EDITOR’S NOTE:
Another year has come and gone, and it’s time once again to present The Nobbies, the official book awards of The Nervous Breakdown.
Below you’ll find this year’s winners, our picks for the best books of 2011.
Congrats to the victors, and their publishers.
And thanks, as always, for reading.
-BL
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
—Karl Marx
One of the first books released by Red Lemonade, the visionary new press brought to life by ex-Soft Skull patriarch Richard Nash, Zazen by Vanessa Veselka is a powerful, political, sometimes humorous, often frightening portrait of a parallel world that lurks in the near future in all of its dystopian glory. Della is caught in an emotional battle, deciding whether or not she should leave the country that is dissolving around her, or help to bring it down faster. Bombs are going off, but capitalism continues unabated. Unsure of what to do, Della starts calling in bomb threats of her own, targeting the companies and locations that offend her the most. When the threats start turning into actual destruction, she questions the her role in these events, the universe wrapping around her, burning martyrs and rat queens shimmering at the edge of her vision.
We start with the bombings. Communities often rally together to keep big-box bullies from pushing out small, independent businesses, but would you really wish destruction on them? How about death? Della considers the possibilities:
“When the first box-mall-church went up in the blackberry field I wanted some kind of rampant mass stigmata with blackberry juice for blood. It didn’t happen. It’s not going to. They win; they just roll, pave and drive over everything that’s beautiful: babies, love and small birds. On summer nights with the windows open I hear joints cracking like crickets.”
As her story progresses, she interacts with a motley crew of eco-terrorists, lesbians, hippies, vegans and posers. Della tries to come to grips with the changes all around her and the sense that something is happening, the world around her calling out, asking her to get involved. She questions her feelings and intuition:
“I wake up sometimes and feel the nearness of something but then it’s gone and I’ve started to wonder if it was ever there. Lately, I’ve become afraid that the feeling I used to feel, like something good was waiting, is what people mean when they say ‘young’ and that it is nothing more than a chemical associated with a metabolic process and not anything real at all.”
It takes her back to her childhood. She wonders if she has the courage to act, or if her words are as hollow as everyone else. She studies film clips and articles on self-immolation, the idea of a Buddhist setting himself on fire, unmoving as the flames engulf him, a noble act, but possibly a myth. War is ugly, death is never pretty, and the romance that is often associated with such actions, misplaced and false. Her memory:
“Once I burned an ant with a magnifying glass. It moved when it caught fire because it wasn’t trained to sit there. The straw it crawled on, its very own Popsicle stick palace, blackened and burned. You have to sit there or it doesn’t count. But it moved. That’s how I knew it was alive; that’s how I knew what I did was wrong. Little ant? Little ant? And me crying all night long with ash on my hands. Popsicle sticks. Matted straw. Grassroots. Hallelujah.”
Della has a conscience, as it turns out—a foreshadowing of future events.
Part of what fractures Della’s thoughts, feelings, and memories is the death of her sister, Cady, at a young age. When Della gets together with her family to honor her sister’s life and tragic death, we witness that moment in painstaking detail:
“There was a whirr of trees when the bus went off the cliff. I put my hand against the glass and green blurry streaks raced beneath my fingers. I imagine her in the thorny arms of wild blackberries singing. Mom used to say that we should look sadness right in the eye. I look Cady right in the eye, my older sister, thirteen, crying, tangled in metal, shining. I cannot turn away.”
The ghost of her sister would haunt her forever, shaping her decisions—a complicated tug-of-war ensuing between her mother’s calls to activism, her sister’s brutal honesty, her friends and lovers telling her what is expected, and her own belief system short-circuiting under the strain.
One of the reasons that this story resonates on the page is Veselka’s lyrical prose, her ability to ground the events in a place and time while also slipping into surreal moments (without explanation), events and scenes unfolding into emotional, dimensional tapestries. Take this moment with her brother, Credence:
“Credence sets his coffee cup in the sink where it turns into a silk moth, flies into a
light fixture, and rains down in a cascade of ash.”
And this longer example, speaking of her desire to leave, and how impossible it is for her to voice these feelings to her family, to explain her longing to go:
“…I don’t want to watch anymore. I can’t stop the bus from running off the cliff and the sea is already filled with lights. I don’t know why I can’t be one. I’m going to try. If I stay here I won’t be anything the Bellyfish could lean on, I’ll just be something they have to prop up…
… I would say: I am a pool of light, then flicker like sun on a swimming pool. I would say: It has already erupted. And then, dancing through the braided shadows on the basin, wait for the foliage to land in the pool water and make galleons and cutters out of oak leaves and elm. Then they would have to understand.”
But this novel is not without humor. Even if Della is laughing on the outside while crying on the inside, she and her friends find a way to joke about serious matters, to laugh as the city burns, striving for moments of normality while surrounded by chaos and threats. This, for example, her friend, Mirror, speaking:
“‘You know, that stupid cat never came back. I spent the whole morning shaking a bowl of Meow Mix like a fucking shaman.’”
There is a farm waiting for her, a friend named Tamara encouraging her to come and be a part of something bigger. Della considers it. She attends a sex party, and opts for the red bracelet, the one that means “all access, open to anything”. She buys plane tickets and considers fleeing the country. She doesn’t. In the end, the farm wins out. Her time there is spent doing mundane tasks—helping the commune to live off the grid. Eventually she is drawn into a smaller group of activists, and put to work utilizing her background as a scientist to help take down several electrical towers, finally acting on her desires.
But not everything goes according to the plans. There is betrayal and confusion, mistakes made, more tickets bought, passports stolen, and alliances broken. In the end, Della comes to terms with the war that is erupting around her:
“I looked around at the smoke and people. I couldn’t find any hate in me anywhere. The world is a violent child none of us will get to see grow up.
I decided to love it anyway.”
Vanessa Veselka has written an engaging, touching book in Zazen, one that leaves the reader saddened by the unnecessary loss and destruction. But there is still a grain of hope buried in the ash. Even in the face of such despair and loss, the human spirit can be retained—the love and kindness that separates us from being nothing more than simple, hungry beasts, a more powerful and lasting force than our base desires and endless wants. Written in a layered, poetic voice, Veselka has helped to launch a new press in Red Lemonade, creating a unique and lasting work of art.
Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen is destined to be an auspicious debut. When my former editor, Richard Nash, asked me to read Zazen in manuscript and told me it would be his first debut at Red Lemonade, I jumped at the opportunity. I knew it would be good. I quickly devoured it, and this is what I had to say (I love quoting myself!): “At turns hilarious, unsettling, and improbably sweet, Veselka’s debut is, above all, a highly engaging, and totally unique experience, which will have you re-reading passages and dog-earing pages. But best of all, in the end, Zazen is that rare novel which dares to be hopeful in the face of despair, and succeeds.”
I’ll stand by those words. And I’ll probably quote them again somewhere soon. In the meantime, I’m gonna interview Vanessa. One of the reasons I think Vanessa has so much voice, and such confidence in her voice, is that she is not a child of the classroom, but a child of the world. She’s been a runaway, a cab driver, and a sex worker along the way, and a whole lot more.
VV: I rely heavily on my personal experience and not always in the way people think. The popular image is of a writer plucking a character or a situation out of their past and dropping it in their fiction wholesale. But I’m an amoral scavenger. I’ll take an extremely painful, meaningful experience, pulverize it to dust and use the remaining grains somewhere utterly frivolous, meaningless and transitory with no regard for their feelings. I’m craven. That said, in Zazen, I used temporary careers of mine to employ a whole cast of characters. Working a lot of different jobs, moving around, dating a zillion people, changing majors like hair color leads to a lot of financial and emotional instability—I mean it’s a friggin’ disaster really, a bad idea—but gold for writing. More than the personal trials that come from that, what I got was an education in different social and economic classes. I became practiced in the vernacular of sub-cultures. It’s really a very American thing.
As a classroom student of writing, I have failed. My one brief interlude of trying a more traditional route was a fiasco. I’m not suited for it.
VV: Most of my life I was about music. I was in a band called Bell in the 1990s and after that in a two-piece called The Pinkos with Steve from The Gits. I ran a label (into the ground) and booked tours. I did a lot of van-touring, which basically means working the equivalent of two low-wage jobs for nine months for the seedy glory of visiting 40 towns that didn’t particularly want you there in the first place. All so you can play for 16 people and sleep in a van. I loved it. None of my bands were hugely successful but we made records and friends and, to my mind, anything that breaks the relentlessness of a dumb job is good. Perspective. Worth it at any cost. When I had my daughter, I no longer had the leeway to tour, financially or childcare-wise. I didn’t do anything for a couple years and it nearly killed me. I wrote some songs but didn’t have money to make a record or tour. Then I started writing fiction when she was about three or four. A couple of short stories. They got published and then I started on Zazen. The differences in narrative are huge. I think I was always trying to tell a story that was too large for a song. If I had been a Dylan kind of writer it would have been fine but I was in love with rock and roll. I had a 19th century novel in my head and was trying to make it sound like AC/DC, Neil Young, and The Fumes. It was a strange pony. Knock-kneed, oddly dappled. I was always trying to take things out. Writing my first novel I was in a euphoric state of letting it all come, like the restriction was gone and I could finally throw down. People have said to me several times that Zazen could only have been written by a musician. I’m not totally sure what they mean but I do work a lot from sentence rhythm. I read everything aloud.
VV: That bio came out of a funny thing. I was writing up a resume (for some dumb job again) and was getting pretty demoralized. So I threw it away and wrote a real resume reflecting my actual human experience. It had things in it like, “Sold flowers on the LA freeway June ’84 – Jun ’84. Worked with cash and successfully stayed out of the way of gangs. Often changed water before it was absolutely necessary.” Believe me, that resume was far racier than my writer bio. I did it as an exercise—you know, what we do for 15-20 years really shouldn’t fit on a sheet of paper—but it turned out to be empowering in a back-handed way. When Arthurmag.com asked for a bio I gave them a shorter, cleaner version of that. It was kind of a small flag on a small hill. I didn’t think much about it. Now that it’s all over the place, I do get a little shy about it but it seems cowardly to excise the sex-worker part. The Millions even used my bio in a piece debating whether writers should just put ‘legitimate’ stuff like their MFA experience and quarterly publications. The writer admitted (albeit somewhat shyly) that she worried people who didn’t get MFA’s weren’t serious about their writing, but rather, they were out there doing other things instead. My answer would be, you tell me how “serious” you have to be about writing to do it with a 2 year-old and a shitty job and on food stamps. A lot more serious than you have to be to get funded to sit in an MFA program and contemplate Flannery O’Connor. Again. That said, the writer was pretty fair and I thought it was a good piece.
Ok, so back to your question about sex work and being a runaway. There are a lot of women (men too, of course) out there who work these jobs and have no public representation. It is an honest part of my past and it affected me greatly so I included it. But my experience wasn’t a glamorous one. In the last fifteen years there have been a lot of gains made giving visibility and credit to workers in the sex industry. I know a zillion hot, confident, vibrant women with other options who choose to do sex-work at some point in their life. The stigma has receded in the urban, high paying jobs. So that’s great. But I didn’t experience it as empowering. People forget that it’s not all pretty 25 year-olds with degrees in Women’s Studies swinging around those poles. It is also (and more often) uneducated moms barely making stage fees out by the airport too. As an underage sex-worker, I was closer to that. The world I was in was dangerous, mean-spirited, and frightening. It was a world without power. I did all that from 15-19 years old. I wasn’t really a hooker but I was more than a stripper. How’s that for diplomatically vague? Bigger than a breadbox smaller than a Volvo? Ultimately being a teenage sex-worker is like being a teenage anything else—you fall in love with stupid people, dye your hair a lot and obsess over how your body looks. You’re just doing it in a more dangerous world. And if you think high school girls are mean, you should try bitter, cracked-out 35 year-old strippers who are trying to keep their regulars.
VV: I find a lot of things suffocating that others don’t. If it’s a flaw in my character, it’s a deep one. I have to point out that while I’ve had a lot of experience with vagrancy, alienation, debauchery, etc. I have also lived among the upper-middle class, been expelled from private schools, and eaten in a lot of fancy restaurants. I mention that because there is more writer cred attached to poverty and desperation but not so much to privilege and in my case both are true. And it’s the range that has helped me most as a writer. I have never thought of myself as rebellious so much as stubborn. It’s always been highly disturbing to me that the things I value above all others are socially meaningless and seem to be associated with a dissolute life. I never woke up and said, I’m pissed off and I’m going to do whatever they tell me not to! I just woke up and went about my business and it looked that way. It often happens that someone in a position of authority gets mad at me because they think I’m challenging them, but really it’s because I haven’t noticed their authority at all. I’m kind of authority blind. As a writer, this has helped me hear my own voice. But I’ve also never had to find it. What I have had to do is work hard to figure out how to write about anything that meant something to me without feeling I was reducing it to glibness.
So have I ever found myself in a situation that threatened to suffocate my “uniqueness?” (Just thought I’d return to your actual question Johnny!) Yes. And no. I have an eject button for situations like that and it works pretty well. But like most eject buttons, it brings about a new set of problems. So what do I find suffocating? Jobs that expect you to care more about their customer base than being a vibrant human being. Educational models that reward adoration. Living around people that are absolutely satisfied with television and pot and $125 Ozzy Tickets.
And…I should say, I’m not against MFAs. It’s like guns, you know? Guns don’t kill people, people kill people? MFAs aren’t to blame for boring writing. Then again I’ve never really agreed with that argument about guns… If they’re there, you’re more tempted to use them. Like MFAs. Seriously though, I’m not anti-MFA. Some of my best friends went to MFAs.
VV: Well Johnny, technically death kills people. But who is quibbling? What’s after Zazen? I’m still ranging around between two different novels. Like most writers, the more I talk about it the less I’ll write. Currently, I’m not writing anything because if I were trying to write now I’d be a cranky bastard and wouldn’t be able to have this wonderful conversation with you. And I’m not being sarcastic. Everything in its time. When things settle down I’ll be back at it 3-6 hours a day. Living the dream. Building intimate relationships with imaginary people. It’s a tricky deal, this fiction thing. Highly anti-social. It’s kind of a relief to step aside and enjoy the moment. And it will be a great relief to return to the discipline too.
