To contain it so gently

The first time I saw him he had barrettes in his hair, wore a huge hoodie and big pants and looked like a cross between a raver and a boy in a fairy tale. The last time I saw him he was hooked up to a ventilator—all tubes, neck brace, IV drip. The first time he may have been standing outside our dorm, smoking, trying to look fucked-up enough to make the right friends. It was about time for me. Neil was a year younger than me, a freshman who landed at Oberlin one year after I did. I wonder if I picked him because he kind of looked like a girl, except he wouldn’t have been a very pretty girl with his deep-set eyes and slightly big nose, which were exactly the best things about his face. And full lips. But he was small-framed, so maybe less threatening as a male specimen, and more familiar—the city boys I’d grown up with tended to be shorter, slighter than boys from outside the city (or maybe it was just that everyone swam in their baggy clothes). When he didn’t wear those barrettes, he would have to brush his hair out of his eyes.

The last time his eyes were sealed shut and blue, blood dripped down from the corner of one. The first afternoon in the hospital I thought he could hear us talking to him. It almost looked like he smiled or nodded but I can’t remember if his eyes were open that day or if the doctors opened them at the end or if they never did. I vaguely remember a blank stare, the big brown eyes. But mostly that blue, purple. All bruise. Life support. What is that?

I think of Neil sitting on the ground, feet tucked under him, knees pulled up to his chin. Ratty jeans bottoms that dragged on the ground when he walked. I think of us making eggs in my frying pan in the dorm kitchen on special occasions, pretending to be grownups or kids at home even though any food we bought had to be labeled (when someone ate my Phish Food I went ballistic). I think of when he first read me Rosy Ear by Zbigniew Herbert, a poem he wrote about Achilles, and the drawings he left in my Longman Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, large-eyed boys and girls with spiky, misshapen hair next to lines by C.D. Wright and Tom Lux.  When I went to his house while friends were collecting his things (when do they become “personal effects”?), I took his copies of Frank Lima and Zbigniew Herbert, whose work he’d introduced me to, hoping I’d find notes in the dog-eared pages, or more of his drawings.

The hospital said it was a broken leg. Then they called back and said come right away. They wouldn’t tell us much because we weren’t family. We sat and smoked in the “Sobriety Garden” overlooking the river and the FDR Drive. We got drinks and waited a few hours for his mom to arrive. I picked a piece of mint in the garden, or maybe that was one of the next days. It was unseasonably warm and nominally “better” to be outside than pacing the hall waiting for news, trading visitor’s passes as more friends arrived. There was also sitting in his room, listening to the machines’ accordion of air, heave and collapse, the occasional beep. Looking at his cheeks, his skull wrapped, his feet. Touching a hand I hadn’t in years.

At his funeral service I read from a postcard he wrote me about brushing his teeth with soap and drinking whiskey straight from the bottle while on a camping trip in Yosemite with one of his friends Gabe (there were two), but why was I one of the readers? I couldn’t have been to him what he was to me, a first in that way. He lost his virginity years before we even met, so I probably started out to him as just another person to sleep with. The card he made for my twentieth birthday, after we’d been together on and off for many months, had a drawing of a slim, long-haired girl. I wanted to believe it was a drawing of me, but I was also weirdly jealous of the drawing, figured it was of someone else or some dream-girl I could never be, like the girl in a screenplay he wrote—the perfect girl drawn on a sheet of acid. But the card said he loved me and “everyday it astounds me that you tolerate my nonsense.” Neil was my training for a lot of nonsense. Neil was the original nonsense.

It happened in a dorm, naturally, the shittiest dorm on campus, where we lived down the hall from one-another. (My roommate and I had gotten second to last draw in the housing lottery.) It was in his room—his roommate was probably out with his role-playing game crew. I think we first kissed the night of the annual “Red Party” (one of the school’s most frat-like events), after talking in the terribly-lit cinderblock hallway for a while post-party.

Around that time my friend Sarah threw a “tequila pajama party” in her room in the all-women’s dorm. We didn’t actually sleep over, and not all of us even wore our PJs, but I drank tequila for the first time and wound up puking all night thanks to a shots and beer one-two punch. Sarah is known for being blunt as hell and asking slightly inappropriate questions in front of large groups of people, which is perfect for slumber parties at any age. We played a variation of “Truth or Truth” or “Skeletons in the Closet” and Sarah asked everyone who was a virgin, or not a virgin, to raise their hands. It was a fairly even split, but I was still determined to get rid of it pronto. It was getting ridiculous, and there was a known shortage of straight (even straightish) men at our school.

We probably used a condom from the vending machine downstairs. I can’t remember much else other than feeling relieved, and I’m sure it was incredibly awkward except he knew what he was doing compared to me, and he was very sweet. I was glad to get it over with already. I probably did a little dance in my head like Tom Hanks in Big when he finally gets with his grown-up lady girlfriend and orders coffee, black, the next morning.

Right after the big event, or maybe it was a couple nights later, Neil and I took a walk over to Fairchild, the nicer dorm nearby with a semi-vegan food coop in the basement. Sarah was standing outside. Could she tell? Did I signal to her in girl-speak? I was relieved to be delivered into the safe company of a friend, or mixed company at least. I also felt some kind of small triumph. Check that off the growing-up list. That I soon fell in love with Neil was a benefit or inevitability (given how much of a romantic I am and how much of an under-the-radar charmer Neil was) that I hadn’t counted on but I’m sure I secretly wished for.

When you can’t see someone, can’t physically be near them again, it makes you want to speak to those you can, keep them in your life in some capacity no matter what. Writing to those who are gone magnifies the line between the possible and the impossible. To address them—does it soothe or just call up the ghosts to keep you from sleeping? It’s the kind of sentiment Neil might scoff at or at least express more eloquently. When I read the cards Neil wrote to me, he is still addressing me. We are not back in the time when we were in love, and I don’t wish to be, but he calls me “you,” he calls us “we.” He writes, “I’ve seen beautiful things. I’ll never be able to describe them, but I hope someday we can come here together.” He frames that time I learned how to share space, choose words carefully, nurture and be nurtured, hurt and be hurt. The main character in Cut Out Paper Heart, Neil’s screenplay, eats the entire sheet of acid, not tab by tab, but devouring the whole thing in ragged pieces, chews up the girl, not swallowing her whole but still consuming her entirely—by the same token she consumes him from the inside out. Neil was that kind of love, albeit in a less menacing or cannibalistic way.

I’ve seen Neil more in the past year in my sleep than in the past almost-decade since we finished school, even though we lived a five-minute walk from each other in Brooklyn for several years. In the dreams, mostly he is telling a story and making me and everyone laugh, maybe doing his impression of an old man, maybe talking about otters or llamas. I was always competitive with and inspired by Neil, but he could out-word me any day. He could call something “grand” and get away with it or say, “I can’t wait to see you. We’ll make chicken soup,” in a letter. The last time I saw him conscious was at a party the night he got hit by a car; I had also run into him the night before that after not seeing him in a while. He had just gotten back from a few months away, practicing Thai boxing, about which he was writing a beautiful blog. Even though he was drunk at the party, he still managed to say something sharp, observant, and sweet to me in our brief conversation about my band’s performance that night. I wish I remembered his exact words.

I don’t remember much about the first time we slept together, but I do remember one of the last times. Fall of my junior year. We rode our bikes out to the golf course at the edge of town. It was misty—very The End of the Affair (a movie we saw that year), but with bad late-nineties fashion and neither of us looking nearly as attractive as Ralph Fiennes or Julianne Moore. Most of our last sexual encounters involved long walks or bike rides, tossing stones into the reservoir, me giving him a flat-eyed look in conversation to avoid saying what I really wanted to. At the time I was newly enamored with Rilke’s poetry, especially the Duino Elegies. In his Fourth Elegy, Rilke writes, “Aren’t lovers always / coming to sheer drop-offs / inside each other / they who promised themselves / open spaces, good hunting / and a homeland?” Sure, some of it was late adolescent hormones coupled with a penchant for drama on both our parts, but it was Neil who began to show me how to navigate the cliffs of intimate relationships, to search for adventure and a home. His postcard from Yosemite said, “I want so badly to show them to you,” the new landscapes he had seen and started exploring. I have been looking ever since.

Note: The title of this piece comes from the Rainer Maria Rilke poem Fourth Elegy as translated by David Young in Duino Elegies

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Rebecca Keith’s poems and other writings have appeared in Best New Poets (2009), The Laurel Review, The Rumpus, The Awl, BOMBlog, Storyscape, The Millions, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, was a semi-finalist for the 2010 “Discovery”/Boston Review poetry contest and has received honors from the Atlantic Monthly and BOMB magazine. A native of downtown New York, Rebecca is a founder, curator, and host of Mixer Reading and Music series at Cakeshop. She also sings and plays guitar and keyboards in the Roulettes and Butchers & Bakers. To contain it so gently originally appeared in the seventh issue of Dossier.

Image: Adam Frelin, White Line, fluorescent fixtures and bulbs, steel cable, generator, 240′ long, 2005.

Awful Math

The commotion surrounding the awful math grew to a hollering, and soon Jenny pitched in an extra twenty dollars saying, “I’ll just give more, that’s all.” But that wasn’t all, and once we were in the car, she was off on a steady pace about which one of my moron friends was going to be wheeled out on a gurney from the force struck beneath his brow. I said, “Calm down,” but she turned back stern and spit, “How many twenties would it take for you to make your spidery arms into fists and cuff those assholes?” and I said, “Four,” thinking of a hundred, and she said, “That’s it? Eighty bucks?” and I said, “Oh wait,” then I said, “Five,” and she said, “You’re just as dumb as the rest of them,” and folded her arms tight like stuck drawer. By then we’d driven out so far that we were once again surrounded by cedars, tall and unflappable, and I tried to think about money and how it was made.

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Sophie Rosenblum’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, New Letters, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is currently finishing her first novel, which was recently a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. You can find links to more of her writing at www.sophierosenblum.com.

Photograph: Spruce Pond, by Bob Gates.

One of the great moments in Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan’s long-awaited and under-publicized two-and-a-half-hour film, is when high school student and protagonist Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) approaches Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon), a well-meaning math teacher she had sex with, as he walks with a female colleague. Abruptly, Lisa tells the two teachers that she had an abortion. Mr. Aaron, who had given into young Lisa’s advances just a few weeks beforehand, tells her she should tell the father, whoever he is. Lisa says that it probably doesn’t matter, the guy is probably sorry. Mr. Aaron says that it doesn’t matter if he’s sorry, that doesn’t mean anything. The guy needs to own up to what he’s done.

The scene shows Lisa as a character in the mode of Hamlet. The story is about Lisa’s coming to terms with her sexuality and her thinking about culpability. Margaret has to make a big decision, and she goes about seeking the knowledge necessary to make this decision in a variety of ways. Approaching Mr. Aaron resembles Hamlet’s attempt to figure out if his stepfather is guilty of killing his father by staging a play and watching his reaction.

Margaret is the story of Upper West Side teenager Lisa Cohen who distracts MTA bus driver Gerry Marretti (Mark Ruffalo) by flirtatiously shouting to him about his cowboy hat as he drives a Manhattan bus. The driver runs a red light, accidentally killing Monica (Allison Janney), a middle-aged female pedestrian. Lisa lies to the police, covering up for the bus driver, and says that the light was green, when it was really red. As the film progresses, Lisa starts to think she made a mistake. She asks every person in her life who she respects whether or not she should go back to the police and tell them she lied. It is the best friend of the deceased—whose name Lisa got from making some phone calls—who eventually gets Lisa to revise her initial statement, saying it’s her responsibility to tell the truth.

Lisa does, and the film explores the question: Is it Lisa’s responsibility to tell the truth? Won’t she be hurting the bus driver, who has a family to raise and protect?

The film’s fidelity to exploring and ultimately answering these questions is one of its many strengths. It is a coming-of-age drama, but a sophisticated one. Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan seems genuinely concerned with tracking Lisa’s consciousness, watching her as she considers the situation and learns.  Nearly every scene involving Lisa shows her worldview coming up against someone else’s and Lonergan writes each scene with both knowledge of his characters and real verve. The film’s characters are all intelligent and idiosyncratic. We do see the characters’ foibles through what they say, but one never gets the feeling that Lonergan feels anything but compassion for them.

Lonergan’s subtlety and cleverness as a writer is exemplified in one scene between Lisa’s single mother Joan (J. Smith-Cameron) and her love interest, Ramon (Jean Reno). The two go to an opera, at Ramon’s behest, and the show ends with tuxedoed audience members shouting “Bravi!” “Bravi!” On their walk out, Joan comments on how pretentious the Americans are who shout “Bravii!” Ramon explains that it is customary in Italy to shout “Bravi” because it is the plural of ‘bravo.’

JOAN:  It’s just so pretentious. “Bravi!” “Bravi!” Why can’t they just say bravo?

RAMON:  Well it’s the plural.

JOAN:  I know—

RAMON:  It’s the plural of “Bravo.” It’s what they say to acknowledge the ensemble.

JOAN:  No, I know it’s correct, it just—don’t you think there was something a little pretentious about those people?

RAMON:  Pretentious?

Here, Lonergan subtly dramatizes the new couple’s inability to connect. As one watches the film, it becomes more and more clear that, in addition to the expansion of Lisa’s consciousness, it’s the development of relationships that is driving the movie forward.

Lonergan imbues each of his characters with sparkling intelligence, particularly Lisa, and this makes for exciting and often combative interactions. So often in the film, we don’t know who to root for. When Lisa argues with her mother, Joan, or the deceased’s best friend, Emily (Jeannie Berlin), with whom Lisa eventually partners to bring a lawsuit against the city, it’s difficult to say which of them is acting irrationally. Lonergan isn’t pursuing a simplistic idea of youth being wiser than adults, but he does show the messiness of relationships and the fallibility of people in general, no matter how intelligent they are.  Most effectively, he dramatizes how difficult it is for a child to sort through the varying worldviews held by the adults by whom she is surrounded.

Consider this interaction between Lisa and Emily, the executive of the deceased’s estate. Here, Lisa explains that when she held the dying Monica in her arms, the woman mistook her for her deceased daughter (coincidentally, also named Lisa).

LISA: But then when I found out her daughter was dead, ever since then I keep having this really strong feeling that some way, for those last five minutes I kind of was her daughter. You know? Like maybe that’s the reason I was there: Like in some weird way, this obviously amazing woman got to see her daughter again for a few minutes, right before she died.

EMILY (very dry): I see.  And is she still inhabiting your body? Or did she go right back to the spirit world after it was over?

LISA:  I didn’t mean she was literally inhabiting my body. I don’t believe in all that stuff at all.

EMILY: I don’t give a fuck what you believe in.

LISA:  Oh my god!  Why are you so mad at me!?

EMILY:  Because this is not an opera!

LISA (flushing): What? You think I think this is an opera?

EMILY:  Yes!

LISA:  You think I’m making this into a dramatic situation because I think it’s dramatic?!?

EMILY: I think you’re very young.

LISA:  What does that have to do with anything? If anything I think it means I care more than someone who’s older! Because this kind of thing has never happened to me before!

EMILY:  No, it means you care more easily! There’s a big difference! Except that it’s not you who it’s happening to!

LISA: Yes it is!  I know I’m not the one who was run over—

EMILY: That’s right, you weren’t. And you’re not the one who died of leukemia, and you’re not the one who just died in an earthquake in—Algeria!  But you will be. Do you understand me? You will be. And it’s not an opera and it’s not dramatic.

LISA:  I’m well aware of that!

EMILY:  And this first-blush phony deepness of yours is worth nothing.

The scene starts to wind down when Lisa tells Emily she’s being ‘strident.’ Lisa isn’t sure about her usage of the word—she claims that she didn’t know exactly what it meant, and that she must have misused it.  But Emily is being strident. She also has a point—Lisa does need to be aware that this situation is affecting others more than her, that she is not the center of the universe. But Emily could stand to work on her delivery. Lisa is forced to learn two things here: one of them is about herself, and the other is about Emily.

The brilliance of this film lies in that we sort through the moral dilemma with Lisa; we grow and learn with her.

It is a grueling, glorious and enlightening experience and, for my money, the best one offered in the cinema today.

Eric Rosenblum is the founder, editor and host of www.theartsinnyc.com.  Eric teaches writing and English at Pratt Institute. His writing has appeared in Guernica Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reader and Playboy.com.

Tonight, catch three amazing writers all reading together in one place- Dossier contributor Joseph Salvatore (whose book To Assume A Pleasing Shape was nominated for the 2011 Story Prize) and fellow Dossier contributor Chiara Barzini (whose debut Sister Stop Breathing is getting all types of love) and Catherine Lacey (who doesn’t contribute to Dossier yet but I guess maybe she should) will all be putting on the ritz at Pacific Standard, one of the California coolest- but in New York- places to have a reading.

It goes down at 7pm at Pacific Standard, located at 82 Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.

My new favorite blog is Bookshelf Porn, created by Anthony Dever. It makes me feel better that I had over 40+ boxes of books when I recently moved and makes me think that daydreaming about what my next bookshelves will look like (I haven’t unpacked yet) or hoping someone will buy me a Sapien bookcase for my birthday is normal behavior. I can’t lie, I have been reading on a Kindle as of late and this website makes me want to smash it with a hammer. (Once I finish what I am reading, of course.) I particularly loved the video from the Toronto bookstore Type at bottom. Way better than a toy store coming alive. That was always creepy. Postscript: If you live in this house below with the tree in the window, I would very much like to be your friend.

All Images re-posted from Bookshelf Porn

Jonathan Lethem is the best-selling author of Gun with Occasional Music, Motherless Brooklyn, and Fortress of Solitude. He has recently re-located from his home in Brooklyn to Southern California to teach fiction at Pomona College. Rachel Elizabeth Jones joins him on campus to discuss his two latest novels, his trajectories to California, what “hipster” actually means, and how he finds his new life as a professor. His new collection of essays The Ecstasy of Influence is released being released this month.

Rachel Elizabeth Jones: Could you talk a little bit about your trajectory to California?

Jonathan Lethem: There’s a cartoon version of my trajectory, that’s been disseminated lately: uprooted-from-Brooklyn-comes-to-Pomona College. In truth I’ve been itinerant. I’ve moved from New York over and over again. It’s a place I love, and I obviously have a charged relationship to it, but it’s been a ritual to leave it behind, or to try. This is my second California life. I lived in the Bay Area for ten years in my twenties. I’m old. That was another life completely, but an important part of my life. It was where I invented myself as writer. I wrote my first three novels and became a published writer in that time. At one point I never thought I needed to go back to New York, or that I was likely to. So this present narrative seems quite ironic.

Rachel: You started college in Vermont. How’d you find that?

Jonathan: Yes, I went up to college in Vermont, at Bennington. It’s something I tried to explain in a number of different places, how influential and significant my brief college career could be, despite how quickly it might seem that I’d bounced away. I only finished three semesters. I was ambivalent about being a college student. I’m not sure I would’ve stuck anywhere.

Rachel: Was it expected that you go to college?

Jonathan: Well it is for anyone, right? Yet I didn’t expect it of myself, not completely. In high school I was obsessed with the Beat Generation script, that of self-invention and running away from things, and wanting to become a writer by going off into a garret, or immersing in raw experiences, like hitchhiking – that would serve as my college. At one point, quite absurdly because my temperament is not that of a student of Zen Buddhism, I thought, “No, not college, I’ll go off and enlist in a Zen monastery.” None of these things prevented my applying to some colleges and then going off to one, but they did seed the ground for the disappearance of my college career shortly after. I felt there were these other live prospects. Whether they were just in my head or not, I’d told myself that not all writers began with school, and since that’s what I wanted to do, I’d fool with these other possibilities. It looks very decisive in retrospect, it might appear that it worked out, in retrospect – neither was true at the time. I didn’t publish a novel until ten years after left college. I was a book store clerk.

From the distance of the East Coast, California is confusing, and you think everything is in one place. You receive a garbled impression, and mine was especially garbled. Yet the Bay Area, when I arrived, had for me the advantage of familiarity. The frozen-in-time 1960s quality of Berkeley reminded me of my parents’ milieu, and I fell into it very easily. I was sort of a vagabond student, and Berkeley is a place that is very congenial for vagabond students.

Rachel: Did you find that when you were in Berkeley that you would talk about New York?

Jonathan: Sure. I played the role of the New Yorker in California immediately, in a way that I wouldn’t have in New York. My street cred wasn’t really so impressive. I was a weird mixed bag of bohemian and Mid-westerner. None of my affiliations in New York seemed very clear or firm, but once I left, my affiliation as a New Yorker became something I could wear on my sleeve. It gave me a card to play. It was my way of continuing to think about New York. Before I really investigated that material, before I lived there again or wrote about it, I had some getting over New York to do. But I didn’t mind taking credit for being from a famously tough place.

Rachel: I recently read You Don’t Love Me Yet. What experiences did you use to inform that work?

Jonathan:The setting of that book is sleight-of-hand. I transposed my time in San Francisco in my late twenties and early thirties, when I was approximately the age of those characters. I spent a lot of time in the Haight Ashbury and the Mission, at a time when those places were funky and interesting. I was even sort of in a band, despite the fact that I’m not qualified by any talent to be in a band.

Rachel: What was the name of the band?

Jonathan: We never settled on a clear name. It bore an unworkable name for a while. “Emma the Crayon.” Which probably proves how devoted to self-erasure this band was. I drew some of energy for that book from my San Francisco days, living in neighborhoods that were being gentrified by tattooed kids. And simply the way you live at that age – anywhere and nowhere. I wrote about Brooklyn in a way that demanded a lot of cultural and sociological and political and historical specificity. Yet I got away with doing a Silverlake book – assuming you think I got away with it — because I wrote about characters who weren’t thinking about their cultural placement, or the meaning of urban life. I wrote about Los Angeles from the point of view of characters who might have actually been living in a bohemian quadrant of Minneapolis, for all they knew. It was a deliberate attempt to do something more playful and irresponsible, specifically in the relationship of my fiction to place. I’d just come off a a decade writing these grounded and accountable pieces about Brooklyn. I wanted to flip a switch and be full of shit. To write about a place that I didn’t know well and make it up and get away with it.

Rachel: So speaking of Silver Lake, and speaking of being in your twenties in the Bay, talk to me about what “hipster” means. At this point it seems like an insult.

Jonathan: I’ve watched this cultural formation in the past decade – hipster-shame – and it strikes me as a red herring, a way of channelling disgruntlement that ought to be reserved for greater evils into morose self-loathing on the part of people who are actually all more or less complicit. On the other hand, a defense of hipsterism isn’t something I’d want to sink a lot of stock into, because it doesn’t actually matter at all. Either way, it’s exactly one of the least important things you could be worried about, whether or not it’s shameful to be a hipster. I suppose I’m drawn perversely to entrench myself behind the term, the way Quakers or the Queer community adopted a term of abuse and made it their own. Why this horror of hipsterism? It’s basically people not wanting to be themselves, not wanting to listen to the music they listen to, or be apprehended dressing the way they dress or feeling the way they feel. A hipster is mostly just an unfinished person – I think that’s where the shame really comes in. People are eager not to be counted among the unfinished. They want to be something real, something complete. But you know what? It’s okay to be unfinished.

Rachel: What is the relationship between the idea of the hipster and cultural critique? You use a lot of cultural critique and you seem to poke fun at it while still holding a deep respect for it. For example, how Perkus Tooth in Chronic City gets lost in movies, or how Bedwin in You Don’t Love Me Yet gets lost in this one movie and chooses one tiny part to focus on – that sort of obsession.

Jonathan: I look at a lot of things through the lens of cultural hunger, cultural voracity, cultural obsession. My characters often identify dangerously, even overwhelmingly, with their affiliations. If you paraphrase the usual critique of the hipster it might be that their cultural affiliations are all too lightly held, that they’re received notions. That they’ve decorated themselves with cultural style, but it’s not a life or death battle for them. I doubt that’s usually true; that’s one of the ways I would defend hipsterism. People’s tastes matter keenly to them, even if they’ve been made to feel embarrassed about them and brandish them with a degree of irony. Anyway, for better or worse, I’m helplessly on the team of the super-taster – he for whom salt is too salty, sugar too sweet, and cultural treasure too precious, for whom it is as crucial as oxygen. I’ve always been very easily colonized by the books and music and movies I love. It’s not only extremely intense for me; it becomes my way of thinking about nearly anything. I use the artworks I love as a lens, or perhaps a crutch, or a tool… or an exoskeleton? There are all sorts of metaphors, each with slightly different implications, but anyway, they’re my apparatus for grappling with the problem of being a person. A novelist tends to write ruefully, or to couch in reservations, the things that are actually most defining of themselves. So, I write about this kind of character passionately, with sympathy, but also I tend to put them in social or political or interpersonal contexts that make them look absurd or problematic. I try to see characters like myself from the inside and the outside.

Rachel: With that said, say you go to a fancy LA party or a fancy New York party and you have all these characters walking around with their cultural critique or their specific project, or whatever it is, how do you personally respond to that? How do you tell if someone’s full of shit or not?

Jonathan: Full of shit about what? Sometimes being full of shit is an amazing way to get started. I was full of shit about everything at the outset, especially about being a novelist. I wasn’t one and I had no idea how to do it. I had to be full of shit for a while. I’m often most drawn to the people who are at the greatest risk of seeming full of shit, because they’re usually not risk-averse. They’re attempting something. Also – this is one of the subjects of Chronic City – life is a performance with scripts, and it matters that you recognize this. Your task is to be in play, to step onto the stage, to make something occur. That means risking being full of shit, or being called full of shit, a lot. So I wouldn’t say that’s what I’m screening for, when I walk into that room that you’ve proposed. What I am looking for is that thing you know when you meet it that’s hard to name otherwise. To be awakened. It’s what I look for on a bookshelf, it’s what I look for when I’m flipping the radio dial, and it’s what I want out of people.

Rachel: Have you always had that mindset, or did you get there later?

Jonathan: I was given a head-start. I’ve never before articulated this exact thing, that I tend to be forgiving of the full-of-shit among us. But in fact, in my parents’ world…they were bohemians and they were artists, they were activists, they were radicals, they were fools. My house, their social set, the other grown-ups – I grew up in a space that was full of preposterous people. Accepting them as a version of the world, one I could tolerate and take pleasure in, and to choose from among their flavors of magnificent bullshit as if at an ice cream parlor, and even to choose some to attempt figure out and believe in – all of that came with the territory, for me. To the small extent that You Don’t Love Me Yet is a serious book, as opposed to a waffle heaped with strawberries, it asks exactly that: How do you define interpersonal meaning when you yourself are still full of shit? That’s the question.

Rachel: Could you talk a little bit about your use of animals?

Jonathan: That’s germane to me right now. I’m preparing a course on animals in fiction, next semester. Watership Down, Call of the Wild, all of it. Now that I’m in an academic department I’ve gained awareness that there’s a lot of really good writing and theory going on at the moment on precisely this subject. Of course as a working artist I’ve just stumbled into the material by my own migrations as a reader. Animal stories were at the heart of my first interest in writing per se, through Lewis Carroll. The talking animals in the Alice books were imprinted on my sense of how characters are portrayed in writing in the first place. My first novel was full of talking animals. People associate that book with Raymond Chandler or Phillip K. Dick, not wrongly, but just behind those lies Alice in Wonderland. My detective strolls through a world of these baffling and annoying creatures, whose ability to speak is a given. The animal element activates a lot of the persuasiveness in the fiction that I love the most. Henry James means a lot to me, but it’s absolutely confounding when you realize he never shows people eating. They just don’t eat, or if they do, the meal is glossed over without you ever learning what it was. I wanted to go the other direction and have my characters defined by their hunger, defined by their sleepiness or horniness, by the animal life of their bodies. You Don’t Love Me Yet is partly an exercise in having the characters always needing a meal or drugs or sleep or…Their bodies are present. The zoo is there as a mirror for this. You find that in Dickens his characters are everywhere described in animal terms. It’s at the heart of fiction, but it hides. Except when it doesn’t. For there are so many great animals in fiction. I’m actually having a very difficult time narrowing the reading list for this course. Once you look for them, they’re everywhere.

Rachel: On that note, how do you find being a professor?

Jonathan: It’s a new experience. I’d been a teacher a lot, I’d even been called “professor”, but I wasn’t exactly. I’d parachute in from the world of writing and be a guest star or “distinguished visitor.” Sure, I grew comfortable in the classroom, and learned I had something to offer in that setting. But here at Pomona I’m actually a professor – I’m part of the department, I’m part of the careers of the students, I’m an advisor. I really have a job. And I haven’t had a job since I was a bookstore clerk. [Laughter]

Rachel: Was that your first job?

Jonathan: The only job I ever held, until this one. Honestly, this is a revelation for me. The collegiality of a department like this is an incredible thing. It’s always being said that writing is a lonely occupation, and it’s true – I remove myself from the world to write novels. It cuts against family life and against the illusion of fraternity among writers, and it cuts here against the idea of academic collegiality because I’m still the novelist. It’s a very hermetic identity. It’s a very strange choice to go away and invent people who don’t exist and spend time with them instead of the real people, right? I go and I commune with the fake people. Yet I don’t do that because I think it’s morally superior to being part of the world [laughter]. In fact it leaves me desperately hungry for the world. So as a professor, I have a really interesting version of a world: this environment, what’s expected of me, and what I find myself excited to deliver. It’s a terrific kind of engagement precisely for being such a good antidote to living in my head.

Rachel: I noticed that Richard Abneg, an important character in Chronic City, shows up in You Don’t Love Me Yet – to what extent is Chronic City a sort of New York transmutation or a sequel to You Don’t Love Me Yet?

Jonathan: There are a few little trails like this. I suspect a lot of people, for superficial but inarguable reasons, see those books as divided, utterly. One weighty if not ponderous, and set in New York, and the other Californian and frothy and small. Yet, You Don’t Love Me Yet taught me how to do Chronic City in the most direct way. The small book was the laboratory in which a lot of the terms of that bigger book were derived: how to enact my plot in terms of a group of friends who behave as friends really do, in these kind of repetitive, solipsistic, self-enclosed rituals. The reason that Seinfeld was not really a show about nothing is that it was about how appalling and fun it is to have friends with whom you develop a private vocabulary and a private world and running jokes that make you feel that you are the only real people and anyone outside that charmed circle just doesn’t get it. That’s the lineage that leads from You Don’t Love Me Yet to Chronic City.

Rachel: Can you talk about Perkus Tooth, from Chronic City? Have you gotten a lot of feedback about him?

Jonathan: People identify the book with him. When people don’t like the book, it’s because they feel that Perkus his failings have been indulged, or that he’s a jerk to begin with. When they love the book they think he’s a martyred saint. So he’s the Rorschach blot. The irony for me is that I feel that hiding in the foreground, almost too near to see, is Chase Insteadman. He’s the character I identify with secretly much. I guess it’s obvious to see where I’ve lent parts of my cultural obsessiveness to Perkus, or to observe that he’s a quasi-writer. But Chase is one of the most important characters I’ve ever gotten onto the page. It must be that because he declares himself as bland, as a chalk outline of a human being, people take that invitation to overlook him. They quit thinking about him, which I suppose is something the book had to invite them to do, in order to make itself happen. But for what it’s worth, the character I still think about, more than Perkus, is Chase.

Rachel: Have you been put off by people being so concerned with Perkus?

Jonathan: No, Perkus is attractive and strange and fragile, so if he’s the popular hero, that’s lovely. I sometimes joke that, in Motherless Brooklyn, the main character Lionel Essrog is quite a lot more loveable than I really am. He’s a magical-geek character, in the way that Holden Caufield, or Ignatius J. Reilly is, or Charley, from Flowers For Algernon – an attractor for reader sympathies. Perkus Tooth functions in a similar way. He’s a magical geek character. You feel that he’s fragile, which pulls the reader towards him.

Rachel: So now that you’re in L.A., I read that you’ve sold the film rights to some of your work?

Jonathan: Over the years I’ve done this again and again: let someone try to develop one of the books into a film. My hopes for these projects get aroused; I’m like a fan, hearing about something I want to see, and hoping it’ll be good. The one that’s like that for me right now is As She Climbed Across the Table, which has been optioned by David Cronenberg. He’s one of my favorite living directors – I’m flattered that he’s even trying, I think it’s a good match, it seems very possible that he’d do something wonderful. That’s the one that I’m in love with right now, but it’s really outside of me. It’s a thing that happens to the books that has weirdly little to do with me as their author.

Rachel: Did you learn that or it’s been like that?

Jonathan: I figured it out pretty fast. I had advantages in figuring it out because I was already a student of film – or a fan, not a student. The best adaptations of books, when books are involved as the sources of film, are the ones where they do very little “justice” to the book. They just take something they like and transform it. And so, I always thought, this is likely the best fate – just take it, make a movie. You’re filmmakers, you do your thing, and I’ll wait and see what happens. I’ll cash your check in the meantime and use it to write another book. That seems like the best relationship possible. I haven’t been seduced into thinking I could be the screenwriter or could control the outcome of these projects.

Rachel: Have you done much exploring of L.A.?

Jonathan: I know bits and pieces of L.A. Over the years I’ve come here on different kinds of trips. I lived in L.A. for a month or six weeks, now three or four different times. So I know it in bursts. I gather this is true of L.A. in general anyway, you can’t know it comprehensively. You know it in fragments. But I’ve plenty more to discover.

Rachel: What do you like about it, or what do you notice about it?

Jonathan: I really like very obvious and corny things about it – I like its diversity. It’s real. It has real diversity. And there are places that brag of diversity when what they mean is that everything is neatly balkanized. It’s not here.

The Ecstasy of Influence is out now from Doubleday, $27.95
Author Photo: Mara Faye Lethem

Congratulations to Bruce Smith and his incredible new collection of poetry, Devotions, which has just been named a finalist for the 2011 National Book Awards. What better a time than now to give our online readers a sampling of his work. This fabulous poem, Devotion: Midrash, originally appeared in Issue 6 of Dossier.

—————————

DEVOTION: MIDRASH

Strings did things to you: held you at one end while you

became deranged, made you forget the inamour, swerved

around the realpolitik, the stink, made a cup for the god

thirst, hid the tent city, relieved the money grief for three bars,

four, bandaged the open sore, realized and blamed the systems

for a blink or two, made (poem) the consternation of coins

falling through the slot on the coffer of the bus (chromatics

and discords) seem like the truth of the end of suffering

(the third noble truth).  They took things far.  Strings made

wings of things, (nouns verbs), held down Gulliver, made

flavors and spins of our duration, made the guitar

a question mark, lost the thread.  They made the rain

come down for a couple of beats, which was the riches,

the tender, the fat stacks, the math.  So the poem (the great film

festival of spirits and sobs) goes on with its fornicating ways

and its clemency for the engines (little, think, could)

which keep it suffering (the first noble truth).  The audience

for this (we can’t agree) will be you or homies, Buddhists,

Prince Hal in Birkenstocks, birds, texting men, enraptured,

ruptured girls left alone in the tent city where they summon

their darlings through perplexed strings.  How do you know

the levels of our sadness without a string across an opening?

How do you get a flood in a bowl, a core sample of the unsung

summoned from pluck (you), the synthetics or cat gut

of zero sum?  Strings made you midrash the stuff, sniff

out the perfume (the ocean, the flower), chew the root, express

the part where we’re talking to ourselves from the part

that’s not.  We have a way (fourth truth) we employ

against the day depending on whether you’re Keats

with your nose pressed against the window of the sweet

shop (devotion, attachment – the second noble truth)

or whether you’re the woman on the bus –

two kids, one crying, eating a cracker from the floor,

one about to cry from the what for.

—————————————

Photograph by Eric McNatt

Simply put, the play is about the creation of a cultural monument.  You see, the characters aren’t building just any theater; it’s the Irish National Theatre of Ireland, and the first of its kind.  Dedicated to prideful threads of Celtic mythology, the performances are intended to uplift the spirits of the Irish people by reminding audiences of their own ethnic identity.  The momentum of the Home Rule Movement—the Irish demand for self-governance within the British Empire—had hit a speed bump with death of its charismatic leader, Charles Stuart Parnell (also known as the “un-crowned king of Ireland”), in 1891. Patriots needed some other vehicle to carry them through the gray days of turn-of-the-century Dublin.  So, why not an alternative outlet for self-expression, one that steers clear of Parliament and republican brotherhoods?  As the play’s protagonist Willy Hayes declares: “It’s not political.  It’s just theatre.”  But, really, one may ask: can the two be separated?  Can art be without an agenda?

Now, I admit: at first I was certain that the character of Willy was a fictional William Butler Yeats, while his protest-loving patroness, Eva St. John, was of course Lady Gregory, stewardess of the Irish Literary Revival. After all, the Abbey opened its door with Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan. And the women, well, both are cultural paradoxes; they’re daughters of Anglo-Irish privilege longing to “save” the impoverished lives of Dublin’s working class with a grand institution of the dramatic arts.  They’re the kind of women who, after inquiring about the rate of your rented apartment, respond with a “That’s it?”—as if half of your monthly salary is a pittance to them.  On the one hand the lowly loathe them, yet sometimes they’re forced to think: “Maybe they’re not so bad.”  In spite of their pomp and presumption, they seem to care about the Northsiders—the notoriously wealth-starved citizens who populate the land on the “wrong” side of the Liffey River—and perhaps “seem to” is enough.

After doing some research, I discovered the truth behind Dublin by Lamplight. Willy is West’s portrayal of producer William Fay, who along with his thespian brother, Frank, formed a touring company called W. G. Fay’s Irish National Dramatic Company.  And Eva is Annie Horniman, an aspiring theater manager with gold-lined pockets and a friend of the Irish Literary Theatre, which was founded by no other than Yeats, Gregory, and playwright and political/cultural activist Edward Martyn (who must be the inspiration for the flamboyant, Nervous Nelly character, Martyn).  So, I was wrong, but hey, I learned something.

This is part of what makes West’s play so alluring. He unearths the facts that have been buried by the “big names” and their accomplishments.  You know, people like Yeats, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and actually—and this is a rarity among most poets and playwrights—sold books.  Lady Gregory is a bit more obscure, but her estate known as Coole Park is now a government-owned park in Ireland and it continues to be one of County Galway’s main attractions, thanks to the “autograph tree” inscribed by the likes of Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, and others.  But the Fay brothers, after working with the Abbey actors for four plus years, had a falling-out with the Abbey’s management and fled to the United States in 1908.   While Horniman, after purchasing the property for the actual edifice, moved back to England; as a British socialite, one might guess that she was fonder of Irish culture when admiring it from across the Channel. What West has done for these people, whose names have slipped from the pages of history, is rather endearing.  He has given them their “time to shine,” so to speak.  He has illuminated their characters for 21st Century theatergoers.

Etymologists speculate that the word “vaudeville” comes from the French phrase “voix de ville,” or the “voice of the city.”  In a way, West is finally giving William and Frank Fay and Annie Horniman their posthumous freedom of speech.  What would they have said about the Abbey, and about the sociopolitical climate of 1904 Dublin?  And is their contribution representative of the collective voice of the entire city?  It’s also important to know that Dublin by Lamplight debuted in 2004, shortly after the centennial celebration of Bloomsday, the day—June 16, 1904—on which James Joyce’s beloved epic novel Ulysses took place.  The tongues of Dubliners were flapping with all that is Joycean—what that man did for Ireland and their position on the literary map.  To me, it almost feels like West had his own agenda.  Did he want the Ulysses-induced Dubliners to remember the other pivotal event in Irish culture that occurred in 1904 (actually, and not fictionally, occurred that is)?  I think so.  I think West had an agenda, one that was veiled in humor, but an agenda nonetheless.

Maybe it’s like Yakov Bok says in Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer: “There is no such thing as an apolitical man, especially an Irishman.”  OK, well, it’s really “especially a Jew” that Malamud writes, but I think this new version works just as well.

Dublin by Lamplight will be at 59E59 Theaters until Sunday, October 2nd. www.59e59.org.

Stone Arabia is Dana Spiotta’s third novel. The time has come to call her one of our best writers.

In Stone Arabia, a woman named Denise describes the slow deterioration of her family: her aging mother, daughter Ada, and her brother, a musician named Nik Worth, who rejects a career as a pop star to create an endless artwork called the Chronicles, which consists of journal entries, interviews, articles and musings, all invented, which amount to an imagined, parallel life. Stone Arabia is anecdotal, intellectual, fleet and frightening and humane, but never acts like love does anything it doesn’t actually do. It is utterly unique.

The slow deterioration of the mind—in other words, forgetting—is an obsession of the novel. Denise’s easygoing mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and becomes, in effect, another person, spewing racist epithets and hoarding receipts and paperwork while forgetting what these papers represent, as if the records of transactions are the only way to know that they occurred. (As Nik says, “Self-curate or disappear.”) The evidence of dementia spreads to other characters, and it gets hard to differentiate just what constitutes senility, since everyone has the symptoms. When her mother is diagnosed, Denise herself begins to suffer from aphasia—the forgetting of common words—as when she spends an entire chapter trying to remember the name “Jayne Mansfield.” She takes her mother’s medication, along with pills she finds on the internet, all of which have terrifying names—memextend, mindroids, braintonics—and while she drives, she listens to memory-boosting tapes. This is Dana Spiotta’s frightening mimesis: sitting traffic and helplessly forgetting.

Denise’s daughter Ada attempts to seize her family’s past before its vanishes, but the documentary film she tries to make antagonizes Nik and even Denise, who are weirdly unforthcoming and defensive, as though their memories are better lost than embarrassed into narrative. And Ada is aging, too; she “…looks tired in tiny ways.” Nik’s Chronicles are probably the best solution to this seeming epidemic—though they mirror the mother’s obsession with receipts—for in such transient conditions, where everything is temporary, his fantasy is no more fake then everyone else’s truth.

Because Nik is a musician, Stone Arabia has been described as a novel of rock and roll. In the book, rock music functions as a cultural activity that titillates desire without rewarding it, and imbues its best practitioners with a both a sexual authority and the respect accorded anyone who is successful at their job. The irony, of course, is that Nik’s job is to slack: to drink and take drugs and make music nobody will hear, which somehow only makes his piety more devout, and thus admired. His family never tells him to give up and get a real job: they admire his faith, a dignified abjection close to sainthood, insofar as it has exempted him from worldly, bourgeois pleasures like insurance and a decent house and so forth. The more devoted to the cause of making art one is, the more one stands to lose, which is why Nik is ravaged more than any other character, but also why his family, and the novel, love him so. Because music is a kind of condensed expression of life, Nik comes closest to possessing that which life “half-seriously offers with one hand and pockets with the other,” to paraphrase John Ashbery. Spiotta sees rock music as a realm of pure desire unfulfilled. Stone Arabia is not a great rock novel because it makes up funny bands names like The Demonics—anyone can do that—it’s great because it thinks very critically about what actually happens to the mind of the rock-and-roll listener. To Spiotta, music acts like it will give, but it actually takes away. It doesn’t mediate isolation, it increases it, and the characters apprenticed to it are ruined. Nik keeps records of his loss because he lost the most, though he also possessed the most, stood the closest to desire. This argument is Romantic—and familiar—but because the book is focused on the facts of Nik’s demise, it’s also painfully unsentimental, and redeems what would have been a cliché.

Another, better way to look at Stone Arabia is as a kind of hi-brow horror novel made of the banal. Nik makes certain his career is unsuccessful, and for most of the book, he’s a bartender whose “…lifetime of abuse could only have come from a warped relationship with the future.” In caring for her brother, Denise herself veers toward insolvency, and, when Nik gets ill and has no health insurance, she treats his painful toe infection with Preparation H after vainly searching Google for solutions. Spiotta knows that anyone who looks for closure on the internet is doomed to add an existential panic to their symptoms. Later, as Denise applies for a credit card just to cover her costs, she reads the little print and thinks, “The first time you actually read the words printed on these things was to feel the last connection to your childhood die.” That night, she takes pills to go to sleep, “what we used to call sleeping pills but can’t anymore because it sounds too tragic.”

The end of Stone Arabia, which reconciles Nik and Denise’s fantasies with their real lives, may be predictable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not affecting, the way that any kind of bad but inevitable news is. If the book sounds too depressing, it should be said Spiotta’s prose is clear and intimate; as Faulkner would say, “Less claw than velvet.” The reader always feels as though a reasonable human being is speaking to them, even as the fodder of daily life is re-described in terrifying ways that may well keep you awake forever. Stone Arabia does not speechify or engage in fantasies of power. It may act like it seduces but the reader never feels they were deceived, except perhaps by their own self, and that’s how all great parties end. This grave and elegant little novel is a masterpiece.

Here’s something I love that has come out of our weirdo digital age: book trailers. Sort of like mini-movies, these small little snippets are meant to take us inside the action of a book and want to read it, in much the same way a movie trailer does. Some of them are very smart and very well done and some of them are so stupid and over the top. Either way, as their own unique art form I think they are quite amazing. People choose so many different ways to utilize three minutes of film to sell a book. If you want more, check out the Moby Awards created solely for this purpose. You can waste hours of time looking through all the nominees, winners and such. So much better than the Oscars. I’ve collected just a few of my favorites here below for you to watch. Tell me if any of these make you want to read a book.

Pynchon is The Dude (The Genius Dude) and The Genius Dude doesn’t believe how much his own book costs:

This one is spectacular because there is so much information and so much rage caught in only two minutes:

Not only is The Instructions a great book, but this is pretty great too:

For photo-shop geeks:

Cause Sloane is just cool and so is everything she does:

This one is just really good. It reminds me of Shel Silverstein if he were a little sadder: