Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing Turbo Boost.
The hit 80s drama Knight Rider was a portent of many of the technologies we have today, from cars that drive themselves to watches that are also walkie-talkies. Sadly, one of the show’s most exciting technological advances was Turbo Boost — the ability for cars to jump over obstacles.
Currently, the only way for a car to become airborne is with the use of a ramp or life-threatening accident. Typically the use of a ramp necessitates that it be installed beforehand, which requires a lot of preplanning. What’s so wonderful about Turbo Boost is that it can happen with only the press of a button.
There are a number of things I could have avoided driving into if I had Turbo Boost. The bunny that ran out in front of me last night, for instance. Perhaps car scientists can look into the bouncing abilities of bunnies to help develop the Turbo Boost technology. We would save a lot of bunnies and driving would look cuter.
It may be that the auto industry is intentionally suppressing advancements in Turbo Boost. This may be due to collusion with the tire industry. The more time spent airborne, the longer tires will last. It’s simple math. But if you’re looking to stick it to the tire industry and can’t wait for Turbo Boost, I’d suggest putting snow chains on your tires year round. It makes for a bumpier ride but your tires will last forever.
While I’ve never personally experienced Turbo Boost, I can imagine what it’s like to go soaring through the air while little children look up at you in awe. It’s pretty awesome. I’m imagining it right now. There’s one little kid looking up at me and he can’t believe how cool I am. And now there’s a tear in his eye. I hope it’s one of joy. Oh no. He just realized he’ll never be as cool as me. Now I feel guilty. Not too guilty though, because wheeeeeeeeeeee!
Turbo Boost would also be a big time-saver in heavy traffic or construction zones. If a deer runs out in front of you, Turbo Boost over it. If that deer is just a guy dressed as a deer and playing a prank, you won’t get convicted of manslaughter for driving into him.
What I’ve described here today is only the tip of the Turbo Boost iceberg. That’s why I implore the young and innovative tech companies to please invent Turbo Boost. Please, Mark Zuckerberg or Gary Google — if you’re reading this — the world needs you, and you’re the only ones who can save us.
BEST FEATURE: The name Turbo Boost is exciting, informative, and sounds a little like “burro juice.” WORST FEATURE: Once Turbo Boost is invented, a lot of people will be hitting their heads on their car ceilings.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing an onion.
Lina Wolff begins Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs with a character telling a first person narrator a story: “‘It was a Friday two weeks ago,’ Valentino told me on one of the days he drove me to school. ‘Alba Cambó and I met up at ten that morning and went for a spin in the car.’” As a reader, you don’t know who the narrator is. You know nothing about her (him?) other than what’s expressed between Valentino’s dialogue. She goes to school. Valentino gives her a ride. It’s not clear who Valentino is. The focus of his story is Alba Cambó. You don’t know who she is, either. For the next ten pages, Valentino tells a story of major, life changing events that occurred on that ride two weeks ago. The story is exciting. It’s gripping. It’s so interesting that you almost forget that Wolff is giving you no ground to stand on as a reader.
When I read the first chapter, I was fully invested in what Valentino told me about Alba Cambó, fully invested in their lives, but also struggling with this lack of a foundation. Who was “I”, the narrator? Why did she disappear after the first ten pages of her own novel? Why didn’t she respond to anything he said? Why didn’t she interject with her own feelings, her reactions, or even what she saw outside the car window? What was her relationship with Valentino? Why did he feel so comfortable sharing incredibly intimate details with her? Why is Alba so important to both of them? Should I be reading more into this? Do the names matter? Is Valentino supposed to harken romantic notions of a dashing silent film star? Does Alba’s last name carry symbolic weight: cambó, literally, “she bent”?
After a page or two of these questions, I had to make a decision: do I follow this author whom I’ve never heard of into uncharted reading territory or do I abandon this book for something more familiar, more comfortable? I knew that sticking with the novel would require a certain amount of trust. I would have to forego my typical expectations and reading patterns and just go with the flow of this novel. Valentino’s story was interesting enough. The fact that I cared to ask all of these questions so quickly mattered. I trusted Wolff and kept going. It was the right decision.
Part of the joy of this novel lies in all that is unknown. The back cover gives almost no sense of what to expect from the pages within. The title is misleading. It was possible for me to enter into my reading completely in the dark, then wait for Wolff to gradually turn on one light after another. She is a master at this. She controls the information in very compelling ways, giving just enough to intrigue, then letting us get lost in the characters before what’s going to happen happens. She’s so good about revealing the information slowly that I’m hesitant to even review this novel. I’ve already told you too much. You’re better off buying the book and reading it before you read another written here.
And now that I’ve done my due diligence in warning you, I’ll carry on with this review. Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs has nothing to do with Bret Easton Ellis. It’s just the name of a dog that a minor character, Rodrigo, talks about, a dog that the narrator never meets. It came from a brothel where all the dogs are all named after famous authors. Rodrigo buys the dog as part of his plan to repair his deteriorating marriage. If there’s a literary allusion at all, it’s simply that looking toward Bret Easton Ellis isn’t the best way to fix your relationship. This is a warning that you probably don’t need — who looks to Bret Easton Ellis for relationship advice, anyway? In the brothel, the prostitutes feed rotten meat to the dogs when johns are cruel. The back cover tells you as much. Neither are dripping with significance in the novel.
The misdirection continues in the very nature of the novel. It’s written in Swedish and by a Swede, but there are no Swedish characters and no reference to anything Scandinavian. It takes place entirely in Spain and follows Spanish (and one Italian) characters. It would feel Spanish except that the translator is English and he uses English colloquialisms. Araceli’s mother is “Mum,” their apartment is a “flat,” friends are sometimes “mates” and colors are “colours.” All of this adds up to something beautiful and global in the same way that Lee Van Cleef in a Spanish desert that was supposed to be the American West and fighting Italians who were supposed to be Mexicans all made sense in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Once all of these typical expectations are abandoned, you can get to the heart of the novel. Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs follows an eighteen-year-old narrator named Araceli. She lives with her mother in a crumbling two bedroom apartment in Barcelona. Not much is happening in their lives. Araceli attends a school for translation and interpretation even though she has no real talent for this and no real job opportunities on the horizon. Araceli’s mother is a government employee who eschews relationships but enjoys trysts. A short story writer named Alba Cambó moves into the apartment below them. At first, Araceli and her mother are intrigued by Alba from a distance. They buy the magazines that feature her short stories and read them. Gradually, they get to know her and her servant, a central American named Blosom. Alba, Blosom, and Araceli’s mother grow closer. The introduction of Alba’s new love, Valentino, only serves to strengthen their ties. The fact that Alba is dying — which she reveals to Valentino in that opening story of his — enriches their bond. Because she is a generation behind them, Araceli becomes the outcast of the group.
The novel moves forward, meanders, and backtracks through the stories of these women. While Araceli is the narrator and this is ultimately her story, she spends much of the novel in the background. She’s a character we’re familiar with in film: the best friend, the one whom the story is never about, but who shows up at a café to say to the protagonist, “What’s wrong? You haven’t been yourself lately?” At least, Araceli seems to see herself as somehow not worthy of a story all on her own. So Valentino tells his story, Rodrigo tells his, Blosom tells hers, Araceli witnesses the adventures of her mother and her more glamorous best friend and her famous downstairs neighbor, and we even get to read one of Alba’s short stories in a chapter all its own.
This discursive aspect of Bret Easton Ellis is reminiscent of The Savage Detectives. I know that, in about a decade, Roberto Bolaño has gone from obscurity to worldwide fame to the cliché reference point for all Latin American fiction. I don’t mention him lightly or make this comparison in passing. Wolff’s work reflects Bolaño like Haruki Murakami’s The Wild Sheep Chase reflects Raymond Chandler novels. In both cases, authors take something incredibly original and put it into a context so unexpected that the second work is brilliant in its own right. In this case, Wolff has learned something about how to tell a story from Bolaño. The Savage Detectives is revolutionary in the way it chooses to approach protagonists. The reader never gets too close to Ulysses or Arturo. We instead get the stories of everyone who encountered the pair — old friends, passing acquaintances, lovers, editors, enemies. Because we can never see the work of the two poets or read their thoughts or even get a chapter in which they’re the clear cut main characters, we have to reconstruct them in our mind from a series of tangential points. It’s never a clear view. In structuring The Savage Detectives this way, Bolaño touches on something unique to twenty-first-century identity construction. We’re starting to construct our own identities through tangential points — posts crafted to maximize likes, pictures or videos with no context that sometimes vanish after a few seconds, ideas restricted to 140 characters and shaped in hopes of retweets. Bolaño’s Ulysses and Arturo are hidden and guarded because they live the lonely, disconnected, and sometimes passionate lives of artists, not because they’re social media addicts. Regardless, in both cases, identities come to be hyperaware of how they’re viewed from the outside.
Wolff shifts this. Our protagonist is also our first-person narrator. Her hyperawareness of how others view (or more often, ignore) her becomes all the more poignant. She’s not searching for meaning in her life because, clearly, there’s not much hope for that. She’s not sharing much of her internal struggles, her ideas or dreams or feelings, because no one in her life seems interested in hearing them. Those around Araceli are dismissive of her to the point where Araceli seems to guard herself from what’s going on inside. Within this dismissal lies the real feminist power of the novel.
The only stories men will listen to in the novel are Alba’s. She writes dark stories about men who meet humiliating or violent ends. Her longest is about a mysterious place called Caudal. She describes it as the last town on the road to hell. The townspeople are the last remnants of an era on its way to becoming bygone. In many ways, they demonstrate the worst parts of our own personality, kind of a collective id that has forgotten how to have fun. A specter of death hovers over them. The cemetery is the town’s most prominent landmark. A new priest enters the town with hopes of reviving it. The town, instead, destroys him.
Even the men who don’t get humiliated or killed come across poorly in Alba’s stories. Still, men love the stories. Araceli seems to learn something from this. When she tells her own story, she finds way to show men in honest, if humiliating, ways. She lets them lead themselves to their own dark ends. Similarly, like Alba does in her stories, Araceli finds a way to keep the women prominent in the stories. The men can take the lead and carry on to their logical conclusions. The women, in the meantime, learn to operate on the margins. They work together and get stronger through this work. They confront their isolation and nurture one another. They leave situations that feel untenable. They reject patriarchy in blatant and subtle ways. As Araceli grows and changes around these women, she learns to tell her own story. While it may not matter much to the people around her, Araceli’s story matters to Araceli. As you read the novel, it matters to you, too.
I must admit that when Electric Literature presented me with the opportunity to interview subversive master of psychological suspense Peter Straub on the occasion of the release of Interior Darkness: Selected Stories, I was not a little intimidated at the prospect. Not only were Straub’s novels Ghost Story, Koko and The Throat dear to me growing up, but his short stories, which I had never read, elevated him to another level completely. Populated by sociopathic teenagers who turn their siblings into somnambulant puppets, murderous kindergarten teachers who slather themselves in human feces, and wicked barristers who fall headlong into self-made purgatories of psychosexual entrapment, Straub’s stories stopped me in my tracks, often with a chuckling grimace, and forced me to take stock anew of a world I wrongly thought I understood. Nor was my giddy apprehension at interviewing Straub ameliorated by the fact that, even by email, Straub is a fiercely intelligent man with a mordant and suffer-no-fools sense of humor. Over the course of a couple of weeks we struck up a warm and complex repertoire. Some highlights not included here were hypothetical riffs on the fate of a fictional character name Romilley “Bud” Bitterman that Straub invented on the spot, Straub’s continuous stream of self-deprecating yet never self-effacing humor, and Straub’s unapologetic fabrication of a quote by Roland Barthes that he insisted, nonetheless, on including in this interview. Straub is a funny, engaging, quick man, with a dark restless mind, a cantankerous streak, and lacerating self-awareness. I thoroughly enjoyed our talk and fully trust that you will, too.
Adrian Van Young: What struck me foremost in reading these stories was a kind of baroque compression whereby the sentences accrue and pile up on each other in a way that both hides and reveals. Hides, in that each story’s revelatory moment is often surrounded by a cascade of less important moments. Reveals, in that these revelatory moments stand out, in turn, from the less revelatory moments that surround them. Take, for instance, this passage from “Ashputtle,” about an ecstatically degenerate and possibly murderous kindergarten teacher, which comes suddenly in the middle of an otherwise normal paragraph: “How it felt to stand naked and besmeared with my own feces in the front yard, moveless as a statue, the same as all nature, classical.” Can you speak to this tendency in your short fiction in terms of what effect you mean it to have on the reader?
Peter Straub: In general, the kind of sentences you are alluding to have several purposes, or so I fondly think. The simultaneous concealment and revelation demonstrates a sort of aspirational quality, often leaching into outright pomposity, on the part of the speaker. He may be trying to present a more sophisticated, better-educated version of himself, so a bit of comedy is freed to float through the atmosphere. Lots of times, however, this kind of internal contradiction signals an emotional disconnection, which may be so pronounced that the speaker literally has in fact no idea how he feels about his subject matter. The reader is intended, I think, to move wool-gathering along, mildly surprised by the (strictly unnecessary) form of these utterances and now and then amused by some local distraction, perhaps eventually to be concerned by the distance between what is being said and what, if anything, is imagined actually to be felt. A great violence might lay hidden behind what turns out to be a strenuous act of denial. You’re a smart guy, you know that absence always involves or invokes a presence, that strictly speaking absence does not exist. It’s like an empty, self-consuming category, an onstage curtain.
However, the sentence you quote, and the many others like it in “Ashputtle,” have an actual provenance. Their use represents an all-but act of appropriation. Tonally, they actually are pretty much a pure example of appropriation. The same set of exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, of which at the time I was a patron, in which I found the John Baldessari painting titled “Ashputtle” had also displayed, on another floor, a good many abstract paintings by Agnes Martin. I loved the Martin paintings. They were astonishingly serene and meditative in feel. Passages from Martin’s journals had been printed up and distributed throughout the galleries. The passages quoted were all surpassingly calm, wide, unpredictable: they were sentiments like “I am the same as all of nature, classical,” and “The work of art has no responsibility to its audience.” Were I to give such excellent sentiments to the mad, furious Ashputtle just coming into being in my mind, I thought, they would acquire an odd and useful resonance. So I did.
AVY: “The reader is intended… perhaps eventually to be concerned by the distance between what is being said and what, if anything, is imagined actually to be felt.” That’s apt and lovely. Granted, pretty much any first-person narrator is unreliable to some degree, but the first-person narrators in these stories seem particularly unreliable, and then in very specific ways. What is your favorite brand of unreliability in a narrator? How does it factor into the frequent portrayals of madness you undertake in your work?
PS: Hmm. Yes. Well. It is a mire, it is a midden. I guess I begin with the conviction that very nearly everyone, well, at least 75–80% of our population, anyhow, serves as its own unreliable narrators — that one’s truest, deepest motives lie locked within a lead-lined tray in a locked lead-lined chamber buried within a locked lead-lined vault deep at the back of a sub-basement beneath a windowless stone fortress guarded by savage dogs and surly, pissed-off deaf mutes. Of this wretched condition, which condemns us to an ongoing emotional ignorance, we remain of course, guess what, happily ignorant, convinced that we are savvy characters with very good ideas of what we are about. For many, a mingled dread and terror, thoroughly repressed, becomes a constant though silent and invisible companion, so close at hand as now and then to be experienced, in fleeting dimply perceived though poignantly experienced moments, as an ally. All of this is the case before we take even a single step past the front door, before we turn the key in the ignition. Once we are outside and moving through the world, we bounce off other people as misguided as ourselves. Deeply hidden plots collide or collude with other motivic and thematic switchbacks hidden no less deeply. Madness can beckon very easily from this situation; the confusion level is positively toxic, and what keeps us out of trouble is chiefly good will and whatever intelligence we can summon from the murk.
I overstate, but not by much.
AVY: You say that, “…what keeps us out of trouble is chiefly good will and whatever intelligence we can summon from the murk.” Granted, you’re referencing real-life here, which has no bearing on fiction, necessarily, but all the same these stories are fairly bleak. In “Blue Rose,” for example, it would seem that the protagonist is aware of the heinousness of his actions toward his little brother and continues on with his life determined to do better — and yet, he only glancingly acknowledges his complicity — indeed, his instrumentality — in what happened. The story concludes on a sinister note. Do you see that kind of redemption through acts of good will and intelligence as available to your characters in these stories?
PS: Real life has no bearing on fiction? Is that what one learns in the theory-academies these days? I am baffled, profoundly. Somewhere in Writing Degree Zero, maybe some other book actually but I don’t think so, doesn’t Roland Barthes — you may find him a bit sketchy, and I understand completely, but I’ve always liked his way around a Dingan sich — say something very like, “As if addressing an intimate friend, one says to the world, ‘The luxury, richness, and amplitude of narrative cannot but derive in the first instance to its relationship, that of connective tissue and torn newspaper hoardings, between itself and the world in which it is given us?’” Probably I do not really understand that sentiment, but it has always reminded me of the conviction I’ve held for years and is by now very dear to me, that Fiction IS Life. Without fiction, a condition in fact unthinkable because impossible, whatever we would call life would be barren, sterile, without memory or enduring emotion, tasteless, like death. Also, and this is really a side issue but at least quite an important one, it is always true that fiction has deep designs on life. It wishes to replace life. I can tell you, it certainly wishes to replace mine. Fiction wants to worm its way into my every memory, even the little desiccated rags and scraps, and stake its claim there, it wants to pitch camp and colonize all the surrounding territory. That’s its god-damned JOB!
Bleakness is really okay with me, you know.
Being sociopathic and without much internal life beyond fear and desire, even in childhood Beevers is way farther along the path toward fiction (Fiction) than most of us. He’s sort of like a tiny, directionless, blocked John Updike, a little Updike without the resources of Shillington and Harvard and Berks County. Harry is bereft of good will, except at times when it seems instrumental and he can display an imitation so flawless it would dupe Mother Theresa and Jacques Lacan, but intelligence is always available to him. Redemption is a meaningless concept to Beevers at any age in his life. Whatever he writes his girlfriend about his little brother and his father is false, actorly, feigned. Bleakness is really okay with me, you know.
AVY: That’s my kind of outlook! And, apropos of the fiction/life discussion: “it is always true that fiction has deep designs on life. It wishes to replace it.” I like that too. I suppose what I mean is that verisimilitude in fiction has always seemed like a false dichotomy to me — that fiction is in some way obligated to reflect the world as it really is. “Relatable” has become such a buzzword these days when it comes to how people connect to narrative in a way that seems antithetical to that signal aim of fiction you cite: “[replacing] life.” Sometimes, the best narratives are profoundly un-relatable to the average person; indeed, many of the narratives in Interior Darkness are. That said, several of the stories in this collection are also deeply experimental, which I was surprised to find given how much commercial success you’ve had as a novelist. Can you discuss the relationship between experimentation and more traditional narrative aims in your fiction? Is there something about the short story that allows you to more fully exercise the former?
PS: I suppose the “relatable” and the “immersive” exist not only side by side but are also holding hands, and both apart and together represent a really satisfying narrative stance. Readerly safety, comfort, security are taken care of; the reader drops her hands, lets her oars drift in the water, and closes her eyes, knowing that her little boat will veer well away from the rapids. For a long time, Stephen King, whom I love as a person and as a writer, attracted readers who understood this as it were Prudential contract to be the only valid relationship between narrative and its audience. Anything that jolted them out of the frame, anything that forced them to notice the very process in which they were so happily engrossed, was experienced as an offense against the act of reading. I guess my doubts about the totality of this project began to come into being after I moved back from London to the U.S. in 1979, started spending a lot of time with my friend the poet Ann Lauterbach, and through her met the poet Charles Bernstein and the novelist and editor Bradford Morrow. None of these people had any real interest in the total immersion school of narrative method. The more time I spent with them, the more limiting I, too, came to find it. I did not want to blow my readers out of the water, but neither did I wish to continue perpetuating a system in which all they felt and understood was what I, their concealed and paternalistic guide and tour director, arrayed before them.
Oh, they were all dead; oh, so HE’s the vampire; hey, that little boy is God! Okay, cool, what else you got in that box?
Without quite being aware that this was what I was doing, I began to loosen the bolts and rattle the floorboards by taking the same crucial bits of character detail — what had been done to whom — and assigning them to different people from novel to novel. So and so grew up at a certain address in Book X; in book Y, another person is given the same address. His life both chimes and does not with the life of the character from the previous book. Traumas were distributed the same way, as if by an amnesiac or indifferent author. Doing these things allowed me to destabilize narrative without damaging the traditional integrity of individual novels. (Much later, Ann Lauterbach’s description of the “whole fragment” helped me clarify this kind of procedure — I mean, to clarify it to myself.) In shorter fiction, with which I was a lot less comfortable/familiar, it was a lot easier to conduct my experiments in plain view: the conventional genre short story, almost always dependent upon a sort of reversal of a conventional polarity, never did strike me as very compelling. Oh, they were all dead; oh, so HE’s the vampire; hey, that little boy is God! Okay, cool, what else you got in that box? I just took it as part of the essential procedure that all bets were off, that you could do anything you felt like, could suppress, heighten, distend, flatten, aerate, amplify as you liked. It is worth remarking that ninety per cent of my short fiction has been published in Brad Morrow’s intrepid journal, Conjunctions, where it rubs up against fiction by writers like William Gass, William Burroughs, John Barth, Brian Evenson, and Rick Moody.
AVY: That’s quite an array of company in Conjunctions. I see the influence of those I’m most familiar with in your work — especially Evenson, Gass and Burroughs. That said, when I was reading this collection I was reminded of nothing so much as the early work of Ian McEwan (First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets), specifically in the way he examines aberrant sexuality and rampant psychosis in this very cool, clinical light. I’m wondering: who are some other authors who have exerted the firehose pressure that we call influence on your work over the years? Who are some in more recent years that you’ve come to admire?
PS: I did always like the amazing writing of those early McEwan stories, and in fact kept on reading and admiring him right along. English novelists have always been very important to me. I liked the tone, the assurance, the implication that the whole central business was going to be taken care of really well, without fireworks or embarrassing displays of self-admiration. I’m speaking of Trollope, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Iris Murdoch, A S Byatt, Kingsley Amis, Muriel Spark. Of all these writers, Murdoch was far and away the greatest influence on me, especially in The Bell, The Unicorn, The Black Prince, The Nice and The Good. So was John Le Carre, in another way, especially in Tinker, Tailor and The Perfect Spy. Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet was also a huge influence on my work, both technically and emotionally. Henry James took up a lot of real estate in my mind, and the same is true of Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and John Gardner. I will describe the astonishing virtues and achievements of Donald Harington to anyone capable of listening to me for at least an hour. From when I first read him at the end of the seventies, Stephen King taught me a great deal, and he is still doing do. Newer writers I like a lot are Laird Barron, John Langan, Joe Hill, Caitlin Kiernan. Roberto Bolano has opened my eyes to a great deal, also the intrepid Laszlo Krasznahorkai. I think John Crowley is in a class by himself, of which he is naturally President. Once every decade or so, I reread The Ambassadors and marvel at the beauty of James’s language and technique.
AVY: That’s an estimable and in some ways surprising list. I’m especially interested in your mention of people like George Eliot, A S Byatt and Henry James. Partly due to literary-historical context and partly due to innate stylistic tendencies, these are all what I would call maximalist writers; they revel in the ornate, not only on the sentence level but also when it comes to things like structure, scope, characterization. Reading this collection all at once I was struck as though for the first time by what a gloriously ornate stylist you can be when you put your mind to it. I’m thinking specifically of stories like “Ashputtle” and “Mr. Cuff and Mr. Clubb,” and I’m wondering: is there a part of you that identifies as such a stylist? In a culture that increasingly values the “hot take” and defaults to terseness in its storytelling, what do you believe to be value of having an ornate and, some might even say, challenging style?
PS: When younger, by which I mean before I turned forty, I took an excessive amount of pride in the ornate lyrical complications of my own style. Not long after that spine-stiffening birthday, which I spent largely in a Westport, CT, riverfront bar called The Black Duck, I happened to notice that the style with which I had been so pleased had somehow softened up and run to fat and flab. Nuts to pride, it required a lot more discipline and attentiveness simply to be worthy of reading. I began to work toward a real transparency of style, and the word “work” in this sentence is not an over-statement. I wanted to get out of my own way, but even more than that to get out of the reader’s — to be as presentational as possible, as invisible as I could be while I went about doing my work. I worked this way for years, for at least a decade, without adjusting the formula.
Then I wrote a story called “Hunger: an Introduction,” not included in my Selected Stories, in which I wanted to release another kind of voice altogether, one more ornate, wilder, also more diffuse and pompous, a show-offy voice that demonstrated the aspirations, pretensions, self-satisfactions, and internal insecurities of the man producing it: a man who instead of “ratty” or “ratlike” would say “rodentine.” This was the origin of the style you admire. It began as an elaborate joke. In part because this sort of style was so absolutely different from the voice I began to evolve after I turned forty, it was very enjoyable to write — it was like a kind of holiday from responsibility, an invitation to have fun.
You will notice that in “Ashputtle” and “Clubb and Cuff” this more ornate style is still presented as the voice of specific characters and represents those characters’ evasions of various kinds. However, by the time I came to “Clubb and Cuff,” it no longer seemed merely the demonstration of evasiveness and pretension, but a valid method for presenting a more complex emotional style, a way of dealing with feelings. The revelations no longer needed to be purely unconscious, but a matter of individual will and intellect. It was still fun, but fun of a more exploratory nature. It felt to me like the opening of a room that had always been there but had been overlooked and passed by for a long time — entrance to the room seemed almost a bit dangerous, because in violation of orders that I had taken as my own decades earlier. Yet once I walked (burst) in, I learned that I was not at all damaging myself, but actually sort of expanding myself, not least into a variety of humor that I had been polishing in emails for maybe twenty years. Somewhere in the back of my mind as I write these sentences is the shade of Nabokov, the patron saint of so much American writing, especially in its maximalist and more self-consciously elevated modes.
AVY: Can we switch “rodentine” and “ornate” altogether? Transparency has its trade-offs, sure, but so do “ornate lyrical complications.” I wonder all the same though if it isn’t more rewarding for one to encounter a beautiful mess than a calibrated calibrated masterwork with monumental purpose. What beautiful messes do you most prefer?
I’m curious what you are working on now. Care to elaborate? What’s the new business?
PS: Here are some books, in part or altogether beautiful messes, that I like a lot.
Under the Volcano: Malcolm Lowry wrote his editor at Jonathan Cape a letter of more than twenty pages that justified and explained every square inch of this big, sprawling novel, a sure sign that it contains some substantial messiness. You don’t try that hard unless the wind is whistling down the back of your shirt.
Gravity’s Rainbow: Brilliant, sure, Pynchon always is, but too exuberant and unbuttoned to be anything but a bit of a mess.
The Tidewater Tales: John Barth’s great novel is straining against its own boundaries at every step. A deft, brainy, deeply felt exhilaration.
Women in Love: I think this is DH Lawrence’s absolutely greatest novel, really elevated by its sense of yearning to demolish both the conventions of fiction and its own limits.
These days and for maybe three years now I work away, when permitted by health and hospitals, on a long strange novel called Hello Jack. Jack the Ripper is invoked by a devoted admirer. The fifth-richest woman in America murders her dying husband. A black, retired homicide detective works as a private chauffeur, in which capacity he does a lot of good. Over various iterations of a very odd repeated story, the dead walk again, the young age hideously, and both seem exhausted by the effort. Henry James pops up, thinking hard, as does the 12-year-old Aleister Crowley. There’s a weird painting, but no one can figure it out.
Believe it or not, Fifty Shades of Grey and the Bible have wound up on the same book list: the American Library Association’s “Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged” books of 2015. John Green’s Looking for Alaska tops the list, which identifies the books — including nonfiction and picture books — that were most frequently recommended for censorship last year.
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
The Holy Bible
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Habibi by Craig Thompson
Nasreen’s Secret School: A True Story from Afghanistan by Jeanette Winter
Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan
OIF bases its rankings on “anecdotal data derived from media stories and voluntary reports sent to OIF about book challenges in communities across the United States.” The organization defines a “challenge” as “a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.” OIF estimates that “for every reported challenge, four or five remain unreported.”
The most common reasons for the 2015 book challenges include “unsuited for age group,” “religious viewpoint,” “homosexuality,” “offensive language,” and “sexually explicit.” Fifty Shades of Grey fell victim to censorship due to concerns that it’s “poorly written,” and that “a group of teenagers will want to try it.” People objected to Two Boys Kissing because it involves homosexuality and “condones public displays of affection.”
The “religious viewpoint” challenge had a number of different applications. People challenged The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, for instance, because of its “atheism.” NPR reports that a Florida parent challenged Nasreen’s Secret School: A True Story from Afghanistan out of fear that it would “indoctrinat[e] children with Muslim beliefs.” Deborah Caldwell Stone–deputy director of OIF–told NPR that people challenged the Bible, which appears on the list for the first time this year, based “on the mistaken perception that separation of church and state means publicly funded institutions are not allowed to spend funds on religious information.”
OIF publishes its annual list of challenged books to promote the freedom of information in libraries and schools, and to remind the public that “censorship is still a very serious problem.” “In an ideal world we would have more tolerance for the idea that people have different ideas, different beliefs and live in different cultures,” Stone told NPR. “Books are a way of exploring these different worlds and can help us appreciate the differences between us.”
Francesca Woodman was a late 20th century American photographer known for her dramatically staged black and white self-portraits. She started photographing at the age of 13 and produced an astoundingly large and diverse body of work before committing suicide at the age of 22.
I.
In the first Manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton lays out the heritage for his movement by retroactively claiming the great authors of the past were channeling his ideas: “Swift is Surrealist in malice,” “Reverdy is Surrealist at home,” and, my personal favorite, “Hugo is Surrealist when he isn’t stupid.” The absurdity of this is not unlike my mother’s claim that the one poem she wrote in middle school — “I see myself an old man now / with wrinkles deep across my brow” — is the wellspring for any poetic talents I might now be able to claim.
Woodman had a similar relationship to drugs. She was “already out there” when she was sober.
Breton goes on to point out that these artists are not always Surrealists, that there is some impurity in their thinking, namely forethought, that prevents them from accessing the unconscious for any extended amount of time. Rimbaud is the one person on his list that comes closest though; “[he] is Surrealist in the way he lived, and elsewhere.” His decision to bathe around twice a year, his endless experiments in absinthe and knife fighting, his defecating on a café table to show what he thought of impasto, all of these are swept under the Surrealist rug. Breton, though, was adamant that drugs were not to be involved in his movement; the drunkenness was to be totally induced from within.
According to Woodman’s good friend Betsy Berne, the photographer had a similar relationship to drugs. She was “already out there” when she was sober. Nevertheless, the link that many draw between her and her Surrealist predecessors is overstated, and her work is best appreciated in her own austere light. There is a feminist restraint, a cold eye, to her work that is totally unlike anything they produced. The only persuasive link between her and them is through Rimbaud, the proto-Surrealist, whose life and precocious mental faculties mirror her artistic arc and downfall more than any of Breton’s cronies or excommunicated cronies.
II.
Woodman famously produced all of her work by the age of 22 when she leapt to her death from a loft window, leaving behind over 800 prints and 10,000 negatives (her father believes the catalyst for this final act was a failed application for an NEA grant). All the poetry Rimbaud would ever write was produced before he turned 21 and ran off to Africa to deal in guns and coffee. He came to completely loathe the European continent and lifestyle, but couldn’t stop himself from ironically becoming its ambassador. Besides the obvious prodigy connection, they are bound together by their mutual insistence that they weren’t receiving proper recognition in their time even though they were still babes at the time of their departures from art. They, too, like my mother and T.S. Eliot, saw themselves as elderly and improperly laurelled from the onset. No doubt this is due to their high level of passion mixed with self-criticism at such early ages. Rimbaud continuously tills over his own pronouncements, at one moment claiming he alone holds the key to all invention, and at the next saying he’s going to bury his imagination forever. Woodman’s self-portraits, the first of which appeared at the age of thirteen, can similarly turn from celebration of the body to degradation, from portraying herself as an angel, to displaying herself unconscious in a glass case of hissing taxidermy raccoons.
Woodman’s self-portraits, the first of which appeared at the age of thirteen, can similarly turn from celebration of the body to degradation, from portraying herself as an angel, to displaying herself unconscious in a glass case of hissing taxidermy raccoons.
Their inner critics, though pitched to the same volume, were of two different natures due to their differing childhoods. Rimbaud came from a provincial background he would later describes as of “pagan blood” (although his mother was strict with him when it came to schooling and moved the family out of a neighborhood she considered poor), while Woodman was the child of two well-off, moderately successful artists who set the standards for her achievements. In Rimbaud’s work his wretchedness can always be attributed to his upbringing or to the French society that tried to shape him, and eventually succeeded in turning him into a colonial capitalist. Much of this is played out in ASeason in Hell, “The pagan blood returns! The Spirit is near; why doesn’t Christ help me, by giving my soul nobility and freedom. Alas! The Gospel has passed by! The Gospel! The Gospel.” In typical Rimbaud fashion, even the request for aid is both sincere and sarcastic. He doesn’t believe in the Gospel in the slightest; these are merely the only terms he’s inherited for salvation.
There was no world to turn against, only a world to turn into, and so when the breaking point comes for her, society is absolved of its sins.
Woodman, however, never finds comfort in blaming the world at large for her problems. Because of her parents, her life from a young age was spent in expression, visiting the Uffizi to sketch masterpieces, discovering photography. There was no world to turn against, only a world to turn into, and so when the breaking point comes for her, society is absolved of its sins. She does thoroughly examine the “male gaze,” but her work is too insular and claustrophobic and Puritanically austere for the frame to fully believe in societal forces beyond her control. She brings everything under her control. In fact, if I had to play Breton’s game of assignment with Woodman, I’d say her consistent staging of tableaux vivants makes her a “Surrealist in forethought,” a contradiction in his eyes, but he was so fond of contradictions and paradoxes that it might be most apt. Here, too, her reasoning powers are aligned with Rimbaud who believed poetry was the result of a “rational derangement of all the senses.”
III.
Not only is she more aligned with critical aspects of Rimbaud, as mentioned, her link to the Surrealists is tenuous, though she did admittedly admire the interplay between text and photography in Breton’s Nadja, and her props — the mirrors, gloves, masks, and occasional stuffed animals — were all favored by Surrealist predecessors. In many of her photos she’s transubstantiating her inheritance with her body. She presents a direct challenge to the Surrealist’s He-man Woman Haters Club (and a challenge to their extreme fondness for transforming anything and everything into glass).
The uncanny anxiety I experience when looking at her work makes me feel as though no one is watching nor should they be.
Take for example the series A woman. A mirror. A woman is a mirror for a man. The literal looking glass in question is a wide cheval mirror that barely rises to Woodman’s navel, the kind of height and width appropriate only for pre-teen conjoined twins. There are circular dust marks smeared across it as though it had been cleaned previously with a dirty rag. In the first frame she appears nude kissing the butt of a cat that’s jumping off and away from her (this cat presages some of her own animalistic movements to come). The room itself is in flux between an abandoned factory and an artist’s studio converted from an abandoned factory. On the ground there is a three-cubby cupboard whose mosaic frame is seemingly composed of mirrors. There’s one frame of a floor to ceiling window in the far right of the shot, which one would normally associate with voyeurism except the factory across the way looks just as dead as the one Woodman is occupying. And, because Woodman is both classic nude model and photographer, the picture itself lacks a traditional maker/voyeur. The uncanny anxiety I experience when looking at her work makes me feel as though no one is watching nor should they be. When I step behind that vacant camera to view a print, instead of filling the role of maker she’s left empty, I feel my ego float away and pass its control totally and solely down to my eyes.
The technique and set-up of this first photo also plays with metaphysics in another way. The factory space is distorted due to the long exposure time, the high contrast, and the tilt of the cheval mirror. It’s almost entirely implausible that its reflection belongs to this room (the far window appears shrunken, whited-out, and oblique, that’s our one clue, so at best it’s a funhouse mirror). There is something of the fairy-tale then in this first picture that intrudes, the link to another space, a wardrobe offering the escape to elsewhere. The second photo in the series comes as a shock then, when Woodman grabs the mirror, looks into it, and the door to elsewhere swings shut with her tenderly distorted face. Her body and hands threaten to bring the mirror down to the horizontal so she can fully transform into Caravaggio’s Narcissus (a self-critique on her many self-portraits as well a reminder that our prototype for vanity is a man). The light streaming down from the window casts a shadow that belongs to Woodman’s mirror-self, whereas her corporeal shadow is nowhere. So, not only has this elsewhere been cut off, the mirror has been given a reality that the room and the body lack.
In the third picture of the series, the camera shifts in and to the right of its previous location. We are given a better sight of the large industrial windows and now Woodman is holding a glass frame, facing the camera. Nothing from our side of the view is reflected in the glass she’s holding, and it can only really be made out because of its edges and its scratches and a stray piece of tape failing at translucency. The photo is almost wholly taken over by reflective surfaces, mostly surfaces that can also be seen through. The right side of her face is totally obscured by shadow and the left is obscured because of the long exposure. Behind her, the mirror appears threateningly darker than the room it’s reflecting and the contrast reminds me of a section of Louis Aragon’s post-Surrealist poem “Elsa at the Mirror”, translated here by George Dillon: “Her dark glass was the world’s facsimile / Her comb, parting the fires of that silken mass, / Lit up the corners of my memory.” The reflection of Woodman’s mirror, as in the first parts of the series, seems to be misremembering the room it’s currently in.
The meaning of the glass frame becomes apparent in the last print. Here Woodman is trying to mount herself to the cheval mirror, to literalize the metaphor of the title. Unlike another untitled photo from this same time period in Providence, the frame isn’t disfiguring her just yet. Her animalistic movements suggest we are looking at the reflection of the spirit trying to yoke itself. Since this is the last in this series, everything that is implied by this act remains for the imagination to fill in, the struggle and disfigurement and impossibility, while here we see a portion of her body “framed” by the glass, another “framed” by the mirror, and the whole “framed” by the limits of the actual photo. Woodman shows us through this excessive framing as well as through the discreteness of the series that the body is never considered “in the round”; she forces us to consider that the images reflected on our retinas are two-dimensional no matter how spherical our eyes appear to be. This effect is reinforced by the small size of the original prints; at only 5 and 3/4” by 5 and 3/4”, they force you to confront the intimacy and flatness of your own experience.
The body is never considered “in the round”; she forces us to consider that the images reflected on our retinas are two-dimensional no matter how spherical our eyes appear to be.
IV.
One reason why this work and many of her other photos resonate so deeply is that their claustrophobic atmospheres, their blurred or obscured faces, recall certain strains of dreams and nightmares that evaporate just as their reality is about to be proven dubious. In my own, there is always something imminent occurring, a tornado absent-mindedly picking up a little girl, a deranged man holding a knife holding my reflection, and always my body is unmoving, but attempting to scream, as if noise alone could stop whatever is occurring and pierce the veil of Maya. I’m never able to speak anything more than clipped words, which sound like panting to my significant other whenever I wake her and myself up. In my head the words have endings, but on my tongue they’re reduced to unorganized air.
…her other photos resonate so deeply is that their claustrophobic atmospheres, their blurred or obscured faces, recall certain strains of dreams and nightmares that evaporate just as their reality is about to be proven dubious.
The analysis of these dreams is easy enough. They’re linked to my own feelings of poetic self-criticism and my inability to speak without first bending each word to my will, exerting a Woodman-like control over my environment. It’s impossible for me to stop wanting to individualize each thought enough so that it’s sincere, to process my feelings to such a degree that they wind up feeling genuine, so that I can place them back into the body where they started. Woodman and Rimbaud’s mission is similarly visceral and embodied. In Rimbaud’s “Genie” for example, he invents a new god to clear out the terror of the morality of the past and the suffering of Christian guilt; this outdated morality is replaced with “the clear song of new misfortunes!” Later he intones that we should “follow his seeing, his breathing, his body, his day.” Because Christ’s sufferings were so tied to his corporality, he can only be replaced by a figure who incarnates the new misfortunes of modernity. The only consolation we’re left with is clarity, and if this clarity of feeling is indeed the new god, then Woodman, through obfuscation and reflection and the fog of long-exposure, is as clear as it gets.
Crabby and Albina the albino giantess leave town on a bicycle built for two after drugging the corrupt and lecherous policeman Drumfoot, who is now dangerously transformed by a bite from Albina. While disturbed by the violence they’ve witnessed, the new companion they rescue might change their cynical idea of men.
Crabby pedaled in the forward seat. Albina, behind, moving her enormous legs automatically without holding onto the handlebars, was writing in her notebook: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I do know with whom I’m going. I don’t know where I am, but I do know that I’m here. I don’t know what I am, but I do know how I feel. I don’t know what I’m worth, but I do know not to compare myself to anyone else. I don’t know how to dodge punches, but I do know how to withstand them. I don’t know how to win, but I do know how to escape. I don’t know what the world is, but I do know that it’s mine. I don’t know what I want, but I do know that what I want wants me.”
In that manner, they reached the outskirts of Iquique. The fishmeal factories appeared, covered by a thick layer of café-con-leche colored dust and vomiting thick smoke that slithered up through the chimneys and down to the ground, where they threw down roots and stuck. Rotten meat, acrid excrement, fermented guts — the stench passed through their pores, infected their blood, and tried to infect their souls. Crabby made Albina sit up front and pedaled behind her, sinking her nose into Albina’s wide back. The pestilence was like the mass of demons born from Crabby’s intestines, and the fragrance that emanated from Albina’s white skin, the redemption of the world. Barely breathing, they covered twelve more miles.
After a steep hill, the ocean appeared, sending its salty aroma toward the flank of the mountain, which, under that extended caress, responded with a thousand perfumes from its ochre earth. “Let’s stop to enjoy the pure air and to eat a bit. Just look, Albina, all I have to do is stroll among the rocks on the shore for the crabs to come to me.” Which was exactly the case; hundreds of crustaceans came out of the cracks and began to follow Crabby. It was easy to catch a couple, open them up, roast them on a red-hot stone, and devour them. All the while crabs never stopped rubbing against the legs of the woman they considered their Universal Mother.
A ray of lunar light passed through the keyhole and hit Drumfoot’s forehead. He awakened without realizing he was naked, and lifted the leg with his normal foot to scratch himself behind the ear. Then he went into the kitchen and lapped up the water in the washbasin. Since the door resisted his shoves, he pulled up some of the floorboards and used his hands to dig into the clayish soil and make a hole to get out. He howled at the waning moon and set out, bent over, sniffing the road. “Mmm… they stopped here and placed their feet right on this spot… mmm!… they peed here and… mmm!” He rolled around in Albina’s excrement, panting with pleasure.
Some soldiers on coastal patrol found him that way, naked and carrying out that fetid act. After giving him a good thrashing, paying no attention to his heartrending barks, they dragged him off to the police station. After two days, he got his mind back. The bite on his shoulder had healed, leaving a violet, half-moon shaped scar. “Those witches will get what they deserve!” Drumfoot spent hours sharpening his knife.
The narrow road built by the Incas along the ridge seemed to float over the abyss. Far below, the waves, transformed into gigantic foamy lips, called to them, insidiously sucking. Luckily, the landscape flattened out little by little, and the path was swallowed up by the dunes on a beach. Albina stripped, ran over the hot sand, and plunged into the glacial water. Crabby followed her, fully dressed. They swam, frolicked, ate clams, and drank the little water they had left, knowing that if they didn’t find a town soon, thirst would swell their tongues.
Original illustrations for ALBINA AND THE DOG-MEN by François Boucq, courtesy of Restless Books
Twelve bowlers floated out of a creek followed by top hats, pith helmets, military caps, pork pie hats, Panama hats, and a huge variety of hats with upturned brims. The tide was carrying them to the shore like an armada of fragile little boats. The intrigued women climbed the rocky wall. On a narrow beach, a small man — he had no visible deformity, so he couldn’t be called a dwarf — surrounded by empty hatboxes was staring out to sea. As they watched he burst into high-pitched laughter, ran toward the high waves, and let himself be carried away, beginning to drown in those convulsing waters.
Albina dove in. Swimming vigorously, she reached the desperate man, knocked him cold with a punch to the jaw, and floated him to the beach. Crabby shouted in a rage, “Why did you bother to risk your life? You should have let him carry out his destiny! He may be small, but he is a man, and one less man in the world is a good thing!” The drowned man opened his eyes, and with an amiable smile said to Crabby, “Madam, perhaps my destiny was to be saved by your friend here, or, even better, perhaps I’m here so that your destiny can be carried out. The plans of mystery contain multiple paths. But I see you have eaten clams! Allow me to translate what these scattered shells mean.” And the little man examined the remains.
“The white lady, who has fled from a temple — I don’t know if she transmits a blessing or a curse. She’s something less or something more than human. With regard to you, Madam Anger, it seems you hate men because you see them as identical to your father, a thin, tall, dead man who was a callous remover by profession. Since I am the opposite of him, a pudgy, living, short man, a hat maker by profession, you may accept me as a partner without a second thought.”
“As a partner? You’re raving mad!”
“Wait a second, let me go on interrogating my clams. A dangerous enemy is chasing you. One of you dances, and the other manages her. You’re looking for a tranquil place to set yourselves up. Now I appear. About a mile from here, in a ravine near the Camarones River — not much of a river, true, but more than welcome in these sandy territories — is my town, Camiña. A little-known place because the highway is far away from it and you can only get there on foot or by mule. About forty years ago, miners loaded with silver from the Chanabaya mine came to town. My father sold them all kinds of hats, because they wanted to look elegant for the prostitutes working in the saloons. But the silver veins gave out, the miners went off to other regions, and the whores followed them. I inherited an enormous shop filled with bowlers, wide-brimmed, narrow-brimmed, and pork-pie hats opening their felt jaws hungry for heads. Those mute complaints drove me to despair. With no other profession than this useless hat-making business and forced by my stature to have no wife, sick with boredom, I decided to bury myself in the sea along with my little felt brothers. But as you two may see, I have a different destiny. Come with me, I’ll give you everything I have, a magnificent shop in the center of town! There you can set up, as the clam shells tell me, the café-temple you want!”
Original illustrations for ALBINA AND THE DOG-MEN by François Boucq, courtesy of Restless Books
Hiding a smile under her severe face, Crabby looked over at Albina, certain she’d burst into a crystalline laugh of approval. The little man was offering them exactly what they had been seeking but had no hope of ever finding, convinced they could only locate it in an unreachable future. But perhaps because the day ended so brusquely, devoured in one bite by the full moon, Albina tensed her muscles to the point that her white skin turned garnet red, showed her teeth, as if all of them were canines, and stuck out a hard, black tongue. Leaping like a wild beast, she snatched the hat maker, wrapped him in a rib-smashing embrace, pulled off his clothes, rubbed her body with his as if the poor man were a sponge, and bit him on the left shoulder, pulling off a piece of flesh she swallowed with delight. Squealing with a sensual pleasure that filled her stomach with waves, she sat down, foaming at the mouth, and recited for hours incomprehensible words: “Bhavan abhavan iti yah prajanate… sa sarvabhavesu na jatu sañjate…” Crabby, always wearing her severe mask, swallowing her astonishment (she considered that with regard to Albina’s unsoundable mysteries it was just better to let them pass, perhaps like divine serpents), picked up the hat maker’s torn clothing, took needle and thread out of her pocket, and with the precision of a sailor sewed everything back together. The hat maker, almost stiff, sometimes emitted small barks or wiggled his backside as if wagging an invisible tail. Soon the sun came up. No sooner did the first ray of light caress her face than Albina, even though she hadn’t slept, seemed to awaken from a deep sleep. Pale once again, she made a small cry of sympathy and went to the hat maker, who was still in a faint, and licked his shoulder. The wound closed in a few seconds and became a violet half moon.
While Albina recovered from her attack by breathing in the sea air and waving her arms like a giant albatross, Crabby dressed their new friend. When she put on his trousers, she surprised herself examining with pleasure that short, large-headed pink penis arising humbly from a clenched scrotum grooved with wrinkles ordered like an ancient labyrinth. It enraged her to admire that sublime and grotesque appendage. She smacked him on the back, and barely had he blinked when she said incisively, “Seeing is believing, John Doe. If your worship says we three are knotted into the same destiny, let’s not make a habit of rejection, and let’s accept that Camiña awaits us. But before we take the first step along that fatal path, please be so kind as to tell us your name — that is, if you have one. I for one don’t go beyond my nickname. Crabby, at your service. My friend, in accord with her pigmentation, is named Albina.”
“Madam Crabby, Miss Albina, for many years now I’ve been called Hat Maker. Even so, I must confess — overwhelmed by shame, since it is a ridiculous injustice — that I was baptized Amado, because my last name, perhaps of Italian origin, is Dellarosa. So I am ‘beloved by the woman who is a rose!’ How’s that for a lie?” And the little man began to weep. Crabby spit violently toward the parched hills so that she wouldn’t feel the knot in her throat.
In that dried out valley, where the earth was a hard shell covered by a pattern of angular cracks, Amado Dellarosa guided them for hours along a steep path that went forward, backward, twisted left, then after a very long curve, went right, straightened out and again went forward, repeating the same movements again and again, hundreds of times. Crabby shook her head trying to banish an impertinent thought: this capricious path was a labyrinth that resembled in every detail the wrinkles on the little man’s scrotum. Albina, perhaps affected by rays of the sun drilling into her skull, began to repeat obsessively a single sentence: “Seek in the root the future flower.” Finally they entered a grand plateau surrounded by mountains: Camiña.
Original illustrations for ALBINA AND THE DOG-MEN by François Boucq, courtesy of Restless Books
The town consisted of an extensive circle of wooden houses built around a plaza where grew four enormous cypresses whose trunks were studded with woody eyes, making them look like a nest of ghosts. No living person or animal was visible. No breeze shook the spiny branches, no curtain waved, no fly buzzed. Everything looked clean, dry, immobile, and silent.
“Dear friends, don’t think my town is a cemetery. After twelve o’clock noon it’s so hot that all inhabitants, along with their pets, retreat to the penumbra of home and take a seven-hour siesta. For their part, the wild animals dig tunnels under the desert plain so they can let the heat pass while in narrow but cool grottoes. Believe me, King Sol hits so hard in these parts that the mosquitoes die in midair. Later in the afternoon, when the temperature becomes agreeable, the businesses still functioning — barbershop, billiard hall, grocery store, herb shop — open their doors while the townspeople stroll the ring-street, men in one direction and women in the other, doing nothing else but staring at one another and saying hello. Nothing extraordinary ever happens here. When the Chanabaya mine closed down and the miners left, the Lady, along with her whores, went off after them. By some miracle, she forgot us. For a long time now, no one has died in Camiña. Old folks, when they’re informed they have to give up and yield their spot to someone new, go to live in the abandoned mine tunnels, a charnel house that goes on for miles toward the very entrails of the earth. We know they’re still alive because from time to time they form a chorus and sing old love songs. It seems — though no one has proven it, as we’re all scared to death of even going near the mine — that they eat the red clay that covers the walls. As for us, we’ve learned to survive by keeping bees from the pampa. It’s a rare species, peaceful up to a point. If you approach them on tiptoe, fine, but if someone approaches planting his entire foot on the ground, they sting him without pity and he falls into a coma, transformed into a mass of rashes. For lack of flowers, these worker bees suck the juice of sea algae and make a delicious, salty honey. As you can see, the roofs of all the houses are covered with hives. Pinco, the deaf mute, transports our product to Arica on burros. The tourists just love it, and the money we get from sales allows us to survive. We are bored, yes, but in a certain way we secretly enjoy the fact that we have at our disposal an apparently infinite amount of time. You must understand that lacking any end changes your mentality. The urgency to do things disappears; idleness, once a sin, has become a virtue. The present moment stops causing trouble and offers us its unconcerned calm. Hope, because it’s unnecessary, is expelled from our souls along with fear. Since we all have the security of living, the only thing we long for is to sleep and find the opium that is pleasant dreams. Solitary pleasure is preferred rather than bothersome coitus. Seduction, lacking a mortal anguish to exacerbate it, becomes an obstacle. A long robe, wide and black, accompanied by a handkerchief worn on the head makes all women identical. It makes no difference whether you marry this one or that one, and that’s only done when a pregnancy is needed to fill the vacancy left by an old person. Do you see why I tossed my hats into the sea and wanted to make the waves my grave? Living without death is not living. But here I am going on and on, while the hat shop awaits us.”
No one peered out to see them arrive, despite the fact that their footsteps, no matter how hard they worked to make them weightless, resounded on the whitish asphalt, turning it into a drum. Suddenly, a voluminous bee, its body a brilliant scarlet, flew over to trace a halo around Crabby’s head. The hat maker whispered, “Make not the slightest gesture. It’s a warrior-spy. It can sting without losing its stinger, and its poison is deadly.” Crabby, stiff despite the heat, thought she would sweat ten thousand gallons of cold water. And her terror increased when the animal slowly flew toward Albina. Smiling, Albina shook her hips, opened her mouth, and stuck out her tongue. The bee landed on that moist appendage and began to drink her saliva. Gorged, it used its stinger to draw a tiny cross on Albina’s white throat and then drew another on Crabby’s forehead. Then it flew off like a flame to its hive. From all the roofs arose a general buzzing, rather like rain falling from the earth to the sky. “Well,” said the little man, “both of you were accepted! Hallelujah! I don’t have to tell you how many smugglers and bandits have been killed by those guardians! Without their permission, no outsider enters our town.”
Original illustrations for ALBINA AND THE DOG-MEN by François Boucq, courtesy of Restless Books
Crabby swallowed her rage. Without warning her, this squirt had dared — a second time — to place the life of her friend at risk. Her own mattered nothing to her, but Albina’s? Shit! To say man is to say calamity! Nevertheless, the bitter saliva in her mouth became sweet syrup when the miserable pygmy raised the metal gate and, with the face of an angel, the eyes of a dove, and the gestures of a gift-giver, showed them the spacious place, where more than two hundred idiots could be packed in. “Thank you, Don Amado!” The now likeable little man stood before her on tiptoe and offered her his forehead. Crabby wrinkled her nose in disgust for an instant, and then, suddenly, as if a stretched elastic band had broken within her heart, she smiled for the first time at a man. Enveloped in a cloud of tenderness, she bent over, and planted a kiss between his eyebrows. Bursting into diaphanous laughter, Albina took off her clothes, and with her marmoreal skin shining like a star in the half-light, began to dance in order to bless the new café-temple.
On a khaki motorcycle, Drumfoot traced the road that rose toward the north. A blood infused with hatred accumulated in his erect penis. In his right fist vibrated a knife, also infused with hatred. The two extremes were guiding him, one wanted pleasure, the other death. While the mountain wind had swept away all tracks from that dirt path, a third extreme, his nose, with its abnormally developed sense of smell, picked up traces of the effluvia emanating from the white woman. It was a vaginal scent, unctuous, biting, bittersweet, greenish, as fragrant as the ivy flowers that open at dawn. Mmm! Suddenly an intolerable stench expelled him from his olfactory paradise. Blood poured from his nostrils. Barking his complaints, he passed by the fishmeal factories. He began to cough, lost control, and, making a leap, twisting like a beast, he fell on all fours, clinging to the edge of the pavement while his motorcycle smashed to pieces on the rocks a hundred yards below.
He left behind the sticky smoke infecting those territories and reached the beach. Vomiting, he ran to dive into the frigid ocean. When the salt water had extirpated even the tiniest particle of stench, he shook his body vigorously, surrounding it for a few seconds with a cloud of golden drops. He growled with satisfaction; there, abandoned at the outset of a narrow path, stood the bicycle built for two! He sniffed it over from end to end, from the handlebars to the tires. He licked the seat that had sunk itself between Albina’s buttocks, and then, overwhelmed by an enraptured hatred, his lower jaw tremulously revealing his canines, he ran along the path, his knees bent, using his hands as feet by leaning on his fists. Soon, so many curves, advances, twists, and switchbacks exasperated him. He located a point in the north, his goal, and left the path to get to it in a straight line. When it was already nightfall, after many hours of trotting, he realized with angry shock that he’d reached his starting point. There was the bicycle, now covered by a sheet of crabs.E
Ninety-five Mississippi writers signed a letter that calls for the repeal of House Bill 1523, an anti-LGBTQ law that is set to go into effect July 1st. Novelist Katy Simpson Smith penned the statement and recruited the signees, which include John Grisham, Donna Tartt, and Kathryn Stockett.
As The Washington Post reports, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) signed HB 1523 last week. The measure “protects ‘persons, religious organizations and private associations’ from discrimination claims if they refuse to serve anyone based on the belief that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.”
“There’s this sense that Mississippi has gone down this path before,” Smith told The Post. After growing “more and more frustrated,” she decided to use her platform as a writer to speak out against the bill. She sent her statement to “as many writers as she could” and received 95 signatures. “It was an amazing thing,” she said, “to see this outpouring of support from the writing community.”
In the letter, Smith writes, “What literature teaches us is empathy. It reminds us to reach out a hand to our neighbors–even if they look different from us, love different from us–and say, ‘Why, I recognize you; you’re a human, just like me, sprung from the same messy place, bound on the same hard road.’” “It is deeply disturbing to so many of us,” Smith continues, “to see the rhetoric of hate, thinly veiled, once more poison our political discourse.”
Here is the complete letter and list of signees, available through the Jackson Free Press:
Statement of Mississippi Writers Opposing HB 1523
Mississippi has a thousand histories, but these can be boiled down to two strains: our reactionary side, which has nourished intolerance and degradation and brutality, which has looked at difference as a threat, which has circled tightly around the familiar and the monolithic; and our humane side, which treasures compassion and charity and a wide net of kinship, which is fascinated by character and story, which is deeply involved in the daily business of our neighbors. This core kindness, the embracing of wildness and weirdness, is what has nurtured the great literature that has come from our state. What literature teaches us is empathy. It reminds us to reach out a hand to our neighbors — even if they look different from us, love different from us — and say, “Why, I recognize you; you’re a human, just like me, sprung from the same messy place, bound on the same hard road.” Mississippi authors have written through pain, and they have written out of disappointment, but they have also written from wonder, and pride, and a fierce desire to see the politics of this state live up to its citizens. It is deeply disturbing to so many of us to see the rhetoric of hate, thinly veiled, once more poison our political discourse. But Governor Phil Bryant and the Mississippi legislators who voted for this bill are not the sole voices of our state. There have always been people here battling injustice. That’s the version of Mississippi we believe in, and that’s the Mississippi we won’t stop fighting for.
Miroslav Penkov’s novel Stork Mountain sprawls in unexpected ways. Initially, the plot seems familiar: a young man returns to his ancestral home in Bulgaria, near that country’s border with Turkey, to hash out the fare of some familial property. But this, like so many things, refuses to go according to plan. The narrator’s relationship with his grandfather is a complex one, each revealing and withholding certain pieces of information along the way. There’s also the narrator’s infatuation with Elif, a young woman whose family’s history hearkens back to Bulgaria’s treatment of its Muslim citizens in the days of Communism. Along the way, Penkov incorporates several decades’ worth of history, along with folklore and mythology, both real and imagined. Our conversation, conducted via email, touched on everything from the way gender and family are handled in Stork Mountain to the time Penkov spent being mentored by Michael Ondaatje.
Tobias Carroll: Reading Stork Mountain left me with a substantial sense of the spaces you’re writing about–the Strandja Mountains, the city of Burgas, the border between Bulgaria and Turkey. What first drew you to writing about this region? And given that they loom large throughout the novel, I was also curious about your experience with the nestinari. When did you first encounter them, or the idea of them?
Miroslav Penkov: It was around the time I turned nineteen that I felt, for the first time, the kind of a pull place can exert on the human heart. I had just left Bulgaria and now a student in the US I was feeling terribly homesick. Writing was the cheapest, quickest way I knew that would get me back home and it was through writing, I think, that I truly fell in love with Bulgaria.
I knew then, from the get-go, that like with my story collection, I must write a novel set in Bulgaria. But I wanted the novel to be of grander scope–to combine several timelines, past and present, to weave in legend and myth, historical fact and complete fiction. And I knew I would need a central image–an anchor for the place and the story and the characters.
Once in my childhood, vacationing with my parents on the Black Sea, I’d witnessed the dance of the nestinari. It may have been only a tourist attraction, but the memory of these beautiful women and men walking barefoot across glowing coals never really left me.
One day, many years later, I was reading Gore Vidal’s Creation. Early on there are descriptions of Zoroastrian fire temples, of drinking haoma and hearing the voice of the flame, and I remember catching myself thinking of the nestinari and of their own ritual fires. I knew, right away, that I’d found my anchor.
The problem was, I knew nothing of substance about this old ritual. So I resolved to learn. To my amazement, certain sources really spoke of a Persian influence. Of the Wise Lord Ahura Mazda, of the Zoroastrian veneration of fire which had somehow made its way to the Balkans, where Greeks and Bulgarians had incorporated it into their own rituals. But there were other influences. First, the Eleusinian Mysteries, held every year in Greece for the cult of Demeter and Persephone. Then, the maenads, the mad priestesses of Dionysus who drank doctored wine and danced madly in his honor; and who, in their exhilaration, were known to tear sacrificial goats to pieces and even men who’d be foolish enough to disturb them. We all know those stories of Orpheus, himself dismembered by the maenads, his wretched head floating down the Helikon river. And Orpheus was a Thracian deity and the Thracian tribes had once lived in what is now Bulgaria. The maenads too had danced in Bulgaria and specifically in one particular mountain, where the cult of Dionysus had been most widely spread. The Strandja Mountains, on the border with Turkey, close to Greece. The Strandja Mountains, which, as I discovered in my amazement, happened to be the only site where the nestinari still practiced their dance.
The more I read, the clearer it became to me that the Strandja herself was a fire dancer. That for millennia, time and again, she had passed through fire, been reduced to ash and risen again.
I knew then that I’d found my place. But again there was a problem–I didn’t know all that much about the Strandja (beyond the basics I’d learned in school) and I’d never hiked its hills. So I began to read more about its tragic history, about the countless wars, the massive migrations of people forced to abandon their homes. The more I read, the clearer it became to me that the Strandja herself was a fire dancer. That for millennia, time and again, she had passed through fire, been reduced to ash and risen again.
TC: Have you found that this is a region that hasn’t been written about much in literature, or are there other works that you’d recommend to readers looking for more about this part of the world?
MP: Strangely enough, not that much fiction has been written about the Strandja Mountains. Or if it has, I couldn’t find it. And maybe that’s for the best as I felt like I’d been given a blank canvas; like I could be absolutely free. By the way, it’s important to note that the Strandja Mountains of my novel are my own invention, a fictional place like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county or Garcia Marquez’s Macondo. I wasn’t interested in writing a history book, or an ethnographic monograph. I was interested in doing what Kazantzakis does in The Last Temptation of Christ. His characters are walking as much through Jerusalem, as they are through the Crete of his childhood. And so I too was describing the actual Strandja, but also the mountains where I’d spent my summers as a child.
I did, however, find some great sources describing, in excruciating detail, the rituals of the nestinari. I acknowledge them at the end of the novel, but most notably helpful was the early 20th-century work of Mihail Arnaudov.
In 2013 I went to the village of Balgari, to watch a proper fire dancing ritual. A little before sunset, an hour or so prior to the dance, it began to pour, drenching spring rain. People crammed inside the old church on the village square (an old-fashioned church, with a balcony for the women folk) and so I too hid inside. And there I stumbled upon a writer friend–Kapka Kassabova–she lives in Scotland and writes in English–who, accompanied by the village mayor, had been collecting material for her own book.
This book is coming out soon, I believe, a collection of essays, and I imagine it will show the region in a more journalistic fashion. Here is a link to one of the essays.
Also of interest may be Georgi Gospodinov’s novel The Physics of Sorrow, beautifully translated in English by Angela Rodel.
TC: The scope of Stork Mountain expands outward–it starts as the story of a young man returning to his ancestral home, and gradually incorporates stories from mythology, the narrative of his family through much of the 20th century, and questions of nationality and religion. How did you go about finding the right balance between these elements?
MP: I’m not sure I ever did find the right balance. I think I did my absolute best searching for it, but I’m entirely prepared that some readers may find themselves overwhelmed. Too many stories within stories, too many tangential legends and myths that don’t, at a first glance, advance the narrative. But in actuality they do advance it. They are the past manifested and they exert pressure on the characters and on their present. I wanted, no, needed to include these stories even if that made for a manuscript which would be perceived as less than optimally “tight.”
A novel can be many things, and this one, among others, is a territory.
A novel can be many things, and this one, among others, is a territory. An expanse through which the reader is meant to roam and even lose herself for a while. That’s not to say there isn’t a narrative to follow in Stork Mountain. On the contrary, there is a distinct path of causes and effects on which, ideally, the reader marches on. But there are moments when the path meanders, on purpose, so that the reader may take in the vistas, the place, the peoples and the cultures.
TC: Periodically, Stork Mountain flashes back to the days of Communism, looking into what its characters were doing then. What kind of research did you have to do into that period?
MP: Very little. I took the approach Edward P. Jones discusses in his essay “Finding the Known World.” For ten years his research constituted of reading, on and off, the first forty pages of the same book. Then one day he closed the book and started writing on his own.
What am I going to research about Communism (at least for the purposes of this novel)? Don’t I know that one of my great-grandfathers owned some land and when in 1944 the Party seized control of Bulgaria that land was confiscated and he was proclaimed a kulak? Thank God he’d shelter Communist partisans in his house before that, village friends of his, so the Party didn’t send him to a camp. Don’t I know that another of my great-grandfathers, a school teacher, publicly renounced his Party membership and so the Party exiled him to teach in the Rhodopa Mountains, far away from his wife and children? Or should I research what Bulgaria was like after 1989 when the Party had fallen and taken with it all semblance of economic stability? When we spent hours waiting in line for bread, and could never watch the Ninja Turtles on TV because the scheduled power outages somehow always coincided with the time the new episodes aired; and meanwhile the bastards across the street, whose apartment complexes were powered by different generators, had all the electricity in the world and could watch the Ninja Turtles to their heart’s content (of course later, when we had power, they didn’t, but who cares about them?).
No, I needed no special research to talk about Communism within the context of Stork Mountain. What I did research, however, was the so-called “Process of Rebirth”–the forceful name-changing campaigns against the Bulgarian Muslims, the attempts to either assimilate them or drive them out of the country. This process reached its climax in the mid-eighties, but it took different forms throughout the twentieth century. I wrote about it in my story collection and here too I had to be careful because it’s grave, serious business and because so few people are willing to talk about it openly and without some hidden agenda.
TC: Midway through the novel, when the narrator becomes fixated on rescuing Elif, you raise questions both of agency and of the narrator’s idea of masculinity. To what extent did critiquing the latter become incorporated into the narrative?
MP: One of the things I love about fiction is that it allows me to be other people; people who sometimes are as different from me as can be, but whom I try to understand and, ultimately, embody. Because of this I would never presume to judge my characters, nor would I judge the culture which shapes and traps them and which in turn they shape.
…I would never presume to judge my characters, nor would I judge the culture which shapes and traps them and which in turn they shape.
Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold deals better with the questions of masculinity, machismo, the place of women in that specific society, of religion, of history than almost any other work of fiction I’ve ever read. And there is no judgment in it that Marquez, the writer, directly passes on anything or anyone; only perfectly presented situations which a reader can witness and weigh against her own moral compass.
Stork Mountain starts with an example of such maddening machismo–a young Muslim girl cuts her wrist on a piece of broken glass and the narrator bandages her before she’s lost too much blood. But when her husband discovers that another man has touched his woman, he removes the bandage, entirely out of spite, and carries her, bleeding to the side. The peasants around shrug and go about their business while the narrator is left to ponder what the hell has just happened. This moment, in essence, lays out one of the big clashes in the novel–this foreign boy has entered a foreign world which he’ll fight to change; but the world will push back with equal force. It’s the clash of cultures and people, with their preconceived notions and beliefs, that interests me. Seeing how this clash manifests on the page is infinitely more interesting than providing a critique of one side or the other.
TC: The narration sometimes consciously overstates things: “And after this it rained, melodramatically, for many months,” for instance. Did you intend that more as a way to characterize your protagonist’s moodiness, or to show a kind of blurring of the lines between the novel’s more realistic aspects and the references to folklore?
MP: I believe a detail or a sentence should work on several levels. Ideally this particular sentence A) adds to the portrait of the narrator as a person melodramatic and a bit theatrical and B) adds to the general mood of the story. You’re right that the deeper we get into the narrative, the more indistinguishable fact becomes from myth. But this sentence is also meant to work on a third, more practical level. Readers don’t like coincidences in fiction (or at least coincidences that don’t get the hero in trouble); so if a coincidence must occur then it helps for the writer to acknowledge it as such (through the hero). Something similar happens here: at this point in the novel I had noticed that it had been raining for quite some time (necessary plot-wise) and now that the narrator was dealing with a broken heart I didn’t want the downpour to make the moment unnecessarily melodramatic. So I thought I’d let him acknowledge the melodrama of all this rain, for the sake of the reader.
TC: In your acknowledgements, you mention that some of the mythology and legends that are featured in the novel are fictional–the incorporation of Attila the Hun, for instance. How did you decide which aspects of mythology to work with directly and which to create for the purposes of this novel?
MP: There is only one little story in the book that is based on an actual legend–about a particular region in the Strandja protected by the Ottoman sultan. Right after conquering Bulgaria, the real legend says, Murad I desired to take as a wife a beautiful Bulgarian girl, a local noble. In return she asked him to let one of her horsemen hop on a horse. However many villages the horseman rounded in his gallop, the Sultan would have to take under his wing. Both the villages of Balgari and Kosti, the last two places where to this day the nestinari dance, fell within this ancient protected territory. I wanted to keep the seed of this legend, but I ended up changing it significantly to fit my own narrative (and, if I may be so bold as to say, improved it a little).
All other stories–and there are many, of janissaries and rebels and Slavic gods–I made up entirely. I don’t know how sacrilegious it is that I created, for example, certain Slavic deities, like Starost, the goddess Old Age, or imagined the topography of an underworld which does not come from Slavic folklore. But I worked with universal archetypes and allowed myself freedom since all these characters and stories arise either from the imagination of the grandfather or from that of the narrator, and take the form of allegory in an attempt to make sense of the real world.
TC: Were there any scenes from mythology that you had hoped to use in the novel that didn’t quite fit?
MP: Originally, five years ago, I wanted to include in the novel a second story line–letters exchanged between the grandfather and the grandson over the course of many years, but under the guise of a game–the boy would impersonate the first tsar in history, Simeon I the Great (914 AD), and the old man would pretend to be his Greek tutor from the days Simeon studied in Constantinople. You can see already how big of a mess such an idea creates. There were quite a few little stories I wrote (about the early Bulgarian khans) that never made it into the novel. For the longest time I wanted Stork Mountain to be titled Nominalia of the Imaginary Khans (after a famous historical list of rules called Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans). But none of the people I asked for an opinion knew what “nominalia” meant and a good number of them weren’t sure about the meaning of “khans.”
TC: Much of Stork Mountain involves questions of family–both how it is defined and what a family’s obligations to one another are. How have you feel about these questions in your own life?
MP: So many of the stories in my collection East of the West deal with the idea that the members of a family, or a larger unit, say, a nation, are somehow bound together by blood. That somehow our blood unites us in one great collective which then permits us to share, unconsciously, experiences and knowledge. In Stork Mountain I wanted to explore this idea further, but the more I wrote, the more I realized (or rather, the characters realized it and I did through them) that underneath our genes, culture and traditions, there lies a deeper, greater bond rooted not in blood but in our common humanity. And suddenly, in the face of this greater bond, all the talk of blood binding us seemed like empty rhetoric.
TC: Your biography mentions that you were recently mentored by Michael Ondaatje. What was that process like? Do you find that it’s had any effect on your fiction?
MP: It was a real privilege to spend a year close to Michael. All this happened under the umbrella of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative (an amazing program, well worth looking into and one I was unfamiliar with before they called me). They made it possible for Michael to visit me in Bulgaria and in Texas and for me to visit him in Canada. I’d already finished Stork Mountain by the time the mentorship began but even so, he gave me his thoughts on the first hundred pages. His input was incredibly helpful, but I feel like the things I learned from him, through conversation, or through the books he recommended I read, will be tremendously helpful when I sit down to write another book. Which I’ve promised myself will be much shorter. And tighter. Now that I’ve written the big, sprawling story, I’d really love to try my hand at writing a sparer 200-page novel.
In the sight-seeing poster for planet Keplar-16b, a traveler in a space suit stands silhouetted before a purple and rose-colored desert. Craggy mountains rim the horizon. Orange and white orbs illuminate a yellow sky. “The land of two suns,” the poster explains, “where your shadow always has company.”
The image fronts as promotional material for a hot, long distance vacation booked through Exoplanet Travel Bureau, a faux tourist agency specializing in interstellar vacations. In fact, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a branch of both NASA and the California Institute of Technology, released the image. The institute is “dedicated to the robotic exploration of space,” and their projects include monitoring weather by satellite, determining the properties of gaseous planets, and the 2003 launch and 2004 landing of the space rover Opportunity on Mars.
Since January of last year, JPL has released fourteen stunning, futuristic posters, depicting the treacherous beauty of interplanetary life. Each image undermines fundamental assumptions. In the poster for HD 40307g, a skydiver free falls through the atmosphere of a “Super Earth.” “At eight times the Earth’s mass,” the poster narrates, the planet’s “gravitational pull is much, much too strong.” The poster for Keplar-186f, a planet that orbits a cooler and redder sun than ours, disrupts expectations about the nature of light. In this one, a space-suited couple admires crimson foliage. “If plant life does exist on a planet like Kepler-186f,” a caption explains, “its photosynthesis could have been influenced by the star’s red-wavelength photons, making for a color palette very different than the greens on Earth.”
The retro-styled series takes its inspiration in part from the Kepler Project — NASA’s mission to survey our region of the Milky Way and locate planets similar to Earth. Kepler’s website explains, there is “clear evidence for substantial numbers of three types of exoplanets; gas giants, hot-super-Earths in short period orbits, and ice giants. . . The challenge now is to find terrestrial planets . . . one half to twice the size of the Earth . . . in the habitable zone of their stars where liquid water and possibly life might exist.” Left unsaid is the distant dream of interplanetary colonization, where scientific research meets sci-fi fantasy. So far, Kepler’s closest Earth-match is Kepler-452b, a planet 60% larger than our own with a 385-day orbit around a Sun-like star. Unfortunately, for wannabe visitors, this exoplanet is 1400 light years away.
While space tourism is futuristic, the style of JPL’s new posters harkens back to previous decades. The colors range from day-glo lime and orange, to gauzy hues of peach. The styles, too, are bygone, recalling Art Nouveau’s organic curves, Mid-Century’s precise lines, and the tie-dyed optimism of the 60s and 70s. The effect is more nostalgic than revelatory, depicting a golden age for interstellar imagination, a time when the future felt more playful and less apocalyptic.
The effect is more nostalgic than revelatory, depicting a golden age for interstellar imagination, a time when the future felt more playful and less apocalyptic.
Many of today’s pop culture depictions of space travel aren’t whimsical. No longer concerned with the anthropological details of alien species and exotic terrain, popular narratives focus instead on the survival of humanity and the long-term viability of Earth as a home. Consider the recent blockbusters Interstellar and The Martian, which both balance a desperate need for discovery with the psychological burden of participation in a mission likely to fail. Unlike the adventurers on holiday depicted in JPL’s posters, these films feature solitary pioneers confronting the abyss of time and space. The stakes couldn’t be higher. In Interstellar, Earth is barely habitable, devastated by drought and dust storms. The best possibility for humankind’s survival depends on a retired pilot’s ability to navigate a wormhole, locate a new home planet, and transmit its location back to Earth. In The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney is separated from his crew during a dust storm and presumed dead. Stranded on Mars, he must adapt to his new environment, keeping his body and spirit alive until he’s rescued. In each film, the heroes’ inner landscape, a predictably lonely terrain, is reflected perfectly by their surroundings, which are hostile and desolate. The protagonists are literally and metaphorically lost in the nothingness.
Unlike the adventurers on holiday depicted in JPL’s posters, these films feature solitary pioneers confronting the abyss of time and space. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Aurora, the newest novel by science fiction guru Kim Stanley Robinson, vastly expands the narrative timeline of intergalactic travel. The heroine, Freya, grows up aboard an intergenerational starship heading for the star Tau Ceti. 160 years and seven generations into the journey, the crew has nearly arrived, and the problems they face are as philosophical as they are practical. Reaching their destination means establishing new means of survival and reshaping the mythology that give purpose to human life. Over a breakfast of strawberries, Freya’s father proclaims, “we are thrust out of the end of [an old] story. Forced to make up a new one, all on our own.”
The recently translated sci-fi novel Another Planet for Rent by the Cuban author Yoss further estranges our planet. Instead of a fabled homeland for far-flung voyagers, Earth is the destination. Alien tourists called xenoids have populated the blue planet. After witnessing humankind’s inept efforts to protect natural spaces, the xenoids take on the project themselves, enslaving humans mentally, physically, and sexually. Flipping the script on colonial narratives, Another Planet positions its protagonists as indigenous Earthlings rather than intergalactic saviors. Humans are the obstacle in an alien species’ narrative about stewardship and travel. The prospect is humbling. Our cosmological destiny may lie beyond our control.
Shifts in the way we imagine space travel come in part from NASA’s change in focus. Unlike the Apollo days, when the Cold War inspired large investments in rocket science and the race to the moon, NASA receives a significantly smaller portion of federal funds (less than .5% of the federal budget), which it divides between space exploration and researching Earth. Unlike the Apollo Missions, NASA’s recent work monitoring melting ice caps, rising oceans, and extreme weather events is sobering. Rather than inspiring patriotism and wonder, understanding the mechanisms and consequences of climate change means acknowledging a potentially catastrophic future.
Spaceship Earth, as Buckminster Fuller dubbed our planet in 1967, is near a tipping point. The accumulation of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere is pushing natural ecosystems towards unstoppable positive feedback loops that could spike the rate of planetary warmth. Once these processes begin, they may be impossible to stop. Melting permafrost will release stores of methane, a greenhouse gas that traps as much as 100 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Shrinking ice caps will expose more of the ocean’s dark surface, which absorbs rather than reflects heat. Drought will damage rainforests, including the Amazon, one of Earth’s most important carbon sinks, and bushfires will decrease the carbon storage capacity of forests. In each scenario, a symptom of climate change becomes an engine, releasing greenhouse gases and fueling atmospheric warming.
Spaceship Earth, as Buckminster Fuller dubbed our planet in 1967, is near a tipping point.
Interplanetary life is still a far off dream, yet anxiety about Earth’s future imbues this research with new gravity. Rather than focusing on discovery, popular culture reflects an increased concern with the logistics of space travel: what psychological challenges will voyagers face during decades long missions to reach a destination; can travelers use asteroids to stock up on water and fuel; can astronauts have sex in space; can women give birth in zero gravity?
These practical questions give way to unsettling existentialism and thrilling narrative possibilities. The scale of the universe is unfathomable. What does it mean to be a speck in the infinite? Do specks have the right to colonize new planets? Will life on a new planet cause adaptations that fundamentally alter our species? To what extent would we include plants, animals, bacteria, fungus and viruses in resettling? Which humans would go and which would stay behind? What are the consequences of failure? Of success?
Numerous stars, planets, asteroids, and nebula populate our galaxy, but the volume they occupy is dwarfed by the emptiness that surrounds them. Because the distance between solar systems is so great, without cryogenic sleep, space travel would entail almost no sightseeing and plenty of shuttling through the nothingness. In other words, exploration beyond our solar system requires conquering not only the third dimension, space, but also the fourth dimension, time. Heroism means confronting aging, mortality, and boredom.
A recent breakthrough suggests how much we’re learning (and how little we know) about the nature of time. On Thursday, February 11, physicists triumphantly announced the first ever detection of gravitational waves. Produced by colliding black holes, these waves vibrated a pair of L-shaped antennas, a precise, highly sensitive arrangement of lasers and mirrors, in Washington State and Louisiana. The significance of this discovery is epic, fulfilling a prediction in Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity, which postulated that space and time are not fixed but mobile, capable of jiggling, curving, stretching and collapsing.
Rather than mapping the known world, as geographic exploration does, discoveries about the relationship between space and time magnify our perception of what we don’t know. Knowledge is infinite. When we glimpse the expanse of what’s unknown, the wormhole of imagination can be an insufficient processor.
In the new JPL poster series, there’s only one image that features human tourists relaxing in the atmosphere with their astronaut helmets off. Looking out across a river at snow-capped peaks, a couple leans into each other. “Your oasis in space, where the air is free and breathing is easy,” the poster reads. After perusing drawings of the liquid ethane and methane lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan and the salt-water oceans beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, fresh air, a (relatively) non-toxic environment, and just the right amount of gravity are nothing to take for granted. The miracle is that we’ve already arrived. While space exploration is awe-inspiring, perhaps the best lesson NASA can teach us is appreciation and stewardship for the home we already have, the planet we call Earth.
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