Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing a needle in a haystack.
Don’t ever jump into a haystack for fun because you never know if that haystack will be one of the ones that has a needle in it. I learned that the hard way when I climbed out of a haystack and a nearby farmhand pointed to a needle stuck in my jowel. I thought an earwig had bit me. Boy was I wrong.
I’m no detective but logic tells me the needle was accidentally dropped into the haystack by a seamstress. Why was the seamstress hanging out next to a haystack anyway? Probably she was hiding from something and that needle was her only weapon and then she dropped it and was like, “oh no.” Or she also might have been a male seamstress. A seamstresser, I think they’re called.
There’s an easy and safer way to find a needle in a haystack. Just let a bunch of cows eat all the hay and see which one starts complaining of stomach pains. Cows are notorious complainers so it shouldn’t take long. If no cow starts crying or bleeding, you know there never was any needle and someone lied to you.
If the needle was your own personal needle, it would be best to cut your losses and just go buy a new one. They’re not that expensive. If the needle industry had their wits about them, they would start designing needles that look just like blades of grass. People would be losing needles left and right and the needle industry would be making a fortune.
This needle I pulled out of my jowel was still perfectly good, so I put it in my sewing kit. Most of the items in my sewing kit are things I found in haystacks. I’ve found a lot of non-sewing related things as well. Once I found a kitten. Another time I found a smaller haystack, and then a smaller one inside that and so on. It was a matryoshka of haystacks, and at the very center was nothing.
BEST FEATURE: Finding a needle in a haystack made me feel like I’d won a prize even though I was bleeding. WORST FEATURE: Once the needle has been found there’s nothing more to search for. No purpose or meaning within the haystack. It becomes nothing more than a stack of hay.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a towel.
If you’ve ever waited (albeit impatiently) in a Chipotle line that stretched out the door, then you already know how irresistible their burritos can be. Jonathan Safran Foer, another Chipotle fan, was the brainchild of “Cultivating Thought” — -a project that puts original short stories and essays on Chipotle’s cups and bags written by literary greats such as George Saunders, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Paulo Coehlo, Aziz Ansari, and Barbara Kingsolver. And unlike the guacamole, literature doesn’t cost extra.
According to the LA Times, Yale’s rare-book library recently obtained a complete set of Chipotle’s “Cultivating Thought” series. The library itself released a statement about its decision to include literature “in all its formats and in all media, documenting the ways great American writers reach diverse and unusual audiences beyond standard book publishing.”
The Atlantic reports that the Library’s collection also features poetry written on alternative materials such as pencils, postage stamps, bumper stickers, and commercial paint chips.
In order to win a spot in the prestigious library, Chipotle had to do more than bribe Yale’s rare-book collectors with burrito donations or buckets of tasty salsa. Business Insider reports that Chipotle had to apply for acceptance, just like thousands of other anxious high school seniors hoping to enter an Ivy League.
Gallagher Lawson’s The Paper Man is a rare narrative, announcing the arrival of an outstanding new voice that comfortably inhabits the strange place where literary fiction, surrealism, and gritty fantasy converge. An allegorical novel packed with emotional distress, obsessed with identity, and the role individuals plays in the machine known as the city, The Paper Man is at once an impressive debut and a novel that’s packed with echoes of many exceptional authors while retaining its uniqueness.
When Michael was 15 years old, he suffered a mysterious and devastating accident that denied him a physical existence. However, his father managed to keep him alive in a body made out of paper. A decade later, tired or dealing with such a fragile unchanging body as well as frustrated with life at home, he decides to leave home behind, running away to the city by the sea in search of adventure, change, and himself. The city is a place on the verge of a revolution, where people are buried at sea, humans perform the work of mannequins, and mermaids are found dead on the streets. To say the least, the city doesn’t give the young paper man a warm welcome. After being rescued from a violent rainstorm by an enigmatic woman named Maiko, Michael battles to find his place in the metropolis. Unfortunately, the city’s political turmoil and its weather combine to make Michael’s quest difficult. Then, to make matters worse, the paper man’s high school sweetheart Mischa reappears, opening old wounds and creating new ones. What follows is an exploration of identity and transformation and a deconstruction of the meaning of art, all of it wrapped in a smart, touching narrative about revolution and love.
The beginning of The Paper Man is somewhat reminiscent of Jacques Jouet’s My Beautiful Bus, but it quickly morphs into a surrealist narrative that walks the line between the hallucinogenic visions of Stanley Crawford’s Travel Notes and the weird elegance of Matthew Revert’s oeuvre. Lawson is fully aware of the way literary fiction’s flamboyance and attention to detail sometimes hurt the pacing, so he maintains the story moving forward at all times with a storyline that shifts between memories, introspection, dialogue, and action that goes from the purely artistic to the purely sexual.
Despite coming in at over 250 pages, The Paper Man is a quick read because Gallagher keeps the surprises coming. Part of it has to do with the fact that the main character is undergoing a perennial metamorphosis, much like the city itself, but it’s also because there is a lot of intelligent, precise commentary on everything from sexuality and employment to artistic vision and the shattering/co-opting of coping mechanisms.
“Masks were now truly multipurpose. They could protect a woman’s complexion from the ocean-side breezes to be a kind of armor, as the Paper Man had used one or to conceal and disguise; to correct the misshapen face he once had and to give alternatives to identity or celebrate the multiplicity of identity; to show nothing is fixed unless made permanent, like art.”
While Michael’s problems with his body and the unusual practices that go on in the city wouldn’t be out of place in a Brautigan novel, Gallagher’s narrative is the kind of noir-esque fable in which even the bright moments occur within a gloomy frame. No matter what he does, the main character is never the person he knows he is/wants to be. This lead to a painful search that forces Michael to transform his mind, body, art, and even sexuality, but the reasons behind each change are never as straightforward as they should be. Meanwhile, the process is constantly complicated by the feelings he has for the two women in his life, the haunting father figure who gave him life twice, and his inescapable fragility.
“After that, things became a blur of tearing sounds, mechanical clicking, and exposing his body to more. It was like the opposite of the work his father had done years ago. Instead of soothing hands that held his injured body and applied layers upon layers, meticulous detail to threading and concern with comfort, this was Mischa undoing all that. She tore, she pulled, she cut and shredded. She stepped on pieces, including his fingers, flattening his hands.”
The beauty of The Paper Man is that Gallagher created a surreal landscape and populated it with outlandish characters in order to give us a fresh look at our own reality, and he pulled it off without sounding preachy. Furthermore, there is a richness in the paper body that is explored, but not entirely, and that invites the reader to think about what the author left out, what he hinted at but never made permanent. Ultimately, this is a novel about art and identity that can be mined for hidden meanings and new interpretations as well as enjoyed for the uncanny characters and dreamlike atmosphere. Regardless of the path the reader chooses to take, this is a novel that deserves to be read.
Are we in the midst of a revisionist Western novel revival? Patrick deWitt’s 2012 The Sisters Brothers earned its fair share of acclaim, including a win at The Morning News’s Tournament of Books and a place on the Man Booker Prize shortlist. This year, Colin Winnette’s Haints Stay has earned glowing reviews; its surreal story of two brothers and the wake of violence that they leave behind is a striking and powerful one. In 2008, Rudolph Wurlitzer, no stranger to the surreal and revisionist Western, released his first novel in decades, The Drop Edge of Yonder. And plenty of Brian Evenson’s novels and short stories tap into a wellspring of Western archetypes, shifting them into stories of obsession, madness, and isolation.
Call it the zeitgeist, then: revisionist Westerns are having a proper literary moment. Except that it’s been over thirty years since Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which looms massively over the notion of the revisionist Western, was first published. Alternately: a writer who was born on the day that Blood Meridian was published might be well sitting at their keyboard, hard at work on a stunning revisionist Western of their own.
Even though Blood Meridian occupies an almost celestial position in this corner of literature, it was far from the first novel to deconstruct archetypes. Wurlitzer was doing it in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with books like Nog and Flats. And even before that, Oakley Hall’s Warlock (1958) and John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing (1960) took less experimental approaches, but still worked with a knowing awareness of what, exactly, readers might expect from a Western narrative, and worked actively to subvert it. Alternately: revisionist Westerns have been on the scene for over fifty years. When, exactly, do the revisionists declare victory?
Robert Coover’s 1998 novel Ghost Town serves as one sign of where this tendency can go. Its opening sentences are both magnificently evocative and deeply aware of the imagery with which Coover is about grapple.
Bleak horizon under a glazed sky, flat desert, clumps of sage, scrub, distant
butte, lone rider. This is a land of sand, dry rocks, and dead things. Buzzard
country. And he is migrating through it.
Coover’s everyman protagonist finds himself in a town where he’ll come to inhabit several roles, from archetypal lawman to archetypal outlaw. Not surprisingly, he’ll also find himself beguiled romantically by two women who seem to occupy similarly disparate roles, the “bad” and the “good.” And so the novel continues on, setting its protagonist through a series of stock scenarios in which he encounters criminals, townspeople, and deputies, each of whom seem slightly more aware of the ground rules of the genre in which they’re all players.
Coover is aware of the fictional territory he’s referencing, but he’s also aware that he’s writing for an audience that’s aware of the tropes and tricks of the genre. He’s aware that his readers know what to expect, and winks at them by skipping past certain events. One section opens, “A lot of things happen and then he’s alone and forsaken on the desert again…” Some revisionist Westerns can be embraced by those who enjoy more traditional Westerns as well, but Ghost Town reads more like a critique, a remix in which the original text is virtually unrecognizable. There are moments of adventure, comedy, and brutal violence found throughout the novel; the protagonist’s deputy in particular meets a horrific fate. But they’re all used in the service of a critique, as though all of the tools and tropes used by hundreds of writers were laid bare, then reassembled to perform one last time, all strings and sets visible for all to see.
Colin Winnette’s Haints Stay generates a fair amount of friction from pushing the genre into uncomfortable territory, though it never quite turns metafictional. On paper, it might read somewhat similarly to deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers–both follow the (mis)adventures of a pair of brothers who work as killers for hire and engage in various acts of antiheroic behavior. In tone, though, they vary wildly: deWitt’s novel allows for moments of bleak humor and self-awareness; Winnette’s is equally compelling, but finds itself in unexpected places. Much of that comes from Brooke and Sugar–both their current dynamic and (shown via flashbacks) their relationship to their father, which goes beyond the stereotypical “abuse from a violent man” concept and pushes forward into something even more unsettling. It’s a matter that Winnette slowly reveals over the course of the book; without revealing too much, there are scenes that suggest a Western as reimagined through the transgressive lens of Dennis Cooper.
What Winnette does here is less about undermining the traditions of the Westerns and more about pushing them in unexpected directions: plugging in characters who don’t necessarily mesh with a reader’s expectation of what a hired killer in a Western would be like. (In this context, it also fits neatly beside Winnette’s previous book, the short novel Coyote, in which characters dealing with a familiar fictional situation take the plot in a radically different direction.) That doesn’t mean Winnette is above commenting on genre, though. A reference to “house wines” seems intentionally anachronistic: though the novel appears to be set in the past, it’s never entirely clear when; there are shades of the Alex Cox-directed film Walker here, where elements of the present seem to have embedded themselves in history. Walker, it should be noted, has a screenplay written by one Rudolph Wurlitzer.
Sometimes Winnette’s exploration of genre takes on a more philosophical tone. “What purpose do killers serve in a town that’s already dying?” Sugar asks early in the novel, and that questioning mood suffuses much of what follows. Dreamlike in its tone from the outset, Haints Stay becomes even more so as it reaches its conclusion: hidden identities are revealed; a sense of surrender pervades the novel as notions of identity slip away and blur. And the book’s final sentence shifts things from the Western realm to an even deeper strain of American literature, magnifying the subversion even more as it nods in the direction of an iconic final sentence.
That maneuver on Winnette’s part is an interesting one, making Haints Stay’s claim to revisionism extend beyond the bounds of one genre and suggesting that it permeates a wider literary field. It’s a kind of blendedness, a shifting from genre to genre, or an act of reclamation applied to certain works and styles. Either way, it serves as an intriguing spark, a push beyond certain expectations that readers might have. And, perhaps, it’s an acknowledgement of the cyclical nature of revisionist Westerns: they come in waves, even as more traditional works set in desert landscapes and charting out historical frontiers still endure.
One could also look at a certain cinematic strain from the early ’90s as bearing some influence here. In a handful of years, the films Unforgiven and Dances With Wolves were critical and commercial successes, each picking apart certain Western archetypes; less widely-seen, but no less determined to dismantle viewer expectations, were Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World and Mario Van Peebles’s Posse. It was a brief moment out of which think pieces could be born–but it echoed a similar cultural moment in the ’70s, when films like Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, with its haunting use of Leonard Cohen songs, dug their way into the psyche of many a moviegoer. Perhaps each generation needs to dismantle the Western edifice, even if no one’s bothered to fix it up since the last time it was broken down.
Perhaps it’s this cycle that also keeps the idea of the revisionist Western leaping from medium to medium, exhausting itself in one form and moving on to the next. Consider Leigh Stein’s “June 14, 1848,” perhaps the greatest poem to have been inspired by an early computer game. (Specifically, Oregon Trail.) Inspiration can transport the Western setting into virtually any medium; in the hands of a talented writer, it can yield memorable and unsettling work. Arguably the most rare revisionist work is one that can work on the levels that Coover and Winnette, respectively, work on: the structural and the traditional.
It can, however, be done. Take, for example, Percival Everett’s Assumption. It’s set in the present day, but the fact that it focuses on a lawman in New Mexico places it in squarely in Western territory. But what makes this book–theoretically, a collection of three related novellas–so powerful is the way that it bait-and-switches expectations and archetypes. Ogden Walker, the protagonist, is set up as a kind of stark lawman, world-weary and haunted by his past. And gradually, all of the expectations that the reader has about where this character will go are upended. Through meticulously precise prose, Everett creates a world where all that we rely on for guidance tends to fail us. By the end of the book, any kind of trust we’ve put in the book’s structure has fallen apart, and the uncertainty faced by its protagonist is mirrored by the haunting, howling vortex that overtakes the experience of reading the book. It’s magnificently disorienting–a work that offers a familiar narrative but reveals something much more terrifying. Approaching the Western, it seems, is like peeling back paint on a familiar structure, only to find that it’s gone hollow and rotted. You can either curse the decay or turn it into something magnificent in its own right.
This week marks the release of In The Country, Mia Alvar’s debut book, a rich and varied collection of short stories about the lives of men and women within the Philippine diaspora.
Alvar was born in the Philippines and lived there until she was six, after which her family moved to Bahrain and eventually to New York. As a writer, she has the ability to capture that peculiar blend of excitement and pain that comes with uprooting oneself from a specific place or idea. Many of the stories in the book deal with literal border-crossings, but what binds the collection together more broadly is a sense of creative displacement. This is a book in which characters are addicted to dreaming, embellishing, or outright lying, and in one story a young woman even goes so far as to become that most heinous of fraudsters: a fiction writer. “I never could get used to the ‘withdrawal,’” the character admits. “The rude comedown from having lived so much inside a story it felt real.”
There’s a similar comedown to be experienced upon closing In The Country, a vivid debut that deserves to catch the interest of prize committees. I sat down with Alvar earlier this month to discuss it.
Jonathan Lee: Talk me through the early stages of construction. What’s your typical process for beginning to pull a story together?
Mia Alvar: If I have an idea rattling around, the only way I can start writing about it is to convince myself that I’m not. Writing for me is so much about the reading and the thinking beforehand — I’ll read all the books I can get my hands on about a subject, or that use a device or strategy I want to try (like the first-person plural point of view, when I was writing “Shadow Families”). I keep a notebook nearby, to jot things down that occur to me as I’m reading, but I tell myself it’s research, not writing, to keep from getting spooked. I could just do that — read and jot down notes — forever. But eventually my agent or editor will say, “How’s it going, that thing you were going to show me?” So I panic and type up my notes into something that looks like a story. That stage is a nightmare, trying to bully a beginning, middle, and end out of material that’s still a huge muddle. But the pressure is useful, too. When a deadline’s looming I’ll stop lying to myself and write ten hours a day, or whatever it takes, to put something together, even if it turns out to be all wrong.
Lee: When you look back through your notebooks and start typing things up, do you find yourself surprised by what’s in there?
Alvar: Definitely. That reading/thinking/jotting stage always feels so productive, and I’m always so happy in this belief that I’m generating idea after brand-new idea. But then I’ll look back to find pages upon pages of essentially the same sentence written hundreds of times, in only slightly different ways. And somehow it’s this huge shock to me every single time.
Lee: What are the kind of things you’re looking for in a sentence, and what are the things you’re looking to throw away as you revise?
I want things to feel clean and conversational, a sense that someone’s telling this story aloud to a friend or relative.
Alvar: Although I’m a maximalist in so many ways — my “short” stories all push that 25- to 35-page limit, much longer than most literary journals are willing to read — I’m always, at the word level, looking for less. If there’s a three-syllable word that I can swap out for one syllable, I’ll do that. I want things to feel clean and conversational, a sense that someone’s telling this story aloud to a friend or relative. When I get stuck I try to think, “Okay, but how would I say this to someone sitting across the table?” The idea of translation also helps: most Filipinos speak English, but sometimes if a sentence doesn’t seem to be landing right, I’ll ask myself how a narrator might say it in Tagalog, and translate that in the most direct and literal way back to English. That often points me to a clearer, more precise, and simpler expression.
Lee: As I read “A Contract Overseas”, I found myself wondering whether you identify much with the narrator of that story — her feeling of seeking out the right kinds of stories to tell, and questioning the impulses behind that desire to tell stories. She worries that her brother, who’s gone abroad in pursuit of financial security, is living the eventful life — the one better-suited to fiction. I think anyone who writes fiction has probably had at least one of those moments — a moment spent wondering whether to shake up their life in some way just to see what new material might drop to the floor.
Alvar: “A Contract Overseas” definitely felt personal to me. The narrator’s instinct to write about her brother and his compatriots in Saudi gave me a space to work out my own questions about why I was writing this book about expat families and the Philippine diaspora — and, more largely, what fiction is for. Are my stories purely a tribute? I don’t think so. Is fiction about wish fulfillment? Well, the narrator of “Contract” does sort of wind up there, writing as a way to keep a loved one close. Is it about giving voice to men and women who aren’t always represented in fiction? Or is it just about following the subjects and characters that I find most compelling, and trying to entertain the reader in the process? I think it’s all and not quite any of the above.
Lee: The first story I read of yours was “The Kontrabida”, back when it appeared in One Story in, I think, the summer of 2012. I’d just moved to New York from the UK and I bought up a stack of literary journals, including One Story. “The Kontrabida” really stood out to me, and I see that it stands as the first story in the collection too. Why did it feel right to put it first?
Alvar: That story is the oldest one in the book. I think it sets up a lot of what the other stories touch on: migration, our ties to the past, the stories we tell about our families in public and the things that happen behind closed doors, the strange places our good intentions sometimes take us. The memories that inspired that story were also the same ones that got me writing fiction, and thinking about a short story collection, in the first place. In the late ’90s I traveled to the Philippines, much like Steve did, because of a death in the family. All these rituals around death and dying that surely had been around throughout my childhood struck me, after being away for so long, as completely new and alien when I returned. Araneta Avenue, for instance, which in my mind I can’t avoid thinking of as the “death district,” was just one of the sights that completely arrested and stayed with me: a long row of storefronts, servicing every funeral-related need from headstones to flowers to cremation.
Lee: Is that a typical process for you, in creating a story — that you’ll take a real moment from your own life and build outwards from that, moving from experience into imagination?
Alvar: Sure, but imagination is the far bigger component. One thing that’s troubled me a bit in some of the pre-pub writeups about the book is the notion of “armchair tourism.” The idea that my book is a good one to read if you’d like to visit the Philippines without leaving Brooklyn? I get it, but still…
Lee:Does that idea of “armchair tourism” feel distasteful to you?
As far as I’m concerned the Manila and New York and Bahrain in my book are imaginary.
Alvar: Not distasteful; I’m just afraid my book isn’t the best vehicle for it. I’m not that interested in factual or geographical accuracy at all, to be honest. As far as I’m concerned the Manila and New York and Bahrain in my book are imaginary. They have a real-life counterpart, but so many features have been twisted and reinvented or added or erased to suit the story. So I really hope that people don’t read the book and think, “Oh, that’s what an overseas contractor who comes home from Saudi Arabia does!” Or: “That’s where I can go to get a meal.” I’ve made up rituals that don’t exist in the lives of people who don’t exist. In “Old Girl” I talk about a chain of Filipino expat households in Boston that calls itself “Manilachusetts.” That’s not really a thing. But it could be, and that’s enough for me, in fiction. I’m much more interested from a craft perspective about what makes a story work than how faithful the details are to real life.
Lee: Let’s talk about “Esmeralda”, a story that focuses on a woman who works as a night cleaner in the World Trade Center. How did that story come together, and why do you think that particular material drew you in?
Alvar: That story came together accidentally — though it was a very slow accident. I knew I wanted to write about a woman who cleans for a living, who connects with one of her clients or customers in a personal way. But I had her in all sorts of settings — on the Upper East Side, cleaning fancy apartments, things like that. The story wasn’t coming together at all. I workshopped those early drafts in grad school, and was getting a lot of negative feedback.
Lee:I feel like stories told in the second person often stir up the strongest opinions in that kind of workshop environment.
Alvar: Yes, totally. There’s this paradox where the second person seems like it should connect the reader more closely to a character’s perspective, but so often the opposite seems to happen. People really resist identifying with someone if they’re being told to.
Lee: It can feel like a pushy form of narration sometimes. You do this, you do that. There’s a heavy imperative mood to second person stories sometimes, isn’t there? I think readers can feel like the author is eyeballing them and doing a lot of passive aggressive pointing or chest-poking …
Alvar: And I did try rewriting “Esmeralda” in the third person, but then changed it back. I decided I didn’t mind having an imperative, slightly more aggressive relationship with the reader in that particular story. I was happy to point and insist that “you” imagine yourself into Esmeralda’s life, to risk refusal on the reader’s part. It seemed like a useful way to call attention to both the necessity and the difficulty of truly identifying with someone you don’t know.,
…I would arrive just as the finance guys in their suits were leaving. And I’d work into the night, when cleaners came to mop the floors and take out the trash.
Still, the story wasn’t working on other levels and I was about to give up. And then I took a residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, where artists and writers take up studio space in vacant corporate offices donated by corporations. I was working steps away from where 1 World Trade Center was being built, where the 9/11 memorial and museum had just opened. And of course I kept writerly hours, so my colleagues and I would arrive just as the finance guys in their suits were leaving. And I’d work into the night, when cleaners came to mop the floors and take out the trash. It came to me that maybe Esmeralda cleaned offices instead of apartments, her shift starting after most people had left their desks for the day. And because it’s nearly impossible to work in that neighborhood without thinking of 9/11 all the time, I found myself wondering, what if she didn’t just clean offices in a building but in one of the buildings? It occurred to me that if she did, she wouldn’t have been there in the morning when the towers were hit, but if she’d made friends with someone who overlapped with her shift when he was working late, he might be. So from there the piece sort of evolved into a story about Esmeralda working in the World Trade Center and meeting John, despite my huge fear of writing about that day. I told myself it was an experiment and I didn’t need to show it to anyone when I was done.
Lee: Did writing and reading about the events of September 11th become a way into other things you wanted to explore in the collection?
Alvar: Certainly a way into things I wanted to explore in this story specifically. Back when I had chosen the name Esmeralda, early on, I wanted New York City — its landscape, buildings and neighborhoods — to play a prominent role in her story, the way Paris and its architecture does for the Esmeralda of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. 9/11 gave me a really obvious context for that kind of hyperawareness of the city, and it gave the story a reason to be a kind of love song to New York. And I was glad to explore, through this connection between Esmeralda and John, the flip side of all my migrant narratives about alienation and estrangement: the fact that sometimes unlikely connections are forged between strangers thrown together in a strange place. And that’s definitely a narrative that comes up — forced connections and unlikely intimacies between strangers, helping each other or sticking together because they had no other choice — throughout the 9/11 archives and testimonies I was reading at that time.
Lee: I was reading a Paris Review interview this morning between Mona Simpson and Hillary Mantel. At one point Mona Simpson said something that I think relates to your work too: that “the majority of human history is lost”. It seems several of your stories show a preoccupation with the gap between the official versions of things and the lost or distorted truths underneath.
…that tension between the histories of record and the messier private dramas people contend with every day…
Alvar: I’m obsessed with that gap. When I think about what my book is really about, that tension between the histories of record and the messier private dramas people contend with every day feels as central as the geographical settings and emigrant narratives. So many characters in the book are contending not only with that gap but also with how attractive the official version can be, how much simpler and easier it is to label people saints or heroes or villains than to deal with the messy particulars.
Lee:There are lots of moments in the collection when deliberate deceptions occur, but it seems like you have a great interest in exploring moments of innocent misconception and misunderstanding, too. Often that seems to relate back to spoken language. There are some great moments of mishearing.
Alvar: Which story are you thinking of?
Lee: There’s a moment in “Old Girl” I remember where a man has been badly hurt. Through his pain he manages to explain the cause his wife, and she thinks he’s saying “black guys”. In reality, he’s saying “black ice”. An accident becomes an assault, and an act of God becomes an act of racial violence — all through a simple mishearing, the fact of people not listening hard enough.
Alvar: I later discovered that Key and Peele had done a joke about that! Devastating. My final edits had already gone in. But no, I definitely had fun playing with misunderstandings throughout the book, and I have to admit that offered some relief at times when the book’s subject matter got a little heavy. I had to find ways to be light-hearted. Those mishearings and confusions happen in real life all the time, and throughout the book, they became a way to talk about identity in ways that are both playful and problematic.
Lee: Can you think of an example of that?
Alvar: In “The Miracle Worker” the Minnie character approaches Sally by asking her, in Tagalog, why she looks familiar: whose maid was she? Sally makes light of it, as most women in my family who have had this experience would; that story of being mistaken for the Filipina maid or nanny is not an uncommon one. And someone pointed out to me recently that they appreciated those moments in “Legends Of The White Lady” when no one knows where Alice is from, mistakenly tracing her brand of all-American blondness to Kentucky or Texas in a kind of reversal of the experience minorities have all the time, and the guessing games that people are obsessed with playing when it comes to pinning down “what” you are.
Lee: There’s also this sense in the book that people don’t live one life — they can be different versions of themselves at different times.
Alvar: Yes, and transnational migration obviously dramatizes that idea — you literally leave your old life behind, in some cases adopting completely different ways of speaking and looking and being in the new world. One of my favorite writers is Joan Silber, who writes so beautifully about the passage of time and how we can sometimes barely recognize the younger version of ourselves. And yet that younger version — the young Milagros of “In the Country,” for instance, when she’s organizing a union and going on strike and meeting Jim for the first time — probably can’t imagine how radically different her life will look in the future. As with leaving home, I’m interested in both what’s lost and what’s gained in that transition.
He understood the idea. God created man as something free, a being with a purity of freedom, so-called. And as Lieutenant Garcia liked to say, a fool and his freedom are soon parted. The original joke was about money, of course, a fool and his money. The idea as Hauser understood it was that if God had created man as a being who lived a perfect, untroubled existence, that would mean freedom was banished. Man would not be free if his life could not be ruined. If he could not ruin his own life, God had designed him in chains.
Hauser himself considered God a not-there. Religion to him was culture, references in art and literature. But working in a women’s prison, he adapted himself to the idea that no one inside its walls did not believe in God. This was not because to be in prison was to be closer to God. The opposite. You were abandoned there, by the world, and God seemed also to have forgotten you. You maintained your opening to him through need. You got a choice inside, King James or International, which the women called “the easy version.”
He didn’t want them knowing his first name. That was the shield he held up to protect himself. The last name was on his staff ID, which he wore pinned to his shirt. It read “G. Hauser,” but the G. was his secret from them, these women he taught, all of them LWOP, life without parole, including his newest student Diana, who spoke in a breathy and elegant whisper and knew she was beautiful and told him they had forced her confession at fourteen with no lawyer or guardian present. Growing up, she told him, her father locked her in a bedroom for weeks at a time, and instead of allowing her out to use the toilet he threw disposable diapers through the door. That was when she was twelve. When she was thirteen. At fourteen, she was an adult, or at least tried as one in a court of law.
Some of them told Hauser everything. They were well beyond the moment, the act, that had shifted their life to punishment that would go on forever. Forever, for each person, lasts precisely up to the moment they die. No one should die in prison, he knew. Twenty, thirty, forty years, is a long time to consider your life. But instead of self-revelation, they were meant to achieve only living death, and then one day, be carried out with a state-issue cloth over the face. The younger ones could not understand Life Without Parole. It takes maturity to grasp that you will not leave. Diana was trying to find a way out, using that breathy grace on him. Who wouldn’t, in her position. She had left parts of the story vague. It was considered impolite to wonder what someone had done, to ask, to be curious. And yet it was a curiosity for truth. But maybe, Hauser considered, maybe the truth itself is obscene.
Of course it was, and he avoided it for as long as he could. But her large eyes, a lost look, stained in even on his vacation. The women would all die there and that fact alone kept them in his thoughts as he wandered Barcelona and remembered, while he did, how dreary tourism was. How you saw the things that the other tourists saw and shared your experience with them, fellow outsiders, except you remained solitary, among strangers, and you all watched one another not have a genuine experience. That was his sentiment, as he walked toward the thing, the Sagrada Família, in all its tacky magnificence, the scaffolding and cranes like ladders to God, and this added to its grandeur, that it could not be finished. He fixed on a column that crushed into the back of a tortoise, as if the column on its back were part of the gravity that allowed the tortoise’s head to emerge from its shell. A girl told Hauser the place was only open one more hour. He said fine, it’s enough time, and bought his ticket.
He had been reading Genet on this trip, and in thinking of Genet sauntering along La Rambla and into the Barrio Chino, Hauser felt less inauthentic and alone. Genet embroidered sacred joy over abject states of existence. To Genet the colors and roughness of prison clothing were reminiscent of the fuzzy petals of certain flowers. Genet wrote that theft was a hard, pure, luminous act, which only a diamond could symbolize. He said handcuffs shone like jewelry. Jewels and jewelry and flowers.
Hauser had read a little of it every night, but the night before this day, visiting Gaudi’s cathedral, he had ruined himself instead. Maybe it was the safety of a hotel room far away, but one night Hauser searched on the Internet. He found so easily, as terrible acts are often marked by ease, what young, pretty Diana had done. Now he knew, and his mind felt like those metal grates in the public toilet stalls Genet described, corroded by hot piss. Evil trickled down over his thoughts. But it was not her evil, even as what she had done was bewildering. What she had said to Hauser was that something went wrong. Something went wrong.
God in prison was the single thing they wouldn’t revoke, you could end up naked in the Secure Housing Unit but they would never take away your right to pray. Only God cared about the women, which meant no one cared about them. Because God was not a person but something outside the world even for those who believed in him, and what Hauser meant by care was not God’s love. He meant human care and these women had none.
He went through the doors. On them, Matthew’s gospel, and if the difference between Frans Hals’s Matthew and Pasolini’s Matthew were not enough to establish the arbitrary nature of the entire Christian narrative, maybe nothing was.
Inside, big drifts of warm wind riffled his hair. The wind seemed to be blowing into the organ pipes and producing resonant streams, sounds that wove among the white columns and archways and opened something in him a little as they did. Hauser looked up at color that was light passing through glass — red, gold, green, blue, against the sparkle of the nave, so high he did not think ceiling, he thought heavens. A jellyfish or parasol with lights on its points, soft speakeasy baubles, floated above him, hovering there to make the cavernous space that much more dizzying, close to show how far. He thought of the false grapes, “as big as greengage plums,” that Genet pinned inside his lover’s underwear, a funny thing but also solemn, the pinning of marvelous and ornate bulk inside his lover’s underwear, the two of them undertaking this ritual of artifice together.
What his student Diana had done was bludgeon an old woman to death in her bed with a wood splitter and an axe. She was serving two life sentences, not concurrently, as if she were meant to stretch far beyond the capacity of one organic life. Her sentence echoed with this place, with Gaudi who died but the church kept going, stretching upward and would continue yet, for decades to come.
Hauser treated them all equally. He wanted to show only compassion and respect. Diana had bludgeoned an old woman and he still must love her and he did, here, in this cathedral, he could; love was vaster even than this massive space, and the organ — it was playing a song.
Hauser looked up at the candy-colored lights and in the great distance between himself and those heavens, he felt a welling and swelling. The women, all of them, would die in prison. Why did there have to be no mercy. The song from childhood said to rise and shine and give God your glory. Glory went up, and mercy came down. That was the exchange. The lack of mercy was man’s, not God’s. Feeling surged up through his body and began to flow from his eyes as he stood under the geometric folds of shadow and angelic but probably artificial light, with tourists bumping past him and they meant nothing. Because he, unlike they, was here in order to let passion destroy him. It felt good to be melted down, reduced to tears by the simplicity of a world without mercy.
A God who has abandoned you is still your God, Hauser knew. He is acting upon you. By his abandonment. He wanted a life of human giving, without being on the take, without an accounting, far from the so-called justice that was ugly and man’s justice and nothing to do with God. Who alone could diminish you sufficiently.
Standing inside this masterpiece of ridiculous splendor, he began to pray.
To pray was to say I am ready. Now. To pray was to request to be able to pray. To keep a line open to the other side. And as it did the thing it requested, to pray to be able to pray to God, it also resolved its own contradiction: we confess to God, and yet God is meant to know already our secrets before we confess. Like that line of Saint Augustine’s, cur confitemur Deo scienti. We don’t do it for God. It is for us, to concentrate passion, intensify faith. It is the most private thing. I have been praying, he told himself, all along. In my unconscious. I’ve been appealing all the time and now I can do it directly.
He couldn’t believe a building would do this. Force on him the question of what he loved, and put God into the what. His sight was blurred by tears, and he knew now that this sudden blindness was supplemental, something added to knowledge, a recognition of what could not be seen.
He turned to his left, toward a young man who was there to assist visitors. Hauser did not plan or think; he acted.
“Excuse me, can I ask you a question?”
The young man nodded yes.
“Are you religious?”
The young man, a boy, really, smiled like someone older. “By tradition, yes.”
By tradition. Hauser plowed on. “Is it, by working here, spending so much time in this space, do you have moments where you feel — ”
The boy put his hands up, to interrupt. “I only work here part time,” he said.
“But when you are here, do you have a deeper understanding of God?”
“Look,” the boy said, “when I’m here, I’m thinking about managing the flow of people in through the entrance, and out through the exit. That’s my job. This place, I’m sorry, it’s about tourism.”
“What about the organ?” Hauser asked. He wasn’t giving up. This boy was not going to ruin his conversion. “The wind, it seems to be playing it — ”
“The organ is programmed,” the boy said, losing patience with Hauser, whose face, Hauser knew, was visibly wet. The boy added, but not in a cruel tone, “Honestly sir, if there is a God, I don’t think he’d step foot in here.”
Hauser dried his tears on his sleeve, passing through the exit with the flow of tourists the boy managed.
When Hauser was himself a boy, he remembered asking his father where the skies began. “Down here,” his father had said, and placed his hand just above the ground.
The cathedral was meant to yoke or harness heaven on earth or evoke or be it. It had brought Hauser into himself, or let him transcend himself, and maybe that’s what God was, in people, a way to be more than merely yourself. I am still praying now, Hauser thought, crossing the city as the sky darkened. I pray as I breathe as I want, and worry, and sometimes despair. But he felt light as he walked. The heavens begin on the ground. He turned down La Rambla.
It’s a fact that all arts administrators hide when we are out in the halls amongst the people we serve: every one of us, particularly in nonprofit, eventually and then regularly turns away from the spreadsheet or the emails, lowers her head to the desk, and wonders if anything she’s doing is helping anyone, or the art, at all. In my three-year tenure working on the creative writing programs at Hugo House, during these desultory moments or weeks, I closed my office door and controlled my facial expressions, even among fellow coworkers. No one needed to be further infected with existential crises.
My problem wasn’t helped by the constant debate over whether creative writing classes should exist at all, some even making the unsubstantiated claim that creative writing can’t be taught. Richard Hugo — the Seattle/Western Montana poet Hugo House was named for — might have dismissed an argument over whether creative writing can be taught as “semantic rhubarb.” Defending creative writing classes is a primary concern in his essay collection The Triggering Town. And in dark times, that book kept me administrating, sent me back to the spreadsheet with renewed vigor, or at least less confusion.
In the essay “In Defense of Creative-Writing Classes,” the most underlined section in my copy of The Triggering Town, Hugo immediately establishes the reason why writing education will always exist: “Writing is hard and writers need help…. As long as people write, there will be creative-writing teachers.” He assures us that the new writer could skip the whole “am I/aren’t I?” struggle. “A genuine impulse to write is so deep and volatile it needs no triggering device other than the one it already has…and that remains mysterious, evidently complete in itself.” The impulse is indelible and ineffable. So get writing.
Hugo wrote, “A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time.” For students, he lays out knowledge that will save a fledgling writer some pain. I’ve been lucky to have a few of those teachers that saved me a lot of time.
What to write about? “Most young writers haven’t learned to submit to their obsessions,” Hugo tells us. A writer can skip some of the pain of becoming by going at those weird, individual preoccupations we all carry around. One teacher helped me submit earlier and sooner to my obsessions by pointing out a misdirected choice of subject. I was writing about mid-twenties creative types stumbling around New York City. “You have much more interesting things to write about, I think?” she said. There are a lot of great books written about young New Yorkers; she wasn’t dismissing those books. She understood that I wasn’t very interested in what I was writing about. “I’m waiting on those other stories until I’m a better writer,” I said, to my own surprise. “Don’t,” she said.
That same teacher argued that, even if you’re writing badly about the subjects you care about the most, to get any better, you’ve got to write. Or, as Hugo wrote, “You’ve got to stay in shape and practice to do it (writing) well.”
Another shortcut that teacher gave was to read, read, read, exemplified in the dozens of books and stories she referenced each class. Hugo felt the same way. As much as he revered great teachers, he also revered what writers learn by reading. “(In English departments) the enrollment in creative writing increases and the enrollment in literature courses is going down. I’m not sure why and I’m not sure that the trend is healthy.” He wrote that if an English program has to choose between advanced poetry and Shakespeare studies, to choose Shakespeare. But he was not in favor of literary snobbery. He lamented equating superior knowledge with superior social status, and he dismissed willful ignorance in the service of maintaining appearances: “A lot of students today would rather not learn Milton than be made to feel inferior because they didn’t already know his work.”
Hugo was a much, much better person than 19-year-old me. I took Milton exactly because I wanted to feel superior; I craved the feeling because I thought it might help me climb out of where I came from. What shocked me about the class was — and is in retrospect no surprise considering my love of reading and the common occurrence that well-loved literature is loved for good reason — I loved Milton. My third and fourth tattoos are devoted to an idea slowly built across Paradise Lost that man is neither good nor evil, but in limbo between the two. I grew up in a bisected world: Good. Bad. Milton’s expression of the complex motivations within humanity made me hate everything, including myself, a bit less, as well as feel deeply frightened and unsure. What else is literature for?
For teachers, Hugo demands no less complexity than Milton’s concept of both good and evil contained in one animal. Hugo believed that a writer cannot teach anyone how to write. Instead, much like Keats’ negative capability, “We teach how not to write and we teach writers to teach themselves how not to write. When we teach how to write, the student had best be on guard.” One thing I love about this is it demands that a student bring a certain amount of skepticism into the creative writing class, as well as asserting of the mystery of what makes good writing.
Perhaps most importantly, Hugo roundly dismisses any teacher who would deny access to or effort toward a student. Hugo came from a working class background in a working class area of Seattle, and I believe his experience helped him understand the importance of even a bit of success and beauty in life:
“What about the student who is not good? Who will never write much? It is possible for a good teacher to get from that student one poem or one story that far exceeds whatever hopes the student had. It may be of no importance to the world of high culture, but it may be very important to the student. It is a small thing, but it is also small and wrong to forget or ignore lives that can use a single microscopic moment of personal triumph.”
And I have barely begun to mine the gems in The Triggering Town. Two of my favorite pieces of advice in the book, applicable to both students and teachers (and when does a teacher stop being a student?) come from the book’s first essay, “Writing Off the Subject.” “In real life, try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write,” and, “As Bill Kittredge, my colleague who teaches fiction writing, has pointed out: if you are not risking sentimentality, you are not close to your inner self.” It’s the kind of book you read over and over, if only to believe again in what you’re doing. I’d guess Hugo wrote it not only for all of the ambivalent administrators of the world, but also to get himself straight on matters.
Hugo believed in creative writing classes, and he believed in behaving humanely, even if stories suggest he might have been a little tough. Hugo House could not ask for a better dead mentor, channeled through The Triggering Town. What else do we need to know: creative writing classes and mentors will always be needed; listen to your colleagues; read and write; don’t hide your ignorance; follow your obsessions (or as we might say now, nerd out); try to be kind, if only because it will get your further; don’t pretend to know the answers; and if it’s in your power to give it to them, never deny anyone the experience of writing that one beautiful line.
The world simply can’t get enough of Christian Grey. As previously reported, E.L. James’ new book, Grey, is the 50-Shades phenomenon retold from Christian’s perspective. If someone you know has locked themselves in their bedroom recently (and has not yet reemerged), Grey might be the reason why.
With e-books, audiobooks, and print copies all included, the bookhas already sold 1.1 million copies. The LA Times reports that Grey’s publisher, Vintage Anchor, is going into additional print runs which will total in 2.1 million copies. So if you’re looking to turn up the heat even higher on a 90-degree summer day, there should be plenty of opportunities to snag a print copy and disappear inside the perfectly coiffed head of Christian Grey, Seattle’s most enticing and infamous S&M-inclined bachelor.
If you’re still not convinced, Entertainment Weekly has provided an extensive list of lines from Grey, including this charmer: “Her sharp intake of breath is music to my dick.” (p. 348)
Want to teach your kids about the hollowness of capitalism and the joys of beating your friends to a pulp, yet are worried that Fight Club is a little too adult? Luckily for you, Mashable got author Chuck Palahniuk to read his (sadly not real) Fight Club 4 Kids children’s book. You don’t talk about horsing around club, kids!
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