Electric Literature is pleased to announce we are appointing Halimah Marcus as our first Executive Director. Halimah began at Electric Literature in 2010 as a volunteer, and has since become a leader in our organization. She was integral in launching our critically acclaimed weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, and establishing Electric Literature as a successful arts non-profit.
“I’m looking forward to making bold new strides to present literature as a public art form, and firmly establishing its place in the popular conversation,” says Halimah.
Halimah will continue as Editor-in-Chief of Recommended Reading, which published a special four-part 200th issue this week, with sitcom-inspired fiction from J. Robert Lennon, Téa Obreht, Rob McCleary, and Morgan Parker.
The full press release is below.
For Immediate Release CONTACT: editors@electricliterature.com
Electric Literature Appoints Halimah Marcus as Executive Director
New York, NY (March 16, 2016): The Board of Directors of Electric Literature has appointed Halimah Marcus to be the first Executive Director of the organization, whose mission is to use digital innovation to keep literature a vital part of popular culture.
Since launching in 2009, Electric Literature has established a reputation as a digital innovator, having created the first literary magazine mobile app and pioneered a publishing model that is widely used today. Their ability to embrace new technologies and quickly adapt to the changing publishing landscape has earned them a large and devoted readership, including a strong and growing social media presence.
“Halimah has been essential to our organization as we’ve grown and flourished over the past six years,” said Andy Hunter, Electric Literature’s founder and board chairman. “She’s a brilliant writer and editor, an innovative thinker, and the perfect person to lead Electric Literature into the future.”
Electric Literature operates electricliterature.com, a daily destination for book lovers with more than 4 million visitors in 2015, and two weekly literary magazines: Okey-Panky, which publishes brief, strange writings, and Recommended Reading, which presents fiction with personal recommendations by top writers and editors. Electric Literature also hosts free public events throughout the year and has commissioned and distributed several multimedia pieces such as apps, art installations, annotated fiction, and twitter fiction.
The appointment of an Executive Director marks Electric Literature’s commitment to their mission and to growth as a non-profit. “At Electric Literature, we believe literature should be accessible to everyone, which is why we are so proud of our large and engaged audience,” said Halimah Marcus. “I’m looking forward to making bold new strides to present literature as a public art form, and firmly establishing its place in the popular conversation.”
Halimah Marcus joined Electric Literature in 2010 as a volunteer, and was quickly hired as Managing Editor. In 2012 she was integral in launching Recommended Reading, which has over 116,000 subscribers, later becoming its Editor-in-Chief. Today, Recommended Reading publishes its 200th issue, which can be found here, and Marcus will continue to serve as Editor-in-Chief. Recommended Reading has published critically acclaimed, prize-winning authors such as Jim Shepard, Charles Yu, James Hannaham, A.M. Homes, and Ben Marcus, alongside hundreds of debut and emerging writers, and has featured recommendations from literary luminaries such as Hari Kunzru, Chinelo Okparanta, Karen Russell, Michael Cunningham, Jennifer Egan, and Kelly Link.
In 2014 Marcus spearheaded Electric Literature’s transition to a non-profit, and has since secured support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Amazon Literary Partnership. Before joining Electric Literature, Marcus worked in programming and development for the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation and the community radio non-profit The Prometheus Radio Project.
Electric Literature has grown significantly in the past two years, quadrupling its audience, launching a second weekly magazine, Okey-Panky, and an original series which features international authors writing about their home cities, “The Writing Life Around the World”.
“Halimah Marcus is one of the finest fiction editors I’ve had the pleasure of working with, and she’s proved an exemplary colleague under the EL umbrella as well,” said J. Robert Lennon, a novelist and the Editor-in-Chief of Okey-Panky. “No one is more qualified to sail this ship than she is.”
Original Poetry for “The 200 Episode Club” by Morgan Parker
Privilege is asking other people to look at you. I like everything in my apartment except me. What is the point of something that only does one thing. I mean I need to buy a toaster. My life is a kind of reality. When I get bored, I close the window. By the way what is a yuppie. Here I am, two landscapes. My tattoo artist says I’m a warrior with pain. I tell her we can manifest this new moon in six months. When I’m rich I will still be Black. You can’t take the girl out of the ghetto ever. It’s too much to ask to be satisfied. Of course I sing through the struggle. My problem is I’m too glamorous to be seen. How will I know when I’ve made it. In the mirror will I have a face. How long does a good thing last. Sometimes eating a guilty salad I become a wife. Let me be the woman who takes care of you. Weezy and George in drapes and crystal silverware. By the way predominantly white means white. I want to be the first Black woman to live her life exclusively from the bathtub. Making toast, enjoying success despite my cultural and systemic setbacks. I was raised to be a nigger you can trust. I was raised to be better than my parents. In a small house with a swamp cooler I touched myself. I wanted to be in the white mom’s carpool. My cheek against something new and clean. I clean my apartment when I am afraid of being the only noise. Everyone I know is a Black man. Me I’m a Black man too. Tragically, I win. It is a joke. I always require explanation: Life, Dope. I am so lucky to be you. When something dies, I buy a new one.
“In early use an exile was a banished man, a wanderer or roamer: exul.”
As I stroll under a canopy of trees on a wide clean path that leads to the rocky shores of the Trail of Tears river crossing in Chattanooga, I listen for the Native American ghosts, exiled. I want to hear the wind wail. I want to hear the leaves crying. I want to be haunted by their eternal longing for home.
The exile waits to return, sometimes forever. McCarthy writes, “This condition of waiting means that the exile’s whole being is concentrated on the land he left behind, in memories and hopes.” Yet, for the Cherokee tribes forced onto the Trail of Tears from Ross’ Landing in Chattanooga in 1838, there is no “there” to return to, for their home has been erased.
“But in recent times it is worth noticing, a new word, ‘refugee’ describes a person fleeing from persecution because of his category.”
These are some of Chattanooga’s refugees: an elderly Cuban man I drive to the clinic because his knee hurts and his blood pressure is high; a young woman from Columbia, hair still wet from her shower, I drive to the woman’s clinic for her annual exam, a silent woman from Somalia, buried in layers of sweaters and scarves, who looks as if she is sixty, but whose refugee card states her date of birth as five years before mine; an ambitious Iraqi Kurd, who I drive to take his GED so he can begin college classes; another young man, a Sudanese, who wants to resume his career as a pharmacist.
These refugees have one thing in common: they fled their countries because their lives were in danger.
“The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in mass.”
The artist as exile represents a significant contribution to the Western literary canon, starting with Dante and Ovid and continuing with writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Herta Muller, Milan Kundera, and James Baldwin. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce writes that the three conditions for an artist are “silence, exile, and cunning.” Joyce himself chose a self-imposed exile from Ireland because he believed his own country would stifle his work.
Joyce himself chose a self-imposed exile from Ireland because he believed his own country would stifle his work.
Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize winning poet, considers the personal exile of an artist like himself, who emigrated from Poland to the US in 1960. In his essay, “Notes on Exile,” he writes, “Exile accepted as destiny, in the way we accept an incurable illness, should help us see through our self-delusions.” In this sense, exile is a type of destiny, because one’s personal life is dependent on larger historical forces. Yet, being separated from one’s culture presents its own problems. As Milosz says, “Now where he lives he is free to speak but nobody listens, and moreover, he forgot what he had to say.”
“An expatriate is almost the reverse. His main aim is never to go back to his native land, or failing that, to stay away as long as possible. His departure is wholly voluntary.”
In contrast to exiles who are unwillingly separated from their culture, expatriates often want to flee theirs. Now more than forty years after McCarthy’s 1972 essay was published, the term expatriate sounds distastefully antiquated and colonialist. Today, as people voluntarily between and among countries and whose values connect them to ways of living rather than nation states’ terms more often call themselves transnationals, global citizens, and third cultures than expatriates. Even in the 1960s, Baldwin, who spent much of his adult life in France, referred to himself not as an expatriate or an exile, but a “transatlantic commuter.”
Today, as people voluntarily between and among countries and whose values connect them to ways of living rather than nation states’ terms more often call themselves transnationals, global citizens, and third cultures than expatriates.
When I moved to South Korea in 1995, I half-consciously had some romantic notions of being an expatriate writer living in self-imposed exile in order to write. My plan to live there for a year turned into twelve, and this changed the course of my life in ways I could not have imagined. Before I moved to South Korea, I was 31, married, and working as a technical writer, living in Arlington, Virginia with my husband, who had a solid job at Georgetown Library. Life was good enough, and our next logical moves were to buy a house and have a child or two and raise a family. The problem was, I’d grown up in Fairfax, Virginia, and hated these very suburbs I was about to commit my future to. For many people, the suburbs are a place of comfort, stability, and, if they are lucky, community. I found them stifling, alienating, and oppressive. If I’d kept my respectable job and bought a house in the suburbs, I’m sure my feelings would not have diminished. I would have lived one of those lives of Thoreau’s “quiet desperation.” I felt that quiet desperation already beginning to fall on me, heavy and inevitable. Only some radical changes — our decision to not have children and to live abroad instead — threw me off that looming trajectory.
That first year in Daegu, South Korea, was not one of glorious expatriation or creativity. The Confucian culture was too different from mine, and I missed many material comforts of home, which seemed superficial but were so much a part of my life: live music and art museums and decent wine and cheese. Popcorn. Before I left for South Korea, I was taking advantage of the cultural benefits of living in the DC area. For the two years before we moved to Korea, I was at one Smithsonian museum or another almost every weekend, catching a new art opening or historical exhibit. I went to Ethiopian restaurants and French bistros and coffee-shop/bookstores and drank microbrews. I went to wine tastings and outdoor concerts and dive bars and music clubs that no longer exist.
That life disappeared when I moved to South Korea in 1995. Instead, I ate Korean food and tried to teach a difficult language to a people who had just emerged from decades of poverty and dictatorship. I drank instant coffee and watched bad Hollywood movies on our VCR and drank watery beer and listened to the same music from a dozen CDs and mixed tapes. I searched for beauty and rarely found it that first year — I saw dirt and concrete and shorn trees and shabbiness. I smelled sewage and kimchi and garlic thick in summer heat. I did not love Korea, and I reluctantly missed home.
I searched for beauty and rarely found it that first year — I saw dirt and concrete and shorn trees and shabbiness.
That first year was long and exhausting, and I counted the days until we could return to the States. But then, a fellow American suggested I apply for a university job in Korea. I would work fewer hours, get more pay, and have long paid vacations in the summer and winter. I would have time to write and travel, things I wouldn’t have if I began working again in the States. I got a job at a university in Ansan, and my husband and I agreed to stick it out for another year.
After that first year, I took a few trips around Korea and in Asia, and I began to see the beauty I’d looked for that had always been in front of me. Persimmons growing on trees, flames of red leaves lining the streets, the traditional songs like some kind of ancient blues, the serenity of the temples, the smell of meat grilling, of incense. The wonder of walking to work, of getting around a country without a car. And when I went back to the States to visit, I saw some of the ugliness there — the myopic, insular conversations, the solipsism, the commercials on TV aimed at every kind of imagined ailment begging viewers to call their doctor and ask if brand x is right for you. I saw the larger and larger houses and wondered why people would want to live in them. I saw everyone driving into work, chained to desultory desk jobs.
I began to see the beauty I’d looked for that had always been in front of me.
The US was a country with faults, like many others. It was not the best place to live in the world, nor the worst. I loved my visits, but I was happy to get back to my two-room apartment with its heated floors and ovenless kitchen and my earnest, sweet students. Even more, I was eager for my next month-long trip to Mongolia or Burma or Indonesia.
One of Chattanooga’s most famous expatriates in exile is Bessie Smith, who left Chattanooga to join a showbiz troop as a singer in 1912, and never looked back. Just as Baldwin had to leave America to thrive, Smith, who lived in poverty in segregated Chattanooga, had to leave the small, restrictive town to become one of the most revered (and wealthiest) blues singers of all time. In some ways Smith helped Baldwin finish Go Tell It On The Mountain, which he wrote as an expatriate in exile. In a Paris Review interview, Baldwin says of writing the novel,
After ten years of carrying that book around, I finally finished it in Switzerland in three months. I remember playing Bessie Smith all the time while I was in the mountains, and playing her till I fell asleep.
For writers like Baldwin, a gay African American in post-World War II America, leaving or staying in the US was to him choosing between life and death. After he witnessed his friends either going to jail or committing suicide, Baldwin realized he could not become “a man” if he stayed.
In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others.
Leaving the States did not save my life as it did Baldwin’s, but in a way it gave me one. I guess I should consider my twelve years in Korea as more of a time of voluntary expatriation rather than chosen exile. I was not escaping anything specific, but felt more that I was running toward something — a larger way of seeing the world and myself. Not so much a place, but toward a space that allowed me to expand my own vision, as a writer and as a human. What living abroad did for me was allow me to live as an outsider and to see the world, forever, in broader terms. It saved me from despair.
Frances Cannon recently put Etgar Keret’s shortest story ever, “Asthma,” into graphic form, and we have the fantastic results for you here, courtesy of the author and the artist. Enjoy.
About the Story: “Asthma” first appeared in Etgar Keret’s collection,The Girl on the Fridge.
About the Illustrator: Frances Cannon is a writer and artist currently pursuing a master’s degree in nonfiction and book arts at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, teaching literature and creative writing, and working as an editorial assistant to The Iowa Review. She was born in Utah and since then has bounced around living, making artwork, and writing, in Oregon, Maine, Montana, Vermont, California, France, Italy, and Guatemala. She received her bachelor’s in poetry and printmaking at the University of Vermont, where she self-published several chapbooks of silkscreened prints and poems. She has also worked as an editorial intern and contributor at McSweeney’s quarterly, The Believer, and The Lucky Peach. She has recently been published in Vice, The Examined Life Journal, Edible magazine, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Lana Turner dumps Frank Sinatra then Ava Gardner dumps Frank Sinatra then Mia Farrow dumps Frank Sinatra so Frank sits at home watching Lana Turner on the 200th episode of The Love Boat with the sound turned off snarling the incandescent rage that is the home field advantage of the late-stage alcoholic.
The records no longer sell.
Frank Sinatra does not know why the Frank Sinatra records do not sell.
He rises unsteadily from the tattered recliner on skinny, old man legs. Bright yellow, old man pee spots the front of his tighty-whities.
Frank Sinatra does not know why the Frank Sinatra records no longer sell. Frank Sinatra cannot fathom why Lana Turner is on the 200th episode of The Love Boat. Frank Sinatra is not even sure what the fuck “The Love Boat” even is.
Or what the fuck “Menudo” is.
Frank Sinatra knows one undeniable fact: Lana Turner and Menudo are on the 200th episode of The Love Boat, and Frank Sinatra is not. He flails his skinny old man arms, knocking over the lamp and plunging the room into darkness, and his soul into a Dostoevsky midnight.
Frank Sinatra has collapsed.
With his appearance on the 200th episode of The Love Boat Andy Warhol’s life is now a closed circle. A fact he does not understand consciously, but with the unwavering intuition of the true artist.
That’s him on the gangplank. A two shot with his first true love, Blotted Line (Candy Darling in an ill-fitting and hastily made costume of styrofoam and pasteboard). Warhol accepts the parameters of this reality: a small, angry lesbian with a .32 has been released into the labyrinth interior of the Pacific Princess.
Andy Warhol has had it with the flunkies at The Factory.
The itchy fright wig.
Silk screening Mick Jagger.
Andy Warhol has had enough. A touching scene where Blotted Line begs him not to go out into the ship.
Silk screening Mick fucking Jagger.
Andy Warhol has had enough of life. Andy Warhol has had enough of Andy Warhol.
Valerie Solanas finds him in the strange nightclub where Menudo performs before a packed crowd of predatory pedophiles and Lana Turner. Menudo, rehearsed and drilled to the point of dissociation by their manager, barely flinch when the shots rings out. Andy has been begging Lana Turner to let him make a silk screen of her. He is shot through both lungs, spleen, and liver, collapsing in an enormous pool of blood. Lana Turner sees the enormous pool of blood and swoons. Andy Warhol changes the channel. Now he is Andrew Warhola, the frightened boy from Pennsylvania, and this is his greatest work.
Lana Turner has been to lots of parties. And acted perfectly disgraceful. But she has never collapsed.
On the 200th episode of The Love Boat, Lana Turner collapses.
The 200th episode of The Love Boat has taken Captain Stubing to a bad place. He has been drinking heavily since the day they put out of port.
Flashbacks.
Nightmares.
Captain Stubing hasn’t spent his entire fucking life on the fucking Love Boat. Captain Stubing has been in the shit. Captain Stubing has hosed what’s left of his buddies off carrier decks. For 199 episodes he has hoped to become famous for a mysterious vacancy. But the fucking white shorts, white knee socks, and white shoes have killed the dream. No one ever becomes famous for a mysterious vacancy in white shorts, white knee socks, and white shoes.
“My life is a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over,” he announces over the p.a. system, his wracking sobs a maudlin echo down the hallways and decks. The hallways are empty. The .32 toting lesbian still at large. Still angry. The All You Can Eat Seafood Buffet is untouched. The whirlpool unused.
Frank Sinatra has collapsed.
Andy Warhol has collapsed.
Lana Turner has collapsed.
Captain Stubing has collapsed. Oh Captain Stubing we love you get up.
I will only tell you that it’s a small bet with myself, with my convictions. I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.
Of course, Ferrante’s own desires matter little to fans and critics who have tossed out different theories of her true identity for years. The latest literary Sherlock is the Italian professor Marco Santagata who has determined the most likely candidate is Marcella Marmo. “I did philological work, as if I were studying the attribution of an ancient text, even though it’s a modern text,” Santagata said, sounding a bit like someone with too much time on his hands.
What’s evidence did he find? Well, Marmo is a history professor in Naples who, like the character Elena Greco, went to school in Pisa. So she fits the rough outline of the Elena… at least if you assume the books are autobiographical:
“I did something simple. I took the yearbook of the (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) students in the 60s and I looked at which names could respond to all of these requirements,” Santagata explained. “Marcella Marmo corresponds to my identikit.”
Santagata also claims Ferrante refers to a bar in Pisa that was popular among 60s students. There doesn’t seem to be too much other evidence. Ferrante’s Italian publisher, Edizioni E/O, called the idea “nonsense.” Marmo, like every Ferrante candidate, denied being the author, saying she has only even read one of the novels. Then she suggested yet another possibility: Silvio Perrella.
I have to admit that Marmo sounds almost like Ferrante in some of her quotes: “Notoriety has no upside. It’s never pleasant. Thank you to everyone who thought that I could be a happy bestseller writer, but as I’ve already tried in vain to say in recent days, I am not Elena Ferrante.”
Still, the greater question is why anyone cares? The obsession with Ferrante’s identity seems particularly odd among American audiences, who are unlikely to even be able to name another living Italian author much less have the “real” identity mean anything to them. Does it really add anything to the experience of Ferrante’s novels to know she is (or isn’t) an Italian professor you’ve never heard of before?
The public has always hounded famous authors who wished to be even somewhat private. (As Thomas Pynchon once quipped, “My belief is that ‘recluse’ is a code word generated by journalists… meaning, doesn’t like to talk to reporters.”) But it also feels like we live in an age where fans feel almost offended if anything is withheld from them. We demand 24-hour interaction from artists and entertainers on social media, declare artists “greedy” if they don’t want to stream their work for free, and even hurl abuse at authors who don’t produce work as quickly as we’d like. That Ferrante continues to publish anonymously is taken at best as a challenge and at worst as a betrayal of the contemporary author-reader relationship.
But Ferrante claims that the anonymity helps her write. Speaking to the Guardian, she said she wrote with a pen name not only for the privacy, but for the “wish to remove oneself from all forms of social pressure or obligation. Not to feel tied down to what could become one’s public image. To concentrate exclusively and with complete freedom on writing and its strategies.”
If anonymity helps Ferrante create the books you love, maybe that’s reason enough to let her be.
The stars above us ask so little, despite our cells, coursing with their dust. To err is constant — someday, all the things we believe will seem ancient. Perhaps, we’ll live more times than once. Eventually, we will all flee toward the coastline. The world we ignore most and understand least will call us back to give up our toenails for tails, cover our breasts with starfish and numinous scales. Tell me, how will a cellist sound beneath the sea?
Desire
after Terrance Hayes
Turn your face. Face the horizon from another side to watch the line between land and sky, upend and rise: a schism slit view, red and swollen. I speak of something like ire — a sweetness that resides, sings in the body like the reed born from runnel, given second life in the mouth. Ser, to be. Tu eres mi amor: one seed born from need, clear and dire.
I’ve always thought of the mixtape as one of the quintessential American art forms. Songs arranged with care and trepidation; the boy’s heart laid bare on an audio cassette; an object of intimacy and vulnerability, which the girl could embrace or crush on a whim. In Bulgaria, it was the Communist Party that did the crushing. How absurd it seems to me now, the idea that getting caught listening to “Smoke on the Water” could get you in serious trouble. The idea that you had to mix your tapes in secret, like bombs. Then in the ’90s, when the Party had already fallen, the mixtape, like our people, grew savage, ruthless, unapologetic. You could go to the market and next to the crates of tomatoes, cucumbers and potatoes find others packed with bootleg cassettes– Serbian Turbofolk, or Scandinavian Death Metal? American rap, or British pop? A cornucopia of choices in a world where “copy right” signified, and still does, one’s immutable right to make copies completely unimpeded.
In my novel Stork Mountain (FSG, 2016), a young immigrant returns to Bulgaria and searches for his disappeared grandfather, ending up in a village on the border with Turkey, a stone’s throw away from Greece, up in the Strandja Mountains. This is a place of pagan mysteries and storks nesting in giant oaks; a place where every spring, possessed by Christian saints, men and women dance barefoot across live coals and seek rebirth. There in the village, the boy reconnects with the old man, falls in love with the rebellious daughter of the local imam and gets drawn in a maze of insanity and half-truths.
I wrote the novel over the course of five years, first in English, and then in Bulgarian. And while I wrote, I listened obsessively to the same musical composition, over and over, and over again. “Ipostas” by the Bulgarian band Isihia. Here, underneath the music, there lie the mountains of my book, with their hills and rivers, mists and rains, the fires and their walkers, the storks nesting in the giant oaks. In Hellenic philosophy “ipostas” or “hypostasis” is taken to signify the underlining, inner reality of things. In Orthodox Christianity the Trinity is viewed as one God existing in three distinct hypostases. A fitting name then for a song, which at least in my mind, is now one with the book, or maybe has always been.
2. March of the Black Queen, Queen
Elif, daughter of the local imam, stepped out of the dark faceless, but driven by a single, simple desire– to be allowed to wear jeans in a world where other women were made to wear shalwars.
“Everything you do,” sings Freddie Mercury in this strange song, “bears a will and a why and a wherefore.” The character of Elif, daughter of the local imam, stepped out of the dark faceless, but driven by a single, simple desire– to be allowed to wear jeans in a world where other women were made to wear shalwars. This desire fueled her will, gave her the “why,” illuminated her face so I could see it better. Elif, the daughter of the imam, who cut herself before he let her buy those jeans; who starved herself until he let her go to college; who smokes pot in a stork nest, up a giant walnut, her safe and sacred place; who whispers all her troubles into a human skull buried in the branches two centuries before. “I reign with my left hand,” the Black Queen sings with Freddie’s voice, “I rule with my right. I’m lord of all darkness. I’m Queen of the night. I’ve got the power — Now do the march of the black queen.”
3. Feuer und Wasser, Rammstein
I don’t speak a word of German, but I chose Rammstein’s “Feuer und Wasser” because it exemplifies a basic alchemical principle which helped me conceive of two of the novel’s main characters– the narrator and Elif. In alchemy, “coincidentia oppositorum” is the sacred marriage of opposites, the coniunctio which makes two opposing forces (fire and water) into a single unified one.
“Feuer und Wasser kommt nicht zusammen,” sings Till Lindemann. “Fire and water don’t come together. Can’t be bound, aren’t related. Sunken in sparks, I am aflame. And I’m burned in the water.”
Coincidentia oppositorum. Beyond the duality, there is unity. Water that burns. I like the idea of beginning a character with a stereotype, or in the case of this novel, an archetype. The boy, the novel’s hero. Grandpa, the figure of the Old Man, the mentor, the guide through the shadowy realm. Elif, the shapeshifter, the hero’s opposite. Her father, a shadowy villain, there not simply to oppress, but also to tempt the hero to “the dark side.” And then these archetypes begin to make their own decisions, to act freely and evolve until in the end, I hope, they break liberated from the mold.
What a surprise it was for me, and everyone in the book, to discover towards its end that the boy, this fish out of water, the weakling who everyone thought could manipulate and use for personal gains, was in fact the force of change in everyone’s life, the fire that had come to the mountain to cleanse it through its flame.
4. Enter Vryl-Ya, Therion
Elif has stolen her father’s car; she’s picked up the boy and taken him as far up the mountain as the road allows. They’ve hiked the hills, crawled under a fence in the forest and crossed, under cover of darkness, into Turkey. Or so the boy believes. What follows next is a drunken night by the ruins of an ancient Thracian temple, a site where millennia ago the maenads, the crazy priestesses of Dionysus, consumed their doctored wine, danced madly and tore to pieces their sacrificial goats.
I made up many wild tales in this novel– Attila is a character and so is the Slavic goddess Lada; Murad the Godlike One, the first Ottoman sultan; Captain Kosta, a fictional rebel who fought the Turks and ended his life alone and forgotten. But perhaps the wildest story is one that actually unfolded, the only real story I allowed myself to use.
In the early ’80s the Communist Party began excavations in the Strandja Mountains at a site where they believed was buried Bastet, the Egyptian cat goddess. They were guided by an ancient map and the word of a venerated Bulgarian psychic.
In 1871 Edward Bulwer-Lytton published The Coming Race, a novel in which a young traveler accidentally stumbles upon a subterranean world inhabited by powerful beings, descendants of a lost civilization and masters of a great force called “Vril” (think Star Wars); a force both of healing and destruction. For a while The Coming Race was enormously popular in England and so convincing in its narrative that certain prominent theosophists of the day (like Helena Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner) believed it to be grounded in deep occult truth.
“Enter the underworld,” sing Therion in this bizarre song, “Enter Vril-Ya. A step down the stairway… In this world they got the key to time and space. And to forces too strong for mankind to know.” I just love imagining the Communist Party, in all its atheist godlessness, digging in hopes of finding the remains of a lioness goddess, buried in the hills of the Strandja alongside scrolls supposed to hold great knowledge of past and future. And who knows what the Party really found?
5. July Morning, Uriah Heep
This tradition takes its name from Uriah Heep’s cult song “July Morning,” so beloved in our country that John Lawton…has now been given “honorary citizenship” to Kavarna…
For decades now people in Bulgaria gather on the Black Sea coast to meet the first rays of the sun on the first day of July. They build fires, play songs all night and wait for sunrise. This tradition takes its name from Uriah Heep’s cult song “July Morning,” so beloved in our country that John Lawton, one of the band’s later frontmen (“July Morning” was originally sung by David Byron) has now been given “honorary citizenship” to Kavarna, a small town on the Black Sea, which boasts a famous mussel farm, a statue of Ronnie James Dio, and an annual rock fest that has seen performances from the likes of Deep Purple, Scorpions and Motorhead.
“July Morning” may not be explicitly mentioned in my novel, but there is a trip to the Black Sea (no more than twenty miles away from the Strandja) and the general sense of waiting for the sun and for its fire, and through them, for rebirth.
6. Sweet Dreams, Marilyn Manson
Annie Lennox is great and who am I to disagree? But there is something magnetically macabre, impossibly irresistible about Marilyn Manson’s cover. In 2001 I moved to the US to study at the University of Arkansas and quickly felt the inescapable pull of Southern Literature. Faulkner’s adage that the past is never dead, that it’s not even past, alongside Katherine Anne Porter’s brilliant long story “Old Mortality” changed the way I think of life, of familial bonds, of the tales we tell each other and of the myths we create so as to face the faceless void. But the line between past and present is not the only line that blurs. “Oh, who can divide dream from reality, day from night, night from dawn, memory from illusion?” writes Danilo Kis in his story “The Legend of the Sleepers.” “Who can draw a sharp line between sleep and death?” What more can we do then, but “travel the world and the seven seas… looking for something?”
7. Exit Music (For a Film), Radiohead
I didn’t speak a word of English until I was fourteen. So used am I to the idea of not understanding the lyrics to a song that even today, unless I purposefully focus, the words flow by me unintelligible, like a great river. And when Thom Yorke sings, even if I do focus, the words are still, for the most part, a mystery. Except in “Exit Music (For a Film).” This song I understand. “Today we escape,” Yorke sings. “Pack and get dressed. Before your father hears us. Before all hell breaks loose.” And I can’t help but think of the boy in my novel and of Elif, of the world which holds them trapped, yet makes them terribly hungry for freedom; and of the boy’s grandfather and of the Greek girl, that sad, beautiful fire walker, he loved, many years before. “Return where you have failed,” Nikos Kazantzakis writes, an old Cretan proverb, “leave where you have succeeded.” There in the mountains where the grandfather once failed, the grandson now returns. And when at last the grandson triumphs, in his victory, the grandfather finds the strength to move on. “Now we are one,” Thom Yorke sings, “in everlasting peace.”
It’s 1984. Provisional Irish Republican Army member Patrick Magee plants a bomb inside the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England. Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet are set to stay there for a Conservative Party conference. Magee hides the bomb under a bathtub in room 629, sets it with a long-range timer, and walks away. October 12, in the early hours of the morning, the bomb explodes.
The specters of this historic bombing and attempt on Margaret Thatcher’s life hang over High DiveJonathan Lee’s new novel featuring three fictional characters during the years and days preceding the explosion. High Dive follows Moose, deputy manager of the Grand; his teenage daughter, Freya, who works reception at the front desk; and Dan, whose 1979 IRA initiation opens the book. Though Magee was arrested and tried in 1986, not much is known about his accomplices. Lee writes into the unknown details of the crime and lives of potential victims, creating a rich, witty, and compelling story full of solid dialogue and masterfully constructed scenes. Though the inevitable bombing at the end of the book creates a sense of dramatic irony and dread for the reader, we see Lee’s characters distracted by their own existential crises: they go about their lives as any of us would before a tragedy, selfishly worrying about their futures, worrying about the past they can’t relive, and worrying about how to fit in when they are not sure what they have to offer. Lee’s High Dive is suspenseful, expertly paced, and an excellent read.
“Welcome to your new life,” Dan’s recruiters tell him following a harrowing standoff of an initiation that pits his sense of moral decency against his sense of responsibility to the cause. From that point on, he lives in service of killing for the IRA. But what we learn early in the novel is that Lee sympathizes with the issues and obligations of people on both sides; Dan is a skilled bomb-maker, but we see him living a mostly normal life with his mother in Northern Ireland. Lee writes Moose and Freya with the same sympathy and care. In this novel of causes, people are a product of their environment, but Lee writes each character with nuance; they are less emblematic caricatures and more complicated, fully-fleshed people. What are most interesting in High Dive are the small details of each person’s life.
Moose is a former diver; he is constantly reliving his athletic glory days in his mind because his life as a mid-level hotel manager is less than thrilling. Freya’s mother left him, and though he enjoys his work in the hotel, his life lacks change, recognition, or anything extraordinary. Lee characterizes him with great affection for his daughter, perhaps even to a fault: he cares more for Freya than himself. Freya is in some ways a stereotypical teenager, trying to figure out what she wants for her life; her inclusion as one of the main characters offers us perspective on Moose, though, and life inside the hotel. Freya notices people coming and going within the hotel, and though at times her characterization feels more mature than a typical teenager, it works because it allows Lee to comment on just how easy it was to place the bomb at the hotel.
In the way that historical novels can be simultaneously prescient about current events, Lee’s offers insight into current discussions about how much responsibility the average citizen has to do the right thing. In one scene, a friend encourages Freya to go out and socialize. Lee’s words here are strikingly relevant to the rest of the story, and oddly, to current events. “…[F]or most of us,” the friend says, “for decent people, the choice each day isn’t between doing something good and doing something bad. It’s between doing something good and doing nothing.” Freya is typically teen-aged in her reluctance to stick her neck out for anything. But taken in light of the terrorist activities in the rest of the novel, this conversation takes on deeper significance than whether or not she should attend a party. The publication of Lee’s novel in America comes at a time when many are calling for us to look back to historical examples of division, action and inaction — High Dive reminds us that the actions of an individual can have a great impact, even if that action is the decision not to act.
High Dive succeeds for so many reasons, particularly the author’s strength in creating dramatic scenes with an awareness of the historical and personal significance of the events he writes into the background of his novel. But more importantly, this is a novel of sympathy for the individual, the highly personal, and the domestic. Lee shows us how difficult it is to categorize the experience of an entire group. He uses a shifting omniscient third person perspective, and each of these three characters rings true. When he writes of Dan, of his experience in Northern Ireland, he says, “The whole of your life in Belfast was organized around light and dark, visibility and invisibility, silence and sound, information and secrecy, the private rubbing up against the public and making you feel tired.” Even Dan, who gives his life over to the cause of making bombs to kill English people, pauses to reflect on his fatigue from IRA arguments, how long-held beliefs about Protestants and Catholics have lost their power. Lee’s novel is commentary on the absurdity of fearing the other, but also of trying to control our fellow man.
Moose understands:
“People were always heroes in their own telling.”
And though this seems at first just to be a passing comment about how we like to relive our best days, it’s becomes evident that Lee chooses the floating omniscient point of view for the sympathy it lends — the credibility it gives to — each character. Moose, Freya, and Dan all want to do well, and yet they’re fallible and inconsistent. With his seamless transition from the world of tense IRA plotting to the doldrums of the wandering teenage mind, Lee makes it clear that humans are the ones who draw lines and set bombs. Fallible, messy, and imperfect humans, often who didn’t get things to turn out just the way they’d hoped.
“Suffering is in your face or two hundred miles away,” one of Lee’s characters says. “Nothing in between.” Jonathan Lee’s High Dive asks us to look at the plethora of thought and self-indulgence — that beautiful minutia — that flourishes in an unharmed life, and to consider how much generous freedom there is in nonviolence.
— –
Check out an exclusive excerpt from High Dive as part of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. Craving more? Electric Literature has an interview with the author discussing the book.
Cliff is trying to fix the doorbell. Today is Theo’s college graduation and a lot of people are coming over; they’re going to be ringing it, and he wants to make it play Miles Davis’s rendition of “If I Were A Bell.” It’s a good joke, you see, because it sounds like a normal doorbell at first, those four notes forward and back, before the quartet joins in. But the thing keeps shorting out — it plays only the opening notes, like a normal doorbell, and then it delivers, to his visitors, electric shocks. The bell doesn’t work. The joke doesn’t work. His house of love is a house of pain.
Cliff’s home maintenance projects seem simple and straightforward, at first: the dishwasher, the toaster, the bathroom tile. Then things go wrong. The tile, in particular, should have been easy. He pressed the thing into place and everything fell apart: the whole bathroom! Cliff has been feeling for some time as though everything, not just the appliances, were about to fall apart. He starts to do something with the best of intentions and it spools out of control. And lately he feels as though the people around him are humoring him. Just now, he invited the neighbors to graduation, even though Theo asked him not to. But he’s proud! He’s proud of his son. He wants everyone to be there. Theo must find more tickets, you see. That’s all there is to it.
Everyone must be together.
For some time now, as a supplement to his medical practice, Cliff has been the star of a dark crime drama about a serial rapist. Dozens of episodes have been filmed. There is, of course, no studio audience. He’s not sure when the show is supposed to air, and his queries to the agency have gone unanswered. Indeed, the subject seems to make his agent uncomfortable. But why? Was it not his agent who got him the gig? He doesn’t remember how it all came about — can’t recall any audition — but it’s good, hard work, the best of his career. Sometimes, sitting at home on the sofa with Clair, he impulsively flips through the channels, trying to find it, hoping they’ve decided to broadcast it without telling him. He envisions a time when he’ll land on it by chance, and casually begin watching, and Clair will ask him what it is, and he’ll make one of his mugging shrugs that the audience loves, and then Clair will be drawn into the story and she’ll say, “My God, Cliff, is that you? You are incredible.”
Sometimes people talk about him in another room. He can hear them talking — can see them in the monitors — and they don’t seem to know. He feels as though they are mocking him — his mawkishness, his silly jokes, his distinctive sweaters. He can’t help himself: he rushes in, steals the scene. Before the rote smiles return to their faces, his family betrays their true emotions: they don’t like him. They want to leave. He can sense it. He has to make them stay. There must be a way.
He’s talking to his granddaughter, Olivia, who is soon to join her mother, Denise, in Singapore. He can’t remember why Denise is abroad, why Olivia is here. He seems to recall an argument. Denise was pregnant and Cliff sent her away — is that what happened? Cliff is uncomfortable with pregnancy. He doesn’t like to look at that. He tells Olivia he has a gift for her, but adds, “I hesitate to give it to you, because you may not leave. People really try to leave this house. But they keep getting sucked back in.” It’s reverse psychology, you see. The girl gazes at him, doubtfully. He demonstrates the phenomenon, which he calls “The Vacuum Effect,” by asking the child to walk out the door, then grabbing her sweater and holding her back. The child struggles; it reminds him of something. He begins to sweat. The audience is laughing. The director yells cut. Cliff heads to his dressing room, to be alone.
“How can you expect your father to contain himself?” he hears Clair ask Theo. Cliff is at the top of the stairs, listening; they are down in the living room. She’s talking about the graduation tickets, but there’s an edge to her voice. She means something else. She says, “He proceeded to hug every person on the dais, including the ushers.” Cliff remembers. His older daughter’s graduation, years before. One usher, a pretty one, ended up on his show. So did a policewoman he met, and one of his patients. He expected more gratitude from them, for getting them this acting work. But they disappeared from his life. He recalls their auditions: in hotel rooms, over drinks. Or was that part of the show itself? The man he plays, the rapist, is some kind of entertainer; perhaps he lures his victims with the promise of acting work? No — that’s not on the show. The auditions are real.
Or maybe they are the show.
He wishes the show would air. He would feel so much better if it did.
In the master bedroom, Cliff lectures the grandchildren on proper behavior among the adults at graduation. “There are certain things I don’t want you to say out loud anymore.” He offers examples. The audience laughs. He recalls saying this another time, in another context, and vertigo overtakes him. The children are staring. “Hammer time!” he shouts, and the children dance. The audience cheers.
“Don’t tell me to control myself,” Cliff says to his father, when he thinks the old man can’t hear. “I’m a grown man living in my own house.”
At graduation, they are all seated together on bleachers, and they are facing the studio audience, who are also on bleachers, and the two sets of people on bleachers gaze at one another under the artificial natural light.
“It’s over?” he asks Clair.
“It’s over, dear.”
“There’s nothing else?”
“There’s nothing else.”
But where is Theo? Where is the graduation? There is only the studio audience cheering them on as they themselves cheer on the son, and the graduation ceremony, that aren’t there.
He fixes the doorbell. He isn’t sure how he did it. One moment, it isn’t working; the next moment, it is. Miles Davis plays. The music seems to break some kind of spell. The house lights come up, and he and Clair parade, arm in arm, before the studio audience, the rest of the family trailing behind them, waving.
“Don’t leave me, Clair,” he says, low, into her ear. The audience is on its feet, cheering wildly.
She gives him a look.
“I don’t like my other life.”
“Are you all right?”
“Don’t,” he says.
“I don’t understand. What are you doing?”
“Don’t.”
She says, “Stop.”
“Stay.”
She says, “You’re hurting me,” and pulls away.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
