American Fantastic Tales edited by Peter Straub

Published October 2009 by Library of America

ISBN: 978-1598530599

The Recommend:

Edgar Allan Poe and Vladimir Nabokov; Herman Melville and George Saunders; Kate Chopin and Stephen King.

An extraordinary collection of “terror and the uncanny” and a faultless exploration of the elemental latitudes of the American imagination.

It will satisfy for years, but the first thing you’ll notice is the jaw-dropping gorgeousness of the package, designed by the singular Chip Kidd.

Be sure to get the boxed set.

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About RJ Wheaton

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RJ Wheaton (@rjwheaton) is a writer and blogger.

Many many years ago, I discovered Might magazine.  It was a funny, silly magazine that spoofed everything (but had a serious backbone, too).  (You can order back issues here).  And so, I subscribed around issue 13.  When the magazine folded (with issue 16–and you can read a little bit about that in the intro to Shiny Adidas Track Suits) it somehow morphed into McSweeney’s, and much of the creative team behind Might went with them.

The early volumes (1-5 are reviewed in these pages, and the rest will come one of these days) are a more literary enterprise than Might was.  There’s still a lot of the same humor (and a lot of silliness), but there are also lengthy non-fiction pieces.  The big difference is that McSweeney’s was bound as a softcover book rather than as a magazine. And, I guess technically it is called Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern as opposed to Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Issue #6 came with a CD of music by They Might Be Giants.  And from then on it was anybody’s guess what the next issue would look like.  (This Wikipedia page provides a nice summary of all of the issues that have been published, including authors).

The latest issue (#33) is being printed as a newspaper (just to give an idea of the diversity of product here).

The books (for most of them are books, despite the above newspaper) come out occasionally.  I gather it was supposed to be a quarterly, but I don’t know that they’ve ever really kept a schedule. Many of the books are hardcover (beautifully bound).  Some have been paperbacks.  Occasionally they come in a fancy packaging (boxes, slipcases etc). You never know what you’re going to get, which is a lot of the fun.

Although you do know that you’re going to get quality short stories.  The list of fantastic (and well-known) authors grows and grows. (Just a few: Michael Chabon, Stephen King, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Roddy Doyle, A.M. Homes, and Joyce Carol Oates.)  And mixed in with them are less well known (ie. more indie) authors, as well as occasional unknowns.  And even if I don’t love every story, I know that they’ll all be worth a read.

McSweeney’s itself has grown from a publisher of this quarterly to include an empire that publishes books (their book of the month club is the way to go), an official periodical (The Believer), and a video magazine (Wholphin).

I am probably a little too steeped in McSweeney’s-world, but I’ve never been disappointed with a release of theirs (okay, that’s not true, they have published a few clunkers).  I’m always excited to get the box with the little chair as the return address.

And, of course, I began a Wikipedia page of all of the McSweeney’s Books. I’m delighted to see that folks have been adding to it!

Original mention in Periodicals Page:

McSweeney’s. Technically a periodical. A collection of short stories and things like it. I’m usually too overwhelmed by the time this comes in, and frankly, I am many many issues behind on reading this. However, I plowed through 21 and 22 recently, and just got 23. So, I’m looking forward to it and its brethren. I got turned onto McSweeney’s because I used to subscribe to MIGHT magazine (R.I.P) which was a hilarious magazine ala Spy (R.I.P). Might ran for a dozen or so issues and then strangely morphed into McSweeney’s. I think somehow my subscription ran over into McSweeney’s and the rest is 23 issues of fun!

Won't do any good to say this isn't what I planned

First of all, an explanation:  There was no post last week because I was buried under a pile of work.  I still am, but I needed a little breather.  A chance to write something a little less news-y or academic.  So I return.

I’m still muscling through Robert Bolano’s The Savage Detectives slowly.  I like it, but it’s more of an undertaking than I was expecting.  What keeps me going is the feeling that something better is around the corner.  I mean, it’s what any good creative product should do, leave you hungry for more.  But I wonder why I feel like something better is on the horizon.  Whatevs, I need to finish this (or any) book, one way or another.

Besides my flirtations with progress in Bolano’s book, I snuck in some shorter readings.  There was a surprisingly decent article on Megan Fox in the latest issue of The New York Times Magazine.  The article, “Stardom Becomes Her” by Lynn Hirschberg, is interesting but it made me wonder why exactly Megan Fox is considered a star.  But what really stuck out to me this week was George Saunders’ short story “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” a trippy story about a Civil War theme park that’s gone to shit.  Follow our narrator as crazy things happen and he talks to his friends, a family of ghosts that were hacked to death by their father.

Headlights reflecting on my face

I’ve always like Saunders (btw, a creative writing professor at S.U., for those of you who don’t know), but I don’t read nearly enough of him.  This story features all his trademarks, a weird satirical premise, creepiness galore and a scene or two of hyper violence.  It always takes a few paragraphs to get into a Saunders story, his voice can be a little off putting/jarring at first, but once you do, it’s a truly visceral experience.  Oh and also, his writing is some funny shit.  Anyone curious should check out this, or my personal favorite story of his, “Sea Oak.”

So yeah, that’s what I read this week.  Now excuse me while I climb back under my pile of work.  Until next time…

Not on vacation, but I’ve been away from my writing life.

Unfortunately, I had to devote extra hours to my day job for the past six weeks and I am now a single-mom during the week (my husband took a great job in a city two-hours away).

There are those who would say those aren’t excuses but when I can barely get my daughter and I fed and dressed five days in a row, without letting anything slip at my paying job, precious sleep does take precedence over writing.

But I’m back now, and with some kind words from a friend, I am feeling the fire in my belly again.

My biggest challenge now, as it’s been for years, is what to do next. I go back and forth between trying to pitch my collection of short stories, The Safest Place in the World, or my novel Dunderhead. What I need is an agent to help me figure out what to concentrate on for the business side.

The irony of course is that I can’t get an agent without getting one interested in my work, but if I don’t know what work to push out there, it’s hard to get an agent. So I do the best that I can and keep on going.

Because there isn’t a big market for short story collections (unless you are Alice Munro or George Saunders), publishers aren’t interested in them, and therefore agents aren’t interested in them. So my plan has been to pitch the collection to small presses directly and the novel to agents.

Okay, so it hasn’t worked yet.

There are a few more small presses for me to pitch, but after that I will set the stories aside and take out the novel again. Looking at my old notes, the last time I worked on it was December 2008. I can’t believe that much time has passed.

But that’s good. I’ll be fresh to look at it again. And make it better. Maybe 2010 will be my lucky year!

ROCHESTER, MN – That our news media is busted will come as no surprise to consumers of vanishing newspapers, shoutfest TV “news shows” and the unchecked political soapbox called the Internet.

But the devolution of our news media has now reached a point that is in some ways so extreme, and with the stakes for democracy so high, it seems useful to take stock.

Larger and larger swaths of the news media now embrace sensation and celebrity, harshly partisan rhetoric and gossip, rumors and lies to beat the competition and grab market share.

Trusted sources of information are fading into irrelevance as we race into a new golden age for anarchists, demagogues and online pamphleteers.

The Web, to be sure, puts masses of indisputably proven facts at our disposal. Yet millions of people remain stubbornly faithful to discredited nonsense, conspiracy theories and urban legends.

Sometimes it’s not the content but simply the overwhelming bulk of news being delivered every minute to our fingertips (our dazed mindtips!) that grates. We can sicken on a sheer surplus of words, including well-intentioned ones.

Artists and writers saw the dangers of a dysfunctional mass media and news media long ago. But they also saw something else, which was a deep misunderstanding of the mass media itself.

They’ve often used metaphors depicting an idiot monster that’s simply too big and shape-shifting for logic and reason to spot.

For George Saunders the dysfunctional news media is “The Brain Dead Megaphone;” for John Cheever “The Enormous Radio;” for Jonathan Schell “The Uncertain Leviathan;” for Jeffrey Scheuer “The Sound Bite Society;” for Larry Beinhart “The Fog of Facts;” for Tony Schwartz “The Second God;” and for the jazzy word artist and media critic John Durham Peter’s it’s simply “The Abyss.”

But literary metaphors aside, what clear definitions and categories can we rely upon now that our news media is failing so badly in its mission to inform democratic society, and to model modes of conversation that create community and hasten social healing?

Take three recent examples:

• Two highly-skilled, well-respected Washington Post political reporters start an online web site devoted to covering inside-the-beltway news. Instead of raising the level of online journalism the web site, Politico.com, largely sinks to the blogosphere’s standards, touting stories about the sartorial habits of presidential candidates, hyping gossipy tidbits, and relying heavily on unnamed operatives, aides, and “sources close to the administration.”

• If any two facts of current and critical public importance qualify as being indisputably proven, they are the safety (if not the absolute efficacy) of the H1N1 vaccine, and where President Obama was born. Yet despite widespread dissemination of the facts and figures establishing both of these facts, millions of people believe that the H1N1 vaccine is deadly, and that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore is unqualified to be the U.S. president.

• The host of a popular TV “public affairs” show, ranting about the U.S. president, douses an actor with liquid from a fake gasoline can and lights a match while shouting bug-eyed: “President Obama, why don’t you just set us on fire?” Later five teenage boys in Florida pour rubbing alcohol on another boy and light him on fire. No definitive link is made connecting the one incident to the other, yet what does your gut say? How is what this host performed on TV different from a cross burning carried out in a front yard?

Free speech doctrine, that cornerstone of our constitution and our journalism, says it’s our solemn and patriotic duty to suck it up, to grit our teeth and stomach whatever garbage comes along to safeguard everyone’s freedom.

But what happens when the news media itself — by distorting facts and dividing community — becomes a potential threat to public health, national safety, and to the very workings of democracy?

What’s our best response then?

II

A promising answer to that question is taking shape today in the work of a new breed of brain scientists who are studying the influence of emotions, instincts and other innate human traits on human reasoning and moral decision-making.

That’s significant because so many of our assumptions about how the news media works in a democracy are based on the premise of rational actors, i.e. the assumption that citizens act on the news primarily in a rational manner by sorting fact from fiction, weighing certain facts against other ones, and so on.

But what if reason is not the main cognitive mode by which citizens read, watch and act on the news? This possibility was flagged by the journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann in the 1920s and has been a theme of media criticism ever since.

And it’s mostly led to the depressing solution, embraced by Lippmann and many others, that basically journalism must act like propaganda, by distilling complex ideas into digestible symbols that manipulate more than inform.

That doesn’t sound like democracy. Yet until recently, no more promising answer has been found on which both producers and consumers of the news could depend.

Now, though, such an answer is taking shape in the work of these scientists who are objectively demonstrating how the true source of human wisdom is not pure reason, as in the Enlightenment view. Rather, it is rooted in an organic mind-body process in which genetics and morality, brain structure and subjective feeling, reason and emotion are enmeshed every moment in a never-ending dance.

Using technological devices capable of measuring the brain at incomparably closer levels than before, these scientists are demonstrating how decision-making and moral actions are not primarily the product of reasoning, but rather are largely emotion-based and hard-wired into the human genome.

The developmental psychologist Jonathan Haidt can predict if a person is liberal or conservative based on a few inherent and measurable personality traits such as “openness to new experience.”

The psychologist Drew Westen has proven how neuronal networks that stimulate strong emotions are expertly activated by political wordsmiths on the left and right. The cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman uses MRI techniques to show how human brains change in predictable ways when  their owners, across cultures, are persuaded by arguments in text and video form.

In terms of the news media, the promise of this new research is to make us more aware, as both producers and consumers of media, of what is actually transpiring in our minds and bodies when we make and consume the news, and act thereupon.

As a result of this research, a substantially new model will replace the “rational actor” model because reason, we are finding out, is not as pure as we thought it was. As we learn more about the real picture, which is based more on genetics and emotions than the old one, we’ll become more able to use it to our advantage.

In other words, these new findings highlight the need for a new decision-making template in democracies. They make clear the need, especially, for new ethical guidelines by which both individuals and society at large can make decisions that are rational and moral.

In the past, moral decision-making has generally meant recourse to an analytical framework such as those offered by Aristotle’s “virtue ethics,” Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative,” or John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number.”

Besides being too complex and bookish for popular adoption, these ethical answer-machines all work mechanically: complex real-world conditions in, tidy morality out.

But what if, as the new neuroscientists are saying, morality works more like a subtle and intricate dance than a crank-turned machine?

What if the great swirl of emotions plays the primary role in moral decision-making? That’s where a new ethical approach is needed when it comes to the realm of the news media, for both producers and consumers. I can suggest one.

It’s not new, actually, but its application to modern-day conditions certainly would be. It’s the “Right Speech” ethic of the 5th century BC spiritual teacher and moral teacher Siddhartha Guatama, popularly known as the Buddha.

III

The Right Speech doctrine has much to commend it for application to our mass media and news media issues, I think.

Perhaps its very first qualification is how seamlessly it complements the findings of the new neuroscientists. As the Buddha himself preached not a religion but rather a practical psychology – centering on a meditation practice designed to reveal to each person the true workings of their own minds – Right Speech totally complements any scientific approach.

By the same token, its lack of political origin likewise commends Right Speech to contemporary application as, theoretically at least, its political neutrality would allow it to sidestep the distraction of political debates. The Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ethical systems – of Kant, Mill, Rawls, etc. – can’t avoid those problems as our present free speech tradition, which largely guides ethical decision-making in the news media, is thoroughly grounded in political liberalism.

But what exactly is the Right Speech ethic? What does it say is “right speech”?

You could write down the Right Speech ethic on a matchbook cover.

Boiled down, it defines ethical speech in four ways, each way having a positive and a negative phrasing. The positive way defines the qualities that each speech act ideally will have; with the negative way defining types of speech to avoid.

The best-known Right Speech formulation offers four types of speech to avoid including speech that is 1) lying, 2) divisive, 3) hurtful, or 4) idle. Phrased positively, ethical speech is thus 1) true, 2) healing, 3) gentle, and 4) useful.

The timeliness of ethical speech is also greatly stressed. The Buddha many times reminded his monks that if delivered at the wrong moment even an absolutely true and useful statement can be divisive and hurtful. In addition, the intention behind every speech act is always determinative. Thus, a lie spoken with a genuine intention to heal, and in the genuine belief that it would cause the least amount of harm in a given situation, would be acceptable in the Right Speech code.

That’s about it. Beyond this core, though, exists a rich literature of parables, stories and commentaries on Right Speech that clarifies its meaning, describes its relation to underlying Buddhist psychology, and provides countless examples of skillful and unskillful daily life applications of the Right Speech ethic in personal, family, governmental and even political settings (6th century BCE Indian politics, that is).

At least three notable traits of the news media today also suggest the ready adaptability of the Right Speech ethic to contemporary conditions.

First is how the Internet has empowered millions of people to become not only consumers but also producers of news via personal blogs, Facebook and Twitter accounts, cell phone photography, etc. Their dispatches may on most days be read or viewed by only a handful, but on other days they may get the attention of millions. More people than ever, ordinary citizens as well as news professionals thus need today to seriously consider issues of journalism ethics.

Second, any adequate speech ethic today must be equally adaptable to consumers of public speech, as well as its producers. There is increasing understanding that language, like food, is absorbed with both potential benefits and potentially serious harm ensuing to its consumers. Therefore, an ethic of speech consumption, similar perhaps to diets and nutrition regimes for food, is needed and which the Right Speech ethic provides.

Third, of all the challenges presented by today’s dysfunctional news media, the most serious perhaps are the deep social divisions that it creates, exacerbates and sustains. The increasing partisanship and rancorous tone of the national public dialog calls out for a speech ethic that explicitly addresses that problem and offers ready avenues for redress, which the Buddhist Right Speech ethic does.

How much would newspapers, TV news shows and the blogosphere be transformed if only these four injunctions – to avoid lies, harsh speech, divisive and idle speech — were honored? And if the urge to go to press or to air was  delayed until to the moment of maximum helpfulness and healing?

It’s perhaps a useful thought experiment, anyway.

Here’s another one, from a short discourse the Buddha used to remind his followers that words, so seemingly weightless and ephemeral, can actually be lethal:

 ”Every person who is born
  is born with an axe in his mouth.
  A fool who uses abusive language
  cuts himself and others with that axe. “

One huge obstacle, though, blocks Right Speech from being widely adopted as an ethical touchstone in western democracies and their news medias.

That is the idea that “Right Speech” and “Free Speech” are in conflict.

Next week, I’ll explain why they’re not.

Part 2 of a Three-Part Series
 Part 1: The Politico Paradox — Feeding the Media We Hate
 Part 3: Free Speech vs. Right Speech (Coming soon)

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report

SOUNDTRACK: PLACEBO-Battle for the Sun (2009).

I’ve been a fan of Placebo since their first disc came out (I had to hunt it down after reading a great review in Q magazine).  Imagine my surprise when they took off with their next album and the huge single “Every You Every Me.”

Battle for the Sun is their sixth album and things haven’t changed too dramatically for them (except that they don’t have any huge singles anymore).  This album experiments with a few different styles (including a few places where it almost sounds like pop metal influences are creeping in). There’s even horns on a couple of the songs.  They don’t add a lot to the tracks, but they also don’t really detract from them either.

But even with these modifications, their sound remains hard guitar driven alt-rock with a touch of glam and the ever present love it or hate it vocals of Brian Molko.  Molko has a fascinating way with lyrics.  So on “Battle for the Sun” we have fascinating parts where he sings a word 7 times at the end of certain lines: “I, I, I, I, I will brush of all the dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt.”  And this will either drive you insane or you will accept it as part of the song.

As with past Placebo records, I have enjoyed this one quite a bit.  There’s always something catchy coming forth, and even if Malko’s lyrics aren’t the most original (“no one here gets out alive” (!)),  his delivery is wonderfully arch/angry/sexy depending on his needs.

The album overall isn’t as grand as Without You I’m Nothing, but if you like Placebo, Battle for the Sun won’t disappoint.  If you’re not a fan, it’s not going to change your mind about them.

[READ: October 15, 2009] “Victory Lap”

This is, hands down, one of my favorite short stories of the year.  The story takes some major sharp turns to get where it winds up, and it is very intense at the same time.

It opens with this hilarious look at soon-to-be-15 Alison Pope.  And if the story had stayed just with her it would have been fantastic anyhow.  Alison is in her own head: as she walks down the stairs of her house, she dismisses suitors on either side, speaking garbled French and mocking their word choices (“Had he said small package?”).  But when she gets to the bottom of the stairs, she sees a baby deer in the woods (of her living room).  And when she speaks to it, it answers (in the voice of her younger sister).  The section is full of {actions} and is charming and very funny.  Saunders captured this character perfectly, and as I said, I could have read about her for pages and pages.

Alison notices the dorky neighbor boy running past her house.  Like he does every day.  She remembers back when they were young and were friendly, but now, he’s just embarrassing.  It’s only when the doorbell rings that Alison breaks out of her reverie.

And then the point of view shifts to the dorky neighbor boy.  We see him traipse through his house, read the note from his father and then plop on the couch.  Then he realizes that he hasn’t removed his shoes. He has disobeyed a directive.  And he imagines what would happen if his parents came home and saw him like this.  More details accrue showing that Kyle, being an only child, is micromanaged and protected within an inch of his life.

And he has rules that must be obeyed for His Own Safety.  Some have to do with what words he should not says aloud (and the section is filled with wonderfully inventive curses that had me laughing out loud), and others are more physical: like not going onto the porch in bare feet, and most importantly, if he can see a stranger he is not to leave the house.

And the stranger that he can see is the meter reader walking up to Alison’s house.

The point of view then shifts to the meter reader.  And we learn that he is not an innocent meter reader at all.

The rest of the story is tense, horrific and very exciting.  I was completely unprepared for where the story wound up going, and I enjoyed every word of it.

After the opening, the funny, idyllic charm that suffused Alison and the raunchy pent up fun of Kyle, I was at first a little disappointed that the story turned so dark.  And yet by the end, I was completely hooked back into the story.  It was really tremendous.

“Fourscore and seven years ago,” our “founding father” President Abraham Lincoln would not have imagined a world as we know it today. Sometimes I wonder where they thought the world was heading with the invention of railroads and the telegraph already beginning to make a big world feel smaller. Some have argued that Abraham Lincoln would fight to keep his blackberry just as President Obama did. Like it or not, the world is progressing further away from the simple face-to-face interactions and relationships into a technology-centered culture. A day at work for many people involves a computer screen more so than a pen and paper; connecting with family members relies much more on a message on their ‘wall’ than a phone call or visit.

Up next: Foursquare. Foursquare is a social network that allows friends to locate one another in real-time, win medals or become ‘mayors’ of certain venues and search cities for places to go. It is currently available on various platforms (online, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, etc) and beginning to brew attention from the trend-chasers. There are about 60,000 users in their 20s and 30s after just 7 months of existence. Although there is no business model as of yet, there is a lot of promise from small businesses as well as brands that want to follow those trend-setters.

While studying at BU, I read a book entitled “In Persuasion Nation” by George Saunders. In this book was an over exaggerated picture of a society where advertising has no clear separation from reality. The common language was slogan lines and the only expressions of feelings and emotions were explained using commercial scenarios. While many already update their “status” and “tweet” about what’s happening to them at a particular moment, Foursquare incorporates technology in yet another way. Perhaps Saunders’ futuristic exaggeration was a bit over-the-top, but with every new fad of the “cyberworld” it seems as though it may not take another century to witness his fantasies become reality.

Earlier this week the FTC released new guidelines on how bloggers must disclose their relationships with commercial entities. I haven’t spent much time thinking about this—unlike smart people who have—mainly because I suspect any battle between the gummint and bloggers will attack women and children first. Relatively speaking, me and my modest stack of advance reader’s copies aren’t worth anybody’s attention and trouble. I’ve always considered ARCs as a tool to do my job, not some great prize; I receive them, but, like editors at newspaper book reviews, I feel no particular obligation to review them, acknowledge their existence, or announce their provenance if I do get around to mentioning them.

George Saunders reports from a homeless tent city in Fresno, California.

Jane Smiley discusses her first novel for young adults, The Georges and the Jewels.

Sherman Alexie: “If I had been talking about drowning polar bears [instead of the Kindle], people would have been weeping with me. But nobody recognizes that a bookstore or library can also be a drowning polar bear. And right now in this country, magazines, newspapers, and bookstores are drowning polar bears.“

Paul Auster laments the death of independent bookstores in New York: “In my own city of New York, so many superb bookstores have gone out of business in the past years that the epidemic has reached tragic proportions. The Eighth Street Bookstore, the grand literary emporium of my youth, has been a shoe store for more than two decades now. The Gotham Book Mart (‘Wise Men Fish Here’), the home of the James Joyce Society, the home in exile for André Breton and other French Surrealists during World War II, closed its doors recently. Books and Company is gone. Endicott Books is gone. Coliseum Books is gone.”

A personal consideration of Raymond Carver along with some thoughts on Lishification, and a profile of his widow, Tess Gallagher.

A cache of Mark Twain’s papers, including letters he wrote during the last months of his life, goes up for auction later this month.

Jonathan Lethem on his new novel, Chronic City: “I had to figure out, ok what should I be writing? I thought, the answer is always, I should write the thing that if I don’t write it, it wouldn’t exist… Maybe I could write a realistic social epic of the Upper East Side; it’s possible that I could do that. I feel that I’ve acquired a lot of those tools and inclinations, but to merge it with the dream-life material, I feel that’s my special task.”

Chicago gets a literary hall of fame.

Waiting for Vu in Ann Arbor with the South Lyon blues again.

* The end of fish. Via MeFi.

* I must be getting old—it’s the second day in a row I’ve agreed with a conservative on the Supreme Court. And this time it was Antonin Scalia!

“The cross doesn’t honor non-Christians who fought in the war?” Scalia asks, stunned.

“A cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity, and it signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins,” replies Eliasberg, whose father and grandfather are both Jewish war veterans.

“It’s erected as a war memorial!” replies Scalia. “I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead. The cross is the most common symbol of … of … of the resting place of the dead.”

I think he’s right about this; it seems to me to be a pretty clear (and frankly inoffensive) case of civil religion, which is historically acceptable in our legal tradition. Dissenting views from Steve Benen and Pharyngula.

* Also via MeFi: results from OKCupid data that suggests race’s impact on online dating behavior.

* George Saunders lives in a tent city for GQ.

If you look on my links to Online Publications you’ll see I’ve added a new publication Wag’s Revue, an online literary journal.

The journal’s current issue has an interview with Lee Gutkind, as well as George Saunders.

            Maybe four years ago now, I got the lucky chance to interview Aimee Bender, and I’d been hoping to land the interview but ended up unable to find a home for it. Since I started this site, I’ve been meaning to put it up, and through some combo of laziness and insecurity (that the interview’s old, that I was young when I did it [and asked young questions, I think]) I’ve kept convincing myself not to put it up.

            All that’s over: here’s the interview. I’m pretty sure we did this interview in the summer of ‘05, when Willful Creatures was coming and after Ms. Bender’d recently had something in the great Secret Society of Demolition Writers. Aimee Bender’s personal site is here, a great interview with her is up here at Powell’s, here are three maps she drew and which were published in Ecotone (and here’s the book about the place Aimee’s mapping), and here’s an incredible essay she had this summer about moths and flies and marriage.

            If you haven’t read Aimee Bender yet, there’s a good chance that your life is more frustrating and less joyful than it could be. Consider her writing to be an experience similar to what life was like before you discovered tea or coffee, whichever’s your non-alcoholic beverage of choice.

            Three books she’s written: two collections of stories (Girl in the Flammable Skirt and, the most recent one, Willful Creatures) and the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own. She teaches at USC. She’s got dark hair and, if you can download her podcast from Powells.com, a fun voice to listen to.

: Okay, so questions. All of the following are just loose guidelines and if there’s something that’s more interesting to say than the answer I’ve set you up for, by all means. I don’t really suppose, actually, that any of this pre-ambulatory stuff is important at all, but just in case. No matter what: thank you so much for your books. As a complete aside: a few  years ago, like a year and a half, you got a letter from a kid in Minneapolis and you couldn’t read his name but you responded, addressed him W. That was me.

            Ah yes! I remember that letter! I’m delighted it’s you.  Hello then, again, now that you have more letters with your name.

: Who are you reading now? Who did you read before, and before that? Is there some group or style or school or anything that you see as particularly substantive and true at the moment?

            True in what way?  I am reading, currently– some Sharon Olds’s poems, and now even more happily so after she said she wouldn’t read at the White House.  I’m reading Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey.  I’m reading Ben Marcus’s essay on experimentation which I am liking a whole lot.  I am blurbing a couple of books– short stories and a novel.  I do think there’s a lot of very lively fiction out there right now– George Saunders has a new book I want to read, and Sal Plascencia’s The People of Paper is incredibly permission-giving and I hear Julia Slavin’s new novel is terrific. 

: How do you like teaching at USC? Did you teach before elsewhere? Is there (for example with People of Paper) some bright sense of pride when your students publish and are  well received?

            Before USC, I was teaching all over LA– UCLA, Caltech; before then, at UC Irvine.  Before that, elementary school.  I love it when students publish. It’s thrilling, and gives everyone hope, and it feels like winning a baseball game or something.  That said, someone like Sal knew from the get-go what his book needed to be, and it was just exciting to witness his process as it happened. 

: How did you get into writing, like as a way to live, as publishing and books and etc?

            It was slow.  I was in graduate school, and sending out stories, and then there were enough stories for a collection, and I went looking for agents and it started to happen from there.  I wanted to publish a book, but I was still amazed when it actually happened.  I still have moments where I am surprised, that I am a writer. 

: Do you have an equal affinity for both short stories and novels? Will the next one be a novel, or do you not think and work that far ahead?

            I work on lots at once, so I have a novel cooking along, and another novel that is either simmering or dead, and I work on short stories along the way.  I do like both forms so much– I write more stories more quickly, but I love that a novel is unknown for so long; it both pains me and thrills me.

: What do you listen to (Red House Painters, railroad cars late at night, coyotes)?

            I’ve been trying to listen more to real-world sounds.  I wish there were railroad cars nearby! What a great thought.  I just listened to Iron and Wine. They’re pretty great.  I listen to a lot of NPR.  I like listening to guitar without words, too.  John Fahey.  I like it when I can remember to take the time to listen to what’s happening out the window– be it birds or cars or people, talking.  Even on their cell phones.

: How did that profile thing in the NYTimes Magazine come about, where you talked about your house and etc? How, also, was the experience of doing the Secret Society of Demolition Writers?

            I knew the writer of that profile indirectly, and they were looking for a female writer, so from there it happened.  It was funny, and fun, and strange, talking about things like what kind of frozen pizza I liked.  The Secret Society was a treat, because Marc Parent, the editor, was such a pleasure to work with: supportive, thoughtful in his edits, enthused.  I have a terrible time guessing who’s who.

: One of the reasons your stories are so absolutely fucking breathtaking is how true they are of themselves: there’s a strength in them to just go wherever the story is bound to go, an integrity, I guess, that puts story above language, plot, anything. How do you…? I almost don’t know how to really ask the question. Here, perhaps: so one of the theories of evolution is that all the elements were right on earth and then, suddenly, wham: there was the presentation of some electrical field, some power applied, and cells joined other cells and suddenly things started moving in new ways. Your stories seem to be just the electrical/power current that comes along and zaps things to life. Are you aware of that while you’re writing? Do you revise endlessly? Did you go through some time where you just wrote the classic ‘straight’ story, terse and cutting sentences (I’m thinking of that just  because George Saunders, in an interview, said he did, for awhile, write the really terse Hemingway-ish stuff, but then realized it wasn’t where his power was)? This is probably just a really long, overtly unclear attempt at asking: how the hell do you do it?

            The thing is, your question is the same way.  You let the question associate to something within itself, and it’s a very compelling and great question!  I love the electrical field image. So, in that, you were following your thought and letting it ride.  Same thing with the stories.  I try to just go where-ever it’s going, and yes, I revise a ton. I reread a ton. I hack a lot out of the story and I add a lot, and I just try to sit with it and grope around in there.  When I’m stuck, I move onto something else.  I did go through a time, yes, where I was writing what I felt might be more acceptable stories, and they were dull as can be.  I read that Saunders interview as well, and strongly identified with that feeling, with the great relief of putting aside what felt like a writerly ’should’ and moving onto what was actually working.

: Simply because you’re connected, a bit, with the only overt ‘movement’ in literature (that I know of) at the moment, McSweeneys, and because they clearly have a political bent, do you also have a political bent that you think your books can/should/may address? Not moral fiction, but fiction with multiple citizenships, maybe: to itself and story, to good and left and more empathizing culture, to the color green?

            I suppose some of the bent comes from a desire to think freely, to let the story move freely.  To have space for all sorts of ideas and styles.  And in a way, that is political.  I feel so strongly that writing needs to be whatever it has to be to get a feeling across, and the form it takes should serve that feeling.  It’s also my belief in feminism– at a reading once, a student asked: “why are your women characters so broken? Do you feel a need to have strong female characters?” And I thought, well, no. Because brokenness is as true as strength, and it feels like a gesture of strength and freedom and progress, for women to write as honestly as we can.  Honesty is tough– I think I really rely on the surrealism/whatever you want to call it as a way to contend with the difficulty of stating things truthfully. 

: And what do you think literature can do, overall? Totally seriously. Not like validate your existence and books, but what do you think literature can do, what do you hope yours might do?

            Awhile back I was reading after watching a lot of TV and film, and the characters in the book I was reading were so flawed, so deeply flawed and unresolved, and I thought: oh.   Right. This is why it’s so key.  There’s something about the internal access to characters, to seeing what they’re doing and also seeing that they may improve/they may not that feels so, so important.  Although I love fairy tales, and I write fairy tales, I do think the neat ending, the pat finale is a dangerous expectation, and I honestly look to literature for complexity. Not to say TV and film can’t have that– sometimes they do. But it is harder, to see that complexity without a narrator, or without access into the internal life of a character, and that is what writing can do, without even blinking an eye.  And all this is done with language!  Literature reminds us about words, puts us face to face with words.  And like it or not, we are all married to words.

: Have you always lived in LA? What do you like and not like about it (loaded question: I don’t like the place and I’m always curious what others do enjoy of it)?

            I’ve lived in California most of my life, not always LA.  I have mixed feelings about LA but it is a good city– it’s a major metropolis, with such a huge range of people and art and style. The first layer of LA, the botox driving boob job shallow LA– yuck. But, in fact, it’s really easy to peel that layer back and suddenly find a really diverse, lively city, where all art forms that aren’t film are happily plugging along, and where it can be exciting, too, to happen upon a film trailer on the street next door, and where all sorts of interesting outreach is happening too.  I like big cities, and even though LA is a sprawling one, I like that it is an invigorating one, too.  And the beach is good.

: What’s the view out your window?

            A big leafy tree, and a pink building that reminds me of Greece, though I’ve never been to Greece.

. . . I say that a poem has the potential for perfection and this possibility finally silenced me, or sometimes I say that I felt trapped in the poems I tried to write, which is like saying one feels trapped in the universe . . .
Nicole Krauss, “From the Desk of Daniel Varsky

Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn’t rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esther’s cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You can’t have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled, not destroyed.”
Jonathan Lethem, “The King of Sentences”

. . . our bodies, which seem to bring us the riches of the earth, prevent the world from reaching us. For the eyes of our skin are closed. Brightness streams in on us, and we cannot see. Things flow against us, and we cannot feel.
Steven Millhauser, “The Wizard of West Orange”

Only one or two lemons tumble from the branches each hour, but I’ve been sitting here so long, their falling seems contiguous, close as raindrops.
Karen Russell, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove”

Twice already Marie had pointed out the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn, because the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn put her in mind of a haunted house — not a haunted house she had ever actually seen but the mythical one that sometimes appeared in her  mind (with adjacent graveyard and cat on a fence) whenever she saw the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect etc. etc., and she wanted to make sure that, if the kids had a corresponding mythical haunted house that appeared in their minds whenever they saw the brilliance of the etc. etc., it would come up now, so that they could all experience it together, like friends, like college friends on a road trip, sans pot, ha ha ha!
George Saunders, “Puppy”

A few of my favorite sentences from The Best American Short Stories 2008. Beth buys the collection for me every year, has done so for probably close to twenty years now. Poor, I bought them used before that. I think I have them back to ‘84 or a couple years earlier. Of course it is ridiculous to think these are actually the best, but the compilation is always reliably great and also thankfully uneven. I like the series better because I do not like all the stories. Also, the series is where I first read “Ralph the Duck,” which is such a flat-out marvel that I will make sure I own each new book for as long as I can, just as thanks.

Per concludere questo lungo weekend di omaggio all’arte e alla persona di David Foster Wallace, vi proponiamo una piccola silloge del suo pensiero; riflessioni dell’autore, raccolte e tradotte da Martina Testa (la «voce» italiana di Wallace), sul valore della letteratura, sul contesto sociale ed etico che stiamo vivendo, sull’importanza e la gratificazione dell’insegnamento umanistico, sul progetto dello scrittore, il suo contatto personalissimo con il lettore, il suo talento, il suo dolore, importante e necessario per intendere e praticare la letteratura come un vero atto d’amore.

Un buon momento per fare lo scrittore

Personalmente, credo che questo sia veramente un buon momento per un giovane che voglia cominciare a scrivere narrativa. Ho degli amici che non sono d’accordo. Al giorno d’oggi la narrativa di qualità e la poesia sono emarginate. È un errore in cui cadono parecchi dei miei amici, questa vecchia idea secondo cui «Il pubblico è stupido. Il pubblico vuole andare in profondità solo fino a un certo punto. Poveri noi, siamo emarginati perché la tv, la grande ipnotizzatrice… bla bla bla». Ci si può mettere seduti in un cantuccio e piangersi addosso quanto si vuole. Ma è una stronzata. Se una forma d’arte viene emarginata è perché non parla davvero alla gente. E un possibile motivo è che la gente a cui si rivolge sia diventata troppo stupida per apprezzarla. Ma a me sembra una spiegazione troppo semplice.

Se uno scrittore si rassegna all’idea che il pubblico sia troppo stupido, ad aspettarlo ci sono due trappole. Una è la trappola dell’avanguardismo: si fa l’idea che sta scrivendo per altri scrittori, perciò non si preoccupa di rendersi accessibile o affrontare questioni di ampia rilevanza. Si preoccupa di far sì che ciò che scrive sia strutturalmente e tecnicamente all’avanguardia: involuto nei punti giusti, ricco di appropriati riferimenti intertestuali… L’opera deve sprizzare intelligenza. Ma all’autore non importa nulla se sta comunicando o meno con un lettore a cui freghi qualcosa di quella stretta allo stomaco che è poi il motivo principale per cui leggiamo. Sul fronte opposto ci sono opere volgari, ciniche, commerciali realizzate secondo formule prestabilite — essenzialmente, il corrispondente letterario della tv — che manipolano il lettore, che presentano materiale grottescamente semplificato con uno stile avvincente perché infantile.

La cosa strana è che questi due fronti sono in lotta fra loro ma hanno un’origine comune, che è il disprezzo per il lettore: l’idea che l’attuale emarginazione della letteratura sia colpa del lettore. Il progetto che vale la pena di portare avanti è invece quello di scrivere qualcosa che abbia in parte la ricchezza, la complessità, la difficoltà emotiva e intellettuale dell’avanguardia, qualcosa che spinga il lettore ad affrontare la realtà invece che a ignorarla, ma che nel fare questo provochi anche piacere nella lettura. Il lettore deve sentire che qualcuno sta parlando con lui, non assumendo una serie di pose.

In parte, tutto questo ha a che fare col fatto che viviamo in un’epoca in cui abbiamo a disposizione una quantità enorme di puro intrattenimento, e bisogna capire come può la letteratura ricavarsi un suo spazio in un’epoca di questo tipo. Si può provare ad affrontare il problema di cosa sia a rendere magica la letteratura in maniera diversa dalle altre forme di arte e spettacolo. E a capire in che modo la narrativa possa ancora affascinare un lettore la cui sensibilità è stata in massima parte formata dalla cultura pop, senza diventare un’ulteriore palata di merda fra gli ingranaggi della cultura pop. È qualcosa di incredibilmente difficile, sconcertante e spaventoso, ma è un bel compito. C’è una quantità enorme di intrattenimento di massa ben realizzato e ben confezionato: credo che nessun’altra generazione prima di noi si sia trovata a fronteggiare una cosa del genere. Essere uno scrittore oggi significa questo. Credo che sia il momento migliore per essere al mondo e forse il miglior momento possibile per fare lo scrittore. Certo, dubito che sia il più facile.

La magia della letteratura

Il mondo reale è pieno di solitudine esistenziale. Io non so cosa stai pensando o che cos’è che hai dentro, e tu non sai che cos’ho dentro io. Nella letteratura penso che in un certo senso riusciamo a saltare oltre questo muro. Ma questo è solo un primo livello, perché l’idea dell’intimità mentale o emotiva con un personaggio è un’illusione, un meccanismo creato dallo scrittore attraverso la sua arte. C’è anche un altro livello su cui un testo letterario diventa una conversazione. Fra il lettore e lo scrittore si instaura un rapporto che è molto strano, complicato e difficile da descrivere. Un ottimo brano di letteratura non è detto che mi catturi completamente e mi faccia dimenticare che sono seduto in poltrona. C’è della narrativa commerciale che è perfettamente in grado di riuscirci; una trama avvincente è perfettamente in grado di riuscirci: ma non mi fa sentire meno solo.

Invece c’è una specie di: «A-ha! Qualcuno almeno per un attimo la pensa come me, o vede una cosa nel modo in cui la vedo io». Non capita sempre. Sono brevi flash, fiammate, ma ogni tanto mi capitano. E non mi sento più solo, a livello intellettuale, emotivo, spirituale. La letteratura e la poesia riescono a farmi sentire umano, a eliminare quel senso di solitudine, a mettermi profondamente e significativamente in comunicazione con un’altra coscienza, in una maniera del tutto diversa da quanto riescano a fare altre forme d’arte.

Stelle polari

È difficile parlare degli scrittori che riescono a farmi questo effetto. Non intendo dire che io sia bravo quanto loro. Sono come stelle polari che mi indicano la rotta.

Storicamente, ecco le opere letterarie che mi hanno dato quella sorta di squillo da jackpot di slot-machine: l’orazione funebre di Socrate, la poesia di John Donne, la poesia di Richard Crashaw, Shakespeare ogni tanto, ma non così spesso, le opere più brevi di Keats, Schopenhauer, le Meditazioni sulla filosofia prima e il Discorso sul metodo di Cartesio, i Prolegomena di Kant, anche se le traduzioni in inglese sono tutte pessime, le Varietà di esperienze religiose di William James, il Tractatus di Wittgenstein, Ritratto dell’artista da giovane di Joyce, Hemingway — specialmente la parte finale di In Our Time, che ti fa veramente fare uuuuh — Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, A.S. Byatt, Cynthia Ozick — i racconti, specialmente «Levitations» — Pynchon più o meno il venticinque per cento del tempo, Donald Barthelme — in particolare un racconto chiamato «The Balloon», che è stato il primo racconto a farmi venire voglia di diventare uno scrittore — Tobias Wolff, le cose migliori di Raymond Carver, quelle più famose, Steinbeck quando non rulla troppo i tamburi, il trentacinque per cento di Stephen Crane, Moby Dick, Il grande Gatsby.

E poi ovviamente c’è la poesia. Probabilmente più di tutti Philip Larkin, e anche Louise Glück, Auden.

Fra i miei colleghi, c’è tutto quel gruppo di grossi maschi bianchi; cinque o sei di noi sotto la quarantina (l’intervista da cui è tratta questa affermazione risale al marzo 1996), bianchi, alti un metro e ottanta o più e con gli occhiali. Richard Powers, William Vollman, Jonathan Franzen, Donald Antrim, Jeffrey Eugenides; Rick Moody. Lo scrittore con cui sono più fissato al momento è George Saunders, che ha appena pubblicato CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, un libro che merita grandissima attenzione. A.M. Homes: le sue cose più lunghe magari non sono perfette, ma ogni due tre pagine c’è qualcosa che ti colpisce allo stomaco e ti fa piegare in due. Kathryn Harrison, Mary Karr, che è famosa per The Liar Club ma scrive anche poesia, e forse è la migliore poetessa americana di oggi sotto i cinquant’anni. Cris Mazza, Rikki Ducornet, Carole Maso.

Insegnare

Non mi piace insegnare scrittura creativa. Ci sono due settimane di roba che puoi insegnare a uno che non ha ancora scritto cinquanta racconti e sta ancora imparando. Poi diventa solo questione di gestire le diverse opinioni soggettive degli studenti sul problema di come dire la verità vs. obliterare il proprio ego.

Invece mi piace insegnare letteratura inglese alle matricole. Alla Illinois University di Bloomington (dove DFW insegnava all’epoca dell’intervista) arrivano un sacco di ragazzi di campagna che non hanno avuto un’istruzione particolarmente buona e a cui non piace leggere. Sono cresciuti pensando che la letteratura sia qualcosa di arido, insignificante, poco divertente, tipo l’olio di fegato di merluzzo. Io invece gli metto davanti roba un po’ più attuale: la seconda settimana facciamo sempre un racconto di A.M. Homes che si chiama «Una vera bambola», tratto da La sicurezza degli oggetti. Parla di un ragazzino che ha una storia d’amore con una Barbie. È una bella trovata, in superficie, ma è anche molto distorto, malato, avvincente e veramente toccante per dei diciottenni che cinque o sei anni fa giocavano con le bambole o facevano i sadici con le sorelle. Quando vedo quei ragazzi scoprire che leggere narrativa di qualità può essere difficile, ma a volte ripaga lo sforzo, e che quel tipo di lettura riesce a darti qualcosa che non può darti nient’altro, quando li vedo rendersi conto di questo fatto, è una cosa fichissima.

I miei lettori

Immagino che siano più o meno gente come me, suppergiù fra i venti e i quaranta, con quel tanto di esperienza o di istruzione che basta per rendersi conto che la fatica che la buona letteratura richiede a volte viene ripagata. Gente che è cresciuta con la cultura commerciale americana e ne è coinvolta, pervasa e affascinata, ma ha ancora fame di qualcosa che l’arte commerciale non può dare. (…) Questa, credo, è la gente per cui scrivono un po’ tutti gli autori della mia età che ammiro: William Vollman, A.M. Homes, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, e anche gente come McInerney e Leavitt. Ma, lo ripeto, negli ultimi vent’anni abbiamo assistito a grandi cambiamenti nel modo in cui gli scrittori riescono a far presa sui lettori, in ciò che i lettori devono aspettarsi da ogni forma di arte.

Tv, piacere, dolore

È troppo facile starsene semplicemente lì a torcersi le mani dicendo che la tv ha rovinato i lettori. Perché la cultura televisiva americana non è nata dal nulla. Quello che la tv è estremamente brava a fare – e rendiamocene conto, «non fa altro che questo» – è riconoscere cosa vogliono grandi masse di persone, e fornirglielo. E dato che nella cultura americana, o comunque dell’occidente industrializzato, c’è sempre stato un caratteristico e fortissimo disgusto per la frustrazione e la sofferenza, la tv eviterà queste cose come la peste in favore di qualcosa che sia facile e anestetico.

In moltissime altre culture, se uno soffre, se ha un sintomo che lo fa soffrire, questo viene sostanzialmente interpretato come qualcosa di sano e naturale, un segnale del fatto che il sistema nervoso sa che c’è qualcosa che non va. Per queste culture, liberarsi del dolore senza affrontarne la causa profonda sarebbe come spegnere il campanello d’allarme mentre l’incendio divampa ancora. Ma se soltanto guardiamo la miriade di modi in cui in questo Paese ci sforziamo all’impazzata di alleviare quelli che sono semplici sintomi – dalle pasticche contro il mal di testa a effetto ultrarapido alla popolarità dei musical spensierati durante la Depressione – si vede una tendenza quasi compulsiva a identificare il dolore in sé con il problema. E così il piacere diventa un valore, un fine teleologico a se stesso. Se guardiamo l’utilitarismo – una teoria etica spiccatamente anglosassone – vediamo un’intera teleologia basata sull’idea che la migliore vita umana possibile è quella che raggiunge il tasso più alto di piacere rispetto al dolore. Lo so che il mio può sembrare un discorso bigotto. Ma voglio solo dire che dare la colpa alla tv è un atteggiamento miope. La tv è solo un sintomo come tanti altri. Non è stata la tv a inventare il nostro infantilismo estetico, così come non è stato il Progetto Manhattan a inventare l’aggressione. Le armi nucleari e la tv hanno semplicemente intensificato le conseguenze di certe nostre tendenze, hanno alzato la posta in gioco.

Una letteratura morale?

Se la condizione della nostra civiltà contemporanea fa disperatamente schifo, è insulsa, materialistica, emotivamente ritardata, sadomasochistica e stupida, allora qualunque scrittore può sfangarla creando alla bell’e meglio storie piene di personaggi stupidi, superficiali, emotivamente ritardati, e non ci vuole molto, perché quel genere di personaggi non richiede nessuno sviluppo. O descrizioni che siano semplici liste di prodotti di marca. Romanzi in cui gente stupida si dice cose insignificanti. Se quello che ha sempre contraddistinto la cattiva scrittura – la piattezza dei personaggi; un mondo narrativo fatto di cliché e non riconoscibile come umano – è anche ciò che contraddistingue il mondo di oggi, allora un brutto romanzo diventa una geniale mimesi di un brutto mondo. Se i lettori credono semplicemente che il mondo sia stupido, superficiale e cattivo, allora uno come Bret Easton Ellis può scrivere un romanzo cattivo; stupido e superficiale che diventa un ironico e tagliente ritratto della bruttura del mondo che ci circonda. Siamo d’accordo un po’ tutti che questi sono tempi duri, e stupidi, ma abbiamo davvero bisogno di opere letterarie che non facciano altro che drammatizzare quanto sia tutto buio e stupido? Nei tempi bui, quello che definisce una buona opera d’arte mi sembra che sia la capacità di individuare e fare la respirazione bocca a bocca a quegli elementi di umanità e di magia che ancora sopravvivono ed emettono luce nonostante l’oscurità dei tempi. La buona letteratura può avere una visione del mondo cupa quanto vogliamo, ma troverà sempre un modo sia per raffigurare il mondo sia per mettere in luce le possibilità di abitarlo in maniera viva e umana.

Non parlo di soluzioni nel campo della politica convenzionale o l’attivismo sociale. Il campo della letteratura non si occupa di questo. La letteratura si occupa di cosa voglia dire essere un cazzo di essere umano. Se uno parte, come partiamo quasi tutti, dalla premessa che negli Stati Uniti di oggi ci siano cose che ci rendono decisamente difficile essere veri esseri umani, allora forse metà del compito della letteratura è spiegare da dove nasce questa difficoltà. Ma l’altra metà è drammatizzare il fatto che nonostante tutto siamo ancora esseri umani. O possiamo esserlo. Questo non significa che il compito della letteratura sia edificare o insegnare, fare di noi tanti piccoli bravi cristiani o repubblicani. Non sto cercando di seguire le orme di Tolstoj o di John Gardner. Penso solo che la letteratura che non esplori quello che significa essere umani oggi, non è arte. Abbiamo tanta narrativa di qualità che ripete semplicemente all’infinito il fatto che stiamo perdendo sempre più la nostra umanità, che presenta personaggi senz’anima e senza amore, personaggi la cui descrizione si può esaurire nell’elenco delle marche di abbigliamento che indossano, e noi leggiamo questi libri e diciamo «Wow, che ritratto tagliente ed efficace del materialismo contemporaneo!» Ma che la cultura americana sia materialistica lo sappiamo già.È una diagnosi che si può fare in due righe. Non è stimolante. Quello che è stimolante e ha una vera consistenza artistica è, dando per assodata l’idea che il presente sia grottescamente materialistico, vedere come mai noi esseri umani abbiamo ancora la capacità di provare gioia, carità, sentimenti di autentico legame, per cose che non hanno un prezzo? E queste capacità si possono far crescere? Se sì, come, e se no, perché?

Rendere strano ciò che è familiare

Il mondo postmoderno, in quanto mondo postindustriale e governato dai media, ha invertito una delle grandi funzioni storiche della letteratura, quella di fornire dati su culture e persone lontane. È stata la prima vera generalizzazione delle esperienze umane che i romanzi hanno tentato di compiere. Se cento anni fa uno abitava in un paesino in culo al mondo, nel cuore dell’Iowa, e non aveva idea di come si vivesse in India, il buon vecchio Kipling glielo andava a spiegare. E ovviamente tutti i critici post-strutturalisti adesso si prendono la rivincita sui pregiudizi colonialisti e fallocratici insiti nell’idea che quegli scrittori stessero presentando delle creature aliene invece che rappresentarle: indigeni balbettanti, concubine focose, il fardello dell’uomo bianco e via dicendo. Ebbene, per il lettore di oggi questa funzione di presentazione della letteratura si è rovesciata, dato che l’intero villaggio globale oggi viene presentato come familiare, e immediatamente accessibile per via elettronica: satelliti, microonde, gli intrepidi antropologi dei documentari della PBS, i coristi zulù di Paul Simon. È quasi come se avessimo bisogno degli scrittori per ripristinare l’ineluttabile.

Per la nostra generazione, il mondo intero sembra presentarsi come familiare, ma dato che questa è ovviamente un’illusione per quel che riguarda tutti gli aspetti più importanti degli individui, forse il compito di ogni forma di letteratura realistica è l’opposto di quello che era un tempo: non più rendere familiare ciò che è strano ma rendere di nuovo strano ciò che è familiare. Mi sembra che sia importante trovare dei modi per ricordare a noi stessi che gran parte di questa sensazione di familiarità è illusoria e mediata.

L’ironia postmoderna

Se ho un vero nemico, un patriarca contro cui effettuare il mio parricidio, sono probabilmente Barth e Coover e Burroughs, e perfino Nabokov e Pynchon. Perché, anche se la loro consapevole letterarietà, la loro ironia e la loro anarchia erano al servizio di scopi validissimi ed erano indispensabili per quell’epoca, il loro assorbimento estetico da parte della cultura consumistica americana ha avuto conseguenze terrificanti per gli scrittori e per chiunque. Il mio saggio E unibus pluram parla proprio di quanto sia diventata velenosa l’ironia postmoderna.

L’ironia e il cinismo erano esattamente la reazione che ci voleva all’ipocrisia americana degli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta. È questo che rende i primi scrittori postmoderni dei grandissimi artisti. Il grosso merito dell’ironia è che spacca le cose a metà e va a guardarle dall’alto in basso, così da rivelarne i difetti, le ipocrisie e i doppioni. Il sarcasmo e l’ironia sono ottimi modi per strappare le maschere e mostrare la realtà sgradevole che c’è sotto. Il problema è che, una volta che le regole dell’arte sono state smantellate, e una volta che le sgradevoli realtà diagnosticate dall’ironia sono state rivelate in pieno, «a quel punto» che facciamo? (…) A quanto pare, vogliamo solo continuare a mettere in ridicolo la realtà. L’ironia e il cinismo postmoderni diventano un fine a se stessi, una misura della sofisticatezza e della spregiudicatezza letteraria degli scrittori. Pochi artisti osano parlare dei modi in cui si possa tentare di aggiustare quello che non va, perché sembreranno sentimentali e ingenui agli smaliziati ironisti. L’ironia si è trasformata da un mezzo di liberazione in un mezzo di schiavitù.

Pronti a morire per toccare il cuore del lettore

Ho scoperto che la disciplina più difficile nella scrittura è cercare di partecipare al gioco senza lasciarsi sopraffare dall’insicurezza, dalla vanità e dall’egocentrismo. Mostrare al lettore che si è brillanti, spiritosi, pieni di talento e così via, cercare di piacere, sono cose che, anche lasciando da parte la questione dell’onestà, non hanno abbastanza calorie motivazionali per sostenere uno scrittore molto a lungo. Devi disciplinarti e imparare a dar voce solo alla parte di te che ama le cose che scrivi, che ama il testo a cui stai lavorando. Che ama e basta, forse.

Il talento è solo uno strumento. È come avere una penna che scrive invece di una che non scrive. Non sto dicendo che riesco costantemente a rimanere fedele a questi principi quando scrivo, ma mi sembra che la grossa distinzione fra grande arte e arte mediocre si nasconda nello scopo da cui è mosso il cuore di quell’arte, nei fini che si è proposta la coscienza che sta dietro il testo. Ha qualcosa a che fare con l’amore. Con la disciplina che ti permette di far parlare la parte di te che ama, invece che quella che vuole soltanto essere amata. Magari questa è una cosa che non fa molto fico dire, non lo so. Ma mi sembra una delle cose in cui riescono gli scrittori davvero grandi – da Carver a Cechov a Flannery O’Connor al Tolstoj della Morte di Ivan Il’ic al Pynchon dell’Arcobaleno della gravità – sia dare qualcosa al lettore. Quando il lettore si allontana dalla vera opera d’arte pesa di più di quando ci si è avvicinato. È più ricco. Tutta l’attenzione e l’impegno e lo sforzo che come scrittore richiedi al lettore non possono essere a tuo vantaggio, devono essere a suo vantaggio. Quello che è velenoso e deleterio, nell’ambiente culturale di oggi, è che rende tutto questo tanto spaventoso da dissuaderci a farlo. Un’opera davvero grande nasce probabilmente da una volontà di svelarci, di aprirci a livello spirituale ed emotivo in un modo che rischia di farci provare davvero qualcosa nel farlo. Significa essere pronti a morire, in un certo senso, pur di riuscire a toccare il cuore del lettore.

Le perle sono tratte da:

Larry McCaffery, An Interview with David Foster Wallace, Review of Contemporary Fiction, estate 1993;
Laura Miller, The SALON Interview — David Foster Wallace, 8 marzo 1996.

A couple of weeks ago I heard Joshua Ferris read George Saunders’ “Adams” on the New Yorker podcast.  I thought that this was the first time I had heard this amazing, incredibly unique author but after researching a bit I discovered that I had actually posted Saunders’ piece on Sarah Palin a year ago on facebook.  As Ferris notes, Saunders’ voice is unlike anything you’ve ever heard before.  His language and subject material is tough and often violent but balanced in such a delicate way.  “Adams” is a story about a man who goes crazy thinking about the perceived threat of his neighbor (an allegory for the Iraq War).   The best part about the New Yorker podcast is that they not only read the story but discuss it.  Ferris really sold me on Saunders so went to my local Staatsbibliothek to see what they had.

Last night I finished Pastoralia, a collection of short stories.  I won’t go through every story but I will say that the text is absolute brilliance.  The stories are disturbing, discomforting and funny.  Saunders’ prose reads like it has been constructed with the utmost purpose, with every word placed carefully.  His characters are flawed and living less-than-fulfilling lives which are also, amazingly, quite spectacular.  In “The End of FIRPO in the World,” the reader follows Cody, an allegedly mentally challenged boy, as he cycles around his neighborhood fantasizing about revenge and redemption against everyone who’s wronged him.  The story ends with a car crash and his bumbling fantasies mixed with the prayers of the man who hit him:

You are beautiful, beautiful, the stickman kept saying, long after the boy had stopped thrashing, God loves you, you are beautiful in His sight.

I read this story twice.  Saunders’ storytelling is a high-wire act of unbelievable events and enormous personalities and delicate, perfectly constructed prose.  So many times after reading a sentence or a paragraph I had to pause and think about the way all these fairly simple words have come together on the page.  Saunder’s writing is very verbal and it put together as someone might put together poetry or a speech.  The rhythm is simply divine.

Here’s the opening paragraph to “The Falls”:

Morse found it nerve-wracking to cross the St. Jude grounds just as school was being dismissed, because he felt that if he smiled at the uniformed Catholic children they might think he was a wacko or pervert and if he didn’t smile they might think he was an old grouch made bitter by the world, which surely, he felt, by certain yardsticks, he was.  Sometimes he wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t even a wacko of sorts, although certainly he wasn’t a pervert.  Of that he was certain.  Or relatively certain.  Being overly certain, he was relatively sure, was what eventually made one a wacko.  So humility was the thing, he thought, arranging his face into what he thought would pass for the expression of a man thinking fondly of his own youth, a face devoid of wackiness or perversion, humility was the thing.

By the way, as I’m writing this I’m going back and looking up the titles to the stories and getting all sorts of interesting ideas about the stories because of them.  I don’t generally go back and look at the title after reading the story and since I read the title beforehand, it usually has little meaning.  Maybe just intrigue.

Anyway, this is a book recommendation, or rather an author recommendation.  I think the Staabi may only have this one collection of Saunders so I may have to wait to read more.  Which is okay, I guess, since I also have David Mitchell’s Number9dream waiting for me…

New activity (from September to June) to learn more about North American literature through the short story genre. Participate by reading the selected short stories and attending the colloquium (usually the last Tuesday of the month at 2:30) directed by IIE professor Tracy Wood.

Participation is free; register at biblioteca@iie.es.

Stories from the series “Best American Short Stories” 2008 edition, published by Houghton Mifflin and with Salman Ruhsdie as editor . Find them also in the library ready to be printed.

Readings of the month:

“Admiral” by T.C. Boyle and “Puppy” by George Saunders

COLLOQUIUM: Tuesday, September 29th, 14:30 p.m.

Recommended links:

http://www.tcboyle.com/

http://www.georgesaundersland.com/

Syracuse, NY – Wednesday was the last day of newswriting (New 605), whew. Here’s how the final hours broke down:

• 8:21 a.m. - arrived at Manley South parking lot
• 8:22 a.m. - bus to campus arrives at parking lot
• 9 a.m. - hand in 1,000 word portfolio
• 9:30 – 11 a.m. – “Boot Camp Idol,” watched the finalists for Best Multimedia Project of the Semester. My project, “Mowing Green For Green,” was nominated
• 11:10 – 11:30 a.m. - Stroll around campus with Matt and Mr. Otero. Stops include Professor Saunders office and Crouse College
• 11:45 a.m. – lunch on the plaza with our professors

- east coast paper boy

It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? So much for a book a week… although were standing strong on a book a fortnight, and there are a couple of pre-pubs I’m waiting for the release date to post on, which will help catch us up some.

Don’t us Industry book fiends love our proof copies. ‘Oh this? It’s just a new book from work I’m reading. It’s not in the stores yet, I  managed to grab/borrow/steal from someone’s office/prise out of  my colleague’s overly possessive claws this uncorrected copy of [something brilliant you're going to be jealous of].’ I’m so flippant about reading copies I’ll tell friends I lend them to that they can just throw them in the recycling when they’re done. ‘It’s not even a real book…’

Yes, that’s right my literary pals, I’m a book chucker.

Are you shocked by that? Somewhat taken aback? Aligning me with the Third Reich? Cursing me with your shushing Nancy Pearl doll? I worship books like any prose-fearing citizen you can name, but I’m not necessarily possessive about the objects. I keep the books I have read and liked. I release those that I didn’t care for or which are ‘no use to me now’. Is that cold? Perhaps a little hyper-practical, as it’s usually done in a quest to make more shelf-room. Don’t get me wrong, there are certain books I would never be rid of on purpose, and I certainly suffer from thing-lust as much as the next bibliophile. For example I’m currently waving under everyone’s  nose my new copy of 1984. And I have a stunning illustrated version of Strunk and White given to me by a fellow editor who understands one’s passion for long-standing cryptic grammatical texts. It’s just that I don’t feel that way about every book that’s ever been written.

Everyone had their own feelings on how they judge a book worth keeping in their collection. For example, if a book is on a shelf then I’ve read it. My bookshelves are filled with the trophies of my literacy. Others like to fill their shelves with potential or a worldly selection. Read hard or die discusses this idea of possession and much, much more…

Are books precious? Indeed. In fact, I’m a card-carrying member of the books-can-change-lives club. I have a resounding middle-class, well-meaning WASPy belief that being literate is one of the greatest powers a person can have. If I was in The Wire, I’d be a do-gooder hanging out with the Deacon trying to give those corner kids copies of To Kill a Mockingbird. I know a lot of people can’t bear the thought of throwing away books, which is great, because it means these little rectangles of tam-creamy still hold an important place in our world. I blame working in publishing for my ability to let go books. I don’t put the same value on the bound-up sheets of paper I once did. I oversee the printing of thousands and thousands of copies of books and so I think I can ‘always get another copy’. Of course, if  you tried to take my signed copy of Sleeping Dollby Jeffery Deaver, I’d have to gut you like a fish…

One author, whose books I would never rid myself of is George Saunders. One reason I have raved on above is because I knew I’d fail to write intelligently enough about Mr Saunders and his amazingly entertaining, hilarious, pointed, imaginative, realistically-conversationally awkward, touching, stimulating, always and ever impressive, short stories. I feel intellectually refreshed after reading his stories. And I’ve had a good chuckle. You could read a whole text by some quasi-political think-tanker about the evils of consumerism, mass media, economic rationalism, advertising, profit over people philosophies, and governments using military might first, or you could read one of George Saunders’ stories. And they’re not only poignant, they’re funny. Some are downright silly. And beneath the satiric commentary and often terrifying imaginations of our future world, is a touching fondness for humankind.

When I was studying for my masters a few years back, I failed to convince my classmates and tutor of the brilliance and hilarity of Mr Saunders’ books (though they thought The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip was cute – which it is, though much more). Worse for them.

“You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right
all right, all right”

…. The Beatles

WBC 09

On the immediate horizon, this week-end in fact, is the second annual three day Wine Bloggers’ Conference at the Flamingo Resort Hotel in Santa Rosa, CA, organized by the Open Wine Consortium, with the help of numerous citizen wine bloggers. Both Napa and Sonoma wineries and vintners’ associations are involved in the support and participation of this year’s conference. So, it seems as though at least in our backyard the Northern California contingent of the wine business has discovered that wine bloggers may matter. Given the general marketing conservatism that seems endemic in these circles, this is somewhat surprising, if not revolutionary, even in this philosophically and politically progressive geography. However, what’s surprising, well not surprising perhaps but inducing a significant feeling of disappointment, is the raising tide of ad hominem attacks on the loosely confederated and decentralized wine blogger community from admired members of the traditional wine print media. As Scott Rosenberg writes in ‘say everything‘, a concise history of the blogging phenomena, “saying that ninety percent of blogs are crap‘ is way too close to implying that “ninety percent of people are crap.’ It seems a tad disingenuous to address the tired and the vapid, and then to paint the whole on the failings of the few.  S.I Hayakawa must be turning over in his grave.

Revolution or Evolution

The tipping point seems to be tied to technology. Anyone around for the infamous Rodney King citizen video, shot on a camcorder and seen almost immediately around the world and resulting in the tragic 1992 Los Angeles Riots, knew that the times had changed forever. All the major news networks immediately began requesting, and still request, citizen videos, now likely shot on video enabled smart phones. Mr. Rosenberg tracks the origins of blogging back to Swarthmore dropout Justin Hall, who in the early 90’s began documenting the minutiae of his life, with links to points of interest found surfing online. Justin’s sharing his diary with his growing cult following lit the pilot light with a receptive online community. But the blogging avalanche seems to be tied squarely to the dot.bomb post millenium period, so familiar to many of us who lived in the various tech corridors around the country. Evan Williams, yes the Twitter guy, was a co-founder of Pyra Labs home to a program called ‘Blogger,’ who with some last ditch VC dollars, moved the company’s servers into his apartment keeping the service alive for the then 100,000+ registered users. Within a year’s time more than 700,000 citizen bloggers had a voice, their voice. This created significant buzz and attracted outside interest, Mr. Williams sold his company to Google in 2003 and went on to co-found Twitter in 2006.

The confluence of technology – the internet, word processing and graphic apps, moving to faster and faster broadband and increasingly cost effective wi-fi and wireless solutions and the rapid development of computer technology have all contributed to this democratization of information dissemination. And, please save the lectures on the sanctity of traditional journalism in this age of what Syracuse journalism professor George Saunders refers to as ‘The Braindead Megaphone’ That shark has long been jumped. So, please get off your high horses, bury that hubris under your tomatoes, and join the movement. Oh it might not be a revolution, more an evolutionary change, but it is a citizen movement and, well, you’re no longer in charge.

Some Last Words

Oh, I know – a short post. Well there’s more to say and I’ll be blogging live daily from WBC 09. So, please stay tuned. I want to extend my kudos to Hardy Wallace on landing the Really Goode Job, to Rick Bakas, who was an early contributor to this blog, and hired to be the Director of Social Media Marketing at St Supery, and to Ashley Bellview, who was hired by someone for whom I have the greatest respect, Paul Mabray of VinTank. Good luck and best wishes to all. And wineries, there are still a number of very talented unattached Really Goode Job applicants. Don’t miss this opportunity to bring talent into your wine company.

Also, kudos to Josh Hermsmeyer, aka Pinotblogger, founder of the Capozzi Winery, citizen wine blogger and the developer of the vineyard to cellar iPhone app Juice. Josh has now developed a second application, this time it’s hosted and called Help a Winery Out, similar to the established Help A Reporter Out, but for wine. So, if you’re a citizen wine blogger/reviewer check out helpawinery.com, take a look and sign up. The service is free, always will be, and is meant to bring citizen wine reviewers seeking wines to review together with wineries looking to target them. At press time I was unable to secure confirmation from the partner working on the winery interface, but be assured it’s a respected and valued member of the wine community. This program will help to professionalize the interface between citizen wine reviewers and wineries.

Note: Copyright © 2009 Think Wine Marketing® All rights reserved.

What’s the Karmic equivalent of Purell?
What essential tool(s) are needed to carve Roma Plastilina modeling clay?
Will there be a Jay Electronica effect? Through intelligent, inimitable rhymes, can this M.C. spur listeners to vote with their ears & wallets and demand more innovation in Hip Hop?
Is there another living short story writer that has the stylistic range of George Saunders?

The Los Angeles Times’ book blog, Jacket Copy, lists 61 essential postmodern reads. Lists are designed to be argued over, so there’s no real point in interrogating all the selections. One thing, though: Reading Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier a few weeks back, I didn’t think for a moment about whether it was “postmodern” or not. At the risk of invoking some ungainly term like “post-postmodern,” it may be that the postmodern novel is just something that happened, not something that’s happening—a method of wrestling with an increasingly mediated existence in the years before mediated existences became commonplace, before a ten-year-old kid could embed video and songs on a MySpace page and make virtual friends with some stranger in Bali. A lot of the stuff on the list, like I Am Not Sidney Poitier, seems more like metafiction than postmodernism, which aren’t synonymous terms. At any rate, I’m sure one of those ten-year-olds will grow up to write a novel that sorts it all out for us.

Scott McLemee considers the new biography of Saul Bellow’s ill-fated colleague, Isaac Rosenfeld.

A book on Flannery O’Connor’s Catholicism is in the works.

And a film based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth might be.

Also in the works: A documentary about bad writing. The trailer features George Saunders delivering one of the smartest and most succinct explanations of what bad writing is that I’ve heard.

The Ransom Center has an online exhibit of artifacts from Norman Mailer’s coverage of Apollo 11.

And Ted Gioia considers whether the moon landing was science fiction writers’ finest hour, and one from which it never quite recovered.

There’s too much damn fiction from Montana writers coming out. (Though I did enjoy Kevin Canty’s new collection, Where the Money Went.)

Lionel Shriver: “I probably had more reading stamina and much loftier literary tastes at the age of 16 than I do now.”

“I am a man in my mid-50’s and starting to feel the weight of the years. I am wondering if there are some good books for me to read that address my station in life. I have never read any Updike or Roth, but I have the impression these authors address the concerns of the aging male. Do you have recommendations?“

The Elegant Variation has just wrapped up a four-part interview with Joseph O’Neill.

Museums dedicated to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway are celebrating anniversaries.

H.L. Mencken once inscribed a book for Carl Van Vechten with a list of the kinds of alcohol he drank during the three years he was writing it. It’s a long list.

1.) George Saunders’ article on Dubai, “The New Mecca.” Originally written for GQ, this essay alternates between gee-whiz appreciation for Dubai’s apparent perfection of the luxury industry (villas with private swimming pools, a seven-star hotel shaped like a sailboat, a theme resort built to replicate an ancient Arab village, complete with wind towers and 2.3 miles of fake creeks) and distinctly non-preachy, humanist concern with the wide range of issues connected to the flourishing city: class, racism, post-9/11 international relations, workers’ rights. Whenever I read a travel essay like this, particulary from a tony magazine, I pretty much expect the writer to hate the place they went and do a lot of hand-wringing.  What I liked best about this essay is that Saunders has a good time, just by staying open. He talks to everybody; he’s not too self-conscious to take pleasure in a fun ride at a themed water park or in eating champagne and strawberries while watching a desert sunset. His trip leads him to feel, overall, positive about the human race. I guess you could argue he engages in some hand-wringing, but it doesn’t feel like hand-wringing, just genuine concern and curiosity. The essay appears in his collection The Braindead Megaphone; you can listen to an excerpt here.

2.) What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland and pretty much all the poems by Tony Hoagland. Doesn’t it seem weird that poets didn’t start writing about parties till like, the 1950’s? Actually, maybe they did but I haven’t read those poems, it feels like Frank O’Hara was the first person to commit to it and before that the narrator was always on a cliff or addressing the beloved or, as Anthony Hecht points out, both. One of the sections of What Narcissism Means to Me is titled “Social Life,” which is telling: If you like your poems funny-sad with lots of people in them, and I do, Hoagland is your man, standing a bit apart from the crowd but nonetheless invested in the party’s goings-on. He’s sometimes frustrated by what he sees (“What I like about the trees is how / they do not talk about the failure of their parents / and what I like about the grasses is that / they are not grasses in recovery”), sometimes repelled, but he stays connected. As he writes in the terrific poem “Personal,” which appears in this month’s issue of Poetry: “Don’t take it personal, they said;/ but I did, I took it all quite personal.” And how.

3.) Terra Firma: poems by Thomas Centolella. I got this book this afternoon, pulled at random off the shelf at Smith Family Bookstore because I liked the title, and took it with me to read by the river that I am obsessed with, aka the Willamette. It won the American Book Award in 1991, so I’m kind of late to the game, but the other things I’ve listed here are also not exactly new releases. Anyway, guys, these poems are so perfect. They’re written in narrative form–I’ve been reading the book straight through instead of skipping around as usual, because the poems pull me along like a novel does–but with an attentive ear to rhythm and sound. I don’t really know how to describe them, they’re so sprawling and occupy so many different moods, but it’s the kind of book that you read and you feel better, like talking to an old friend makes you feel better when you’re in a new place and nobody knows who you are yet. I guess that’s it: I feel like we know each other. Here’s the first poem in the book, mostly because I can’t choose and the beginning’s always a very good place to start. Julie Andrews never lies.

Transparency

That year everything went transparent.
First the buildings. Their concrete and granite,
their monumental marble, all seemed like
cardboard facades one stiff wind would flatten
Their faces. What they registered was never more fleeting,
and what astonishments lay hidden behind them–
space shuttle, sonata form, world series, mortal sin–
were, after all, only fabrications of flesh and blood:
perishable, pitiable, nothing more.
Worst of all was hope. Like wine
turned back to water, hope was weak
and easily seen through.

It was something of a miracle, then, that one day
when, dwarfed by the library’s massive vault,
penned in by words intended for posterity,
I stared at the hand holding open my book
and saw it was only flesh and blood,
but perfect. The greenish veins, the knuckles
and grimy nails, the fine reddish blond hairs ablaze,
even the tiny white scar left by an army knife when I was seven–
my hand was nothing to be improved upon.

And I looked up from the book that had been failing miserably
to enlighten or uplift me, and among the dreary stacks
and institutional quiet, I was drawn
to human faces–each one holding the weight of a world
carefully chosen or acquired at random,
faces open to me now as any book–
and one by one, I began to read them.