him and reached around his waist with her arms and tried to draw him closer into her. But Bruno—impervious or obstinate—didn’t allow his body to respond in kind. Instead, he reached down and rifled through her papers. Anna let fall her arms.  Bruno picked up a page of exercises and gleaned it for accuracy.  “Du hast hier einen Fehler,” he said in a voice he intended to be helpful, but one that Anna interpreted as condescending. She had made a mistake. “This verb goes at the end,” Bruno said.  He was right. In both the future and the past tense, the action comes at the end. It is only in the present tense that the verb is joined to the noun that enacts it.  Bruno returned her work absently.  “I’m going to bed.”  He didn’t bend to kiss her. Bruno shut the bedroom door behind him and went to sleep.

Anna lost all interest in her exercises.

She checked the wall clock. It was well after eleven. She wasn’t tired.

*

“A dream is a psychic statement,” Doktor Hediger explained. “The more frightening the dream, the more pressing the need to look at that part of yourself. The purpose of a nightmare isn’t destruction. It simply fulfills its compulsory task in a highly unpleasant manner.”

And then she added, “The less attention you pay, the more terrifying the nightmares become.”

“And if you ignore them?”

Doktor Hediger’s usually relaxed face took on a cast of gravity. “Psyche will be heard. She demands it. And there are other, more threatening ways of capturing your attention.”

Anna didn’t ask her what those were.

*

That late in the evening, most of the houses on Rosenweg were entirely dark, their inhabitants already asleep. It took years for Anna to become habituated to this, how Switzerland, machine that it is, powered down at night. Shops closed. People slept when they were meant to.  In the States if you couldn’t or didn’t want to sleep, you could always shop at a twenty-four hour supermarket, wash clothes at a twenty-four hour Laundromat, eat pie and drink coffee at twenty-four hour diner. The television networks ran viewable programming the entire night. So much never shut off. Lights always burned somewhere.  It was an insomniac’s solace.

*

Doktor Hediger asked about Anna’s insomnia. How long had she suffered, how it presented. How she curbed it.
Anna had no real answer and instead replied, “Sleep won’t solve my situation.” Even to Anna’s ears it sounded canned.

*

Anna stepped outside into the cool darkness.  The porch lamp, sensitive to motion, flickered on.  Anna was restless and fidgety. From Rosenweg 1, she crossed the street to the playground at the Kirchegemeindehaus. In the playground she took a seat on a wooden swing intended for very young children.  Perhaps, she thought, I don’t need a walk.  Perhaps I simply need fresh air.  

Even Anna would admit that it was entirely too often she prowled Dietlikon’s streets in the dark hours. In her second month of living in Switzerland, Bruno awoke in middle of the night to find her gone.  She was nowhere in the house, neither basement nor attic.  He ran outside calling her name but she didn’t answer back.  He searched for less than five minutes before calling the Polizei to tell them that his pregnant wife had either run away, been kidnapped, or had vanished like an apparition into the thinnest of thin air. By the time Anna returned from her walk, the police were at the house.  Bruno threw his arms around her and thanked aloud the god he didn’t believe in.   Everything was fine.  Anna was safe.

But when Anna and Bruno were alone behind Rosenweg 1’s locked doors, Bruno dug his fingers into Anna’s shoulders and shook her as he yelled. “Who are you fucking, Anna? Who were you with?” No one, Bruno. He was out of control. He cursed and spat. He called her a cunt and a whore. “Whose cock was in your mouth tonight?” Nobody’s, Bruno. I swear it. And it was true. Anna and Bruno were in a version of love and Anna had not been roaming the streets to meet a paramour, but to settle herself into sleepiness.  It took almost half an hour, but Bruno finally settled down and came to believe her. Or said he did.

A neighbor’s cat hissed and sputtered at what was likely a hedgehog.  Three minutes later, the quarter hour toll of the church bell rang.  The bells and their clockwork throb.  What a comfort, Anna thought. They are always on time.  Like the trains.

*

When she presented for the first of her German classes, Anna was empty of expectation.  She was not fully indifferent to first-day-of-school jitters, even at her age.  At breakfast she told her sons that she was starting school.  Charles sweetly offered his pencil box, which she took, assuring him that she’d return it unharmed by day’s end.  Charles was like that.  Victor was silent; he had no opinion. Ursula made a show of snapping out a dishtowel.

The Deutschkurs Intensiv met mornings, five days a week. The first day of class, Anna arrived six minutes late and knocked into a woman with her book bag as she tried to wedge past her to take the last seat at the table. It was a small class, fifteen students of various ages and nationalities and no two were in Switzerland for the same reason.  The teacher was a tall man named Ivan, whose first command was that they go around the table and introduce themselves, using whatever German they already knew.

A blond woman with heavy-lidded eyes and a darting gaze began.  “I am French,” she said, and that was all.  Another woman, younger than the first though neither as blond nor as slight, told the class that she came from Moscow, that she loved music and hated dogs.  A woman Anna’s own age introduced herself and told everyone she came from Canada with her children and her husband who was the goalie for Zürich’s hockey team.  She’d only been in Switzerland two months. She apologized for her ham-fisted German but she’d just finished the basic class and there was no place for her but here.  It didn’t really matter. Everyone’s German was unmistakably foreign, littered with mistakes.  Something about the woman’s saccharine deference grated Anna.  She wasn’t sure which bothered her more, how easily this woman self-censured, or how gently she presented her own belittling.

Then the man sitting next to Mary leaned forward and spoke.  His accent, even over broken German, was distinctly Scottish.  Glaswegian, Anna would learn. His name was Archie Sutherland.  As he talked, his eyes scanned the perimeter of the table.  By the time his introduction was over, he’d locked his gaze on Anna, who sat across the room at an angle from him.  He ended with a small, slight wink, intended for Anna alone. She blushed beneath her clothes.

When Anna introduced herself, she flashed a sincere-seeming smile and spoke the words she’d practiced in her head.  Ich bin Anna.  Ich bin in Switzerland für almost nine years.  Mein Mann ist a banker.  Ich habe three children. Ich bin from America. Ich bin, ich bin, ich bin.  When she couldn’t lay her tongue to the German word, she substituted an English one.  Anna hated introducing herself.

Anna looked to Archie.  She could not help it.  His hands seemed strong even from the distance of an entire room.

While standing in line in the cafeteria during their first coffee break, Archie leaned in towards Anna’s ear, and in a whisper, he flat-out propositioned her.

During their second coffee break, Anna flat-out accepted.

In the last third of class, Ivan reviewed a list of German prepositions: under, against, on top of, from behind.

Afterwards, Anna phoned Ursula and told her there were errands she needed to run in the city and wouldn’t be back until three.

And that is how the affair between Anna Benz and Archie Sutherland began.  And that is how it continued.  After Monday’s, Tuesday’s, and Wednesday’s class they rode the number 10 tram from Sternen Oerlikon, where the streets ray out from an interior middle like a five point star, to Central, a stop at the north end of the Niederdorf.  From there it was a five-minute walk to Archie’s flat.  What followed was hour and a half of uninhibited sex.

On Thursday and Friday, they skipped the class altogether.

*

Anna twirled herself in the swing, winching the chains so that they lifted her higher off the ground than she was to begin with.  Then she pulled up her feet and let herself spin down.  She accomplished this multiple times unto dizziness.

Eventually the church bells rang their midnight toll. A low, wormish feeling of a reckoning approached her. Only in the present tense is the subject married to its verb. The action—all action, past and future—comes at the end. At the very end, when there is nothing left to do but act.

Even so, Anna was back inside the house before the chime of the twelfth bell.

_____________________

Jill Alexander Essbaum is the author of several collections of poetry including Harlot, Necropolis, and most recently, the single poem chapbook The Devastation.  Her poems have appeared in various journals including Image, Gulf Coast, Poetry, The Christian Century, and many others.  She teaches in the UCR-Palm Desert Low Residency MFA program. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Interview

Having seen Aldrin speak at a convention many years ago, I was fascinated by the premise. At the time, Aldrin filled the auditorium of San Francisco’s Moscone Center–an impressive accomplishment for anyone, much less a man whose star first rose in 1969, when his Apollo 11 lunar mission tattooed the left arm of history. Aldrin’s speech started strong but eventually splintered into rivulets of tangents that drew him far beyond the gravitational pull of his prefatory remarks. Expecting something energizing and focused, I walked away disappointed.

The very premise of the interview intrigued me. How would Aldrin conduct himself under such unusual circumstances? Would he ramble? Would he participate as a formal interviewer or as part of a conversation?

I was thrilled to discover the two falling into a convivial and thought-provoking dialogue that shines ample light over the men’s respective areas of expertise. The interview flows easily, guided by Interview magazine’s music editor Dimitri Ehrlich, as the men discuss space travel, the perils of divorce (Aldrin offers almost immediately that he is in the middle of a divorce proceeding at the time of the interview) and of course, music.

White is refreshingly deferential, asking thoughtful questions and providing candid and gracious answers to Aldrin’s questions concerning the breakup of The White Stripes and why White didn’t rank higher on Rolling Stone magazine’s Top 100 Guitarists of all time (White was listed at number 17). When Aldrin veers back into the future of space travel, White genially follows along, never pushing his own image or agenda onto the stage they share. Given that White recently released his most stunning record to date, Blunderbuss, it is pleasantly surprising to see him turn off the wheels self-promotion, instead yielding the spotlight to Buzz.

Jack White fans will find relief in the discussion of Blunderbuss appearing in the feature’s introduction, but even non-fans will dig the men’s banter concerning the meaning of the number three, and forty years on, what the moon feels like to Buzz.

Click here to read the full interview.

For starters, how about some delicious Avengers cake pops? Forget that they look like heads on pikes. They’re cute heads on pikes. (Via Vulture.)

CBS recently ran a profile of Joss Whedon in which Whedon discusses, along with The Avengers, his upcoming adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, shot entirely at his Santa Monica house.

Mashable has posted “8 Hilarious Avengers Parodies” for your entertainment. Watch. Learn. Make your own.

Here’s an Avengers promotional clip featuring a fight scene between Iron Man and Thor with commentary by Joss Whedon. (Via The Hollywood Reporter.)

IMDB has an original video interview with Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans for your perusal. What were the Chrises’ first non-animated films they’d ever watched? What are the Chrises’ favorite movie quotes? How did they differentiate between the two Chrises on set? Just how many Chrises does it take to make The Avengers, anyway? Wonder no more.

Take Escapist Magazine’s “What Avenger Are You?” quiz.

Read about that one time the projectionist deleted the entire Avengers film at a screening for critics. To quote Roger Ebert’s tweet on the matter, “Oops!” (Via Slate.)

See Danny Pudi, Abed on Community, pose with Thor’s hammer on his recent tour of Marvel Comics.

Follow Drunk Hulk on Twitter.

Preview The Avenger’s soundtrack featuring the brand spankin’ new Soundgarden single “Live to Rise.” You’ll have to tweet about it first to “unlock” the privilege of giving it a listen.

You know, a few stories in, I wasn’t completely sold on the title—Aerogrammes. But after I finished the book, it dawned on me how brilliant it was—the characters, who are primarily of second-generation Indians in America, all have a story that they believe in, cling to, that makes them feel good, and the challenge is excepting the story they are actually living. There is often a sort of glossed-over, stereotypical feel to how each culture–American and Indian–perceives the other. Aerogrammes were popular in the United States in the 1940s, which colors them with a feeling of an innocent, simpler reality. They also convey a feeling of exotic intrigue because they were mostly used for airmail (and particularly because you prefer the British spelling). How did aerogrammes become such an important symbol in your work?

When I was first tossing around title ideas with my editor and agent, they suggested that people might not know what the word aerogramme means.  Oddly that never even occurred to me; aerogrammes were such a memorable part of my youth. My uncle—a big guy with a big personality—would write in this fairy-sized handwriting so as to fit in all his news; he wouldn’t waste a millimeter of space.  Those letters had an aura about them of both intimacy and distance, which I think is a tension that animates most of my stories.

I’m intrigued by all the associations you’ve drawn from the title, especially that airbrushing aspect—how we imagine ourselves, and how we want others to imagine us.  That was on my mind as I was mulling over the title.  I also think of an aerogramme as an attempt at connection across a gap that will never be closed completely, and in that way, the title seemed thematically capable of carrying the whole collection.

Were there any stories that were particularly more difficult to write in, either from voice or subject matter or something else? Do they all come from the same span of writing or a particular time in your life?

The first story—”Lion & Panther in London”—was the toughest in that I’d never grappled with history before.  It was exciting at first to come across a whole world in which I could immerse myself, and to learn the grammar of Indian wrestling.  But I was also tied to the lives of two real people who don’t appear all that much in history books and yet who continue to exist in the memories of many Punjabi folk.  (Their names were Gama the Great and Imam, two national champions from Punjab.)  I kept trying to render the wrestlers as peripheral characters, perhaps out of respect or intimidation or both, before I realized that I’d excised most of what had interested me in the first place: the wrestlers.  So when I refocused the story on the personal relationship between those two wrestlers, who were also brothers, the heart of the story pulled into focus.

I was taken by the precision in the language in the stories—not frilly, not overly sentimental, but clearly packing a punch. Can we talk about the evolution of your writing style—was it influenced by studying at Columbia, and/or are there certain authors/mentors to whom you respond? Is English your primary language, or do you also speak Hindi? [or another Indian language—I'm told there are hundreds of dialects!] I’m always fascinated by how writers discover their lexicon—

I guess my trajectory, style-wise, is similar to many a writing student’s in that for a long time I was very devotedly and relentlessly mimicking other people.  At Columbia I was introduced to writers I’d never come across before, like Lydia Davis, Italo Svevo, Ben Okri, Deborah Eisenberg, George Saunders.  Even the writers I’d known were somehow made new to me, like Virginia Woolf and Henry James.  All of them, in various ways, exploded my notions of what a story or an essay could be, and so shape-shifting was inevitable and exciting and, I think, necessary to my development.

But just as important as those books were my teachers (like Nathan Englander and Sam Lipsyte) as well as my peers, and how their responses guided me towards seeing what was worth pursuing in my own work.  I still tend to slip into other voices from time to time, depending on the demands of the story.  I’m aware that I have a particular voice I can’t shake, no more than I can really describe or analyze it, but I’m also aware that I can slant it in different ways, according to the story I’m trying to tell.

As to my language capabilities, I’m sort of proficient in Malayalam, my parents’ first language.  I can speak and understand what I call Kitchen Malayalam, but ask me to swear or share a political opinion, and I got nothin.

That’s too bad! It’s always useful to know swear words in as many languages as possible. Of course, since we’re talking about language, I’m going to segue-way into the dreaded identity question. Do you feel there’s a conscious effort to market you as an Indian writer, or specifically an Indian woman writer, a la a Jhumpa Lahiri or Arundhati Roy? How would you like readers to approach your work?

That depends on who’s doing the reviewing/interviewing.  I don’t think that my publisher was waving the Indian Woman Flag, but there were other times when I was very clearly presented that way.  I had a lovely interview with an Italian newspaper, which ran my interview alongside a giant photo of Aishwarya Rai (super-famous Bollywood actress) whirling around in a still from the movie Mistress of Spices.  It certainly caught the attention in a way that my book jacket would not have.  Some moments like that are funny, and sometimes they’re not.  I don’t dwell heavily on the subject as it’s often outside of my control, but I don’t totally ignore it either because I think it’s important, as a minority and as a woman, to know how I’m being represented or perceived.

As to the other question, I’m aware that every reader, including myself, brings her preconceived notions to whatever she’s reading.  None of us live in a vacuum.  But my ideal reader would be one who approaches my work with a willingness to let those notions be complicated or altered by what they’re about to read.

I know you just spent 8 months in India on a Fullbright fellowship. What was your exposure to Indian literary culture there? Are there different taboos for say, an Indian writer working in India than one who is based in the U.S.? Roy, of course, received a lot of acclaim (and criticism) for focusing on “love laws” (including caste and incest) in The God of Small Things–in fact, she even faced an obscenity trial for writing about Christian and Hindu lovers. As an Indian and/or American writer, is there anything that might be difficult for you to explore in your work?

There has indeed been loud criticism of Indians abroad attempting to represent the India they left behind.  Are they writing of mangoes and nasty toilets simply to appease or affirm the fascinations of a Western audience?  To me, good writing is good writing, and I don’t care much who the audience was meant to be.  As a reader, if I feel I’m being given a lengthy cultural lesson, I tend to lose interest in the story, but excess didacticism is a flaw I’d dislike in anyone’s writing, be they an Indian or a New Yorker or a Martian.

There’s another (and to me, more interesting) side to the criticism, and that is the question of publishing itself.  Are Indian authors being given the same attention and opportunity as their expat counterparts?  I can’t really say.  From my meager experience in talking with an Indian literary agent, homegrown authors are emerging and taking advantage of the Indian reading public, like Amish Tripathi, author of the wildly successful Shiva Trilogy.  There are also some excellent venues for publishing creative work, like Tehelka, and local literary festivals that try to steer the spotlight toward more marginalized writers.  So perhaps the perceived center is shifting in some ways, so long as Indian literary agents and Indian publishing venues continue to grow.

As to your other question, I don’t feel beholden to any cultural taboos.  The only things I actively avoid are the painful particulars of other people’s lives, people who are close to me and who might recognize themselves and feel exposed by my work.  I did enough of that in college.  As a film major, I mostly made personal documentaries featuring various family members and it wasn’t until their faces were projected on that giant theater screen, in front of hundreds of my peers, that I realized a sense of responsibility in bearing someone else’s story.  I suppose I do draw from life (and distort it) at times, quite often in fact, but there’s a gut feeling I can’t ignore when I’ve tampered with something that I know should remain off-limits to me.

So what are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel that involves wild elephants who tangle with humans.  That’s all I know for now!

You can find out more about Aerogrammes, Atlas of the Unknowns, and Tania James at her website.

PARTY THIS FRIDAY WITH BLACK OAK ARKANSAS!!!

Black Oak Arkansas (“BOA”) was more southern than Skynyrd, raunchier than Blackfoot and raised more hell than Molly Hatchet.   BOA was backseat sex with white-haired witches; Jesus and the Devil and Arkansas shine; triple-axe attacks of hillbilly rock;  and the “scary basso profundo growls and testosterone-fueled antics of lead vocalist/showman James ‘Big Jim Dandy’ Mangrum.”

From All-Music Guide:

“The band toured extensively, building a reputation as a raw, incendiary live act that made up for occasional musical deficiencies with energy and the explicit sexuality of Mangrum, who flaunted his body at every opportunity and became known for such antics as miming sex with the washboard he used for musical accompaniment.”

When I was about seven I went through a spell where I listened to Black Oak’s “Hot ‘N Nasty” about thirty-nine times a day.  Something about the song mesmerized me — the funky drummer intro, limber and lazy wank of greasy guitars and bump and grind bass, and most of all that rapsy cackle of the captivating frontman, Jim “Dandy” Mangrum.

Well-lll they caw meh / Hot ‘n nas-tehhh

Yeaahhh they caw meh / UNH – Mista fan-say

I stared back at the sign through my rearview mirror.

FRIDAY NITE

BLACK OAK

 LIVE!!!

Problem was, it was the Monday afternoon after.

Soon as I got home, I went to the bar’s website and saw pictures of the show, including a happy and healthy Jim Dandy with his arm around a smokin’ hot blonde just outside the club’s back door.  With a few clicks, I found the blonde’s contact, sent her an email and soon enough was on the phone with Mr. Hot ‘N Nasty himself.

Hey man, this is TNB Music, calling for an interview.  Is this an all right time?

Never a bad time for Jim Dandy, brother.

Growing up, I went to a Pentecostal church and an evangelist came and did the backmasking anti-rock and roll thing.  He played When Electricity Came to Arkansas backwards and said you were calling Satan.   Man, I’ve been wanting to ask you about that pretty much all my life.  

They were full of shit!  Follow me now.  I was into Indians.  Still am.  In fact, I’m gonna be buried on Indian burial grounds, up on a scaffold so the birds of prey can pick my eyeballs out and make me ugly. (roaring laughter)

That’s pretty rock and roll, right there.

So anyway, what I said on that record was Watash  — a Navaho word for Hello — a greeting.  This preacher is claiming I’m saying Satan backwards.  I got him back though.

How’s that?

My son was dating this girl and she was religious, so he went to one of these revivals with her.  Preacher starts saying “Jim Dandy is in league with the devil”.  Someone says, “Naw, he ain’t.  His kid is right here.”  So he stands up and the preacher says for me to meet him at a motel in Jonesboro, Arkansas.  My boy said he’d put me on the phone with him right then and there.  At the time I was drinking Wild Turkey with my daddy and we were watchin’ Cool Hand Luke.  Having a good time…  I set him straight though.

If it makes you feel any better I probably saw the same preacher and that guy turned me on to rock and roll.   I went straight out to the Howard Brother’s Discount Store and bought Black Sabbath and Black Oak.

Which Sabbath?

Paranoid.

That the one with good on the one side and bad on the other?

That was Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.  Paranoid had the guy with the sword.

Oh, yeah.   Same guy did our album covers.   Ozzy, he’s my buddy.  We’re the same age.

I was talking to Glenn Hughes from Deep Purple awhile back about Cal Jam ’74.  250,000 people, paid.  Tell me about that show.  

Sabbath and us, we had the most people because we played the middle of the day.  It was August hot, all them people….  Black Oak, we had a helicopter drop visors for the fans and they appreciated that.

Like sun visors?  Hats?

Yeah, those fold out things.

How many?

Thousands, man.  Hell, we were there for the people.  Wouldn’t be nothin’ if it weren’t for them.   ELP wasn’t worried about the damn people.   They had that spinning piano thing…..  As for Deep Purple, Richie Blackmore ran his guitar into the camera and it end up costing more than they got paid.  Camera was a hundred grand, Purple only got sixty-five for the show!

The All-Music Guide bio mentions you simulating sex with a washboard on stage.

On stage?  When they thought I was jacking off with it?  Well, that just goes to show you that the human mind can make a phallic symbol out of a piece of hardware I guess.

David Lee Roth gives you lots of credit for inspiring his stage show.

He always gave me credit.  He didn’t steal anything from me.  It ain’t about us.  I think we take ourselves too seriously sometimes.

What about the Elvis call that inspired you to record Jim Dandy?

I’ve been Jim Dandy since I was nine.  Daddy named me that.  But we were in the studio doing High on the Hog and they told me Elvis would be calling in two hours.  He was nice to me when he didn’t have to be.  Said we oughta cut Jim Dandy.  Well, you don’t say no to the King of Rock and Roll!  And he told me this: “Jim, it comes to us, not from us.  We’ve got the best seat in the house.” That’s pretty profound right there.  And then there was the Lennon thing…

John Lennon?

Lennon put his hand on my shoulder one time and said, “Hey, can we talk in private?” He told me I was ahead of my time.  Not so much in music, but in my words.  They interrogated me once after Lennon was shot because of some of the things I said in Chicago.   Seven and a half hours in a little room with no water.  Told me if I didn’t quit talkin’ between songs I might not be alive.  I just tried to do like Ray Charles said and stay country dumb.  But I’m a natural born agitator–live and die.

So they government was afraid of the message you were preaching?

Come on son, I thought you were heavy metal?  You gotta get a groove!  They were the ones that shot him….

Natural Born Agitator would make a great record title.

Waylon used to tell me, “They don’t know what to think about you, hoss.  Keep it that way.” I guess our stupid enthusiasm was contagious — longhaired country boys, smoking weed and talkin’ ‘bout karma….

We do a thing on TNB called either/or…

Ah, I don’t do beauty contests.  (laughs)

Uh… OK, what bands in the last twenty years or so do you like?

Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters.  There’s a lot of good music out there.

How do you stay on the road in your 60s? 

I turned 64 in March, two weeks ago I was 17!  I stay busy.  Got a new CD coming out called Memphis Mean Time and a song with Shooter Jennings on his new record called Fifteen Million Light Years Away.  They oughta be out this summer but I’m in no hurry, Jim Dandy ain’t going nowhere.  Black Oak is about giving kids hope.

Well, rock and roll gave me a lot of hope when I was a kid and still does to this day.  I appreciate you getting up there and giving it your all.  I know it isn’t always easy.

I appreciate you, brother.  Hope to see you at a show.  I always like to see old friends.

Me too, Jim.  Hope to see y’all soon.

Selected Discography

Hot ‘N Nasty – Self-Titled

When Electricity Came to Arkansas – Raunch ‘N Roll Live

Uncle Lijah / Lord Have Mercy on My Soul – The Best of Black Oak Arkansas

I Need More Love – The Black Attack is Back

Flying Horse of Louisiana – The Knowbody Else

For the rest of the day, strangers approached and handed me folders, speaking to me in French while I panicked inside. A sentence would begin slow, with watery syncopation, then accelerate, gurgling until it slammed into an ennnnnnh, or an urrrrrrrr, and I’d be expected to respond.

What did they want from me?

Why was every question a confrontation?

First day on the job, my French was not super. I’d sort of misled them about that.

The advertising agency occupied three floors of a building located a few blocks east of the Arc de Triomphe, next to a McDonald’s. Our floor might have been a wing from Versailles. Chandeliers everywhere. Gold-flaked moldings. Long rooms walled by spotty mirrors. There were fireplaces like cave mouths, and high ceilings painted with frescoes. A cherub’s little white gut mooned my desk.

For a long time I’d thought Paris had the world’s best everything. Girls, food, the crumble-down buildings. Even the dust was arousing. Coming out of the Métro that morning, I’d been so full up my throat constricted.

Basically, I’d been anaphylactic about France since I was ten.

So I was trying to seem cool and unruffled.

My new boss, Pierre, was an old friend. We knew each other from New York, where Pierre and his wife had lived before returning to Paris, their hometown. In March, I’d received an e-mail that Pierre had sent around looking for someone to join his agency who could attend meetings in French but write English copy.

We spoke the next day. Pierre said, “You’re good in French . . .”

I said, “How good in French?”

Around lunchtime, Pierre introduced me to André, his co–creative director. They shared an office. André was stocky, longhaired, orthodontic. He grinned like Animal from the Muppets. I liked him right away. Probably ate scissors for lunch.

“André doesn’t speak English,” Pierre said.

“Fuck that,” André said in English, staring at me. He added, smiling, “But no, do not.”

A computer monitor attached to André’s laptop showed two nude women sixty-nining. André had on a pink Lacoste shirt and a blazer with two lapels, one folded up. It was the first jacket I’d ever seen that included a constantly popped collar, suggesting, Dude, let your clothes handle the boil, you’re busy musing. At that moment, André’s boots were perched on an Italian racing bicycle. People informed me later that he never rode it—it was parked there only to keep beauty in near proximity.

I told André I liked his office. André grinned, then his BlackBerry began to chirrup. André ignored it and said in English, “So, where you come?”

“Come from,” Pierre corrected him.

“New York,” I said.

The BlackBerry kept ringing. André grabbed it like it was a burning club and screamed down the line while rampaging out of the room.

In a short while, I’d figured out the e-mail system and how to remap my keyboard; as long as I didn’t look too closely at what I was doing, it would perform like a QWERTY layout and communicate my intentions. Perhaps this will become a metaphor, I thought. Then my calendar program started making a boingy sound. It said I was late for a réunion on the sixth floor.

Getting my étages wrong, I wound up in a law firm. The receptionist was prickly: I was due for a meeting where? With whom?

On the proper floor, I asked an IT guy for directions. He said a bunch of things and gestured with his arm. Tried a hallway: dead end. Backtracked, tried another hallway. Oh, you’re dead, I told myself. Around me people were speaking French into headsets, wearing scarves despite the heat. Finally I found a conference room, took an empty chair, and apologized to a horseshoe of elders who were watching a PowerPoint presentation—“Désolé,” I said, catching my breath, “désolé.”

A woman wearing a white suit and white eyeglasses said in English, “Excuse me, who are you looking for?”

Kind of bold, I thought, matching your pantsuit to your glasses.

Finally, down the hall, in the right conference room, I met Claude, a senior account director, who assured me I was where I belonged.

“Dude, you’re from, like, New York? So cool, man,” Claude said in English. Claude was skinny and smelled of cigarettes, with arms sunburned to the color of traffic cones. “I love New York,” he said.

“Why did you leave? You know, no one goes New York to Paris.”

Claude said he’d recently returned from the beach. “Just the total best, dude, Antibes. You haven’t been? You must go with me sometime.”

Behind me, a breeze suckled the blinds from a large open window. The view spanned Paris, one of those views that came with sunshine and clarinets, from the Eiffel Tower to the Grand Palais, to the fondant of the Sacré Coeur.

I wanted to levitate right out of the room.

Claude asked if I was married and what girls were like in New York. “They’re easy, right, easy pussy? Like you’re just going down the street”—Claude mimed a drum major swinging his arms; he found it hilarious and exciting—“and there’s one! And there!”

Slowly, about a dozen young French people turned up—art directors, copywriters, project managers, programmers—nodding with afternoon fatigue. They helped themselves to Coke and Coca Light from plastic bottles shaped like petite scuba tanks, and Claude began the meeting. “Okay, so hey, meet this guy . . .” Claude paused before saying my name. Truthfully it was a pain in French, all those “R”s. Claude asked in French if I had any introductory remarks. I said, “Excusez-moi?” People laughed, and I laughed, too, a survival reflex or whatever. I said, “Non.” Claude explained to the group that I was there that afternoon only to listen. “Mais demain matin, nous aurons un brainstorming . . . with this dude.” Claude gestured at me and winked.

An hour later, I had no idea what my assignment was, what I’d be called upon to do, or when I’d be required to do it.

In the beginning of my job, I had a look: toddler struggling with digestion. I saw it reflected back at me in people’s sunglasses, absorbed by my coworkers’ eyes. They weren’t used to an American coming up so close, being such a worried listener—me pressing in with my nervous smile, my jaw clamped, my forehead rippling with humps like a Klingon’s.

Why couldn’t I have found a job in Sydney or Cape Town, where the surf brahs communicated by vibe?

What had I done?

________________________

ROSECRANS BALDWIN’s debut novel, You Lost Me There, was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2010, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a Time and Entertainment Weekly best book of summer 2010. He is a cofounder of the online magazine The Morning News. Learn more about him at his website.

Excerpted from PARIS, I LOVE YOU BUT YOU’RE BRINGING ME DOWN, by Rosecrans Baldwin, to be published in May 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2012 by Rosecrans Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Sure, children have been ruining their mothers’ lives since we evolved from chimps. But what makes this snapshot in time so different, according to Badinter, is the fact that modern, emancipated mothers are so complicit in their own destruction. Lactating, co-sleeping, time off from work – that’s a bunch of “naturalist” mumbo-jumbo and a distraction from a woman’s duty to herself and a society that wants to see her as equal but can’t quite get past the milk stains on her blouse.

Men don’t need to keep us down, Badinter claims.  We’re doing the work for them.

For my part, I throw my lot in with Holler and most sane people:  What’s important is not what a woman chooses, but that she has a choice.  It is the perception of most women and feminists my age that the choice was the reward object of our predecessor’s hard work, not the privilege of being castigated by them for taking advantage of it.

Where modern women do undermine themselves is the constant questioning of their choices and allowing for an onslaught of guilt. No matter what we do, it’s wrong in someone’s eyes – so why do we take any of this criticism seriously? Instead of doing as we please and moving on, as Badinter praises French women for doing, we do as we please and then punish ourselves with guilt.

Maybe the bottom line is simply that wherever two very equal options exist, we will always perceive the one that is more difficult to obtain as having greater value.  Maybe old tropes about women are true:  We just want whatever we don’t have.

Holler ultimately concludes, more or less, that this is just the circle of life.  To us, our mothers are out of touch; to them, we are ingrates, intent only on doing the opposite of whatever they say, but ultimately, we’re just doing what we need to do in our time.

My mother and I both reacted to the demands of our time. In this book-length attempt to scold the young’uns for screwing up progress, Badinter, like others before her, fails to see that what her generation gave us were real choices.

She only sort of touches on the fact that it is currently more necessary to be a working mother than it used to be and that to be able to afford to stay home, not to have the privilege of venturing out into the world in a career, is the greater luxury.

Not at all subtly, as any mother who cannot afford to stay home will tell you, this is a pretty obvious class/income bracket issue.

The fact of the matter is that for most women, particularly those of the middle-middle class and below, giving birth in the current economy and job market where anyone with a job had better hold on to it for dear life, there still isn’t actually any “choice” between working and staying home and there never has been.

But this is seen as an economic, rather than a feminist, issue, and maybe that is the greatest travesty: Because actual choice exists for the microphone-wielding, yet not-technically-wealthy women of the upper-middle class (women like Holler), there is an illusion that the same choice exists for everyone.  As such, feminism is increasingly convinced that except for the very poorest of social classes, there is little more to be done but to stop bickering amongst ourselves about which among her bountiful options a woman should choose.

Erika Rae: Which one–the weeping or the laughing?

Carissa Carter: The weeping might be me. I over-indulged on this new craving for kale that just won’t go away.

What is your earliest memory?

ER: Spiderman was creeping around all open-armed on our brown, plaid living room couches in the dark. Next, I found myself inexplicably stuffed in the kitchen pantry eating dried brown rice from a white bucket. I think it may have been a dream, but I’m not sure.

CC: I was sitting on the floor of my room in our new house stroking a 4×6” swatch of shag carpet from our old house.

If you weren’t a [ERIKA RAE: Writer; CARISSA CARTER: Designer], what other profession would you choose?

ER: An Irish musician. I would go from Irish pub to Irish pub and play my flute or fiddle and make people dance when they were finished munching on their boxties. Boxties are really heavy on the potatoes, so I’d be doing the people a service by making them dance off all of those carbs. People would applaud me for enabling them to be so joyfully healthy and would buy me free shots of Midleton whiskey while calling me “luv”. And then, for one moment – one brief moment – I would know what it felt like to be Slade Ham or one of The Whiskey Brothers. And then, I would go dance the whiskey off.

CC: An astronaut. I even have the blue, ‘inside the shuttle’ suit. Think weightless whiskey globules! You’re welcome to join me if you want a redo on your answer, Erika.

Describe a typical work day.


ER: I have kids, so my work day is generally divided into increments of fifteen minutes. It generally devolves around 1:30 when my 2-year old needs a nap and the 4 and 8-year-olds are in need of attention and/or food. By the time Mommy looks up from her computer somebody has frequently been duct taped to a ceiling.

CC: I left my corporate job to start my own company only a couple months back, so I’m still in that honeymoon phase of taking advantage of my freedom. I charge, full-throttle from about 8:30-11:30. Around that time I realize that I should take a shower because it will be embarrassing to have a wet head when I go out to lunch. Early afternoon is often a bust and I consider exercise, but I usually Hulu. Around 5:30 my productivity turns on once again and I go off and on for another few hours. My days are a mix of making things with my hands and staring at a screen. Lately I’ve been sketching something with clay every day. I need to keep up the balance for my own sanity. Oh, and every single day at 6:06pm I take a photo.

Is there a time you wish you’d lied?

ER: Yes. Growing up, I was not supposed to dance or watch movies. The church I was going to said it was a sin. When I was in junior high, though, I went to a slumber party where they showed the movie “Breakin’”. It was dancing and a movie…at the same time. We sort of got out of control that night and I even learned how to do the Wave – not too far off from how Kelly in the movie could do it, if I do say so myself. The next day, when Mom asked me what we did at the slumber party, I fessed up to all of it and got in trouble. I should have kept the Wave in my heart. With Jesus.

CC: No. I used this token in first grade. I stole a marshmallow Easter bunny from Medi-Mart because my mom never put candy in my lunch at school, and there are only so many carrots a girl can take. I got away with the theft and enjoyed every bite of that bunny from my second row desk the next day, aka the best day ever, at school.

What would you say to yourself if you could go back in time and have a conversation with yourself at age thirteen?

ER: The rapture will not happen in 1988. Relax.

CC: No, you should not cut one side of your hair short and leave the other side long.

If you could have only one album to get you through a breakup, what would it be?

ER: Indigo Girls: Shaming of the Sun.

CC: Pat Benatar: Crimes of Passion.

What are three websites—other than your email—that you check on a daily basis?

ER: Scree, TheNervousBreakdown, and monstertruckgames1.

CC: Scree, core77, clientsfromhell.

From what or whom do you derive your greatest inspiration?

ER: My Filipina great-aunt. She’s well into her 90s and still works the miniskirts and gold bangles. She is the granddaughter of some former viceroy in the Philippines. My great-uncle, a serviceman from a humble Kansas farming family, rescued her back in the middle of the 20th from a coup attempt. They fell in love and on the boat back to the States, she turned to him and asked, “So, my love, how many servants does your family have?” She married him anyway. Also, I derive a great deal of inspiration from Irene Zion and her life with Victor. I think my husband Scott may be a bit like him someday, so I am trying to watch and learn.

CC: My sister. She’s a designer as well, and my sounding board for absolutely everything. I trust her implicitly. We have about 18 words in our own language, and with these 18 words we can communicate anything to each other. This comes in handy often in awkward public situations.

Name three books that have impacted your life.

ER: The Bible, The Poisonwood Bible, and The Satanic Verses.

CC: Shogun, Out of Control, Annals of the Former World.

If you could relive one moment over and over again, what would it be?

ER: The time I dirty danced with Patrick Swayze at age 15. I was in London with Ronlyn and Kirstin—my sisters—and we got caught up in a mob rush. At the front of the screaming human tsunami, I crashed into the shore of his freshly waxed chest with only a police bobby’s arm to separate us. For 10 awkward minutes, I stared straight up into his cleft chin repeating the words, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” As an adult, however, I would like the opportunity to reinvent those 10 minutes.

CC: I was the only person in this small pool. The surface was soft-butter thick and still. I had goggles on, and everything underwater was crisp. I sunk myself underwater on my back, so that I was a few feet below the surface, but looking up. The light created these perfect rays that cut through the water, and I was gravity neutral.  I’ve searched for this sensation for years since.

How are you six degrees from Kevin Bacon?

ER: I would be 2 degrees from Kevin Bacon since my brother-in-law, Todd—who used to be an admissions counselor—showed him and his son around the University of Puget Sound once. But now, thanks to LinkedIn, I’m only one degree from Mr. Bacon. Boo-yah.

CC: I know Erika Rae, who is only one degree from Kev, so I’m only two degrees removed. Double boo-yah.

What makes you feel most guilty?

ER: I am a recovering Evangelical (or “Devangelical”). My life is guilt. But if pressed, I would have to say it was the time I called a boy out for being in the girl’s bathroom in the 7th grade. It turned out he was a she.

CC: People that spend their ‘lunch’ going for a jog. Stop ‘training’ and eat chips with the rest of us!

How do you incorporate the work of other artists into your own?


ER: Unconsciously. When I’m in the middle of writing a book, I really can’t be reading a book simultaneously or I start adopting the style of the author I’m reading. I blame this on being a Gemini. I am an impressionable chameleon. As I’m pretty much always in the middle of writing a book these days, the ladies in my book club barely tolerate my attendance.

CC:  In the form of a bounce. I love working with smart people. I toss, it bounces, he or she catches, smooshes, tosses, bounces, I smoosh, etc.

Please explain the motivation/inspiration behind SCREE.

ER: Scott (husband) and I quit working for “the man” more than a decade ago. It has not been easy trying to create something that’s ours, but it seems worth it somehow—even through the financial uncertainty and stress. When Carissa approached us with the idea for a magazine about the modern entrepreneur’s struggle, we were well into our own evil genius plans to do the same. It was trippy—like we were psychically riding the same delusion of grandeur. We all three decided right away that we didn’t want to just focus on the business-y ventures that usually get all the press, though. We wanted to catch artists, scientists, designers, writers, musicians, comedians, and engineers, alike—while they’re still on their climb. We want to learn from their struggles and be inspired by them.

CC: I’m amazed, continually, by the caliber of work and smart people that I know. These folks put out beautiful products, services, art, writing, science, etc., and I want to see more of it. When I make maps, the process is often as important as the journey, and with Scree I wanted to highlight these journeys.

What is the best advice you’ve ever given to someone else?

ER: Wipe from front to back.

CC: The minute you realize that adulthood is a sham you’ll feel a lot better.

List your favorite in the following categories:  Comedian, Musician, Author, Actor.


ER:

Comedian – Slade Ham
Musician – Amy Ray
Author – Barbara Kingsolver
Actor – Dietrich Bonheoffer

CC:

Comedian – Amy Poehler
Musician – Tom Waits
Author – John Kennedy Toole
Actor – Gwyneth. I think we’d be friends in real life.

If you had complete creative license and an unlimited budget, what would your next project be?


ER: I would pour the entire “unlimited budget” into the world’s food supply and distribute it to everyone who needs it until the end of time. Of course, I would have to then travel widely to study the consequences of a society with no more hunger and then write a humor memoir documenting the whole event. There might be a Broadway musical involved, as well (finger-to-nose). Also, a day or three at the beach.

CC: I would ask everyone in the world to hand-draw a map of where his or her drinking water comes from. Then, I’d get some of those programmer types to help me connect all these maps. We’d have this massive web of interconnected maps. It’s information connection by perception. I’m convinced this is the next interweb.

What do you want to know?

ER: Whether I make God smile or cry.

CC: Am I even close?

What would you like your last words to be?

ER: “I did it myyyyyyy waaaaay!”

CC: “Mas pan?”

Please explain what will happen.

ER: I’m feeling the urge to enlarge my tattoo.

CC: I’m going to get my inner stylist on and cut my husband’s hair.

_________________________________________________________________

ERIKA RAE is the author of Devangelical, an irresistibly funny  and irreverent book challenging the culture of the Evangelical church (forthcoming from Emergency Press, 2012). She is editor-in-chief at Scree Magazine and nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. Erika earned her MA in Literature and Linguistics from the University of Hong Kong and to this day can ask where the bathroom is in Cantonese, although it is likely that she will not understand the answer. In her dream world, she fancies herself a kung fu master cleverly disguised as a gentle mountain dweller, eagerly anticipating danger at the bottom of every latte. When she is not whipping one of her 3 children and denying them bread with their broth, she helps run an ISP with her husband from their home in the Colorado Rockies. You can friend @ErikaRae on Facebook or Twitter.

CARISSA CARTER is the creative director at Scree Magazine.  When she is not working on Scree experiences, she is applying her design genius to multiple other endeavors, including (but not limited to) her startup design company, Parallel Design Labs , the design and production of skate­boards (Gesture Boards), and the making of maps. One of her degrees is a Masters in Engineering—Product Design from Stanford University. She has been an Instructor at Williams College and Stanford University and has worked in design with both Google and IDEO. Carissa has recently returned from Hong Kong, where she worked with Herman Miller. She is a lover of awkwardness, map making, all board sports, kung fu, and teaching. Carissa currently lives in San Francisco and is pursuing projects in the crossover between science and design.

I LAY IN BED 

Listening to the steady rain, I wondered if it was raining on my parents’ house in Lafayette too. I was in a tight cocoon, bound by worship and work. Time was ticking by, cycling through season after season. Years later, reading a four-line poem by Dr. Seuss, I felt a sharp pang of recognition, so perfectly did it capture the ranch’s state of missing time:

How did it get so late so soon?
How is it night before afternoon?
It’s December before June.
How did it get so late so soon?

It was easy to drift in a fugue of isolation; no newspapers or radios alerted me to the world outside. As isolated as I felt, I could’ve been living on an atoll in the Pacific. In 1973 – my second summer at the ranch – the Miami Dolphins won the Super Bowl, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in a tennis match billed “The Battle of the Sexes,” Kurt Vonnegut published Breakfast of Champions, and “streaking” became a fad across U.S. campuses. While the space probe Pioneer 10 was transmitting television pictures from within 81,000 miles of Jupiter, women in consciousness-raising groups were clambering up on tables with plastic speculums and mirrors, hoping to get a glimpse of their own inner space.

“I’m in the hollow of His hands,” I wrote my parents on Lighthouse Ranch stationery featuring a neat little garden and a large building overshadowed by a cross. And then quickly, God spread his fingers and I was allowed to scamper briefly back into the world – chauffeuring a troubled woman back to her home in the Bay Area. Helen had driven to the ranch, but she was in no shape to get herself home. Helen was in her early 20s and her heart seemed – there’s no other word for it – flayed. She’d recently given birth to a baby girl, Chloe, whom she’d given up for adoption. I don’t know why Helen had come to the ranch, but her kinetic presence in the sisters’ dorm made us edgy. I read once that sharks never sleep but having to keep swimming, moving the water through their gills or they’ll drown. Helen was like that, a trolling blur of restless limbs, with reddened eyes that never shut. How tired she must’ve been; how tired she made us all. What kept her swimming was Chloe. Helen was bereft, inconsolable, continually on the verge of tears. Talking non-stop one minute, nearly catatonic the next, she was losing it.

Her parents were wealthy intellectuals who lived in the Berkeley hills. I had the distinct feeling that they wouldn’t have approved of their daughter’s sojourn among us. In the Bible it says: “Whosoever will may come.” Helen had come and it was now clear she must leave. We couldn’t help her. We’d prayed over her, laid hands upon her, asked Jesus to list the spirit of oppression plaguing her. But Helen didn’t improve. Probably because I was single and unencumbered with children, knew how to drive, and was semi-reliable, I was recruited to drive Helen to her parents’ house in Berkeley.

Helen handed me the keys with a gloomy air.

“Ready?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“OK, let’s go,” I said.

Helen stood by the door, looking across the sprawling lush garden, to the wooden cross on the bluff.

“Okay, here we go,” I prompted.

She nodded absently. We stood there a minute longer.

Barbara clip-clopped out to the car in her little wobbly shoes. The wind caught at the hem of her madras skirt, exposing her knobby knees. “Praise the Lord, Helen, we’ll be praying for you,” Barbara said, trying to hurry her along.

Helen kept looking away. A tear glistened in the corner of her eye. Barbara looked at me. I looked back, imploring her with my eyes. Somebody had to take charge.

“We’ll miss you, Helen,” Barbara said, brisk as a nurse. “Goodbye.” Barbara put Helen’s suitcase in the back of the car. Finally Helen got in and I drove out of the parking lot with a heavy heart.

Lurching down Highway 101 in Helen’s Volvo, I kept a sweaty grip on the wheel. I glanced over at my passenger. She sat slumped against the door, chin trembling, hands folded tightly in her lap. Towns rolled by: Fortuna, Rio Dell, Scotia, Pepperwood.

“Want to sing a song?” I said. “How ‘bout ‘The Joy of the Lord is My Strength?’” Helen shook her head. I didn’t blame her.

“Helen, what’s wrong?”

“I’m fine,” Helen said. Sniff, sniff. And then the skies opened up and the rains came. Helen wept and babbled rapid-fire about Chloe. Chloe! She wanted her baby girl back. Why couldn’t she get her back? She was a good mother, wasn’t she? Where was Chloe? Couldn’t she at least visit her baby?

“I don’t know,” I answered, feeling helpless. “I’m so sorry.”

Placing her hands on her flabby abdomen, Helen bent over and sobbed. “I should never” – gasp – ”have let her out of my sight.” I tried to keep my mind on driving, but by the time we’d reached Garberville, less than 50 miles from the ranch, I was ready to turn back. Chauffeuring Helen was the job of someone with a hardier, less permeable personality. I was becoming as hopped up as she was, twitchy, hungry, homesick for a child I’d never known. My mind was echoing: Chloe! Mama! Baby! Gimme! It was as if I had internal Tourette’s. I chewed the inside of my cheeks, and tried to stay within the white lines. Think of those lines as stitches, I told myself. Stay within the boundaries. Neat and tidy, in and out. Sew yourself to Berkeley and keep the thread taut. As we reached the outskirts of Ukiah, Helen started hyperventilating.

“Stop the car!” she said, bracing herself against the dashboard. I hit the brakes and the Volvo shimmied.

“Are you sick or something?”

Or something. Helen put her hand on the door handle. She unrolled the window. “I need to get out for a minute.”

“Do you have to pee?”

Helen opened the door and got out.

“You know, Helen, we’re never going to get you home at the rate we’re going,” I said to her retreating back.

“I need some air,” she called. You and me both, I thought.

Helen stopped at a grove of redwoods. The Eel River tumbled by. I watched her clutch at a tree branch and shake a finger at it, as if lecturing to a naughty puppy. I was trying very hard not to be terrified of Helen. We had been thrown together in the most basic way, without artifice or pride or the buffer of small talk, just two people hanging on by our fingernails. There was really nothing I could do but except pray and that I did in the most direct way: Oh-shit-God-help, oh-shit-God-help, oh-shit-God-help. Row, row, row your boat. Oh-shit-God-help. This was my mantra, a four-word invocation I mindlessly repeated as I watched Helen talk to the trees. At that moment, Jesus seemed like a figment of my imagination. Helen was gathering steam for what seemed like a real melt down. The river rushed over the rocks, cold and frothy. Helen required so much vigilance! I thought angrily. I didn’t know if she was going to impale herself on the car’s radio antenna, fling herself into the Eel, or start singing Three Blind Mice. I was nineteen and childless. What did I know about post-partum depression? I watched her from the window, thinking: Why are you doing this to me, Helen? And then I stopped, convicted down to the soles of my feet. Helen. I’d been flogging her with her own name, a name that was not only familiar but cherished by God. I thought about that scripture which says The Lord knows us and had called us each by name. That scripture, so intimate, so personal, always gave me chills.

I got out of the car and walked over to Helen. Now she was sitting on a tree log, tossing pine needles into the river, one by one.

“What’s wrong, Helen?” I said, squatting beside her.

“I feel sad, that’s all,” she said, flinging in a handful. “I’m sorry I’m such a mess.”

“You’re not a mess, I promise you.”

A few minutes later we walked back to the car and drove on. When we reached Helen’s parents’ house that night, they plied her with anxious questions as they fed us tofu and stir-fried vegetables. Had she forgotten to take her medication? Where exactly had she been? Did she need to make an appointment with her psychiatrist? No one mentioned Chloe.

I spent the night at Helen’s parents’ house. The next day I met my mother in the Berkeley Rose Garden on Euclid Avenue. I had wanted to see her but I was also dreading it. I wore a pair of knee high leather boots that Rita had given me. They were a little too big but the leather was nicely broken in. I chose a dress for the occasion, one of the few store-bought items I owned, a long-sleeved blue and red plaid mid-calf dress with strawberries on it. My mother and I sat in the stone amphitheatre, surrounded by terraced, climbing roses. I cannot recall the particulars of our conversation, except that it was strained. I cried. I told my mother Jesus loved her. What was her reply? I cannot recall her words, only her consternation over my tears.

Why are you crying?

I’m just so happy.

No, you’re not. What’s wrong?

Repent and be saved.

I was crying for more than my mother’s salvation. I was crying for the missed cues between us. I wept for Helen, mentally unhinged by grief; I wept for adopted Chloe; I wept for myself, a daughter who had left her mother’s house and been adopted by another family. I had been in retreat and now I was back. In memory, everything that day seems exaggerated: the garish plaid of my dress, the bigness of my boots, the cloying scent of the roses, and of course, my mother’s presence. My mother was the most important person in my life, realer than Jesus, more powerful than all the ministry’s elders combined. I’d thought that living with other people would dilute her mighty power but here we were, once again caught up in each other’s gravitational pull. Next to her, I felt large and ugly, unlovable and weird. Like Helen, I felt like a mess.

I took the Greyhound back to Eureka that evening. Still in my dress and lace-up boots, I sat in a seat by the window with my Bible in my lap. It was crowded on the bus, and people were restless. Somewhere around Healdsburg an older woman got on and sat next to me. She was short and had a bad perm that was growing out. She pulled out a ball of yarn and began knitting. I glanced over at her and then looked away, feeling clearly that God wanted me to witness to my seatmate. I didn’t want to. Several miles passed. I argued silently with God. Do I have to? Why can’t I just ride the bus like everybody else? What do you want me to say, anyway? Sighing, I snapped open my Bible. The page opened to Psalm 130:1, which said:

Out of the depths I cry to you,
O Lord.
O Lord, hear my voice.

I stared at the lines and meditated on them. God was telling me to praise Him at all times, even on a Greyhound.

As James’s mother had pointed out, I couldn’t even carry a tune in a bucket. I was tone-deaf and tune-challenged. But as dusk came on, I flicked on the overhead reading light, cleared my throat, and took a deep breath. I sang:

Oh God, hear my cry
Attend unto my prayer!
From the depths of the earth
I will cry unto thee
When my heart is overwhelmed.
Lead me to the rock
That is higher than I!
Jesus is the rock
That is higher than I!

I sang those verses as my stone-faced companion kept knitting. After a few minutes I stopped, flicked off my light and turned toward the window, burning with embarrassment. Neither of us said a word. When we stopped in Cloverdale for more passengers, she moved to another seat.

_______________

D’ARCY FALLON teaches journalism and creative writing at Wittenberg University, a small liberal arts college in Springfield, Ohio. Prior to teaching, she was a reporter for nearly twenty years, working for such papers as the Long Beach Press-Telegram, The San Francisco Examiner, and The Colorado Springs Gazette. She has won many writing awards, including “Best Columnist” from the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors. Her nonfiction has been published in The Sun, Image magazine and many other venues. Her memoir about living in a remote Christian commune in Northern California, So Late, So Soon, was published by Hawthorne Books.

walking in the middle
   of the street

until they glide and
   become ghosts

loose clothes only aid
   the illusion

everything that moves forward
   billows backward

wanting most of all to
   be where it’s been

my headlights creep
   up on them

in the glow is
   resurrection

but only for the moment
   between when

the light hits them but
   before the bumper

Daniel Pinchbeck:

Allison Lynn:

Scott Pack:

Mel Bosworth:

Steve Edwards:

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming:

Lizz Huerta:

Matthew Batt:

James Greer:

Steve Himmer:

***Please be sure to follow The Nervous Breakdown @TNBtweets and Other People @OtherPeoplePod.***

When I was home in Seattle, I saw a lot of old friends, including one who writes poetry. We both do. This is somewhat coincidental, since we became friends around the time we learned to read. Even now, when I see him, we almost never talk about poetry.

What we talk about, what my girlfriend and I also talk about, is race, identity, culture, and difference. My friend is half African American and half Jewish. I am half Italian American and half Jewish. My girlfriend is half Korean American and half Polish American. All three of us were raised in predominantly white, middle class, almost fervently PC communities in Seattle, where people are just people, man, and racism is bad.

Sometimes, for people in those communities, I think this is literally as complicated as some of these questions get. Treat people how you want to be treated. Everyone is the same underneath. People are just people, people!

Talk to people of color, though, and you tend to hear a different story. During the summers, for example, when I was home from college, I used to work in a city program for at-risk teens, the majority of whom were black and brown. Given the opportunity, they would not shut up about race. They reveled in talking about race. Obviously, it was a major part of their experience.

My girlfriend tells me, in her reading, that she learned about a creative writing exercise often used in high school classrooms. In the prompt, students are asked to write from the imaginative perspective of someone of the opposite sex. The girls, it turns out, tend to write pages upon pages, while the boys, as they would say in this country, this culture, can hardly be bothered.

Culture and difference. Imagination and empathy. When I was at home in Seattle, my friend and I went to a small press fair in the city. A natural thing for poets, or wannabe-poets, to do.  Soon, I will publish my first book of poems. In a few months, my friend will graduate from a low-residency M.F.A. program in Creative Writing. He picked the program, in part, because it featured a high ratio of brown faculty members to white.

If some part of you blanches at this, let me recommend an exercise. Pull up a few M.F.A. sites at random; click on their faculty pages; note their cheerful, smiling, majority white faces.

Now invert the ratio. Pretend that all the white faces are brown, all the brown faces are white.

Now imagine the brown faces wearing hoodies. Would you still apply? Could you do it without trepidation?

So we went to this fair. It was held at a prominent literary establishment in the city. Respected presses from all over the region were supposed to be there. A high-profile literary magazine had made the drive up from Portland. Etcetera.

Inside, I recognized a few names, even one or two faces. I felt more or less at home. Then again, I had come wearing a disguise. I had ditched the hooded sweatshirt, the jeans, the basketball shoes that until not so long ago comprised my life’s uniform. Now I wear gray corduroys and an elegant winter jacket. I only have the one jacket. It doesn’t matter. Strangers, white, ask me where I bought it. Baristas smile at me winningly. I used to get eyeballed with suspicion when I walked into cafes in places like Seattle and Portland, where I also used to live. Now I get treated like a customer. At literary fairs, people look at me like I might be a poet.

My friend, though, hasn’t gotten with the program. He still wears the hoodies, the big jeans, the crisp Nikes we grew up with. He still dresses like he’s from the city. Like he went to public schools. Like he’s never heard of an M.F.A.

It took a little while for this to dawn on me. Then I realized. We were making people nervous. Some people were looking away when we walked by their booths. Others made awkward, mouth-breathing small talk. One man who was literally offering whiskey shots to the other browsers said nothing to us. Finally, a white guy (what am I saying? they were all, there were only, white guys) clad in tawdry jeans, a torn tee-shirt, and an ironic suit jacket announced that a reading would be taking place in the other room.

Three readers were scheduled. My friend and I only made it through one. The first author, like the announcer, was clad in flamboyant “hipster” attire. I won’t go into the details of his story, but suffice it to say that the tale’s salient image was that of the protagonist imagining his own mother being gangbanged by three men: one Native American, one Latino, and one black.

It was supposed to be outrageous. Funny. Around us, people tittered, laughed. In the back of the room, my friend and I waited, tense, until we were able to go.

My girlfriend tells me that Emmanuel Levinas, the 20th century French philosopher, has this theory about faces. Only after we come face-to-face with the other, Levinas says, can we truly begin to know ourselves. The face of the other, of any other, for Levinas, is incomprehensible. It is beyond knowing. It compels us inward, toward the recesses of our own soul.

For while that first movement must be inward, toward self-knowing, the action inevitably produces the opposite effect, pinging the self back out into the world, toward the other, in an attempt to understand.

Such an attempt requires a strenuous effort of the imagination. For empathy is an imaginative, and ultimately an intelligent, act.

The author we saw read in Seattle evidently had imaginative resources at his disposal. He was smart, articulate. Funny. I am not sure, though, when it came to race, that he had done sufficient imaginative work. I don’t know that he had imagined what it might be like to hear a story like that, in an environment like that, in a city like that, in a region like that, in a nation like that, if he was not white.

The irony, I found out later, was that he himself was part Mexican American. Oh, there are layers and layers.

Having a face-to-face with any other is rare these days, given the prevalence of technology in our lives. It is especially rare, though, in my experience, to have a face-to-face—a real face-to-face—with someone of another race. I find this to be particularly true in the communities I have observed in Seattle and Portland, where people are just people, man, and everybody’s the same on the inside.

People are just people, of course. But such thinking (such non-thinking? such absence of thinking?) ignores that race is integral, not incidental, to personal identity. Our experience in the world, the way people perceive us, matters, even when the cultural circumstances are more or less the same (and especially when they are not). You know—that old double consciousness W.E.B. Du Bois was talking about.

On my recent layover in London, bleary with sleeplessness, I decided to write the author of the obscene story. I had wanted to talk to him after the reading–to have a face-to-face. But my friend needed to go. He told me he didn’t trust himself not to hit the guy in the mouth—more of a fist-to-face, as it were.

So I wrote the guy at the airport. I found his Facebook profile online.

Imagine, I wrote, walking into a room full of your colleagues. Imagine they have a hard time meeting your eyes. Imagine you are a poet, or want to be, but all the poets you meet dress different, speak different, look different than you.

Then imagine hearing a story like that.

He wrote back the next day. We went back and forth a few times about race, the small press scene, comedy, literature. He was gracious, more or less, throughout, even if there remained, I thought, some defensiveness in his tone, a certain blindness to his vision. It wasn’t quite the face-to-face I had been looking for, but we succeeded, I think, in hearing each other’s voice.

Later, I showed the correspondence to my girlfriend. Good, she said, interesting. But maybe, she said, maybe, I was guilty of doing precisely what I resented when it was directed towards me: making assumptions based on how the author looked and dressed. Maybe the author’s hipster clothing had precipitated my anger, made me more reactive than I otherwise might have been.

Maybe, she was saying, I had a hipster problem.

Which may be true. In addition to Seattle I have spent time in Brooklyn, where I went to college for a couple years, and Portland, where I lived for two more. So I have seen the “hipster” thing up close. Aspects of it, admittedly, appeal to me. I like the emphasis on art, the enthusiasm for food and coffee, the general attitude of irreverence. I like the hegemony of beards.

The overwhelming, one might say overweening whiteness of the culture, though, and of pretty much every youthful, trendy art gathering I have observed in places like Portland, Brooklyn, and Seattle, eventually turned me off. Especially because when I used to walk into cafes pre-jacket, I found myself feeling like a threat.

The point, though, is that I never really had a face-to-face with someone from that culture. I never performed that imaginative work. I don’t know what it’s like to walk into a room filled with white people in skinny jeans and instantly feel at home. I don’t know what it’s like to be from a small town or smallish city, like a few of the people I met, and to move to a city like Portland so you can practice your art, live cheap, and be surrounded by like-minded people. I haven’t had that experience.

The point, though, is that I can do better.

We all can. My girlfriend tells me that people usually identify with the component of their identity they feel to be most under threat. The part that makes them feel vulnerable. The part that makes them feel alone.

Which makes sense to me. An individual identity is always a mosaic of competing, constituent parts. The parts that make us feel different, though, to a large extent guide how we interact with, and ultimately view, our society. So if we fall outside the dominant racial group, we find ourselves more sensitive to racial discrimination and discomfort. If we are physically handicapped, we become more aware of able-bodied privilege. Holding hands with a same-sex partner, we can see suddenly how much heterosexual norms guide society’s values, language, and legalities. Being from the city…As a woman…

We are not wrong to view the world through such lenses. These are our lives, after all. Our experiences as outsiders influence our views on our society, our understanding of ourselves. It is good, necessary, even, to be aware of them.

But it is bigger, more expansive, to imagine alternate types of difference, ones that fall outside our personal experience. As outsiders, we can exploit our experience to empathize with marginalized viewpoints in other situations—especially those in which we might find ourselves to be an insider.

It takes a certain mental toughness to do this, I think, a certain largeness of spirit. It feels good, after all, to point with rage from outside the circle at the bullying thoughtlessness within. Such attitudes, though, Levinas would say, I think—I gather from my girlfriend—ultimately alienate us, limit us, make us smaller than our selves. The self according to Levinas is responsibility to others, to all others, not just those with whom we feel instinctual solidarity.

It would take serious imagination to reach such heights of empathy, I realize, and much selfless attention. It would take honesty, candor, and a willingness toward introspection. But we can do it, I think. All of us can.

At the heart of a story like this, The Kurd told me, there should be love—a man and woman, or friends, two people, anyway, who, amid the destruction, find in each other what may be worth dying for, what may even require it. As the city burns, imagine them at the kitchen table with cups of coffee, an atom of intimacy in a galaxy of waste. Watching the ashes drift, they might still speak of another life in another place, certain that if such goodness between two people were possible then all was not lost, even if all might be destroyed.

Forget that it wasn’t 1915, 1934, or 1984. Forget that we were hardly on death marches or stuffed into cattle cars or terror-bound to a chair—no, just the opposite, we were cock-walking pilgrims, each from a different country and caste, supercharged with will. Yes, we were a melancholy distance away from all that was familiar, at an outpost far from home; but each toted his or her best, the very most finely spun and handsomely hewn. There we showed, bartered, bought, and sold, to better store up for the long journey ahead on the magic lantern-lighted road.

Only in the middle of that sojourn we were forced to stop, such was the commotion over the high fence, stop and stoop and peer through peepholes. In black and white, the monochrome color of the plainest of dreams, several police, batons cocked, surrounded a man prone on the ground with his head vaguely raised. Then the man rose, and a policeman struck him, and the man went down, and then rose again and the policeman struck him again, and again, and with each strike the man rose rather than fell, until another policeman, appalled, put out a hand. “Stop.”

Suddenly, the man, like some cornered and wounded buffalo, lunged, and at the vile sight of his unlikely power they lunged back, his buffalo-sized body absorbing blow after baton blow. Groping in the darkness as though for a life rope, he fell to his knees like a supplicant. What must he do, melt into the ground before they would relent? He did melt to the ground, and one of the hyenas put a foot to his nape, and they struck his prostrate bulk. They were striking him for anything now, not because he was resisting them, but because he was there, because it simply struck their fancy. A tort of blows landed at each rung of his body, and when he jumped from pain they struck him for that too. Finally, convinced he was subdued, the hyenas cuffed his hands and lashed them to his ankles behind his back and dragged him facedown to the side of the street, where he was left to his debased self. And the hyenas loped back and forth, taking notes, dispatching reports, contented with their quarry.

What was done was done, except for a man hiding in the shadows, who at that moment had turned his camera on and now had in hand an accounting, a moving negative a mere minute long. With no floodlight or fanfare or marketing budget, this shortest-of-shorts in a matter of days awestruck the world. We watched it, endlessly studied it, tried to find a way to stamp it with reason, with purpose; but it continued to mystify, spooling upon its own tortured body, its own sadomasochistic logic.

Finally, twelve persons were charged to put its meaning to rest. They watched and listened for three weeks, frame for frame tried to fix the meaning of the moving negative; they accepted arguments, retorts, theories, and counter-theories about what was in the hyenas’ minds during each frame—what frame of mind accompanied the frame, how did the hyenas’ action comport with the hyena handbook, why did the buffalo lunge at one of them, why, once surrounded, did the buffalo not submit?

They listened to experts and counter-experts, and bystanders who told of what they had not seen:

1. The encounter that night had begun on the freeway, with the buffalo trying to outrun the hyenas for eight miles at an ungodly speed.

2. In the vehicle, three men rode alongside the beast. When orders were given to heel, only the beast demurred. His stare blank, his limbs inarticulate; sweat dripping from his brow.

3. Whipped up and frothing, the beast grabbed his arse and to provoke the hyenas shook it brazenly.

4. Forthwith, it was surmised the beast had eaten crystalline, a hellish substance, and that this was what had unleashed in him such a formidable force. Upon this surmise, the entire pack, even those hyenas of two minds, were galvanized.

5. With stun guns, twice he’d been struck. But rather than wreaking havoc upon his flesh, the guns’ hundred thousand mortifying volts by all appearance did multiply it.

6. The best science has it that no man not possessed by a malevolent force could prove so refractory to such stuns, be so impervious to pain.

7. As the malefactor was struck, emanating from his throat were grunts and reports of otherworldly import. Note: these diabolical cries rose even over the vulture’s terrific thunder.

8. Even when subdued, handcuffed, nearly snuffed, the beast’s spirit, animated by unknowns, was lambent still.

9. Of the beating, true, one of the hyenas had opined he’d never had a hand in anything akin; it reminded him, he averred, of a hard ball game, part of the good ol’ American pastime, during which he had hit a home run.

10. There were spectators to this “sport.” Some watched frozen in horror, others rallied the hyenas on, yet others pleaded for the hyenas not to mortally wound him.

11. Hospital pictures revealed that from the beating his face had lost its features. Blood-red, ochre, and plum-colored bruises, tumescent and everywhere split; it looked like something that from inhumation had begun to putrefy.

12. One eye from distension was sealed shut, and from a baton blow that had severed his face from ear to chin, a new eye was opened.

13. Before it was sewn shut, there were those who deposed: along the round of the iris was inscribed, novue ordo seclorum. “A new world has begun.”

And the jury went into a room to deliberate. There, with the information they were handed, they elevated and elaborated, parsed the pure from the impure, the subtle part from the gross, and within a matter of days returned with their verdict: not guilty. How? How! It was as though the beating was legerdemain, that your eyes perhaps were cataract, your reasoning sublimated, from dereliction deprived, or that what you saw was a base version of the real, that the deluxe, superlit version existed elsewhere, where only those twelve people had in lux-ury stood.

Sensing the fulminate taking shape, civic leaders and clergy rose to prayer, imploring, flapping, squawking, one by one, running the sky the way crows do before a storm; but no sooner had they come then space was emptied of them, of sense itself. The city had turned into a sense vacuum, and in a matter of hours into this vital negativity, this perfect black body, particles began to collide and form a kind of supernova. It was just about dusk when you felt it from the heavens with an appalling force hit.

In a section of the city there was thunder, lightening, a gale strong enough to bust open the cages and set loose a horde: they flooded into the streets throwing bottles and rocks, overturning garbage cans, and screaming from rage. Then they began striking at cars with bats and bars and jumping up and down. And then we saw, from a peephole in the sky this time, a big truck lumber like a lost elephant into an intersection and dumbly stop. Within seconds they had swung up and lifted from right out of his seat the driver, a sad, waif-like figure. They dragged him into a clearing, where he cowered and looked confused, because never, even on TV, even in the movies, had he seen anything like this. They screeched and hollered and spat at him and jumped up and down, and threw him to the ground, and one of them held his head down with a foot, and the others kicked and struck him, and he wondered—as he wobbled to his feet like a newborn calf, lost his balance and fell, and tried to find his feet again—what was going on, and they stood over him, kicking and striking, aping each other, and then a man with an X on his chest hurled a canister at his head, and then another man, at point-blank range, did a trick with a brick, busting it on the scrawny calf’s skull, whereupon his body collapsed to the asphalt and went limp. We saw the bloody mop of his newborn head; his innocent body curled up unconscious. We saw the bricklayer do a little jig.

__________________

Excerpted from This Angelic Land, by Aris Janigian.  ©2012 Aris Janigian, West of West Publishing.

Rob Delaney:

John Mulaney:

Tyler Greene:

Mike Macrae:

Dan Bialek:

Jamie Lissow:

Tommy Johnagin:

Dan Levy:

Paul Oddo:

Mandy Stadtmiller:

***Please be sure to follow The Nervous Breakdown @TNBtweets or suggest tweets to Arts & Culture editor Slade Ham @SladeHam

Then the trickle starts, slowly, phrase by phrase, an echoing refrain from the distant reaches of my back brain:

Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live…

Edward Lear’s nonsense poem ‘The Jumblies’ was one of the staples of my childhood, its six stanzas just short enough to hold my micro-sized attention. The frequent repetition worked in its favor too, and, as I grew older, the nonsensical fantasies that children devour like unattended candy. I recall the illustrations to this day, the dome-headed Jumblies packed together like diminutive scholars riding the high tide of my imagination. Its unbridled flights of fancy may go some way towards explaining my teenage fascination with fantasy and science fiction. At the very least, they fed my burgeoning appetite for all things ridiculous and surreal.

If you’re not familiar with Lear’s poem, I suggest you get your hands on a copy (you can read it online here). The Jumblies are presumably no bigger than the top joint of your thumb, as they pack together into a sieve – that most unsuitable of seafaring vessels – and head out across the sea in search of… nothing. We never learn the motivation for our thimble-sized heroes. They simply launch their leaky boat onto the water one day for no reason other than the undeniable desire to sail away in a sieve. Some may say that’s reason enough.

Naturally they almost die when their makeshift boat starts to leak, but with the help of a pinky paper – whatever that may be – and a crockery jar they stave off disaster, spinning round and round in the dark on a voyage that even now fills me with infantile terror. It sounds like one of those white-water rafting experiences that’s advertised with grinning tourists gurning for the camera, mere seconds before they drop over a precipice to a watery grave. Maybe that would be the Jumblies’ idea of a good time (round in our sieve we spin!), but it certainly isn’t mine.

Against all odds the Jumblies somehow survive this prototypical adrenaline ride, and they end up on the ‘Western sea’. Their excitement upon arriving at this new horizon is best summarized by Lear’s catalog of their ill-advised purchases: an owl, a cart, some rice, a cranberry tart, some bees, a pig, some jackdaws, a monkey, a blue cheese, and forty bottles of ‘Ring-Bo-Ree’. I’m assuming this last item is an extremely potent alcoholic beverage – that may at least explain their bizarre spending spree, and the fledgling menagerie that joins them in their sieve.

What has stayed with me longest, however, is the refrain at the end of each stanza, and it’s this that inveigles back into my brain as I slump beneath the wailing form of eight-week old Jacob. Before I can register what’s happening my mouth starts flapping, and Lear’s words echo from some forgotten point in my past:

Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.

I can’t help wondering whether our heroes’ hands were blue before they began their seafaring adventure in an item of leaky kitchenware, but the effect is instantaneous. Jacob slumps into a confused silence, his clenched hands slackening at his sides. I’m pretty sure I lost him at ‘Far and few’, but Lear’s words clearly work some kind of spell. They probably make as much sense to him as they do to anybody.

With an apology to literary purists everywhere, I must confess that my next move was to jump straight onto my iPad and search for a Lear fan site. It took less than a minute to uncover the poem in its entirety. Whatever you think of electronic media and the future of the printed word, the internet certainly has one advantage over paper-and-ink books – you don’t have to wait weeks to get your hands on a copy. Even Jonathan Franzen must appreciate the benefits of instant gratification when it comes to calming a squalling infant.

Reading one-handed is a bonus too. As Jacob continues to stare trance-like at my lips I read him the nonsense poem from start to finish, and I look on with unbridled awe as his eyelids gradually droop and close. Lear’s lyrical cadence and frequent repetitions act like a pre-pharmaceutical Infant Tylenol. Before I can quite believe what’s happening he’s slack-jawed and snoring in my lap, and I can finally slump into a relaxed stupor of my own.

What’s even more surprising is the discovery that I’d completely forgotten about the poem’s last verse, a final act that makes more sense now that it’s projected thirty years into the future. The Jumblies don’t simply vanish off to the Western sea – they also return, twenty years later, much to the surprise and consternation of those who watched them leave. And as they tell tall tales of their adventures (and presumably show off their flashy purchases of rice and livestock) everyone else starts to wish that they too had mustered the courage to take to sea in a leaky vessel.

And every one said, “If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve –
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!”

The pioneering message isn’t subtle, but before I drift off to the dream shores of the Chankly Bore myself I can’t help wondering how much it has influenced my own adult life. I’ve traveled the globe, worked in four different countries, gawped at the wonders of the world from Ayer’s Rock to La Sagrada Familia. Sometimes the trips were intricately-planned projects, but more often than not I trusted my future to some pinky paper and a crockery jar.

Then I see Jacob snoring contentedly in my lap, and I realize that my wife and I have yet again embarked on a life-changing adventure. And when we return to our previous lives, in twenty years or more, we too will amaze our friends with tales of the Western sea, and Ring-Bo-Ree, and going to sea in a sieve.

A rabbit.

If you were a fruit what fruit would you be?

A turnip.

A turnip isn’t a fruit.

Sorry. A banana.

If you were a country, which country would you be?

The Republic of San Marino.

If you were a Zebra what kind of Zebra would you be?

Would you want to know why, of all countries, I’d be The Republic of San Marino?

No, please answer my Zebra question.

You should, it is a very funny reason. It’s political too. It has to do with the peace in the Middle East issue. This is the kind of witty political answer that upgrades interviews.

I would still rather you answer the Zebra question.

Ok. What was it again?

If you were a zebra what kind of Zebra would you be?

A striped one.

If you could go back in time and become the killer of a famous historical figure, which killer would you want to be?

This is getting silly.

If you were an incurable disease which disease would you be?

Your mother’s genital Herpes.

Could we cut this crap and start asking about my new book. Or about other stuff, but the kind that would make people become interested in my new book?

With all due respect I’m a journalist, not a publicist. I’m not interested in promoting your book.

Then what are you interested in?

If you do not mind, I’m the one asking the questions.

Shoot.

If your house was on fire and you could either save your grandfather or your future grandson whom would you save?

My future grandson. My grandfather died in WW2.

I meant your other grandfather.

The other one died, too, in 1950-something. His next door neighbor had stabbed him to death. I’m still going for the future grandson.

It is time for the last question.

Thank God. This was getting a little tiring.

If you could ask me one question what would that question be?

OK. Who the fuck are you, you so full of himself, self-centered piece of shit?

I’m you.

But I’m me.

It is true, my friend, you are you, too.

This is becoming sillier than Star Wars.

But the book isn’t, it is smart and full of insights.

The Star Wars book? I didn’t even know they had one. I knew they had those collectable plastic toys that geeks sell on ebay for ridiculous prices , but I’ve never heard of a book.

Our book, dummy. I thought you wanted us to plug it.

Ah, that book. Sure.  It is full of insights. Buy it!

Don’t say “Buy it!” A book is not some used car. This is not about people’s money, it is about their curiosity. About their willingness to expose themselves to something different. Their willingness to change.

Ok. I won’t say “buy it.” I’ll say “read it.”

“Read it” is even worse. It sounds both anachronistic and sissy.

How about “get it?”

“Steal it.”

Right. This book is full of insights. It will change your life. Steal it! Can I do the two fingers thing when I say that? You know  like they do in in Death Metal concerts?

It’s a text interview. The reader can’t see you.

So they can’t see this?

No. They can’t.

Are you sure?

One hundred percent.

Then I think we’re done.

________________________

Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Etgar Keret is the most popular writer among Israel`s young generation and has also received international acclaim. His writing has been published in The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Zoetrope. Over 40 short movies have been based on his stories, one of which won the American MTV Prize. His feature film Wristcutters (2006) also won several international awards, and $ 9.99, based on a number of his short stories, was released to critical acclaim in 2009. At present, Keret lectures at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He has received the Book Publishers Association`s Platinum Prize several times, the Prime Minister`s Prize, the Ministry of Culture`s Cinema Prize, the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize (UK, 2008) and the St Petersburg Public Library`s Foreign Favorite Award (2010); he was also a finalist for the prestigious Frank O`Connor Short Story Collection Prize (2007). In 2007, Keret and Shira Gefen won the Cannes Film Festival`s “Camera d`Or” Award for their movie Jellyfish, and Best Director Award of the French Artists and Writers` Guild. In 2010, Keret was honored in France with the decoration of Chevalier de l`Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His books have been published abroad in 31 languages in 35 countries.

Buy Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

A little lower.

That’s it.

That’s right, sexy came early this year and you feel it. Your skin is softening, your muscles are tenderizing and your fingers have made no less than five attempts this week to hijack your insightful political essay for HuffPo into a filthy, bodice-ripping anime for YouTube. Come back to the light, serious writer. Neither Gingrich nor Romney is among the sexy.

Unless one of them is wearing chaps and an Arnold mask. Oh, yeah.

This is my third year for sexy on TNB. Year Trois. “Trois” is French for three and everyone knows that the French are sexy. They wear haute couture and kiss in multiples and keep secrets mystérieux. They have special booths on the street corners, next to the mimes and the crepes. These booths collect orgasmic light and recycle it back into the power grid to illuminate things like bare, naked bulbs and chocolate shops. Paris is fueled up to 69% by le sexy. It’s a fact. Look it up.

Caution: the sexy hits without warning. In the park, in your car, in the produce section of Safeway standing before the mangoes. That’s right. Pick one up. Slit it open with your thumbnail and slip that peel down. Say it out loud: mango. Lick long at the luscious, saturated flesh and pull back with your teeth. Pay no attention to the old lady watching you from the cauliflower. She feels it, too – the return of the sexy. She has her own history with lust and with vegetables. Sink your teeth in and smash it down with your tongue. Make them ask you to leave.

All over the northern hemisphere people are gearing up for sexy. Oklahoma girl is getting a French manicure, Copenhagen girl is getting a Brazilian, and Hong Kong girl is buying a new see-through Hello Kitty backpack.

Over in Iran the mullahs are stealing glances at the shariff’s daughters. Be careful, bearded one—you could lose an eye for that. Losing an eye is not so sexy.

Unless you have an eye patch. Oh, yeah.

The sexy is all around us. Just last week, I saw a man driving down the street in a pickup truck. He was wearing a bicycle helmet while driving because he knows that protection is sexy.

As writers, we rely on the sexy. We bask in it. Let it wash over us. Sometimes the sexy inspires us to do crazy things, like this video I made about the photo shoot for the cover of my upcoming book, Devangelical. TNB Arts & Culture editor Megan DiLullo even dressed up like an Elvis fairy at one point during the photo shoot while Anthony Camera worked his magic behind the lens. Sadly, when we checked the footage later (taken by the amazing Bridget Johnson), Fairy Elvis was not there. Illusiveness is sexy, too.

Gina Frangello and Stacy Bierlein know how to be sexy. They put out a book this last year called Men Undressed, about the male sexual experience according to women writers. Now, that’s sexy.

Our leader, Brad Listi, knows how to be sexy. If you haven’t checked out Other People yet, you’re missing out. His interviews of other authors are both deep and inappropriate. Plus, he’s wearing a gas mask in the graphic. Rrrrrrowr.

And then there’s Rich Ferguson, who recorded this at the last TNB Live Event.

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

No fair. You already knew the answer. It’s you, sexy.

A month ago I went to Denver with sexy Nigerian-American poet Uche Ogbuji to see Jonathan Evison read from his NY Times bestseller, West of Here, at Tattered Cover. Johnny wore a fedora and drank beer from a bottle on stage while he read because he is a genuine kind of guy both on a stage and off. Afterwards, he went out and had a drink with several of us at a pizza place that smelled like wet paint. We didn’t think that odor combo was particularly sexy, but Jonathan did. Just goes to show, there’s no accounting for when the sexy will hit and, sometimes, a slice of latex laced pizza just does it for a man.

And just look at all you sexy TNB readers and writers out there. Bringing whole worlds to life with a mutually beneficial relationship between your minds and the tips of your fingers. Pull back those curtains and let the Sun illuminate your face as you toy with that glowing rectangle in front of you. Make that Sun jealous. He knows he can’t compete.

So, go on. Twinkle, twinkle little star, there’s no question what you are. Because damn, what you are…is sexy.

I try to explain to the bearded man that if he puts his pistol away it will only work in his favor, in our favor. It’s hard to think up a story with the barrel of a loaded pistol pointed at your head. But the guy insists. “In this country,” he explains, “if you want something, you have to use force.” He just got here from Sweden, and in Sweden it’s completely different. Over there, if you want something, you ask politely, and most of the time you get it. But not in the stifling, muggy Middle  East. All it takes is one week in this place to figure out how things work—or rather, how things don’t work. The Palestinians asked for a state, nicely. Did they get one? The hell they did. So they switched to blowing up kids on buses, and people started listening. The settlers wanted a dialogue. Did anyone pick up on it? No way. So they started getting physical, pouring hot oil on the border patrolmen, and suddenly they had an audience. In this country, might makes right, and it doesn’t matter if it’s about politics, or economics or a parking space. Brute force is the only language we understand.

Sweden, the place the bearded guy made aliya from, is progressive, and is way up there in quite a few areas. Sweden isn’t just ABBA or IKEA or the Nobel Prize. Sweden is a world unto itself, and whatever they have, they got by peaceful means. In Sweden, if he’d gone to the Ace of Base soloist, knocked on her door, and asked her to sing for him, she’d have invited him in and made him a cup of tea. Then she’d have pulled out her acoustic guitar from under the bed and played for him. All this with a smile! But here? I mean, if he hadn’t been flashing a pistol I’d have thrown him out right away. Look, I try to reason. “‘Look’ yourself,” the bearded guy grumbles, and cocks his pistol. “It’s either a story or a bullet between the eyes.” I see my choices are limited. The guy means business. “Two people are sitting in a room,” I begin. “Suddenly, there’s a knock on the door.” The bearded guy stiffens, and for a moment I think maybe the story’s getting to him, but it isn’t. He’s listening to something else. There’s a knock on the door. “Open it,” he tells me, “and don’t try anything. Get rid of whoever it is, and do it fast, or this is going to end badly.”

The young man at the door is doing a survey. He has a few questions. Short ones. About the high humidity here in summer, and how it affects my disposition. I tell him I’m not interested but he pushes his way inside anyway.

“Who’s that?” he asks me, pointing at the bearded guy. “That’s my nephew from Sweden,” I lie. “His father died in an avalanche and he’s here for the funeral. We’re just going over the will. Could you please respect our privacy and leave?” “C’mon Man,” the pollster says and pats me on the shoulder. “It’s just a few questions. Give a guy a chance to earn a few bucks. They pay me per respondent.” He flops down on the sofa, clutching his binder. The Swede takes a seat next to him. I’m still standing, trying to sound like I mean it. “I’m asking you to leave,” I tell him. “Your timing is way off.” “Way off, eh?” He opens the plastic binder and pulls out a big revolver. “Why’s my timing off? ‘Cause I’m darker? ‘Cause I’m not good enough? When it comes to Swedes, you’ve got all the time in the world. But for a Moroccan, for a war veteran who left pieces of his spleen behind in Lebanon, you can’t spare a fucking minute.” I try to reason with him, to tell him it’s not that way at all, that he’d simply caught me at a delicate point in my conversation with the Swede. But the pollster raises his revolver to his lips and signals me to shut up. “Vamos,” he says. “Stop making excuses. Sit down over there, and out with it.” “Out with what?” I ask. The truth is, now I’m pretty uptight. The Swede has a pistol too. Things might get out of hand. East is east and west is west, and all that. Different mentalities. Or else the Swede could lose it, simply because he wants the story all to himself. Solo. “Don’t get me started,” the pollster warns. “I have a short fuse. Out with the story—and make it quick.” “Yeah,” the Swede chimes in, and pulls out his piece too. I clear my throat, and start all over again. “Three people are sitting in a room.” “And no ‘Suddenly, there’s a knock on the door,’” the Swede announces. The pollster doesn’t quite get it, but plays along with him. “Get going,” he says. “And no knocking on the door. Tell us something else. Surprise us.”

I stop short, and take a deep breath. Both of them are staring at me. How do I always get myself into these situations? I bet things like this never happen to Amos Oz or David Grossman. Suddenly there’s a knock on the door. Their gaze turns menacing. I shrug. It’s not about me. There’s nothing in my story to connect it to that knock. “Get rid of him,” the pollster orders me. “Get rid of him, whoever it is.” I open the door just a crack. It’s a pizza delivery guy. “Are you Keret?” he asks. “Yes,” I say, “but I didn’t order a pizza.” “It says here Fourteen Zamenhoff Street,” he snaps, pointing at the printed delivery slip and pushing his way inside. “So what,” I say, “I didn’t order a pizza.” “Family size,” he insists. “Half pineapple, half anchovy. Prepaid. Credit card. Just gimme my tip and I’m outta here.” “Are you here for a story too?” the Swede interrogates. “What story?” the pizza guy asks, but it’s obvious he’s lying. He’s not very good at it. “Pull it out,” the pollster prods. “C’mon, out with the pistol already.” “I don’t have a pistol,” the pizza guy admits awkwardly, and draws a cleaver out from under his cardboard tray. “But I’ll cut him into julienne strips unless he coughs up a good one, on the double.”

The three of them are on the sofa—the Swede on the right, then the pizza guy, then the pollster. “I can’t do it like this,” I tell them. “I can’t get a story going with the three of you here and your weapons and all that. Go take a walk around the block, and by the time you get back, I’ll have something for you.” “The asshole’s gonna call the cops,” the pollster tells the Swede. “What’s he thinking, that we were born yesterday?” “C’mon, give us one and we’ll be on our way,” the pizza guy begs. “A short one. Don’t be so anal. Things are tough, you know. Unemployment, suicide bombings, Iranians. People are hungry for something else. What do you think brought law-abiding guys like us this far? We’re desperate, man, desperate.”

I clear my throat and start again. “Four people are sitting in a room. It’s hot. They’re bored. The air conditioner’s on the blink. One of them asks for a story. The second one joins in, then the third …” “That’s not a story,” the pollster protests. “That’s an eyewitness report. It’s exactly what’s happening here right now. Exactly what we’re trying to run away from. Don’t you go and dump reality on us like a garbage truck. Use your imagination, man, create, invent, take it all the way.”

I nod and start again. “A man is sitting in a room, all by himself. He’s lonely. He’s a writer. He wants to write a story. It’s been a long time since he wrote his last story, and he misses it. He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right—something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before. The man decides to write a story about the situation. Not the political situation and not the social situation either. He decides to write a story about the human situation, the human condition. The human condition the way he’s experiencing it right now. But he draws a blank. No story presents itself. Because the human condition the way he’s experiencing it right now doesn’t seem to be worth a story, and he’s just about to give up when suddenly …” “I warned you already,” the Swede interrupts me. “No knock on the door.” “I’ve got to,” I insist. “Without a knock on the door there’s no story.” “Let him,” the pizza guy says softly. “Give him some slack. You want a knock on the door? Okay, have your knock on the door. Just so long as it brings us a story.”

______________

Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Etgar Keret is the most popular writer among Israel`s young generation and has also received international acclaim. His writing has been published in The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Zoetrope. Over 40 short movies have been based on his stories, one of which won the American MTV Prize. His feature film Wristcutters (2006) also won several international awards, and $ 9.99, based on a number of his short stories, was released to critical acclaim in 2009. At present, Keret lectures at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He has received the Book Publishers Association`s Platinum Prize several times, the Prime Minister`s Prize, the Ministry of Culture`s Cinema Prize, the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize (UK, 2008) and the St Petersburg Public Library`s Foreign Favorite Award (2010); he was also a finalist for the prestigious Frank O`Connor Short Story Collection Prize (2007). In 2007, Keret and Shira Gefen won the Cannes Film Festival`s “Camera d`Or” Award for their movie Jellyfish, and Best Director Award of the French Artists and Writers` Guild. In 2010, Keret was honored in France with the decoration of Chevalier de l`Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His books have been published abroad in 31 languages in 35 countries.

“Suddenly, a Knock on the Door,” is an excerpt from SUDDENLY, A KNOCK ON THE DOOR, to be published in April by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.  Copyright © 2011 by Etgar Keret. Translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger. English language translation copyright © 2011 by Etgar Keret.

Mateo got me drunk and told me about his mother’s parties. I stared at my reflection in the half-empty glass and lost myself in the white organza and tulle, the light strings and floating lanterns. Teo masked his familiar scent with cigarettes and cologne, but I could still smell the sweat lacquering his forearms, Argentina moist on his dark skin. He bought another round of tequila, and we drank to Cash and the mountain, my throat raw and roaring, the drowned pink worm dancing against my lips like a second tongue.

The small room filled up with eyes watching this príncipe and his boyish gringa. I leaned on the bar and laughed like my father, Mateo spinning words into worlds and building horizons with his long hands.

He vomited later, outside in the dark, his broad shoulders heaving like great shuddering wings. I held back his long hair, the black strands ash against my rough palms. Standing, he rubbed spit from his cheek and looked at me. I found him beautiful, and the lack of a camera weighed on me.

There was a photo of him from earlier that week when we had met in Buenos Aires, another from the train where he had fallen asleep against his own hand, a third from two days before when he had tied a blue bandana around his head and grinned at me from under the shadow of his pack. That was a different Mateo, and I began to see the man who summited mountains.

We hiked out of the pueblito and turned toward camp. In the silence, I felt the finger light touches of the peak on my shoulders.

The wait was almost over.

II.

We forded the river, crossed the valley, ate dried mangos, and watched the sun begin its ascent of the sky. Under the weight of the mountain’s shadow, Cash rubbed his palms against his thighs and thought. I took his picture because of the look on his face, the lines around his eyes like striking claws. He flicked his head and the curling tip of his braid snapped against the gear on his back, asking to be touched. Behind me, Teo was singing, and if his Spanish could have been tasted, it would have lingered like caramel, elastic and soft.

Cash spat, and I framed the mountain in my lens, tracing the steep walls of the eastern side. Beneath the lightweight fabric of my clothes, the fine hairs of my body rose up, and Cash, who felt something like this, ran his knuckles over the smooth rock, tilting his head back as though listening.

III.

Teo came to the rock like a conquistador, but Cash breathed it, his body flowing in delicate surges up the mountain wall. I had documented enough ascents to know that Cash had the instinctive gift that every climber hungered after. He read the rock with the gentlest brush of his fingertips, rode its intricacies.

I rested in a shallow alcove above them, my slackened line allowing me to lean away from the wall face. I caught the wind ruffling Teo’s hair and his half-lipped smile. I focused on his thick and calloused hands and found dark markings on the pale stone underneath his palms. Tight lines etched like worms.

Below us the valley spread and the three rivers doubled back into each other. I breathed in the beauty and lowered my camera, wondering after the feel of the fall.

IV.

I learned about these two men through my camera lens. Most mornings Cash prayed, and breaking camp he always seemed to leave some little thing behind: a string of raisins, a red band from his hair, a small white stone from the riverbed many feet below. One morning it was an elaborately twisted grass figurine.

He’d made it to look like a man and pinioned it between two rocks on a small cairn. Kneeling, I framed its features against the landscape unrolling below us. Cash’s shadow broke the scene moments after I took the picture.

“This isn’t what you should be photographing.”

I tilted my head back to look at him, found myself surprised by the jumping lines in his jaw. His voice did not betray his anger, but his face was not as steady.

“I like these little things you leave.”

“Mateo wants pictures of his climbing, his tent, his pretty face. You should take photos of those things.”

“Cash,” I said, affronted by his sudden authoritarian tone; I’d never taken orders well, “This is what I do.”

“Look, I’ve got something to do here, too. And if I’m to do it, I’m going to need you to stop following me with your camera. No more photos of me, no more pictures of my offerings.”

Offerings. That word surprised me. A glimmer of the fantastical in my silent, pragmatic lead-man.

“I’ve seen things like this before.” I tried to explain, “In Mexico—”

Cash’s lip curled, something like disdain darkening his eyes, “Just no more pictures. Not of this.”

“But Cash, you’re as much a part of this climb as me and Mateo.  And this thing you do—”

“Is not something to photograph,” he spat, swearing quickly in Hopi.

I couldn’t resist the pull of his stormy face, the way he had set his body up against mine, all cast-out shoulders and tense lines. I took his picture.

He blinked twice, slid his pack slowly off his shoulders and took three decisive steps in my direction before I realized what he meant to do. I danced out of his grasp seconds before his hand jumped for my camera. From the campsite above, Teo watched the ludicrous exchange: Cash lunging as I stumbled away, raised my voice, tried to reason.

“Cash, Cash….Cash!” He was herding me back around, trying to hem me into the rocks, “Alright! I shouldn’t have done that. But Cash, stop this.” He leapt for me and I tripped, fell over my own pack and rolled over backward, camera cradled to my stomach.

“Cash!” I barked, rocky crags nipping at my shoulders.

“That lens gives you no right! There are things here you can’t even begin to understand,” Cash snarled, his eyes bright.

Mateo’s voice broke in as his hands hauled me upright forcefully, “Cash. Enough.”

Cash dismissed me with a toss of his head and slid his eyes to Mateo, “She’s a fool, and it’s on you. I’m done.”

Teo sighed through his teeth and watched Cash turn, yelled at his back, “We start hiking in ten!” I hissed, touched my neck, checked the camera.

“Leave Cash alone, yeah?” Mateo said.

“What? Mateo, he came after me!”

“But you were taking pictures of him. You’ve got to know he hates that.”

“Teo,” I laughed tightly, “that’s what you want me here for. That’s the whole point of me on this mountain.”

He grinned at me stupidly, reached out to ruffle my hair as though I was a kid, “And here I thought you were along for the fun of it all, the rush. First ascents don’t come around every day, you know.”

I batted away his hand as I tried to hold on to some of my anger, “I won’t stop. You know I won’t.”

“And this is why I like you. Obstinate to a fucking fault.”

I stuck my tongue out at him, and he made as though to grab it, laughing as I back-peddled and nearly knocked myself over again. Teo wrapped his fingers around my arm to steady me, brushed pine needles from my hair.

“But really, you should stop.” His hand in my hair was deliberate and intimate, an appeal to familiarity.

“But why? This is what I do.”

“I know, but I need Cash. He’s going to get me to the summit.”

I turned away from his suddenly serious face, looked up the trail toward the peak ramming up like a horn between the last of the trees. I thought about Mateo as a child, Mateo and his family tree. When I looked at him again, it was almost as if I could see death marking him on the gentle slope of his forehead. From further up, Cash shouted at us in Hopi. We were moving, climbing, getting closer.

V.

Mateo was from one of the wealthiest families in Argentina. On the walls of his grandparents’ castillo, he could trace his lineage through the growing tree that had been attended by four generations of painters. The room was taken up with it, and a year earlier Teo’s grandmother had raised the ceiling to allow for the progression of limbs. Teo hated the room, called it the funeraria.

In his first remembered memory, he had touched the wall where the roots began, and when he had pulled back, his fingers were slick with blood. Teo had cried out, but the sound was swallowed by the sound of the tree itself, alive and in agony. The bleeding had spread, dampening boughs in rich dark swathes. Mateo said that he had heard his own name called, saw a delicate stem unfurl, knew the tender claim against his life.

Teo thought about his place on that tree as we climbed. He said that moment would always be with him, and that only when death and life could not hide from each other could he ever begin to let it go.

VI.

We carried two tents, and often I slept alone, the light one-man obscuring only the sky. I heard the sucking sound of the wind as I rubbed my feet vigorously, planning to buy better socks for the next climb. Even Cash was too tired to feel angry, and hard words had been reserved for moments when we had the luxury to say them without losing our breath. My body hurt and my thin pad did little to muffle the contours of the ground. I welcomed the overwhelming smell of my own sweat, found beauty in the ache of muscles and the slow dulling pain.

Back home in the rig, I had driven with my left arm out the window and watching my hand play with the swells of hot dry air, I couldn’t convince myself that it was mine. Pain changed that. When everything hurt, it was hard to forget your body. Hard to forget what you were given it for. It was this pain that settled me inside myself, and it was this pain that had brought me here. The climb was a beautiful, strange struggle.

I balled up in my insulated warmth and lost the thread of my thoughts against the steady foreign roll of my own heart beating.

VII.

Things started happening. The wrong things.

It was too hot. I tied my extra clothes to the loops on my pack. Laboring up the mountain trails, I was a rash of colors, bright reds and yellows, pure blue and summer sea-green, sleeves falling about, flapping. Cash pulled a pink bandana around his forehead and watched the mountain. Teo, ignoring the thaw and the shuddering weight of snow before us, told me stories, half-aware of my camera.

Teo adjusted his stride to mine, brushed his hands through his hair, “Los abuelos used to tell stories about a dragon on this mountain, how it set the foothills on fire, swallowed the old village. You’ve seen the burn area, the scorch marks.”

The gnarled obsidian trees, smooth like sand and oddly scentless, covered most of the southern side. Thistle and flagging weeds rustled in the charred roots. Years later, still nothing else had grown.

“They still leave things for it. Goats, sheep, little bits of metal.”

I thought of the faces in the bar the night we had been in the pueblito. There had been some strangeness in them, and I remembered with sudden clarity a young man reaching out to touch my hair.

“La gente don’t even like to climb much further up than the foothills. The men like to say it’s because the dirt isn’t good for farming, but the women don’t hide the reason. Did you see the kids running around in the pueblo? The women teach them to make little dolls, and they leave them in the trees around the mountain. Just little things for the dragon.”

I thought of Cash, of the offerings he’d left and that I still carried with me, sealed into photographs. Cash remained silent, his face almost tender. He was almost always looking upward.

It was because of Cash’s sky eyes that we weren’t lost to the storm billowing up around the eastern side. We huddled for hours in the seams of a rock scattering, our bodies pressed tight, Mateo’s heavy breath a tyrant in my ear. The winds made noises like I had never heard before. Teo mumbled something about carnaval and being so drunk that the fireworks looked like exploding stars.

“No,” Cash murmured, “nothing speaks like this mountain. Like her.”

And the winds howled beautifully and brought a wet layer of ice and snow to the mountain’s rough skin.

VIII.

Cash cooked, carried a small pouch of cornmeal, and told us that he grew up in the backwaters of the Rio Grande. He spoke a Spanish-Hopi hybrid, and if he was good at anything, it was staying alive. Cash knew the walls and the ground and the rocks, and even my unease at his superstition could not overshadow his animal deftness. Cash measured, and Cash calculated, and more than once I had wondered if the thin scars on his forearms and the fading ink of a tattoo were mementos from some sand-and-bomb war.

Mateo paid me for my ability to document, paid Cash for his ability to keep us all breathing. Pressed close to Cash then, I discerned what I could from his lined face. What sort of a man was it that had time for the practicalities of day-to-day survival and the fantasy of a mountain-dwelling dragon?

I felt as if I could look at those distant dark eyes all day and never really know.

IX.

We made camp late that night. The fresh snow made us all nervous and walking forward, we were trapeze artists. Snow-masked crevices spiderwebbed the mountain. To fall would have been a sharp way to meet death, lost to unseen teeth.

Only one tent. The pressure of bodies to my sides felt safe. The knots carving up my skin had lessened, the hum of the wind fading in my ears.

“We’ll go down tomorrow,” Cash said softly, shifting onto his hip, “we don’t know the trail up, and I’m not risking it with the snow as weak as it is. Once we make it to the eastern wall, we can wait her out a bit, see how she firms up.”

Mateo rolled up against me from the right, “With only four days hike left?”

“And a climb up the costillas.”

Teo pushed forward, his hair falling into the thin space between my chin and the turned up collar of my coat. He would argue. “If we go down, we’re done. If we go down, we’ve failed.”

Cash laughed and ducked his head, dry lips brushing my jaw line, “If we go down, we don’t make the ascent. The only failure I know of involves my funeral. Or yours.”

I couldn’t stop thinking of the costillas, the ribs. A beautiful nasty stretch of scrabbling to the top, the stone wind-smoothed. The rocks sloped up in crags like the bones they’d been named after, and in the place where they met was a short stretch of flat ground: the summit.
It occurred to me that Teo was here to flirt with death, to posture some in the face of his fear. Cash, with his level gaze and hard eyes, wanted to survive this climb for another and another yet. And I, I found that this was the only place where living was anything at all like what I had been promised.

X.

We did not sleep. The silence seemed to be trying to speak to me, and I could feel the bodies on my right and left as they grew distant.

“Tell me something Cash.”

He started with a deep growling laugh in my ear, “There isn’t anything I could tell you that you haven’t already seen. I see you watching, your eyes all funny.”

“Tell me about something I haven’t seen yet. Something I can’t.”

Cash was quiet for so long that I wondered if he had decided not to speak. Mateo rested his head on my shoulder, his breathing hard and unhappy. We were both of us swimming in ourselves and fighting. It was too warm, the snow deep and thick and treacherous, the way up and the way down riddled with unforgiving falls.

“It’s about time you asked me about the mountain. I’ve seen you looking at her all these days, but what your eyes are seeing isn’t right. You don’t watch for the way she settles down and breathes, how she lifts herself up to spit out the winds and curls and shakes to shed off the snow.”

“You believe a dragon lives up there?” The words sounded strange from my lips, as though my speaking them had lent them a certain right-ness.

“The mountain is the dragon. She bares her teeth, and you and I both cower. What are we doing now?”

Teo spoke abruptly to my throat, his eyes closed tight, “My grandfather used to tell me stories about this mountain. He lived not far from here when he was young and trying not to be my great-grandfather. He said he would get up early to say good morning to the dragon on the mountaintop. With the rising sun, it looked like the peak was alive with fire. He said the dragon had to have the most beautiful view from up so high and asked me if a fire-worm cared about those sorts of things.”

“If this mountain is a fire-worm,” I asked without thinking, the thought of heat pressing on me, “then what are we?”

Cash laughed again, a barking sound from his stomach, “We’re worms to this mountain, gusanos in the ground.”

Teo snorted, propped himself on an arm to lean closer to Cash, his delicate throat bones inches above my nose, “There is no dragon, Cash. There is nothing but us and this mountain. The only gusanos here are the ones dead in your cornmeal.”

XI.

The tension beneath the seams of the tent brought some feeling back to my numbing body, enough to make the balls of my feet ache and spit warmth up the veins to my ankles.

“This mountain, she’s something beyond us. She’s beautiful, she’s deadly. And yet here we are, facing her, making something out of her, using her to make something out of us.”

I thought about Cash’s words as the night settled, thought about his dragon and my mountain, how perhaps the two weren’t so dissimilar. He prayed to her with small gifts as I gloried in her irrefutable beauty, photographed with reverence.

XII.

I had found them the day before. Cash had left the little pouch of green wool on a rock and after capturing it from four angles, I had loosed the straw tie with stiff fingers. I didn’t understand why he would leave it. The normal offerings were bits of things. This had been more. Cash had pinched out the corn powder with his thumb and first finger, made daily peace with sprinkled particles and soft prayers. I couldn’t know, but it looked like the pouch had been with him awhile, holding penance close to his body. Forsaking it had left me cold.

Inside were worms. Their bodies fat and looped, parts leading into parts leading into parts until one was indistinguishable from another. They must have crawled in down at the valley camp during one of the wet nights, rising up only as Cash’s cornmeal had dwindled. They had all died now, firm and pale, a shiny, purplish-gray.

I had taken a photo despite the bile climbing into my mouth, caught the lifeless forms against the beautiful rising slopes: gray-green rock flowing into a dove-snow peak.

XIII.

I was counting footsteps as we descended and humming one of Cash’s folk songs to ward off the silent unease. I imagined the things I would eat first: the salmon smothered in miso, the undercooked steak, the yellow cherry tomatoes so easily mistaken for flowers.

Teo had started screaming. I couldn’t see him. The line connecting all of us threw me forward as I took his weight and hit the ground with an unforgiving clap, slid after him toward the fissure. I made myself into desperate points, scraped my knees and elbows, jutted my hips and chin, grasped at the sheened surface with my teeth. The only thing I knew was that I could not follow him down.

Behind me, Cash threw himself backward with a howl, and we floundered to a halt. Facedown, I took in great gasps before I rolled myself over, the line painfully taut between the three of us. All I could make out of Mateo was the red cord where it rolled over the edge. Cash was on his knees. He said nothing but wrapped his hands around the rope and began to pull. For a moment all I could do was stare, watch his muscles strain, and then I was on my stomach crawling toward him.

I couldn’t see Teo, but the stillness of Cash’s face told me the exact moment when we pulled him up over the lip. Cash was on his feet, walking back with a bracingly choppy step. I heard Mateo crying and pushed myself to my knees, surged toward Cash in blind panic and dragged Teo across the snow.

Cash dropped down to Mateo. I stayed on the ground, heaving, too frightened. It was a long moment before I looked.

We moved him, or tried to, but we were lost in drifts, and between us he curled suddenly broken, suddenly small. I was no longer sure if the things Cash cast off with almost every step were offerings, penance, or a simple lightening of the load. Another storm was rising behind us, and we dug in behind an outcrop of small boulders.

The fissure had been sharp and narrow, grinding the skin from half of his face, throwing his shoulder out, bending his foot in an unnatural contortion. One of his eyes had gone missing beneath the bubbling flesh, and in the tent I worked away the blood. He stared at me and made these gawping sounds. He would have choked on the part of his tongue that his teeth bit through if Cash hadn’t curved his finger into the back of his bloody throat and scooped it out. It had lain on the snow, very pink and soft.

In the photo it would look like a flower.

I tried to smile at him, but my face was frozen and stiff with my own dried blood, my nose a numbness in the middle of my face. Cash was diligent and silent, turning and splinting Mateo’s foot. Teo’s left arm hung like a broken wing, and together Cash and I made a sling and secured it to his chest. He was crying again when the shuffling and awkwardness of our quiet attentions were over.

Outside the dragon rose. Mateo gaped like a fish and I could see that parts of his teeth were sawn away. I curled around him more to keep myself from seeing what was left of his old face than to bring his body warmth. He collapsed against me as if he had been waiting a long time. My fingers found their way into his beautiful black hair.

XIV.

I thought about the worms: many-hearted, their bodies naked of defense, eyes little more than holes in their heads. Their rubbery bodies given the illusion of jumping life under the firey weight of tequila, the chalked in lines scrawling with ecstatic black frenzy along the mountain walls, the scar-purple, shiny and hairless corpses in Cash’s cornmeal.

I felt Cash under one hand, his ribs like a perpetual series of rise-and-fall valleys, his heart a cautious expanding and contracting. Mateo folded to me, our legs a tangle of shins and knee bones. His breath still smelled like Argentinean dirt as it warmed the c-bone behind my ear, and when he moved, his nose dragged coldness and blood into my hair. I wished its redness could give him warmth. The tendrils from my scalp should have snapped and growled, should have burned holes into my body, should have shed embers and devoured us in ashes.

I thought of the mountain and its teeth against my skin, felt distant from my own flesh. I had come here to feel and to become, I had come here to test and to defy. I had not come here to die.

XV.

Cash wasn’t gentle about anything. He brought me out of my sleeping stupor by running his fingers along my crushed nose and half-hauled me out of the tent. Dawn was creeping slowly across the wind-blown snow, and as I hurried to pull up my hood and cover my hands, I realized it was Cash’s yellow pack that was catching the light of the sun.

“This is it. Last night it snapped colder than it’s been in a while. The snow should hold us. If we go, we’ve got a chance. A good chance.”

“Cash.” It sounded like a plea, “Cash, Mateo isn’t up for moving. Let’s give it a few days, let his foot heal up some.”

Cash shook his head and met my eyes steadily. “There’s too many risks with that. What if this is the last cold spell? What if it just keeps getting warmer? Then we’re talking an avalanche, not just the hidden falls. This is our shot. She’s only giving us one. I mean to take it.”

I sat down heavily in the snow. Cash growled, “I’m leaving in five minutes. You’ve got two choices and one of the most easy fucking decisions to make.”

I felt like I should feel like crying, but I didn’t. I was just cold and tired and bloody. I was still half-asleep, the mechanisms of my mind turning with a precarious slowness. A thought emerged from the creaking grind.

“But, Mateo?”

Cash looked up from where he was systematically checking over the climbing gear in his pack. He straightened, ran a hand over his frosted and red face, “Like I said, this mountain, she’s making something out of us. You can call it what you want, but I came here knowing what I am and what I do. I survive.”

I dropped my eyes from the intensity transfiguring his face. Over the tops of my boots, the light cut firey patterns against the rising slopes of the mountain.

XVI.

Mateo was a thing of blood and sinew as he lay in the dirt, divided from us. Cash and I still moved, still reached out clumsily with unseeing hands. Above us, the dragon reared. The sound of her roar climbed into my skin, and lessening my hold on Mateo, I gave him into the hands of our mountain. Worming through my veins, the pain was sharp and bright.

I took his picture in the half-light. It would show his profile, the side still wrapped in flesh, and the sleeping bag would cover the worst of his injuries. It wouldn’t show his shallow breathing or the way he shuddered and pulled himself inward. It wouldn’t show the blood or the bits of teeth he choked up earlier. It would show his hair like a dark wing making a halo around his face, spreading like the night sky.

Outside, Cash dropped the pack at my feet, settled his eyes on the beautiful rising sun.

We were done waiting.

________________________

Clare Boerigter is a Spanish major at Grinnell College in Iowa; she has previously lived in Saudi Arabia and Indiana. Clare writes creative nonfiction, poetry and fiction and is the ACM’s 2012 Nick Adams Short Story Contest winner. At Grinnell, Clare serves on “The Grinnell Review” writing committee and has written for “The Scarlet & Black” student newspaper, “The Grinnell Review” and Grinnell’s Spanish newsletter, “¡Letras!”.

Clare spent summer 2011 as an archaeology intern in the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona; she wrote about this experience in a blog called “Arizona, You’re Breaking My Heart,” which has since been included on the Kaibab National Forest’s federal website and in the “Grand Canyon News” article, “Kaibab National Forest: Linking College Students to Forest Service Culture.” Clare will be working as a wildland firefighter with the Kings Peak Wildland Fire Module in the Ashley National Forest in Utah during summer 2012; she is looking forward to studying abroad and volunteering at a remote ecolodge in Costa Rica during fall 2012; through it all, she is happy to be able to keep on writing.

Lewis’ new novel, Berlin Cantata, is set in a newly reunited Berlin shortly after the fall of the Wall. American-born Holly Anholt is fascinated by a film clip of her parents, blissfully happy at their house on a lake near Berlin. The house, we learn, is owned successively by Jews, Nazis, and Communists. Returning to Berlin to recover her family’s property, Holly falls in love with a German journalist who is investigating the story of a gay Jewish man who claims to have been a Resistance hero in Berlin’s underground. The hero has teamed with a camp survivor who has made a fortune rebuilding a devastated Berlin from the rubble. As Holly becomes close to the hero, defending him to the journalist, a string is pulled, and the hero’s story unravels. Secrets and surprises emerge. Lewis employs thirteen different voices to tell an astonishing story that raises unsettling questions about cultural and personal identity, desire across time, conspiracies of silence, exile and return, and problematizing the notion of home itself. Berlin Cantata is a brilliantly conducted work by a master storyteller.

Jeffrey Lewis, welcome to The Nervous Breakdown.

I’m interested in your choice of structure for this novel. What challenges did you face employing polyphonic voices and unreliable narrators? In the end, is this the only way the story could be told? What structures did you jettison along the way, and why?

It was the only way the story could be told by me.  Believe me, I tried every other way first.  This seems to be typical of the way I work.  More out of desperation than orderly process.  Everything fails, then one day one more bright idea surfaces and I try it out.  Chief reasons other structures didn’t work:  I couldn’t seem to get at the whole story; and, in particular concerning the option of using a conventional third person omniscient narrator, I as usual couldn’t find a voice that I liked or believed.

As for the challenges of so many voices:  of course, avoiding confusing people.  I’m not sure if I’ve succeeded at this or not.  Some people have said they’d like to read the book twice.  I suppose this could be a good thing or bad thing.  Also, Rashomon problems–getting contrasting viewpoints on the same basic stories right.

I’m not sure about the unreliable narrators.  Unreliable to whom?  It’s not like the facts of the story are really proving anyone unreliable.  It’s more about how the reader might view the facts.  If they view the facts one way, x is unreliable.  If they view them another, y is unreliable.

As I was reading your novel, marveling at the way you conducted your small orchestra of voice, I couldn’t help thinking about how Hill Street Blues essentially invented multiple storylines, now a staple of television series as different as Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Californication.

Yes, Hill Street did do that.  And yes, working on that show with so many storylines probably did give me a certain comfort level with multiples voices.  One thing you have the potential to get is an atmosphere that’s more than the sum of the parts.  You could also get simply chaos, of course.  But if it works right, there’s an unstated bonus.  As it’s sometimes said, “a whole world” is created.

There is a dialectical relationship between your characters and the city of Berlin, which functions as a fourteenth character in the novel. Does the city shape the characters, or the characters the city?

I don’t hold myself out as an expert on the city.  There is, however, a narrow slice of it that I was exposed to, perhaps inadvertently deeply, and that slice had, among other things, in my understanding of it, a strong mixture of death and Eros, two things traditionally intertwined.  I think that ethos of death and Eros, whether I’ve imposed it on that slice of the city or correctly interpreted it, is reflected in the book’s characters.  It seems to me in these equations that the city provides the history and the characters provide the present.  Roughly speaking, anyway.

No place has rehashed its past as Berlin has, and yet far from settling the past, the rehashing keeps it alive.  In a sense, my characters are part of that rehashing.  Some seem to sacrifice their lives for it.

The story of the Jews has always centered on exodus and exile. Berlin Cantata features remnant Jews, secret GDR Jews , Soviet Jews – and raises important questions about Zionism, military occupation, and the fate of the Palestinian people. Berlin and Jerusalem have both been divided cities.

I had never thought before about this similarity of division.  But I think you must be onto something, because it reminded me that when I was in law school, many years ago, my third year paper was a proposal for the internationalization of Jerusalem.  It was idealistic and hopeless.  My teacher sent it off to the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.  So the attitude expressed by the character of Franz Rosen in the book, of wishing to do something to compensate for Middle East injustice, has been with me for a long time.

On the subject of exodus and exile:  not to get too fancy about it, but the world seems awash in exiles these days, you can be an exile even in your own house, in your own mind, and so on.  Negotiating the terms of exile, finding a way to live with others when no one’s really at home:  this seems to me like a challenge for us.

You did not start writing novels until you were sixty years old. Do you prefer writing novels and short stories to screenwriting, and what do you see as the essential difference(s)?

 Actually, I didn’t publish a novel till I was sixty.  When I was young, I wrote several drafts of things.   I came back to fiction a) because I always meant to; b) because I could see that, while it was a fine marriage while it lasted, the things I had still to express would not be anything that the television industry itself was likely to want to express, particularly in the specific terms in which I would want to express them, and I didn’t want to express them in any other than my particular terms, for fear that they would come out as lies; and c) I could afford to.  One good thing about TV for a writer if you’re lucky is that you can amortize a few good years over a lifetime of otherwise penurious labor.  Another good thing is that, like journalism, it’s a gaping, demanding maw that forces you to write, that isn’t interested in excuses.

One big difference between a screenplay and a novel, which becomes more obvious when you actually have to do it:  you don’t have to know nearly as much to write a screenplay; you’ve got these wonderful actors to fill things in for you and they don’t even want to be told too much what to do.  Another big difference:  film is not very good as an abstract medium, at least not as it’s developed so far.  Its great trump card–its apparent naturalism–is actually a huge limitation as well.  I like film, but if I had one vote, it would be for books, despite how much has been already rung out of them over the centuries.

When you wrote for Hill Street Blues, you recruited your roommate at Yale, David Milch, who later went on to create NYPD Blues and Deadwood, as well as Big Apple, and Luck, featuring Dustin Hoffmann, (which was cancelled earlier this year before it found its audience). Are you still in touch with Milch, and do the two of you have plans to work together again?

 Actually I did have lunch with David, two weeks ago, and we did talk about whether we might ever work together again.  But who knows?

What are you working on now?

 A love story.  Though I suppose I should add:  ask me again tomorrow.

Your poetry has been called dark, dangerous and mordant. How do you feel about that?

Part of me accepts it. Another part cringes—the way I did when a former boyfriend nicknamed me the “Shadow Queen.” I cringe, of course, because there’s truth in it.

Violence touched me early in childhood, and I’ve spent years grappling with what Jung termed the “shadow”—those blacker aspects of our humanity. You know, the ones we like to suppress, disown and project onto others.

Writing poetry, in particular, helps me to speak the unspeakable; to make meaning of the incomprehensible; to bring all that unconscious stuff into consciousness so it can be integrated and, ultimately, transformed.

Kinda sounds like therapy …

There’s a cathartic element, sure—a freedom found in playing with the pain. But equating writing with therapy is a slippery slope. Unrefined, “therapeutic” writing should stay in a journal. It’s great for the healing process, not for public consumption.

What propels a poem, or any form of writing, out of the therapeutic realm and into the transformative realm of art is craft. It’s the rewriting—the meticulous honing of language and details, which then transcend the personal and become universal—that allows others to truly experience the material on the page, no matter how close to or far away from their own reality it may be.

Now, returning to why I cringe: The only way we know darkness is by experiencing its opposite, right? So even though many of my poems tunnel into the shadowy crevices of the human psyche, I like to believe they can be seen and felt because there’s so much light present.

As a friend once told me, “How bright the light must be to cast so dark a shadow.”

You mentioned childhood and implied an early wounding. Are there a lot of poems about that in your debut collection, MONSOON SOLO: Voices Once Submerged?

Ten out of the fifty-nine poems in this collection deal directly or indirectly with the sexual abuse I suffered as a child. Many were written more than a decade ago; and I almost deleted a few because, to me, they seemed like ancient history. I decided to keep them, though, with the hope that they might help others.

Back in the late ’90s, when I was deep in the labyrinth of recovery and just beginning to reclaim my voice, I stumbled across Bruce Weigl’s brilliant poem, “The Impossible,” in which he describes an incident of childhood sexual abuse. That poem and its stunning last line—“Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what”—gave me the courage to keep writing; to speak my truth; to believe that I, too, could transmute the horror I’d undergone into something beautiful: a work of art.

Today’s headlines are packed with these crimes. But the way the media covers them keeps our culture stuck in the horror, the “trauma and drama,” rather than compelling us to understand the complexities and shift our awareness toward prevention. That’s where art—poetry, memoirs, novels, music, films—can play a powerful role in catalyzing new conversations about this epidemic.

I guess it’s no accident that you’re being featured in TNB during April, which is not only National Poetry Month, but also National Sexual Assault Awareness and Child Abuse Prevention Month …

My gratitude goes out to Rich Ferguson and TNB for running this piece during a month that merges so many of my passions.

Back to the book. What about the other poems?

Right. The other poems—whether written in first, second or third person—also tackle the stuff of nightly news: sex, death and other people’s money … sometimes in funny ways. There is humor in the book. God knows I couldn’t have survived what I’ve been through, or the publishing process, without a sense of humor.

Was it tough to get the book published?

The process ain’t for the faint of heart.

After submitting the manuscript to countless contests and spending hundreds upon hundreds of dollars in entrance fees (don’t start me ranting about that system), I finally vowed, “Enough. No more contests!”—and I abandoned hope that the manuscript would ever see the light of day. Around that same time, I did a reading with the prolific and talented Colette Inez. She suggested I submit to WordTech Communications. I almost didn’t. I was fed up. Done. Then, at the last minute—literally on the postmark-deadline date—I mailed my manuscript in without any expectations. A few months later I got an e-mail. As I opened it, I anticipated finding the usual: “Thanks for letting us consider your work, but it doesn’t meet our needs at this time …” Instead, it began: “Congratulations.” I almost fell out of my chair: sobbing, trembling. I kid you not. Having grown so accustomed to hearing “No,” it took me a while to wrap my mind around “Yes.”

All writers hear “No” more than “Yes.” Has your attitude toward the dreaded N-word changed in any way?

It has. Though rejection always stings, at least a little, I now embrace it as an opportunity to re-evaluate, fine-tune or deepen my commitment to a project. I do my best to bless the “No’s,” because, without them, I’d never get to experience myself as unstoppable.

And in times of doubt, I repeat this: After the final no there comes a yes …

I love stars, the kind you find in the sky, but I’m not as enamored with those on the ground.

There was a time when celebrity impressed me, primarily because the stars possessed things for which I could only wish. To be a high school quarterback all the girls loved, for instance. To be a famous writer like Stephen King. To date a glittery Hollywood actress and join the fairy tale I assumed was her life.

Celebrity worship, after all, is at least partially driven by envy, is it not? When you pore over the pages of Us Weekly, when you read about stars who are Just like us!, are you not in some way wishing to be one of them? When you make your daily trek to TMZ.com, do you not feel a rush of vindication to see the latest fall from grace, do you not feel a small and secret pleasure to see a star brought down from the sky? Because now they’re a little more like you, aren’t they?

But when you have the chance to meet a bona fide celebrity, if you get to know one, you’re able to see beyond the fiction of their lives created by the press, by the public, by you. A real person lives somewhere behind the façade, and to know this real person can have a demystifying effect on the artificial one. This effect may extend to other celebrities, to all of them, and lessen your envy or eliminate it altogether.

You can, however, want to understand a person’s greatness even when you care little about the person himself. I would like to understand how Albert Einstein made insights that other talented physicists did not. I would like to have lived in Jonathan Franzen’s mind during the white heat of his work on The Corrections, or examine the thoughts of Tiger Woods as he summoned the nerve to hit one miraculous shot after another on the way to 14 major golf championships and 73 total professional victories.

I’ve long been fascinated with greatness. What separates the very good from the great? Is it genetic luck? Upbringing? A lot of work? All three?

I want to be great. I want to write a novel that garners rave reviews from both the literary and pop culture communities, the quintessential Great American Novel. I can only assume that most fiction writers who contribute to this site want the same. But in spite of the rich talent amassed here at TNB, it’s unlikely any of us will ever reach such a goal, if for no other reason than the sheer improbability of such a feat. True, transcendental greatness is necessarily rare. It’s the barometer by which we compare all other efforts.

But is greatness really worth it?

I recently read Hank Haney’s Tiger Woods expose, The Big Miss. In many ways I wish I hadn’t read it, because in doing so I felt as though I was contributing to America’s unhealthy obsession with celebrity. And for the most part, the book is exactly what I imagined it to be: a couple hundred pages of Haney’s defense as coach of the world’s best golfer. He desperately wants you to know he didn’t break Tiger’s golf swing, that in fact he put it back together after it began to fall apart in 2002. He wants you to know the most famous athlete in the world didn’t trust most people around him, even those in his “inner circle.” And he also wants you to know that being a world-renowned prodigy is difficult, because in many ways you feel suffocated by the expectations created by your greatness.

Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.

Of course, Haney is smart enough to know that golf’s appeal has its limits, so he felt compelled to include a little dirt as well. About Tiger’s sex addiction, his relationship with his wife and other famous athletes, about his obsession with Navy SEAL training. But above all Haney wants you to know he did EVERYTHING HE COULD HELP THE BEST GOLFER OF ALL TIME AND FOR GOD’S SAKE DIDN’T FUCK UP HIS SWING!

If I took anything from The Big Miss, it’s that Tiger Woods seems to be a man very similar to what I would have imagined: a famous introvert, a kid who grew up as a nerd, perhaps with a chip on his shoulder, and has been proving himself to the world ever since. I have long assumed as much about Tiger, because my own life has followed a somewhat similar path. Having lived through a long period of painful teenage nerdiness, I spent much of my 20s refashioning my body, building self-confidence, and being obsessively dedicated to my chosen craft.

But where our paths diverge is that Tiger is a genius and I am not. I reached a goal few writers will ever achieve—to earn a lucrative fiction contract with a major publisher—but in golf terms, that’s the equivalent of simply earning the right to play professional golf, to say nothing of actually winning an event, or coming close to Tiger’s amazing record.

Is that disappointing? I would be a liar if I said it wasn’t. But the nice thing about writing fiction is that you can, and almost always do, improve as you gain more experience. The same can’t be said for sports, even golf. I likely have many years to chase the elusive dream.

And what if I never get there, or even part of the way there? Does that mean life is a failure? A waste?

I used to think so. There was a time when I believed nothing short of financial success as a novelist would fulfill me as a human being. But to define life this way is far too narrow. Happiness and fulfillment can take many forms, and perhaps the most rewarding lives are those buoyed by deep and complex relationships. And by understanding your true nature.

It’s possible that tempering my obsession with writing a famous novel will preclude me from ever doing so. But it won’t rob me of my love for writing.

In any case, as much as I respect his golf greatness, I wouldn’t trade places with Tiger Woods.

And especially not Hank Haney, who wrote a book about a fallen star: himself.

Okay.  First things first.  I’ve long ago come clean as a violence junkie.  Maybe even a scholar.  But, okay, okay, this is not about me.  So, your new book, Pot Farm, deals with your experiences working on a medical marijuana farm in Northern California—the politics, the narratives, the social hierarchies and what-not.  Your first day there, you mention some guy named Hector the Treetop Sniper or something.  Is this some sort of metaphor (I really hope not, just to let you know) for the way violence rises, approaches the ether, spreads, and returns to us earthlings as, say, a “black rain” of sorts?  Or are you talking about an actual sniper here?  I mean, a dude with a gun.

Hector was an actual sniper, flesh and blood.  Highly trained, but not bloodthirsty.  A real sweetheart.

Okay.  An admission: I didn’t read the whole book, though it was crazy fucking compelling.  I took two shots of Stawski Spirytus—you know, that Polish white lightning, 192 proof, 96% alcohol?—and went temporarily blind.  And on an afternoon that End of Days was on, no less.  So, well, I couldn’t see the words anymore after the first chapter.  So:  why was there a sniper on a medical marijuana farm?

Well, many of the farms there employ snipers now as, you’ve probably guessed, a security measure. During 1996’s harvest, for instance, Weckman Farm (where I worked) was twice invaded illegally; once by CAMP, California’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, a division of the Department of Justice and Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement; once by a private vigilante anti-marijuana militia—real cross-eyed motherfuckers.  According to Lady Wanda, the woman for whom I worked, these private militias are increasing in number, staging armed raids on marijuana farms both commercial and medical.  When these lawless CAMP “warriors,” as Lady Wanda calls them, or private militias storm the property, they often indiscriminately destroy crops, beat or kill the crewmembers, cut irrigation hoses, slaughter farm dogs…  As a result, marijuana prices skyrocketed due to the risk.  And snipers were employed to help minimize said risk.   My wife (who was working as a massage therapist on the farm) and I were nervous as hell about the potential dangers, at the beginning at least, before we got swept up into, well, the farm life.

Which, I’m guessing, involved a lot of weed smoking.

It did.  Some of the farm workers actually chose to be paid in marijuana.  Some of the workers there were terminally ill folks or folks suffering from some sort of chronic pain—their work loads were, of course, far lighter than the rest of ours—who completed some light duties in exchange for easy access to their medicine.

So, just to get back to the violence, or the threat of violence: you tell me that Hector was a sweetheart.  A sweetheart sniper?

Well, yeah.  He was ex-military.  His house was wiped out during Hurricane Katrina…

He was from New Orleans…

Um, yeah.  Hurricane Katrina?  So, he wound up at some Katrina refugee camp in some stadium in Phoenix, Arizona.  Lady Wanda, like a lot of medical marijuana farm owners, came to such camps scouting for farm workers—offering these people jobs, a salary, a place to stay.  It’s actually a very philanthropic industry.  And the farm owners, shrewd businesspeople.  So Hector was happy to be there.  He was stationed up in this kind of tree fort during the day with his rifle, way up in the redwoods.  He climbed up this rope ladder with a little radio and a few books or magazines.  At dinner, he used to talk about how he listened to this crappy advice show—maybe it was Dr. Judy, I don’t know.  He couldn’t believe that people would share intimacies—some sexual in nature—over the radio.  He would blush.  It was like having a conversation with my grandmother.  When we were there, he never had to shoot anybody.  As far as I know, he spent his days listening to Dr. Judy and reading Saul Bellow or something.   Still, should you find yourself in rural Mendocino or Humboldt Counties, I would advise against trespassing, inadvertent or otherwise.

What exactly might happen?

You might exactly get blown away by a guy who blushes at radio talk about cunnilingus.

And the night sniper?

This was Waldo.  I never really got to know him all that well.  Rumor had it that he was epileptic.  I used to watch him from a distance, muttering to himself and scratching at his MedicAlert bracelet.  Of course, Where’s Waldo? jokes abounded on the farm.

So you would ridicule an epileptic night sniper who talked to himself?

Well, not to his face.  Only on Weckman Farm did something like this seem appropriate and… in-context, I guess.

What were the sleeping quarters like?

A big tent colony set up adjacent to the crops.

How did that affect your sex life?

For a while, adversely.  We slept on an air mattress, which creaked in the way that rubber creaks… I’ll leave it at that.  I don’t want to make Hector blush.

Describe a typical workday.

Twelve or so hours in the fields, trimming marijuana buds from the plants, pruning away any desiccated or moldy parts.  Eating lunch with the crew…

And were these a bunch of foo-foo pseudo-hippies?

Well, as I mentioned before, some were sick folks working for their meds.  Lady Wanda employed gourmet chefs to cook for us.  There were farm doctors-in-residence.  Katrina refugees.  Ex-military.  Businesspeople.  Tractor mechanics.  Artists.  Musicians. A yoga instructor.  A massage therapist (my wife).  Maybe a handful of pseudo-hippies.  It was a real self-sufficient little village, as corny as that sounds.  That said, it was very cloistered.  Really fucking claustrophobic at times.  Once on the farm, since the industry is still cloaked in a lot of secrecy, we were, well, let’s say, strongly discouraged from ever leaving until the season ended.  So Lady Wanda employed one guy to take our mail into town; to take our shopping lists and return with paper bags inked with our names, full of our Colgates and SpeedSticks and Vidal Sassoons.

Well, I have a lot of other questions, but we have limited space and I suppose I should actually read the book.

Yeah.  This time, limit yourself to tequila and a joint.  192 proof?!  Jesus.

__________________

Matthew Gavin Frank is an assistant professor of creative writing at Northern Michigan University. He is the author of Barolo, available in a Nebraska Paperback, and the poetry collections Sagittarius Agitprop, Warranty in Zulu, and The Morrow Plots.   Pot Farm, his latest, is available here.  Visit the author at matthewgfrank.com.

You’ll first feel the dense mass of steel, polymer, or wood weight in your palms. You’ll roll the cylinder, if there is one, pop it open and snap it shut. You’ll learn the distinct snicks and clicks of safety levers and shells and the hammer. With a shotgun, you’ll beware the bite of the spring snap after you shove the last round in the loading port. You’ll see that it takes time for untrained fingers: slipping single bullets into the chamber, loading multiple cartridges into the magazine. You’ll count as you shoot. The sound of each shot will be extra startling if you shoot indoors the first time: WHOUUM for the 357 Magnum. TAP TAP for the 22. You won’t help but wonder about all the pockmarks in the ceiling and sidewalls from previous bullets poorly aimed. Gunpowder will make a shocking cloud. You’ll leave with black marks on your hands, and you’ll smell faintly of fireworks.

I am not a gun owner. But I have been seeking lately to understand guns as a matter of fact. I was surprised, for example, to learn that I preferred to use (preferred to use?) a 357 Magnum, despite its size and heft, rather than a 22 semiautomatic handgun. The latter is so light and comparatively easy to fire that it feels a bit like a weaponized Pez dispenser. Somehow that ease and lightness felt troubling, even offensive, for a killing machine. I figure a gun needs to look and feel like what it can do to you.

I realize that there are all kinds of gun owners: the hunters, law enforcement, the trained-for-combat professionals, curator-connoisseurs fascinated by firearm history, even survivors of violent crimes and/or their neighbors and loved ones. Criminals would make up their own category altogether. Of course each group has its own strata, and certainly some of these groupings overlap.

The group that interests me most is a distinct subset who seem over-eager, the ones who just love guns for being guns. These folks seem (ironically?) least likely to have tangible reasons for shooting, though they tend to be itchy for reasons to shoot, or to justify shootings that have already happened–whether their own, or someone else’s.

At the extreme level, some members of this contingent would righteously avow themselves in the self-appointed sword-of-valor “make-it-right” category. Consider Anders Brevik, whose calculated rampage in Norway last year followed his declaration in a manifesto that “it is better to kill too many than not enough, or you risk reducing the desired ideological impact of the strike.”

A bit more recently and close to home, we have George Zimmerman, neighborhood watchman, who pursued a black teenager named Trayvon Martin down a sidewalk and then shot him dead with a concealed 9 MM pistol, telling a police phone dispatcher: “these assholes, they always get away” and “these fucking punks.”

When I think of Martin walking along, wearing his hoodie, hearing the sound of footsteps behind him, I can’t help but think that Stand Your Ground should be on his side–as the pursued, un-armed, murdered party. I hope that, when he was attacked, he did claim a chance to fight back. How could the law favor Zimmerman, the gun-carrying pursuer who pulled the trigger because of some axe to grind with “these assholes” and “these punks” (code for young men? young black men?).

What does it mean to stand your ground with a gun? Any armed person who’s been attacked knows his or her answer. Anyone who’s been in combat knows an answer, too. In fact, standing your ground as the likely lone-armed person means doing your best not to shoot if you can avoid it. But indoor ranges–say, compared to skeet ranges outside–train you only to hit immobile paper forms: maybe a target shaped like a bullseye with an orange center; or a cartoon mobster; or the outline of a human form, every body part labeled with its scientific name. You can move the target towards or away from you, but there it sits: waiting for a bullet. A sniper or assassin’s dream, really.

I went through a whole introspection process after I’d fired at a piece of paper shaped like a human body. I have been a relatively accurate shot for a beginner. But would I fire at a real person? Under what circumstances? And if I was willing to squeeze a trigger, could I execute the shot under the pressure of adrenalin, likely chaos, limited visibility, and lots of movement? If I did shoot, would I be accurate then? And what would “accuracy” mean: strategic wounding or incapacitating? killing?

It keeps getting more complicated.

When I went with a friend to a nearby outdoor range to shoot long guns for the first time, I had a weird experience. A too-friendly old-timer on the range set us up with our targets and weapons, and he just wouldn’t leave. When it was my turn with the assault rifle, I decided to shoot from a standing rather than seated position. It’s tricky to balance the gun butt properly for the first time when wearing big plastic ear muffs, so I took my time to get positioned and kept the safety on.

“Try this,” said the oldtimer. And he groped his hand across both of my breasts to adjust my shoulder joint and elbow just slightly. There was nothing subtle or accidental in the movement. It was the most obvious, unwelcome double-scoop from a stranger I’ve had since college. And here’s the thing: I almost laughed.

“Don’t be copping a feel on me now,” I said. “Not when I’ve got a gun in my hand.”

He backed away as if all he’d done was adjust my elbow. “I’m not worried about that,” he said.

I clicked off the safety and fired my bullets at the paper target we had bought. A couple of misses, but the rest hit the center chest and gut, the upper shoulder, the head. “You did good,” said the oldtimer. His walkie talkie squawked again, and he went to help a new pair of customers. My friend and I went on to try the rifle against the target, testing the impact from thirty feet, then twenty, then ten. It’s drastic how five long paces forward can change a shot from painful to perilous.

So who was this guy that had no problem groping a woman with a gun in her hands? That level of entitlement, or audacity, seemed awfully risky. He didn’t know me. Was this his way of trying to put me in place, remind me that I was “just a girl”? Was it a bizarre kind of test he tries on all the ladies? Or was it simply some cliché about women with guns turning him on? (I can hear it now: “Ma’am, what kind of gun were you wearing when he assaulted you?”)

I didn’t feel assaulted, though. The scenario felt comical, even lame. In other scenarios, I realize, it wouldn’t have been that way. I could have been alone. There could have been two creepy gun guys rather than one. Could I have shot at this guy if he had overtly attacked me, or would he have easily wrestled the gun away and used it against me?

I like to think that I will never own a gun. This is not a romantic, righteously pacifist notion, but I do realize that the whole gun thing is more than a cowboy fantasy, more than simply point and shoot (ideas, sadly, Zimmerman imbibed, at least on an indoor range–or with videogames). I also know that paper targets are not real people–the insight Zimmerman missed, or didn’t care about.

When I think about what happened that day on the range, and that tragic night in Florida, two female characters come to mind. In Night of the Hunter, Rachel Cooper on a front porch, rifle across her lap, ready to blast to bits Reverend Harry Powell, who threatens to invade the house and kill two orphan children because they witnessed their mother’s murder.

And in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina–a young black woman who warily carries a Smith and Wesson into a post-apocalyptic landscape of eroding neighborhoods, crumbling freeways, erratic crime, and privatized government. She’s wary to shoot because she has “hyperempathy,” which enables her to feel the perceived pain of others, both humans and animals, in her own body. But she’s also willing when necessary–because, as she tells us repeatedly, she aims to survive.

My own wary epiphany comes down to this. If my survival were immediately threatened, I would want to fight for my own life. If I saw another person being brutally attacked–my husband, or a family member, or a student, perhaps even an unarmed stranger with a bag of Skittles in his pocket–I hope that I would pull the trigger. That my conscience would demand it, joylessly.

And this reminds me of another category of gun owner, one I forgot at first but now I am learning to understand: the reluctant one.

Did you catch that cool Weyland Corp. fingerprint?  Did you see how he cries without scrunching his eyes, the most pitiful cry of all, and then admits his inability to feel sorrow?!  He smells flowers, wears soft shoes, sits straight-backed, hands on knees, like that neurotic child you knew in kindergarten who meticulously peeled the papers off of all the crayons and made an origami caterpillar that stretched all the way out the door to the tetherball pole. (Psst, that was me!)  So Prometheus’ debut of David prompted me to think up a list of ten great movie robots.  And they are ….

Rachael from Blade Runner.  So many replicants to choose from in Blade Runner.  While I’m partial to Rutger Hauer here (as I am in most cases, truth be told), I also love Sean Young’s performance as the emotionally-advanced Tyrell Corp prototype who keeps a noir Harrison Ford transfixed.

David from Prometheus.  Hey, if the makers of the “Happy Birthday David” promo can declare it a “viral video” as it was uploading, I can put David on my top ten movie robots list before the film even makes its debut.  Yeah, yeah, I remember Ash from Alien, but Ridley Scott plus Michael Fassbender equals hyperventilating into a paper bag and a bee-line to this here spot.

Yul Brynner’s gunslinger from Westworld.  Roughly ten years before The Terminator unleashed the relentless, virtually unstoppable cyborg hell-bent on annihilating its target, Westworld’s robot gunslinger-gone-rogue terrorized the vacationers at Delos with his rigid quick-walk and death glare and itchy trigger finger.

R2-D2 from Star Wars.  I’m sorry, people who think omitting C-3P0 is blasphemous, but if I’m only picking one per franchise I have to go with the little guy because C-3P0 whines more than a four-year-old out of tokens at a rigged Chuck E. Cheese crane game.  He whines more than Luke himself.  “What have you done? I’m backwards!”  Wah!  R2-D2, on the other hand, makes for a supercool record player.

The fembots from Austin Powers.  Three words: machine gun jubblies.

Officer Alex from RoboCop.  In the era of The Terminator (they’d used the Terminator theme in the original trailer for RoboCop, in fact), RoboCop, i.e. the future of law enforcement, presented an interesting twist on the unstoppable killing machine trope.  He’s on our side, saving the ladies from thugs in dark alleys and fighting corporate corruption all at the same time.

The giant from The Iron Giant.  Voiced by Vin Diesel, The Iron Giant is one of those under-the-radar kid movies that few people out there realize is actually terrific.  War is bad!  Artists are good!  Mom is alive and well!  And the retro styling of the robot is a nice nod to its 1957 setting.

Data from Star Trek: Generations.   I can’t really say that I don’t like Data.  That’d be like saying I don’t like double rainbows or the IHOP Rooty Tooty platter.  I mean, he’s likeable … but insufferable at the same time – taking things so literally, being so rule-oriented, blinking so earnestly.  I love/hate Data.  Yes.  There you have it.   And whatever you think of Star Trek in any incarnation you have to admit that Data’s child-like little wound-tight self was masterfully, and memorably, realized by actor Brent Spiner.

Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still.  I had a neighbor once who tried to make a sculpture of a knight out of mufflers and baking sheets, and the knight pretty much looked just like Gort looming outside my bedroom window.  That’s the beauty of Gort.  He’s visually simple.  Clean lines, hulking and shiny, laser-beam eyes.  So simple you can build your own (and I know you want to).

The T-800 from The Terminator.  The old story goes that James Cameron based the Terminator story on a dream he’d had.  I don’t know what he’d eaten for dinner that night, pizza and beer and peyote buttons or what, but I wish we could somehow recreate the circumstances that had once allowed Cameron to dream up something like the T-800 as opposed to, say, I don’t know, giant blue people.

Honorable mention:  the Rocky IV robot.  Come on!  You know you love it when the walking trashcan gives Paulie his birthday cake to the tinny slur of ‘80s synthesizers.

Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen write anthems about the travails of the working man; we line up for the revival of “Death of a Salesman.” John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson hold festivals and fundraisers when farmers suffer. Taxpayers bail out the auto industry and Wall Street and the banks. There’s a sense that manufacturing, or the agrarian economy, is what this country is really about. But culture was, for a while, what America did best: We produce and export creativity around the world. So why aren’t we lamenting the plight of its practitioners? Bureau of Labor Statistics confirm that creative industries have been some of the hardest hit during the Bush years and the Great Recession. But  when someone employed in the world of culture loses a job, he or she feels easier to sneer at than a steel worker or auto worker.

The piece has gotten a lot of traction on the web, and the comment board responses over at Salon are themselves a gripping read.

Some examples:

…even in good economic times, artists often had other jobs. Ashbery worked as an editor. Wallace Stevens was an insurance agent. Being an artist is, contrary to popular belief, not a cushy or elitist life. We’ve got to find ways to get that truth out there. People are artists because they have to be, even if they can’t make a living doing it. It is hard, I guess, for non-artist types to understand that view.

Didn’t the likes of Michaelangelo, DaVinci, Mozart, Handel hire themselves out to Cardinals, Popes and aristocrats — the rich CEOs of the time? Weren’t Shakespeare’s plays aimed at — marketed to — the tastes of a populace far less educated and informed than the modern moviegoer and considered bawdy and low-brow? The great works of European architecture were paid for by the church & the aristocracy and much of the labor building them coerced. Isn’t the Mona Lisa a portrait commissioned by a rich merchant? How would such work, say a portrait of a Walton wife, be regarded in today’s art world? Would the NY critics and gallery owners even regard it as art, give its artistic worth any objective assessment or would they dismiss it a commercialized pandering because of its origin?

I’d say self-indulgent pretty much sums up the problem.

“What we’re dealing with here,” the news anchor tells us, “is the total breakdown of society.”

“THE TOTAL…BREAKDOWN…OF SOCIETY,” we all chorus, and whoop with delight. My roommate and I have never touched, but in this moment we meet eyes and suddenly it’s as clear as the sound of shattering glass that we’re going to fuck. They interrupt this program to say the mayor has declared a curfew, and now everybody’s grabbing purses, jackets, car keys, we gotta go, we gotta run, as if a monster in a cop suit is roaring out of the television and chasing us all out the door. We crash out into the cold spring night and run zig-zag across the street, wild Indians with toy spears and paper feathers, and I crush her against the car crush my mouth against hers. Oh it’s Us against Them alright, we’re rebels alright, oh glorious underdogs, we’re crushing our mouths together on the night of the revolution.

As soon as we get back to our apartment we turn on the news. My hometown is on fire. The have-nots in my home town are having a family barbeque in their homes. My hometown rages with smoke, on the TV in our chilly living room.

My neck aches with holding my body a crucial distance away from hers as we kiss. Because she might not want to lose control. “Out of control, out of control, destruction, looting, it’s out of control,” shouts the TV. My hand moves across her belly, her white belly. Submission. Maybe my breath’s no good any more, I can’t tell, have I washed today, yes, but when? I can’t remember. I can’t tell her that I’m considering my breath.  A group of women and men in summer clothes scatter at the sound of police gunshots. A storefront lies in shards on the sidewalk. A guy’s carrying diapers, six plastic-wrapped bags, out of the ruins. He’s going home. Over and over again, two black guys drag a white guy out of a truck and kick him to death.

The news anchor is deeply disappointed with the people of America. “From the air, Los Angeles looks like an inferno tonight.”

My left hand cups her cunt as if I might accidentally crush it like an Easter chick. Searching her face for anything, searching her face for her gaze, I shift around to have my right hand free instead. The left hand, shady thief, can’t be trusted with an Easter chick. My right hand pushes onward. A Mexican woman in red slacks pushes a shopping cart that’s toppling over with groceries through the blasted-out wall of a convenience store. Helicopters whirl overhead, put wind in her long black hair. After the toothpaste commercial, the death toll is announced at thirty-eight. I think: I’ll have to write about this truthfully in the morning, but it’ll be impossible.

Her tongue loosens my center, but my edges are stiff. My limbs are taut with the strain of not pushing her too far. Los Angeles is on fire, on fire. “Hey, my home town’s on fire,” I say, unscared, shivering with the thrill.

She comes but doesn’t make a sound. My hand is pushed away. But I won’t know why until later because we can’t talk about it as it happens; we’re being too intimate for that. Over and over again two black guys drag a white guy out of a truck and kick him to death. “I can’t watch this part anymore,” I tell her, “it’s terrible.” We don’t, though, turn it off.

Flames crackle out of an overturned station wagon by the guard rail. Three white teenagers carrying televisions run across the Hollywood Freeway. Behind them, the sky’s Halloween. A wet spot’s seeping through the back of my cheap nylon slip. I’m embarrassed by the behavior of my cunt. My cunt smashes the plate-glass window of a Safeway supermarket and walks out with two cases of domestic beer. Out of control, out of control.

I wince when she bites my breast, but don’t make a sound. Does she know she hurt me? Is she likely to hurt me some more? I search her eyes for my face.  Our bones engage and lock. Will this happen again between us, will the fire that’s shining through her ribcage burn out black before I come?

The next day we’ll walk downtown together, where the police will be waiting with their riot costumes and plastic hats. The crowd will scatter, running in all directions, and we’ll run too, kids on the playground, giggling as the rubber bullets whiz around our heads.

Small, a gifted guitarist with a penchant for heavy metal, writes the songs performed by the show’s fictitious band, Dethklok, and he has compiled that music into two Dethklok albums of potent, riff-heavy music that have enjoyed both critical and popular acclaim. The second album, Dethalbum II, debuted at number 15 on the Billboard 200, selling 45,000 copies in the first week alone.

Preparing for the second album, Small found himself in the throes of a quality problem–he had a collection of riffs, licks and music that were not quite suitable for Metalocalypse, but that were too catchy to ignore. The solution? Galaktikon. Can call it a solo album, a side project or a rock opera–all apply. Small himself calls it “a high-stakes, intergalactic extreme rock album.”

The release of Galaktikon will coincide with the Season 4 premiere of Metalocalypse on Sunday, April 29 at 12:15am (ET/PT) on Adult Swim. We recently met with Small to get the inside track on his new album and to find out what’s in store for Dethklok in the new season of Metalocalypse.

Let’s start with Galaktikon. What was the inspiration behind the project?

Well it was kind of an accidental project. I knew it would be fun to do something outside of Dethklok. There are a lot of different kinds of music in different genres and things that I’d love to just mess around with because, just like people aren’t in one mood constantly, I think we don’t listen to the same style of music constantly. I think most people’s iPods are pretty eclectic. I’ve got stuff from Steely Dan to ELO to Cannibal Corpse to Amon Amarth and Jeff Beck.

What happened was that I was about to do the second Dethklok record–probably the Friday before the Monday that I was going to go in and do it. And I found out later that Friday that the contract was not finished and we weren’t going to be able to start making the record on Monday. But what nobody really knew was that I had already booked the studio, I had booked (drummer) Gene Hoglan, I had booked Ulrich Wild, who was the engineer and co-producer of that record and a bunch of people, and rented equipment and all kinds of stuff. I could have canceled everything and said, “Sorry guys, we’re gonna have to wait a month or so,” but instead I thought, “You know, I’ve got all these people in one place, I’m going to use them for something. I’m gonna gather a bunch of songs that I think are kind of in the same vein, stylistically.” They were songs that I was writing and developing when I first started the show and I threw them to the side even though I liked all the riffs and these cool ideas, but it wasn’t heavy enough for Dethklok. So I though I’d use these songs and spend the next five days recording drums and figuring out guitar parts. Lucky after the five days I spent working on that stuff, the contract got signed and we seamlessly went into Dethalbum II.

But what happened was I had all these drums and songs and ideas on a hard drive, and I had to get back to them at some point because in my mind, I thought “I’ve spent a lot of money on that stuff–I should finish it.” I would hate to be that guy with the half-finished project sitting on his hard drive. Plus, no one’s asked me to do this–it’s just a personal challenge to finish this project. It’s very easy to finish a project when you have a network breathing down your throat and money’s being spent and it’s not yours. It’s very easy to hit deadlines. But when it’s your own stuff, it’s a little bit harder. So I finished Dethalbum II, we went on tour, and I did season three and a bunch of time passed and I said, “I’m gonna finish this record,” and I did after season three.

As I was doing it, all the energies of these songs were starting to kind of make sense to me and I think I wanted to tell a story.

So what’s the story?

Well, I’m very influenced by Brian May and Queen, and a bunch of 70s stuff, and a bunch of modern metal. I also like a bunch of 90s stuff like Soundgarden. I also like Foo Fighters and I like Weezer. It’s all about borrowing from these sources throughout the songs, but still it sounds like the Dethklok rhythm section at times, too.

I was improvising songs and lyrics over what would be the last song on the record, which I thought sounded like a chase sequence. I was improvising lyrics about a superhero dating a girl, but complaining the whole way. And I thought, “Wait a minute–that’s kind of fun. This guy’s really pissed-off that he’s gotta do this. He’s kind of sick of his job. Or he’s sick of this girl! OK, that’s better–I like that. He’s sick of the girl.” So there’s this big battle that happens and then the big final chorus and there’s this big song called “On My Way,” which is the last song on the record.

So I thought, “OK, what do I know now? I’ve got a superhero who’s pissed off at this girl he’s gotta constantly save.” Then I thought, “OK, I know what the story is. What if Superman had this big, horrible, messy divorce with Lois Lane? And what if it was very public and he lost a lot of money and it was really ugly, and there was a lot of name-calling in the press, and he was just humiliated and he’s kind of half the man he was–but she still keeps on getting in trouble, and because he’s Superman, he’s gotta save her all the time. Because of course, it looks bad if he doesn’t.”

Furthermore, what if she started dating Lex Luthor? And also, Lex Luthor is not gonna keep her around–he’s gonna use her as a trap to kill Superman. So our Superman character’s gonna have to make a decision: “What do I do? Do I meddle with these affairs or do I let her make her own decisions?” He’s kind of letting go of this relationship. Ultimately, that’s what Galaktikon is–it’s an intergalactic divorce story.

It begs for a movie treatment. Is that something you’d consider?

Yeah, I mean, I didn’t want to do a collection of songs, because I didn’t know what I would sing about, really. I like inventing things and coming up with stories and ideas, so I’d love to find something for this to make sense. It definitely is not Superman–he will be his own superhero. But the whole record starts out with the guy getting his divorce papers, and he’s driving angrily through space. He’s pissed off and he’s got his robot counterpart with him–this comic relief robot–and he’s kind of processing the divorce and processing what the world thinks about him, and there’s kind of a Greek chorus of people talking shit about him, and at the end of the first song, he says, “What am I gonna do now? What the fuck am I supposed to do? I’ve gotta go talk to somebody.”

The second song is that basically he goes to a therapist, and that song is called “Prophecy of the Lazer Witch,” who’s kind of like an outer space prophet who says, “You gotta move on from this relationship. She’s gonna go and do shit, and it’s gonna be dangerous. Furthermore, I think your arch-nemesis is breaking out of prison as we speak, and you’ve just gotta stay away from this and quit meddling in affairs that aren’t yours. Move on from this relationship.”

The third song is “Beastblade,” which is like Superman II, where the bad guys escape. In this case, the song is the bad guy’s point of view. He’s talking about how he’s going to fuck this guy up and how he’s vulnerable, and now is the perfect time to kill him. And the song is kind of a softer song. It’s a really heavy riff with a soft vocal on it. He’s just very methodical. It’s kind of from the point of view of a serial killer.

So the songs go on and take this shape. There’s a song where the bad guy seduces the girl, and a song where the good guy has to contemplate entering into this world where he doesn’t belong and doing something. There’s a song where he gets trapped and has to fight this monster in this arena–this big Spartacus moment. There’s a big outer space chase song called “Dangertits,” which is an instrumental, and then we’re back to where I started–the big chase sequence, and that’s the record.

Some of the clips that I’ve heard are still pretty heavy, although they are more melodic. How do these songs differ from Dethklok?

I think I use the same mentality that I do when I do Dethklok stuff, which is find something that interests me, riff-wise, and contradict it later in the song. Like, louds and quiets, slows and fasts. But you know, when you’re in a metal band, everything is turned up to a million, so how do you create the illusion of dynamics? It’s usually by half-speeds, half-times or contradicting rhythms. On Dethklok I’m almost rapping–it’s almost a percussion instrument on death vocals. You don’t get to imply anything but rhythm, there’s no melody. So in Dethklok I overcompensate by putting lots of melody in the guitar parts. You’ve got these songs with these grandiose, harmonized parts because I want it to be as melodic as possible because that’s what I like. I like melody and harmonic movement and stuff like that.

Then I had this one riff in the song called “You Can’t Run Away” that was kind of a black metally kind of riff that was melodic and outer spacey and fun, in my mind. I thought, “What if I tried to do an Elliott Smith kind of vocal on top of that? How would that sound?” I kind of got breathy and falsetto-y.

So those were the kind of experiments that I was doing and that’s how I was attacking it from a different place.

Shifting gears, this coming Sunday (April 29, 2012), is the season four premiere of Metalocalypse. What can we expect this season?

Well, I’m pretty vague about this stuff, because I don’t like putting too much story out there–why even watch it? But what I have been saying is that the kind of bigger Metalocalypse story is moving forward as we continue. We’re in our seventh year of production for this show–it’s been going on for awhile–and it takes a really long time to do seasons, and I know the audience feels that, too.  The show has a natural ending point that I thought of when the show started, and we’re starting to move towards that in this season. It’s moving towards the end. Any show really should have an ending. I don’t think these things can go forever because I think you start getting diminishing returns. I don’t think people are tuning into shows that have been on for ten or fifteen years, wondering, “What’s gonna happen next week on Two and a Half Men?” I know the show’s doing incredibly well but I think at some point you’re doing it just to make money and not to tell a story or because you’re creatively engaged. Not that I won’t do that in the future someday (laughs) but not with this show. This show needs to be put together carefully.

As a fan, I have to say that one of my favorite parts is reading the end credits, when you find out who the guest voices were that you heard during that episode. Because you never know who’s doing the voices during the episode–it’s all but impossible to figure them out. How do you get these metal icons to come on board and do this?

First of all, I think a lot of people’s secret goal is to do cartoon voices, because you’re not yourself, you get to goof around, and the other thing that a lot of people don’t know is that people in the world of heavy metal have a sense of humor. A lot of people, even some fans, take things out of proportion and think that people like Cannibal Corpse are serial killers. But they’re people. They eat food, they go to sleep, they play with their kids and they have a lot of time on their tour bus and they’re usually watching The Simpsons or Monty Python. They love comedy. When you combine that universal interest in animation with the idea that musicians like being funny, it’s not too difficult to cast people.

Do you have a favorite among the guest appearances?

I don’t know. There are so many different things. Like Slash was on the show, easily one of my favorite guitar players. It was easy to work with him. There are some people where you’re like, “Wow, you people should be actors.” The Mastodon guys were really funny. Michael Amott, from Arch Enemy had an amazing kind of Shakespearean take on stuff. He had a great speaking voice and was a really great actor. It was really cool. A lot of people are really fun and goofy. When I first thought of the show, I thought, “Obviously King Diamond–he does a million voices, so he’d be perfect.” So that was an obvious one for me.

And I get to meet all these people and ask them questions. A lot of them are guitar heroes of mine, like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, that I got to befriend and ask the nerdiest of guitar questions. Billy Gibbons is on this season, from ZZ Top. He’s awesome. Dweezil Zappa, we have Kim Thayil from Soundgarden, Cannibal Corpse comes back. Then we have a bunch of people who are kind of new to the show. Jon Hamm came in and did a voice–he’s been watching the show for awhile. Werner Herzog is on like eight episodes of the show. That’s a pretty big coup as far as I’m concerned. I’m a pretty big Herzog fan. You’ll hear his voice a lot. And then people from Janeane Garafalo to Amer Tamblyn. This season has a nice mix of comedy and metal people.

I’m a huge fan of Dr. Rockso, and from what I’ve seen online, a lot of other people are too. Dr. Rockso and Razz Blammymatazz look very familiar. Assuming that they were inspired by real people, have you ever heard back from those people about what they think of those characters?

It didn’t start out that way. What happened was there was an episode–episode three of season one. It was Murderface’s birthday and the whole idea was that he’s a big baby. The idea of Murderface is that he thinks he’s really tough and he hates everything, but he just really hates himself. He thinks he’s a nihilist but he cares too much about being a nihilist to be a nihilist. Even before the first episode, I knew that Murderface was the most fun person to write for because he was filled with contradictions.

In his birthday party, we were looking at storyboards and I thought he should have some kind of shitty birthday clown. In the initial drawing, it was kind of a fat clown, looking sad. I thought, “You know what? That’s not good enough. It should be the wrong genre of metal. It should be humiliating.” It was like, “Dr. Rockso, the Rock and Roll Clown,” and all he cares about is cocaine and he kind of has that patter of like Paul Stanley or Steven Tyler or David Lee Roth. I drew a big picture of him with the dry-erase marker and I was like, “Yeah, he’s got a cop hat and I remember seeing KISS at the Wax Museum and they were wearing these things with these plunging neckline things and you could see the top of their pubes and everything about that was embarrassing and strange, but I thought their makeup was cool, and as a little kid I thought KISS was amazing.

So that was it–listening to those Paul Stanley things and putting in those vocal things like “Cu-cu-cu…” When David Lee Roth has a breakdown in a song, where he starts talking, we went, “That’s how this guy speaks.” And he keeps on saying, “I do cocaine.” And that was it, we got it: “Dr. Rockso, the Rock and Roll Clown. I do cocaine.” All of us that make the show, we don’t give a fuck about Dr. Rockso. In fact, we hate him! But everybody loves him, which is always the funniest part.

But as the music came, they drew him and immediately it started looking like David Lee Roth, and it was kind of undeniable how great that drawing is. I really fucking love Van Halen–like really, really love Van Halen–so thought I’d like the opportunity to do these kind of Van Halen sounds, and that to me was fun. And it’s funny that the one band member in Dethklok that’s the most innocent and stupid (Toki Wartooth) hangs out with the dumbest, most shitty idiots in the world and one of them is Dr. Rockso.

We end these interviews with five Either/Ors, so you just pick one and if you want, say why you picked it.

OK. I hope I don’t piss anybody off. Here we go…

Well yeah, you might piss someone off on the first one: Madonna or scented candles?

I have a really strong affection for scented candles. Yeah, I’d pick scented candles any day of the week. Over almost anything–not just Madonna. If you’d said, “Lady Gaga or scented candles,” that would be a tougher thing.

Black metal or thrash?

Oh, that’s a tricky one. I’d go to thrash.

The Wall or Tommy?

Tommy.

Commercially successful or critically-acclaimed?

Oh boy. If there was just somewhere in between… I think it’s unfortunately, critically-acclaimed. No, you know what? Fuck the critics. It’s self-satisfying making money. I wish there were a third option. Critically-acclaimed. I don’t think Metalocalypse was critically-acclaimed. I think my old show, Home Movies, was critically-acclaimed, but nobody watched it. We got cancelled early, so if there’s a way to straddle those lines, that’s what everyone is looking for.

Last one–Van Halen with Roth or Van Halen with Hagar.

Um, there isn’t a Gary Cherone option?

Um…

OK, it’s Roth, it’s Roth. And I’ll tell you, those early records are so great. I was probably like twelve years old when 5150 came out and I will follow the guitar player anywhere, so I bought all the Sammy Hagar Van Halen stuff, and I read Sammy Hagar’s book, and I re-bought all of his stuff, and I re-listened to a lot of stuff that I didn’t spend much time with, like Balance. That record’s a lot better than I remembered it being, and Eddie’s guitar sounds really fucking cool. That’s probably one of his better sounds since Roth left Van Halen. But yeah, I know that it’s an unpopular thing to think that Sammy Hagar is a big part of Van Halen, but I do think he is. I’m a fan.

So how did you get the idea in the first place of collecting classic advice books?

I have been collecting advice books since about 1985, when my college roommate and I picked up a copy of the Evelyn Millis Duvall’s The Art of Dating, which was written in the year that we were born (1967). We read aloud from the book during breaks from our studies, giggling over the silly advice (which is still some of my favorite from my collection). When we parted ways my roommate bequeathed the book to me, and so began a small collection. I was never very good at doing my own hair or makeup, and never dated very much, so I was naturally drawn to these books, which claimed to have all the answers! I had about 50 books when I started my “classic advice” website in 1997, missabigail.com, where I would answer questions about “contemporary dilemmas” with advice from the classic books. Today, the collection is up to over 1000 (I’ve lost count). I’ve got over 700 of them cataloged at LibraryThing but there are many more still to do. I need an intern!

Which of the classic advice books do you think was the most ahead of its time, perhaps even giving advice that would make sense to the average reader today?

Nina Farewell’s The Unfair Sex : an Exposé of the Human Male for Young Women of Most Ages, from 1953, is one of my favorites that is definitely in this category. Farewell is a pseudonym so not sure of the true identity of the author, though her introduction points to her own experiences as a naive 18 year old, who “surrendered her virginity because she was afraid to appear rude”. She wrote this book as a handbook for girls, so that they would know how to “cope with men”. One chapter titled “Never Go to a Man’s Apartment” is followed by “How to Behave When You Get There.” How great is that? And I bet pretty unusual for its time.

What do you think are the aspects of modern life that would most shock one of the authors from your collection?

I think they would be a bit shocked an horrified by the recent report on cell phone usage while on the toilet. I know Miss Abigail is!

You turned your column into a book, Miss Abigail’s Guide to Dating, Mating, and Marriage. Was this your first book project? Were you approached by a publisher to write the book, or did you pitch the idea? How was the process of the book, from conception to writing through promotion and then the additional editions?

Yahoo picked up my website as a “site of the week” early on, and it got a fair amount of attention (remember when the “cool site of the day” concept was big? when people didn’t have resources like friends on Twitter or Facebook to alert them to cool links? Yeah, way back then). Thanks to that attention, from 2001-2002 I had a weekly column in the London Times Saturday magazine, dispensing advice to Brits as an “agony aunt.” Sometime after that I was contacted by a book developer to help them come up with a concept for a book using the classic advice. It was shopped around but didn’t pan out. Then not long after (I guess in 2005), my site was featured in a weekly e-newsletter that reached NYC readers, and I got a few calls from publishers about doing a book. A deal with Thunder’s Mouth Press was struck, and over the course of a few months that summer (in the evenings, since I still had my day job), I worked on pulling it together. The book includes the best advice from the site, plus other advice that helped fill in a “story” from puberty to happily married.

I was somewhat familiar with book production thanks to a previous job at the Smithsonian, however it was still an odd process. I had a great editor who was really excited about the project, but it all happened pretty fast and suddenly there was a book! And that editor moved to a different job. The hard truth is there was little marketing assistance, and no real push or help from the publisher. I had to take on a lot and I’m admittedly not the best promoter. The publisher eventually went out of business. The title moved to another publisher, and the book went out of print, just as the play was opening. I was able to get the rights back and quickly worked to self-publish the second edition so it could be available to show goers. Thankfully my parents own a book packaging company so they helped walk me through the process. In January 2012, I published Kindle, Nook, and iBook versions of Miss Abigail’s Guide. That’s a whole other story, the mysteries of ebook publishing.

Oh, and the German rights were bought up from Thunder’s Mouth, so there is a really cool German edition out there. All of these versions are available via links from my site.

How did the Miss Abigail play come about?

In the Fall of 2009, I hadn’t thought much about the book in awhile, and wasn’t updating my site all that much. I’d met my future spouse and was busy taking some of my advice books to heart so had less time to devote to the hobby. So it was a bit of a surprise when out of the blue I got an email from a producer in NYC, Ken Davenport, who had seen my book and wanted to buy the theatrical rights. How could I say no? He and his co-writer Sarah Saltzberg wrote the script, which is inspired by my book and uses some quotes from it. I got to read a few earlier drafts of the script and provided some feedback, but it’s really their baby. I turned them onto some of the dating and sex ed films in Rick Prelinger’s Archive, which they used in a great mashup in the middle of the show. It all happened rather quickly – it was only about a year from that first discussion to opening night Off Broadway!

Abbie Grotke with Laurie Birmingham, who played Miss A
in the first readings & was recently on tour with the show.

What has it been like to see the persona you created turned into a play?

The weirdest moment was when my husband and I sat down in the theatre in NYC for a first public reading of the script. I was oddly nervous — how would the audiences react? Suddenly some music starts, and there is a theme song, all about Miss Abigail. I loved it. To have my name said on stage for an hour and a half was the strangest feeling. But other than Miss Abigail’s name and the set piled with books (much like my home) she’s not really me. She’s retired from the Library of Congress (I still work there) and she advises the stars (I most definitely do not, unless they are secretly reading my blog!). The character is also about 20 years older than I am, and she has a hunky young sidekick named Paco who is in love with her. Because I’m a geek it’s also been fun to see my name come up in Google alerts for Eve Plumb and Joyce Dewitt, who have both played Miss Abigail in the Off-Broadway production.

The star of the play’s first run was Joyce DeWitt, famous for her role in the sitcom Three’s Company. What do you think some of the authors from earlier eras of your collection would have said about the situation in Three’s Company? Some of your books are contemporary to that show. Would their responses be any different from their predecessors’?

Eve Plumb was the first Miss Abigail, you may remember her as Jan from The Brady Bunch. Joyce was next. The classic advice books would never suggest you share quarters with members of the opposite sex unless you were married. They would probably take more the Mr. Roper point of view, though I’m fairly certain they wouldn’t approve of the gay roommate either. Or being gay at all. While these older books can be entertaining, they are also a reminder that times have changed for the better in so many ways.

You and I have worked together on the topic of digital preservation of cultural heritage. How do you think the creative evolution of your lavor of love is relevant to preservation of less-remarked genres such as classic advice books?

We talk a lot at the library about citizen archivists and enthusiasts who are passionate about preserving one particular genre or thing, and how that supplements what libraries and archives and other cultural heritage organizations might do. These citizen archivists potentially can have a big impact if they are able to step in and preserve things when cultural heritages organizations don’t for whatever reason. I guess in a way I’m doing a similar sort of thing with my collection, even though that wasn’t my original intent. This is really just a hobby for me, I don’t profess to be a scholar or expert, but do hope by doing what I’ve done with my collection, and having some fun with it, it’s brought new life into these classic advice books. I wish I had all the money and resources to scan my books to share more widely! Of course there is that pesky copyright issue.

Have you ever found yourself turning a bit like one of your model authors in dealing with someone with whom you interacted in real life?

Sometimes I play the advice-giver card, but mostly as any good friend might do. Mostly its the etiquette questions I like to look up, and I have a modern-day Emily Post to help when I need “real” advice. I have look up the occasional answer for friends, but mostly they realize I am not the same as the character Miss A and am just like any other friend with advice. In fact I felt like a bit of a poser—for most of the years I was answering love advice on the site and working on the book, I wasn’t even dating myself. I was hopelessly single, and still couldn’t do my hair or makeup. Eventually I did find true love though!

What advice would Miss Abigail give to a correspondent who worries his or her significant other is having a nervous breakdown?

I found an answer that is surprisingly 2012! Josephine A Jackson, M.D., and Helen M. Salisbury, the authors of Outwitting our Nerves (1921) explain that “In a nervous disorder there is nothing to cut out and there is nothing to give medicine for. Nevertheless there is something to be done, something which is as definite and scientific as a prescription or a surgical operation… psychotherapy.”

Here are a few other books from the collection that I can recommend: Release from Nervous Tension (1943); How to Worry Successfully (1936), and You Must Relax (1934).

If you had a chance to ask one of those classic advice authors a question of your own, what might it be?

Dear Classic Advice Giver: How many times did you get questions on this topic: “I like this girl but I don’t know how to tell her”?

You’ve had a remarkable, and probably exhausting decade or so. What interesting developments do you see in Miss Abigail’s future?

Well, I’m excited to have the e-book versions finally done and available. And the play has recently gone on tour, so it’s been fun to see it travel to other cities. There is now also a version of Miss Abigail in the Czech Republic so we are trying to figure out if we can manage a trip to Prague to see it.

Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by this ever-expanding world that you’ve created?

Oh yes. Miss Abigail certainly has taken on a life of her own; sometimes I don’t even recognize her! I’ve been doing this for so long, it’s pretty amazing that there is still life in it and that it’s expanded the way it has. I’ve changed too! I still have that day job, and life does get in the way, so I don’t devote nearly the same amount of time as I used to to the site, though I try to post a few times a month. I do try to keep up more regularly with Facebook and tweeting (@DearMissAbigail) these days. It sure is easier to get the word out since I first started the site.Who knows where the future will lead! I think it is out of my hands now, and that’s pretty darn fun and incredible to think about.

For those of you who couldn’t make it out to last week’s TNB Literary Experience in Los Angeles, here’s a little taste of what you missed.

Behold this set from spoken word maestro Rich Ferguson, accompanied by B.O.S.S:

I would say: At dusk, the crops’ silhouettes held to the sky like herons cemented into the earth, leaves flapping feebly in the Northern California wind, unable to lift themselves from the forthcoming hands of the Morning Pickers, and the watchful green eyes of Lady Wanda—I would say that, but I was likely stoned.  It’s just as likely, the crops didn’t look like herons at all, there was no wind, and it may not have even been dusk.  It could have been morning.  It could have been afternoon.  Having worked on a medical marijuana farm, filling six notebooks with scribblings of varying degrees of sense, and engaging in the attendant and standard subcultural vices, I have made of myself an unreliable narrator.

Indeed, much of my memory of the experience exists somewhere between the hazy and the disturbingly vivid—it is the stuff of fever dream and emotion, and drugs, and hangovers and hard physical labor.  The pot farm, and that stage in our lives, still clings to reality with a tenuous grip.  But that’s exactly what the place and that time were: tenuous.  I have, by default, forgotten certain things, and am deliberately going to leave others out, like how, on our drive out to California, my wife and I stopped along I-80 to sleep in a small town outside Lincoln, Nebraska, one day after a tornado destroyed much of the region.  I am going to leave out the detail of the giant yellow Super 8 Motel sign that lay crushed in the middle of Main Street.

I am going to try not to dwell on the details of our lives up to this point.  How we moved into my parents’ house after my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and, because my father still works six days a week, and they maintain three large dogs, my wife and I became responsible, for just over a year, for their feeding, walking, watering, and shit-removal.  How we slept on an air mattress in the bedroom I grew up in, and, (I will certainly leave out any discussion about how weird it was to have sex there, in that room where I discovered masturbation and fantasized about the “popular” girls while listening to a cassette of Bon Jovi’s “Slippery When Wet,” because everybody writes about that) always, before falling asleep, cried too much, laughed too much, talked too much, were too fucking silent.

How that stint drove us to do something deliberately foreign and “off the grid,” they way people do when they realize, but are fleeing from, the awareness that they may have just shed their youth, or whatever it was that allowed them carefreedom.  How we quietly said goodbye to ourselves, packed up the car, and took off West, thinking, without saying it, that we could somehow have a hand in jumpstarting a new phase in our lives.  Some people have children, or shave their heads.  We took off for the pot farm—not because we’re a marijuana-crazy couple or anything, but because it sounded like the experience could spark…well…something.

Besides that, given the nature of the pot farm and the people who work there, I am changing names also.  Unreliable.  I am Binjamin Wilkomirski, and James Frey, and Helen Demidenko, and Wanda Koolmatrie.  I am waiting to be crucified on Oprah, then sign a seven-figure deal.

So I was likely stoned and let’s say it was dusk, and let’s say the crops looked like some kind of water bird.  My wife and I strolled the first few rows before the communal dinner, our shoes picking up soil as we go.  I do remember that: the place was soily, though soily’s not a word (and soil-rich sounds too “green,” and soiled sounds like a dirty diaper).  Unreliable.

I must admit: I’m a little neurotic about engaging the whole “mom-with-cancer” thing.  Such events seem ubiquitous these days, and I hope you don’t think that this is one of those stories.  I do have to warn you though: It’s likely to come up again, but only to further the main thread—the pot farm thread; to provide a dramatic (and truthful!) backdrop, as in, “…a passionate love story set against the backdrop of the post-revolution ’30s and ’40s Mexico…” (Variety, review of “Tear This Heart Out,” by Jonathan Holland, Dec. 19, 2008).

So: In Mendocino County, summer confuses itself with fall; fall with winter.  Likewise, the seemingly dissonant landscapes commingle—rocky headland shore, redwood forest and wine country overlap, yielding an environmental cassoulet that somehow works together.  You can fact check that.  I’m pretty sure I’m right.

The crops average just over six feet tall, looking down on my wife and me as if concerned parents, hands on their hips, braced to praise or punish.  Behind us, the sun wounds the sky, scores of tents from the Residents’ Camp whip like sails—another would-be moveable species held into place with cement shoes, or stakes, or the bodies of the weary crew.

I’m switching to present tense here.  That’s my choice, I feel, even though this happened in the past.  I’m hoping it lends this tale some of the same paranoiac urgency I felt while living it.  If you care about that sort of thing…

We can hear the tinkling chorus of four acoustic guitars making their way through a mocking, overwrought rendition of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.”  I probably rolled my eyes and mocked a dry heave—my usual response to Journey—though, secretly, I choked down my uncool reflex to hoist my right fist into the air.  Maybe I should feel more comfortable being myself around my wife; after all, we were married five years then.  What’s wrong with me?

As the moon asserts itself, the guitars suddenly go quiet, one of the singing voices missing the cue, left stranded without music: Hold on to that feeee-lay-eee-aayng!  I am quietly jealous of the picking crew.  They seem so at ease making asses out of themselves, which is to say, being human.  I feel I can learn something from them.

A dull orange cloud of Durban Poison smoke hangs over the Residents’ Camp tonight.  This exotic strain of medical marijuana was only this morning the bane of our existence, as the Pickers were asked to trim even more quickly and carefully than usual.

“We have three times the requests for D.P. than any other,” Lady Wanda told us this morning, “More than Northern Lights, more than Trainwreck.”

That Lady Wanda allowed some favored Pickers to sample such an in-demand product spoke to her benevolence.  As Johanna and I watch the sky drain itself of light, the Residents’ Camp seems to yawn as one.  Some crewmembers take pre-dinner naps, some pre-dinner walks, some stretch and meditate at the evening yoga class in Lady Wanda’s cavernous basement, some sit alone and smoke their paycheck, enjoying the crop.

I nod to Hector, one of the Treetop Snipers stationed fifty feet up a south-leaning redwood, knowing full well that, while on duty, he would never nod back.  I reach for Johanna’s hand.  Hers is smooth with oil, mine still sticky with resin.  She’s here at Weckman Farm as a resident massage therapist.  Her friend, Robbi, with whom she grew up in Overkalix, Sweden, is the Farm’s resident yoga instructor.  A thin, well-muscled woman, Robbi is what my robust Jewish grandmother would have called “a little piece of gristle.”

Remember: names have been changed.  Sometimes, this refers to the names of places.  I made up the name Weckman Farm, because it sounds a little like the farm’s real name, though not in the way that you’re thinking.  Another admission: because I can’t see you, I am going to be presumptuous from time to time.  Please don’t be offended.  Also: “Johanna” and “Robbi” are not from Sweden.  They are from another non-North American country—one that has seen a bit more unrest in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

It was Robbi who got us these jobs.  In order to obtain work on a medical marijuana farm, one needs a recommendation from either a current or a former employee.  Access to the property is restricted to current employees.  It’s very incestuous, but without the risk of a three-eyed baby.  They haven’t yet proven that pot causes that.

I’ve got the grunt work (though Johanna insists that massage is no easier), working as a Picker, harvesting the many strains of marijuana for Lady Wanda, reefer heiress and owner of Weckman Farm.  Each morning, when I go out into the fields, Johanna sets up her massage table and lotions and oils in a corner of Lady Wanda’s basement—the room Johanna sometimes calls, The Hall of Mirrors or The Mausoleum.

“I swear I wouldn’t be surprised to see skeletons shoot from the walls like in a Spielberg movie,” she told me.

I quietly hoped she was thinking of “The Goonies,” (yes, I know, it was directed by Richard Donner of “Lethal Weapon” fame, but Spielberg wrote the story!) and not of some Indiana Jones movie, because this would mean, as a non-North American, her cinematic knowledge would be “deeper”—was “The Goonies” as popular overseas?   Anyway, whenever she says things like that, and we’re around people, I have to fight back the urge to give her a deep kiss—the sort that leads to other things.  I’m not leery of public displays of affection, but I also don’t like to torture myself.

I’ve never seen the room, but picture it like a Spanish catacomb, with a rounded brick ceiling and rounded brick walls.  On more than one occasion, I’ve pictured Lady Wanda reclined on a chaise lounge in the opposing corner, serenely sipping blood from a silver cup.

The crew has assured us that, while a ruthless businesswoman with a zealous work ethic, Lady Wanda has a heart of silver, if not gold, but of course, the crew is a group with consciences either great or absent, and here, on Weckman Farm, if you want a thoughtful answer, it depends on who you ask.  For such a clandestine enterprise, the crewmembers really are a bunch of, what my grandmother would have Yiddishly called, yentas.

Lady Wanda prefers housefrocks—pastel ones—but given the massive red half-moon dangling from her tan-lined neck like Turkish jewels, and the ocean of milk-white flesh spreading beyond, she spends many an afternoon in a XXXL tank-top as well.  Lady Wanda is built like a multi-tiered wedding cake in mid-collapse, the flour milled from something bullfrogish and a pinch of Mama Cass.  (Insert your own manifesto on exaggeration here).  She could pass for sixty on a bad day, thirty-five on a good one, but probably rests somewhere in her upper-forties.

Her voice is that of an opera star falling down a spiral staircase, her words carrying vibrato dragged over a speed bump.  Vocally, she favors, “Honey,” as in, “Bring that crate of bud to the flat-bed, Honey.”

By flat-bed, she means the cargo bed attached to the one-seat tractors, used for hauling the red crates of freshly-picked marijuana to a series of storage sheds.  From there, the crop will be sorted, cured, dried and packaged.

Legislation surrounding the harvesting of marijuana is, under California law, constantly in flux, and traditionally, either over- or under-enforced.  Currently, it is legal to cultivate marijuana on a “caregiver” basis, meaning that the crop must be used for medical purposes.  As a “caregiver,” Lady Wanda is permitted by California law to possess eighteen marijuana plants per patient served.  Mendocino County extends the law a bit, permitting one-hundred square feet of plants for each awaiting patient.  With her hands in the air, the undersides of her formidable arms shuddering, Lady Wanda forcefully assures her crew, “I conform to all the goddamn ordinances!”

Still, whether a grower is compliant or not, local law enforcement is known to raid these farms, arrest many of those involved in their operation, and, reportedly, decimate the crop. Helicopters piloted by the California Department of Justice often fly low over the pot farms, visually estimating the number of plants on the property. Of course, many of my pot-smoking-picking-selling sources on this are biased, but there are certain articles to be found about such things, and there’s a later chapter about my first-hand experience with one of these helicopters—but, of course, I was likely stoned at the time.  Sorry.

Each grower is issued a government-certified permit to cultivate a certain number of plants for a fixed number of patients.  If an airborne law enforcement official, with binocular aid, suspects that the farm possesses even one more plant than the allowed number, the helicopter will land and, according to Lady Wanda, “All Hell will break loose.”

In 2005 alone, Lady Wanda warns her crew, employing her favorite slang for the local law enforcement, “Johnny Screw confiscated over a million-and-a-half plants in this county.  And stole quite a bit of money as well.  They have more guns then we do.  We’ve gotta watch each others’ asses.”

Here, the wind would likely sweep the lip of her flowered housefrock slightly to the left, bestowing upon her speech an added emphasis and the threat of glimpsing one of her magnificent thighs.  I admit, I now overuse the whole Johnny Screw phrase, much to the annoyance of my friends, without citing Lady Wanda as my source.  I doubt she’s the persecute-for-plagiarism type.

I listen to Lady Wanda, whether she’s talking about ass-watching or crate-hauling.  Perhaps it’s not only her hulk I find intimidating, or the fact that she’s managed to domesticate something as wild as the wind, but this is the first time I’ve ever engaged in employment quite this, well, underhanded.  Additionally, rumors circulate among the crew (though nobody claims to have seen it) pertaining to the size of Lady Wanda’s gun collection.

Always at her command, I drop my scissors to the soil, and carry a crate-ful of recently trimmed marijuana buds—about six pounds worth—to the flat-bed of a one-seat tractor driven by Charlie the Mechanic.  By this time, the sweat ringing the chest of my shirt rivals the expanse of Lady Wanda’s sunburn, and I will think of Johanna calmly performing some cranial-sacral therapy in the air-conditioned comfort of her New Age mausoleum.

A Picker (also known as a Trimmer) is responsible for grooming the marijuana buds with a pair of nail scissors, making them perfect.  Like harvesting wine grapes and other ingestibles, the pruning of the product is of utmost importance.  I reach elbow deep into the plants, the leaves, oils, resin, wayward clippings tattooing my arms with the smell that will stay with me for the season; the smell that permeates my clothes and shoes and tent; the smell that will ruin a chair if I sit down; the smell that will infect a carpet if I stand up.

Everyone on Weckman Farm bears this olfactory burden, though rumors circulate of special soaps and shampoos that almost get rid of it.  Of the many rumors saturating Weckman Farm, this is the most often dispelled.  It is because of the smell—a jogger bull moose’s dirty laundry— that the Pickers are rarely allowed into Lady Wanda’s house, save for The Mausoleum.  But even her mansion, formidable as a bulwark, is susceptible.  Because Johanna sleeps with me, the odor of premature marijuana attaches itself to her and, in turn, Lady Wanda’s gothic basement.  Pickers talk of Growers who, every season, have to replace their furniture.

Reaching into the crop, without removing the soon-to-be-smokable bud from the plant, I manicure the stuff, pruning away all rotten segments: marijuana that has grown small tufts of white mold; marijuana that has desiccated too early; the large outer fan leaves that have fallen into brittle dryness.  I collect all of these clippings in a crate and carry them to the one-seat tractor.  The work itself is hard and monotonous.  If it were legal, these mundane details of my work at the pot farm would be of about as much interest as my summer spent detasseling corn outside Normal, Illinois.

Charlie the Mechanic will not stop staring at me until I successfully deposit the crate on the flat-bed, as if he’s trying to divine the secret ingredient responsible for the miracle of human locomotion.  Every time I set the crate on his tractor (there are many, given that a Picker may opt to work twelve-to-fourteen-hour days), Charlie exhales through his nose and speaks his refrain, “That’s it, brother.”

His voice is trapped in rasp, predicting the tracheotomy he’ll certainly have to receive in a decade or so.  A two-day-old beard permanently clings to his face like playground sand and, in the early mornings, his hair glows ethereal orange.  Never having fully recovered from his tours in Vietnam, Charlie enjoys his Seagrams 7 whiskey a bottle at a time and his Winston cigarettes by the carton.

Rumors spread among the Pickers: some say that Charlie used to be a millionaire oil tycoon and had a fleet of tankers working under his command somewhere in Alaska, but when his wife left him, he went to ruin; some say that when his wife left him, he became an ice cream truck mechanic in Los Angeles.  The common denominator is the flight of the wife.  Rumor also has it that he occasionally drinks tractor fuel.

Always, at day’s end, I tell Johanna what I’ve heard.  This is our favorite pre-dinner ritual.

“You can’t believe everything you hear in this place,” Johanna tells me as we round one row of pot plants and disappear into another, “Rumor also has it that everyone who works here is a great liar.”

By great, I hope she means talented, but I’m pretty sure she means big, fat.

“Maybe they just like to tell a story,” I say.

“I’d love to see a list of Lady Wanda’s prerequisites,” she says, smiling, too tired to laugh at herself.

This is our privacy together, when I can marvel at Johanna’s ease with the world.  After Chicago, and living for a year in my childhood bedroom, with its autographed photo of Ryne Sandberg and pin-up of Alyssa Milano circa “Who’s the Boss?” I’m surprised she still can muster it.  Of the world, she’s seen so much more than I.

Dusk is slowly giving way to night (or morning to afternoon, afternoon to evening…Choose your own adventure).  Johanna lets go of my hand and cracks her knuckles.  She has given seven hours-worth of massage to the crew today and her hands are hurting her.  I’ve had my hand cuffed into a pair of scissors all day.  My hands are hurting me too.

___________________

Matthew Gavin Frank is an assistant professor of creative writing at Northern Michigan University. He is the author of Barolo, available in a Nebraska Paperback, and the poetry collections Sagittarius Agitprop, Warranty in Zulu, and The Morrow Plots.   Pot Farm, his latest, is available here.  Visit the author at matthewgfrank.com.

The story includes this sentence:

World Peace raised his left elbow over Harden’s shoulder and cleanly hit Harden in the back of the skull.

And this one:

Ibaka and other Thunder players challenged World Peace, but were kept apart, and World Peace was ejected after officials reviewed the tape.

I’m bringing this up because 1) I didn’t want you to miss it, if you are one of the many TNB readers who do not care a whit about professional basketball, or 2) You saw the headline and wondered what the heck was going on.

Allow me to explain.

Ron Artest came into the league out of St. John’s in 1999, the 16th overall pick in the NBA draft.  The Knicks had the 15th pick, and could have drafted him; Artest is from New York, a product of the Queensbridge housing projects.  Instead, they opted for the Frenchman Fredeic Weis, who never played in the league.  They have sucked ever since.

Artest developed a reputation as a bruising, tireless defender, a smaller, sleeker version of Dennis Rodman, and just as looney tunes.  Have you ever played pick-up basketball, just to kill time on a nice summer day, and there’s some asshole who plays really intense defense to the point where he’s practically humping your leg, and he totally ruins the experience for you?  That’s what Artest did, except on the pro level.

He became an All-Star, and a first team All-NBA defender.  But, again, he had a screw loose.  The defining moment in his NBA carer was the so-called Malice at the Palace, when a fan threw a plastic bottle at him as he was reclining on the scorer’s table, ostensibly to calm himself down and stop himself from losing his temper on the court, and he went into the stands to accost the culprit.  It was a black eye on the entire league, and led to him being suspended for the rest of the young season–the longest suspension in NBA history.

The thing is–and this is what makes Artest so fascinating–to this day, I don’t think he meant any harm when he went into the stands.  For all his brawn, Artest exudes a certain child-like quality that is refreshing in the mercenary world of pro sports.  I’ve always liked that about him.  He’s troubled, but his heart, as the old saw has it, is in the right place.

He found redemption, of sorts, in Los Angeles, where Kobe Bryant keeps him on a tight leash.  After the Lakers won the championship a few years ago, Artest thanked his therapist, on national TV, for helping him manage his anger.  This is not the sort of thing that ever happens in pro sports.  Again, it’s refreshing.

There’s more unorthodox behavior, too, but you get the gyst.

This offseason, Artest legally changed his name to Metta World Peace.  He is now, as many, many others have noted, the Artest Currently Known As World Peace.  Because it’s a legal name change, his surname, WORLD PEACE, is on the back of his jersey.  When he scores a basket, the announcers say, “Two points for World Peace.”  (This despite the fact that he continues to refer to himself as Ron Artest).  It is endlessly amusing, especially when you read stuff like this:

“I got real emotional and excited, and it was unfortunate that James had to get hit with the unintentional elbow,” said World Peace, who had scored 12 points and played solid defense on Durant. “I hope he’s OK. Oklahoma, they’re playing for a championship this year. I apologize to the Thunder and James Harden. It was just unfortunate.”

Later, World Peace took to Twitter to share his thoughts and expressed remorse over the incident.

“I just watched the replay again….. Oooo.. My celebration of the dunk really was too much… Didn’t even see James ….. Omg… Looks bad,” World Peace tweeted.

World Peace tweeted!  Ha!  The thing is, Artest didn’t change his name to be a wise guy, like Chad Johnson did.  He really did want to embrace a less violent way, for himself and everyone.  He’s sincere.  And that’s why I continue to root for the guy, in spite of all his flaws.  After all, to root against him is to root against World Peace.

Give Peace a chance.

Yesterday, you were born.  You were not an easy delivery, for the ink on my laser printer was ready to give out.  I fed thirty sheets of you at a time so I could take out the toner and shake it, to make sure the words on your pages printed solid and streak-free.  I carried you from the output tray to the stack.  I watched you grow.  I picked you up.  You were as warm as a blanket in my hands.  Bound with a long rubber band, you were my hefty, luminous bundle.

A month ago, I didn’t even know what to call you.  I tried out Kevin & Judy, but it felt lazy to use the names of the two main characters.  Matters in the End was also in the running, because those words are in the book and I like it when a novel’s title is derived from the text inside, except this one sounded grandiose for no good reason.  Since tennis plays a part in your story, I ran through the usual suspects: Break Point.  Match Point.  First Serve.  The Advantage.  None was right.  But then I thought of love, which is where everything begins in tennis, a score of love-love, except that made the book too tennis-centric.  So I dropped the bridge in between, and there it was, Love Love, first word verb, second word noun.  Because my characters need to love their love.  We all do, don’t we?

My boy.  To me, you are a boy, because you are made in my image.  If there’s one thing that I know to be true, it is this: nobody else could have created you.  You are a product of my imagination, but my imagination springs forth from events and people in my own singular life.  When I look at you, I see the last nine years in strips and shards, mixed and remixed into a vision of vicissitudes and…

No.  That’s quite enough.  Time to can it and come clean.  I owe you that much.  Everything I’ve said so far has been a delaying tactic in what I really need to say.

Which is: I’m sorry.

I’m sorry I maligned you every chance I got.  Still do, in fact.  It’s the first draft, I tell people.  It’s horrible.  I’m ashamed of it.  You’re not surprised, I know.  After all, you were the one who saw my grimace each day, set against the blank whiteness of the virtual paper on the monitor, the cursor whose constant blinking was a neverending accusation of my ineptitude.  There were days when I hated every word of you.  Especially Chapter 22.  Remember?  We thought it would never end.  Why can’t I just shut up?  You heard me saying that, didn’t you?

But we did end that chapter.  And there were others after that one, and then came the epilogue and we were done, you and I.  Maybe it wasn’t so bad.  It was a team effort, and I appreciate you hanging in there.

Please, stop staring at me like that.

I’m not asking for forgiveness.  I just want you to understand, that’s all.  This was hard.  We both took a beating.  I know you think I should’ve handled myself better, since I’ve had some practice.  But your brother Everything Asian was completely different from you.  He was my first, and I really didn’t know what I was doing, and things just sort of fell into place.  Or at least that’s what I think now.  See, the problem is that I don’t write books that often, and the bad experiences tend to fade away with time.  It’s sort of like raising a puppy – people forget how difficult it was a dozen years later, and there they are again, adopting another cute canine tyke, unaware the cycle is about to begin anew.

With you, I was supposed to know better, so this should’ve been a smoother ride, but it wasn’t.  It’s funny, really, what we expect from writers, and people in general.  Just because a guy writes one book, why does that automatically make it possible for him to write another, and not only that, but better, since he is no longer an amateur?  They say practice makes perfect, but I say they’re wrong.  Think of the number of athletes who star in their rookie year and fade out.  Or musicians who produce that first brilliant album and pump out schlock for the next twenty years.  It happens all the time.  I hope you are richer and more complex than your older brother, but that’s all it is, hope.

I’m sorry I’ve failed you, Love Love.  I wish you were perfect, but you’re not.  I wish everyone could see you as you are now, but only a handful will.  Some parts of you will live on, but who you are right now, the complete being of a novel, with all your plot potholes and cheesy characters – that will die.  A month from now, you will return from my readers with bloody red lines that slash you, cut you, carve out entire chunks of you.

I know this is hard to hear, but I want this.  I want the carnage because that’s the only way I’ll be able to make you better.  There is a good book inside of you, but it’s not you.

The worst thing of all is that I’ll be glad when you are gone.  I’ll love what you will become, but I can’t love you now.  Because, at the core, I despise you and all of your failures.

If it’s any consolation – I know it isn’t – I’ll save your amputated parts.  You won’t be alone – there’s a folder on my hard drive that’s full of snippets of unworkable material excised from previous works.  It’s a graveyard of the broken and the ridiculous, and even though I take a gander every so often to see if there’s anything worth picking through, there isn’t.  Like the extra feature on a DVD of a cut scene, there’s a reason why it’s cut.

I am sorry, Love Love.  I mean it.  Thank you for giving it your all, even though we both know it wasn’t good enough.

Forever disappointed,

Sung

drinks deep into afternoon. Gone
are doubt-free days of communion,

salvation in a single sip. The sky, now
a punched eye, swells. Steeples vanish.

At night in a stranger’s bed, his chest
a bare wall she can beat, sex an excuse

to scream. More intimate: the cigarette
shared after, the ripped condom wrap, its familiar

grin. With a fingertip he dabs
sweat beads on her back, says, “Stay.”

She turns her head, watches droplets
slide down windowpanes—her faith

fleeting as a breath-mark. He sleeps.
She showers. Daydreams of deserts, unseen

saviors, water to wine. The last bottle drained,
she leaves thirsty. Sediment

at the back of her throat.

• Monsoon Solo (on Amazon)
• Essays/Interviews: The Daily Beast: My Letter to Jerry Sandusky, Coward
• Head Butler interview with Kathryn Harrison: Life After “The Kiss”

 You’ve been in the bourbon business a long, long time.  What’s your earliest memory?

 Eddie Russell : Goin’ out there as a little kid.   Jimmy worked seven days a week, and I’d go out there with him during the summer, on the weekends.  The buildings were so big, and fun to play in, and I knew everybody out there…it was just a fun thing for a young kid to do.   Then as a teenager I moved on to other things, but I actually went there for a summer job, and that was thirty-one years ago.

Jimmy Russell: I started there in 1954.  Mostly it was quality control, but back in ’54, “quality control” meant something a lot different than it does now.  You’d check for the rains coming in, be up there with a scoop shovel unloading grains, mowin’ the grass.  Eddie didn’t complain to me when he started in the business, and he started mowin’ grass.

Eddie: As a twenty-one year old you don’t think that’s such a good idea, but I worked in the union doing that for four years and then he brought me in to the distillery to teach me how to make it.  Ever since that time it’s been so important because the employees that work for us, y’know, they think more of me ‘cause I started out working side-to-side with ‘em.

Was that the idea?

Jimmy: Yeah.  When you live in a small community like we live in, everybody knows everybody, and most of the people he’s overseeing now he went to school with.

Eddie: Jimmy’s advice to me was “You need to work twice as hard as anybody else, because they’ll think that I’m playing favorites.”

Jimmy: Figured if I started him where he did he’d know how easy it wasn’t.  I don’t think he liked it at first, but he realizes now it was right.

What’d you want to be, growing up? Did you ever entertain thoughts of doing anything else?

Eddie: I never really thought I would work there.  I was getting my education in business, and I just thought I’d be in some type of business, but going there for that summer job, being there for two or three weeks, I knew it was home.  I knew.  And, like I said, that was thirty-one years ago.

Jimmy: More or less…my age group, when we got out of school, we wanted to stay at home.  Young people nowadays, when they get out of school, they wanna get away from home!

Eddie: I thought that too, ‘cause our town is such a small town.  I thought, growin’ up, I wanted to get a college education and move to a bigger city.  I love the big cities, but Lawrenceburg is probably the best place in the world to raise a family.  Don’t lock my doors til I go to bed at night, leave my keys in my vehicle…just a nice atmosphere to raise a family.

I gotta call you out on something.   I read in an article that you’d never been drunk or hung over.  Jimmy.  Not sure I buy that.

Eddie: <laughing> Go out with him some night.  I can’t stay with him.

Jimmy: <grinning> I just have one drink a night.

Eddie: I’ve never seen him looking like he had a hangover before.  Every city I go into, it’s like, “Your dad was here, and he kept us out til 5 a.m., and he was at breakfast today, wantin’ to know why we wasn’t at breakfast.”

<to Eddie> You’re on thirty-one years at Wild Turkey.  <to Jimmy> You’re on…fifty-eight?

Jimmy: In September it’ll be fifty-eight.

You don’t last like that in one business without some inspiration.  What drives you?

Jimmy: I tell people when it becomes a job I’ll retire.  And I work seven days a week.

Eddie: Me and my brother, when we were growin’ up, used to talk about going to college so we wouldn’t have to work seven days a week.   Five years in, I was stopping by the distillery on Sundays.

Any regrets?

Eddie: I don’t think I really missed out on anything.  We’ve been lucky enough to go all over the states, and to some parts of the world, and do what we love to do.  We preach about bourbon, we drink bourbon, we eat good food…it’s a pretty good life.   And Jimmy doesn’t change.  I learned that real quick.  There’s nothing he ever wants to change about anything.

You’ve been around the world with Wild Turkey.  Japan, Australia…anywhere you haven’t been that you want to take a bottle?   

Jimmy: <instantly> Cuba.  But you can’t go there.

Has Wild Turkey changed during your run?

Jimmy: The thing we’ve done with Wild Turkey is, we never change.  Still doin’ it the same it was as the day I first went there.

So if I open a bottle from 1953 and a bottle from today…

Jimmy: We hope it’d taste the same.

Eddie: When we came out with American Honey, we were the first one out, of the honey flavors and the cherry flavors they’re doing now.   So we’re doing the right things.  We wanna honor our past, doing the same things over and over, but still doing new things, like when we came out with the 81*.  My generation didn’t want to do anything their parents did.  So if they was drinkin’ bourbon, you was drinkin’ tequila or vodka or anything.   Nowadays the young guys are looking at the vintage drink list, lot of bourbons and ryes, and that’s what’s bringing brown spirits back.

Jimmy: The 101 (proof) is all we had on the market until the mid-1980s.

Eddie: We used to have an 80-proof, but it was too young, or what we call “green”.  So when I started I was looking for something lighter and easier for the younger generation.  Decided to do away with the 80 and come out with something that was good.

* Wild Turkey introduced an 81-proof bourbon in 2011.

Do you guys have a favorite that isn’t bourbon?  Ever allow yourselves a beer or a tequila or something?

Jimmy: He does.

Eddie: I do.  He does not.  <laughter> It’s tea or bourbon for him. Me, I like to try everything, just to see what it’s about.  White spirits are hard, ‘cause they don’t have any flavor.  Normally I drink it on the rocks.   There’s good tequilas, there’s good rums.  I like Shiraz, or a Cabernet wine.  I like some other things, but 99% of the time I drink bourbon.  But there’s other things out there, and there’s somebody making it right somewhere, no matter what category.  Especially rums. I was shocked to learn there were some rums out there that were pretty good.  So I’m different than him.

When you do drink bourbon, is it ever not Wild Turkey?  Anybody else make a product you think is worthwhile?

Jimmy: <grinning> We all make good bourbon in Kentucky.  Some’re just better’n others.  <laughter>

But do you look at anybody and think, “Man, that guy’s really got it together.  If I wasn’t me, I wouldn’t mind being him.”

Jimmy: We’re all close friends…we all know each other.  That fella who just came up and shook hands with us, he’s Four Roses.

Eddie: Some of ‘em don’t make a good general product, but all of ‘em make a high end product that is their best.  Personally I don’t think it’s as good as ours, but they all do have a good one.  The top shelf, the small batches, are really big, so they’re holding it back like we always have, aging it longer, to make a better bourbon.

Jimmy: We’ve always been seven-eight-ten-twelve year old bourbons.  My personal taste buds, bourbon at four years old is just not okay for us.  Our 81 is about seven years old.

Eddie: We’ve always been older whiskey.  Most bourbons are four or five years old, except the top shelf.  It’s the cheapest and the quickest you can get it out there.

Jimmy: My age, what we’re making and putting in the barrel now, I’m hoping I’m around when it’s sold.

Eddie: He’s been saying that for twenty years.  <laughter>

What’re your thoughts on the super-premium bourbons, the barrel proofs like Booker’s and the single-barrels like Blanton’s?

Jimmy: Booker* and I were real close friends.  Booker’s is a barrel proof bourbon, and our Rare Breed is a barrel proof bourbon.  They were the first two barrel proofs on the market.  Now everybody has ‘em on the market.  The first two single barrel bourbons were Blanton’s (from Buffalo Trace) and Kentucky Spirit from Wild Turkey.  Now everybody has all that.

Eddie: It used to be you didn’t see the Master Distillers out in public, they were just home making the bourbon.  Now the Bourbon Trail has grown so big…I think we had 450-some thousand come through Kentucky just for the Bourbon Trail last year.  We educated ‘em so much, their first question is always “How do you like it?”  Well, it never tastes better than when me and Jimmy walk into the warehouse and pull a sample right out of the barrel to check the color and taste.  That’s what Rare Breed is.

Jimmy: I said we don’t think bourbon’s mature until it’s seven or eight.  But we don’t care for it after about 13-14 years old, either.  Lot of people think, the older it is, the better it is.  What happens with that new charred white oak wood, the longer you leave it in there, the more the white oak wood becomes the dominant flavor.  My personal taste buds, I just don’t like it.

Eddie: It’s something the consumer’s learning.  Scotch is aged a long time, but they don’t have the seasonal changes we do.  The hot and cold makes a difference, as it expands that barrel.  So bourbon’s…the old over-aged bourbon’s don’t have a good bourbon flavor. They’re oaky, chewy.

* Booker Noe was  Jimmy Russell’s counterpart at the Jim Beam distillery from the early sixties until his death in 2004.   He was also Jim Beam’s grandson.

How far out do you need to plan changes?  The 81 isn’t just the 80 with another year in the barrel.

Eddie: It takes a couple years to do anything new.  First is, you’ve got the idea. And then we’ve gotta taste a lot of whiskey to get the right combination. So that’s what it’s about.  Once you get that taste right, then you can work on the bottle and the marketing.  We were changing our label, and I had this idea ready (the 81) and so it was just a perfect time to change it.

Jimmy: The only thing we can’t change in a hurry is age.  If they decide to make a fourteen-year-old bourbon next year…no.

Eddie: It’s like the rye.  Used to see three ryes on the shelf in a liquor store: Jim Beam, Old Overholt, and Wild Turkey Rye.  Now look at the rye categories. Now we have to reallocate big time because nobody told us 5-6 years ago rye was gonna take off!  It’s a couple years away, before I’ll be able to meet demand.

So all the distilleries making rye realized ten years ago rye was the next big thing?

Eddie: Nah, there’s just a lot of people who were makin’ rye and suddenly rye got hot.

If you have to plan 5-6 years ahead in advance for what the next thing is…what’re you planning for?  What’s the next thing?

Jimmy: I can tell you this, we just spent $70 million expanding.  More space for more barrels.  We’re expecting to make a lot more, especially for export. The export market’s been the big jump for the last several years.

Eddie: That’s the thing, that export market.  Right now the flavored bourbons are doing good, but we’re not gonna be like vodka, where you’re putting out thirty different flavors a year.  There’s a few that’ll be out there. Our American Honey’s a wonderful product, and honey’s great with bourbon, but beyond that, y’know, You’ve basically got bourbon.  You can do barrel proofs, you can do single barrels, things like that.

What’s next for you?

Eddie: The 81 is the big thing now.  We may hit a flavor, or do something like that.  For us, it’s really about doing a specialty bottling, where every two or three years we’ll do a 30,000 bottles total of maybe a fourteen or fifteen year old that I’ve sort of taken care of to keep it from aging too much.  But besides that, really, you’ve got bourbon, and that’s what you’re selling.

Last one: Booker’s Bourbon is Booker Noe’s ideal bourbon, what he would have wanted.  Is that what Russell’s Reserve is for you?

<Eddie starts laughing>

Jimmy: No!  Really was a big battle for many many years.  With me.  Wild Turkey is a family.  I’m working with fourth-generation people. And they wanted to put my name on the label!  I wouldn’t do it.  We’re all a family.

Eddie: I did it for him.  His 45^th anniversary – which was now thirteen years ago – they came to me and said they wanted to do something.  And really, it was just gonna be one of those one-time deals.  They said to me, “Either you can pick it out, or we’re gonna pick it out.” So I picked it. (Jimmy) was actually tasting it with me, and he didn’t know what it was for!  So on his 45^th, we asked him to come out, and it was just in a bottle with a silk-screen.  Ten years old and 101-proof. And of course, as soon as everybody tasted it they realized it was a great product.  So we did a nicer bottle, and I talked him into it.

 ______________________________________________________________

Master Distiller Jimmy Russell has been making bourbon in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky for 58 years. Jimmy trained under Bill Hughes, Wild Turkey’s second master distiller, and Ernest W. Ripy, Jr., the son of the original owners.  He has been called “the master distillers’ master distiller.”

Eddie Russell is the son of renowned master distiller Jimmy Russell and the fourth generation Russell to work at the distillery.  Russell collaborated with his father to create “Russell’s Reserve,” and was a 2010 inductee into the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame.

Photos © Sarah Alban 2012

I have known you for more than a decade as a writer of sensitive fiction mostly centered around your Indian roots.  But you are also a journalist who has many in-depth articles on nature and religion under your belt.  Now you have taken on the role of filmmaker. Specifically as writer and Associate Producer.  How did this new project come about?

A good friend of mine in the US, Ribbel Josha Dhason, happened to read one of my stories online and got in touch with me. “How about making this into a movie?” he said, ever so deceptively casual. Equally casual I replied, “Why not? How do you want to go about it?”

First step, turn it into a script, he said. Could I do it?

Yes, of course, I told him, although I had not written a script before. But I had read and reviewed a couple of scripts online at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope, and had also studied the script of Mr. Holland’s Opus, which is one of my favorite movies. That, plus my own writing style where I imagine the POV (point of view) as a camera or multiple cameras (in the case of different POVs) gave me the confidence I could write the script.

Ribbel said fine, go ahead, take your time.

It has taken me more than a year.  Ribbel was a rock of total support. And another dear friend, Richard Lewis, an American author based in Bali, and whose novel The Killing Sea was optioned to Scott Free productions (Ridley Scott of Gladiator fame) helped enormously by critiquing every version. In fact, he will be there with us at the shooting of the film.

What a cool thing to have happen!  It’s like that dream of being “discovered” the way old movie stars got discovered while sitting on a stool at the famous drugstore/soda fountain in Hollywood. Except, in your case, you’ve paid your dues.  And, then some. You are not an overnight success by any stretch. You’ve done extensive amounts of lengthy travel in order to research your news articles on nature and religion.  I remember a compelling piece you wrote a few years ago about a spiritual movement in India taking place at an ashram type of compound.  It was very white and open and spacious in your photos, lot of columns and sky.  Very peaceful looking.

And now you’ve taken this new turn toward film and that is hugely exciting!  Can you share a little about the plot, without giving too much away?

You’ve touched upon what I have always believed— traveling and examining cultures in different regions (and India has so many sub-cultures because of different foreign influences— Persian, Mongol, English, French, Portuguese, etc) contribute to a good repertoire into which you can dip your pen of fiction. I mostly write from the viewpoint of realism— on issues and themes that I have experienced or encountered. So, yes, that nonfiction writing on religion and philosophy that you mention helped a lot in the writing of this film.

For example, I visited the former French colony of Pondicherry on the east coast in southern India some years back to write about the veterinary scene there for an Australian magazine.  I stayed for over a week, meeting veterinarians and farmers and housewives impacted by issues relating to cattle— poor knowledge of the care of cattle, dwindling farmlands because laborers are migrating to cities for more lucrative work and other city attractions, and conversely, industrialists snapping up those unused lands, and the men-folk sliding deeper into alcoholism because alcohol costs almost fifty percent less in Pondicherry than anywhere else in India— due to the tax structure prevailing in such colonies.  The article was completed but things went astray with the magazine editors and my article could not be used.

It’s awful when things get mucked up outside of your control.  But to get back to Pondicherry, a lovely name that conjures up so many images.

Last year when I began to write this script, my director discussed Pondicherry as a possible setting for our story. The place has such beauty and compactness.  Filming there would not only ‘lift’ the story to a level not usually seen in Indian movies in English, but would also provide ease in terms of logistics. I naturally jumped at the idea.  And that’s how Pondicherry and to a certain extent the issues specific to the place figure into our script.

Regarding the plot:  as stated in our website, it’s a story about a teen-aged girl slowly sliding into schizophrenia, and the ways in which her orthodox parents and self-centered siblings react to her condition. The plot mirrors what is happening in India— there is so much ignorance about the disease and so few facilities available. Plus there is the acute social stigma. As it’s understood today by most mental health specialists, schizophrenia is the result of improper workings of certain chemicals called neurotransmitters in the brain. It can be controlled, or often even cured in the early stages, by medication. But the patient is swiftly labeled as ‘mad’ by society as a whole here. So what does the family generally do?

Dreadful to label a person with an illness in such a way.  How do the families often react?

They refuse to acknowledge the disease, refuse to take the patient for medication; at best, the family just carries on, at worst, they isolate the patient or even abandon him or her. There are other factors too involving the schizophrenic patient that I have dwelt on in the script.

Mental illness is a tragically fascinating subject for art.  Always has been.  Often it has been romanticized, as in the case of certain poets.  But people who work in mental health say it’s horrible in every regard and deeply sad for the patients who are struggling.

The manner in which you came to know the former French colony of Pondicherry, ultimately the setting for this film, is so interesting.  Like it has been said: There are no accidents.  Can you tell us more about what that area looks like? 

In terms of physical appearance, Pondicherry is like any other small Indian town— crowded streets, hundreds of stalls and shops, houses and buildings of every size, noisy traffic— including their famous three-wheeler auto-rickshaws which come in two sizes; one that can squeeze in five passengers and the other, a little bloated, which crams in ten!  Then there is of course the dirt and the heat.

Much of Pondicherry needs to get its act together in terms of cleanliness. If that is done it will attract more tourists to see its ancient temples, churches, magnificent colonial mansions, and spiritual retreats like the renowned Aurobindo ashram and Auroville. About the heat, it is 30 to 45 degrees Celsius much of the year.

However, the town’s location by the sea is somewhat of a cooling balm; the main beachfront is a great place for jogging and strolls. Another, the Ruby Beach, is in my opinion one of the cleanest beaches in India.  No vendors or beggars.  Just white sands, blue sky and bluer waters for miles on end.

Ruby Beach bordering Pondicherry gives it an extra special dimension as a film location, I would imagine.

Yes, it does.  And in terms of sensibilities, I found the place easygoing. The locals are friendly to the tourist—whether Indian or foreign. The availability of inexpensive liquor acts as a high octane fuel for the ‘friendliness.’  This is unlike Goa which is a former Portuguese colony, where also liquor is cheap, but the local Christians there, descendants of Portuguese, are not as friendly with the Indian tourists as they are with the foreign tourists. The French, unlike the Portuguese, did not resort to persecution, and hence the original natives of Pondicherry remained Hindus. In fact, the Portuguese governors participated in several Hindu festivals and ceremonial processions; largely a strategy to gain a better ‘hold’ on the native population for ease of administration.

That the British out-strategied them is another matter. There are a few hundred descendants of the French, the Creoles, living in Pondicherry, but they prefer to keep to themselves. They live in what is known as the French Quarters. A walk through that section of the town is quite an experience— silent buildings, half-shut windows, impassive faces and lean bodies bicycling past in a non-intrusive manner.

Can you give us some hints about your main characters?

The film revolves around teen-aged Sundari, who has all those commonly accepted attributes to make a success of her life —  beauty, brains, and a loving nature. We establish that early on in the film. But things go wrong in rapid succession. Yet, equally rapidly, she seems to recover from each setback, until a huge setback proves far too much. Other people she is in contact with, in the family and outside, react in various ways to her situation— principally her journalist father, Iyengar, a man so complex that one doesn’t know whether to hate him or love him. He is egotistic, loving, intelligent, intolerant and short-tempered.

An extremely difficult and complex father would not be helpful to a young woman failing under the weight of mental illness. Are there more characters?

The other main character is her older brother, Deepak. In the beginning he is intensely jealous of Sundari for all the love and limelight she hogs in the family. He seizes every opportunity to belittle her. He is obsessed with her, and the developments in her life, a trait that may seem foreign to western audiences but is fairly common in Indian culture.

What aspect in the family or culture creates such an obsession?

Indian parents generally dote on the son, for he is, they have always felt, going to be the future breadwinner, protector and caregiver in their old age.  While their daughters, though educated and employed, would be married off and move away to live with the new husband’s family.  Or at least near his family, should the daughter have enough clout over her husband to wean him off living with them.

That’s too much closeness for me.

(laughter).  But going back to the doted upon growing up son… he assumes or tries to assume the power of the father, especially when his siblings are all sisters, and when his father is out of the house a great deal because of work. In our story, the son is not much doted upon; it’s more the girl, the lead character, who receives much of the parental, especially the father’s, attention and love. This creates anxiety for the son which leads to suppressed anger, making him obsess even more over his sister.

It’s interesting how different cultures manage to develop their own specific patterns of neurotic behavior.

Yes, but then the son, Deepak, gets embroiled with a girl of French descent called Mary Anne who almost makes him forget his family.  These are the principal characters. The others’ behaviors, while illustrating their individual personalities, also serve to unravel deeper layers of the main characters.  And there are two other siblings in the film. Plus friends at the school and college where Sundari studies. And a Romeo who swaggers in with the typical confidence of such Romeos.

What is a film without a Romeo?

Later we bring in a priest who exhibits the typical holiness of his tribe with a certain surprise twist. So, all in all, we have worked to make the plot throw up unexpected twists and turns, even as the audience sits back in apparent satisfaction that they have figured everything out. The script has been reviewed by one of Hollywood’s foremost script consultants.

You have me at the ticket line!  Now here is something I simply must ask: Do you feel that it is essential, when presenting a female lead character, that she be very attractive?  It seems all films made today, at least in the US, have a beautiful female lead.  I see less of that in films from other countries, though England seems to be following the US pattern.  In recent re-makes of old BBC films, the female leads, and even the males, are quite good looking.  Sexy, actually.

Susan, let me put it this way. If I were to write a short story or a novel, I wouldn’t think it necessary that my lead character has to be beautiful or handsome in the sense that they should have the commonly accepted attributes of external beauty or handsomeness. In writing a story there is room to portray beauty and handsomeness in other ways, deeper ways, more convincing ways. But in film, where time is a critical factor, where the image establishes instantaneous contact with the audience, I have to rely on those commonly accepted attributes to go towards my objective— to stimulate disturbance in the audience’s mind, to bring in poignancy— in order to better impact the audience about the ultimate point that I wish to make. In short, it is more dramatic for film when a ‘beautiful’ girl develops schizophrenia.  It may not work quite as much with a ‘non-beautiful’ girl.

I hear you.  Because of my own theatre background, I understand the physical dynamic that takes place with an audience. The character has to strike an unconscious chord of desire to help the audience connect.  It’s done in advertising, too, all the time.  I was just curious to hear your thoughts on that subject. Can you tell us how you are going about casting this film?

Casting for a low budget film does require unconventional approaches; we can’t afford the usual methods of employing a casting director or hiring an outside agency.  The producer, Ribbel Josha Dhason, has done some research on how low budget films get their actors. It was quite revealing.

That brings to mind some anecdotes I’ve heard about the early Merchant-Ivory productions in India, and what hoops they jumped through to finance, cast, then bring the film to fruition.

Yes, Merchant-Ivory were legendary for their tight budgets.  I believe Ismail Merchant used to cook meals for his principal crew during shooting.  Primarily, one would guess, to show off his culinary skills.  But I also think it was another part of his overall cost cutting strategy.

Ramesh, will you be doing any cooking for your cast?

I love to cook!  Maybe on weekends during the shoot I will don the apron!

Umm… I will hold you to that!

(laughter) In our case, for the casting, we have approached some colleges where theater and cinema is part of the course curriculum, and we put out a call for actors of both their past and current students. Another means of independent casting is the insertion of flyers in the English dailies just before they are distributed to readers; this method takes some time and legwork.

How exactly do you get that done?

By printing the flyers at a nominal cost, then inserting them via the newspaper boys.

Creative!

Thank you.  And we are also trying to make maximum usage of YouTube and Facebook by announcing our requirements.  We are taking advantage of free postings offered at film and actors sites.  The trick to producing a low budget film is keeping the costs down as much as possible on every front without sacrificing the quality of what we want to achieve. It entails more time and effort but it can be done.

It sounds like the type of film that will be nominated for many awards at the film festivals.  I look forward to sitting down in my local movie theatre and seeing this unfold on the big screen. And I wish you and Ribbel Josha Dhason, and all those involved in this amazing project very great success!

_____________

Susan Tepper’s new book From the Umberplatzen is a quirky love story set in Germany and told in linked-flash-fiction.

Ramesh Avadhani is a writer and filmmaker.  His regularly featured articles appear in  Religioscope (Switzerland), World & I Journal (a Washington Times enterprise) and Reptilia (Spain), which is the leading herp magazine published in Spanish and Italian.  His fiction and nonfiction have been widely published in the US and abroad, appearing in journals such as Contrary, Dragonfire, Gastronomica, The Reader, Living Now, Woman’s Day, The Veterinarian (from Australia), Woman This Month (UAE), The Times of India (Mumbai), Coin News (UK) among many others.  He is a graduate of Bangalore University.

“Hello! I’m your neighbor from down the hall!” He exclaimed it like that, like a joyous proclamation, the luck of which he didn’t quite understand.

I pulled the headphones out of my ears and the twangy SF garage rock faded. I tried to put on my least suspicious smile. “Hey.”

A pause, back-of-the-head scratch. “I’m playing a show in a couple hours, at a club called Makan. If you want to come.”

I blinked. The offer wasn’t what I’d expected. “Um, yeah, maybe. I mean,” I nodded at my computer, “I’m waiting to hear from a friend, but maybe.”

“Well, I’ll write it down for you.” The boy leaned over the coffee table. The guitar slung over his shoulder slid down. He didn’t bother to pull it back up and I watched it as he wrote, wondering if it would fall.

“Give this to a taxi driver,” he handed me a scrap of paper in abbreviated, sloppy swirls—boy Arabic. “If you want to come,” he added.

He gave a little wave and disappeared, down the skinny hallway and into the unlit landing. I heard rusty old gate of the elevator open; I heard the cage wheeze and rattle and clang him six stories down.

Then it was quiet—just the echoes of sirens through the light shaft, the tiny sting of guitar still coming through my headphones.

I hadn’t seen the boy before, but I’d heard him, through the walls, which were thinner than the mattresses in this cheap hotel.

Five months earlier, I’d been booking flights for a haphazard round-the-world trip. I’d found a flight between Rome and Bangkok that included a four-hour layover in Cairo. I had a friend living there—or so I thought—and decided it’d be a waste to touch down in the city without actually seeing it. So I’d impulsively extended the layover to last four days.

This was my chance to see it: Cairo, Tahrir Square. The place at the center of all the headlines and buzz and blog posts. The place that had existed all that year inside my laptop—in YouTube videos and live tweets and viral essays, in liking the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page. The place that had given me hope in my generation.

I hadn’t thought we’d had it in us. The fight. I’d thought my generation was lost, deadened by consumerism and hipsterdom and self-reflective oversharing. We were nothing like the stories my parents told of Vietnam War protests, of running from riot police, of the idealistic conviction that revolution was possible.

I’d grown up in the shadow of a failed revolution. My parents had been Maoists. They’d met in a meeting of the Communist Party, of which neither of them ended up becoming members—the Party wasn’t radical enough. They’d spent ten years fighting for a revolution in the United States. When the movement finally dissolved, they’d tossed in the towel and become a firefighter and a public school teacher.

I’d grown up with stories, with heated dinnertime debates, with my own visions of what those times must have felt like—smoke-stained meeting rooms and the sting of teargas in fervent eyes, bell bottoms and raised fists, the burn of fighting for something you believe in.

But I’d also grown up with the relics of their radicalism—a framed photo from my mother’s illegal trip to China; a weathered Little Red Book in a drawer in the desk; all 48 volumes of Lenin, faded blue spines on the bookshelf. These were real things; I could touch them.

“It didn’t seem that crazy at the time,” they’d told me. “It was all on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement; anything seemed possible in those days. And”—here they’d always sigh and look nostalgic—“we were young.”

I was young, too. But I hadn’t seen or felt anything like what my parents had described until Cairo. Throughout 2011, I’d watched the revolutionary notions of Tahrir Square spark and spread, into Syria and Tunisia. This was the time, I’d thought, this was the moment—now.

But it was far away, And it wasn’t mine. It was ensconced in layers of commentary and images and shaking cell phone videos. I couldn’t reach through the screen and touch it. I could barely understand it.

I left California on my trip in early October, just as Occupy Wall Street was taking off. It hadn’t attracted major media attention yet, but there was a low buzz on the internet, like mosquitoes around a bulb.

The night I touched down in New York, Occupy held its first big march on the Brooklyn Bridge. I watched the headlines roll in on my iPhone as I rode the Long Island Railroad into the city, old Delta blues moaning in my headphones.

I visited Zuccotti Park the next day. The small wedge of park had been filed with dread-locked kids who looked as though they’d driven straight from the Playa at Burning Man. Tourists ringed the edges, snapping photos of protestors’ signs; a Korean pair posed and flashed the ubiquitous peace sign. Gutterpunks emerged from sleeping bags, groggy-eyed in the afternoon sun, and an old timey band played banjos. I felt more of a kinship to the passerbys—to the delivery boys, beat cops and office workers on their lunch breaks—than the protestors.

I snapped a photo of a man holding a sign that read, “Class Warfare: Wall Street Drew Blood First.”

I posted it to my mom’s Facebook page.

I followed along online, as Occupy spread across the US. In my next stop, I inadvertently wandered through protests in Rome. Young people—who didn’t look so different from American Occupiers—shouted into megaphones as police helicopters panted in the air above those black-stone streets.

I couldn’t understand any of what they were saying. I only vaguely grasped the severity of the burgeoning European debt crisis. But I’d felt something on Via Nazionale that night—a kind of déjà vu, a kind of connection. The kind of thing I was looking for in Cairo.

I continued to watch online as the fervor spread. And in late October, it came to my own hometown of Oakland. I’d learned about it first on Facebook—friends’ updates of riots and protests and police brutality. By then I was in southern Albania. I stood outside a bar late into the night, pirating their free wi-fi and watching the reports on my newsfeed while my headphones blared 90s hip-hop. I felt both terribly far away and a part of something that was bigger than just my city or my country—a kind of international movement.

A few days later, a friend posted a picture of young boys in Cairo, marching with solidarity signs against police brutality in Oakland.

There was a connection, I thought, beneath all the static—a kind of global connection made possible by technology that was shrinking the planet to the size of a computer screen.

And more than anything, I realized, that’s what I’d come to Cairo looking for—a connection as palpable as a pulse.

I came through the gates at the Cairo airport and was met by a sea of men in cheap clothes holding cardboard signs, uncertain lettering of passengers’ names. For the first time in my life, my name was on one of those signs—the hotel I’d booked had included a free transfer from the airport.

The driver was young and not particularly smiley, but he helped me with my bags and opened my door for me.

The dingy old car swerved and careened through endless miles of highway and tunnels, the city a streak of neon and crumbling buildings, the faces of young boys on motorbikes passing by. The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror and, yelling over the thumping pop music that shook the car’s tinny speakers, asked, “Your first time in Cairo?”

I answered yes. He smiled slyly, in a way that was almost a smirk. I didn’t know what it meant.

I arrived at Dina’s Hotel dizzy and reeling from the ride. I rattled up the old elevator; I checked in; I dropped my bags and yanked open the wooden doors to the terrace and stared down at the street.

Cars and motorbikes swerved. Horns honked and headlights cast sharp streaks of light. Fireworks boomed and popped, for the three-day holiday of Eid. Celebratory shouts ricocheted off the sides of ornate old buildings and rose up, punctuating the roar of traffic. Even from six stories up, it was overwhelming.

I tried to jam the doors shut, but they were warped and half-hinged and looked about as old and tired as the colonial building. They didn’t do anything to keep the noise out.

And that’s when I’d heard them—boy voices, low laughs, the strum of guitar strings. Singing and talking and the sharp distortion of music through laptop speakers.

There’s nothing lonelier than hearing someone else’s party through the wall.

I slid in earplugs, plugged in an incense dispenser filled with yellowed Raid and fell into a fitful sleep.

“Be careful,” Dina from the hotel told me on my first morning. “There’s less tourists here now, so the touts are more aggressive.” She paused, looked me in the eye. “They’re desperate,” she added with a kind of seriousness that took me off-guard.

She continued to give me a rundown of how to act on the street and what to expect, which basically amounted to: anyone talking to you is trying to hustle you.

I’d thought I’d be getting off easy. The Arab Spring, I’d read, had hammered tourism in Cairo. I had visions of wandering the streets hassle-free, not quite blending in per se but not eliciting much attention either.

The friend I was supposed to be meeting had sent an email that morning saying he had work that day. In fact, he had work every day I was to be in Cairo. But maybe we could meet for dinner some night.

I spent the day wandering through Downtown. The shops were shuttered for the holiday and the streets were deserted in a way that felt sketchy. Touts and hustlers lurked on street corners, followed me and called out in a dripping English, “Welcome to Egypt.” I felt out of place, lonely and restless.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

I made it to Tahrir Square; it wasn’t far. At first it struck me the way all places of notoriety have initially struck me—as just a place. It was massive—not a square at all, really, more of a rectangle, framed with highrises and spotted with asthmatic palm trees.

The sun glared down. A man pushed a giant cart of pink balloons. Street vendors had set up souvenirs stands, t-shirts that said ‘January 25′ flapping in the hot-breath breeze. People walked to and from Metro stops, talking on cell phones. There was a KFC, the windows of which looked out prominently onto to the square.

I wandered around, snapping photos of the stencil graffiti and the silent, neon faces of bloggers who had been jailed or killed.

Squinting against the sharp sun, I spotted a scrap of shade and stood back in it, against a wall and out of the stream of foot traffic.

A group of young boys passed. They had gelled hair and smug grins, and whistled low at me. “You want sex!” one cried out.

I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a declaration. His friends laughed. Their faces were sneering masks. One of them reached forward, his fingertips brushing my sweaty t-shirt.

I flinched.

They laughed.

I spent the rest of the afternoon with my headphones on, blasting electro-riot-grrl-punk. I was determined not to retreat back to the hotel. At dusk the crowds came out, the streets filled—families and old men and more groups of teenage boys. I tried to find dinner; I didn’t speak enough Arabic to order at the stalls, where elbowing throngs waved little receipts—I couldn’t even figure out where the registers were.

I kept passing groups of boys. They hung around lampposts, their faces lit in gaudy, angular shadows. They threw trash at me, grabbed at my breasts; one sprayed me in the face with a repugnant cologne as he passed by. “You fuck me!” he called out and laughed.

I thought of the Facebook photo of the boys with Oakland solidarity signs.

Where were those boys now? It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

The next morning I went to the Pyramids. I took the Metro, then a taxi. I tried to ignore the tour guides, the touts, the begging children, the hustlers offering camel rides. Again, I put in my headphones, cranked up doom metal. I kept my eyes down and marched straight towards the monumental pile of stone before me.

The wind whipped up and blew dust everywhere. I stared up at the great crumbled masses. Urban sprawl stretched out endlessly behind them under a blanket of smog. I thought of an essay I’d read, of a man who’d lived in Las Vegas; when he’d finally visited the Pyramids, his first thought had been, “They’re smaller than the Luxor.”

I blinked the dirt from my contacts, eyes welling up. I tromped around, squinting, until I felt like I’d earned my entrance fee. A boy called out to me, trying to sell me postcards; when I ignored him, he shoved the book of postcards in my face. When I ignored that, he grabbed my arm; I felt his fingernails dig through my long sleeves.

I whipped around, stared him in the eye. “Don’t touch me,” I snapped.

He scrunched his face and mimicked me in a high voice, “Don’t touch me!” Then he laughed and followed me around, shouting, “Don’t touch me!” until he apparently grew tired of it and wandered away.

None of it was supposed to be this way.

In the faded lobby, the mosquitoes were still feasting on my legs. The receptionist was walking around the room, spraying Raid as zealously as air freshener. It wasn’t doing much good.

I looked down at the scrap of paper with its sloppy Arabic. I picked it up, squinted at it, as though that would help me read it.

Suddenly, sitting on thin cushions in the hotel lobby, the weight of those four days snapped into focus—the frustration, the disappointment, the alienation and the humiliation.

I slammed my laptop shut and grabbed my purse.

Down on the neon street, I hailed a taxi. I handed the paper to the driver. He looked at it, nodded, then veered sharply into the traffic.

The club Makan wasn’t far from Tahrir Square, down a long street stained by pools of jaundiced streetlights. A few sleeping bodies laid curled up beside bags and debris; stray dogs sniffed the gutter. Egyptian pop rattled out of the stereo speakers.

There was a modest crowd on the sidewalk in front of the club. They looked young and hip—sneakers and iPhones and women not wearing headscarves. As I got out of the cab, I heard a mix of English and Arabic being spoken.

I peeked inside. Arty black-and-white photographs lined the walls. The room was near empty. I was early.

I went back outside. I crossed my arms and leaned against the wall, not sure what to do with myself. I lit a cigarette, just to have something to do. I flicked it anxiously.

“Who are you here to see?”

I looked over at the girl who’d spoken. She had on jeans and a hoodie; her hair was long and thick and uncovered; stray strands blew in the evening breeze.

“I’m not really sure, to be honest.” I shrugged and smiled. “This guy I met.”

She laughed. “We’re here to see our friend Deeb; he’s performing.”

Jessie introduced herself with a firm American handshake. She was Egyptian-American, had grown up in Southern California but had spent summers in Cairo. She came back often, and this time had brought her American boyfriend.

I asked them what they’d done during their visit. I thought they’d say they’d gone to protests; I expected their eyes to light up as they shared stories of inspiring encounters.

But Jessie just shrugged. “Hung out with family mostly. We’ve seen friends and gone to some shows too though.”

Then she asked me what I’d done. “The Museum, the Pyramids, just the usual I guess.” I looked away, embarrassed I didn’t have anything more exciting to report.

“So,” she leaned in, “it’s your first time in Cairo—what do you think?”

I paused, tried to think of something neutral and noncommittal.

I gave up. “It’s been hard.”

She paused, seemed to consider it. “It’s an intense place,” she conceded.

We went inside and found seats. The room was dimly lit, pillows and folding chairs circling a threadbare stage. Photographs and paintings hung on the wall, and it struck me as familiar—an independent art space that could have been in Brooklyn or Berlin or Buenos Aires.

I took a chair by the wall. In the spotlight, the boy from the hotel was sound checking. He looked up, smiled, and waved.

A tap into the microphone and a hush came over the crowd—he said a few words in Arabic and began his set.

It was good. The sound was intriguing —a kind of folk/hip-hop hybrid I’d never heard before. I leaned forward. I watched his fingers strum his acoustic guitar; I watched his eyes close when he sang, them open when he rapped, them look down as he whistled. The sound was familiar enough that I recognized it, but new enough that I was engaged.

A few songs in, another MC joined the stage—“That’s our friend Deeb,” Jessie leaned over and whispered—and he looked like he could be straight out of New York: thick-rimmed glasses and a Shepard Fairey shirt.

He took the mic, and the tone became decidedly more hip-hop. The boys flowed back and forth, rhyming in Arabic. I couldn’t understand the words, but at one point they lowered their heads and raised their fists, and the crowd clapped, and I could understand that. At another point, they closed their eyes and rocked their heads to the beat and I could understand that, too.

I felt the music in my chest like a pulse.

On the sidewalk after the set, I approached the boy from the hotel. “Hey, that was really good.”

“Thank you, thank you.” A puff of smoke and a nod. “It’s cool you came.”

His name was Tareq and he wasn’t Egyptian, he was from Jordan. “Well, actually, I’m not from Jordan either. I’m from Palestine, but…”

I nodded.

He’d come out to Cairo for a music festival that had happened the previous weekend, the first all-Arab hip-hop festival. It had been three days of massive shows, tons of people—“the first time we’d all come together, as a real movement.”

“That sounds amazing,” I said. “I wish I’d been here.”

The words sat there a moment, in the air between us. I realized how much I meant them.

“You should have seen it,” interjected a guy with a gap-toothed grin.  “It was crazy!” He introduced himself as Leif. “We took over the hotel, partying every night—it was great!”

“Are you at Dina’s too?” I asked.

“Yeah. We’ve seen you.” He leaned in, “I hope we haven’t been too loud.”

“No worries.” I smiled. Then, with a wink, “That’s what earplugs are for.”

We stood on the breezy sidewalk outside Makan and chatted while the crowd dissipated. They told me about the Arab hip-hop scene—“It’s exciting; since the Arab Spring, there’s been a lot more interest from the West. The world is really paying attention.”

They told me how it’d started: Arab youth living in diaspora bringing back urban, hip-hop culture. They told me how it’d spread through the internet and social media, and how local Arabs had started making their own beats and writing their own rhymes. They told me about the albums and documentaries they were now working on, the European tour they were planning.

“Now’s the time,” Leif said, pointing down to the sidewalk beneath our feet. “Now’s our moment.”

I thought about it. Maybe I’d gotten it wrong—maybe there was a connection, but it wasn’t to the thing at the center, the “real” thing. Maybe the connection was to the nimbus—those layers of discourse and YouTube videos and status updates, to the social media and file sharing that made youth culture global, inescapable, equalizing.

Because I didn’t know Cairo. I didn’t know Egyptian culture and I certainly didn’t know Arabic. But I knew music.

It was different from what my parents had. But was it any less real?

“Hey,” Tareq raised his eyebrows, “do you want to come to the after party?”

We hailed a taxi. I crawled into the back seat, wedged myself against the door. We careened through the neon streets, Tareq’s guitar case bouncing on my knees.

Pop beats rattled the tinny speakers.

Benjamin Percy:

Laura Miller:

Mark O’Connell:

Shya Scanlon:

Mindy Kaling:

Blake Butler:

Teju Cole:

Neil Strauss:

Damien Owens:

Augusten Burroughs:

***Please be sure to follow The Nervous Breakdown @TNBtweets and Other People @OtherPeoplePod.***

Why the hostility?

I’m sick of you.

Do you want to leave the coffeeshop?

No.

Why not?

I need the coffee, and Laura Lippert just got here.

Do you want to ask Laura Lippert to interview you?

Yes.

Why?

She’s a professional aerialist.

So?

She’s more interested in why I don’t “do stuff” than she is in writing, which is more interesting to me right now than writing.

That’s it?

Well, she’s got hair down to her hips that she hangs from a ring by sometimes, twenty feet up in the air.

Is she gonna do it?  Interview you?

Yes.  She’s already started.  She’s sitting next to me, protesting my assertion that she’s more interested in why I don’t “do stuff” than she is in writing.

Can this really be considered a self-interview any longer?

I’m doing all the typing.

Why are you so negative?

Because I’m not an aerialist, or anything like an aerialist.  I take it for granted that I’m not going to die soon.  Often I’m dizzy.

Is that why you smoke so much?

Don’t be facetious.  I’ve seen you smoke, too.

This guy in the booth over there, talking on his cellphone—why do you think he thinks it’s okay to do that?

I think he thinks he’s exceptional, important, possibly even worth overhearing.  I think he wants you to get that sense from him, that that’s why he’s making those broad hand-gestures.  Like, no way he thinks whoever’s on the other end of the line can see his hand-gestures, whereas you’re in his sightlines and you have hair that goes down to your hips.

My hair’s all braided and up.

Your braids are formidable.  Aren’t her braids formidable?  Look at him pretending like he doesn’t know I’m talking about him trying to impress the aerialist with the formidable braids via broad hand-gestures he believes indicate an air of importance.  Yeah you.  Lower your fucking voice, dude.  We’re trying to talk about me over here.  Still pretending!

I don’t know what to ask you.

Try a non-sequiter.

Why not cowboy boots?

I think I would want to beat me up if I saw me wearing cowboy boots.

How high can you jump?

I don’t know.

Why are you so negative right now?

I’m negative because I don’t know how high I can jump?

You’re negative because look at your face.

I’m sick of my face.

Be positive.

You sound like an aerialist, or a speedskater or something.

Do you prefer oceans, rivers, or lakes?

That’s a loaded question.

Dude.  What’s your problem?  I’m trying here.

I’m trying, too.  Maybe we should stop trying.

SO negative!

Not necessarily.  See?  Isn’t this nice?

What?

This.

____________________

Adam Levin is the author of the novel THE INSTRUCTIONS, a finalist for the 2010 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and winner of both the 2011 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the inaugural Indie Booksellers Choice Award.   For his short stories, Levin has won the Summer Literary Seminars Fiction Contest, as well as the Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize.   His fiction has appeared in a number of publications, including Tin House, Esquire, and New England Review. HOT PINK, his collection of short stories, was published by McSweeney’s in March 2012.  He lives in Chicago, where he teaches Creative Writing at the School of the Art Institute.

Cort didn’t know whether to think of this as a gift or a curse, though.  On the one hand, the bulging overpuss area was off-putting, and that kept, he assumed, any number of other dudes from hitting on Kelly, which, for Cort, meant (most likely) a more grateful girlfriend in terms of how she fucked, not to mention less competition. But on the other hand, was Kelly The One?  Because if Kelly was The One, then hey, great: no downside to a seemingly bulging overpuss whatsoever. If Kelly was not The One, though, and Cort would, eventually, be moving on, then couldn’t dating her hurt his chances with other girls later?  Might not other girls, later, remember him as the guy who’d settled for that girl with the overpuss out to there, and thereby fail to feel flattered enough by his interest in them to give him a shot?  And even if, with his native charm (he had a way with words), Cort could overcome that particular hurdle, might not a longer-term girlfriend, at some point further along in their relationship, find herself incapable—upon recalling Kelly’s (seemingly) bulging overpuss—of accepting Cort’s assurances that she was as attractive as she wanted to be?  (“He says I’m not fat, but what does he know?  His last girlfriend weirdly bulged above the puss area!”) Or, worse, might not the new girlfriend choose to let herself go (split ends, rough knees, dimpled cellulite, etc.), believing that Cort, who had, after all, dated someone with a (seemingly) bulging overpuss, wouldn’t mind? Well… sure. Of course.  Sure.  All kinds of retarded stuff could happen, thought Cort, but that was only the scratched-up lousy side of a coin whose shiny nice side was all the cred he’d get from girls for going out with Kelly despite her unfortunate overpuss bulge. And if it did turn out that Kelly wasn’t The One, and that Cort had been suffering the overpuss bulge for a smaller payout than real true love, not only would that land him in the black, karmically, but these cred-giving girls would be all over him, knowing he would never say anything, or even think anything, about their bodies to cause them any feelings of insecurity, because, as he’d have demonstrated by dating that girl with the weird bulge above the puss area, Cort wasn’t shallow.

____________________

Looking, I was delirious for him, felt the happy
Stones banging the barrel of my chest for him;
He was knowing what I had known and lost along
The way like a red-lit caboose cutting a curve
In the dimness that was my little years.
I ached, knowing that I had come of age, of importance,
That my little dreams are cries for peace
And sweat is sold for food to fill his mouth.
The world had fallen in my path and I had scaled
A mountain away from him. I wanted to leap
Chuteless from its peak into his time, to know
Once more the sense of glory and romance
In all things the mind has fingers for.

In the evening, pink threatening red on the horizon,
He finally came to me, the seven years of him
And a day of his days enfolding more mystery than fog.
“Come with me,” he said, eyes of miners’ lamps,
A face blacker than coal is black, where dirt
Had so much freedom you would think he had never
Been clean, had never been discomforted by soap.
“My fort, it’s over here. It’s secret and mine.
I’ll show it to you. Only once, though. Big people
Aren’t supposed to be here.”

Quiet, motionless as a beached ship, the fort
Was built against a split-trunk maple tree;
Limbs bare and black hung over a pit nearer
Darkness than all the caves I had known.
Canopied arms rigid over a small darkness
Huddling like a rabbit down the barrel of a rifle.
I turned back on myself, into dreams, onto pages
Long since read. Ah, how high and strong its walls,
Built of stones I dared not move, set magically
With a mortar I could not mix. Passageways
And tunnels with dumb mouths stared back,
Mysteries leaped, dangers crept, silent
As Sicilian Vespers. Hamlet’s father would walk
Such walls. Quasimoto lurked quietly overhead.
Lafitte, Long John Silver, Grendel, shared the dark.

On my spine ice began to flow. I was knowing again
The lost land, the lost time, the lost dreaming.
He crept along the wall, motioned for me to follow,
Whispered a sound I’m helpless to repeat and can’t forget
As if a ghost of me were calling on a cold gray moor.
Back, still back, I went, spinning in a machine
Tumbling off my hard edges, knowing the deliciousness
Of fright, savoring one grand moment in a life
So old to magic. And he huddled, my son, my coming man,
For a moment, for a split second of forever, against
The high walls of his childhood. I dared not move
For fear I’d break them down

Tell us about your book, The Insomniac’s House.

It is a chapbook about a character called Swampy Woman. I wrote a poem a year and a half ago and it had a person in it called Swampy Woman. Some time went by and then she showed up in another poem and I became enamored with her. The poems poured forth for quite a while after that. I wrote one almost every day for a month and then I was done with her as fast as she had begun. I have written a couple of more since then, but the flood has become a thin trickle.

Who is Swampy Woman?

I was writing these poems about her and having a good time with them when a teacher I was working with asked me the question: Who is Swampy Woman? I had no idea what the answer was. In thinking about it, my first response was Swampy Woman is Mother Nature on steroids. The media image we have of Mother Nature is all pastel gauzy and floaty with flowers and sweet animals nudging her. I don’t buy that for a second. In nature everything is consuming or being consumed and Swampy Woman knows this.

What swamps do you know?

I grew up in the middle of a cedar/willow/cattail swamp in Door County, Wisconsin. We had frogs and leaches and porcupines and a host of other swampy critters on our property. Later on I lived in Oconto, Wisconsin where there is a wonderful marsh outside of town. Lots of birds and turtles and acres of water grasses. I loved to sit out there and watch. When I moved to Rhinelander, Wisconsin, I discovered a marshy pond in the woods across from my house and I spent a lot of time there. I caught my first bullfrog tadpoles in that pond (they are huge!) and discovered sundew plants and pitcher plants. I love carnivorous flora. A real life “Little Shop of Horrors” in my back yard.

There are some slightly icky things in these poems. What is the grossest thing that ever happened to you?

When I was a kid, we lived on a farmette and raise a mishmash of critters. One time I reached into a rabbit hutch to pick up one of the baby rabbits and what I got instead was the body of a dead rabbit filled with maggots. Why tell this gross tale? Because it informs my poetry somehow. I am a happy, joyful person whose glass is always half full. Still, I understand the dark side. I think you see that in a lot of my poems. Certainly the Pollyanna in me comes out, but I think the most interesting work has an edge, a peek behind the curtains. I was told once that I was an optimist who writes like a pessimist.

If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

I would love to grow horns or antlers at will. Probably as a superpower thing, horns won’t get me far, at least not as far as invisibility or the ability to fly. Still, consider two bighorn rams on a snowy mountainside, breaths clouding the air, slamming those giant curled horns together, and the crack of sound in the freezing, snapping cold. There is some incredible power there.

Who are the poets you most derive inspiration from, for your life as well as your own poetry?

I am currently reading and loving Traci Brimhall (“Rookery”) and rereading Brigit Pegeen Kelly (“Song”). But there are two specific poems that I read over and over and they break my heart every time. They make me think I will never be able to do anything as well, so I should just quit now and take up knitting. But they also give me hope that someday I might write something even half as wondrous. The first one is by the master, Robert Hass, “A Story of the Body” and the second is by a young poet, Zachary Schomburg, titled “Testy Pony.” Search them out and you will see what I mean about heartbreak.

How does your bird-watching influence your writing and how does your writing influence your bird-watching?

I think there is a lot of power in the ability to name things. My parents were big on bird watching and all sorts of nature things, including hunting. I am in a wheelchair now due to MS, but I can still use my scooter and go down the bike trail by my house and watch birds. The great thing about them is they come to me. Well, they come to the food I put out for them. I am amazed sometimes at how many birds show up in my poems. My current favorite is the tufted titmouse. They have a tuft on top of their heads. How can you not love a bird with a tuft? And I like to say the word tufted.

So, what is your favorite word?

Linoleum—which pops up in my poems more often than you might think. I like it especially because the material we put on our floors these days is vinyl, not linoleum. I also like the word bismaroon which, as far as I know, is only used in one place in the world. In Oconto County, Wisconsin, they call bullfrogs bismaroons. I used it in one of the Swampy Woman poems because it is a good word and I think it sounds just like what it is.

Where does Swampy Woman live in all of us?

A friend asked me this question and I can only hope that all of the women in my life have a bit of Swampy Woman in them. Aside from the sexiness, and the devil may care attitude, I think she has a lot of kindness in her. Kindness goes a long way in getting along in the world. Imagine you are standing in a long line at the grocery. When it is your turn to check out you find you are a dollar short. If there is an honorary Swampy Woman in line behind you, she will reach into her black bag needlepointed with giant maroon cabbage roses and hand the cashier a dollar. She does this for no other reason than that is how you should treat other people.

Are you the swampy woman, and, if so, what does that mean?

No no no! She is so much braver than I am. She is probably nicer than I am, too. I suppose you could call me a disciple of Swampy Woman. She taught me some things about standing up for what you believe and living your life with your own rules. Women want to be like her, men want to have sex with her.

What is your writing process–how you gather language for your poems? How you decide to edit?

Thanks to my teacher/mentor Terri Brown Davidson, I have a better ear for sound than I used to have. Still, if asked to write a poem in iambic pentameter, I’d be lost in a swamp. And when I hear the word dactyl the first thing that comes to mind is dinosaur. But, if you want poems that have internal rhyme and alliteration and assonance, I’m your poet. Those things come naturally to me. I have always thought that a big part of poetry for me is making ugly things beautiful. Part of that is loving language which I do.

As for editing, I do it as I write. I am not a poet with drawers full of earlier drafts of poems. I make changes on the computer page and throw the old stuff away. I am a big fan of thesauruses and this online tool called Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus. I am always looking for the exact right word. I am comma inept and I put them in and take them out all the time. Still, I am never sure I am right. One wonderful thing that has helped my editing immensely is having a friend who listens to me read every poem aloud. I find many mistakes when I do that.

What surprised you the most about Swampy Woman?

I think the thing that surprises me the most is how she caught the imagination of a lot of people. Maybe we are all looking for heroes or mentors. Or at least someone, real or fictional, who lives her life to standards she sets herself.

Last question—Where did the title, “The Insomniac’s House” come from?

A lot of women of a certain age get insomnia. Hot flashes and having to pee in the middle of the night contribute to it. Swampy Woman is of that age. One of the poems has the lines:

Geography of the insomniac’s house,
stars divided by mullions into tic-tac-toe.

I loved the sound of that phrase and it just fit.

I agree with the Roiphe haters, but I’ll take a different tack in my defense of feminism. In my experience, feminism doesn’t just allow you free reign in your fantasy life, feminism equals sexy. And I don’t mean this figuratively, as in iPads are sexy. I mean it literally, as in feminism equals materials and attitudes and actions that lead to sexual arousal and satisfaction. (I guess some people might feel that way about iPads, too.) At least that’s the role it’s had for me. I started noticing gender-based unfairness when I was just a little kid, and when I was older, learning how to deconstruct the systems that contributed to that unfairness gave me an intellectual thrill — but I’m honestly not sure I would have gone for that women’s studies minor if it wasn’t linked in my mind with good sex.

From the time I was twelve, round about 1980, I was looking for sexual information and titillation anywhere I could get it, and I couldn’t afford to be picky. A friend’s dad’s Playboys, The Joy of Sex pilfered from the library, V. C. Andrews novels passed among classmates, Judy Blume books, late-night Showtime, Spencer’s Gifts: they all made their appearance. But it wasn’t until I started calling myself a feminist in my late teens that the floodgates really opened. I guess if I had been in the trenches of “the movement,” I would have experienced fallout from the big clash between the Catherine MacKinnons and the lipstick lesbians, or whoever. (Well, not whoever. I just said that for rhetorical effect. On the pro-sex side were people like Susie Bright, Kathy Acker, Betty Dodson, who I was finding at the time.) But I came of age at the right moment, and whenever I was in a feminist bookstore I made a happy bee-line for On Our Backs, which led me to plenty of other SM porn.

I’m pretty straight and On Our Backs was an indie lesbian porn mag, but who cared! It was full of sexy sex, plenty of it suggesting dominance and submission, and I was way more comfortable thumbing through it in Giovanni’s Room than I was scanning the spread-vag rags in the few ammonia-smelling porn stores I’d ventured into with friends, giggling and squirming and feeling as much an object of curiosity and lust as the bearer of it. Also, because I was bookish, soon enough I’d wander away from the bookstore’s magazine racks, and I got off just as much on the tomes of theory that took sex as their analytic subject. Yes, some of the texts were critical of porn, but plenty of them weren’t, and in either case, I was immersed in my favorite topics: gender and sex, handled smartly.

Yet I have to admit it. My first vibrator did not come from any kind of feminist co-operative but from an ammonia-smelling porno store. My best friend bought it for me and sent it to me the summer I turned 19. Built to resemble a giant Caucasian dick, it took three D batteries and never lost its reek of melting plastic. It did the trick, but its motor busted within months, and it’s thanks to feminism that I knew what to do when that happened: Mail order a Magic Wand from Good Vibrations as soon as I had the fifty bucks in hand. I had already made a pilgrimage to the women’s-centered sex store when I visited San Francisco, but I was stone broke then. I could do nothing but finger the displays of dildos and vibrators and latex and leather, nothing but look through the books in the comfy chairs they provided. I walked out empty-handed but dripping and happy. I had a feeling of belonging. This came from getting hot and bothered publicly, sure, in a safe place that welcomed it, but it also came from joy and pride and gratitude for the solidarity of the group of women who made a place like Good Vibrations possible. For me, going to that store, just knowing about that store, messed with boundaries—good girls/bad girls, women/men, do’s and don’ts—that had always chafed. I’m a white, first-world, middle-class woman with the luxury of having sexual support be one of the most important things I needed feminism for, but I did indeed need it. Far from causing me conflict, feminism gave me a way to reconcile my sometimes-weird lustfulness with my busy brain.

I got that dripping, happy feeling from the women’s health centers where I got my medical care and birth control, too. I loved going to those places—Family Planning. Planned Parenthood—and I loved the kind women therein who I could admit things to or ask questions of. Roiphe’s article drips with the certainty that feminists want to censor certain kinds of sex, but who is fighting for our right to control our own reproduction that’s essential to good-time getting it on in the first place? If you’re pregnant with your unplanned third child under four, your sexual satisfaction is probably going to decrease whether your preference tends toward woman-on-top or bound-and-gagged.

I particularly loved the Sex Co-Op at college, an explicitly feminist space that gave me a tingle any time I went in there. Access to cheap birth control made me horny. I loved to run my fingers through the boxes of condoms that lined the co-op’s small office in the Student Union. I’d buy strings of different kinds at a few cents a piece just because I could. I took a feminist women’s health care class in that room, the kind of crunchy, consciousness-raising thing often mocked, during which a group of us charted the fluctuations of our vaginal mucus and sat in a circle, naked from the waist down and with mirrors and flashlights at the ready, to look at our cervixes and share the view. And goddamn it if the knowledge of my mucus and cervix and cycle and so on didn’t help me understand my body better as well as help me tame the constant urinary tract infections I got from too much fucking.

I don’t mean to portray myself as boy’s-girl type of feminist, at the ready for anything, always whipping off my shirt. And I am not suggesting that everything about sex has always and only been good with me, that I’ve never had a problem with porn. That’s not the case. I’ve harangued with the best of them, especially during those early women’s studies classes. Sex and gender and human rights and internalized and external sexism are complicated. That’s part of what interests me. I don’t think feminism on the whole—and what’s the whole?—denies this or tries to shut it down. On the contrary, most feminisms want to get on in there. I have always believed that what I’ve called feminism wants me to get off.

I’ve resisted going into the specifics of Roiphe’s argument, because while there’d be some satisfaction in trotting out her inaccuracies; logical fallacies; over-generalizations; false causations; and selective, vague, and ahistorical evidence, that’s been done so well so many other places. But I’ll tell you that she pins her thesis on the massive popularity among the ladies of the SM-tinged novel Fifty Shades of Grey, and I can’t resist pulling this one quote:

“Recently on talk shows there has been a certain amount of upstanding feminist tsk-tsking about the retrograde soft-core exploitation of women in Fifty Shades of Grey, and there seem to be no shortage of liberal pundits asking, “Is this what they went to the barricades for?” But of course the barricades have always been oddly irrelevant to intimate life.”

I don’t know what talk shows or pundits Roiphe is referring to, or who is doing this feminist tsk-tsking she derides—I have a feeling they’re not the feminists that are in my pantheon, and I suspect they might not be self-identified feminists at all—but I have felt since I’ve been 18 that feminist women have gone to the barricades for me to be able to know my own sexuality, and I appreciate that. Thank you, feminists. I don’t need a Magic Wand anymore because I have a selection of high-quality, ergonomic, battery-operated or rechargeable toys that are a little more graceful. I use them with whatever fantasies turn my crank that day. We’ve come a long way.

In Rebel Without a Cause, we got Dean in red cloth instead of black leather: red jacket, white shirt, blue jeans.  He’s the flag!  America gone bad, or at least post-war conflicted.  Youthful disaffection—and how can you be properly young if you’re not properly disaffected?—has always dressed itself up in costumes of threat.

Young women are required to present themselves in overly sexualized ways:  I’m young; I can take your man.  And then they’re chastised for doing what was asked of them—think of Jessica Rabbit’s poignant comic plea: I’m not bad. . . I’m just drawn that way.

Young men are required to present themselves as icons of danger:  I’m young; I can take your woman.  And then they’re told they’ve brought on whatever violence comes their way, random and casual or sanctioned and official: front like a thug, die like a thug.

And so to Trayvon Martin. .  .  starting, of course, with obligatory disclaimers and stipulations:

1. Zimmerman is innocent until proven guilty; we don’t know (sadly, we may never know) exactly what happened.

2.  The information we have certainly makes it appear that he was a man with a growing racialized view of threat and the ultimate confrontation took place because he treated Martin as prey—to be pursued even  after he was told not to pursue.

3.  Geraldo Rivera is a jackass—most recently—for suggesting that Martin’s hoodie “is as responsible for his death as George Zimmerman was.”

4.  Representative Bobby Rush is to be commended for his donning of a hoodie during a speech to Congress.  His mic was cut and he was removed, while quoting the bible, by the sergeant at arms—don’t remember that happening to Dick Cheney, when he told Pat Leahy, “go fuck yourself” on the floor of the Senate. . . civility seems to mean different things in different contexts.

Geraldo is wrong; (Bobby) Rush is, well…he’s half right.

How we dress, how we represent ourselves publicly, does matter. But, as with so much else about race, we can’t talk about these things openly and honestly.

In June of 2011, DeShon Marman, an African-American football player at the University of New Mexico, was taken off a USAirways flight, pre-takeoff, in San Francisco, and arrested after an altercation with airline personnel—the details of which are in dispute—regarding pulling up his pants, something he was initially asked to do by African-American airline employees.

Marman’s mother, Donna Doyle, lamented “sagging,” to a reporter a few days after the incident, saying it was something she had tried to get her son to stop doing:  “His coach has told him; my sister, my cousins. .  . We’ve all said, ‘Boy, pull your pants up.’”

A month later, however, after charges against Marman were dropped, his mother was talking about the inevitable filing of a lawsuit against the airline:  “Well there’s a lot of racism in there, between the humiliation and the harassment that they brought upon my son,” she said in an interview.

Was the Marman incident a matter of inappropriate behavior on the part of a passenger?  Was it a matter of racial profiling on the part of the airline?  It’s hard to decide.  Marman’s mother can’t really seem to decide.  One suspects, however, that—had they been traveling together—she would have cuffed his ear and tightened his belt, curbside, before they entered the airport.

Would Trayvon Martin be alive if he had been wearing a prep school uniform?  Quite possibly.

Is that right?  No.  Walking-While-Hoodied should no more be a capital offense than Walking-While-Black.

But it is dishonest for us to pretend that presentation doesn’t matter.

What Marman’s mother said—privately, fiercely, and often—to her son was: Don’t dress like that!  What she says now publically is Don’t judge my son by how he’s dressed!  What plenty of well-intentioned progressive white people say publicly now is, Don’t judge African-American kids by how they dress, an affirming and supportive message, undercut by what they say—privately, fiercely, and often—to their own kids which is: Don’t dress like that!

Across the board, I’d like to see fewer of America’s children dressed like thugs—whether that means the jailhouse fashion of sagging pants or the hoodie and sunglasses, Unabomber-chic, look.  I don’t expect that to happen any time soon.  What young people do—what they have always done; go back to James Dean—is to play with the iconography of threat: sexuality as threat, violence as threat.

Issues of race and class are often overlays on the basic bone structure of “age threat.”  Give me a choice at midnight, between a subway car whose sole occupant is an eighty-year-old woman and another with an eighteen-year-old man and I’m going to go sit with the eighty-year-old woman.  Young people are scary; it’s what they often want to be and I take the iconography of threat seriously.

But if young people are compelled by culture and by biology to revolt, or at least transgress, older people have an obligation not just to attempt to temper that behavior—futile as those attempts will often be—but also to temper our own overreactions, to distinguish between the pose and the reality, between Thug Lite, the fashion, and Thug Life, the reality.

However much the young try to blur that line, we’re still supposed to act like the adults.

I have occasionally taken issue with—or had issues with—the way my teenage daughter wanted to dress for school; that doesn’t mean that I think any clothing ever authorizes a young girl to be harassed or attacked.  In the same vein, it’s not unreasonable, regarding teenage boys, of whatever race, to voice some caution about the enthusiasm with which they take up, or normalize, thug garb or fashion; that doesn’t mean clothing ever legitimizes an attack on an adolescent—or on anyone else, for that matter.

Young men of color carry a special, and unfair, burden, complicated by a contradiction of youth, in which adolescent boys simultaneously say both “see me as a threat,” and “why am I being singled out as a threat?”  The hoodie isn’t the problem.  But it’s not the right badge of innocence either.

In 1988, a federal law came into force, requiring that all toy guns have a brightly colored tip at the end of the barrel—usually red or dayglo orange.  One reason for this was the use of fake guns in real crimes.  But given that adult criminals have no compunction about removing the tip, the more obvious target of the law was children, children who were shot—not often but with some regularity—by police officers, who allegedly mistook toy guns for real weapons.

Fifteen years earlier, in the spring of 1973, a ten-year-old African-American boy named Clifford Glover was shot and killed, in Queens, by an undercover police officer.  I remember this vividly, both because I was the same age and because of the riots that followed.

The officer said the child had brandished what turned out to be a toy gun.  Whether that’s what happened or not is an open question.  A toy gun and a starter pistol were supposedly found in the area—one on the street, one in a storm drain—but there was open discussion about how credible this evidence was: everyone knew—or believed—that the police were wont to use a “throw down” to support their contention that what they had been involved in was “a good shoot.”

Again, Geraldo is wrong: it makes no sense to exonerate the shooter—or the egregiously flawed Stand Your Ground Law—and blame the clothing.  But it also makes no sense to act as if the pretense of threat—toy gun or Thug Lite fashion statement—doesn’t confuse the landscape, sometimes dangerously so: there’s no red tip, on whatever the street fashion of the day, to distinguish the real gang bangers from the wannabe-seen-as.

We should be saying, across the board, that our kids, regardless of race, would do better not to emulate thugs; but it’s not realistic to think they’ll heed this fashion advice anytime soon.  What the adults need to hear and heed in that sentence is “OUR,” we have to start being more consistent, open and honest, about what we say to—and about—America’s children.

And we would do well to start by being more consistent, open, and honest about what we say to each other:  If I wouldn’t want my child to dress in a certain way, it’s not racism for me to have and to voice the same safety concerns for your child; and if I’m condemning problematic behavior in my community in private, it’s not just a matter of airing dirty laundry to do the same thing in public.

In both cases, we should have no higher priority than protecting America’s children.

She tells her story candidly, with a consistent and unflinching attention to detail that is both beautiful and difficult, symbolic of the effects that loss and the grieving process have on her life. Her prose is poetic and compact, never lacking in intensity, and delivered in the present tense to maintain immediacy.

The book is separated into five sections, each signifying a different step in Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief.  The story unfolds out of sequence, leaping forward and backward, years at a time, illustrating the variable nature of the process. Claire is in denial for over a decade, bargaining for over a decade, and so on. She enters dysfunctional relationships with people who are also grieving, either a death or a relationship or some other ghost. She reaches out and is reached out to; she taps into each step before transitioning to another. Over the course of time, she heals.  There are hard lessons along the way: hurting others and being hurt and missing opportunities and choosing wrong roads. We are never entirely healed; Smith is not an exception.

Her grief is emotionally isolating—”like another country” (94)…a vast nothing expanding outward from the very core of who I am (150)…like living in a country where no one speaks the same language (234).” Her grief is a shield, a numbing one, dulling the pain inflicted upon her by others or herself. It is all-encompassing, a distraction, an excuse, a crutch. Loss protects her, giving her reasons not to fully invest herself. She turns to alcohol, and men. Eventually, the shield falls.  She is forced to confront herself, her pain and its origins. She must remember, process, and accept.  Over time, by trial and error, she grows to appreciate her mother’s death, and eventually her father’s death, as they lead her to the rest of her life.  Lessons are learned and applied, yet we remain impulsive and, at our cores, unchanged.

Currently living in Los Angeles, married with a child and expecting another, Claire Bidwell Smith is a therapist specializing in grief. The Rules of Inheritance is not a complete history of her life, but an achingly beautiful window into a portion of it. The grieving process is never complete. There are no rules. We become who we are by way of every relationship we have. We become our fears and our failures, yes—but we also become our successes, and our greatest loves. 

I am exhausted. My bones don’t ache, I lost my bones somewhere in a pile of papers and notes, sitting in a chair for hours on end day into night into day, again, I left them there.

My body is now a formless mass of bubble cells of unknown electricity and spit and blood. Normally I stretch and burn with the snappy, silly, limber power of a musical theater star, but today, and all days in recent memory, my whale eyes roll over, unblinking, flooded, to whatever has attracted my attention over there, and then, synapse engaged, message received, my limbs reach slowly up, steadily as though through heavy thick water, with a relentless tired journey through the weeds and scattering fish, and I grasp my goals firmly and pull them back down to me, deep below, squatting on the sandy floor. I breathe steadily and deeply, but you can’t hear it. I’m not sighing yet. But I’m not drowning, either. I consume the oxygen in the water around. I exhale full sentences and academic structures with three logical steps each.

I’ve forgotten to eat regularly. But I breathe deeply.

Nights, I choke down the lessons of each day, press them down firmly with the dark of the room, efficiently. A lifelong insomniac, I now enjoy the lumps of my pillows, which have long needed to be replaced, stained with time, oxidized, and I close my eyes easily. A few magical touches to my forehead and thigh, light fingers beside me, and I sleep without needing to acknowledge every, or any, degree towards a sleeping state, as I am so accustomed to doing. My lungs, no longer constricted by ribs, expand exponentially, rhythmically, instantly. I rest in coffin position, joints open and long, and I’ll awake later with only my head turned to the right.

Meanwhile, I dream.

I dream of nursing others in catastrophe, of mothers and war, explosions and fireworks. Journeys, lost maps, and myself, over and over, always a new discovery, a new place, and another, and another, positions perpetually re-established, mountains, houses, snow and the sea. Often, my rest is disturbed by the realization that I am dreaming. One half of myself is often surprised to discover the other half in a room of some sort, of peers and professors, wooden panel walls, excitedly and confidently involved in a discussion of theoretical mathematics. So this was the real dream all the while. Blood rushes to my dreaming head. Confusion ensues. Conversations are gently paused and I am shepherded back to the relative impotence and safety of the nursing dreams, chaotic as they are, but filled with smoke and opacity.

I awake tired, I have not really rested, and now I feel even more uneasy. The day already begins this way. The light is yellow and burns cheerfully and small through the curtain. I tap the alarm repeatedly only for the illusion of longer rest, to practice the exercise of waking, as if I still need it. My shoulder despises the early imposition. We are spent.

Walking, or cycling, or dragging, my heart bursts if I am made to run for the train. But on leisurely days I notice that I have no body, my consciousness is simply making its way down a quiet street, spinning around, somehow. I imagine entire conversations with the trees, who freely dispense quite reasonable advice.

I laugh when I realize it, how silly it is. But I don’t laugh out loud. It’s fine to have a small private joke with myself. It isn’t strange at all. It isn’t real, or if it is, it doesn’t matter, as long as I meet my deadlines. I consult the next tree about it. What does he think of deadline? He already knows my query, and is prepared with an answer before I can properly frame my hypothesis, because all trees are connected below the surface, through sinew and root and worm.

This is exhaustion. I am detaching in all but the most important moments: Presentation, paper, presentation, paper, presentation, paper. My brain is a mass of quivering paper cuts. I could cry from this, but that would take far too much time, and I do not have time right now. So I’m determined to weave all of myself into every moment, which is not possible with too much reflection. I’m weaving the trees and their conversations, the water that impedes my arm, the mothers in my dream, the catastrophes and wars, the unknown maths of my existence.

I exist. I stretch, I reach, I grasp. I’m losing my body, becoming very very small and very very big, not in an acute moment of ecstasy but in an elaborate, protracted state which takes place only between my ears.

I reach up through the thick water and I pull things down towards me, steadily. I exist and weave and eat knowledge.

Dear Lobbyist Bowles,

I recently read about the exciting new venture your organization is embarking on and am very interested in the Social Media position you are no doubt preparing to establish. Having just graduated from the number one party school in the entire southwest, I am eager for an opportunity to get my foot in the door and begin my life in the workforce. Making that happen with a well-established movement such as yours would be a bonus. (Everyone wants some job security these days, am I right?)

Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m willing to try anything, I like to hang out in a group, am constantly on the Internet anyway, and I’m always coming up with classic one-liners. Look no further, I’m your man.

Attached please find my résumé.

As you will see, I was asked for two semesters in a row to be my fraternity’s event planner. This involved many tweets to sororities to ensure hot chicks would show up.  I had to think outside the box.  What do hot chicks want to hear? I’d ask myself.  And then I’d tweet it.

(Example:

“X marks the spot. #imtalkingaboutXtacy”

“Hotgirlz contest. All contestants drink free. #likethedoctorsaid…FreeAtLast”)

I’ve taken it upon myself to compose some sample tweets of how I imagine taking your message to the people.  I’m open to direction and collaboration.  My blacksmithing T.A. taught us not to be overly precious about our work.

First off, I’d like to suggest changing your name ever so slightly from The American Nazi Party to The American Nazi Partay.

You’ll also probably want to get out in front of the tired, old perception of your cause and send out a clear message.  Lead the way instead of being a victim of preconceived notions and closed-minded thinking.  People probably think they know you… but do they?

Below are a few sample slogans and talking points—my vision for taking the movement forward.

Let’s keep things separate.
#JustLikeYouDidWithItemsInTheFridgeWithYourCollegeRoommate

Some people don’t like vegetables; we don’t like anyone who isn’t white.
#WeAllCanProbablyAgreeThatZucchiniIsDisgusting

Sometimes we eat chocolate ice cream.
#NotWhileWearingOurWhiteHoodedRobesThatWouldBeReckless

When did cleansing get a bad rap?
#NextToGodliness

We’re not entirely sure anymore what our beef is with the Jews, but it’s tradition.
#CulturalNazis

Hoods not hoodies.
#It’sAStyleChoice

We’re not cowards.
#WeMerelyLikeToWearCostumes

Once you go white you never go back.
#Don’tEvenThinkAboutIt

Nazi rhymes with Yahtzee.
#AlmostAsFun

Nazi rhymes with Potsie.
#ThatGuyOnThatNickAtNiteShowHappyDaysWhoAlthoughIsSuperWhiteDoesNot- IdentifyWithUs

Hate and bile are fear and ignorance turned inside out.
#We’reJustScaredCuddleBunnies

This is just the tip of the iceberg.  Mein brain overfloweth with good ideas!

(I had my baseball coach look this over and he pointed out that the KKK wear hoods and robes and have wizards, not Nazis.  My bad.  I threw all you guys in together since ideologically you seem to be on the same page. Just another example of sweeping generalizations and over-arching prejudice…OR happy accident?!  Perhaps going forward you guys can think about joining forces.  TBD at our [hopefully] forthcoming interview.)

Please note: I will be out of town for most of the month of June as I’ll be following Drake on his tour of South America but since most of this type of work can be done from virtually anywhere while doing anything (I’m typing this naked while giving myself a pedicure; I didn’t have to tell you that, but I am to prove a point) it really shouldn’t impact my work.

You’re going to need someone to speak for you, it might as well be me.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Jeff “Let’s Do This” Jefferton

Find me on Twitter at @JLDTJ

I took this pail of aging cynicism, dumped it into a Glad kitchen garbage bag with OdorShield and Febreze Freshness, tossed in a copy of Infinite Jest, drew the ForceFlex red drawstring, and said good-bye to irony forever.

My friends, it’s over. When you can walk into Target and purchase a T-shirt with the Jolly Green Giant on it, you’ve been mainstreamed.

It’s not easy for me, this change. It’s hard to tear the skin off the brooding kid in the back row of the classroom and be someone else. It’s hard to dress yourself in a light blue button-down shirt instead of those safe ironic tees—you feel far too cheery; far too exposed. But there are these lyrics I keep hearing in the back of my head: Fight Test off The Flaming Lips Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots album:

I thought I was smart
I thought I was right
I thought it better not to fight
I thought there was a virtue in always being cool
So when it came time to fight I thought I’ll just step aside
And that the time would prove you wrong
And that you would be the fool

I can’t ignore them any longer.

Recently, I posted a question on my Facebook page, “What is the central narrative of the 2010s?” What surprised me was that people’s answers haven’t changed much from the 90s. My generation has been smothered by angst and powerlessness for over twenty years. We’ve watched our government and corporations trample one sacred American notion after another.

In the 90s, the American work ethic was stolen from us, as we saw money thrown by the billions at loud-mouthed visionaries without a profit model, while the slow-to-be-convinced middle class lost their entire savings when they invested in bogus companies right before the dot-com crash.

In the 00s, we lost the cornerstone of American democracy—the right to a fair trial; the one thing we could hang our moral hats on—ripped out from under us by a government that manufactured fear out of a disaster that should have taught us an entirely different lesson.

Finally, in the 10s, we’re losing hope itself: our homes are worthless; our government in gridlock; we fight wars and can’t even remember why we’re fighting them.

And what are the greatest minds of my generation doing in response—those of us clear-sighted enough to see? We’re titillating ourselves with ironic articles from The Onion.

I often find myself frustrated by my peers in Generation X. We sit over microbrews and complain, for hours on end, about how bad things have gotten here in America: how dumb the politics; how decrepit the culture—and yet when some idea is posited, someone’s wild scheme, some unlikely way to change the narrative of inevitable apocalypse, a haze seems to take over our expressions, and the conversation dies on the vine. I haven’t fully determined what the haze means yet—for years, I thought it was me, that people simply thought my wild propositions nuts—but lately I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t me at all, that the fear of engaging in a vision of change is generationally universal.

It’s so hard-coded we don’t even see it. We’re a generation that was taught in our adolescence to be cool at all costs, that to engage in any sort of seriousness of purpose was to be ridiculed. We were brought up on Animal House, where low-brow comedy, sloth, and cheap sex were the highest of achievements; and poets, intellectuals, and do-gooders the butt of all jokes. We had no idea—and still have no idea—how programmed we’ve been to be the cowards we are.

And still this teaching goes on: perpetrated by us now on our own children. Ha! The world is ending, but SpongeBob SquarePants is a riot.

It costs one a great deal in our generation to try to be sincere. You lose relevance: a writer can get a great deal more attention for writing about Ashley Judd’s puffiness. It’s also self-destructive: we’re a generation of hyenas, salivating over the chance to pounce on something to label preachy or self-righteous.

But once you’ve torn the veil off, it becomes difficult to ignore. Once you’re aware that everything you once thought counter-cultural has become mainstream, that most of us are simply cogs in the apathy machine, that the only way to truly be countercultural in today’s society is to be an Atticus Finch, a serious man with a singularity of purpose, it’s hard to go on in the same way.

So I do things. They’re not much. They’re little baby steps. I think of it as irony therapy. I joined the school board of my daughter’s alternative school. I volunteer for a literary organization full of seventy-year-old ex-radicals. It’s difficult for me to sit through these meetings—two hours worth of Bike Routes to School; the dedication of a Poetry Pole—and not think or say something sarcastic, not try to sully the conversation by noting the surety of its uselessness. But I bite my lip as best I can.

The novel that I’ve just published speaks to this. It ends with a single image: a grainy photocopy of a milk crate—the modern version of a soap box. To me, that image asks this central question to my generational peers:

Will we continue to surrender in order to maintain our cool? Or will we stand up, fight, and make fools of ourselves?

For the next generation’s sake, I hope it’s the latter.

The reality of the inevitable decline of humanity in the face of insufficient natural resources is described, with much more eloquence than that, in this fascinating excerpt from Wasted World:

In “The Limits to Growth,” Dennis Meadows and others concluded from one calculation that the number of humans could crash suddenly rather than stabilize gradually. But none of the other calculations showed this effect; their results suggested that the numbers of humans on Earth had to be reduced gradually, and with them, the overuse of natural resources. It seemed that this single result was anomalous and could be ignored, although its cause remained unclear.

Twenty years later, however, in their 1992 follow-up book “Beyond the Limits,” on the basis of calculations using data from the intermediate years, the authors reported that such crashes were no longer exceptional but had become the rule. Results without a population crash had become exceptional; crashes appeared to be normal and seemed not easily avoidable. This was a very different story. Without knowing the underlying causes, population crashes were now being attributed to delays in the fine tuning of interactions within the system and to the exceeding of limits of irreversible degradation.

So I’ll amend my opening statement.  If we don’t stop both consuming and reproducing at the current rate, we’re fucked.

Generally the focus is on consumption because, as the author notes earlier in the piece, discussion about population decrease is a major taboo.

It’s not taboo because people see anything fundamentally wrong with reducing human footprint(s), quite literally, on the planet.  It’s taboo because the ways of doing so in the expedited fashion necessary fall, arguably universally, under the category of eugenics to some degree or another.

If they do not fall under eugenics, most strategies are at the very least socio-economically unfair in some way or another.

So we preoccupy ourselves with the consumption portion of the equation.  It’s less morally and ethically troublesome.  Easier to pontificate upon.  Easier to run a campaign about.

Whenever I end up in discussions about climate change–what it is, what it means, who or what is responsible for it–I always, somehow, through the bramble and tangle of politics and moving pieces, arrive at the same conclusion:

It hardly fucking matters if we don’t, as a species, at the very least stop increasing our numbers — and preferably decrease them.

That statement, perhaps understandably, usually signals the end of the conversation.  What else, after all, is there to say?

People prefer to stick to questions that are compatible with their politics and have apparently obvious answers.  People like questions that don’t challenge their most basic beliefs and assumptions about human rights.

But if there are 14 billion apples, and even if we all eat only one apple a day and consume nothing else, if there are 15 billion of us, there will not be enough apples.

End of story.

The end of the metaphorical apples is in sight.  It is not as far off as you might imagine, and certainly not as far off as you hope.  Probably.  Increasingly probably.

In fact, as the excerpt states, the longer we go without having the conversation, the faster the end of the apples comes.  As with anything exponential, it actually increases in relative speed:

Moreover, system collapse follows from almost any simulation experiment based on relatively recent data—data that are now already twenty years old and are therefore too optimistic. In those twenty years, it has become even more likely that the conditions theoretically leading to system collapse will occur.

So.  When will the mainstream, public conversation about human reproduction and population — the exceptionally difficult conversation and the one that truly, actually, matters when we’re talking about finite earthly resources — actually begin?

Or, as I’ve been told before, is it better to focus elsewhere, not to risk infringing on human rights, and to simply lean into our fate, heroically swinging our organic fruit-laden, upcycled Dorito wrapper tote bags at the beast that will, unquestionably, devour us anyway?

Should we go into that good night, but not gently, so we can at least say — to whom, one wonders, if the collapse is utter — that our conscience is clear?  And to whomever has to salvage what is left of the human world, will having done so appear as integrity or selfishness?