Novelist, critic, and essayist Zadie Smith, winner of the Orange Prize, James Tait Memorial Prize, and Betty Trask Award among others, can now add the Langston Hughes Medal to the list. Smith will be presented this medal on November 16th during the annual Langston Hughes Festival at The City College of New York (CCNY) in Harlem. The event is free and open to the public.
Smith joins an array of legendary authors of the African Diaspora who have been previous recipients, including the first ever honoree in 1978 James Baldwin, playwright Ntozake Shange (2016), National Book Critics Circle Award winner Edwidge Danticat (2011), National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson (2015), Lucille Clifton (2003), Chinua Achebe (1993), Octavia Butler (2005), and Ralph Ellison (1984) to name a few.
Langston Hughes Festival director and CCNY publishing certificate program assistant director Retha Powers says that the Langston Hughes Festival and the medal is considered a cornerstone event of CCNY. With regards to this year’s honoree, Powers mentions that Zadie Smith is an “excellent example of a writer who stands in the tradition of [Langston] Hughes.”
She adds, “[Smith] writes about identity, race, class, the life of the city and of relationships that intersect on all of these levels. She is also a prolific critic and essayist with a passion for music so her work intersects with just about every form Hughes wrote in.”
Langston Hughes remains an iconic name not only in the literary field but also in New York City history, specifically Historic Harlem. Last year the I, Too Arts Collective formed to extend his legacy by renting his brownstone as a space for the larger artist community. Hughes’ poem, “I, Too” has served as a rallying cry, published and quoted regularly in the midst of a consistently tense political climate in the United States. His poetry, commentary, and influence is rooted deeply in the criticism and analysis of the existence of Blacks in America as well as a reflection to the specificity and universality of our experiences during his lifetime. #LangstonsLegacy continues to have an effect on artists of all ages. The Langston Hughes Festival also encourages and awards essays on Hughes’ influence through a contest open to City College students to read and reflect on his work and how it applies today.
The Festival begins with a symposium on the legacy of Zadie Smith’s work with speakers Kaitlyn Greenidge, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Tracey L. Walters, and Vanessa K. Valdés and others at 12:30pm in Aaron Davis Hall on Thursday, November 16th. The celebration will conclude at 6:30pm when Smith will be in conversation with Emily Raboteau, after which she will be awarded her medal.
One spring afternoon in 1593, four men walked into an inn. Some hours later, three walked out. What happened in that room has been the subject of speculation from gleeful Puritans, a solemn, mournful Shakespeare, and generations of critics, because the man who died in that room — although some claim he did not — was the playwright Christopher Marlowe.
Christopher Marlowe is not nearly so well-known as Shakespeare, of course, though he was more famous while he was alive. He was born exactly two months before Shakespeare. He went to Cambridge on scholarship, where he probably became a spy. He wrote about compelling demons, Christian hypocrites, atheist tyrants persevering without punishment, and a king in love with his courtier. Rumors about his own life abounded — necromancy, atheism, sodomy — and likely played a part in his death, allegedly in a brawl over the bill — the reckoning. It’s suspicious that all the men in the room at the time were in some way involved in Elizabethan intelligence networks; the story of the three survivors is a bit hard to believe. If he could summon his own shade, we might get some answers, but everyone knows to speak to a ghost you must make the right offering, speak the right words. For a poet, perhaps, the words themselves are the offering.
Marlowe is buried, they say, somewhere in the corner of a churchyard in Deptford, near where he died. No one knows exactly where his grave is; on the far wall there is a plaque commemorating him, and a rosemary plant, for remembrance. In Westminster Abbey the stone with his name bears a question mark after his death date. Some conspiracists theorize that he faked his death and went on to write Shakespeare’s plays under a pseudonym, which makes for a good spy story but poor reading comprehension; the two men, both brilliant, have such different syntaxes, such different focus, such different pace, that it is impossible to mistake them.
Some conspiracists theorize that he faked his death and went on to write Shakespeare’s plays under a pseudonym, which makes for a good spy story but poor reading comprehension.
There’s a simple answer to this question mark, though, or simple enough to a certain kind of person, which is the kind of person I was in 2013 when I graduated college and followed in Marlowe’s footsteps to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Unlike him, I wasn’t studying divinity, but like him I was using a subject I had only the barest intention of following through to a career in order to get to a place that seemed like a ladder to another world. I was 22, and if someone had asked me to spy for the Queen I probably would have said yes, for the sake of danger, a good story, and a hill to die on. So I also thought it entirely reasonable to dig up a churchyard looking for answers about a long-dead poet whose primary audience these days is English professors and college students who have tried more than once to see what happens if you summon a demon in Latin in the woods.
A plaque commemorating Marlowe’s death place (Photo by Loz Pycock)
Of course, my advisor, the church in question, the University of Cambridge, and probably the British government would likely have had other ideas, and so I could not excavate the graveyard where Marlowe was supposedly buried. I was left to try digging up anything else I could find. I was studying biological anthropology at Cambridge with the vague aim of doing forensic anthropology. A few years earlier, splitting my time between English and anthropology, driving between a forensic anthropology and pathology lab at UMass and my Shakespeare class at Smith, I had thought that I could combine the two by reading narratives into bones. I got into Cambridge on this metaphor; my admissions essays included a long paragraph about how I overcame my fear of death and the dead by studying their bodies, learning their stories, becoming an instrument of a kind of afterlife for them in the capacity of evidence-gatherer, storyteller, witness.
This was something of a falsehood: I was still afraid of death, and the only immortality I was interested in at the time was real, physical, vital immortality, the kind involving a literal beating heart. I had once been afraid of hell, and then I stopped believing in God, and now I was afraid of dying, of nothingness, and also, still, a little bit, of hell. I read Doctor Faustus and recognized myself in the title character’s inability to ask sincerely for salvation. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on it, a play that a friend directed and I acted in; there was a time I knew the entire play by heart, and that was the same spring I’d wake up with nightmares of red eyes and glowing furnaces.
One of the critics I read for my thesis said something that has stuck with me ever since: To read or watch Doctor Faustus, you must, for the length of the play, enter into the mind and spirit of a Christian. You must believe in it for the trick to work, for the play to horrify you completely. Part of the horror of the play is that, on a basic level, it is completely theologically orthodox: What happens to Faustus is what should happen. But it is not right that it happens, not morally or instinctively or emotionally, and in that dissonance lies a world of subversion. The God of this play has no mercy, and it is in part because Faustus knows this, and knows the moral universe to which he is unwilling subject is unfair, that he is damned.
The Old Court at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where Marlowe lived from age 17–23.
Most of what we know about Marlowe is shadowy. A lot of the conventional knowledge that gets passed down is, at its heart, story; scholar after scholar, however brilliant and credible, will note, We are not sure if this is true; however, it seems true, and if it is not, it should be. There is a portrait of a young man, unidentified, from 1585; his age is noted as 21, which is the right age for Marlowe. It was found at Corpus Christi in the 1950s. On it is a motto: Quod me nutrit me destruit, what nourishes me destroys me. There is no evidence other than the age and the college to suggest that it is Marlowe, and probably he wouldn’t have had the money for either the portrait or the elaborate doublet the young man in the picture is wearing. But the face seems right, and the motto is so perfect that it is almost a thing out of fiction.
Even Marlowe’s name could be mysterious. Christened Christopher, he was almost ubiquitously called Kit; his surname is rendered, variously, as Marlowe, Marley, Marlin and even, resonantly, Merlin. Another story, almost certainly untrue, is that Kit’s spy code name was Mercury (there was a Mercury who worked in Elizabethan intelligence)—a trickster, quick and ever-shifting. A figure emerges from these stories: laughing, irreverent, driven by an internal fire. Reckless and grinning, but tortured. Almost immediately after his death, the stories started: Moralists wanted him struck down by the hand of God, a cautionary tale; an anti-theatrical pamphlet published not long after the murder claims that he died cursing. Others have him as a reckless hero, a kind of martyr, the muses’ darling. His story, the way we like to tell it, seems irresistibly to follow the pattern of one of his own plays: the son of a tradesman comes to glory from nothing, is a miraculous success, but is torn apart by his own overreach, his desire for something deeper, his inability to stand still or to be contented. Quod me nutrit me destruit.
One of the stories about Marlowe, one with more meat to it than some, is that he was an atheist. This is implied in the accusations that got him arrested, stated outright in the note written by another spy in an attempt to incriminate him, and bandied about a great deal because of his associations with Walter Ralegh and other freethinkers, and because in his plays he wrote things like I count religion but a childish toy. I tried to imagine what it must have been like not to believe in God in a world where it would have seemed that everyone did. Catholic or Protestant, they all believed, and many so strongly that they’d kill or die or torture in the name of it—surrendering their own souls in hope of righteousness, martyring each other in hope of becoming martyrs.
Catholic or Protestant, they all believed, and many so strongly that they’d kill or die or torture in the name of it.
In the environment I grew up in, everyone believed in God. Everyone went to church. When I was thirteen and my faith shut off like a switch and my sense of God disappeared as though some inner eye was either at once opened for the first time or blinded, I did not at first think there is no God. At first I thought God has taken away my faith, and I am damned. When you feel yourself at odds with the whole world, perhaps the whole universe, you feel, inevitably, a deep sense of wrongness. You can either attribute it to yourself and try to stamp it out, killing some essential part of yourself in the process, or you can cultivate it, nurture the dark seed in you like a flower, take pride in it and show it off, even if it hurts.
The River Stour near Canterbury, where Marlowe was born. Photo: Emily Atkinson
I chose pride, and from his plays it seems that Kit did too. This was what made me first fall in love with him, or a least into obsession. If I could not read his bones, I would read his plays, and what wasn’t in those I would find out from history. While I was meant to be studying primate aggression and head trauma in medieval Irish cemetery populations, I was learning Marlowe’s biography. One critic went so far as to have a medical examiner read the 400-year-old inquest report into Marlowe’s death and write up what he thought that death must have been like. I wondered about that but I wondered, too, who had buried him. His family was in Canterbury, two days’ ride away. Ten days before his death he had been arrested on charges pertaining to blasphemy, but released pending investigation. Had they known? His mother could not read, nor his sisters; his father could scrawl his own name. What would it have been like to go to Cambridge, to speak and write Latin and Greek and French, to wear English like your own skin, and to go home to people who had never had the chance to learn to read? To wonder at your own luck, at what might have happened to your whirring mind had you not been so fortunate?
What would it have been like to go to Cambridge, to speak and write Latin and Greek and French, to wear English like your own skin, and to go home to people who had never had the chance to learn to read?
When I was six, the Calvinist school I went to took away my books and told my parents not to let me read so that the other children would catch up. I would slam my fingers in my desk on purpose so I could sneak a book from my backpack and read it in the nurse’s office, escaping boredom for ten wonderful minutes. By that age I already spent a lot of time thinking that I was damned; that I didn’t really believe in Jesus, I just believed that I believed because I knew that that was what one had to do to go to heaven. Nothing transactional, I thought, could possibly be pure.
Canterbury Cathedral, July 2014. Photo: Emily Atkinson
This is John Faustus’s central problem and Marlowe writes it like someone who has felt it, who has found himself trapped in that unending damning logic puzzle. Sure, Faustus compounds it by summoning a demon, but if you believe yourself to be constitutionally incapable of receiving salvation, why not get what you can while you can? Why not sign your own death warrant, appoint your own time and place, gain some modicum of control?
I did not know what had happened to Kit Marlowe in that little room in Deptford that led to him getting stabbed in the eye, but somewhere at the crossroads of my research into the osteological effects of torture, the history of serial murder, and the life of Christopher Marlowe, I came across a figure straight out of hell who might offer some explanation as to why a knife to the eye might have seemed a kind of mercy. Crossroads, after all, are where traditionally one finds such demons.
Richard Topcliffe was about the same age as Queen Elizabeth, in his 60s in the 1590s. He was from a wealthy, highborn family; he had known the Queen since they were young. Topcliffe was the Queen’s own demon. He hunted priests and tortured them. He loved his work so much he built his own torture chamber in his house and got permission to take prisoners there. He made men who had worked at the Tower of London all their lives cry and resign.
Torture was illegal in Elizabethan England until the 1580s, which may come as a surprise; our modern understanding has everyone before the Victorians racking people on the slightest pretext. But it was held to be morally reprehensible and beneath the Queen’s men — until an uptick in radical Catholic plots on the Queen’s life led to a royal lawyer writing out a justification for torture in specific cases. Something like a torture memo, arguing for the legality of certain methods in extenuating circumstances — you know, for national security. Youthful opposition to the Bush administration doing essentially that exact thing had sparked an interest in human rights abuses and forensic anthropology as a method of investigating and prosecuting them. It was difficult not to see the parallels to Elizabethan England, where an exception to the ban on torture, initially meant for those directly involved in a regicide plot, widened and widened, slipping open until finally it could be twisted to encompass almost any Catholic in England — Catholics whom men like Marlowe were employed to spy upon.
One story about Marlowe is that he was cruel. He wrote violent plays and he met a violent end, and in between, we know, he got in several fights. One ended in a death, though he didn’t strike the killing blow, and had backed off well before it came. But still. His heroes kill and sometimes go unpunished. He writes of blood. Once at a production of Tamburlaine, the bullets in the musket onstage were real, and a woman and her child were shot and killed in the audience. A violent man involved with other violent men ends violently; this is not an uncommon story, and if he was a spy, an informant who turned people in to be tortured, well, that fits with the narrative.
But another story about Marlowe is that he was kind. Another playwright called him “kind Kit Marlowe,” in fact. All his contemporaries called him Kit, even those that didn’t know him well; they were on familiar, friendly terms. He certainly had a lot of friends; he was invited to the great houses, and after his death poets and playwrights wrote glowing eulogies to him and referenced him long after he was gone. His plays are dark but they are also often funny. They are brutal, but in them is a thread of universality: we all suffer, we are all human, we all deserve mercy and it is unkind and unfair that the world will not give it to us. How can we not expect better, from it, from each other, from God?
In his plays is a thread of universality: We all suffer, we are all human, we all deserve mercy and it is unkind and unfair that the world will not give it to us.
Whichever story is the truer one, we know that Marlowe wrote those plays and poems with their brutality and empathy and beauty. We also know he was probably employed as a spy, did dirty, ugly work, and that he died of it. We don’t know what he was like, really, or what he believed, or why he was killed. But we feel like we do, because we know the stories he told, and those stories resonate with something — good or bad — inside those of us who feel compelled to untangle the knots of Kit’s narrative. Somehow, when it comes to a story, the probable answer — that he, like all of us, was sometimes cruel and sometimes kind, and was capable of doing wrong and also of great bravery, and that he did some but not all of the good and terrible things our narratives attribute to him — does not satisfy.
So I found myself asking, knowing the impossibility and foolhardiness of the question: how could a poet and radical himself in danger of prosecution and torture, someone to whom I felt a keen connection, whom I liked — have involved himself in something like that? At a production of Edward II, at the National Theatre, I found myself hit by the full force of this difficulty. Near the end of Edward II, just before Edward is murdered in a particularly horrifying way, he enumerates the trials he has endured: his captors have systematically deprived him of sleep and decent food. They have made him stand so that he has to remain upright and still. They have played loud music. They have shaved his beard.
This isn’t sensationalized torture; it’s not the rack or what you see in 24. It could have come out of the CIA’s playbook on “enhanced interrogation,” except in Edward’s case he wasn’t being interrogated. But the description chilled me because it wasn’t at all the sort of thing someone would make up. It was described in detail, with intimate emotional awareness; it felt, in other words, like the account of someone who had been there.
The description chilled me because it wasn’t at all the sort of thing someone would make up. It felt like the account of someone who had been there.
Edward isn’t a good king. He’s not particularly sympathetic. For most of the play, he’s selfish and overdramatic and makes frustratingly stupid choices. But in this scene, he is undeniably the one with whom we are meant to empathize. He is a victim, quite clearly, and Lightborn, his killer, is literally an Anglicization of Lucifer, a monster who defines himself based on how creatively he can kill. Though certainly the usurper of Edward’s throne could make a compelling argument for killing Edward — on the basis of national security, even — we cannot, watching the play, agree with him (and in fact, he ends up getting executed, too). Marlowe uses brutality to evoke empathy, even for characters we might otherwise think deserve what they get. Faustus knows what he is doing, but in his final monologue, desperately pained, we cannot help but feel for him. Edward has done bad things for the wrong reasons, but when he is brutally killed his scream echoes our own.
For a long time, perhaps since I lost my faith, I thought logic and evidence was the only way to solve a problem or a mystery. But watching that play, I realized I was never going to know how Kit Marlowe knew what kind of torture spies really use. I was never going to know which side of those techniques he had been on, or who he’d heard it from. I was never going to know with any certainty or satisfaction what had happened in that room, not from a medical report or an inquest. Not even from digging up half the graves in St. Nicholas’s churchyard looking for a late 20s male with some kind of orbital trauma and disintegrating finery that didn’t belong in an unmarked grave.
Maybe if I did it I’d find him and put an end to speculation that he’d run away to Italy and written the plays we call Will Shakespeare’s. But the answer to that is already in poetry; his influence on Shakespeare is monumental and undeniable. Shakespeare gives him an epitaph better than any tombstone: Dead shepherd, now I see thy saw of might/He never loved, who loved not at first sight. Marlowe wrote two well-known poems, “The Passionate Shepherd” and “Hero and Leander,” and it is that latter that that line about true love comes from, the one Shakespeare quotes in As You Like It. Some people think Mercutio is an homage to Marlowe. Prospero in The Tempest is an inverted Faustus, an aging man’s answer to a young man’s fury. Some people live long enough to know when to give up their magic, to know when passion has become danger, when one has verged from grey into black. To know that there is such a thing as grey, and to know too that living in that alone is not always as satisfying as it might seem.
Writing is a kind of necromancy, and a shade from the underworld, if fed with blood, can tell us much more than his bones.
What did Shakespeare think of him? What was it like for the two of them to meet and recognize each other, so different but firing along the same track, working in ways of which no one else was capable? These fictional answers beget more questions, and these fictional delights must have fictional ends. Margaret Atwood’s book on writing, Negotiating with the Dead, references The Tempest as a kind of touchstone; I think she mentions Faustus, too. Writing is a kind of necromancy, and a shade from the underworld, if fed with blood, can tell us much more than his bones. All writing is conjuring, and all ghosts come to us with secret histories. I had made myself a shade of Marlowe, a vivid image of a man I had come to care about, if not to fully understand. But I could understand him with the right magic. With the right words. And so I set about conjuring my spell.
Atwood writes that “all writing of the narrative kind…is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality — by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.” All stories are ghost stories. Stories are what assure us that we will always be more than bones, however insubstantial the facts of their foundations, and if that is the only path out of mortality — the only way both into and out of that little room in Deptford — then I will take it. “Danger is in words,” Marlowe has Faustus say, and that is true, but so is everything else.
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, the first essay collection from Hanif Abdurraqib, is a towering work full of insightful observations about everything from the legacy of Nina Simone to the music of Bruce Springsteen. Throughout the book, Abdurraqib juxtaposes the societal with the intimately personal, and the end result is a powerful work about art, society, and the perspective through which its author regards both.
In the waning days of summer, I talked with Abdurraqib about the way his book came together, how it relates to his work as a poet, and how the powerful and cumulative structure of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us emerged. An edited version of our conversation follows.
Tobias Carroll: Your book opens with back-to-back essays about Chance the Rapper and Bruce Springsteen, both of whom are very much associated with particular places. Did you have that structural decision in mind from the outset, or did it come later?
Hanif Abdurraqib: It came later. But I think it makes sense, right? They’re both artists who are speaking to a unique American experience, more than just a distinctly geographical one. Their vision of what freedom in America looks like is governed by two vastly different frames. That’s in part because of their demographics: Chance is younger; he is black; he is of a different era and a different place. I was really interested in examining Springsteen’s relationship with labor as freedom, and who in America gets to claim that gleefully and who gets to feel like that’s a burden.
I was interested in Chance particularly because his idea of freedom is tied to this idea of inexhaustible joy in the face of whatever is trying to take it away. I don’t know if I believe in that, but I was interested in his belief in that. With both of these artists, it’s the same thing. I don’t know if I believe them. I don’t know if I believe in what their ethos is telling me, but I’m interested in why they believe it.
TC: Did you find that the process of writing about these musicians caused your views on them to change over time?
HA: It’s refined it more. I’ve been a Bruce Springsteen fan for pretty much my whole life. I’ve grown up with, and grown into, the great Springsteen narrative, so my interest in Bruce Springsteen is always shifting. Especially because in so much of his work, particularly in his earliest eras, he’s hinting at some sort of escape. But it’s not an escape from anything, really, because all of his characters are still riddled with this Jersey lower-middle-class minutiae of waiting for a weekend. Listening to Bruce complicates my opinions of him.
The piece in the book is more about complicating what it’s like to be at a Bruce Springsteen show, and to take in everyone at a Bruce Springsteen show and the Bruce Springsteen of now. That’s different than the Bruce Springsteen of the Hammersmith Odeon in 1975. The audience is dreaming more, but he’s decidedly more cynical; he’s performing to an audience of dreamers, but I don’t know if he believes himself as much as he used to.
TC: As someone who grew up near the Jersey shore, that mythic Springsteen figure has definitely loomed large in pop culture for me.
HA: It seems like the songs he believes most now are the ones where there’s no happy ending. Like “Atlantic City,” for example. “Atlantic City” is this harrowing tale where you’re on the edge of your seat, waiting and waiting and waiting for this terrible life to resolve itself into something better. The song opens with the image of a house being blown up, and it doesn’t resolve itself. That’s why I think “Atlantic City” is great — it opens with this image of a house being torn apart and a fight on the boardwalk in a city that doesn’t know how to handle itself. The central character in that story, the speaker of that song, can’t make a better life for himself. He never makes a better life for himself. The last verse of “Atlantic City” is so harrowing, that last line of “Last night I met a guy, and I’m going to do a favor for him.” It’s a person who’s at their wit’s end, and we are to assume that they’re getting by on ill means. Everyone in the song is facing consequences for things they’ve done wrong, and in the end, the character himself says, “Well, I am now one of these people who is going to do something wrong, despite the consequences and how I know it’ll play out.” And that is the Springsteen dream turned on its ear.
Author Hanif Abdurraqib
TC: Did most of the pieces about music in the book originate as freelance assignments, or were they written with the book in mind?
HA: About half and half. Some of that stuff was published in places like MTV News, where I worked for about 18 months. There’s a piece in there from the New York Times, one from Pitchfork…The thing for me is that I love music, and I think about music all the time. A cool thing about having an essay book is that you’re not beholden to any strict timeline. There were things I wanted to explore that I certainly couldn’t publish anywhere because they weren’t “topical.” I could really grind away at them in that book in a way that felt good. A lot of the things that were rattling around in my brain for several months could finally get outside of my body and have a place to live, outside of me rambling to my friends in bars about pop-punk.
TC: There are a few places in the book where you quote Lester Bangs, including a piece that’s written as a homage to “Sham 69 Is Innocent!” Were there any other music writers who you wanted to invoke or engage in dialogue with through this book?
HA: Bangs is important to me. I’m glad that you mentioned the “Sham 69 Is Innocent!” thing, because that’s my favorite piece of music criticism ever written. It’s this absurd collection of statements, and I feel about Twenty One Pilots the way Bangs felt about Sham 69. I feel that there was a clear lineage for me to bring him up in that piece. He was endeared to Sham 69, but also, “Oh…..those guys.” I’m from Columbus; Twenty One Pilots are from Columbus. I’m endeared to them, but I also have moments where I go, “Oh…those guys.”
I think that Bangs and Greil Marcus are in a similar lineage. Greil Marcus is so good at drilling through the music to get to the story underneath it. I really wanted to do that. And I wanted to honor both Bangs and Greil Marcus, especially because Bangs was so good at making the reader feel like they were in on the joke. I don’t want to write about music in a way that makes people feel like they have to be a music fan to understand why I like it. I don’t want to write about music in a way that makes people feel like they have to be up on the latest things to appreciate what I’m trying to get at. I’m not trying to get the reader to like the music I like — I’m trying to convince them that it meant something to me. The music is kind of perfunctory.
Jessica Hopper is a massive influence on me. There was actually a piece that got pulled from the book that was written after a piece of hers. I really wanted to honor the impact that she’s had on my writing. She was my editor for several months at MTV; she edited me when she was at Pitchfork. There’s a working relationship there, but I’ve also just been a fan of her criticism and her insistence on the fact that music is not a small or stupid thing. Pop culture is not small or stupid. It should be treated with respect; critics should look at it with respect and write about it with a level of respect. I was trying to honor that as well.
Pop culture is not small or stupid. It should be treated with respect.
TC: Is that why you began the book with music and gradually expanded it to include questions of family, faith, and race?
HA: Yeah — it’s a reverse blooming. I opened with music because I want to open my palms so that everyone can feel welcome. I don’t want to crush people, obviously, but slowly making the stakes smaller and smaller and making the space more intimate — that’s a gift that a writer can give a reader. I opened with music to say, “Here is a conversation I want you to be in. Here’s a peg that you might be comfortable with, and I want you to be in on this conversation that I’m going to get to later.” And by the time you actually get to the conversation, people are either uncomfortable or a little more comfortable, but they’re there. I wanted people to feel like I was talking to a part of them that they were comfortable with. I wanted people to be able to step comfortably into a conversation that was going to get gradually more difficult.
TC: In the book, you talk about having spent time in the Columbus punk scene. Do you feel that that had any influence on shaping you as a writer?
HA: I think I am less romantic now about being in a punk scene than I was then. I was often the only black person on the punk scene, or definitely othered by a punk scene. When you are a token in a setting that is branded as a familial setting, even your othering can feel like it’s a part of this familial ritual. Even the fact that you are being distinctly othered by people can feel like it’s done out of this sense of brotherhood. Which, at the time, I needed. At the time, I was in my late teens, and that was a thing I needed. That was where I felt most like I fit in.
It did also teach me a lot about the lengths that we will go to — and when I say “we,” I mean “me,” and I particularly think, at least in my punk scene, of young straight men — the lengths that will go to to escape emotions, and the reckoning that comes when those emotions come back to live, to live a full life. If anything, growing up in in a punk scene pushed me to a level of vulnerability in my writing that I don’t think I ever would have gotten to. I want to be vulnerable because I did not see a blueprint for vulnerability in the scenes I was in, and I saw the damage that did to people. And I saw the damage it did to me, personally.
At least in the scene that I was in, there was a lot of performed vulnerability in the musicians. We demand a performance of vulnerability that we think is going to transfer to us, but instead it all feels like a performance. I think it’s easy to perform vulnerability when the stakes are low. It’s significantly harder to come correct and come through with real, actual, sustainable vulnerability that allows you to, for lack of a better term, be in your feelings when you need to be in your feelings, and handle that in a way where it doesn’t harm or put other people at risk.
I want to be vulnerable because I did not see a blueprint for vulnerability in the scenes I was in, and I saw the damage that did to people.
TC: You write about the phenomenon of bands playing songs that express sentiments that they felt in their 20s a decade later, and how that doesn’t always age well. Do you find that that’s the case with a lot of the artists that you liked at a certain point in your life, or does it vary from artist to artist?
HA: I think it varies from artist to artist. I do think that there’s a specific brand of early-to-mid-2000s emo or pop-punk album wherein a dude or several dudes are angry at a woman or several women. I’m thinking of the first Fall Out Boy album. The longest piece in the book is a piece about Fall Out Boy, so I have a lot of love for them, but that first album is horrifically violent. It’s all about how much Pete Wentz wants his ex-girlfriend to die. That’s played out in a very literal way. I’m thinking of Mayday Parade’s A Lesson in Romantics, which is kind of bad in the same way, and Cute is What We Aim For’s The Same Old Blood Rush With a New Touch. The first Brand New album is also in that same vein. There’s a brand of album that really leans into this idea of punishing women who rejected the men in the band.
That’s not specific to this genre, and it’s not specific to music. It’s specific to men and the world we live in. Just a couple of days ago, there was a story of a man in Dallas who rolled up to his ex-wife’s house and shot everyone inside.
I don’t want to pretend that this is a specific thing to a genre. But if you’re talking about things that don’t age well, that hasn’t aged well for me. In my criticisms of those albums and those songs, it’s been vital for me to be honest with myself and remember that there was a time when I loved those songs. There was a time when I sang along with those songs. In order for me to properly critique them and properly write on them, I needed to reckon with myself on why I liked them, and not just chalk it up to, “Well, I was young.” That’s an easy window out, and I’m interested in creating harder windows out for myself so that I might, hopefully, be a better critic at the end of it.
TC: You mentioned your book of poetry. Did you start writing nonfiction before you wrote poetry, or did the two go hand in hand for you? Have the two started to influence one another?
HA: They’ve definitely started to influence one another. First, I was a freelance music journalist writing for no money for a long time, or writing for very little money. I started writing poems in 2012, and then I decided to take poems very, very seriously. I stopped writing all other things, and really studied poetry. I got a lot of poetry books and locked myself away and studied poetry the best I could without going to get an MFA–and then came out writing poems that were better than the ones I started writing.
I returned to music writing around 2015. I wrote a thing about “Trap Queen” and it picked up a lot of buzz. That’s when Jessica [Hopper] reached out to me about writing for Pitchfork, and eventually for MTV. It was kind of like a domino effect.
I hope this shows up in the book: I think the poetry and the longform work both inform each other. There’s a thing in the book that’s literally a poem; I just removed the line breaks. There’s that thing about Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. It’s a poem–I just made the sections in the paragraphs instead of having line breaks, like it was before. But that’s not an essay. That’s not making a linear, clear argument for anything. It’s making a metaphorical argument for a thing. I think “Defiance, Ohio is the Name of a Band” is more of a poem than an essay, but it’s kind of like neither.
I know that, because of this book, a lot of people are going to want to talk to me about genre. I get that. But I don’t know how to explain this idea that I sit down to write and I am, at my heart, sitting down to write a poem every single time. I envision everything that comes out of that to be driven by my desire to write a poem. If I write an essay, in some ways it’s an essay because people say it’s an essay. But it was driven by desire to write a poem. That doesn’t mean I’m a poet and only a poet; it just means that my idea of genre is not restrictive. My idea of genre is that I have many ways to get to many end results. But I’m driven to the page by my love for poetry, and if I’m lucky, then other things come out from time to time.
Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. This time, we asked: What’s a book you read in secret?
Saturday night on the banks of the Piscataqua River. Seagulls battle the wind, land to rest on the metal frame of Memorial bridge. The first alarm sounds and the gate arms descend, one after the other, like domino tiles. In a moment, the bridge will rise with a screech to let a gundalow barge through.
I watch the boat while I settle at my own gate, an entrance to the arts festival where I’ve been working as a gatekeeper all summer. There’s a concert tonight. Behind me, musicians unpack their instruments for a sound check, cover their arms with bug spray. It’s an outdoor stage and by evening the mosquitoes will swarm. The Piscataqua is a water boundary between New Hampshire and Maine. Earlier this summer, a band joked you can hear them perform in two states at once when the wind is right.
It’s still hours before the show. I twirl a package in my hands, a crumpled plastic sleeve with line after line of stamps and my mother’s neat handwriting. She memorized the list of items approved for mailing to the States by heart. Russian chocolate, gingerbread cookies, newspaper clippings, socks — all okay. No luck on tea bags, CDs, religious paraphernalia. Sometimes she gives packages a false bottom and hides an icon for this saint or that. She says she worries about my spirit. This package came earlier today and I know, before I rip the plastic open, that it’s a book. A copy from my childhood, worn edges, the price — six kopeks — listed on the back cover.
The Adventures of Dennis by Victor Dragunsky is classic Soviet literature — Soviet, not Russian. Does the difference matter? It didn’t when I was a kid. My grandfather read those stories to me at bedtime. In them, a mischievous eight-year-old boy finds all sorts of trouble. Perched on my stool at the gate, I open the first page. These titles! “3rd Place, Butterfly Stroke,” “Exactly 25 Kilos,” “Who Ever Heard of It?” Each one resurrects a memory. In one story, Dennis forces himself to drink a full bottle of soda to weigh exactly 25 kilos and win a year’s subscription to Murzilka, a children’s magazine. In another, he performs “satire verses” during a Young Pioneers concert, only to suffer from extreme stage fright and be stuck singing the same line. Twin stories “Things I Like” “…And Things I Don’t” list with lucid detail the tastes of a young boy in the 1950s, one of them playing “Reds and Whites.” He doesn’t like to be a “White,” Dennis says. He’d rather drop out of the game.
Pioneers, Murzilka, Reds and Whites were relics by the time I entered school in the early ’90s. Things of the past, but not forgotten. Reds, of course, were the Bolsheviks in the Civil War; Whites were the remains of the old society, the side that lost. My great-grandfather, a White Officer, disappeared in the prison camps. “I love stories about Red Army cavalrymen who always win their battles,” Dennis says in “Things I Like.” I did not hear it as a child, but now that I sit with this book 25 years later, I wonder. Did my grandfather’s voice falter when he read this story to me?
The audience gathers. The gate is a formality. There are no walls around, only strings of colorful flags creating a square in the middle of a public park. Every night I watch children tug on them, jump over, sling themselves into the arms of parents as if from a catapult. One night a boy kept walking the length of the string taking every flag between his fingers and saying its color — green, blue, pink, yellow, green, red, pink. There are no tickets, only donations I collect in a black apron tied around my waist. Now, as I spot the first people in the distance, I hide The Adventures of Dennis in my bag. A couple races through. “Just going to our boat,” the man says over his shoulder. The stage is adjacent to public docks. I watch them until they descend to the water and disappear from sight. I take the book out again.
My great-grandfather, a White Officer, disappeared in the prison camps. Did my grandfather’s voice falter when he read this story to me?
I want to slow down, savor the stories, but the moment I finish one my eyes find the first line of the next. “The Mystery Clears,” “Chicken Soup,” “Twenty Years Under the Bed.” New editions of the book come every year, but it’s becoming harder and harder for parents to translate the realities of Soviet life to their children. “Chicken Soup” begins with Dennis’ mother bringing home a whole chicken, which she hangs on the window frame. The English translation published in 1981 by Raduga has the mother put it in the fridge instead. Playing hide-and-seek with his friends in “Twenty Years Under the Bed,” Dennis enters an unfamiliar room only to be accidentally locked in by the room’s occupant, the elderly Efrosinya Petrovna. This won’t make a bit of sense unless you’ve lived in a communal flat.
The Cyrillic letters, the choppy sentences of a children’s book with their dropped subjects, the long unpronounceable patronymics erase the reality around. As if I never left my hometown, where fluff of poplar trees floats down the streets in July and the chocolate factory fills the air with a thick oily smell in the mornings. As if I never grew up, and my grandfather still lives, still reads those stories to me every night. Then I look up and people at the gate are waiting. I hide the book before accepting the crumpled dollar bills they hand me. One is a two-dollar bill, and I set it aside. Later I will replace it with my own money, bring it home, and add it to the growing stack on the fridge. One of the things I have learned in five years in the States: two-dollar bills are rare.
As the start of the show nears, people pass through more often. I collect the money, count the change, hand out small round reentry stickers from my fingertips. Between these exchanges I open the book, read a page, close it again. I hid it on impulse the first time. I didn’t want to appear bored. But after that, I begin to wonder. Is it the cover? The book is flimsy, with a faded image of a boy bundled in a thick winter coat marching in front of his father. It doesn’t scream of being a children’s book, not unless you can read the title in Russian. Or is it my connection to this book? After all, The Adventures of Dennis is an intimate part of my childhood. Somewhere in it are chocolate stains from my six-year-old fingers. Trapped between its pages is the smell of meatballs and pickle soup my grandmother made every month.
What would you think of a woman if you saw her stealing glances at a children’s book in another language? Would you think she missed her homeland? Would you think she was happy?
On their own, these things don’t matter. It’s when I put them together that I understand why I hide the book each time someone arrives at the gate. What would you think of a woman if you saw her, in the middle of her shift, stealing glances at a children’s book in another language? Would you think she missed her homeland? Would you think she was happy?
I am part of the last generation born in the U.S.S.R. A thread connects me to the world of Pioneers and soda at three kopeks a glass. But the thread is thinning. On days like this, as I watch the American flag soar over Memorial Bridge, I begin to doubt myself. Memory is not like a bridge that goes up and down, allowing you to cross. It went up long ago and never came down. Now you can only stand on the shore and look at the lights across the river, and wonder. But if the wind is right, sometimes you can perform in two states at once.
What is St. Crispin’s Day, you ask? Technically speaking, the Feast Day of St. Crispin, October 25, venerates the martyrdom of Christian saints Crispinus and Crispianus, who were twins (rude, Mom). But let’s be real, no one cares about that. Instead, today we honor the most prolific playwright of all time, William Shakespeare, and the greatest speech from one of his greatest plays, Henry V. If you haven’t read Henry V, well, you’ve been done wrong. For some reason public schools rarely teach the histories, but the Henriad and the War of the Roses cycle should be required reading. Fuck Romeo and Juliet. You heard me. [Ed. note: This is an official editorial position.]
Greatly outnumbered by the French on St. Crispin’s Eve, King Henry V rallies his demoralized army with a rousing soliloquy promising brotherhood, greatness and legacy:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition: And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
SNIFFFFFFF. Anyway, his soldiers, aroused with visions of glory, win a staggering victory at the Battle of Agincourt on St. Crispin’s Day. In summary, this kick-ass soliloquy will make you feel like you can do ANYTHING! Conquer that biochemistry exam! Vanquish that evil pigeon that pooped on your head! Win over your prospective mother-in-law who hates your guts because you’re a freelance writer with no steady income! Okay, maybe not that last bit.
Watch these these interpretations and cry God for Harry, England, and St. George:
Now that you feel the burning fire of patriotism in your veins, we suggest invading France. Or at the very least, plant a miniature American flag in front of the Eiffel Tower.
The saying “it takes a village” may sound hokey but it applies to publishing. I’ve played many roles myself: I’m a writer. I am also a freelance editor and do authenticity reads (also known as sensitivity reads). By profession I’m a production editor (aka managing editor), technically one of the last lines of defense as a book becomes a finished product you find on a shelf. We’re responsible for consistency, clarity, error checks, and making people in-house as well as out-of-house happy, but we’re only one of the cogs in a machine that has input on a book’s content, presentation, and promotion. Prior to the manuscript hitting my desk it goes through the agent, the acquiring editor, the editorial assistant, possibly additional editors, beta readers, and authenticity readers (should the author choose to hire them). The book is then launched to marketing, publicity, and sales teams who attempt to sell it in many ways to many people before it’s a physical object. A book goes through many hands and is seen by many eyes before it hits the shelves.
And that means all those eyes that look at this book during the publishing process have a responsibility to speak up when said product is problematic, when the issues are glaring, when alarms have been signaled.
All those eyes that look at this book during the publishing process have a responsibility to speak up when said product is problematic.
The most recent dust-up over an ill-conceived book has people again asking the question: “Who can/should write what?” That is not the right question to ask. How about: What’s your reasoning and responsibility when choosing to write outside of your own experience? Craft does come into play, but skill is not enough. I agree with Brandon Taylor that empathy is a factor, too. To write a Black character as a white person is not the same as using the “we” narrative voice. To write a transgender character as a cisgender person is not the same as attempting to create a braided essay or tell a story nonlinearly. There are points of structure and personal bias that writers bring to their work. This is also inherent in how we read and critique work. Recognizing that we view certain groups under certain gazes can help editors offer feedback to better deconstruct what’s working and what isn’t, as well as why. We need to acknowledge that craft and empathy go hand in hand before attempting to martyr ourselves as victims of “mobs” when we’re not owning our own failures to spot the issues we’ve created and/or edited.
I’m learning my own lessons as an editor of a short story anthology. The contributors are amazing and ethnically representative; I am humbled and honored by those contributing to the anthology and am reminded of how varied and full the voices are each time I re-read stories to suggest edits.
Among the stories that were submitted to me were two written by abled people that include disabled characters. Where my marginalization (as a woman of color) can help me identify problematic areas, my privilege (as a cishet, abled person) can easily allow me to dismiss it. This is why it’s important for me to listen to and engage with friends and voices in other communities — in this case, voices like Alice Wong who leads the #CripLit chats and the DisVisibility Project, Karrie Higgins who is vocal about disability on her blog and on social media, Vilissa Thompson’s Ramp Your Voice, Keah Brown’s essays on feminism & disability and creation of #DisabledandCute, Alaina Leary’s writing on disability representation on and off screen, the existence of Disability in KidLit, comedian Zach Anner’s videos on YouTube reflecting how inaccessible the world is, and Cara Gael O’Regan’s In Sickness + In Health podcast. Because of their work and the work of so many others I had sources that helped me determine something was off in these stories.
I asked, “What is the reason for this (disabled) character in this piece?” As in, are they there to serve the abled protagonist? Are they someone you still don’t have a hold on yet? What gaze are you viewing them through and why? By asking this question I hoped to spark the understanding that while the story was good, these particular characters weren’t working as written. These writers are not bad writers, nor are they bad people. Mistakes get made and both sides can catch them sooner rather than later. And when we can’t catch them in time or at all, the next step is to acknowledge this and do better — and sometimes, that means cutting an incompletely thought-out character or story, rather than trying to fix it. In this case the revised stories were scrapped and we decided on other ones. Even if it meant one less story in the anthology, I had to stand by this. As editors that is our job.
I could’ve done things better as an editor. I shouldn’t have waited as long as I did to be firm about my concerns. I hired authenticity readers after revisions and should’ve hired them for that first draft. The readers noted things that I as an abled woman couldn’t catch, specific words that I had glossed over. This more direct perspective can have more impact with the writer.
The burden of editing is heavy when you’re the only one doing it. My main concern is that I do the authors and their work justice. I want to make sure their voices shine and that their stories feel complete. An editor’s job is not to “push an agenda,” but to help the stories be what they are in full. Our job is not to force our voice but to help clarify the authorial voice. Our job means analyzing what does or does not work (and why). There will inevitably be criticism that is not always boasting but biting. This is writing. This is the profession.
An editor’s job is not to ‘push an agenda,’ but to help the stories be what they are in full.
Do you know what a character (especially a marginalized character) is who isn’t fleshed out? A device. As writer I also have to recognize this. I wrote a story where one of the side characters was a gay man dying of AIDS. He was a representation regularly seen in media, practically a corpse. A friend and reading partner who clearly remembered this moment in recent history, had been a nurse to afflicted friends during this time said to me, “Give him more humanity.” That’s when it hit me: I wasn’t seeing this character as a person. He was a tool in a story I was telling and that wasn’t fair to him or the reader or the community I was portraying. I was filling a trope dictated by my own ignorance.
If the writer cannot see these issues, then we as editors (and as agents, friends, and readers) can help. The ultimate responsibility always falls on the creator, but the many people who see the book on its way to publication are culpable too. We’re here to aid writers, and in a sense that does mean protecting them. But protecting the writer also means ensuring the work works. Understandably editors (and agents) are “worried about their clients.” We’re worried about how things may be taken or dissected. I do wonder, though, if this concern stems more from the desire to protect the privileged masses over the marginalized ones. This can also be part of the inability (or unwillingness) to make the effort required to see inclusivity and parity come to fruition. It means that someone, possibly those of us in a position of power, will be uncomfortable and need to face that discomfort. Senior editor Kate Sullivan at Delacorte wrote about the need for editors to “check ourselves.” Checking ourselves includes not prioritizing the white gaze; analyzing the prose at a micro not just macro level; and discerning why editors don’t connect with marginalized voices and do connect with white, socioeconomically well off, cishet ones. To not do any of these things under the guise of “protecting” the writer or more so enhancing the work is a failure on our part.
An editor has the power to make sure these issues don’t see the light of day. An authenticity reader does not have this power or say, and shouldn’t be the only line of defense. Even with our commentary, our pleas, our well-crafted letters saying how harmful this portrayal is there can always be a rebuttal from the author, a perceived “workaround,” a way to fix something that can and has reduced people to facile creations, almost marionettes for a particular gaze. As my friend said, Give us more humanity.
I wonder if this concern stems more from the desire to protect the privileged masses over the marginalized ones.
If we’re making the same mistake when it comes to bad representation, when it comes to the consistent issues brought up by marginalized communities, it’s because we’re not listening. It’s because the wealth of information available at our fingertips, often for free and much of it online, is not something we’re taking the time to digest. We can ask authors all day long to become more informed, but how does that help progress within the industry if those of us representing them do not do the same, or do so only when inclined and shamed? For those of us in the publishing profession, are we listening and learning or posturing? Is commerce more important than community? Are we also uplifting unheard voices to find their stories and helping them start and maintain their careers? There are a lot of questions we should be asking. Not about what we have the “right” to publish; that demeans those continually fighting for the right to live and exist, to have equality on a daily basis. What we (especially editors) should be asking is: Who’s responsible for where we are now, and how will we see actual change?
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.
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.
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.
“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.
“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.
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.
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?
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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.”
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.
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