Tiny White People Took Over My Brain

Posted on by 007595

Hiding out in the suburbs, on the hard drive of the Windows desktop that still lives in my childhood bedroom, are the remains of the world’s whitest novel. We’re talking upper-middle-class-ennui white. Picket-fenced, silently-seething-marital-dissatisfaction white. Where every person is conversant in Cheever’s entire catalog and has started, finished, or seriously contemplated a Ph.D. These characters don’t just see psychoanalysts, they are psychoanalysts.

I fared no better with short fiction. My head was crawling with enough tiny white people to populate several years’ worth of stories, many of which wound up published in Canadian literary journals. If I ever felt brave enough to mention race at all in my writing, it was either as an awkward conversational topic, or worse, a minor plot point — the functions to which the world had consigned it in my own life. Implicitly, every character in the work was white. Explicit mention of a person’s race was more to point out what they weren’t, which was white.

You’d be forgiven for expressing surprise that the author of these fictions was an eighteen-year-old woman of color — one who seemed to view the world with the blinders of an old white man.

My stories were evidence for the imagined judge and jury  of how many tiny white people could dance on the head of my pen.

“Who wrote this shit?” is a common sentiment among writers confronting their past work. There’s a distinct pleasure to this bit of theater, namely due to its silent implication — that the writer has improved since then, transforming her sentences in the crucible of craft. But the work is also genuinely hard to face. I struggle to charitably imagine my way back into my teenage psyche, that of a girl so averse to taking on race in her fiction — despite its status as, arguably, the most visible thing about her — that she took to tone-deafness instead; a clumsy, not-so-knowing wink at the reader that this was A Sensitive Subject. I’m told we should be kind to past versions of ourselves, so here’s my attempt at being charitable: these overwrought fictions were attempts to excise my intellectual anxieties, a glib performance of my vocabulary and theoretical smarts to prove my fitness for authorship. They were also an exercise in fanatic emulation, further evidence for the imagined judge and jury — who probably looked a lot like Wallace, Franzen, and Roth — of how many tiny white people could dance on the head of my pen.

But there was a deeper kind of anxiety at play than mere questions of talent or intelligence. These self-serious slices of white life were also a diversion, a bit of razzle-dazzle to distract the world from the writing that, just by looking at me, it might expect me to produce.

As a mixed-race woman, I inhabit a body that people have either too much or no fun trying to read. To make an explicit claim to my own heritage is often seen as an invitation to call my belonging into question. The places where I could easily opt out of facing such social torsion were the worlds where I was sovereign. So in my constructed realms I aimed for neutrality, and to my younger self, under the sway of a knotty mess of factors — reading habits, course syllabi, peer group, role models — “neutral” meant “white.” (Once, in a terrible writing workshop, one of my colleagues described my characters as “WASPy” — though only to ask why I’d bothered to make them Jewish).

As far as acts of intended subversion go, this one was a perfect failure. In seeking to circumvent the question of race, I wound up replicating the same ideologies that had cornered me into feeling like I didn’t deserve to write about it in the first place. “Write what you know” took a hard backseat. Instead, I wrote what I read.

My reading taste was never formed with the expectation that I should encounter, on the page, people who looked like me.

My reading taste was never formed with the expectation that I should encounter, on the page, people who looked like me. I did not think to demand representation from the works that I consumed, and for their part, the authors I read were content not to offer it. Instead I trained myself into literary cipher-hood, learning to commune with narratives that focused on what I only much later came to call “white people doing white things.” I can think of a number of reasons why, as a young person, such a communion could have seemed so natural. For one thing, psychological realism has always been my Achilles heel — nail it and I may well forget that everyone in your book is white. It’s also hard to find people who look like me, so perhaps at some point I just gave up trying to find them — and anyway, circumstances had arranged it such that I spent my time in mostly white spaces. When I bothered to look up from the page at the world around me, given slight adjustments for time period and geography, the slide clicked neatly into place.

All of which meant that I didn’t think to question the greatness, or the whiteness, of the works put in front of me. As a young person with undeveloped taste, I clung to the classics as a compass in the unknowable stacks of adult fiction. I convinced myself that consuming the texts of the titans was the work of becoming a writer. I affected, then developed, a taste for expensive sentences. An undergraduate English degree fed the beast. Mainstream creative writing wisdom, grounded in the principles of emulation, supported this parasitic hunger to inhabit the master’s sentences (see the famous commandments of author and god-aspirant Richard Bausch, with the numbers two and seven dictating, respectively, that thou shalt “imitate” and “eschew politics” — about the last pieces of advice any non-white writer should feel they have to follow). The sole force in my life that made an effort to diversify my tastes — if we’re not counting certain syllabi’s token inclusions of Beloved — was my mother.

I have always loved my mother unreservedly, but that doesn’t mean I was receptive to her suggestions. Any twinges I felt to read Maya or Toni or Zora or Alice were promptly stifled by the fact that to do so was framed as some kind of virtuous choice, like so many of the things my mother advocated but my adolescent self found personally offensive (curfews, piano practice, tuna casserole). More than that, I was deeply, destructively resentful of the idea that these texts were somehow “for me,” or “good for me,” in a way that the works on the Great Books Lists were not; that the shape of my taste could be predicted or in any way influenced by the way my body signified.

It’s not that I didn’t want to read Maya or Toni or Zora or Alice — it’s that I didn’t want to feel like I ought to read them. Like it was a duty that fell more heavily upon me and the people who looked like me than on those who could easily swap themselves in for a character in, say, Goodbye, Columbus. I’d settled for demanding less from the works that I read, which in all fairness should have guaranteed the logical opposite — that no works had more right than any other to make demands on me. Especially not while I was trying to conquer the classics. I read to know and understand, not to be known and understood. The relationship had only ever flowed in one direction. When it suddenly offered hints of the reciprocal I felt, more than anything else, offended.

It’s not that I didn’t want to read Maya or Toni or Zora or Alice — it’s that I didn’t want to feel like I OUGHT to read them.

While I insisted on sheltering my reading list from any forms of outside influence, I had absolutely no problem disrupting someone else’s. For a long time before I was brave enough to share my output with any kind of writing community, my mother was my sole litmus test. I’d push my fiction in front of her like a mouse I’d just killed, hungry for praise but usually just provoking the emotional equivalent of “I guess we’ve got mice.” My mom was always gracious when faced with this evidence of my mind’s infestations — gracious, but never in love. She’d read everything I gave her, compliment it, smirk at its smartass humour and coo over the diction, but it never seemed to touch her. Kind of like how I felt about Mao II.

But that wasn’t a connection I was capable of drawing at the time. I was merciless in my cross-examinations as I tried to plumb her responses for depths that, let’s be real, the work hardly merited. Things I wanted to know: Did she like it? Was it funny? Like actual ha-ha funny? Was it better than my last story? Did it remind her of any writers? Were they American? Were they men? (Being compared to men was always higher praise; my youthful priorities were misaligned along multiple axes.) Things I didn’t want to know: if she had any suggestions for improvement; if it hadn’t made her laugh; if it reminded her of anything Oprah liked. The wrong comment and I’d sulk for hours, certain of both the infallibility and the fundamental, enigmatic complexity of my tiny white people.

Other than the knowledge that she’d diligently fostered my love of language, I wonder if there was anything in this early work that my mother could even recognize, let alone connect with. Apart from taking place in a white suburb much like our own, my writing contained no tangible traces of our experience, not so much as a nod to our bodies or inner lives or cultural heritage. I wonder if she was struck by this absence; if it felt, as certain mid-century American writing sometimes makes me feel, like she’d mistaken a window for a mirror. If it was a jarring moment, reorienting herself to the awareness that this was the flat and awful lens through which her child perceived the world, as reflected in bits of test-tube lit where everyone was horrible to one another and also had no discernible day jobs.

As a younger writer, my pet fantasy took shape not just as literary fame, but as a particular question posed by a reporter: that authorial interview fixture, “what’s your relationship to your characters?” There’s a lot to be gleaned from a writer’s response. In a now-infamous conversation with the Kenyon Review, the novelist Richard Ford describes his relationship to his fictional creations as one of “[m]aster to slave.” As if that weren’t enough, Ford removes any traces of reasonable doubt by claiming to sometimes “hear them at night singing over in their cabins,” so caught up in his racist rhapsodies that he seems to forget the tenor of the metaphor: all the inmates of a Richard Ford cabin would be white, apathetic, and sleeping with somebody else’s wife. It’s an analogy that, in addition to being highly offensive, allows the writer to self-congratulate about both his discipline and the apparent reality of his creations — he can’t even escape their voices when he puts down the pen.

E.M. Forster gives us a similar humblebrag when he describes his characters seizing the reins and galloping off with the plot, a conceit Nabokov is quick to dismiss as derivative and “trite,” deadpanning instead that he works his own subjects like “galley slaves” (surprisingly, this one checks out — it’s tied to a very narrow context of European penal servitude, the second most severe punishment after execution, with a bonus Nabokovian pun on “galley” as the proofs of a book). Colson Whitehead’s decision in The Underground Railroad is both more interesting and more sensitive, rewriting a fugitive slave bulletin to proclaim of Cora, his main character, that “SHE WAS NEVER PROPERTY.” Within the narrative, Whitehead offers his protagonist a kind of apology for putting her through the traumas of the preceding pages, according her a freedom that neither the text nor history was able to provide.

My interviewer, I imagined, would ask the question for a different reason, expecting a different kind of answer: intending to sniff out the scent of autobiography in my work. The perfect metaphor to shut down such an invasive reading, I long ago decided, was to claim a parental relationship and call my characters my children. Nabokov would probably also find this figure trite and derivative, and he wouldn’t be wrong, but necessity trumps originality. The analogy propped up a number of crucial truths about the umbilicus between me and my tiny white people: I created them, they contained a part of me, any flaws of theirs I claimed as my own, but at base, we were separate and distinct.

This is not to say that love for my characters was absent, any more than a parent’s love for a child she created but does not completely understand. But it feels telling that I was so prepared for this criticism — do you honestly see yourself in these people — and so invested in defending myself against it. It feels telling that drawing a clear line of demarcation between the me and the not-me was my chosen defense.

At the same time, it seems a bit chilling to invoke the parent-child relationship as the basis of differentiation rather than affiliation. You’d think that after going through a process as birth-like as the one Hilary Mantel describes — one of physically “pull[ing]” her characters from “out of [her] own self” — that a writer would be a little prouder to claim the product as her own. But in my case, claiming my characters too openly might have invoked the same judgment that I’d been hearing on and off for my entire life: that the child looked nothing like the parents.

Claiming my characters too openly might have invoked the same judgment that I’d been hearing my entire life: that the child looked nothing like the parents.

I hadn’t read all of Cheever. My house was not edged by a picket fence. I did not stare moodily out of windows, nurturing dark thoughts because it had been weeks since I’d slept with my wife. The parental metaphor was a bit, I guess, like Forster’s autonomous characters, meant to indicate that these dear, horrible little people had lives of their own. But in my case, the claim came with a silent addendum — “and their lives look nothing like mine.”

Crucially, neither did their bodies. In my writing, I saw no room to engage with the fraught question of how I saw myself, or how the world struggled with seeing me, as a racialized person. With my own racial identity so often questioned for its legitimacy — encapsulated by the constant demand by strangers and acquaintances to identify my “background” — to tackle that dynamic in fiction didn’t seem worth the exhaustion. To write at any length about non-white characters would have been to risk retreading that same terrain. But I’m wary of making it sound like I actively suppressed the urge to diversify my writing, when my omissions and missteps were closer to unconscious. I did not write white characters at the deliberate expense of black characters; it was just what my mind defaulted to as the most acceptable. It was a stone that earned me two dead birds: a swerve around personal pain, and an offering to the world of what it seemed hungriest for.

It took me a while to twig to the fact that I had serious competition for the heart of my first reader, that there were heights of aesthetic bliss to which my tiny white people were not capable of transporting her. There was one book in particular that my mother carried around with great care and for some time; one she’d curl up with on the couch and snicker into quietly, as though the two of them were shit-talking everyone else in the room. While sidling past, I cut my eyes at the cover and promptly wrote the whole thing off on the basis of its graphic design — boxy white letters over a color-blocked background of pink, lime and aquamarine — and my unfamiliarity with the author’s name. If I hadn’t heard of a title, as my watertight logic went, then it must be the fault of the book.

A couple of weeks passed. Between raising five children, my mom found the time to finish the novel’s 400-something pages. Still the love affair didn’t end. I caught her Googling the writer’s name and doing the same shit-talking snicker over a lengthy interview. Hovering behind her shoulder in her home office, I caught my first glimpse of my mother’s funnier friend, who I’d come to think of as a kind of personal antagonist vying for the role of pseudo-daughter: young, turbaned. Killer cheekbones.

“She’s mixed,” my mom said. “And she’s hilarious. Look at her” — flipping over her copy of White Teeth — “so young. You should read it.”

The bliss, it turned out, wasn’t aesthetic at all — at least, not exclusively. My mother’s reaction to Zadie Smith’s writing, the feelings of recognition and communion the work produced in her, was so foreign to any effect I was trying to achieve with my fiction — foreign, even, to anything I’d thought of fiction as capable of doing — that it couldn’t even take root in me as jealousy. The undeniable gap in the joy she took between Smith’s work and mine was not just because Smith was the superior craftswoman, but because we were engaged in totally different pursuits — Smith to write the world as she knew it, me to write the world as others did. When I did read the novel, and more of Smith’s work, it was so much more to me than just a pleasurable lesson in empathy and sentence-making, delivered with the gift of narrative absorption.

Reading Zadie Smith was the first time I really thought of the author as a person, as bearer of a physical body that both produced and informed the text, and how the experience of encountering that on the page — whether it takes the form of candor, humor, or representation — can be a revolutionary one for your reader. Though at the time, you’d have been hard-pressed to get me to admit that my mother’s recommendation was actually right. Zadie would back me up on this — as a teenager, she had her own resistance to her mother’s prescribed list of books by black women. When she finally agreed to read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, her fourteen-year-old self’s grudging admission, after a reading experience that left her weeping, was that the novel was “basically sound.”

In a recent Harper’s piece on Jordan Peele’s Get Out and the Whitney Biennial, Smith admits that “[t]o be biracial at any time is complex.” The inner conflict that animates the biracial experience, Smith writes, can produce an anxiety about one’s authenticity, one that may result in “an unfortunate tendency toward overcompensation.” Smith is reflecting on her encounter with Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, asking what ought to be the “appropriate” response of a mixed-race person to this depiction of black suffering. “Overcompensation” might be one word that explains the genesis of my tiny white people. When faced with works by writers of color, my knee-jerk response was an overwhelming anxiety about the inability, real or imagined, to recognize myself in these depictions of black life. Instead I threw my literary lot in with the “canon,” trafficking in tropes both more easily recognizable and widely consumed. Whiteness as neutral. A curious, unfortunate symptom of what Smith might call the “yearn[ing] for absolute clarity: personal, genetic, political.”

This past December, I took my mother to meet Zadie Smith on the Swing Time tour. Standing in the signing line, I had some vague plan to introduce them by tracing some kind of lineage of her novels through our two generations, but when we reached the front of the queue it was Zadie who spoke first. She loved my mom’s outfit — camo pants, baseball cap — and told her she looked “like a nineties homegirl.” Before I had time to say anything, my mom broke in with an opening play of her own, sliding across the table a picture of her five kids like it was a code in a secret, shared language. I watched as the two of them bent over the signing table to study the photo, heads together, marveling at the “roll of the dice” that comes with biracial family making.

When faced with works by writers of color, my response was an anxiety about the inability to recognize myself in these depictions of black life.

“Your turn next,” Zadie said, looking up at me, meaning it now fell to me to ring in the next generation. I didn’t tell her that I do have children of a kind, and that I’m still trying to sort out how best to do them justice; how to fashion them into people I’m entirely proud to call my own. Depending on how brazen I’m feeling, sometimes when I meet an author, I’ll claim my writerly affinity (sometimes too passionately — I’m pretty sure I scarred Jonathan Franzen). But with Zadie I kept quiet, contented enough with those moments of recognition.

The world’s whitest novel, the one that still lurks in my childhood home in the suburbs, remains mercifully unfinished, which is how it will stay. A few years back, I cribbed one of its stronger subplots and turned it into a short story with a title — “The Anxiety of Influence” — that grows more cringingly symbolic as time goes by. I’m still learning, which is to say I’m still unlearning. Tiny white people are everywhere, bursting into every subgenre and ready to crawl into your ears — bored and affectless as they surf the true-crime wave, vomiting “all the feels” across your feminist long-reads, inserting themselves unceasingly between the words “great” and “novel.” I won’t be so gross as to give you a recitation of all the non-white characters in my work — I’ll leave such tasks to Jonathan Franzen. But I will say that I’m seeking to do my part as a writer as well as a reader. I demand more of my characters, now, because I demand more of myself.

The Pain That Works Its Way Through Families

Posted on by 007595

I n the 1970s, the Australian author Christina Stead wrote across the Atlantic to American poet Stanley Burnshaw: “Every love story is a ghost story.” The phrase, like a restless apparition, continues to haunt — attributed at times to David Foster Wallace and Virginia Woolf, its exact origins remain unknown. With the work of Josephine Rowe, one could take Stead’s equation a little further: every story is a ghost story, an act of writing into and away from loss. The past haunts, and Rowe draws our attention to what is left behind: objects, artifacts, stories.

I first encountered the work of Josephine Rowe at a monthly reading series back in the homeland we share — though Rowe hails from Melbourne, and I from Sydney: the two places that divided my own childhood and family, linked only by the long, black ribbon of the Hume Highway. That night I’d followed the trail of a boy I liked in the hopes of being, for a short while, in the same room as him — up a set of creaky stairs to an apartment above a convenience store in Newtown, to somebody’s bedroom that had been converted into a performance space for the night, a red velvet armchair marking center-stage, the distant rush of traffic on King Street in the background. I sat on the floor, drinking mulled wine brimming with pulpy oranges from a paper cup, staining my teeth. I no longer remember if the boy was there or not. What I do remember is a woman with long auburn hair reading from a slim volume of short fiction. I remember her wearing glasses, though I have not since seen any photographs of Josephine Rowe wearing glasses. Maybe this is a mutation of memory — something to do with the clear-eyed gaze she turned on places so familiar to me, the singular vision that wrestled the terror and beauty of the Australian landscape into a topography of small, transcendent moments — sparse, but highly-charged. I remember a story about foxes and how loyalty is a learned thing; another a story about a father teaching a daughter to break beer bottles, and how this, too, might be a kind of love. I went home alone that night, but less lonely than I had been, clutching a copy of that first book of stories as if it was a talisman.

Josephine Rowe’s debut novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal, considers the shadows of violence that dog one family from the Vietnam War to their rural Australian home. But here, Rowe also provides us with maps of other kinds of tenderness, other acts of grace. Follow her, and you just may find a way out of the darkness, towards a shaky but luminous hope.

Madelaine Lucas: A Loving, Faithful Animal is deeply rooted in a dusty, dry, isolated Australian landscape. You’re based now in Tasmania, but have lived in parts of the U.S. as well as Canada. How has this changed your relationship to place? Is it easier to write about the Australian environment when you’re oceans away, or right in the middle of it?

Josephine Rowe: Most of A Loving, Faithful Animal was written from oceans away. It was an almost tactile pleasure to write of Australian coastal pools from the heart of a Montreal winter, in the midst of a polar vortex. Would I have written about it so joyously and gratefully from the edge of the Coogee Women’s baths, or from a diving block the Newcastle Baths? No, I would have gone swimming.

At a certain remove — emotional, temporal or geographical — things crystallize. It’s a matter of perspective, which is partially illusion. We begin to feel as though we might see and understand things clear to their outer edges. There’s also the question of what survives such distance, be it abstract or physical, what rises out of the white noise of minutiae.

But yes, all places seem easier to write once you’ve left them, or with the traveler’s hyper-awareness that comes from being very new to them. There’s also a kind of coda of this sensitivity that comes in the process of leaving — the smash-and-grab of remember this. I suppose the shared element in these three situations is an awareness and appreciation of distance.

ML: Animals have a kind of totemic power in your work. In the novel, the characters seem to have more of a sense of empathy towards, and kinship with animals than they do for the members of their own family.

JR: Yes — what is it? I remember overhearing my father talking to our family collie with a gentleness and affection that he would never show to my sister, mother or me, that I believe he might have been incapable of showing us. I listened from behind the back door — I might have been about 10 — with something of a bewildered, a curious relief. Oh; that person is in there. Somewhere. I remember, too, the swift, gruff shift in his tone when he realized I was there, how embarrassed he seemed. Eat your food now, he said to the dog, and went back inside.

What our culture does to males, in particular — to men and to boys — in shaming tenderness out of them from an early age. It’s infuriating. And it stems from fear that tenderness will somehow render them defenseless, weak, open to attack. For whatever reason, affection towards animals is more permissible.

ML: Your previous published works of fiction have been composed of beautifully whittled short stories, some of them only spanning a paragraph or a page. I’ve read that A Loving, Faithful Animal began as a short story. What was the process like of developing this into a longer, sustained narrative? Do the two forms feel, to you, like drastically different beasts?

JR: The longer feels more vulnerable, absolutely. There’s something armadillo-like about those shorter works; balled up tight, and gone over so many times they feel — at least to me, knowing how many editorial layers they comprise — as though they’re lacquered, armored. Whereas the novel, especially in inviting so many voices, has so many points of articulation. Which somehow feels more…exposed? I instinctively feel this way about dialogue, too, and maybe it’s an aesthetic, on-page thing: here’s a narrows, or a fragile bone.

There’s also something about writing that can be contained all at once in one’s visual field — this sense of seeing it in its entirety is comforting to me. The novel, longer stories and essays…writing towards these is more like wading out into dark, open water, a night ocean. It’s uneasy but a little thrilling, too. You’re less sure of what’s there, about to brush your leg. I’m still talking about authorial process, though, rather than as a reader, and I’m certainly not making value judgments: I will keep both forms, please. I read an essay by Annie Dillard recently that held longer narratives (in fiction and non) as superior, as they draw upon the greater temporal experience an author might have over the course of penning it, however many years:

“Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn. A project that takes five years will accumulate those years’ inventions and richnesses.”

I take her point, regarding time. But short stories — and poems, essays, etc. — can accumulate that way too, over years, can draw upon that breadth of lived experience and shifting concerns. The best writing, at whatever length, does hint at that strata, and that long gaze fore or aft, but if pressed I might say it’s more exceptional to witness in the space of a story.

Author Josephine Rowe. Photo by Jason Montano.

ML: The novel is told from multiple points of view, with each chapter being told by a different member of the same family. How did you arrive at this structure?

JR: A Loving, Faithful Animal started as a short story, and the only voice was Ru’s, echoing my own interest in the imaginable link between my father’s panther tattoo, that of a mascot kept at the Puckapunyal Army Base in central Victoria, and the phantom big cat said to stalk that area.

As it tendrilled out into a longer work, it became evident that Ru would simply not be able to tell all of it, that here were corners around which she couldn’t see, no matter what age she might be positioned at. I was also wary of having her young judgment cast over everything. Diplomacy, then.

ML: The multiple perspectives also allow us to see how Jack’s experiences of the Vietnam War have ricocheted, affecting his family in different ways. Can you talk about the idea of inherited memory that comes up in the book? Did scientists really traumatize mice with the smell of cherry blossoms?

JR: They did, yes — in a study at Emory University several years ago. And I’m no advocate for traumatizing mice, so I was a bit conflicted about referencing this study. But it did strike me profoundly, when I heard about it, as vividly illustrating the inheritance of fear.

The mice in this study were conditioned to associate pain (electric shocks) with an otherwise innocuous scent, acetophenone, akin to cherry blossoms. The subjects’ offspring — and their offspring’s offspring — were observed to fear the scent alone, at first encounter, despite no negative stimulus. Mice whose parents had not been conditioned to fear it showed no adverse responses.

The study has gained a lot of attention, as it is quite a tidy metonym for intergenerational trauma — I think I first heard of it on an episode of RadioLab. It led me to considering my own fears — those shared with my father, but with no direct experiential grounds — and wondering about the nature of such legacies, or how to parse coincidence from legacy.

ML: One thing that unites all these characters — aside from place, and blood — is voice. Even simple phrases, like calling an argument “a blue,” speaks to an Australian vernacular that is so familiar to me and, even in its gruffness, comforting. Did you know from the beginning that voice was going to be essential in capturing these characters? I’m also curious what your favourite Australian colloquialisms are. (My personal favourites are “We’re not here to fuck spiders” and “Off like a bride’s nightie.”)

JR: In showing the novel to early U.S. readers I was often perplexed by the things picked up as exoticisms. So many wavy underlines on the manuscript: Skerrick!? Chook!? And maybe they stand out with similar clarity for you for the inverse reason: because they’re familiar, nostalgic — like a catching the scent of eucalyptus in Oakland or Manhattan.

To me the vernacular isn’t intended as ornamental at all — it’s the natural, audible landscape. As I imagine Glaswegian is to James Kelman; he’s simply recording, just trying to page it true to ear. The characters in A Loving, Faithful Animal share a lexicon, as do most households, but that’s only one element of voice — each of them sounded very different to my ear. Hopefully that individuality carries to readers less familiar with Australian colloquialisms. There’s always the danger, in writing vernacular — especially if it’s being read at some remove — of characters becoming caricature. But at the same time, to completely iron out this phraseology — to bestow everyone with an RP (received pronunciation) kind of eloquence would be false, and in a way, reductive. Some of the smartest people I’ve known say “fink” rather than “think.”

ML: You’ve spoken elsewhere about how you were working on stories about Australia’s colonial history and out of this emerged a narrative about a family and the long-ranging aftermath of the Vietnam War. I’ve also read that your father was an army man and that some elements of the novel are autobiographical. I’m wondering if the process of writing the novel was one of cutting closer to the bone? Was there some resistance, at first, in digging deep into experiences that felt, perhaps, close to home?

JR: I’m comfortable with lived experience, including difficult lived experience, being a launch point for stories or poems or essays. But yes, this was much harder, for many reasons, and it dredged up a great deal more doubt. Partly because it was cathartic, and I was in some ways distrustful of that catharsis: Who’s this for? Does it need publishing, or has it served its purpose? Around the time I was most impeded by such doubts, and over-interrogations of worthiness, Romeo Dallaire fell asleep at the wheel after a long stretch of insomnia related to his recollections of the U.N.’s failure with Rwanda. This, coupled with (Canadian) reports of military suicides related to PTSD, which prompted some briefly-lived media lip service about speaking out and de-stigmatizing mental illness, which was in turn followed closely by the closure of several regional returned service leagues. And I thought, fuck it. There really isn’t enough talk of duty-of-care, and not enough awareness of the intergenerational repercussions of conflict.

The depiction of violence was difficult to navigate throughout writing, and in some respects remains so. I’ve heard a few times, recently, domestic violence dismissed as an Australian trope, which is frustrating and saddening. This disinclination to look is part of the same greater victim-shaming culture that allows it to be clichéd: Don’t talk about it anymore, no one wants to hear, it’s boring.

Violence handled gratuitously, however — violence in place of substance — is entirely deserving of scorn. With the novel, I found it a difficult negotiation; I didn’t want Jack to be two-dimensionally monstrous (the Ruined Vet stereotype) but I didn’t want to shy away from his brutality, either, nor of Evelyn’s re-rendering of it. At the same time, I didn’t want to list into misery porn. The end result is far less centre-stage, visible cruelty — far less sadness in general — than there was in the day-to-day of my own upbringing. In fact I think of this as quite a hopeful book. I needed for it to be, and I’m relieved when I hear from readers who arrive at the same take.

This disinclination to look is part of the same greater victim-shaming culture that allows it to be clichéd: Don’t talk about it anymore, no one wants to hear, it’s boring.

ML: I love that line from Louise Bourgeois you quote elsewhere — “Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.” Writing, for me, has always been a way to grapple with experiences that have felt chaotic and impose a shape on them, so I relate to that. But I imagine there is a difficulty here, when writing about violence at war or at home, which is often senseless and unfathomable. What were the challenges of wrestling narrative coherence around the character’s experiences of trauma?

JR: Here’s another good one from Anne Truitt:

“The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s most intimate sensitivity.”

Physical and psychological violence is part of what steered me to literature in the first place — initially as a place of refuge, then later as a means of agency. Writing has made it more fathomable, has been a means of metabolizing. For Jack, who has no outlet, really, artistic or otherwise, things remain curdled. Like so many veterans he’s been shamed into silence about his experience in Vietnam (and I feel this post-war silencing is particularly damaging in the case of the Vietnam War, for a number of reasons — personnel who were conscripted into a conflict that was later downgraded in a way that would exclude them from returned service leagues and benefits, among much else). Ignorance of harm is its own violence.

Jack can only really meet the war and its effect on him slantways, in small, isolated (diffused) glimpses, and is shaken when images or echoes of the war come uninvited. It always seemed obvious that his section would be fragmented in the manner it is, interspersed with the rhetoric of others — political speeches and talking heads and medical journals and field manuals. Half-remembered songs, doctors’ diagnoses. An aversion to himself as first-person subject. It felt truest to him, closest to his interior. I appreciate that some readers will find it distancing or alienating, and perhaps this is as it should be — inhabiting another’s sense of alienation should feel discomforting. Jack’s chapter is certainly more heavily reliant on reader empathy, in understanding that others’ thoughts don’t adhere to the same patterns as our own.

Physical and psychological violence is part of what steered me to literature in the first place — initially as a place of refuge, then later as a means of agency.

ML: There’s a great attention to language in A Loving, Faithful Animal. I’m curious about your process. Are you the type of writer who carefully considers each word before you put it down, or does the rigorous editing come later?

JR: I write and edit fairly frenetically, fastidiously, over a number of formats — longhand in journals, on the backs of envelopes, etc., going back and forth between these and the laptop (and occasionally the typewriter), and long walks. The months a draft spends in the desk drawer or in some backwoods of a document folder is just as important. In short, it takes me forever to do anything. I even edit cocktails, mid-drink. I’d make for a terrible journo.

ML: I’ve noticed that many of your stories are written in the 2nd person point of view. Do you think this is an impulse that comes from also writing poetry?

JR: Ah — I was actually thinking about this the other day. I’ve always been a little nonplussed by readers who resist second person narratives on grounds of personal taste or a lack of familiarity, especially given how natural it is to spoken conversation. I tend to dismiss it when it’s leveled as vague criticism of a work, as my take is that the reader or reviewer objecting just hasn’t read widely enough. My response is typically, okay, keep reading, you’ll get over that. But in thinking about how it’s so often a blind spot to writers and readers of fiction, I did land in the same place. So you’re quite possibly onto something there. Everyone — all of us — should read more poetry. It’s the form that most encourages leaning out towards another’s thinking.

ML: Who are the writers that you continue to return to for inspiration? What books are on your desk?

JR: My desk is currently in pieces in a Tasmanian storage locker, but writers who most frequently travel along in my suitcase include: Michael Ondaatje, Rebecca Solnit, James Galvin, Jayne Anne Phillips, Denis Johnson, Virginia Woolf, Sarah Holland-Batt, Alice Munro, and more recently, Annie Dillard.

10 Books That Were Written on a Bet

Posted on by 007595

John Steinbeck once said, “The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.” There’s no doubt about it — writing is a gamble, and all authors, even the legends, are occasionally seized by a paralyzing fear about whether and how their work will turn out. But over the course of literary history, some writers have found that doubling down on that uncertainty was just the thing they needed to get the creative juices flowing. A little doubt, a little pride on the line, maybe some money, too — that’s the kind of motivation authors need every now and again. In fact, some of our best-loved authors were known to make good on a wager, from Dostoevsky to Hemingway to Agatha Christie. There’s a lesson to be learned here for writers suffering from creative roadblocks and shortage of motivation: sometimes all it takes is a close friend telling you that you can’t do something to make you realize you can — and dammit you will.

Ranging from six words to hundreds of pages, these works attest to the impressive dedication of writers refusing to turn down any challenge, never mind cold hard cash. So, next time you’re in need of a prompt, head to the track, and tell Steinbeck to pipe down and take a flyer on the filly to show.

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss

“I’ll bet you $50 that you can’t write a book using only 50 words,” Seuss’s publisher Bennett Cerf once said to him. And the rest is history…Little did Cerf know, it probably wasn’t a smart wager to challenge one of literature’s most iconic wordsmiths. As expected, Seuss — a power not be underestimated — won the bet, and Green Eggs and Ham was born. And the author became $50 richer! (There may have been some residual income…)

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

On one fateful summer day in 1816, the idea for Frankenstein was given life, all thanks to a bet. With lightning flashing in in the background and the candleight flickering, Mary Shelley was at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva when Lord Byron suggested that those present should endeavor to write frightening ghost stories. What was initially a fun few hours during a storm resulted in Shelley’s romantic, gothic classic. Clearly affected by the ambiance and discussions of that night, Frankenstein was published a year after.

Precaution

Precaution by James Fenimore Cooper

What’s one way to encourage your unemployed husband to find work? Make a bet with him to write a book! In 1820, Cooper was reading aloud to his wife from an English novel, but finding it dull, he threw it aside and declared, “I could write a better book than that myself.” Cooper’s wife Susan challenged him to do just that. The result was the first of Cooper’s many novels: Precaution. Written in imitation of well-known English novels, it’s positive reception made Cooper realize his potential as a writer capable of delving into topics uniquely American.

The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We can’t help but think that Dostoyevsky was referring to himself in the title of this novel. Ironically enough, the prolific Russian writer used the writing of this book to dig his way out of some steep gambling debts. The terms of the wager were that if he didn’t finish the novel within a few months, he would have to hand over the publishing rights and royalties for all of his other novels — which as you can imagine, is a lot. Thankfully, Dostoyevsky completed the book in time, appropriately reflecting the dangers of compulsive gambling.

J.R.R Tolkien and C.S. Lewis

The iconic friendship between these two authors is the gift that keeps on giving. Legend has it that they made a bet that they would try writing in a new genre. With a simple flip of a coin, it was determined that Lewis would write a space-travel story, while Tolkien would have a go at time-travel. Lewis was successful in his attempt, creating his space trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Tolkien, on the other hand, wrote that his effort “ran dry,” leaving Lewis the winner of their hefty bet.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

We have Agatha Christie’s sister Madge to thank for the mystery novel that started it all. It was written on a bet that the now-legendary mystery maven couldn’t write a novel in which the reader would be unable to spot the murderer, despite having access to the same clues as the detective. Christie began writing the novel when she was volunteering in Torquay hospital dispensary during WWI. Naturally, her exposure to medicines of all sorts, made poison the murder weapon of choice for her first book. The manuscript was accepted after rejections from six publishers. All we have to say is: Thanks, Madge!

“For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

In what has been described as a six-word novel, “For Sale: baby shoes. Never worn” is an extreme example of what we now might call “flash fiction.” Some have called it apocryphal, but the legend goes that Hemingway was part of a bet to see who could write a complete story in six words. And, true to form, the victorious Hemingway supposedly went around the table collecting his ten dollars from each and every writer who was not as brave or succinct as he.

The Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton

This 1976 Michael Crichton novel about a 10th-century Muslim Arab who travels with a group of Vikings to their settlement has its origins in a bet with his friend that he couldn’t make an entertaining story out of Beowulf. A few mist-monsters, soothsayers, and vicious savages later, you can guess who won that wager.

Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan

What else are you supposed to do when you’re stuck in a cubicle on your computer all day except make office bets? James P. Hogan did just that when his complaints about the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey finally drove his coworkers to tell him to write a better one, if he thought he could do it. Accepting the challenge, Hogan and his coworkers bet about whether he could get it published. Needless to say, his days of computer sales were over and he began his new career as a hard sci-fi writer. (Better than 2001? Your call.)

Catacombs of Terror! by Stanley Donwood

This noir crime-thriller set in Bath, England was written as a result of bet between Donwood and his publisher at the time, Ambrose Blimfield. Sitting in a pub in the early 2000s, Blimfield told Donwood that he would publish his 150,000 novel if he wrote it in a month’s time — and he threw in a five quid wager for good measure. If Donwood was unable to deliver, Blimfield would have to go back to publishing local poets. As is often the case with writers, Stanley’s precarious finances dictated his decision, and he accepted the challenge. Writing at any and all times of the day, Donwood had two days to spare by the time he completed his pulp novel.

My Snuggle

Posted on by 007595

for Karl Ove Knausgaard

SCENE ONE

Karl Ove Knausgaard and I are stuck together like two halves of an oyster shell, or maybe something a little more solid like a lynchpin. The atmosphere is on fire. It’s like we’re in one of those Hollywood movies where two lovers are running towards each other in a meadow filled with flowers, except Karl Ove and I aren’t moving. Karl Ove’s head is resting on my chest. My hand is resting on his head, my fingers buried deep in the waves of his beautiful, gray hair. I close my eyes and try to keep quiet. I don’t want to disturb the neighbors or let on to Karl Ove’s wife.

SCENE TWO

Karl Ove and I are in his studio. I straighten my dress (I don’t usually wear a dress) and sit down on the couch. The couch is nondescript. Karl Ove straightens his t-shirt and faded blue jeans and sits down at his desk. He lights a cigarette, a Chesterfield, the same kind of cigarette my father used to smoke. The smoke creeps across Karl Ove’s desk, covering coffee cups, ashtrays, random seashells, feathers, and photographs, maybe, of his wife and children.

I find my laptop and open it. Karl Ove opens his laptop. I notice we have matching laptops. It’s another sign. Karl Ove begins typing. Tap, tap, tap, click, tap, tap, tap, click. His face glows in the soft light radiating from the computer screen, the same way it must glow by firelight, or lamplight, or by the Aurora Borealis so marked in these Nordic countries. But I don’t care about the Aurora Borealis, the lamplight, or the firelight though, all I care about is Karl Ove’s face glowing, and how he looks like an angel, I think.

Tap, tap, tap, click, tap, tap, tap, click.

I wonder what Karl Ove is writing. I wonder if he’s working on a poem, a haiku maybe, or maybe just a word. I begin to type, too. Tap, tap, tap, click, tap, tap, tap, click. The keyboard is on fire. I love the idea of me and Karl Ove working side by side. I wonder if Karl Ove notices my fingers gliding across the keyboard. I wonder if he’ll like the memoir I’m writing. I hope it won’t bother him that I’ve been with other men. Karl Ove takes a drag off his cigarette and goes back to typing.

Karl Ove’s wife enters the room through a doorway to my left and stops. Karl Ove doesn’t look up. The couch I’m sitting on is directly between Karl Ove and Karl Ove’s wife. Karl Ove’s wife is wearing black lingerie. The lingerie doesn’t look like normal lingerie, though. It looks like an old corset Great Grandmama Iðunn used to wear. There’s a red lace thread running across the bust line. The thread reminds me of a vein running through stone.

Karl Ove’s wife looks at Karl Ove. “It’s late. I’m going to bed. I expect you immediately,” she says, her voice strained, her face contorted.

“Yes, mother,” Karl Ove says, without looking up.

I notice Karl Ove’s face has lost its angelic glow. He looks serious and gloomy now.

Karl Ove’s wife looks at me. She knows everything. She knows Karl Ove and I made love. She knows I had my fingers buried deep in his hair. A woman knows these things. I sit up straight and try to look innocent. I was much better at lying when I was younger.

“You are not allowed to appropriate my husband,” says Karl Ove’s wife. “I don’t give a damn if this is a dream or not.”

“I’m not trying to hurt anyone. Besides, this is my dream and a person can’t really control this type of thing,” I say.

“You better be careful or you’re going to end up in trouble for defamation of character, invasion of privacy or worse,” says Karl Ove’s wife.

“At least there weren’t these kinds of situations when Socrates was around or Plato would have had his ass in a sling,” I say. I think of the nuns and the auburn-haired priest in the memoir I’m writing and hope, by God, they’ll understand.

“Ass in a sling?” Karl Ove’s wife looks confused.

I look over at Karl Ove and wonder if he’s appropriating this conversation I’m having with his wife.

Tap, tap, tap, click, tap, tap, tap, click.

“And the truth is — ,” I say, looking back at Karl Ove’s wife, “I’ve never read a single one of Karl Ove’s books, not yet anyway.”

Karl Ove’s wife turns abruptly, her expression like a General Major, and leaves the room.

“God, your wife — ” I start to say to Karl Ove, but then stop just short of saying — tyrannical, oppressive, buzzkill. I don’t want to criticize Karl Ove’s wife. I just made love with her husband for Christ’s sake. I had my fingers buried deep in the waves of his beautiful, gray hair, I —

Karl Ove takes another drag off his Chesterfield and continues typing.

SCENE THREE

There’s a brown tabby cat purring next to me on the couch. The purr fills the room like semi-automatic gunfire or a bomb blast. The cat is young and sweet. I run my fingers through her fur, making slow, deliberate passes from her forehead to the tip of her tail. I wonder if Karl Ove hears the purring. I wonder if he sees how good I am with cats, with his cat, I mean.

I notice the couch. It’s no longer nondescript. It’s made of a dark, rich, mahogany leather, a Chesterfield couch made in England, maybe. The arms of the couch look like fists minus the thumbs. The back is lovingly cross-stitched. My father would have liked this couch, but not my mother. I wonder if Karl Ove’s wife likes the couch.

I suddenly remember Karl Ove is married and I’m married, too. Everything feels complicated. The cat is purring louder. I hope my husband and Karl Ove’s wife will forgive me. I hope Karl Ove will forgive me. I look over at Karl Ove and notice his face is no longer gloomy, but wholly radiant as if maybe the word he was struggling to possess has finally offered itself up. Karl Ove snuffs out his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, smooths back his hair, and smiles. The cat stretches and yawns and jumps off the couch.

The Nostalgia of the Neighborhood Hardware Store

The Best of This Year’s Small-Press Comics

Posted on by 007595

I f you’re an independent cartoonist, you’re probably not going to get a Pulitzer or a Man Booker Prize (although let’s not rule it out). What you want is an Ignatz Award. This year, I was nominated as a juror for the Ignatzes by a 2016 juror (being a juror for the Ignatz Awards is passed on like vampirism). This meant I got to help winnow hundreds of nominees — anyone who makes a comic, in any form, can self-nominated or be nominated by an advocate — down to a smaller group of oustanding finalists. All told, there were 600 submissions: graphic novels, short story collections, a couple of coloring books, gag collections, book art, sketchbooks, and a ransom in zines.

Each juror (me, Glynnis Fawkes, Neil Brideau, Trungles, and David Willis) was allowed to nominate fifty books for the award, five books per category. It was incredibly difficult to pick just fifty out of those boxes. And it was hard to reconcile the breadth and originality of some of my favorite books with the limitations of the categories. There were so many books I fell in love with along the way. There were also things I wanted to nominate for awards that weren’t books — intelligent, challenging small presses, surprising design ideas, individual drawings, drawing styles, pen choices, line widths, paper thicknesses. Finding institutionally approved ways to sneak all my favorite things into the award nominations was hard. It couldn’t be done.

But even if I couldn’t give everything an award, I can still recommend them. Here are a few exciting things — books, series, presses, paper weights — that didn’t make it onto the official rap sheet. (And a couple that did, explained.)

1. Starseeds by Charles Glaubitz

There really ought to be a category for book design. The first thing I saw when I opened the box dominated by Fantagraphics titles was Starseeds by the Mexican multimedia artist Charles Glaubitz (Fantagraphics). The cover illustration is a KO, sumptuous with color, and enhanced with tightly localized textural effects.

2. Fante Bukowski 2 by Noah Van Sciver

The Fante Bukowski books, also from Fantagraphics, are a portrait of Fante Bukowski (not his real name), a down-on-his-luck Ignatius J. Reilly type whose propensity for self-sabotage is beaten out only by his power to deflect sympathy. “Oh, Fante,” thinks love interest, affectionately, “You’re such a bad writer.” Van Sciver’s genre is unusual in indie comics: he’s a realistic fiction writer, and he’s very good at it. Meanwhile, the drawing, compositions and color are truly great art in the tradition of ‘60s/‘90s American underground cartooning.

3. Velour, The Drag Magazine, edited by Sascha Velour and Johnny Velour

Besides inclusive and prescient curation, besides embodying (and helping define!) the conceptual areas where design, illustration, and drag combine, besides establishing a unifying print venue for queer and artist communities, the drag magazine is a beautiful object. House of Velour for life.

4. Extended Play by Jake Terrell

Extended Play is a collection of Terrell’s line drawings and comics stories. His combined influences pull from manga, twenties newspaper strips, Nickelodeon, modernist line drawings. I particularly liked the way this book was put together — a perfect bound softcover with a dust jacket. Minneapolis press 2D Cloud, which published this one, has been hitting it out of the park for years now, consistently producing original, genre-inconvenient art comics against economic odds.

5. Yours by Sarah Ferrick

Ferrick takes exciting advantage of book art as a medium. Yours, also from 2D Cloud, is a series of multimedia drawings, some figurative, some not, and intensely emotive, vulnerable handwritten messages. The effect is very disarming immediately. The book favors spreads over recto/verso sequencing, which makes the experience of reading more like looking at paintings than reading traditional comics or prose. It’s a wonderfully natural — and powerful — formatting choice that builds the edges of the work up and around you, as an environment rather than a narrative. Language, stress signals, and questions assert and reconstitute themselves, occasionally falling into rough-hewn grids and other loose systems, allowed to deviate like thoughts caught in the middle of forming.

6. Canopy by Karine Bernadou

I always look to see what Box Brown’s press Retrofit is publishing first. This year the good stuff includes Canopy by Karine Bernadou. Canopy is a mostly silent, four-color comic about a woman who lives in a dark (not exaggeratedly dark, but on par with our world in terms of utopian/dystopian balance) Eden filled with with relationship parables. The metaphors are sharp. Calling Bernadou’s work “charming” is too slight to do justice to the real depth of her ideas about relationships, but reader beware: charm lies among the thistles. This is a book about pain, need, and self-reliance.

Karine Bernadou

7. What is a Glacier? by Sophie Yanow

Also from Retrofit, What is a Glacier? is Sophie Yanow’s autobio/nature essay/op-ed comic. Yanow’s writing is always intelligent — introspective while looking outward, and always seeking clarity (makes sense, since Yanow also works as a translator). She’s great at starving the page, using space and silence to underline her points. Props back to Retrofit for further satisfying design choices on Glacier: the thick paper, the long, lean dimensions.

8. Youth in Decline’s quarterly monograph series Frontier, issues 13 (Richie Pope) and 14 (Rebecca Sugar)

This series has been a going concern since 2013, and is thoroughly great. The books showcase U.S. and international artists across disciplines. Pope’s issue is a vividly illustrated picture book about “the experience and gaze of black fatherhood” (Pope’s synopsis from his back page interview). It’s personal work, intelligently handled, and Pope’s play-anthropological field report on creatures called “Fathersons” is handed over with confidence.

Rebecca Sugar’s (the force behind Steven Universe, among many other animated, print, and musical projects) issue is a sketchbook full of thrilling ideas and intimate observations about animation and, well, love and stuff.

9. Zonzo by Joan Cornellà

Joan Cornellà’s new collection from Fantagraphics is fucked up, but that’s not why it’s good. Anything can be fucked up. Cornellà’s six-panel dumbshows are sly achievements in lateral thinking. Another example of inventive book design.

10. Rule Break by Anna Syvertsson

Anna Syvertsson is VERY FUNNY and she keeps having good ideas. Truly, just one great notion after another. I was on a road trip while reading some of these and Syvertsson’s cartoons were the ones I force-fed everyone in the car until I wasn’t allowed to.

The Ignatz winners will be announced during Small Press Expo, the weekend of September 16–17, at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Convention Center. The winners will be listed on the SPX website the evening of September 16. If you can’t make it to SPX, the books mentioned in this article can be purchased from their publishers, sometimes directly from the creators, and from your local comics shop.

Actually, an All-Girls ‘Lord of the Flies’ Could Be a Good Idea

Posted on by 007595

Social media did not take kindly to the announcement that two men will write and direct a film adaptation of “Lord of the Flies” with a contemporary setting and an all-female cast. Twitter users pointed out that the purpose of William Golding’s novel was to show how prepubescent boys, left to their own devices on an adult-free desert island, would begin to replicate the patriarchal society they knew — one infected by paranoia and ruled by scheming, warmongering brutes. To swap the boys for girls was to miss the point, many argued, about systemic toxic masculinity.

David Siegel, one half of the team behind the movie, didn’t reassure people that he got the point when he told Deadline that the filmmakers intend to create a “faithful but contemporized adaptation of the book, but our idea was to do it with all girls rather than boys.” A simple swapping of one gender for the other might sound more like a novelty than a dive into the realm of preadolescent girls, as deep as the one Golding plumbed with boys — an analogue to the Ghostbusters remake, only this time with classic literature. That the adaptation might traffic in tokenism, might be crass and dishonest, seem reasonable concerns.

But some detractors didn’t stop there: They went on to argue that a female version of Lord of the Flies wouldn’t work because women are not brutal. Writer Jessica Valenti tweeted, for instance, that “The all-female Lord of the Flies will just be a group of young women apologizing to each other over and over till everyone is dead.”

Although Valenti’s comment is tongue-in-cheek, it seems to stem from the same perception of women as nurturers, as passive, that has served as a foundation for their subjugation. In Why I Am Not a Feminist, Jessa Crispin writes that the idea of this set of supposedly innately female attributes in fact originates with men, but that women “have adopted this belief because it suits us to believe this about ourselves. It makes us special.”

Crispin goes on to surmise that many women identify with these allegedly “feminine” characteristics — compassion, emotional intelligence, receptivity — and not “masculine” ones — foolishness, predation, brutality — in order to locate a sense of collective value in their womanhood after centuries of oppression, to bolster their community’s power by insisting they stand on a solid moral high ground.

There’s a sinister side to this, a building of political clout by identifying a noble us and a savage them — though I don’t think that’s the intention of most feminists who advance the notion that women, by dint of being women, are somehow morally superior. Any woman, after all, who has been to junior high knows very well that girls are more than capable of viciousness; anyone who has followed even vaguely the careers of female leaders like Margaret Thatcher knows how absurd it is to say that if women were in charge, the world would cease to be riven by conflict.

Maybe it’s more about the human tendency to turn one’s face away from the darkness within, from the shadow described by Carl Jung: the one we construct over our lifetimes out of all the components of ourselves that condemn us, that reveal we are less “good” than we’d prefer to believe. (The boys, upon their rescue at the conclusion of Lord of the Flies, revert to vulnerable, weeping naifs in the presence of adults; they’ve shoved their shadows out of sight of authority.)

Any woman who has been to junior high knows very well that girls are more than capable of viciousness.

But we do want narratives that present women in all their complexity, even if that mirror is a shadowed one — or at least we say we do. So why is it impossible that a gender-swapped Lord of the Flies could offer this? The adaptation’s critics seem to object mainly on two grounds: that the filmmakers misunderstand Golding’s intentions with the novel, and that the filmmakers are men.

As to the first concern, authorial intention typically seems to matter very little when a book is adapted — and maybe it shouldn’t. (Find me someone who prefers the Stephen King-approved miniseries version of The Shining to Kubrick’s, other than Stephen King.) A good adaptation can reinvigorate a work and draw new attention to it. Hulu’s recent take on The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985 when the evangelical Christian movement’s influence in U.S. politics was still relatively novel (and alarming), hit uncomfortably close to home even for its author — and put it back on the bestseller list, in the wake of Trump’s election.

Besides, Golding’s intentions for his own book seem a bit muddy. In a recording, Golding explains that the idea for the book came to him while he was sitting by the fire; he remarked to his wife that he’d like to write about boys on an island and show “how they’d really behave, being boys and not saints like they usually are in children’s books.” To the question of why he chose to write about boys rather than girls, Golding says, “I was once a little boy…” and then adds, “If you, as it were, scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys they are more like scaled-down society than a group of little girls would be. Don’t ask me why.”

He hastens to explain that this is not intended as a knock against equality; in fact, he says, he believes women are “foolish to pretend they’re equal to men. They’re far superior.” This seems to me as good an indication as any that he did not understand women to be complex and flawed, but rather more like those saintly children’s books characters he wanted to expose for the lies they are. And perhaps he sensed this, and perhaps his first answer — that he wrote about little boys because he experienced being a little boy, and he sensed he could not in good faith represent girls on the page — is the best reason why Lord of the Flies is what it is.

But even if we take as written in stone his second answer — that he chose boys because he wanted to present a scaled-down society, and society being patriarchal, its microcosm must, too, be male — this doesn’t seem to me a persuasive reason not to gender-swap an adaptation of his book. Of course, there could not be a female mirror image of Lord of the Flies. You can’t have a microcosm when there is no macrocosm, no matriarchal culture to pillory.

There is no example of conduct for girls to emulate that isn’t responsive to and shaped by men’s.

But you could have something else — say, an exploration of the way that girls, once removed from the world of men, might continue to uphold its rules, having never encountered any alternative to draw upon for their own desert island culture. One Twitter user joked that there already is a female Lord of the Flies, called Mean Girls, and there’s something to that: I’ve always found the strongest moment of that movie to be when Tina Fey’s teacher Ms. Norbury tells her female students that they “all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores,” a sly reference to the infinite regress of men establishing a social order and women, absent any other model for living, maintain it, thus reinforcing men’s continuation of it. Maggie Nelson describes in The Argonauts how a girl’s sexual education forms around the fact of the ever-present potential for violation; she writes, “There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about ‘female sexuality’ until there is a control group. And there never will be.” There is no example of conduct for girls to emulate that isn’t responsive to and shaped by men’s.

But no control group doesn’t mean nothing to uncover, and the reason Golding gives for why he didn’t have his stranded children be boys and girls suggests a pretty astounding outlook on gender relations: With a co-ed cast of characters, the matter of sex would inevitably arise, and “sex is too trivial a thing,” he says, to put in a story like this, which is about the problem of evil. If Golding understood the impulse toward violence and control over others, and the drive for sexual satisfaction, to be totally distinct matters, he may have missed something important about the potential toxicity of any human being. In that case, we no longer have to hold up Lord of the Flies as an authority on brutality; we’re free to reinterpret it for today.

The second objection, that the adaptation’s writers and directors are men and therefore unable to capture the world of young girls, seems to be in line with Golding’s assertion that you’re only allowed to write about little girls if you were once a little girl. Never mind that David Siegel and Scott McGehee also directed What Maisie Knew (another adaptation!), and extracted (or simply recorded) from their six-year-old female star a performance that felt poignant and true — or that one of the most wrenching and funny depictions of girl-on-girl savagery, at least in my view, can be found in the male-written and directed Welcome to the Dollhouse.

And what does it mean to capture girlhood or boyhood with accuracy? To Golding it means to show how quickly, once removed from “polite society,” the barbarism supposedly undergirding it comes bubbling forth. Golding is hardly alone in believing that human nature is inherently base in this way. In her essay “A Common Faith,” Marilynne Robinson investigates this belief, and the purpose it serves. She writes of the ungenerous assumptions we make about our own human nature, our apparent commitment to reducing ourselves to creatures driven solely by self-interest. “I’m sure all of us can think of a thousand examples that argue against” the hypothesis that concern for others is unnatural, Robinson writes, and then points to one fascinating one: evidence that our hominid ancestors, as much as 700,000 years ago, possessed technology and culture, formed communities and passed down knowledge through the generations. In other words, there’s reason to believe our “natural tendencies” run just as much toward collaboration and cooperation as they do toward destruction, if not more so:

Modern theories of human nature, which are essentially Darwinist and neo-Darwinist, pare us down to our instincts for asserting relative advantage in order to survive and propagate. This dictum hangs on our essential primitivity as they understand it — assuming that our remote ancestors would have been describable in these terms, and that we, therefore, are described in them also. But it seems worthwhile to remember that this is a modern theory projected onto the deep past. Then the past, seen through the lens of this theory, becomes the basis for interpreting the present. And the observed persistence of these archaic traits in modern humanity affirms the correctness of this characterization of our remote ancestors, which goes to prove that these archaic traits do in fact persist in us. The endless mutual reinforcement distracts attention from the fact that it is all hypothetical. We know precious little about those dwellers on the savannas of the Pleistocene, and, as Brooks points out, we clearly know precious little about ourselves.

We don’t really know what we are, Robinson is saying; being human also means being mysteries to ourselves, containing questions that are unanswerable but nonetheless worthy of posing and probing in art. In The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson writes that “attempts to nail down ‘who we really are’ most often serve as rhetorical pawns in unwinnable arguments fueled by competing agendas.”

If so, then Golding’s agenda appears to be to persuade us that men — and not women — are killers, not nurturers. Many of us, clearly, are persuaded. A female Lord of the Flies might only make it explicit that this refers to women too — which at the very least gives us something to continue thinking and writing and arguing about. But at best, it — and female-centered works like it — could rise to the level of art. As Robinson suggests at the beginning of her essay, it can “test the limits imposed” by our long-held cultural patterns around gender, rather than continuing to operate within their very narrow and ungenerous boundaries.

The Art of Drawing with Text

Posted on by 007595

Earlier this summer, I stumbled into the Kate Werble Gallery in Manhattan for a publishing event and became interested in the gallery’s current exhibition of work by artist Beth Campbell. I remembered Campbell’s word drawings from my graduate art school days, and it was a pleasure to see this work in person, as well as a newer abstract mobile sculpture series she had begun based on the structures of her drawings.

Campbell works in many mediums, including video and installation, in addition to sculpture, but two of her drawing series might be especially interesting to writers: a series she began in 1999, entitled My Potential Future Based on Present Circumstances (referred to as Potential Future for short, and sometimes referred to as flow charts by Campbell), and her subsequent series Future Past, begun in 2014. As described on Campbell’s website, the former is a “text-based drawing series” that “makes use of a flowchart to explore the far-reaching map of possible futures arising out of everyday encounters.” The drawings, an early precursor of which Campbell titled “Web Drawing of Me,” are composed of handwritten text and start at a single point (i.e., “Me”), then branch off into many possible outcomes from that starting point, which could be seen as a possible parallel to the seemingly endless directions a story could go when a writer first sits down to begin new work. In one drawing from 2004, possible futures are as different as “Still waiting tables in a Diner when I am 42” and “Hired to write for FOX.”

I had the pleasure of sitting down to chat with Campbell about her projects at a café in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where she has her studio. At the time, her work was in exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Catherine LaSota: Let’s start with your My Potential Future Based on Present Circumstances series. What was the genesis for this series and your use of words in your art making?

BC: When I entered grad school, I was a painting major, but with a really large interest in installation, and about a month in I just threw myself into installation without any training in sculpture. I had seen this show in Chicago that was full of installation, and it really blew me away. I didn’t really know anything like that was possible. A month into grad school I stopped painting to pursue installation, and just threw myself into materials. What was very important to me in installation was the phenomena, the actual, quite theatrical experience of the thing.

CL: Are you referring to the experience of making it, or the experience of the viewer?

BC: The experience of the viewer in the space. For me, that was and continues to be an important part of when I do installation work. So instead of the work being about stuff — it’s not like, “this is about” and pick a theme — it’s about the phenomenon of the experience. This gets into psychology and perception. I’m interested in more than just a topic. As a human you are many things, and you’re interested in many things, and you’re influenced by many things. As an artist I was making my position: I made a mind map with the word “everything” in the middle to try to outline my position. My first web drawing was the word “everything” and things around it, and concepts, and it evolved into a basic drawing of me, with me in the middle and the different roles I performed.

CL: Did that web drawing start off as just words, or were there drawings within the web?

BC: They’re text-based drawings. The one that had “everything” had some blobs and stuff, but when it became the word “me” in the middle (of a web drawing), it was just words. It was really exploring all the different roles I perform. You’re not singular, you know — you’re a mom, you’re a writer, you’re a private person.

Interview with “Used Books” Artist Ben Sisto

CL: Right.

BC: So I finished grad school, and I moved to New York. For a year I was just adapting to New York and trying to figure out how to be creative here, and life stuff happened. I met my now-husband, and I’d moved here with another guy, and I thought, oh I should do a drawing about my future. I had already made a map of “me,” so then…

CL: The map of you that you had done before was the present you, in the now?

BC: Yeah, it was the 25 year old me (laughs). But it wasn’t about a future or anything. What I liked about it was that in the middle it was “me,” some personal thing — just you and the roles that you play — but the end became things like coffee and things that I liked. They were like a cockaburr to someone else’s edges. When I finished grad school I did an installation of two identical bedrooms at Roebling Hall, my first show in New York. My idea was that if someone develops themselves through stuff in their room, and this is all stuff in the world that there are multiples of, then there is a possibility that you would reoccur. Like you are creating a person out of this stuff. Then I have this drawing that goes from something seemingly singular (“me”) to this edge that is various bits of all of us.

“Web Drawing of Me” by Beth Campbell. Photo courtesy the artist.

CL: It’s interesting how you talk about these drawings, where when you get to the edge of them, it could also be the edge of somebody else — it’s a bit like choosing a POV when writing a story: the main character’s life touches on all the other characters’ lives, but the reader only sees the edges of those other characters’ lives. Your description of these early drawings also sounds to me like the way atoms come together in molecules. Have you thought about that?

BC: Not so directly, but that’s a good comparison.

CL: Sometimes we get together with people and it’s like a solid, sometimes it’s liquid. Sometimes relationships are a gas!

BC: (laughs) Well, totally. It’s like there are some people you can be around where you feel…

CL: …grounded?

BC: Yeah, or strengthened. And there are others, they make you feel horrible.

CL: We learn to shed people who make us feel horrible from our lives, hopefully?

BC: Yeah, I’m still learning that.

CL: You’re always meeting new people, too.

BC: Yeah. It’s funny, when I was getting the work together for the Aldrich show, this idea appeared multiple times in my sketchbook. It’s funny how something comes in and out and then finally you act on it. I felt like when I acted on, I thought the idea was new at that stage.

CL: Wait, what was repeatedly coming to your sketchbook at that stage?

BC: Doing a drawing about my future. It was this life thing of one guy to the next, choosing one over the other, that made me finally do the drawing of My Potential Future Based on Present Circumstances. I held off on it for three weeks just thinking about it, because I didn’t want to make a text-based piece that nobody would read, you know? There are a lot of text-based works that you never get through.

I didn’t want to make a text-based piece that nobody would read, you know? There are a lot of text-based works that you never get through.

CL: Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s the sheer amount of text?

BC: Probably, because the format of a huge wall text means maybe you are supposed to stand there with your head cricked back. Maybe it’s just me, but if I’m reading something like that, I just like to sit. (laughs)

CL: So when you make a text based work, are you thinking somebody is going to read the entire thing?

BC: For many of them, that’s the expectation. But when I was thinking about the Potential Future drawings in those three weeks I wanted to make sure you didn’t have to read all of it to understand what the point was. I was surprised at how much people actually read, because you didn’t have to read all of the text to understand that this was about the future.

CL: I think that people are drawn to text, you know? You see people going straight to the explanatory plaques in museums, for instance, — I mean, it’s a different thing, but…

BC: Oh, yeah.

CL: …perhaps words are a way in to art for some people, because they know what a word means, for example.

BC: Yeah, because it’s the familiar mode. Can I add one more thing about the Future Present drawings?

CL: Of course!

BC: I felt like they were like installations, in that people’s paths through them are very different, unlike when you’re reading through a book. It’s more like the Choose Your Own Adventure type of book. People go through it at different points and move around in very different paths.

CL: So it’s more Choose Your Own Adventure than novel, is that what you mean?

BC: Yeah, definitely. There’s a lot of movement in it. Or, each person’s movement through it is different.

CL: This brings up the question for me of time spent with an artwork. With a novel, or even a short story, there is a certain number of hours that a reader is spending in a space, based on the number of words on a page, and the time period that is being covered. A lot of your work is time-based in a way, too, because it is experience-based. So is the idea of time something that you think about? There’s a finite set of time, also, when you read a story, and then it’s over.

BC: Right, You start it and then you stop. One thing I’ve come to learn with the Potential Future drawings is that the people who live with them, love them continually, because they’re the kind of thing that you can pass by and glimpse another portion of it. It keeps having a newness. They access different points, so over time, it’s always refreshing. You don’t have to take all of it in — you get more time with it, you keep getting bits and pieces.

CL: That sounds a bit like re-reading a story at different points in your life and getting something new out of the story each time. For example, if you read Catcher in the Rye as a teenager and then again as a forty year old, you’re going to see it differently, you know?

BC: Right.

Support Electric Lit: Become a Member!

CL: What are you reading now?

BC: My reading these days is all nonfiction and philosophy and things like that. In college, I was really trying to understand Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I was so committed to trying to understand it, and it is really curious looking back, because I don’t even know how I got the book — there was nothing in my area that was saying, oh you should read this. I don’t even know how I came to it. I mean, it was prominent back then.

CL: Yeah, I remember it being around, I remember it being in the house.

BC: Now I’ve been reading a lot of books on the new neurology and decision making and psychology and philosophy stuff.

CL: Are there particular philosophers that you are looking to, or is it more general theories that interest you?

BC: I feel like I’m always trying to learn, so I’m always a student of it. The last few years, I’ve been consuming a lot of object-oriented ontology stuff like Graham Harman, or things on materiality and thingness theory. What I want to do right now is understand Latour.

CL: Latour?

BC: Yeah, Bruno Latour. Don’t ask me to explain, though! One book is We Have Never Been Modern. I do like to read a lot. And when I am working on the mobiles, I’ll listen to people talking. I had to stop listening to music in the studio.

CL: You listen to words in the studio?

BC: All the time. I’ve gotten really into Krista Tippett. She’s a contributor to NPR, she has her own program based out of Minneapolis. Last year I got into going to estate sales on Long Island. I get up really early and drive at 7am on Sundays for shows (and listen to Tippett’s On Being). I guess because it’s like church time, the show is intellectual-spiritual, but she interviews physicists and psychologists and brain surgeons and Buddhists and artists and writers, too. Like I learned about Mary Oliver on her program. Supposedly she doesn’t get interviewed much. That was amazing.

CL: I should check that out.

BC: It’s like church for people who don’t believe in god. So I’ll listen to her, and when I was working on the mobiles I’d listen to a lot of panel discussions on parallel universes and quantum physics. I’m deep into words.

CL: Do you absorb the words when you’re working in the studio? Does it ever become background noise, or do you really hear it?

BC: Well, I’m sure it goes in and out. I’ll re-watch or re-listen to the same thing.

CL: It sounds like words are always present as you are working.

BC: In my sketchbook, it’s mostly words. I mean, there are the text-based drawings, and I do a lot of other work, but it’s like there are these ideas that are in word form first that I kind of get enamoured with. I’ll even make my husband write stuff down — I was going to bed a few weeks ago, and I was too lazy to get back up, and I said, can you write down “everything is an accident?” He’s like, ok.

Beth Campbell in her studio. Photo by Catherine LaSota.

CL: You were talking about how you started with text-based drawings as a 25 year old with “Me” in the middle and then you wanted to draw one that was the future, and then eventually there was the transition to your Future Past series.

BC: I did My Potential Future Based on Present Circumstances drawings fairly steadily from my mid 20s for ten years plus, but the plus was really painful and not appropriate. I had made so many, and when I first made them, they were really necessary and liberating and kind of crazy, and I embodied crazy. Those drawings get associated with decision making and they get associated with the future, and there is a lot of association with choice — that’s why I started calling most of the mobiles, There’s No Such Thing as a Good Decision. (laughs)

For me, those drawings were sort of a self portrait of what it’s like to be at that age, which is full of anxiety and not knowing — if I do this, this will happen. What I say now is, really everything is an accident. You know, some decisions we make — it seems like we make, I should say.

CL: So is the idea that you think you can control things when you are younger?

BC: I wouldn’t say that you can’t control things but just that — this is now in hindsight, too — it’s more anxiety in general, and letting it just completely flood out of you. And it helped, because sometimes I would worry about something, and I’d say, oh, I’ll just save that for the drawing, I’ll put that worry in the drawing. It was like recategorizing it — instead of on your own turning it into a present.

Now I like to read about rational thinking, authors like Daniel Kahneman on thinking fast and thinking slow, and Dan Ariely about the irrational mind, and just how much everything around us is constantly nudging us and the concept of this self that we think is stable and is always in flux and influenced greatly by various simple things.

So those drawings weren’t just about “if I do this, this will happen.” They’re more in a spirit of anxiety. I did them for a good solid 10 years, and as with anything that someone does in life, it was really essential. Then it got to be imitating myself, and it just wasn’t that same voice anymore, because I got older and…

CL: …you didn’t have the same anxiety?

BC: Or not to the same degree. I am afraid of saying just anxiety, it’s so many things. I did them for a long time, but then I started feeling like, this isn’t my voice anymore. Although I loved them! And maybe in time I may do them in that same way.

CL: That happens to writers, too, where they get to a point of being really good at a certain thing and can get stuck.

BC: Yeah, I just couldn’t. I would chew all my fingernails off. It became really stressful, because I wasn’t in the process anymore. I was outside making it. Then I had a kid, and I was thinking, it’s not the same anymore, it’s not just me, I have a child, so I’m not just going to… I know that someone could and would be the person who would keep writing those, and their child would be endlessly hit by a cab or ending up in drug rehab.

CL: You are saying there would be more anxiety in the pieces with a child in the picture?

BC: No — that it would be about him, PTA meetings, and taking off for family trips…

CL: So it’s no longer just you as the nucleus.

BC: And I’d kill me and my boyfriend/husband all the time, but I don’t want to do that to my son, I just don’t want to entertain it. Anyway, I couldn’t do these drawings in the same way. I didn’t feel like I was that voice anymore, because I couldn’t do something that came from that time period, that kind of person, younger.

I have to be careful, because it’s not like as you get older there is no future for you (laughs), but I was also looking back on my life. In your 40s, there is regret — why didn’t I do this? I also didn’t want to just have me be the center anymore. In those drawings, even though I was the center, or — what would you use in writing? the protagonist? — everyone related to it. People would say to me all the time, it’s just like me, it’s just like me.

CL: People do that with books, too.

BC: Yeah, well, it very quickly was not me; it was a universal. I just didn’t want to be thinking about the world through me in the same way, so I started trying to figure out how to do it through other ways. It started as events, like a moment that had a future and a past, and it was a painful evolution into finding what’s the future past in the space.

I like to say it’s about mirror-ness. There is one drawing at the Aldrich on mirror-ness that is focused on psychology and narcissism, and another one is focused on superstition and technology and they’re kind of related in a way in terms of these crazy fantastic ideas. In early times people claimed to see the past, present, and future in mirrors, and now we’re using mirrors and telescopes to actually look at the past. There’s a coincidence of superstition and technology.

In early times people claimed to see the past, present, and future in mirrors, and now we’re using mirrors and telescopes to actually look at the past. There’s a coincidence of superstition and technology.

CL: One piece in your show at the Kate Werble Gallery actually has bits of mirror installed here and there between scraps of paper with text on them. I found it very interesting, because as I moved along it, I could literally see glimpses of myself within the piece.

BC: If that happens, that’s awesome. I did imagine that from a distance they kind of blend into the drawing, so you might be surprised by the mirror. But I know where they are, so it’s very obvious to me.

CL: Do you ever feel like you install a piece and then hear people’s reaction to it, and it causes you to think differently about you work?

BC: That’s the awesome part about it.

CL: That’s something that is said a lot about literature, that it’s not done until somebody reads it.

BC: Right. I think a lot about the viewer, even in the mobiles. For some of them, there’s a real fizzy visual thing that happens in them, the viewing that’s beginning to perform on your brain, and there’s a tension between perception and all that.

The Supermarket at the End of the World

Posted on by 007595

This summer the television network Spike launched a series loosely based on Stephen King’s novella The Mist. I was a huge King fan as a kid; I devoured The Mist. I’ve seen the 2007 film version — taut, rollicking, B-movie perfection — multiple times. But I won’t be watching the TV version. From what I’ve read, a core aspect that I found so compelling in the original is missing from this adaptation: no longer is the local supermarket the setting where nearly all the action plays out.

King has said that he was inspired to write The Mist after dropping in on his own local grocery store with his son the day after a heavy thunderstorm. If you had to barricade yourself against a mysterious fog hiding flesh-eating, tentacled monsters, where better than a place that is literally stocked with food?

Whenever I find myself in the aisles of a Key Food or Stop & Shop, I have a similar, fleeting thought: in the event of a cataclysmic disaster, is this where I’d want to bunker down? A number of zombie apocalypse bloggers advise against this strategy: too many people will have the same bright idea. And those glass façades that supermarkets seem so fond of? They’re vulnerable to attack — a truism which plays out to gruesome effect in the movie version of The Mist. I rarely ever get that far in my doomsday daydreams. I become too preoccupied with figuring out whether I should eat my way through the produce aisle first — or perhaps those frozen Sara Lee cheesecakes, or the Klondike bars — before focusing my attentions exclusively on the nonperishables.

The crisis of food shortage is a common trope, not to mention a primary plot engine, in a number of post-apocalyptic narratives. In some cases, all it takes is a single can to illustrate how dire things have gotten. In The Road Warrior (still the best of the Mad Max films, including George Miller’s 2015 reboot, Furiosa notwithstanding), Mel Gibson reaches for a can of Dinki-Di dog food. Instead of giving it to his canine companion he chows down on it himself, tipping his head back and chewing with the relish of a lapsed vegetarian eating a steak on his birthday. Dinki-Di even made a small cameo in the recent Mad Max video game.

In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, the entire life of the protagonists — an unnamed man and his son — consists of scavenging for food, plowing forward with a shopping cart that holds their dwindling provisions. Their world is unrelenting shit: dust, ash, ruin, and scabland. But early in the book there is one small bubble of joy. On the outskirts of a city the heroes come across a picked-over supermarket — nothing left but a few shriveled apricots. But what’s this? From the guts of an overturned soda machine, the man’s hand connects with a cold metal cylinder: a solitary can of Coke.

What is it, Papa?

It’s a treat. For you.

Treat is right, kid. Never has a carbonated beverage been described with such anticipatory brio. Every soul-restoring gulp of Coca Cola we have taken in our lives is summoned in this moment. The man puts his thumbnail under the aluminum clip. He leans his nose to the “slight fizz” rising from the can before he hands it to the boy. McCarthy doesn’t need to describe the taste — we all know how it tastes. But the boy — encountering Coke for the first, and possibly last, time — thinks on it before proclaiming, in all seriousness: It’s really good. In the 2009 movie the boy burps after his first sip. He insists that dad (Viggo Mortensen) also take a swig. This is satisfying. In the novel the man refuses, selfishly, like a martyr. The movie knows the best treats are shared.

Having a Coke with you. Still from “The Road” (2009)

But drink up, because what follows is more misery piled on misery, including a harrowing set piece in a house basement occupied by a band of cannibals. (The novelist Benjamin Percy has described this sequence as the scariest in all of literature.) By the time the man discovers a bomb shelter midway through the book, the boy calling out nervously from the trap door entrance, “What did you find?”, you are inclined to take Papa’s answer literally: “I found everything. Everything.”

Stored inside the bunker is the glorious mother of all mother lodes: “crate upon crate of canned goods. Tomatoes, peaches, beans, apricots. Canned hams. Corned beef. Hundreds of gallons of water in ten gallon jerry jugs.”

As with the Coke, McCarthy activates the frontal lobe of desire by describing the ritual of extraction:

He opened the carton of pears and took out a can and set it on the table and clamped the lid with the can opener and began to turn the wheel … they sat side by side and ate the can of pears. Then they ate a can of peaches. They licked the spoons and tipped the bowls and drank the rich sweet syrup.

One more, the boy says, like a recovering drunk hungrily reacquainting himself with the taste of alcohol.

Unfortunately they can’t stay. The man surveys the underground stash and calculates how long before they’re discovered by marauders. There is a last supper of coffee, browned ham, scrambled eggs, baked beans, biscuits with condensed milk. Then they pack up what they can and set out across the gullied, eroded land, and pretty much nothing else good happens for the rest of the book.

In the post-apocalyptic imaginary there is not only the foraging of food but also the stockpiling of reserves. Early in her sci-fi novel Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel delivers a tour de force of the latter. A central character, Jeevan, is tipped off by a doctor friend about a deadly flu pandemic that appears to be spreading fast. What follows is a fraught, exquisitely paced episode of panic buying, as Jeevan races to fill seven shopping carts in the forty minutes before his local supermarket closes.

First cart: all water. He is on the phone with his doctor friend again. No, he can’t leave town, he explains; he can’t abandon his paraplegic brother. The second cart is soon loaded with “cans and cans of food, all the tuna and beans and soup on the shelf, pasta, anything that looked like it might last a while.” The doctor starts coughing and hangs up. Jeevan continues. His next cart is one hundred percent toilet paper; the one after that brims with more canned goods. Also frozen meat, aspirin, garbage bags, bleach, duct tape. Finally he gets through to his girlfriend’s phone, just as he enters the checkout line for the last time, laden with a hodgepodge of “grace items” (vegetables, fruit, bags of oranges and lemons, tea, coffee, crackers, salt, preserved cakes. Preserved cakes? Must be a Canadian thing). Laura isn’t listening; she keeps asking if he’s having some kind of panic attack. He pleads with her to get out of the city, now, at the same time as he tosses a bouquet of daffodils onto his hill of purchases.

The daffodils signal that Jeevan hasn’t quite accepted the new normal. Despite the doomsday events unraveling around him, he can’t resist this last nodding gesture to beauty in all its ephemerality. Fuck the flowers, Jeevan! I want to shout. Throw in more cans of garbanzo beans and cling peaches!

Fuck the flowers! I want to shout. Throw in more cans of garbanzo beans and cling peaches!

In Northern California where I grew up, and where earthquakes are a feature of the landscape, local TV news gauges the damage by surveying the supermarket aisles. Shelves with cans and bottles strewn about or knocked to the ground means that the jolt was serious. More ominous are empty shelves: those signal a loss of services. Earlier this summer my internet feed flooded with images of people emptying supermarket shelves in Doha, after Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Arab-nation powerhouses announced that they were breaking diplomatic ties with Qatar, where the majority of food in the country is imported. Prior to that it was the empty shelves during Venezuela’s economic implosion. Before that, post-tsunami Japan.

Andreas Gursky, ’99 Cent’ (1999)

The purpose of supermarkets is to be stocked to the gills, like a dizzying Andreas Gursky-ian fantasia, with a half-dozen brand choices for every product. That makes supermarkets quintessentially American. Indeed, the first such market, which combined a butcher, produce stall, bakery, and pharmacy under one roof, opened in 1930 in a 6,000 square foot former garage in Jamaica, Queens, with the promise to “Pile it high. Sell it low.” Supermarkets represent a way of life, of the security that only a massive amount of food can give you. So when they instead become a locus for anxiety and depletion, that way of life comes tumbling down.

And yet, my mental obsession with the stockpiling of canned goods has not translated to actual disaster preparedness in any way. As I write this I don’t even own a flashlight — my last two broke. For research I recently watched a few episodes of National Geographic Channel’s Doomsday Preppers, a reality series about the obsessive ends that survivalists pursue to prepare for the end of the world. One man’s bunker, stocked with gleaming rows of vegetable and fruit preserves, gave me a shiver of pleasure. But I quickly lost interest in the other survival tactics that are a focus for the bulk of the show — weaponry, booby traps, defense training. I was only in it for the food.

Supermarkets represent a way of life, of the security that only a massive amount of food can give you. So when they instead become a locus for anxiety and depletion, that way of life comes tumbling down.

According to a National Geographic survey (no doubt commissioned as a marketing gambit for Preppers), forty percent of Americans believe that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter makes for a wiser investment than a 401(k). You could tsk-tsk the folly of this mindset. But who doesn’t, on some level, get satisfaction from envisioning a future where paper currency and plastic cards have become worthless, but not freezers of vacuum-packed venison and crates of Goya kidney beans and split-pea soup?

When my sister and I were kids growing up in Berkeley and money was tight, we ate a lot of Campbell’s soup. We favored cream of chicken, with its yellow, salty polyps, and New England-style clam chowder, because they could be thickened on the stove with milk instead of water. I haven’t eaten a can of Campbell’s soup in at least a decade; I can’t say I miss it. But I respect the can. In the long game of the post-apocalypse, canned goods are the daffodils.

401(k)s may be practical, but they would have meant nothing to our hirsute hunting/gathering ancestors, let alone those struggling to survive in modern-day disaster zones. Nor will they help us in the not-so-distant future, when the icebergs have melted, the pandemic has decimated millions, and midday temperatures are enough to boil our kidneys. If we’re headed for apocalypse, it is the hardy aluminum-clad cylinders — time capsules from a vanishing present, units of mushy brown produce or quivering ridged tubes of sweet dessert — that will sustain us. “Turn the wheel” and out comes a fruit cocktail, tasting just like it did before the world became ash. All those canned goods stacked in cupboards and on supermarket shelves are reminders of the kind of life we might one day lose, even as they assure us how good we have it now. They are, as Viggo would say, everything.

John Ashbery Changed My Life

Posted on by 007595

Almost exactly a month before poet John Ashbery died, the New Yorker’s Louis Menand published an essay called “Can Poetry Change Your Life?” I didn’t get past the title before I answered yes, out loud, in the silence of my studio. Can poetry change your life? Maybe. I don’t know you. But John Ashbery changed mine.

I was in the third year of my Ph.D. when I encountered John Ashbery. I’d tried to avoid him; two years earlier he had given a reading in the town where I went to school, but although the MFA program buzzed with news of his coming visit, I’d never heard of him and I didn’t go. In fact, I was busy trying to avoid 20th century poetry entirely; when I was compiling the list of significant works I would master for my oral exams, I’d bristled at the idea that poetry had to be included. I liked narrative, the art of telling, the skill of designing the slow slide into what happened. Poetry was full of mirror-games; it multiplied the stakes and possibilities of language dizzyingly, discarding the chains of cause and effect that narrative secured and untethering words from their posts of dutiful explanation. In poetry I found no anchor, no explanation, nothing firm to onto which I could grasp and no anchor tying it down to anything stable. I didn’t have the patience or the interest in developing sea-legs to stand on a ship with such a pitching keel.

But poetry was determined to change my life. My faculty advisor disapproved of my poem-free list and unceremoniously dumped heaps of poetry back on, notably “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” an epic eleven-page poem by John Ashbery.

Why All Poems Are Political

Pursuing a graduate degree is an odd combination of delusional self-confidence — you have to be delusional to believe that the contents of your thought are worth seven years of single-minded pursuit at the expense of both a personal life and a research university’s funding — and cowering self-doubt. Ashbery’s work has a way of exposing the laughable qualities of both. In “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” there is the sense that the artist, whose round mirror organizes everything, is desperate to bring everything into arrangement, order, full comprehension — and loses control in the attempt.

Parmigianino’s self-portrait

Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait” takes as its object a painting, composed by the late Renaissance Francesco Mazolla. As the poem describes, Parmigianino, as Francesco Mazolla is familiarly known, contrives to paint himself, capturing his own reflection in a convex mirror (the type, Ashbery observes, commonly used by barbers). Parmigianino’s technique was new. The idea of a self-reflection as the subject of art was itself a novelty of the time. Parmigianino doubles the convexity of the reflection he finds in the barber’s mirror by painting the resulting self-image on a sphere of wood, divided in half so that the portrait itself juts out. As a result, the figure rendered in the portrait Parmigianino left of himself bulges out of the frame, only to be pulled back into the portrait by its shape, its convexity, its dimensions. Ashbery doubles the convexity once more. Parmigianino’s portrait is a reflection of his reflection: the poem is a reflection once more removed. In this series of infinite regressions, Ashbery shares the restraint of Parmigianino’s frame. You feel him, like Parmigianino, wondering at the constraint and whether there is a way out of it. The combination of the portrait’s convexity, the painter’s circumscription, and the reproducing levels of self-reflection, captivates Ashbery. In the portrait, Ashbery sees the painter’s attempt to capture the entirety of the subject and all that surrounds him. He also sees the immanent distortions of that self-reflexivity: the artist, and the hand of the artist in the act of creation, loom too large for the frame.

Nothing is ever complete, nothing ever fully ordered, in an Ashbery poem. The poet heaps image upon image, layers voice upon voice, seeking to contain, it seems, everything in the form. It includes the utterances of others; their sounds sneak in from outside the poem’s frame to inhabit the space within it so that the poem is humming with them, creating a dense chatter that swells into a cacophony of reflections until nothing remains that is surely the poem’s own substance. These background voices utter light and dark speech that becomes indistinguishable from that of the speaker, so that this sense of otherness is only barely constrained by the artist’s smooth self-image floating on the surface. The poem strains under the weight of the attempt to contain everything beneath the surface, the content straining the outer limits of the poem’s form. More keeps getting included, Ashbery wrote — perhaps about what he was writing — without adding to the sum. Ashbery’s poems are driven by a certain degree of amusement at expectation that one does, finally, arrive at the sum. He was interested in the more, in how much of the weight of otherness the form of the poem could bear, and what it couldn’t. For Ashbery, it was what is outside the portrait that mattered.

My eyes would start to glaze over whenever I picked up the slim volume that bore the image of Parmigianino reflected on its cover (or rather, the convex reflection of that image, as Ashbery persistently pointed out). So, determined to master Ashbery, I went off of the page, and found a recording of him reading “Self Portrait.” Ashbery’s self-recording seemed to recapitulate the content of the work: a self-portrait of the poem itself in the convex mirror of sound.

The recording is in his flat, decidedly un-musical, disinterested voice. The pitch of his tone never lowers or rises, and the poem, read in entirety, spans three recorded segments and about fifty minutes of listening time. I listened to it the first five or ten times out of a sense of duty, as a means to the ends of mastery, which at that point in my mind meant the ability to say one or two witty and new things about the poem if asked about it during the exam.

And then I listened to it a hundred more times. And then a hundred times again. Sometimes, I would get to the end of the poem, and as Ashbery’s voice intoned the final few lines, whispers, out of time, I would immediately start the poem from the beginning, listening to it endlessly so that the repetition would almost seem to ignore the poem’s own caution that its whispers were out of time, existing only in cold pockets of remembrance. They existed in streams of endless words, flowing through my ears endlessly, a reflection with no terminus.

I listened to it the first five or ten times out of a sense of duty. And then I listened to it a hundred more times. And then a hundred times again.

I live in Los Angeles, and the gift that the city has given me is a love — maybe a compulsion — for traversing the terrain of its mountain ranges. I take pleasure and delight at the sun cresting over the hills and lighting up the sky into pastels in the summer, neons right out of a Lisa Frank illustration of magentas and tennis-ball yellow in the winter. The quality of the sky could be nothing more than the city’s legacy of smog and pollution, but there is a certain density of the light that transforms the horizon, and delivers a radiant quality to the sunsets that compel me to venture daily through the various trails that are cut into various Los Angeles mountain ranges, chasing that endlessly receding horizon into dusk, dimness, and eventually night.

Once I discovered John Ashbery, he became my companion and guide in navigating those trails. I would listen to his voice reading over your “Self Portrait” as I walked, his words transforming the landscape I traveled in. I started to view my surroundings through the images and the pressure of his phrases and the beat of his sounds. The poem was, and still is, the background to the chatter of my consciousness, as essential to my existence as my breath. I found myself thinking, writing, speaking in the language he created, understanding my experiences in his terms. Often, when I would watch the city fall under the cast of moonlight, as the traffic bloomed below, I would, watching from my remove, discover a feeling that I had

seen the city; it is the gibbous
Mirrored eye of an insect.
All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within.

When I heard him speak that line, it was the first time I felt that I had truly seen the city. I can think of nothing else that has quite described the panorama of Los Angeles achieved from the top of the canyon with such perfection. Now I cannot see it any other way.

If you listen to “Self-Portrait” enough times — I have listened to it more than a thousand times now, almost daily for five years — the strain of sounds in Ashbery’s words start to present their own stereotypes. The glistening smoothness of his superfluous sibilance butts up against an excess of plosive Ps. You feel the poet sputter and spurt out language, trying to get everything out before, as it were, closing time. The sounds offer a mixture of amusement, regret, and surprise (surprise: the word is a gratuitous enjambment of S and P bursting at the seams to get out):

We have surprised him
At work, but no, he has surprised us
As he works.
The picture is almost finished,
The surprise almost over, as when one looks out,
Startled by a snowfall which even now is
Ending in specks and sparkles of snow

The exam came and went, and I returned, maybe even compulsively, to “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” I could not rid myself of its influence. I could not turn away from it; the poem became a reflection that surrounded me on all sides. I had gotten to the point where I would speak the poem alongside the poet’s own recording, and I could feel, with each S, the slow slide into what happened; with each P, lips moistened, about to part, releasing speech. I could feel the language tensely coiled in on itself, it seemed eager to spring out beyond the poem.

I could not turn away from it; the poem became a reflection that surrounded me on all sides.

When I heard that Ashbery had died this week at the age of ninety, I thought immediately of Menand’s essay, “Can Poetry Change Your Life?” Menand visits a multitude of theoretical and philosophical positions and discourses before arriving at the rather uncomplicated and almost banal observation that the answer to his titular question is entirely a matter of which poem and which life. “The funny thing about the resistance all these writers put up to the idea that poems can change people’s lives is that every one of them had his life changed by a poem. I did, too,” Menand writes. The best response Menand comes up with is a personal statement, a claim about what poetry does to him.

Ashbery, whose ear was finely tuned to the particular, would have probably loved that. Menand’s conclusion, even at the foot of a great mountain of theory, is that whether poetry changes lives is deeply personal and impossible to qualify in the abstract terms that theory requires of its objects. In the great debate about how and why poetry matters, and what, if anything, it does, I only have anecdotes and my own experience: John Ashbery changed my life. The words of the poem created my world, his worlds of words changed my life. Poetry can do this. Perhaps not in a clear-cut, quantifiable, predictable way, but surely it has and it can. Perhaps what compels a great many of us who encounter poetry and take it into our lives, our minds, and our hearts, is the unpredictability of that encounter with these strangers, the surprise in a connection with a poem when the impact could not have been foreseen, the not knowing if and when we will discover attachments through words and on pages and in rhythms, the discovery of a response we could not have willed nor anticipated.

In the great debate about how and why poetry matters, and what, if anything, it does, I only have anecdotes and my own experience: John Ashbery changed my life.

A month before Ashbery’s death, the essay had given me a chance to meditate on what John Ashbery specifically, and what poetry, broadly speaking, has meant to me. When I heard we had lost him, I knew the size of his loss to me because I had spent the week before thinking about what I had gained through his words. With Ashbery’s poem, the explosion that the poem created in me was precise and fine. His words created my world; his worlds of words changed my world.

I can’t tell you that reading “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” will change your life too. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. My world is not your world. Poetry does not change worlds like a billiard ball changes a formation of billiard balls. It does not head in a direction and with a force proportional to its aim; it does not break open the heart the way a cue ball breaks that neat triangle. You can’t aim poetry in that way. But surely it can change the formations that lie on the table, and surely it has.

Perhaps what compels those of us who encounter it is the unpredictability of that encounter, the surprise of the break, the wonder in the direction that poetry travels in spite of its aim and target, the surprise in a connection with a poem when the impact could not have been foreseen. The astonishment that something on the table, bewilderingly, ended up in the pockets.

What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific
Life, experienced or not, channeled into some form
Steeped in the nostalgia of a collective past.
The light sinks today with an enthusiasm
I have known elsewhere, and known why
It seemed meaningful, that others felt this way
Years ago.

Five years after I found Ashbery’s poem (or after his poem found me), a decade after I opted out of the reading he gave in that seminar room in Massachusetts, I worry whether my mind will now ever really be mine. I doubt that it will. I find that my consciousness itself does not belong to me; it is, rather, patterned with light and dark speech that has become part of me, that is not mine but that has so thoroughly patterned my mind that I don’t know where his words end and mine begin. (I’ve italicized, here, the phrases that seem to come to me directly from Ashbery’s mouth.) Sometimes, I worry that I’ll never be able to speak freely again, that I will never see any city but as a gibbous mirrored eye of an insect. That memory will forever be understood to me in the conceptual form of it he provided for it, as irregular clumps of crystal.

Support Electric Lit: Become a Member!

That fear is itself a part of the poem’s engine: once the poet has seen Francesco’s self-portrait, Ashbery too wonders whether he can create something new for himself without reproducing the portrait that reflects endlessly in his mind, the old forms that have embedded themselves in his consciousness. Francesco’s fear was the same: the discovery that the whole of the self seems to have been supplanted with the strict otherness of another painter, in another room. Like Francesco, Ashbery, and now I, am possessed by the fear not getting out of that enclosure, a self-enclosure that cannot help but contain the other in its reflection. Does Ashbery get out? If he does, it is only by letting go of the need to command the form, the desire to master it, by accepting that the history of creation proceeds according to stringent laws, and that things do get done in this way, but never the things we set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately to see come into being. You can feel his release — or at least the attempt to be released from the constraints of all know-how — in the poem. Nowhere is this clearer than in the poet’s final last gasp:

The hand holds no chalk

And each part of the whole falls off

And cannot know it knew, except

Here and there, in cold pockets

Of remembrance, whispers out of time.

The stanza is alive with homonyms and alliterations, filiations and shuttlings, John Ashbery might say; the chalk crumbles, the whole falls into the vortex of its homograph. Newness — or rather, what cannot be known as new — enters into the poem, but under the cloak of what one “cannot know it knew.” The whispers, that clutter of plosives and sibilants, which end up in “cold pockets of remembrance,” are somehow out of time — but the poem is also out of time, there is room for only one final utterance. There is more to say, but the poem is out of time, and anyway, there is nothing that one could say that would complete it — more would only be included without adding to the sum. But something has landed in the pockets.

Poetry does not change worlds like a billiard ball changes a formation of billiard balls.

One final anecdote: on the night I learned of Ashbery’s death, I went back to the printed version of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” for the first time in years, certainly the first time since I had started listening to Ashbery’s recording. To my astonishment, I discovered an entire section of the poem that was unfamiliar to me. There on the page was a whole chunk of the self-portrait, a segment of the poetic sphere, that Ashbery had left out of his self-recording. The poem had kept a secret, withheld something from the whole. It was delightful, so perfect; Ashbery could not have designed a better postscript. He had, in his own words, found a way to stick his hand outside the globe and wave back at the sphere he had left behind, a gesture. Something indeed lived outside of his “Self-Portrait,” in his own reading of it. The master had mastered me once again.

And so, as I have felt about any poem worth talking about, any meaningful life I’ve tried to understand, I found that in writing I too have omitted the thing I started out to say. Out of time, I will only say this:

John Ashbery: thank you for giving me the extraordinary kaleidoscope of your poetry, a convex mirror through which I have found a self-portrait, and with which I will always find a reflection of the world.

Party Like You’ll Never Die!

Posted on by 007595

The Masquerade of the Red Death
Thursday, October 26, 2017, 8:00 PM

Littlefield
635 Sackett St.
Brooklyn, NY 11217

Dear Friends of Electric Lit,

Our third annual fundraiser is coming to Brooklyn on Thursday, October 26! Please join us to celebrate the immortality of the written word at “The Masquerade of the Red Death.”

Advance tickets are on sale for $35, so get yours before October 1, when the price increases to $50.

Masks are included with each ticket purchase, and guests are encouraged to wear red or black. In light of the Edgar Allan Poe theme, we are pleased to report that masks look great with Poe-staches. (See below.)

Edgar is ready for the Masquerade

We’ll have a DJ, free drinks, dancing, and maybe a few surprises. But most importantly, funds raised will increase payments to our hardworking, talented writers, who deserve all the money.

So if you’re in the New York area, please join us! I can’t wait to see your seductively obscured faces there.

Yours evermore,

Halimah Marcus
Executive Director, Electric Literature

Electric Literature is grateful for the support of our generous Masquerade sponsors.

Electric Lit, Inc. is 501(c)3 non-profit, and your ticket purchase is tax-deductible minus the cost of goods and services.