Which begs the question: Are you watching The Circle or is The Circle watching you or is Dave Eggers watching all of us right now?
Emma Watson IS The Circle. Wait…is that right? Tom Hanks is in this, too. Is Tom Hanks The Circle?
As fans of blockbuster literary adaptations and cyber-thrillers are no doubt aware, we are only a few short months away from the premiere of The Circle, starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, adapted from Dave Eggers’ 2013 bestselling dystopian novel. That means it’s time for an official trailer. (That snippet back in December? That was a teaser, apparently. Do you feel teased?) The Circle’s story follows an ambitious young woman, Mae, who lands her dream job at the world’s most influential internet company, The Circle. (Are there any lawyers reading this? The company is definitely not Google, okay?) While Mae is initially ecstatic about her new position and the company’s world-changing potential, she slowly begins to question the line between privacy and democracy. From there, thriller-ish stuff unfolds.
The movie arrives in theaters on April 28th. So if you haven’t polished off the doorstopper already, that gives you about two-and-a-half months to read it and then pretentiously tell all your friends that the book was far superior.
The folks over at the Drama Channel recently sought out academics to create a historically-accurate rendering of what Jane Austen’s famed fictional hunk, Mr. Darcy, would have looked like in “real” life. The result is burst bubbles everywhere. According to John Sutherland and Amy Vickery, the Drama Channel’s experts, features that passed for “handsome” in Austen’s day are a far cry from what contemporary readers and Hollywood casting directors would find agreeable, never mind swoon-inducing. (Sorry, Colin).
Per today’s Guardian, Vickery explains: “As Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in the 1790s, our Mr. Darcy portrayal reflects the male physique and common features at the time. Men sported powdered hair, had narrow jaws and muscular, defined legs were considered very attractive.” In fact, the rugged, brooding, broad shouldered typecast frequently seen in modern adaptations wouldn’t have done it for Austen’s Georgian era characters. Those physical traits were all too typical of the poor working class.
Since most 21st century people don’t think it’s sexy to run their fingers through their lover’s hair only to have their hand turn white, readers may be understandably disappointed by the new revelation. However, Sutherland points out, “There are only scraps of physical description of Fitzwilliam Darcy to be found in Pride and Prejudice,” so as with any novel, the reader has the ultimate say in how they want to envisage the characters.
Judge sentence vandals to… read books: “[T]he defendants have been given a list of thirty-five books and will submit monthly book reports from that selection. As part of the deal, they will also visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of American History, which is running an exhibit on the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, and will submit to the court research papers on the use of hate symbols.”
Will the great millennial fiction be in the noir genre? “[T]he generic pillars of network television have always been the cop show, the hospital show, the high school show, and even the FBI G-man show of the 1950s — shows grounded in a friendly fascination with US institutions. But nothing feels more appropriate for the present moment — another Golden Age for TV and a dark era for civic life — than the rebirth of noir on network television.”
Darnielle: [A friend and I] invented a game that you can play while driving through Iowa. It’s called What’s Growing? It’s a very simple game in which one person says What’s Growing? and the other person says Corn. And the thing is, it’s funny, but there’s something about it, if you’re not from out there, that is other and alien. It’s just an unfamiliar thing.
Tartt: It’s scary to me. I’ve only been there once, and I felt like rifles were trained on me the whole time. The sky is too big.
JoAnn Chaney’s debut thriller, What You Don’t Know(Flatiron Books) opens with detectives cracking Denver’s most notorious serial killer case. Jacky Seever is hauled away to prison as bodies are dug up from his crawlspace. But that’s just when things begin to spiral for those in Seever’s orbit. Seven years later when a string of similar murders occur, the reporter who covered the case, the detectives, and Seever’s wife are all pulled back into the warped world of a man who is locked away in prison. Chaney’s work is a careful study in characters and deception. The author answered questions over email recently about lies, the people who can hurt us the most, and her suspenseful debut.
Heather Scott Partington: Does anything scare you? I’m such a wimp that I read this book with my breath held and the lights on, and I kept thinking what a badass you are to write about creepy clowns and bodies in crawlspaces and skin peeling off corpses — all while maintaining tension and a kind of macabre chic. What was the first book that really scared you? Was there a quality of that first scare that wanted to bring to What You Don’t Know?
Joann Chaney: Things that scare me: something bad happening to my kids. Spiders, especially those huge ones people are always trying to cover with a bowl in YouTube videos. Being sideswiped on the interstate and crashing. So, you know, the typical stuff.
I can’t remember the name or author of this short story I read when I was a kid, but I remember exactly what it was about — a single woman has her home renovated and takes the contractor as a lover, and when the work is done she ends the relationship. But she doesn’t realize that the contractor has built tunnels behind the walls so he can creep around and watch her. He says he’s in love with her, but he’s obviously a nutcase, and decides if he can’t be with her, well — she’s gotta die. Boy oh boy, that story freaked me out. It was about obsession and lust, and the idea that none of us are safe, not even in our own homes.
I think a lot of writers have themes and ideas and issues they revisit time and time again, and that short story laid the groundwork for what I write about now. I have an ongoing fascination with the idea that things are never what they seem, that everything can look amazing and perfect on the surface and be rotten and stinking underneath. Like the home renovation in that short story — all the paint and drywall and plaster are hiding something much more sinister than you can possibly imagine.
“Everything can look amazing and perfect on the surface and be rotten and stinking underneath…”
Also: if anyone knows what short story I’m remembering, let me know. I’d love to read it again.
HSP: There’s also a lovely grown-ass Nancy Drew-ness to the novel. The reporter at the heart of the story, Sammie Peterson, is both solving the crime and finding herself hopelessly entangled in the world of the killer. She’s no victim, and yet she keeps getting caught up. Was that something you wanted to balance? How did you conceive of Sammie from the beginning?
JC: I love Nancy Drew. Just wanted to put that out there.
I think Sammie’s character is really interesting, because she’s a woman trying to get places and maybe not always going about it in the best way. It’s something of a man’s world she’s living and working in, so she’s constantly battling it out with men — her husband, Hoskins. I’d like to think she’s a modern day Lois Lane/Nancy Drew — strong, smart, willful. But she’s got issues — hell, if she didn’t, she wouldn’t be realistic. And I wanted Sammie to seem real, and I think all her quirks help make her believable. Sammie’s tough, but she’s also soft. She’s strong, but she second-guesses her choices. She makes bad decisions. Sammie’s multi-faceted — but aren’t all women?
Quite a few people have had a very strong, negative reaction to Sammie’s character — she’s unlikeable, she’s a sexual deviant, she’s an all-around terrible person. But I’d argue that those things all make her a believable, balanced character.
HSP: One of the characters says, “knowing things another person is capable of, well, those things stay with you, they change you.” Everyone in What You Don’t Know is damaged at the start of the story by knowing Seever; but I think what readers will find rewarding is the complexity of characters who we come to find are damaged well before they meet him. What You Don’t Know makes a compelling argument for being alone, or at least guarding against the compromise that comes from close association with other people. Did you start to look at people differently as you got further into writing it?
JC: That’s a good question, and one I hadn’t even considered. I wouldn’t say I started looking at anyone differently as I wrote WYDK, but I’ve always believed that the people closest to you can cause the most damage. They know you, what makes you tick, your deepest darkest secrets and fears — and anytime you get close to anyone else you run the risk of them hurting you.
I feel like at its very core What You Don’t Know is about the secrets we keep from each other, and for each other. The characters are constantly in a kind of battle, both against other characters and themselves, trying to protect these secrets and their hidden motives. And I think those sorts of relationships can make for compelling reading.
HSP: My favorite line in the book is “You can make a person believe anything.” What’s the biggest lie you’ve ever made a person believe?
JC: When my oldest son was about six or so he asked me who invented padlocks, and why. I honestly don’t know the answer. But instead of just telling him the truth, I came up with an elaborate story about a gentleman-farmer named Jebediah Masterlock who was having some problems keeping his sheep in the pen. I’ve also told my kids that a certain button under my car’s steering wheel is an emergency self-destruct in case of the zombie apocalypse. When we saw a street getting repaved I told them the old pavement was never scraped off — it was just layer after later of asphalt, and when it got too high the buildings would all be cranked up a few inches so everything was the same height.
You get the idea. I’m pretty sure my kids don’t believe a word that comes out of my mouth, but they keep asking questions and I keep spinning stories. It’s a fun tradition.
HSP: The two marriages — Jacky and Gloria’s and Sammie and Dean’s — are in some ways such interesting mirrors because they both involve the idea of turning a blind eye to a partner’s shortcomings. “Every marriage has rules,” Gloria muses, “not ones that are written down or set in stone, but they’re there just the same, creating invisible fences that only two people can see.” As the story progresses, you do a really nice job of reminding the reader that it’s what we can’t know — or what we choose not to see — that’s what we should worry about. Have you done research into the spouses of historical serial killers? (Do serial killers have spouses?) Was marriage initially a focus of the book, or did that evolve with the plot?
JC: I’d have to say that marriage has always been a key focus of this book, because in many ways marriage is one of the closest, most personal, and (sometimes) the most damaging, warped relationship a person can be in. Your partner knows you at your best, but also at your worst, and is probably privy to all sorts of information about you that no one else has. I’ve been married for fifteen years, and my husband knows things about me that no one else ever will — not my parents, not my kids. No one. Your spouse keeps your secrets — or they don’t. There’s a fantastic line in Stephen King’s Bag of Bones I kept thinking about while writing: “…marriage is a secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.”
“Marriage is one of the closest, most personal, and (sometimes) the most damaging, warped relationship a person can be in.”
The idea for What You Don’t Know actually first sparked because of an article I read about Jerry Sandusky, the convicted child molester who’d coached college football. The article asked the question: Did Sandusky’s wife know about her husband’s crimes, and if she had, why did she keep this terrible secret? That piece really stuck with me, and ultimately turned into the plotline involving Gloria Seever.
I haven’t done much research on the spouses of serial killers, but I do know that John Wayne Gacy (who is the inspiration for Jacky Seever) had been married, although it ultimately ended in divorce before his arrest. And Ted Bundy had several relationships while he was operating as a killer. It’s interesting because it appears that these men were able to have “normal” relationships while they committed their crimes, but it also makes me wonder what sorts of things these women experienced or saw that they overlooked or ignored.
HSP: The book is written like a movie, so I have to ask: What’s your dream cast?
JC: I’ve been asked this question many times before, and I’m embarrassed to say I still don’t have a really good answer — especially since the first line in the book is If this were a movie…
(A day later) But…after some thought and a lot of time paging through IMDB, here’s my cast list of the main characters:
Jacky Seever: Stacy Keach
Gloria Seever: Sissy Spacek
Paul Hoskins: Christopher Meloni
Ralph Loren: Patrick Kilpatrick
Sammie Peterson: Robin Tunney
HSP: There’s a scene in the bookstore where Sammie goes and finds the spot where her book will sit on the shelf someday. Where will this book sit?
JC: Dream scenario: A big stack of What You Don’t Know would be sitting on a table right in the front of a bookstore, with a glowing personal recommendation from one of the booksellers. That’s important. There’s nothing better than having someone you don’t know, a person who doesn’t give a damn whether they’ll hurt your feelings or not, say how much they love your story. How it made them think or feel differently, or how it kept them up all night.
And when What You Don’t Know goes home with a reader, maybe it’ll sit on their nightstand. Or the corner of their desk. Or on their shelf of favorite books. On the back lid of their toilet. Or wherever they put the books they love.
HSP: What’s the best thing you’ve read lately?
JC: I read Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes and Jane Harper’s The Dry — both really great, smart thrillers that were recently published. I’ve also been doing a lot of re-reading my old favorites: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin, to name a few. I’ve also been reading the Harry Potter series with one of my kids.
HSP: What’s next for you?
JC: Writing: I’m working on my next book. It’s set in the same world as What You Don’t Know and features quite a few of the same characters, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a sequel. It’s the story of a marriage gone terribly wrong — early readers have compared it to The War of the Roses, which I take as a huge compliment.
Personally: I’ll be doing a bit of traveling over the next few months for What You Don’t Know promotion, and my family will be tagging along — it’ll be business, with a good deal of pleasure. Disneyland, we’re coming for you!
Teenagers who vandalized the Ashburn Colored School assigned to read Richard Wright, Margaret Atwood and Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Ashburn Colored School, or the Ashburn Old School, now being restored by the Loudoun School for the Gifted.
A county prosecutor in Ashburn, Virginia, has designed an unusual plea deal for two young men who vandalized a historic schoolhouse with racist and anti-semitic graffiti. According to a report from local news outlet WUSA-9, the defendants have been given a list of thirty-five books and will submit monthly book reports from that selection. As part of the deal, they will also visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of American History, which is running an exhibit on the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, and will submit to the court research papers on the use of hate symbols. The young men were charged with spraypainting the side of the Ashburn Colored School, which is currently being restored, with swastikas, dinosaurs and slogans such as “white power” and “brown power.” The community was outraged, but goverment officials came to believe the vandalism was an example of dumb teenagers who did not understand the significance of the hateful crime they were committing.
Alex Rueda, the county prosecutor who conceived of the deal, said that because the young men had no criminal records, “it would be very easy for them to to just walk into court plead guilty and the judge would just put them on probation and then they would just be meeting with a probation officer once a month, and…peeing in a cup to make sure they weren’t smoking weed.” Instead, she wanted to seize on “a teachable moment.”
Rueda is the daughter of a librarian and went about creating a list of thirty-five books and fourteen movies for the defendants’ edification. The list includes Richard Wright’s Native Son, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as contemporary work from Colson Whitehead and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Rueda expects that the reading will change the young men’s outlook more than any probation or diversion program could. “Hopefully,” she said, “what they get out of this year is a greater appreciation for gender, race, religion, bigotry. And then when they go out in to the world, they are teachers.”
Below is the complete list of thirty-five books assigned. A little Leon Uris heavy, you say? How about subbing in some Baldwin? Just remember, justice takes many forms, and punishment is more art than science.
1. The Color Purple — Alice Walker 2. Native Son — Richard Wright 3. Exodus — Leon Uris 4. Mitla 18 — Leon Uris 5. Trinity — Leon Uris 6. My Name is Asher Lev — Chaim Potok 7. The Chosen — Chaim Potok 8. The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway 9. Night — Elie Wiesel 10. The Crucible — Arthur Miller 11. The Kite Runner — Khaled Hosseini 12. A Thousand Splendid Suns — Khaled Hosseini 13. Things Falls Apart — Chinua Achebe 14. The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood 15. To Kill A Mockingbird — Harper Lee 16. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou 17. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks — Rebecca Skloot 18. Caleb’s Crossing — Geraldine Brooks 19. Tortilla Curtain — TC Boyle 20. The Bluest Eye — Toni Morrison 21. A Hope In The Unseen — Ron Suskind 22. Down These Mean Streets — Piri Thomas 23. Black Boy — Richard Wright 24. The Beautiful Struggle — Ta Nehisi Coates 25. The Banality of Evil — Hannah Arendt 26. The Underground Railroad — Colson Whitehead 27. Reading Lolita in Tehran — Azar Nafisi 28. The Rape of Nanking — Iris Chang 29. Infidel — Ayaan Hirsi Ali 30. The Orphan Master’s Son — Adam Johnson 31. The Help — Kathryn Stockett 32. Cry the Beloved Country — Alan Paton 33. Too Late the Phalarope — Alan Paton 34. A Dry White Season — Andre Brink 35. Ghost Soldiers — Hampton Sides
“This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever.” — Nietzsche
First, you see a circle. Next, the location of our sun as measured via pulsars, depicted in binary code. A legend explaining the units of measurement / length used. The sun. The surface of the moon. Several slides later, you see the Earth; more precisely, you can see the Horn of Africa and the Fertile Crescent, the ancient site of the origin of the story being told by these images and their accompanying soundtrack, a story that is a history, a record.
More slides and then you get the partial portraits of a human body, the type I remember from the encyclopedia, which you could add layers to by turning transparent pages — muscles, organs, skin — to overlay the skeletal base. There are two images of sperm entering an egg, and an image then of cellular division. Next, images of a fetus — alone and then in the womb — and finally an image of a boy being born.
I was born in the lame duck presidency of Jimmy Carter, just after America elected Ronald Reagan, a celebrity who campaigned on “Let’s make America Great Again.” I was born between the first and final episode of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Carl Sagan’s famous TV show, which began with him intoning, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be,” the story of which he says is also “a story about us.”
“The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be,” the story of which he says is also “a story about us.”
I was born between the end of the solar system mission of the Voyager I probe — four days after its flyby of Saturn, in fact — and the beginning of its extended mission, its long trip out of our solar system, out and out, far past the famous pale blue dot, to drift forever or until found.
My discovery of the Voyager Golden Record was by chance, and (it turns out) late. I came across it via research on Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” which I was listening to as I read that his song (a sort of wordless dirge) was one of 27 selected to be sent to interstellar space as an emissary of humanity to any alien audience.
I tracked down Sagan’s Murmurs of Earth, the 1978 history of the making of the records, at the library of the college where I teach. It hadn’t been checked out in seventeen years, since I graduated high school. The book is a cultural artifact, like the Golden Record it describes: a glimpse of humanity sent out across space and time with the unlikely hope of reaching some future consciousness — or as Sagan himself wrote, “…receipt of the message by an extraterrestrial civilization was chancy at best, while its receipt by the inhabitants of Earth was guaranteed: the public would eventually have access to the message contents, as is in fact accomplished by this book.”
What struck me as I read Murmurs of Earth, especially Sagan’s brief history of the endeavor in the first chapter, was the profound hopefulness that drove the whole effort. Beyond the hope for contact inherent in sending a gold LP into space, the contents of the record (or records, since there are two copies, one affixed to each Voyager probe) illustrate a pluralistic and open vision of a global society. Some of the images and sounds are explanatory; some are banal (a woman in a grocery store); some — the 27 musical tracks — are emotive.
Beyond the hope for contact inherent in sending a gold LP into space, the contents of the record illustrate a pluralistic and open vision of a global society.
What it depicts is the world circa my birth, which felt deeply important to me, looking back, discovering this book’s record of the record, from our contemporary moment. Part of this is our current political environment — “Make America Great Again” again — and maybe part of it relates to the fact that my wife and I are expecting our second child, a boy, this fall, right around my birthday in fact, more or less on the date Murmurs of Earth is due to be returned to the library.
As I said, my discovery of it was in a sense late. I came across the record and immediately then found I was not the only one it had recently reached. A 2015 episode of Drunk History detailed the story of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan falling in love as they discussed the music to include, the music that moved them; Atlas Obscura published an essay by Cara Giaimo in May 2016 focused on the embarrassing and dated contents of the record, a sine qua non of all time capsules; and, in that same month, Anthony Michael Morena published his slim, smart Voyager: A Transmission, a book-length essay in fragments that is at once an exploration of the record, a response to receiving its (and Sagan’s book’s) message, and an ekphrastic project dedicated to the act of sending the record out.
Though the record (debatably, as Morena notes) left our solar system in 2012, you can easily find the images online. The greetings, sounds, and music included can now be streamed on Sound Cloud. NASA also released a CD of the Golden Record in the 90s, though it didn’t include the 90 minutes of music. (An Amazon reviewer named David B gave the CD version three stars, writing an alien reply — signed “Zorg” from “the sombrero galaxy” — less witty than Steve Martin’s [“Send more Chuck Berry”] and focused mainly on the criticism that any audience might well not be able to make sense of the messages even once decoded, i.e. “To the representative of [Nigeria]: you say your country is ‘as you know, located in West Africa, a land mass more or less shaped like a question mark’…btw: what’s a question mark?”)
Morena’s project is inspired by David Markson’s employment of fractured narrative where facts arise and are later revisited or echoed, while section by section there is some amount of disconnect. Using this Marksonian art of bricolage, Morena goes on to survey the project itself but also to respond to it and expand upon it, offering suggestions for what music he would include — a Philip Glass piece, a GirlTalk mashup, early hip-hop — noting along the way that he used to make mixtapes, thus imagining himself into the problematic position of Sagan et al. trying to select what music to send that would represent the world, all of humanity.
What the record contains is the story of us, a sort of origin story, told chronologically via sounds (and, as Morena points out, language: the “55 greetings begin with Sumerian…so did writing”). He notes the evolutionary perspective conveyed in the order of abstracted sounds, especially the “The Sounds of Earth” collection, “[which follows] the same trajectory as evolution, from a human point of view.” Meaning the first sounds are meant to convey the music of the universe, and from there they proceed through the first tools, fire and speech, mud pots, a horse and cart, a train, a car, etc. (This portion ends with “EEG patterns of brainwave activity, specifically Ann Druyan’s…thoughts about Carl Sagan, with whom she’d fallen in love,” suggesting perhaps that love is the ultimate point of human development.) The music, however, does not bother with this chronological story of us. As Morena notes, a listener may well not know Chuck Berry is the most recent addition but instead hear Bach and assume “that his music is the latest development, disembodied aesthetics, endpoint in humanity’s linear progress from simple to complex.”
The first sounds are meant to convey the music of the universe, and from there they proceed through the first tools, fire and speech, mud pots, a horse and cart, a train, a car, etc.
Elsewhere Morena comments on this idea of linear progress, considering the robotic nature of Voyager versus a manned mission like the “difference between a linear narrative and a cyclical one,”
We want people to come back to the circling world, like a record, so we can start again. From scratch. A cycle’s humanity is its finality: it has to end somewhere; it has to begin again. Voyager, on the other hand, may never stop.
Like David B’s Zorg from the Sombrero Galaxy, Morena envisions and re-envisions what the receipt might look like: space-junk scavengers who indifferently destroy the record in collecting it; always-aflame aliens who melt the record on contact; earless aliens; corporate aliens (a joke on the contemporary American view, e.g., “Corporations are people, my friend”); a paranoid military culture; an advanced race that makes the record sentient and sets it searching for its maker, “S’gan” (a reference to the 1979 film Star Trek: The Motion Picture where V’Ger, a fictitious successor to the probes, has become sentient and returns to Earth to find its creator); aliens with “testicle-shaped heads”; aliens confused by the need to communicate a common greeting in 55 different languages (elsewhere, Morena asks, “what does it say about a planet if the people there don’t know how to say hello to one another?”); a form of life so small the record crushes one of their cities; a society so impressed they reverse engineer the technology and ultimately create a Borgesian mirror-world, an “Alien United States of America,” that sends its own exact replica of the Golden Record, and thus, “We are confused when it returns to us, apparently untouched.”
In one instance, written in second person, he envisions not its receipt but “your destruction” in the Oort cloud, “by a thousand micro-impacts spread out over time in the empty regions of space.”
At the very end of the book, he again addresses the record directly, “You are getting so far away now. Does your distance mean your irrelevance?” But, to me, this is the wrong question.
Morena and I are coevals, but in his framing, “Carter’s message was meant to speak for all Americans, so, by extension, it’s my message too.” As with the Atlas Obscura piece, I think this mistakes “the recipients” (as Jon Lomberg suggested the hoped-for audience be called) for the senders: the message is not ours. We can look back at the time that sent it as recipients and be reminded of — better: connected to our own histories. I don’t give a shit about aliens discovering it and the message contained being mine; they won’t; it isn’t. But I’ve received the message sent up as a hopeful statement that there was something somewhere out there and a believer’s vision in the good of humanity.
I don’t give a shit about aliens discovering it and the message contained being mine; they won’t; it isn’t.
As noted above, Morena made mixtapes and he mentions offhandedly a time when a girl he was dating mistakenly assumed a mixtape he’d made was made for her, “That romantic cliché of guys making mixtapes for girls.” She may have understood his evident care in making it as his feelings for her; she may have received a message he never intended to send, or sent subconsciously to no particular audience. Where Morena identifies with the makers of mixtapes (he calls his book “a transmission” after all), I identify with the girl who announced her misheard intimacy to the car, “Anthony made this for me.” To me, this is the power of the Golden Record. It’s the personal contact in the universal signal; an interstellar mixtape that feels like Carl Sagan made this for me.
Because here’s the thing: I feel fully confident the Golden Record will never be played. It will never be heard, never be found. There is nothing anywhere out there for it to connect with. What animates the effort of sending it is not, I don’t think, any confidence in its being received (Sagan admits as much: “Perhaps the Voyagers would never be recovered by some extraterrestrial society”) but rather something else, something along the lines of Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, who would believe “nevertheless” that the record will be received, decoded, played, “in virtue…of the absurd, in virtue of the fact that with God all things are possible.”
I feel fully confident the Golden Record will never be played. It will never be heard, never be found.
Because the gesture of sending Beethoven and Bach and Blind Willie Johnson out to the unimaginable vastness beyond us is a spiritual one; it is an act of faith, not only in us (the better angels of our nature) but in the possibility of a universe that contains some Other, whatever form that other might take. As Roland Barthes writes in “Jet-man,”
In fact, and in spite of the scientific garb…there has merely been a displacement of the sacred….as if even today men could conceive the heavens only as populated with semi-objects.
Though it is a physical object, borne on the side of a probe that reflects the outer limits of our science and technology, shot into space on a rocket, it may as well be an orison murmured to the vastness we hope — we believe — to be populated, an offering we hope and believe will be heard.
It is a truly stupefying act to try conceiving of the long drift of the gilt LP before it approaches the nearest star, a length of time equal though in the opposite direction from us, in 2016, back to the arrival (OOA) of homo sapiens in Europe, back to the makers of the earliest cave art, the hand stencils and clay-red disks found in Cueva de El Castillo: 40,000 years before it even nears a possible receiver, which would of course be a crazy bullseye if the first star it approaches happens to have a life form capable of scouring the emptiness for sounds of “footsteps, heartbeat, laughter.”
In the letter he included, Jimmy Carter wrote to the imagined audience, “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” Of course, we will not live into the time of the record’s putative recipients. As Sagan concludes his chapter in Murmurs of Earth, “Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder.” The Golden Record, however, will indeed survive our time, will outlast us, “will still be largely intact,” as Sagan continues, “in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished.” The Golden Record is thus, in a very real sense, like Keats’ urn, which when those billions of years “shall this generation waste…shalt remain, in midst of other woe,” lasting out there long beyond our lives, our deaths, beyond our whole history. It will be our whole history, and its message could well be summed up, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all / [we knew] on Earth, and all ye need to know.”
The Golden Record is thus, in a very real sense, like Keats’ urn.
In the midst of a campaign driven by woe, the desire to project an incomplete catalogue of the best of us into the future — to send a message of hope out to the unknown audience of the future, to try to survive my time so that I may live on into my son’s, my daughter’s — resonates. The launch of the Voyager Golden Record seems, to me, profound in a way: a golden text striving to shape the culture of tomorrow, of the world we’ll never meet. Its most important message is not in the contents but in the fact that it was sent at all, and not to any alien audience, but to us. Its central message not the contents, however dated, and not to any alien recipients but much more meaningfully to us, to a culture in the shadow of its launch that has forgotten the strident hope that propelled it into interstellar space; this message is closer to that which Sagan recalls from the 1939 NY World’s Fair, “there were other cultures and there would be future times.” Of that edge-of-WWII World’s Fair and its time capsule, he adds, “Because there was something graceful and very human in the gesture, hands across the centuries, an embrace of our descendants and our posterity.”
I feel this embrace, reading Murmurs of Earth, playing the greetings, hearing the haunting hour and a half of world music, and it makes me feel nearer to myself, nearer to my history. It restores not an aspirational upward-looking desire to map the skyways but rather a sort of horizontal awareness of my present, of the sometimes invisible asterisms of its nearest context. It is an argument that there is something here worth recording, worth remembering, worth projecting out to the greatest plane imaginable. The reach of the probe connects us to far distant space and time; it also connects us to ourselves, nearly 40 years back, and instead of something unfamiliar, something alien, what begins to play are images like our own childhood memories, our own dimly understood first moments on Earth.
It is an argument that there is something here worth recording, worth remembering, worth projecting out to the greatest plane imaginable.
Morena ends his book with a litany echoing and extending Steve Martin’s joke, using “Send more” as a refrain. This seems to be at once from the imagined alien recipients and from Morena himself. It articulates the desire for connection, for communication, that is at the heart of the record’s creation as much as the heart of its receipt. The Golden Records are far from us, and within a decade will go silent, no longer capable of contacting us back here at home. But it is not the probe — nor even the glittering object on its side — that matters. Sagan’s desire to communicate informs our desire for more. It inspires a little shiver like the one I get reading Whitman’s “On Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” i.e. “What is the count of the scores or hundreds” or tens of thousands or billions “of years between us? // Whatever it is, it avails not — distance avails not” and later, “Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?”
Before that litany, Morena imagines Sagan at the launch and, later,
[that] night, in a darkly lit room of a motel, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan had sex…they were in love. They didn’t care that they were being loud….In the next room, someone turned the volume of their television set all the way up. It was the late movie: Ronald Reagan being screeched at by an ape.
After this, Morena describes Sagan years later seeing the famous pale blue dot: as opposed to the more familiar images from space — showing “Africa, more or less in the shape of a question mark” — he thinks, “There was no way to tell anything about humanity from this picture.” This is what it looks like to truly get outside of our limited perspective, to briefly glimpse what an alien observer would see of us: nothing like what the Golden Record holds, but merely a faint blur of blue, which in no way suggested we were here, that we existed, that we ate, drank, laughed, and were, fundamentally, lonely, yes, but also filled with the capacity to imagine someone to satisfy that existential loneliness.
Sagan himself describes the scene of the launch by evoking both joy and mourning, a hope whose contrail is quickly fading into the early-morning sky; he writes, “We kissed and embraced, and many of us cried.”
Malati had always been unstable — a pile of gunpowder waiting to go off. All it took to light the fuse was our improved finances. She was in college when we moved to the new house. We’d been painstakingly frugal until then; what choice did we have? We consulted each other when money was to be spent, gave precise accounts. We thought of the family as being interdependent: a person who spent money was also taking it away from the others. All that changed overnight. There was enough now to buy things without asking for permission or informing anyone or even thinking about it. Appa’s hold on the rest of us slipped. And to be honest, we lost hold of ourselves, too.
We needed things for the new house, and this freed us in the matter of making purchases. For the first few weeks we bought as we had never bought before. Amma and Malati obeyed Chikkappa’s instructions with diligence and emptied his friend’s furniture shop. Soon the house was crammed with expensive mismatched furniture and out‑of‑place decorations. A TV arrived. Beds and dressing tables took up space in the rooms. In retrospect, many of the new objects had no place in our daily lives. Our relationship with the things we accumulated became casual; we began treating them carelessly.
Malati personified the chaos in our family. She’d always been quick to anger and inconsiderate of others, and those attributes found fuller expression in our new way of life. Her restlessness revealed itself in the harsh tone she took with others, and in violating the household’s unwritten rules. She was the first in the family to start eating out whenever she felt like it. Then she’d pick at her food at home, which would lead to a tussle between her and Amma.
Until then, eating at a restaurant had been an infrequent treat. Every fortnight or so we would all go out for tiffin on a Sunday afternoon. Appa was in the habit of taking a nap after lunch on Sundays, and on the appointed day we’d wait impatiently for him to wake up, Malati growing increasingly desperate for her masala dosa. The budget was fixed — it bought a masala dosa for each of us and a single coffee shared between Appa and Amma. Sometimes one of us would ask for another snack. Then, Appa wouldn’t feel like a coffee. You only had to see the plates off which Malati and I had eaten to know what we thought of the food — not a trace remained, even the chutney licked clean.
It wasn’t easy to confront Malati. You’d have to listen to ten words for each one you spoke. Amma asked Malati once with some hesitation if she had eaten out. “Yes, Amma, I ate out,” she said loudly. “I ate till I was full and then I drank coffee, too. What about it?” If anyone asked Malati where she’d been, she would give it back to them: “Do I ask you where you go? Why is it that everyone only asks me? Don’t you trust me?” There was no one in the house who could stand up to Malati in a battle of words. Rather, there was no one until my wife Anita joined the household.
It’s true what they say — it’s not we who control money, it’s the money that controls us. When there’s only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us. Money had swept us up and flung us in the midst of a whirlwind. We spent helplessly on Malati’s wedding. No one asked us to; we simply didn’t know how to stop. The main actors in that month‑long orgy of lavishness were Amma and Malati. I don’t think even they knew what they wanted. They’d set out every morning to shop, and when they were at home they spoke of nothing but saris and jewelry. The most expensive wedding hall we could find was booked. The caterer was dumbstruck by the number of dishes he was asked to serve. He would come to inquire about the menu and when he gave options of chiroti, holige, jalebi, pheni for the sweet, they’d say yes to all. He had only to mention a vegetable for them to say, “All right. Add that one, too.” On the wedding day, after the ceremonies were over and the guests had been served, we all sat down to eat in the last round. Amma was weighed down in gold, beaming as she accepted compliments about the food. The couple was having their photo taken as they fed each other. Appa was sitting at the end of the table, looking dazedly at the plantain leaf crammed with food in front of him.
Perhaps it is not right to conflate Malati’s short‑lived marriage with the wedding expenses or our family’s wealth. But I can’t help wondering if she would have given up as easily if Appa had still been a salesman. Maybe she had gotten used to having whatever she wanted and it diminished her capacity for making the inevitable compromises that ac‑ company marriage. Her husband, Vikram, was not a bad man. He ran the family business — a large sari shop — and worked from morning to dinnertime. He was free only on Sundays, but Malati expected him to spend more time with her. Initially they had small fights after which she’d come home in a huff. “He doesn’t care,” she’d say. “He would die for that shop of his.” Perhaps her vision of an ideal life lacked room for hard work. Vikram, too, was helpless, having no source of income other than the shop. Her breaks from her husband’s house began to grow longer and longer. In less than two years, she announced she wanted to leave him. Appa, Amma, and I went with her to Vikram’s house to see if a reconciliation was possible.
We went on a Sunday afternoon around four. It had been cloudy all day. By then Malati had not lived there for three months. They received us in their large hall, where Vikram and his father engaged us in inconsequential talk. Malati was in the kitchen with her mother‑in‑law. I suppose we — all four men in the hall — were struggling to get to the point. We didn’t have to. Just then there was a crashing noise from the kitchen. Malati stormed into the hall. Her mother‑in‑law, who was arthritic, limped out behind her, looking distraught. “Look what she has done,” she said. “She’s broken the whole tea set. It was such a good one.” She was panting with rage and exertion.
“Tell them what you said first,” said Malati, with a familiar curtness.
“What did I say wrong?” her mother‑in‑law asked. “I asked why she unpacked a new tea set, that’s all.”
“Why not a new tea set for my family? Why serve them in old, chipped cups?”
“We’ve never used old or chipped cups in this house. There’s nothing wrong with the cups we use every day. I only asked what need there was to open a new one, that’s all . . .”
“And that’s why I broke it. There’s no need for it after all.”
Her mother‑in‑law couldn’t resist. “Is this what your parents have taught you?” she asked, in front of them.
“Yes. This is what they have taught me. You can ask them yourself since they’re here. Go on, ask!”
It had all gotten out of hand. Vikram’s father said to Appa and Amma, “Look, now you’ve seen for yourselves. How is it possible to get along when anything we say leads to a scene?” Malati’s mother‑in‑law was in tears.
Vikram couldn’t stay quiet any longer. “Why are you weeping, Amma? Everyone’s seen how she behaves. Let her go stay in her parents’ house if she doesn’t like it here.” His tone was not particularly harsh, but there was an obvious touch of male authority in his words.
His father raised his voice now. “Look,” he said, pointing to his wife. “I’ve lived with her all these years and not once have I made her cry. It’s only after this girl has arrived that I’ve seen her in tears.”
Malati could hardly be expected to stay quiet. “Yes, yes, it’s all my fault. You’re all very gentle people.”
Her mother‑in‑law wiped off her tears and said, “You can’t buy graciousness. It’s something that’s handed down through the generations. They say the newly rich carry umbrellas to keep moonlight at bay . . .”
Amma was wounded by this. “Yes, it’s true we’ve lived in poverty. That doesn’t mean our heads have spun around because some money came our way.”
It was clear that all this was not going anywhere. We rose to leave. They didn’t ask us to wait. Nor did they come to the door to send us off. Malati led the way, still fuming. I felt it was mostly her fault, but I wasn’t going to say anything while she was in this frame of mind. Appa hadn’t said a single word all through the afternoon’s farce.
The next Sunday I went to see a film in the afternoon.
When I got back home, everyone including Chikkappa was sitting in the hall. Something about the way they were gathered struck me as ominous.
Appa and Amma were on the sofa. Malati was sprawled in a chair. Chikkappa was in the chair opposite her. Malati was somewhat triumphantly ticking items off on a list of jewelry. I knew there had been some concerned talk of recovering her jewelry from her husband’s house. It seemed to have been done while I was out. Chikkappa greeted me as soon as I entered: “Come, come, you were the only one missing.”
Malati started from the beginning for my benefit. “I went there at one in the afternoon,” she said. “I knew they’d all be home between noon and two. Chikkappa’s friends were waiting in the park nearby. Their leader is called Ravi. He’d told me, ‘You just get there and give me a missed call, sister. We’ll be there in no time.’
“I went there and rang the doorbell. My mother‑in‑law opened the door. She refused to let me enter. ‘If you don’t let me in, I’ll scream and make sure all the neighbors know what you’re doing,’ I told her. She said, ‘Go ahead. I’m tired of your antics.’ I quickly called Ravi from my mobile. He and his friends were there in no time, six of them, hefty men. My mother‑in‑law was scared. ‘Who are these people?’ she asked me. ‘Just my uncle’s friends,’ I told her. ‘Are you trying to scare us?’ she asked. Just then Ravi pushed her aside and entered the house. Vikram and his father emerged from within. ‘What’s all this? Who are these people?’ Vikram shouted, looking at me. ‘I’m going to call the police,’ he said. And then you know what? Ravi simply stepped up to him and gave him a sharp slap. You should have been there! Vikram was so scared. ‘Please, sir, don’t hurt me. Please,’ he started saying. I wanted to laugh. He was actually calling Ravi ‘sir’! I told Vikram, ‘Look here, I’ve just come to take my jewelry. I only want what belongs to me. You can keep whatever your parents gave me.’ He didn’t say anything. ‘What? Did you hear what she said?’ Ravi asked, taking out a long knife and placing it on the table. One of Ravi’s guys shut and bolted the front door from inside. I went into the bedroom. The keys to the almirah were still where I remembered them. My gold was all in one box, lying there since the wedding. I brought it out with me. I took my taali and the bangles they had given me and threw them at my mother‑in‑law’s feet. You should have seen their faces! Vikram’s father was sitting mute in a chair. Ravi was speaking to Vikram in a low voice. Every time I heard Vikram calling him ‘sir’ I had to stifle my laughter. I opened the box in front of him before leaving. ‘I’ve only taken what is mine. See for yourself,’ I said. He didn’t look. He didn’t say a word. I left. Ravi called sometime before you got here. He said they sat there for a while after I left and even had my mother‑in‑law make tea for them. He’s warned them that the matter better end here, peacefully.”
Chikkappa was sitting in his chair, looking very pleased with what Malati was reporting. Amma didn’t approve of the phone call. “Was it so important to report that they had tea?” she asked.
Appa didn’t seem happy with the day’s events. “This means we’ve broken all relations with them,” he said to Malati. “You shouldn’t have gone there and frightened them like that.”
Chikkappa cut in: “They’re all my friends, nothing to worry about. Don’t family members go in these circumstances and bring back valuables? Same thing. It’s also their work. They call themselves recovery agents. It’s these times we live in . . . Nothing is straightforward. If I didn’t use their help to get payments due to Sona Masala, all I’d be doing is walking from street to street, knocking on doors.”
Appa got up and left the room. My guess is that Amma didn’t approve of these rough methods, either, but she would never say that. “Where’s today’s paper?” Chikkappa asked, indicating there was nothing more to be said. Malati went to her room. I followed soon after. When I passed the closed door of her room I thought I heard sobs from inside. Perhaps it had all gone too far, and she was being pushed down a path she really didn’t want to take. I wanted to go in and console her, but I didn’t know what I would say. And what if she thought it a loss of face to be seen crying? I went on to my room.
Amma had hopes that Malati’s marriage could be salvaged. I suspected that Malati was not entirely indifferent to Vikram either; perhaps she even loved him. But she settled in at home and attempted no reconciliation. Nor did he. None of us had the courage to ask her where she went or what she was up to. Occasionally, she halfheartedly helped Amma with the housework. But this was aimed only at asserting her position in the house, and it became more conspicuous once Anita joined the household. The rest of the time she was thumbing messages into her phone. Sometimes I heard her on the phone late at night and wondered who it could be. That Ravi? Or was it possible she was softening toward Vikram and meeting him without the knowledge of the families? Malati forever invoked a friend named Mythili with whom she would watch films, at whose place she would stay, in whose company she would take trips to Mysore and Madras. I suspected this Mythili was a front behind which she was having an affair with someone. But even if that were true, what could I have done?
Malati’s restlessness, her lack of peace, touched all of us. She was outspoken, rude, aggressive, it’s true; yet we had lived for years in some sort of harmony. How could that aspect of our life together have vanished entirely? In the middle room of the old house where she and I used to sleep, sometimes we’d chat late into the night and she would confide in me. She told me about her college, her classmate Vandana, whose stepmother served her leftovers, and who was in love with a boy they called Koli Ramesh. It was Malati who carried letters between them. In the new house, we were locked in the cells of individual rooms, and there was no opportunity to ex‑ change casual confidences. Lying alone in my room, I sometimes wondered if Malati’s happiness would have been better served had Sona Masala not existed at all.
It isn’t easy for a woman to leave her husband and live in her mother’s house. In our case, the trouble was not so much the people who lived there — we were ultimately on Malati’s side after all — but others: guests who visited home, people we would run into at weddings, well‑wishers ever eager to put us on the defensive, busybodies. We all grew a little paranoid, suspecting malice on the part of anyone who spoke to her. Terrible stories spread about her after she got back her gold from Vikram’s house, stories in which she was made out to be an incarnation of Phoolan Devi: she had led a band of goons and ordered them to vandalize the house; she had herself held a knife to her husband’s throat. I know she could have done without all the talk. I’m sure she, too, wanted to live a regular, happy life, but things had somehow gone awry. I’m not sure how. Perhaps it isn’t right to place the entire blame on Sona Masala, I don’t know.
A Norwegian bookstore invented “The Conversational Lexicon”
When a Norwegian independent bookstore, Cappelens Forslag, started going under, the owners devised an ingenious plan to keep their establishment afloat. According to The Guardian, booksellers Pil Cappelen Smith and Andreas Cappelen concocted The Conversational Lexicon — an encyclopedia that would compile subjective definitions from renowned artists and writers. The varied entries were to be “freed from the demand for factual accuracy,” and instead have the essential purpose of generating discussion.
The concept took off. In fact, there was so much interest that they doubled their original fundraising goal. The bookstore in Oslo raked in $54,235 (or €50,524), and is safe from going out of business. Every edition they’ve printed since 2014 has quickly sold out. The latest avant-garde version of the encyclopedia has just gone on sale.
The folks at Cappelens Forslags invest in the utmost quality for their beloved book. “Each [encyclopedia is] hand bound in calfskin leather by a third generation bookbinder,” which certainly comes at a cost for the buyer. The cheapest edition is roughly $80, while the earlier, limited editions can cost over $1,000. If that’s a bit above your pay grade, it’s still fascinating to watch the artistry involved in putting these babies together.
You can also see a handful of the entries on the bookstore’s website, and they’ve attracted some big names to their project. George Saunders is among the latest contributors. Here’s his take on people who play with puppets:
“Ventriloquist, a person inordinately fond of a puppet. This relation is often dysfunctional and may become abusive. This psychological condition may become so pronounced that the ‘ventriloquist’ will claim to be speaking for the puppet…”
See, isn’t this a lot more fun than your old dusty Britannica? Who knows, maybe one day they’ll give Wikipedia a run for their money. Enjoy entries from Jonathan Lethem, Jarvis Cocker, and more on the company’s website, here!
Ed Skoog: I’m curious about beginnings: how did you get started writing poetry?
Jess Williard: What got me started writing poems was reading poems, of course, and then imitating them, approximating certain gazes with my own “voice,” approximating voices with my own gaze, and then hopefully something on the other side of that.
What do you mean, more precisely, by gaze?
By “gaze” I mean the kind of appreciative, revelrous lenses I observed early on in poems, specifically poems by Philip Levine and Elizabeth Bishop. This is perhaps kind of obvious, but I was and continue to be struck by the way poems seem to be unique vehicles of gratitude in their attentions to the world. The way Levine considers time and physical landscapes in his poems, for example, are gazes that I find imminently affecting. Or Bishop’s attention to atmosphere in her poems. Or, more recently, Marie Howe’s consideration of daily minutiae; making something large out of something small by looking at it. These are the kinds of exacting, appreciative lenses I try to look through in making poems. They are borrowed lenses, but what they offer are ways of looking at the world that can animate any gaze and give it singularity.
By voice I mean finding ways to organically adopt those lenses, to make them more my own. And that’s its own way of appreciating things, I suppose; acknowledging the ways you’ve been impressed and trying to do something with that.
I read an interview with the singer The Weeknd last year in which he was asked about the influence Michael Jackson has had on his music (The Weeknd sounds a lot like Michael Jackson). “I want to make it very clear that I’m not trying to be Michael,” he said. “He’s everything to me, so you’re going to hear it in my music.” I really like that. I think that making things involves, in some way, locating yourself on the creative continuum that existed long before you and will exist long after.
You mention The Weeknd and Michael Jackson — what does contemporary music mean to you as a poet? As a person who write poems?
Contemporary music means a whole lot to me as a person who writes poems! I mentioned “atmosphere” earlier, which I think is something that music can manufacture in ways nothing else can. To this I think poems can and should aspire. How that happens on the page, exactly, I’m not sure (though I can point to many successful examples: Keats! Plath! Carolyn Forché! Brigit Kelly!), but it’s part of the magic that can occur in the discrete space of a song or a poem.
And speaking of discrete spaces, I think the album as both a collection of discrete song-units and a single, cohesive whole is the most useful model or correlative to the book/group of poems. The way pieces can bleed into and speak to one another while casting their own individual shadows is something best demonstrated in albums, I think. The best books of poetry exist in that way, rewarding both a read of a single poem and an entire sequence. I see so much overlap there.
As far as contemporary music specifically, I don’t think it’s acknowledged enough that music is happening around us all the time. It’s the result of proliferative technologies, but it’s also (and I think more importantly) an aesthetic and creative evolution. When I watch older movies I’m always astonished at how quiet they are — there’s no background music urging a constant pathos. Atmosphere there is cultivated by different means. But so much contemporary music is used as under-girding and is consumed passively. I suppose this is all to say that it deserves being paid attention to, especially with the idea of understanding and creating atmosphere in mind.
Contemporary music, specifically hip-hop, also utilizes what we often refer to as the “speaker” in poetry; a voice or perspective that directs the piece but isn’t necessarily the voice of the artist or author. That’s so interesting to me! And especially interesting for the ways in which these identities within and without the text get confused. As artists I think we need to be cognizant of the kinds of artifice that give access to the work itself. I’d like to hear musicians talk about this more.
I like what you say about atmosphere and quietness in old movies and certain music. Poetry gives us this, of course. If it’s something we seem to need so badly, why is it so rare?
Oh man, I wish I knew. It probably has something to with the de-valuing of real attentions, the kinds of perceptive faculties that can absorb nuance and subtly. Similar to the way the act of reading has been reduced, in many ways, to a character limit. It also probably relates to that passive mode of consumption I mentioned before, where there’s such a constant stream of stimuli that it becomes tuned out, easily ignorable if it isn’t super sensational.
Paul Auster is an iconic Brooklyn writer, popular in Turkey and Germany, New Zealand and many other places. Famous since the New York Trilogy in the ‘80s — City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room — Auster has now published over thirty books. With his 1995 film Smoke, Auster became a symbol of New York at its best: welcoming, liberal, good-humored. Over the phone, Auster is a thoughtful and gregarious interviewee, ever embodying these qualities.
4321, his first novel in seven years, clocks 866 pages. It follows four alternative lives for protagonist Archie Ferguson, Newark-born in 1947 (Auster’s birthplace and year, too). Peppered with important twentieth century American history, from JFK’s assassination to the ’68 Columbia University protests. Auster remains an advocate for the Big Apple. “Dear, dirty, devouring New York,” 4321 puts it.
We discussed Auster’s process, solitude, traumatic history, and the joy of reading. And, pre-Inauguration, Trump and the rise of authoritarianism.
Alexander Bisley: Just before Trump’s election you said: “I’m scared out of my wits. Everyone I know is on the edge of a nervous breakdown.” Here we are.
Paul Auster: Here we are. It’s happened. I was hoping against hope that it wouldn’t. But I had this terrible feeling that the polls were wrong and I think it was Brexit that opened the door to another way of thinking for me. And when that vote was announced, I thought to myself: “It’s possible Trump could win.” I never could shake that feeling and lo and behold it’s happened.
AB: Much as New York is one of my favorite cities, people like Trump and Giuliani are symbols of its dark side.
PA: It seems like Giuliani’s gone crazy. He’s becoming a fire-breathing maniac. At the Republican convention; he was shrieking that Hillary Clinton could be but the end of civilization as we know it, something to that effect. I think he’s so far out now that Trump didn’t even want him in the cabinet.
AB: Marine Le Pen and her vile family will get help from the fascist Russian tsarist this year.
PA: I don’t think the National Front will win but then again, I’ve been wrong so many times recently that I’m not gonna guarantee it by any means.
AB: Conservative candidate Francois Fillon is bad (and a Putinista), too.
PA: Yes. So, my beloved France is in trouble too.
AB: In one of your memoirs you wrote about 1968: “The year of fire, blood and death.” You said that unfortunately your protests at Columbia University, featured in 4321, accomplished not much.
PA: Not much of anything. Looking back on it all now, especially from the vantage of today with what’s been happening in the country, tumultuous and wrenching as those times were, we were engaged in a huge war that was tearing apart the country. It was a moment of tremendous racial conflict in the United States. The civil rights movement started in earnest in the fifties, slowly, by around 1960 was picking up steam. I think pretty much by 1965 the Martin Luther King view of civil rights changed in America and the non-violent approach was over. I think that famous Selma — Montgomery march was the last hurrah of the civil rights movement which united black and white people together in the effort to change the laws of the country. After that things became much more fractured.
The black power movement started, a new kind of black nationalism was in the air, divisions between blacks and whites deepened, rather than improved, leading to a tremendous, wrenching chaos in the late 1960s. Riots in many cities, and the Newark riots are in the novel too because that’s the town I’m from, and I was there. I know what happened in Newark in 1967.
(And then, of course, the next year was the Columbia protests, where I was a student. Now in the book, the Ferguson who goes there, he’s working as a reporter on the Columbia Daily Spectator. Which was the student newspaper which covered the events very well, with great professionalism. I myself was not a reporter for the Spectator. My character is, but that’s not autobiographical.)
Still though, despite all this hurt that was going on, and all the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of young men who were over there in Vietnam and the tens of thousands who suffered and were killed, I had more hope about what was going on because it was a movement against the war. There was still a big, organized effort in the country, even despite of the conflicts, for improvement in race relations.
I’m praying that young people get involved again, because without them we’re gonna be going down a very dark road indeed.
We’ve had little moments recently where I’ve thought some new kind of mass movement is brewing, for example the Occupy Wall Street moment a few years ago, but things have fizzled out. I think Trump is going to unleash, perhaps, a new era of youthful activists. I’m praying that young people get involved again, because without them we’re gonna be going down a very dark road indeed.
AB: Obama’s facile leftists critics should consider the unprecedented scorched earth opposition he’s faced from the Republicans.
PA: That’s right. That’s a good way to put it. Well OK his opponents got what they wanted [elegiacally], now let’s see what they do.
AB: Toni Morrison was wise when Bush and Cheney were elected in 2004. She wrote: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
PA: I wholeheartedly agree. Artists must go on making art and we must all do what we can do and also to hold leaders responsible and accountable. And that’s our job, and we have to do it.
AB: The traumatic history in 4321, like Trumpism, reminds me of that enduring line from William Faulkner’s: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
PA: I’ve always been amazed in America that we don’t have a museum of slavery. Why don’t we have it? Why shouldn’t it be there? Maybe in every city in the country a museum of slavery, just to know how this country started and on what it was built. And why not a museum everywhere of the American Indian? How they were massacred by the whites who came here…there’s this desire always to put a pretty face on it all and ignore the past, and so I agree with Faulkner wholeheartedly. It’s not past, it’s here. It’s with us now.
AB: How do you remain productive? T.C. Boyle told me: “Well most artists generally produce more art prior to death than after death.”
PA: It’s a very funny comment. I like it very much [laughs]. Yeah, of course. Listen, with this book, this big, big book, I didn’t do anything for three years except write the book. I turned down invitations to travel, to do interviews, to do readings. I more or less stopped all of the subsidiary activities that writers can do if they’re of a mind to do them, and I thought I have to just sit in a room and do the book because I wanna live to finish it. I’m at this point now where it becomes a question. I’ve outlived my father now by almost four years. He died suddenly of a heart attack at 66 and now I’m pushing seventy, and I must say passing through that 66-year old boundary was a strange experience for me, to have outlived him. And so, I know my days are numbered. Maybe I have a year, maybe I have a day, maybe I have ten years or fifteen years? I don’t know. But the odds are getting worse. Every time I wake up in the morning the odds are stronger that the next morning I won’t wake up in the morning, if you understand what I mean.
AB: Only as old as you feel, Paul.
PA: Yeah, well today I feel really old [laughs].
AB: Salman Rushdie praises how you explore how lives can take different directions, an idea you develop in 4321. Do you think about how Paul Auster’s life might have turned on moments?
PA: Doesn’t everyone? I think this is one of the things that binds us all together. We’re constantly, especially when you get to a certain age, we’re constantly imagining and thinking back: What if I turned right instead of left? What if I have said yes instead of no? How would things have changed for me? What if I had not met that person and married her or him? What if I had a child who was damaged in some way, how would that change my life? What if my child did not get run over by a car when he was four years old? All the things that are possible to think about, which gets back to what we were talking about earlier, the imagination. You don’t have to be an artist to have an imagination. Every human being has one. We think about these things, not every minute, but at moments of reflection we do, and I think this is the urge of this big novel. What if? I’ve been thinking about this question all my life.
AB: Any regrets?
PA: Of course, everyone has regrets. We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t done. But then again as I say in the novel, the narrator says, you know the pain of it all is you can only be on one road at any given moment, you can’t be walking on all four, or twenty, or fifty. You can only be on one road and that becomes the story of your life. I think to live with bitter regret about the things you’ve done is not a very satisfying way to live, because as long as you’re still breathing, there’s today and tomorrow to look forward to as well. And if there’s something you truly regret having done, well, there’s still a possibility of not precisely undoing that, but at least making sure you never do that thing again.
AB: Starting with The Invention of Solitude, I feel you’ve always understood solitude.
PA: What I was trying to do in The Invention of Solitude, especially in the second part, the second half called The Book of Memory, was to prove in a sense that we’re all inhabited by other people. We’re made by other people. So even when you’re alone, the very fact that you can say to yourself: “I’m alone,” means that you’re not alone because the word “alone” was taught to you by other people. You learn language by interacting with other people, no one creates a language by himself or herself. You see how physically you might be isolated from other people, but the fact that we can think even when we’re alone is a product of our having been born out of the body of a woman, raised by other people and taught how to become a human being by other people. So, it’s very complex. It’s not simply loneliness.
Solitude is a neutral term, it seems to me. It means you’re not with anyone else physically at that moment. Whereas loneliness has all kinds of sad connotations to it. It seems to imply that you’re pining for contact with others and don’t know how to find it.
You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.
You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer or a painter, I suppose, or a composer, anybody creating art. You have to enjoy it. You have to feel very fully alive when you’re alone in your room, painting your painting, or writing your book. So not everyone is cut out for that. Most of us don’t want to do that. That’s why when you look at the numbers, statistically there are not that many artists comparing to all the other people in the world. Even though you sometimes think that everyone’s a writer or everyone’s a painter.
AB: Something you’ve referred to, most famously in your classic film Smoke, is the story of Mikhail Bakhtin smoking pages of his own work. Do you have any notable authorial habits?
PA: I’ve stopped smoking as of about two and a half years ago, after doing it for fifty years, but I’ve switched over to electronic cigarettes. So, I vape and it’s been a good way to cut out tobacco from my life, which I needed to do, just as a matter of preserving my ever-diminishing body.
AB: Being a New Yorker, have you ever met Trump?
PA: No, no, no, [laughs] I’ve never crossed paths with him. I don’t think I’ve been within a thousand yards of him at any time in my life.
AB: People worry Trump will shoot down the first amendment.
PA: The first big questions will be how quickly are they going to try to pass legislation to undo things that have been in place in our society for decades. And then how much pushback will there be on the cabinet appointments, whether they will all be rubber stamped in and approved, or if there’ll be battles. I just don’t know how this is going to play out yet. By the time this piece is published we’ll probably know some answers.
AB: Do you think you could write fiction about this election?
PA: Sure, anything is possible, but seems to me that it’s too soon. You can’t fictionalize something that is still playing itself out. I know we’re gonna be jumping over many years, but this is the prime reason why the new novel I’m publishing is mainly dealing with events that are forty, fifty and sixty years old. I think it takes that long to understand the consequences of what’s happening at any given historical moment. I mean you look at War and Peace, one of the great novels of the 19th century. Tolstoy published it in 1870, but the material he’s writing about took place in around 1810 to 1815, that’s the scope of the book. So, it takes, I think, all this time before you can really write about it. Even the Civil War in the United States, which, remarkably enough, did not produce a lot of very good literature. The very best book, The Red Badge of Courage, that small brilliant novel by Stephen Crane, didn’t come out until 1890, which is a full 25 years after the war was over. I don’t know how anyone can possibly write a novel about this election at this point yet.
AB: 2008’s Man in the Dark is set in the aftermath of 2000?
PA: Yes, my poor protagonist lying in bed with a bad leg, and he’s unable to sleep, is making up stories and one of them is about an imagined civil war in the United States after the 2000 election. I’ve always looked at it as an illegal coup, the Supreme Court handed to George W. Bush the election. I was always appalled that America just rolled over and let it happen when it was so clearly illegal. And I’ve never gotten over it, to tell you the truth. And so much damage has been done to the country and the world because of that horrible decision by the US Supreme Court.
AB: You say that you believe written stories will continue to survive because they answer an essential, current human need.
PA: Yes, I agree with that. Because books have no practical use, because they really are useless in some way, when you compare it say to someone putting in a toilet in the house or any of the thousands of occupations people have to keep society on its feet. It’s easy to forget art, it’s easy to push it aside. But, in another way, try to imagine life without stories. Try to imagine life without music or theatre or films or dance, and it becomes such a grey landscape that it would be pretty difficult to live in it I think. Almost impossible.
It’s easy to forget art, it’s easy to push it aside. But, in another way, try to imagine life without stories.
It’s not that every single work of art is valuable. But we need these great armies of people trying so that there’ll be some things, or even quite a few things, that will be worthwhile and will satisfy people’s hunger for excellence and beauty. We do need beauty in our lives.
AB: So, you’re writing from your home these days?
PA: Yes, we have a house in Brooklyn. We’ve been here for almost 25 years now. It’s an old house. It has four stories. It’s a narrow house but it’s tall. Siri has a study on the top floor and I have a study on the bottom floor. There are two floors between us, during the day we rarely if ever talk. When we finish our work in the late afternoon that’s when we become a couple again, and we start talking and doing the things that other married people do. But during the day it’s the powers of silence here.
AB: Do you ever write to music?
PA: No. Silence. I need quiet. When I listen to music, I want to listen to music; it’s never background for me.
AB: Do you still write by hand?
PA: I have a fixation on a certain kind of notebook that I write in, with quadrant lines, squares, graph paper, I get them in France whenever I’m there. I write everything by hand. Most of it with a fountain pen, sometimes with a pencil. I work on a paragraph again and again and again until it seems to be coming into shape. Then I go to my old manual typewriter and I type it up.
That’s how I’ve written all my books. I don’t jump around the way some writers do. I write the first sentence and then the second, and then third, all the way to the last one in the book. I don’t work with an elaborate plan. I have impulses, ideas, inclinations, stories, all these forming as I’m working on it. I discover things in the act of doing them. This is at times so frightening because you have no idea what the next sentence is going to be, but at the same time it’s thrilling to be on that adventure.
Generally, I write at home. Other people seem quite happy writing in public parks, cafes, restaurants, on trains, buses, airplanes. I can’t do that. I need to be alone and somehow holed up in my little bunker and that’s where I feel freest and best able to think.
AB: Do you have any writer’s tips for avoiding the distractions of modern life?
PA: Well, I don’t have a cell phone or a mobile phone, however you want to describe these things. I decided at certain point early on and I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be so reachable. I figured that if people wanted to get hold of me, they’d find a way. So, I’m free of that. I don’t do email. I don’t have a computer. I have just refused the digital revolution. I live as a dinosaur. But I do have ways of participating. I have a young woman who helps me out with various things and she fields emails for me, and I do have a fax machine, so when she gets them, she faxes them over. But it gives me time to reflect on what I want to say and not feel that I’m in this constant whirl of messages and responses to messages, which most of us now seem to take as a normal part of life. It’s too frenzied for me. I need the quiet and the slowness of the old ways.
I watch my dear wife so overwhelmed by all the things that come into her computer every day, and most people seem frazzled by it rather than happy and so I thought if I could save myself that aggravation I will. If I had another kind of job, then needless to say, I would have to participate.
AB: A good quote from The Brooklyn Follies: “Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head.” Still?
PA: Yes, of course. Isn’t that the joy of reading? We’re talking about novels, and then poetry, writing as art. But we also read history, biography, science, all kinds of other things that could be enrapturing. Well-written history, well-written biography can ignite the mind in the same way that good fiction can.
AB: I thought there was a prescient comment in Smoke when Augie says, kidding on the square: “Three or four years it’ll be illegal to smile at strangers on the street.”
PA: That’s right. I have an interesting thing to tell you about just this kind of interaction. As you know I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn and I’ve been here for a long time and this neighborhood I feel is a bit like living in a small town. You get to know everybody. Even though I’m not a particularly talkative person when I go into shops, I’m not silent either, and I’ve built up friendships or warm relations in any case with people who run restaurants or stores of various kinds. Last March, it was still very cold out and I went into my stationery store where I buy all my supplies here in Park Slope. After Donald Trump’s berating of immigrants and all this hatred he poured on the people who were not born in this country and live here, I go into this stationery shop. It’s owned by a man born in China. His assistant is a man born in Mexico and the cashier is a woman born in Jamaica.
We’ve had some nice conversations over the years. I walked in there eight months ago, and it was a chilly day outside and my nose was running, but I wasn’t aware of it. I was up at the counter to pay, and instead of telling me “Your nose is running,” she just plucked out a Kleenex from her box of tissues and reached across the counter and wiped my nose for me. And I found it so kind and so gentle. Some people would object, wouldn’t they? They’d say: “She has no right to touch me without my permission.” I didn’t feel that at all. I thought it was an act of real friendship and kindness.
AB: What might surprise readers about 4321?
PA: Boy, I have no idea. It’s so hard for me to step back and look at myself from the outside. The books are written from within, and I don’t know how people respond to them. I know that over the years many people have loved my books, other people have despised them.
AB: In your memoir Winter Journal, you recall your formative years as a young poet in Paris, engaging the young professional named Sandra who recited Baudelaire to you and introduced you to the Kama Sutra?
PA: It was one of the most extraordinary nights of my life, to run into this young person who was a prostitute in Paris but she also knew French poetry by heart, and so I put it in the book because it was so memorable. So unexpected, so extraordinarily wonderful, that this should have happened to be. People might not believe it, but I swear to you it’s true. It really happened, just as I wrote it.
AB: You’re translated into over 40 languages now, including your beloved French.
PA: French is the only language I have any mastery over, except English. I can comment on the manuscripts that come in with the translations of my books and they do send them to me. I read them carefully and I also make suggestions, but I can’t do that with any other language. I’m at the mercy of the skill of the person translating the book and I truly cross my fingers and hope that they’re doing a good job but I don’t have the ability to read German or even Spanish well enough to have anything useful to say to the translators.
AB: Obviously, you’ll be looking forward to taking 4321 to Paris?
PA: Yes, eventually. It’s not coming out right away, not for the whole year after the English version. Interestingly in Germany, they’ve hired four translators and so it’s all done, it’s printed now. And so, it will be coming out simultaneously in German and in Dutch, they’ve done a quick job of the translation as well. In other countries, it’s gonna be more in the middle of the year. And then, eventually, France. I think January of 2018.
AB: Another thing that I admire is that you’ve been versatile over the years. What interests you now, in addition to opposing Trump?
PA: I will find it eventually. I’ve written all these novels, yes, but I’ve written five autobiographical books also. And then I’ve written essays. Translations. I don’t do that much anymore but there are translations in the new novel, particularly the Apollinaire poem which I worked on with great happiness I must say. Over the course of about a year I kept going back to it and refining the translation till I thought it worked. I’ve written movies, I’ve directed movies, I’ve put together anthologies a few times. I don’t know what’s next.
About the Interviewer
Alexander Bisley is a card-carrying member of the ACLU, He writes on books for Playboy and The Guardian. His work has been translated into French and Russian.
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