Page 643 – Electric Literature

Space Tourism in Modern Storytelling

Posted on April 12, 2016November 19, 2020 by 007595

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.

Jack Pendarvis on Movie Stars, Annie Hall, and The Small Ghost Donkey That Defines Us All: An…

Posted on April 12, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

Jack Pendarvis’s new story collection, Movie Stars, is out April 12th from Dzanc Books. Pendarvis writes for Adventure Time and recently put out a work of non-fiction called Cigarette Lighter, but it’s been a long wait for a new book of fiction (his novel Awesome was released in 2008). As a fan, I couldn’t be more excited. These sixteen stories are hilarious first and foremost, but they’re also tender and kind and melancholy. They’re infused with the sort of dreamy wonder that only a good-hearted genius like Pendarvis can access. Movie stars like Bob Hope, Joan Crawford, Jerry Lewis, and Scarlett Johansson haunt the lives of the characters in these stories, as do movie memories. Everything these folks do has been shaped and continues to be shaped by what they’ve seen in movies, lending the whole collection an atmosphere of cinematic yearning. There are also cats in these stories. Lots of cats. If I had to give you one sentence that summarizes the overall spirit of the book, it would be this from “Duck Call Gang”: “I worry about all the little cats out there in the world.” Or maybe, from “Jerry Lewis,” this: “He had a bad day and couldn’t get any turds painted.”

I met Pendarvis at a coffee shop in Oxford, Mississippi, where we both live. He’s one of my writing heroes, a former teacher and someone I’m glad to call a good friend. Two guys at the table next to us were having a religious meeting where they used phrases like altar call. The staff was inexplicably blasting Billy Joel over the house speakers. Before I got there, my five-year-old son had told me that he believed his spit was full of escape pods.

[Read Pendarvis’ “The Black Parasol” in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading.]

William Boyle: Movies are a unifying force in these stories. How did movies shape your life as a kid in Alabama?

Jack Pendarvis: There are different ways I came to movies. One, of course, was seeing them in the theater, especially things like The Aristocats (not to be confused with The Aristocrats) or The Biscuit Eater, which was a Disney movie about a rascally dog. And there were a lot of old movies on TV. I guess they were cheap to program. A bunch of Abbott and Costello movies. Tarzan movies — that’s in the book. There’s one traumatic memory of a Tarzan movie, which comes from my own life. They’d show things like Shirley Temple movies early on Sunday morning before church. Also, when I was a kid, I got a big coffee table book called The Great Movies by a guy named William Bayer. He was writing about movies I hadn’t seen at all. I was just looking at pictures. I read that book over and over. It was shocking. There was a picture of the Last Supper scenario that Buñuel does in Viridiana, and there was a matching shot from Robert Altman’s MASH. (I’d see Altman movies a lot on TV too. California Split came on a lot for some reason.) When I saw these matching shots — really blasphemous shots that imitate the Last Supper — it was kind of shocking and seemed taboo to me. You know, I was a Southern Baptist kid. I couldn’t believe that people were messing with the iconography that way, but it was also fascinating to me, and I wanted to know more about these people that were engaging with this stuff.

When I went to the University of South Alabama — uh, you can’t put that it in there, yeah you can, I don’t care — I went down to this smelly basement and they had tapes — I don’t know if they were VHS tapes or what — but you could go down to this really damp, moldy basement and watch movies. I watched Rules of the Game for the first time in that smelly basement. The Magnificent Ambersons, which Bayer talked about. Things that I’d just only heard of. And then I’d sneak into film classes. I saw Boudu Saved from Drowning and Hiroshima Mon Amour that way. VHS introduced a bunch of new movies to me. I remember you could go to the Phar-Mor drugstore in Mobile and rent a movie for 65 cents and keep it for as long as you wanted. And they had a really strange selection, like Under the Volcano and Harold Pinter things, you know, just lots of weird movies and foreign movies. That was revolutionary. I did see a David Lynch movie in the theater. I took a date to see The Elephant Man in high school. That’s not a good date movie when you’re in high school! We had to sneak out to see the rest of Private Benjamin, which was playing in the next theater. To be clear: When I talk about my childhood, I could mean anywhere from about age 10 to age 30. I’m serious. It all blurs together.

WB: Was there a movie experience that you had early on that was transformative — like you were too young for that movie and it changed the way you saw the world?

The ticket-taker said, pointing to other side of the theater, “In that movie, they do it. In this movie, they talk about it.”

JP: My brother talks about walking into our parents’ room and The Innocents was on and he saw a bug crawling out of a little cherub statue’s mouth and that it scared him to death and only years later when he was an adult he saw that scene again and realized what it was from and it freaked him out again. A movie I saw too early that had a big impact on me was Annie Hall, which came out in ’77. I was 13 or 14. I went to see it with my friend Franklin Tarelton, whose father had been my father’s high school football or baseball coach. We went to a place called the Airport Twin Cinema, which had two screens, on Airport Boulevard in Mobile. On the other screen was a soft-core movie that was very popular at the time. Something like Emmanuelle 3. And I was such an earnest 13/14 year old that I asked the cashier about Annie Hall: “Is this movie okay for us to see?” The ticket-taker said, pointing to other side of the theater, “In that movie, they do it. In this movie, they talk about it.” I felt nervous, but we bought the tickets. I was like, I guess I can handle that. I understood hardly any of the jokes, but it really made a huge impression on me. I think I mostly understood the slapstick.

WB: That was your first Woody Allen movie?

JP: I might’ve seen Sleeper on TV by then. It used to come on a lot. I’d already read some of his prose collections, Getting Even and Without Feathers. So I knew about him. It’s weird to think about now, but everyone knew about him then. He was quite famous and popular. I remember the woman who drove our car pool saying, “He’s a genius, but I don’t approve of him.” I liked the slapstick in Annie Hall, the way it was cut together, the imagination. It was instructive. I wanted to be a writer even back then. I loved James Thurber and I saw a connection between the kind of humor James Thurber wrote and what I was seeing on the screen. I associated it with New York, The New Yorker, that whole world I was fascinated by. I was too young. I mean, anyone else could’ve handled it, but I was a very young 14.

WB: Most of the stories in Movie Stars are set in Mississippi, but “Cancel My Reservation” takes place, in part, in Los Angeles. I’m assuming that movies influenced how you thought about place too? Your first impressions of New York and Los Angeles would’ve been through Woody Allen, through movies?

JP: My first impression of New York was probably from reading James Thurber and reading about James Thurber. I read a lot of stuff about New York. I was fascinated by Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley and all those people. Ugh, I sound like just a horrible kid. So my impressions of New York were really like in Radio Days — which came out much later, obviously — when it shows the little kid listening to the radio and the elegant people in their penthouse eating breakfast, that sort of thing. I recently watched the Michael Ritchie movie Smile, which came out in ’75. Seeing it now, that movie looks so much like my childhood, even though it takes place in California and I grew up on the Gulf Coast of Alabama. The people, the buildings, the cars, everything. If you want to see what it looked like when I was a kid, you should see Smile.

WB: Since your formative movie-watching years were the ‘70s — this kind of golden age of filmmaking — did that generally shape how you write and think?

And we went to see The Deep, which was a distressing thing to see with your parents because Jacqueline Bisset brought out certain feelings I didn’t feel comfortable experiencing with my parents around.

JP: Well, I wasn’t going to see Taxi Driver when it came out. I was going to see things like The Biscuit Eater. I saw Smokey and the Bandit in the theater. I couldn’t believe all the cursing coming out of Jackie Gleason’s mouth! I kind of indignantly walked up the aisle and I expected my parents were going to be soon following in similar haughty indignation and they were just still in there and I was like, This must be okay, and I went back and watched the rest. And we went to see The Deep, which was a distressing thing to see with your parents because Jacqueline Bisset brought out certain feelings I didn’t feel comfortable experiencing with my parents around. And then, let’s see, I remember going to see The In-Laws with my parents. That was a wonderful movie-going experience. I’m talking about the original, with Peter Falk and Alan Arkin. That was a huge experience because my parents loved it so much and they were laughing and I was laughing. We all thought it was hilarious. That was a nice bonding experience.

WB: But you don’t think your taste wasn’t shaped by that specific ’70s aesthetic?

JP: I mean, I did see California Split, Smile, Cotton Comes to Harlem, and things like that on TV. I’m sure it seeped in there. And The In-Laws, Smokey and the Bandit, Annie Hall — those are all ’70s movies. I was getting a good dose of that. But the first Scorsese movie I saw in the theater, for instance, was After Hours in ’85. I was pretty ignorant about a lot of things. The Blues Brothers had a big impact on me too. I went to see it with my most religious friend. It had a lot of what I thought of then as blasphemy in it. But, at the same time, the scene with James Brown, that was uplifting spiritually. Saturday Night Live certainly gave me permission in new ways. The movies I went to see that pushed me into the Devil’s Crew were starring people I’d seen on SNL like Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and John Belushi

WB: Another thing that unites these stories — though they’re all hilarious — is melancholy. For me, as a kid, watching movies compulsively was often sad as hell. Do you see a connection between movies and melancholy?

Movie characters are these vessels you can pour your own emotions into.

JP: Movies are supposed to be social, but I guess a lot of my characters are watching movies by themselves. I find that to be an enjoyable experience. Sometimes I like it better. I remember crying at the end of Shane the first time I saw it. And then I showed it to some of my friends in my 20s and they were just laughing. Same thing with Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. I didn’t cry, but I thought it was amazing. Then I showed it to some friends of mine. Every time the Beast came on screen, these two young women would say, “Courage!” like the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. It was really getting on my nerves. So, I enjoyed that movie a lot more when I watched it by myself. I’m ambivalent, I suppose. I like watching movies by myself or with my wife. We have a similar frame of mind about movies and we enjoy the same things. It’s fun to watch a movie with her. In the book, one guy’s watching a Joan Crawford movie after his girlfriend’s just left. Movie characters are these vessels you can pour your own emotions into. If you want to think about the melancholy/lonely aspect, there are guys like the narrator of the story “Pinkeye” who’s imagining he can be a henchman in a movie. He’s projecting himself into a movie.

WB: There’s a lot of that. It’s funny, but it’s sad too. When you grow up watching a lot of movies, a lot of your knowledge comes from movies. You think of projecting yourself into a movie or when you see someone do something it recalls a movie memory. Your characters are always thinking that they’re doing things “like in a movie.”

JP: Movies actively — almost perniciously — encourage that. Think of Sherlock Jr. with Buster Keaton or even The Last Action Hero. Movies encourage that kind of identification. I guess fiction does the same thing. Not mine. Somebody’s. Think of Mary Katherine Gallagher in Superstar. I think that movie is an accurate portrait of a melancholy film fan.

WB: There’s a lot of facing down mortality in the book too. In “Duck Call Gang,” for instance.

JP: After that story came out in McSweeney’s, our friend Elizabeth Kaiser was concerned about me. Because, you know, they put it in the letters section. So, I think, maybe it was worrying. But it’s pretty close to documentary, I suppose. I made up the part about a gang that blows on duck calls.

WB: There are other narrators that think about getting old and dying in the way that narrator does. And that’s tied into the horror influence in these stories. There’s your take on the ghost story here, but also people are kind of haunted by their own mortality and there’s an awful lot of dread.

JP: What’s the point of writing if you can’t put in a little of that feeling that we all have that there are invisible people watching us? Don’t we all have that feeling? Or that we’re all kind of walking a line between two worlds? Aren’t we all walking a line between two worlds?

WB: The epigraph is from a book by called The Ghost World.

That’s the way I feel all the time, split between, ‘Oh that thing looks like a funny donkey’ and ‘Oh no, now that I saw it I’m going to die.’

JP: A book I found at the University of Mississippi library. Not the Daniel Clowes graphic novel. A book from 1893. It says: “In the neighborhood of Leeds there is the Padfoot, a weird apparition about the size of a small donkey, ‘with shaggy hair and large eyes like saucers’ . . . to see it is a prognostication of death.” Now what I like about that epigraph is that it’s funny it looks like a donkey — that it’s the size of a small donkey is a funny detail — but then if you see it you’re going to die, which is terrifying. That’s the way I feel all the time, split between, ‘Oh that thing looks like a funny donkey’ and ‘Oh no, now that I saw it I’m going to die.’ That’s my general feeling at all times. And maybe that kind of plays out through the book.

WB: Ha ha ha. It does.

JP: I thought of something. I saw Caddyshack at the theater. It was right after my grandfather died. And I was like, Lord I’m sorry, as I sat there watching a turd floating in a pool and a priest cursing and being struck by lightning. I was like, Any punishment that you give me will be just, Lord. That’s probably what I was thinking as I watched Caddyshack.

WB: What’s the role that nostalgia plays in the book? There are some characters who shun technology, who talk and act like they’re from another time, even though technology is very present in their lives. There’s not a yearning for another time, more of a general out-of-placeness. But maybe they’d be out of place any time?

JP: The narrator of “Cancel My Reservation” might be a nostalgic type, and that doesn’t work out too well for him. But otherwise I don’t think that’s a big motivating factor. I had to go back and add some technology. I always forget that everyone has a cell phone now. So, I might’ve gone back and stuck a few cell phones in so people have the illusion that I live in the present.

WB: To me, a lot of the things I was somehow nostalgic for as kid, came from the movies. Typewriters, record players, old cars.

This is the saddest interview ever. “Ancient Man Manages to Crap Out A Book! 167 pages! Barely a book! But you’ve got to hand it to him because he’s so decrepit!”

JP: I loved those things because they were part of our daily life back then, ha. In fact, I didn’t learn to type until I got my first job. My grandmother showed me where to put my fingers on the keys and I taught myself to type really fast. This is the saddest interview ever. “Ancient Man Manages to Crap Out A Book! 167 pages! Barely a book! But you’ve got to hand it to him because he’s so decrepit!”

Here Is the 2016 Baileys Prize Shortlist

Posted on April 11, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, formerly the Orange Prize, is one of the most celebrated awards in UK literature. Any woman writer who has published a book in the UK in English in the past year is eligible. Past winners have included Zadie Smith, Marilynne Robinson, and Barabara Kingsolver. The six finalists this year include three authors from the US, two from Ireland, and one from the UK.

Congrats to all the authors who made the shortlist!

Cynthia Bond: Ruby (US)
Anne Enright: The Green Road (Ireland)
Lisa McInerney: The Glorious Heresies (Ireland)
Elizabeth McKenzie: The Portable Veblen (US)
Hannah Rothschild: The Improbability of Love (UK)
Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life (US)

9 Books Coming To TV In 2016

Posted on April 11, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

In 2016, as Hollywood steels itself for the era of Peak TV, studio green-lighters are looking to an old friend: the book adaptation. What better match, after all, for a medium that finds itself specializing in ambitious, serialized storytelling? There are so many books (novels, comics, graphic novels, historical epics…) being adapted for the screen, so many novelists cashing those sweet HBO checks for a season or two, it can be hard to keep track. Your favorite Elena Ferrante volume could be debuting on Netflix this summer, and you might not know. (A reader can dream.) Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Here’s a handy list so that you won’t miss any of the literary action coming to TV this year. (Ed. Note — This article was originally published on February 3, 2016 and has been updated where available.)

1. The Magicians, Syfy

The Magicians, based on Lev Grossman’s 2009 fantasy hit, premiered on Syfy late last year. The remainder of the episodes will run in 2016. (New episodes started on the January 25th, with “The Source of Magic.”) The story, if you’re not familiar, is set amongst the student body at New York’s Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. If that doesn’t entice you to watch, what will? Where is your damn sense of wonder?

2. 11.22.63, Hulu

The Hulu Originals adaptation of Stephen King’s 11.22.63 (JFK, portals, time travel) has some pretty big names attached, including executive producer J.J. Abrams and star James Franco. The production is billed as a limited-series, meaning a fixed run of eight episodes (streaming started on February 15th). It’s about time Hollywood took some notice of this talented, emerging novelist plugging away in the woods of Maine. The man needs to eat.

3. Lucifer, FOX

Lucifer, the latest supernatural police procedural from FOX, premiered last month to rave reviews…Nah, not really. This is a network show. Nobody raves about network shows. In fact, the NYT published a pretty brutal takedown. But fans of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series or Mike Carey’s Lucifer spin-off may want to tune in anyway. (Update: Lucifer was recently renewed for a second season.)

4. American Gods, Starz

Neil Gaiman is making it rain. His novel, American Gods, long-rumored to be a prime candidate for adaptation, looks like it’s finally coming to TV this year. Gaiman himself is serving as an executive producer on this one, alongside showrunners Bryan Fuller (known for creating Hannibal, among others) and Michael Green. There’s no premiere date scheduled yet, but Starz announced last year that it gave production a green light and was expecting a late 2016 debut.

5. The Night Manager, BBC One/AMC

The BBC & AMC are bringing John Le Carré’s 1993 novel to the small screen this year, with a six-part miniseries starring Tom Hiddleston, Olivia Colman, Hugh Laurie, and Elizabeth Debicki. The novel was Le Carré’s first post-Cold War book, shifting focus from cat-and-mouse anti-communist spycraft to the world of international arms dealing (and drugs and mercenaries). Like any novel worth its salt, it begins in a grand hotel in Cairo. Presumably the show will do the same. It’s set to premiere on April 19th.

6. Luke Cage, Netflix

After receiving solid reviews for its first two Netflix productions, Marvel is back in 2016 with Luke Cage, set in the same comic book Hell’s Kitchen as Daredevil and Jessica Jones. There’s plenty to like about the new series’ prospects (and about its showrunner, Cheo Hodari Coker, previously on staff at SouthLAnd & Ray Donovan), but really there’s just one thing you need to know: it stars Mike Colter. The man is a damn star. A question remains, though: how many episodes before Rosario Dawson shows up?

7. War & Peace, BBC/A&E/Lifetime/History

The BBC is always good for at least one epic adaptation, so long as costumes are involved. This year’s headliner is War & Peace, a four-part miniseries which will be simulcast in the US by that classic TV alliance: A&E, Lifetime, and the History Channel. The series stars Paul Dano, Lily James, and a whole lotta fur. We’re talking Zhivago-levels of fur. So go ahead, splurge on that old doorstop classic you always meant to get around to. Just make sure it’s the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation. Constance Garnett will get your ass laughed out of book club.

8. Preacher, AMC

The DC Vertigo comic book (created by Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon) is finally coming to TV. The show, set to premiere later this year on AMC, is helmed by the team from Superbad (Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen), along with Breaking Bad vet Sam Catlin. Dominic Cooper, of Mamma Mia! fame (and probably other fame, too, but who’s to say?), will star. The plot, which pretty much defies summary, involves a Texas preacher, an Irish vampire, and a quest in search of God.

9. Big Little Lies, HBO

You thought we were going to have a TV books list without an HBO show? Granted, HBO often goes the route of signing novelists to work on its original material (see R. Price, G. Pelecanos, G. Flynn, et al), but it also knows how to do a hell of an adaptation. This year, they have David E. Kelley (creator of just about every popular drama in the 90’s) adapting Liane Moriarty’s 2014 novel about a group of mothers driven to violence. HBO is, of course, bringing the A-list talent: Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern, and more. Will it air in 2016? Who knows. It still makes the list.

The Stories in Diane Williams’ Latest Collection, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine Don’t Resemble The…

Posted on April 11, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

What to make of a Diane Williams story? They don’t resemble other stories, though some of the ones in NOON come close. NOON is a literary annual that regularly features a cabal of out-there authors; contributors include Lydia Davis, Rebecca Curtis, Tao Lin, and Sam Lipsyte. Williams just so happens to be NOON’s architect, purportedly editing each issue with slicing-dicing verve. (“Clancy Martin and I now laugh about how she will take forty pages of writing and slash it down to two pages,” Deb Olin Unferth has said, sounding like every other NOON writer. Unsurprisingly, Williams was a student of Gordon Lish.) The result makes NOON one of the only lit mags whose every issue is worth reading cover-to-cover.

The stories — NOON’s and Williams’ own — are weird, elliptical little gems. They — Williams’ especially — seem designed to confound. So yes, the stories in Williams’ new collection, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine don’t resemble other stories. They are governed by a free-associative logic. They are replete with non-sequiturs and ungainly phrasing, and they revel in uncanny banalities. Of the 40, three or four edge close to 1000 words; most are half that, or shorter. They eschew the conventional pleasures of literature: narrative and character development, as well as the insights they provide.

And I must confess, though I just finished the book, I don’t recall much of what happens in it, nor. The stories take the form of a fleeting thought, and who remembers each thought that passes by? What sticks in the mind are the sentences.

Williams’ sentences have an unpremeditated quality, the kind indicative of laborious craft. Look at the harried opening of “Cinch.”

My back started killing me and Tamara asked what else did I want and why?

Oddly, she was suddenly unenthusiastic about me and she revealed resentment, of all things, and possibilities for her revenge.

But how busy I was! — building the twelve-by-sixteen rec room at the rear of the house.

Punctuation’s deployed in manner akin to musical notation, rather than as a tool for syntactic clarity. The first sentence does not have commas and periods where it should; there’s just that incorrect question mark at the end. It disorients but still gives the sentence a rather clear tempo. And the second and third lines defy the half-baked dictums everyone hears in freshman writing seminars: instead of using adverbs and exclamation points sparingly, she puts two adverbs at the front of one sentence and an exclamation point in the middle of the other. When the style works, as I think it does here, it’s sort of brilliantly awkward. It sounds like someone thinking to herself.

Often these stories are awkward in another way. Williams excels at the comedy of inconsequence, uncovering humor in the inane not through exaggeration or cloying commentary, but by mere presentation, as in the drolly repetitive party dialogue in “People of the Week.”

“I didn’t think you even knew what Ethelind looked like.”

“I saw her up front. I thought you saw her. Let’s go see Tim.”

“I don’t want to see Tim. Why would I want to see Tim? Who is Anita? I want to thank Anita.”

“Dale, is that you?” a woman called. It was Tim who turned, thinking someone had mistaken him for Dale.

The damage from that misunderstanding was irremeable…

Many acolytes of Williams are aficionados of the sentence. Indeed, she has cultivated a singular style, and the brevity of her stories serves to highlight that style, but it is so potent that it might distract a reader from what she’s doing to narrative.

A Diane Williams story resembles a story as it exists in the mind at the moment it reifies from abstract brain activity into concrete language. Her stories — events, “slices of life,” human things — are free from the interlocutor of literary convention. They are just being, and they are about just being. Williams shows what it is to be a woman, to be a wife, to be bored in a roomful of strangers, to be bowled over by despair. If I asked you, “What is it to be walking down the street?” something like the story “Personal Details” might roil in your mind before you can spit out an answer.

This is an interesting narrative project, and when it’s paired with the unwieldy precision of her sentences, along with volume after excellent volume of NOON, you begin to apprehend the unique contours of the space in literature Diane Williams has carved out for herself.

Art is, among other things, an expression of individuality. It is a stepping forth from the crowd. And one of the hallmarks of a great artist is that you sense no one could else could’ve produced her work. This admirable idiosyncrasy is how Williams gets away with something like “The Skol,” my favorite story in the book, reproduced below in its entirety.

In the ocean, Mrs. Clavey decided to advance on foot at shoulder-high depth. A tiny swallow of the water coincided with her deliberation. It tasted like a cold, salted variety of her favorite payang congou tea. She didn’t intend to drink more, but she did drink — more.

Who else would have chosen such an unsettlingly formal tone? Rather rather than telling a story, she relays information.

Who else would have compared the ocean’s taste to payang congou tea, the soothing stillness of the drink at odds with the force of the ocean, the Chinese words at odds with the English, all dissonance?

Who else would have used that dash there at the end, an awful final flourish, stuck in like a pin between your ribs?

Click here to read a story, “To Revive a Person Is No Slight Thing,” from Diane Williams’ collection as part of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading.

The Wooden Miles: Poems by Kevin Craft

Posted on April 11, 2016February 27, 2020 by 007595

Matinee

She is one moving over the boardwalk —
my mother in Ocean City — crossbeam
hammered and hovering above the dune
line, boardwalk cracking like an exhumed spine.
So much love does she have for it, walking
the boards has become her life’s work,
measuring out the wooden miles like stalking
her own horizon, summer after summer
climbing down the gray-green ladder of the Atlantic
only to climb back up again, every plank a sleeper,
every nail a fraction of that solitude
named for the beach end of the road — 12th Street,
13th — the music pier floating over breakers
like an ark. But who is alone walking
on a boardwalk if not my mother in winter
gauging the distance between storms
and the hours she has to make it through
childhood and back again, hers awash in
sistering, the small tasks of being eldest
among six, three in a room, one big bed,
born into a boom she can’t escape.
I know her by the broad-brimmed hat,
the trail of gulls and the easy way
she lifts me from the splinter in my foot
or finds me somewhere in her twenties
sitting on a bench, waiting if not wailing through
a blank day lost and found. What do I know
about difficulty then except what I glean
from late night arguments in the kitchen,
my mother driving to work and my father
chain smoking at the end of the driveway,
never mind the hopeless weeping
she all but buries herself inside that summer
Christopher was lifted, blue and lifeless,
from the bottom of the pool. The Atlantic
has nothing on her, pounding out its names
for erasure, emptiness and fullness the same
calamity underwriting now the doo-wop band,
now the high school prom and string quartet,
drawing the sanderlings into its sheen,
chasing them aside. Through cold war backwash
and every season of the Ferris wheel
she walks as if the boards depended on it,
the hardwood opening to her tender instep,
so many breaks collected in her stride.

Carousel

I am sitting
on the grassy shore
of Alcyon Lake

fishing for lazy carp
or waiting for fireworks
to embellish

twilight in July,
the bicentennial
darkness warming

to history like a shy
friend I am following
now to the train tracks,

drawn by the distant
clatter and whistle
with a fistful of pennies

to smash into medallions,
ovoid and weighty
as a lie. From the tire

swing my brother
falls and cuts himself
in the rusty creek,

a little bloodletting
we survive by leaping
from sand bank to gravel bar

running from the stones
I throw at yellow jacket
nests for no good

reason, the heat of summer
coiling in our brains.
Soon they will drain

the lake, cup by cup
of poison leaching out of
the lakebed until

the mallards flee
the carp disappear
the geese grow oblong

lumpy like clumsy
lovers with no better
place to make

love memorable, never mind
where a duck goes
when the water’s gone,

when the decade
evaporates
like gasoline in sunshine

billowing
out of both arms
open like the whitewash

glare of a missed slide
out of which a man
comes walking all over

again, brushing his sideburns,
holding up a fish
that glitters like the only
life he knows.

The Girl in the Cabinet (I Read What You Wrote and I Hate You)

Posted on April 8, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

by Melissa Chadburn

Last summer a friend sat on my kitchen counter and said, “You just always make things about you.” The feelings that followed…I so hated myself at that moment. I was ashamed to be there, taking up space, too much space in a friendship, in a workspace, at a meeting, in the board room, in the classroom, in the bedroom, at the party. A montage of myself just talking and talking and talking surrounded by a sea of blank faces. Thought clouds above everyone’s heads as they leave the place with the people, God, she sure does talk about herself.

What I should have done is seen this as progress. I should have jumped up for joy and said, “Fuck yeah!” In 1994 I went with my foster brother to visit his mom, my former foster mother, and her new partner at work. They worked in an ad agency; we entered the board room he and I, and I gave a presentation on why they ought to take me back in. The presentation included ways I would contribute financially, and to the daily household tasks, and how I would be invisible.

The presentation included ways I would contribute financially, and to the daily household tasks, and how I would be invisible.

Now, to their credit, they never held me to that last promise, but invisibility is definitely a thing I’ve aspired to. Which absolutely contradicts all the personal essays I write. I guess in person I strive to be invisible, no problem, and on the page, I aspire to BOOM!

I recently read Meredith Maran’s, Why We Write About Ourselves. It’s a lovely compilation of interviews with twenty memoirists on why they choose to write about themselves. In it Edwidge Danticat says, “Welcome to my bathroom. I’m naked.” This is the shame part I was thinking of. Then she writes, “It feels to me as though there are people waiting around with knives, waiting to skewer me.”

***

I tried to kill myself once. At the time my brother was sending me letters about his stepmother calling him bakla, (“fag” in Tagalog). He said if he wanted to be called a fag he would’ve just stayed walking the halls of school. Until then I imagined my two brothers were living a life of snow and hot cocoa and fresh baked cookies, a life of sledding, and two parents in one warm cherished home. But there it was in my hands, proof of us on separate coasts, filling with hurt. I swallowed a half a bottle of Tylenol, and disappointingly awoke the next morning with absolutely no side effects. I felt every bit of every thing. Despite this sensitivity, like a dog or like a man who’d been shipped off to war, I was most known for being compliant and every moment I swallowed my opinion — something in me was blushing with anger and fear.

I swallowed a half a bottle of Tylenol, and disappointingly awoke the next morning with absolutely no side effects.

When I consider the difference between my experience in writing fiction and that of nonfiction I feel I have more freedom to be honest in my fiction. By that I mean there is no swallowing of my opinion in fiction. There is no me and there is no you. It’s just a world of words — a bridge from my imagination to yours.

I am in search of what Sue Monk Kidd refers to as “the common heart.” A phrase she originally learned from reading Ralph Waldo Emerson. “He described it as a place inside of us where we share an intrinsic unity with all humanity.” This is a thing I long for and seek to accomplish in my writing but sometimes I’m met with controversy.

When it comes to my essays, part of what I do is share ideas. I go places and tell people my ideas, or people read about them and they hate that. Because ideas are very very dangerous and should be limited to only a few people. Male people and wealthy people and white people, preferably. So these people who are dead set on hating me, they go to a reading and when I say, “Question gobbledygook!” There are people who come to see me with angry eyes and they raise their hand and they say, “You are an idiot! Goobledygook is what is good about this country and if you don’t like gobbledygook you should just leave!”

There is no swallowing of my opinion in fiction. There is no me and there is no you.

And then sometimes when I get home there will be emails written to me:

Dear Resting Bitch Face,

I read what you wrote about gobbledygook and I hate you. I hope you die in hell. I want to rape you.

This might sound extreme but, in Why We Write About Ourselves, Ayelet Waldman talks of an experience she had in publishing an essay about loving her partner more than her kids and getting hundreds and hundreds of emails. Some of them threatening, some saying she should “be shot” or deserved to die. Someone actually taped a note to their household gate that said, “Your children should be taken away from you.”

And just last year Amanda Hess, a journalist who writes about sex, published a piece, “Women Aren’t Welcome Here,” in Pacific Standard about a man who opened up a twitter account just to send death threats to her. One tweet read: “Happy to see we live in the same state. Im looking you up, and when I find you, im going to rape you and remove your head.”

Back in my life, I will get another email, an email from a magazine that I like with really smart people in it. It will be a rejection in response to my query on a piece I wrote about gobbledygook. A form rejection like: We appreciate the opportunity to read “The Secrets of Goobledy Gook,” but we feel it is not a good fit for Top Tier Journal 100 at this time.

And then I might scroll through Facebook and see all these cash and prizes being thrown at people. Small island awarded to Chief Operation Officer of Gobbledy Gook. Author of 101 Benefits of Gobbledy Gook receives MacArthur ‘Genius Grant.’ By this time I will be very tired and go to bed. My lover and I won’t have sex that night and I’ll think maybe it’s because I’m fat or smell funny, which will prompt me to stay up and wonder about all the ways I’m unlovable.

My lover and I won’t have sex that night and I’ll think maybe it’s because I’m fat or smell funny, which will prompt me to stay up and wonder about all the ways I’m unlovable.

Encouraging people to fight for what they believe in is an easy enough task. Having an unpopular opinion is a completely different thing. People don’t like you for it and when people don’t like you, you see their ugliest sides. Sometimes this side stares you in the face. Sometimes it’s a dozen quick sharp slashes — being shunned. People think this opinion dealing could be contagious. People who are your friends may not invite you places. People may stop calling you.

In WWWAO, Jesmyn Ward writes about a scene in her memoir in a cellar in the woods. Her editor kept pushing her, dig deeper. Of this experience she writes, “I finally realized what that cellar had taken on for me. All the feelings of self-loathing and worthlessness I had at that age were embodied in that cellar. It symbolized all the dark things that happened to me, things I thought I deserved because of the way I thought of myself at that time: as a young black woman in the South.”

There’s many reasons I love what she says here. The cellar reminds me of the child in the basement in Ursula Le Guin’s story “Omelas.” It also reminds me of an essay Ursula Le Guin once wrote called “The Writer on, and at, Her Work.” In it she writes:

And I found myself
in the dark forest, in silence.

You maybe have to find yourself,
yourselves,
in the dark forest.
Anyhow, I did then. And still now,
always. At the bad time.

When you find the hidden catch
in the secret drawer
behind the false panel
inside the concealed compartment
in the desk in the attic
of the house in the dark forest,
and press the spring firmly,
a door flies open to reveal
a bundle of old letters,
and in one of them is a map
of the forest
that you drew yourself
before you ever went there.

Aside from the experience of writing and existing, there is only one true reward and this too is an idea or more of a hope and the idea is this: For every doo doo ca ca angry face, for every email seething with hatred, for every gala or shindig to which you are not invited there is a child somewhere — a girl — and maybe she will pick up a book or peruse the internet and she will find your words. And in your words she will discover a world of the possible and she will climb out of the cabinet and she will put down the razor.

Victor LaValle Talks About Horror Fiction, Imaginative Illiteracy, and Lovecraft’s Complicated Legacy

Posted on April 8, 2016April 12, 2019 by 007595

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of talking to literary horror writer extraordinaire, Victor LaValle, for Vice about his new Lovecraft-by-way-of-#BlackLivesMatter novel The Ballad of Black Tom. Our conversation went on so long, we decided to split it in two, with the second half appearing here, in Electric Literature.

LaValle, who straddles the border of genre and literary fiction as well as any contemporary writer, is the author of several books, including The Devil in Silver and Big Machine. The Ballad of Black Tom, is a tightly-written horror thriller that works as both an homage and a rebuttal to H. P. Lovecraft. You can read our Electric Literature review, by Tobias Carroll, here.

In this interview, I talked to LaValle about the status of horror fiction, the different legacies of Lovecraft and Tolkien, and the “imaginative illiteracy” of people who don’t read genre fiction.

Lincoln Michel: First off, I really enjoyed the book, and I’m excited about it coming out. What was the genesis of the project?

Victor LaValle: I’m still in shock over the life that this book is having. It started out as just an itch I wanted to scratch last summer. I had turned in the edits for my novel and was waiting to hear back from the editor, and I was just itching to write something. So I knocked this thing out in that month. Like the first draft. I went to my wife and I said, “Nobody’s going to want this shit. Who wants a literary mashup of H.P. Lovecraft with a black lives matter undercurrent?” She was just like, “Well, don’t delete it.” And I really just thought that it wouldn’t find anybody who would think this combination is as interesting as I do. When I wrote it, I really thought, “Well, maybe I could post this online somewhere for free, people could just check it out?” But over time, people kept saying, “Oh, I like this! We should publish this.” I said, “Okay, that sounds great.”

LM: You’ve said you wrote the book during “the last round of arguments about H.P. Lovecraft’s legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man.” This includes the fight over having his bust removed as the trophy for the World Fantasy Awards, which they just decided to do.

VL: Smartly, it seems like they are going to go with a choice that’s not a specific person. I hope that’s what they do. Because any person’s legacy is going to age and potentially sour. But an idea or an image or something like that is much better. Like Cthulhu, I think, has much more of a lasting life than Lovecraft. Or could mean more for longer than Lovecraft personified.

LM: Right, because that references the work as opposed to the man. Lovecraft wasn’t all that popular in his day, yet he’s grown to be this huge influence not just in horror, but in the culture at large. In an interview in Dirge magazine, you attributed that in part to what you called the “open code” nature of his work. Why do you think that that made it so enduring?

VL: If you read his stories over time, he himself didn’t have a singular idea about what the Old Gods were, who all the Old Gods were, what all the conspiracies in his universe were. It was constantly changing, and so as a result, you as a reader can feel like, okay, this is constantly evolving and shifting, it never feels fixed. Then he dies and one of his confidantes, August Derleth, goes on to publish Lovecraft’s work partly in an effort to make people know and remember how great Lovecraft was. Then he starts writing these Lovecraft Universe stories, but Derleth starts shaping things into much more of a Judeo-Christian narrative. And that’s not really something that Lovecraft seemed to be pushing. That’s Derleth. And so it was almost like right at the beginning of his legacy building you have people saying, “I’m gonna try my hand at this.” And if one of his closest friends, the one who’s trying to get his legacy out there, feels the right to do that…well, why not everybody else?

LM: And even in Lovecraft’s day, he had a circle of friends including Robert E. Howard, who wrote the Conan the Barbarian stories, that would share elements and borrow names from each other. So even in his day, he had a collaborative process.

VL: I think that’s right.

LM: It’s very different from the modern geek culture notion of pure canon, and how everyone worries about what’s “true” or what “counts” in fiction.

I wonder too if there’s a way that the spirit of the creator telegraphs how we’ll take things.

VL: I wonder too if there’s a way that the spirit of the creator telegraphs how we’ll take things. A fine example would be Tolkien. It seems to me that the point of his output was to be definitive about his worlds, and it didn’t seem like he was in collaboration with anybody. Tolkien was simply producing and creating that really huge world of his. I might be wrong about that, because I don’t know that much about Tolkien, but that spirit seems very different than Lovecraft’s. I wonder if it even comes down to how someone like Tolkien was this Oxford don who’s very used to authority and what I say goes and being left to his own devices, and then you have Lovecraft not coming up through this system where he is taught that he is somehow the authority or the final word on anything. And as a result maybe lives and dies by those collaborations. He does live and die by his letter-writing to all his friends. And so maybe that makes for a much more relaxed way with your work and conversational letters about your work.

LM: That seems right about Tolkien. He doesn’t really leave many gaps, and even when there are bits of mystery in the Lord of the Rings, he has The Silmarillion, which is an encyclopedia that fills out every detail.

Lovecraft is typically classified as Weird Fiction, a genre that’s having a moment right now with Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Penguin Classics reissuing those Thomas Ligotti books and several other Weird Fiction writers seem to be getting a lot of attention. You’ve said Weird Fiction was the first genre of literature you fell in love with. Can you talk about its influence on you?

VL: When I was younger, I didn’t understand that I was falling for Weird Fiction, but I gravitated towards Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter — folks whose work was not about necessarily here are all the answers to how the world works or what these horrors are. They were much more about a sort of mood and a suggestion. I liked the stuff that suggested things are beyond our reckoning, human beings are limited beings and we can’t grasp or fathom everything that this universe has to offer. I just was drawn to that. It’s how I still view existence. One writer not in that list above is Stephen King, who was also a formative influence on me, but he can do the whole spectrum from splatter to realism to the genuinely weird.

LM: Yeah, because Lovecraft was a big influence on King too, right?

VL: I think he’s said that’s so, more than a few times. One of the greatest books that he ever produced was It, and that seems to be his great Lovecraftian/Weird book. At the end, when he starts explaining how there’s turtles and there’s stacks of turtles and the way we stack cosmic turtles is that all the boys have sex with this one girl, it was like…what in the fuck am I reading? This is just nuts, this is so weird.

LM: [Laughing] That’s definitely one of his weirdest endings.

VL: But nobody I know who has read and loved that book, or even read and hated that book, has ever forgotten the feeling of that last confrontation down in the caves. There’s the sex, but also the cosmic turtles and the deadlights. It doesn’t make sense, but it isn’t nonsense.

LM: Speaking of genres and moving between genres, it seems like it’s kind of popular wisdom that all of these genre barriers have come down in the last ten years and you almost expect big literary writers like Ishiguro or David Mitchell or Cormac McCarthy or whoever to write genre crossover books. That said, I get the impression that it’s still a lot easier to crossover writing literary science fiction or literary detective fiction than literary horror. Does that seem right to you and if so, why do you think horror has such a bad rap in the literary world?

I’ve told some folks I’m a literary writer trying his best to become a horror writer and they’ve practically shaken me to stop me from saying such a thing.

VL: It may be as simple as a lot of the people who are in the literary world read science fiction when they were young. If they dabbled in a genre it was that one. And if they liked it then, well, it can’t be entirely bad. That kind of self-centeredness. I just feel I talk to people sometimes and they’ll say, oh you know I read Ursula K Le Guin or Atwood or whoever you wanna name and they’ll say that at a certain stage those people really spoke to them so now they can still appreciate it and even applaud it. But the horror genre’s reputation precedes it. Even just the term “horror” creates a sense of revulsion in many people. I’ve told some folks I’m a literary writer trying his best to become a horror writer and they’ve practically shaken me to stop me from saying such a thing. “Don’t talk like that!” But since I’ve loved the stuff since a young age — and since I know a great many works of high literature are actually works of horror — I never understand this reaction.

LM: It’s interesting to me, because — and I also obviously love horror — there’s a certain way in which horror is almost the most literary of the genres. It comes from like Gothic fiction like the Brontës and down through Edgar Allan Poe. Its lineage is all these people who are firmly in the literary canon. I’ll probably get flack for saying this, and using “literary” is always problematic, but I feel like a lot of horror writers are just more literary in the sense that they tend to pay more attention to language. Because so much of the horror itself comes from the style and the atmosphere, and I feel like there’s a much greater focus on that, at least historically, than in a lot of old fantasy and sci-fi.

VL: Sometimes I wonder about what people come to a book for. If you’re not trained to love all that world-building that they do in fantasy or sci-fi then you might not find all that much to embrace or enjoy. Similarly, if you don’t want to immerse yourself in that mood then quite a bit of horror simply won’t be interesting because you can’t read horror for the explanations. Most horror makes no fucking sense at the conclusion. But if you love that mood, that language, then you shrug that stuff off. It’s like how people who love literary realism don’t mind the characters just sitting around introspecting for four hundred pages.

LM: [laughing] Yeah, I mean that’s one thing that’s kind of interesting about the genre discussions, is that people forget that genres are not like fixed immutable things that have always existed. They live and die and get absorbed by other genres. There was a time when the Southern Gothic was a real genre, even with its own pulpy covers and readership, but it died out and only a few really great ones — like O’Connor and Faulkner — got absorbed by the literary world. Then they just got a new label.

VL: Right, once they get taught, they get the stamp.

LM: Well, speaking of that divide, you know one thing that I’ve seen you do a lot, especially on Twitter, is you talk about the literary world’s inattention to plot. I remember there was one tweet I looked up. This was around Christmas, you said the greatest gift Santa could have given any literary writers this year is plots. Why do you think that literary writers don’t see plot as as essential a tool as voice or character or anything else?

I’m convinced the main reason literary writers are somewhat averse to plot is because most don’t know how to write one.

VL: You know, I’ve been teaching for going on fifteen years and I’m convinced the main reason literary writers are somewhat averse to plot is because most don’t know how to write one. It’s actually as simple as that. Maybe a more generous way to put it is that they have less interest in such things. Instead their focus is on the sentence level. A beautiful sentence may matter more than a memorable plot. But if we’re going to give shit to writers in other genres about their lackluster language or their wooden characters then why wouldn’t we tell the literary realists to get these human beings out in the world and do something?

LM: I mean, I love a lot of writers like that, but they’re normally short story writers.

VL: Maybe the true form of literary fiction is the short story. Because you can manage that over the course of a story, and have it be transcendent. Over the course of a novel, it can become deadly. And in fact a novel that’s only an accumulation of beautiful sentences risks becoming incoherent. You read along thinking, “This is an amazing two page description of a tree, but what the hell are we doing at the park again?”

LM: Especially if your goal is to create this powerful feeling or atmosphere, that’s going to get diffused after a while if that’s the only thing going on in the text.

VL: That’s right, and even the idea that one would modulate your tone and change the mood, then you have to pay attention to more than just sentences because you have to think in blocks, paragraph by paragraph, how to modulate things. Then section by section, and if you talk about novels, chapter by chapter. And that’s where the literary mind can stumble. Because they don’t seem to think bigger than that single block of pages, and that’s the whole point of plot. It’s the tether that you use four yourself and for the reader. It’s how you don’t get lost wandering in all those perfect sentences.

LM: I wonder if part of that is, you know you’re talking about teaching and you know like the way literary fiction is taught is so geared towards the short story, just because it’s easier to read and critique in a workshop. And then like we just don’t talk about the novel structure as much, at least in my experience.

VL: This is the second time I’ve been doing a year-long novel at Columbia, and I’ve been really happy that the department agreed with me that this was a need. It’s not for everyone, but for some of the students it’s been vital. And there is something powerful about reading 200 pages, 300 pages over the course of a year, reading that together as a group, and when you look at it in full, you really can think broadly about the book as a book. Bigger conversations than you can achieve reading 25 page submissions three times in a semester.

LM: I don’t know if this is a weird question, but a lot of people will just say that genres are purely artificial labels, that are just there for marketing and they don’t mean anything, and then a lot of other people will say that you know, genre snobbery is something that we should do away with, but the genres themselves are kind of important and distinct traditions and they’re not just artificial boundaries. Do you agree with one of those, or both?

Most people don’t want to bother, but they blame the genre categories rather than themselves.

VL: There’s this great term called “imaginative illiteracy.” It was coined by an academic named Northrop Frye. He explains that people are trained to read the genre they’re introduced to and lack training in the genre to which they’re not exposed. It seems simple but it isn’t. Every genre contains a great deal of complicated signs and symbols but if we read them for long enough we learn to become literate in those signs and symbols. As a result we can more easily enter into these genres and enjoy the stories inside. This holds true for realism, horror, romance, historical fiction, everything, since reading any kind of story is an act of imagination. Even the most plainspoken realist is still just making a bunch of shit up and trying to get you to picture all of it in your head. If you’re well read in a certain genre then you no longer notice how much imaginative literacy you’ve mastered. You’ve become a native speaker. But it isn’t automatic, it wasn’t effortless. So I don’t know if the genre labels are meaningless or aimed solely at commercial concerns, but I do know that you have to learn how to read different stories differently. This might be why so many people fall in love with certain genres when they’re younger and then don’t really leave those lanes. Even if the level of sophistication in the books increases the literacy required doesn’t and that’s fine for many. The problem is when such a reader is given something entirely different. Then it’s like being introduced to a foreign language. I can’t imagine someone saying, “Portugese just isn’t for me.” Or, “I don’t know why, but I never liked Mandarin.” Instead a person would say, “I don’t know how to speak Portugese.” Then they would either learn it or not. “Imaginative illiteracy” is a way to approach the same idea across genres. I like that explanation for genre divides much more than any other because a person can learn a new language if s/he wants to work at it, and a reader can learn how to be literate in other genres if they want to go to the trouble to become proficient. Most people don’t want to bother, but they blame the genre categories rather than themselves.

LM: I like that phrase, “imaginatively illiterate.” That makes a lot of sense to me. I remember when I was in workshop, often if I wrote something that was kind of in the tradition of weird fiction in some general sense and the tradition of weird fiction or the tradition of Kafka or Kobo Abe, there would always be a few students who could only understand it as “satire.” If it wasn’t realist fiction, but it wasn’t fantasy or SF, it had to be satire. And I also feel like I see genre people who really come from like the fantasy and sci-fi world are often baffled by writers who kind of have some of those elements but don’t really care about world-building. They’ll always ask questions like, “What are the rules to this world?” and the write is often like, “It’s like a four-page story, there’s not really a world or rules…”

VL: [Laughing] Right. And what I like about that imaginative illiteracy term is that it basically lets no type of reader off the hook. I mean lots of stuff is just bad, but if you’re imaginatively literate in that genre you can explain why rather than dismissing it because of its genre. You can see this even in professional criticism or book reviews. A book is crossing between literary realism and some other genre, and the reviewer’s intro is essentially saying, “Now this is a little outside my wheelhouse, but this person is pretty famous, so I guess gotta review it.” Then they write, “I just didn’t get why Ishiguro had to talk about dragons. He should stick to butlers.” Or something, you know what I mean? That’s not a review! You did not review his book. You just said you don’t like reading about dragons.

LM: Yeah, and then whenever those kinds of books come out you get like, the opposite, you know the one reviewer will be like all the literary elements worked in the fantasy don’t and the next reviewer is like all the fantasy worked because I really like fantasy, but didn’t like the literary stuff.

VL: “Why did Ishiguro have spend so much time talking about this old couple? Couldn’t they just go fight the dragon right away?” No! No they could not. Maybe in the end the real point is that each of those sides, all of the sides, is often saying, “Can’t you just give me something simple?” And the right answer to that is, “No fucking way.”

TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: THE BELLHOP AT THE HOLIDAY INN

Posted on April 8, 2016January 16, 2024 by 007595

★★☆☆☆

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing the bellhop at the Holiday Inn.

I recently stayed at a Holiday Inn because I thought there was a burglar in my house and I figured it would be best to just stay out of his way. I learned later that the burglar was just a brick someone had thrown through my window.

When I checked into the Holiday Inn, the woman at the front desk handed me my key and said, “Arthur will help you with your bags.” I turned around and saw Arthur, a young man with a big smile, excited to carry my bags for me. Unfortunately, because I had left my house in a hurry, all I brought with me was the clothes I was wearing and a head of lettuce I’d grabbed off the counter on the way out.

Arthur looked so excited to have a purpose, so I handed him the lettuce. He asked if that was all I had and his eyes looked so pleading that I unbuttoned my shirt and handed him that as well.

I liked his enthusiasm, although I didn’t care for the guilt it made me feel. I always resent doing things out of guilt and I didn’t like the idea of resenting Arthur because he was just being himself.

He wasn’t very good at conversation. The walk to my room took less than two minutes and in that short amount of time he didn’t ask me anything about where I’m from or if I like the weather or anything like that. The only thing he said was, “Hey look, a pencil” because there was a pencil on the ground. I asked him what he thought about pencils in the hopes to get the conversation started but he just shrugged.

When we reached my room I immediately put my shirt back on and I think while I was doing that, he peeled a couple of leaves off the head of lettuce and shoved them in his pocket. I’m not 100% certain he did, and I would hate to accuse him if he’s innocent, but the lettuce felt a little lighter and he had this strange grin on his face as if he’d just pulled the wool over my eyes.

He was clearly angling for a tip but I felt like the lettuce leaves he stole were tip enough. So I used my eyes to say, “Didn’t you already get a tip?” Then he completely ignored my question and used his mouth to tell me to have a nice stay.

Knowing there was a possible thief with a key to my room made me feel even less safe than with the burglar in my house. I locked the door and climbed out the window and just slept in my car instead.

BEST FEATURE: Arthur has some great teeth. They’re a little yellow but the size and shape is perfect!
WORST FEATURE: When he walked, there was this strange noise his feet would make, as if there was water in his shoes.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a straw.

In Praise of the Messed Up Mind: Synesthesia, Substances, and the World Anew and Askew

Posted on April 7, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

by Molly Prentiss

Last night I was sitting at a restaurant with a writer friend — let’s call him Ed because his name is Ed — arguing over the colors of the days of the week.

Mondays are blue, he said.

No Mondays are bright red, I said.

Fridays are black, he said.

No Fridays are blue, I said.

We disagreed on all the days with the exception of Thursday, which we both agreed was brown. We also agreed it was strange that Thursdays were brown because Thursdays are always the most fun and brown is the least fun color.

We were having this conversation because moments earlier I’d busted out one of my favorite bar tricks, which is listing off famous people who have synesthesia. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which the cognitive pathways that relate to one’s senses — sight, smell, touch, sound, etc. — are swapped, and I’m mildly obsessed with it. A synesthete might see the color red when he hears the sound of bells, for example. Or smell roasted peanuts when he reads the word dog. The sensations are automatic and involuntary. Many synesthetes describe its visual manifestation as a sort of screen in their minds eye, the colors or images floating atop whatever is in their sightline — a scrim of sensation between them and the rest of the world.

Mary J. Blige! I had been yelling happily to Ed. David Hockney! Nabokov! PHARELL. Kanye says he does, but does he? You never know with Kanye. And Jewel, and Jimi Hendrix, and Van Gogh…Isn’t it fascinating?

Ed was moderately fascinated. Makes sense to me, he said. A brain that misfires to connect colors and sounds and smells? I’d say they’ve got an edge on the rest of us — their brains doing all this linking automatically, and we’re busting our asses trying to write our fussy similes. Don’t you think?

I’d say they’ve got an edge on the rest of us — their brains doing all this linking automatically, and we’re busting our asses trying to write our fussy similes.

I did think. In fact, it was one of the things I thought about a lot. I coveted the synesthete’s highly specific associations and heightened sensations — things I thought would most definitely be benefits in making art or writing. I’d dreamed of that sexy screen of elaborate colors and sounds that coordinated themselves into my daily life, allowing me to feel more than I ever knew was possible. I craved that portal into a new way of seeing, that provocative sensory shift, that messed up, magnificent mind.

***

When I am writing, I often find myself grasping for some altered state. I drink many cups of coffee, until my hands and mind feel shaky and shaken. I take any low-key leftover drugs friends offer — Adderall, dusty pot, vague pills from Mexico, given to me by an ex-boyfriend, that make me feel simultaneously focused and twisted. If it’s evening enough, I drink wine. For whatever reason, I find its easier to say what I think if my thinking is a little skewed.

Occasionally, though, I can enter a specific mental freedom without such moderate substance abuse, and I credit this state for most of writing I’ve done that I consider good. When I am in it, words whistle out of my fingertips, sentences sail onto the screen — it is as if the writing was already fully formed, as if I were simply seeing or feeling something and describing it: that easy. I feel unbridled in my thoughts and limber in my execution of them. Obscure and sometimes seemingly absurd connections come freely and unexpectedly, surprising even me. This writing state feels so far removed from the everyday toiling I do, the wrenching of words into their place, the tough, sticky metaphors, the scratched up outlines. It is as if, in these moments, the barrier between my mind and the page is lifted, the distance between me and my ideas shortened. It is inside these moments that the writing dances and sings.

But these sprees are fleeting. They abandon me, leave me alone with glaring blank screens and unfinished sentences. The distance between me and the work widens and sprawls again, until I am inhabiting a different island than my art, and between us is a large black sea.

Is a synesthetic brain naturally better equipped to create — like a music prodigy, in whom notes and songs seem to be engrained at birth? And as such, does a creative outlet become practically necessary?

But what would it be like if the metaphor I was searching for was not a metaphor at all, but my reality? What if I could simply write down what was happening in my body, or in front of my eyes, and that would be that? It makes me wonder if the workings of a synesthetic mind make art feel more available, the distance from it lessened. Is a synesthetic brain naturally better equipped to create — like a music prodigy, in whom notes and songs seem to be engrained at birth? And as such, does a creative outlet become practically necessary? Is the very nature of the condition — the connections between unlikely things — the essence of creative thought? Which leads me to the question: If a synesthte creates a work of art based directly on the associations in his or her brain, does that mean that the synesthetic mind is a work of art in itself?

***

Richard Cytowick and David Eagleman, co-authors of Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, write:“…synesthetes have more abundant connections among conceptual maps and accordingly are more facile at linking superficially unrelated concepts and seeing deep similarities in seemingly unrelated realms. Likewise, they have a higher aptitude than nonsynesthetes for figurative speech.” So it is true; a synesthetic brain — specifically its “angular gyrus at the junction of the temporal, parietal and occiputal cortices” — is hardwired for the type of thought that creative people count on: connecting the unconnected.

Kandinsky described listening to Wagner like this: “I saw all my colours in my mind; they stood out before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.” Kandinsky’s wild lines: not imagined or dreamed, but seen, witnessed.

Juxtaposition is the natural work of the synesthtetic mind; metaphor is a synesthete’s mental currency.

Hockney seeing the trees on the side of the road as purple, painting straight from what he knows as life.

Jewel blinking in orange flashes when she hits one of her famous guttural low notes.

“All art is juxtaposition,” wrote British poet and academic Robin Skelkin. “Placing images beside each other in such a way as to suggest previously unnoticed or unimagined relationships.” Juxtaposition is the natural work of the synesthtetic mind; metaphor is a synesthete’s mental currency. Whereas I can sit for hours searching for the perfect way to describe the color of a certain dusky sky, a synesthete might simply explain the things he experienced while looking at that sky: the taste of papaya, maybe, or a heat in his hands. This description, for him, is not a metaphor but a reality. Where as my metaphor might be more direct — a sky that was as purple as a bruise, say — it would also be, by definition, less true. My metaphor is a fabrication, a fiction. I did not feel my skin bruising as I searched the sky.

***

Of course, synesthesia isn’t all rose colored glasses and invisible rainbows. Biologically, the condition is actually considered “useless”; it doesn’t increase someone’s chances for survival, make the more attractive to a mate. In fact, it has been known to do the opposite; many synesthetes speak of being ostracized for their condition, especially in their early lives. No one around them can understand why their perception of the world is so different than everyone else’s, why they are so affected by their surroundings, why they might answer a math problem with the word beige. (This was common especially for those born before the advent of MRIs, which could validate the cross firing of their synapses and legitimize their uncommon perceptions.) Because their way of seeing is unrecognizable to others, they are often considered crazy or wacky or out of touch; their opinions are cast aside.

No one around them can understand why their perception of the world is so different than everyone else’s, why they are so affected by their surroundings, why they might answer a math problem with the word beige.

This, of course, is a common theme among many artists, even those without quirky neural conditions. An artist, to my mind, is anyone who has a fresh or particular or nuanced way of seeing the world around them, and who can translate that way of seeing into a work or idea that others can explore or inhabit. These perspectives are often read as problems, dubbed as illegitimate. Part of the artist’s lot is to persevere with her way of seeing and with her work, despite being, by nature, differently-minded than most. It is lucky when the world changes its mind to accommodate or appreciate hers, but this does not always happen. Often, genius isn’t recognized until death, until it’s left this world for another more expansive one.

Sidelining the mistrust of the outside world is the problem of mistrusting oneself, the constant questioning and self doubt that is so routine in the inner life of any artist. The fear that the connections one is making in their work might not be valid or real, that what one has to say is unimportant or unintelligent. This questioning erects a thin, nearly invisible wall, creates a distance that separates you the oddest depths of your own mind, and therefore from you work. The artist’s job, then, is to learn to distrust that wall, to see through it in order to get closer to her original mind, her original mental mode. In many cases, seeing through it isn’t enough; she’ll have to rip down the whole thing of the wall, trust that the structure will hold, relish in the new view through the gaping hole they just made.

Synesthetic poet Arthur Rimbaud said: “The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.” In other words, the artist must actively pursue skewed perception, chase demons into dark corners, obtain insanity. She must actively pursue the mess of her own mind.

***

There is a long history of artists and writers using drugs or alcohol when they work. Susan Sontag has spoken fairly freely about her use of speed, claiming it allowed her to be less constrained as she wrote, to be loose, to unlock a river of fast, new ideas. Ditto Sartre, ditto the Beats. Cocaine fueled Robert Louis Stevenson’s creation of Dr. Jekyll, not to mention the inventions of Thomas Edison or the drastic conclusions of Sigmund Freud. Dickens did opium. Then there are the classic alcoholics: Hemingway, Van Gogh — the list goes on.

Why do so many creative people, people whose minds are arguably the sharpest or most brilliant, want to alter those minds, fuck them up? What is it about the jostle of the drug or the blur of the alcohol that is attractive, specifically, to the artist?

Sure, there is an element of personality involved; artists have the reputation of being depressed, sensual, open, needy…all traits that can lead them to inebriation. But one also has to believe, as Sontag suggests, that something of it has to do with fueling their creative work — a desire to twist their perception for the sake of creative vision, the need to feel and see things differently in order to crack a creative code. (Artists seek escape from many tyrannies, one being their own innate sense of things.)

What is it about the jostle of the drug or the blur of the alcohol that is attractive, specifically, to the artist?

The mess of one’s mind is terrifying, and culling one’s layers of rational and regular thought to get there is some of the hardest work an artist must do. It is painful, not only to touch at one’s own soft core, but to recognize one’s own inner madness, one’s weird way of working, one’s anomalous way of being. Again and again, the artist must remind himself that he is different, and that even when this is working in his favor, he will never be like anyone else. Often, one needs to be in an altered state to allow themselves to get to their original altered state, make themselves feel different to allow themselves to be different.

It seems to me that when one is drunk or high, that distance — between one’s actual experience of the world and what they allow themselves to create — shortens a bit. As the brain becomes altered — dopamine increases, new cortexes light up, inhibitions dwindle — the cloak of perpetual fear can be lifted, perhaps even removed. Sight is blurry or tilted, maybe, thoughts slide outside their normal boxes. A room becomes a boat, and suddenly you are sailing toward a very slightly different world. A world you could write about, and in which you can write.

***

Apparently, we are all a little bit synesthetic. Cytowik, in 2009 interview, stated: “…cross-talk among the senses is the rule rather than the exception — we are all inward synesthetes who are outwardly unaware of sensory couplings happening all the time.” He sites dancing as an example: our bodies moving naturally to rhythms produced by sound. And watching a movie: our eyes seeing a screen and our ears hearing speakers, our brains doing the work to merge the two senses together so that we believe the actor is actually speaking to us. In other words, we may not all see fireworks behind our eyelids when we hear orchestra music, but our brains are still cross-pollinating in ways we don’t even notice or acknowledge, all the time.

In extrapolation, we are all natural metaphor makers and understanders. Cytowick sites our collective association of dark colors with lower sounds, for example, and deeper smells. Light colors with higher sounds and brighter, fresher smells. When we describe wine, we might very well sound synesthetic. It’s deep and round, we might say about a lush red. Or for a white: it tastes like a day at the park. It’s bright. It skips across the tongue.

This makes me wonder about my conversation with Ed. Neither of us have synesthesia, and yet we were so adamant about the colors of the days. Sure, our associations were probably left over from kindergarten color wheels or the calendar on our mom’s fridge when we were growing up. Or perhaps they were just based on how we felt about a day — Ed said Monday was blue because it felt fresh, like a new start. But for whatever reason, they are there in our mind like imprints, old memories or mental links that linger like stains. Though we can’t see them, they are defined and strong, perhaps even fixed. If this is the case, our only job as writers is to travel the distance between the thought and the page.

The unexpected is scary; not everyone allows for it.

Modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi said: “To see far is one thing: going there is another.” What exists in the space between seeing and going? What dark mess lies there that makes it so difficult to traverse? It is within this space that anything can happen, where truth can emerge, where messes are made. The unexpected is scary; not everyone allows for it.

Perhaps what separates an artist out from the rest is not simply an innate ability or built-in way of seeing. Perhaps it is also her willingness to travel through this bog of truth, and to come out the other side with the hinge that connects vision and reality. She might have to get miserable for a moment, in the aching heat of her own sensations. She might have to wallow in Monday’s blue, or she may have to invent a color she’s never seen. Most importantly, she’ll have to hop into the messy ship of her own mind, trust it to get her where she wants to go, or even where she doesn’t.

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7. War & Peace, BBC/A&E/Lifetime/History

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TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: THE BELLHOP AT THE HOLIDAY INN

In Praise of the Messed Up Mind: Synesthesia, Substances, and the World Anew and Askew

1. The Magicians, Syfy

2. 11.22.63, Hulu

3. Lucifer, FOX

4. American Gods, Starz

5. The Night Manager, BBC One/AMC

6. Luke Cage, Netflix

7. War & Peace, BBC/A&E/Lifetime/History

8. Preacher, AMC

9. Big Little Lies, HBO

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