A semi-regular roundup of stuff we like from the internets and youtubes:

-Dolly Freed has been blogging for Powells this week. If you ever wanted to know how to prepare that bird that kamikazeed into your window, now’s your chance.

-Poet Heather Christie is doing a live reading/Q&A tonight at htmlgiant. She won me over last time she read in Portland, and her collection, A Difficult Farm, is fantastic.

-Our pal Steve Almond on DIY publishing.

-R.I.P. J.D. (also Howard Zinn)

-Preview of the new Walker Percy documentary (!) via Maud Newton

-Stephen Elliott takes down Taylor Antrim’s take down of Nick Flynn and Alex Lemon (both of whom we adore).

RIVKA GALCHEN, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

TAO LIN, author of Shoplifting from American Apparel

DEB OLIN UNFERTH, author of Vacation

JUSTIN TAYLOR, author of Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever

STEPHEN ELLIOTT, The Rumpus’s own editor and author of The Adderall Diaries.

With music by ALINA SIMONE, DIANE LOUVEL

and, just added, JEFFREY LEWIS

DJ: LINCOLN MICHEL

Special Guest DJ: KHAELA MARICICH of THE BLOW

And video art installation by MONOFONUS PRESS curated by JILL PANGALLO

WHERE: Broadway East, where Chinatown meets the Lower East Side. 171 East Broadway (nr. Rutgers). View Map. Kitchen will be open with a light menu of snacks.

WHEN: January 21, 2010

7:00pm – 10:00pm

$5

Advance tickets available here.

Dragged Kicking and Screaming Into The 21st Century

Back in 1978, when I was 18, I wrote a book on living frugally and happily.  At the time, there was a raging recession, imploding job markets, and rampant concerns about foreign competition and natural resources.  Meanwhile, my dad and I were living a simple life on a half-acre outside of Philadelphia, gardening, raising rabbits and chickens, and enjoying ourselves all while being self supporting, lazy, and completely unconcerned about the national economy.

"This Is Not Nasa Technology"

Given current economic conditions, when a reprint was suggested by Tin House Books, it sounded like a good idea. People who wanted to stop having their whole life jerked around by a fickle job market could learn how we became financially independent without having a fortune or running off to live in the woods.  People who wanted to keep their jobs could take comfort in knowing that we lived a good life on very, very little money and so could they, if needed.

In the past 30+ years, I found that knowing how to live happily without much money gave me the confidence to try all sorts of ventures including becoming a NASA engineer, an award-winning environmental educator, a college professor, and a business owner.  With the addition of an afterword to the new edition of Possum Living, I got to add the lessons I’ve learned from these experiences to the voice of my younger self.

But there was a price to pay for the reprinting.  The publisher wanted me to start a blog.  I would have to join the 21st century.

Mind you, I had a telephone and even Internet access, which I thought was quite progressive.  My dial-up service may have been terribly slow but it was cheap and reliable.  In the morning, I’d sit down in my recliner, prop my feet up, open my laptop, dial up the Internet, drink my coffee, watch the birds at the feeder, nibble on my breakfast, and read a couple of chapters of a book while very slowly cruising the Internet.

The fact that we still used dial-up drove many people crazy.  Our neighbor was so frustrated, he told us to use his wireless service.  In order to pull it in, my husband, Pete, had to set up his own antenna.  He took a wire fruit basket, covered it in tinfoil, put it on a music stand, attached the wireless receiver with jumper cable clamps, and pointed the whole thing at the neighbor’s house.  With a lot of fiddling, repositioning, and tweaking, he was able to get a dribble of wireless Internet.  When I told him we had to get DSL, he was very happy.  We switched services, got a new wireless thing-a-majig, and breathlessly awaited the rush of progress.

Now when I sit down in the morning, I connect instantly with the Internet.  I start to read an article and the connection dies.  I curse.  I try again.  It pops back up.  It dies.  I curse some more.  I get up and reboot the thing-a-majig.  I sit down and try again.  The connection dies in the middle of an email exchange.  I curse.  I get up and jiggle some wires.  I sit back down.  It still doesn’t work.  I use the telephone to call the person I was trying to email.  Then I watch the birds at the feeder to calm down.

I suspect that there are several problems going on.  I’ll bet you that the wiring is messed up, the receiver is screwy, and the provider unreliable. This may take a bit of time to fix.  Meanwhile, I’ll do my best and try to get some good discussions started.  But here’s the deal; no name calling, no blaming the Republicans, the Democrats, or this or that president, no cursing, and no put downs.

Let’s hear what you have to say…

What do these two magazines have in common? So far as I can tell…Nothing. Well, almost nothing. While their editorial positions on merkins may differ, they’re both enthusiastic about Dolly Freed’s Possum Living:

The Vice Interview

The O Magazine Review

There was really no question of Dolly being who she said she was. The New York Times sent their own photographers to take pictures of Dolly at her home. Any fact-checker should have been able to compare those photos to Dolly’s appearance on the Merv Griffin show. (Those interested can view some of the original press at Dolly’s own website, http://www.possumliving.net/) Williams spent a several days with Dolly and her family, as did Tin House editor Nanci McCloskey. This wasn’t a James Frey scenario.

Still, the Times killed the story two days before the spread was supposed to run because Williams refused to break her promise to Dolly and reveal her real identity. (Dolly acknowledged that, yes, someone could likely track her down after the photos were published, but figured it wouldn’t have as widespread of an effect in her community or on her family.) Though it was a shame for Williams, for Dolly, and for us (the publicity couldn’t have hurt book sales) The silver lining was that Williams had the opportunity to experiment with a DIY style of journalism she’d been considering for some time. She’s created a website that allows readers, if they like the story, to donate whatever they feel it is worth in order to help her recuperate her expenses. An excerpt of her “About The Dolly Freed Story” is after the jump, but you can read the piece, as well as a description of the process on her website, http://www.paige-williams.com. If nothing else (other than the fact that it’s a really, really good piece), it’s an experiment in a different type of financial model for journalism.  As we get more and more of our information from non-paying aggregation sites (i.e. Huffington Post), journalists are going to need to figure out some way to pay for the costs of original reporting.

From Paige Williams’ Website:

I’m self-publishing this story because it had no other home. I wanted it to live in the world, not die in my notebook.

Usually, freelance journalists find a buyer for their work before digging into the reporting, but when I heard about Dolly Freed I launched this piece on spec. I most love reporting and writing stories about truly original characters , about authenticity, and Dolly is one of the most interesting people I’ve met in years.

I pitched the idea for this piece all over the place: The New York Times magazine (rejected), Texas Monthly (rejected), The New Yorker (rejected), Philadelphia magazine (rejected), Slate.com (crickets), and others. Nobody was interested. In November, theTimes accepted the piece for one of its Style sections; two days before publication, during edits, editors pulled the piece because “Dolly Freed” is a pseudonym, and Dolly declined to allow her real name to be published. I had told the Times from the start that “Dolly” was a pseudonym, but apparently I had failed to make it clear that I’d not be reneging on my word to Dolly and her family that I wouldn’t violate her decision to remain anonymous. The Times didn’t make it clear that they expected me to. In agreeing to tell her story and have her book reissued, Dolly sought a balance between being helpful and maintaining her privacy. She doesn’t want kooks showing up at her home. When I told her that people will probably figure out her identity eventually, she said, “Maybe, but I don’t have to make it easy for them.”

I had been thinking about self-publishing a magazine-length piece of independent journalism, and the orphaning of Dolly’s story created the perfect opportunity. CONTINUE READING…

To tide you over, here’s Geoff Nicholson’s Lost & Found essay on David Carradine’s Endless Highway.

“When I was a little kid, I had a problem with God.” This, I suggest, is a rather surprising opening line for a Hollywood movie star autobiography, although since the author is David Carradine, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at all. The autobiography, Endless Highway, was published in 1995, at a time when he was in the middle of the comeback TV series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. Commercially, this was no doubt a good time to release the book, though it’s a long way from being a quick TV tie-in. It runs to nearly 650 pages, and even if some parts of it feel a bit rushed, it’s clearly a work of great effort and genuine commitment.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, in 2003, I went to a “Hollywood Collectors and Celebrities Show” in Burbank, an event at which movie and TV stars (some far more famous than you’d imagine) sat behind tables, peddling their wares: signed photographs, posters, DVDs, and, in some cases, autobiographies. And there was David Carradine.

His career was perhaps in the doldrums at the time—Kill Bill would have been completed though not yet released—but even so I was amazed to see him there. Was he really so desperate for money or attention that he had to make nice with a bunch of rubbernecking plebs? Apparently not. He didn’t make nice at all. He sat there doing a crossword, head and eyes down, oozing hostility, daring anyone to approach. I certainly didn’t dare, though I wanted to. Consequently, it was a while later that I bought Endless Highway from a used bookstore.

The fact that it’s dedicated to a bunch of people including Plato, Shakespeare, and James Dean didn’t bode well. But it’s also dedicated to Dad—and that’s very significant. Dad was the legendary bad-boy actor John Carradine, the man who, according to his son, said to Katherine Hepburn, “Why don’t you take your Connecticut station-wagon accent and go home?” And she did.

The book tells us that the Carradine household was predictably troubled. Father was a jobbing actor who came and went, and even when he was there he was otherwise occupied. David writes, “When he was home, it was usually ‘don’t bother him . . .’ The only time I could really depend on having a real talk with him was when I needed discipline. It was almost worth a whipping just to get his attention.”

After his parents’ divorce, he was bounced around various dodgy educational establishments, including a trade school, Straubenmuller Textile High, in Manhattan, where “between classes, I would be jumped in the halls and beaten. It had something to do with my dad being famous; specifically, with the fact that he had shot Jesse James.” Of course, he told them his dad was a hero.

The father remained elusive, and even after the son had grown up and become successful, their relationship was as difficult as ever. David came up with the idea for a theatrical season in which he’d direct Dad in King Lear, then Dad would direct him in Hamlet. It sounds like a crowd pleaser to me, but unfortunately it never came off. David writes, “He asked me, ‘How do I know you can play Hamlet?’ I asked him, ‘How do I know you can play Lear?’ Then we got into a big fight—family stuff.”

David organizes a party at Morton’s restaurant and Dad, aged seventy-six, arrives, picks up a twenty-two-year-old German girl, and by the end of the evening is necking with her in the back of a Rolls Royce. I guess not every son would think this was endearing behavior, but when Dad comes up with the line “You’re only young once,” all is likely to be forgiven. And, of course, he had actually turned up at the party.

Inevitably an actor’s early struggles tend to be more interesting than his later successes, but Carradine remains consistently skeptical, and just this side of cynical, when it comes to his own career. In the army he enters a talent show, delivering the abdication speech from Richard II, but loses to a Hopi hoop dancer. Carradine can see why it happened: “Well, he jumped through fire, I just talked loud.”

Later, when he’s a success, he meets Marlon Brando and finds him utterly compelling. “He was looking right through my soul. His face was colored with a golden light. I was transfixed. Suddenly the golden light faded . . . I turned around and realized the sun had just set behind me. He hadn’t been looking at my soul, he had been watching the setting sun.”

He agrees to play a cop in the movie Q: The Winged Serpent. Then he reads the script. “I said to myself, ‘I can’t do this. It will destroy my career. But I have to, I said I would—I need the money, my house is in foreclosure, Linda will lose her Ferrari. We’ve got to keep one Ferrari in the family.’”

Ah yes, the Ferraris. The Carradine lifestyle requires a lot of expensive props, a lot of expenditure. He spends several small fortunes on houses, fine wines, drugs, guitars, and cars; the rest he just wastes. Somehow it never sounds like boasting. The fact that he enjoys his toys so much, and that he’s only ever one step away from financial disaster, even collecting unemployment at one point, makes it all bearable.

And just once in a while he’s a pretty shrewd social observer. He was in San Francisco at the time of the Beat Generation, and he didn’t fall for that one. “The ‘generation’ consisted of, as far as I could tell, about fifty people, mostly male—the scene was a little rough for girls.” And then he finds himself in newly independent Zimbabwe: “Everywhere were happy faces in fatigues carrying automatic weapons.”

Look, I’m not trying to pretend that Endless Highway is some high point in Western art, but by the standards of most Hollywood autobiographies, it’s downright Proustian. There’s something about Carradine in print that’s very similar to Carradine on screen. He’s compelling; likeable without begging to be liked: he commands your attention.

After his sensationalized death in a hotel room in Bangkok earlier this year I went back to the book. It had been a while and there were gaps in my memory, and yet how could I have forgotten, there on the first page, below the paragraph about having trouble with God: “When I was five, I tried to hang myself in the garage by jumping off the bumper of the Duesenberg.” He failed, obviously. His dad burned his comic book collection as punishment. Of course, as a five-year-old, he probably didn’t really intend to commit suicide. Equally, most of us don’t believe he actually committed suicide in that hotel room in Bangkok either.

I’ve been on a literary biography kick lately.  I don’t know why.  These are my favorites:

1-Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Hazel Rowley
2-Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford
3-Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch
4-The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr
5-A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates by Blake Bailey

Like many of us, I read so much that I can barely remember what I was reading last week, let alone two, five, ten years ago. But as I started compiling a list of the short stories that have stayed with me over the last ten years, I realized that, in many cases, the stories that haunt me are themselves haunted—by regret, by missed opportunities, by the supernatural. And when I reread several of these stories, I realized that some of them are haunted by a particularly fearsome phenomenon: the little girl. Thus, this is not so much a “Best of” list as it is a subset, though I have arranged the list counting down from the least to the most haunting (in my opinion). Rather than attempt to summarize each story, I have included a quote that will hopefully haunt you enough to entice you to read it.

And so I present . . .

5. “The Scheme of Things,” by Charles D’Ambrosio (originally published in the New Yorker in 2004; included in the collection The Dead Fish Museum, 2006)

“Where’d you say you were staying?”

“With these old people, Effie, Effie and his wife, Gen.”

He dropped the pamphlet on the floor and pushed himself out of the chair. He swayed and stared dumbly into a wallet full of receipts.

“Well, tonight you say hi to them for me. You tell Effie and Gen Johnny says hi.” When he looked at Kirsten, his eyes had gone neutral. “You tell them I’m sorry, and you give them this,” he said, leaning toward Kirsten. Then his lips were gone from her mouth, and he was handing her the last five from his billfold.

4. “The Dressmaker’s Child,” by William Trevor (originally published in the New Yorker in 2004; included in the collection Cheating at Canasta, 2007)

“Will I make your wedding dress for you?” the dressmaker offered. “Would you think of me at all when it’ll be time you’d want it?”

And Minnie Fennelly laughed and said no way they were ready for wedding dresses yet.

“Cahal knows where he’ll find me,” the dressmaker said. “Amn’t I right, Cahal?”

“I thought you didn’t know her,” Minnie Fennelly said when they were outside.

3. “The Room in the Attic,” by Steven Millhauser (originally published in Tin House in 2004; included in the collection Dangerous Laughter, 2008)

“Where are you?” I asked the dark. “Here,” she whispered, so close that I could feel her breath against my ear. I reached out and felt empty air. “I can’t see you, Isabel.” Deep in the room I heard a burst of laughter. “Can you fly, Isabel? Is that your secret?” I listened to the room. “Are you anywhere?”

2. “Haunting Olivia,” by Karen Russell (originally published in the New Yorker debut fiction issue in 2005; included in the collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, 2006)

Then comes the less beautiful moment when I’m up to my eyeballs in tar water, and the goggles fill with stinging brine. And, for what seems like a very long time, I can’t see anything at all, dead or alive.

When my vision starts to clear, I see a milky, melting light moving swiftly above the ocean floor. Drowned moonbeams, I think at first. Only there is no moon tonight.

1. “Stab,” by Chris Adrian (originally published in Zoetrope in 2006; included in the collection A Better Angel, 2008)

She held my gaze for a few moments, then laughed coyly and said, “Would you like to see my bodkin?”

Obviously, five “best” is a bit of a misnomer, since I don’t claim to have read even a fraction of all the no-doubt excellent debut novels published in the ’00s.  But these are the five I have read that have stuck with me the most:

1. House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski (Pantheon, 2000)
A Pandora’s box of a book, an unholy union of critical theory and pulp novels, the most perfect melding of (bizarre) form and (disturbing) content I’ve yet come across.  It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever read.

2. The Horned Man — James Lasdun (W.W. Norton, 2002)
Does it count as a “debut” if you’ve already published three collections of poetry and three more collections of short stories?  “First” novel might be more accurate, but in any case, this is a coolly brilliant work of paranoia and psychological shell-games, which also manages to deftly satirize the sexual politics of academia.

3. Sharp Objects — Gillian Flynn (Shaye Areheart, 2007)
Sometimes contemporary literary fiction can seem a bit precious.  Those are the times when you want to read a thriller about a self-mutilating journalist investigating two brutal murders in her hellish Missouri hometown.  It’s a nice bonus when that thriller is as well-written and expertly controlled as this one.

4. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook — Gary Shteyngart (Riverhead, 2002)
Bawdy, shambolic, and hilarious, this send-up of the mid-’90s Prague ex-pat scene earns every bit of its hype.  The laughs-per-page ratio is clearly the highest on this list, yet as with all the best comedies, at its heart is an affecting sadness.

5. Indecision — Benjamin Kunkel (Random House, 2005)
This novel prompted some strange responses when it was first published, including Michiko Kakutani’s review written from the point of Holden Caulfield and buckets of ad hominem vitriol from Gawker.  But if you ignore all the extra-curriculars, you’ll find a very funny first book, the greatest strength of which is its perfectly calibrated voice, stuck somewhere between a grad-school seminar and a Phish concert parking lot.

THIS guy beat Cheston in a foot race?

I had taken the train to Baltimore to see a girl that I really had no business in seeing. Upon my arrival, having packed a small duffel bag, I produced a few paperbacks that I was sure would announce how astute and serious a suitor I was. How was I to know that she had already been with Camus, traveled with Burkowski, and had sold her copy of Sophie’s World a few summers prior?

So it was that I slept on the couch, ate crab alone, and saw very little of the girl over the course of a long and awkward weekend. It was a disastrous affair for a young literary man and as such I struck back the only way I knew how; I stole books from the girl who had laughed at mine. Slim, handsome titles, bright in color, whose author’s names I had never heard before, they sat in perfect order on a bookshelf beside her bed, begging to be taken out. I took three whose titles seemed best aligned with my own heartache and spent the afternoon at the train station alternating between them, mending my wounds with novels that felt as if they were just my own.

Ten years after their first publication, the NYRB Classics Series still feels like a secret to me. Walking down the aisles of Powells, I look for their familiar spines, where I am guaranteed to find some long out of print discovery. The kind of translated gem that you loan to a friend rather than giving them, because even though you know very well there are three more on the shelf, it still feels like you are the only one in the world who owns a copy.

Top Five in the NYRB Classics series:

Boredom by Alberto Moravia

The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese

Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter

Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By by Georges Simenon

WAR AND PEACE, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

The great novel of the Napoleon excursion into Russia is brought to all its glory by the veteran translators who have been methodically slashing their way through the Russian classics. Their deft work with both Russian and French (Russian nobility spoke primarily in French) is a remarkable feat. When I asked my editor, the worldly, wonderful Beena Kamlani at Penguin, whether I should read this, she replied, “It will make you glad to have been alive in order to be able to read this.” Amen.

SWANN’S WAY; In Search of Lost Time (Volume I), by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis.

The humor, word-play, the amazingly musical sentences, Davis makes Proust shimmer like no one else. Sadly, this was part of a project that gave seven different prominent translators each a volume of Proust, and the continuity from book to book is lacking. Still very much reading this volume on its own.

THE BOOK OF CHAMELEONS,by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn.

Agualusa is a prominent journalist and novelist in the Portuguese-speaking world of Brazil, Portugal, and his native Angola. Narrated by a gecko who is the reincarnation of Borges, the novel follows the gecko’s master, an albino who invents past lives for Angolans who have had their histories wiped out by endless civil war. A playful, heady read.

2666, THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES, and LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH, by Roberto Bolano, the first two translated by Natasha Wimmer, the latter by Chris Andrews.

On a recent trip to Chile, I was frequently asked why has Bolano become such a phenomenon in the English-speaking world. While it is true that he has become the South American fiction writer, often at the expense of all others, Bolano’s reputation is well-deserved. His translators have done a remarkable job in conveying his eerie brilliance. Here is a link to an informative interview with Natash Wimmer which sheds light on this process: http://www.powells.com/authors/natashawimmer.html

IF I WERE ANOTHER, by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Jouday, and A RIVER DIES OF THIRST; JOURNALS, by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Catherine Cobham.

Taken together, the last poems along with the selected journal entries of the late Palestinian poet, showcase why Darwish transcended the politics of the Arabic world to become a universal poet, not by turning his back on the Palestinian condition, but by melding the personal with the global. “I watch as your absence accumulates over my head like a heavy sky. Even if you were not the absence you are, I would be the presence I am. As if you are with me. As if I am in the utmost need of the least thing.”

Glitter and Doom show at Metropolitan Museum of Art

George Seurat's Aman-Jean, 1883.

German Portraits from the 1920s. A walloping history lesson in a small show of stunning, troubling paintings, encapsulates the desperation and decadence of Germany between WWI and WWII.

Manet/Velazquez show at Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of the best shows I’ve ever seen at the Met. The show demonstrates the profound impact of Spanish painting on French artists, (most interestingly Velazquez’s influence on Manet) and through french art, on later American artists such as Sargent and Whistler. An absorbing and stunning show.

Paul Kos Retrospective — Everything Matters, at Grey Art Gallery, NYU

A conceptual artist whose work I was unfamiliar with before this show, Kos’ work is witty, beautiful, intelligent and engaging. Two favorites – using a block of ice as a lens through which sunlight is focused on paper and wood, to start a fire. (Using ice to start a fire? So cool!) And – a video installation that uses tv monitors to recreate a Gothic stained glass window in Chartres Cathedral – each monitor capturing an individual window during the course of one day. The video condenses the day into a sublime 12 minutes, as the only movement you see is the passage of light outside the window over the course of a day.

Van Gogh Drawings show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Need I say more?

Georges Seurat — The Drawings show at MOMA

Who knew?

One of those shows where maybe four pieces so blow you away that it doesn’t matter that little of the rest is particularly memorable. Here’s the guy known for pointillism, which is all about color really, using black Conte Crayon on toothy white paper to create some of the most exquisitely beautiful drawings I’ve ever seen. The tooth of the paper offers up a grainy texture that somehow connects to the pointillism idea, and the total effect is much like what you hear about Michelangelo’s sculpting to reveal the figure that’s already in the marble.

Side note: When I went later to Lee’s Art Supplies on 57th Street asking for Black Conte Crayon, the clerk said, “Oh, seen the Seurat show?”

I chose these books based on the quality of discussion that they lead to as book group books–I read each of them over the last ten years in a now sadly  defunct book group at Annie Bloom’s here in Portland.

I have found that it is much more important for a book to have a compelling narrative and strong characters than lyrical, lovely prose when it comes to book group discussions. What I enjoy is a hot debate over a character’s believability or lovability or detest-ability. A significant sense of place can also lead to a great, though often meandering, discussion. And of course the plot needs to lead us somewhere by raising questions, comparisons, agreements, and disagreements. And all of these books do all of that and more.

Deb’s Picks for the Best Book-Group Books of the ’00s

1. Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Nazir Afisi

2. A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews

3. The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson

4. Atonement, by Ian McEwan

5. The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

As 00’s wrap up, and we move toward those difficult adolescent years of the new century, we’d like to take a moment to look back on the decade that was. In the coming weeks, Tin House staffers will compile lists of their favorite books published over the last ten years. Too avoid repetition, I’ve asked for specificity in these lists: “Top 5 books narrated by dead children,” “Top 5 books panned by Kakutani,” or “Top 5 chapbooks written by a female poet in her early 20’s.” Something to that effect. Please leave your contribution to each list in the comments section.

I’ll get the ball rolling with something simple:

Top 5 Literary Essay Collections of the Young Millennium:

Orphans, by Charles D’Ambrosio.

It’s rare too find writing so equally balanced between the cerebral and the emotional, the concern for language and the dedication to its subject. Thanks god this books is tiny as it is, because I want to carry it in my pocket for the rest of my life. Worth the price for the essay on Richard Hugo alone. If you’re a fan of D’Ambrosio’s fiction (as you should be), you should be thrilled that this books exists as a complement to The Point and The Dead Fish Museum.

Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace

I miss the days when I’d hear that Wallace had a new piece in Harper’s or Rolling Stone. When he took on a subject in his nonfiction–be it tennis, cruise ships, or pornography–I knew I’d come away with a new perspective. I suppose I still have many pages of his fiction to digest, but, man, I wish he was around to keep turning out 50,000-word magazine pieces. (Added bonus: the audio version of Consider the Lobster, though abridged, experiments with sound filters to differentiate between the main text and the footnotes…it’s kind of fun.)

Death of Adam, by Marilynne Robinson

While our big-name Christian authors are more commonly peddling get-rich-quick schemes or silently enabling the execution of Ugandan gays, Marilynne Robinson reminds me that religious belief and ignorance don’t have to go hand-in-hand. It takes a truly great writer and thinker to make John Calvin fascinating to me, but Robinson is a truly great writer and thinker. As demonstrated in her Harper’s takedown of Richard Dawkins, she could go toe-to-toe with any polemicist on the religious spectrum, and still come across as rational and sensitive human being.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real, by Slajov Zizek

OK…this is likely shelved in a different section than the rest of the books I’ve mentioned, but I consciously chose Welcome to the Desert of the Real over Enjoy Your Symptom (probably my favorite Zizek work) because I felt it was more appropriate to this list and less entrenched in the world of academia. Published on the first anniversary of September 11th, this slim volume is a splendid digestive for a decade rich in fundamentalism, lazy thinking, and punditry. Far and away the sweatiest author on my list, even considering D’Ambrosio’s bike commutes.

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, by Joan Didion

Is choosing an Everyman’s Library collection of previously published pieces a cop out? Yeah, probably. But I curate this blog and thus get to make the rules. Every personal essayist alive owes some debt to Joan Didion, and none are as smokin’ hot.

The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House combines the best craft seminars in the history of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop with a variety of essays written by some of Tin House’s favorite authors, offering aspiring writers insight into the craft of writing.

“We get all manner of books on writing around here and they tend to blend together but the offerings from Tin House always stand out.”—The Elegant Variation

The Story About the Story, edited by J. C. Hallman, feature lively discussions of great literature by some of the most prominent authors of all time. With over thirty essays written by authors as diverse as Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf to Cynthia Ozick and Salman Rushdie, this collection offers an invaluable course on literature.
“That’s the problem with this book: too many irresistible things.”—James Salter

Spanning from 1887 to a month before his death in 1910, The Journal of Jules Renard is a unique autobiographical masterpiece that, though celebrated abroad and cited as a principle influence by writers as varying as Somerset Maugham and Donald Barthelme, remains largely undiscovered in the United States.
“Directly, or indirectly, Renard is at the origin of contemporary literature.”—Jean-Paul Sartre

The World Within gathers twenty of the freshest, funniest, and most intriguing interviews in the history of Tin House. Featuring informal conversations with a veritable who’s-who of contemporary writers, these remarkable interviews offer insights into the creative process, writing craft, and the balance between a writer’s work and life.
“You, lucky reader, are a bystander at the greatest literary dinner party ever held.”—LA Weekly

A Good Without Light, by Curtis White

“As so often happens in disasters, the best course always seemed the one for which it was now too late.”

–Tacitus, The Histories

For environmental, business, and political organizations alike, the term that has come to stand for the hope of the natural world is “sustainable.” Sustainable agriculture. Sustainable cities. Sustainable development. Sustainable economies. But you would be mistaken if you assumed that the point of sustainability was to change our ways. It’s not, really. The great unspoken assumption of the sustainability movement is the idea that although the economic, political, and social systems that have produced our current environmental calamity are bad, they do not need to be entirely replaced. In fact, the point of sustainability often seems to be to preserve—not overthrow—the economic and social status quo.

This should not be surprising. Sustainability is, after all, a mainstream response to environmental crisis. It may want change, but it does not want what would amount to a fundamental self-confrontation. While it wants to modify existing models of production and consumption, especially of energy, it does not want to abandon what it calls “freedom,” especially the freedom to own and use large accumulations of private property. And certainly it does not want to ask, “What went wrong in the great Western experiment with freedom? Why do we seem to be mostly free to destroy ourselves?”

What no one is allowed to consider is the distressing possibility that no amount of tinkering and changing and greening and teaching the kindergartners to plant trees and recycle Dad’s beer cans will ever really matter if our assumptions about what it means to be prosperous, what it means to be “developed,” what it means to live in “progress,” and what it means to be “free” remain what they have been for the last four hundred years under the evergrowing weight of capitalist markets and capitalist social relations. As Marx put it, under capitalism we carry our relation to others in our pockets. Marx would now have to add, sadly, that those “others” must now include the animals of the field and the birds of the sky (Daniel, 2:38) as well as the fields and sky themselves.¹ But such a line of thought is not tolerated because the very word “capitalism” (not to mention “Marx”) is a fighting word.² (Or, worse, it is a sort of faux pas to speak of “capitalism” at all; you’d be better off saying “the economy,” just as if you were a slave asked to refer to your master as your employment counselor.) Unfortunately, in banishing this word we eliminate from the conversation the very thing we came together to discuss. We can talk about our plans to save the world, but we can’t talk about the economic system that put it in jeopardy in the first place. That’s off the table.

But I do not believe that capitalism is somehow singularly at fault. I don’t even think that it is necessarily bad. It is too reductive to say simply that there are cruel and greedy and violent people among us (capitalists), and that we need somehow to confront them and assert the good in ourselves. The truer problem is that the people who are destructive honestly believe that they are doing good. They are more often than not, or more often than any of us should be comfortable with, an expression of the virtues of what I call the Barbaric Heart.

This is the barbaric calculation: if you can prosper from violence, then you should go ahead and be violent. In short order the Barbaric Heart is led to conclude that, in fact, prosperity is dependent on violence. Therefore, you should be good at violence, for your own sake and the sake of your country. Which is a way of saying that the barbaric itself is a form of virtue, especially if you think that winning, surviving, triumphing, and accumulating great wealth are virtues, just as athletes, Darwinians, military commanders, and capitalists do.

My reader may wonder how I can yoke together virtue and violence. To which I would reply, “How can one remove the claim of virtue from the behavior that is most habitual to a people?” The artful (if ruthless) use of violence is obviously something that we admire in those sectors of the culture that we most associate with success: athletics, the military, entertainment (especially that arena of the armchair warrior, Grand Theft Auto), the frightening world of financial markets (where, as the Economist put it, there are “barbarians at the vaults”), and the rapacious world we blandly call real estate development. Instead of being “shocked, just shocked” by it, instead of living in bad faith, let’s just say that violence (especially competent violence, violence that has a skill set and a certain virtuosity) is something that we’re rather pleased with ourselves about. As ever, artful violence is the marker of an elite (whether the Persian “Immortals,” the Spartan 300, the Praetorian Guard, the United States Marines, or the Redeem Team of men’s basketball at the 2008 Beijing Olympics).³

Violence is an ethical construction that we forward to the rest of the world as an image of our virtue. The idea that we can “mov

e mountains” is an expression of admiration. When it is done with mammoth machines provided by the Caterpillar Company of Peoria, Illinois, it is also a form of violence (as the sheered mountain tops of West Virginia confirm). To any complaints about the disheartening destruction and injustice that comes with such power, the Barbaric Heart need only reply: the strong have always dominated the weak and then instructed them. That is how great civilizations have always been made, from the ancient Egyptians to the British in India to Karl Rove and George Bush.

When Scipio Africanus looked over the army of Hannibal in the deciding battle of the second Punic War, he saw not only another long day’s work in the phalanx worrying about being stepped on by the Carthaginian elephants. He also saw the end of any limitation on Roman power. One last concerted act of violence and Rome would be history’s lone actor for the next five hundred years. As the historian Polybius described it, “The effect of their victory would be not only to make them complete masters of Libya, but to give them and their country the supremacy and undisputed lordship of the world” (302). This is how the American government felt as the Berlin Wall fell: Carthage is no more. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Karl Roves of the world (those who soak themselves in the blood of the Barbaric Heart as if it were a marinade) understood that they could use violence any time it was in their interest to do so, and they believed that was a good, if bloody, thing.

The question becomes, if this is our moral context, violence masquerading as virtue, how is this thing we call sustainability going to work? Sustainability presents itself as a kind of wisdom. It argues that it can reach an understanding, an accommodation with our destructive virtues and our faithfulness to capitalism. The wisdom of the sustainability movement (especially in its most visible activities through the United Nations and NGOs) is that it can make the Barbarian play nice. (“Attila, this is a tea cup. It’s fragile. No! Okay, here’s another one, now . . . Oh!” And so on.)

But I want to be quite uncompromising in saying that the logic of sustainability is also a sort of thoughtlessness. It is not really opposed to the Barbaric Heart. In fact, it participates in the yearning and willfulness of the Barbaric Heart in spite of itself. In spite of the fact that it can feel that this Heart is grasping, pitiful, and a danger to itself and others. The logic of sustainability provides a sort of program of carefully calibrated amendment (“Sure! We can make coal clean and still maintain our lifestyle”). But in the end, it is not an answer to our problems but a surrender to them. Its virtues are dependent on its sins. It is, as Simone Weil put it, a “good without light.”

What is most menacing about the logic of sustainability is evident to anyone who wishes to look into its language. It will “operationalize” sustainability. It will create metrics and indices. It will create “life-cycle assessments.” It will create a sustainability index. It will institute a “global reporting initiative.” It will imagine something called “industrial ecology” and not laugh. Most famously, it will measure ecological footprints. What the so-called sustainability movement has accomplished is the creation of “metrics,” ways of measuring. It may not have had much impact on the natural world, but it has guaranteed that, for the moment, thinking will remain only technical interpretation. In short, it has brought calipers to the head of a songbird.

But what is most thoughtless about the logic of sustainability, especially as it has emerged through the Kyoto and Bali international agreements and protocols, is the assumption that it should allow for continued economic growth and development. In short, sustainability assumes that the reasoning of economics—of economics as a form of reason—must continue to provide the most telling analyses of and prescriptions for any future model for the relationship between human beings and the natural world. But what if the assumptions of economics are nothing more than a form of thoughtlessness? And what if that thoughtlessness’s purpose is nothing more than to allow—oh, tragically, we’ll all say—the very activities and, more importantly, the very habits of mind that over the last two centuries of industrialization have brought us to this sorry pass? In short, what if the thinking of economics is merely another vestment for the Barbaric Heart?

The idea that economics will aid us in thinking through the problem of the destruction of the natural world, will aid us in managing the earth’s “carrying capacity,” commits us to the assumption that our world ought to be governed and guided by technicians. It is part of the thinking that says, “If only the politicians would listen to what we scientists have to say! Listen to what the climatologists have to say about the sources and consequences of global warming! The scientists will save us if only we’d listen to them, respect their authority, follow their instructions.” They can maintain this while gloriously ignoring the fact that the world we presently inhabit was conceived by science, designed by engineers, and implemented by technicians. It starts with the rapidly beating heart of the four-stroke engine inside your automobile, and then radiates out in what is laughably called urban planning, the world as designed for the convenience of the automobile, the sterility of the interstate highway, and the fantastic waste and increasingly fascistic experience of jet travel. Of course, behind all this there is the global energy infrastructure, burning off methane waste, spilling its toxic cargo on land and shore, and destroying the people who have been cursed with “oil wealth.” Looming over everything, guaranteeing it, is the grim visage of the warrior, the global oil police known as the military. In short, looming over all this is the Barbaric Heart.

What I want to suggest, not to put too fine a point on it, is that the act of trusting these experts—whether economists or scientists— to provide us with a sustainable future of ever-growing capitalist enterprise is not to place faith in the subtle capacities of the engineer but to indulge in the primitive longing of the barbarian in his moment of despair. After a period of truly grand slaughter and plunder, the barbarian discovers with an audible “uh-oh” that the legions have regrouped, they’re moving forward in an orderly and powerful way, and it’s going to be murder and mayhem in the barbarian camp for a while. The barbarian sees that his willfulness and violence has become the equivalent of self-defeat. That is his inescapable reality, even if it’s one he is constitutionally incapable of understanding. (Rising oceans may make Manhattan the next fabled city of Atlantis. Get that?)

What science should be saying now is not, “Why were we not listened to, respected, followed?” but, “We have wittingly taken common cause with the barbarians and participated in the making of this world, and it is clear now that this making was also our collective unmaking.” In other words, science should be looking to something other than science, and certainly something other than barbarians, for ideas that will be a truer response to the disasters it has helped create. This looking elsewhere is not something science is particularly good at, if for no other reason than because, as intellectual victor for the last two centuries, it has contempt for those religious, philosophical, and artistic “elsewheres.”

For instance, at the Ecocity World Summit in San Francisco in 2008, climatologist Stephen Schneider commented that science could only demonstrate the “preponderance of evidence” and make suggestions about risk management and the investment of resources. (You see how comfortable science is in the garments of economics?) But it cannot make decisions that depend upon what Schneider called “value judgments.” In other words, science can tell you that global warming puts the polar bear at risk, but it can’t tell you why you should care.⁴ It’s as if Schneider were saying that we should take that issue up with the Pope. And maybe what I’m saying is: that’s exactly right. We need a common language, not arrogance and then a punt.

The irony here, and it seems to be mostly lost on Schneider, is that nothing has been more destructive of value than Western science. It has contempt for the truth claims of religion, obviously, but also the arts and even the so-called “soft” or social sciences. So just where, one might ask, does Schneider expect these “values” to come from when in fact science has done all it could to use its social prestige and intellectual authority to destroy all non-scientific systems of value?

From the point of view of the Barbaric Heart, this is all good news. Until science can manage to join its habits of mind to a way of thinking that is genuinely dedicated to the cultivation of value (i.e. a whole, thriving human culture and not the shards that science leaves to us), the Barbaric Heart will only hear in what science says that it can continue to be barbaric, if under a somewhat chastened model. Endless, profligate energy consumption, yes, but we’ll pump the CO2 back into the ground. How about that? That should fix it. That’s sustainable, ain’t it? For the barbarian, so long as someone suggests to him that he can continue to be violent and willful but mitigate the self-destructive consequences if he’s shrewd about it, well, he’s more than willing to listen and believe. And that is what the logic of sustainability does. “Let us mitigate your violence,” it tells the barbarian, “so that your heart may retain all those barbaric qualities that have become the envy of the world.” ⁵

As the Romans knew, empire and wealth attract envy, but in the end it is envy not of some sort of civilized superiority but of the freedom to behave like barbarians without the consequences.

But, perhaps we should say with a breezy sigh, “Thus has it ever been.” What makes such breeziness untenable is the newfound understanding, for which the term “Global Warming” has become a sort of shorthand, that as we pursue our own venal ends, heedless of the consequences that pursuit will have on others, we are “sacking,” in the barbarian vernacular, ourselves. We are like the barbarians described so aptly by Edward Gibbon in that we are not much conscious of the fact that our energetic pursuit of our own interests has a “blowback” factor (as the CIA puts it). Our pursuit of what we want makes us blind to how that pursuit is actually destroying ourselves. In the midst of its murderous pillaging, the Barbaric Heart discovers with a cry of surprise and animal anguish that it has dug its own grave. This self-defeat is true of our international bungling in places like Iraq, but it is most dramatically true in relation to the destruction of our own environment. Ask the people of New Orleans, or all of the places from Southern Europe to Africa to Australia to Malibu that have been visited by “once in a century” droughts, or places like Shanghai or Mumbai or the tiny island nation of Tuvalu, all of which are about to have the unique opportunity of seeing what it’s like to live underwater. The future and its consequences is obviously now.

Which makes it a little easier to see why I would say that we are a culture dominated by a rationality that is the equivalent of thoughtlessness. We are dominated by a form of logical intelligibility (science) that insists that what is not intelligible to it is not intelligible at all. Strangely, what is most dramatically unintelligible to science is itself. Especially hidden to it is the degree to which its own habit of logical orderliness prepares the way for the progress of the Barbaric, just as Rome’s system of roads proved a great convenience not only to its own legions but to the barbaric armies that for once didn’t need to “swarm” but could proceed in an orderly and direct fashion to their bloody destination: the final sacking of Rome.

To say that we live in thoughtlessness is really no more than to say that for the moment the Barbaric Heart is very comfortable. It does not feel threatened except distantly by things like Islamic terror, which it understands very well since that violence is little more than a reflection of its own conduct. And nothing is working persuasively with it, suggesting that it ought not to be what it is. (The intellectual disdain of science keeps all those voices at a distance in their respective communities: the university, the church, the museum, or the downtown art scene.) Rather, it hears only the narcissistic self-congratulation from the “experts” it hires to describe its triumphs and its benevolence on cable news programs. We are not quite yet at the point where the orderly rhythm of violence and plunder have no choice but to stop.

“And why should we stop?” you might ask. After all, the Barbaric Heart produces certain sweet and pleasurable things that we know quite well. The food is abundant, sex is everywhere, and the spectacles are spectacular.⁶ (Always a sufficient argument for thepopulus Romanus.) But these sweet things are all produced by procedures that we do not see and do not understand, like the black boxes that run our cars or televisions or computers or, well, our lives. We know the benefits of these things but not their origin and not their procedures and not their ultimate purpose. The finely marbled filet at the supermarket meat counter is shrink-wrapped and looks as if it has been produced by an algorithm. It looks as if it were the Platonic idea of meat and not something hacked from a cow, not something produced by poor people standing in blood. At the far end of a gallon of gasoline is a Marine rolling a hand grenade into a living room in Haditha, Iraq. At the far end of the purchase of a plastic gizmo at Walmart is a Chinese industry dependent on the oil produced by a genocidal regime in Sudan. How that changes the look of the delightfully cheap gizmo! It is steeped in blood!

************

¹ In China and India, the commitment to capitalist development has become an international scandal and tragedy. The unthinkable has become commonplace. China seeks to triple the size of its economy by 2020. Expanding cities and industry claim rural areas, and farmers in turn claim ever more animal and plant habitat. At present, nearly 40 percent of all mammal species are endangered. For plants, 70 percent of non-flowering and 86 percent of flowering species are threatened. What the situation will be in 2020, that golden time of universal prosperity, is horrifying to imagine. (NYT A1, December 5, 2007)

² I once gave a talk at Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle and during the Q&A was asked, “Did you say you were a Marxist?” I could feel the room lift in anticipation of the wrong answer (“Yes”), as if they were already halfway out of their seats and through the door. I almost had to laugh. They had come expecting a little good-humored and satirical lambasting of the current state of capitalism, but praise Marx? And this was in Seattle!

³ As Freud put it presciently in Moses and Monotheism, the inclination to violence is “usually found where athletic development becomes the ideal of the people.” (182) Or, as Hank Williams Jr. likes to sing on Monday nights, “Are you ready for some football!? ”

⁴ In fact, Schneider commented that the polar bear is already “functionally extinct” because its ecosystem is extinct. The polar bear will survive only in a sort of great northern zoo. The species is sufficiently generalist to scavenge an existence from a variety of food sources, many of which will depend on humans. In short, the polar bear is becoming a big, white, house sparrow.

Tin House is seeking to invest in fiction, essays, and poetry that address the often taboo subject of CLASS IN AMERICA. We are looking for all perspectives: from or about the rich to the middle class to the poor and those who have moved up or down. We want to know more about those who identify with a non-traditional class, or consider themselves classless, along with those who have immigrated from class-bound or class-less countries or societies. Also, what are the new class indicators in our increasingly digitized, global, and green world? The issue will be out September 1, on stands through November. Our deadline is June 1, but this issue is sure to fill sooner than later.

Summer, 2010 will be an OPEN issue and we are reading for this issue as well. The deadline is March 1, on stands June 1.

There are a still a small amount of space in our Spring, 2010 issue, with a theme of “Games People Play.” The deadline is November 24.

Thank you for all of your support, and for those of you in New York, we hope to see you at the Rumpus/Tin House fundraiser on Tuesday, November 17 (more info: http://www.highlineballroom.com/bio.php?id=1183)

Sincerely,
Rob Spillman

Lee Montgomery shows off her new Apple Tablet

While we’re still getting comfortable with the technology ourselves, Tin House is beginning to roll out our list on various E-Book devices. Most of our forthcoming titles will be available the same time that physical books hit the shelves, and our backlist is in the works. Check back soon for titles from  Jeff Parker, Karen Lee Boren, Adam Braver, and others.

Dolly Freed’s POSSUM LIVING, available on Kindle and Sony E-Reader

Keith Lee Morris’s THE DART LEAGUE KING, available on Kindle and Sony E-Reader

Jim Krusoe’s ERASED, available on Kindle and Sony E-Reader

Jim Krusoe’s GIRL FACTORY, available on Kindle and Sony E-Reader

Zak Smith’s WE DID PORN, available on Kindle and Sony E-Reader

Matthea Harvey’s THE LITTLE GENERAL AND THE GIANT SNOWFLAKE, available on Kindle

Alex Lemon’s MOSQUITO, available on Kindle and Sony E-Reader

J.C. Hallman’s anthology, The Story About The Story, collects essays that approach book criticism from a personal angle. One of his favorite venues for that sort of thing is Tin House’s own “Lost and Found” section. In our most recent issue (Hope/Dread), Hallman writes about encountering Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight.

I had it pretty good: Big Wheel at six, go-cart at eight, ten-speed at twelve, Volkswagen Rabbit at sixteen, and I ran all of them into the ground. When I was twenty, a motorcycle ran me into the ground, and after two weeks in the hospital and a year of physical therapy I cashed a check for $120,000. I limp a little, like the devil—but he gets around, and so do I, and we’ve both, since our respective falls, signed our share of lucrative contracts.

Which isn’t to say I’ve rolled in dough. I haven’t. In fact, whether a writer should turn a profit—selling his soul to academia or otherwise—has been a live question ever since writers began to prematurely retire and hang out their shingles as teachers instead. I’ve always thought of the writing life as a protracted action of the mind, supported by a body that does whatever it needs to do to pay the bills. But it’s rare anymore to hear of a writer scraping by on this sort of life—of a Kafka in his insurance firm or a Melville on his boats. This is reason enough to consider the career of Kenneth Patchen.

I didn’t come close to dying in my accident, but you couldn’t have convinced me of that when I was kneeling on the asphalt and realized the blood pooled on the ground was my own. That shook me up. A young man who buzzes death and then receives a significant lump payment might be forgiven for taking a while to screw his head back on straight. And when he does, it might not be a surprise if he’s inclined to take stock of who he is and where he might go.

I ws a rich kid who’d never had a job. So when the $120,000 ran out, I went to Atlantic City—not to gamble, but to work. I’ve told the rest of this story elsewhere, but the important part is that I wound up as a table-games dealer with two master’s degrees. I was looking for the education my universities had left out of their core curriculums. I got it in about three months, and then I was stuck.

Well-read people were hard to come by in the casino world. Even literate people were a tough trick to turn. So I was surprised when one day on a high-action craps game—the very same table where a few months later I would watch a player seize and crumble and die right beside me—I realized that another member of my dealing crew, a guy named Tim Gosman, was far better read than I was. Books were not typical cross-table chatter for dealers, but the subject came up, and, like members of some guild who couldn’t simply reach out to see if the other knew the secret handshake, Tim and I at first regarded each other warily, tossing about titles and authors, plumbing the depths of each other’s libraries. Our box man and pit boss listened for a moment, then decided to ignore us, and we were left talking books across the felt bathtub of the craps table, all the while calling the game (“Come out roll! Craps, yos, highs and lows!”) and setting up come bets and proposition wagers for players so hypnotized by the action they were entirely deaf to our discussion.

Tim asked whether I’d read Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight. I’d never even heard of it.

I was at low ebb then. It wasn’t clear that my working-life ploy was ever going to return me to the writing life. The thought had come that dealing might be all there was in store for me, and even this sort of passing concern about one’s fate tends to indicate a loss of gumption and agency.

Kenneth Patchen helped me find them again. So did Tim Gosman. For a few months I refused to leave him alone. I tracked him down on breaks, made him talk books. Tim wasn’t a writer, but he’d read more poetry than anyone I’d ever encountered. He wore delicate Elton John glasses, sported a wrist tattoo that I still covet, and had named his young son Seamus—after Heaney. I followed him everywhere. I think I worried his girlfriend a bit.

I had taken in a lot of books when I first moved to Atlantic City. I read a good deal of Conrad out loud to myself on the deserted beaches of an island just north of the neon skyline. Those stories were meant to be read out loud—they had frame tales in which someone (Marlow) was always speaking the narrative. But that enthusiasm fell away as I began to sink into the city’s pervasive malaise, and I’d stopped reading for almost a year before I met Tim. (Instead I listened, via internet radio, to the San Diego Padres’ miraculous 1998 season—the intense joy I took in this was a reverse measure of my despondency of that year.) When I got my hands on The Journal of Albion Moonlight I returned to my read-aloud strategy. To this exercise—with this particular book—I attribute some degree of salvation.

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not trying to tell you this is a great book. I’m not sure there is such a thing, and if there is, I’m not sure I’d argue this is one of them. But I am saying it’s a pivotal book—both for me, and, in a way, for you.

As told in Larry Smith’s Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America, Patchen grew up working class in southern Ohio, in the same town that produced William McKinley (it’s tempting to link this to Henry Miller’s later description of Patchen as a “sincere assassin”), and even early on Patchen seems to have been at the center of a kind of literary nexus. He shared teachers and mentors with Hart Crane and Walter Potashnik, a writer whose bestsellers in the forties saved a struggling Knopf. His high school had already produced Earl Derr Biggers, of Charlie Chan detective novel fame, and it later graduated William Gass.

Patchen only dabbled in college, but he studied with Jean Toomer and Alexander Meiklejohn when he did. His schoolmasters described him as having a “possibly dangerous tendency toward solitude.” He started a diary at twelve and never stopped writing. He produced a book a year for most of his life. He was a large man, described as “Dantesquely handsome.” A tendency toward pacifism came early, although he later found that sustaining pacifism through World War II was a one-way ticket to obscurity. Regarded now as a kind of pre-Beat proletarian-dissident-surrealist poet/novelist. Patchen makes some important links—say, from Whitman/ Blake to Pynchon/DeLillo, from enthusiasm to experimentation—and his career offers a lesson that is useful whether you are a young man staring at purgatory in the form of a croupier’s career or a society whose writers are, more and more, opting for tenure and investment portfolios over experience and productivity.

Patchen started out working in his hometown’s steel mills. In 1930, he wandered America just as the characters of The Journal of Albion Moonlighteventually would. Like many writers, he assembled his list of menial employment—gardener, clerk, odd-jobs man—the difference being that he never settled into some sweet gig from which all that hard work appeared distant and quaint. “I am willing to go anywhere,” he once wrote to an editor, “live anywhere, do anything in order that I may write.”

In 1934, he received his first book contract: Random House gave him one hundred dollars against future royalties on a book of poems. When the money ran out they offered him a job packing books at eighteen dollars per week. It was too much work—he quit so he could write. His wife, Miriam, recalled a day—a month after he signed the contract—when Patchen was reduced to begging. He gathered enough for a “heavenly meal” of peppers, bread, coffee, and apples. When the book was finished, it sold two hundred copies and went out of print.

In desperate times Patchen wrote to other writers for help. He had well-placed friends—Lewis Mumford and E. E. Cummings— but he cold-called others as well: Thomas Wolfe, Wallace Stevens. In 1936, he won a Guggenheim and used the first $108 check to move to Santa Fe. He followed the Joads to California for work and met James Agee, William Faulkner, and William Saroyan in Hollywood. The mid-thirties was a relatively flush time with ghostwriting, script doctoring, and federally funded writing programs, which kept him going while his poems began to attract national attention.

In 1939, he began a correspondence with James Laughlin, then still a student at Harvard but soon the founder of New Directions Press. The Patchens moved to Boston to work for Laughlin while New Directions published Patchen’s poetry. They earned twenty-five cents per hour for the “grubby work” (packing books, proofreading), while Laughlin bragged that he punished slip-ups with “sarcasm which is almost hostility.” A year later they moved to New York, where Patchen began work on a novel, The Journal of Albion Moonlight, in reply—it is safe to assume—to the nation’s steady march toward war. If Norman Mailer saw World War II as a good opportunity to launch a literary career, then Kenneth Patchen saw it as a viable end-times scenario.

In March 1940, Patchen met Henry Miller at a Greenwich Village meeting on free speech. The two had already corresponded, but now a friendship erupted. Miller later wrote a short book, Patchen: Man of Anger and Light, about their conversations during the writing of The Journal of Albion Moonlight. And Miller did more than blurb the book. He called Patchen “America in person, the best it has to offer,” and compared the novel to Blake, Lautréamont, Picasso, Jacob Boehme, Savonarola, Grünewald, John of Patmos, and Hieronymus Bosch.

Which didn’t mean it found a fast track to publication. Laughlin rejected it, and complained that he wasn’t in the habit of giving “handouts” when Patchen asked for money to finish the book. “Handouts!” Patchen raged. “You better just sit down and work your head a bit before you say such richboy horseshit to me.”

Battle lines formed over Moonlight. Miller and Patchen were on one side. Those who worked to prevent its publication included Delmore Schwarz, Anaïs Nin (who may have been upset over an episode in which Patchen appears to have taken insufficient care of her pet gibbon), and Edmund Wilson (who called the book “pretty juvenile”). Moonlight was eventually published with the assistance of a variety of donors and friends who helped to typeset a handwritten manuscript resembling the love child of a flow chart and the confessions of a serial killer.

William Carlos Williams gave the book a positive review in 1942, but it wasn’t until the sixties that Moonlight found a cult following among those who finally came back around to pacifism. That’s why it was there for Tim Gosman to find and pass along to me. Patchen kept writing, eventually dabbling in painting and “poetry jazz” until he died, in Palo Alto, in 1972, though to be honest my interest in him begins and ends with Moonlight.

The cover image of the New Directions paperback of The Journal of Albion Moonlightis one of the manuscript pages—now archived at UC Santa Cruz—and even a quick glimpse suggests that maybe Nin wasn’t just upset about her monkey when she described Moonlight as the “mumblings of a prisoner.”

In 1998, I took my copy to the beach near Atlantic City. I read it out loud to myself. What was it about the book that saved me? I want to say the sentences. I want to say that Patchen did things with sentences that I didn’t know, or had forgotten, one could do. Or maybe it was simply that my working-class plan had finally clicked, and Patchen’s proletarian message saved me from spouting richboy horseshit for the rest of my life.

The book has just the faintest outline of a plot, and it’s been suggested that Patchen used the anonymous pre-Shakespearean epic poem Tom O’Bedlam as a model. I can’t tell you about that. What I can tell you is that at certain key points the book has the loud allegory of a zombie movie. It’s the diary—sort of—of the leader of a band of archetypes and historical figures wandering through an America at war, a landscape we would now call post-apocalyptic. Except it’s not particularly realistic, even within the parameters of its fantasy. Characters routinely die, return, change sexes, or are elected President of the United States. I say zombie movie because the troupe, such as they are, are forever pursued, on the run from a “new plague,” suffering from “a cancerous fear of [their] own species.” Sometimes it’s more direct: “For the first time I saw that her face was fleshless, eaten away. She advanced to my side and her fingers closed on my throat. I threw her off—dry bones clattering to the floor.” And: “In the depth of the earth I hear them stirring: the countless, unliving dead.”

There’s more of that kind of thing, but Patchen reminds us too that long before apocryphal ghouls embodied the nation’s moral apocalypse, it was Christ who was first to claw his way out of a tomb. The Journal of Albion Moonlight is the gospel according to George Romero. It pits the living dead against the resurrected, the latter wandering a backward landscape in search of someone called Roivas (savior), and you sort of know from the beginning that they’re never going to find him.

Not that they have a chance. Long before the plot can make any significant forward progress, its narrative strategy, not to mention its sentences and paragraphs, begins to break down. There are novels within novels, whole short stories reprinted as margin notes. Handwritten scrawl and pencil drawings crop up, mysterious symbols and a range of font sizes appear, and eventually the text is reduced to lists of aphorisms and finally to something like language poetry. Moonlight plummets through everything that can amount to a book.

I liked the aphorisms best (perhaps because I had yet to read Barthes and Cioran):

Dogs with broken legs are shot; men with broken souls write through the night.

I tell you that I do not like the pain that is in me. If my thinking cannot alter the fact of our mortality, of what good is it? what use?

“You’d like to try your hand at being God.”

“I’d like to try my hand at being.”

What a tight-fisted bitch this little matter of writing is.

So what does The Journal of Albion Moonlight mean? Perhaps it means a nation considering war ought to consider its priorities first. That seems trite, but recent history proves it’s a message worth repeating. And what did it mean to Tim and me working as dealers, hustling tokes instead of begging? Maybe ours was its own plague summer, one in which our hypnotized players came at us like zombies and our role as croupiers was to keep on knocking them back—like the man who asked me for seventeen dollars on the inside numbers before his face twisted into a rictus and he dropped dead on the floor.

What does it mean? When Laughlin asked the same question, Patchen offered, as writers should, a reply as cryptic as the book itself:

I have I think kept the reader on his toes—I have made him a participant— I have removed the obvious landmarks and encouraged him to accept the book for what it is: an attempt to evaluate the world in the precise terms by which the world will force its will on him…The meaning of my book? It means a thousand and a thousand things. What is the meaning of this summer?

Of course books mean things. But it’s a mistake to think you can definitively articulate whatever that is. Every bit as important as what a book means is what itdoes. In fact, I think I’d like to say that what it does is what it means. The great irony of literature is that our inability to describe what happens to us when we read a book is compounded by our intense desire to do just that, to share the experience with another as soon as we’ve had it. Books are private experiences, but we never want to leave them private. Stories are the salve applied to the wound of self-consciousness, the laceration that leaves us discrete and lonely in our skins. We read to close the gap. When we’re done, we stumble after one another, inarticulate, hypnotized, hoping to spread the virus of our inspiration.

I kept chasing after Tim Gosman for a few months, to share my experience of Moonlight with him. I could barely find words for what it had done to me. Moonlight might not be a great book, but Patchen helped me leave Atlantic City, claw my way back to the writing life. I even survived just on book advances for a few years. Eventually, though—God help me—I started teaching.

The other great irony of literature is that books are temporary—like people. You lose them, you forget them. I forgot a lot of Moonlight, and I lost Tim Gosman. I don’t know where he is, what he’s doing. Do me a favor. If you run into him, tell him to find me. Tell him to call. I’d like to hear what he’s been up to. I’d like to hear what he’s been reading lately.

When you’re a professional artist, however, the thought process doesn’t stop there.  The fact is, doing enough to simply get paid doesn’t take that long.  Once you’re somewhat established, you can easily get five figures for something that takes you less than ten minutes to make.  A contemporary fine artist can draw a face on a bottle cap with a sharpie and make enough to feed a growing child for ten years.

What takes up the vast majority of the time is making the thing good.  This process is made strange by the fact that the customers don’t notice when it’s not good.  Ask any full-time painter, sculptor or video artist—what they subjectively consider their fuck-ups sell as well as anything else.  But, nevertheless, you put in hours trying to make it good.  Trying to make it, in fact, unlike anything you’ve seen before.

It’s like you come into work at Taco Bell at 7am and your job is to make one taco.  You make it, and so at 7:10 your boss is like “Hey that is a beautiful taco, whenever you wanna go home is fine, see ya later.”  Then you stay in the kitchen and spend the next seven hours and fifty minutes making the taco better.

Why do you do that?

Well part of it is you get to eat the taco—that is, you get to see the art when it’s finished.  Now I will not deny that it’s a good and worthy thing to see some good art.  But I also know that given several hours of free time in New York, I routinely choose to hang out with my friends and do (roughly) nothing instead of go to see all the amazing art that’s housed in various public and private collections all over the city, and even if I was with my friends someplace I’d never been like, say, Java, I’d be just as likely to hang out with my friends and do nothing than go to the temple at Borobodur (which I’ve always wanted to see and which I’m sure is incredible and beautiful).

In other words, when I’m sitting at my desk trying to make something good and therefore choosing to put effort toward eventually seeing some good art rather than just spending an equal amount of time at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles or in Tahiti or wherever doing nothing with my friends, there must be some other force at work.

The only other major factor I can think of is, well, you’ve started this thing, and if you sell it before you think it’s good—before it conforms to your own personal standards of what’s good—then you know that you are an asshole.  You are just one more dickhead cluttering up the universe with lackluster visual information in order to make money.  You do that and suddenly you’re no better than the people who clutter up the world with lozenge-shaped cars and empire-waist dresses and bad art and beige things.  And you don’t want to do that.

Of course you wouldn’t be in any danger of doing that if you hadn’t decided to make something in the first place.

But if you didn’t make something you wouldn’t get paid and you wouldn’t get to eat.

So, because you want to eat, you make something—which doesn’t take very long at all.  But, because you want the luxury of self-respect, you have to make it good, unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, which takes forever.

Zak Smith is the author of We Did Porn: Memoir and Drawings, and the artist behind Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow.

Expect more of this kind of thing from us in the future. Maybe even audio samples from “Bad Dudes” or “RBI:Baseball.”

Tony Perez: I’ve heard you mention that The Little General came to you in a dream. Can you talk about the book’s genesis?

Matthea Harvey: About five years ago, I had a very vivid dream, in which I looked out a window (I was on the second floor of a stone house in England) and saw a smaller-than-usual Napoleon standing on the path below. Moments later, a giant snowflake obscured that view. The combination of the tiny general and the giant snowflake stuck in my head, and eventually I decided to try and write a story about it—partly as a way of understanding the dream. The story came very easily… Napoleon makes his way into my poems every now and then (I also had a pet blue and white budgerigar called Napoleon), because my fathr has read hundreds and hundreds of books about Napoleon. In this case, I made him a kind of “Everygeneral.”

TP: In your poetry, do you often (or ever) find yourself pulling imagery from dreams?

MH: Sometimes. The title of my first book of poems, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form came to me in a dream. In my second book, the poem, “The Crowds Cheered As Gloom Galloped Away” came from a dream I had while I was doing a residency at VCCA. In it, I opened a suitcase of sorts (I now have a case like this, but it holds a cocktail shakers and other cocktail tools) and in it was a bottle of antidepressants and a number of tiny living ponies. A dream about being in a mechanical park with my friend Anna Rabinowitz turned into the poem “Color by Number,” and in Modern Life, the demi-title poem, “Implications for Modern Life” stems from a rather alarming dream I had about fields and fields of ham flowers. I was off ham for about three years after that.

TP: Are there any particular children’s books that you love? If you had kids, what would you be reading them?

MH: Growing up, I was a huge fan of Enid Blyton—especially her Faraway Tree series. I was having dinner with my sister and her two-year old son yesterday and I said something about “fish ice-cream” and she said, “you’re thinking of The Faraway Tree,” which, in a way, I always am.  That series is so wonderfully imagined—the main conceit is that there’s this tree with a cloud at the top and different lands arrive there. Apparently the children had fish ice cream in the Land of Eat-What-You-Want, or some similarly named land. Predictably, I also liked all the orphaned girl stories—The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, as well as Noel Streatfield’s series, Ballet Shoes, Skating Shoes, Tennis Shoes…

I have a lovely pack of nephews, nieces, godsons and friends’ children now, so I’m always looking out for books to give them. Some of my favorites are George Saunders’ The Very Loathsome Gappers of Frip, illustrated by Lane Smith, Jack Prelutsky’s Scranimals, illustrated by Peter Sis, a book that features wonderful animal-food hybrids—broccolions and antelopetunias and Giselle Potter’s The Year I Didn’t Go to School and The Boy Who Loved Words. I also like giving them handmade books by graphic novelists and artists—Long-Tailed Kitty by Lark Pien (“You’re not on my side, sand in the pants”) and Pencil Pie: A Comic for Tiny Babies by Doug McNamara (“Pinkle tinkle pencil pie, robot squirrels walking by…”) are both genius books.

TP: As someone used to the solitary work of a poet, how was it collaborating with Elizabeth Zechel (the illustrator)?

MH: It was wonderful. Elizabeth is a dream collaborator. The first day I went over to her house, she had baked a cake and then introduced me to her four cats, and I thought, “She’s the one!” If you’re like me and can’t draw, it’s an amazing gift to have someone take your words (and your feedback) to visually create the world you’ve imagined. Elizabeth got the little general just right—with his puffed-out chest, his luxurious moustache, and sad eyes (I found a real approximation of him on a moustache contest website) and we had really interesting conversations about what degree of realism vs. cartoonishness would be right for the book. Often she did a drawing that I could never have imagined that way, like the image that shows the Realists getting confused while trying to a difficult formation—I loved that she made a map of their footprints hover over their heads.

We’re working on another book right now, called These Birds Don’t Fly: An Alphabet of Absurd Birds.

TP: I know that you’re a big fan of graphic novels. Should we expect an interplay of words and pictures in your future work, or are you strictly back to poems these days?

MH: Good guess! Amy Jean Porter and I are collaborating on a book called Of Lamb, which is an erasure of a Charles Lamb biography, with images (more independent imaginative acts than illustrations) by Amy Jean. My next book of poems will also have a combination of text and image. In that one, I’m collaborating with myself— writing poems that have photographs as their titles (about 2” x 2”). The photographs are usually miniature scenes that I set up, which is great fun, but it makes the process of completing one poem about ten times longer.

TP: You once wrote a poem to be read along with Philip Glass’ String Quartet Number 5. Is there a piece of music you’d recommend to accompany The Little General?

MH: Hmm. To start with he’d probably like some John Philip Sousa, but by the end of the story, he’d be open to listening to Air’s Love 2.

TP: In The Little General, there’s a war under way between the Realists and the Dreamers. Who would you take in a fight between Borges and Balzac?

MH: Ah, but there isn’t really a war. The little general just thinks there might be one. If I had to choose a side, it would be Borges.

TP: Between the slashing of arts’ budgets, and the emphasis that No Child Left Behind puts on test scores, there’s no question that imagination has taken a backseat in American schools. How can we ensure kids don’t view imagination as a triviality, or, as the Little General’s encyclopedia puts it, a “disease”?

MH: The cuts in arts funding worry me a great deal, because for me, the delights of school were precisely in those arts programs that are now disappearing. But I don’t think children think about whether or not to be imaginative—at a certain age, they just are, whether they’re making up words, “pillowboat” for sofa or “sleepblow” for snoring (two favorites from a Mr. Solomon Cravitz and a Mr. Toby Campbell, both three and under) or playing out vivid flying baby fantasies. Later on, I think that imagination sometimes get labeled “silly” or “childish,” which is a shame if it’s meant in a negative sense. If you read The Little General I think it’s clear that I’d like as much imagination in my life as possible.

A Good Book

Curtis White’s intelligence, colored by righteous indignation, is a slippery and protean thing. He’s tackled Liberalism and contemporary Art Culture and in his newest book, The Barbaric Heart, he examines the hidden ills of the environmental movement. We were fortunate enough to publish an excerpt of it in the “Dread” half of Issue #41, called “A Good Without Light” — check it out.

We were quite impressed with the essay and book and followed up with him via email.

Tin House: In your previous non-fiction work, you’ve played the Socratic gadfly, uncovering all sorts of life’s sinister things even the “educated” among us fail to see as sinister. How does The Barbaric Heart, if at all, continue that line of attack?

Curtis White: I’ve come to think that the three recent nonfiction books—The Middle Mind, The Spirit of Disobedience, and now The Barbaric Heart—really are a trilogy. They are all books critical, in order, of what passes for art culture in this country, what passes for liberalism, and finally what passes for an environmental movement.

I think the guiding idea has been, as Marx wrote, “If capitalism must have enemies, it will create them itself and in its own image.” The major environmental organizations are enemies in the image of their purported foe. And I say this while acknowledging that I’ve belonged to just about all of these organizations for decades.

So, The Barbaric Heart describes the most important ways in which environmentalism consorts with the enemy, especially when it makes science and quantitative reasoning its primary voice, and when it agrees, as it does in the utterly failed Kyoto protocols, that economic growth is a desideratum of the future and that any negative environmental consequences will be handled by wiser bureaucracies, laws, and technological fixes.

I advocate a reconsideration of the origin of our concern with nature: Romanticism. The Romantics believed that the human and natural worlds were one, that the natural world was the realm of spirit, that materialism, rationalism, and money had alienated us from nature, that human beings were in this context not capable of being fully human, and that the best response to this situation was art, especially poetry and music. Just as important, they practiced “romantic irony,” the rather postmodern attempt to undermine all ideologies, even its own. Romanticism was a movement of the provisional. But if you went to an environmental conference now to say such things, imagining that you could get the politicians and urban planners and climate gurus to shut up for a moment, people would cluck their tongues and complain (as has already been said of my book) that there is nothing “practical” in it. What this plea for practicality really means is that we should work within the assumptions of the status quo, the world as it stands.

The book attempts to provide a kind of metaphysics for the environmental movement. The question it asks is, “Given that we are destroying the world, but why?” The usual implicit answers are, I think, lame and not thought through: We’re greedy sinners, we’re naturally destructive, or it’s the work of evil-doer CEOs. My answer is that it’s not our sins but our virtues that are the root cause. The virtues of the warrior ethic: if you can profit from the skillful use of violence, then you should go ahead and be violent. This is obviously the ethic of capitalism and its great defender the state, but it also penetrates deeply into the entire culture through our respect for athletes, the military (consider all the oohing when fighter jets pass overhead at “air shows”), the triumphs of business wealth (the Jack Welch story), and every action movie out there where the hero uses uber-skillful and hyperbolic violence to “fight his way through” the enemy in the name of preserving the good, i.e. his own people. Think Bruce Willis and Die Hard.

Willis: Activist, Actor, Sexy

Ours is not simply a violent culture. It is a culture that believes that violence (especially violence with a skill set) is a virtue. It is really our national religion, if, as Tolstoy said, a culture’s true religion is not the things it claims to “believe” but the ideas that it lives through on a daily basis. Some people call this disconnect between belief and conduct hypocritical. It’s not really. Competitive business practices are, for their practitioners, virtues, destructive virtues but virtues. For a while, we admired the math whizzes and physicists that Wall Street recruited to “quant” finance markets. Only now can we see what it really was: rapacious violence against the vulnerable or naïve, including other financiers. The math whizzes may or may not have understood this. Whether they did or did not, they must now stand with all the scientists and engineers in the arms industry.

TH: You say that the Barbaric Heart describes how environmentalism consorts with the enemy and that makes for some fascinating reading, for sure, but this idea of the Barbaric Heart is rooted much, much deeper than just that. The issues you find with environmentalism, in other words, are but one expression of the Barbaric Heart. Could you talk a little about the dynamics of the Barbaric Heart, how it has arisen out of capitalism and eclipsed other modes of being, and maybe some of the particular ways it plays out in the day-to-day living of life?

White, Moments Before Discovering Truth About Environmentalism

CW: Actually, I don’t think that the Barbaric Heart rose from capitalism. Capitalism rose from it. It is the dominant contemporary example of the Barbaric Heart. But the Barbaric Heart itself is as old as humanity. It was first the warrior virtues of being able to fight your way through animals, nature, and other humans. Then, in the ancient world, it became the conviction that there was no virtue as virtuous as triumph. Winning. Obviously a large part of the problem is that the Barbaric Heart penetrates deeply into the culture in all sorts of ways. We admire, almost to a person, violence with a skill set. As I said above, this is all around us though mostly not understood for what it is. Why are we as a culture so given over to worship of athletes, action heroes, business success, and the stoic military?

TH: While you say you’re attempting a metaphysics of the environmental movement, much of the book, especially when the anger and disgust is most pointed, appeals to ethics, i.e. how now, with everything the Barbaric Heart has wrought, are we supposed to live good lives. So, could you take, say, 80 words and answer: how are we to live good lives?

CW: I don’t think we can live good lives. We’re all complicit in the corporate life world and the easy assumption that profit is dependent on violence (against workers, against nature). Like getting coal or gas to power a huge-screen HD TV in every home. We are not going to get rid of those things until we have no other choice. I don’t say that the Barbaric Heart is evil or sinful. I say it is dishonest. So what I advocate in the very intellectual practices of the book, the book as an act, is that we need to stop “mental lying” as Thomas Paine called it. Perhaps capitalism is the best of all possible economic systems. Perhaps that’s true. But can we at least stop saying all these deluded things about it? Like that it provides freedom, supports democracy, cares about fairness, cares about the environment. It has other values and virtues that make these things most unlikely.

TH: You say in the book that we’ve ‘lost our sense of what it should mean to be American.’ Could you explain this a bit? Sorry if this is redundant, but as a corollary, could you talk about what to your mind it means to be a good citizen?

CW: Americans have always been known for their bluntness. As any Henry James novel would show, that has not always made us popular among Europeans. And Asians are dumbfounded by it. But it was Romantics like William Blake that first said “honest indignation is the voice of God.” I believe that. That’s a religion I can belong to.

William Blake observed just after a Greenpeace Canvasser waylaid him. He really did have somewhere better to be.

Americans should be the voice of honest indignation. Instead we are, as Sonic Youth put it some time back, a “Daydream Nation” incapable of self-scrutiny in any fundamental way, and willing to live in a corporate life-world of deadening work, strip mall communities, and cities designed with the needs of technology (like automobiles and those wretched cell phone towers) most at heart.

TH: You mentioned practicality and that you and your book are often accused of not being so. To say that is, to my mind, an almost willful misreading of the book. I’d even go so far as to call it fatuous. That said, in what ways do you hope the book will work on a reader?

CW: Slavoj Zizek expressed this well in a recent issue of Harper’s. “The old saying ‘Don’t just talk, do something!” is one of the stupidest things one can say, even measured by the low standards of common sense. Perhaps the problem lately has been that we have been doing too much…. Perhaps it is time to step back, think, and say the right thing.”

Perhaps thinking and talking can be dangerous again, just as it was for Voltaire, and Paine, and Marx. The job of the writer, as I see it, is not to create strategic plans or utopian projects all based upon the “best science” or “best practices.” The job of the writer is to seek clarity, starting with self-clarity. “What do I really think about this problem?” Marx once wrote to Engels of the unpublished early essays, “We can submit this work to the criticism of the mice. We have achieved our purpose: self-clarification.” We know how dangerous this self-clarity was to become. How practical. I think readers experience a kind of joy in finding a writer willing and capable of being honest and lucid. “Finally, someone willing to tell me the truth.” That’s what I try to do.

TH: This might lead to the same question as before, or be my attempt to answer it, but hell, whatever. Heidegger (hear the yawns?) once wrote that the genuine sense of what philosophy can achieve is ‘the burdening of historical Dasein, and thereby at bottom of Being itself…Burdening gives back to things, to beings, their weight. And why? Because burdening is one of the essential and fundamental conditions for the arising of everything great, among which we include above all else the fate of a historical people.’

Man in High Dudgeon with the Concept of the Burdening of Historical Dasein Driven to Protest

Would you mind entertaining me (and really maybe only me) by responding to this?

CW: I never yawn around Heidegger. He too is heir in his own way to Spinoza’s and Romanticism’s first engagement with the idea of Being-as-such. I don’t know this particular passage (Being and Time?) but I like what it says. Heidegger was critical of the instrumentalization of our relation to Being. The quantifying of the world both human and natural. To “burden” that world is to oblige it to step out of the “automatic,” our numb sense of normalcy, our “received ideas” about who and where we are, and be obliged to take on the weight and anxiety of self-reflection, of thinking. The nausea of having to begin from the zero degree (as Sartre might have expressed it). I try to burden not only capitalism but environmentalism. Environmentalism is too used to thinking itself the voice of the righteous. It does not sufficiently see the ways in which its mission has been compromised. This is all very much in the interest of the reigning economic order (whatever that should be called). For that order, instead of having to deal with the unruly, often revolutionary zeal of poets, musicians like Richard Wagner, and uncompromising spiritualists like Muir, it can now deal with something it is very familiar and comfortable with: science, technicians, and quantitative reason. Risk assessment. Data. The reign of Numbers. It has also succeeded in transforming a movement that was originally not only a protest against the denaturalization of the world but the dehumanization of the world. It has remade that movement in its own image.

The failure of science is not with science as such, its discoveries, but with its failure to become what Morse Peckham called “romantic science,” that is, a science whose first job is to use its knowledge to undermine ideologies of power, to destroy their “regnant platitudes.” Instead, science, even environmental science, has put itself at the service of these ideologies.

As Ken Burns’ new film The National Parks: America’s Best Idea shows, it is one thing to ask John D. Rockefeller to give millions for the creation of a national park, but quite another to ask him to take responsibility for how he made those millions in the first place: oil, monopolies, the exploitation of workers, and even the massacre of workers (as in the 1913 Ludlow mine massacre, although it was his son that was responsible for that). Burns sees no need to dig into this. It might get in the way of feel-good moment when the banjos are playing.

Still taken from Ken Burns documentary

It is one thing to ask capital to contribute to certain sites that provide “spectacle,” but another to ask it to stop the profitable destruction of the rest of the world through behavior that is little more than systematic violence (factory farming, for instance). Ken Burns’ film is marked by this contradiction: his sponsors are nearly all conduits of corporate philanthropy. He knows where the boundaries of the possible are just as he knows that national parks have boundaries beyond which is the slowly dying world we are becoming ever more familiar with. In the end, even those park boundaries are unlikely to resist the steady erosion of climate warming, pine bark beetles (been to Colorado lately? it’s a very brown experience), species extinction, the bio-accumulation of toxins in animals, invasive species, and the rest of it. Parks are not the answer. They’re not even the beginning of the answer or a step in the right direction. They avoid a confrontation with the real problems.

Well, now you’ve outed me as one of those shameful academics. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go back in a manuscript and delete some Heideggerian or Hegelian digression that my editors are always sure doom my rating on Amazon.

TH: And finally. (Finally!) Could you define the word ‘creative’ outside the context of any market? I’m reminded of this section from Joshua Ferris’s hilarious debut novel, Then We Came to the End:

‘Sometime later in the afternoon, Max Jackers surprised Jim by calling him back. “You folks over there,” said Max, “you say you call yourselves creatives, is that what you’re telling me? And the work you do, you call that the creative, is that what you said?” Jim said that was correct. “And I suppose you think of yourselves as pretty creative over there, I bet.”

“I suppose so,” said Jim, wondering what Max was driving at.

“And the work you do, you probably think that’s pretty creative work.”

“What are you asking me, Uncle Max?”

“Well, if all that’s true,” said the old man, “that would make you creative creatives creating creative creative.” There was silence as Max allowed Jim to take this in. “And that right there,” he concluded, “is why I didn’t miss my calling. That’s a use of the English language just too absurd to even contemplate.”’

CW: God. I know. I sometimes get appreciative comments from the audience that say, “He’s right. Art is the best path.” You’ve got market creativity, which is mostly a joke. Then you’ve got this quasi-mystical New Agey reverence for creativity, even if its products are awful. One of the paradoxes of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is that he is really saying that the only time we really need art is when the world is damaged. Art is the response to that damage. The rest is the product of the Culture Industry or is kitsch. In theory, art goes away in a restored world. Of course we’re in no danger of that any time soon.

But I think I agree that art has a mostly negative function for the moment. It is the call to life. It is the refusal of death. I don’t argue that everyone should start writing poetry. I argue that we should create a common language of Care (Heidegger!) that makes us not environmentalists but members of a greater Party of Life.

Pledge Yourself to the Party of Life

CEO, CFO and COO of the Party

Tin House #41 should be hitting your mailboxes or newsstand any day now. The dual theme is Hope/Dread (our designer, the fabulous Janet Parker, created stunning covers for each). In the dread corner, look for Nick Cave, Ander Monson,  Alex Lemon, Matthea Harvey, and other doomsayers. Flying the colors of hope, we have Karen Russell, Abigail Thomas, Mahmoud Darwish, Matthea Harvey (she’s good enough to have her cake and eat it too), and, as you’ll see below, Cory Doctorow. The “Genre” label created something of a controversy on this site awhile back, but Doctorow’s take on what Science Fiction is capable of is pretty tough to argue with. 

CORY DOCTOROW: RADICAL PRESENTISM

Every writer has a FAQ—Frequently Awkward Question—or two, and for me, it’s this one: “How is it possible to work as a science fiction writer, predicting the future, when everything is changing so quickly? Aren’t you afraid that actual events will overtake the events you’ve described?”

It’s a fresh-scrubbed, earnest kind of question, and the asker pays the compliment of casting you as Wise Prognosticator in the bargain, but I think it’s junk. Science fiction writers don’t predict the future (except accidentally), but if they’re very good, they may manage to predict the present.

Mary Shelley wasn’t worried about reanimated corpses stalking Europe, but by casting a technological innovation in the starring role of Frankenstein, she was able to tap into present-day fears about technology overpowering its masters and the hubris of the inventor. Orwell didn’t worry about a future dominated by the view-screens from 1984, he worried about a present in which technology was changing the balance of power, creating opportunities for the state to enforce its power over individuals at ever-more-granular levels.

Now, it’s true that some writers will tell you they’re extrapolating a future based on rigor and science, but they’re just wrong. Karel Čapek coined the word robotto talk about the automation and dehumanization of the workplace. Asimov’s robots were not supposed to be metaphors, but they sure acted like them, revealing the great writer’s belief in a world where careful regulation could create positive outcomes for society. (How else to explain his idea that all robots would comply with the “three laws” for thousands of years? Or, in the Foundation series, the existence of a secret society that knows exactly how to exert its leverage to steer the course of human civilization for millennia?)

For some years now, science fiction has been in the grips of a conceit called the “Singularity”—the moment at which human and machine intelligence merge, creating a break with history beyond which the future cannot be predicted, because the post-humans who live there will be utterly unrecognizable to us in their emotions and motivations. Read one way, it’s a sober prediction of the curve of history spiking infinity-ward in the near future (and many futurists will solemnly assure you that this is the case); read another way, it’s just the anxiety of a generation of winners in the technology wars, now confronted by a new generation whose fluidity with technology is so awe-inspiring that it appears we have been out-evolved by our own progeny.

Science fiction writers who claim to be writing the future are more apt to be hamstrung by their timidity than by the pace of events. An old saw in science fiction is that a sci-fi writer can take the automobile and the movie theater and predict the drive-in. But the drive-in is dead, and the echoes of its social consequences are fading to negligibility; on the other hand, the fact that the automobile was responsible for the first form of widely carried photo ID and is thus the progenitor of the entire surveillance state went unremarked-upon by “predictive” sci-fi. Some of my favorite contemporary speculative fiction is instead nakedly allegorical in its approach to the future—or the past, as the case may be.

Consider Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids (Bantam, 2009), an environmental techno-thriller—Sterling once defined a techno-thriller as “A science fiction novel with the president in it”—set in a mid-twenty-first century in which global warming has done its catastrophic best to end humanity. Finally forced to confront the reality of anthropogenic climate change, humanity fizzles and factions off into three warring camps: the Dispensation, an Al-Gorean green-capitalist technocracy; the Acquis, libertarian technocrats who’ll beta-test anything (preferably on themselves); and China, a technocracy based on the idea that technology can make command-and-control systems actually work, in contrast to the gigantic market failure that destroyed the planet. The play of these three ideologies serves as a brilliant and insightful critique of the contemporary approach to environmental remediation. Sterling especially gets the way that technology is a disruptor, that it unmakes the status quo over and over again, and that a battle of technologies is a battle in which the sands never stop shifting. Casting his tale into the future allows him to illustrate just how uneven our footing is in the present day—and the fact that the book consists of humans getting by, even getting ahead, despite all the chaos and devastation, makes The Caryatidsone of the most optimistic books I’ve read in recent days.

Moving back in time, there’s William Gibson’s Spook Country (Penguin, 2008), a science fiction novel so futuristic that Gibson set it a year before it was published. This was a ballsy, genius move, which Gibson characterized as “speculative presentism”—a novel that uses the tricks of science fiction in a contemporary setting, telling a story that revolves around technology and its effect on people. Gibson’s protagonist is Hollis Henry, a washed-up pop star who is writing for an art magazine published by a sinister, gigantic PR firm. An assignment brings her into the orbit of a set of post-national spies fighting an obscure and vicious battle, with motivations that are baffling and, eventually, wonderful. Contrasting spy craft, technological art, and the weird, hybrid semi-governmental firm that is characteristic of the twenty-first century, this book makes you feel like you are indeed living in the future, right here in the present.

Go further back to Jo Walton’s recently completed Small Change trilogy:Farthing (Tor, 2006), Ha’penny (Tor, 2007), and Half a Crown (Tor, 2008), a series of alternate history novels set in the United Kingdom after a WWII that ended with Britain retreating from the front and ceding Europe to the Third Reich in exchange for an uneasy peace. Now that peace is fracturing, as fascist Europe’s totalitarian logic demands that all its neighbors bend their rules, norms, and laws—otherwise the contrast would make the whole arrangement unbearable. If Europe is persecuting its Jews and allied England is not, then there is an unresolvable cognitive dissonance between the two states, one that can only be resolved by England slipping, bit by bit, into a “soft” totalitarian mirror of Nazi Europe. In this naked parable about the erosion of liberties around the world brought on by America’s War on Terror, Walton isn’t writing about the past any more than Sterling is writing about the future. Her books are a relentless, maddening, inevitable story of how good people let their goodness dribble away, drop by drop, until they find themselves holding nooses.

Science fiction is a literature that uses the device of futurism to show up the present— a time that is difficult enough to get a handle on. As the pace of technological change accelerates, the job of the science fiction writer becomes not harder, but easier— and more necessary. After all, the more confused we are by our contemporary technology, the more opportunities there are to tell stories that lessen that confusion.

Human credulity is indeed wonderful. There may be good reasons for believing in a King or a Judge or a Lord Mayor. When we see them go sweeping by in their robes and their wigs, with their heralds and their outriders, our knees begin to shake and our looks to falter. But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say. They have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs. No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity. And, like most miracles, this one, too, has had a weakening effect upon the mind of the believer. He begins to think that critics, because they call themselves so, must be right. He begins to suppose that something actually happens to a book when it has been praised or denounced in print. He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees.

And yet, barring the learned (and learning is chiefly useful in judging the work of the dead), the critic is rather more fallible than the rest of us. He has to give us his opinion of a book that has been published two days, perhaps, with the shell still sticking to its head. He has to get outside that cloud of fertile, but unrealized, sensation which hangs about a reader, to solidify it, to sum it up. The chances are that he does this before the time is ripe; he does it too rapidly and too definitely. He says that it is a great book or a bad book. Yet, as he knows, when he is content to read only, it is neither. He is driven by force of circumstances and some human vanity to hide those hesitations which beset him as he reads, to smooth out all traces of that crab-like and crooked path by which he has reached what he chooses to call ‘a conclusion’. So the crude trumpet blasts of critical opinion blow loud and shrill, and we, humble readers that we are, bow our submissive heads.

But let us see whether we can do away with these pretences for a season and pull down the imposing curtain which hides the critical process until it is complete. Let us give the mind a new book, as one drops a lump of fish into a cage of fringed and eager sea anemones, and watch it pausing, pondering, considering its attack. Let us see what prejudices affect it; what influences tell upon it. And if the conclusion becomes in the process a little less conclusive, it may, for that very reason, approach nearer to the truth. The first thing that the mind desires is some foothold of fact upon which it can lodge before it takes flight upon its speculative career. Vague rumours attach themselves to people’s names. Of Mr. Hemingway, we know that he is an American living in France, an ‘advanced’ writer, we suspect, connected with what is called a movement, though which of the many we own that we do not know. It will be well to make a little more certain of these matters by reading first Mr. Hemingway’s earlier book, The Sun Also Rises, and it soon becomes clear from this that, if Mr. Hemingway is ‘advanced’ it is not in the way that is to us most interesting. A prejudice of which the reader would do well to take account is here exposed; the critic is a modernist. Yes, the excuse would be because the moderns make us aware of what we feel subconsciously; they are truer to our own experience; they even anticipate it, and this gives us a particular excitement. But nothing new is revealed about any of the characters in The Sun Also Rises. They come before us shaped, proportioned, weighed, exactly as the characters of Maupassant are shaped and proportioned. They are seen from the old angle; the old reticences, the old relations between author and character are observed.

But the critic has the grace to reflect that this demand for new aspects and new perspectives may well be overdone. It may become whimsical. It may become foolish. For why should not art be traditional as well as original? Are we not attaching too much importance to an excitement which, though agreeable, may not be valuable in itself, so that we are led to make the fatal mistake of overriding the writer’s gift?

At any rate, Mr. Hemingway is not modern in the sense given; and it would appear from his first novel that this rumour of modernity must have sprung from his subject matter and from his treatment of it rather than from any fundamental novelty in his conception of the art of fiction. It is a bare, abrupt, outspoken book. Life as people live it in Paris in 1927 or even in 1928 is described as we of this age do describe life (it is here that we steal a march upon the Victorians) openly, frankly, without prudery, but also without surprise. The immoralities and moralities of Paris are described as we are apt to hear them spoken of in private life. Such candour is modern and it is admirable. Then, for qualities grow together in art as in life, we find attached to this admirable frankness an equal bareness of style. Nobody speaks for more than a line or two. Half a line is mostly sufficient. If a hill or a town is described (and there is always some reason for its description) there it is, exactly and literally built up of little facts, literal enough, but chosen, as the final sharpness of the outline proves, with the utmost care. Therefore, a few words like these: ‘The grain was just beginning to ripen and the fields were full of poppies. The pasture land was green and there were fine trees, and sometimes big rivers and chateaux off in the trees’—which have a curious force. Each word pulls its weight in the sentence. And the prevailing atmosphere is fine and sharp, like that of winter days when the boughs are bare against the sky. (But if we had to choose one sentence with which to describe what Mr. Hemingway attempts and sometimes achieves, we should quote a passage from a description of a bullfight: ‘Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like corkscrews, their elbows raised and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterwards, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero’s bullfighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time.’) Mr. Hemingway’s writing, one might paraphrase, gives us now and then a real emotion, because he keeps absolute purity of line in his movements and lets the horns (which are truth, fact, reality) pass him close each time. But there is something faked, too, which turns bad and gives an unpleasant feeling—that also we must face in course of time.

And here, indeed, we may conveniently pause and sum up what point we have reached in our critical progress. Mr. Hemingway is not an advanced writer in the sense that he is looking at life from a new angle. What he sees is a tolerably familiar sight. Common objects like beer bottles and journalists figure largely in the foreground. But he is a skilled and conscientious writer. He has an aim and makes for it without fear or circumlocution. We have, therefore, to take his measure against somebody of substance, and not merely line him, for form’s sake, beside the indistinct bulk of some ephemeral shape largely stuffed with straw. Reluctantly we reach this decision, for this process of measurement is one of the most difficult of a critic’s tasks. He has to decide which are the most salient points of the book he has just read; to distinguish accurately to what kind they belong, and then, holding them against whatever model is chosen for comparison, to bring out their deficiency or their adequacy.

Recalling The Sun Also Rises, certain scenes rise in memory: the bullfight, the character of the Englishman, Harris; here a little landscape which seems to grow behind the people naturally; here a long, lean phrase which goes curling round a situation like the lash of a whip. Now and again this phrase evokes a character brilliantly, more often a scene. Of character, there is little that remains firmly and solidly elucidated. Something indeed seems wrong with the people. If we place them (the comparison is bad) against Tchekov’s people, they are flat as cardboard. If we place them (the comparison is better) against Maupassant’s people they are crude as a photograph. If we place them (the comparison may be illegitimate) against real people, the people we liken them to are of an unreal type. They are people one may have seen showing off at some café; talking a rapid, high-pitched slang, because slang is the speech of the herd, seemingly much at their ease, and yet if we look at them a little from the shadow not at their ease at all, and, indeed, terribly afraid of being themselves, or they would say things simply in their natural voices. So it would seem that the thing that is faked is character; Mr. Hemingway leans against the flanks of that particular bull after the horns have passed.

After this preliminary study of Mr. Hemingway’s first book, we come to the new book, Men Without Women, possessed of certain views or prejudices. His talent plainly may develop along different lines. It may broaden and fill out; it may take a little more time and go into things—human beings in particular—rather more deeply. And even if this meant the sacrifice of some energy and point, the exchange would be to our private liking. On the other hand, his is a talent which may contract and harden still further, it may come to depend more and more upon the emphatic moment; make more and more use of dialogue, and cast narrative and description overboard as an encumbrance.

The fact that Men Without Women consists of short stories, makes it probable that Mr. Hemingway has taken the second line. But, before we explore the new book, a word should be said which is generally left unsaid, about the implications of the title. As the publisher puts it . . . ‘the softening feminine influence is absent—either through training, discipline, death, or situation’. Whether we are to understand by this that women are incapable of training, discipline, death, or situation, we do not know. But it is undoubtedly true, if we are going to persevere in our attempt to reveal the processes of the critic’s mind, that any emphasis laid upon sex is dangerous. Tell a man that this is a woman’s book, or a woman that this is a man’s, and you have brought into play sympathies and antipathies which have nothing to do with art. The greatest writers lay no stress upon sex one way or the other. The critic is not reminded as he reads them that he belongs to the masculine or the feminine gender. But in our time, thanks to our sexual perturbations, sex consciousness is strong, and shows itself in literature by an exaggeration, a protest of sexual characteristics which in either case is disagreeable. Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas, and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit. All we can do, whether we are men or women, is to admit the influence, look the fact in the face, and so hope to stare it out of countenance.

To proceed then—Men Without Women consists of short stories in the French rather than in the Russian manner. The great French masters, Mérimée and Maupassant, made their stories as self-conscious and compact as possible. There is never a thread left hanging; indeed, so contracted are they that when the last sentence of the last page flares up, as it so often does, we see by its light the whole circumference and significance of the story revealed. The Tchekov method is, of course, the very opposite of this. Everything is cloudy and vague, loosely trailing rather than tightly furled. The stories move slowly out of sight like clouds in the summer air, leaving a wake of meaning in our minds which gradually fades away. Of the two methods, who shall say which is the better? At any rate, Mr. Hemingway, enlisting under the French masters, carries out their teaching up to a point with considerable success.

There are in Men Without Women many stories which, if life were longer, one would wish to read again. Most of them indeed are so competent, so efficient, and so bare of superfluity that one wonders why they do not make a deeper dent in the mind than they do. Take the pathetic story of the Major whose wife died—‘In Another Country’; or the sardonic story of a conversation in a railway carriage—‘A Canary for One’; or stories like ‘The Undefeated’ and ‘Fifty Grand’ which are full of the sordidness and heroism of bull-fighting and boxing—all of these are good trenchant stories, quick, terse, and strong. If one had not summoned the ghosts of Tchekov, Mérimée, and Maupassant, no doubt one would be enthusiastic. As it is, one looks about for something, fails to find something, and so is brought again to the old familiar business of ringing impressions on the counter, and asking what is wrong?

For some reason the book of short stories does not seem to us to go as deep or to promise as much as the novel. Perhaps it is the excessive use of dialogue, for Mr. Hemingway’s use of it is surely excessive. A writer will always be chary of dialogue because dialogue puts the most violent pressure upon the reader’s attention. He has to hear, to see, to supply the right tone, and to fill in the background from what the characters say without any help from the author. Therefore, when fictitious people are allowed to speak it must be because they have something so important to say that it stimulates the reader to do rather more than his share of the work of creation. But, although Mr. Hemingway keeps us under the fire of dialogue constantly, his people, half the time, are saying what the author could say much more economically for them. At last we are inclined to cry out with the little girl in ‘Hills Like White Elephants’: ‘Would you please please please please please please stop talking?’

And probably it is this superfluity of dialogue which leads to that other fault which is always lying in wait for the writer of short stories: the lack of proportion. A paragraph in excess will make these little craft lopsided and will bring about that blurred effect which, when one is out for clarity and point, so baffles the reader. And both these faults, the tendency to flood the page with unnecessary dialogue and the lack of sharp, unmistakable points by which we can take hold of the story, come from the more fundamental fact that, though Mr. Hemingway is brilliantly and enormously skilful, he lets his dexterity, like the bullfighter’s cloak, get between him and the fact. For in truth story-writing has much in common with bullfighting. One may twist one’s self like a corkscrew and go through every sort of contortion so that the public thinks one is running every risk and displaying superb gallantry. But the true writer stands close up to the bull and lets the horns—call them life, truth, reality, whatever you like—pass him close each time.

Mr. Hemingway, then, is courageous; he is candid; he is highly skilled; he plants words precisely where he wishes; he has moments of bare and nervous beauty; he is modern in manner but not in vision; he is self-consciously virile; his talent has contracted rather than expanded; compared with his novel his stories are a little dry and sterile. So we sum him up. So we reveal some of the prejudices, the instincts and the fallacies out of which what it pleases us to call criticism is made.

I didn’t quite mean to do this when I started collecting pieces for the book, but the essays in The Story About the Story add up to a solid century’s worth of literary wisdom—straight from the horses’ mouths.

This wisdom takes a number of forms.

Cynthia Ozick (“Truman Capote Reconsidered”) begins with an elegant aphorism: “Time at length becomes justice.”  Similarly, Nabokov (“‘The Metamorphosis’”) introduces Kafka with a rapid-fire definition of art, “Beauty plus pity,” a maxim that a few pages later is met with Camus’ insistence (“Herman Melville”) that Melville is the furthest thing from Kafka but still offers “inexhaustible sources of strength and pity.”

Other contributors suggest trends.  Michael Chabon (“The Other James”) recalls that “all stories…descend from the fireside tale, told with wolves in the woods all around…” and Frank O’Connor (“An Author in Search of a Subject”) contrasts Katherine Mansfield with “Joyce and Proust, who in their different, more worldly ways were also attempting a magical approach to literature by trying to make the printed page not a description of something that had happened but a substitute for what had happened.”

The book’s essays often seek to make the effect and purpose of reading a visceral experience.  William Gass (“In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life”) describes beginning a book (“How easy it is to enter.  An open book, an open eye, and the first page lifts toward us like a fragrance…”) and Susan Sontag (“Loving Dostoevsky”), on ending one, is “purged, shaken, fortified, breathing a little deeper, grateful to literature for what it can harbor and exemplify.”

On the stakes of literature, Robert Hass (“Lowell’s Graveyard”) finds a metaphor for a poem’s capacity to change life irrevocably: “Poems take place in your life, or some of them do, like the…day the trucks came and the men began to tear up the wooden sidewalks and the cobblestone gutters outside your house and laid down new cement curbs and asphalt streets.”  Charles D’Ambrosio (“Salinger and Sobs”) unapologetically articulates why he reads at all: “Admittedly, wanting practical advice is a pretty primitive idea of what a book should do, but…I didn’t know any better, and probably still don’t.”

Walter Kirn (“Good-bye, Holden Caulfield.  I Mean It.  Go!  Good-Bye!”) reveals the true life of books: “People tell me that the mark of a great book is the way that it sticks with you, stays vivid over time, but I disagree.  The best books fade into the scenery, dissolve into instant backdrop, return to dust.  But that dust is never the same; it’s changed forever.”  And E.B. White, writing of Thoreau, proposes that the reader-writer relationship is much more than a contract: “He is a better companion than most, and I would not swap him for a soberer or more reasonable friend even if I could.”

Sven Birkerts (“On a Stanza by John Keats”) sets out to question the whole business of writing about reading—“Is beauty that has been made out of words impervious to other words?”  To which Phyllis Rose (an excerpt from The Year of Reading Proust) offers an answer: “No matter how full we make our accounts of reading…what we produce is less than the text it describes.”

But of course, what’s at stake in the writing life is more than just chat.  Seamus Heaney (“Learning from Eliot”) reminds us that a writer’s life means “the disciplining of a habit of expression until it becomes fundamental to the whole conduct of a life.”

The Story About the Story is full of such-disciplined souls.

THE STORY ABOUT THE STORY will be available October 1. To see if J.C. Hallman is coming to your town, see our events page.

After thirty years on West Seventeenth Street in Chelsea, Deborah Eisenberg is moving house. The closets have “disgorged” their contents, books tip sideways on their shelves, boxes lie here and there. Eisenberg and her beloved comrade, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, will be moving to a sixth-floor walk-up a few blocks away, a small “palace” of elegant moldings, terraces, a willow tree. Shawn says, in his lovely, wry, and bemused way, “We think it will make our declining years more . . . acceptable.” And the exercise they’ll get apparently makes their doctor “ecstatic.” It’s no accident that some people in sixth-floor walk-ups are ninety years old and going strong.

But even for the casual visitor, such a move seems laden with loss. This apartment, with its air of industrial romance, clarity, and ghostly chic, seems right for Eisenberg’s literary aesthetic: radiant, complex, dense, fierce, and comic. In a closet-sized study here, she has composed some of the most ambitious and memorable works of fiction in the contemporary literary landscape. Like her peers Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, she has predominantly written short stories, and what short stories they are: “Flotsam,” “A Lesson in Traveling Light,” “Under the 82nd Airborne,” “In the Station,” “Someone to Talk To,” “The Custodian,” “Mermaids,” “Revenge of the Dinosaurs.” For them, Eisenberg has received numerous awards: Best American Short Story and O. Henry prizes, a Whiting award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the prestigious Rea Award for Short Story, made to writers who have contributed substantially to the short story form. Her prose is fresh and lyrical and pungent; by any accounting she’s one of the country’s most distinctive stylists, and her capacity to describe fleeting states of mind and heart is unmatched. All her work shows a species of stubborn courage in dissecting the mind, with particular attention to the space where consciousness and conscience overlap. She resists the blandishments of conventional wisdom, particularly those of her own cultured kind; like a diplomat on an eerie planet, she has beautiful manners but takes no creature’s self-presentation as the truth.

Her characters—generally some variation on that class that used to be known as “middle”—are struggling to stay on their moral feet in an America—or an American satellite—that is slippery with hypocrisy, pain, deception, and exploitation. To their confusion and chagrin, the characters often find that they themselves are implicated in the production of the grease beneath their feet. Eisenberg says, “I’ve always been interested in power relations,” which is, perhaps, not unusual for a writer, but the fictional permutations of that interest are so diverse and subtle that their main commonalities may be the sensations they provoke in the reader: venous dilation, prickling, unease, and ferocious enjoyment. In “Windows,” a woman leaves a man who has beaten her, taking with her his child; it’s a decision that’s not really a decision, but a deep, unconscious impulse, and it dooms woman and child to permanent flight and pursuit. In “Tlaloc’s Paradise,” the arrival on her Mexican doorstep of an inquisitive young tourist causes an expatriate American woman to recall with pain the Communist hunting that sent her south decades before. In “Some Other Better Otto,” curmudgeonly New Yorker is nearly crippled by grief for his schizophrenic sister. In “Twilight of the Superheroes,” upwardly mobile millennial youths, contemplating the pleasures of their future from the terrace of a fabulous Manhattan sublet, are presented, one beautiful morning, with the sight of dark figures sprinkling from the destroyed World Trade Center.

Power relations, indeed, but not paraded in front of us with academic righteousness; the subject of interpersonal, intersocial relations is subsumed in Eisenberg’s characteristic and inimitable rendering of thinking, feeling, and perceiving. Her sinuous use of point of view displays—without shrinking—the layered, elusive nature of thoughts and the illusory quality of what we may believe are convictions.

Eisenberg, now sixty-one, is strikingly beautiful in a way that probably didn’t go over big in fifties Winnetka; large-eyed, slight, and leggy in tall boots, she resembles a black swan, a Jazz-Age divorcée, or a European ballet mistress with a haunted past. When we had our conversation in the quiet of the disassembled apartment, she shared my terror of the recording device, and it took a couple minutes to arrange ourselves in a sufficiently oblique relationship to it.

—Anna Keesey

Anna Keesey: It’s one of my missions in life to get more people to read your stories. They’re amazing.
Deborah Eisenberg: Thank you. But it could be an uphill battle.
AK: I mean, a lot of people do read them, but they tend to be the smartest and most well-read people I know. I wonder why the next tier of smart and well-read people don’t read them?
DE: I gather that there is something kind of intimidating, or, not intimidating, but inhospitable about the stories. I mean, I don’t see it, but I know sometimes they’re greeted with impatience: “Why does this have to be so complicated, why can’t you just say it immediately, why do I have to find my way around in the scene?” Well, I never think of myself as presenting obstacles—it’s not a game, in my view. I’m not making a game of some sort.
AK: You’re not purposefully withholding information, to get an advantage . . .
DE: Never. I don’t withhold information to achieve an effect. In fact, I don’t withhold information at all. I don’t hide information that the characters know. I’m trying to be faithful to experience, or sensation. But I think there are readers who are confused by having information come to them in the way it does in my stories—it’s not parceled out in tidy, discrete bits.
I remember asking my friend Craig Lucas, the playwright, to read a story. I don’t remember which one it was, but I do remember that I considered it finished, and it was pretty much what I’d wanted it to be, but I was sending it around and it was being greeted with what I’d call complete incomprehension. Naturally, I wanted to figure out what the problem was, so I enlisted a few people, including Craig, who I consider to be very good readers, without really telling them why. Anyhow, Craig didn’t seem to have any trouble with the story at all, and I asked him why he thought other people might find it so baffling, and he said, “Well, you have to be awake when you read it . . .”
It wouldn’t seem to be much to ask of a reader, but actually, it turns out that a lot of people like—and expect to be able—to read fiction while they’re half asleep. And it’s just not possible to do that with my stories. You might not realize what something is doing in one of the stories, but there isn’t anything in them—in my opinion, of course—that isn’t doing something; I don’t just chuck in idle stuff for the fun of it. And if you miss detail, it will be at a cost to your understanding or enjoyment of a story. Things are placed at angles, and unless you’re receptive to the way a given story is coming toward you, to the way you’re moving through the story, you’re going to miss a lot, and then you’ll be confused, frustrated, and angry.
I think that some people have to slow down quite a lot to read the stories. I’m such a slow reader that it’s a natural pace for me to have to move slowly through a piece of fiction.
AK: Well, the fact is you’re writing short stories, but they are the longest, most complex short stories that anybody is writing. I imagine that even Alice Munro is sitting in her kitchen in Ontario, drinking Nescafé or something, thinking, Wow, this is so fucking complex! I just don’t know if I can follow it! You have these webs of characters, who have all sorts of different, and sometimes obscure, relationships to one another, and each brings in an overt agenda, and a covert agenda, and an unconscious agenda; then, often, they are getting drunk, or getting high, so their perceptions are changing dynamically over the course of the story, and beyond that, we have another level, which is that they’re not just talking about their boyfriends, they’re talking about American privilege, or race, or McCarthyism. Well, they’re sort of talking about those things, and sort of talking about what’s right in front of them. You can see that if the reader’s brain is not firing on all cylinders, he’s not going to get it.
DE: Absolutely. And then the whole story just seems like static, or papier-mâché or something.
AK: Where does that come from? You talk about being a slow reader, or a literal reader, someone who as a child had trouble learning in a conventional way, and I wonder if this deep level of detail—this capacity to stay in a given moment that doesn’t resolve immediately or easily—is an aspect of the way you think? Is it a neurological personality, or is it an aesthetic commitment: this is the way the world needs to be represented, and other ways are fake?
DE: I’m guessing it’s an aesthetic commitment based on a neurological fingerprint. Condition, actually, is the word I think of, but in its broadest sense, not as pathology. It’s very much the way I experience the world—not very streamlined—and therefore feel appropriate and necessary—natural—for me to represent it that way.
AK: People are so used to seeing experience predigested for them, and they expect to see those markers, and when they don’t see any of those—what they’re seeing is an original story—they throw up their reader hands.
DE: Yes, and I’m always perplexed when a reader is perplexed, when a reader says of one of my stories, “What was that?” I think, Well, it’s what I said it was. It’s the thing I said.
AK: One of the things I notice is that the point-of-view characters seem always to have information, perceptual data, flooding over them. They aren’t armored. Their capacity to predigest information, to strong-arm the data away from them, to filter or ignore it, is—
DE: Is compromised.
AK: But they are often the characters who can then pay attention to what people . . .
DE: Actually say and do.
AK: Yes. So when you’re writing a story, and you are rendering that experience—when light and sound are behaving in strange ways, when the character is overwhelmed by sensory perception—are you recalling it, or are you inventing it?
DE: It doesn’t feel like recalling. But it can’t be inventing—I mean, what would you invent a sensory perception out of? So it kind of has to be some sort of mental act related to recall. I mean, there’s the vaguely odd paradox in my life that I can’t actually pay attention to anything, or I don’t seem to be able to pay direct attention, but things do apparently slide in somehow and live vividly in some area that’s usually unavailable to me . . . There’s a news broadcast, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, that I love to listen to in the morning, it’s indispensable, but usually after it’s over I have to ask Wally what the news was!
But if Wally’s not around, I still seem to end up—often much later, and very mysteriously—with a lot of the information, somehow, even though my brain seems to have been just an impermeable obstacle while I was listening. I miss stuff—I’m really like Mr. Magoo, of all the senses. The elephants are walking by, and I don’t notice.
AK: But you’re noticing that the light looks like apple cider.
DE: I don’t notice the elephants, but I do register, say, out of the corner of my mind, some toenails and trunks and fuzz on great big ears. I think something like, Huh, yeah, toenails, trunk, ear fuzz. What seems to be going on in my brain is nothing. Absolutely nothing. And I have no memory at all, which can be kind of alarming. That is, the years have stacked up—I must have had some sort of experience at some point in all that time! But when I’m trying to picture what the light was like in a room at a certain time of day, well, I sort of can picture it—so I’d assume that something of the sort was taken in by my brain at some point, because something like that, a sensory experience, is, I would suppose, uninventable.
Fiction is making stuff up, but I would suppose that it’s making stuff up by analogy. If you’ve never been beaten up but you need to describe what it’s like to be beaten up, you probably won’t have more than the routine difficulties involved in describing something that you have experienced directly. Because you’re almost sure to have some experience in your sensory repertoire, some feeling of being physically violated and shamed—maybe it was tripping over your ice skates when you were a kid—but the knowledge of the experience common to both getting beaten up and tripping over your skates is somewhere in your body.
AK: It also strikes me that you can tell when you move from something that is an authentic analogy into something that is phony or invented or a cliché or somehow received or self-serving—a lot of writers who are good don’t catch themselves there, they aren’t as vigilant. Do you just never go to phony places?
DE: I always go to phony places. For a long time when I’m working on something, I can’t look at what my hand has produced the day or week or month before, because it’s just hideously phony. You’d think that phoniness would be something that’s achieved with work—that the natural would precede the artificial—but it’s actually the opposite for most writers, I think. There are famous exceptions, of course. But generally, unphoniness is what you achieve with work. The first impulse is always a cliché, or something that’s inaccurate. It’s a kind of inaccuracy that is the most powerful siren song, because although it’s very difficult even to approximate something, it is actually possible. And you’re so proud of yourself for having approximated it, you think, Well, that’s pretty good—
AK: That’ll pass.
DE: That’ll pass. I’ve so often had the experience with a gifted student, when I say, “You know, that doesn’t ring true,” and the student says, “I know, I knew it, I knew it.” And they didn’t quite let themselves face it, because it’s so hard. It’s a bit of a habit, a discipline, which I acquired under the tutelage of the wonderful man I live with, who would just never let anything pass—and I feel that the reason it’s hard to acquire is that you’re terrified that you’re never going to be able to get it, really; you’re going to be able to get pretty close, but not close enough—it’s just not going to be adequate no matter how hard you work, and so you allow yourself to think, This will do.
But if you can build up the confidence or patience—simply patience—or steady nerves, you think, Well, I didn’t do it today, and I’m probably not going to be able to do it tomorrow either, but I will be able to do it sooner or later, then you can just relax. I think one of the reasons I’m so slow is because I’m so mortified by all the horrible writing that I do, and instead of just thinking, Okay, I’ll let it be for now and go crashing forward and I’ll get it to work eventually, I lose heart, because I don’t really have the confidence that I will be able to get it to work. You see people who write swiftly and also extremely well. It’s pretty thrilling—you can just tell that they’ve got that kind of nerve.
AK: So you can’t go crashing forward, but you return eventually to the scene of the crime; you linger and start figuring it out again.
DE: Well, unfortunately, I don’t know what something is until I’ve already figured it out! So maybe I’ll always have to work backward like that. I do think that the caliber of a piece of fiction is pretty much proportional to the fiction’s urgency and seriousness of purpose—even if it’s something funny, of course, or apparently light as a feather—and I usually can’t locate the purpose of what I’m doing until I’ve already spent a very long time on it. People say to writers, “How do you find the right word? You’re good at finding the right word, how do you do that?” Well, that is really not the problem. The problem is to think of the thing—what it is that the word needs to represent—and then the word will eventually be there.
AK: So you must believe, then, that eventually all things you experience can be described in words.
DE: I do. I don’t necessarily have all that much evidence in support of this belief, but I do believe it. Although, I would say that over the course of the effort the returns can be substantial in their diminishment. I fervently wish I were a composer or painter or something so that I would be able to render a lot more expeditiously the incredibly ephemeral effects I yearn to render. Writing really feels like you’re down in the quarries with your axe. I grew up with H. T. Lowe-Porter’s translation of “Death in Venice,” which is no doubt wildly inaccurate and wildly flawed, but at the end of the story there’s a description of Aschenbach thinking about writing, that’s translated as, if I’m remembering it correctly, “to liberate from the marble mass of language the slender forms of his art.” Well, I don’t know how much of that is really Mann and how much is Porter—or, at this point, come to think of it, how much is me—but it’s just so accurate! You think of the duomo in Siena, those thin, ethereal marble forms. The thing that wants to be written really does seem to be hidden in the marble mass, and you think—
AK: You think, How is that done? How do you do it without breaking it? How do you know it’s in there?
DE: Yes. And you think, Argh—if I were a composer, or a painter, I could do this in twenty seconds!
AK: And what do the composers and painters of your acquaintance think of that?
DE: Well, I haven’t actually run the theory by them.
AK: Back to the idea of choosing the right word, which we agree is not really the problem, it seems to me that one of the great pleasures of your stories is the outrageous richness of the diction. In “Rafe’s Coat,” for example, there’s line in which “Cookie ratified her little witticism with raucous baying.” I think, Ratify? Raucous? Bay?
DE: I was pleased with that. It seems correct and efficient to me.
AK: There’s a lot of the language of unpleasant physical qualities: things are “gummy,” “bulbous,” “oozing.” And then we have all those Latinate words: witticism, lambent, ratify. So there’s a rich range of diction. And I thought, Well, when did she gather those words? Did she get that from being attached to Wallace Shawn by a string for years?
DE: Well, I was a big reader as a child. As a child, up until about when I was fifteen. And I was very a big talker, when I finally did learn to talk. I was a very late talker. But when I did finally start, evidently I talked in whole paragraphs and plenty of them. I remember being shushed a lot. But apparently I wasn’t about to talk until I could use relative clauses.
AK: You have an older brother. He might have colonized the language thing.
DE: He was much older. Now he’s not, but he was then—six and a half years. And always very articulate. And my mother, I believe, was very exact as well. I myself talked in volume but not necessarily well. I still feel pretty helpless when I try to express the simplest thought without a piece of paper in front of me and a lot of time. But I loved language-y things when I was little. I loved “Pogo,” for example, long before I was old enough to understand it. I mean I loved “Pogo.” It’s always a source of fascination for both me and Wally—on what basis are children enjoying these things they can’t possibly understand?
AK: There’s something about the physical profile of the words on the page that is intriguing. It seems to me that there are some people who have a kind of mind for whom the word, the signifier, doesn’t turn immediately into the signified. They don’t drop instantly through the hieroglyphic into the imagined thing, but rest on the surface of the word for a while. A lot of those people turn out to be poets, of course.
DE: That’s so interesting. That sort of abstraction, which you think has nothing to do with the content, with no value of its own, actually does represent the content in some way. So [gesturing to teapot on table] you think TEEEAAAAPPOTTT. Hmm, what are we saying?
AK: Certain things hit you at a certain age, when you’re developing certain skills cognitively . . .
DE: We both should have been brain scientists. It’s a shame.
AK: So you were a huge reader, and you were gathering these language trinkets that you were not yet deploying. But you were not very compatible with school, not able to remember what you were taught . . . what was that like?
DE: Well, I don’t know. It’s still the same, though. Now, this is an unpleasant story and I can’t remember it very well, but we were having dinner with some people the other evening, some of whom we didn’t know, and there was one guy of whom I kept thinking, Boy, is this guy dumb, he doesn’t understand a single word anybody is saying, it’s unusual to run into somebody this dumb, isn’t it remarkable. And then about ten minutes later I realized that I had no idea what people were saying.
AK: It was you! You were the dumb one!
DE: Well, I think it was both of us, maybe. It was really shocking. I was sitting there and nodding, but I couldn’t understand a single word. Everyone might as well have been saying, “Arf, arf, woof, woof.” It happens to me a lot, I’m sorry to say.
AK: I remember you saying once that you started writing because you had to figure out something to do.
DE: Yes—well, at some point during the years when I was just managing to entrench myself in writing, I heard a young woman, much younger than I was, talking about going to a writing program. She said, “Oh, yeah, I thought maybe I’d try that.” Well, I almost went through the ceiling, because to me writing wasn’t something you’d casually try. It was as if someone had said, “Yeah, stigmata? I Think I’ll give that a whirl.”
I wasn’t thinking of suffering, but I was thinking of exaltation. Writing fiction does seem to me like going on a vision quest, and not something to be taken up lightly in any way. And for me, starting to try, or trying to start to start to try, was a court of last resort. I mean, my life—you see that brick wall [pointing out the window]? Well, that brick wall was here [hand in front of face.] It was upon me. It was kind of a desperate situation. Those are the circumstances in which I started to write.
And of course I couldn’t do it at all. And if I hadn’t been living with a writer, I would have thought, Oh, that’s because I can’t write. I’m not a writer. I have friends of course who are writers who were just born being able to do it, or were able to learn rapidly when the time came. But because I started so late and was so inept, my embryological struggles with writing are still very present in my mind, so I have a lot of sympathy for young writers, particularly those with an acute sense of the difficulty of it. And had I not been living with a writer I would have thought, Well, this is ridiculous, of course I can’t do it. But he was able to inform me that the fact that I was bad at it, that I couldn’t just sit down and toss off a reasonable sentence, let alone a trilogy, bore no relation to whether I was suited to it. And that is precious, precious knowledge. A lot of people don’t—well, how would they know unless they found out from other writers?
AK: Yes—the hothouse. So, did you start writing with the play Pastorale?
DE: No, I started with the story in my first collection called “Days,” which concerns someone quitting a heavy, long-term smoking habit. It’s the only autobiographical thing I’ve ever written, and it is autobiographical because I didn’t think I was writing fiction. I thought I was keeping a journal about going to this wonderful, kind of scruffy gym in a neighborhood YMCA. This was long, long before people considered it, as so many now do, de rigueur to go to a gym—it was pretty novel, in fact. And it was all I could do at that particular point in my life to get out of bed once every month or two and go to the Y with my friend Kathy, so I thought, Here’s this wonderful institution which is going to save my life, and if in fact I am going to try to write some tiny thing, I’ll write about what it’s like to go there.
And I was completely unequal to the task. Wally was encouraging me, but my threshold for frustration was low, very low—I kept tearing up what I’d written. After a very long time—I’m guessing about a year and a half, I gave what I’d done to Wally, and I was very excited about having filled up some pages, but very uncertain about what I’d filled them up with. And Wally said, “Well, you haven’t written a factual piece about the Y, you’re writing fiction, so now turn it into fiction.” So I was in a state of intense frustration and anguish, and I spent another year or so turning it into fiction. And I gave it to him, and he said, “Great, you’ve turned it into fiction, but it’s lost its life. Do it again.” And I thought, Well, which of us am I going to kill? But I wrote it again, and he said, “Wonderful—you’ve written a story!” It took about three years, altogether.
AK: I have a question about that story. The character comes to understand, and says, that the point of life is to have a good time, to find out what one wants to do, and start doing it. In the context of the story we understand how it’s a revelation to her, because she has told us that previously, whenever she had a feeling, or something to say, she stuck a cigarette in her mouth and inhaled smoke instead of speaking. So it seems as if she has, actually, no self. Did that experience characterize you? Was it an exaggeration of something you experienced?
DE: Far from being an exaggeration, it was an understatement—to the most remarkable degree, you would hardly believe it. There was this little prisoner waiting inside a shroud of smoke, inside the personality that had been able to survive with the aid of that smoke—a very angry, starved little creature—so when the façade crumbled because I stopped smoking, the creature stepped forth, without a shell, without skin, totally unformulated, and was just this volcanic, lavalike, terrifying, inchoate, dangerous, endangered thing.
AK: How old were you?
DE: I was thirty. I’d been smoking since I was fifteen. By that time I was a very heavy smoker, and I loved it, I loved every cigarette I ever had in my life. I can practically remember their names. Stopping was like a death. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop by exercising my willpower, so I made it non-negotiable.
AK: How did you do that?
DE: I decided that I would never, ever, do it again. Never, ever. No, worse—there was no “never again” to contemplate; the future was closed as far as smoking and I were concerned. Because I knew that if I had to rely on willpower to stop smoking, I would lose. I went to a hypnotist, who taught me how to hypnotize myself, but there was something about the physical sensation that I couldn’t stand. I just couldn’t bear it, so instead of using that technique or using my nonexistent willpower, I just put smoking behind me.
AK: So all you had to do was suffer, not decide.
DE: Yes. It was horrible. I was in mourning—not only for the fantastic consolation of nicotine but also I suppose for the person, the smoker, I had just killed, as well as the person inside the smoker whom I had allowed to be stillborn long before. And here was this new person, entirely unequipped. Probably if someone who had known me in kindergarten saw me now, he’d say, “You’re exactly the same.” And in many fundamental ways I’m sure I am. But in some critical ways I’m very different. Or maybe I’m substantially the same as I was in kindergarten, but very different from the way I was at sixteen.
AK: It was a challenge to know yourself, to act on your own behalf, that sort of thing?
DE: I’d say maybe acting on my own behalf. Authenticity of experience was never the problem. Autonomy was. It was an incredible problem. A lot my experiences were fairly bitter, because I was so reduced, so reduced and rather damaged. Have you ever seen or read the play Kaspar by Peter Handke? Well, I don’t remember it much, so I’m talking about something I don’t really remember, but it’s about Kaspar Hauser, who was a feral child. It’s very beautiful. Handke has a lot of views that I consider pretty loopy, or anyhow, I don’t agree with them, but what a writer! I mean, that guy is fabulous. So, there’s a phrase that might be reiterated for half an hour, or maybe it just occurs a few times, but Kaspar says, in the translation I encountered, anyhow, “I want to be someone like somebody else was once.” Or maybe it’s “I want to be a person like somebody else was once.” I never really felt like a human being. But just now I’m embarked on this huge apartment move, and the other day I was calling Con-Ed to change the account, and calling the movers, and I thought, Wait a minute, I am someone like somebody else was once. When did that happen? Because I sure wasn’t always someone like somebody else was once.
AK: You turned into a person who could make phone calls. I’ve probably told you this story before, about when we were all at Iowa and Denis Johnson was there briefly. At the Mill one night he talked about how grateful he was to have married his wife, and we said, “Why is she great?” and he said, “She can talk to those people.” We said, “What people?” and he said, “Those people who call on the phone about the mortgage. I can just say to them, ‘You’re not human,’ and hand the phone to her.”
DE: I think he’s the funniest person alive. I’m sure I’ve told you that I used to follow him around at Iowa?
AK: Just to hear what he said?
DE: Just to—that luster, to travel in its wake or something. I’d see him at the grocery store and say, “Denis, Denis, hey, hi, Denis, can I carry your beer, Denis?” Well, I’m sure it wasn’t beer because he wasn’t drinking, but potatoes or whatever. And you know he didn’t have a clue who I was, I think, that he and I were teaching in the same program—I was just some weirdo following him around the grocery store.
AK: Let’s see. You wrote “Days” and then what came next?
DE: What happened next was that my friend who appears in that story as Kathy—her name is Kathy, and she’s a writer and director, Kathleen Tolan—said she wanted to direct a reading of that story at the Public Theatre. And I said, “No, no, it belongs on the page, blah blah,” and she said, “Well, what kind of a friend are you?” So I said okay, and she got a wonderful actress, Karen Ludwig, to do the reading. So a little later Joe Papp, who had initiated the Public and ran it, called me up and said, “I’d like you to write a play.” And I said, “Well, Joe, I can’t write a play.” And he said, “Well, I’ll pay you.” I said, “Oh, that changes things considerably.”
But I had a very good waitressing job at the time—I mean, good in that nobody had bothered to fire me, and believe me, no one else would have hired me, so I was very reluctant to give it up. And Joe said, “Drop a couple of nights a week, and I’ll pay you, and you’ll write.” I was totally panicked. He said, “You’ll come in and show me what you’re writing.” And I said, “Oh sure, of course,” but I never show anybody what I’m writing and I wasn’t about to then, and of course, actually, for a long time there was nothing. Wally basically moved out so I could just be a lunatic, doing it.
AK: He’s the best man in the world.
DE: He’s the best man in the world. So after five months, bonk, there was this play.
AK: But it can’t be true that bonk, there was this play. Was there . . . fragmentary chaos that suddenly resolved into a play? All those funny characters, who are turning coffee cups upside down over dead mice and dropping acid accidentally—
DE: There’s a large autobiographical component to that one, too. Actually, I sort of tried to write something as a story that then became that play and partly a different story—very different—later. And, really, it was remarkably bonk. I’ve never written anything so fast. Except for “Revenge of the Dinosaurs,” which I wrote very, very quickly, for me, that is, over a few months. But with that story I had real clarity of purpose from the outset.
So I gave this play to Wally and he said, “Gosh! Gee! Great, a play—but I don’t get it.” And I said, “Believe me, this is really good.” I don’t know why I had such confidence in it, but I did—complete, serene confidence. I said, “Don’t worry, you’re in good hands, it works, it’s good.” So then I brought it to Joe, and Joe said, “I hate this play.” And I said, “But, Joe, it’s really good!”
And Joe loved to be the guy dishing out favors, so he was infuriated at having to be the bad guy. It drove him sort of wild, so with every second that passed while I sat in his office with him, he became more and more vehement about how much he hated that play. But I didn’t mind at all. I just found it hilarious, for some reason. So Wally said, “Why don’t you invite the people you work with at the bar to read it.” We got a bunch of food and everyone came over, and afterward Wall said, “I see. I see.”
AK: He got it.
DE: Yes, because it did work, after all. And by the time I’d written the play, I’d begun to think, This is great. This is really fun. That feeling you can’t get from anything but making art. And I’m very grateful to Joe, because if he hadn’t encouraged me—of course as it turned out, he was trying to discourage me, but it was too late by then—I very much doubt I would have kept on.
AK: Making the thing that no one else has written before, because no one else could, because only you can.
DE: Yes. And that’s every writer’s birthright.
AK: I suddenly had a vision of a writer taking her hand off and putting it on the street for everyone to look at. It’s that disturbing, that real, and that much ours.
DE: Yes, that’s absolutely right.
AK: But after having the pleasure of that reading of the play, you went back to writing stories. You were living with a playwright, and you were around actors and directors and playwrights a lot, and you’d had that communal experience, and yet you went back to the more solitary world of writing stories.
DE: Yes. You might well wonder why, because of course theater is so much more fun, a million times more fun. But for one thing, I don’t have the nerve for plays. It really takes steady nerve. You can’t imagine the terror of production—all the things that can go wrong with people that just won’t go wrong with a pencil and eraser; your pencil won’t get sick, for example, or be cast in a movie during rehearsals. It’s exhilarating, but you have to be strong. Also, I don’t think that the form is that compatible with the way I tend to look at things. What I do is a little fragile for theater. I like to control things much more than you can control a play.
AK: I would say that in a play you can’t render consciousness, the elusive quality of consciousness, in the same way.
DE: That’s it, that’s exactly right. You really can’t do that so well in theater, though of course there are many things you can do that you can’t do in fiction.
AK: Was it produced fairly soon after?
DE: No, it sort of floated around. I sort of forgot about it. As far as I was concerned, I’d had the fun, though it turned out there was so much more fun to be had. Carole Rothman, who I knew a little bit, called me up and said, “I’d like to direct your play,” and I said, “Great! Just don’t change anything.” And she said, “Well, er—don’t be ridiculous, plays are always changed.” I said, “Not mine.” But I did end up changing it a little bit.
AK: What was it like to see it?
DE: Rehearsals were the most fun I ever had in my life. In fact Christine Estabrook, who played Rachel, said, “You’ve just got to stop laughing! You’re disrupting rehearsals!”
AK: “We can’t have a maniac in the house.”
DE: Yes. I mean I couldn’t believe what they were doing. I couldn’t believe what they were doing. They were so funny. I was screaming. Because the writer can’t imagine anything as concretely as the person who is going to get up on stage—it’s going to be their voice, their body, their rhythms of speech, of breathing, of moving—the particular quality of their concentration.
It was amazing. But I don’t enjoy sitting in the audience. I really hate it. Just having other people experience your work. Just to be sitting there noting how other people are responding—you don’t have to watch people reading your book!
AK: And you’re so close to other people, when you’re in a theater. So, I’m interested in what order the stories were written in. I think it might be of interest to posterity—
DE: I’m glad you put it that way.
AK: —and so what came after “Days”?
DE: “What It Was Like, Seeing Chris” was the second. That’s a story I’m pleased with. Now I see lots of things that are clumsy about it, but I’m still pleased with it.
AK: Is that common? When you look back, are the stories meaningful? Do you remember their composition?
DE: These days I almost never look back. I did at first, but not now. And I remember very, very little about making each story, though I do remember certain things about certain stories.
But early on, there was no pressure on me at all—I had all the time in the world. “A Lesson in Traveling Light” was my third story. The fourth one, which I don’t like, was “Rafe’s Coat.” But it was the one that got my first book published. I was Laurie Colwin’s waitress, and she kept asking me what I did, and I kept telling her I was a waitress, which was absolutely true, but then there was a review of my play in the Times, which, incidentally, compared my writing to hers. So Laurie, who was a wonderfully generous and lively person, demanded to see something I’d written, and I had just finished “Rafe’s Coat,” so I gave it to her, and she passed it on to her editor, Alice Quinn, who liked it, and offered to publish a collection when the time came. But in fact, I had no interest in making a collection then. I was amazed that I could even produce a piece of paper with a mark on it.
AK: But “Rafe’s Coat” does have some of the funniest things in the world in it. Doesn’t Heather, the soap opera actress, describe something or someone as being like “a stack of fish on a plate” or “fish on a plate”? And it does have Cookie ratifying things with raucous baying. What don’t you like about it?
DE: First of all, that quality of consciousness that you mentioned. The story’s more superficial. I mean, it doesn’t attempt not to be superficial, it is the way it was supposed to be—
AK: It’s about manners, and so on—
DE: It’s sort of brittle. The narrator is obviously a very self-deceptive person, and that was the fun of it, keeping up that big edifice, while also making it transparent. It was fun. Well, it wasn’t that much fun to write, but it was interesting. I think I needed to write it, to teach myself some technical skills.
AK: And then?
DE: Then “Transactions in a Foreign Currency,” then “Broken Glass.”
AK: There are certain sorts of women in some of the stories—perhaps they attract each other, or create each other—a confident, rapacious woman and a nervous, naïve, inchoate sort of woman. I’m thinking of Cinder and Charlotte in “Flotsam,” Amanda and Jill in “The Robbery,” Marcia and Patty in “A Cautionary Tale,” and Melanie and Rachel from Pastorale.
DE: Well, I suppose they come from . . . me. I mean, thankfully things change when one gets older, but I remember being extremely attentive to, dazzled by, that sort of competence, that sort of confidence.
AK: How did your political consciousness grow?
DE: I’m not sure that it really has grown. I’d say that maybe what you’re calling a political consciousness is just an amalgamation of a few attitudes I’ve had from very early on that have been sort of forcibly refreshed from time to time.
For one thing, I was always rather acutely aware of inequities of various sorts, imbalances of power. I think many children are—after all, they don’t have much power, and most children aren’t in very benign situations, in my view. But that feeling never abated for me—the painful awareness of inequity—perhaps it was an element that my family was Jewish in a Midwestern suburb that was not Jewish—and I think it’s a simple jump from noting the fact of inequities to noting that different circumstances are bound to create different attitudes toward the same things.
That sounds moronic, but actually it’s something that has to be learned over and over again, at least in my case, because it’s really easy to lose sight of. It’s very difficult to remember that not only are other people experiencing things that are quite different from what you’re experiencing but also that the difference is important and it doesn’t go away when you yourself stop thinking about it. And the more privileged you are, the more comfortable you are, the more obtuse you’re likely to be about the experience that other people are having, the fact that the experience of other people is different from yours and every bit as real.
I’ve always—always—been marked by my class. I mean, there are things I will never know about the world that any factory worker knows. Even when I’ve done menial or degrading or unpleasant work, even when I’ve felt that my financial prospects are disastrous, I’ve always had a big cushion of a middle-class background and middle-class expectations.
As a child, I had a rather tortured relationship with the people who were known as “the help.” My mother did not, possibly because she had grown up poor, or relatively so. She was untroubled, I suppose, because she was just hiring people to help her do the work she couldn’t get done by herself. But I felt awful about it. I suppose I had some awareness that I’d been born inalterably on the winning side of certain relationships.
Then when I was seventeen, I had the great good fortune to be sort of accidentally involved in an amazing civil rights thing. It had to do with the Highlander Folk School, a really wonderful institution, founded by Myles Horton, who had initially been very active in labor issues with the Cumberland miners. His son Thorstein, named for Thorstein Veblen, I believe, went to the same boarding school that I did, and he invited me to come down to Tennessee in the summer and join in on a project. The school had been burned down some time before, and we were in the Smokies, building a campsite, and the local police came up in the middle of the night and arrested us and took us to jail.
But the fact is, they wanted to kill us. I was charged with “assimilated intercourse,” which meant interracial sex shows or something. Well, I was seventeen, and it was about two in the morning, and we were all asleep after a hard day of work, and I wasn’t having any kind of intercourse. They took us down the mountain into town, and into jail, and in a couple of weeks there was an actual trial. And when the cops realized I was a minor, they transferred the charge to the one other white girl, who was eighteen.
As I remember, “assimilated intercourse” was a hanging charge, or anyhow, someone said it was, but fortunately it was completely obvious that the cops weren’t even trying to make any of the charges, which were plentiful, look legitimate. And somehow we were all let off with fines. They had refrained from killing us, apparently, in the first place, to make an example of us, but looking back at it from this vantage, that trial feels like a triumph of the justice system. I mean, when one thinks of the privatizations of prisons and immigrants in detention camps and the undermining of habeas corpus, to say nothing of Guantanamo and “extraordinary renditions” and so on, that courtroom seems to have represented a tiny, fleeting golden age of American justice.
AK: What did they look like, the people who arrested you?
DE: I don’t remember. That is, in my memory they were wearing Klan sheets with their badges pinned on them, but I simply can’t believe my memory is accurate. I’m pretty sure my memory of the sheriff’s daughter is reasonably accurate, though. She was about to go to teacher’s college or something. It was the early sixties, you know, but it could have been the forties. She had blond ringlets, and a blue gingham dress. And she sat demurely in the courtroom and took notes.
AK: That’s amazing. What happened? Did your parents come down?
DE: No, actually. Things were terrible then with my mother, and had been for a long time—everything she did drove me absolutely crazy, everything I did drove her absolutely crazy. It happened, also, to be the summer my brother was getting married, and everyone was very anxious that the wedding go smoothly. Which it did, actually—it was lovely. But anyhow, I was allotted my one phone call, and I called my mother and said,“Hi, Ma, guess I can’t get home yet—I’m in jail!” and she said, “You’re coming home right now.” And I said, “Er, well, I can’t—” and she said, “No excuses.”
AK: She didn’t understand.
DE: She didn’t. Neither did I, really. I thought, I’m from Winnetka, nothing can happen to me! It was the next summer that the three boys [Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney] were murdered in Mississippi.
But the especially valuable lessons from that experience were reserved for my return home. Because when I got back, lots of people expressed interest or curiosity about what things were like where I had been, and when I told them, they flatly didn’t believe it. I had been there and they hadn’t, but they didn’t believe me. Of course there were certainly those who knew that real courage was required of black people in the South—and the North, for that matter—but for the most part it was clear that this fact only retained its reality for a moment at a time, and the rest of the time it was like a movie that was over. That was true for me, too. There were moments when I had some insight that the life of another person went on coherently from one moment to the next, but for the most part, the lives of people I’d just met would be vividly real to me one moment, and the next moment it was as if no experience but my own was legitimate, as if there was in fact no experience but my own. Mine was the only experience that was wholly real to me for more than a minute or so, but at least I’d learned that. I mean, at least I’d learned how much I wasn’t taking in.
AK: Then later you went to Central America with Wall, which shows up in both of your work, in stories like “Broken Glass” and “Holy Week” and in Wall’s play The Fever. Did you go in the eighties?
DE: In the late eighties and early nineties.
AK: I always notice that your most caustic characterizations are of Americans abroad, people whose only interest in another land is where to get a good steak and how to relieve the locals of their indigenous textiles.
DE: Yes. And I include myself in that characterization. I mean, I’m one of them.
AK: What happened there? And what did you come back with, besides textiles? What did you come home knowing that you hadn’t known?
DE: Nothing. Well, except for a great deal of information about where, exactly, I was situated in the workings of the planet, and what, exactly, was being done to certain people on my behalf. But in essence I’d been horrifyingly reminded of how parochial I am, of how difficult it is to learn, if you’re in a comfortable position, what went into the construction of that position, and how extremely important it is to make an effort to learn what that was—where you fit in.
It’s always a shock. It can never be assimilated, at least if you’re reasonably privileged, reasonably comfortable, you can never fully understand or accept it, that your particular experience is neither inevitable nor dominant in the world. People vary of course in their capacity to comprehend the reality of someone else, to comprehend the humanity of somebody else. Did you see the photograph of the Rutgers women’s basketball team in the Times a few days ago?
AK: They were so beautiful!
DE: They were so beautiful. And the expressions on their faces—of such serious, painful, judicious reflection! And it was so fascinating to hear Don Imus, in contrast, trying to “explain” himself. He couldn’t really understand what the fuss was about. He seemed genuinely confused that anyone would censure him, because in his mind he had just been making jokes about things that weren’t real: women.
I don’t know, I have no way of evaluating, but I do suspect that our particular culture has made itself unusually expert in dehumanizing other people and instructing people how to estrange from themselves the experience of people not themselves. Or the experience of people who are themselves, actually. For example, what about this prevalent, hair-raisingly weird attitude a lot of people seem to have that they themselves aren’t real unless they’re on TV! That their lives must be reflected in order to be actual—a complete inversion between internal and external. Television has been a very powerful instrument, in many ways, in colluding in this thing, a sort of derangement of humanness, that does have rather immense political consequences. And, yes, when we returned from Central America and were asked what was going on, we were received with a chorus of, “No. No. That’s not happening. You didn’t see that, you didn’t hear that. You didn’t understand the context, you were naïve.”
AK: That willful ignorance shows up in a number of stories: “Broken Glass,” “Under the 82nd Airborne,” “Holy Week,” all terrifying stories that take up the problem of not knowing what one should know. And the people who do know, who are able to hear, are driven almost crazy by what they know. They fall apart, their speech falls apart, they decompensate. Like Beale, in “Someone to Talk To,” and Susan in the “Robbery.”
DE: We live in a bubble. Everybody outside it, outside this tiny milieu, knows exactly what’s going on. Yet unless we happen to meet or know someone who lives outside it, or we have a special motivation to find out, we’ll be ignorant, no matter how “well educated” we are or if we read the Times every day front and back. Well, that will only embroider your ignorance, really. You really have to ferret out the information. When we went to Central America, I realized that a six-year-old child in El Salvador, a six-year-old, knew exactly who I was, and what I represented. I didn’t know. I was there trying to figure it out. But the child knew.
AK: What did you represent?
DE: The very day we arrived in San Salvador, in fact, a huge graffito appeared on the U.S. Embassy. Like a lot of U.S. embassies I’ve seen, it was up on a hill, like a fortress, surrounded by a high wall and barbed wire, and so on, but someone had managed to get up there and paint, in Spanish, of course, “In this building is planned the torture and murder of the Salvadoran people.” The next time we saw the embassy it was gone. I imagine the person who’d gotten the words up there didn’t last so long, either.
If one is American one has to be very resourceful, very motivated, to find out what’s going on, because you won’t find out from TV, and rarely will you read something in the mainstream media that conflicts with the views useful to the corporations that own the mainstream media. There are lots of people very motivated not to tell you what’s happening. Well, look at the war. Billions of dollars going “to the war,” but what can that possibly mean? “The war” is an abstraction. Where, actually, does all that money go? It’s not going to the soldiers. They’re not adequately armed, they’re not protected, they’re poorly paid, they’re poorly cared for, they’re not underinsured, when they come home wounded or disabled or traumatized, the treatment they receive is very inadequate, or they’re actually disqualified for treatment. All that money is not going to the soldiers, so where is it going? It’s going to buy airplanes, tanks, bombers—all sorts of instruments of annihilation that are manufactured by U.S. corporations. It’s going to private military contractors like Blackwater, mercenary outfits, in short, which are run by private corporations from the U.S. A large amount of it is going to “reconstruction.” That is, to huge corporations like Halliburton, and Bechtel, to reconstruct—or, it seems, to not reconstruct—at great profit, what has been destroyed by the army and the airplanes and the tanks and so on that similar corporations manufacture.
AK: So there’s no motivation not to destroy, when they profit from the reconstruction.
DE: Exactly. And now of course the big joke is that Halliburton is going to Dubai, where they won’t have to pay U.S. taxes. So, in short, you and I, with our U.S. tax payments, who are funding profit-making corporations to knock things down and get people killed. Because also, when you think about it, who are these “insurgents”? What does that word mean in this context? It means people who want the U.S. to get out of their country and stop destroying it.
AK: That truth, and the fact that we don’t hear about it, or listen for it, fuels “Revenge of the Dinosaurs.” Everyone is quarreling about her own little agenda, and no one is noticing that Nana is dying, and people are getting beaten up on the street, and the TV news is showing explosions. Nana, who once wrote a book on economics, on currency, is no longer compos mentis. And she’s the only one who would have been able to look at the violence on television and say, “That is about money. That is money, there.”
DE: Yes.
AK: Is it possible to be an American and live an ethical life?
DE: Well, that’s the question. For the middle class—there used to be a huge middle class, but of course there hardly is one any longer—if you vote, and pay taxes, you’re contributing to all kinds of destruction. Our money enriches big corporation and kills poor people at home and elsewhere. As we sit here, people are being killed, with our money. But what is there to do? On, in fact, Amy Goodman’s show, I heard an interview with a woman who led a group of tax resisters, all of whom withhold portions of their taxes on moral grounds. As it happened, I was just on my way uptown to see my tax accountant, and make out my tax checks. Well, the woman was saying, “Nothing that can happen to a tax resister in the U.S. can possibly compare to the horror that we’re inflicting on people in Iraq.” And I thought, That’s so true. I’m going to go tell my accountant that I’m going to withhold my taxes. Then Amy Goodman asked her what happens to tax resisters. And the woman said, “Well, some property has been confiscated—some of our members’ homes.” And after another moment she said, “And some of our members are in prison.” And I thought, Plan B.
I know she’s right, I passionately share her views, but not passionately enough to emulate her courage. So, in regard to your question—I think that I, and the overwhelming majority of people in this country would be considered perfectly nice, decent, upright people, if we happened to be living in other countries. But our private and local selves are overshadowed, now, by our public and global selves. I’m talking now about people like myself, who would be considered fiscally stable. It gets more complicated, obviously, when you think about the rapidly growing population of the impoverished. I can’t do anything about my disproportionate power—none of us seem to be able to do anything about our disproportionate power unless it’s something extreme almost to the point of self-immolation in one way or another. So the circumstances of our life, the historical circumstances, decree that we’re villains, no matter what our convictions or character, unless we’re willing to risk a lot more than I, at least, have thus far had the courage to risk.
AK: What I really don’t understand, though, is how people like Dick Cheney can be so wrong, how they can not believe in the personhood of others. They don’t understand the least thing about human feelings. I had a cab driver recently who knew more than Cheney—he said to me, “You come in my house, I throw roses on you?” meaning, of course, how ridiculous it was to invade another country and expect to be greeted as “liberators.” But Cheney—he has children, he has daughters. How can he not know that other people are real?
DE: That would be the one to figure out. Because if you could understand Dick Cheney, you could understand everything. I mean, I think it’s very likely that Dick Cheney had no expectation of being greeted as a liberator—though I think there were people in the administration, I’d guess including George Bush, who were sufficiently ill-informed to believe that they would be—but I don’t imagine that Cheney cared in the least how he’d be greeted.
AK: We’re skipping over a lot—the stories that use Europe as a setting and a force, stories that use addictions as settings and forces, extraordinary stories about children and young people like “The Custodian” and “Mermaids” and “The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor,” but I want to ask you about the most recent collection, Twilight of the Superheroes. I notice that in the title story you come back to the division of the story into pieces that you used way back when, in “Days.” And the web of characters we’re used to seeing gets even more broad. Did you—did those fragments have anything to do with the enormous intensity of the material [the immediate experience of 9/11]?
DE: I don’t know. I don’t think that was intentional. The broad range of characters is what I needed, I think, to represent a range of experiences. What I was focused on was representing what that huge event felt like in the moment before all the reactions inevitably set in. What was it like before we knew that this thing would come to be called “9/11”? I was in Virginia on that day, and as I remember, my class was ultimately cancelled, but not before a number people had gathered. I think I said, “We just don’t know what this is—if it’s one horrible event that will be swallowed by history or whether it’s the beginning of something.” And one of the students said, “Yes, it might be the beginning of terrorist attacks all over the country.” And that had never crossed my mind, strangely enough. I was thinking with apprehension of the retaliations and the political hay that would be made of it—and the things that I feared obviously came to pass.
AK: I’m curious about Kate, the protagonist of “Like It or Not” in the recent collection. Along with perhaps Lynnie in “The Custodian,” she’s one of the most conventionally middle-American characters you’ve explored. Who is she to you? And how and why did it occur to you to send her to Europe?
DE: I don’t remember how—possibly I was just utilizing some stuff that was ready to hand, a fairly recent trip to Italy—and I don’t know why. I suppose I just needed her to have an experience that might painfully reawaken a longing for a romance, and Europe is very good for that.
AK: I’d also like to hear you talk about “Some Other, Better Otto,” in this recent collection. It strikes me as perhaps the most intimate of your stories, the most undiluted portrait of a person in persistent, insoluble emotional pain. How did that story start, and grow?
DE: I’m very happy with your characterization of that story. There have been lots of readers who just feel that Otto is an unpleasant person, which I certainly don’t. All I remember about the genesis of that story is that it started very unfruitfully with a couple, or two couples—in some scrawlings they were heterosexual couples and in others they weren’t. It went nowhere, and I put it aside. But then from its ashes another story arose later, and that one started with my feelings about the sister—with Otto’s feelings about her.
AK: Do you feel your project or projects as a writer have substantially changed, in the years you’ve been writing?
DE: I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. I suppose my effort has been a consistent one—I just keep trying to make something out of words that you’d think couldn’t be made out of words.

The Story About the Story is an attempt to correct all that.

One of the reasons anthologies prove problematic is the whole business of permissions.  I went into the process of obtaining permissions for this book with a degree of curiosity and the tenacity of a visionary.  But if I’d known what I was getting myself into I probably never would have started.  The permissions labyrinth is a maze manned by a squadron of unruly Minotaurs, and I quickly found that as a single Theseus I wasn’t going to be able to find my way through it alone.  After about a month of phone calls I was at the end of my string, as it were.

The problem with The Story About the Story was multi-fold.  When we write about reading, we want to cite things, to use examples—these become permissions issues, too.  Furthermore, for an anthology like this to have any chance at succeeding, it needs to have the possibility of getting to foreign markets, at least the UK (a number of the writers in The Story About the Story are British—from Woolf and Wilde to De Botton and Dyer).  This meant that each essay actually wound up requiring multiple permissions.  The prize for most went to Edward Hirsch.  The short selection from How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry required two permissions for the text itself (US and UK), two permissions for the Plath poem it explicates, and a permission for a few lines from poet Miklós Radnóti.

Five permissions for one essay.  The average permission for The Story About the Story was $150.00  Thirty-one essays in the book.

The budget was $3500.00.

I’m not complaining!  True, I wound up in the red on The Story About the Story, but I had never hoped to make a profit, and money wasn’t the biggest problem I encountered.  The biggest problem was a new descent into the Kafkaesque.

Probably the most famous essay reprinted in The Story About the Story is Vladimir Nabokov’s take on Kafka, “The Metamorphosis.”  Or, rather, “‘The Metamorphosis.’”  Remember that.  Perhaps for ease of use, or perhaps frustrated that “Franz Kafka” becomes an anagram for absolutely nothing else (including any number of words), Nabokov gave his wonderful lecture on Kafka’s story the same title as the story itself.  He probably didn’t realize that this would become a well-laid man-trap in a maze already overpopulated with monsters.

I won’t name the publisher who actually wound up owning the rights to Nabokov’s essay (though with a little imagination, it’s easy enough to figure out), but trouble began almost as soon as I wrote to them about this piece and couple others.  Alas, they rejoined, we don’t control the rights to Nabokov’s “The Metamorphosis.”  That was controlled by an agency in the UK, which after a few additional calls turned out to be a subsidiary of Random House UK.

Ah, silly me, I thought.  I’m such a novice.  But fortunately I have good, informed people to help me along on my path.  I wrote to Random House UK.

They wrote back almost at once, kindly explaining that Vladimir Nabokov had not actually written “The Metamorphosis,” Franz Kafka did, and it was published in a book called In the Penal Colony in 1910.

I took a closer look at the email from the initial permissions department.  They had no idea what they were doing.

I called to explain.  Nabokov’s essay on Kafka was about a story called “The Metamorphosis,” and the essay was, in an admittedly confusing fashion, also called “‘The Metamorphosis.’”   They did in fact, I said, control the rights to the essay.

No, we don’t, they said.  There followed a somewhat tense exchange.  Nabokov’s essay “The Metamorphosis,” they insisted, had first been published in a book by Franz Kafka called In the Penal Colony in 1910.  That was the information they had.

I should have just run with it from there – but I didn’t.  Why, I argued, would an essay by a writer two generations further on, an essay about a Kafka story, appear in the same book in which the story was first published?  How was that even possible?

There was silence on the other end of the line.

I put the pieces together for them, using my new knowledge of the permissions maze.  What seemed most likely was that Nabokov himself had been required to seek permission for the sections he wanted to quote from Kafka.  The story was public domain now, but it wasn’t when Nabokov was writing, so the agency that was eventually sold to Random House UK gave permission for the excerpts, not the essay.

We’ll look into it, they said.  A few hours later I received a confirmation that they did, in fact, control rights to the essay.  I would receive a contract shortly.

Victory!  Castle doors open wide!  Acquittal in the trial of the century!

In a few days, the contract arrived.  For the English language rights in the United States alone, they asked $6,190.00.  As well, I’d need to obtain the translation rights for the excerpts Nabokov had originally used.

For a moment, I had what is commonly known as a “hissy fit.”  Then I called my agent, Devin McIntyre.  I can’t do this, I said.  I need to quit.  This is insane.  Devin did what he always does when I call in a panic, ranting about something.  He said nothing.  He knew his job was simply to listen.  (I assume he was playing computer solitaire.)  He was better than a chatty Kafka character, but not by much.

I called Lee Montgomery at Tin House.  I begged her for help.  She agreed, but reminded me that my agent had sold Tin House the book on the assurance that I would do all the legwork myself.  He’d never told me this.  (To his credit, he sacrificed his agent’s cut of our advance to the cause of permissions.  Never has an agent worked so hard for absolutely nothing.)

About forty-eight hours later I was calm again.  That was really just the beginning.  I started the process of talking them down to a reasonable price, which took a while.  And I still needed both the translation rights (US and UK), and the UK rights for the essay itself, and then there was the whole hassle of the drawings that Nabokov had made of Kafka’s beetle, and of the inside of the Samsa flat.  Images in a book are a whole different maze with a new set of Minotaurs.

But it all got done.  And there aren’t too many of Nabokov’s words on the page.  And it’s reasonably priced.  And there is handsome art.  And you can use it for a class, or just read it—because it’s great fucking stuff.

And there are thirty other essays in the book, besides.

Beware: this song will be stuck in your head for the rest of the afternoon!

And be sure to check out Steve’s story in issue #40, “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched,” which don’t worry, doesn’t involve any creepy sexual stuff, I mean, other than the fact that it was written by this guy.

The problem with literary criticism is not that critical actions conducted on literary texts do them damage—the problem is the way in which critical actions tend to be conducted.  There’s a basic contradiction built into the system: dry, soul-deadening, derivative, entirely dispassionate prose is used to dissect literature that is supposed to be inspiring, passionate, creative, and unique.  Worse, this critical doublespeak has become the way in which we expose literature to new readers, to kids.  The insidiousness with which literary criticism has infected the culture and targeted children recalls the basic marketing strategy of religious cults and tobacco companies.  The present low status of serious reading should not surprise anyone.  The Story About the Story wants to believe that this hobbling of our collective soul is like a smoker’s lungs: if we quit the bad habit of setting out to write poorly about good writing we can heal ourselves.

The collected essays approach the problem in a number of ways.

James Wood, in an essay from The Broken Estate, offers a novel description of “interrogating” texts.  The interrogation strategy—familiar to anyone who has attended an English department meeting or scholarly conference—is as worthy of Edmund Wilson as Abu Ghraib:  “Having been caught out,” Wood writes, “the poem is triumphantly led off in golden chains; the detective writes up his report in hideous prose, making sure to flatter himself a bit, and then goes home to a well-deserved drink.”

Not all in The Story About the Story are quite so angry.

As a schoolboy, Seamus Heaney (“Learning from Eliot”) was left scrambling for metaphors to describe initial exposure to T.S. Eliot.  “But, of course,” he laments, “we were not encouraged to talk like that in English class.”

Wallace Stegner (“On Steinbeck’s story ‘Flight’”) notes that literature swarms with interconnected images, but warns against a tendency to go beyond simply noting and enjoying those connections.  “The ingredients are all there, and must be noticed, for they are the literal instruments of both truth and suspense.  But let us not take them apart, and let us not imagine that when we have become aware of them we have ‘explained’ the story, or laid bare the mystery of its composition.”

Which is what Robert Hass worries about in “Lowell’s Graveyard.”  Not only do literary critics attempt to explain poems, he claims, they project meaning where there is none.  Wondering whether “In the Quaker Graveyard” contains imagery of crucifixion as redemption, Hass decides that “three or four pages of [tedious] theological explication could put it there, but it isn’t in the poem.”

Some take the problem downright personally.

Virginia Woolf (“An Essay in Criticism”) equates her annoyance with Hemingway—he’s too macho—with literary criticism in general, leaving her eloquently befuddled: “But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say.  They have neither wigs nor outriders.  They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh.  Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we,’ for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible….No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity.”

Geoff Dyer hits an even more fevered pitch.  On the occasion of being given a collection of critical essays on D.H. Lawrence (in an excerpt from Out of Sheer Rage), Dyer frets his way to the perhaps hyperbolic theory that criticism and book burning are synonymous: “How could it have happened?  How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it?  I should have stopped there, should have avoided looking at it any more, but I didn’t because telling myself to stop always has the effect of egging me on.  Instead, I kept looking at this group of wankers huddled in a circle, backs turned to the world so that no one would see them pulling each other off….Then I looked around for the means to destroy his vile, filthy book.  In the end it took a whole box of matches and some risk of personal injury before I succeeded in deconstructing it.”

So should criticism simply be chucked, as Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels prescribe for theory-based criticism in “Against Theory”?  No.  In fact, all the essays in The Story About the Story conduct a critical action (even Out of Sheer Rage occasionally reads like straightforward analysis).  Collectively the message is this: serious criticism contextualizes itself in the critic’s subjective perception—the subject is the writer, as much as it is the text.  In “Mr. Pater’s Last Volume” Oscar Wilde offers a miniature manifesto for the critical enterprise, long forgotten: “The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.”

In other words, good writing about literature is unique, passionate, inspiring, and creative.  Robert Hass captures the debate in a single line: “You can analyze the music of poetry but it’s difficult to conduct an argument about its value, especially when it’s gotten into the blood.”

Which should be the whole point, shouldn’t it?