Julia Stiles was straight. But that didn’t stop me from thinking about kissing her pretty moon face, with its tiny mouth and nose, her cheeks smooth and delicately furred as an apricot.
We met at summer camp. Our summer camp was not the kind filled with campfires, canoes, and crudely woven friendship bracelets. Our camp offered workshops like “existential crises on the back porch,” zine-making, and creative writing led by a six and half foot tall Nick Cave lookalike named Dave, who gave us Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and said only one sentence all afternoon: “I hate white people.”
At our camp, we chain-smoked cigarettes, swam at a coed nude beach, shaved each other’s heads at 3 a.m., and traded mixtapes studded with Sonic Youth concert bootlegs. It was at camp that I had first heard all my favorite bands: The Pixies, The Cure, PJ Harvey. And in the summer of 1994, Julia introduced me to Bikini Kill.
She and I met in our first year at camp, and had traded letters ever since. Every time an envelope arrived in my mailbox with her SoHo address scrawled in the corner, I tore it open, basking in the parallels between my rural Cape Cod adolescent life and her cosmopolitan Manhattan one. (We BOTH hated everyone at our school! We BOTH thought meat was murder! We BOTH liked to cut the necks out of our thrift store t-shirts!).
Rock & Roll Day was an annual camp event. All day, teenagers plugged in on a tiny outdoor stage, and played covers of their favorite songs. Someone always played “I Wanna Be Sedated,” and somebody always sang “No Woman No Cry.” Though I was so obsessed with music that I’d developed an unpleasant ear condition by wearing my Walkman headphones even while sleeping, I had never considered performing.
I didn’t want to be a rock star, like everyone else at camp. I didn’t want to be a movie star, like Julia did, either. I wanted to be a writer. But I loved Billie Holiday’s voice, and I had a feeling in me that matched it. So I took secret voice lessons from a plump woman named Shirley who ran scales with me in the musty top floor of our local music shop, and I made her teach me “God Bless the Child,” “Summertime,” and “Don’t Explain.”
That year, on Rock and Roll Day’s eve, Julia grabbed me and said, “I signed us up.” We were a band, she informed me, with her on guitar and me on vocals. “We get two songs,” she said. “What’s your pick?”
Without thinking, I answered: “Gigantic.”
“Great,” she said. “Here’s our other song — go learn it.” She handed me a cassette tape.
For the next eight hours, I locked myself in the Rec Hall restroom, and listened to Kathleen Hanna sing “Feels Blind.” Singing was the only way I knew how to articulate my loneliness, but I hadn’t known it was also a way to articulate anger. Until I heard my own voice ricocheting off the tiled walls of that bathroom — what have you taught me, you’ve taught me fucking nothing — I hadn’t even known that I was angry.
On that stage in my torn jeans and Pixies t-shirt, I was so nervous that my voice cracked as I murmured, Hey Paul hey Paul hey Paul let’s have a ball, and I glanced across the stage at Julia in her torn slip and black lipstick. She nodded at me, and I kept going — What a big black mess, what a hunk of love.
But when I sang “Feels Blind,” I didn’t stutter, and I didn’t have to look at Julia, or the handful of dirty teenagers watching us from the grass — I closed my eyes, brought my lips to the cool microphone, and it was better than Billie, better even kissing Julia, which I never got to do.
A year later, I was supposed to go visit her in Manhattan, but instead, I met my first girlfriend, and blew Julia off because we were too busy kissing and fighting and dry humping to Kristin Hersh. The next time I wrote her, she wrote back to tell me that her career was taking off and she didn’t have much time anymore for letters.
We never spoke again, but if I wrote her one last letter, it would say this:
Dear Julia,
Thank you for Bikini Kill.
Love,
Melissa
P.S. Your solo at the end of Save The Last Dance killed.
“The Necropastoral is a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of ‘nature’ which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects.” –Joyelle McSweeney
In our world, one in which images of impending environmental doom seem to simmer and bubble all around us — hapless polar bears on melting icebergs, seagulls slicked black with spilled oil, withering farmland and flooded cities — McSweeney’s concept of the necropastoral is at once intellectually vital and darkly comic. On its most basic level the term is ironic, a sort of Latinate, literary shorthand for man’s fundamentally flawed relationship with his planet, a marker for his simultaneous roles as victim and perpetrator, maker and reaper, of apocalypse. It’s also a term that seems uniquely descriptive of Karl Taro Greenfeld’s second novel, The Subprimes. Others would be infectious and breakneck, hilarious and profound.
The latest addition to the growing subgenre of cli-fi (or climate fiction), Greenfeld’s is one of, if not the best. Part satire, part preemptive elegy for a dying planet — and, really, who will be around to write (or read) an elegy if the unthinkable becomes reality? — The Subprimes may turn out to be one of 2015’s most-celebrated novels. With a language that splits the difference between Martin Amis’s slangy poetics and Vonnegut’s jabbing minimalism, more heart than any piece of comic writing I’ve ever read, and a narrative twist or three up its black little sleeves, The Subprimes is the work of a major, emerging talent in literary fiction.
I feel a little silly describing Greenfeld as an “emerging talent.” He’s published six books of nonfiction after all, written for The New York Times, GQ, and Vogue, and placed stories in the Best American Short Story series twice (2009 and 2013). Still, this is only his second novel. His first, Triburbia (2012), was a critical success Jay McInerney (writing for The New York Times) called “artful” and Publishers Weekly described as “absorbing.” So, I’ll stick with “emerging.” Fair is fair.
The subprimes are average Americans in a near future that may become our own, a growing class of people with bad credit and worse job prospects edged out by the unfeeling (often insidious) forces of killer technology and market economics run amok. In an America that’s fracked its way to energy independence (and become the world’s largest energy producer as a result), families of dispossessed subprimes roam the American countryside in their beat-up, gas-guzzling SUV’s, postmodern Bedouins trapped in an American Nightmare.
The book’s main character (and narrator) is Richie Schwab, a dope smoking, middle-aged hack journalist. Richie’s dual role as reporter and story reminds me of the great, vaguely meta-fictional narrators Martin Amis used in his best novels (the London Trilogy of Money, London Fields, and The Information). A stand-in for the author himself, Richie’s role in both first and third person narrations plays with notions of truth and story, the lines between fact and fiction.
In addition to Richie, the cast is made up primarily of families: one of subprimes (Bailey, her husband Jeb, and their children, Tom and Vanessa), another in danger of becoming subprimes (Gemma, estranged wife of fraudulent energy derivatives trader, Arthur Mack, and her daughters, Franny and Ginny), and Richie’s own (his ex-wife Anya and their kids, Ronin and Jinx). There are two notable exceptions, both spiritual leaders of a sort: Sargam, a young woman who eventually becomes the leader of the subprime community at the center of the book’s drama, and televangelist Pastor Roger, leader of the famed Freedom Prairie Church (and pawn of wealthy industrialists, the Pepper Sisters). Though this list of characters may seem dizzying in the abstract, there’s never trouble keeping them all straight. The book is a smooth speedy read, one that nonetheless has a lot to say.
As the power of government yields to that of the corporation, the subprimes find themselves constantly on the run, moving from one Ryanville (camps reminiscent of the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression) to the next. There, they work wage-unregulated jobs (the minimum wage having been outlawed) at job sites unpoliced by the Feds (OSHA and the EPA, too, have gone the way of big government). It’s not only humanity that suffers in Greenfeld’s world: from whales mysteriously (maybe suicidally) beaching themselves to roving packs of ravenous coyotes and the blasted vistas left by industry run rampant, nature is in open rebellion against humanity in general and America in particular. With global warming accelerating, the wealthy plot their escapes to sanctuary islands where they dream of living untouched by the death all around them. Though they never come out and call themselves “primes,” the derision we hear leveled at the jobless, credit-unworthy subprimes carries echoes of the alphabetic caste system of Huxley’s Brave New World.
At the heart of Greenfeld’s future America rests the abandoned town of Valence, Nevada, an arena in which good and evil (or, better put, life and death) will meet in the forms of Sargam, Pastor Roger, and their respective flocks. Under the cyanide gaze of network news drones (and unintentionally-embedded journalist, Richie Schwab), Pastor Roger’s quest to bless the Pepper Sisters’ latest tool of resource extraction, the massive Joshua machine, will come up against Sargam’s philosophies of nonviolence and “people helping people.”
There will be losses on both sides, the worst of them born by children, which is one of the central points Greenfeld posits: humanity’s relationship with its environment is so unsustainable that it amounts to the rejection of a future beyond that which we can see and, on some level, the rejection of life. Couple this with the role of the supernatural in the book’s conclusion (earned though it is throughout) and we have the final piece of Greenfeld’s satire. In a world so clearly stripped of magic — so obviously a result of the victory of technology over everything including man — the idea of humanity being saved by supernatural means is laughable, no matter how good it might feel dramatically. In the wake of Greenfeld’s last, and maybe his darkest joke, the reader is left with two choices — either stop laughing altogether or laugh loud enough to drown out the sounds of madness all around you.
[Editor’s note: the following is the introduction to New American Stories, an anthology of contemporary American short stories edited by Ben Marcus. The anthology will be published by Vintage on July 21st.]
There is a game I play with my young son. He shuts his eyes while I sneak to the shadows with my weapon. On the dark side of a bookcase, concealed by a doorway, I stand and wait. I stifle my breathing, and the game begins.
My son does his best to avoid capture, even though he circles my hideout, risking the worst. He cannot yet play this game silently. He advertises his location with badly muffled squeals. He sprints through rooms, taking the corners too fast. He’ll stumble, wipe out, right himself, and charge again. I always hear him coming. Maybe he wants to be captured just as much as he dreads it, but you can hear the conflict thumping inside him. He produces frightening sounds, a pure bullet of feeling. How does one body hold so much? What will I do when he grows up and learns to conceal this feeling, or, worse, when the feeling stops rising up so strongly in the first place?
My son can’t be sure where or when the ambush is coming. But it always does. When he tears past me I roar from his blind spot, ensnaring him in a blanket. Down he goes, kicking and laughing, a thrashing little figure under cloth. I close the bundle, cinch it in my fist, and drag it from room to room.
My son is five now, as easy to lift as a pillow. I hoist him over my head, teeter on one leg for suspense, then plunge him onto the couch. He bounces high, still tucked inside the blanket. I hold on tight and swing until we’re spinning. His little voice drifts up from far away. Inside his trap he is in heaven, or so it sounds. I swing him and drag him and toss him until I’m ready to collapse. When I let him go he is red and sweaty and wild. Usually he glares at me. Why did I stop? What is wrong with me? He begs, begs, for us to play again. It’s all he wants to do. He promises not to peek, and I steal off to hide again.
My son would not put it this way, because he knows better than to try to dissect his own pleasure. But he is asking to be amazed and afraid in this situation we’ve contrived. He cannot really come to harm — the boy is so small that it is child’s play to keep him safe — but by surrendering control, submitting himself to the darkness, to the fast passage inside a careening world, he can take himself to the bursting point. He is looking to suddenly feel a great many things, and to feel them intensely, inside this fictional crisis. And I can’t blame him, because, more and more, I would like that very same thing.
When I want to be ambushed, captured, thrust into a strange and vivid world, and tossed aloft until I cannot stand it, until everything is at stake and life feels almost unbearably vivid, I do something simple. I read short stories. When I was young I read fiction because nothing much happened to me. As a reader I could fight a war, lose a father, be pushed from a bridge with a noose over my neck. I could grow up and grow old, turn angry and sad. I could love and hate and harm and get away with it. In stories I had children of my own, got divorced, worried, wondered, rode shotgun inside intellects far swifter than mine. My earliest reading was not just a romance with what was possible, but a romance with what was not. If something was never likely to happen in real life, I was doubly committed to live it in fiction. I think back to when I have had the most intense feelings, and most often those moments resulted not from cruising through a so-called real world of bodies and things, collecting actual experiences. Those feelings arose out of something invisible yet strangely more powerful: the language of others. Language has made some of the most durable feeling this world has seen. Not the functional kind of language we bleat at each other out in the world when we want something, or need to declare or deny something. Not the quotidian language that showers down everywhere around us to block us from our true thoughts. I’m thinking of the much more unusual and spell-like language of fiction, which generally does not occur out loud: razored, miraculously placed, set like stones into staggeringly complex patterns so that, somehow, life, or something more distilled and intense, more consistently moving, gets made.
I have been reading stories for forty-two years and I still find it astonishing that, by staring at skeletal marks on paper or a screen, we can invite such cyclones of feeling into our bodies. It is a kind of miracle. Our skin is never pierced and yet stories break the barrier and infect us regardless. We study these marks, move our finger along them, and they transmit worlds. If we could paint what happens between the page and our face, the signal channel saturated with color and shape, the imagery would be so tangled that the picture would blacken into pure noise, a dark architecture of everything that matters.
A story is simply a sequence of language that produces a chemical reaction in our bodies. When it’s done well, it causes sorrow, elation, awe, fascination. It makes us believe in what’s not there, but it also pours color over what is, so that we can feel and see the world anew. It fashions people, makes us care for them, then ladles them with conflict and disappointment. It erects towns, then razes them. A story switches on some unfathomably sophisticated machine inside us and we see, gloriously, what is not possible.
And yet language is a prickly delivery system. It requires attention, effort. It does not produce reliable results across the population. The same text that makes one person weep makes another blink with indifference or spit with contempt. By reading more, and more variously, we decimate our immunity, increase our vulnerability to this substance, but our private wiring does something profoundly subjective to this material that would seem unique from body to body. Language turns out to be the most unruly of medicines, the most unknowable, and yet, provided we collaborate with it, still among the most powerful.
Language is a drug, but a short story cannot be smoked. You can’t inject it. Stories don’t come bottled as a cream. You cannot have a story massaged into you by a bearish old man. You have to stare down a story until it wobbles, yields, then catapults into your face. And yet, as squirrely as they are to capture, stories are the ideal deranger. If they are well made, and you submit to them, they go in clean. Stories deliver their chemical disruption without the ashy hangover, the blacking out, the poison. They trigger pleasure, fear, fascination, love, confusion, desire, repulsion. Drugs get flushed from our systems, but not the best stories. Once they take hold, you couldn’t scrape them out with a knife. While working on this book, I started to think of a it as a medicine chest, filled with beguiling, volatile material, designed by the most gifted technicians. The potent story writers, to me, are the ones who deploy language as a kind of contraband, pumping it into us until we collapse on the floor, writhing, overwhelmed with feeling.
Imagine trying to assert the importance of water. Food. Love. The company of others. Shelter. There are some things that we need so innately that it feels awkward and difficult to explain why. To this list of crucial things, without which we might perish, I would add stories. A short story works to remind us that if we are not sometimes baffled and amazed and undone by the world around us, rendered speechless and stunned, perhaps we are not paying close enough attention.
In high school I made mix tapes for girls. The term for this now would be playlist. You can create one with a few clicks, and no one much cares. Back then a mix tape was an act of love, a plea, a Hail Mary, an aphrodisiac. In other words, it was an anthology, published in a limited edition of one copy. Then it was surrendered to an audience of one, a girl not even guaranteed to listen to it, because sometimes it must have seemed like it was made by a stalker, a creep, a card-carrying freak. To make a mix tape, before computers, you needed a mule cart, a bag of hair, and a padded suit. It seemed to take a whole year to produce, and I wasn’t even one of those kids who decorated the case with snakeskin and neon markers. I just dumped songs from one tape to another, pulling from the vast catalog of seventeen albums and twenty-four cassettes that I owned. And when I handed it off to some poor girl, she might regard it as a grim example of my biology, dropping it like medical waste into her bag. The tape needed to perform the charm and seduction that, with my own body and words, I could not. Not that I didn’t try. I wrote plenty of poetry in a literary tradition that never took off: the wrong words in the wrong order. And even though I hoped some handcrafted poems would reveal me as a person worth shucking one’s clothing for, my verse was embarrassing, far too easy to understand. I had yet to realize how easy it is to dismiss what comes to us with no thought, no struggle. If there is nothing left to think about, we stop thinking. I did not understand that my poetry needed to at least seem eligible for further reflection. It had no time-release feature, as do the stories in this anthology, to crack open in the body days later, bleeding out inside us until we start to glow. Obviousness was a clear turnoff. My poetry shut people down, maybe invited death into the home. I’m sure my fondness for rhyme didn’t help, either.
I also made a classic mistake. I confused the description of feelings with the creation of them. I wanted to cause feeling in others, but all I did was assert, somewhat grandiosely, that I had feelings myself. This is an unpleasant thing to announce. I had a lot to learn.
So I retreated from creation to curation. As with the stories in this anthology, I chose music that somehow, in ways I could not understand, came spring-loaded with insights about me, a youth from nowhere who knew no one, who had said and done precisely nothing that mattered. The songs I liked already intuited what I thought and felt, deep within my well-guarded interior. No doubt this wasn’t particularly difficult, because I had not thought and felt all that much yet. But this feeling — of being known, understood, seen, accounted for — seemed in urgent need of passing along. The songs, as fiction would later, worked a kind of excavation, breaking down resistance to reveal a territory that I otherwise did not have access to, fears and desires and mixed or half- formed feelings that had been hidden. When a song surfaced this stuff, I felt destroyed and remade, gifted with a new body, a weapon, a helmet. We don’t just have our feelings. Our feelings have us, and change us, and the endorphins triggered by this kind of change became compulsory. If a piece of noise, or later a string of words, could perform this kind of archaeology, I hoped to undergo such surgery as often as I could, and I looked for others who could enter the very same operating room. Life without it no longer seemed like life. To listen was to grow one’s inner self, to become more of a person, to see and feel more possibility. A sweet medication for solitude? Sounds as ointment for some impossible sorrow? Maybe, but those were the minor spoils up against the feeling of purifying one’s oxygen and sharpening the very air so that all I saw and felt leapt to a nearly unbearable resolution. It’s one reason we read, listen, and look at things made with exquisite skill. I’m sure I also thought that I would somehow get credit for these stirring songs — the sad and introspective ones, the punchy and danceable ones, the oddball ones that came out of nowhere with beeps and glitches and clicks. Certainly I thought that I’d be seen differently after the girl had listened to the tape. If she liked these songs, and if she felt similarly discovered by them, she would, if not disrobe, at least see I was no caveman. Or, more likely, she’d copy the tape and pass it on to whomever she wanted to impress, whoever was, for her, someone she wanted to show her true self to.
This anthology aims to present the range of what American short-story writers have been capable of in the last ten years or so, not as a museum piece but as a sampler of behaviors and feelings we can very nearly have only through reading. A sourcebook of required emotions. For months I collected books, stories, links, and names. I asked writers, readers, editors, friends, and strangers to alert me to strong stories, favorite writers. Who should I read? Who am I missing out on? What is the most memorable story you’ve read in the last ten years? What story has shaken you?
The range of work I encountered was staggering. I have sometimes wished for a bookstore organized not by genre but by feeling. You could shop by mood, by emotional complexity, by the amount of energy and attention that might be required. There’d be a special section for the kind of literature that holds your face to the fire. Until there is such a bookstore, we have anthologies.
Had I worked strictly from my passions, collecting the most intense and beautiful and memorable work I could find, stories exhibiting the highest degree of artistic mastery, this book would have grown so huge that you would have needed to carry it in a wagon.
I sought stylistic and formal variety in the stories not to be fair, but because there seem to be endless ways, in fiction, to make the world come alive, to reckon with our time, to fearlessly reveal what’s in front of us. To look to the past, to posit the future. To lean on language and bend and try to break it. To preserve and refine tradition, or to struggle otherwise. If writers can’t genuinely make it new, they probably can’t convincingly make it old, either. They are helpless but to make it now. But who we are now is impossible to fix, and impossible to generalize about. The minor labels that would scar our writers — realist and experimentalist would be the obvious ones — seem like someone else’s nicknames, sounds we use to call off a dog. We say these words out loud and we feel the instant shame of having told a lie in a language we hardly even speak.
The idea was to put together a book that shows just what the short story can do. Had I chosen thirty-two stories that showcase the exact same methods and make love to the same traditions, that would be too many hammer blows to the face, when a single one will do. Each story here is a different weapon, built to custom specifications. Let’s get bloodied and killed in thirty-two different ways.
Inside this book you’ll find language smooth and seamless, jagged and mean. The kind of language you use and hear every day, and the kind you never thought possible. If these stories were paintings, one might depict the human figure in angry detail while another might puncture the figure until it spills over its frame, leaking color down the wall.
Therefore there are stories of the past. Stories of the future. Stories set in some gummy mixture of the two. Stories rocketing inside a character’s head. Stories casting out into the world. Stories that burn out inside a few seconds. Stories that blanket a lifetime. Stories set here, stories set abroad. Stories set in some unsettling elsewhere. Speaking of which: stories that could happen, stories that couldn’t, stories that did, stories that didn’t. Stories that confirm our beliefs or assault them. Stories that hurt the mind. Stories that ate a poem. Stories that refute the dictionary. Stories pretty, strange, or plain. Stories so monstrously intimate I was often scared to reread them.
What resulted started to feel like a kind of Whole Earth Catalog. Not of things and goods, but of the strategies, in language, to attack our tendency — my own, anyway — to feel too little. I wanted to bring together stories I would not care to live without, a kind of atlas, or chemical pathway, to the sort of language-induced feelings that, to me, are no longer optional. The names of the moods and states and spirits these stories provoke, like the names of animals, or the names of people, are woefully inadequate.
When I could not shake a story, was kept up at night by it, and days or weeks later began to confuse the story with my own life, there was a sign that the story had taken seed. As I read, the stories I sided with were the ones that began to own me. They won’t relax their hold, and the more I read them the more this arrangement seems secure. I kept the stories that won’t unhand me. If I could forget a story then I suppose I did. And yet even then, the stories I forgot formed their own pile, where I revisited them each at least once, believing the defect to be mine.
In my reading I found stories that make us forget our troubles, and stories that rub our faces in them. The first kind of story relieves us of the burden of some basic truths: We are made of flesh, it often hurts to be alive, and we are in a constant state of decay. If we lived in relentless contemplation of these facts, we would burst. Some of us already have. Pleasure arises when we forget our fears. Relief, an illusory break from time. A break from ourselves. Such stories provided entertainment but left no residue. When I examined myself for evidence of them days or weeks later, I could find none. A respite from some basic emotional reality — the central predicament of being a finite, feeling thing — came to seem too much like a vacation I hadn’t earned. And didn’t really want.
A deeper pleasure arguably comes when our fears are admitted, revealed in full color, enlarged and even strengthened, in the world of language. It was this kind of story I favored, a story not in flight from something elemental and inescapable — we are going away soon. Meanwhile, what is worth noticing, what is crucial to feel and think before we do? Why is it pleasurable, deeply so, to read sorrowful, dark, often difficult stories? What need is being satisfied? It’s challenging to answer this without sounding like a glutton for end-times entertainment. When a story achieves a degree of moral honesty, not in its specific plot or its claims, not in its subject matter, necessarily, but in some of its deeper materials, its methods, language, style, and mood, in the emotional space it carves out within us, the result is eerily comforting, like being wrapped in a blanket and hurtled through space. In the end it is far more disturbing when our entertainment denies our fears, our mounting suspicions, estranging us with a version of the world that is too safe and easy to be real. A story seemed to find its place here when it did not look away from what was coming.
Cartridge Discount wants you to choose the typeface (and font) that’s right for you. It turns out Helvetica is not as all-purpose as Gary Hustwit would like us to believe…
The War Between the States, the War of Secession, the Lost Cause: the Civil War has as many names as stories to tell. Its battles and losses forced America to define itself, from Maine to Louisiana and into the West. Its causes and roots are as brutal as its casualties, and its epilogue is a celebrity publically committing assassination. In short, the Civil War continues to capture the imagination.
Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War, by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm (Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb) and Ari Kelman (A River and Its City, A Misplaced Massacre), published just after the 150th anniversary of the Confederacy’s surrender, is a poignant and soulful retelling. It is an ambitious text, as in many ways a comic can only paint a broad picture of a complex theater. To widen this scope, Battle Lines relies on a human narrative of America’s bloodiest divide. Fifteen vignettes, each prefaced by brief, contextual articles typeset and designed as though from a newspaper from a previous era, carry readers through Reconstruction. The most powerful of these are the stories about individuals, including an escaped slave crossing Union Lines; two friends behind Confederate ramifications, one lost and one spared; a journal-keeper doomed to starve in the infamous Andersonville, Georgia POW camp. Each vignette follows a particular object of everyday life from that era: the Union flag is lowered at Fort Sumter and the banner of the Confederacy raised, a mother and son watch a battle through a pair of Opera Glasses, loose fibers weave together to form a noose through scenes portraying the postwar Deep South.
Through every scene, there are bodies. Bodies of soldiers. Bodies of freed people. Bodies of animals. There are limbs lost. There is disease.
Since it’s a graphic novel, the language in Battle Lines is concise. Every word counts. The best panels illustrate the unsaid. A long line of partially shoed Rebels, walking through the woods with rags tied around their feet, next shown stripping the surrounding dead, fallen from some previous encounter. An empty shell bag early in a skirmish. A husband who returns home to find his wife alone, the framed photograph of her holding their infant adorned with a pair of slippers but no child in sight. The destroyed hulls of Richmond and Atlanta. The tactics of some Confederate veterans keeping ballots out of freed men’s hands simply described as “terrorism” beneath an image of hooded Ku Klux Klan members on horseback, one holding a torch.
The Civil War, like most any violent confrontation, was a compendium of tragedies, spurred by slavery and soured by appalling racism in the North and South alike. Fetter-Vorm’s and Kelman’s account isn’t pandering; instead, Battle Lines beautifully and succinctly paints a full picture, challenging readers to confront ugly truths about the past and present.
As a person brought up and schooled in the Northeast, it is difficult to gauge how much of my prior knowledge of the Civil War fills in the gaps between historic overviews and the short impressions represented in the graphic novel. There’s no way of knowing how different my reading would be if I knew less or perhaps nothing of the issues and times. Knowing what I do, however, it is impressive how much information Battle Lines manages to include and get right.
The book itself is a collector’s piece, designed for print lovers. Longer than it is tall, like an old time photo album, its presentation is sophisticated and alluring. Washed earth tonesfurther communicate the grim realities of barren farms, trench warfare and lives lost. In short, it is a work of art, illuminating, in small and large swaths, the conflict surrounding the abolition of the heinous crime of slavery and its aftermath.
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing Uber.
Uber is a taxi business where the taxis look just like regular cars and the drivers look just like regular people. It’s pretty inventive. Last week I rode in my first one. It felt like I was in the back seat of a stranger’s car. Like hitchhiking but not for free.
My driver was named Ameer and his day job is as a regular taxi driver. We didn’t talk much because when I asked him questions he said, “No talking.” I guess he had a lot on his mind and wanted to focus on the road.
Unfortunately it was raining, so the 27-minute ride cost me $112.47. This is no different from regular taxis. Like the time I took a regular taxi and at the end of the trip the driver said, “It’s raining so give me an extra $80.” And I did, of course, because he made a good point. Then he asked me for all kinds of personal information just like Uber does.
What really sets Uber apart from other taxi businesses is how you can hail them with your cell phone instead of having to raise your hand. With a regular taxi you never know who the driver might be but with Uber’s taxi service you can choose your driver by their photo. That way you can be sure to select someone who looks like they probably won’t sexually assault you.
I had chosen Ameer because I liked the shirt he was wearing. He turned out not to be wearing it when he arrived five minutes after I hailed him, so I guess he stopped somewhere along the way to change. He must have spilled coffee on it or something. I liked that he cared about his appearance.
As I passed pedestrians I waved to them excitedly. “Look at me,” I screamed. “I’m in an irregular taxi!” No one looked, however, I think because to them it just looked like a car. And also I couldn’t figure out how to lower my window, so it was probably hard to hear me anyway. “Stop screaming, I can’t stand you,” screamed Ameer extra loudly so I could hear him over my own screaming. That was the most he said to me.
I cheered up slightly when he dropped me off because he stopped in the middle of an intersection blocking traffic. It made me feel important and powerful to make everyone have to wait for me, like I mattered.
BEST FEATURE: It’s hard to pick just one best feature when the whole experience is amazing! WORST FEATURE: No one can tell you’re in an Uber taxi unless you yell it at them.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Björk Guðmundsdóttir.
After a pre-publication press embargo, the reviews of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman are finally rolling in.
Although it may seem like everyone you know has an opinion about the eagerly anticipated novel — your mother, your boss, your barista, your bartender — reviewers at The New Yorker, The New York Times,NPR, and The Guardian haveprovided plenty of material for further discussion.
Adam Gopnik of The New Yorkerdescribes the novel as a “failure” — especially compared to the widely-read To Kill a Mockingbird. And yet, he acknowledges that Lee’s magical evocation of the South, though veiled by clichés, is still undeniably appealing. He suggests that Lee’s descriptions allow readers to both re-experience and perhaps redefine the “Pastoral South” as it is represented in literary history.
The critical tone of Gopnik’s review appears to stem primarily from disappointment. Gopnik refers to Scout’s (or Jean Louise’s, as she is now called) and Atticus’s “static and prosy debates” about “integration” and “other fifties-era subjects” as mechanical “set pieces” which barely resemble dialogue. Due to these weaknesses, Gopnik argues that “the book falls apart as art — partly because today it is impossible to find the anti-civil-rights arguments anything but creepy, but more because any novel that depends for its action on prosy debates about contemporary politics will fail.”
In TheNew York Timesreview, Randall Kennedy also expresses his disappointment about Harper Lee’s missed opportunity to successfully “explore a dense, rich, complicated subject: How should you deal with someone who has loved you unstintingly when you find out that this same person harbors ugly, dangerous social prejudices?” Kennedy describes Lee’s response, and therefore the impact of the novel itself, as “uninspired,” as a mere rough “sketch.”
Maureen Corrigan, in her review for NPR, unapologetically describes the novel as a “mess.” Corrigan is similarly troubled by the novel’s “fishy origin story” (is it a sequel or a first draft?) as well as Atticus’s “bizarre transformation.” However, unlike the previews reviews, Corrigan praises the “poignant” and “moving” scenes involving Jean Louise’s “torment over not feeling like she has a place in the world.”
In The Guardian’s panelreview, Syreeta McFadden writes that while the novel aspires to complicate the concept of disillusionment with one’s parents, it ultimately fails to deliver on its “ambition to interrogate the character of so-called good, moral people.” Kiese Laymon, too, is frustrated by the idea that “white characters in this novel have simply gone about the business of becoming white women and white men, and unbecoming white girls and white boys, at the expense of terrorized black women and black men. All has been accepted, if not forgiven. White supremacy, though provoked by a curious white woman, has preserved itself.”
Beyond the literary merit of the novel, its provenance, and its politics, another hotly contested aspect is the characterization of Atticus Finch. Has our hero truly fallen from grace? Did Atticus become a racist, or has he always been racist? In To Kill a Mockingbird, is it possible that his abhorrent views were obscured by the nostalgic narrative of his devoted daughter?
In TheNew York Times review, Randall Kennedy introduces an anecdote about a law professor named Monroe Freedman, who once published an article asserting that Atticus Finch “ought not be lauded as a role model for attorneys.”
Kennedy notes that, in Freedman’s opinion, Finch’s “acts and omissions” throughout the trial and throughout To Kill a Mockingbird “defined a lawyer who lived his life as a “passive participant” in “pervasive injustice.”’
Gopnik of The New Yorker agrees with this assertion, stating in his review “that this is exactly the kind of bigot that Atticus has been all along.”
Kiese Laymon in The Guardian effectively challenges our more simplistic readings of race in Harper Lee’s novels: “The real revelation–if we can call it that–in this novel (and possibly in To Kill a Mockingbird) is that given the limited point of view, there is nothing to “declare”, nothing at all to “seeth” here other than hollow conceptions of blackness facilitating the moral and narrative development of white characters, over and over again.”
James Tate was one of our most celebrated and prolific writers, with over twenty collections of poetry, several works of prose, and awards ranging from the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award to the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. And he yet had good humor to spare.
Here, some of Tate’s fellow poets, former students, and friends remember the man and his work, in their own ways and in their own words. Scrolling over the image below will introduce you to some of the poet’s most memorable lines; clicking on those lines will bring you to the full text of each poem. Once there, you will notice links within each poem. These links offer personal memories of Tate, commentary about his work, and recordings of some of his most meaningful poems.
As Tate himself said, in “The Initiation,” “The piece is dedicated/ to me. How strange,/ I thought I was new here.”
Browsing among the zero hours, and where I went from there . . . diabolical? No. I went out of myself into . . . I did not go out of myself into the after-
noon of parrots; I did not go out of myself into the dew; I did not go out of myself into the bat-terrors. I did not say silence, I said nothing about the love I
did not go out of myself into. I said nothing fire, I said nothing water, I said nothing air. I went out of myself into no, into nowhere. I was not alone.
[Absences, 1972]
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Goodtime Jesus
Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ’bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
[Riven Doggeries, 1979]
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Amy Newman
James Tate has said his autobiographical work is “based on a little truth and a lot of myth, or a lot of imagination.” Any writer interested in how the materials of life alchemize in poetry may consider his early poem ‘The Lost Pilot.” How deftly Tate navigates between what is real (a son’s desire to reunite with the lost father) and what he imagines (Tate would never know his father, who was shot down in WWII when Tate was an infant). In the poem, what is unseen by the human eye remains the most vivid of images. The son’s imagined father navigates both the sky and the son’s psyche, distant and ever-present and, in his absence, perfected to a god. The speaker tries, impossibly, to romance him back to the world with promises:
If I could cajole you to come back for an evening, down from your compulsive
orbiting, I would touch you, read your face as Dallas, your hoodlum gunner, now,
with the blistered eyes, reads his braille editions. I would touch your face as a disinterested
scholar touches an original page.
In such a gaze, in his desire to know the lost one who is dreamed of, longed for, and also feared, Tate’s speaker conjures the capacity for dread mingled with reverence that is the definition of awe.
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Sarah Blake
What I would call my first poetic voice came out of my love for James Tate, Mark Strand, and the prose poems of Charles Simic — three men who valued humor, image, action, and the absurd — men who prioritized the turns of language over the fluff of it. Every time I’m asked about my use of language in my own poems, I return to these men in my head. I think about tension, how a sentence pulls itself over the lines, how juxtaposition and pace work to elevate, work to surprise. Looking back, it surprises me that I started with these men, but I’m so glad I did. Because of them, I never felt unusual.
From “It Happens Like This,” by James Tate
I was outside St. Cecelia’s Rectory smoking a cigarette when a goat appeared beside me. It was mostly black and white, with a little reddish brown here and there. When I started to walk away, it followed. I was amused and delighted, but wondered what the laws were on this kind of thing. There’s a leash law for dogs, but what about goats? People smiled at me and admired the goat. “It’s not my goat,” I explained. “It’s the town’s goat. I’m just taking my turn caring for it.” “I didn’t know we had a goat,” one of them said. “I wonder when my turn is.” “Soon,” I said. “Be patient. Your time is coming.” The goat stayed by my side. It stopped when I stopped. It looked up at me and I stared into its eyes. I felt he knew everything essential about me. We walked on. A police- man on his beat looked us over. “That’s a mighty fine goat you got there,” he said, stopping to admire. “It’s the town’s goat,” I said. “His family goes back three-hundred years with us,” I said, “from the beginning.” The officer leaned forward to touch him, then stopped and looked up at me. “Mind if I pat him?” he asked. “Touching this goat will change your life,” I said. “It’s your decision.” He thought real hard for a minute, and then stood up and said, “What’s his name?” “He’s called the Prince of Peace,” I said. “God! This town is like a fairy tale. Everywhere you turn there’s mystery and wonder. And I’m just a child playing cops and robbers forever. Please forgive me if I cry.” “We forgive you, Officer,” I said. “And we understand why you, more than anybody, should never touch the Prince.” The goat and I walked on. It was getting dark and we were beginning to wonder where we would spend the night.
I destroy the living room furniture to prove I own nothing of value.
From “The World Doesn’t End,” by Charles Simic (dedicated to James Tate)
A dog with a soul, you’ve got that? You apes with heads of Socrates, false priests’ altar boys, retired professors of evil! I imagine cities so I can get lost in them. I meet other dogs with souls when I’m not lighting firecrackers in heads that are about to doze off.
Blood-and-guts firecrackers. In the dark to see, you ass-scratchers! In the dark to see.
I think this is a good one about poetry and faith, and trying to write something for strangers. Maybe even strangers who’ll read and love your work after you’re dead.
Look at all this poem’s tricks: burn snowflakes? Check. Open caskets, bringing the previously-only-imagined reader to life? Boom. End up both ecstatic and irritated? Sounds right.
Say we are the reader, wedged into a sudden aliveness with the writer. He’s willing to give up sleep to make us real, driving toward us all night in the sleet. It’s cold out there with the firmament and waters, lost in the coalescing matter making up this world. Let there be light, “a little fire.” Okay.
Then we are together, just us and Tate, all in, burning our identification papers for warmth. Who needs them? Who needs them once the poem is working, and we’re met there together? He doesn’t know. We don’t know. But here’s a poem about him tunneling toward us, working on faith, bringing us to life.
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Fady Joudah
I insist on return: I return you to me, you return me to you, or me to me and you to you: return is only to the stranger.
These lines came to me after I spent some time reading or rereading Tate’s earlier poems — before he fatigued from a certain form, and his mind and body fatigued along, before he went into the prose format and its allegorical inner world, its own semi-private logic that was always announcing the final disintegration, a return to being a root….dear James:
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Dorothea Lasky
“People read poems like newspapers, look at paintings as though they were excavations in the City Center, listen to music as if it were rush hour condensed. They don’t even know who’s invaded whom, what’s going to be built there (when, if ever). They get home. That’s all that matters to them. They get home. They get home alive.”
It’s true. Some people do and can have a tendency to read poems as if they are these things they can safely enter and leave at will. They want a sad poem to make you sniffle a little but not wail. They want a funny poem to make you say, “Ah, how clever,” but not belly laugh. They want a poem about sex to be erotic, but they don’t want to think about fucking towards an inevitable death. Tate knew that a poem will never let you have the will to do anything, except be. Because once you’re in a poem, you had better be ready to be changed — you will never get home alive no matter how much you claw back towards there. In a poem, home is already gone and you’re already a new person, ready to live a new life, do new things, make the world new again.
But in these past few days, I haven’t read this favorite poem as much, instead I have read this poem over and over, “Very Late, but Not Too Late.” I am not sure why I have focused on this one particularly, but it does represent particularly what Tate has taught us. In the poem, the speaker feels empty, but then he finds a purpose: this lonely woman who he can save or maybe she can save him. It’s a romantic/Romantic poem. Because it states that within the act of the journey there is always hope. Because it somehow insanely believes that even though (to quote my best friend) evil always wins, underneath this reality is the idea that life can start again, that a life has only begun on a night road traveled already so many times, that as my grandmother used to tell my mother “love is always right around the corner,” that we are never too late for a new beginning. These are good things to think about. Without these considerations, what is life.
James Tate was my teacher and he gave me immeasurable lessons both in and outside of the classroom, both in and outside the space of the poem. The past few days I have been remembering his feedback in class and how much he loved using the word, wild. When he used that word about your poem, you knew you had done something right. I remember distinctly the first time he used it on my poem. I had included the image of an ostrich and for some reason, he commented, just kind of matter-of-factly, “Wow, that’s pretty wild.” All the accolades of my nerdy youth fell away in that moment. Now this is what I want a poem to do, I thought. It’s a test I give myself with my work every day. Is this idea really wild, I ask myself. It’s a good question, because if you aren’t thinking about the wild in your work, if you are keeping your language and ideas purring methodically, then you aren’t really doing the right work at all. I mean, really, if the poem isn’t strong enough to bite you, then what’s the point.
It makes sense that the wild would have been important to his feedback, because his poems were certainly so. But it’s not as if they were all ragged edges and off beat staccato rhythm. He was an expert at regulated beat, his lines were perfectly constructed and paced. No it’s more that he was willing to let nihilism coexist with sincerity, to let his persona express the disagreement we all feel with ourselves and others. Not disagreement like there is one right answer, more that we will never come to a consensus about anything. We won’t ever really understand why we are here, what the point of our lives is, or if we were meant to meet the woman alone at night or if it were a random occurrence (a law of life that is one and the same). To be truly wild means to in spite of it all really believe that it’s never too late for life to begin. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to ever forget that.
Last summer, I had the honor of teaching at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and one of the days I went to a conversation between Dara Wier and James Tate. I wrote down so many things that Tate said, but one thing I have kept remembering all year is when he said, “I never know what is coming next. And that is the excitement of writing. And that is what keeps me glued to the poem.” It’s stuck with me because it really sums up what’s magical about creativity. I hope to always write and read poems where I can’t anticipate what’s coming next. And I hope in this life, when I am traveling the winding road full of dirt and bugs and people and trees, there is the answer to all my hopes and fears, just waiting there, ready to start me up again. If we can manage to live for this, then we can manage to live for anything.
Thank you, James Tate, for everything.
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Eduardo C. Corral
James Tate ruled the MFA program at Arizona State University in the late 90s. It seemed every poet in the program read him passionately. I was an interloper, an undergraduate student who’d just discovered poetry. I attended all the readings, I studied all the posters hung along the hallways of the English department, I crashed graduate-level workshops. In other words, I was a pest. The MFA students were, for the most part, kind to me. Some of the students could barely hide their dislike for me. I ignored those students. Instead, I reached out to the welcoming ones, the ones who remembered the fever, who remembered the thrill and anxiety of falling in love with poetry.
I was a nervous wreck among the MFA students. They were so worldly and so well-read. I was just starting out. I made it a point to ask each student to recommend a few books. Without fail, each student would mention one of James Tate’s books: The Worshipful Company of Fletchers, The Lost Pilot, and Distance from Loved Ones. Though each time I went to the library, I couldn’t locate his books. They were either checked out, misplaced, or stolen. One day I ran into Brandon Som on the first floor of the library. Brandon was an undergraduate student and a budding poet, like me. I noticed he was returning The Lost Pilot. After a few minutes of small talk, we walked to the circulation desk. He returned the book. I checked it out.
The poems in The Lost Pilot rattled me. Let me be more specific: the attitude of the speaker toward his parents rattled me. In the title poem the speaker says, “Your face did not rot.” In the poem “For Mother on Father’s Day,” the speaker confesses to his mother that he pitied her. These were instructive and challenging moments for me as a fledgling poet.
They forced me to rethink the way I wrote about my parents. My early poems viewed the familial through rose-colored glasses. My mother was a saint. My father was stoic, pure. The poems in The Lost Pilot showed me it was okay for a son to express anger, doubt, ambivalence, and a host of other emotions. James Tate was one of the poets who taught me a poem could be as complex as love.
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Brian Henry
Many of James Tate’s poems, particularly those from the past 20 years, enact mini-fictions in which he is generally the protagonist. By rendering the poetic fictive, Tate becomes both character and narrator as well as author. And he combines this narrative line (which frequently approaches the nonsensical, the hilarious, the enigmatic, and the profane) with both a prose vernacular and the kind of linguistic facility evident in his poems from the beginning. As with William Carlos Williams, his work attains the measure of speech without becoming prosaic or merely garrulous. And his use of dialogue seems reminiscent of the dialogue in Grimm’s fairy tales (at least as translated by Jack Zipes). Tate’s poems since Memoir of the Hawk and the fairy tale share more than absurdist, deadpan, economical dialogue: consider how the impossible is presented as absolutely normal, how the mundanity of violence is portrayed, how language both saves and fails.
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Joe Pan
We’ve all had those nights. It’s two or three AM, something has triggered an abrupt end to the seemingly banal reverie you’ve been inhabiting, & you look around to notice everything has gone still, hushed, & you are alone with yourself, more alone than usual. Your living room undergoes a subtle shift, in light, in balance. You are hyperconscious, almost predatory with your senses, & it all comes into relief — the wood of the bookshelves find their edges; objects slough off whatever personal meaning you’ve attached to them; & it’s like a film has slipped from the framing of your life as the dreamlike quality of your narrative expires & awaits reset, the true nature of your bodily existence now disinterred, & you find yourself imbued with the awful clarity of mortality. You are nothing more or less than an obvious statement of fact, an example — of the universe practicing consciousness, perhaps — & unless you are a Buddhist of the most devout practice, experience an overwhelming sense of dread. Strangely, though, a deep acceptance begins moving through you, hollowing new channels, until you arrive at a leveling, tired sadness that accompanies what feels like some ultimate spiritual acquiescence.
It is sobering. God help you if you have a child or partner sleeping on the couch. The curves & heft of my wife’s body transubstantiate to become the actual physical embodiment of loss & suffering, like during a lunar eclipse, when the moon sheds whatever poetic frivolity ascribed to it & greets you undressed as the floating orb it is, so close in its insurmountable distance that what lies beyond it, that anything could lie beyond it, seems impossible, induces panic.
The Germans must have some throaty word for this, something molecular & crushing. When Don DeLillo was asked by a friend what he should do to stave off this particular fear, the elder writer responded: “Watch more television.” Because cognitive distraction is not only how we’re able to drive a car while ruminating on our day’s to-do list, but also why we can shop for food at the grocery store without huddling crouched & weeping under the fruit table. Our brains must remind themselves not to be constantly reminded of certain facts. Entertainment is a readily available nostrum. In moderate doses, we are briefly relieved of ourselves & our problems. In large doses we forget our humanity, forget the suffering of others, forget our responsibilities to the political moment. But then, death. How are we supposed to combat daily reminders of the erasure of the self while retaining compassion & a belief in the meaningfulness of our actions?
The Private Intrigue of Melancholy
Hotels, hospitals, jails are homes in yourself you return to as some do to Garbo movies.
Cities become personal, particular buildings and addresses: fallen down every staircase someone lies dead.
Then the music from windows writes a lovenote-summons on the air. And you’re infested with angels!
This James Tate poem shows our insides for what they often are — returned-to waiting areas — while simultaneously performing what I love most about his work, that it can hold in its ephemeral hands both the struggles & the joys of life. The poem accounts for the sorrow, for the dead, for the forgetting, for the reemergence of ecstasy. It is entertaining, but also active, invested, & if you’re someone searching, instructive. In the darker periods of my life, Tate’s poems have become a welcomed infestation. In those moments of haunting self-discovery, in that essential aloneness, Tate’s humor can help hunt down what Rilke called the “the unity of dread and bliss” in order that we might “[take] possession of the full, ineffable power of our existence.”
The thing about anxiety over this kind of insufferable impermanence is that the feeling passes. The filmic nature of our narrative-inducing brains lays a fine layer of plastic over everything again, if only for a short while, & we’re back to being profoundly ignorant of our own impending deaths. Thank god for forgetfulness. But somewhere in our subconscious the feeling persists, & it’s nice, for some weird reason, to be reminded of the fact, so that we might laugh it off. This is where Tate’s poems really get going, for he was a master of macabre humor.
The Lack of Good Qualities
Granny sat drinking a bourbon and branch water by the picture window. It was early evening and she had finished the dinner dishes and put them away and now it was her time to do as she pleased. “All my children are going to hell, and my grandchildren, too,” she said to me, one of her children. She took a long slug of her drink and sighed. One of her eyes was all washed out, the result of some kind of dueling accident in her youth. That and the three black hairs on her chin which she refused to cut kept the grandchildren at a certain distance. “Be a sweetheart and get me another drink, would you, darling?” I make her a really strong one. “I miss the War, I really do. But your granddaddy was such a miserable little chickenshit he managed to come back alive. Can you imagine that? And him wearing all those medals, what a joke! And so I had to kill him, I had no choice. I poisoned the son of a bitch and got away with it. And so I ask you, who’s the real hero?” “You are, Granny,” I said, knowing I was going to hell if only to watch her turn to stone.
All humor is gallows humor, in a certain light; the heart of comedy is vulnerability. On a larger scale, the absurdity of the sublime arrives when we recognize that, trapped in the commanding breadth of its field, we are exposed as neither important nor unimportant, & that’s pretty funny, in a very tragic sort of way. Our laughter is the reaction to some true part of us being exposed. Humor makes light of important things, or makes seemingly inconsequential things suddenly important. It’s absurd that a tomato in a joke can become, though language, the absolute saddest thing on the planet for a moment. We chuckle. That release is possibly our grandest gesture of human vocalization. It’s contagious & provocative & social, & cuts through us like no words can.
Another thing literature can do is serve as mile markers, becoming intractable from the memory of a defining moment or era. As a young man who escaped the book-burning, gay-bashing, othering wilds of Florida & my Southern Baptist roots, this poem — the first I ever read of Tate’s — sent me back giddily on my heels:
Goodtime Jesus
Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ‘bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
From the writer & humorist Finley Dunne — or H.L. Mencken, depending on who you ask — & delivered slightly altered by Gene Kelly in Inherit the Wind: “[It] is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” The same thing can be said about literature — & has been.
In his seventy-one years, James Tate has afflicted & comforted many a poet, I’m sure.
Being funny is hard work. Living in all this pain & fear is hard work too. Camus said that we must believe that after all the hard work he did rolling his boulder up the hill, only to watch it fall back down, Sisyphus somehow managed to stay happy. & Sisyphus was happy, because the work of struggling in our humanness matters to us. We find unity in it. & besides, who doesn’t like to watch a boulder roll down a hill?
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Matthew Zapruder
I’ve been trying to write this little tribute to Jim for days. Every time I sit down to do it, I pick up one of his books, and just want to read, and also think about the many years I knew him, first as his student and then as the recipient of his gentle friendship, and also as a witness to his life as a true poet.
I had wanted to write something about “The Blue Booby,” one of my favorite poems by Jim. It’s an early poem, from his second book, which has the best title ever, The Oblivion Ha-Ha. I love the way the poem moves from actual information about the birds into unselfconscious projection and personification. It’s goofy and sweet, and also the end of the poem has always seemed scary and distant to me, the way the stars reflected in the blue foil are like the eyes of a “mild savior.” Those many eyes seem perfectly spooky and creepy and sublime, like we are being watched over by a giant beast, which probably we are. I asked my mom, when she was traveling down to the Galapagos a few years ago, to read the poem to the Blue Boobys, which she did, and then she brought back from there a piece of blue fabric that she sent to me and I brought to Jim in his house full of stacks of books and marvelous objects.
On my desk is the blue and white and black Selected Poems I bought at Cody’s Books in Berkeley, when I knew I was going to come to the MFA program at UMass Amherst to study with Jim. It became my constant companion. Now I am looking at my brown paperback of Distance from Loved Ones, which I bought as soon as I arrived in Amherst. “Quabbin Reservoir” is about the body of water created by a dam in the 1930’s, that covered over four small towns (don’t worry, the people were moved out first). It begins
All morning, skipping stones on the creamy lake, I thought I heard a lute being played, high up, in the birch trees, or a faun speaking French with a Brooklyn accent. A snowy owl watched me with half-closed eyes. “What have you done for me philately,” I wanted to ask it, licking the air. There was a village at the bottom of the lake, and I could just make out the old postoffice, and, occasionally, when the light struck it just right, I glimpsed several mailmen swimming in or out of it, letters and packages escaping randomly, 1938, 1937, it didn’t matter to them any longer. Void. No such address.
and then goes on. Talking to the owl, wanting to ask it, what have you done for me philately, that impossibly clever and naughty triple pun (lately, philately, fellately), the village under the lake with its mailmen still delivering lost packages. I knew I was in the right place when I read that poem. My friends and I learned more reading his poems and just being around him when he talked about poetry, and also knowing how he and Dara Wier worked, than we could easily absorb. While I was [at UMass Amherst] as a student he published Worshipful Company of Fletchers in 1994. Many of us remember being at a reading at tiny Wooton’s Books on the main street of Amherst for the release of that book: it was the single most antic, hilarious, heartbreaking, electric reading I have ever been to. There was a sense of being right in the middle of poetry. Our coffins had been pried open by the burning snowflake, and now we were alive.
I can’t find my copy anywhere of maybe my favorite of his books, Shroud of the Gnome. Maybe I lent it to someone, a student. If so I hope they are reading it. Memoir of the Hawk has one of my favorites of Jim’s poems, the first one I read after I found out he had passed away, “Rapture,” with its blue antelopes. Return to the City of White Donkeys, The Ghost Soldiers, and the second volume of his selected poems, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, are right next to me too. And yesterday in the mail I just received his final volume, Dome of the Hidden Pavilion (no one will ever write better book titles). I just read the last poem in the book, “Plastic Story.” In it, he wrangles with a piece of plastic, tries to push it under a chair, because “Some things are not worth contemplating.” Eventually he goes to sleep and imagines he’s being strangled, and then discovers he is. “A piece of plastic had grabbed my throat and was strangling me./ I fought with all my might, but it was too late. I had never/ done a thing to hurt that plastic.” I can hear Jim saying it, like he’s here in the room. It’s not online, you’ll have to get the book to read it. Please do. And then get all his other books and read them too. You’ll be so happy and sad and grateful, like I am now.
James Tate is one of the greatest originals that American poetry has ever produced. Upon learning of his passing, my heart has remained full and sad because I know that for many in Amherst, and throughout this country, his family, many friends, as well as a massive network of former students throughout the years of his legendary teaching, he was their one true genie. He was also, it bears emphasizing, one hell of a sweet man.
Because Tate’s career was so long and prolific, so inexhaustibly inventive and imaginative, there will be many books to revisit and favorite poems to remember. For me, it will be the prose poetry of the last two decades, in particular Ghost Soldiers, where I felt he entered (and perfected) a zone of literary space only James Tate ever, and ever will have, entered. Not that his work is without its familiars — especially the wacky flash-sized prose worlds of Borges and Kafka.
As a creative writing teacher these last five years, I remind myself now and then of something David Foster Wallace once said on Charlie Rose’s program. That teachers — perhaps he meant especially writer/teachers, just like himself? — tend to burn out after a few years. Many an adjunct knows firsthand that the temptation to repeat sometimes overwhelms the desire to improvise. Yet there’s also a special kind of wisdom that only comes once you’ve taught certain texts for ten or twelve semesters straight, as I’ve done with but a few trusty authors in my classes of introductory creative writing. One of these wisdoms I cherish is that no matter the classroom, the university, the pedigree or limited interests of my students, I can — and have! — always relied on a packet of Tate’s prose poems early on in the semester to energize and awaken young writers to the joy of reading. This is, I suppose, because writing, whatever else it may be primally tied to, is about freedom. Freedom from obvious and bad choices; freedom to make new and surprising ones; freedom to reproduce reality, your own private world or the big unknowable one as you see it around you. And of course, writing is also about freedom to let things fuck up, spoil, break in half, collide and mutate. When I read “The Cowboy” or “Uneasy About the Sounds of Some Night-Wandering Animal,” that’s what I’m continually reminded about, the harrowing fertility of Tate’s genius.
So yeah that’s what James Tate means to me as a writer, reader, teacher. FREEDOM. It’s a word he would snicker at, I imagine, rightfully, since no poet demonstrated better than him how hollow and macabre our national pride is/was, its charming and combustible myths. He also captured our persistent small town paranoia, Main Street’s wry hubbub, workplace as absurdist purgatory. But the poems, like him, had a sweetness of spirit that always carried us through, you know, straight on through to the next lovable and treacherous bend in the road.
A few years ago, I did an interview with Jim that yielded a 20-plus-page document, which remains unpublished. From it:
Did you ever wonder to yourself, where did this all brilliant, mad poetry come from? Maybe someone far back in your family tree had a way with words, too?
James Tate: No, no, absolutely not. Nobody. I can almost remember when it clicked in my head. I was 17 at the time and I just left a very rich high school in which I was part of a pretty large gang, as we called ourselves. It was very social and fun; you know, drinking beer and carrying on at all hours of the night every night or just about every night. Then I went to college and this was a really shitty little college, it was nothing, but still, I don’t really know where it came from. I can remember sitting there at the table in the library with the advisor and he said, “What’s your major?” And I said, “Hmm. I don’t know. What’s my major? Geology,” I said. I did, I swear, I said geology. So that’s what he put down and that’s what I was listed as. Then about, I guess it was one month into my freshman year, everything went crazy in my head, and I just don’t know where it came from. I’m not maybe thinking clearly right now, but I really don’t know. It really wasn’t a teacher or any fellow students. I just suddenly said, “I want to be a poet and I want to be a poet for a life.” Of course, I had no idea what that meant. I mean, I thought it meant, literally, quite literally, I can remember thinking this, I thought it meant sitting up all night outside around the campfire and reciting your poems to other bums. That’s what I thought my life was going to be. I mean, I didn’t know anything about living poets or anything like that. I just was wildly in love with poetry and I don’t even remember what the first poem could have been. Whitman? I know, thanks to a good freshman teacher who gave me a paperback copy of the Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens, I know that was hugely important. But one thing led to another, I was instantly reading William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson. And I read a lot of foreign poets. Yes, yes. I mean, you know, the obvious things like Rilke and Rimbaud and Baudelaire and stuff like that. But I don’t think I really read living poets until I got to Iowa as a graduate student and then I went insane. I mean, I devoured everything the bookstore could offer in a couple months. I was just insane. During my undergraduate period I was very isolated. And then when I became a graduate student, the world just blew open like crazy. It went from I was going to be a vagabond to, ah, I’d like to publish something. I won the Yale award about five months later.
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Angela Ball
James Tate was a true eccentric — that is, someone outside the realm of the usual, by virtue not of affectation but imagination. J.D. McClatchy has said that his work demonstrates “the surrealism of everyday life” — I can’t agree more. His poetry is weird in its connection with fate and splendid in its connection to the ideal.
I first saw James Tate in 1972, when I was an undergraduate at Ohio University. Three young poets read together that night: Jon Anderson, William Matthews, and James Tate. I remember them being on stage all together. Tate read the very affecting “The Lost Pilot” and the hilarious “The Distant Orgasm.” I believe he also read “The Buddhists Have the Field.”
I was lucky enough to be in London one summer in the nineties when John Ashbery and James Tate read together at the South Bank Arts Centre. Afterwards, I complimented Tate on his reading style. “I didn’t know I had a style,” he said.
James Tate and Dara Wier visited the Center for Writers in 2006, only a few months after Katrina. Wier is a native of Louisiana. We ate together at Arnaud’s and had a lovely time, though the city was still stunned from the horrors of the manmade flood. In Hattiesburg we ate at Leatha’s, a wonderful barbeque joint housed in a doublewide trailer. The mayor of the city was also having lunch there. This could have happened in a James Tate poem. The reading given by James and Dara was extraordinary, with Dara’s and James’s work conversing back and forth, trading the ineluctable and the ordinary, the down-home and the far-fetched. The reception was at my house, and a picture was taken of James and me in earnest conversation. I imagine us talking of poetry, dogs, and pie.
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Tyler Mills
Though I never met him, James Tate influenced me a great deal during my MFA. In my last year of the program, I submitted a poem to a contest he was judging (the Third Coast Poetry Prize). I was totally shocked that it won, and I was on cloud nine when I realized that he was actually going to write something about it. He wrote, “The bats, in the end, are what one expects least, and yet they seem to bring the whole poem together” — which, to me, seemed like something I would dream James Tate would write about a poem that was doing what I wanted it to. Hearing this from him confirmed that wild leaps and play with image could work, that one doesn’t always have to close a poem with some kind of return. I wrote him a fan letter to thank him and spent the summer reading and re-reading The Ghost Soldiers. I’m very sad about his passing. The world of poetry still needs him.
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Contributors
Angela Ball is a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. Her most recent collection is Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds.
Sarah Blake is the author of Mr. West, an unauthorized lyric biography of superstar Kanye West, out now from Wesleyan University Press.
Eduardo C. Corral is the author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize.
Adam Fitzgerald is the author of The Late Parade (Liveright, 2013).
Brian Henry’s tenth book of poetry, Static & Snow, is forthcoming from Black Ocean.
Winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator. His most recent books are Alight and Textu, both published by Copper Canyon in 2013.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of four books of poetry and teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
Gail Mazur’s 6th collection of poetry is Figures in a Landscape. She is Senior Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College and Founding Director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series.
Three-time Pushcart prize winner Jill McDonough directs UMass-Boston’s MFA program and 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center online. Her books include Habeas Corpus and Where You Live; Alice James will publish Reaper in 2017.
Tyler Mills is the author of the poetry collection Tongue Lyre. She is an assistant professor at New Mexico Highlands University.
Amy Newman is the author of five books, most recently Dear Editor (2011) and On This Day in Poetry History (forthcoming in 2015).
Joe Pan’s newest collection of poetry, Hiccups, is forthcoming from Augury Books in October 2015.
Matthew Zapruder lives in Oakland, CA., where he is Editor at Large at Wave Books, and teaches in the MFA at Saint Mary’s College. With special thanks to Rebecca Morgan Frank and Lana Lingbo Li. We are indebted to James Tate’s publishers: Ecco Press; Wesleyan University Press; Little, Brown & Co.; Halty Ferguson; and Yale University Press.
“Have you ever had real glow?” asks Raf, the 22-year-old male protagonist in Ned Beauman’s novel Glow. The title refers to a new party drug permeating London’s underground rave scene, an arrival that suspiciously coincides with a shortage of ecstasy in the city. Haunting the characters throughout Glow is the idea that nothing in their world is mere coincidence.
For example: Raf asks the above question to a young woman named Cherish, the morning after he rescues her from a group of masked men pulling her into a white van. Cherish only appears in Raf’s periphery because they had met the previous week — at a rave in a launderette — and Raf only recognizes the scene’s imminent danger because his friend Theo had been abducted in precisely the same way.
Page-by-page, such strange associations begin to pile up, infiltrating the world of South London. Even before these string of events, conspiracy colors Raf’s perception, invoking suspicion into otherwise mundane observations. In one early scene, he muses that a discarded pile of mattresses might be “the waste product of some secret industrial process.” When his life finally does intersect with “real” conspiracy, he barely hesitates before plunging deeper into the mystery.
Raf and his best friend, Isaac, search through online forums and chat rooms, buried news reports and company websites, noting suspicious names and charting the locations of different people on particular dates. Cherish gradually evolves from an innocent bystander, into an oddly useful source of relevant information, and eventually into a leading suspect in their investigation.
“The world is spinning and meshing all around [us],” she tells Raf, when asked about her enigmatic childhood in a small mining town near Burma. “Even the canniest adult has to accept that for every three parts of the machinery [he or she] has learned to follow there are seven or eight farther back that she’ll never even glimpse.”
Raf and Isaac avoid involving the police, partly to protect their own illegal activities (recreational drugs and a pirate radio station called Myth FM), but mostly because the clues they uncover hint at wide-reaching corruptions that not even legal apparatuses would be capable of correcting. Global corporations appear to be tapping into illegal markets and enslaving migrant workers in an effort to bolster profit margins. Intelligence-based startups are building Big Brother-like surveillance networks and selling that power back to governments and big business.
Despite his introverted background as a suburban-raised, college dropout, EDM-obsessed freelancer, Raf proves unusually adept at tracking down suspects and converting them into valuable accomplices. For individuals so attuned to the world’s darker forces, they are surprisingly keen on confiding in strangers. Backstories are bundled up into dense flashback sequences and dropped into the narrative upon each new encounter.
“I hoped you might be candid but I never expected you to be this candid,” one character says after enduring such a monologue.
The overall plot operates at the speed and logic of a rather conventional thriller, leaning on witty and self-aware one-liners to pardon the implausibility of too many sequences. The rapid shifts in tone, the procedural pacing of the investigation, and the numerous contrived “a-ha” moments at times resemble an episode of Law & Order SVU, where the stark transitions between scenes are underscored by that ominous, slightly cartoonish, “thump thump” refrain.
Rarely do Raf’s complicated stealth efforts encounter any serious logistical hiccups. Even in the harrowing moments that follow life-or-death confrontations, neither he nor any of his partners experience a nervous breakdown or true emotional reckoning. In one scene, seconds after watching a bootleg video of five foxes brutally attacking a group of men, Isaac jokes, “we should send this to Animals Do The Funniest Things.”
Psychological complexity is injected into the narrative through the characters’ eccentric and intensely technical mindsets. Raf suffers from an obscure chronic condition known as “non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome,” and is obsessed with the various tempos of life and objects around him (including flowers, Muslim prayer times, and Maneki Neko cats). His friends and acquaintances, steeped in the world of recreational drugs — both supply-side and demand-side — cling to chemistry’s objective logic in order to make sense of their experiences. Minutes after a bout of physical intimacy, Cherish takes a swig of Raf’s cheap supermarket vodka, explaining that “if [she] drinks something neurotoxic right after [they] fuck, [she] won’t bond with [him] so much.”
Glimpses into these peculiar interior worlds illuminate the many invisible yet essential waves and frequencies on which the outside world operates: solar cycles, circadian rhythms, chemical reactions, light and radio wavelengths, the social rhythms of spiritual adherence, the flow of capital. “It seemed like a dip in the bandwidth of reality itself,” Raf says about one of his adventure’s more absurd chapters, providing a fair description for the book itself.
Glow’s corrupted reality is the grim result of technological capabilities and economic motives gone haywire. Weaved into the narrative are astute observations about the unrestrained capitalist engine, which is designed to exploit any and every arbitrage opportunity, regardless of moral considerations: “There is money to be made selling the same product at different prices to different ethnic groups according to their willingness to pay.”
In a culture born of paranoia, each person guards his or her own theory about how different parts of the world actually operate. Throughout his personal investigation, Raf uncovers a few layers of the conspiratorial forces at play, but many questions and shady characters remain lurking in the shadows. Hotly anticipated conflicts barely surface, their climactic action repressed back into an underground state, lying dormant until enough momentum is gained for another fresh upheaval.
By the book’s closing pages, the lines between “real” and “fake,” physical and virtual, nation and corporation, have all blurred so thoroughly, even the conspiracy’s central characters seem perplexed about the actual state of affairs, and what exactly has transpired. Dozens of pills later, Raf still hasn’t tried a taste of “real” glow, which grows ever more popular across the party capitals of Europe. He and Isaac continue swapping ideas and stories, speculating about what new developments might be mobilizing behind the scenes. Heeding the words of Cherish, they remain convinced there is something else going on, unseen parts spinning and meshing, somewhere farther back in the machinery.
Like a mythical quest to defeat an unvanquishable monster, many have tried to tackle the meaning of science fiction and fantasy. For our trouble we often end up scratching our heads, starting over, or desperately trying to come up with new terms to help understand why our culture seems to need science fiction. But sometimes the reminder of the importance of sci-fi isn’t found in texts which attempt to explain it, but rather in a work of pure passion itself.
Cuba has produced an author capable of understanding science fiction by writing it like it’s rock and roll. Yoss is a thoughtful author who simply seems to understand his work and science fiction better than many of us. We were lucky enough to score an interview with him, in which he talks about his first science fiction novel released in English, A Planet for Rent(Restless Books). In the following, Yoss covers everything from his influences, to his background as a member of a metal band, to why sci-fi is so necessary in all of our lives…
Ryan Britt: A Planet for Rent is very heavy on allegory, metaphor, and analogy. Is science fiction the best way to communicate “real world” issues?
Yoss: I like to say that Sci-Fi is a mirror we place in the future to understand our present better, and that this reflection is better than if we looked at our present directly. Actually, when we write stories about 24th-century characters facing problems that currently appear fantastical, these characters are often our contemporaries, fighting everyday dilemmas in disguise.
…Sci-Fi then becomes a code, not only to evade censorship, but also to try looking beyond the everyday.
In Cuba, on the other hand, it is normal that if one deals directly with the most critical points of the “real world,” the official response will be, in fact, intolerant: If one does not draw an optimistic panorama, one will be accused of being a defeatist, of siding with the enemy, etc. So Sci-Fi then becomes a code, not only to evade censorship, but also to try looking beyond the everyday. For example, writing about a future Cuba becoming the 51st state of the U.S. could now appear totally absurd (perhaps not so much after 12/17/2014) but dissecting that possible country could make us consider, much more carefully, the pros and cons of present politics. Of course, the politicians that decide Cuba’s destiny don’t read Sci-Fi — they prefer to make it come true. But is Sci-Fi their favorite genre? Or is it terror, which they love to nurture?
Britt: You’ve got alien art curators who “help out” human artists towards the end of the book. Are real artistic curators (editors, band managers, bookers, etc.) similarly alien to real artists?
Yoss: I think that the metalized xenoid manager Tutambiénbruto or Ettubrute, who appears in the story, “The Performance of Death,” later changes a lot to become nearly the protagonist of the last story, “The Platinum Card,” in which he becomes, one could wonder, more human? He practically represents the two sides of all the foreign curators, managers and marchands (above all Europeans) who flocked to the Cuban art scene in the ’90s: everyone from those who wanted profits and only profits, to those who became so emotionally invested that they surprised themselves. Some even got to understand life, how artists think, and that says a lot about the phrase, “the first rule to make money from art is not to understand it.” In general, most patrons and curators respect and praise artists, because they live off them… and at the same time they despise them, thinking that artists are people who don’t have their feet on the ground entirely, which is but a reflection of their secret envy. Personally, I suspect that many would give all the money they make off those creative madmen in order to have the ability to create like they do, even if it was for a brief moment. And I tried exploring that point of view in my novel.
Britt: How does your musical background [heavy metal] influence your writing?
Yoss: First of all, I want to clarify that I do not have a background in classical music, which I regret. I don’t have good pitch, nor can I read musical notation; I even have trouble telling C apart from D. I don’t have a good voice either, like those who can travel entire scales. But singing in my band Tenaz since 2007 has been one of the great experiences of my life. As every teenager who is a fan of heavy metal, I dreamed of doing it… and even though I was already 38 when they asked me to become their singer, I think it’s never too late to chase your dream, right? I’ve loved heavy metal since I was 11 because of its mix of symphonic sophistication and pure street energy… and I have also learned to appreciate the immediacy of the feedback you get onstage: when you write, you often have to wait months and even years to know what the public thinks of your creative effort. By contrast, with music that lapse is much shorter, almost immediate: You only need to play a song once to know if people like it or not.
I also have to highlight the importance of collaboration; in Tenaz, we all compose. The synergy is almost magical: Lesther, the guitar player, comes up with a riff, and then Aramis, the drummer and bandleader, plays a beat, Gaby the bass player joins the rhythm and suggests a couple of variations, and then I’m already writing the lyrics. Of course, sometimes I arrive with lyrics and an outline of the melody, or Aramis comes up with the lyrics and the basic rhythm… but finding the point in which we are all satisfied, not clinging to the absolute truth of your original version, is a true learning experience. In fact, many times during my writing career I have tried writing in tandem with other authors… and it is something similar: it requires patience, not boxing oneself in one’s own style, and trying new things. To sum it up, it’s something quite difficult, in general… but since 2007 I sincerely find it a bit easier.
Britt: In the novel, you give groups of optimistic science fiction writers a name- “futurologists.” Do you think there’s a place for optimistic science fiction in today’s world? Has there ever been? Would you describe this novel as optimistic?
Yoss: In every time period there must be a place for optimism. If we are here today, if the 21st century civilization still exists, even though it appeared that it would disappear during the 20th century because of nuclear war, overpopulation or environmental contamination… if we survived the terrible tensions of the Cold War without our world ending in an atomic holocaust, why not be a little optimistic? Things are never so good that they can’t get better.
Nor so bad that they can’t get worse. Because, objectively, many of the problems I just mentioned are still reasons to worry right now. If we add up global warming, terrorism, plagues, and total energy collapse if we run out of oil before discovering other energy sources, it nearly makes me want to go screaming that the Apocalypse is coming. Tomorrow.
It is true that Sci-Fi writers are often accused of these sinister predictions, of blowing up the planet once a week in our writings. But people forget that the genre’s function is to warn. Raising awareness of creating a system of anti-asteroid missiles so that we don’t end up like the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, for example. Or talking to the World Health Organization so that SARS, AIDS, or Ebola don’t become the pandemics that make humans an extinct species.
Of course, Cuban authors and readers, as well as all the citizens of the socialist world, so depleted since the ’90s, remember well the time in which, as a side effect of social realism, the Sci-Fi we were encouraged to write was methodically optimistic: Capitalism was about to fall in a definitive crisis, the world would be completely communist in a couple of decades, and if we bumped into another intelligent species they would be pacific and not a race of galactic conquerors whose only interest in humans would be the interest of a farmer in his livestock. Very pretty.
But, as you can see, what eventually disappeared was socialism, and Fermi’s paradox still holds true: if there are others out there, why don’t they answer back? It’s not about a lack of room for optimism, but like I just said (If I were religious I could very well believe that gods love humanity very much, given that despite all our stupidities we are still here), when this becomes, ideologically, the only option for representing the future, these futures turn false. And writers of these don’t believe much in them, nor do their readers.
That’s why A Planet for Rent has a load of pessimistic baggage: after our leaders promised us development for decades, the USSR fell, and it all ended up being a lie. But we were not even allowed to say that: so while the government opened up the country’s doors for foreign tourism… and while our women opened their legs to these tourists in order to survive, there was still talk about the inevitable victory of socialism, and of redundant values while we all looked desperately for dollars. The ’90s were all about hypocrisy being the government’s policy. In my novel the xenoids, owners of the Earth, always claim they are humanity’s friends, and hide the fact that they are its masters.
…leaders and their dictators, their paranoid repressions and their stupid policies fade away, but the people always remain.
However, Cuba survived the “Special Period” after all, and without giving up socialism… even if this happened by perverting all the socialist values we had been spoon fed before the ’90s. A very high price. So at the end of my novel, the last story, “The Platinum Card,” has a message that is optimistic for me, an homage to the Cuban people: You can betray us, you can lie to us, you can repress us, force us to emigrate, to sell ourselves… but we are here and we will still be here. Because no government is stronger than its people; leaders and their dictators, their paranoid repressions and their stupid policies fade away, but the people always remain. Maybe they remain only to suffer new repressions and dictatorships… but they remain, and that’s the important part.
Britt: Friga was an interesting character; you made someone who was tough and happened to be a woman into a sympathetic and formidable character. It doesn’t seem like it, but do you have challenges as a man writing female characters?
Yoss: Gustave Flaubert once rightly said: “Madame Bovary is myself.” Like him, I firmly believe that one of the main appeals of literary creation is that an author can get under the skin of many characters, become a woman, if he is a man, or a man, if she is a woman. And no one questions your sexual identity because of that… not even in a country as male-dominated and Leninist as Cuba.
Personally, I like developing female characters a lot, because beginning with genetics and ending with the different education that both sexes receive, men and women are so different from one another that, despite the current premium on gender equality, one could say that they are two separate species. But also important: one is not better than the other. And also, full of exceptions: feminists and male chauvinists forgive me if you can, but I don’t think that a man, for being a man, has to be physically stronger than all women, or that women have to be shy and prudish for having ovaries instead of testicles. All of us are, above all else, individuals.
Friga, enormous, physically powerful, resolute, a natural leader, is what many would call a tomboy… without leaving aside the fact that she is still a woman. As a contrasting character, Jowe is a sweet man with lots of femininity.
Of course, I am Friga… but also Jowe. And both are influenced by many men and many women whom I know or have known, in life as much as in literature, because literary feedback also helps in character development. The same as in watching films or even paintings.
By the way, I got the idea of Friga’s body while reading a magazine called Musclemag, in which a female bodybuilder (I think it was Kim Chizevsky) was dressed in street clothes instead of her competition bikini. And she looked so glorious and strange. I imagined how the everyday life of a woman of that build would look like, and from there I developed the character, with a lot of the inner strength of some women I’ve known, without so much muscle to back her up.
Britt: Who was the hardest character in this book to write?
Yoss: I hope I don’t sound careless if I say that all characters… all characters were easy. The prostitute in “Social Worker,” the player in “The Winning Team,” and the artist in “The Performance of Death” all came out in a stroke of the pen, as they say. So probably the character that was hardest to write was either the corrupt policeman of Planetary Security in “The Rules of the Game,” or the marginal little girl in “The Platinum Card.” Those two demanded a little bit more time to profile their personalities. Above all because I don’t know any corrupt cops (although I have known many players, prostitutes and scientists) and I had stopped being a kid some years ago.
Britt: What’s your favorite section of this novel?
Yoss: Once again, I would stick with two: “Escape Tunnel” and “Fitness Interview.” Those are the two stories in which I focused more on the style: one-phrase paragraphs in the former and the exchange of questions and answers in the latter. But I think that “Escape Tunnel” ended up being the best. Out of the seven endings in the book, that one is my favorite. Optimism despite disaster, triumph in defeat, not giving up on your dreams; a total statement of values.
Britt: Which (if any) English-language science fiction writers influenced you?
Yoss: Oh, there are many. Great Sci-Fi has many splendid figures in English and I am an ardent reader. I can mention my beloved Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny, but also Philip José Farmer, Brian Aldiss, Ursula K. LeGuin, Dan Simmons and Joanna Rush. Without forgetting Orson Scott Card, Robert Heinlein and John T. Sladek. All those Sci-Fi authors.
Outside of the fantastical realm I can mention, of course, the legendary Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Pynchon, John Updike, E.L. Doctorow and William Saroyan, nowadays unjustly forgotten.
I read a lot of Anglo-Saxon literature, most of it translated, I confess, but now more often in its original language. I think they are the masters of the short story, without a doubt. In any genre.
Britt: What was your first exposure to science fiction?
…this book lied, but… it was such an attractive lie!
Yoss: Ah, it was unforgettable: I was about five years old (I learned to read on my own when I was two, looking over my father’s shoulder as he read The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth) when a neighbor lent me From the Earth to the Moon, by Jules Verne. I devoured it in a single stretch, in two days, and this despite it being a thick book, because the Cuban edition also included Around the Moon, the follow-up novel. It was the discovery of a new world: I already knew that we had reached the Moon by rocket, so this book lied, but… it was such an attractive lie! Not what had actually happened, but what it could have been. I started looking for other Verne novels, and my favorites were 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Facing the Flag, Master of the World… the ones that were the most in the Sci-Fi realm. Even the others that dealt with trips to the little known areas of the globe (little known in that time, of course) fascinated me because of their sense of wonder, even though I knew that the land there wasn’t uninhabitable anymore. Afterwards, I discovered that there were other novels and stories that talked about other worlds, of that final frontier that, since Star Trek, is and will always be outer space. I read a lot of Soviet Sci-Fi, the small amount of English-language novels that had been published in Cuba then (and this is not to say that many more have been published since, but now at least one can get many translations of the classics online, pirated, of course) and I had the good luck of having a neighbor, Arnoldo Aguila, who had some books of the Nova collection from Editorial Bruguera, with a prologue by Carlo Fabretti, and he lent them to me… it made me discover an infinite world, in time and space. So when I was fifteen I had already made up my mind: I would become a writer, and until I learned typing, I spent hours scrabbling with my horrible handwriting in thick booklets, trying to see if I could write stories like all those I liked to read so much… it was hard at first, but soon I learned that playing the demiurge and creating new worlds was even more fascinating than entering the worlds created by others. And I keep doing that till now…
Britt: Do you think science fiction writers have more of a responsibility or less of a responsibility than other “kinds” of writers to infuse activism into their writing?
Yoss: I suppose that answering in the affirmative would be something like putting more coal in my fire, trying to legitimize or privilege the genre I cultivate.
All literature has a great responsibility to its readers and its time. But Sci-Fi, to be honest, has a responsibility that goes beyond: a compromise with the future. This is not about Sci-Fi predicting the future, which many have done countless times to justify the entire genre, listing with notorious ingenuity the forecasts and gadgets it has gotten right. This is about the duty to show humankind the consequences that its own actions can have tomorrow. Of reminding us that we are not the masters of the Earth, because we only have it on a loan from our parents and must give it back to our children. And if possible, not merely intact, but improved.
Sci-Fi reminds us of something we like to forget: we are here because our ancestors thought a little about us. Because they believed that the human race was a concept that went beyond the nation state, and even beyond one’s generation. Or we are here despite they tried to think that only the present mattered, paying with their selfishness. Let’s not repeat their mistake! Let’s not transfer that debt to our descendants!
And dreams are not only an essential element to defy reality, but also the raw material with which to change it.
Also, many traditional critics without imagination, or lacking a basic knowledge of technology, bohemians but not geeks, before recognizing the literary or philosophical merits of Sci-Fi, prefer to label it as “escapist literature.” But who, besides jailers, could possibly care about escapism? Sci-Fi is about dreams filtered through logic. And dreams are not only an essential element to defy reality, but also the raw material with which to change it. That is the genre’s great responsibility.
Britt: Do other members of your band [Tenaz] read your books?
Yoss: Ha, I’d like to say yes… it would look nice in the interview without a doubt. But why fool myself? No, I don’t think they’ve read much of what I’ve written, even though in Cuba more than twenty books of mine have been published, among them novels, story collections, anthologies, works of scientific promotion and essay compilations. I’m not going to generalize and say that rock musicians do not usually read Sci-Fi… because, as every generalization, it is false: I have heartfelt admiration for how David Bowie, Brian May, Bruce Dickinson, Mick Jagger (who acted in the film Freejack), Steve Tyler and many others love the genre. But also: as a writer, I nearly always have the last say with regards to the lyrics of our songs… And not only mine. Something is something, right?
Britt: What are you working on now?
Yoss: I usually write many books at a time, and right now it’s not an exception. I’m finishing a work of popular science, 100 Question About Weapons, for a youth audience. I’m halfway done with a story-novel or fix-up (I like this format a lot, the same one I used in A Planet for Rent) of heroic fantasy, titled The Forgotten Names. Of the thirteen stories the book must have, I’ve already written eight, and from what I’ve heard in the literary workshop Espacio Abierto, in which I participate and assist regularly every other Sunday, it is turning up pretty well. I’m also revising a trilogy of heroic fantasy, Rain in the City of Salt… an ambitious project that I began more than twenty years ago, in 1993, although, of course, I haven’t been writing intermittently all this time, because if I had it would be longer than the Mahabharata by now. And I’m beginning to outline the first sheets of a short Sci-Fi novel, a space opera with the backdrop of a war that right now has the title of Wolves and Calves… I hope to send it next year to the La Edad de Oro prize, the only Cuban Sci-Fi award I have yet to win. And because the page limit is 110, I will have to restrain my hand quite a bit, like I did for many years when I would send, each summer, works to the UPC prize in Barcelona, until I won it in 2010 with Super Extra Grande, which will soon appear in the U.S. with Restless Books, in English and in a digital version.
This interview was made possible by a translation from English to Spanish and back again, courtesy of Restless Books.
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