Page 510 – Electric Literature

Will Spotify Kill the Local Music Scene?

Posted on October 25, 2017March 25, 2019 by 007595

For some indie rock fans, it’s a tired story by now: In 2001, the New York-based band The Strokes released their debut album, “Is This It,” and revived rock and roll, which had been overshadowed by glitzy pop and co-opted by grotesque alternative groups, such as Limp Bizkit and Korn, in the late ‘90s. The success of The Strokes, the narrative continues, paved the way for other refreshing guitar rock bands, such as Interpol, the White Stripes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Killers, to thrive in a new era.

The most salient feature of The Strokes, a group of five tall, good-looking college age dudes, was their New York-ness. The essence of New York City, from the tight ripped jeans to the scraggy long hair to the rumors of their bad-boy misbehavior in the big city, was a big part of their DNA — and the band represented New York to the rest of the world, from California to London to places far beyond, where they would end up playing as their fame snowballed.

It wasn’t a coincidence that many of the other bands The Strokes inspired and were lumped together with were also from New York. The city went through a clear and special artistic moment in the early 2000s, the way Seattle had in the ‘90s (see Nirvana and Soundgarden), Detroit had in the ‘70s (see The Stooges, Ted Nugent and MC5), and New York had previously in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s (see The Talking Heads, Television, The Ramones and all the other bands that frequently played at the famed CBGB’s club).

This early-2000s moment and its aftereffects are chronicled in the book Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011, published in May by journalist Lizzy Goodman. The book’s 600 pages are made up entirely of interviews with the musicians themselves, artists, rock journalists, bloggers, club owners, publicists and many others who belonged to the scene that helped prop up The Strokes and their ilk.

As the book jacket admits, it’s really more of an oral history, and Goodman’s voice is absent, save for a short introduction — but she masterfully collages the interviews to create a compelling narrative that is hard to turn away from (especially if one is at least a casual fan of the bands involved). Reading it feels like watching a long, uncensored documentary. Along the way, the reader gets a backstage peek into all kinds of partying and fun — like the first time LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy tried ecstasy or the time when Courtney Love hosted The Strokes on an MTV show and got so drunk she ran through the hallways naked.

Some of the book’s revelations, such as the rock songwriter Ryan Adams’ former heroin habit, are darker and have resonated in the real world. In the book, members of The Strokes portray Adams as a bad influence on the band during his days in New York and insinuated that he used to give Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond, Jr. heroin (Hammond, Jr. would later check into rehab in 2009 for his destructive habit). Adams lashed out at The Strokes with some strong words on Twitter in July.

But putting all of the fun and drama aside, Meet Me in the Bathroom raises a deeper and potentially distressing question for the modern age, in which all music lives and dies on the internet, and a band’s location has become an irrelevant footnote: Could the time the book has recorded go down in history as the last true site-specific musical moment?

Could the time the book has recorded go down in history as the last true site-specific musical moment?

Just before her introduction, Goodman provides a list of all of the people quoted in the text and gives that list an apt name: the “cast of characters.” As the book’s narrative progresses, it’s clear that the interactions of these characters in their specific settings — mainly the Lower East Side of Manhattan and a few years later Williamsburg, Brooklyn — undoubtedly influenced the creation and progression of bands such as The Strokes, Interpol, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fischerspooner, The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem and The Walkmen. There was tacit competition between them all, or at least a desire by many to be as hyped or as in-synch on stage as The Strokes, whose legend quickly caught on like wildfire. They all hoped to play specific clubs (for The Strokes, who can now pack arenas, it was ironically the tiny Mercury Lounge) and passed out CDs at shows. And though it seems like an ancient practice compared to boosting ads on Facebook, they put up physical promotional posters around the city.

That’s not to say that these bands were not creative individuals: Interpol consciously decided to wear suits and play complex guitar lines; Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs chose to douse herself in olive oil before shows to escape into her rowdy stage persona; and, of course, they all wrote great music. But it is undeniable that they were all part of a larger sociological environment and phenomenon contained in New York City.

11 Books That Will Transport You to the NYC Demimonde

Today, competition between bands around the entire world takes place on online streaming platforms. Each group’s performance is laid bare, as listeners can see how many times each song has been played. Physical location consequently becomes a non-issue — why compete with the band in your city or town when you could be going after the band across a continent that plays the same genre but has more streams than you do? Why pine after playing at a specific club when your online performance, open to all like an embarrassing test score, dictates your success (since music ownership — and the revenue formerly generated from it — has become as archaic as a paper flyer)?

In today’s environment, a fan is at least as likely to find a new band online as she is at a local club that is part of her physical surroundings. Although the local scene is likely still an important stepping-stone for upstart bands in cities around the world, the goal of becoming a local phenomenon is less important — if not entirely irrelevant.

In one interesting passage of “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” former Spin editor Alan Light sounds unconvinced in the early 2000s that any of these bands will resonate with fans outside of New York City. “Does anyone outside of New York care?” he asks. It’s a reminder that music used to be much more of a local phenomenon, more akin to local news. The New York Times might still cover a small building fire that impacts a specific New York community that the Associated Press would not cover. But if Spin passed on the next Strokes of Spotify today, it would be committing music journalism suicide.

Light’s concern is less of an issue now because the internet works as a kind of open international capitalistic market and winds up defining what people everywhere are interested in. That still includes a huge range of music genres and artists, but there’s less of a need to speculate from armchairs when online performance is common knowledge.

(Of course, it is not a perfect “laissez-faire” market. Some portion of what people listen to is introduced to listeners through random factors, such as what songs your Spotify playlist generated for you with an algorithm on a certain day. And not all new music is available on Spotify, though it is certainly trending that way. See the example of Taylor Swift, who held most of her catalogue off of Spotify for a few years before putting it back on this summer.)

It can be tempting to say that a local scene never mattered all that much in the long run. Just last month, members of The Killers stated in an interview that there hasn’t been a real rock band that has become as big as they have in several years now because the bands currently out there are “just not good enough yet.”

It can be tempting to say that a local scene never mattered all that much in the long run.

“It could happen — but there hasn’t been anybody good enough,” singer Brandon Flowers told Vice. “If there was a band like the Strokes, or Interpol, people would talk. [Points outside to Brooklyn] If there were some kids out there right now playing ‘Obstacle 1’ tonight, I would hear about it, you would hear about it. But there isn’t.”

The Killers are portrayed as underdogs in Goodman’s narrative. They are transparent about their intense ambitions to be bigger than The Strokes, who were their idols. They were working class guys who toiled service industry jobs and grinded away at their craft, writing and throwing away songs for a long time before settling on a group that would become their first album.

But most importantly, they come together in Las Vegas, which is about as far — physically and culturally — as one can get from New York City. They are included in the book because they are a necessary inclusion in a history of rock in the first decade of the 2000s, not because of any real connection to New York. They have a chip on their shoulder for not being as “cool” in a sense as their rival New Yorkers, but location means less to them, as it appears from that quote in Vice.

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Or is the quote a little more complicated? It may seem like Flowers praises songwriting quality over everything else, but ultimately, he points outside to the trendy Brooklyn neighborhood Vice is still situated in. If a band like The Strokes was playing out there, he says — specifically in Brooklyn, the new starting point for bands in New York — it would help us all hear about them. It’s as if he is additionally saying, “Most bands still need to come through New York. You need to be good, but you still also need to come through New York.”

It’s still difficult to predict whether the online streaming revolution will eventually render the concept of a local scene entirely irrelevant. It’s hard to think of a music industry without all of the human elements of a city or community playing a role. It’s tough to imagine a world in which young musicians don’t flock to New York City for their big break. It’s sad to think of The Strokes and everyone else in Goodman’s book writing music on their computers, spread across the country in random locales. The world of rock might be less interesting without it.

Lust as Violent as a Hernia

Posted on October 25, 2017March 18, 2020 by 007595

“Let’s Play Doctor”

by Cris Mazza

The nurse shaves away her pubic hair.

“I wonder if Joey will like this.” Dee props herself up on her elbows and watches.

The nurse doesn’t use shaving cream or water, and yet it doesn’t hurt. “Looks like a baby,” Dee says, and laughs.

Then she has to stand on the floor and bend over across the examination table while the nurse shaves between her buttocks, holding the sides apart with two fingers. She must be a good nurse — not a single nick, scratch or drop of blood.

Let’s Play Doctor (Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading Book 284)

“I guess you’ll be lying on your side for a while,” the nurse says.

“Yes, a double-whammy!” Dee is seemingly unable to avoid saying anything without the breathless half-laugh. She’s just repeating what Dr. Shea said last week when he decided to remove the cyst near her tailbone after he repairs her hernia.

“You know, neither the hernia nor the cyst has ever bothered me, never any pain or anything. They seemed to bother Joey more than me. He was afraid he was going to hurt me or something.”

“You don’t look old enough to be married,” The razor makes a scratchy sound.

“Looks can be deceiving, you know,” Dee says. “We’ve been married three years.”

“Just about time for another honeymoon.”

The nurse stops shaving for a second as Dee giggles. “We never had a real honeymoon.”

“Never too late to start.”

“I’ll tell him,” Dee laughs again.

“Hold still, okay?” The nurse holds her buttocks farther apart, the razor moving intricately around Dee’s anus. “You realize you won’t be able to, or shouldn’t try to have intercourse for at least three weeks.”

“Oh, I know that. Joey knows too.”

She’d asked Dr. Shea last week in the final pre-surgery exam. He’d probed the hernia gently, then she rolled over and he touched the cyst, lying just under the surface, and he’d explained the procedure, then tapped her bottom and told her to get dressed.

“What about sex?” she’d said. Joey never told her to ask.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a few weeks, after the surgery. Tell Joey I’m sorry,” Dr. Shea is as thin as a young tree, and when he smiles he’s all smile.

“That’s okay,” Dee said. “He doesn’t care. I mean, it’s no big deal. He’s not worried about it. I mean, it’s not as though it’s going to change anything. Is it?”

“Won’t make a bit of difference,” Dr. Shea began lowering the examination table, with Dee still on it, lying on her side, wearing light blue underwear and a paper examination gown. She’d shaved her legs that morning, taken a shower and sprayed a little deodorant in her crotch. He kept his hand on her hip while he lowered the table. A nurse was in the room, holding Dee’s chart.

“It’s no big deal,” Dee repeated.

Another nurse comes in to put silly paper slippers on Dee’s feet and a blue paper poncho over her head. “We’re ready for you.” The three of them walk to the operating room and Dee climbs on the table.

“Dr. Shea’s still at the hospital, but the anesthesiologist is here,” says a third nurse, already masked. The three nurses turn their backs and begin to scrub. Dee can hear their voices under the running water. Whoever they’re talking about had to be reminded about something over and over and everyone’s beginning to wonder if she’ll ever get it right and how many chances is Dr. Shea going to give her before he — But maybe she’s providing him with other services. Him? Well, why’d he hire her then? Him? The three nurses laugh. Dee turns her head and smiles at the big man who comes in and introduces himself, but she can’t understand his name through his mask. He attaches some round things to her chest so everyone in the room can hear her heart beat. She keeps one eye on the door, but Dr. Shea doesn’t arrive before the other doctor has already attached an IV and shoots something into the tube so the drowsiness begins like an eclipse.

Then she can hear Dr. Shea’s high-pitched voice and the nurses mumbling. One of the nurses says, “What’s ten inches long and white? Have you heard this one already?”

“Nothing,” Dee says. She can’t see anything because the paper poncho is pulled up over her head.

“Is she awake?”

“Hi, Dee!” Dr. Shea says.

“So what’s the punch line?” a nurse asks.

“That’s it. What she said.”

“You knew that joke, Dee?” Dr. Shea says. “Okay release it,” he says, in a different voice.

“I remember another joke,” Dee says with a chuckle. “But it’s too nasty. You know what? I can’t feel you doing anything.”

“I’m almost done. Go ahead, tell your joke.”

“You sure? Okay. How do you make a hillbilly girl pregnant?”

“I don’t know. How?”

“Come on her shoes and let the flies do the rest.”

One nurse groans. Dr. Shea says, “What? I didn’t catch it.”

“Don’t make me repeat it, it’s awful, isn’t it? Come on her shoes and let the flies do the rest. You can change the hillbilly to anything — Italian, Mexican, whatever — but I use hillbilly cause I’m from Kentucky, so no one can say I’m making fun of anyone else ….” She closes her eyes. She can’t feel him touching her. Not like last week. He has very soft hands and long fingers, well-manicured and without heavy calluses. Of course he does, he’s a surgeon.

“Did Joey tell you those jokes?” Dr. Shea asks.

“Joey? No, I never tell him nasty jokes. I get `em from a book … in the library, that is, I go to the library every night while Joey’s at work.”

“I gotta get me that book,” a nurse says.

“Very hard to find. Not all libraries ….”

The bookstore is a block past the library, in between a cult movie theater and a health food store. A bakery and coffee shop inside the bookstore — where apparently people are allowed to sit at tables and read new magazines — seem to make the store warmer than most. It’s a fairly small bookstore, but has a whole wall of magazines, organized by sexual preference. Dee always walks past them, slowly, back and forth, but hasn’t yet ever taken one and sat at a table with a tempting croissant. Of course the joke book is on the humor shelf and she reads a few jokes every time — but not at one of the tables — and when the smell of the baked goods gets too overpowering, she leaves. The air outside seems to be shockingly cool — sometimes she gasps.

She wakes puking as they wheel her back to an empty examination room. A nurse walks beside her holding a little dish to catch the vomit. She can’t hear Dr. Shea and can’t move to look for him. The gurney is narrow and she’s on her side. They tell her not to roll one way or the other. She continues puking. Joey arrives to take her home, but she’s still puking and can’t leave, so he sits beside her all afternoon, holding her hand and reading Sports Illustrated while she pukes. There’s probably poetry in that somewhere.

Eventually she’s home. She heard Dr. Shea giving Joey some instructions. He said she could have a bath on Saturday. Joey drove carefully, but she puked once on the way home anyway. She sat on the edge of the bed, doubled over, then fell sideways, curled in a ball on her side, noticed the bouquet of carnations Joey had put on the night stand, then closed her eyes and the nausea began to fade. Dr. Shea had told Joey that if she didn’t calm down tonight, call his service and they would get in touch with him. She reaches blindly to the night stand to make sure the plastic vomit bowl is close at hand. Joey comes in to say he has to go to work. He sits on the side of the bed and strokes her head.

“Touch my places,” she says, “The scars.”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Okay, it doesn’t matter.” She moves one hand, slowly, from where it was tucked between her thighs and pushes it under her pillow, beneath her head. “You won’t have to call the doctor tonight.”

He pulls the sheet over her shoulders. It’s an early summer evening. When he’s gone, she opens her eyes once more. The carnations are white and pink, but look gray in the twilight. She was a virgin when she met him.

It might be later, but not too much later. She seems to be watching herself as she gets out of bed, not appearing to need any help, apparently not weak or sore. She brushes her long hair, seeing herself — she might be in the bathroom looking in the mirror, but she can see the back of her head, the brush swishing through her hair which hangs to her butt. Her hair was blond when she was younger, even when she got her drivers license. It’s been light brown for several years but looks blond again now. She breaks off one of the carnations and puts it behind her ear. The flower is some bright, exotic color, but she can’t really tell what color it is. Her reflection seems to be coming from a wall of glass, like a picture window. She leans close, shading her eyes to help herself see through. Apparently she already left the house, locked up, walked briskly down the sidewalk, as she does every evening after Joey goes to work. If she passed the library, she didn’t recognize it, and the bookstore has changed too — she can’t see any books through the window. In fact, she can’t see through the window. It’s black, huge and opaque, and all she can see is herself trying to look through.

“Aren’t we going to go inside?”

The voice doesn’t startle her. It’s Dr. Shea. He’s with her. Either they came together or he met her here. He looks too young to be a doctor, especially in his green scrub suit which makes his neck look longer and his smile even more toothy. “Show me where you learned your jokes.”

Suddenly she’s hot, burning up, and presses both hands to her face. “It’s okay,” he says, “From now on I’ll teach you all your jokes.” He takes her hand.

The bookstore is extremely hot and humid. It’s like a heavy coat hanging on her shoulders. The heat seems thick around her and she paddles with her free hand, passing thousands of racks of books, looking for the wall where the magazines are. “I know they’re here somewhere,” she says. Even though it’s so oppressively hot, she’s not sweating. But when they find the magazines, they walk back and forth because she doesn’t recognize any of them. “This isn’t right, where are they?” It doesn’t even seem like she’s searching for the magazines. She’s looking at his hand holding hers as though she’s still standing behind herself. He strokes her knuckles with his thumb.

“Don’t you want to look at one of them?” he asks.

“Yes, of course.”

“You don’t need to be afraid. We’ll say it’s doctor’s orders.”

She has a magazine in her hands and Dr. Shea moves behind her, very close, his cheek against hers. The smells from the bakery at the back of the bookstore become potent. She sees a whole pan of buttery cinnamon rolls coming out of the oven. She doesn’t let go of the magazine; she can feel the slick heavy pages in her hands. Dr. Shea kisses her neck. “Let’s check your wounds,” he murmurs. She’s looking at the magazine but doesn’t see anything. Dr. Shea lifts her shirt and runs his finger along the line where he had cut her open. She had bandages on when she got home from the hospital, but they’re gone now. She can see the place, a red line where the two flaps of her skin are sewn together with invisible thread, his finger moving back and forth across it. She shudders. “Did I make you do that?” he says. She must be mute. Or there’s nothing more to say. She can see him smiling, like maybe she’s watching from a different angle now, but she’s still holding the magazine and he’s digging his finger between the stitches then pushing it inside. She doubles over, pressing her butt into him, and he seems to bend over around her. The magazine could be a mirror or maybe she’s looking out of the pages, watching herself and Dr. Shea, but sometimes she can’t tell which one is her. She’s never moved her hips like that. His hand moves into her gently, cupping each organ in his fingertips. He’s a surgeon so he’d know if something was wrong with her.

“Now the other place,” he says, turning her around. He holds her buttocks and rubs the wound on her tailbone with his thumb. There’s blood on the front of his scrub suit. Bread is baking. The hot odor of it makes her dizzy for a minute. Then he turns her sideways and maybe holds her with his knees, his chin over her head, but his legs and arms and neck are just warm places pressing against her, and the room is so hot anyway it seems hard to tell if it’s really him — except for his hands. Each of his hands is on one of her wounds, reaching inside, feeling the slippery pieces of her. She’s wiggling and arching her back, but he doesn’t tell her to be still. Every once in a while she can feel the magazine in her hand. She smells the bread baking and looks at the blood on his shirt. She asks if it’s hers without having to say anything. “You started your period during the surgery,” he says. His hands are pushing harder, farther, his fingers spread, softly touching everything they find, although her heart is too far away, and his hands aren’t reaching that direction. She must have her eyes closed because she can’t see anything anymore, not until his hands meet each other in the middle. He must be clasping his hands together, making a gentle fist that seems to throb, matching the sound of an uncontrolled heartbeat coming from somewhere else, which everyone in the bookstore must be able to hear. She can see her own mouth open and her entire body arch, her head thrown back and she is alone, writhing and moving freely through the pea-soup heat, holding a heavy magazine. Her arm is tired. It’s dark and somehow she got back to her bed before Joey came home. She can hear his key in the front door and she can see her hand lying on the mattress beside her, the weight of the magazine tingling in her palm, a pounding soreness in her guts, underneath the bandages. He comes in to ask if there’s anything she needs. The room is freezing and she begins to sob but doesn’t answer him.

Submissions Are Open for Personal and Critical Essays!

Posted on October 24, 2017March 25, 2019 by 007595

Today, October 24, Electric Literature is opening submissions for personal and critical essays, as well as humor that reflects on the world of reading, writing, literature, and storytelling in all its forms. We’re particularly interested in pieces that examine the intersection of the literary world and other creative disciplines: film, fine art, music, video games, architecture — you name it. Submissions will remain open until November 6.

Some of our favorite recent personal essays include pieces about how an overwhelmingly white culture can colonize a writer’s inner life, about learning to love yourself through sports and reading, and about why men have to stop telling women to read David Foster Wallace. Has a book changed your life, or has your life changed how you read a book? Do you have a personal story about your favorite story? Bring us your sad, thoughtful, funny, illuminating experiences.

Critical essays may cover a single book, multiple books, a whole genre, or non-book pop culture like TV, music, and games. In the past, we’ve been interested in the neoliberal elements of “The Remains of the Day”; why people are so critical of incest memoirs; and why we’re so obsessed with creepy dolls. Some essays may be both personal and critical, like this one about how a Carmen Maria Machado short story brings up questions about why women aren’t believed.

Payment for personal and craft essays, as well as humor pieces, is $50. Length is up to you; most essays we publish fall between 1500–4000 words.

Submissions will be accepted on our Submittable account.

The Unhinged Fiction of Greg Ames

Posted on October 24, 2017May 6, 2025 by 007595

I met Greg Ames at the 2014 Colgate Writers’ Conference, where we talked about Aimee Bender and Fugazi. Three years (and three conferences) later, the stories I’ve heard Ames read at Colgate—in various maniacal personas—have come together in his new collection, Funeral Platter. The stories in Funeral Platter are dark, funny, and deranged: a man severs his arm to get back at his ex; Pontius Pilate talks trash in a ping-pong tournament; a dance party erupts in a Taco Bell men’s room; a couple hosts their own funeral.

Ames’ first novel, Buffalo Lockjaw, won a NAIBA Book of the Year Award, and was featured in a Dockers ad. We conducted this conversation over email, with only one or two cat pictures punctuating the discussion.

Deirdre Coyle: Both J. Robert Lennon and Brock Clarke described this collection as “unhinged.” Are you?

Greg Ames: Only between the ears. My outer life is pretty stable these days, so somehow I’ve managed to filter all that berserk energy into my writing, where it is less likely to get me arrested.

DC: I’d describe a lot of these stories as elastic realism (a phrase I copped from Nancy Pearl). I’m interested in the proliferation of terms about fiction that walks a line between realism and speculative fiction (magical realism, slipstream, new weird, surrealism, etc.). Do you relate to one term over another—or to any of them?

GA: I just looked up elastic realism. Seems like she’s talking about fiction that is firmly grounded in realism just before it goes off-kilter. Some of my favorite stories operate like that. I’m thinking of one by Stuart Dybek called “The Death of the Right Fielder,” which seems at first like a typical baseball story but then you realize it’s really about aging, death, loneliness, the expendability of human lives, etc. He grounds you in the story, boys playing baseball, and then the secret story emerges. The story behind the story pops up and haunts you. When I begin a new piece, I feel like I’m just writing about the ordinary world—the parking lot, the grocery store, etc.—and then something happens. It swerves.

DC: Yes, that elasticity almost always feels like realism while I’m immersed in it, reading or writing. Like in your story “Punishment,” where a man starts cutting off his limbs to “punish” his ex. I’ve definitely known that guy.

GA: I think I’ve been that guy. I wrote “Punishment” before I knew it, when I was nineteen and still had no idea how scared I was of everything. But I wrote this little two-pager, liked it, hoped it was good, and brought it to the office of the literary journal on my college campus. Personally hand-delivered it to some longhaired dude on a garbage-picked couch. On his upper arm was a tattoo that said SHAMELESS. I turned and walked away without saying a word. He contacted me a few days later saying he loved “Punishment” and wanted to publish it. I said no, it wasn’t ready, and retracted it. That’s just one of the ways my behavior confused people. It’s amazing still that anything of mine actually gets published because there are so many strategies for not completing the process: it’s not done yet, I could make it better, I want to change the ending, etc.

DC: I spent a lot of time in my teens and early twenties working service industry jobs, then library jobs, and not really showing anyone my writing. Fortunately I saved everything, and have some gnarly journals from those years. Do you have anything like that that you mine for material?

GA: Yeah, I definitely borrow from my life, and everything has some autobiographical connection, and I’ve worked plenty of jobs and lived in a lot of places, but the task is to fuel the writing with the most charged parts of the truth. In Funeral Platter, I’ve included some parts of my life—I’ll leave it to the reader to guess which parts are based on my actual life, but I can say with confidence that, unlike the narrator of “Punishment,” I have yet to chop off my arm after a breakup.

I can say with confidence that, unlike the narrator of “Punishment,” I have yet to chop off my arm after a breakup.

DC: Your first novel, Buffalo Lockjaw, was firmly centered in your hometown of Buffalo. Not all of the stories in Funeral Platter are explicitly located, but those that are take place across New York state: Buffalo, Akron, Utica, Brooklyn, the Catskills. How does New York—in its entirety—affect your writing?

GA: Well, I grew up in Buffalo, so I experienced being a child there, and some of being an adult. When I moved to Brooklyn, I had a whole new set of experiences, made a whole new life, and that informed some of the energies of my writing, as well. I lived in England and France for a few years too, worked as a bartender, and that helped me to drink. To be honest, I’m more interested in the generic spaces found in all cities, such as convention centers, barbershops, funeral homes, public restrooms, movie theaters, and parking lots. Most of my stories, I realize now, are set in interstitial spaces or the non-places that people have to go on their way to somewhere else.

DC: Which process do you find more agonizing—novel or short story writing?

GA: I love the compression, power, and tonal and structural difficulty of the short story. In The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor says the short story is closer to the poem than the novel. A novel takes much more planning, sweating, weaving, but I think it’s inaccurate to say that the short story is a less complex form than the novel. Anyway, I’m shocked that the short story is not a more popular form among general readers. It seems like the perfect form for this age. You can read a short story on a train ride and feel like you’ve been given all the psychological depth and emotional resonance of a novel. I guess general readers are resistant because they sometimes don’t know what to feel after finishing a short story. They couldn’t get comfortable in it. “A novel wants to befriend you,” Joy Williams once wrote. “A short story almost never.”

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DC: How long was this collection in the making?

GA: When I wrote “Discipline,” I was maybe twenty-three and had just begun sending out my short stories. One of my toughest critics was my uncle Neil who taught at the University of Buffalo. My aunt Margaret told me that after he read that story, he came down the stairs holding it over his head and said loudly, “He’s done it!” That felt like one of my first acknowledged successes. So, it’s beautiful to have a lot of early work in Funeral Platter. It represents so many different parts of my life, my history, and obviously, parts of my imagination.

DC: You’ve said that you hated school growing up. Now you’re an English professor. Has that youthful hatred affected the way you teach?

GA: Well, I hated school because I knew that I wasn’t being seen. I was the kid who fell through the cracks a little bit; I don’t think they knew what to do with me. And it was that way until Buffalo State College when I stumbled into the classroom of an English professor who would change my life. Marvin LaHood opened my experience of literature and my understanding of my own capabilities. Once I was actually seen by someone, I was able to feel safe in the academic setting and pretty soon after that things took off for me, cerebrally and creatively. Big Marv was a powerhouse. I mean, he’s 81 years old and he’s still teaching! I just spoke to him today actually. He’s still so committed to it; he lives by this stuff—the sentences, the stories. And that’s informed the way that I teach. The classroom is a place where I feel at home—totally comfortable being myself, and it seems like students respond to that.

DC: The dreaded question: what are you working on next?

GA: I don’t know about dread. There’s always doubt but mostly I’m just playing with words. At the moment, I’m putting together a second short story collection. I have two novel drafts that I keep coming back to—I’ve been writing and rewriting these things for years. I call one of them a comic existential detective novel, whatever that means. And lastly, I’m in the process of approaching a larger nonfiction project about my childhood, though I haven’t quite figured out how to move into nonfiction with the same ease that I have around fiction.

Behold the Winners of the 280-Character Story Contest

Posted on October 24, 2017March 25, 2019 by 007595

Our five top microfictions, illustrated

Two weeks ago, we asked you to write 280-character short stories, in honor of the unasked-for, unappreciated, and frankly awful increase in Twitter’s tweet length restrictions. Uncannily, we wound up with 280 submissions. (Actually, it was 282, but we’ll round down.) Among them were tiny tragedies, tiny comedies, and tiny political satires; there were tiny births and deaths and tiny sex. (And regrettably, tiny failures at following directions, as we received at least a dozen 280-word stories.) We hadn’t known it was possible to pack so much drama into 280 characters, but in accordance with our theme—“the story must be about something getting magically, randomly, inexplicably, or mysteriously bigger, longer, or just… more”—these snippets of fiction seemed to expand to contain something bigger than themselves.

Out of 280 entries, the Electric Literature editors chose five winners, and New Yorker writer and cartoonist Sara Lautman illustrated them. We still hate the 280-character tweets, but with these five writers, at least we know they’re in good hands.

Stephen Aubrey, “Cohabitation”

Our first night living together, we took in that puppy howling outside the door. An auspice, I thought. But we’d never done this before. We didn’t know how small things can grow, what little space we can be left to live in. We were not the sort to abandon something until we were.

M. Lopes da Silva, “Several Coats of Coats”

In the pockets of the coats there were always other, far more dashing tiny coats that — when shaken out and placed in the sun — would promptly grow to full size. In those new coats? More tiny coats. The trouble was that none of them would ever quite fit, no matter what you tried.

Josh Lefkowitz, “A Moment of Silence”

The fans stood in silence for 58 seconds before the hockey puck dropped. Someone remembered the school back east, so they added 26 more. The church; the nightclub; etc. Minutes turned to hours, everyone standing silently. “I’m tired of this,” said a girl. “Quiet,” said the crowd.

James Lough, “When We Lost Alphonse”

We worried when Alphonse tried heroin, which exposed him to the world of marijuana, and quickly opened the door to beer, which naturally led him to pretzels and peanuts. Before we could intervene, we found him enmeshed in a group who allegedly ate nothing but vegetables.

Tamar Nachmany, “Mount Sinai”

All the electronics above my hospital bed are gossiping about when, exactly, I’m going to die. It sounds like a concert I heard in Berlin many years ago. We were told to close our eyes and listen. Static. Beeping. Rain. My monitor is the principal violin. I am not dying alone.

Stephen Aubrey is a writer and theater-maker living in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in Publishing Genius, Commonweal, The Brooklyn Review, Pomp & Circumstance, and Electric Literature.

M. Lopes da Silva is an author and fine artist living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blumhouse, The California Literary Review, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and anthologies by Mad Scientist Journal, Gehenna & Hinnom Press, and Fantasia Divinity Publishing. She recently illustrated the Centipede Press collector’s edition of Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs.

Josh Lefkowitz won the Avery Hopwood Award for Poetry at the University of Michigan. His poems and essays have been published at The Awl, The Millions, The Rumpus, and many other places including publications in Canada, Ireland, and England. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

James Lough’s upcoming book, Short Circuits: Aphorisms, Fragments, and Literary Anomalies will be published by Schaffner Press in April. His oral history, This Ain’t No Holiday Inn: Down and Out in New York’s Chelsea Hotel 1980–1995 (Schaffner Press 2013) was optioned by Lionsgate Entertainment for TV production. He is a professor of nonfiction writing in the Savannah College of Art and Design’s writing department, which he formerly directed.

Tamar Nachmany is the director of 1010 Residency, a former writer-in-residence at the New Mexico School of Poetics, and a former Johns Hopkins University Woodrow Wilson Research Fellow. Her work has been shown at the Bell House (Baltimore), the Cullom Gallery (Seattle), the Jewish Museum of Baltimore, and other venues. She is currently writing her first novel.

Sara Lautman is a cartoonist, illustrator, and editor in Baltimore. Her drawings have been published by The New Yorker, Playboy, Mad, Jezebel, The Paris Review, The Pitchfork Review and The Awl. She is the Comics Editor for Electric Literature’s Okey-Panky, and in 2016, Recommended Reading published her illustrated “cut-up” collaboration with Shelia Heti, “The Humble Simple Thing.”

Soft Men with Hungry Hearts

Posted on October 24, 2017March 25, 2019 by 007595

Our culture does not love soft men. In Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a tender barman named Biff Brannon feels himself to be both mother and father to everyone in a small Georgia town. To make this feeling tangible, he wants to adopt a couple of kids. “A boy and a girl,” he imagines; “in the summer the three of them would go to a cottage on the Gulf… and then they would bloom as he grew old.” But he owns that bar, has a demanding wife, plus is probably queer, and the calendar reads sometime in the 1920s. Biff does not get his wish.

Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods also opens with wishes. A baker and his wife wish for a child, but they can’t have one because the Baker had a shitty father who earned a curse that follows the whole family line. In the Baker’s best number, “No More,” Baker Senior appears and sings, “We disappoint, we leave a mess, we die, but we don’t.” Fathers of tender men die hard, it seems. Or they weren’t around — the Baker sings back, “No more curses you can’t undo left by fathers you never knew.” The Baker’s wish for a baby comes true, but to get it, he has to lose his wife. The consequences of wishing are always dear, we learn, even fatal.

The consequences of wishing are always dear, we learn, even fatal.

I was negative 57 years old when McCullers’ book punched its way onto the literary scene, and negative one when the curtain went up for Sondheim, but a raw and raging twelve when Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia found its way into the dusty off-brand video store in my Chelsea neighborhood. “I’m sick and I’m in love,” wails William H Macy’s character, a gay quiz kid all grown up, as the bar patrons, men who keep their feelings on lockdown, look on in horror. “I do have a lot of love to give,” he says later, sitting on a gas station trash can and his face covered in blood. “I just don’t know where to put it.”

Thunkity thunk, went some knock of revelation and recognition. Here was a brand new thing, yet I’d felt it myself: a sense of wrongness, that something in your gender and your body and your way of being does not match up with what the world requires or will allow. The video store owner, which mostly stocked gay porn and regarded my portly posterior with real confusion, was all too happy to let me keep Magnolia for many, many months.

Lindsay Hunter’s Eat Only When You’re Hungry is a welcome addition to the miniature curio cabinet of works centering male tenderness, softness, vulnerability, and yearning. The novel’s crackling core is Greg, a fat, hungry, sexual, alcoholic father who embarks on a lonely and lazy cross-state voyage in a rented RV to find his drug-addicted son, Greg Junior — GJ.

As I read I dog-eared the pages that called me out or taught me something new about parenthood, marriage, addiction, family dysfunction, food compulsion, hunger, the body, the texture of objects, or the American South, but soon I had to stop it. Every other page was getting folded.

The RV seemed made for men like him, men whose asses needed room to spread, men whose backs zinged at the sight of a golf club. The driver’s seat was as wide as two seats in the Volvo, skinned a plush gray something or other, and felt four feet deep with cushion. The headrest stayed out of his way but was at the ready whenever Greg needed cradling.

Could I love this description of Greg any more? I could not. (Relatedly, see my thoughts on male frump as an aesthetic, which also includes Biff and the Baker). Could Greg hate himself any more? He could not. Comfort, spreading, cradling — these are things that Greg does not allow himself in his regular life with his sturdy and shut-down wife, Deb. “Hair pinned back out of her eyes,” Hunter writes of Deb. “Purse snug under her arm. Nothing worrisome, nothing out of place.” Yet just on the other side of the Deb coin is his ex-wife Marie, an untidy curly-haired woman who drinks too much and likes to fuck, facts about which Greg feels profound ambivalence. And could he love his son, GJ, a smart, sensitive kid who likes camping and lets other boys drink out of the bottle before he does, any more? He could not. (That camping flashback, where we learn that GJ is truly an unsalvageable addict … break my heart into glittering smithereens, why don’t you, Lindsay Hunter).

Greg’s universe is polarized, populated by only two kinds of people: those whose hungers eat them alive (Greg, his son GJ, his father, his ex-wife Marie) and those who lock theirs up and swallow the key but are able to live normal, if fundamentally sad, lives (Deb, his father’s girlfriend Lydia).

Luke Goebel Talks With Lindsay Hunter

If a family is a gradual loosening, a journey from denial to acceptance with the passing generations, Hunter skillfully sets up Greg’s son GJ, the quest object of this book, as the opposite of Greg’s own parents. His parents are a grey sky and his son is a tornado and he sits somewhere in the middle, ping-ponging back and forth between restriction and indulgence, between too much feeling and too little. The way parents both love and hurt their own children in precisely the same ways is perhaps this book’s most devastating illumination, and just simply how terrifying and random and loving and terrifying again it is to be a parent. “Y-ball. T-ball. Pop Warner. Tap dance (Marie’s idea),” writes Hunter in one of two stylistically innovative mini-chapters that add zing to the whole book. “Crayons, markers, paints. Charcoal. Spray paint. Skateboard. Body board. Beach summers. Sky-blue swimming pools. Hotels. Resorts. Camping. Hamburgers, pizza, hot dogs, ice cream.” These are all the things we buy and give to our kids because what else is there to do but try to love and offer them things. And then, a few lines later: “Big gulps. Beer. Whisky. Dope. Hash. Tar. Rocks. Spoon, needle. Pipe. Darkness. Light. I’m sorry. It’s okay. Theft. Shouting.” These are things we make with them, and the other things we gave them.

The way parents both love and hurt their own children in precisely the same ways is perhaps this book’s most devastating illumination.

In my fat processing group, we are often grappling with a gap between the fat positivity movement, which reminds us that being fat is a body characteristic like being tall or redheaded, and the reality of the air we breathe everyday, which equates flesh with failure and teaches fat people to hate not only our own bodies, but also our hunger — our needs, wishes, desires, feelings, and very guts. Though Hunter herself is surely aware of fat positivity and fat acceptance, Greg is not — all the book allows him when it comes to his body is hatred and shame, feelings meant unequivocally to slosh over into how we understand his feelings towards all desire and vulnerability in general. It’s a choice on Hunter’s part that feels both disappointing and true.

The strategies Greg’s parents and his wife practice do not work. This much is clear by the end of the book. GJ’s strategies do not work. His appetites have eaten him alive , as hunger denied is wont to do. This kind of extreme black-and-white thinking feels bang-on for an addict and the child of addicts, which Greg’s son is—and, which we learn in the final pages of the book, Greg also is. He goes to bring his son back, to save his kid from the clutches of insatiable need and out-of-control desire, but the person he ends up saving, of course, is himself — but by the end of the book we readers are hungering for some sort of middle ground.

As political actors, we want to practice the most liberating and idealistic thinking and behavior, but as humans we are flawed, stuck, cruel, damned, busy, poor, programmed, and oppressed. Greg’s mother didn’t eat and didn’t feed him; the seeds of equating need with weakness began there. Yet it doesn’t feel outside the bounds of good art to wonder if Hunter might have explored other perspectives towards fatness, hunger, and shame through the wishes of her other, equally glittering, supporting characters.

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One glimmer of this that Hunter does offer is expansive possibilities as to how to deal with an addicted or self-destructive child beyond enabling or condemning. Greg’s father’s girlfriend Lydia smokes crack with her addict daughter so she can empathize. Greg himself decides to listen, to self-examine, and to love.

One important feature of my childhood what my father called “the automatic no.” To hear him tell it, my sister always said “no” to any request he or my mother might make of her: no to setting the table, no to picking up milk, no to seeing some new doctor who would surely cure her, once and for all, of her fatness. To hear my sister tell it, her “no” was a necessary corrective to the power of Our Father, to whose dictatorial demands and senseless moods we had been submitting for all of time. If my sister was the one who always said “no,” I was the one who — if I spoke at all — always said “yes.” From my bedroom, I listened to my sister and my father do battle. Our apartment rattled with endless things and their opposites — it’s like this, no it’s like that; yes you will, no I won’t.

After years, you start to leave rooms, leave lovers, leave cities from no discernible motivation, just to see if you can.

But here is what I have found out: To live in the automatic no is to block the process that happens when you say “yes” or “no” by choice, and start to move towards or away from things on purpose. After years, you start to leave rooms, leave lovers, leave cities from no discernible motivation, just to see if you can. You become unable to say “yes” and mean what “yes” means: come closer. These days, I’m trying not to pingpong back and forth, but instead sit lost, homesick, and ill, in the middle. For me, this has been growing up.

It’s Biff who closes McCullers’ book, alone in the bar, after all the other characters have left.

His heart turned and he leaned his back against the counter for support. For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who — one word — love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror. Between the two worlds he was suspended… Between bitter irony and faith. Sharply he turned away.

Pockets Full of Salt, Pepper, Mustard and Ketchup

Posted on October 23, 2017March 5, 2020 by 007595

How Doth the Little Crocodile

Moonlight scooches over the kitchen floor, a white tongue, panting, licking, shedding its skin, looking for a corner, a place to hide and puddle.

Something in the refrigerator begins to shiver. Is it the brown eggs? The ice cubes?

My bowl of die?

There, there, I say to the moonlight as I stroke it with a wire whisk. There, there.

“Guests might find that Carrington had crept into their room at night, cut off a chunk of their hair, and served it up to them in an omelet the next morning.”

Each morning, another key.

I find them on the table, hanging from a nail. What do they open?

Bronze, brown, blackened, brass, cast iron, briny.

They look like skeletons, fossils, needle-nosed fish.

I find them in my slippers and under my pillow.

I suck them and put them in my ears, my nostrils, my bellybutton.

They taste like marrow.
What do they lock?

I fill my mouth with my keys to keep them, to keep my keys away from you.

20 Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa

Little Bunny speaks with people across many years.

At the suggestion of an inquisitor, Little Bunny twists Julian’s tits. They lick tongues. They lock whatnots.

Perhaps I should see the school doctor about this?

Julian keeps his hair as long as a cow’s tail, so he can flick away the black flies.

On a hike in the forest, we discover a trail of breadcrumbs. Julian picks them up with his tongue. We’re in league with the wolf, Little Bunny explains.

When Little Bunny walks barefoot, she holds her breath.

Julian pinks up at the sight of an abandoned piano. He collects their keys so he can reintroduce them to the ocean.

The rain makes me mistake Monday for Sunday, March for August.

Julian eats cauliflower for fear of being turned into cauliflower.

Little Bunny’s song requires an open window and a blade of ash. She will use her song to scratch her name in the air.

Little Bunny and Julian apologize for no dinosaur for dinner.

I order delivery.

When Little Bunny walks barefoot, over the hot sands, holding her breath, the water shivers.

Julian takes me to the movies, instead of school. We fill our pockets with packets of salt, pepper, mustard and ketchup.
We like previews. We eat California rolls.

Little Bunny uses a blue marker to color-in the wrinkles around her eyes. All rivers flow into her irises.

I write with a pencil, so I can erase, so I can turn the words into

Pink curls.

Julian: When I was a boy my grandfather refused to take me hunting because I talked too much. What did I say? My dancing days are kaput! What did my voice sound like? White swallows. White swallows.

I intercepted a call from my proper authorities and recited, poorly, a small poem by Rimbaud, in French. They hung-up.

Little Bunny: Tes crocs luisent.

Why did you name me papa, I never ask.

A September Gospel

My ribs are sardines.

They beg me to turn the key.

But when I do, I shiver. Or is that dancing?

The fish are not pleased.

It reminds them of their death, below decks, above the sea, covered in salt, rocking, singing their sardine songs as the fishermen cleaned their blades with red ale.

I grab the freezer door to steady myself and it opens. I stick my head inside. What a world! Swedish meatballs, peas, vodka, pearl onions, samosas, ice cream and a cow’s heart.

The light bulb is a white dwarf, humming, radiating, dreaming of its future as a black dwarf.

My chest pulses. The fins sense water. They want to dive into the vanilla lava, swim to the ocean in the center of the earth and transform into a swarm of Eves.

Later, outside, I sit on my stoop, sipping hot vodka and onions.

A clutter of uniformed school children pass.

Each one of those angels will tease the skinned rabbits in the butcher shop window, I know.

I scratch my neck and there it is, the key. Caught in my throat.
I loose a gulp of booze and whisper to my ribs:

vivat, don’t swoon
I’m greasing
the track, soon
we’ll all be free.

Five Poems, by Jeff Whitney

Why We Keep Telling the Same Stories

Posted on October 23, 2017March 25, 2019 by 007595

Some stories are primal. Some have drawn the attention of readers for centuries or even millennia–they might be national epics, sacred texts, or myths that explain some quality of the world. Depending on the reader, they might be all those things. But just as certain stories retain the ability to hold an audience rapt, so too do they inspire a particular group of writers to retell them.

This is far from a new literary tradition. Italo Calvino’s bibliography involves plenty of genre-defying, narratively innovative, and head-spinning works; it also includes 1956’s Italian Folktales, a massive collection of, well, retold versions of Italian folktales. William Butler Yeats collected several volumes of Irish folktales in the late 19th century. And in 1973, R. K. Narayan, best-known for his works of literary realism, published a shortened prose version of The Ramayana, a centuries-old Tamil epic. Canongate’s ‘The Myths’ series has included contributions from writers like Ali Smith, David Grossman, and Margaret Atwood. Here, the definition of ‘myths’ is wide-ranging: Smith’s Girl Meets Boy juxtaposes a retelling of Ovid’s tales of changing bodies with more contemporary concerns, while Grossman’s Lion’s Honey is an essayistic meditation on the Old Testament story of Samson.

Some tellers of ancient tales prefer a decidedly restrained approach, a neutral tone that serves as a literary middle ground between the archaic style in which the stories were initially told and a more contemporary voice. For others, though, a contemporary sense of language is crucial. Chester Brown’s recent graphic novel Mary Wept over the Feet of Jesus retells several stories from the Bible pertaining to sex work. Brown uses a familiar and conversational tone throughout; one caption memorably reads “Meanwhile, in Heaven, the angels are hanging out.”

Neil Gaiman’s New Book Will Be a Novelistic Retelling of the Norse Myths

Among the highest-profile retellings of ancient stories in recent years is Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology. Gaiman has a longstanding fascination with the deities. His novels American Gods and Anansi Boys feature riffs on immortals from numerous pantheons, with questions of perception, belief, and evolution thrown into the mix. Even earlier, Gaiman wrote several of the Norse gods–notably, Thor, Odin, and Loki–in his groundbreaking Vertigo comics series Sandman.

There’s an element of circularity, then, to aspects of Gaiman’s introduction to Norse Mythology, in which he writes about his own initial experience with these Norse figures.

My first encounter with Asgard and its inhabitants was as a small boy, no more than seven, reading the adventures of the Mighty Thor as depicted by American comics artist Jack Kirby, in stories plotted by Kirby and Stan Lee and dialogued by Stan Lee’s brother Larry Lieber.

It’s probably also worth pointing out that a version of Marvel Comics’ Thor turned up, albeit briefly, in the Gaiman-penned series 1602. Norse Mythology marks the fourth time Gaiman has taken a crack at these characters; like Johnny Cash going into the studio with Rick Rubin, there seems to be an effort to get back to the basics, to find what’s essential in a familiar story without too many additional trappings.

The Wolves Pursuing Sol and Man, Hélène Adeline Guerber (1909)

It’s significant that, by and large, there are no postmodern or metafictional nods in Gaiman’s retellings. The way in which stories are told, and how belief in certain narratives can influence reality, are concepts Gaiman has wrestled with in numerous works. Here, the narratives are more straightforward; this feels more suitable for an all-ages audience — it’s more about the flair of the telling. There is the sense that he did savor writing some choice bits of dialogue—the trickster Loki reveling in someone’s inability to consider “the exactness of their words,” for instance. And the voice through which Gaiman recounts these stories also is polished; it’s one that seems familiar and collegial with both these characters and the reader experiencing the stories:

That was the thing about Loki. You resented him even when you were at your most grateful, and you were grateful to him even when you hated him the most.

In his introduction to Norse Mythology, Gaiman writes about his process of assembling this book, reading “words from nine hundred years ago and before, picking and choosing what tales I wanted to retell and how I wanted to tell them.” In an interview with Petra Mayer at NPR, Gaiman spoke about the appeal of this particular mythology because it has an end point, which created a sense of a larger narrative. Ragnarok, Gaiman argues, “turns the entire thing into a tragedy, which gives it depth, it gives it base notes, it gives it a peculiar profundity.” It’s a prime example of how a modern storyteller can find their own angle on long-running narratives.

Like Johnny Cash going into the studio with Rick Rubin, there seems to be an effort to get back to the basics, to find what’s essential in a familiar story without too many additional trappings.

That’s an essential part of crafting retellings that will endure. In a 1988 interview with Adit De, R. K. Narayan spoke about his own work with classic narratives — retellings of The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. For him, the need to retell these stories was essential. “They are symbolic and philosophical,” he explained. “Even as mere stories, they are so good. Marvellous. I couldn’t help writing them. It was part of a writer’s discipline.”

Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Hanuman, circa 17th c.

For some writers, tapping into the essential elements of an older text can be its own reward. Others may well want to explore more contemporary questions or use the narrative to critique something in their own society. Halldor Laxness’s novel Wayward Heroes was written in 1952, but was only recently translated (by Philip Roughton) into English. From the first page of Laxness’s novel, he makes it clear that this is a conscious retelling of an older work:

Most of the stories of these warriors we find so remarkable that recalling them once more is certainly worth our time and attention, and thus we have spent long hours compiling into one narrative their achievements as related in numerous books. Foremost among these, we would be remiss not to name, is the Great Saga of the Sworn Brothers.

If the tone of that passage strikes you as overblown, that’s the point. The two sworn brothers in question, Þorgeir and Þormóður, engage in a host of bloody feats over the course of the book that ultimately feel more tragicomic than remarkable. In a long essay about the works of Laxness for Harper’s, Justin Taylor argues that “Wayward Heroes belongs in the pantheon of the antiwar novel alongside such touchstones as Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22.”

Whether straightforward or revisionist, these stories can be adapted into countless forms, and experienced in a host of ways.

Throughout the novel, there are reminders that this is a retelling of an older story. A paragraph in one section of the novel set in Greenland opens with a line that reads like nonfiction: “Sources state that when Þormóður reached the Eastern Settlement…” Later on, the action pauses entirely so that the book’s narrator can draw attention to narrative discrepancies: “There are two different accounts concerning what subsequently occurred between the brothers-in-law.” From there follows a long and self-effacing explanation of why, exactly, one of the two accounts has been chosen to appear in these pages.

This seems entirely in keeping with Laxness’s wry tone, which takes notions of heroism and national glory down several pegs. So too is the use of narrative ambiguity when one of the novel’s central characters dies. “[W]e shall never gain a clear answer from men of learning — the old books differ widely on these details,” Laxness writes.

For writers like Narayan and Gaiman, revisiting older stories was a kind of master class in narrative: finding what was most essential about certain essential stories and making it their own. For others–Laxness certainly comes to mind, as do several of the writers who have written books for Canongate–the oldest of stories are fertile ground to examine much more contemporary concerns. And perhaps that’s the biggest testimonial of all to the staying power of some of these narratives: whether straightforward or revisionist, they can be adapted into countless forms, and experienced in a host of ways. Some of these stories date back to the oral tradition; a series of repeated retellings was what made them endure over the years, the decades, the centuries. Retelling might involve a storyteller finding their own perspective on something timeless; it might involve using an ancient tale to illuminate something contemporary. Though the stories in these relatively recent retellings are printed and bound, their lineage hails back much further into the history of narrative. What these contemporary forms and devices do, then, is give us something to handle, something to set beside more recent works, seeing how these stories have influenced generations of stories and storytellers that followed. And perhaps for some readers, these versions will spark a new cycle of tellings and retellings.

The Secret to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Overnight Success

Posted on October 23, 2017March 9, 2021 by 007595

This month, the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen was awarded one of the most prestigious honors a writer can receive: the MacArthur “genius” grant, given to artists, thinkers, and public intellectuals whose ideas have culture-altering potential. This, in itself, should surprise no one. Nguyen writes with arresting moral and intellectual force, often about people scarred and uprooted by conflict. As the MacArthur Foundation put it in its citation, Nguyen’s demonstrated a unique gift for exploring how depictions of the Vietnam War “often fail to capture the full humanity and inhumanity, the sacrifices and savagery, of participants on opposing sides.”

But the MacArthur is just the latest in an astonishing run of literary successes, one that makes it easy to forget a simple fact: A mere 18 months ago, Nguyen was still unknown as a fiction writer. His career began quickly, and seemingly out of nowhere, in April 2015 — when a rave on the cover of The New York Times Book Review made his debut novel, The Sympathizer, one of the year’s most-discussed books. Shortly after that, The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, bringing Nguyen international fame. Since then, he’s stayed busy, publishing two celebrated books in short succession: a work of nonfiction cultural criticism, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, and a short story collection, The Refugees.

But Nguyen is no overnight sensation — far from it. In this interview, he opens up about a period of his life that’s been mostly overlooked: the two decades he spent trying, and mostly failing, to write fiction, working in secret while he juggled a host of other responsibilities. We discussed the 20 years of work that preceded his debut, the challenges he faced along the way, and — when it seemed his literary ambitions would never quite materialize — the strategies he used to keep going.

Viet Thanh Nguyen and I first spoke in 2015, discussing how he stumbled on The Sympathizer’s first sentence, an opening that finally allowed him to complete the rest of the book. That conversation appears in Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process, published this fall by Penguin Books. He teaches at the University of Southern California, and spoke to me by phone.

Joe Fassler: Your public life as a novelist has really only been about two years long — but I’ve read in interviews that writing fiction was important to you for many years before that. Tell me about your private life as a fiction writer.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I started writing fiction semi-seriously when I was in college. But I felt I was a better scholar than a fiction writer, so I decided to pursue academia and graduate school. I thought that I would write fiction on the side and when I got tenure, I’d concentrate on the fiction more fully.

That’s not quite how things turned out. It took me 20 years to learn how to be a writer, and part of that was because I was also being an academic at the same time. It was very much a long-term act of trying to balance both of these sides of myself — dealing not only with the demands of the art, but also with the petty world of ego and human vanity. I simply wasn’t making as much progress as quickly as I wanted on the fiction, and that was hard.

JF: How did you actually make time for your creative work, given the demands of full-time teaching and academic work?

VTN: Well, I’m very fortunate that I’ve had a very tolerant partner for most of that time. The reality was that there was very little free time, because academia is obviously a full-time job, and then writing had to come on top of that. I wouldn’t say that writing was another full-time job, but it consumed a lot of hours.

During the summers, I’d have enough free time that I could writer. But during the semester, I would probably do some work on the weekend, and whenever I had free time — when I wasn’t grading midterms, for example. During the teaching periods, I never got to write every day. I would only get to write every once in a while. The luxury of writing every day was not something I had the discipline to do.

It really wasn’t until I had writing residencies that I could write full-time. The first time that ever happened to me was not until 2004, when I did a fellowship at the Fire Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Then I really got to know what it meant to be a full-time writer, and it was a really difficult experience.

JF: I imagine that kind of pure, unstructured time was the opportunity you’d always been waiting for. But you’re saying it was difficult?

VTN: Very difficult. Up until that time, I’d been writing in the margins of my life — longing, just longing for the moment when I could write full-time. As a result, I was also completely unrealistic about my abilities. Up until that moment, I’d been thinking: oh, I’m actually a pretty good writer. I just need that chance. If I could just be full-time for a while, I can finish this book of short stories that I’m writing.

I realized that I faced a choice: I could give up on being a writer, or I could decide to persist.

So I got the chance. But Provincetown was a disaster. Finally, after all that time, I could write eight hours a day — and the outcome was completely bad. Number one, I was forced to confront the fact that I had a completed inflated sense of my own abilities. Number two, I was forced to confront the difficult reality that I had much more work to do before I could become even a competent writer.

That year was supposed to be the wonderful moment in my creative life up until that point, and it turned out to be the worst moment. And I realized that I faced a choice: I could give up on being a writer, or I could decide to persist. I decided to persist, and I think that was the moment that I really started becoming a writer. It was the process of overcoming those unrealistic expectations, of buckling down and spending another decade writing, that was really transformative.

JF: After that humbling experience at Provincetown, did you change anything about your schedule, your mindset, or your approach to writing?

VTN: Well, two things. One, I did change my approach to writing. I realized that I can’t write eight hours a day, which is what I was trying to do. The next time I had a long stretch of time to write, I only gave myself four hours a day. That was the right amount of time. There’s something about writing that, to me, is much more exhausting than office work, for example, or academic work, which I can do eight hours a day or more. For me, four hours seems to be the right amount.

I think it was Hemingway who said he’d stop writing when he reached a good moment — stop when you feel happy with the day’s work, and when you’re in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph while you still have an idea of what’s going to take place next. And resume the next day. That’s great advice, and I took it to heart.

The other thing I learned is that, for me, part of being a writer is about endurance. The ability to withstand rejection, and neglect, and obscurity, and all of that. I really began to learn that for real in Provincetown, because up until then I could imagine that I was an academic. There was a reason I wasn’t getting my creative work done, and I had all these excuses lined up for why I wasn’t writing more.

But after Provincetown, there was no excuse. That whole decade following that, right up until The Sympathizer was published, was about learning how to endure, just living with the art itself. Just trying to be faithful to the art, and believing that if I took as long as I needed to take, something good would come out of it. I learned I could not force myself to, let’s say, write the book within a year, simply because I wanted that success. It wasn’t going to happen.

JF: Still, it must have been hard at that point to have your career be so lopsided: your academic credentials greatly outweighed your creative accomplishments, even if your heart was really with your fiction. How difficult was that for you, emotionally, during the long period in which you wrote your novel?

VTN: It was hard, because I was successful in my academic career and I knew exactly what to do to maintain that. I could have just stayed with that, you know? But then, because I decided to devote much more time to writing fiction, it meant that both of my careers were developing at an equally slow pace. On the academic side, I could see other people moving far ahead of me, and that was distressing. On the fiction side, I thought that I was moving too slowly — I felt I would never have the time to get a book published.

What if I spent 10 or 20 years doing this, and I could still not get a book published, and then both my careers would be a disaster?

It was difficult enough just to learn how to write. But also, because I’m a petty human being, I was concerned about whether or not my efforts would have any kind of material outcome. What if I spent 10 or 20 years doing this, and I could still not get a book published, and then both my careers would be a disaster? Just trying to live with that possibility, and trying to have faith that I could do this, was really very challenging.

JF: Considering how badly things went at Provincetown, and what an ongoing struggle the work was, what made you stick with it? What kept you from giving up?

VTN: Occasionally I would get some recognition. I did sell a story when I was in Provincetown; from there, every year or two, I’d sell a short story or something. So small rewards came in little bursts. They didn’t happen very often, and they didn’t bring very much money or renown, but it was enough to keep me going.

Besides that, I think it was just sheer stubbornness, and the willingness to just work. For me, writing is about just sitting in a room, looking at the computer screen — no music, no window, just a blank wall. It’s a grind, but there was something in me that could endure all of that. I don’t know where it comes from. I do think a lot of it comes from my parents. I grew up watching them work 12 to 14 hours a day without relief.

While what I do as a writer is nowhere near as physically taxing as what they endured, I think that I learned lessons from them about just persevering, just putting one foot in front of the other, and hoping that would take you somewhere far, eventually.

JF: I don’t know about your parents’ work — tell me more about that.

VTN: They ran a grocery store for a decade during the key years of my youth. It was a brutal experience, physically brutal, but also very violent because of crime that you have to endure as a small business owner in a working-class neighborhood. It was very tough for me to watch them do that. While I never wanted to do anything like that, I certainly looked to their model of sacrifice.

I think being a writer very much involves sacrifice. Let’s say you use Malcom Gladwell’s figure, the 10,000 hours he’s said you have to work before you can learn to do something well. (I recently I had to count all the hours I spent in that early period for a sake of my accountant — and 10,000 hours was about what it came out to, disbursed over 15 or 20 years.) That means you have to give up 10,000 hours of your life, which could be much more productively used for your career, or for just entertainment and pleasure. The challenging thing is that there’s no guarantee those 10,000 hours are going to lead to anything whatsoever, besides what is meaningful personally.

JF: We first spoke in 2015, shortly after The Sympathizer was published, but before the book was awarded the Pulitzer. You explained how you came upon the novel’s open sentence, a breakthrough moment in a long, arduous process, one that helped you finally understand the novel’s tone and terms. Where were you in the process when you at last wrote that all-important first line?

VTN: I knew when I set out to write the novel that the opening was really important — that it would set the tone for the entire novel. And so, immediately after I wrote the outline for the novel (which is only two pages), I set about trying to figure out the opening scene and what that opening line would be. It took me, I think, pretty much the entire summer of 2011, which is when I started writing The Sympathizer.

It took all summer, but when I finally got that opening sentence, I wrote to a friend — who, besides my partner, was the only person I was talking to about the novel. “I’ve got it,” I said. “I’ve got this opening line.” And I was right. The voice and rhythm of that line drove the entire book.

JF: We all know how this story ends: You finished the novel, and published it to great acclaim. But there’s no way you could have known that outcome then. Let’s just say it went the other way, as it does for so many writers — even deserving one. Let’s say The Sympathizer had sat, instead, in your drawer. Do you think you would have been content with the sacrifices you’d made anyway?

VTN: I’m not the right person to ask, in some ways — because I did get rewarded for my work. It’s hard for me to put myself in a hypothetical situation where these things didn’t happen to me. The last 18 months have been crazy, and mind-boggling, but they’ve obviously made the last 20 years totally worth it.

But if my reality had turned out differently, if I never got a book published, would it have been worthwhile? I like to think that it would have been. Writing is only partially about the external rewards of publishing a book — even only partially about the external manifestation of the book itself.

This is not something that you want to voluntarily embark on because you think it’s going to be fun, or cool, or anything like that. It has to come out of some deep need.

There’s a spiritual dimension to it, I think. If someone finds it necessary to write, then it’s worth the sacrifice. By the way, that’s why I tell people: If you don’t find it necessary to write, you shouldn’t do it. This is not something that you want to voluntarily embark on because you think it’s going to be fun, or cool, or anything like that. It has to come out of some deep need.

If it’s coming out of that deep need, then the sacrifice will be worth it — because, I think, through the act of writing, you learn something about yourself. The whole idea about spirituality being necessary as a way of disciplining yourself, and separating yourself from the world of tempting vanities that is so tempting: I think that applies to writing as well. Even writing that doesn’t lead to a material outcome.

JF: So what was it that made it worth it for you, then? Before the publication came, before the book’s success?

VTN: I think that if I hadn’t become a writer, I would’ve done something else that would’ve required that discipline. I would have been a fanatical gardener, or a fanatical cook, or something like that. For those of us who become writers, we have that trait within ourselves — this desire to master something. A desire to try to become an expert at something through the art — something somehow related to what we feel, and what we need spiritually.

It’s a lifelong endeavor. I think that, even if I hadn’t somehow gotten a book published in the last few years, I would’ve kept at it. You know, there are these stories of writers who don’t get published until they’re in their 50s, or 60s, or 70s. Sometimes, that’s the reality of things.

Of course, I hope my career isn’t finished. And if it isn’t, there will be future tests of my spirit, and my soul, and everything else still ahead — whole different set of tests than what I’ve already been through. I have to believe that I can face those as well.

The Only Thing Better Than Dostoevsky is Pumpkin Spice Dostoevsky

Posted on October 20, 2017July 23, 2019 by 007595

After a long weird summer, it’s finally, finally fall—season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, season of lying on the floor crying because the sun set at 6 p.m., season of Halloween candy and decorative gourds and that dancing jack o’lantern guy. And most importantly, season of pumpkin spice.

Oh, you think pumpkin spice is basic? Well, tell that to prominent Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky! (You can’t. He’s dead, which is also very seasonally appropriate.) Snuggle up in a cozy sweater and enjoy these classics made more autumnal, more nutmeg-scented, and somehow even whiter than before.

Crime and Pumpkin Spice

Before committing his crime, Raskolnikov believes that murder is permissible; afterwards, he comes to believe that murder is monstrous. But what happens when he believes that murder is delicious?

Notes from Underground and The Double Pumpkin Spice Latte

Are you capable of enjoying a cup of tea with sugar in it? Then imagine how much more you’ll enjoy a double pumpkin spice latte.

Poor Folk Without Pumpkin Spice

In Dostoevsky’s first pumpkin spice novel, two cousins mail a Starbucks punch card back and forth and discuss whether they can afford to buy pumpkin spice Pop Tarts at Trader Joe’s.

The Gambler and Nasty Business and Pumpkin Spice

The man wrote a lot of novellas. It’s fine. We can’t all write War and Peace. Anyway, there’s jamming two novellas into one book and then there’s jamming two novellas into one book with a swirl of pumpkin spice and we know which one’s better.

White Nights of Pumpkin Spice

A short story about unrequited love that can only be soothed by eating a dozen pumpkin spice Milanos.

A Raw Youth (Now in Pumpkin Spice)

A son rebels against his father by scolding the old man that “actually, there’s no pumpkin in so-called ‘pumpkin spice’ flavoring.”

The Brothers Karamazov (Autumn Edition)

Mitya, Vanya, and Alyosha put on light jackets.

Pumpkin Spice Notes from the House of the Dead

A personal memoir of the grueling and inhumane conditions in Siberian labor camps, but with pumpkin spice notes.

Pumpkin Spice Demons

An unassuming town becomes the nexus for a pumpkin spice revolution.

The Orange Idiot

It’s Dostoevsky’s epic novel about a good, kind, compassionate leader, but with pumpkin spice. What did you think it was?

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The Only Thing Better Than Dostoevsky is Pumpkin Spice Dostoevsky

Crime and Pumpkin Spice

Notes from Underground and The Double Pumpkin Spice Latte

Poor Folk Without Pumpkin Spice

The Gambler and Nasty Business and Pumpkin Spice

White Nights of Pumpkin Spice

A Raw Youth (Now in Pumpkin Spice)

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Pumpkin Spice Demons

The Orange Idiot

“Let’s Play Doctor”

by Cris Mazza

Our five top microfictions, illustrated

Stephen Aubrey, “Cohabitation”

M. Lopes da Silva, “Several Coats of Coats”

Josh Lefkowitz, “A Moment of Silence”

James Lough, “When We Lost Alphonse”

Tamar Nachmany, “Mount Sinai”

Crime and Pumpkin Spice

Notes from Underground and The Double Pumpkin Spice Latte

Poor Folk Without Pumpkin Spice

The Gambler and Nasty Business and Pumpkin Spice

White Nights of Pumpkin Spice

A Raw Youth (Now in Pumpkin Spice)

The Brothers Karamazov (Autumn Edition)

Pumpkin Spice Notes from the House of the Dead

Pumpkin Spice Demons

The Orange Idiot

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