Hazlitt Magazine
Speaking with the author of Bright, Precious Days about resisting contempt for your characters, differing degrees of infidelity, and the health of the novel in 2017.
There’s an easy way to avoid the clichéd, harmful, and just plain wrong narratives about sex work: actually talk to sex workers.
From Pissed Jeans inviting Lindsay Hunter onto a song to Lynne Tillman writing for Y Pants to Kathy Acker performing with the Mekons, there’s a unique energy and catharsis in these collaboration…
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13.06.17
The fact that I’ve always had an exact replica of my father, with a startlingly similar voice, mannerisms and, well, face, never really struck me as exceptional until he passed away.
In 2011, my father died. Technically.Let me start again. My dad, Tony, was an identical twin. He and his brother Tom were tall, blonde, thin-legged and blue-eyed with a surprisingly Italian last name. They typed terse emails with their index fingers and loved The Godfather movies. They shared bad senses of humour, ice cream dependency, discomfort with long phone conversations (save for with each other), and business acumen.Tom is still alive. My dad isn’t. The fact that I’ve always had an exact replica of my father, with a startlingly similar voice, mannerisms and, well, face, never really struck me as exceptional until my dad passed away.As is custom, the funeral was bleak. In the memorial line up of family members, seeing my uncle exacerbated the strange reality of loss. A few guests were unfortunately or hilariously caught unaware that Tony had a twin brother. Reactions to Tom ranged from shock to clinginess. People insisted on reminding my uncle of his uncanny resemblance to my dad. Tom responded, patiently, way too many times: I know.In the ’80s, the only feature that distinguished my dad from Tom was a thick, blonde cowboy moustache. One day, well into a confidently moustachioed decade, after much urging from Tom, my dad shaved. The twins then tried to confuse my cousin and I about who was whose father—It’s me, your daddy, one of them insisted—and neither my cousin nor I could distinguish. They were that identical. This experiment ended in tears. My cousin and me: paralysed and afraid. Betrayed? I was about five years old at the time.I’m not sure what the fear was. Was I worried about making the wrong choice and losing my dad’s faith, failing a test of some kind? Or was it that I couldn’t be clear about what made my dad my dad?*Tom and Tony’s likeness went deeper than their appearances. A particular freaky twin thing happened during a summer in the ’90s when my parents brought my brother and I to a little hotel on Prince Edward Island. We went for a walk into the charming town to marvel at, I don’t know, the gables and the red clay beaches, probably, when my dad stopped on the sidewalk and said something like I think Tom’s here. Minutes later, we heard a car horn and turned to see my uncle cackling out the window. The twins had, without knowing, booked the same vacation, at the same hotel, for the same damn week.Coincidences like this are called tacit coordination—the phenomenon that people can successfully coordinate their decisions without communication. Though it can happen in many social contexts, identical twins in particular enact synchronous behaviours or decisions frequently, and have a high incidence of tacit coordination. The social bond between identical twins has been described as among the closest and most enduring of human social relationships.The genetic commonality of identical twins may underlie their similarities and social intimacy, and the perception of physical likeness can cause others to subconsciously reinforce similar behaviours.While my dad and uncle were growing up, people could never be sure who was who, so each twin was often called TomTony. One word. The twins would answer to each other’s names; they were so wrapped up in each other and indistinguishable that to be recognized as an individual might’ve been expecting too much. And really, how could you maintain any behavioural or psychic distance if you share everything, including your name?Growing up in Windsor, Ontario, in a family of nine children, the twins were like their own unit. As my Uncle Tom puts it, they kept each other company and, as far as I can glean from second-hand stories and my own experiences with their hard-ass Canadian Auto Workers union activist parents, protected each other amongst the chaos.I called my uncle recently and asked about some of his twin memories. He said one of the hardest times for them was when my dad failed grade 7, which meant that Tom and Tony would no longer be in the same class. The twins cried over their report cards outside the school; the repercussions were overwhelming—separate grades, separate classrooms, Tom would start high school a year sooner. They were devastated at the idea of being apart. On their walk home from school the twins formulated a plan: Tom promised to intentionally fail grade 8, leaving Tony enough time to catch up so that they could be together again. Of course, when their hardline parents caught wind of this, the twins were scared off from following through with the scheme.I wonder, if they’d followed through, if their relationship would’ve been different. Maybe my dad’s 13-year-old follies gave the twins enough distance in their education to grow some independence, to maintain their bond, but who knows, maybe into their adult years they still would’ve preferred to have been synched up. Still, they went on to work the same jobs at A&P grocery, eventually becoming twin co-managers, and put themselves through business school at the University of Windsor, one year apart.My uncle got married in August of 1977. Following a job offer, he and his wife moved to the Toronto area after the wedding. It was the first time Tom was away from home, and the first time in their lives that the twins wouldn’t share a room. The twins were distraught and crying as the reception wrapped up. My uncle’s wife stepped in to get Tom on the road to their honeymoon, prying the twins apart.My uncle’s family were the only LaSordas who moved out of Windsor. Most of my life Tom’s family has lived across the border in Michigan. When our families would visit, the twins were giddy. TomTony essentially reverted to being little boys. They matched each other. One exception was the development of my uncle’s slight American accent, notable on words like dah-lers, which my dad hated. If one twin lost weight, the other would try to lose weight too. Haircuts. Glasses. Clothing. They’d explained their constant evaluation of each other as disciplining themselves so they could still look alike. They wanted to.Tom and Tony have their differences, however subtle. My dad, minutes younger, was more outgoing. He’d starred in a middle school production of Our Town, and brought up his glorious moment of stardom on the regular. He dated a few women before he met my mother. Tom, on the other hand, married his high school sweetheart. In their careers, too, Tony was preoccupied in creating, and Tom was interested in contributing; my dad started his own marketing company while Tom worked at high level corporate for auto companies. Both twins were blind in one eye—Tom’s left, Tony’s right—one of the only physical attributes in which they were the inverse of each other.As a non-twin, I think all of the blurred identity stuff sounds annoying. When your self is so tied up in another person’s, I assumed there’d be a longing for that sort of individual distinction, maybe some resentment at having a persistent and dizzyingly close model for comparison. Instead, my Uncle Tom explained that being mistaken for someone else or someone not being sure what name to call him made him feel special. With every milestone or piece of good news, Tom says he and my dad were never jealous or competitive in any negative sense. If anything, the twins felt as though they were achieving vicariously, maybe even taking credit for it by genetic association.As Tom remembers, in Windsor, Ontario in the 1950s, identical twins were rare. Everyone around them seemed to reinforce their twinness; together, they were magnetic. “People stared, stopped us on the street, asked us questions,” he said. “We were rock stars.”*My dad died suddenly, after what should have been a routine heart surgery. He was too young—everyone I knew made sure to say so, as if confirming that this loss was indeed tragic. His death shattered me. I went through unnerving phases like eating only comfort food. I threw away a manuscript I’d “finished,” adopted a kitten, never talked about his death, and then sometimes talked about it.It’s only recently that I’ve considered how deeply and distinctively his death must have shattered his twin. I think of my uncle witnessing my dad being extremely ill, struggling, and dying; it would be horrific in ways unique from my own experience. Losing a life partner and a best friend is its own grotesque and crushing blow. But with their resemblance, my uncle could’ve been glimpsing himself in such a state, not unlike a Dickensian spectre of what-is-yet-to-come.[[{"fid":"6700756","view_mode":"media_original","fields":{"format":"media_original","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":""},"type":"media","attributes":{"height":"2448","width":"3264","class":"media-element file-media-original"}}]]Kinship genetic theory suggests that our ratings of grief intensity will increase proportionally with genetic relatedness to the deceased. Several twin-specific bereavement studies have found direct association between the degree of gene similarity (which is highest in identical twins) and anticipated grief. Using a rating system called the Grief Experience Inventory (GEI) selected aspects of twinship—preoccupation with the co-twin; disruption of shared birthdays; reactions to meeting or seeing other twins—were significantly associated with high GEI scale scores.In terms of experiencing grief for a co-twin in comparison to another sibling, my uncle can speak to both. Two younger LaSorda brothers passed away in the twins’ lifetimes: one at age of 16, and one at age 39, both unexpectedly. Of course these were tragedies that my uncle grieved, but when his twin died, he said the loss felt completely different.Twin researchers Nancy Segal and Thomas Bouchard have found that the mean grief intensity rating for twins was higher than for non-twin siblings, and significantly higher than that for spouses. My uncle echoed this finding: “A twin is more like a wife or a husband,” he said, “but bigger than that, because with a spouse, you could maybe meet another one. You can remember a time before. A twin leaves a void that’s always, always there.”*Tom and Tony have left their children a legacy of similarities, in a way. My cousin, Jackie, and I are the first-born kids of the twins. We share some physical traits (kind of tall, kind of blonde, fast walkers), but the parallels in our behaviours are what I find most striking. We both move around a lot (too much). For several Christmas holidays in a row we’ve chosen the same gifts for our mothers. We’ve both gone to university and later pursued two Master’s degrees: one academic and one Fine Arts each. We are intensely self-deprecating, solitary, and we were given the same prescription antidepressant.Oh, did I mention we’re both writers?As the children of identical twins, Jackie and I share 25 percent of our genes instead of the usual cousins’ share of 12.5%. Biologically, we’re half-sisters, not cousins. An identical twin parent is as closely related to his own children as to the co-twin’s children. At first I was surprised by my cousin’s grief when my dad died, but then again, I’d feel the same way. Our dads are our favourite people for the same reasons.*What I struggle with is the question of whether grieving my dad is made easier or harder by his twinship. You hear it all the time when someone loses a loved one: what I’d give to see them one more time, to be able to call them, hear their voice, hug them. I have that option, sort of. This father-clone.Since his death, I attempt to formulate my dad’s opinions about events that unfold, about the arc of my life since his absence, even thoughts about former tensions in our relationship. I hold on to my metaphorical grief suitcase. I can get insights from my uncle, though I rarely consult him; in part because I worry it’s painful for us both. When I called Tom the other day and asked for advice, I can say with confidence that what he told me is exactly what my dad would’ve said, down to the idioms and the nervous, excited laughter when answering the phone. So, in a way, the twin thing is a privilege.In another way, I can get petty. I see my cousins enjoying their lives with their dad. I watch Jackie grow annoyed sometimes, probably the same way I was, by her dad’s conservatism (maybe born out of the vehement working-class socialism they were raised with), his struggle to talk feelings, or his crippling awkwardness at drive-thru windows. I also see how my dad would’ve aged, how a few more years would’ve softened him.On the phone with Tom, talking about my dad, I was nervous. My uncle relaxed, and recounted story after story of his favourite twin memories. I jotted down Tom’s words in my notebook for over an hour—a shockingly long phone call for one of the twins. Tom and Tony were excellent baseball players. One season, they were placed on separate teams and pitched. Both made it to the finals—Tom’s team won. The Windsor Star featured a small clipping with a photo of the indistinguishable twins facing off with their uniforms and gloves, but the caption stated that Tony’s team won. Tom jokes about demanding a retraction from the paper, but the reality is neither the championship nor the headline mattered: their wins and losses were vicarious. As I listened, I began to step back and recognize that Tom is whole—a person who can offer me a distinct relationship and a perspective on my dad that I could never otherwise access. I stopped fretting about the upsetting parts of their identicality, because those exist in the similarities and the differences. I’m sure I’ve overlooked a lot of sparkling individuality while hunting for what I needed from my uncle, which is my dad.
07.06.17
The author of Fugue States on upending Diaspora clichés, disingenuous narrative arcs, and dharma.
I first saw Pasha Malla speak in 2008, at a packed event at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, for the launch of his debut collection of stories, The Withdrawal Method. Instead of a customary reading he presented a slideshow which included a series of doodles he made as a kid in London, Ontario while fascinated by the Nazis: swastikas, guns, fighter jets and tanks. Each drawing was accompanied by self-lacerating commentary on his childhood psychology, and if I remember correctly, he didn’t read a single story from his book that night.This lite deviancy left me enthralled at 21—who was this funny brown dude treating his own book launch with irreverence? I scooped up the stories and was engrossed with the tender rage he presented in the collection: brothers full of love unable to talk to each other, absurd imagery that stretched and collapsed. The book was funny. Like, funny-funny, but then the stories would detonate in unexpected ways and leave me reeling; it seemed impossible that someone could make stories twist and feel with such precision.Since The Withdrawal Method Malla has published a collection of poetry, found poetry focusing on post-game interviews with athletes, an art book riffing on Frank Capra’s Why We Fight, and an experimental novel, People Park. He has taught at the University of Toronto and mentored a wide range of authors, alongside writing a regular books column for The Globe and Mail, and contributing regularly to The Walrus, Newyorker.com and others.Last year I was fortunate enough to work with Malla on a project of my own. I was a little scared to meet someone I knew only through their work and my own admiration, but my fear was needless. Malla greeted my writing and me with a relentless generosity, rigor, and seriousness. While I spent the summer floundering with the state of my own work, ambition, and relationships, Malla—unbeknownst to him—provided a kind of anchor and model of what it meant to live a life in the arts, one built on dedication to serious thinking and a devotion to craft free of pretension.His new novel Fugue States follows Ash Dhar, a thirty something radio interviewer and author, spiraling outwards from the recent death of his father. The book is ambitious in its scope—at once a comic farce, serious in its psychological searching, while also delicately taking apart the conventions of the realist novel. It manages to be a page turner and provocative simultaneously, asking from the reader as much as it gives.We talked over Skype; Pasha in his book adorned office in Hamilton, Ontario, me in my balmy room in Toronto. He laughs often when talking about basketball or something personal but shifts gears quick when speaking on writing. We were interrupted only once, near the end, when his big bushy dog burst into view. We spoke mostly about Fugue States, how it came to be, and the responsibilities he felt towards it and by the end of the interview he was back to recommending me books for my own work.Adnan Khan: What was the process to get into Fugue States? One of the things that’s curious to me is that this is very much a realist novel, but at the same time there are some elements of it that feel like you’re poking at the genre a little bit. Pasha Malla: Oh yeah, totally. The intention is that it dismantles the whole structure as it goes.I think I set out to write a realist novel and then what I wanted to write about and talk about kind of required me to disobey the conventions. It’s so weird, I started writing this thing six or seven years ago, and you have to try to remember where it started. And I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been saying things…I dunno if any one of them is true or it’s a combination or I don’t know.I was just interested in trying to write a realist novel that was about a chronological story that takes place in space and time, where, you know, people do things that people do.To me it seems like the easy sell for this novel is that it’s a comic, Diaspora psychological realism novel, and then as you read it, you see it sort of turn inside out. I’m curious to know why you did that, basically. Lots of reasons. I mean there are reasons of my own accountability to the material. Like, I don’t feel like I’m the guy to write a novel of Kashmir, you know? Those aren’t my stories to tell, there are already plenty of writers who are writing about that place, better than I can, people who live there, people who speak the language, people who are on the ground getting shot in the face with pellets and shit like that. So, yeah, I did not, I really wanted to, not take that one. Not appropriate it, I guess.At the same time, I thought that there was something interesting in that tension of having this tenuous cultural heritage, from this place, being a piece of who I am, and so actively resisting it for ten years of having a writing career, because of that concern. Because of that concern and because of how that shit gets commodified and how in some ways writing about it is adhering to a market expectation and how easily that becomes packaged.It’s interesting that you say that—to explore that tension—because re-reading The Withdrawal Method, there are a few stories where there are certainly brown characters, but it’s not central to the story. Someone asked you in an interview why in The Slough, the first story of The Withdrawal Method, you named a character Pasha, and you talked about responsibility and not wanting the character to get away with something. The Slough is almost a foreshadowing of this novel, in the way that story also inverts upon itself. The point of that inversion was more exclusively literary and the points of the inversion in this book are, for lack of a better word, political. Or at least, I’m trying to—by sort of dismantling the structure and by setting up one kind of story only to subvert it I hope that I am—asking some questions about how we create narratives: political narratives vs. narratives of masculinity vs. narratives of purpose.One of the things that came up was this idea of responsibility. It seemed to me very much about responsibility, about whom is responsible for whom and not just who cares for who—but who is responsible, that sense of duty. Yeah, duty is—I mean, dharma.And it comes up in The Withdrawal Method, there are at least two stories about care giving and that sense of duty. I’m also curious to know, because the Kashmiri question comes up, there’s a point where Ash directly addresses this—when he discovers his father’s manuscript, he asks something like “why would I write this book, is it my story to tell?”He says explicitly that the character had written this kind of silly book and then felt the weight of doing something political, and wanted to write about Kashmir and then just couldn’t find a way in and felt disingenuous or manipulative or in some way advantageous to his own career to write about a very serious trauma.Is that cynical? Maybe I’m being cynical, maybe I’m being naïve, but even your willingness to engage with that question…I don’t think that if you publish this book and you take away all those questions about who can write about Kashmir, I don’t think anyone would say to you: you can’t write this. I think they would say, “You’re half Kashmiri, your father is Kashmiri, go nuts.” I think it’s just a personal resistance—I don’t really care what other people say. It’s just a personal thing, especially having gone there with my dad and feeling so outside of that culture. I went while I was writing the book. Basically I’d written drafts of the first two sections and I was like, “Okay, well, I’ll go there with him and then I’ll be able to write the third part where they actually go” and it did not go how I was expecting. I did not come away from that trip with any sort of better understanding of the things that I wanted to write about but a whole different set of questions that I thought were worth pursuing.What did you go there wanting to pursue? I thought I would just go there and get some answers. Just see the place and breathe the air and some way innately understand it. I hadn’t been there since I was four and I have no memories, or very, very small little flashes of sensory memory of ever being there.I thought, yeah, I had expectations of that trip, that it would sort of be like a birthright trip or a homecoming or something and I would suddenly be within my people. It was, like, not like that, at all.It’s a decimated place. It’s really not what it once was. Infrastructure is crumbling, people are suffering, the large proportion of the population no longer lives there, and 40,000—probably more than that—people have been murdered. It has kind of a shell shocked feeling of a place. It’s still beautiful if you look up, but if you look down, it’s degradation. And it’s not what it once was—at least, what I’d been told what it was.The story then became about the idealization of what it is to people, to exiles, and how the place can never be what people want it to be, or how it’s remembered. They remember in this idealized sort of way.I think that the character in the book, Ash, has inherited this idealized version of what that place will be and has this innate suspicion that it is not that so I think he knows that if he starts to write about it, he will be writing about a false version, and then, he resists going because he doesn’t want to know the truth, and then he gets there and forgets why he’s there!Why is care giving, or duty, so prevalent in your work? Ash does go to India for Matt—there’s an underlying sense of taking care.When I was writing The Withdrawal Method my step-mom was really sick and my dad just dedicated his life to taking care of her. I mean, he talked about dharma all the time—it’s like, I’m not doing anything good, I’m just doing what has to be done. Not out of obligation—but this is what you do. And, you know, I like that idea.I like to think about the various degrees of loyalty and what that means in friendships and how Matt’s idea of loyalty is built into this code of what he imagines it means to be a man and a friend and whatever else, that the book kind of dismantles. And I think that, you know, ways that men in this novel, like Chip is the sole caretaker for his son, who has cerebral palsy, and it’s just a relationship that Ash cannot fathom.I wanted that relationship to have an irony to it, where we see how hard this guy is trying to take care of his kid, as a man, he’s doing his best, and there’s something kind of innate to how he’s been culturally limited to do it right—or at least, how he feels he should be doing it right. Struggling with it and whatever else. You know, you don’t read a lot of books—I don’t anyway—that apply that care-giving role to men, or caretaking. How men take care of each other and family and friends and everything else. And also how they fail.There is this undercurrent of menace through the book; Ash’s father is very angry, Ash is morose, but then there’s this comedy throughout. Even Matt—who is this incredibly destructive force for most of the book—is quite funny. I wanted to make their characters multivalent, so they’re not all just struggling with a kind of masculinity. Whether it’s bro culture masculinity that Matt feels like he has to live up to, or some sort of paternalistic culture the father needs to live up to, or whether the son feels like he has this male inheritance.But the way that North American male culture is built, that sadness sharpens into anger very quickly and the way that it manifests outwardly as hostility, violence, anger, aggression, and for the three of those characters. You know, Matt is physically violent, Ash is linguistically violent.And I think for that to work and the kind of tone I wanted—I didn’t want it to just be a book of menace, because that would create a kind of monotone that didn’t work for this. I think it works for something like Blood Meridian, where that tone is crucial to how that book operates, but I wanted for that to be not the dominant strain, but an undercurrent that is inevitable, especially when it rises up and becomes so prevalent.It’s very unsettling. The Matt-in-India stuff is terrifying. And he doesn’t know! I kind of wanted a certain, it’s hard to create expectations for what you want from the reader, but I liked the potential for the character—the people who find him innocuously entertaining and have some sympathy for him, I think that’s good. But I also wanted to turn that into a kind of complicity, where his bumbling is such a symptom of a certain type of privilege. And that this kind of behavior actually wreaks a lot of havoc.I think that my intention was to try and create a character that feels potentially dangerous but is innocuous enough—at least in the first two, maybe the first part of the book and then starts to shift in the second and then really shifts in the third—that if you’re entertained by this guy, then suddenly you’re like “oh shit, I kinda got sucked up in this character.” To some people I think he might be charming, or sympathetic; and certainly some people would find him repulsive. That’s fine too.I was also interested in the relationship between Ash and Sherene. It’s sort of set up initially that Ash is very needy towards her, and kind of longing for her, but then it comes out that it’s a friendship. You see that Sherene, a woman, is the only place where he can express that longing for intimacy. Whereas Matt, who is desperate for it from Ash, never gets it from Ash. Yeah. And they have an intellectual intimacy. There’s nothing really romantic there. There’s a kind of longing of certain kinds of friendships that will never be consummated in any way, except trust, and a sort of emotional dependency.You said complicit, and that struck a chord because that’s something the book does. Not only playing with the very typical Diaspora storyline—I’m pretty sure the father dying and the boy going back home is what happens in The Namesake—I mean, I’m not gonna name names, but it’s cliché, and the book is full of cliché, but I hope that, it kind of upends them. The main character is aware that he is a cliché.And that self-awareness comes through. I remember when you outed Chip and Sherene as being Asian—do you want to talk about that a little bit? I love things that make me feel that sort of shame; because in the book you introduce them and then later on we learn that Chip is Korean and Sherene is Persian, and in both those moments I was like, “Oh, wait a minute, I was definitely thinking that these dudes were white.” It’s just a little game. It’s a game to play with expectations and racialized characters have to be identified as racialized. I had a clear idea of who these people were from the beginning and then I was like, why do I need to explain it? If they were white I wouldn’t explain it. I hope that you know, the reader’s response to that is to make them question that expectation, that unless specified, a character is read as white.Talking about those ideas of what is common in Diaspora literature is this heirloom—Ash finds his father’s manuscript; this is what his father has left behind. Exactly, it’s another cliché.It also provokes a lot of questions about memory, about what’s left behind, and that ties in really well with a lot of the political stuff. You ask, how much responsibility does Ash have to Kashmir—what was the decision behind that, that you wanted to explode that? Explode what in particular?This idea of heirlooms, because it’s an unfinished heirloom. That caught my mind particularly—when someone comes from another country, you have to decide what to leave behind, and Ash’s father is this man of intellect and he decides to write the Great Indian Novel. And then Ash, viewing himself kind of as a failure, kind of not, sort of steps into his father’s shoes by retyping this novel and seeing what he can discover. And using that novel to engage with his dead father. It doesn’t go anywhere though, right? It’s a process that I think we see in fiction as being kind of rewarding, as a path to the self, I just feel like it’s a little bit disingenuous. Does life really work that way? I don’t know, it’s a question. I don’t know. But at least, in this book, the manuscript never goes anywhere, and then that sort of gets transmuted into the reality of the book, eventually. But Ash’s process of working on it doesn’t go anywhere either.The riskiest thing to me about this book is that you withheld the epiphany. Yeah, well, kind of.You withhold the epiphany with a capital e. I struggle with that tendency, among, let’s say, North American writers, to sort of take that cultural heritage and cultural inherited trauma and use it for self- discovery. It’s so weird. “I don’t know who I am, I’m going to dig up all this stuff about X genocide that happened to my ancestors to get a better sense of myself.”The level of solipsism in that is insane! So it’s something the character is aware of, and it’s something that I was thinking of when writing this book. I could spend a year in Kashmir talking to people and living there, but I think that the instinct to then use that to better understand myself is crazy. Like, I grew up in London, Ontario, you know what I mean? So it’s like—the resistance, the way the book sort of sets that up, is a kind of garden path, like he’s going to use this to sort of discover something about his dad and then discover something about himself, but is very conscientiously a dead end, I guess.I don’t know if there are epiphanies that are withheld. The coda that’s at the end of the book is supposed to lead the reader to a realization that the character’s had, you know, this theme of time and memory that’s sort of been threaded throughout the whole book, that there’s something still within that, there’s something that’s still worthwhile. And that the act of storytelling and, you know, fiction, and the process of engaging with these questions is, in itself, even though they don’t go anywhere, is worthwhile.I don’t think it’s an entirely cynical and nihilistic book. I feel like though it’s resisting a lot of these things, it’s resisting a lot of tropes and things that I think are themselves cynical. I think that, you know, approaching storytelling as a kind of teleology that will lead you to an end point of understanding is this thing that we’ve developed as a way to talk about fiction, to me, it’s like, is that what life is like?
06.06.17
From Pissed Jeans inviting Lindsay Hunter onto a song to Lynne Tillman writing for Y Pants to Kathy Acker performing with the Mekons, there’s a unique energy and catharsis in these collaborations.
So let’s begin with Pissed Jeans. From the eastern side of Pennsylvania, they tap into a grimy, visceral strain of music, have one of the most evocative names of any currently running punk band, and put on a gripping live show. Their latest album, Why Love Now, was released by Sub Pop at the end of February, and right smack in the middle of it, prime sonic real estate to disorient discerning listeners, is a song called “I’m a Man.” Like many of their songs, it delves into the grotesque and the menacing: over booming drums and frenetic guitars, a voice declaims a narrative of toxic masculinity that would make the misanthropic protagonist of your average Shellac song blush.“I’m a man, Miss Office Lady,” the narrator says, and proceeds with an unsettling and over-the-top method of seduction, using a tone of voice that’s both highly exaggerated and frequently sinister (“I’ll take the milk and the cow. That’s you. You’re the cow”). But the voice heard here isn’t that of Pissed Jeans vocalist Matt Korvette. Instead, those words were written and read by author Lindsay Hunter, whose books—including the novel Ugly Girls and the collections Daddy’s and Don’t Kiss Me—involve a host of similarly oversexed, comic-yet-sinister figures. Hunter blends in so neatly with the band’s sound and attitude, it’s almost a surprise such collaborations don’t happen more frequently.[[{"fid":"6700721","view_mode":"media_original","fields":{"format":"media_original"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Pissed Jeans - I'm A Man","class":"media-element file-media-original"}}]]Which isn’t to say they never happen at all. Earlier this year, Water Wing Records out of Portland, Oregon, reissued Beat It Down, the first full-length from No Wave band Y Pants. Originally released in 1982, the album offers plenty of archetypally post-punk moves: left-field instrumental arrangements, haunting vocals, and a general sense of aesthetic unpredictability. The phrase “don’t be afraid to be boring” is repeatedly intoned on “Obvious,” the album’s first song, with connotations that sound alternately liberating and ominous. In other words, it’s par for the course for that particular musical moment in time.Where does the literary side of things come in? The song’s lyrics were written by Lynne Tillman, who went on to become an iconic writer among iconic writers, nominated for National Book Critics Circle Awards in both fiction and criticism. On its own, “Obvious” seems of a piece with the rest of the album, whose songs deal with alienation, flawed interpersonal connections, and subcultures, but its lyrics also fit nicely in with Tillman’s bibliography, the components of which frequently disconcert, experiment with form, and often bring artistic disciplines together. It’s not the only literary nod on Beat It Down, either: the lyrics to “The Fly,” the eighth song on the album, are adapted from Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -.”In his 2008 book on the genre, Marc Masters pointed out that artists identified as No Wave had little in common—except for, in the case of many, a brief existence. “Did the bands sound the same? Did they think the same? Did they all get along? No. There is perhaps only one question to which No Wave offered a Yes: is there anything left when you start by saying 'No'?” All of which, then, makes for a subgenre that’s fairly open to collaborations, perhaps moreso than most. Why not bring in a writer to work on lyrics? Why not collaborate with someone outstanding in their own field but without formal musical training?The moment in No Wave history from which Y Pants emerged is important to keep in mind. In his introduction to the 2006 anthology Up Is Up But So Is Down: New York’s Literary Scene, 1974-1992, editor Brandon Stosuy set the stage for the literary world that the book encompasses. Stosuy notes that the experimentalism of that scene had a greater aesthetic similarity to the punk bands with whom those writers frequently shared art spaces than more traditional concepts of experimental writing from the same time. “All in all,” he writes, “these writers have more in common with Reed and his Velvet Underground, the tight three-chord anthems of the Ramones, or the jagged sounds of Suicide and DNA than baroque Pynchon and his V-2 missiles.”As tends to happen when likeminded creative figures congregate, disciplines began to overlap. Stosuy’s anthology is particularly useful in the way it showcases a cross-section of a particular scene, noting not just the punk ties of literary figures like Tillman and Dennis Cooper, but also the literary efforts of those known for their work in other fields, such as Lydia Lunch and David Wojnarowicz. Barbara Ess, best known for her innovative photography, is represented in the anthology as both a writer and designer, but has also been involved in several musical groups over the years, the aforementioned Y Pants included.The same spirit of collaboration and the motif of punk and literature borrowing from one another—what Stosuy refers to as “the fusion of power chords and words”—persisted beyond the initial heyday of postpunk and downtown experimentalism. One of the most prominent writers mentioned in Up Is Up But So Is Down is Kathy Acker, who collaborated with the long-running group the Mekons on the album Pussy, Queen of the Pirates. Now might be a good time to mention this live footage of the collaborators performing on television, in which Acker dramatically reads from her work before segueing into the Mekons at their most catchily new wave, while everyone dances across the stage dressed as pirates. It is an amazing sight to behold. But more importantly, it suggests, like Lindsay Hunter taking the microphone on a Pissed Jeans song, that the overlap by a pair of artists with roots in the avant-garde can be surprisingly cathartic and ecstatic. It’s another way for musicians already taking their music in unexpected directions to go in an even more unexpected direction. In the case of Hunter and Pissed Jeans, for instance, this is twofold: adding a literally different voice to the band’s music, and folding in a representative of a new artistic discipline along the way.[[{"fid":"6700726","view_mode":"media_original","fields":{"format":"media_original"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"The MEKONS & Kathy Acker ~ Live ~ Pussy, King of the Pirates ~","class":"media-element file-media-original"}}]]Pussy, Queen of the Pirates shares its name with a book by Acker, though the two works are distinct from one another. In a 1996 interview for the zine Carbon 14, Acker talked about how she had sought to explore questions of race through writing the book. Her answer, however, ultimately explores larger questions about the nature of collaboration and the work that can result:“When I start it, I have no idea where it will end up. The same thing with the record with the Mekons. I didn't know it would end up the way it has. I was using material from the book, but I think it's also partly something else. Something you get from the record itself, or from the live performance.”That sense of “something else” isn’t easy to quantify. Some of it might be the notion of taking a listener (or a reader, or a viewer) by surprise; some of it might stem from the friction that emerges from the best collaborations (and is entirely absent from the worst). It does seem notable, however, that plenty of those collaborations maintain a connection, even now, to the same downtown scene from which Acker played a part.The producer of Pissed Jeans’s Why Love Now is, in fact, Lydia Lunch (who has herself worked across multiple artistic disciplines). A significant amount of the press the band did follow Why Love Now’s release delved into the band’s working relationship with their two high-profile collaborators. In the case of Hunter, that came via vocalist Matt Korvette’s admiration for her writing.“I’ve just been a fan of hers and I reached out and we became friends,” he told writer Sarah Rose Etter in an interview for Fanzine. “I just love her writing. I wanted her to write something for the insert initially, but then I wondered does anyone even read inserts?” And so the band and Hunter worked together to create “I’m A Man,” which both feels like a natural extension of their sound and a necessary counterpoint to it. In an interview with the music website CLRVYNT, Korvette was asked about Lunch’s reaction to the finished song. His response? “Oh man, she was moshing to it. It was great!”There are, of course, such collaborations whose lineage can’t be traced directly to that New York scene of yore. The Philadelphia-based poet, musician, and performance artist Camae Ayewa makes music under the name Moor Mother; her album Fetish Bones was released last year by Don Giovanni Records, best-known for being the home to music by punk artists ranging from Downtown Boys to Screaming Females to Alice Bag. In her introduction to her interview with Ayewa at Pitchfork, writer Jenn Pelly wrote that “she’s posted some 100 recordings to Bandcamp, with samples ranging from children’s hand games to Fugazi’s ‘Waiting Room’ bassline to the poets Maya Angelou, June Jordan, and Ntozake Shange.” Here, too, there’s a juxtaposition between the literary and the musical; here, too, the result is nearly impossible to classify, but frequently gripping.Trying to force cross-disciplinary collaborations can backfire in a host of ways. But the upswing in these sorts of punk/literary collaborations feels organic: the increased presence of writers at music festivals suggests a move towards increased overlap, and as writers have embraced more performative readings, some have also gotten attention for that side of their persona—author Amelia Gray, for one, has recorded two sessions for the online music archive Daytrotter. A number of DIY performance spaces are also taking a cue from bygone days and hosting multidisciplinary work: the calendar for the Brooklyn DIY space Silent Barn shows readings and zine events alongside a host of punk and experimental artists. The result, often, is thrilling and unexpected: artists of different stripes challenging and complementing each other, and forging new ground together in the process.
The specific way men interview women (5:05), Rory Gilmore, journalist (17:17), and the Avril Lavigne riots of 2021 (48:27)
05.06.17
Speaking with the author of Bright, Precious Days about resisting contempt for your characters, differing degrees of infidelity, and the health of the novel in 2017.
The story of how Jay McInerney met Raymond Carver reads like a cheesy novel. After college, McInerney lands a job at The New Yorker as a fact checker, but he’s no good at it and the magazine fires him. Unemployed, and with not much to do, he’s hanging out in his lower Manhattan apartment one day when the phone rings. On the line is his old roommate from Williams College, Gary Fisketjon, who’s already making a name for himself as an editor at Knopf. Fisketjon tells McInerney that he and his colleague Gordon Lish just had lunch with Carver. But the two editors have to go back to the office and the not-yet-legendary writer is at loose ends until a reading that night, so the poet and master of the short story needs someone to entertain him for the afternoon. Because Fisketjon is well aware of his fondness for Carver’s work, McInerney assumes the call is a practical joke. But soon he hears a buzz at his door.At first, the two men—from different socioeconomic backgrounds and different generations—don’t really have much in common. Then McInerney serves some cocaine and the awkwardness melts away as they spend the afternoon talking about books and writers and writing. At 7:30, they suddenly realize they have just half an hour to get all the way uptown to Columbia University. Only a little late, Carver reads “Put Yourself in My Shoes” from his Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? collection. He reads it really, really fast.After returning to Syracuse, where he’s landed a teaching gig, Carver writes McInerney a letter to say that it occurs to him that perhaps living in New York City might not be that conducive to the young man’s goal of becoming a novelist. He suggests McInerney enroll at Syracuse University and work with him.And here’s your impossibly happy ending: the two become close, personally and professionally, and Carver writes a blurb for the cover of McInerney’s debut that reads: “A rambunctious, deadly funny novel that goes right for the mark—the human heart.” That 1984 book, Bright Lights, Big City, becomes a massive critical and commercial hit.*When a Hazlitt editor asked me if I wanted to interview McInerney, I assumed it was typecasting: an old white male from an upper middle class background to interview an old white male from an upper middle class background. The rationale ultimately wasn’t quite that shallow, though the idea did seem to spring from the notion that “every journalist of a certain age read Bright Lights, Big City.”He wasn’t wrong. The main character is a fact checker at a publication clearly based on The New Yorker, so obviously every magazine journalist read it. But so did everyone else, or at least everyone who read any literary fiction at all. The novel—which McInerney wrote in six weeks, the same amount of time it took William Faulkner to write As I Lay Dying—was a cultural and literary phenomenon. This was in the days before the Internet helped splinter us into discrete cultural tribes: you could actually go to a party and expect to talk to other people in depth about Bright Lights, Big City.McInerney was hailed as part of a new literary Brat Pack, a group that also included Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, and others. The label had more to do with marketing young writers who wrote about sex and drugs than anything else, but it caught on. I enjoyed Jill Eisenstadt’s From Rockaway, but I gave up halfway through Ellis’s Less Than Zero—I couldn’t stand the novel’s amoral sensibility (or, if that book had a moral compass, I wasn’t smart enough to understand it). And Janowitz’s Slaves of New York remains on my bookshelf, unread for decades. But, since I’m not sure anyone has ever asked me my opinion of it, I never felt any guiltier about not reading that than any of the other books on my shelf that I haven’t read. No, the one you needed an opinion about—and wanted an opinion about—was Bright Lights, Big City. Even my wife was keen that I take this assignment because, she said, “I remember how excited you were to read it back then.”I reread it before I interviewed McInerney and was delighted that it totally still holds up (unlike much of the cultural output of the 1980s). In just 182 pages, the spare but energetic prose screams along as it documents—famously using second-person narration—the drug-fueled descent of young man whose mother has died, whose model wife has left him and who’s about to lose his coveted magazine job.All of which really did happen to McInerney. Just like something out of a novel.*When I met McInerney on a Friday afternoon last October, he was wearing a sports jacket, a light blue shirt without a tie, dark grey jeans and loafers. I found him fidgety: he flicked his fingers a lot and crossed and uncrossed his legs often. He’d been touring his eighth novel, Bright, Precious Days, for two months and I’m sure he was getting tired of it. But later, when I listened to the recording, I was surprised at how much he laughed—chuckled, actually—so maybe he wasn’t that bored.We were in a small meeting room in the Toronto offices of Penguin Random House, not a funky lower Manhattan flat. He was set to do a reading at the International Festival of Authors that evening. We did not snort cocaine. But we did talk about books, writers and writing. And British sports cars.I’d opened our conversation by asking if a friend of his had smashed his Austin Healey. He laughed nervously, said no and, I’m sure, wondered what kind of psycho I was. I pointed out that an Austin Healey gets demolished in both Bright Lights, Big City and Bright, Precious Days. "Does it?” he said. “Oh, wow, you're right. I didn't realize that until just now.”And then, a memory: he told me the story of the time his father wrecked an MG. McInerney lived in Vancouver from Grade 4 to Grade 8 and on Saturdays, his father would take him out in the sports car to do errands. One day, McInerney was playing with friends and his father went without him and wrapped the MG around a telephone pole. The passenger side was obliterated. “If I had been in the car that day, I would no longer be here."McInerney’s first car was an Austin Healey. "Like my father, I liked British sports cars. And still do,” he said, adding that he spent a lot of time by the side of the road waiting for tow trucks when he was younger because of unreliable British automobiles. "Suffering for style because they are cool looking cars, but they aren't very practical."Both Bright Lights, Big City and Bright, Precious Days also feature hilarious scenes with ferrets. And there are drugs in both. But I’m not suggesting McInerney has just rehashed his first book. Far from it. While the writing in his latest might be more sedate than in his debut, it’s more assured and the characters have more psychological depth. For me, reading Bright, Precious Days was like re-discovering an old band I used to like but had, for whatever reason, stopped listening to.*As we spoke, McInerney drank from a mug with a Penguin cover of The Great Gatsby on it, which seemed a bit too perfect given that I’d found it impossible to not think of that great American novel when I read Bright, Precious Days. Although, like all of us, McInerney read Gatsby when he was young, it didn’t make an impression on him the way The Sun Also Rises or The Catcher in the Rye did. But once people started making comparisons after Bright Lights, Big City came out, McInerney went back to Fitzgerald’s work, was inspired and admits he’s been influenced by him ever since.He bristles, though, when readers describe Russell and Corrine Calloway as fabulously wealthy. The couple at the centre of Bright, Precious Days, don’t have particularly lucrative jobs by Manhattan standards. Russell is a publisher of literary fiction and Corrine runs a non-profit. And their city is a Darwinian place that has priced out people who haven't succeeded or who work in lower-income fields. So the Calloways rent their one-washroom loft, eat out only three times a week—about four times fewer than everyone else in Manhattan, jokes McInerney—and hang out almost exclusively with people who are richer than they are. Still, most readers would likely consider them fabulously wealthy even if no one in New York sees them that way.But the protagonists’ relative economic status is integral to the novel, which takes place between America’s mid-term elections in 2006 and the financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama in 2008. “For me, it's important that Russell and Corrine, even though they are glamorous, are in some sense something of an Everyman, Everywoman,” he says. “And even though they live in this really exotic setting of New York City, their struggles really aren't that different than people living in small Midwestern towns. They're struggling to keep up.”In a 2002 piece called “Why Gatsby is so great,” McInerney noted, “Fitzgerald's best narrators always seem to be partaking of the festivities even as they shiver outside with their noses pressed up against the glass.” That’s also true of Russell Calloway, who, though he isn’t the narrator, is not unlike Nick Carraway: he observes a socioeconomic culture where people have more money but aren’t necessarily better or smarter people. And the setting is similar. “It's not deliberate,” the author says, “but certainly I like to think there's some continuity between Fitzgerald’s fictional New York-Long Island and mine.”McInerney, who moved around a lot as a kid, has made Manhattan his literary turf the way Carver made the Pacific Northwest his and Alice Munro has made Southwestern Ontario hers. He’s fascinated by the upper echelons of New York, a world not many people have access to and not many people write about with realism. “And,” he says, “there's a lot of fodder for satire there.”At one point, Calloway goes out for lunch with a possible investor and watches a pissing match between oenophiles: his host and a table of financial hotshots send glasses of increasingly rare wines back and forth in an effort to impress each other. McInerney wishes he could take credit for completely inventing this scene but it wasn't too far off what he saw back in 2006 and 2007 at Veritas and Cru, two “meccas of wine worship” that boasted $5,000 and $10,000 bottles on their lists. His celebrity as a novelist and wine columnist meant people often offered him glasses of expensive vintages (similarly, many people offered him cocaine after Bright Lights, Big City came out). “You can't write about New York without making fun of a lot of the ridiculous behavior,” he says. “I mean, if you did, you'd be a fool.”Inevitably, the other book I thought of while reading Bright, Precious Days was Bonfire of the Vanities. McInerney calls it a great New York novel, thanks to Tom Wolfe’s talent as both a stylist and a sociologist. The two writers ran into each other at a dinner in late 1984 or early 1985, and the man in the white suit said, “You did something really cool there. Nobody's written a literary novel about New York in years.” At the time, Wolfe had been going around saying the novel was dead. “That stuck in my mind,” says McInerney, “because three or four years later, he wrote a very big literary-slash-commercial novel set in New York. So I like to think I had a bit of influence on him.”Although Wolfe mocks relentlessly, McInerney oscillates between satire and romance. Some chapters in Bright, Precious Days are more Evelyn Waugh or Wolfe, he says, while others are more Fitzgerald. Sending up the lives of the affluent is part of his objective, but far from the point of the book. After all, like everyone else, New Yorkers struggle with questions of life and love and fidelity and family.While Wolfe seems contemptuous of all of his characters, McInerney is fond of the Calloways, whom he first wrote about in 1992’s Brightness Falls and then again in 2006’s The Good Life. “The only thing that keeps me from liking Bonfire of the Vanities as much as Balzac's great novels, for instance, is there's nobody that I really identify with or care about terribly much,” he says, before pointing out that Wolfe isn’t trying to make us care about them. “I genuinely like Russell and Corrine or I wouldn't keep writing about them.”In fact, he’ll likely return to them in a future novel. He doesn’t want to follow them into assisted living—he is, by his own admission, too much of a glamour hound for that—but, at only fifty-one by the end of Bright, Precious Days, they aren’t ready for the old folks home just yet.In the meantime, he’d like to think people in other parts of the world, rural and urban, can relate to them. After all, money and bright lights aside, most of their problems are normal ones. “There is the issue of what dress Corrine is going to wear to the gala,” he says, “but most of the time she is dealing with more fundamental questions.” These include their kids, their jobs, their home—and their marriage. “Ultimately, this book is about marriage and relationships as much as it's about making fun of rich people,” he says. “More than it's about making fun of rich people.”*McInerney’s current wife is Anne Hearst, sister of Patty and granddaughter of William Randolph. At 62, it’s his fourth marriage. So it’s a subject he was some experience with.Fidelity, he argues, is the central question of marriage and the eternal question that the domestic novel—including classics such as Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary—inevitably deals with. “The interesting marriages are the ones that survive the crises rather than the ones that sail placidly along the untroubled waters,” he says. His parents had a good one, but his mother had an affair. “I think my mom was glad that she stayed in the marriage. In the end, she believed in it.”To their friends, the Calloways seem to be the perfect couple. They aren’t, of course, and both have had affairs. But they’re still together after more than twenty-five years. The book considers whether it’s different when a husband cheats than when a wife does. And McInerney wanted to see how far you could push a guy like Russell before the marriage’s trust was irreparably broken. “Male infidelity is certainly less surprising and it seems to be somehow less consequential,” he says, suggesting that it’s a dog bites man story when a guy cheats on his wife and more of a man bites dog story when a woman cheats on her husband. “I think where it really differs is the whole question of what's forgivable, because male pride is a much more obdurate thing than female pride.”*In 1984, McInerney’s publisher told him the novel was dying and nobody his age read, so while he’d written a good book, he shouldn’t have any big expectations for Bright Lights, Big City. That sentiment was wrong then, and a succession of writers—he cites Nathan Hill as a recent example—have proven it wrong ever since.So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Bright, Precious Days is also about books and the publishing industry. McInerney says his relationship with Fisketjon, who has been editing him since he was writing short stories in college, informed the characters. But anyone who knows the infamous controversy over how Lish edited Carver will hear echoes of it in the relationship between Russell and a young short story writer named Jack Carson.I asked McInerney if he preferred Lish’s versions of Carver’s stories or Carver’s versions. His take: “I hate to say it, but I kinda like both.” Which was an answer I really liked. I told him I’d seen Carver at the International Festival of Authors in 1984. He’d read “Cathedral,” a story I’d initially come across in The Atlantic in 1981 and loved, but when I heard Carver read it, I suddenly realized how funny it was. McInerney, who’d first heard an oral version of the story before there was a cathedral in it, told me, “He always made things funny when he read them.”For many people in publishing today, there’s not much to laugh about. But Russell’s optimism—or at least his refusal to be pessimistic—about the industry reflects McInerney’s view. The fracturing of the culture means it might be harder for a literary novelist to seize the popular imagination the way he did with Bright Lights, Big City. But he’s encouraged that the novel endures.Sure, they don’t have the cultural centrality they did in the 1920s when Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner were putting them out. “But I like that young people are still interpreting the world through the vehicle of the novel,” he says, “and it's wonderful that it hasn't died yet.”
02.06.17
There’s an easy way to avoid the clichéd, harmful, and just plain wrong narratives about sex work: actually talk to sex workers.
My job was to show up, look good, and entertain the mystery man behind the hotel room door, which, thankfully, I mostly found fun and easy. Married business men were the usual clientele, and there was always plenty to talk about. Conversation was the gateway to sex. If I could connect to a man, if we could make each other laugh, or if we had common interests, I would have no qualms about having sex with him; that’s what I was there to do, after all. In fact, having learnt a bit about his mind, I wanted to know his body. How it moved, how he fucked. Truly, a jolly time was had by all. And I was making a ridiculous amount of money, too. —Andrea Werhun, author of Modern WhoreA few years ago, I wrote three hundred pages of a Depressing Novel about a sex worker. Though the story began in Thailand, during her childhood, it opened on her present-day adult life and work as a high-end escort servicing wealthy businessmen and oil executives in Calgary. Her present work was complexly linked to the traumatic experiences she’d had as a child and adolescent. But the narrative arc kept springing awry, like a segmented tent pole on a windy day; you know the kind, with elastic cord stretched tight inside. The tension—sproing!—between my fictional story and the true stories that sex workers kept telling me was too much. The more I wrote her, the less true my character became.To be honest, this did not surprise me. This sad adult character, with her weighty childhood memories, wasn’t based in truth. She was a lie.I had relatives and friends who were or had been in the sex trade. These women were real; they were honest about their work, which had its difficulties, especially for those who had worked the street. But their lives had never been anything like the sombre, wordy drama my novel was becoming. Beyond their specialized work, these women’s lives were “normal,” whatever that means. When it came to their jobs, they were like labouring human beings all over the world. They wanted safe working conditions, good healthcare, and legal protection of their basic human rights. Some of them had been hurt by their clients, or their families, or the police; some of them had never met an abusive client and had worked quietly out of condo buildings their entire careers. One thing they had in common was how profoundly tired they were of other people’s disrespect, hatred, and miscomprehension when it came to them and their livelihoods. All of them supported complete decriminalization of sex work.For the past couple thousand years, most societies have pathologized sex work and have responded to sex workers in moralistic, punitive, and violent ways. I grew up in a Christian fundamentalist religion, where only married heterosexuals were allowed to have sex; everything else was disgusting and bad, the pathway to annihilation. As a child, I learned that if I masturbated or had sex before marriage, God was going to kill me. He would kill anyone who did any bad sexual thing, especially women. This was borne out in biblical stories, of course: most of the sexually transgressive women in the Bible come to tragic ends.However, a couple years before the execution threats, I’d snuggled in front of the TV with my older sister. I was eight; I did not yet know what sex was. We watched a scantily clad dancer on screen twist acrobatically around a pole. An aspiring gymnast myself, I was delighted. She was beautiful, but already blurring into the background as loud powerful men took over the scene. No doubt the movie revolved around them as surely as the stripper revolved around her pole. A moment later, and she had completely disappeared from view—in hindsight, an important first lesson about how the usual storylines of our culture make sex workers invisible.I asked my older sister what the woman had been doing. “Taking off her clothes. For money! She’s a stripper.” Terrible, thrilling word. I felt its import and power—look what she could do on that pole!—without understanding what it all meant. But the power of that half-naked woman remained with me, as certain as the power of the vengeful Christian god who was soon to take over my young mind and body.*Any deep study of history, myth, and etymology confirm they’re all of a piece: the naked woman and the god, the goddess and the naked man, the sacred and the profane. They’re braided together, woven back through time to ancient fertility cults that honoured the awesome and mysterious generative powers of both male and female sexualities.One root for the word “whore” finds its origins in the name of one of the earliest ancient goddesses, Xar, or Kar, whose name meant desire, heart, beloved—she who stands at the heart of the world. Cardia in Greek, meaning heart, is still a term of endearment, just as cuore is in Italian, and carino in Spanish means beloved. As Kar was absorbed by Greek culture, a further derivation of her name is possibly xora, for dance, after the ritualistic routines the attendants of the earliest temples would perform. Xora is closely related to ora, for time and hour; the dances themselves marked the seasons and times of the temples. Priestesses and their attendants sometimes had sex with worshippers in exchange for offerings to the temple; some participated in orgiastic fertility rites. Over a thousand years, as monotheistic, masculine-god religions established themselves, so-called “pagan” temples were destroyed or transformed into the churches, synagogues and mosques of the “one true God.” The temple attendants and priestesses were forced out of these repurposed holy places. Unhoused, no longer holy, they became some of the first street-walking sex workers in history.Many languages (Greek, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, German, French, Russian, to name but a few) all contain variations on the words ora, horo, hora. They mean, variously, time, hour, dance, and whore.Working with customers as a barista or waitress, I quickly realized that service with a smile—in conjunction with a plunging neckline—guaranteed a top gratuity, especially from men ... They wanted to feel wanted. With every grin ... and tasteful boobie jiggle, another toonie dropped into the tip jar. One day, it occurred to me that I was using my sexuality, my beauty, and my youth to make money. But I was making minimum wage, subtly squeezing my tits together for pocket change. I knew these guys wanted to have sex with me, so I thought, Why not, then? Why not get straight to the point and have sex with them for money? Why degrade myself and live under the poverty line when I could "degrade" myself and live like a queen?—Andrea WerhunAs the seasons changed, so did my novel. I dropped the tragic sex-worker character, and, given permission by talking with women who made their livings with their sexuality (and their charm, and intelligence, and open-mindedness), I started thinking more about the role of sex in my own life: who it made me, how it delighted me, how my sex life had changed over the years. I started writing a new book, with women characters who were essentially happy and healthy, deeply engaged in life, and interested—surprise!—in sex.One of those characters is a sex worker in her thirties, who is slowly transitioning out of the industry, getting close to working as a psychologist who specializes in sex therapy. But she has anxiety about that coming change in her life; she knows she will miss her first career. I wanted to show that many sex workers love doing what they do. Everyone I talked to during the course of my research wanted to be in the sex trade. They liked using their bodies in various sexual ways in exchange for payment. More than one of them laughed at that pitying formulation, “she sells her body for money.” Marissa, a worker in her forties, told me, “If I were selling a kidney, or an ovary, sure, I’d be selling my body for money. And big fucking deal, it’s my body. Nobody gets all insulting and pissy if you donate a kidney to someone who’s dying, right? So what’s the big deal about sucking a guy’s cock or doing it doggy-style in a slutty bustier?” She laughed; I observed that she might consider a career in standup comedy. “No way, it doesn’t pay well enough. Besides, I’m serious! Sex work is a lot safer, technically speaking, than donating a kidney. It does nothing negative or harmful to my body and sometimes it’s even fun. That’s all I sell: my time, my expertise. I take my whole body with me when I leave. Just like any other person who has a job.”These women educated me. More and more, I was reading their blogs and websites. Still, I had to consciously work to root out cultural, societal, religious and even feminist notions about who did sex work and why. I had to ask the women, are you doing this because you’ve been abused? Because you’ve been coerced, in some way, even in the past?Nathalie Lefevbre had so many clients ask her that question that she addressed it on her website, under the tab “Ask me anything.” In response to the question “Are you being exploited?” she writes:“You’re lovely to ask. I would be equally worried about exploitation and choice in the context of sex work. As a privileged, white, able-bodied and educated young woman, this is a choice I’ve made among many equally appealing opportunities. I work full-time outside of escorting as a grad student, research assistant, and teacher’s assistant, and feel extremely fulfilled in my employment. I enjoy the interpersonal intimacy that sex brings, and companionship has brought a lot of happiness and fulfillment to my life.”When I first contacted Nathalie and told her that I was researching Canadian sex workers’ lives, she was generous with her time and expertise. She was also politically savvy, kind-hearted, and funny. Like other sex workers I’d interviewed, her humane directness about sex combined with her youth and intelligence were attractive on various levels. I always enjoyed talking to her. After our first few interviews on the phone, I met her in person. Unsurprisingly, I was attracted to her sexually, even though she wasn’t really my type. (Flexibility is a virtue.) If my husband and I had an extra $800 to spare, she would have been a wonderful person to get naked with for a couple of hours. I understood why her reviews on CERB—the Canadian Erotic Review Board—were glowing and sweet.“I tell clients that I enjoy physical intimacy and gentleness. Sure, things can get intense, too. But it usually takes a few dates to build up that kind of trust with someone. I’ve never had a bad experience with a client. I have a lot of privilege in the kind of sex work I do. I have the ability to stay safe. I am able to take care of myself.” She only sees clients who can offer a reference of safety from another service provider. “Not everyone can make this kind of work safe for themselves. How could they, when society and our laws still denigrate and endanger sex workers?...I offer a space for people to express themselves sexually. A lot of men—and women, too—simply don’t have that in their lives. They’re in sexless or otherwise unhappy marriages where they stay because they love their children and feel they are doing the responsible thing. Every other client I see is like that. They are often ashamed of the fact that they’re married, and seeing me. I tell them that I do not judge them, and I do not. I believe in the humanization not just of the sex worker, but of the client, of the man.”People with histories of abuse come from all walks of life and work in all kinds of industry. Sex workers aren’t just abuse victims re-enacting their trauma over and over again for money. This fantasy infantilizes a whole swath of the sex working population without a single shred of evidence. Why does sex work only make sense within the framework of worker victimhood? Why is the empowered, sex-work-is-real-work whore so unbelievable? A few thousand years of indoctrination against the whore has taught us a lascivious woman is damaged, not to be trusted and deserves to be abused. —Andrea WerhunThe Depressing Novel, all three hundred pages of it, sits in the bottom drawer. I won’t be rereading it any time soon. The book that replaced it is a funny, erotic, set-in-my-neighbourhood tale called The Change Room. It features a woman character—Eliza, a busy middle-class, middle-aged working mother, like me—who in the midst of her jam-packed life meets a sexy woman named Shar at the community pool. Though Eliza truly loves her husband, there’s not much going on in the bedroom. The first time these two women meet—in the shower room, just before entering the change room—Shar plugs right into every sexual electrical socket in Eliza’s body. They quickly become lovers, and the novel follows how this and other secrets change (or do not change) the characters’ lives. (FYI: No one in this book is punished, murdered, or beaten for transgressing sexual norms.) Shar is a sex worker, though she doesn’t tell Eliza that. She has complexities, failings, and wounds of her own, but she is not depressed, nor is she acting out some long-ago abuse. She takes good care of herself; she loves her work. She is also pursuing post-doc studies in psychology. Shar lives with that open hearted courage that I admire in real-life sex workers, even though our governments and societies leave them vulnerable to harassment and violence by refusing to decriminalize their profession. It is the defining paradox of the sex worker’s life: these fearless people—women, men, trans—are also the most willfully, callously endangered by those who want to control them.Sex workers’ right are human rights. How many times will they have to tell their fellow citizens this before we listen to them with an equal courage, at the political level, and decriminalize sex work permanently?
01.06.17
Mass intimacy requires a dilution of one’s complexities. In order to become a celebrity, a person necessarily becomes a personage.
On May 14, 1643, thirty-three years after taking the French throne, Louis XIII died of complications from tuberculosis. Throughout his reign, he had found difficulty in centralizing power, and felt forced to exile his mother, Marie de’ Medici, and execute many of her followers in order to stave off both Italian influence and the followers of his late father, Henry IV, who had been assassinated when he was just eight years old.Louis XIII left the throne to his four-year-old son, who would ably learn from his father’s mistakes. When Louis XIV entered his twenties, he realized he would have to cement his monarchical legitimacy not exclusively through the violent realpolitik of his father, but also by making himself into a celebrity—someone the people and the courts could understand, could like, could dream of being. It was largely through soft power that he would affirm and centralize his domestic rule.In order to do so, he declared himself “the Sun King.” He ordered that his triumphs on the battlefield be engraved and distributed. He had two arches—the Porte Saint-Denis and the Porte Saint-Martin—constructed, as well as two squares—the Place des Victoires and the Place Vendôme, both of which surrounded statues of him. He had Versailles turned from a hunting lodge into a palace, bringing together the previously decentralized French nobility, and he hired Israel Silvestre the Younger as his designer and engraver, who was tasked with distributing high-quality etches and prints of the new palace and gardens to the French populous. Perhaps better than any other monarch in history, Louis XIV understood that power could be realized most efficiently and most persuasively not by hard-fought accomplishment but by performance and artifice.Today, we would call someone like Louis XIV, who was adept at managing his image and performing a high social role, a celebrity. But the history of celebrities as we now know them is a relatively recent one. In its current definition—as someone who is given or achieves major public recognition—the word dates back to only 1849, when it first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary, just a decade after photography was commercially introduced. Mass intimacy requires a dilution of one’s complexities. In order to become a celebrity, a person necessarily becomes a personage.*The contemporary celebrity is a slightly different breed than the Sun King. The most interesting and salient aspect of modern celebrity culture is the recent addition of the “attributed celebrity,” the kind of celebrity to which Donald Trump and the Kardashians belong. As the sociologist Chris Rojek noted in his book Celebrity, fame can be “ascribed” (because of one’s lineage), “achieved” (because of one’s talent), but it can also now be “attributed.” While the first two paths have been common throughout history, the third is quite new. By definition, the attributed celebrity is associated with qualities that the populous believes are useful and desirable but may not actually be so.Attributed celebrities are, as Rojek wrote, “cultural fabrications.” Rojek, who published Celebrity in 2001, presciently saw that the existence of attributed celebrities was largely due to “the expansion of the mass-media.” Via social media today, the masses have a direct say in an individual’s public recognition. Remarkably, the attributed celebrity does not have to be an achiever of anything in particular, an original thinker, or a groundbreaking iconoclast. As well as being anti-elitist and populist in nature, attributed celebrity culture is also conceptually anti-neoliberal: little must be done to earn celebrity and one does not have to positively affect the market to be made famous (although it helps). On shows such as The Bachelor, The Apprentice, or Survivor, it is the contestants’ characters—more so than their accomplishments—that give the viewing public reason to watch.Celebrity culture has been particularly successful with the rise of mass dissemination of images. (The term itself, perhaps unsurprisingly, grew out of the era of photography’s invention.) Projected on our screens, the celebrities we choose can do our living for us. We assign them to positions of power and notoriety, and then let them live and feel on our behalf, whether it’s in our best interest or not.So why do some people catch the public’s favor in such a way as to vault them to celebrity status in the first place? Historically, a central reason has been their characteristic adherence to tropes. In order to trust someone, it is helpful if the populous feels as though they have seen that person before—in history, or, perhaps even more importantly, in stories.As anyone who has spent time watching reality television knows, there is a standard cast: the villain, the sweetheart, the charmer, the gold-digger, the attention obsessive. There is also often the ditz, the moralist or goodie-goodie, and the everyman. We have seen these roles before. They fit into our oldest stories. In his fourth century B.C.E. book The Characters, Aristotle’s student Theophrastus introduced the types of characters he’d seen across Ancient Greece, which are, in essence, the same characters as one sees on an episode of Big Brother or Survivor: “the talkative,” “the show-off,” “the coward,” “the basely covetous,” “the penny-pincher,” “the boor,” “the officious,” “the flatterer”—and twenty more. The best way for people in positions of power to be understood, beloved, and legitimized is by their adherence to these cookie-cutter character frameworks, which have lasted millennia. In this way, the would-be celebrity is understandable to everyone—beyond linguistic, social, cultural, even intellectual barriers.*Is there a truth behind the type? In the case of Donald Trump, will we ever know who he is? What really comprises his relationship with Melania? With his children? What are his deepest, most heartfelt opinions? “It’s like a Rubik’s cube trying to figure this guy out,” Joe Biden once told The New York Times. “We have no freakin’ idea what he’s gonna do.”This mystery is not accidental. Like any attributed celebrity, Trump understands that mass intimacy requires simplification of one’s characteristics. Only so much can be presented at once. To be best understood, one must present a consistent image while, ideally, adhering to a recognizable type. If Trump is to maintain the favor of those who put him in power, he cannot change from his current tropes of “ruthless businessman,” “man’s man,” and “independent,” which vaunted him to celebrity status in the first place. Although some of his supporters claimed that he would become “more presidential” upon ascending to the role, Trump surely knew that this would be a betrayal of those who made him a celebrity in the first place. His celebrity “role” is not, and has never been, “presidential.” When Trump pushes past Montenegro’s leader Dusko Markovic at a NATO conference in Brussels, when Trump tries (and fails) to intimidate Emmanuel Macron with his signature aggressive handshake, he is only playing his role.Many of his voters—who watched The Apprentice, who bought his Trump-branded clothing, attended Trump University, and who appreciated his anti-Establishment rhetoric and all the others characteristics that fit within his pre-established trope—are more comfortable seeing that little has changed between candidate and president. He installed gold drapes in the Oval Office; he still wears his wide-lapelled Brioni suits and keeps up his combed-over hair; he’s still out golfing, and, based on his orange complexion and the little white goggle lines around his eyes, he seems to be continuing his tanning regimen.That is, he is still the same well-known trope-character, consistent and understandable—and understandability is comfortable. To understand a person is to understand the tropes he adopts. Perhaps it is to give Trump too much credit, but if he’s adept and interested in anything, it’s the creation of his own celebrity. Louis XIV, meet Donald Trump. Predictability, even the explosive kind, is the foundation of trust.
31.05.17
For two years after one of my closest friends killed herself, I thought my grief and guilt were meant only to be handled privately. Tree of Smoke reeled me back into the world.
When I heard last week that Denis Johnson had died, I thought immediately of the opening pages of Tree of Smoke.The book centers on CIA officer William Sands and the soldier brothers James and William Houston, set amidst the Vietnam War. Johnson begins on a grand scale, his first sentence reporting the death of President Kennedy, before he squares up on a sobering up William Houston, wandering through the jungle in the Philippines, looking for wild boar to shoot. The scope of the prose is wide—“ten thousand sounds of the jungle”—and personal—“pulse snickering in the heat of his flesh, and the creak of sweat in his ears.” Few writers can toggle between operatic registers and sneaky details as well as he could, and he flexes all these muscles in this short early scene. We follow Houston through the jungle until he stumbles on a small monkey. Houston shoots it: “He raised the barrel a few degrees and took the monkey’s head into the sight. Without really thinking about anything at all, he squeezed the trigger.” Johnson’s prose matches the raw enormity of the revelation: “Seaman Houston felt his own stomach tear itself in two. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he shouted at the monkey, as if it might do something about its embarrassing and hateful condition.” Approaching the monkey as it dies, Johnson renders Houston coming into an elemental grasp with the world through death: “As he held the animal in his hands, its heart stopped beating. He gave it a shake, but he knew it was useless. He felt as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it, he let himself cry like a child. He was eighteen years old.”In something like a thousand words, Johnson creates this magnificent moment, ludicrous and far away, exaggerated but serene. The exact details of the book are distant from my life, but his reckoning with death and grief’s ability to disorder resonated deeply when I first read it. The book came to me two years after the suicide of my oldest friend, C.—two years during which I had tried to understand her death, but also which I fled from it, afraid of the pain. I was initially expecting from Tree of Smoke a macho, fun, war story—instead, for the first time in two years, I felt absolutely confronted. Houston’s disorientation and naivety chimed in me, rang through the guilt and sadness and loneliness. That surprise, and Johnson’s tender ruminations, helped me finally let my guard down. The overwhelming sadness that came with C.’s death had made it impossible to step back and think about our friendship; this trick of fiction opened that node in me.*C. had been a constant presence in my life from grade two onwards. She sat across from me in Ms. Yamamoto’s class, her afro crowned by a hair band. I remember her as a serious student, always volunteering for the hand-outs, and a kind one; in grade six, she organized a surprise birthday for a teacher no one liked. While she was at the head of the class, I would linger at the back, more interested in Iron Man and Shaq; once, I shoved a chunk of rubber eraser up my nose and, too scared to tell anyone, left it there for a few days when it wouldn’t come out.Our friendship remained distant until high school, when our lives began bending toward similar creative paths. Always pragmatic, she had a keen interest in design, and for the first time, I found someone to talk to about art. I babbled nonstop about Charlie Kaufman; C., having a more agile intellect, rightly refuted most of what I said. I was bored then, mostly—I wanted to get out of the neighbourhood I grew up in but had no means to do so. C.’s friendship provided me an escape; for a time, there was nobody I was closer to. She called me “little one” in Spanish and teased me about my mopey demeanor, the fact that I was two hours late to the first date I ever went on, and my love for the band Korn. My family life was imploding as my older brother swerved in and out of trouble, and my parents were fully occupied with him. I sensed a similar restlessness in C.—I knew she had a complicated relationship to family, and that, despite her responsibilities, she wished she could have thrown them off.During our final year of high school she was the president of the student association, and I would stop by her office between classes and at lunch; C. was an emotional conduit for almost everyone who entered the room, always ready to provide sensible advice. On top of school, she played a large role helping her family with her younger siblings. I’d known C. to be stressed sometimes, or overworked, but never sad or depressed—never such depths of inner agony, or anything that suggested her life would end that way.When I went to university we began to drift apart. As time pulled us further away from each other, I checked in less and less, but I never forgot those early years of friendship and the grounding force she was. Even now, my memories of her are crowded with laughter and joy, the picture of a person I could go to when I was lost, for intimacy both intellectual and emotional. When her death came, a few months since we had last spoken, I felt as disoriented as Houston in the jungle—what had I really known? I felt, as Johnson wrote of the soldier, “as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it.” Her death thwarted my conception of our friendship. That guilt trailed me through the years, veering into the path of any happier recollections: did I not ask? Did I not see? Was I content and greedy with our friendship, eager and willing to benefit from her emotional maturity, drawing more from the well of her generosity than she could handle?*Johnson captures, in those first pages of Tree of Smoke, the aloneness of death. It is a solitary act; no matter how many people surround you, no matter how you go, the experience is singularly yours. Grief mirrors this: the folds of memory C.’s death had exposed belonged to me. I cried at her funeral and then not again for two years. I had a new girlfriend who didn’t know C. and I didn’t know how to articulate my thoughts to her; I was encircled by my best friends, all of whom had known her, but I didn’t know, then, how to be vulnerable with men. The only person I could have brought something of such gravity to was gone.When I found Tree of Smoke, it lured me in. Johnson’s prose is a trap—beautiful, romantic, but deadly. I had spent those years living in a sort of daze. C.’s death had shifted my understanding of the world, but I had no tools to comprehend that shift (and as I’ve learned since, even having those tools doesn’t necessarily mean you can build peace). Those pages were a hallucination, a dream, a ghost—how could it be magic and real at the same time? Johnson’s gift was in centering the minute within his gigantic spiritual worlds, where people’s small, private tribulations were balanced next to larger existential dread. I had thought for those two years that my grief was meant to be handled privately and with fortitude—I felt strong shame at having wept at the service. To see myself in this Vietnam War novel, the anguish I had been feeling expressed so clearly, so publicly, to see it realized with such acuity, was startling. Reading that opening, I felt myself being reeled back into the world. I hadn’t known what to do—C. was dead, I was not, and I could only wonder if I had let her down. I could feel my sadness morphing into fear, and I kept an emotional distance from those around me best suited to help. The pain remained, not available to me, but still informing my decisions. When a less direct path presented itself, cloaked in a book about Americans in the Vietnam War, I was able to engage in the confrontation.Learning of Johnson’s death felt oddly engulfing. I spent the day in bed scrolling through online remembrances, trying to parse my own feelings, trying to understand why the death of this person I had never known was so evocative. After Tree of Smoke, I read all his other books, and while impressed, it was the opening of Tree of Smoke that I would return to. Its language remains startling: there is no machismo, no bravado, none of the charm and romance sometimes ascribed to his characters. There is only Houston, the grand gesture of death, and his terrible sorrow and guilt. It wasn’t until after reading Tree of Smoke that I visited C.’s gravesite for the first time, though it took watching the bizarre funeral scene in Lars and the Real Girl sometime later that same summer for me to burst into tears, unexpectedly and unwillingly, finally prompting me to ask my girlfriend that unanswerable question: how much of it was my fault?Even now, I wouldn’t say I understand C.’s death, or that it resides in me in some uncomplicated way. I still don’t always understand my own sadness, or the different ways in which I miss her. Nine years since her passing, I’m only now beginning to have relationships that eclipse it in duration. Nine years later, and I still wonder what wounds I might reopen. I’ve tried to hold onto one of the lessons Johnson’s writing helped teach me: that grief can reside in me alongside memories of C.’s laugh, her teasing, that intimacy, without corrupting them. And though Johnson is now gone too, it’s with a familiar thankfulness I can approach what he left behind, knowing that each time I return to them, those sentences will bring me to life.
29.05.17
[[{"fid":"6700626","view_mode":"media_original","fields":{"format":"media_original"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"LCD Sounsystem - Someone Great (DL Link)","class":"media-element file-media-original"}}]]1. What do those humming sounds at the beginning of the song remind you of? Personally, I always think of grocery store freezers, the sound of which falls into that wonderful category of “almost music.” Like the occasionally sweet scrapings of a tram-car, or the borderline drumming of a forceful rain. There’s a lot of excellent ambient music being generated by our surroundings. Poignant, emotional stuff. But, usually, I don’t pay attention to it, unless I’m pointedly avoiding another sensation. Like how, at the dentist, I’ll mentally harmonize with the drill so I don’t think about what it’s doing. Or how I realized, during my ex-girlfriend’s accomplished description of my emotional problems, that I really like the sighing sound of passing cars.There was a cool night outside. The wind was yelling in the trees. Crickets were talking about whatever. What I wanted was silence, but there’s really no such thing. Even in the most soundproof rooms, you can still hear your heartbeat. Sylvia Plath famously called it “the old brag of my heart,” but in such moments, my heartbeat always feels like an apology. Sorry this is still happening. Poom-poom. So sorry. Poom-poom.All through the song, the freezers keep going. They’re slightly dissonant, almost wrong. Over the course of a decade’s obsessive listening to this song, I’ve heard it all sorts of different ways. Sometimes, rather than focusing on the lyrics, or the beat, I zero in on those weird freezer sounds—the noise that precedes and outlasts everything else.2. Walter was a garbage collector—one of many in my neighbourhood, who made a little cash from collecting bottles and cans and returning them to the liquor store. Every morning, he’d stop by while I was smoking on the stoop, and tell me what he’d found. Sometimes there was treasure. An expensive pocketknife, or a birdwatching guide. Walter said that these moments made a hard job worthwhile.His job was hard because, first of all, garbage, but secondly, because he had to compete with a whole cabal of old ladies who had their own rival operation. He showed me a little map, a very detailed map, of all the neighbourhood alcoholics, in whose bins could be found endless paydirt.It was a great little friendship. But I screwed it all up when I told him I wanted to write a story about him. He immediately accused me of being a spy—a covert representative of the other collectors, who were all trying to crack his secrets. After that I still saw him in the neighbourhood but he didn’t make eye contact.3. I know there’s a new LCD Soundsystem album coming out. What I’ve heard so far is good. Whatever. I’m writing about the old shit. Because the new shit could never hit me in the same way.Sorry, James Murphy. Not that I think you’ll take it personally. You know about the power of the music of youth. That’s why most of your best songs are ripoffs. It all sounds like New Order, or Talking Heads, or Heaven 17. Because those are the artists who first terraformed your insides. They gave you feelings you can’t ever have again. Feelings you gave me, the first time I heard your second album.You know this song is special, too. During what was supposed to be your last concert, after you played it, you retreated to the corner of the stage, and you had a little cry. You had a little huddle with Nancy, who comforted you. (She’s the keyboard player, maybe the one making all the freezer sounds.) Who could blame you? Being haunted in your apartment alone is hard enough. Being onstage for the last time, I imagine, has a way of inflating all that jiggery-pokery of the soul.But it wasn’t the last time. Because you’re back now. Playing shows again, making new music. Given how much of a music nerd you are, you know how badly comebacks usually go. (For every Leonard Cohen, there’s a thousand Frank Blacks.) It doesn’t matter, though, does it? You’ve got to keep trying, even though failure is nearly assured—you’ve got to keep attempting the capture of what looms inside you. Even though you can’t possibly, because, as the song goes, it keeps coming. It grows and grows. And yet, you can’t stop reaching out, as far as you can. You have no choice.4. Rumour has it that the song is about the death of James Murphy’s therapist, Dr. George Kamen, to whom the album is dedicated. The interpretation fits the lyrics well: “I wish that we could talk about it, but there, that’s the problem.” In the context of a doctor/patient relationship, this is clever: Murphy called Kamen whenever somebody died, and then Kamen went and died himself.But the rumour is incorrect. I know who the song is about, and it’s not some dead Bulgarian doctor. First of all, the person the song is really about is not dead. Secondly, to my knowledge, she’s never met James Murphy. Strictly speaking, she never actually existed, being that she was a fantasy I rudely assigned to a real person—an excellent person, really, but not the boundless rescuer I’d thought she was, the suture for my nonspecific wounds. James Murphy has never revealed her name, and neither will I.5. Here’s a pasta recipe.—Cut an onion in half. Throw it in a saucepan with a can of diced San Marzano tomatoes, and half a stick of butter. Boil it until it’s reduced to about 70% of its original volume. Season to taste.—Boil spaghetti in generously salted water. Wait for it to get nice and toothsome.—While you’re waiting, try and identify what’s going on with your sense of being somehow alone on the planet. Is it abating? Or are you just getting used to it?—And also, what happened with all that stuff you used to be passionate about? The German poetry, the documentaries, and so on. Whatever you thought about in school. You got distracted somehow. Diverted by all that laundry and that career stuff. Then the diversions became mostly everything. But that turns out to be okay. You can have lots of fun decorating your living room, and kissing your girlfriend before the void. Sometimes you cook dinner.—The sauce and the pasta are burning. You forgot about both of them. Disconnect the smoke alarm, dump the burning food in the sink, and go out on the deck.—Outside, the city, below you. Just beyond your view from four stories up, everything is going on. A dog is reading the instructions it finds in the pee of another. In a barely lit room, an atom-splitting gaze arrests its human object. And you, a soft, peachy coward, safe for the moment, alone on a Sunday evening.6. Everyone should date my girlfriend. But I am, so you can’t. Sorry about that. We have a great time. It’s the best relationship I’ve ever been in, and every day I learn more about love. Sometimes we drive to a mafia-owned bakery that’s open 24 hours, and nervously eat calzones under the fluorescent light.But nostalgia is immune to this knowledge—that I’m happier now than I ever was. Nostalgia says, “remember when your heart felt like neon wine, and you were drinking it through a crystal straw?” It sits ready, somewhere in a special foxhole of grey matter, waiting for the slightest moment of discontent or unease. Springing all over the mind, it says, “you were tremendous once. How did you arrive in this dreary circus?”7. Any time you spend with someone could be the last time. Which is so weird, because, usually, you don’t know that’s the case. Nobody tells you. Fate never says, in a buttery murmur, that after this brief chat, you won’t see Jimmy again on earth.Every remark is potentially final—potentially the last thing you tell a friend before they die, or just go somewhere. Most are wildly insufficient for that purpose. For example, scrolling through Facebook Messenger, I see that the last message I sent to Jill was: “nice nice re: format.” Imagine if she never heard from me again. Bye, Jill. Nice nice re: format.Most people I’ve ever met, in fact, I’ll probably never see again. All those kids from school. We’ve already exchanged our last looks, our unceremonious farewells. Troy saw me last when I was being pushed into the mud by another boy. Pippa gave me a concerned look as I left the party abruptly. My grandmother was having trouble eating a biscuit. “That’s kind of gross,” I thought. She was a good person.And at some point, I’ll have trouble eating biscuits, too. My jaw will weaken, and my gag reflex will lose its refinement. “Are you okay?” my currently unborn nephew will say. A few hours later, I’ll stop breathing, after saying something pithy, like, “could you pass me the tissues.”8. “You’re smaller than my wife imagined / surprised you were human.”9. It’s easy to be good to someone when you no longer exist. Your coffee breath no longer lingers in their nose. Your head doesn’t stain their pillow. Once or twice you let them down—neglected their emotions simply because you couldn’t be bothered. That doesn’t happen anymore.You never tell them the same stories twice. You never tell them a story at all. You watch their story elapse, from a brief, impassible distance, just around a corner in the sky. Their bar mitzvah, their recitals. They do a decent job of being alive. Not perfect, but pretty good. You praise their little foibles. The fidgeting nobody else can see.You get prettier, too, when you’re not around. Your less appealing angles forgotten. Your yellow teeth. The kind of impressionistic soft focus that flatters everyone. All of that sweet Terrence Malick garbage. That’s how they see you.And downtown, they walk beneath condominiums that make expensive shadows in the post-rain air as thick as cake. They occupy the very last parcel of oxygen on the rush hour bus. They feel dirty, and when they get home and wash the dirt off, they feel old. “I should catch up on email,” they say, to nobody in particular.Who could forget you? Everyone. But only partly.
29.05.17
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author on her new book, Anything is Possible, being a natural observer, not judging your characters, and stand up comedy.
In Anything is Possible, the sixth and most recent novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout, the residents of Amgash, Illinois, clash, collide, pass judgment and fall in love with one another. Though the stories interconnect, every chapter focuses on a different character. Dottie Blaine, the owner of a bed and breakfast, becomes a quiet observer of the subtle anxieties and humiliations of one of her guests. Pete Barton prepares for the homecoming of his sister, celebrated novelist Lucy Barton, and suddenly becomes painfully aware of how his humble, dusty life must look through Lucy’s eyes.That last name will be familiar to fans of Elizabeth Strout. In early 2016, she published My Name is Lucy Barton, a novel narrated by the astute eponymous character while she recovers from surgery in the hospital. Fragmented and poignant, Lucy Barton reflects on her career as a writer, shifting identity as an artist, complicated relationship with her abusive but devoted mother, and the stark contrasts between her poor small town upbringing and current life in the city. My Name is Lucy Barton becomes a recurring motif in Anything is Possible; her success as a writer is in the background to the others’ stories, and the residents of Amgash both resent and admire her for getting out.Strout is as thoughtful a writer as she is a speaker. She takes her time answering questions and doesn’t waste words, meticulously engaging with her characters and their worlds as if they are as real as any of us.Anna Fitzpatrick: It's a unique conceit, to have Lucy Barton’s book, and then have a second book where they're all talking about the first book. Her memoir that they read in Anything is Possible, was that intended to be My Name is Lucy Barton?Elizabeth Strout: Yes, it was.So it exists in the universe?Exactly. I had originally conceived of the entire project as one book. I thought, "I'll write My Name is Lucy Barton and then I'll have Lucy write these stories about her childhood." In the end, I thought, no, because her voice is so distinct. I didn't want the reader to turn the page and go into a third person narrative. It just didn't seem right to me. And then I thought, forget it. She didn't write the stories. I wrote the stories.There would have been certain limitations, if Lucy was the writer behind Anything is Possible. It would have been her interpretation of these characters.Exactly, so I let that go. But that was my original concept.So did you write them at the same time?I wrote a lot of Anything is Possible at the same time that I was writing My Name is Lucy Barton. I would skip over and write scenes of Mississippi Mary or the Pretty Nicely girls.A lot of the book is impressionistic; chapters will contradict or challenge the assumptions of characters from previous chapters. How honest do you think a memoir can be, in that regard?I think Lucy Barton was trying to be as honest as she could be. That's why I kept having her qualify her statements. She would say, "Well, I think that's what my mother said." Because I wanted her to be as reliable a narrator as possible, and she understood that writing memoir meant that she could only think that's what she remembered. So, I'm not sure.She's reliable in the way she's unreliable.Yeah.The story jumps around in time a lot. You have this anti-spoiler approach to writing. Like, in Olive Kitteridge, where you'll flash two decades into the future for a few pages and then goes back to where you left off. So it's not really about the plot. I'm not particularly interested in plot, and I never have been. I don't write with plot in mind. But I write with some change in mind. There'll be a change from the beginning of the story to the end of the story. I figure that out as I go along.Do you care about plot when you read other writers?No.What writers do you like?I like Elena Ferrante. I liked her books a lot. I have loved Alice Munro and William Trevor. I think those have been my bookends. They're just so wonderful in their own ways. Alice Munro has so much authority on the page, and William Trevor can just flip a sentence so gently and gorgeously. I love Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Philip Roth and John Updike and those American landmarks. I love Virginia Woolf, and the Russians. Tolstoy and Chekhov and Turgenev and Pushkin.Was there a freedom, in writing Lucy Barton, because you could have characters react to it? Even within her book, she brings her work to a writing workshop, and the teacher flat-out says, "This is what the book is about." There was. I wrote that scene—I don't write anything from beginning to end. I write these different scenes and see how they work together. I had written [writing teacher] Sarah Payne a number of times before I realized she would even be a writer. I thought, "Oh, this all works together. We'll have Lucy look up to her and go to her." And when I realized I could have Sarah Payne tell the reader what the book is about without Lucy having to tell the reader what the book is about. When Sarah says, "This is a book about a mother who stayed in a marriage because at that time everybody did, except for these different people who didn't. She's happily recounting all the bad things to these women that didn't stay in their marriages." Then I realized, oh, this is helpful.How did you first conceive of Sarah Payne, if not as a writer?You know, the first scene I wrote with her was just somebody Lucy met in a clothing store. They had a nice little exchange. Then I thought, okay, let's go back and make this something.There's that line in the other book, where Angelina's husband tells her, "You're in a love affair with your mother." And that's kind of a lot of the book, these passionate relationships that aren't romances, but with family members. Exactly. I wanted, not that it matters at all, but I wanted Anything is Possible to almost be like a hall of mirrors that reverberated with My Name is Lucy Barton. Like Charlie Macauley, the Vietnam vet. He's a reverberation of Lucy's father in the sense that these two men were damaged forever by war, so there's that. Then there's other little things I wanted to reverberate.I saw a lot of parallels between Patty and Vicky, the way they stand separate from their siblings, but Patty really responds to Lucy's work whereas Vicky has this coldness. When Abel Blaine is recalling how Dottie was twelve years old and was told at school, standing in her stained dress, that nobody was too poor to buy sanitary pads, and that reverberated in My Name is Lucy Barton where Vicky was told by her second grade teacher that nobody was too poor to buy a bar of soap. There were just those little things that I just wanted.Theme and variation.Yeah!Do you consider yourself a political person?I've always believed that phrase, "the personal is political." If I'm writing about anybody, then it's a political statement in my way of thinking.Obviously you started this a while ago, but now every week the New York Times has a profile on small-town white working-class communities. It's interesting, I was just a little ahead of that game. I do think my work is political. It has to be. Anybody who is recording the human experience is recording something political.Abel [a character from the last chapter of Anything is Possible, who has a strange encounter with an actor from a community production of A Christmas Carol] is a Republican, but he's really insistent on telling everyone that he pays his taxes, and he's not going to cheat on them. It was funny because I realized, Abel Blaine has gone from eating in dumpsters to marrying the boss's daughter, which we know from My Name is Lucy Barton. The mother tells Lucy he marries the boss’s daughter, and in fact he did. So when Scrooge says, "Oh, you married you way up," Abel is embarrassed. I think he was in love with his wife when he married her, but he did marry into this position of power, of changing from his class dramatically just as Lucy did. Thinking about him I realized, okay, he will be a conservative, and he will be a Republican, but he'll have this fundamental decency in him, which it used to be Republicans did. There are men like Abel Blaine who believed, I'm not going to cheat on my taxes. That's who he is, and he says that he's been successful in business, even though he married into money, he's been successful because people have been known to trust him, and trust in business is everything. He is, in my mind, a very trustworthy man. Not wanting to skimp on his taxes was a way of showing that.Would he have voted for Trump?I really don't know about Abel Blaine. I think Lucy's sister Vicky might have voted for Trump. I don't know if Abel would have. He may not have voted. [Laughs] Except he seems like the type of person who would take it seriously. So I don't know.You know that saying, the one I think applies to most good fiction, "You can never truly hate someone if you know their story"?To know all is to forgive all.I was trying to figure out if there was an exact source for that quote earlier, but when I Googled it, it was attributed to the actress Emma Stone, which doesn't feel even a little bit right. Anyway, it comes through a lot in your books, but there are characters who are still a little bit ambiguous. There's the chapter where the couple is spying on the people who stay in their guest bedroom. And we don't know that much about [the husband] Jay. So we don't really understand his story. Like, what is it that makes him have to do this? The story's more Linda's story, about what made her stay in the marriage and do that. Jay's behaviour is just so creepy, and I'm perfectly aware of that. But I don't judge him as I write. I don't judge any of my characters as I write, which is so freeing.How so?In real life, we are judgmental. We just are. And I think we have to be a little bit to maneuver our way through the world. But when I go to the page, I'm just not at all, so it's just fun in the sense of not having to—my job is just to know my characters as well as I can, and to report on them.I think it's healthy in real life to be judgmental. To say, "Hey, why is this guy spying on women?" But fiction—Exactly. And I expect the readers to make their judgments. They should. But I'm just saying, as the creator…I've heard that you've done stand-up comedy.Oh god.Is that true?Yeah, it is. Many, many years ago.Because you started writing when you were older…I started writing when I was four years old.But you started publishing later.I had a few stories in small literary magazines in my twenties. I think I even had one in Seventeen or Redbook or something. But I had been writing for so long, and it just wasn't right. It was almost right, but it just wasn't right. And I kept thinking, "What's wrong with this?" In my mind, I thought it must have something to do with honesty, because it always does, I think. The real stuff. I kept thinking, what am I not being honest about? And so I had just moved to New York and I was interested, you know, we would go see stand-up comics and I was just interested in it. I realized we laughed at what was true. So what would happen if I was responsible for making a group of people laugh? What would come out of my mouth? And I thought about it more, and I thought, well, let's give it a try. So I took a class. It was terrifying. Every week somebody else would drop out, and those of us who made it through would have to perform at the Comic Strip in New York. And I did, and it was, it really was one of the most terrifying things I had ever done. But the point is, it was very successful. First of all, they laughed. Thank God.Did you have friends in the audience? No. And I didn't let anybody come.Which is liberating in its own way. There was nobody I knew that came. Not one soul. But it was a full house. But the point is, I learned as a result of my routine that I had been writing over the course of the semester, that's when I really understood that I was a white woman from New England.Did it also take going to New York to realize that?Absolutely. It absolutely did. If I hadn't gotten out of New England, I never would have realized that I was from New England. But being in New York at that point for a number of years, and realizing my jokes were on myself for being so New England.Like Jerry Seinfeld but, "What's the deal with lobster bisque, am I right?" [Anna laughs for a long time at her own joke.]I can't even really remember it. But I remember understanding like, Oh. Oh, this is who I am. This is funny. It worked.A lot of comedy comes from dismantling power. I don't think your books would have worked if you were like, "Hey, look at these small town poor people!" You have to be there.There's been a lot of debate about what's okay to joke about, and I think too often it comes down to a question of free speech as opposed to, well, what's funny? I think comics should get a pass on everything.Yeah?I mean, they have to. That's their job, to say the unsayable.But it's not always funny. "Controversial" is such a big umbrella. Something can be controversial but subversive, and something else can be controversial but reinforce the same old. I think your books are powerful because you have characters in the book who make jokes or make fun of the kids for being poor, or who tease Patty for being fat, "Fatty Patty." But those jokes aren't presented as funny in your books. It's just bullying.Right.Do you strive for humour when you write?I never try to do anything except be emotionally truthful. That's always what I'm trying to do. I think sometimes I am funny, because life is funny at times. But I don't try to be funny.Do you ever surprise yourself, searching for that emotional truth?Constantly. Constantly I surprise myself. To my mind, that's a good thing, because if I'm not surprised the reader won't be surprised. If I go in knowing everything, it will not be as interesting to the reader.What were some of the things you learned, with this one?Just every story, I never really know where it's going to go. Starting with Tommy Guptill, I didn't quite understand until I had him talking to Pete Barton, that Pete was going to take his father's responsibility for burning those barns down. I didn't even understand that until all of a sudden I thought, "Oh wait, wait, wait. Here we go."What's it like for you going home? When you see people you know in real life who might have assumptions after reading your books?The people I know in real life know that this is not my life, but I use every single thing that I've experienced or observed my entire life for my work.You seem very observant. Yeah. Exactly. I'm always, always, always watching. People are just so interesting to me, and they've always been more interesting to me than anything else in the world. So I watch. And I listen. Everything. It's just how I live. Every single thing gets absorbed. And then maybe years later it shows up in some story.When did you start doing that?Absorbing things?Yeah.Oh, I think I was pretty young.Were you aware you were doing this?Yeah, I can remember sitting with my mother when we went into town. I'd sit in the car with my mother. She'd see a woman walking by and she'd say, "Oh, that woman's hem has not been fixed for quite a while. I guess she's depressed." It'd just be so small, but I got so interested in that woman, in that I'd be peering at her walking down the sidewalk and I can remember thinking, I wish I could see her home. I wish I could follow her home. I wish I knew if she had pom poms on her shower curtain. That's how curious I was. All my life. Starting as a young kid, I was just so curious about people and their inner lives.As someone who is so observant of other people, are you conscious of how you present yourself?Yeah. I mean, it's funny because I almost feel I don't have a self, which is crazy, because obviously I do. But I don't...it's hard to explain. I'm not as conscious of myself as I am of other people.Are you constantly absorbing other selves?I think so. I think it also probably had to with my background, which was very isolated. When you're not interacting with other people, I think the self isn't developed in terms of a social self. My self has always been an observing self. Isolated like, as an introvert, or geographically?Geographically. You talk about your mother making these observations. You dedicated Olive Kitteridge to her, and call her the best storyteller you know.She's a fabulous storyteller. She verbally can tell a story. It's so interesting, because I'll watch her take a strand of the narrative and bubble it over, and always bring it back. She's a natural storyteller. She has very intuitive powers. I think I do too. I'm aware how good her intuition is in terms of telling a story and going for the real thing in a person. She taught writing in high school. What did you read growing up?I don't remember reading children's books at all. I think I have a memory of my father reading me a Beatrix Potter story once. At a very young age, I was reading adult books. I remember reading John Updike's Pigeon Feathers when I was six or seven years old, because it was on the coffee table. I read that from beginning to end. I didn't understand it, obviously. But I did understand that being a kid was not where it was at, you know? I realized something was going on with this grownup world. I think that's true when you're developing a creative sense. You absorb everything and don't really discern what's good. Up until high school, a lot of my favourite books were just titles I had heard adults mention, and then I would go to the used bookstore.Exactly! And then you'd just absorb all of them. And that's really, really what I did. I would make a list for myself at a young age, starting around twelve or thirteen, I would make lists of books I had heard of, and just read them all. And then we had a set of Hemingways, full complete works. My grandfather had been sold the complete works of Hemingway by some traveling salesman, and so they sat there on the shelf and I went through those at age seventeen from beginning to end. When was the first time you remember really loving a writer?I can remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in the third grade, and that was memorable for me. And then I can remember reading Lolita when I think I was about fifteen, and I loved it. I just loved it. I wept, I thought it was so beautiful. What did you love about it?I thought it was a love story. I really saw that book as a love story. That killed me. And then Hemingway's books, it was interesting, because I understood some were not as good as others, but I loved him. I loved his work right away. Have you read Lolita since? Has your relationship with it changed?I have. You know, it has changed, but I still cling to that first reading of that because it was so memorable to me. You know, when you get older—there's a freedom in being able to read things when you don't know what the world thinks of them. I remember these friends of mine, their parents were so against Lolita. I just resist all that because it was what it was to me. I had romantic sensibilities as a teenager, both about life as well as what I thought a being a writer and reader meant. I read books like Romeo & Juliet and Wuthering Heights, and then later you're told, "These aren't actually about being in love! These are about these messed up relationships." But just cause you're in love doesn't mean it's going to be pure and healthy. You're exactly right. I had the very same experiences with Wuthering Heights. People say it's not a romance, but it's incredibly romantic. Incredibly romantic. Incredibly romantic. I couldn't agree with you more. It's warped and upsetting—Because it's real life in a certain way. Obviously when you're fifteen you shouldn't model your real life relationships off it—But who cares? You're just reading and absorbing this intense situation.
24.05.17
The author of Birds Art Life on spark books, the art of stillness in children’s literature, and collaborating with illustrators.
Kyo Maclear skirts and samples fact in her fiction. In her picture books, word play often becomes literal. Virginia Wolf posits the animalization of Virginia Woolf’s bad mood, Julia, Child imagines the cookbook author reverted to childhood. Her most recent picture book, The Fog, licks at the realities of global warming, but through the eyes of a people-watching bird.Birds Art Life, Maclear’s first title to officially live in the bookstore’s nonfiction section, flips that perspective. Whether working in fiction or non, Maclear is reaching for a whole story, a more full understanding that neither could truly tell on their own.In Birds Art Life, she chronicles a year, she contemplates art, she looks at birds. She follows around a man she identifies as “the musician,” though his primary role is as a non-commital guide to the solace of urban birdwatching. She wants to find the missing piece, a way back to her life before it was shaken by her father’s unreckonable illness. But there is no widget to be found, only a new understanding, a clearer emotional truth.When Maclear and I sit down at a picnic table in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park on a blustery weekday afternoon, she is quiet, clutching her coffee and shivering just a little. Maclear’s particular way of being quiet is patient. Thoughtful, easy. She is generous with her attention. For the last third of our conversation we are interrupted every few minutes by an uncomfortably close and alarmingly fearless squirrel. The interview slowly melts into elaborate personal stories of past squirrel encounters, none of which are transcribed here.“A spark bird could be as bold as an eagle, as colourful as warbler, or as ordinary as a sparrow, as long as it triggered the awakening that turned someone into a serious birder. Most birding memoires begin with a spark bird [...] I began thinking about “spark books”. It occurred to me that most ardent readers would be able to pinpoint the book that ignited their love of reading.” - Birds Art Life, page 113Serah-Marie McMahon: In the book, you describe the summer as a pre-teen in Japan when you felt yourself become a reader, and you list your friends’ spark books, but nothing of your own. Does one exist?Kyo Maclear: I’m not sure if I have one specifically. I had a fetish for Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant, which is bizarre looking back. I can't read it without cringing now—it’s so heavily Christian, its symbolism so overwrought. But something about it resonated. My copy was lovely, illustrated by Herbert Danska. I still have it.When you’re a child, adults are kind of giants. They dwarf you in different ways, with their power. This giant was captivating, how he reforms through the child figure. He was beautiful to me. And there was this garden. It’s a bit of colonial story, but The Secret Garden was also very important. Gardens enchanted me, especially the hidden garden, the walled off garden. These little Edens, little Utopias. I found them magical.Did you have a garden growing up?In England we had a garden. In Toronto my mother uprooted everything growing in our backyard and built a Japanese rock garden. It was her attempt to re-envision the landscape in a way that felt familiar to her. I grew up with a lot of plants that aren't native to Ontario or Canada, but yeah, I always had a garden. Do you have a spark book?I think mine is From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. That book was really important to me, it opened my eyes as a kid to the nature of independence. That you don't need to rely on your parents to provide your sense of wholeness. You can go find it yourself. And maybe it will be messy, and maybe it won't turn out exactly how you think, but you can be responsible for your own happiness. Oh, I loved that book too, for the same reason I think. I was always attracted to what I call “orphan stories,” even if the parents were there. Kids who took off, and through their own wiliness had these great adventures. The idea of staying overnight in a museum was enchanting to me. I grew up in museums, it was a rare common bond between my mother and I. It was a space we could connect through, with pictures in a way we couldn't through words.Both your books this year revolve around bird-watching. How do you tell a story differently with a book for children than you do with a book for adults?Everything I do is in the same house, but it's all taking place on different floors. My kid writing floor, my adult writing floor, my scholarship writing floor—I'm writing a dissertation now. They are all different ways of telling stories, but they are all concerned with the same themes.I find myself thinking a lot about kinship, how we might form it in more inventive ways. In The Fog, a human and a bird find a sense of kinship, these little lone wolves finding each other, understanding and really getting each other in a way that their own species don't. In Birds Art Life I found this weird kinship in a totally motley crew of urban birders, somewhere I never expected to find a sense of community. I'm generally not a person who seeks community. I'm such a solo person, almost agoraphobic. I like the idea of finding tribes in ways that are non-tribal, and that are unexpected.What is the role of an illustrator in authoring a picture book?I love what images can do, above and beyond just parroting the words. A really special picture book will take a story into another dimension, provide something atmospheric. When we were working on The Fog, I sent the illustrator, Kenard Pak, a link to an old book. It was from the ’60s maybe, called Hide and Seek Fog. It had a real sense of atmosphere to it, the pages almost felt damp with fog. I could have described that feeling in words, but Ken captures it so beautifully with his clouds and mist, above and beyond anything I could ever design. I love the collaborating. It's something I gravitate towards again and again. Doing something that is not solitary.You both avoid community and are attracted to work specifically that is not solitary. It is contradictory, I know! I think maybe I am comfortable when there is a structure and context. I'm socially awkward in so many ways. Being part of a project makes it easier. Truthfully I just love creating things with other people. It's pure joy.What does that collaboration look like?I always have art notes in my manuscript, take-it-or-leave-it notes. I don't intend to be a guiding hand, but I give over a lot of the motoring along of the story to images, and I need to actually be specific about what I'm intentionally leaving out. Whenever you see words in the art, I've written those. Other times I leave gaps and ask the illustrator to please fill it. To create a wordless spread that captures a certain sensibility, or whatever.Sometimes in my text I play the straight man. I want the beat to fall on the illustration, so there is kind of a de-dant de-nah. I leave it to the illustrator to finish the thought, to imbed humour in a way that plays up the earnestness, makes it a little funny.That needs to be a conversation between two people, you can't do it if you're the only person creating something. It's not monologic. It's not a monologue, it's a dialogue. You can create a lot of humor that way. I really need to have a sense of play to derive any pleasure from what I'm doing.Most of the interpretations of The Fog include a strong environmental message, but I read it differently, as a metaphor for depression.Well, that fits in with my whole oeuvre, which is mood disorder. [laughs] I’m always somehow dealing with themes of depression, or anxiety, or OCD.I don't even know if depression is exactly the right word. Being too much in your own head. But once you connect other people and realize they feel the same as you, it gets easier. The fog begins to clear. I love that. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I mean it fits. It's about the idea of naming things, having things named for you. How important that is. How you are in a squishy and uncertain place before things are defined or a consensus is made about what's happening. So there is also that theme of normalization, how you can get accustomed to the most inhospitable conditions.You talk about the idea of a “the new normal” in Birds Art Life as well, what we accept as our new baseline.Right, the shifting baseline. One conversation I had with Ken, which I think is still unresolved, was the kind of open-endedness of the conclusion. Some people are going to have a hard time with it. People who want it to be more pragmatic, have an environmental message about how everyone took action, how everyone put solar panels on their houses and the fog disappeared through collective action. It's really not that. We veered away from that story, despite some counsel from a good friend of mine who's a climate change activist. He suggested we might want to be more activist, but we felt like it was all implied.We left it to the reader to come up with their own ideas about where this story should go. The ending isn't conclusive. The bird and the girl are left thinking about what to do tomorrow. The reader still sees all these messages in the water, and there’s a sense that something else is going to happen, but we didn't want to tie it up in a tidy bow. Ken was really very adamant about that.I wanted to ask about the girl, the human part of the relationship in The Fog. Did she come out how you envisioned her?Ken and I had talks. Because he's also Asian I could be forthright with him and say: I want the Asian character to be Asian. I don't them to be racially indistinct or some ambiguous any-ethnicity. I want them to be look really East Asian. And he's like: got it. He had planned on doing that anyway. It was nice to have a conversation where he didn't get defensive, where he understood right away.It's not just that I want there to be more children of colour in picture books, I'm also increasingly interested in how certain ethnicities are not seen in nature. We see a lot of stories of Asians in cities. I'm trying to figure out ways of telling stories that are unexpected in setting, placing characters where you wouldn't necessarily assume them to be.I read the post you did last year about identity and representation in children's books. Do you still feel the same way?Yes. I feel like I could add to it now though. It was a very modular piece about the need to parse this idea of diversity. There are many different kinds of diversity, and what we've seen is a resurgence of casual diversity. Everybody and their uncle, and their sister and their, I don’t know, dog, are writing books where there's some sort of rainbow tribe. I think that's really well intentioned, but it stops us from asking questions about what inclusion really means, who's writing picture books, and what publishing looks like. We needed to be more specific in this conversation.Since I wrote that piece, people have drawn my attention to things that I hadn't noticed before. Like about how animal stories are not neutral sites. My friend was talking about Finding Dory, and how she felt the characters were particularly white in certain ways. How it's culturally coded. I don’t know if I would have thought that way, or questioned animal stories, or like, stories about shapes. Those too can have assumptions embedded in them—about who they are spoken about, and who they are spoken for. It's an ongoing conversation basically.Your picture books, while being very much for children, definitely appeal to adults. Not in the Disney movie way of winking pop culture references over the kid’s head so parents don’t fall asleep, but that seem to understand how to tell a powerful story. How considered is your audience?This actually preoccupies me. When you publish a kids book it will say ages 4 to 8, or whatever. I know why they do it, but in some ways I wish they wouldn't. I write picture books for all ages, which is not to discourage children as readers. My books can be entered at different levels. That's the way I'm writing them.It's such a silo, you know? Kids Books. It's such a silo. All books should be read by all people. I like the non-categorical books, books that jump fences. I'm drawn to those. So why not let picture books jump fences too? Why not put them in art sections, or Julia, Child in the cookbook section? I mean, why not?A great picture book has more in common with the poetry section than with some things in the kids’ section, like a middle grade novel. Not because picture books are necessarily "poetry" in structure, but because they are siphoning down such big ideas to so few words. The rhythm is so important, in a different way than it is for a novel.Yes! Yes. And I don't know if a poet would cross over as successfully into middle grade as they would into picture book writing. Anne Michaels did it well, but I think it can be difficult. I’m sure there are some unusual middle grade readers who don't care about plot, but at a certain age there’s an impatience with just beautiful language.I've been thinking a lot about Hayao Miyazaki’s films, partly because I'm writing about it right now for my academic work. In an interview with Roger Ebert he talks about this idea of the gap—what he calls the japanese word ma—the kind of stillness that doesn't move things along.In picture books there are so many moments like that. In Miyazaki films there are so many moments like that. They are usually concerned with nature, and take place in a field of grass that has nothing to do with the plot. The background rushes to the foreground, and suddenly you're by a stream. It’s given you insight into the character's temperament, or mood, but it's not actually about plot.Picture books can allow for those moments, capture its beauty. I think that's why I return to them again and again. That stillness is so important. I almost have narrative sickness. I'm tired of narrative. It's weird.I want to end with a line I loved in Birds Art Life, "The more I encountered the reality of birds, the more my secondhand impression of birds began to fall away.” Do you think this is also a role kids’ books can perform? I think that’s true of really good kids’ books, to defamiliarize the familiar so that we can see it again, but in a specificity. We tend to fall into habit-mind, like with a drawing exercise. You draw the vase, or the flower pot, or whatever, and you're doing it from habit-mind. It looks a certain way. Then someone asks you to do a blind contour, and now you're really seeing it. You’re seeing every change and texture, every little detail, every chip. Kids’ books should do that particularly well.
23.05.17
On the art of imitation.
There was a painting hanging in the house where I grew up—Troll Forest, my mother called it. As a child I found the scene scary: it’s a moody forest, the kind where the sunlight doesn’t reach all the way to the ground. Among the rocks and trees there’s a stone structure that resembles a troll, one of those large, ugly creatures described in Nordic folklore.To a connoisseur, it’s probably not a very good piece of art. I like the colours, though: shades of rust red, steel blue, muddy yellow. Having looked at that picture for over 30 years, my feelings have moved from fear, to indifference, to affection. It looks a bit amaterur-ish but I like it a lot—it’s always been part of my life. I like looking at Troll Forest for the same reasons I like looking at the face of a person I’ve known forever.There’s a signature in the corner of the painting, in neat block letters: Samuel Slyngstad, 1978. Over at my grandma’s house, Samuel’s signature can be found on three more canvases. A couple of my uncles have Samuels too, and my father’s cousin even has her own version of Troll Forest. Samuels everywhere! Clearly this Samuel Slyngstad was an artist of some repute.It was a long time before I realised that Samuel wasn’t actually a famous painter. I first started looking into Samuel some ten years ago out of idle curiosity, only to find that no one had heard of him. There’s nothing on the Internet. But in my family, everyone knows his name. How did Samuel Slyngstad, obscure painter, became so famous to us?I asked my mother about Samuel the last time I visited. But she knew nothing about him, except that his painting came to us through family. “Your dad’s mother, it was her brother, let me think. The woman he was married to, I think Samuel was her father.” Not much, but it was a start.Samuel Slyngstad was remarkably ordinary, I came to learn: he lived his whole life in Ålesund where he was born, a manual labourer whose hobby was painting. Every single one of Samuel’s paintings are copies, imitations of works by fine artists. Does that mean there’s an original Troll Forest out there?*My father met Samuel several times as a child, he tells me when I call to ask about our old painting. “Every summer we’d travel down to mum’s parents at Sunnmøre, and most years we’d stop to visit Uncle Arthur and Aunt Bjørg. Her father Samuel lived upstairs,” he says. This was at Ragnvald Jarls Street in downtown Ålesund, a mid-size coastal town in Western Norway. “Their house was full of his paintings,” says my father, suggesting I contact his cousin Yngve, Samuel’s grandson.I find Yngve Eiken on Facebook where he responds almost immediately, more than happy to talk about his grandfather’s paintings. “I never thought of Grandpa as an artist anyone would know about,” Yngve tells me in his singsong Ålesund accent. “He never wanted to hear anything of it!” He laughs. “They wanted him to join them at the city art collective, but Grandpa refused, telling them he had no business being there. I suppose he didn’t really think he was good enough. He didn’t want to be called an artist.”While Samuel may have refused to call himself an artist, people enjoyed his work, and they wanted to buy it. So when friends, family and the occasional tourist came knocking, Samuel had to find a way to reconcile this demand with his non-artist self image: “He asked for payment to cover the canvas and the paint, nothing more.”Yngve spent a lot of time with his grandfather as a boy, making things and going on trips to the woods. When Yngve and his parents eventually moved away from the house they shared with grandpa, Samuel would visit every day. “He was a man of routine. No matter the weather, every day he’d come at 4 p.m., or if it was a Sunday, at 11 a.m. He’d sit for an hour before going home, always on foot.”Samuel’s most productive years came towards the end of his life—he was a widower for two decades. “Four of the eleven Slyngstad siblings were painters, but none of them could afford to go to art school,” says Yngve. Samuel would find pictures of famous paintings in books, or in newspapers left down on the docks, and tear out pages to take home. There he’d sketch the image onto a larger canvas and add colour—often from imagination if the inspiration was black and white.When I describe my parents’ picture, Troll Forest, Yngve knows the one I’m talking about even before I’ve sent him a photo. “That’s Troll Rockslide,” he declares confidently. He has one just like it, and his sister has one too. He laughs. “So there are four or five of these ones, huh? I had no idea.”*The art of copying fine art has a long history; the likes of Monet, Picasso and Van Gogh learned the craft by copying the old masters. And since most people can’t afford the originals, there’s always been a market for buying copies. Today, industrial-scale art copyist operations are plentiful in China, so if you want a knock-off Matisse you can get one in just a few clicks. But if you want a copy that can fool an art connoisseur, you need to hire a specialist.Susie Ray, an art copyist living in Cornwall, England, says it takes much longer to copy a painting than to create an original. Her bread and butter is painting for people who’re looking for exact replicas of famous works. People seek her out because they have the original in a vault but want one for the wall, or because they don’t have the real deal but want people to think they do—Ray is very discreet.Ray will only replicate a painting once: “I put in a huge amount of energy. It’s recreating someone else’s work, and [it takes a vast] amount of time and concentration.” The process is a lot like solving a puzzle, says Ray, explaining how she needs to use the same type of canvas, paint and brushes as the original, and replicate the way it dried so the textures build up in the same way. “You have to approach the painting the same way the artist did. Because you are copying, you’re painting a lot slower, so you have to [try to] keep the same spontaneity of the original painting.”Ray always signs the backs of her copies, as she has no desire to pass off her works as originals. “People often talk about how the original painting has an aura to it,” she says when I ask how she views her copies in relation to the originals. “But if you take a good copy and put it on the wall and no one knows, it still has that aura.” Ray laughs. “I don’t make it too complicated, though. I just make the copy.”*Just how important is authenticity? I know the Samuel painting I grew up with isn’t one-of-a-kind, so whatever value it has will always be about something else. But authenticity remains something we covet. I thought about this recently when I visited the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, wandering around in silent awe among the thousands of originals, many of which I’d previously only seen in reproduction. To stand in front of a Picasso is to be in the presence of true genius, watching as mastery meets mad creativity. Maybe if they’d all been copies it wouldn't have made a difference to my experience—except that if I’d known, I’d never have bothered going.We look for authenticity everywhere. Travellers look for so-called genuine local experiences away from the crowds; we seek out true versions of dishes; we buy director’s cuts of films and unabridged books. Even those who prefer a no-stress pool vacation and the mildest curry on the menu may well cop to a desire for a degree of authenticity in their interactions, as I learned when a then-boyfriend discovered I’d been texting the same holiday photos to a friend as I did to him. We want our experiences to be meaningful, and this often translates to a desire for originality. But does this mean they need to be unique to have value?“I love the process of seeing a painting emerge. It's an original experience,” says Antonia Williams, an art copyist who also makes her own art. Speaking via Skype from her home in Portugal, Williams laments the quality of copies from industrial-scale operations in China, where the painters have never seen the original, let alone researched the methods. “There’s an awful lot of bad copying around, by people who don’t understand the method of slowly building up a painting.” A bad copyist may simply start in one corner and move across the canvas, says Williams, instead of building up the layers to replicate the process of the original artist.Williams’s favourite artist to copy is Chardin, the 18th-century French painter. And it’s when she describes the process of copying Chardin that I finally understand why someone might choose to dedicate themselves to the art of copying: “It's very subtle. The colour is very subtle. When you start painting, you understand how complex his paintings are. When you look at it you think, ‘Oh that's lovely.’ But when you start copying, you realise his vision was very specific, what he was searching for. When I'm copying the painting, I'm also experiencing his search.”Samuel was a family man who built roads and bridges for a living, stone by stone in the streets of Ålesund. For him, being an artist seemed impossible. At first I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t create original works, but after speaking to the art copyists I think I see what he was doing: copying works of famous artists let him experience a world otherwise out of reach.*Troll Forest currently sits in a closet in my mother’s house, relegated there from the living room, by way of a few years in the hallway. My plan is to save our Samuel from obscurity and hang him on the wall of my home in London. I know it’s a copy—it’s not even a one-of-a-kind copy—but still, it’s valuable to me.I can just about picture Samuel, flicking through newspapers left around the docks of Ålesund, finding Troll Forest in one of them and deciding to give it a go. I’d come to accept that the inspiration for Troll Forest was some random, obscure picture I’d never find, but after speaking to Yngve I decided to take one last crack at it. Armed with the proper title—Troll Rockslide—it’s almost rudely easy. My jaw literally dropped as my laptop screen filled with the original that Samuel must have copied, like a magician flicking back the curtain to reveal the trick behind the illusion. The style is different but this is definitely it: “Trollura i Jahrskogen”—Troll Rockslide in Jahr Forest. Painted in 1933 by Henrik Sørensen, a Norwegian artist who’d studied under Matisse, the canvas resides at Holmsbu Gallery in Hurum, an hour’s drive south of Oslo. In fact, the entire gallery is situated within the very same moody old forest that the painting depicts.Henrik Sørensen was a passionate advocate for preserving the virgin forest, presumably the reason why he chose it as the theme of Troll Rockslide. Samuel Slyngstad would have created his copy in his studio in Ålesund, steadfastly refusing the label of artist as he channeled the experience of being one. My copy of Troll Rockslide was a gift to my parents from family, shortly after they’d moved into their first home and had all those bare walls to fill. “He was a bit folksy, Samuel. It was art for the everyman.” That’s my father’s take on the appeal of Samuel’s work. Just like the art of copying is a window into someone else’s experience, owning a copy lets you peek into a world that you otherwise may have no access to.My unoriginal and inaccurate copy of Troll Rockslide is miles from being authentic, but now more than ever I feel like it’s part of a bigger story—it’s had a secret life for all these years. My painting is the story of an artist striving to save a precious forest, a dock worker dreaming of a creative life, a young family starting out in a country village—and now, a daughter who’s crossed borders to live in a global metropolis. I don’t need a copy to be in the presence of art—London has dozens of museums full of famous originals and I can go and experience them whenever I want. But that’s not what my Samuel Slyngstad canvas is about. My beloved fake is a reminder to me that everyone wants something, and it’s good to dream a little.
19.05.17
The singer walked a line between overt masculinity and brooding sensitivity—fearlessly exploring the dark, wailing with the voice of a man who could sound like he was trying to escape his own body.
Chris Cornell and Soundgarden had always been there. The memories come quick: Being transfixed by the melting Barbie doll in the “Black Hole Sun” video on MuchMusic. Terrorizing the neighbourhood while blasting Badmotorfinger in my friend’s mom’s minivan. Playing “Outshined” on guitar a thousand times in my dad’s basement. Hating Audioslave. Eternally defending these legends against accusations of being corny or dated to people who just didn’t get it, man. To a lot of people, they were just that band—the last classic rock band you could talk about for hours and headbang to for even longer. To me, they were everything a true classic rock band should be.So when the news reached me via fragmented texts yesterday morning—from close friends, estranged partners, old tourmates—all with some combination of “Chris Cornell” and “this is awful,” I feared, rightly, that a lifelong hero had passed. Worse: It was suspected, and later seems to have been confirmed, to have been a suicide.Though never too far from the public eye, Cornell seemed to be a private man, with his own demons rarely surfacing despite having a longstanding relationship with drugs—as did his peers Andrew Wood, Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley and Scott Weiland. Unlike those frontmen, though, his personal life never quite seemed to get the better of him; his songs dealt less with wallowing in his own pain than assessing and confronting it. When it comes to depression, this tends to be a productive approach.How are you supposed to feel when the people you grew up idolizing decide they no longer want to live their hallowed lives? How does one reconcile that kind of loss with their own struggles? And yet, somehow I understood. The devastating climax of “Slaves and Bulldozers” rang immediately through my mind: “Now I know why you’ve been shaking.”*An Adonis with a voice any singer would make a Faustian deal for, Cornell was one of the last larger-than-life rock stars left. He and Soundgarden were a crucial part of the Seattle scene in the mid-to-late ’80s, which gave way to the grunge explosion in the early ’90s. They had landmark releases on both Sub Pop and SST—labels synonymous with “indie rock” and true meccas of gritty guitar music in their time—and they did it well before many of those labels’ most iconic acts even got signed. Their early material could sometimes be mistaken for macho riff rock, but moments like the tense but tranquil bridge on “Loud Love” and the slow, grinding build of “Beyond the Wheel” showcased their ability to pull the listener into a world much more menacing than Cornell’s bravado and guitarist Kim Thayil’s shrieking leads let on.They were veterans of their local scene, making the jump to a major label during the early stages of majors snatching up indie bands before many of their peers. Instead of watering down their sound as so many would upon making a similar transition, they became even more complex, growing into a sort of post-modern Zeppelin on later records such as their major label debut, Badmotorfinger, and their opus, 1994’s Superunknown. They took the stark, metallic sound they’d honed alongside contemporaries like The Melvins and Mudhoney and started incorporating more psychedelic elements, never fully settling into any one style but rather constantly building upon their own. The first four songs on Badmotorfinger—“Rusty Cage,” “Outshined,” “Slaves And Bulldozers” and “Jesus Christ Pose”—comprise one of the most ferocious openings to any rock record not named Appetite For Destruction, and I owe all of my future spine and throat problems to the amount of time I have spent screaming along and headbanging to these tunes since I was a pre-teen. I have often said that if you can’t get down to at least one of those four songs then you must hate rock music, and I stand by this statement.As the group’s often shirtless leader, Chris Cornell walked a line between overt masculinity and brooding sensitivity. In an era where seeming like you knew how to sing or play was a strong case against your credibility, the guy wailed like Robert Plant while his bandmates flexed their deceptively dexterous muscles and made no apologies for it. What separated Soundgarden from their jock-rock ancestors was Cornell’s willingness to go beyond mere histrionics and push his superhuman voice to its absolute limit. His band fearlessly explored dark, murky waters via intricate time signatures, odd tunings, and serrated guitar assaults to match their singer’s opaque, cerebral lyrics and incomparable vocal range. If you enjoyed unstoppable guitar riffs with a healthy dose of melody, then you were never going to find a more satisfying band than Soundgarden. A song like “Slaves and Bulldozers” strikes you less as a group of masturbatory virtuosos than four desperate men trying to capture the precise feeling of a nervous breakdown, and when Cornell breaks through to his highest vocal register, it sounds like a man trying to escape his own body.[[{"fid":"6700516","view_mode":"media_original","fields":{"format":"media_original"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"SLAVES AND BULLDOZERS LIVE - SOUNDGARDEN","class":"media-element file-media-original"}}]]With Temple of the Dog, Cornell reckoned with Wood’s heroin-related death on songs like “Reach Down,” which lyrically works as both a touching tribute and cautionary tale after witnessing his dear friend spiral into addiction. His lyrics were never as blatantly autobiographical as Cobain’s (who he would be nearly twice as old as at the time of their respective deaths), and his public persona never seemed to revolve around drug problems or legal troubles the way that Staley’s and Weiland’s did, either. These comparisons are not meant to minimize each singer’s own personal turmoil, but rather to illuminate the fact that in spite of his own issues, Cornell had seemed to overcome each of them on his own terms and come out stronger as a result. That mindset seemed to extend to his other facets of his life and career, too: the Timbaland collaboration, the "Billie Jean" cover, the Von Dutch tank tops, Audioslave—there was a sincerity in everything he did. He always meant it. Then why, even through the shock, did his sudden death make a sort of sense to me? I am not and would never presume to know what any person is dealing with internally when they choose to commit suicide, and it is a somewhat morbid preoccupation for people to give posthumous meaning to an artist’s work when they take their own lives. But, as someone who has struggled with depression for the better part of their own life, I understand that it is not a thing one can defeat in a single sitting. It is an ever-morphing monster that one must constantly learn and re-learn how to conquer, again and again. And unfortunately, it is a long-term battle that people like Chris Cornell—as charmed as his life might have seemed to a kid who grew up singing his songs—sometimes lose.It’s a common reaction for people to condemn those who kill themselves as “selfish,” but I have trouble reaching this conclusion myself. There is nothing readily apparent in Chris Cornell’s lyrics or public actions that would indicate he did not fully appreciate life—his own and those of his family and loved ones. And yet, as a friend informed me as we both discussed his death at 3:30 this morning, he was found dead roughly an hour after he’d walked off that stage in Detroit. Whatever form his depression had last taken seemed insurmountable for him, and for all the battling he had done throughout his life, he had reached this conclusion for himself, and then, tragically, acted upon it. I wonder, perhaps selfishly, what this means for people like myself who deal with depression, and what it would take in my own life to conquer it once and for all. His decision suggests that, whatever it is, it must certainly have to come from within, which is both liberating and terrifying. Now I know why you’ve been shaking.