Page 680 – Electric Literature

We Must Be Alive: Among the Wild Mulattos & Other Tales by Tom Williams

Posted on November 13, 2015March 14, 2019 by 007595

In his 1991 hit song, Black or White, Michael Jackson meditates on racial equality, singing, “I’m not going to spend/My life being a color.” However, Jackson’s well-documented, complicated relationship with his African American appearance speaks to the contrary. In a way, Jackson’s transformation from his natural skin tone to an eerie, bleached white speaks not just of his profound personal battle with identity, but a broader problem in America as a whole. The simple fact is, that as a result of systematic white supremacy, many African Americans do spend their lives “being a color.” This troubling issue forms the central motif of Kentucky-born writer and academic Tom Williams’ short story collection, Among the Wild Mulattos & Other Tales.

The burdens of oppression, violence, and inequality shouldered by black Americans weigh heavy. But how are bi or multiracial people affected — the shades of grey, if you will, in the simplified divisions of ‘black’ and ‘white’ — and how are they recognized and represented in cultural phenomena like literature? Here, Williams attempts to address these matters in their multifarious forms.

Almost 7% of American adults — around 9 million as of the 2013 Census — are genetically comprised of more than one race. In June, the Pew Research Center published Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers. Of the 1,555 participants of Pew’s survey, only 60% claimed to feel proud of their multiracial heritage, and 55% reported experiencing racist slurs, jokes, and threats due to their mixed parentage.

The findings of the PRC study demonstrate the complexity of racial identity, and how the degree to which people struggle depends in no small part on the race to which they most identify. Participants with a biracial black and white background reported receiving a notable quantity of racial profiling and discrimination, aligning with the many prejudices targeted against black Americans. However, despite such a parallel, many multiracial individuals do not report a sense of connection with people of the same racial mix, indicating a lack of strong shared biracial identity.

Author of The Mimic’s Own Voice and Don’t Start Me Talkin’, and currently Chair of English at Kentucky’s Morehead State University, Williams explores in detail the experience of biracial Americans in a contemporary environment that claims, albeit falsely, to be ‘post-racial.’ The eponymous ‘mulatto’ is a term traditionally denoting a person with one black and one white parent, or sometimes referring to someone with mixed black and white ancestry. Not commonly used today, mulatto is regarded as at best archaic and at worst a racial slur, which is reasonable considering the etymology of the word is based in the Latin mūlus, or mule, the infertile offspring of a horse and donkey.

Perhaps unsurprising given his own mixed race heritage, Williams is explicitly concerned with representations of biracial identity, using fiction to consider the ways in which biracial individuals navigate a world that is unsure whether to treat them as black or white. The majority of these stories are located in the Southern and Midwestern states, where racism remains rife, and racial tension is high. One character, in ‘Who Among Us Knows the Route to Heaven?,’ describes his reception as a biracial child in 1970s Ohio as “(o)dder than two-headed calves, stranger than Uri Geller,” and when watching TV at that time, that “(n)ever once did I see a face or family that looked like mine.” It is this alienation that Williams is most curious about, and the steps some biracial people feel forced to take to in order to counteract it.

Thematically, the collection ranges from a twist on the tortured writer trope in the opener, ‘The Story of My Novel: Three Piece Combo With Drink,’ to Doestoyevskian doubling in ‘The Lessons of Effacement,’ and the relationship between image and identity in ‘Movie Star Entrances’ and ‘The Finest Writers in the World Today.’ The cord tying these narratives together is identity; a notion encompassing our sense of self, how we are perceived, our manipulations of these perceptions, and those aspects beyond our control.

Despite Williams’ concentration on representing biracial characters, his stories share a universality that prevents them from alienating readers of other races. ‘The Finest Writers in the World Today’ focuses less on race, exploring the strange phenomenon of celebrity impersonators. Williams humorously imagines the consequences of a lookalike agency — ’Cause Celebs’ — introducing the doubles of famous writers; a group not traditionally celebrated for their appearance, but for their talent. It is discovered that the popularity of these doubles comes not from their ability to imitate, but from the ability to represent an author without all the troublesome drinking, arrogance, or ridiculous demands. Dead writer? No problem, a “plain creepy” William Burroughs, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez (“the manager of a Mexican restaurant near Clintonville”) double can step in. As authors do experience a huge amount of celebrity — recent examples include Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — Williams’ satire cuts close to the bone.

Another particularly strong story, ‘Movie Star Entrances,’ scrutinizes our obsession with how we are perceived, and is accordingly one of the most relatable narratives. The protagonist, Curtis, is a shy and timid employee of Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts; a self-described “biracial suburbanite,” whose childhood in Des Moines left him desperate to “find a place where his presence was not so spectacular, where he might be among others like him.” With a work party looming, and a special lady’s attention to attract, the self-conscious Curtis turns to a very odd agency to re-invent himself.

Run by Ramon and Miriam, an entertainingly odd couple, Movie Star Entrances promises an extreme makeover, which thoroughly convinces the bashful Curtis. However, despite their extraordinary efforts at transforming him, he finds that his brief moment in the spotlight is not enough to change his perception of himself, and “his tawny…undistinguished skin.” Williams hits the right balance between humor and melancholy, the story a reminder of the sadness and frustration that can arise from growing up without a sense of place — in this case due to race, but applicable to anyone that has struggled with identification or self-confidence.

Williams’ shines when he allows his characters to interact with the uncanny, absurd, troubling, and bizarre, epitomized in the disturbing ‘Ethnic Studies’. A group of men — Javier, Teng Lo, Amos, and our unnamed narrator, all in “the general family of brown” — are offered $500 a pop by a university professor to engage in a highly problematic demonstration of racial variety that is reminiscent of the 19th and 20th century ‘human zoos;’ degrading exhibitions emphasising the differences between ‘primitive’ peoples and white Europeans and Americans. Feeling increasingly uncomfortable and exploited, the men retaliate, putting on a display of racial stereotypes that highlight the absurdity and racism of objectifying of people of color. As thus still, unfortunately, all too common — whether the use of black backing dancers by a white performer, or the wearing of traditional native American headdresses by white teenagers at music festivals — Williams brings us uncomfortably close to how little we’ve advanced from the abhorrent racist practices of our white predecessors.

While Williams’ characterization is generally strong, and he generates authentic, engaging personas, what is glaringly absent is positive female representation. Frequently, the women in these stories are background props, or fulfil an archaic, rather sexist role, such as object of desire, lover, or girlfriend. Only once, in ‘The Finest Writers in the World Today’ does a woman take a vaguely central role, but rather than being celebrated, her confidence and drive to succeed are portrayed as arrogance and obsession. More bothersome is the puzzling vignette ‘A Public Service,’ which takes the form of a kind of marketing spiel for a pornographic website focusing on larger women’s bottoms, imaginatively named ‘rearview.com.’ While it’s clear that Williams’ is attempting to engage in a commentary on the objectification of women:

Denigrating women. Invading their privacy. Who told you that shit? We’re showing women, real women single moms, widows, divorcees…But we’re respectful, We don’t show faces so nobody knows just who it is who’s carrying around all that sugar.

What he produces instead is a rather uninspired, directionless vignette. For female readers, the story serves no purpose aside from an unnecessary reminder of the misogynistic, patriarchal society we must live in.

Although the thorough exploration of this collection is enlightening, at times entertaining, and often disquieting, Williams’ explicit repetition of the biracial motif becomes somewhat tiresome, with almost all of the stories mentioning that the protagonist is ‘biracial,’ in no varying terms, within the first few pages. This degree of exposition leaves the reader feeling vaguely patronized, as if their powers of deduction would be too weak to figure this out without guidance. However, the closing story — the eponymous ‘Among the Wild Mulattos’ — with its depiction of an isolated, biracial utopia for those desiring to escape the whitewashed landscape of America, provides some reinvigoration.

Despite its flaws, this collection forms a fairly vital function: enriching and positive representation of biracial Americans in contemporary literature. What it lacks in gender and geographical diversity, it makes up for in diligence and unwavering focus. While Williams’ reiteration of biracial protagonists can appear excessive, this does, in fact, remind us of the need for such attention; it is not just our society that is dominated by white people and culture, but art and literature, too.

Watch This: Animated Video of Rare Kurt Vonnegut Lecture

Posted on November 12, 2015March 14, 2019 by 007595

This short video is taken from a guest lecture Kurt Vonnegut held at NYU in 1970. Blank on Blank, who created the video, describes the lecture: “In November 1970, Kurt Vonnegut walked into a class room at NYU. He was a guest speaker that day. He’d prepared some handwritten notes on what he wanted to say: there were his thoughts on the art of writing, his childhood, the death of his parents. He jumped from topic to topic as he shuffled through his papers. Sometimes his voice trailed off. He delivered punchlines with perfect timing.”

On writing:

“I’ve heard that a writer is lucky because he cures himself every day with his work. What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won’t know it.”

On the importance of his books:

“How important my books are or anybody’s books are, I don’t know. I don’t think they are terribly important. I think that they make people contented during the period they are reading them and this is worth something is to take care of somebody for a couple of hours.”

This interview is taken from Blank on Blank, a project meant to “preserve and re-imagine the American interview.” The website features rare interviews from famous speakers, each complete with an illustration to go along with the video. More interviews can be found here.

In Defense of the Invisible: Eyes: Novellas and Stories by William H. Gass

Posted on November 12, 2015March 14, 2019 by 007595

“There are no magic words,” said William Gass in his seminal collection The World Within the Word. “To say the words is magical enough.” Gass, no stranger to such conjuration, has practiced his own brand of experimental, decadent, and richly complex literary bewitchment for nearly half a century. From the tangled beauty of his debut Omensetter’s Luck (1966) to the sui generis meditation On Being Blue (1975) to his American Book Award-winning magnum opus The Tunnel (1995), the 91-year old belle-lettrist has indelibly marked American letters with a luxuriant, lavishly jeweled prose style whose gorgeous obscenities landed him in one of the great literary grudge matches of the last century, facing off against the arch-moralist John Gardner. In one of their more legendary exchanges, Gardner, a fine novelist in his own right, claimed that the difference between them was “my 707 will fly while [Gass’] is too encrusted with gold to get off the ground.” To which Gass famously responded: “There is always that danger. But what I really want is to have it sit there solid as a rock and have everybody think it is flying.”

That extraordinary mimesis is once again marshalled for Gass’ newest collection Eyes: Novellas and Stories, his first work since 2013’s Middle C. Comprised of two novellas and a handful of short stories, Eyes circles familiar Gassian material — isolation, meanness, obsession, and the wonder and terror of representation — while packing enough formal inventiveness and lyrical sleights-of-hand to keep even the most seasoned Gass acolyte pleasantly off-balance. As might be expected from its title, Eyes is concerned with the implications of sight; more precisely, it is the inverted capacity of seeing — what Jan DeBlieu calls “a glimpse of all that happens out of the realm of human vision” in the book’s epigraph — that especially grips Gass here. These stories strive to tease out the invisible relations required of our existences in order for something — anything — to be seen. “Only once had the world realized these relations; they would never exist again; they had come and gone like a breath,” one of his characters says early on, and the mystery of these words hangs on a wire above the entire collection. What comprises our vision of ourselves? Of others? Of objects? What unseen metaphysical scaffolding — like a photographic negative — can be intimated from the limited world of the visible?

Nowhere are these questions handled with more grace, verve, and surprisingly un-Gassian gentleness than in the opening novella, “In Camera”, which tells the story of Mr. Gab, a greedy (and possibly criminal) aesthete whose love of photography supersedes any moral framework, and his orphan assistant Mr. Stu (a diminutive of “You Stupid Kid”) whose physical deformities and feigned ignorance belie the development of his interior life. Mr. Gab, owner of a drab photography print shop possessed of a suspiciously fine library of images, has found life to pale in comparison to his beloved photos. In the idealized image he sees —

a testimony to the unerring fineness of the photographer’s eye; an eye unlike the painter’s, he claimed, because the painter constructed; the painter made up his image as if the canvas were a face; while the photographer sought his composition like a hunter his prey, and took it away clean, when it was found, to present in its purity, as the result of an act of vision, the sort of seeing no one else employed.

Through the mouthpiece of Mr. Gab, Gass uses the language of photography throughout in order to complicate and, at times, ennoble the act of seeing. “The right click demonstrates how, in an instant, we, or our burro, or our shovel, or our eye or nose or nipple, were notes in a majestic symphony,” says Gab. In the surprisingly tender denouement, a crisis enables Mr. Stu to help Mr. Gab see that “a whole world made of fragility and levitation” can, perhaps, exist among and between us outside the frame. There is subtle, nuanced mercy and heart in what develops between the two, like a photograph years in development finally presenting its richness.

The collection’s other novella, “Charity”, is vintage Gass, a remarkably complex exploration of shame, privacy, pride, and the ambiguous motivations inherent to the act of giving. It follows a young lawyer, Hugh Hamilton Hardy, whose self-loathing arises from his status as “an EZ mark” among panhandlers, schemers, and beggars. A rejected act of charity haunts him from his childhood:

having known both sorts of shame — having inflicted shame and suffered it — shame searing his soul so its skin smoked — Hardy knew the difference between a guilty conscience and crushed pride, between — in a shameless world — getting caught and being defiled.

Gass interweaves sexual memory and dialogue from Hardy’s most recent relationship, adroitly calling into question the ways we use (and abuse) our own sexual currency as charitable gesture. The increasingly blurred lines between shame, need and generosity underpin a surprising exchange at the story’s end that echoes the charitable trauma of his youth. Gass calls into question how we curate the objects of our charity, and what we choose to ignore out of shame or self-interest. In “Charity”, the empathetic offering is as likely as not a desire in disguise: an inverted way for Hardy to coerce others to “feel sorry at him, for a change, all night long.”

The short stories featured in the collection are, by and large, about objects rather than people. “Don’t Even Try, Sam” allows the battered and forgotten piano Dooley Wilson plays in Casablanca to air its grievances in a one-sided interview about old Hollywood, artifice, and memory. It isn’t clear if the piano is even functional (as its keys seemingly refuse to plink), but that is largely beside the point as this funnily eccentric one-off — the literary equivalent of a ditty — ponders the ways in which storytelling provides meaning and, even if only briefly, wards off obscurity. “Soliloquy For an Empty Chair”, meanwhile, gives voice to a foldable metal chair in a barber shop that somehow becomes a melancholic rumination on the inevitability of disintegration. “We die through use…when rust’s slow debilitations pick at what we are and what sustains us with more repetition and determination than the woodworm,” says the chair. In these stories, the oft-ignored life of objects is brought to the fore, vignettes whose psychosis, humor, wit, and absurdity are both a joy in their own right while also a subtle interrogation of how, where, and why we spend our attention.

Returning to Jan DeBlieu’s lovely epigraph, “eyes”, beyond being receptacles of vision, are also geographic features “where an underground spring suddenly bursts to the surface.” These places of mystery — “where dry ground becomes soaked with life-giving water” — are pitch-perfect allegories of Gass’ fiction. In his more than capable hands, our condition is slandered, complicated, buffed, broken open — and, finally, illuminated. It is perhaps an irony that Eyes: Novellas and Stories, a collection written near the end of his career, makes for a wonderful entry point into the Gassian literary cosmos. In these strange, piercing stories we read of ourselves hungrily and with a growing awareness. We read for the inimitable prose style, of course, and the brilliant narrative gambits — but we also read to see what he sees. Mr. Gab, when rhapsodizing over his photographs, professes that our lives “are lifted up and given grace when touched by such lenses”; so, too, are Gass’ stories “such lenses” in which life and literature shimmer and intensify. May we all learn to see with such eyes.

TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: MORSE CODE

Posted on November 12, 2015March 21, 2019 by 007595

★☆☆☆☆

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing Morse code.

Of all the codes, Morse code is so easy to decipher that it barely counts as a code. You’d have to be at a real loss for codes to end up using it. I bet the inventor, Samuel Morse, was really disappointed when his code was deciphered so quickly. He probably regretted naming it after himself, because now the most useless code in the world is associated with him.

Just to show you how easy Morse code is to decipher, I’m going to reveal to you my deepest, darkest secret. If you decide you want to know it, you can decode it in about 45 minutes. I tested it on my paperboy and that’s how long it took him to decode it before he ran away.

— — -. -.-. . .. .-.. . — .- — .-. .- …- . .-.. .. -. — . …. .. . — . . — . .. . .-.. .. …- . .. -. — -. — — . .- .-. .- — . . .- -. -.. .. ..-. . -.. …. .. — -.-. .- — ..-. — — — — -.. .- … .- . — . .-. .- -. -.- .- -. -.. — …. . -. . -..- — -.. .- -. — …. . …- .- -. .. … …. . -.. .- -. -.. .. . — .- … . — — — .-. .-. .. . -.. — …. . ..-. — — — — -.. — .- -.. . …. .. — … .. -.-. -.- .- -. -.. …. . -.-. .-. .- . — .-.. . -.. — — ..-. ..-. … — — — . . — …. . .-. . — — — -.. .. . .. -.-. …. . -.-. -.- . -.. .- .-.. .-.. — -. — -. . .. — . …. -… — — .-. … — . .- .-. .- — . . … .- -. -.. ..- -. -.. . .-. — …. . .. .-. . — . — — .-. -.-. …. . … -… ..- — — …. . …. .. . — . . — . .. . . — .- … -. — .- -. -. — . — …. . .-. . .. ..-. …. . . — .- … -.. . .- -.. … — — — . . — …. . .-. . .- -. -.. — …. . -. — .-. .- -. .- -. .- ..- — — — . — . … -. — .- -. -.. ..-. — — ..- -. -.. …. . -.. -… . . -. ..-. . -.. -.-. .- — ..-. — — — — -.. .. — -.-. — — ..- .-.. -.. -… . — .-. .- -.-. . -.. -… .- -.-. -.- — — — — . … — — .. . — — ..- … — — — — …- . -.. — — — .- -. . . — — — — . — -. .. -. . …- . .-. …. . .- .-. -.. .- -. -. — — …. .. -. — . .- -… — — ..- — — …. .- — …. .. . — . . — . .. . .- — . .- .. -. . …- . .-. … .. -. -.-. . .- .-.. .-.. — …. .. … …. .- . — . . — . . -. . -.. .. — .- ..-. .-. .- .. -.. — — — — .- .-.. -.- — — — …. .. . — . . — . .. . … ..-. — — .-. ..-. . .- .-. — …. .- — .. — .. — . …. — . -. -.. ..- . — . .. -. — …. . … .- — . … .. — ..- .- — .. — — -. .. -.-. .- -. — -.- . . . — . — — — …- .. -. — . ..-. .-. — — — — — — . — -. — — — — — — . — -.

I’ve never heard anyone talk in morse code before although one easily could. Each line is represented by a long sound, and each dot represents a short sound. It’s one of the only codes that can be written and spoken.

After going back through all the newspapers in my town for the past 50 years, I could find no record of Morse code being used. No Morse code festivals, no Morse code stores. Nothing. It is clearly on the verge of extinction, which I’m sure must frighten Samuel Morse’s heirs who are likely still receiving royalties. This is exactly the type of reason why I didn’t want royalties for my work on Melrose Place — because I didn’t want to become dependent on it.

BEST FEATURE: If you turn the M in Morse upside down it says Worse code.
WORST FEATURE: There are no other shapes besides lines and dots. At least throw in a star or something. Pretty boring, if you ask me.

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

Unpublished Short Story by Edith Wharton Discovered at Yale University

Posted on November 11, 2015March 14, 2019 by 007595

Hidden between a number of other drafts and short stories by Edith Wharton, an unknown story titled “The Field of Honour” was recently discovered in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The story, nine pages in all, is composed of six typeset pages, one page of strips of paper cut and pasted together, and two final pages of fragments. All of the pages are covered in edits and annotations in pencil and ink, but together they form a coherent story. It is clear that the author is Edith Wharton, from the handwriting, as well as the fact that a section of one of her published stories, “The Refugees” is written on the back of one of the fragmented pages.

The woman who found the story, Dr Alice Kelly, Postdoctoral Writing Fellow at Oxford, was doing research for her book on modernism and the First World War at Yale University when she made the discovery. She claims the cut and paste nature of some of the pages, as well as the scribbles and edits on all of the pages, is typical of Wharton. She says of the find: “Working in the marble-clad Beinecke Library in the Wharton papers was the highlight of my time at Yale, and led to my discovery of this unknown First World War story and its significance in terms of Wharton’s war writings.”

“The Field of Honour,” is set during the First World War and reflects on the time Wharton spent in France during that time. Wharton was very much engaged with the war, she worked for a time as a war reporter, and in her fiction she wanted to write about the war’s effects, the losses and the changes it brought on for those who survived. In “Field of Honour” she describes women who are gaining power and freedom in a society where the men are gone. At one point the narrator, who is probably female, and ambivalent about the advanced position of women in wartime society, is describing the beauty of the character Rose as a direct result of the absence of her husband, and feels the need to put a stop to her progress: “Now I knew why she looked so pretty. I felt at that moment as if she were a venomous insect that one ought to smash under one’s heel.”

Kelly explains her fascination with the plot of “The Field of Honour”: “Where this story differs from Wharton’s other war fiction — and what makes it particularly interesting — is its depiction of a common wartime fear: that women were profiting socially, professionally, even sexually from the wartime economy that privileged their lives over male lives.”

The idea for the story was possibly born in 1915, when Wharton wrote her editor explaining that she was unable to finish her novel draft by the time they had agreed upon, and asked whether he would take a handful of short stories in the meantime, which she had plans to write, on subjects “suggested by the war.” Kelly believes “The Field of Honour” could have been one of these stories, as it is certainly concerned with issues related to the war. It is unknown why “The Field of Honour” never made it to publication, Wharton may have simply abandoned it to focus on other projects, like the Age of Innocence, her Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Kelly’s full article and reproduction of the story can be read here.

War Is Beautiful: An Interview With David Shields

Posted on November 11, 2015March 14, 2019 by 007595

David Shields is the author of international bestsellers and critically acclaimed books, including The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (Knopf 2008), Black Planet (Three Rivers Press 2009), and Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf 2010), which argued for the obliteration of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, the overturning of laws regarding appropriation, and the creation of new forms for a new century. Over the past several years, Shields’s work has become increasingly political.

Earlier this month, I sat down with Shields to interview him about his new book, War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict (powerHouse Books 2015). During our conversation, Shields spoke about the New York Times’s use of sanitized, sensually inviting front-page photography to glamorize the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; these photos — in Shields’s view — desensitize readers to the cruelty and violence of these wars.

Rita Banerjee: The images of war in the book are very provocative. For example, in the Nature section, in the photo where you’re looking at a beautiful field of flowers and then you see the helmet of a soldier, it’s shocking. It grabs you. And even in the “Paintings” section, many of the images are so aesthetically inviting.

David Shields: They look like Abstract Expressionist paintings. They might as well have been painted by Rothko or Pollock.

RB: Reading War is Beautiful, you realize how cleaned up American media is. It’s weirdly Puritan, weirdly sanitized.

DS: It’s quite striking how this process happened over the last couple of decades. First of all, the rise of digital culture so that a picture could be sent instantaneously from the battlefield to the Times. Second of all, the advent of color photography on page A1 (starting in October 1997).

In the book’s afterword, Dave Hickey points out how serious and great war photography was from Mathew Brady in the Civil War all the way through Robert Capa during World War II and, say, Tim Page in Vietnam. And basically what happened during World War II was the rise of something he calls the “swipe photograph” — the quick photograph that conveys a quick, blurry image; for example, Capa, with his famous picture of a fallen Spanish soldier during the Spanish Civil War. And then what Hickey argues is that with the rise of Abstract Expressionism, people like Diebenkorn, Rothko, Pollock, Gerhard Richter, the swipe image became a huge part of Abstract Expressionism. And now war photographs are not based on what the war photographer is actually seeing in war. Rather, he or she is trying to reproduce Abstract Expressionist tropes — swipe-image gorgeousness.

All of these pictures from the New York Times are remarkably hollow and bloodless, composed, and abstract. All of these photographs have come, to a staggering degree, from art history.

…they’re looking for perfect composition; there’s nothing of lived life in these pictures…

These pictures are beautiful but dead, all 64 pictures (and I have 700 more cached that I could have used, though we couldn’t print all 700, of course; they are basically dead because, I would argue (as does Dave Hickey) that the photo editors, the photographers, page designers at the Times have all gone to school over the last fifty years on Abstract Expressionism and art movements afterward (photo realism, neo-realism, Pop Art). And so they’re looking for perfect composition; there’s nothing of lived life in these pictures, there’s only stylized —

RB: Framing, posturing.

DS: These pictures belong in an art gallery. They don’t belong on a front page of a newspaper, covering a war that’s created hundreds of thousands of civilian and soldier deaths. This is how war gets sold: war is portrayed not as hell but as heck, or even as heaven.

RB: I was really struck by your commentary in the beginning of War Is Beautiful. You raise the point, Is the Times complicit in selling a certain kind of narrative to the United States? That is, the Times promotes its institutional power as a protector or curator of a death-dealing democracy. Who is responsible for it? We all are. We are all inscribed in that death-dealing democracy.

Maybe that’s why we’re so accepting of capitalism as well. We don’t see the devastation. If people are dying of chemical poisoning in an Apple factory in China, how much do we care? The same with Iraq or Afghanistan. As Americans, we’re so used to the idea of distance. When the political world is distant from us, not only are we desensitized and numb to it but it’s almost as if we’re watching cinema or playing in a video game; there’s even a certain aspect of pleasure in a weird way. We have power and yet we’re at such a great distance from what’s going on and what’s going down.

Capitalism, distance, aesthetic pleasure, drone voyeurism are all part of one complicated cocktail.

DS: I try to make this emphatically clear via the book’s opening epigraph from Edmund Burke: “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience. The cause of this I shall endeavour to investigate further.” Capitalism, distance, aesthetic pleasure, drone voyeurism are all part of one complicated cocktail. You’ve summarized it very well; it’s clearly capital that’s driving all this. We take pleasure in the privileged distance that capitalism buys.

RB: When examining the front page of the Times, did you encounter images that were slightly unframed or perhaps out-of-focus or hurried or not composed? All of these images, whether in the section “Beauty” or elsewhere, look like complete portraits, or they look like stills from a video game or movie. It begs the question, Is this war? Is this Hollywood? Does it matter?

DS: I know. That one photo: one chair and several water bottles, with gorgeous colors bouncing into the ether. [laughs] What is that?

RB: I wrote next to that image, “Almost innocent.”

DS: Because what does that have to do with — ? Why is that the front page of — ?

RB: Well, you know, David, by the time I got up to that image, I was thinking to myself, if you took out the New York Times from the text, or even the word “war” and you put it in a gallery and just did this as an art installation, how would people react? Would they even realize these are war images or would they not? They may not. If you decontextualize the imagery, I think some people might even buy a postcard of some of these images. Like the one with the piano.

DS: That’s an excellent, alternative, and even more depressing version of the book.

RB: You could just sell this as a postcard book.

DS: We have to admit that the pictures are beautiful, aren’t they?

RB: They are. I was thinking to myself, as I was looking at some of these images, if I didn’t know that this was about Afghanistan or Iraq, unless there was someone like Bush in the picture, I don’t know if I would find them viscerally shocking. I would probably think, “Oh, what a great shot,” “What great lighting,” or “What great color and composition.”

DS: That’s one of the main ironies of the book.

RB: So you don’t read the New York Times anymore, right?

DS: No.

RB: Really?

DS: After writing Black Planet and becoming very aware of the ways in which sports fandom operates, I could no longer keep being a fan of the games; it seemed too weird, too sad, too wrong. And so, too, having looked at 9,000 photographs on the front page of The Times over twenty years, I just found myself incapable of continuing. Occasionally, someone will send me a link to an article.

RB: I think I do that sometimes. Sorry! [laughs] I’ll try not to do that.

DS: I definitely don’t subscribe to it, either digitally or physically.

RB: I actually don’t subscribe to it at all, in the sense that once they put up the pay-wall, I tried so many avenues to subvert it, and I refuse to pay for the New York Times. It’s such a capitalist endeavor. They want to be the ultimate authority in terms of history; that is, writing the front page of history in the United States and throughout the world.

DS: As Seymour Krim once called the Times: the “commissar of the real.” The book is an attempt to show the undergirding, fictional framework of the commissariat.

RB: And yet the very fact that you have to pay for this type of information begs the question, Do you not want the public to have knowledge? The purposes of the Times have become indistinguishable from the purposes of the government.

DS: I think that is what is dangerous about the book, and why I’m proud of it. It does try to unravel this very complicated mixed message that the Times sends. The Times, I think, has a very confused and confusing role in our culture. On the one hand, it pretends to be a paragon of the Fourth Estate; people say all the time that it’s the best English-language newspaper in the world. The first draft of history. “The Paper of Record”. “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” Etc.

…that is, the Times, on the one hand, pretends to be covering war but is essentially promoting it.

On the other hand, it’s hugely obeisant to the United States government and is hugely intertwined with the US government’s imperialist ambitions. I’m interested in the ways in which those photographs are a switching station between that very mixing of messages; that is, the Times, on the one hand, pretends to be covering war but is essentially promoting it.

In the introduction, I explain that this has historical and cultural and familial roots in the Times, namely, that although the paper was founded by a German-Jewish family, the Times was notably silent on the extent of the Holocaust. They didn’t want to be perceived as either too German or too Jewish. The Times was criticized for not reporting the depth of atrocity of the concentration camps.

And ever since, I argue in the introduction, over the last seventy years, essentially, the Times has overcorrected in this rather grotesque way. It has been hugely supportive of every military adventure of the US government with very few minor exceptions (that prove the rule). The pictures, in my view, are the exact emblem of The Times’ profound hypocrisy.

RB: I’ve read sections from Other People (forthcoming next year from Knopf), in which you talk about your parents, your father and your mother, and their influence and their roles as activists and journalists in your art and life. And on the cover of War Is Beautiful is a quote from Phillip Lopate, who says, “This stunning rumination on beauty as a hazardous material, this buzzing conversation between word and image, power and global politics, is something that could have come only from the singular brain of David Shields. We’re ever grateful for the risks he takes and for his finely honed moral imagination.” I’m not sure if I would ever use the term “moral imagination” to describe your work. It seems to try to do the opposite. It destabilizes what is considered moral. It definitely plays with the imagination, but it almost breaks the illusion of imagination to get at something heartier and trickier and more uncomfortable. Both of those terms in your work are always questioned. And I want to know, since this is on the front cover of your book, do you agree with Philip Lopate?

DS: Well, it’s very generous praise from Philip Lopate, a writer whom I greatly admire and who has hugely influenced and inspired me. Your point is well taken — I’m attempting to be not pietistic but to explore epistemological and psychic complexities when it comes to moral questions — but, yes, I do agree with you that War Is Beautiful would not be the work that you might expect from me, based on my previous books, because it’s pretty overtly political. As I wrote to you once, in a sort of kidding way, “See, I am Chomsky.”

I think of my work as indeed profoundly moral, just not in the way that term is usually used (see above). I think of my work as imaginative, too, again, not in the standard imaginative way in the sense that I’m not creating a work in which I’m making up “imaginary beings,” but I’m trying to deeply imagine what it’s like to live in someone else’s skin.

As Jonathan Lethem says in another quote on the cover, this book casts light back on previous works of mine, Black Planet, Reality Hunger, I Think You’re Totally Wrong, or even That Thing You Do With Your Mouth. Those works are meant to seriously but implicitly and complicitly engage moral questions regarding race, sexuality, violence, celebrity, mortality, etc.

RB: There’s also this idea in the book that war is somehow a masculine desire, or that it’s somehow an inherently male preoccupation. The book argues that women can generate life, whereas the male body, in order to compensate for that, goes to war. So I wanted to ask you, If war is inherently a masculine desire, what is female desire?

DS: I’m not sure if the book specifically says that war is exclusively a male provenance, though, does it? One quotation goes to that idea.

RB: Well, I was looking at the photographs. And I think there are very few female soldiers. There’s one of an injured, female soldier playing basketball with a male soldier.

DS: I tried to find glamorizing, color, front-page photos of female soldiers, and there were few if any.

RB: I would say the gender dynamics of the book are left unquestioned. If we take out these rather traditional gender dynamics, who creates war? Is it men fighting to dominate and have authority over other men and other countries and other peoples in order to exploit them, to colonize them, to take advantage of them? Or if you remove the male figure, what would the female figure do? Would she do the opposite? A lot of people theorize rather rhapsodically that women are very community-oriented and that they would bring peace if they were the world leaders. But then you have rulers like Indira Gandhi, who was one of the most divisive prime ministers in India, and she caused a lot of bloodshed.

DS: Margaret Thatcher. Golda Meir.

RB: So women in power aren’t exactly the mother figure once they assume that role.

DS: Right.

RB: Get a bunch of women together — get twelve or fifteen together — and that is war. It’s absolute war.

DS: I guess I’d say masculine aggression often takes the form of violence, whereas female aggression is usually subtler, more psychological — something like that?

RB: In a weird way, the whole idea of the father in the book is very phallocentric. Such as in the Pietà section, where the fallen figure evoked is that of Jesus Christ and the figure who should be embracing him is that of Mary. But the mother figure in these images is always replaced by a man. It’s fascinating, because just a few images of women are featured. There are some images of women in hijabs. Overwhelmingly, though, the imagery is that of men embracing other men or men destroying other men. Only in the “Love” section do women finally come back.

DS: And in the Beauty section.

RB: Again, it’s the male gaze.

DS: I had a number of photo assistants who helped me pull the digital images. And many of them are women — undergraduates and graduate students. And some of them said, Can’t we bring in more pictures of women? And I said, “Find them.”

RB: Interesting.

DS: They’re not there.

RB: As you were looking at the front-page images of the New York Times, did you see images that were grotesque or repulsive or not beautiful? Is this something that you encountered as you reviewed all of these thousands of images?

DS: I was very open to being course-corrected, to my original impression (accumulated over many years) being proven wrong, but there were no, or nearly no, color images on page A1 that come close to conveying the horror of war.

Elizabeth Cooperman co-edited with me a book called Life Is Short — Art Is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity. She’s working on her own book about impasse, and I found myself texting her a note in which I said, “You have to be opportunistic. You’re not solving for X. Symptoms, not cures.”

…I’m not a political scientist. I’m trying to create provocative metaphors.

And I don’t know if you agree with that, but in a way it’s kind of an acknowledgement that finally I’m not a political scientist. I’m trying to create provocative metaphors. Okay, here are 64 images. Can one shoot possible holes in it? Go ahead and try. In a way it goes back to your question about moral imagination. I do think that if I have imagination, it lies in finding a metaphor that gathers and generates energy: the metaphors underlying Reality Hunger or Remote or Black Planet or War Is Beautiful.

RB: Well, I think that’s the intrigue of reportage: that we pretend to be objective. If you try to describe a phenomenon, maybe you are allowing it to have a chance to speak for itself, in the sense that it’s not totally overwhelmed by your persona or your ego or your desire to get a certain kind of reading or data out of it. How can you be fair and still be a challenger?

DS: “How can you be fair”? There’s no such thing as fairness. All is fair in love and war and art. The value of a work of art can be measured by the harm spoken of it, as Flaubert said. On some level, you’ve ultimately just got to go with your intuition. These images, I just know, are glamorizing war.

Morning, 1908

Posted on November 11, 2015February 18, 2020 by 007595

by Claire-Louise Bennett

Since he’d advised it and it had immediately appeared perfectly rational — to the point of being really rather obvious — I filled a glass with tap water and took a few sips. I imagine his idea was that I drink a full glass, but I just wasn’t able to stomach a full glass, not then. Nevertheless, the little amount I did manage was really very refreshing — uplifting actually — and the dizziness that had bristled in and about my joints since I’d got up out of bed more or less subsided directly after consuming it. That done, and better oriented, I took a long thin coat from the wardrobe, toppling a patent leather boot from the shelf to the floor as I did so, and put it on over my dressing gown and night slip. No one will see me, I thought, but took a look in the mirror near the door all the same. And was surprised to see that the three garments layered this way looked very well, rather pretty actually, and I evaluated, briefly, if I couldn’t perhaps wear the ensemble publicly — on a Saturday, for example, when I go about my business, such as it is, in the town — before swiftly conceding that France, in fact, was just about the only place where I might feel comfortable in such an outfit, and on any given day.

This is my favorite time to leave the house and take a slow short walk. It is the time when my mind is least disposed towards fuss or hypothesis. It is the time when I have nothing to do after. Even so, I wasn’t expecting much from it this evening — I don’t know why. Possibly because I was taking one thing at a time and therefore such a thing as expectation was nigh on impossible to cultivate. Added to which, the impetus, really, for going out there at all was primarily to take some new air, and, secondly, to have my body undergo a little activity, however gently, however briefly. Pragmatic objectives, then, pertaining to my physical wellbeing, were my principal concern — I was not, for example, looking to overhaul my mental disposition or redirect my emotional bearings. To be perfectly honest I have, of late, become unusually disassociated from my immediate surroundings. The weather has not been particularly congenial this summer and such is my resignation that lately I have taken to commenting upon its brooding contrariety in routine phrases which demonstrate exasperation and contempt while leaving the utter indifference I’ve actually begun to feel towards it undetected and intact. It just never stops. Standing next to where the trees are particularly dense, long after the downpour has expired, you could be forgiven for believing it was still raining. But in fact what you are hearing is just the sound of detained raindrops, sliding off one leaf down to the next, and so on, from leaf to leaf to leaf, until falling, at last, from the final leaf to the ground.

Incredible, really. Or so it seemed to me as I went by and heard the thing play out. Further along there were those very small raindrops, droplets I suppose, which attach themselves with resolute but nonetheless ebullient regularity among the fronds of a beautiful type of delicate grass, appearing, for all the world, like a squandered chandelier dashing headlong down the hillside. I soon came to stand by one of the gates for a while, one I ordinarily pass by in fact — most times there’s a wind blowing up here and regardless of its cardinal direction it invariably travels through the gate in such a way as to make a sound out if it. The same sound always. A sound I don’t mind hearing incidentally, while passing by, but which would, I’m sure, induce a kind of peripheral insanity if attended to in stationary fashion for very long. Still, despite the gate being uncommonly mute, I would not describe the time I allotted to spend there as being altogether peaceful.

I’m used to vehicles coming up this way. That is something I am used to. And sometimes — though less often — they go down the way, and I’m used to that too. In either case I step into the long grass; out of the way. At such times, he, without fail, will put a hand up to the driver, whereas I never do — I don’t know why and I do know why. I’m just the same, actually, when I’m on my own, but perhaps the reason why I don’t put my hand up then is in any case quite different. Perhaps it would feel sneaky to do a thing without him that I do not do with him.

I don’t know, and I don’t believe unraveling these minor foibles is a relevant pursuit just now — the point is, no car came by. Not one, not in either direction. A car passing by me is something I am accustomed to: a young man passing by me on this road, on the other hand, is something I am not at all accustomed to. So it was that while I stood at the gate there came up the road not the thing I am accustomed to but its opposite, a young man, on foot, his head in a hood. An apparition quite without precedence — I saw him and I almost didn’t believe my own eyes. I saw him, the young man, and it was an alarming thing. A most alarming thing that set my blood and organs into crashing disarray until I was soon drained of all former purpose, as slender as that was. Yet for all that it did not feel as if the alarm I was experiencing had originated from me — it was rather as if I were implementing the feeling for the purpose of some sort of nebulous external design. No, it didn’t quite belong to me, and in fact it didn’t quite belong to the situation either — as the young man came closer the disquieting sensation did not surge, as one would expect, but remained constant. As such I could only infer that the pervasive unrest I was undergoing was probably not attributable to the young man’s sudden and unprecedented presence entirely.

I angled my elbows upon the gate’s top railing so that my hands tilted back behind my ears and my fingers slid up into my hair, and I committed every strand and sinew to this position despite not being quite able to inhabit it fully. Initially I thought such a posture might signal an impenetrable insularity — to the point of rendering me invisible perhaps — a somewhat far-fetched aspiration that was emphatically curtailed by the terrible recognition that actually I in fact appeared as defenseless and available for the taking as an ostracized vole. Unable to withstand or accommodate the panic that was the same but more exacting I found myself attempting to wrong-foot it with the speculation that perhaps the worst thing that could happen right now might not be quite as diabolical and frenzied as the thought of it jaggedly decreed. If it — that — were to happen right now, would it be so awful, I thought. Would it really be such an upheaval — such a defiling affront? Perhaps on the contrary it might actually seem fairly recreational, like the way dogs are, and not in the least bit vile. I looked as far into the distance as I could and after a moment of blank thought it occurred to me that I would very likely wet myself. That was a certainty, more or less, and it troubled me actually. The likelihood that I’d wet myself — not after, but during — troubled me. I surmised it would be unavoidable, really, because, for one thing, of all the rainwater that entwined in a lithe stream along the side of the road, which surely I would not be able to take my eyes off, and, for another thing — though it’s true I drank very little water before leaving the house earlier, I had in fact consumed a considerable quantity of ginger tea throughout the afternoon — consequently my bladder was already very susceptible.

What do you care, I thought, if you urinate on him during? Wouldn’t it serve him right? I did not dwell upon the question long because the fact of the matter was that the possibility of urinating on him bothered me very much, and I did not, just then, wish to confront the reason why. As his proximity to me increased I became aware of myself from the young man’s perspective — my shabby sealskin boots, the cerise snowflake pattern around the top of my thick Norwegian socks, the thin lace trim along the hem of my nightdress. My damp unbrushed hair. Nothing happened of course. I stood at a gate and a young man passed by. That was all.

Then the cows went all queer on me. When I arrived at the gate, which was in fact a good while before I’d seen the young man, the cows scarpered off pronto to the left side of the field, down a kind of gradient — a reaction which, in itself, wasn’t very remarkable so I accorded it no significance and mention it now only in order to clarify the herd’s temperament and position so that the subsequent development, convoluted as it is, may be better appreciated. I didn’t mind in the least that the cows took exception to my approach and found myself likening them to a shoal of fish on account of the way they each stared out at me from just one side of their head as they ran by. In fact, if anything, I rather approved of their taking up a more distant location since it meant my attention was free to overlook them. However, this pleasant reprieve did not last long. Soon after the young man had passed by me, and my hands had dropped down from behind my ears, the cows drew in close to one another and all looked up at me with the very same expression. I wondered what exactly they could see and did not move. Time passed, right up against me, and then the cows reeled forward ever so slightly — all of them still regarding me with that same expression.

The cows stopped and continued several times over and always in the same rhythm, and even though, as they got nearer, I felt increasingly aberrant, I managed, actually, to defend my position at the gate. In all this time they did not take their eyes away from me, and so unwavering was this confluence of looking that I went on wondering what exactly it was they could see. Once they got fairly close they became less unified — some were genuinely wary, while others dumbly followed suit, and at least one was acquiring that lurching confidence which menial and unexamined curiosity brings out in certain members of any species. I must admit that all this had me feeling fundamentally perturbed in a way I could not describe or even classify. Did they know something? Could they see something? Were they waiting for something? What did they want, exactly? Despite my inadequate comprehension of the situation and the absurd tension that upheld it, it was somehow clear to me that something was going on and I continued to stand where I was and remained there until the one cow reached across the gate with her nostrils and eventually released a long sultry breath across the backs of both my hands — at which point I couldn’t see that there was anything left to do. The situation, whatever it was, seemed at an end and so I stepped back from the gate, not quite ceremoniously, but with what I felt to be due consideration. Once I found myself to be very much back within the parallel parameters of the narrow road I shook my hair out a little and carried on up the hill.

It must have been the case that after the somewhat preternatural standoff with the cows I required a much vaster, more general, and completely disinterested picture to reassert itself because I began to extend a scoping look about me. A survey that might well have encompassed the broad and familiar panorama that is available from this vantage point had it not stalled upon the figure of the young man, who now stood facing northwest beneath the mast on top of the hill, his head perfectly bare.

There wasn’t much opportunity this time to get worked up about his appearance because almost immediately I saw him a line of smoke distended from his mouth and gave me to suspect he’d recently sustained some perennial and flawed grievance from someone close to him — a girlfriend, or his father — I couldn’t quite make up my mind which. This sobering impression did much to humanize the young man of course, and so I continued up the incline with my recently re-harnessed equability quite uncompromised and the more unchartered areas of my psyche hermetic and submerged. As I rounded the bend the atmosphere was very much involved in a customary process of change, and in fact some way past the Maamturks there was a sunset beginning. Beginning very ordinarily, it ought to be said, and then, via a series of protracted yet imperceptible increments, the sky imported the trenchant beauty and dubious brilliance of a new and unnamed world. And so it was I came to linger within the vicinity of another gate. I did not approach this one. There was no need. No need, now, to angle my elbows upon a gate and have my hands recline and disappear.

Everyone has seen a sunset — I will not attempt to describe the precise visual delineations of this one. Neither will I set down any of the things that scudded across my mind when the earth’s trajectory became so discernibly and disarmingly attested to. Peculiar things, yet intimately familiar. Impressions of something I have not perhaps experienced directly. Memories I arrived with. Memories that snuck in and tucked up and live on within and throughout me. None of this distracted or deposed me, not in the least, I was still very much where I stood and it wasn’t long I’d been standing there when I heard the young man walking the track that goes, more or less, from the mast down to a gate in the surrounding stone wall. I did not turn, but continued listening, waiting anxiously, I suppose, to hear the gate latch rise — because, as it turned out, I was not convinced that once he’d shut the gate behind him the young man would go right and carry on back down the hill, away from me.

I looked across to where some distant trees went black, and I looked at the mud and the rainwater that quaked minutely in the mud’s depressions — there, directly, in front of my boots — then I stepped a little way forward so that my arms came to rest along the top rail of the gate. So be it, I thought. Let him come this way. It might in fact be the very reason why despite feeling the way you are feeling you were drawn out of your house this evening nonetheless. Wearing only your nightclothes beneath a long thin coat. It might, in fact, just be the very thing you need. Let him come this way. By this time I had no difficulty acknowledging that the shock and aversion that had coincided with his appearance on the road had not been incited by fear of him but rather by the horror I had felt towards my own twisted longing. A horror which had now more or less receded, along with all fleshly reticence. It might just feel like the most natural thing in the world, I thought.

The black trees

The tilting sphere

The humid bovine nostril

The sprawling chandelier

The thin lace trim

My damp unbrushed hair

All of them tangible and increscent coordinates in an immemorial routine of force and transmutation, of which the twilit taking of me was perhaps the final and most assuaging element. Surely we are all occasionally called upon to become a function of this overarching and irresolvable hunger. Who knows really what came over me — I was ill, after all — my defenses were down, I wasn’t quite myself; or, perhaps, I was myself more than ever. Perhaps I was stripped right down to my most vehement hidden currents: transparent and seen through, right there at the gate. On the way to the mast I met with my true body, dissolute and available — I saw it all, every aspect of its necromantic inclination — no, it was not fear that shook me, but rapture. Dissolute, truly dissolute. I heard the gate latch rise and I heard it fall back into place, and just like that something somewhere went slack and nothing further was issued. The gate closed and the young man turned right and made his way back down the hill. Away from me; head in hood, hands in pockets. It was as if the sifted moon, weak as chalk dust, had been abruptly discarded. Just for a moment everything gathered in dreadful suspension, my eyes gaped, cold and enormous — and then it all glided backwards into an atmosphere of broadening redundancy, intersected by a vertical and rather searing sense of abnegation.

Remote sensations really, hardly mine at all — nothing to take personally. Whatever singular intensity there had been sheepishly drifted off and the usual way of things resumed. I felt quite chilly in fact. The cows were still there by the gate as I walked on by, down the hill. I slowed down a little and thought of Jesus, I don’t know why. Perhaps you all think I’m Jesus, I said, and then looked over at the windows of a neighboring bungalow. A light came on. There were cactus plants in trays along the sill. Soon enough I was outside my own cottage, admiring its green door and deep-set windows. Fancy that, I thought. What a very lovely place to live. Then I arrived inside and after stepping out of my soaked boots I went across to the desk and began slowly skimming through a book of photographs by Clarence H. White.

New Orleans Bookstores Challenge Louisiana Age Verification Law

Posted on November 10, 2015March 14, 2019 by 007595

Two New Orleans bookstores, Octavia Books and Garden District Books, are challenging a new law passed in Louisiana this summer which requires websites distributing material deemed inappropriate for minors to verify the age of their users. Any website failing to confirm that the reader of their “inappropriate content” is 18 years or older will be risking a fine of up to $10,000.

Given the unfortunate American pastime of artistic censorship and book-banning, readers, booksellers, teachers, librarians, and writers a like know that “inappropriate content” is in the eye of the beholder and can range from hard-core pornography, to a Mary Gaitskill novel, to His Dark Materials, depending on who you ask. The bill describes inappropriate content as “depiction, display, description, exhibition, or representation” of sexual acts or organs, human or animal, and states that the content must be flagged when “the material taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.”

In addition to logistic concerns about how to verify readers’ ages on their website for specific titles, booksellers are concerned about how the language of the law may be interpreted to pertain to titles that they believe do not contain any inappropriate content.

Tom Lowenburg, co-owner of Octavia Books explains: “The law is a serious threat to the First Amendment rights of booksellers and our customers. Our job is to get customers the books they want, but this law makes it impossible by forcing us to block access to 16- and 17-year-olds who want to browse Young Adult novels and other works that may be inappropriate for younger minors.”

Media Coalition and the American Civil Liberties Union are filing the lawsuit on behalf of Garden District Book Shop and Octavia Books, Future Crawfish Paper LLC, publisher of Anti-Gravity magazine, American Booksellers Association and Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

Timothy Burns, who drafted the bill, claims the bookstores have no reason to worry about this law affecting their image or business, saying the law was “aimed at pornographic content, not a romance novel.” He goes on to say that as long as the bookstores aren’t distributing pornography on their websites, they have nothing to worry about.

Media Coalition’s press release, featuring more quotes from the owners of Octavia Books and Garden District Book Shop can be read here.

Propulsive Energy: A Conversation With John McManus, Author Of Fox Tooth Heart

Posted on November 10, 2015March 14, 2019 by 007595

by Jonathan Lee

The first story in Fox Tooth Heart, John McManus’s fourth book of fiction, starts with a power chord: “The story of the creation of my elephant vampire songs begins on the December morning when I killed Aisling, heroine of our last album and my fiancée, in one Porsche and fled Texas in another.” It put me in mind of the opening line of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman: “Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade …” Like O’Brien, or Barry Hannah, McManus has a gift for idiosyncratic openings that make the reader lean in and listen. His sentences carry a confidential note. They make you excited and a little afraid for whatever is coming around the corner. Read “Elephant Sanctuary” at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and you’ll soon see what I mean.

McManus is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Fulbright Scholar grant, and numerous other accolades. He is a major American author with a wonderful eye for people’s insecurities and a wonderful ear for the babble of their dreams. Fox Tooth Heart, published by Sarabande Books this month–the same press that’s been on a recent roll with Arna Bontemps Hemenway’s superb Elegy on Kinderklavier and Kerry Howley’s Thrown–contains several stories that will rattle around in your brain for a long time after re-reading.

In the interview that follows McManus told me about what he’s looking for in his sentences, the story behind the best rejection letter he’s ever received, and the writerly advice he’d like to scream into the ear of his younger self: “Slow down…Be patient. Take care. Drink less.”

Jonathan Lee: It’s clear you take a lot of care over the way your sentences sound–the pounce and rhythm of them. What goes into a great sentence, and what are you looking to inject and withdraw as you revise?

John McManus: Nothing makes me quit reading faster than strings of insignificant actions like “He looked at her.” That’s my bugbear lately: “She looked across at him. He met her eyes.” This kind of thing is pervasive, so I wish I could ignore it, but the truth is any line whose sole purpose is to tell me one character is looking at another character while those two characters are talking will kill my desire to read on. So I try to make sure every sentence is doing two or three things at once. If a sentence doesn’t have any propulsive energy, I cross it out.

Lines like “He looked at her” cede fiction’s best natural advantage and capitulate to television.

I’m reminded of something Ben Lerner said a few years ago in an interview with Teddy Wayne: he’s “bored to tears by most of the mainstream supposedly realistic novels that run bland 21st-century sentences through 19th-century structures in order to produce what’s essentially very inefficient television.” TV and film are the dominant narrative art forms, at least in the United States. HBO dramas have countless huge advantages over fiction, like multimillion-dollar budgets and production teams and state-of-the-art cinematography, but one thing they’ll never do better than prose is burrow into characters’ minds to name and describe their desires and fears. Lines like “He looked at her” cede fiction’s best natural advantage and capitulate to television. But this is turning into more of a polemical rant than an answer to your question.

JL: You’ve written a very well-received novel, Bitter Milk, but in the last 15 years you’ve kept coming back to short stories. What’s special about the short story form, and why does it seem to be the natural container for the ideas you’re interested in exploring?

JM: I feel like I know what I’m doing when I’m writing stories. The backbone of a story can be a single vector of progressive action, so there’s an elegant simplicity to the form that I enjoy. I can hold a whole story in my head at once, which I can’t do with a novel. I can finish a story in a month or two; a novel seems to take me ten years.

JL: Back in 2005, you were interviewed by Dan Wickett for the Emerging Writers Network blog. You said in an aside that the best rejection letter you’d ever received was from The Atlantic, two sentences long: “The stories you sent us are quite good, and we like them a lot. However, your vision is dark, and we resist it.” Do you believe your own vision as a writer is dark, and has it changed in the last ten years or so?

JM: That letter was responding to a story in Stop Breakin Down, my first collection. I wrote those stories in college when I didn’t know what I was doing. I followed my instincts, and sometimes it worked out okay, but I either didn’t know how to revise or didn’t have the courage for it. As soon as I finished a story, I would cringe to imagine looking back at it, because I perceived so many problems that I didn’t know how to fix. Possibly those included the kind of gratuitous misery I hate encountering in narrative art, where characters suffer not because the story needs them to but because the author has decided they should suffer.

I wouldn’t have described the collection as “dark” prior to reading the reviews, which–in praise or otherwise–called it bleak, despairing, hopeless. People would ask how I could bear to put my characters through such pain. To answer “They’re not real people” probably sounded glib, but I meant the characters’ pain didn’t affect me while I was writing because characters were artificial entities that had more in common with mathematical variables than human beings. To write made me feel tranquil, no matter what was happening to my characters. That was one of the main reasons why I wrote. When I’m reading, it’s different, of course. I often teach The Easter Parade which means I’ve read it over and over, most recently in July. Every time, I’m moved to tears. Emily Grimes’s life is miserable, and I wouldn’t want to spend ten minutes in her head. But her pain tells the truth, so I enjoy it, aesthetically at least.

JL: Fox Tooth Heart begins with the creation of a character’s elephant vampire songs, and ends with the vivid image of those lithium-and-lye bottles and the feeling of “high tide” in one’s veins. How did you find the right shape for the collection, and the right ordering of the stories within that shape?

JM: I wanted to open with “Blood Brothers.” It was my favorite story in the collection, and I felt like it has a quick hook — but it’s also a bit depraved. Sarah Gorham, the editor-in-chief at Sarabande, convinced me to put “Elephant Sanctuary” first instead. That required reordering everything else, which felt like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. A lot of stories got shuffled around until the last minute.

JL: Tell me about the humor in your work. In one story your narrator says a particular guy’s face was “shaped that way from having no shame. Without shame, you could grin and crack jokes.” To be a good writer–and a funny one–do you need to be shameless?

JM: That’s tricky since shameless can mean different things. The passage you quote expresses the thoughts of a character in “The Gnat Line” who’s too full of self-loathing to let anyone befriend or tease him. He brings a kind of bitter irony to most of his observations, and he might think of himself as funny, but he’s too ashamed of himself to be honest. The guy he’s talking about, who definitely thinks of himself as funny, is shameless in both senses of the word, but his jokes are limited to wisecracking and his honesty is impaired by an almost total lack of introspection.

What we hate, or what confuses us, tends to obsess us, which is absurd.

I doubt I could give an objective explanation for how humor works in my stories or for that matter in anyone’s. If I try to describe what I think of as some of the funniest passages in literature, they don’t sound funny out of context — like when the protagonist of Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth gets beaten up for speaking Irish instead of English, or the women in Flannery O’Connor’s story “The Displaced Person” gleefully mock the Guizacs, or the writer in Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters sits around for 200 pages despising pretty much everyone in Austria. I tend to find obsession funny, or at least absurd. What we hate, or what confuses us, tends to obsess us, which is absurd. In “The Gnat Line” Stephen envies Bruce’s ability to laugh, which contributes to his hating Bruce.

JL: Is a deep sense of place important to you as a writer and a person? Within Fox Tooth Heart you’ve managed to conjure, with wonderful energy, such a range of American atmospheres, from Arkansas ranches to the Florida coastline to the wilds of the national parks. The survival of the characters depends literally on the places around them, the air they breathe, the vagaries of the weather, but their imaginations seems to thrive on a sense of place too–Hunter thinks at one point that his “survival…depended on faith that the land was make-believe.”

JM: I’m not sure a deep sense of place is always important to me in an abstract sense. I mentioned Bernhard — some of his novels are confined to rooms where bitter men sit around ruminating, but that’s appropriate given what the men wish–if you can call it wishing. Hunter in “Cult Heroes” is one of several protagonists in Fox Tooth Heart who yearn for physical danger and open space and wilderness. The line you quote refers to his mother’s Christian Science beliefs, which Hunter feels ambivalent about. In the course of the story he goes from ruefulness to mockery to consideration that she could be right in thinking the world is a beautiful, uncanny illusion built to test his faith. The main action — he sneaks into Grand Canyon National Park with a mountain bike, planning to ride illegally from rim to river on a trail where the slightest wrong move could kill him — is in part a flirtation with his mother’s belief system.

It took me ten or twelve drafts to figure that out. Until I realized what was going on between Hunter and his mother, the setting struck me as arbitrary — like I was writing about a trail in the Grand Canyon just because I felt like it, rather than because the Grand Canyon was the essential place where Hunter’s story needed to play out. So I guess I’d say that if people read a story of mine and don’t come away thinking that the place is essential to the plot or that the characters seem affected by the place, I’ll feel like I’ve failed.

JL: In the stories that comprise this collection you use section breaks often, leaning into the white space those offer. By contrast I think I’m right in saying that Bitter Milk is a single flow–the voice in that novel resists neat skips in time and place, the arrangement of experience into units. What kinds of things are you thinking about when you determine whether to use this or that structural device in a particular work?

JM: Bitter Milk is about a fat nine-year-old boy who feels trapped in a manner that I hoped an endless unbroken chapter would help convey. Plus there weren’t any major breaks in time; the story played out chronologically over a period of a few weeks. It’s easy now to look back and wonder if chapter or section breaks might have helped me sell a few more copies. Still, even in Fox Tooth Heart I’ve tried to use section breaks as seldom as possible, maybe because they feel like the easy way out — like cheating somehow.

JL: Maybe we could talk in detail about how a specific story in the collection came together. I was particularly intrigued by “The Gnat Line” — where the seed of the idea might have come from, how you sought to control the material, why it felt right to cleave to that close third person perspective.

JM: The plot of “The Gnat Line” conflates two news stories I read within a few weeks of each other in 2009. In one, the police were breaking up a camp of registered sex offenders who’d been camping in a park, same as in “The Gnat Line.” The other told of a man arrested for being naked inside his own home. I don’t know how that case turned out, but he was being threatened with the sex offender registry. So I created a character who’d lived through a similar circumstance, and plopped him down in a camp like the one I had read about in the paper.

I can’t remember how I settled on the modular format, but I know I wanted the severity of the characters’ crimes to vary across a spectrum. The real-life camp existed because a law in Georgia–since scaled back–prohibited sex offenders from living within a thousand feet of a school, church, park, bus stop, swimming pool, or several dozen other categories of places children might gather. Some states’ offender registries can list dangerous psychopaths alongside people arrested for crimes as minor as peeing in public, so I decided my fictional camp would house rapists like Allen and also a sympathetic figure or two like Jeremy. Seven men live in the camp, and “The Gnat Line” has seven chapters, but there are only four points of view. Travis, Bruce, and Gus didn’t turn out to be figures in search of redemption or change. I began and ended with Stephen because he struck me as the most complex of the bunch. He’s aggrieved and supercilious, and thinks of himself as unfairly wronged, but secretly he knows he’s guilty of hurting people more severely than the court has learned about.

JL: This collection is full of memorable characters. How do you balance the need for them all to have, to some extent, their own little sheen of uniqueness, with the desire not to distort into caricatures?

JM: Most of these stories are told from the subjective points of view of characters whose belief systems are pretty idiosyncratic. They themselves can have prejudices or fixations that distort the people they encounter into caricatures, like when Victor in “Gainliness” is living his booze-soaked dream-life in the years after grad school. The only qualities he notices in other people are the ones that pique his romantic imagination, or turn him on. So that’s kind of a tightrope to try to walk. I don’t know. You could say the stories are stylized in certain ways, but I’ve tried to make everyone seem real.

JL: What would you tell your younger self if you could go back to Goucher and whisper some writerly advice in his ear …?

So for starters I would whisper, Slow down. Or I would scream it, not whisper.

JM: In the early stories I had this desperation to say everything all at once, and then as soon as I’d finished, I hurried on to the next piece out of fear of looking back closely at what I’d done. For a while I was writing a story a week. So for starters I would whisper, Slow down. Or I would scream it, not whisper. Be patient. Take care. Drink less.

JL: The oldest and most awful of questions for a writer: what’s next?

JM: I’m finishing a novel about a girl who tries to save a neighbor boy from the religious madman who’s raising him, and it takes place in a remote Smoky Mountain valley not far from where I grew up. I’ve told my agent I’ll send it to her by the end of the year, which I hope doesn’t turn out to be a lie. I’ve been working on it for longer than I care to admit. If I ever finish it, I’ll get back to my other novel-in-progress, about a fabulist reporter sent to Uganda to cover the so-called “Kill the Gays” Bill. Since he’s not capable of performing the serious journalism that that requires, he fictionalizes a story that gains traction in part because Americans are so eager to believe bad news out of Africa. And if I ever finish that one, I’ll get back to writing stories, which is more fun.

We Become the Mask That We Wear: An Interview with Eduardo Halfon

Posted on November 10, 2015March 20, 2019 by 007595

“Oh Ghetto My Love” is featured in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading with an introduction from Dwyer Murphy. Eduardo Halfon’s books Monastery and The Polish Boxer are available from Bellevue Literary Press.

Julia Johanne Tolo: I read in an interview you did with Dwyer Murphy in Guernica a few years ago, that writing in Spanish, instead of English, wasn’t a choice for you, that Spanish was the natural language to write in. Yet you have said that you think in English, and then write your thoughts down in Spanish. How do you experience seeing your words translated back into English?

Eduardo Halfon: When I’m writing, the words in my mind begin in English, and somewhere between my head and the page they turn into Spanish. It’s a very bizarre writing process, I know. And not one that I dwell upon too much or even pretend to understand. I do know that I have two languages, that I am straddling two languages. One foot in Spanish, my mother tongue; another foot in English, my step-mother tongue. It’s not that I go back and forth, but that I’m inside both or that both are inside me at the same time, and everything I write, then, is really a product of both. As if I’d developed my own private language, regardless of the language of the words on the page.

JJT: One of my favorite aspects of “Oh Ghetto My Love” is the rhythm of the language. Is that something that you think is close to the feel of the Spanish?

EH: I think every language has its own rhythm, its own particular music. And that — and not the words themselves — is perhaps the hardest part of the translation process. How do you translate the music of words from one language to another? In the English translations of my stories, I’m able to work closely with the translator. And I’ve found that most of my suggestions and edits concern the sound of the words, their cadence and rhythm. Not because I’m capricious, or not only because I’m capricious. But because the rhythm of the words is essential in creating an emotional response in the reader. The words to a song can be beautiful by themselves, but the emotions we experience while listening to that song are unattainable without its music. Same in literature. And this is something I’m very conscious of while writing: the rhythm and tempo of the words and sentences. When I was young, I wanted to be a professional piano player. I would have settled for weddings and bar-mitzvahs. Never made it.

JJT: You’ve given your narrator your own name and details or characters from your own life are similar to those in your stories, such as your grandfather and your trip to Poland. What do you think can be gained from/enjoyed most about playing with genres and the borders between the real and the imagined in this way?

EH: Fiction isn’t interested in facts, but in truth. The facts of my life — my name, my birthplace and family, my grandfather, my beard — are only the starting point of a trail that leads the reader somewhere else, somewhere deeper and more mysterious and magical, somewhere even I, while writing, didn’t expect to go. Fiction, like music, resonates at an emotional level, through which we can arrive at an emotional or poetic truth. To an ecstatic truth, as Werner Herzog called it. In literature, we use facts to create on the page the illusion of life, and once there, the imagined becomes real, and water becomes wine.

JJT: How does traveling inspire you? What kind of places do you like to travel to, and what do you seek from travel?

EH: I feel as if I’ve been traveling my entire life. We left Guatemala when I was ten, and I’ve been shuffling along ever since. But I’ve never felt at home anywhere. Never felt rooted to any city or country. I suppose I was educated that way, brought up in the permanent diaspora that was my childhood. But now, every time I arrive for the first time in a new city, I arrive with the hope that that city will be where I finally want to stay, raise some kids, hang a hammock, get a black lab. I find myself yearning for a piece of land somewhere, or at least for the nostalgia of land somewhere. But I’ve never found it. Never felt it. Perhaps that’s why I travel so much, both in life and in fiction. Since I don’t have a city of my own, I write as if the entire world was my back yard.

JJT: In “Oh Ghetto My Love” as well as in your story “Signor Hoffman,” (which I believe can be read in BOMB Magazine in December) the name Hoffman is recurring: in one story the narrator chooses it for himself and in the other it is mistakenly given to him. How does this play on names connect to the themes of travel, identity, and the past that are present in these stories?

EH: I find that there’s something profoundly significant in the identity bestowed upon us by our name. I’m Halfon. I’m born with the weight of that name — of that word — on my shoulders. That’s who I am. That’s my identity, my family’s identity, our history. Yet, Halfon isn’t our original name. It was longer. But an immigration officer at Ellis Island decided to chop it in half, when my great-grandfather arrived there from Lebanon at the beginning of the last century. So my name — my identity — is also arbitrary, haphazard, created in a fraction of a second by the whim of some lazy or stubborn immigration officer. I’m fascinated by this. How something so permanent and profound as our name can also be so ephemeral. Like Hoffman in the two stories you mention. Like all last names. At some point in the past, all of our last names were created or decided by the whim of someone, but over time they become our identity. We all eventually become the mask that we wear.

***

Eduardo Halfon was born in Guatemala City, moved to the United States at the age of ten, went to school in South Florida, studied Industrial Engineering at North Carolina State University, and then returned to Guatemala to teach literature for eight years at Universidad Francisco Marroquín. Named one of the best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogotá, he is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the prestigious José María de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel. He has published eleven previous books of fiction in Spanish. The Polish Boxer, his first book to appear in English, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and finalist for the International Latino Book Award. Halfon is currently the Harman Writer in Residence at Baruch College in New York and travels frequently between his homes in Nebraska and Guatemala.

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