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Novelist and New Yorker editor Ben Greenman went on tour to promote his new novel, Please Step Back, which has its own theme song courtesy of funk legend Swamp Dogg. In Portland Greenman stopped at a coffee shop, Powell’s Books, and a strip club. His dispatch is below.
 

When I landed in Portland, I deplaned indifferently and went through the concourse slower than I would have liked. It was the final stop on my four-city, nine-day West Coast book tour, and I was tired. Authors are lightweights. Musicians can be on the road for months at a time. Athletes travel for every away game. But authors are sedentary creatures, and a week into the tour I was beginning to wilt. I stopped for coffee to try to fix things. There at the coffee shop, I heard two things about Portland that would condition the rest of my time there. The first was from an older woman talking on her phone. “It’s beautiful here,” she said, even though there it was pouring rain outside. An optimist. The second was from a young guy talking to a friend of his. “Portland has tons of strip clubs,” he said. Also an optimist.

When I say that both things would condition the rest of my time in Portland, I mean it exactly. It rained all day long, and every time I tried to wander away from my hotel, I had to turn back. The furthest I got was three blocks, where I waited under an awning just outside a strip club. It was closed, but while I was there, two guys walked by. “Another strip club?” one said. His tone was admiring. In the evening, I went to the bookstore to read. It was Powell’s, and even though the weather was terrible, there was a good crowd. There was also a local TV crew, which was odd, and the reporter was a man named Joe Smith. For more than a second I thought he was an actor hired by my publisher to impersonate a TV reporter to boost my spirits. Joe Smith? Come on.

I spoke to Joe Smith, who seemed more legitimate by the minute. I read. I answered a few excellent questions. When I finished, I noticed that a friend of mine had come out to see me. He’s a writer too, and we stood around for a little while before we realized we didn’t want to be in a bookstore any longer than was necessary. We went to a bar instead with some friends of his, and he introduced me to his girlfriend, who had recently become his fiancé, and who would, in a matter of days, become his wife. She told a story about a whale and someone else told a story about a thief.
 

Behind us, there was a group of guys drinking cheap beer. One of them said something about a strip club, and that sparked conversation at our table. People shared stories: straight strip clubs, gay strip clubs, friends who had worked at them, friends who were addicted to them. Someone made a joke about my friend’s bachelor party. His face fell a little. There was no party. “Hey,” someone said, “Ben should take you to one of Portland’s finest strip clubs tonight.”

I didn’t know anything about Portland’s finest, but I knew the club near my hotel, and when I mentioned it, my friend nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve never been there, but we can go. It’s supposed to be an alternative rock strip club.”

“Are you just saying you’ve never been there because your fiancé can hear you?” I said.

“She can hear you, too,” he said.

“Tell me later,” I said.
 

We dropped off his fiancé and went to the club. The place wasn’t crowded, but it was more crowded than you’d expect it to be at midnight on a weekday. The crowd was diverse, in a sense: there were two beefy young guys with crew cuts, a few weedy types wearing warm-up jackets, one older obese man with a Kangol-style cap. There were two dancing platforms, and, in the corner of the room, a middle-age woman announcing the dancers and playing music: “Paradise City” and “Toys in the Attic” and “Rock You Like a Hurricane.” My friend pointed up to the speakers. “Pretty alternative,” he said.

We sat at the bar and watched one woman on the pole. Well, my friend watched. The woman was behind me, and I felt strange turning and gawping. It was easier facing the other way, where I could track the action in the room. Across the club, girls in skimpy outfits approached the guys in the banquettes and at the bar. We were at the bar. A girl approached us. She was short, with long brown hair and gigantic brown eyes. She would have been pretty outside of the strip club, and she was pretty inside of it. I told her that my friend was getting married, and he smiled sheepishly and bought her a drink. I bought a second drink. Then, because he’s a writer, he started to ask
her questions. They were fairly innocent questions, so innocent she might not have heard them before. Did she like her job? What was it like? Was it ever depressing? She told us about the club manager, and how he watched all the private rooms on closed-circuit TV. She told us about how some of the dancers drank too much over the course of the evening and ended up drunk and compromised in the parking lot at closing time. She was in school, of course, like every other stripper in the world — she said she was studying graphic design, which was
plausible, and that she was nervous about her final exams, which was sensible. Behind her, a girl went up and down the pole. My friend asked her for her name, and she said something I couldn’t hear, but which I doubt was real anyway.

“What do you guys do?” she said.

“We’re writers,” my friend said. He motioned at me. “In fact, he’s in town for his book tour.”

“What’s the book?”

I borrowed a pen from the bartender and wrote it down for her on a napkin. “Thanks,” she said. “Listen, I’m dancing in a minute. Come over and see me, okay?” She went into the back to undress.

My friend turned his hands palm-up in disbelief. “You gave her your real name?”

“Sure,” I said. “Otherwise, how will she buy my book?”

“But what if she mentions you on her blog or something?”

“She has a blog?”

“I’m just saying.”

“I guess I could have told her my name was Joe Smith, but who’d believe that? Plus, maybe this way I’ll make the Stripper Best-Seller List.”

“There’s a Stripper Best-Seller List?”

“I’m just saying.”
 

The house DJ announced our new friend’s appearance, so we collected our drinks and went to sit on the edge of the stage, next to the obese guy in the kangol cap. When she came out, she was naked, which was entirely unsurprising and even a bit dispiriting — during the conversation, she had been attractive in part because we couldn’t exactly see what she’d look like without clothes. She was a beneficiary of imagination. On the stage, she was perfectly pretty, but somehow lesser. She put her legs wide apart. She bent over and looked backwards at us. She hung her head over the edge of the stage into my friend’s lap. We dropped a number of singles onto the stage, and she smiled, which displeased the kangol guy; he tried to regain his advantage by outbidding us. I looked, then looked away, then looked again. It wasn’t particularly sexy, which confused me. Was it my fault? Maybe I needed to drink more. I finished my beer to try to fix things.

The dance lasted two songs, and then that was it. My friend and I went to a banquette, and the girl came and sat with us. It was difficult to pick up the thread of our conversation. Were we supposed to congratulate her on her dancing? Was she supposed to thank us for dropping dollar bills next to her naked body? Something had been added
to the dynamic, and also subtracted.

For a little while, she was quiet, and then she cleared her throat. “No one’s falling in love with me tonight,” she said. It was half-announcement, half-lament. She gave us one brief, fascinating, possibly true glimpse into the economics of the club — she had paid fifty dollars to dance on the feature stage, and to make the money
back, she needed to entice at least a few men into private dances in the back rooms. “Those are more expensive,” she said. “but they’re worth it.” My friend and I were done. He went to the bathroom and I went to stand by the door.

As we were walking back to my hotel, it occurred to me that strippers and writers aren’t very different. Both
of us demonstrate our skill for the benefit of others, never knowing exactly how we will be repai… No, no. It didn’t occur to me. That’s ridiculous. Strippers and writers are nothing alike, except for their common humanity, and their outsized expectations, and their sadness when those expectations aren’t met, and their essential fragility. I hope her finals go well.
 

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Below writer and professor Carrie Spell offers an appreciation of her former writing instructor Mary Robison’s latest novel, One D.O.A. One on the Way, in the context of the author’s larger body of work.
 

In their memoir Double Down, Frederick and Steven Barthelme describe a trip to a Mississippi Gulf Coast casino with their colleague, story writer and novelist Mary Robison. Robison — along with the Barthelmes — was my teacher at the University of Southern Mississippi, and their description of her always struck me as perfect:

Mary says, “I can’t afford to lose a penny. I’ve got forty dollars here and I can’t afford to lose a penny.” She’s tough, tall, good-looking but deadly thin. In her black clothes she looks like scaffolding.

“You’ve only got forty dollars?” Rick says.

“That’s all I’ve got in my pocket,” she says, pretending this is a very important distinction. “I’ve got my credit cards. But I can’t lose a penny,” she says.

Mary often says things because she loves the way they sound. She loves the word “penny.”

 

She loves the sound of words, and this is evident in her work, even if the words don’t always seem to do what we need them to. Take, for example, the following section of her novel Why Did I Ever:

Hollis and I have killed this whole Saturday together. We’ve watched fourteen hours of the PBS series The Civil War.

Now that it’s over he turns to me and says, “That was good.”

Two characters spend fourteen hours watching an epic documentary, one that took Ken Burns years to research and film, and the only way to respond is, “That was good.” The seeming inadequacy of these words brings about their beauty and humor. The passage is actually reminiscent of the creation story in Genesis. God spends six days on the world: letting there be light, separating night and day, adding water and heavens and earth, giving life to the wild animals. God then looks over his creation, and how was it? “It was good.” Robison creates a paradox in which people sound careless, when, in fact, they are being as precise as possible.
 

Amid these seemingly minute interactions, we find the guts of Robison’s work: dead parents, children left alone in snowstorms, women with cancer, cats missing, women with dying husbands. Because of her constant use of compressed space — three pages for the widely anthologized story “Yours,” or a novel composed of 536 tiny vignettes as was the case with 2001’s LA Times Book Award winner Why Did I Ever — critics often rush to label Robison a minimalist.

You’ll find this information in any article on her work, just as you’ll also learn that she hates the term minimalist and prefers subtractionist because, as she claims in an interview with BOMB magazine’s Maureen Murray, “that at least implied a little effort. Minimalist sounded like we had tiny vocabularies and few ways to use the few words we knew.”

The people Robison creates may avoid spelling out their every emotional response, but they do continually regale us with sharply and deeply observed facts about their surroundings. The narrator of the story “I Am Twenty-One,” originally published in the collection An Amateur’s Guide to the Night and reprinted in Tell Me: 30 Stories, complains of another college student, “He was a quitter, a skimmer, I decided; a person who knew shit about detail.” Attention to detail is Robison’s skill, a trait she attaches to her characters which seems to keep their lives in order when everything else defies control.
 

This is certainly true in Robison’s latest novel, One D.O.A. One on the Way. Like her previous novel Why Did I Ever, the new one is constructed of short vignettes. The narrator, Eve Broussard, is a film location scout in New Orleans, her work having dried up after Hurricane Katrina. She lives with her husband, Adam, who is sick with Hepatitis-C, and his twin brother Saunders, with whom she is having an affair while his wife is in a psychiatric hospital, in the mansion of their wealthy parents.

Eve begins the novel by telling us that she’s stepped on “a rusty fucking nail” and goes on to explain that this happens to everybody — the novel being set in post-Katrina New Orleans. Robison then writes, “There’s a little window period with Tetanus, of about twenty-four hours.” Absolute fact. Check.

One D.O.A. also includes a recurring thread of bulleted facts not only about New Orleans but also about guns:

The only high school in the Lower 9th Ward, Alfred Lawless, is not scheduled to reopen ever.

Louisiana finished dead last in the Health Index for the past three years running.

There are no orthopedists. For broken bones, the recommended spot is Houston.

Thigh holsters are good when you want to Open Carry. A holster on the thigh puts your gun under your hand. Most have pop buckles for instant access.

 

Robison has always written about disorder, but now that she’s writing about New Orleans and its lack of recovery, she provides a new dimension. The ruins of the landscape and its people let us know that Eve is not the only one suffering and unsure. In one scene at a restaurant, she observes a father forcing his son on all fours to eat off a plate on the floor, the man gripping the boy’s neck. Patrons leave, and everyone is appalled, but no one does anything, including the narrator herself who can only observe and report.

Eve also makes other, sometimes absurd lists — of things stolen by her young kleptomaniac niece, Collie, and of things she’ll never do again, like “wearing the Trotsky t-shirt or newspaper hat to church.”

These lists are the rules, a way these characters make sense of disorder, no matter how arbitrary. Actual rules no longer exist — especially in New Orleans — so they stick to whatever they know. For example, Eve learns in the first couple of pages that her assistant, whom she’s been calling Lucien, is actually named Paul. She continues to call him Lucien. And Lucien has his own rules. When finding someone else’s handwritten grocery list, he decides that the “obvious conclusion is, buy everything on the list.”

Through it all, Robison also reminds us of just how beautiful this world is, with sky that is “a grape color” and “tree-lined avenues, fields of indigo, King cotton, cane, cows, high tension lines, cricket oil wells, now stretches of winding country roads, moss-covered monuments, oddly still bayous, long alleys of arching Live Oak trees.” Yet despite the loveliness of this description, something sinister lurks behind those images of the old South — King cotton and moss-covered monuments reminding us of the racist, violent Southern past that unfolded on these bucolic country roads with their lazy cows. This is the strength of Robison’s work, the insistence on writing of an America as it is lived, warts and beauty, word for word.
 

For more praise of One D.O.A., One on the Way, see Daniel Handler’s NYTBR review and the unsigned “briefly noted” piece at The New Yorker.

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Stephany Aulenback and Pasha Malla are two extremely talented writers I met years ago, when the literary Internet seemed smaller, after finding and enjoying their work online. Now Pasha’s The Withdrawal Method, a story collection highly acclaimed in Canada, is out in the States.

Below Steph (who posts an occasional Babies in Literature series at her site) admires Pasha’s depictions of children and childhood in fiction and asks him some questions. Pasha, being Pasha, asks some back. The conversation ends up being one of the best I’ve read on the subject.

At the end is a bonus video of the author reading from a poetry anthology he wrote in the 8th grade.

 

Pasha Malla does not write about generic children. His child characters are very vivid, very fleshy and real, if you will, and very different from one another. In some ways they are more vivid and individual than his adult characters, even when they make only fleeting appearances. In “The Past Composed,” a story mostly about the adult narrator, there is a very memorable secondary child character who is described as looking like “a mini-Richard Nixon.” There’s another very memorable secondary child character, Trish, in “Long Short, Short Long”:

Miss wasn’t really marking. Sort of, but more she was waiting to look up sharply and order some loud kid: “Out!” She hoped it was Trish. Trish in those stirrup pants like an acrobat, prissy, too eager with her head of perfect blonde curls and private voice training and hand shooting up fluttering to correct Miss on something Trish had learned at the Conserva-tree (like the Queen, she said it). “Miss, Miss!” and then, “Actually…” Doing harmonies when the class sung “Happy Birthday” even.

And when his children are the main characters, well, they are, in my opinion, his most memorable characters.

He places them in extremely truthful situations — it’s as if he remembers how dark, disturbing, and confusing being a child is. “Big City Girls,” for instance, features seven-year-old Alex, his older sister Ginny, and several of her fifth grader girl friends acting out rape scenarios (using Alex as the rapist) on a snow day from school. There’s a lot of that in these stories, actually — children acting out on each other adult behaviours, sex and violence for instance, that they don’t quite understand:

After a minute or so came the whisper of socks along the hall’s parquet. Alex waited, waited, and just as the footsteps neared the closet he swung the door open and pounced and grabbed the girl standing there and hauled her back into the closet, slamming the door behind him.

Alex was on top of the girl. He held his hook [ed: a toy plastic pirate hook] to her throat.

Can you be Jordan Knight when you rape me? said Heather’s voice in the dark.

Okay, what do I say?

Just be slow and nice, she said.

Okay, said Alex. Okay.

This kind of thing is common behavior for kids, of course, but it’s usually done in a very secretive way, and it’s the kind of thing that adults prefer not to see and not to remember. In the story “Pushing Oceans In and Pulling Oceans Out,” this taking on of an adult role happens in a different way — a fifth grade girl whose mother has died of breast cancer tries to act as a mother figure for her “slow” little brother. The strain of it all seems to be causing her to develop obsessive compulsive tendencies. This story is written in the first person, from the little girl’s perspective, and her voice is beautifully captured, something that is very difficult to do. In “Big City Girls” and “Long Short, Short Long,” Pasha uses a childlike close third person, and this works very well, too.

Yet while Pasha is relentlessly unsentimental in his treatment of childhood, he’s also hugely, hugely empathetic. When a child character behaves badly — as does Bogdan, a fourth grade immigrant from Bosnia who is both bullied and bullies — there is no blaming distance from the author, the way there often is when an adult character behaves badly. Instead, the character and the story are so carefully built that the reader, while certainly disturbed, also feels compassion and understanding –- I should note, here, that Pasha taught elementary school for at least a year or two.
 
 

Some people seem to maintain a connection to childhood, and others simply don’t. There are some writers whose work, whether or not they are actually writing about children, seems somehow childlike in the best possible way — I think it has something to do with the freshness of their vision and also with a refusal to try to be sophisticated, with language, with plot, with ideas, simply for the sake of sophistication. And yet their work often turns out to be more imaginative, more nuanced, more risky and therefore, in these ways, more truly sophisticated, more truly new, than the work of writers whose work you would never describe as childlike.

I don’t think retaining a connection to childhood and having a “childlike” quality are necessarily linked. In Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Robert Irwin comes across as curious, relentlessly inquisitive, easily delighted by simple things (like a good Diet Coke) — all characteristics I think we’d associate with some ideal of a “childlike sense of wonder.” But, despite being able to recall entire days from high school, Irwin claims to have no memories of his childhood. None. And it’s not because he’s repressing anything either; apparently he was a pretty happy kid.

Maybe part of it is that associating any particular characteristic with children is false; it seems to assume that kids are a homogeneous species. If someone has a “childlike quality,” it’s generally meant to insinuate a sort of wide-eyed innocence in the way, say, William Blake wrote about kids — 250 years ago. It’s one of the big mistakes we make in thinking about childhood: we’ve idealized one aspect of it, which is limiting. Being a kid is much more emotionally complex than that.
 

Well, I agree and I disagree. I think you can assign a few, a very few, qualities to children in general. But great fiction doesn’t come out of generalizations, does it? So yeah, I do agree that every child is as different from every other child as every adult is different from every other adult. And it’s clear from the variety of kids in your work that you recognize this. I started to count up all the children in the thirteen stories that make up your book — there are a lot of them, and they are very different from each other. Why are you so committed to writing accurately, truthfully, about children in your work?

Well, there’s just so much going on when you’re young, and kids feel everything so deeply — mainly because, I think, their understanding of time is so different from ours. If there’s one major difference between adults and kids it’s that as we age it becomes increasingly difficult to live in the present: we’re either working our way through the past or thinking about the future, how our decisions and actions now will either reflect upon things that have already happened or things that are still to come. (In Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk there’s an amazing essay, “Aces and Eights” about exactly this.) With kids — and this is one generalization I feel pretty comfortable in making — there’s only now. Think about how, when you’re young, you can fall in and out of hopeless, desperate, gut-wrenching love in the span of a week.

There’s this fantastic, perfect story of Graham Greene’s, “The Innocents,” which is maybe the best thing about first love I’ve ever read. Check this out; the kids he’s writing about are 8 years-old: “I remembered the small girl as well as one remembers anyone without a photograph to refer to… I remembered all the games of blind-man’s bluff at birthday parties when I vainly hoped to catch her, so that I might have the excuse to touch and hold her, but I never caught her; she always kept out of my way… I loved her with an intensity I have never felt since, I believe, for anyone.”

And that to me is why I want to write about kids: if “childlike” means anything to me, it’s a heightened state of experience, whether that manifests in joy or fear or happiness or shame or whatever. This is why childhood makes such amazingly fertile ground for fiction. And I think I’m still close enough to it and have decent and vivid enough memories of being a kid that I can do a decent job of writing about it – or I try to, anyway!
 

That really resonates, that you tend to feel things more deeply and more fully when you’re only there, in the present, and not projecting yourself into the past or the future by worrying about it. Except maybe the emotion of fear, actually, which is often requires a projection of the self in time. And kids do seem to feel a lot of fear. I know I did. And I’ve noticed it in my own little boy, Luke. What is fear but a kind of anticipation? So while I generally agree with the notion, I think it might be too simple to say that for kids there’s only now.

But here’s another thing about being a kid that’s rather at odds with his or her experience of the passage of time as slow – kids change more, and more rapidly, than adults do. I mean, you can feel pretty certain that a two-year-old experiences only the now – but eight years later, when the two-year-old is ten, that’s no longer as true. There’s such a distance travelled in those eight years in pretty much every way. Whereas I feel as if I’m pretty much the same person, with the same perceptions, I was eight years ago. So there’s this weird juxtaposition of slow time with rapid change.

Right, and in that tension is a world of possibilities for any writer who’s willing to think about it. What I’m wondering, though, is how writing for kids differs from writing about kids?
 

Wow, that’s a difficult question and I think you’re in a much better position to answer it than I am. Aren’t you working on a novel for adults right now and also on something for children? What do you think?

The YA book is on hold for now — and, with that said, Brian Doyle, a great writer of books for young people, told me this: never say you’re writing a YA book; let readers decide who the audience is. It’s good advice.

I think in fiction for adults about childhood there’s always this shared nostalgia that the author is trying to tap into; the stories are told from an adult perspective, with an adult’s knowledge and experience. That results in dramatic irony, which, even if not made explicit in the text, can create realizations that are shared between writer and reader about childhood or how the kids in the book are experiencing the world — I guess a subtle sort of winking over the heads of the kids. That sounds exploitive, but I think the best books about childhood are the ones where this is least obvious, where the reader is swept up into the children’s world and forced to keep up. Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy is one (albeit horrifying) example of this.

I don’t really know what writing for kids is like, since I’ve done so little, but I’ve been thinking lately how unimportant the details and logic of narrative were to me when I was young. When I rewatched Star Wars as an adult, for example, I was completely astounded to discover that the movie had a plot — even though I could remember exactly what happened in every scene, and even entire passages of dialogue. And think about popular kids’ books like Goodnight Moon and even Where the Wild Things Are — so often the story, if there is one, is peripheral to mood, tone, imagery, and feeling. Those seem to be the things that attract and stay with kids about a book, far above what actually happens.

Has having a kid changed your experience as a reader and writer?
 

For the first seven months or so, Luke didn’t sleep. He cried around the clock and fed constantly. So initially, in my case, having a kid meant I didn’t have one spare minute to read or write. After that horrible time passed, I started reading again — like a starving woman. Writing didn’t start to happen again until Luke turned three, really, and then, soon after, I got pregnant again.

I must say that I am much more drawn to depictions of both motherhood and childhood in literature now and that I am much more sensitive to the tragic/traumatic, particularly if the trauma or tragedy has something to do with childhood. I’m absolutely blown away if it’s done well and I’m much more disgusted if it’s done poorly — for example, if I think it’s done to be sensationalistic. I guess I’m more emotional as a reader.

What are some books you’ve read that depict childhood honestly and truthfully?
 

Last year I started trying to compile a list of books that remind the adult reader what it’s like to be a child, classics not of childhood but about childhood. Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows was the book that started me thinking about that. And I’ve always loved A High Wind in Jamaica, a book that is certainly not for children but beautifully evokes childhood for the adult reader. How about you?

I love “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” but that’s a story, and more about teenagers. I think Robert Cormier is one YA (sorry, Brian Doyle!) author with an unbelievably astute sense of what being young is all about. I reread The Chocolate War, a book I loved when I was younger, recently; it totally held up. The Butcher Boy, as I said, is another amazing portrayal of a certain type of youth, and so is Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero, although it’s completely different. The first section of Portrait of the Artist is pretty amazing in how it uses language to capture childhood experience – and then there’s Joyce’s story “Araby,” which does the same thing without so much linguistic experimentation.

Lastly, back to thinking about people as children: I find child stars the most difficult people to think of as kids – or at least normal kids who might have been students at the school where I used to teach. There’s this weird performance of childhood that goes with that territory, I think, and it feels so false – they’re like these odd little reversed Victorian versions of kids, like adults playing kids.

Which makes me think, somewhat digressively, about aging in the public eye. Those 7-Up films are interesting for that, and I know a few of the participants have dropped out because as adults they’ve found the experience too invasive. It must be impossible to be yourself when your childhood is so easily accessible: millions of people want to see Drew Barrymore at 9 years old, they rent ET. I wonder if instead of feeling robbed of your childhood, as people seem to say of child stars, this fabricated version of your childhood feels inescapable. It’s not so much that they didn’t have a childhood, but that they had one created for them.
 

I agree about the child stars – you’ve put your finger on it exactly. They’re just like adults playing children. I love those 7-Up films with a passion but I don’t think I would’ve wanted to be in one or have one of my children as the subject of one. The directors have done a terrific job of imposing a narrative structure on the lives of each of the children — but that’s the kicker. I think a proper narrative structure can only ever be imposed on a real life — real lives are too complicated, inexplicable, messy to be pressed tidily into a story — and I feel it’s up to the individual to decide on his or her own narrative structure. There’s something that feels a little dangerous, a little wounding, when it comes from outside.

I feel like I’m heading into the direction of pseudo-psychology here, and I don’t really know much about psychology. But your dad’s a psychiatrist, isn’t he? Does he talk about his work with you and do you discuss yours with him? Has he, or his field, influenced your fiction? How about your mother?

My folks are great readers (and writers — they’ve both been threatening to write books for years), but I think if I inherited anything from what they do professionally it’s a sense of inquiry and a deep, abiding interest in people. Both my mom and dad are also very excited about discovering new things, and — to return the conversation to childhood a bit — that was something instilled in me from the time I was very young. So I guess all that’s mirrored in my fiction, or I hope so, anyway.
 

 

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When the economy goes south people visit the library more; it is a fact of the profession.

They check out materials to save money, take classes to get new skills, and pay more attention to our free cultural events. Some children’s librarians I know have seen a definite uptick in “drop offs,” where children are left alone in the library by parents desperate for short-term child care. Many people have been coming in looking for resources to start their own businesses or for finance and budgeting advice.

We are the base of operations for many job seekers, a place where they can search employment listings, type a resume, and, frankly, find a little camaraderie and hope. Obama got help like this back in the day too.
 

But there are a lot of scared librarians in the city today. All three public library systems (Brooklyn, New York, and Queens) are facing massive budget cuts. Each system is scrambling and though each is trying to handle the shortfalls as best it can the talk in the trenches is getting shrill. We keep telling each other that we’ll all be fine, hoping to convince ourselves through repetition if nothing else.

Thank God for the union. We got a raise in the last contract negotiation, although we haven’t seen it yet and so far nobody is really pushing either for it or the back pay we are owed. A colleague put it best when she said “I’m a lot more worried about next week’s pay than last week’s.” Management, in coordination with the union, has restructured vacation time and designed new voluntary part-time positions, and is offering early retirement. We’ve had our book budgets cut, travel money for conferences eliminated, and funds for programming slashed.

Will this be enough? We are worried that, at the end of the day, it will not. Presently the libraries are in a hiring freeze, which is unnerving for new MLS graduates, but there are a lot of working librarians who fear that they are on the block as well. Librarians with less than two years’ seniority (which incidentally includes myself) are potentially at risk. Ultimately our job losses would be passed on to the patrons through limited hours and, though we’ll fight it clawing and screaming all the way, a reduction of services.
 

Dark though the situation may appear, the struggle is far from lost. Final cuts have yet to be made and large group layoffs haven’t happened (though some non-union librarians have been let go). We live to serve the public but right now we really need the public’s help. Concerned citizens can support their local library through any (or better yet, all) of the organizations below.

Save Queens Library

Brooklyn Public Library: Support Our Shelves

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Brooklyn Vanguard

We are here working for you, New York City. Come in and use the library, check out books, get on the computers, tell everyone how great it is and how much you love the institution, but make sure you tell your politicians that this is an important issue for you — and excuse us if our smiles are a little bit tight.
 

Image of the Flushing, Queens library branch, the nation’s largest by circulation, taken from the New York Times.

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Marie Mockett’s first novel, Picking Bones from Ash, appears later this year (excerpt here). I’ve started talking about it so far in advance not so much because she’s my friend, although she is, but because I’m passionate about the book and want to do everything I can to spread the word.

Below she discusses some of the themes I’ll emphasize at tonight’s Powerful Women event, which will feature Mockett alongside novelist Marlon James (whose The Book of Night Women I can’t recommend highly enough) and photographer Stephanie Keith.

 

It’s May in Japan and the girls are swaddled in layers of silk and have painted their lips bright red. Everyone is heading for the Hollyhock Festival, but there’s a problem; Lady Rokujo’s carriage is blocking the path of her frenemy, Lady Aoi. At this point, it might be good for Lady Aoi to consider that a few years ago Lady Rokujo killed off another rival via a little spirit possession trick. But competitive girls don’t always think about these things in the heat of the moment. Aoi orders her men to dismantle Rokujo’s carriage; Rokujo deploys her enraged spirit a few days later to tackle Aoi’s body and literally frighten her to death. While all this is deeply upsetting to the men and women in her circle, Lady Rokujo is neither arrested nor punished. It is simply understood that sometimes a girl can’t help but be overwhelmed by frustration, and woe betide the person who provokes her to extreme rage.

This famous incident takes place in The Tale of Genji, written circa 1000 AD and often considered the world’s first psychological novel. For the next one thousand years, a great many classical and popular Japanese plays, texts and films have depicted exorcism and the quieting of hurt and angry female spirits struggling to express themselves in a society where men have most of the power. This is not to say that Japanese women are powerless. Genji, for example, was written by Murasaki Shikibu — a Japanese woman — a fact that startles some westerners accustomed to thinking of the Japanese as being so repressed as to be unexpressive.

Shikibu, however, was not the only female writer of her period; she had an ongoing literary feud with Sei Shonagon, author of the pithy and witty Pillow Book, which chronicled, among other things, “Words That Look Commonplace but That Become Impressive When Written in Chinese Characters” (something with which a certain generation of tattoo enthusiasts might identify). Shonagon thought that Shikibu took herself too seriously and Shikibu thought that Shonagon was a ditz. Whichever side they have taken in this rivalry, female writers in Japan have had Shonagon and Shikibu as a source of inspiration for over a thousand years. Not many cultures — even western ones — can match that.

My first novel, Picking Bones from Ash, comes out in September, and is about three generations of women in Japan and America struggling with what it means to be talented. One of my characters, Akiko, takes a page from Shikibu’s book and believes that the most important thing a woman can do is to develop her gifts. But Akiko is in Japan, and it’s no coincidence that, as the women in her life struggle to accept the abilities they have been given, they run up against an actual ghost among the family demons.

Along the way to publication, a few editors felt that the ghost in my novel was not “literary.” But anything that scares us — whether it’s a discomfiting nightmare, an enemy’s threat, a future unknown — has the ability to change our behavior, and this is the stuff of the best novels. There must be something deeply unsettling to us about talented girls; they often don’t fare well in fiction. In AS Byatt’s Possession, the poet Cristobel Lamott suffers obscurity and a broken heart after her initially inspiring affair with fellow poet Roland Ash; he goes on to enjoy great fame and a stable marriage. Ditto for Griet in Girl with a Pearl Earring; she helps to birth Vermeer’s masterpiece due to her sensitive eye for color and lighting, but doesn’t manage to make much else of her own, except for a nice marriage with the butcher’s son. And who can forget how Briony, the plawright protagonist of McEwan’s Atonement, disastrously meddles with her sister’s love life? I’ve tried, among other things, to examine the thorny questions surrounding talented girls and the things they fear and the reasons why.

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I’ve been looking forward to my friend Laila Lalami’s first novel since her story collection, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published back in 2005. Secret Son is finally out today, and — although, having witnessed its transformation over a couple of drafts, I’m not entirely objective — it’s well, well worth the wait.

Below Lalami discusses what it was like to write such an extended work from a man’s perspective. Her insights are an interesting counterpoint to some of Marlon James’ comments, in last week’s interview, about the challenges of finding his way into his second novel, The Book of Night Women, which is narrated by a teenage girl.

 

I remember clearly the day I began working on the manuscript that became Secret Son. I was in the middle of revisions for my first book, and I wanted to try my hand at something new. When I pulled out my notebook and started scribbling, I had a blurry image in my mind of a young man, hands stuffed in his pockets, walking home to the shack he shares with his mother after watching a movie at a nearby theater. I followed that image and others like it, pixel by pixel, for the next five years, finding out more about this character as I went along.

Youssef — for that turned out to be his name — is a shy, bookish, gullible young man who learns that his dead father — whom he had always thought was a poor and respectable schoolteacher — is in fact a wealthy businessman living in the same sprawling city — Casablanca. Youssef sets out to find him and, much to his surprise, is welcomed into his father’s liberal, sophisticated, yet corrupt world and begins to learn that it isn’t possible to change who you are.

Now that Secret Son is being published, one of the first questions I get asked is, “What is it like writing from a male point of view?” I’m never sure how to answer this; perhaps it’s because I don’t think there is such a thing as a single, unified male point of view. I can only describe what it was like to write from this particular man’s point of view. There were some things about Youssef that felt extremely personal for me — for example, his attempts to negotiate various identities, classes, cultures, languages, and so on — and others that were not at all — for instance, his first sexual experience with a prostitute. But that was my task as a novelist; I had to use my imagination and my empathy to get at the sum of all those experiences.

Perhaps the reason I’ve never dwelled on the gender difference between my character and me is that I feel (with apologies to Flaubert) that Youssef, c’est moi. Youssef studies English at a university in Morocco (as did I); his mother is an orphan who was raised in a French institution in Fès (as was mine); he is gullible (as, unfortunately, am I); he speaks French fluently (as do I); yet he never quite feels at home with the French-educated élite (neither do I).

As a novelist, of course, I’ve used these details and shaped them according to the needs of my characters and plot. I made Youssef very poor and his father very rich to add more tension to their reunion; I had the mother lie about her origins because it seemed to fit with her character; I introduced temptations I was never exposed to; and so on. Overall, it’s been a wonderful experience, even though it was also sometimes difficult and even painful. So I don’t know what it’s like to write from a male point of view, but I do know how Youssef views the world and how he feels about it.

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Jonathan Baumbach may be best known among hipsters as the dad who has a cameo in The Squid and the Whale, but more fundamentally he’s the experimental writer who co-founded the venerable Fiction Collective in the ’70s when his third novel, Reruns, was not picked up by the commercial publishers who put out his first two. After Fiction Collective published it, the book went on to sell more than any of his others, before or since.

Now, thirty years later, Baumbach’s most recent publisher, like his last, has gone under, and in this case the enterprise went belly-up just months after his latest book, You, appeared. My friend Lauren Cerand was so passionate about

You, she took Baumbach on as a publicity client despite the difficulties of reviving a book after the initial media window has closed. She and the author have started a site dedicated to the project.

Below Baumbach remembers the circumstances that led him and other writers to create Fiction Collective, and he compares the climate of 1974 with the dire situation publishing finds itself in today.

 

I got into my only publishing venture not for idealistic reasons (not at the beginning) and not for business considerations (least of all for that), but out of desperation. Reruns, my third and — at the time of its completion — best novel was rejected thirty-two times over a period of three and a half years. It was circulated by Candida Donadio, a literary agent of the highest reputation, and so had every chance to find acceptance.

During the years that Reruns was almost, if not quite, making connection, I had difficulty getting into another novel. My first two novels had been taken by major publishing houses on first and third tries, and had their share of favorable attention. I had been spoiled in a modest way. Reruns may have been a departure from the first two books but it was also an outgrowth of what I had been doing, the inescapable, if not so obvious, next step. It was a breakthrough book, I supposed, a leap beyond where I had been and I had, fair to say, an excessive (and perhaps obsessive) attachment to it.
 

I began to talk to other writers whose work I admired about alternative means of publishing fiction. This was in 1973, a time when there were exceedingly few small press outlets for book-length fiction, and certainly none making its case to more than a handful of readers. It was not our idea to invent another marginalized small press. Our aspirations were naïve and inflated with quixotic enthusiasm. We wanted no less than to publish the best new fiction around and have it acknowledged as such in the media and carried in bookstores everywhere. We hoped to create something comparable to the wide-reaching writers’ cooperatives in Sweden and England, although there had been no tradition for it in the U.S.. In our unguarded expectations, we saw what eventually we called the Fiction Collective becoming the New Directions of our time.

At our early meetings, before we had a name, before we got to publish our first 6 novels in 1974, we analyzed the commercial publishing scene (which has worsened exponentially over the years) by sharing negative anecdotes. In addition to the old horror stories about how our books were not properly marketed (were not in bookstores when favorable reviews appeared) were new ones about editors admiring manuscripts, keeping them on ice for five or six months (I certainly knew about that) and then returning them because the writer had “a poor track record” or because the book was perceived to have “limited sales potential” or, with all good will, the house didn’t know how to present the book to the marketplace. Sometimes books were accepted only to have that acceptance revoked at a higher level. And then there were books that were out of print (shredded perhaps or incinerated, nowhere to be found) a year or so after coming to life.

Fiction that redefined the rules, innovative and experimental work, was having the most trouble finding a home in what was clearly (though defensively unacknowledged) a publishing establishment increasingly attuned to the bottom line. And why not? Publishers, like the rest of us, had to fill their stomachs and pay their bills.
 

I wrote a version of the preceding thirty-five years ago and updated it in 1999 as an introduction to an FC2 anthology. What we wanted then — the writers who created Fiction Collective (which has survived as FC2) — was not only to have the best overall list of fiction around, as Robert Coover said about us some years later, but to jostle the publishing establishment into taking more chances with work that was out on the edge. I couldn’t imagine Fiction Collective going on indefinitely. Our business, our busyness, was the writing of books. We were, I wanted to believe, a stopgap action in a period of emergency.

I was wrong on both counts. Fiction Collective (in the form of FC2) has continued to survive and corporate-controlled publishing has retracted its range even further. Some of our writers, most notably Russell Banks, have moved on with well-deserved success to larger venues. Others, myself included in the early days, eschewed commercial publishing for the advantage of keeping our books in print indefinitely — a commitment FC and FC2 have sustained.

Despite the emergence over the last 30 years of a plethora of good, if sometimes invisible, small presses, the emergency has become if anything more dire. The present financial crisis has made matters even more desperate.
 

It is hard (when you have no money) to sustain the publishing of original fiction in the U.S. and virtually impossible to sell books in significant number without the wherewithal to advertise and garner reviews.

Media is a system of mirrors that tends to discover and honor whatever it offered for discovery and honor in the first place. We are a culture in which the perception of something often counts for more than the thing itself.

My most recent small press publishing experience provides unwittingly an object lesson. My latest novel, You, was brought out by Rager Media, an ambitious press in Akron Ohio that was still in its infancy and, though decked out in running gear, had not quite learned to walk. For inexplicable reasons, the silence pervasive, books never seemed to find their way to review media until a terrific review by Steven Moore appeared in the Los Angeles Times. At long last, something was working, I thought, until I discovered through an intermediary that the reviewer had actually purchased his copy in a bookstore. Six months after the publication of You, Rager Media felt its only remaining option was to call it quits.

I have published 14 works of fiction in all, though none (including the first two commercially published novels) has sold as many books as Reruns. And the reason is not necessarily that Reruns found its audience, though I’d like to believe that it had, but that Fiction Collective as the first national literary publishing cooperative in the U.S. was news and so got considerable attention until it became, inevitably, old news.
 

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This literary moment’s persuasive illusion is that fewer works that challenge the reader’s skills are being read. The reasons may be beside the point though they are everywhere apparent. Impatience seems high on the list. We want immediate payoffs for our commitments of time and concentration. Fiction, suggests the evidence, tends to be used more and more as a licit form of drug abuse.

Originality tends to generate difficulty in that it breaks faith with expectation, undermines the prevailing verities of last season’s fashion. Originality, by definition, takes us by surprise. Surprise is one of the touchstones of art. Literary art is always somewhat difficult during our first unescorted encounter with it. It often arrives without fanfare and without self-defining context.

It is probably fair to say that art sells only when it becomes an identifiable commodity. Commercial publishing tends to court literary work that is a thinly disguised variation on the recognizably artful — last year’s award winner tricked out to seem at once new and safely familiar.

An inevitable self-justifying cynicism pervades in an industry that knows in some secret pocket of denial that it is not doing its job. We are continually offered the cliche that there is nothing new by people who want to believe the new is really just the same old thing shrewdly disguised in this year’s marketing strategy.

Reading itself, reading anything, is an ambitious act in an age dominated by visual media. Even the simplest books require the translation of language into thought and image. Still what’s the point of reading work that is like television when television is tastier, more easily digested, and less time-consuming. If one reads books at all, shouldn’t one go for an experience one can’t get from TV or movies or anywhere else. Taking the trouble to read, perhaps we ought to go for something that throws our whole way of seeing into question. Art permits the dangerous in the comfort zone of the imagination.

Yet the system has its own self-referring logic. Books brought out by small presses, with little or no publicity budgets, which is to say little or no public identification, have virtually no hope of selling fast enough to earn space in the stop-and-shop bookstores. Review media unwittingly collaborate with the chain of circumstances that discriminates against fiction that does not conform to any of the prevailing verities. Media give extensive review space by and large to books publishers announce as important through, among other signifiers, commitment of advertising budget.

Even writers of established reputations who are not perceived to have large audiences (or audiences large enough to satisfy the multi-national corporations that own most publishing houses) pay the price.

Now I come with some trepidation to the argument implicit in this piece. What’s fun about reading fiction that refuses to yield itself without a struggle? Ah, fun! Still, I think it reasonable to say that the more active we are as readers, the greater the potential satisfaction in the reading experience. It’s a bit like love, but isn’t everything that matters?

It is not the resolution of difficulty that the ideal reader we imagine for ourselves is after, but the nature of the mysterious, mysteriousness itself.

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When Clay Risen emailed recently to share the sad news that the Nashville Scene’s books section was folding, I wondered how he thought local writers would be affected.

Risen isn’t exactly a southerner, but he grew up in Nashville. He bristles when critics of the South traffic in caricature, and he’s dedicated to reading and nurturing the region’s literary talent. I’ve followed Risen’s work since an insightful 2004 response to Charles Simic’s Down There on a Visit. Below are his thoughts on the collapse of books coverage at the

Scene — and other alt-weeklies.
 

Last week the big news coming out of Cooper Square was that the once-venerable Village Voice had let go yet another of its legendary contributors, Nat Hentoff. But the ever-shrinking coffers of its parent company, Village Voice Media Holdings, also claimed a victim far away from downtown Manhattan: the book section at the Nashville Scene.

The Scene’s books section was one of the best in the South, willing to take risks on new reviewers and little-known books — in 2002, Margaret Renkl, the Scene’s literary editor, gave me my first freelance gig. The section lasted a long time, given the rate at which regional outlets for literature and serious criticism are rapidly dying off: Last year the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cut its full-time book editor, Teresa Weaver, and it seems every year brings a new, potentially fatal challenge to the Oxford American, now a quarterly run under the stewardship of the University of Central Arkansas. The South, it seems, is one step closer to the “Sahara of the Bozarts,” in Mencken’s famous, caustic phrase.

Which isn’t to say the South is devoid of the literary arts. There are scores of great writers, young and old, working in a self-consciously southern idiom: Beth Anne Fennelly, Joe Formichella, William Gay, Silas House, Ravi Howard, Tito Perdue, Ron Rash, and George Singleton, to name just a handful. Many of them live in clusters, like Fairhope, Ala., and Oxford, Miss., where they support each other and live in symbiosis with musicians, painters, sculptors and filmmakers.
 

But unlike other arts, literature relies heavily on other writing for sustenance and promotion. Enjoying a book requires a serious investment of time, and often money, whereas music streams free over the radio. Readers need critics to point out which books are worth picking up and to help them understand what they’ve read once they’re done. That’s why book sections like the Scene’s are so important: Alt-weeklies, predicated on giving voice to local, under-represented news and activities, shine light on writers overlooked by outlets like the New York Times (likewise, they provide a great avenue for young journalists and critics like myself to get in on the act). Blogs are great, and in some ways better than book sections, but there’s nothing like a book page in a local, general-interest publication to “cross-pollinate” interest among people who might otherwise never come across serious discussions of the printed word.

Novelists will continue writing and publishing without venues like the Scene’s book section. But don’t be surprised if a few give up because even their neighbors have never heard of them.
 

Jesse Chehak’s image taken from writer Ann Patchett’s 2007 New York Times Magazine article on music in East Nashville.

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Soon, for my own amusement more than anyone else’s, I’ll get around to posting about the rest of my England trip.

Meanwhile, I thought you might enjoy reading Levi Stahl’s delightful Anthony Powell pastiche inspired by my post about the torrid affair that erupted in the row ahead of me on the flight home. “As I read,” he told me, “I found myself thinking about the ridiculous situation in Powellian cadences… [A]s I was cooking last night, I decided to give in and try to write the scene.”
 

He gets the woman and her husband just right. But because I held back lots of details — having already been branded a busybody, I wanted to make sure the lovers weren’t identifiable — the scene is significantly different from the one that unfolded before me.*

Levi’s detailed imaginings put me in mind of Carrie Frye’s recent post on William Logan, Hart Crane, and the role of fact and fantasy in biography — and in writing characters generally.

 

Anticipating a sleepless flight back to Chicago from the Barbara Pym conference in London, I had packed the second volume of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time; re-reading this old favorite seemed the surest way of filling the deathly airplane hours, otherwise so prone to relatively fruitless introspection. The second volume of Dance takes Powell’s characters from their mid-twenties to their mid-thirties, those years in which one finds oneself wrapped up, either as a participant or spectator, in questions of marriage — a state so often followed, distressingly soon in some cases, by its shadowy cousins, adultery and divorce.

I was just beginning to settle into the flow of Powell’s narration when my eye was caught by the arrival of a woman who apparently held the ticket for the middle seat of the row in front of me. Tall and slim, even skinny, probably in her late forties, and dressed in draped layers of varying browns whose apparent artlessness was but an indicator of the care she’d taken in her appearance, she had the fiercely attractive facial structure of an actress, an impression not belied by the narrow line of her plucked eyebrows or the glistening bow of her lips. The smile with which she graced the man in the aisle seat as he rose to allow her passage gave the impression — a bit chilling, I thought — of someone who is perpetually calibrating, to an ever-finer degree, the effect she is having on the multitudes. When I found myself unconsciously smiling back at her, I dropped my head once more to my book.

Reading was not, I soon discovered, an option. For the actress woman, on sitting down, began to talk, with a verve and facility that suggested she might continue throughout the eight-hour flight. She began by introducing herself to the man in the aisle seat, of whom I’d not taken much notice when he entered, having only a vague impression of a fairly standard businessman, probably mid-thirties, wearing an unmemorable dark suit, the tie and collar perhaps loosened for evening. The woman had a throaty, even masculine voice, the emergence of which was so incongruous when set against her slight frame as to make one suspect it had been carefully cultivated — not without, one had to admit, a certain attractive effect. This flight represented, she revealed, the end of a week’s holiday to visit a friend from college — “such a dear” — who, having married an Englishman, now lived distressingly far out in the English countryside, “in one of those villages that seems to think that quaintness is not just a virtue but the virtue.” After a bit more detail about her friend, who had apparently found the English cooking more congenial than its reputation, judging by the weight she’d gained, and whose husband was, she hated to admit, somewhat of a bore, the woman paused long enough to allow the man to adduce a few facts about himself.

At this point, I’ll admit that I fully expected him to avail himself of some functionally rebarbative answer, the conversational equivalent of laying the airline’s embroidered night mask over one’s eyes; but no, he instead explained that he worked in finance and had been sent over on a rush trip to, as he put it, “smooth some oil on the waters” regarding some complicated partnership, “a very hush-hush, on the QT kind of thing.” Clandestine as his activities may have been, he nonetheless seemed fully prepared to offer the woman a brief course in the intricacies of high finance, with a leaven of slightly smarmy charm, but she quickly cut him off. “You’re probably voting for John McCain, aren’t you? You stockbroker types, you’re all McCain voters. You probably think Sarah Palin’s hot, right?” His failure to deny the charge with sufficient alacrity seemed to function much like the report of a starter’s pistol, as the woman instantly launched into what could only be called a screed, ill-articulated though mostly, it must be said, accurate, about Palin’s lack of qualifications, experience, integrity, or fashion sense. Her fervor only mounted as her critique devolved into the personal, and by the time she reached her contention that the small of Palin’s back almost certainly bore a tramp stamp, she was — I couldn’t help but realize due to the vibration of the seat in front of me — jabbing the man in the chest with her forefinger.

By this point, we were airborne, the animated conversation having been so distracting that I’d barely noticed the routine, almost ritualistic, operations of takeoff, and as the man began feebly to protest that he had decided against McCain, I attempted to turn my attention back to Powell. However, the category of person who converses with strangers on airplanes having always perplexed me, never more so than when I’ve been stuck on the receiving end of such a person’s overtures, I couldn’t help but find my attention at least somewhat divided over the next hour, during which the woman spoke almost non-stop. As the lights dimmed to signify night on the plane, and the inflight movie began, she embarked on a disquisition about her college-age daughter’s complicated relationship with the pledge mother at her sorority. That led into an account of the woman’s decision to take up cabaret singing on the occasion of her fortieth birthday — “Tell me you wouldn’t have guessed forty, right? “– which led to some catty remarks about photos she’d seen of Meryl Streep in shorts, following which, in order to demonstrate Streep’s facility with accents, she sang a few bars of “Jolly Holiday,” from Mary Poppins, in a Cockney accent that could quite possibly have made Dick van Dyke surrender the bottle. Fortunately, my worst fear — the eruption of an impromptu duet –went unrealized, as the businessman revealed himself to be impressively ignorant on the subject of Mary Poppins, a situation that his seatmate wasted no time in rectifying.

It was some time after that when I realized that without quite noticing it, I’d actually been reading Dance for several minutes, uninterrupted by commentary. A rustling from the row ahead, followed by what sounded like a light slap, made me worry for a moment that the man had snapped and was executing a rough vigilante justice with his bare hands. It was but the work of a glance to determine that I couldn’t have been more wrong: rather than throttling her, the man appeared to be kissing her, with a vigor more properly associated with attempts to dig one’s way out of the Bastille. They were, as my nephew might have put it, all over one another.

Like the woman’s banal monologue, this, too, went on at surprising length. The near-silence from the pair, following the skein of chatter, was disconcerting, while certain rocking movements in the seat, the more fervent of which sloshed my glass of wine on its insecure seatback tray, suggested that more than lips were being brought into play. I contemplated pressing the call button for a flight attendant, but anticipation of the fumbling conversation that would ensue stopped me. Of what could I rightly complain? That their ardor had disrupted my reading? Such a position, though not entirely putting me in the wrong, seemed nevertheless to open me up to not inaccurate charges of churlishness. Did I have any other recourse?

A resolution to my indecision was obviated by the unexpected entrance of a new component to the romantic tableau. Swishing purposefully through the curtain that separated our section from the rarified confines of first class was a tall man in a clearly expensive suit, his bleary eyes and unruly shock of dark, but graying, hair suggesting a recent emergence from sleep. He stopped at the edge of the row in front of me and, almost before I could register his presence, said, in a voice that was not without a trace of petulance, “Hey. Remember me? Your husband?”

Though we pass through life without, as it were, a script of any sort, one still has to admit that the times when one is utterly astonished are relatively few. This moment qualified. Had I been holding a glass, I’d have dropped it; had I been smoking a cigarette, I’d have most likely allowed it to burn down to my fingers as I sat gape-mouthed. The man’s lower lip trembled unmistakably; whatever one’s reservations about first class, it was hard not to feel a bit sorry for him. His flight to this point, it seemed reasonable to assume, had not offered quite the satisfactions that his wife had found.

What was hard to determine was what he had actually seen. Had he spied the couple intertwined, deep in a passionate embrace? A kiss? Their general disregard for the presence of other passengers would make it seem likely that he’d burst on them unawares, and that is what I initially assumed. But perhaps not — for somehow, in a way that is even now unclear to me, the woman managed to more or less laugh off his implied accusation. Though she said nothing particularly memorable — let alone cut loose with any of the sort of withering insults that a skilled marital scrapper might have been used to slice the ground out from under a husband of uncertain self-confidence — she somehow deflected the conversation almost instantly into channels of the purest, most unremarkable banality. Before I even quite realized what was happening, she’d introduced her paramour and the three of them were discussing, of all things, The Da Vinci Code and its relative reliability as a source on the history of the Catholic Church.

This went on for about fifteen minutes, veering into a brief account of a Chicago avant-garde theatre production that the woman had been dragged to by a friend and which had featured a forty-five-minute simulation of natural childbirth, set to an extended mix of Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good.” Whatever tension inhered in the scene was utterly dissipated by what was essentially a brilliant primer on the art of making small talk; an outsider would have been forgiven for assuming the three were old, if not close, friends. Eventually — whether mollified or flummoxed I couldn’t quite tell — the husband turned and made his way back into the well-appointed shadows of first class, at which point I began to wonder whether this was a regular occurrence with the couple. Given the tone of the husband’s initial declaration, it was hard to imagine that this was the first such clinch in which he’d found his wife; at the same time, the lightning swiftness of his shift from angry cuckold to at least grudgingly jovial conversant suggested at minimum tacit approval of her behavior. Perhaps this was something they orchestrated in tandem, even to the extent of selecting a victim — if that’s the right word — in advance.

Those thoughts were soon overcome by questions about whether the woman’s seatmate might at least find his ardor cooled by the sudden revelation of the proximity of her spouse. Or, I mused, might he find that proximity — and the danger it implied — in itself erotic? Given what we’d already seen, I realized I couldn’t rule out the possibility that his spouse, too, might be pop by for a surprise cameo. Either way, what would be the woman’s response? Even if my theory about the husband’s complicity were misguided, she had unquestionably instigated the contact knowing of his presence — might his appearance only serve strengthen her adulterous resolve?

The couple’s next movement — accompanied by whispers which, one must admit, were relatively furtive when set against the pair’s actions in general — answered my questions, if not specifically, then at least generally. They switched seats, in order that the woman, now in the aisle seat, might better be able to keep an eye on the dread curtain. Settled again –though not, one assumes, safely buckled — they set to their work once more. Disconnected phrases came to my ear — “commitment,” “jealousy,” “poetry,” “deserve” — between telling silences. After a time, I began, against my will, to discern those sharp (though muffled) cries and intakes of breath whose place on the continuum between pleasure and pain can only be determined by context — the context, in this case, to the extent that it was necessary, being provided by a certain rhythmic bounce of the seat against my entrapped knees and the occasional appearance of the man’s head, bobbing like a jack-in-the-box, in the aisle. Sex, at least as broadly defined, was unquestionably being had.

All pleasures are fleeting in this fallen world, however, and that being shared by the couple was no exception. The rocking subsided, silence replaced the melange of groans and sighs. As the silence drew out, I began to suspect that the sleepiness with which evolution has seen fit to grace the male of the species post coitus had perhaps ended — for now — this menage. But just as I was, once again, reopening my book, I heard one last — and undeniably passionate –male whisper: “That was great. I don’t just mean the sex.” Snoring, whether masculine or feminine I couldn’t determine, soon followed.

As I drank off the last of my wine and gratefully settled back with my book, I couldn’t help thinking of a pair of observations from favorite writers. The first was from Iris Murdoch, who pointed out that “sex comes to most of us with a twist”; the other resided somewhere in the volume that rested in my lap. The rackety painter, Mr. Deacon, whose favorite subject is finely muscled, deceptively young heroes of Greek and Roman history and myth, says, “It’s no good pontificating about other people’s sexual tastes.” And with that thought in mind, I soon found myself joining the sated duo in sleep.
 

Ed Note: The fellow passengers were both theater people, both in their mid-to-late forties. At first she sat in the aisle seat; he was next to the window.

When the husband emerged from behind the curtain, the wife introduced her paramour, explaining, “He’s in the business.” Throats were cleared. There was some jokey back-and-forth about Husband and the woman traveling in different classes. She (falsely) claimed she’d tried to visit him at his seat, and that the flight attendants turned her away. “They don’t even let me into the first-class lounges with him in airports,” she said to Theater Guy. All three chuckled, not entirely convincingly.

It was revealed that Theater Guy would be directing a show in New York and was flying into town to make arrangements. The three discussed the show’s likelihood of success, the impending collapse of the economy, and the likely end, according to Husband, of civilization as we know it. As they spoke, Husband seemed impatient, but increasingly only mildly so. It was impossible to tell what, if anything, he’d seen. When he excused himself to return to his Auster novel, the wife saw him to the curtain and they talked in the galley for a couple of minutes before she retreated to the bathroom.

On returning, as I mentioned, the woman switched seats with Theater Guy. At times showering the man with quick passionate kisses, at times rebuffing his advances, she murmured softly in his ear and then dabbed at her eyes as she listened to some (of his?) recordings on his MP3 player. Although apparently overcome with emotion, she gave him notes. Things really got going again once the plane began its descent into JFK.

But I like Levi’s version better.
 

Incidentally, I took this photo of the Arctic tundra (above right), or whatever it is, on the flight. The view went on like that — bright blue and red against the cracked brown of the earth — for nearly an hour.

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“When I start to read John Leonard,” said Kurt Vonnegut, “it is as though I, while simply looking for the men’s room, blundered into a lecture by the smartest man who ever lived.”

Leonard died last week, the day after casting his vote for Obama, and his absence is mourned far and wide in the literary world. (Laura Miller’s remembrance is a good place to start.)

Below Lary Wallace offers his valediction.

 

John Leonard refused to write in the critic’s standard default voice: detached and smugly ironic. He wasn’t afraid to be passionate about books, especially novels, novels being something that he stopped writing when, by his own admission, “I realized that the novels I was reviewing were better than the ones I was writing.” He could engage in that kind of self-deprecation, secure enough in his own talents as a stylist of dazzling originality to praise the performances of those who had chosen to play a different sport. No one could capture the essence of a good novel better than Leonard — the more metafictionally post-modern, the better.

This would be the place to choose an example, but it’s a choice that’s difficult. Here’s one, on E.L. Doctorow from the New York Review of Books, in 2004:

It can’t be that he’s furious because he wants attention, although he deserves more, as a writer who has quietly amassed a shelf of books that are as serious-minded as they are beautifully crafted; who is at once a radical historian, a cultural anthropologist, a troubadour, a private eye, and a cost-benefit analyst of assimilation and upward mobility in the great American multiculture, as well as the chronicler of the death of fathers, the romance of money, and the higher ‘latitudes and longitudes of gangsterdom’; who has put on more narrative glad rags and jet-propelled pulp-fiction sneakers than a Condé Nast cafeteria — western, sci-fi, gothic, gangster, ghost, fairy tale and fable, historical or philosophical romance — sort of like Melville’s Confidence Man; and who can’t stop going to the movies.

This is the kind of run-on exuberance that James Wood, in a bit of meta-criticism, once referred to as “John Leonarditis.” Leonard has also been criticized for being too much of an enthusiast, someone who was always too shy with the knife’s blade. It’s true that Leonard was much better at testifying his love than proclaiming his hate, but he wasn’t afraid to let even his favorite novelists — up to and including Salmon Rushdie–know when they’d gone wrong. Yet excoriating failures obviously wasn’t something that he relished; it wasn’t what he’d gotten in the game to do. All he wanted was to read beautiful sentences in order to write them, and it was William F. Buckley, of all people, who first hired this unrepentant liberal, to spike up the letters column in National Review. After that, more suitable venues opened up — at the New York Times, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, New York, Harper’s, and many (maybe a few too many) other publications. But Leonard never let his voice drop out of its register of sustained intensity, as if letting the propeller stop would mean falling from the sky. He wrote that way first as an alcoholic, in the 1960s and ’70s, and he continued writing that way, in spite of his worst fears, after he quit drinking on his doctor’s stern and urgent advice. Getting sober saved his life, at least for a while.

Which is why it’s so sad to see him go now, from lung cancer at the age of 69, and at a time when America is obviously ready to embrace the values of cooperation and tolerance and free expression that Leonard always cherished. He bore eloquent witness to the first New Frontier and its failures, and he would have brought equal eloquence to bear on this new New Frontier, while not ignoring its failures, whatever they turn out to be. It’s in heralding its successes, though, that he would have achieved true transcendence. That was the muse most worth answering, and it’s not his fault that it wasn’t available all the time.

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Anne Landsman has published two books, The Devil’s Chimney and The Rowing Lesson (just out in paperback). Below she writes about the difficulty of embarking on a second — and now, a third — novel.
 

A filmmaker friend of mine recently described the completion of one of her films, and her attempts to begin the next project, as something akin to a divorce. “The world as you know it is gone,” she said, “And you have to start all over again.” This applies to finishing a book as well. For me, fictional characters — either in my own work or in the work of others — are as real and lasting as the people they’re fashioned from, and I say my goodbyes to them at the end of reading or writing a novel with a tremendous sense of loss.

More painful, however, than separating from one of your characters, is the prospect of creating a new one from scratch. There’s a clear recipe for making a real live human being, but there’s no such blueprint for a person who lives and breathes solely on the page. The alchemy of dreaming up an Emma Bovary or a Harry Potter is deeply mysterious, something that has to be teased out of the writer’s psyche over time, with a great deal of patience and forbearance. For many of us, the process starts with hearing the voice of the character, as he or she sails toward us out of the fog of our unconscious. None of this is easy to quantify, or describe, but you know when it’s not happening, and the fog remains still and impenetrable.
 

Many authors talk about the difficulty of writing their second novel, or getting to that place where the next story begins to flow. As Anne Lamott points out in her wonderful book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, “The beginnings of a second and third book are full of spirit and confidence because you have been published, and false starts and terror because you now have to prove yourself again.” I certainly had my share of false starts and terror after the writing of The Devil’s Chimney. I’d been listening to the profane, irreverent voice of my narrator, Connie, for so long that I could hardly imagine writing in another idiom. Since the novel was well-received, it felt a little frightening to leave behind what had worked before and to venture into the unknown. In the beginning, I clung to Connie’s deaf sister, Gerda, and began writing about her and her children.

On a family trip to South Africa, I visited Worcester’s De la Bat School for the Deaf and interviewed several teachers there, and back in New York City, I started taking a course in American Sign Language. I read several memoirs written by the hearing children of deaf parents and decided that the book was going explore that world, and tell the story of a South African woman who grew up being her mother’s ears. I’m not sure whether or not it was the difficulty I experienced trying to learn how to sign (being good at languages is absolutely no help in this regard), or whether I got lost trying to figure out the differences between American Sign Language and South African Sign Language, and then how to describe this non-verbal method of communication in words, but I began to feel defeated, frustrated and confused. I had the fragment of a chapter written in the voice of Gerda’s daughter which felt as if it was going nowhere. And then somehow, Gerda’s family doctor showed up, a brusque, Jewish man who was short and bossy and had a lot to say for himself, and slowly Harry Klein – who would even eventually guide me through the The Rowing Lesson – came to life.
 

I spent years listening to Harry, with his non sequiturs, his playful use of language, his fierce love for his country and its people. I loved him, hated him, was occasionally baffled by him. By the time we parted (on good terms, by the way), I was spent. What added to the intensity – and difficulty – of the writing process, was that Harry was modeled on my late father, a country doctor in Worcester, and that this conversation with Harry, my fictional character, was also a conversation with my father, Gerald Landsman, who died just days after I found out I was pregnant with my second child. (In one jam-packed year, I lost my father, published my first novel, and gave birth to my son.)

The decade between the publication of The Devil’s Chimney and The Rowing Lesson was a complicated mix of grieving, joy, motherhood, literary creation. Many times, I berated myself for not writing faster, for getting swallowed up by the demands of my home life, for every minute I spent away from my desk. I couldn’t help noticing the writers who had published first novels when I did, and had now published second and third novels. Others, thankfully, took just as long if not longer. Was I afflicted with the curse of the second novel? I often asked myself. If so, what was the best way to undo the spell? In the end, I learned that time was not my enemy, but my ally. Everything I experienced in those ten years as a daughter, mother, wife and writer became the stock in which the story simmered. When I held my children close, feeling overpowering love for them wash over me, I understood Harry a little bit better, and his crippling inability to express what was in his heart for fear it would break. In life, spending the time and effort getting to know someone well often yields unexpected rewards. The same is true in fiction. As you live with your characters, they reveal themselves to you in ever-deepening ways.

This sanguine perspective can be hard to maintain in the twenty-first century, where speed is of the essence, where we take for granted our ability to communicate instantly with people all over the globe. Writing a novel is taking a step back, hearing the beat of an older, slower drum, and realizing that great works of literature – whether written in Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia – were written by men and women who observed, listened, wrote and rewrote stories they were compelled to tell. These books didn’t appear in the blink of an eye. They were always the result of time, effort and immense concentration. It’s always helpful to remember this, and to learn from the lives of writers who came before, and whose work still resonates today. For sustenance, I read and reread the work of Virginia Woolf, who, in A Room of One’s Own, had this to say about how hard it is to write well: “Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down…” Or Eudora Welty, on the subject of her own life in One Writer’s Beginnings: “As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
 

Just as I’m inspired by the past, I find myself drawing comfort from the writers I know. I have the great good fortune to work at the Writers Room, a communal writing space in downtown Manhattan. I write in the silent company of others, in a big, open space much like a newsroom without noise. And it is here that I often draw solace from the writing practices of all kinds of writers. It’s helpful to see that writers nap, take frequent breaks, stare out the window, engage in on-line procrastination. They also have bursts of sustained activity, and sometimes the room is alive with the muted clickety-clicking of several computers at once. There are four people at every workstation, separated by dividers, so we work turned away from each other. For a respite, people gravitate to the kitchen which is separated from the main space by a door. The quiet rule no longer applies there, and conversations often begin with the sentence, “What are you working on?” There’s always someone who has wrestled with the same difficulties you have, who has spent hours searching for a missing word, idea, plot-line, character. These conversations are not long, but they’re often fruitful. On a shelf nearby, are two jars filled with pretzels and candy and I often find myself going back to work munching on a pretzel and heartened by someone else’s story.

I wrote both my novels at the Writers Room, and now, after the publication of The Rowing Lesson, I find myself looking down the barrel of the third, facing my demons in the same work environment, with more or less the same cast of writers sitting at their desks, on the edges of my peripheral vision. As with The Devil’s Chimney, the critical reception to The Rowing Lesson has been very positive, which has brought on its own stresses and anxieties along with the thrill that people have responded well to a story that was so close to my heart. Once again, I’m fearful of leaving behind what I know, the voice I grew accustomed to, the milieu I created. The world as I’ve known it has been disassembled, and I have to build a new one, without directions or a map. Over and over again, I’ve heard, “Hope it doesn’t take you ten years to write the next book” from interviewers, reviewers, editors, friends and family.

What do you do when you feel the pressure of others’ expectations, and your own? When those demanding inner voices threaten to strangle your creativity, paralyze you? The only way to hear the spirit calling to you from the fog is to write towards it, to throw a rope made of words into the mist, hoping it will catch onto something, take hold. And you have to do this joyfully, knowing that you’re about to go on a breathtaking new adventure, to find an unknown continent within yourself. As difficult and lonely as the journey may sometimes be, you have those good writing days to sustain you, when everything beyond the page evaporates, and you live right inside your narrative, a fragile, shiny new world no one has ever seen before.
 

Here’s Landsman reading an excerpt from The Rowing Lesson:

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Below John Warner, editor of McSweeney’s online, author of So You Want to Be President? and Fondling Your Muse, and creative director of the struggling TOW Books, explains why he’s rejecting the age-old strategy of sending review copies to newspapers, and offering them to you instead.
 

I knew when I founded a humor imprint a couple years ago that these were tough times for publishers — too many books, not enough readers, and all the rest.

It’s just that, after editing McSweeney’s Internet Tendency for a few years, and seeing our cult readership grow, I decided that while there were probably too many books being published, the real problem was that there weren’t enough books being published by me.

TOW Books was going to be the solution. Back then I imagined that the challenge for most publishers was content, and since our titles would be good, and rigorously curated, so that if you liked one, you’d like them all, we would take bookstores by storm.

I know, stupid.

Now, after two years of, let’s call it, non-success, I understand that the problem is at least as much about publicity and distribution as it is about quality. (At least I hope that’s the problem.) So I’m here to announce that if TOW Books is going to fail at publishing, we are going to fail in our own spectacularly new way.
 

How badly are we struggling? Well, we’ve released four books. Their Amazon rankings at the time of this typing are:

388,165
170,374
706,198
1,033,377

The most distressing part is that last number belongs to a book I wrote, So You Want to Be President? — a book that should have been especially relevant and timely given that it’s a guide to running for office when totally unqualified. I hope it’s in Governor Palin’s briefing materials.
 

The plan was to dominate the humor section. My corporate overlords, F+W Publications, a nice bunch of folks with whom I’d previously done a book, were interested in branching out from their usual offerings, which focused on writing, reference, and various enthusiasms (knitting, painting on rocks, guns, baseball cards). We all agreed that we wanted to produce books that deserved to be read as opposed to simply looked at or flicked through. If not intelligent humor exactly, at least humor that extended beyond, “look, that’s a funny picture of a cat/dog/baby/federal employee” and “sometimes our president really does say some stupid shit.”

Jason Roeder, who became the author of the first book we released, put it as well as I’ve ever heard:

The humor sections of most bookstores are clogged with books that are really more like extended greeting cards. If you’ve ever opened a Shoebox Greeting and thought, “Man, I wish that dismal punch line pertaining to how decrepit I am at age 40 could go on for a hundred more pages,” I have some fantastic news for you, my friend.

Editing the McSweeney’s website had convinced me that there was an audience for the kind of humor that reached beyond a bloated greeting card.
 

Of course I was well aware that the humor on the website was not universal. Almost daily people wrote us email saying things like, “U think ur funny, but ur not,” or “My friend said your site was hilarious, but really, you suck,” or just, “You suck.” But the audience we did have was both growing and enthusiastic. I was pretty sure there were enough people out there who shared our particular sensibilities to support TOW. The audience I imagined, while not massive, was significant enough, particularly for titles where sales of a few thousand copies is cause for fist-bumping.

Was this arrogance? Of course. But editors are readers above all, and what reader isn’t compelled after finishing a good book to go up to someone and say, “You’ve got to read this”? If someone was willing to put a publishing company behind that urge, I wouldn’t turn it down.
 

From the start there were warning signs that things might not go smoothly. First, our planned launch title (to be written by me), a parody of a popular series of children’s books, was strong-armed out of existence by a threatened lawsuit from the publishers of the original.

What can I say? Sometimes you win and other times you’re crushed by the legal division of a publishing conglomerate.

The second problem was spawned by another section of the press release:

According to Mr. Warner, TOW Books will be dedicated to publishing titles with staying power instead of relying on slapdash parodies, designed only to capitalize on a current cultural trend and rushed to market to make a quick buck.

The first announced title to be published in early 2007 will be Kevin Federline’s Guide to Sudoku.

I assumed the joke would be obvious, but this little nugget was repeated in the Publishers Weekly coverage of our launch as fact. “The second Tow Books title, scheduled for release in early 2007,” PW reported, “will be Kevin Federline’s Guide to Sudoku.”

Perhaps my sense of humor did not translate as well as I thought.

Warning sign number three came shortly after this bit of erroneous information escaped. Word got back that there actually was significant demand from chain bookstores for Kevin Federline’s Guide to Sudoku, provided it could be produced quickly.

Warning sign number four was that I actually began working on FeDoku: Kevin Federline’s Guide to Sudoku.

Here was the opening of the book’s introduction, written in the voice of (the now-ex-) Mrs. Federline herself.

Look, I not stupid. I know that when the world looks at my husband that they see a former dancer turned third rate rapper who knows next to nothing about either shaving or birth control and managed to drag an A-list celebrity down to the D-list through the sheer force of his non-talent, but from the moment I met my Kevin I knew that he had it in him to do something really special and especially real, and now he has!!!!!!!!

In the first three weeks of the imprint’s existence I’d discarded our vision of humor that might endure beyond a daily news cycle for something more perishable than a chicken salad sandwich down Rafael Nadal’s tennis shorts.
 

Fortunately, because I was distracted by the threatened lawsuit over the other book, we pulled the plug on FeDoku and got down to the business of finding talented writers who could deliver funny books.

We quickly signed up three promising projects by authors whose work I already admired from editing them at McSweeneys.net. By coincidence, the books all fell under the umbrella of “fake advice”:

Oh the Humanity: A Gentle Guide to Social Interaction for the Feeble Young Introvert, by Jason Roeder;

Really, You’ve Done Enough: A Parent’s Guide to Stop Parenting Their Adult Child Who Still Needs Their Money, but not Their Advice by Sarah Walker; and

Everything is Wrong with You: The Modern Woman’s Guide to Finding Self-Confidence Through Self Loathing, by Wendy Molyneux.

 

The books were hilarious. I laughed myself silly editing them. The F+W design and production people did a fantastic job. In my mind I began scouting for my future vacation home, which would be purchased with bonus monies earned from these runaway bestsellers.

We launched them at BookExpo in New York, with special shot glasses filled with special Jack Daniels. We felt giddy, and not just from the booze. I began to picture my New York Times profile, where I would be crowned a cultural tastemaker. Somewhere in the article I would be referred to as “the Judd Apatow of the written word” — the piece practically wrote itself.
 

In fact, nothing much happened, or at least not enough happened. There were a handful of reviews, the occasional notice in the media, face out placement in the appropriate sections of bookstores, and some, but not enough, sales. If a tree falls in the forest and that tree is turned into paper that goes into a book that doesn’t sell tremendously well, does the tree make a sound, and if it does, is it something like the silent scream of an author when the product of their talent and hard work disappears into the bottomless void? The sad fact, and I’m afraid that it is a fact, is that the reason we’re struggling is because very few people even know our books exist.

Of course we at TOW Books aren’t alone in our struggles. Articles about publishing in decline appear weekly, if not daily. (Soon there won’t be enough book coverage in newspapers even to report on our continuing demise.) The vast majority of books, many of them as or more worthy than ours, suffer the exact same fate.

People are full of helpful advice. “Use the Internet,” they say, but they don’t tell me how. The most common suggestion is to get on The Daily Show, or failing that, The Colbert Report. (As a sign of the sort of books we publish, no one mentions Oprah.) “The Colbert Bump” is a real phenomenon, and authors everywhere thank him for it, but as we well know, for the vast majority of books it just ain’t going to happen.
 

At TOW Books, we’ve been doing what publishing has always done, launching books into the world and hoping something good happens. This usually takes the form of sending hundreds of copies to newspapers and magazines and radio and television outlets, hoping for reviews and coverage. If only we could get on Fresh Air we’d have a real shot! I would say it’s akin to throwing shit and the wall and seeing what sticks, but what we’re throwing isn’t nearly as sticky as shit, and the wall has millions of book-sized holes in it.

I don’t know what ultimately happens to these copies — I have an image of editors and producers, or media gatekeepers getting crushed under toppling towers of books — but they aren’t getting assigned for reviews, they’re not getting coverage, and I have not earned the down payment on my summer home, so we’re not going to do that anymore.

Instead, we’re going to give them to readers, and my hunch is that if you’ve encountered this message then you may be the sort of person we’re looking for. Really, if you think about it in this day and age of Amazon and blogs and Facebook and MySpace, and LibraryThing, and Shelfari, everyone has a public forum where they can express their opinions.

If you want a free book in either old-fashioned paper or new-fashioned electronic form, we have a special website. Please, help yourselves. All that I ask in return for the free books is that you say something somewhere about them, even if it’s along the lines of “U think ur funny, but u suck.”

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Last week Levi Stahl of I’ve Been Reading Lately ran a delightful series of excerpts from writers’ letters. Selections ranged from the chatty, catty, and caustic to the bereft but self-deprecating.

His series was inspired by the publication of Penelope Fitzgerald’s letters (image above), and correspondence with writer Jenny Davidson.
 

Coincidentally, Stahl and I recently exchanged some email about Iris Murdoch’s letters. I won’t quote my part. Just assume it was really learned and highbrow, and didn’t go anything like, OMG, you’re right, it’s been ten years; haven’t we waited long enough, John Bayley and Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies?!?!!!!

Then my correspondent “had a horrifying thought: Murdoch was a very private — secretive, even — person. I can imagine her regularly having, well, not quite trash-barrel fires, but furtive pokings of bundles of letters into the living room fire. Regular burnings throughout life of incriminating and/or interesting letters, leaving us little to enjoy post-Bayley. Now that I’ve thought of it, it seems plausible to the point of being likely. Oh, I hope I’m wrong!”
 

We were both briefly immobilized by despair at the prospect, but last week Stahl did some investigating:

I’ve consulted Peter Conradi’s (disappointingly flat) biography of Iris Murdoch to test my supposition that Murdoch may have been a sneaking burner of letters. A quick rundown of what a cursory look at the apparatus reveals:

1) “She left behind edited journals (1939-1996) which constituted an invaluable resource, carrying her unique ‘voice’.” (Hoo, boy — can we see those?)

2) ” . . . although an inveterate destroyer of letters . . . ” Aha! I was at least partially right!

3) Lord! Her initial choice of a biographer was A. N. Wilson, her friend who–perhaps miffed because she didn’t ultimately choose him?–ultimately (2004?) wrote about her and Bayley perhaps the most mean-spirited book I’ve ever touched.

4) Conradi writes, “I had loved her work since finding The Bell in Oundle school library around 1960, and thought, like tens of thousands, ‘These books are about me.’” Which is a thought I’ve never had–yet her writing has been as important to me as anyone’s other than perhaps Anthony Powell, Kafka, Dickens, and Borges. Odd.

5) Of the hideous Canetti, when Conradi mentioned him in 1997, she replied, “His name shudders me with happiness.”

6) “Although Fletcher and Bove’s Iris Murdoch: A Primary and Secondary Annotated Bibilography shows that there are many of her letters in public collections in libraries scattered worldwide, I have relied much more heavily on privately held letter- runs.” Hmm. Odds of us seeing them seem to be falling.

Not sure what this all tells us, except that there are still letters — however decimated by furtive destruction we don’t know - that we may someday see? And there are journals that surely — they’ve been edited!!! — we’ll get to see?

If you have anything to add, or just want to join the Petition to See Iris Murdoch’s Papers Published, email me at maud [at] maudnewton [dot] com.

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As a devout agnostic who’s as turned off by the proselytizing atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, et al. as by my mother’s blaming and weirdly self-congratulatory brand of Evangelical Christianity (think Jesus Camp), I was interested in much of what Peter Berbergal and Scott Korb had to say last summer at Jewcy in “What the Angry Atheists Get Wrong.”

Below Korb, a self-proclaimed Catholic atheist, talks about his Christian-inflected faith in the things of this world. He and Berbergal are touring in support of their new book, The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God. You can catch them tomorrow night at Madison’s University Pres House at 7:30, and on Thursday night at Chicago’s Fixx Coffee Bar, also at 7:30 p.m.

 

Near the end of my new book, The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God, coauthored with Peter Bebergal, I do what I thought was only fair (and Peter agreed): I acknowledge that I’m an atheist. (For the record, I’m also the Catholic.) As of this writing, my search has ended there. The book, which for my part details a kind of OCD-ish belief in God, from a longing for the lonely aspects of the priesthood to the sense that my facial tic was God’s way of keeping me on the straight-and-narrow, is the best account I could give of what faith has come to mean to me over the past seven years, more or less the time I’ve known Peter.

It’s no coincidence, of course, that my faith has changed over this time, but those changes — what I call in the book an “ongoing religious conversion” — do not owe everything to Peter and his influence on me (or mine on him). My current atheism, in fact, owes most of its debt to the early death of my stepfather, Paul, — and, to a lesser extent, to the earlier death of my father, Frank — and my sense of what Jesus was teaching with the most famous of his parables, the one about the prodigal son.
 

That parable is usually taught for what it has to say about compassion and forgiveness, for its message that it’s never too late to repent and its promise of homecoming (typically, all with the Christian emphasis on Heaven). I find that another more telling message — one that underscores my atheism and comforted me when my stepfather died — is often overlooked or underemphasized. When the older brother complains to the father after the prodigal returns, the father reminds him of the value and always-thereness of his real inheritance: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”

In some of his last really clear moments, Paul said something similar to me. I write in the book:

“When I’m gone, you have to take care of your mother,” Paul said.

“We know. We will.”

“You have to take care of your mother when I’m gone. She’s already been through this once.”

“Yes, we know. Don’t worry.”

That was the charge of faith, of humility and of selfless compassion. He spoke to all of his children as the faithful adults we were. Seemingly not concerned with his own salvation, nor fearful of death, not presuming a thing about God in the afterlife, Paul knew only his obligation to my mother, to his faith in the things of this world. He acted out that faith in awarding us our inheritance.

 

My faith is entirely about the things of this world. I don’t believe in God, at least not in any sense I would have recognized as a child, or in a sense that most people can identify as even Christian anymore. And I certainly don’t believe in Heaven. So, again, it seems only fair to call myself an atheist. But still, I go to church every week, I celebrate holidays as a Catholic, and most important, I use Christian mythology to shape my ethics.

Since the release of the book last November, though, some family and some Catholic friends — to say nothing of readers confused by what I could possibly mean, then, by Catholic atheism — have responded with misgivings. “I hope you’re wrong,” is what my mother said when she first read the book. An editor-friend said exactly the same thing when we met at his office after Faith came out for what he smilingly called a “pastoral visit.” (Neither of us are pastors, though he’s probably closer.)

At first I took “I hope you’re wrong” the wrong way. It meant they hadn’t read closely enough. It meant they didn’t take my point: There’s no reason to hope for, much less believe in, the afterlife. (I agree with religion scholar Karen Armstrong that there are some very bad reasons for believing in the afterlife. The afterlife, she argues, is about preserving your ego “eternally in optimum conditions.” And for that matter, she notes, “A lot of people see God as a sacred seal of approval on some of their worst fantasies about other people.” I’ve seen this — who hasn’t? — and it’s ugly.)

But now, now that my mother’s repeated herself (more than once), I realize that by hoping, she and my friend, too, are doing something as Christian as it gets. (Something I insisted I was doing, too, during that recent pastoral visit: namely, that my Catholic atheism is just as Christian as his Catholic theism. We’ll argue about this for years, we agreed.)
 

Another favorite moment from the New Testament comes in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Like the parable of the prodigal son, this section is very famous. Regardless, it goes: “But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

And those people who hope I’m wrong are worrying for my sake and for their own, and in hope that we’ll meet our dead loved ones again when we die. (They’re hoping, in a sense, that when we die we won’t really die.) Yet, in their way and through their hope, they’re expressing the greatest Christian virtue, and arguably the greatest religious virtue, there is — which, it is profoundly important to note, is not belief itself, but love.

They don’t know I’m wrong any more than I know they’re wrong. But in good faith they hope I am because they love me.
 

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Below novelist Jami Attenberg talks with Kate Christensen about unexpected convergences in their most recent books. You can meet Attenberg (pictured below) tonight at Barnes & Noble Chelsea, at an event for The Kept Man, which I read over the holidays. And as long as we’re considering great men and kept men, you might as well read Attenberg on dirty old men, too.
 

I met the generous and talented Kate Christensen this summer at a book party for Emily Flake’s wonderful little graphic paean to vices, These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves. I did not know then that her new novel was called The Great Man or that it was about a deceased artist and the women who loved him, and that part of the book took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, where Kate lives. Kate was soon to discover that my book, The Kept Man, was about an artist in a coma and the women who loved him, and that it took place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, where I live.

It goes without saying that The Great Man is one of my favorite books of last year — you will not find this kind of sharp, funny dialogue, or female characters this robust, in many other books, and Kate writes about food with the lust of a starving young Frenchman. I was thrilled when she agreed to chat with me about emotionally absent men, the potency of unlikable characters, and the charm of the North Brooklyn waterfront.
 

JA: You would think our books are about men from the titles, but the men are so actively absent. Oscar is dead in your book, and Martin is in a coma in mine. And let’s face it, even when they were alive, they were both emotionally absent in their ways. Why are women attracted to this kind of man?

KC: It’s very strange that both our The Something Man-titled novels are about the struggles of women to come out from under the figurative wings of the famous but absent male painters they’re associated with. I could easily see being attracted to Martin, the painter in The Kept Man, and I completely understood why Jarvis, your heroine, found it very hard to move on when he had his accident. Not only was he devoted, sexy, and successful, he also gave her the stability she didn’t have before they met, back when she was a wild party girl. He became her home, emotionally speaking; underlying your novel’s story is her struggle to forge her own solitary identity.

One of the interesting things for me about writing The Great Man is that I didn’t like Oscar; I’m never interested in or attracted to men like him, total narcissists who expect women to coddle their egos. I liked the women who loved him, and unconsciously I wanted all of them to get their own lives together and not live vicariously through this needy, demanding, charismatic, selfish man. I have a feeling you felt quite differently about Martin; did you?
 

JA: I would have wanted to know Oscar, which is often half the battle in life (and definitely the whole battle in a novel.) Martin I found very attractive but also entirely ruinous. I think he might have ultimately devastated Jarvis one way or another. And Jarvis is “kept” in her way, as well, obviously, before and after his accident.

Practically every character in my book is held back in one way or another. That said, Martin is definitely a seductive character. It may have something to do with him being held in Jarvis’s memory in his prime. Whereas Oscar is an old man in my reading of your book. But he had something to say, that man. And if these vibrant, sexy older characters in your book loved him, than that made me love him a little bit too.

I think there are a lot of these articulate, charismatic, scruffy artist types out here in North Brooklyn. Today was the first snow of the season and when I went out earlier I saw a few of them trudging in the snow by the East River, with their long striped scarves, mismatched wool hats and pea coats. At least I imagined they were interesting artists. You and I live about a mile away from each other down the waterfront. Is there something about writing on the waterfront that is particularly inspiring for you?
 

KC: Thanks for sticking up for ole Oscar! I think one reason he was so insufferable is that no one ever really stood up to him. Something about that sort of spoiled brat must appeal to me on some level, because, come to think of it, all my novels are built around a character with too much power: Jackie, Ted, Dennis, and Oscar. I think they all serve as the energy-generating foils for my protagonists to react to and deal with, the irritating grains of sand that cause the pearl to be made. The novel I’m working on now has one, too. So it looks like I needed Oscar just as much as those old ladies did.

I was also thinking that the words “great” and “kept,” respectively, take on some complex and possibly ironic meanings in the course of both of these novels.

The waterfront has, in addition to those interesting-looking characters wandering along it, an equally interesting history that exists still in the form of beautiful old warehouses, buried train tracks leading down to the old shipyards, and street names like Java and India. Teddy in The Great Man moved into this neighborhood when it was very rough, back in the late 50s; she was the daughter of a millionaire English financier who lost everything, and she dropped out of Vassar and reinvented herself as a single mother, a secretary living in this immigrant waterfront community in a brick row house on Calyer Street, which happens to be the same house I live in. The imagination works a little differently, setting a story in a familiar place as opposed to a made-up one; it’s necessary to reinvent the familiar.

The Kept Man really gets at the essence of Williamsburg, so much so that in a way, for me, the authenticity of your imagined Williamsburg starts to supersede the Williamsburg I know so well, which is no mean feat. I know that laundromat, the donut shop, the Greenpoint Tavern, and they are and yet aren’t the places in your novel; I was blown away by the way you were able to both capture and transform them. How much of this place itself was the impetus for the novel?
 

JA: The first time I ever visited Brooklyn was about ten years ago, I actually came to a party in the very building I live in now. (I’ve lived here for about five years.) And it couldn’t have been any more raw or industrial or wild at that time, and I instantly fell in love with it. So in a sense this novel has been building up for ten years, whether I was aware of it or not. And after I moved here I met a lot of creative people who waxed poetic about the way the neighborhood has changed and I was always so captivated by them and their stories. There’s plenty of nonsense that has been written about this neighborhood — all those crazy young kids that live up by the L station — but to me Williamsburg, and in particular the waterfront community which is far different than the rest of it, is defined as much by its past as it is by present. Which I guess is something I would say about Jarvis, and definitely your brilliant characters. All of these women are trying to find a way to forget about the past so they can move forward. I suppose that’s a long way of saying that to me, Williamsburg is another character in the novel. Ghosts and all.

KC: There’s a scene in your novel that illustrates this perfectly… Jarvis is riding through the neighborhood with a car service driver who seems iconic to me, symbolic in a visceral literary way, the kind of character I think of as the “angel” archetype — but she also seems like a real person. In fact, I feel like I know her and have ridden in her car before, twice, both times with my dog, because she has a dog and when you call to request a ride for yourself and a dog, she’s the one who shows up. She exactly fits the description of Missy in The Kept Man, and I almost don’t want to know whether or not it’s really the same woman. The point is that now that I’ve read The Kept Man, it is the same woman. It’s like a dream that’s so real you can’t remember whether it happened or not. So Missy exists now for me in this part of the world; maybe she’s a ghost, maybe not.
 

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Mark Sarvas’ praise for the depiction of fathers and sons in Sándor Márai’s novel The Rebels led me back to Kafka’s Letter to Father (a gift a friend brought me from Prague several years ago). It’s an illuminating document — complex, sad, highly self-serving — but not a work of art. Writing about the feelings a father inspires is difficult.

Eric Weinberger, who taught expository writing at Harvard for eight years, collects nonfiction writings by sons about their dead fathers. Below he traces his interest in the genre and admires Fathers and Sons, which follows four generations of Waugh men responding to their dads.

 

In the same year, which was 12 years ago, I read both And When Did You Last See Your Father, by Blake Morrison, and The Lost Continent, by Bill Bryson, and thus began reading sons who write about their dead fathers. I became especially interested in the brief biographical sketch or intermittent rumination, and soon came upon a masterpiece of the genre, an essay called “The Author at Sixty” by Edmund Wilson. The piece appears in a small book characteristically titled A Piece of My Mind, whose table of contents is notable for its ten chapter headings of single, grand words like “War,” “Science,” “Sex,” and — venturing one word further — “The Jews.” Most of these chapters are twenty to thirty pages long. “The Jews” is fifty-three; “The Author at Sixty,” last of the ten, is thirty-one.

When Wilson turned 60, he had special reason to consider his father, who had died in his sixty-first year. The essay, written in the family home in Talcottville, New York, begins and ends on a note of increasing estrangement. He feels, as an American, he is at least one century and possibly two behind his contemporaries. He spends his time only in the few towns or cities he likes and has business in. He rejects what has been his life’s work. “I have ceased to try to see at first hand what is happening in the United States… I do not want any more to be bothered with the kind of contemporary conflicts that I used to go out to explore,” he writes, adding with satisfaction, “Old fogeyism is comfortably closing in.”

His thoughts naturally turn to his late father, a brilliant, hypochrondriac lawyer subject to frequent nervous breakdowns and complete withdrawal from his family. Edmund Wilson, Sr., for all his talent and high accomplishment, had surrendered goals and ambition; “He had had every possible success at law, and law in the long run bored him. More and more he would drop his practice.” Then, “When he felt that the money was running low, he would emerge from his shadow or exile and take on a couple of cases, enough work to retrieve the situation.” He is described as someone “who liked to travel in style and paid a good deal of attention to his clothes. He was tall and good-looking and rather vain, and women were supposed to adore him. He was undoubtedly a very self-centered man…”

Essays like “The Author at Sixty” are marvelous for their cadence, for the plain, unadorned sentences so often beginning with “he” and thumbed throughout with “him,” “himself,” “his”: almost Biblical. This is Blake Morrison writing about his dead father: “The weeks before he left us, or life left him were a series of depletions; each day we thought ‘he can’t get less like himself than this,’ and each day he did. I keep trying to find the last moment when he was still unmistakably there, in the fullness of his being, him.”
 

Echoes of Morrison’s observations sound throughout a more recent book, Fathers and Sons, in which Alexander Waugh writes about his illustrious literary family, particularly his father Auberon. “A father’s death resolves nothing,” says Alexander. “While the son remains conscious the relationship never ends. Neither does it flourish. Instead it trundles round and round on an axis of the mind, suspended, unclosed, incomplete.”

In nearly all cases the son is more prominent than the father he recalls. But Auberon, who wrote about his own more famous father, Evelyn, in the 1991 autobiography Will This Do?, was one of the best-known British journalists of his time. Known as Bron, he was the type of newspaper columnist who could not exist in these earnest United States: an eager and savage fantasist, who created an antic persona starting in the 70s with a regular series of his “diaries” in the satirical biweekly Private Eye. He died in 2001, before September 11, since when we have needed him most.

In Private Eye Bron pretended to be the intimate of the Queen and other luminaries (”My tea-party with the Emperor Hirohito gets off to a sticky start”); in his Daily Telegraph columns, in the 90s, he: campaigned for a good, fast war against Sweden, affecting to despise their “hairless bodies” and constant complaining about acid rain; formed the Venerable Society for the Protection of Adulterers (VESPA); and railed against British proletarian culture-and especially its tabloid papers like The Sun — for, among other things, its enthusiasm for barbarisms like the death penalty. He was fascinated by the Clintons, warned against “hamburger gases” emanating from the White House, and advanced the theory that Hillary had Vincent Foster murdered because he was a secret smoker (a great smoker himself, Bron mocked most health campaigns). As his son describes him in Fathers and Sons, Bron was a “liberal anarchist” whose “core was a hatred of bossing in all its manifestations.” Many others, lacking a sense both of humor and the absurd, saw his writings as snobbish or the crude rantings of a reactionary, which is hard to understand if you read him carefully. An author of a line like “perhaps it would save time and trouble if we abandoned the jury system and hanged 30 or so randomly selected Sun readers, every year” is probably making a joke.
 

Fathers and Sons traces four generations of Waugh men responding to their fathers: Alexander to Bron, Bron to Evelyn, Evelyn (and his favored brother Alec) to Arthur, Arthur to the Victorian family patriarch, a demonic doctor known simply as “the Brute.” The fathers and sons address or contemplate each other in their own words (sometimes taken from print, otherwise from correspondence), and Alexander’s own eccentric commentary laces through everything.

Like any Waugh, Alexander is unflinching and unsentimental even in the face of death, his father’s: “People assume that the deathbed-side moment provides the perfect arena for exchanging ideas like ‘I love you,’ forgiving ancient wrongs or eliciting from the dying some flattering or memorable quotation. Nothing of this kind occurred to me.” At 37, Alexander has an arresting thought — also, perhaps, like other Waughs — “As far as I remember we never, in all our time together, had a single serious conversation. He had not trained me for it.”
 

What ties my favorite writings on fathers and sons together, beyond implicit expression of filial love, is the continuity that a shared name and past provide. Wilson and Auberon Waugh, both living, and writing, in the country houses owned by their fathers, strike similar notes. “I have been fortified by this place,” Wilson writes. And Bron — taking himself less seriously — mentions the thirteen ugly modern windows of Combe Florey he is having replaced on the proceeds of his book, and calls them his monument: “There they will remain until the house is burned down, or taken over by the local authority as a hostel for unmarried mothers, who will no doubt wish to restore plate glass throughout.”

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Below writer Jean Thompson offers a rejoinder to Stephen King’s charge that short story writers are hastening the decline of the form with airless and insular tales. “When circulation falters,” says King, “the air in the room gets stale.”
 

The 2007 edition of the Best American Short Stories, edited by Stephen King, is out, and Mr. King’s introduction (printed in the New York Times Book Review on Sept. 30 as “What Ails The Short Story?“) is abroad in the land. You should read it for yourself, but to summarize: Mr. King speaks with enthusiasm of the wonderful stories he read in his editor’s role, and with dismay about those he judged less wonderful. He describes a trip to a chain bookstore in search of literary magazines, finding them at last on an inglorious bottom shelf. Could it be, he suggests, that the regrettably small audience for short stories has led to stories mainly written for other writers (or editors or teachers), stories that are “airless, somehow, and self-referring” … “show-offy” … “self-important,” “guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open.”

The next day, 164 comments were posted in response. The American short story’s reading audience is indeed tiny, and it was nice of the entire 164 of them to weigh in.
 

The comments fell into several camps. One faction dismissed Mr. King as a bad writer, a hack writer, and his criticism along with it. Some stuck up for the short story, its practitioners and its supporting enterprise. Others pointed fingers at the culture itself for the short story’s presumed decline. Round up the usual suspects: capitalism, commercialism, crass marketing pressures, the rise of video amusements, the general dumbing-down of American life. Still others, a considerable group, cheered Mr. King on. Many of these seemed personally offended and wounded by the existence of bad stories, and their language was notably harsher than Mr. King’s. Writers today are “artistically in-bred” … “pretentious” … Too many are products of “elitist” M.F.A. programs, where they lead “insular” lives, they “imitate the mediocrity in journals and classrooms,” spewing “ego-motivated dreck.” There was more, but that’s a fair sampling.

Any art form that can generate this much discussion and diatribe can’t be on life support yet. I find that heartening, even though I also feel somewhat implicated. I’ve published my stories in magazines large and small, but mostly small. In addition, I graduated from one of those elitist M.F.A. programs. “Elitist” is a killer insult, since just about the worst thing you can do in America is act like you’re smarter than somebody else. For the proof of this, I refer you to the 2000 presidential election. As a long-time teacher of creative writing, I’m part of the powerful cabal of professors, literary magazine editors, and critics, dedicated to sucking the marrow out of the contemporary short story and celebrating its pallid, narcissistic shadow.
 

The criticism merits inquiry. More on that in a moment. First, I tried to replicate Mr. King’s bookstore experiment. I entered my local Barnes and Noble, prepared to hit the ground for the literary magazines. I never found any at all, though I searched both high and low. What I did find, in the Fiction and Literature section (located behind Games and Puzzles), were four and a half shelves of Mr. King’s books. He was also represented in the mass market paperback display, and on the cover of another author’s book, for which he had provided an introduction. On this cover, Mr. King’s name was a good bit larger than the author’s. Maybe the literary magazines were knocking around the store somewhere, but I was too disheartened to ask, let along look for any of my own books.

Before I left, I purchased the 2007 B.A.S.S. and took it home to read. Whatever his merits as author (neither as bad as his detractors say, nor as good as his sales figures, in my judgement), or arbiter of excellence, it seemed clear that the series publishers had decided to fasten themselves to the enterprise that is Mr. King like barnacles to a whale. Not a bad move, if you want to make a little noise, stir the pot of opinion, and maybe get in one some of that four and a half shelf action.

This year’s anthology has a fine selection of fiction’s thoroughbreds (Alice Munro, T.C. Boyle, Anne Beattie, Rick Russo, Mary Gordon, etc.), plus some lesser knowns and some new writers, and that is as it should be. Anyone inclined to think dark thoughts about Mr. King’s office as editor should be reassured by the volume’s general excellence. Some of the stories are gorgeous, knock-outs; others are less so, but still creditable; others misfire, seeming either overwrought or overstately. And that’s fine too, since part of the fun of any prize anthology is going through it and being displeased by certain of the choices. If I were the guest editor, I’m certain I would displease in my turn. Chacun a son gout, as we say in Elitistburg.
 

I’ve made two appearances in the B.A.S.S., over gaps of many years, and I’ve been in the bridesmaid’s section, the list of Distinguished Stories in the back of the book, a few times more. My last appearance in the anthology was about a decade ago. I offer this account of the story’s provenance as an instructive tale. It was first published in a little magazine (after being rejected by some larger ones), which paid me ten dollars for it. There was some testy correspondence back and forth about what constituted payment and what was insult, but in the end I cashed the check. Hey, ten bucks is ten bucks. In due course the story appeared in the B.A.S.S., a happy thing. A couple of years passed before I met the guest editor who had chosen it. In fact, I’d been told, the editor had actually selected two of my stories ( reading them blind, that is, without the author’s name attached), and was told to pick one of these. But when I introduced myself and thanked him, he looked at me blankly, not remembering either me or my stories. Anyone still in awe of this sort of literary success may approach and touch the hem of my garment.

The short story has been declared dead more times than a horror movie villain, and in similar fashion, the corpse always rises up to attack one more time. Two of the finalists for the 2007 National Book Awards are short story collections, by Lydia Davis, and by Jim Shepherd, one of Mr. King’s B.A.S.S. picks. The creature lives! Before addressing Mr. King’s bottom shelf observations, let us stipulate that bad stories of the sort he describes do walk the earth, are even published and praised. Literature can exhibit all the sins of human character — pride, anger, sloth, etc.- plus a number of its own: sloppy, tired, inexact or overblown language, unoriginality, lack of verisimilitude, manipulation, sketchiness, glibness — I’m on a roll here — dullness, confusion, disorganization, inauthentic feeling. And more. I recognize the type of story that Mr. King describes as “show-offy,” in which the writer seems desperate to get our attention like the loud talker at a party. Or the loud talker juggling dinner plates while riding a unicycle. Such cleverness fatigues me, although I do admire the artful cleverness of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (a novel, yes, but with some of its chapters published as stories), which manages to keep all those plates aloft and whirling throughout.
 

Back now to the central question. Are short stories on that bottom shelf because they deserve to be, having become too rarefied and precious? Have we failed to deliver the goods? If we’re so smart, why ain’t we rich? Who among us wouldn’t like the widest possible readership, bushels of money, universal critical reverence? (Any two out of the three wouldn’t be bad.) Some of the audience problem really is a matter of faulty distribution. Several posters wrote in to direct people to the Internet, where so much of news, commerce, and now art has migrated, to web sites and literary blogs dedicated to the promotion of short fiction.

But beyond that, what to do? These days, editors who reject a book or a story, and I have reason to know this, often fall back on the formulation that they didn’t “love” the work, another complaint that’s difficult to answer. Why do you not love us? Do we make too many demands, challenge people in ways that other, flabbier entertainments do not? Should we give our readers (or non-readers) a good scolding? One recoils from the notion of writing that is championed as being good for you, like cough syrup. And yet. I have a friend who runs a stable where she boards and trains horses. She really only likes to read fiction that prominently features horses, and I would not deny her that pleasure. I just wish she were not so dismissive of all the non-horse writing out there.

When readers complain that short stories leave them unsatisfied, confused, that they lack drama or closure, the writer must acknowledge this response. The great imperative of fiction, as Mr. King correctly notes, is making the reader care passionately about what comes next. But it’s also true that the world is complex, ambiguous, difficult; it often makes us feel lost and fearful. Any fiction that attempts to do justice to those complexities can seem disquieting in turn, if what one really wants is a clear prompt, how to react, how to feel, like a television newsperson’s intoning about a tragic vehicle accident. For the same experience rendered new and strange, read Denis Johnson’s story, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” (Another Nat’l Book Award nominee for his novel, Tree of Smoke.)
 

Mr. King laments the era when stories filled the Saturday Evening Post, as opposed to their current shrunken estate. I’m old enough to remember the Saturday Evening Post (I was a kid who read everything), and none of its stories remain in my mind, although the Dickens, Chekhov, Ray Bradbury, Willa Cather, and Hawthorne I read at the same time have done so. (OK, I was a weird kid.) The Post stories were for the most part sturdy and comfortable, like those Norman Rockwell covers, but I can’t say I mourn their passing. The relationship between excellence and audience is not necessarily an inverse one — we need art that entertains, and entertainment that partakes of artistry — but evaluating fiction as product or commodity, like tubes of toothpaste sold, is not helpful. Mainstream, jetstream, stream of consciousness — you pay your money and you take your choice, and some of us out there are real bargains.

Many posters offered their own lists of good short story writers as rebuttal to the notion that the story is a minor art form. Some number of them mentioned Flannery O’Connor as an exemplar, often with the regret that they don’t write them like that any more. I’d like to imagine that some of these were former students of mine, to whom I fed heavy doses of “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” “Greenleaf,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, and others of her stories. Poster #94 pointed out that O’Connor attended one of those much-disparaged M.F.A. programs, the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. I’ll go you one better: her first published story, “The Geranium,” appeared in 1946 in a small literary magazine, Accent, edited and published by a group of creative writing teachers at the University of Illinois. “Flannery O’Connor has been doing graduate study at Iowa,” her contributor’s note reads. I have a copy of that issue, which also contains a story by Katherine Anne Porter and a poem by Richard Wilbur. It’s the drabbest of little brown books, about 6″x9″, thinner than the Dean and Deluca catalogue I got in the mail the other day, and without any hint of graphic embellishment. On its back cover New Directions advertises “7 Unusual Books,” one of them Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, available for $1.50.

I anticipate the argument that neither M.F.A. programs nor little magazines are as good as they were back in the good old days, and maybe not. But I don’t see what’s so pernicious about the proliferation of M.F.A. programs, even though many are called and few are chosen, and only some minute percentage of their hopeful graduates will achieve careers as writers. Why not train people to value the written word and the habit of careful thought? It provides a counterweight, no matter how slight, to all those other enterprises out there, humming along so splendidly, bringing us war, brutality, poisons, lies. Writers, editors, and teachers were readers before they were anything else, and they remain as passionate readers. Nor should little magazines take it on the chin for being what they so often are, proving grounds for new writers, giving them their first audiences, first accomplishments, first sense of nervous public scrutiny.
 

Most art is failed art, when you think about it. It misses by inches or by miles, it grasps at an ideal, falls short, and rallies to try again. Flannery O’Conner revised “The Geranium” as a better story, “Judgment Day.” We should not be sorry that the lesser version saw the light, or that short stories and their readerships carry on, despite all the forces arrayed against them. Publishers greet short story collections without much enthusiasm, and this too often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’ve published four books of them by now, and I’ve had my share of favorable notice. Still, I’m only “popular in certain circles,” like Aunt Rose in Grace Paley’s “Goodbye and Good Luck,” another story published in Accent, another writer premiered by that magazine. Short story writers are used to swimming upstream against the odds. Heap scorn upon us for our fusty, stubborn ways. We are so flattered that you noticed.

There is in much of the criticism the inference, or the downright accusation, that writers of highbrow fiction lead effete and timorous lives, as opposed to the robust and brawny ones of those who write the solid, homespun stuff that people really want, and whose hearts, as well as wallets, are in the right place. But writing is always a balancing act between involvement with the world and the solitude and retreat needed to render it in words. One does one’s best in both arenas, and then resolves to do still better the following day.

As for Mr. King’s wish for stories that have the impact of “a big hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky,” I lived in Kansas for a little while, in Wichita, and though I never saw a meteor, the sky was busy with all manner of other things. Jets from McConnell Air Force Base deafened us, tornadoes approached and retreated, cold air funnel sightings sent us down to the basement precincts for anti-climactic waits. Even on days when the sky was largely vacant, a baked blue or grim gray, there was always plenty going on with me, my students, colleagues, and neighbors, more than enough for stories. There were hearts aflame and hearts broken, alcoholic crises, marital crises, alcoholic/marital crises. The kid two houses down was a gang member whose friends came to pick him up with shotguns visible in the back seat of the car. Going to feed friends’ cats while they were out of town, I found their door kicked open and their belongings scattered, a ceiling fan rotating idly above the wreckage. Operation Rescue had set up shop in Wichita, picketing the abortion clinics, holding rallies and demonstrations, slapping full-color fetus posters against car windshields. An anti-abortion parade went past my front door, with marching citizens, kids waving from wagons, and a farmer driving a tractor bearing a hand-lettered sign, “Stop Killing Our Consumers.” Two of my students, out driving around one night, well liquored-up, decided to harass the driver of the next car they saw with a pro-life bumper sticker. Which turned out to be driven by a fellow student. That’s the kind of thing you can’t put into fiction without it seeming contrived. And if you want to read a perfectly chilling story about the abortion turmoil, try T.C. Boyle’s “Killing Babies.”

The life nourishes the art, and for the artist, life resonates in ways oblique, mysterious, unexpected, so that our best work is a revelation even to ourselves. Those of us who love the short story love its capacity for such surprise, as well as its elegant compression, its craft, its many shapes and modes, as various as types of birds: hunting hawk or meadowlark, fancy chicken, migratory seabird, Woody Woodpecker cartoon, stylized origami crane. Imagine a whole flock of great stories set loose at once to trill or squawk or soar. Now that’s a sky I’d like to see.
 

Jean Thompson previously contributed a guest piece on favors writers ask and are asked.

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Joseph Clarke (my brother-in-law) sends this brief report following his recent tour of Kentucky’s Creation Museum.

After the photos Joseph and his brother Max discuss the museum’s contrast depiction of the idyllic world of Genesis with the filthy and depraved modern era. Also, Joseph invokes Derrida, and Max puzzles over the American Museum of Natural History’s new “Mythic Creatures” exhibit.

 

I just got back from a visit to the recently-opened Creation Museum, located across the Kentucky border not far from Cincinnati. The place crackles with all the animatronic and multimedia glitz that one might expect from a museum founded by a former Universal Studios executive, and it seems to be doing a booming business.

Rather than present a coherent argument for a particular view of life’s origins, the exhibitions encourage visitors to question the scientific method and the institutions of modern science. A Genesis-based history in which creation occurred 6000 years ago is offered as an alternative, but, notwithstanding all the fossils on display, the museum doesn’t make an evidence-based case for its claims. Instead, a sensory overload of animations, dioramas, and plaques about contested scientific theories seems to dissolve any kind of rational engagement with natural history; in this digitally-enhanced intellectual fog, the only sure anchor is given in the immutability and univocity of a literal reading of Genesis as an “eyewitness” account.

The biggest surprise for me was the extreme security regime. The museum, located in the middle of nowhere, is surrounded by a sturdy iron fence with a gated entry. Patrol vehicles, security guards, and heavy bollards surround the building; inside, it is full of security cameras and listening devices, and polite uniformed attendants are always in sight. The crowd of happy white suburbanites shuffling through the exhibits and whispering “amen” during the movie presentations certainly didn’t show any outward signs of paranoia, but with its scenography stripped away, the museum is a fortress.
 

 

Max writes: It’s interesting how brick walls adorned with fake graffiti and torn, weathered fliers and posters — walls which look very “urban” — are supposed to represent the depraved modern world.
 

Joseph: The museum clearly presented nature as an idyllic state (in two of the movie presentations, the main character was sitting by a campfire out in the wilderness) and seemed to show cities as dangerous breeding-grounds of relativism and hubris. Also, maybe I’ve been reading too much Derrida lately, but the contrast between the textual mutability of books, graffiti, and those weird collages of torn magazine pages with the “eyewitness” authority ascribed to Genesis seemed quite revealing.
 

Max: Today on the subway I saw an advertisement for a new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History here in NYC called “Mythic Creatures.” The museum has put together a collection of created representations of mermaids, dragons, unicorns, etc. Evidently there is at least a little bit of science woven into the presentations, in that possible scientific explanations for the origins of the various imaginary creatures are presented (e.g., legends of dragons may have been inspired by dinosaur bones).

I have no doubt that this will be a huge money-making enterprise, given the current popularity of fantasy novels and movies. But it still seems like a rather major departure from the museum’s traditional mission of educating the public about the realities of nature. In a strange way, what the AMNH is doing parallels what the Creation Museum in Lexington is doing: elevating wishful thinking over scientific knowledge.
 

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James P. Othmer is a fellow contributor to the high school loser anthology. His debut novel, The Futurist, sits in my to-be-read pile. Below he describes the enraged reactions of trend forecasters to his fictional portrayal of the profession.
 

Last summer, Ted Genoways, editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review, which published the first chapter of The Futurist, was approached at a book fair by an actual futurist. She said she had recently discussed my novel, its potential fallout, and damage control strategies at a convention with other futurists. If she were truly good at her job, she would have been able to forecast my eventual hardcover sales and then, realizing the folly of her concern, dismiss the book’s laughable threat with her colleagues at the futurist convention happy hour.

Then there was the TV interview on a Toronto business show about our culture’s obsession with what’s next, for which the producers tried without success to convince a futurist to appear with me. I just wanted to discuss my novel with a wildly inappropriate target audience, not have a cage match with, say, Alvin Toffler, but the futurists feared I would make them look bad.

Apparently that’s what the producers were hoping for, too. When I saw the replay of the interview, the words on the scroll bar read, “Is futurism just a bunch of BS?” Which didn’t exactly help my case.
 

I have no beef with futurists. Really, I’m very much pro-future. In fact, I distinctly recall having the sensation of kind of looking forward to something the other day (I think it was a nap). And once, that same day, I heard myself thinking, What if…? Shit, I even have a calendar (America’s Ballparks) on my wall that occasionally shows the current month. Which anyone can see makes me a big believer in the future, if not a proponent of all those who claim to be able to foretell it.

Yet futurists keep bugging me. Despite the fact that over the years I’ve met and been impressed by many futurists, despite the fact that I’m a huge fan of the writing of Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem and William Gibson, these futurists write angry emails saying things like, Who are you to tell me that I don’t know what’s really going to happen on the sub-continent in 2012? Or, What makes you think I’m so wrong about predicting that sports cars with prescription lens windshields will be the next big thing for aging baby boomers? And, Who are you to write a book (let alone a novel) that renounces my very high-paying yet hard-to-define profession?
 

I think one reason futurists are upset with me is that my eponymous protagonist is a plagiarizing, lying, self-absorbed, borderline alcoholic fraud. But really, does this mean that all futurists are, too? I mean, just because Rabbit Angstrom is a sleazy car salesman, are all car salespeople sleazy? Okay, but still…

Another theory is that these angry prognosticators simply haven’t read the book. The fact that the number of angry futurist emails (587) exceeds actual book sales (563*) reinforces this hypothesis. Then again, if they had read the book there’s a strong chance that they’d still be pissed.

But it’s not all bad between me and the present day Oracles at Delphi. Faith Popcorn, whose fictional self appears without her permission in my novel, recently called me to tell me that she had read it and “fell out of bed I was laughing so hard.” Which I took as a very good sign, and not just because she didn’t call to say she was suing me. It doesn’t hurt that Ms. Popcorn’s character, who gets to call my protagonist “a sham and an asshole,” is described in the book as “the mother of all legitimate futurists,” which (attorneys, take note) I totally, truly think she is.
 

So what do I really think of futurists generally? Well, in former jobs, prior to dedicating my life to checking my Amazon sales ranking, I was fortunate enough to meet many brilliant and interesting people, from Nobel prize-winning inventors, to the head of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, from Laurie Anderson and Kurt Vonnegut to Watts Wacker, George Gilder, Stuart Brand, the founders of Wired magazine and Carrot Top. Many of them were futurists, and the best were able to interpret trends, data, memes — whatever — and formulate brilliant behavioral insights as well as speculate about what it all might mean for individuals, societies, governments and the planet.

Over the years I also was subjected to the smoke-and-mirrors shtick of some complete assholes who postulate rather than speculate. Who speak in absolutes and well-rehearsed aphorisms. Some sounded interesting the first time I saw them in a meeting, or at a conference. Then, by the fifth time I heard them saying their catch phrase while bringing up (insert most innovative ad brand of the moment’s) work (which makes them cool by association, even though they had nothing to do with it), I was not so impressed. This is all expressed in my protagonist’s supposdely career-ending speech.

So, despite the fact that there are countless futurists of tremendous merit, in my research I chose to focus upon the bullshitters, plagiarists, and phonies of the trade. The ones who speak in sound bites and tell people what they want to hear (or fear). I created a futurist of no merit because I thought that opened up the most provocative possibilities for absurdity, moral tension and situational humor. I thought the notion of such a man — a grossly under-qualified, emotionally unstable man — charged with making sense of the world at this particular moment, let alone five minutes from now, was fascinating.

Besides, who wants to read about someone who’s good at what he or she does?
 

Trend map image at the top of this post swiped from Information Architects.

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Reading my friend Terry Teachout’s literary criticism tends to make me wish he wrote more of it. Over the years his praise has sent me off in search of many books — Cakes and Ale among them — that have since become favorites.

Below I post for your enjoyment, and with permission, his introduction to Elaine Dundy’s highly entertaining The Dud Avocado, which is republished this week by NYRB Classics. (Elsewhere, see Kate Bolick’s recent conversation with the 85-year-old Dundy.)

 

It is the destiny of some good novels to be perpetually rediscovered, and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, I fear, is one of them. Like William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf or James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor, it bobs to the surface every decade or so, at which time somebody writes an essay about how good it is and somebody else clamors for it to be returned to print, followed in short order by the usual slow retreat into the shadows. In a better-regulated society, of course, the authors of such books would be properly esteemed, and on rare occasions one of them does contrive to clamber into the pantheon — Dawn Powell, the doyenne of oft-rediscovered authors, finally made it into the Library of America in 2001 — but in the normal course of things, such triumphs are as rare as an honest stump speech.

The Dud Avocado is further handicapped by being funny. Americans like comedy but don’t trust it, a fact proved each year when the Oscars are handed out: our national motto seems to be Lord Byron’s “Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter/Sermons and soda-water the day after.” To be sure, The Dud Avocado is perfectly serious, but it preaches no sermons, and what it has to say about life must be read between the punch lines. That was what kept Powell under wraps for so long — nobody thought that a writer so amusing could really be any good, especially if she was also a woman — and it has been working against Elaine Dundy ever since she published The Dud Avocado, her first novel, in 1958. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that The Dud Avocado has never been out of print in England. I’m no Anglophile, but I readily admit that the Brits are better at this sort of thing. Unlike us, they treat their comic novelists right, perhaps because Shakespeare and Jane Austen taught them early on that (as Constant Lambert once observed apropos of the delicious music of Chabrier) “seriousness is not the same as solemnity.”

Now The Dud Avocado is out again in the United States, and I’ll bet money that some dewy-eyed young critic is going to read it for the first time and write an essay about how Sally Jay Gorce, Elaine Dundy’s adorably scatty heroine, was the spiritual grandmother of Bridget Jones. To which I say… nothing. I actually kind of like poor old Bridget, but if you want to properly place The Dud Avocado in the grand scheme of things, you should look not forward to Chick Lit but backward to Daisy Miller. Sally is Daisy debauched, an innocent ambassador from the new world who crosses the Atlantic, loses her virginity, and learns in the fullness of time that experience, while not all it’s cracked up to be, is nothing if not inevitable — and that Europe, for all its sophisticated ways, is no longer the keeper of the flame of Western civilization. Paris may be “the rich man’s plaything, the craftsman’s tool, the artist’s anguish, and the world’s largest champagne factory,” but you don’t have to live there to live, and once Sally gets to know some of its not-so-nice residents, she has a flash of full-fledged epiphany that is no less believable for having popped up in the middle of a comic novel:

“They are corrupt — corrupt,” I kept saying to myself, over and over again, as I paced around the room. It was the first time I’d ever used that word about people I actually knew, and again the idea that I could take a moral stand — or rather, that I couldn’t avoid taking one — filled me with the same confusion it had that morning.

I don’t want to leave the impression that The Dud Avocado is in any way po-faced. It is above all a book about youth, about a clever girl’s realization that she is up to her ears in possibility, and every page bears the breathless stamp of her new-found freedom: “Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, I’ve suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment.” In the very first sentence, Sally tells us that it is “a hot, peaceful, optimistic sort of day in September,” the kind of day that Ned Rorem, another clever young American who came to Paris in the Fifties, must surely have had in mind when he turned Robert Hillyer’s “Early in the Morning” into a perfect little song about what it feels like to find love on the rue François Premier: “I was twenty and a lover/And in Paradise to stay,/Very early in the morning/Of a lovely summer day.” If you read it without laughing, you have no sense of humor, but if you read it without shedding at least one tear, you have no memory.

The Dud Avocado was extremely well received on its initial publication. “It made me laugh, scream and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm),” Groucho Marx declared in a fan letter to the author. “If this was actually your life, I don’t know how the hell you got through it.” It was, more or less, and Groucho didn’t know the half of it, for in 1951 Dundy had the bad luck to marry Kenneth Tynan, a great drama critic who turned out to be a comprehensively lousy husband, and though she would publish other good books, she never became quite as famous as she should have been. To make matters worse, Dundy began to lose her sight shortly after writing an alarmingly candid memoir cheerily titled Life Itself! in which she told her side of the unhappy story of her marriage. By then The Dud Avocado, her best book, had already gone through three or four cycles of obscurity and revival. Perhaps this long-overdue new edition will bring it the permanence it so richly deserves.

But even if The Dud Avocado is doomed to remain one of those novels that is loved by a few and unknown to everyone else, we lucky few who love it will never stop recommending it to our friends, for it is so full of charm and life and something not unlike wisdom that there will always be readers who open it up and see at once that it is just their kind of book. Every time I read it, I find myself tripping over sentences I long to have written: “A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.” “It’s amazing how right you can sometimes be about a person you don’t know; it’s only the people you do know who confuse you.” “I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.” I rank it alongside Cakes and Ale, Scoop, Lucky Jim, and Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born, a quartet of soufflé-light entertainments that will still be giving pleasure long after most of the Serious Novels of the twentieth century are dead, buried, and forgotten. A chick litterateuse could do a lot worse for herself.
 

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Will Allison’s first novel, What You Have Left, depicts the cycle of abandonments and longings set in motion across generations by a father’s disappearance. The writing is as precise as the story is emotionally true, and, when I finished the book and read Allison’s author bio, I wondered how much of his concision is attributable to reading and editing manuscripts for STORY and Zoetrope: All Story. He addresses my question at length below.
 

Of all the things I learned from Lois Rosenthal, perhaps the most valuable was impatience.

Lois was the editor of the Cincinnati-based literary magazine STORY, which, despite lasting only ten years (in that particular incarnation), was a five-time finalist for and two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Fiction.

Lois loved going up against The New Yorker and Harper’s and The Atlantic, but what she liked best was helping launch the careers of young writers: Chris Adrian, Judy Budnitz, Junot Díaz, Nathan Englander, Heidi Julavits — the list goes on.

She helped launch mine, too, though at the time, it was less a writing career than an editorial career — one I thought I didn’t want.
 

In the summer of 1996, two months after I finished an MFA at Ohio State, I got a call from Lee K. Abbott, the program’s director. He said STORY was looking for a new managing editor, and he’d passed my name along to Lois.

Maybe Lee felt sorry for me. After failing to land several teaching jobs I hadn’t really cared about, I’d moved back to South Carolina to sell baseball cards at an antiques mall. That it was a dead-end job didn’t matter, because my “real” job was writing. I told myself that if I used my brain to do anything more than just make ends meet, I’d be taking precious energy away from my fiction.

A few days after Lee called, I got a call from Lois and her husband, Dick, STORY’s publisher. We talked about the magazine and the job — a long, pleasant conversation, at the conclusion of which I basically told them no thanks. My goal wasn’t to work at STORY, it was to be in STORY.

That night on the phone, my future wife basically told me I was crazy. What young, underemployed writer wouldn’t want a job — with benefits — at the country’s most celebrated lit mag? I found her arguments persuasive. The next day I wrote Dick and Lois a letter telling them how desperately I wanted to work at STORY.
 

Lois took mercy on me and mailed out an editing test, the meat of which was a group of three anonymous manuscripts. My assignment was to pretend I was an editor at STORY. Should we publish the manuscripts, and why or why not?

Apparently I did okay on the test, because Dick and Lois invited me to Cincinnati for an interview. I liked them immediately. They were stylish, collegial, and passionate about the arts and politics. I mistook them for displaced New Yorkers; in fact, they were Cincinnati born and bred.

They were also quite wealthy, thanks to the family business, F&W Publications, which was best-known for its stable of Writer’s Digest books and magazines. STORY was an odd corporate bird. Whereas the rest of F&W existed to turn a profit, STORY existed to celebrate Lois’ love of short fiction. STORY was also the lucky beneficiary of F&W’s considerable marketing and sales muscle, which eventually made it another kind of odd bird: a lit mag that broke even.

In those days, F&W occupied a sleek Art Deco building constructed in the 1920s as a Coca-Cola bottling facility. After a tour (STORY’s office had its own balcony), I went to lunch with Lois and the rest of the editorial staff: Laurie Henry, STORY’s quietly brilliant, longtime associate editor.
 

As luck would have it, Lois and I hit it off. I was undaunted by the fact that she’d burned through five managing editors in just six years. She was undaunted by my buzz cut (though she feared it meant I was a Republican) and by the fact that, in my editing test, I’d recommended rejecting a story she’d already accepted — by Joyce Carol Oates.

For the next four years, I had the good fortune to be Lois’ right-hand man, first as managing editor, then as executive editor. It was the greatest job on earth. I loved working with authors, I loved panning for gold in the slush pile (though really this was Laurie’s forte), and I especially loved editing.

I did have some trouble getting up to speed, though. Having only recently left the world of MFA creative-writing workshops, I was used to dutifully, painstakingly giving each and every manuscript its full due. Lois didn’t play that. If a story failed to hook her by the first page or two, she was on to the next. I was struck by her ability (and Laurie’s) to plow through a bin of manuscripts in a couple of hours, emerging with only a handful of stories requiring closer attention. It wasn’t just that she read with great confidence — in her taste, in her ability to recognize quality — but also with great impatience. How dare an unworthy story waste her time!

I, on the other hand, felt a sympathetic agony for all the manuscripts so quickly consigned to the reject pile. As a writer who regularly submitted to magazines, I knew all too well how it felt to be on the receiving end of a rejection slip. Obviously, these were not productive feelings for the managing editor of a publication that received nearly twenty thousand submissions a year. I had to get over it and fast, so I quickly embraced Lois’ slash-and-burn mentality as the survival tool that it was.

But her impatience was instructive to me as a writer, too, an emphatic reminder that it’s not the reader’s job to cut you slack but rather your job to make sure the reader is never bored. The irony, of course, is that it takes a great deal of patience to write a piece of fiction that won’t leave a reader like Lois impatient.

During the time I worked at STORY, I became a much slower writer, trying to hold my fiction to an ever higher standard (that being the work we published in the magazine). Whereas I’d once cranked out stories in a matter of weeks, I now spent months, sometimes a year or more, on a single story. I also started what would become a short novel, What You Have Left, which ended up taking seven years to finish.
 

If STORY were still around, I’d still be working there (the good Lois willing), but in 1999, Dick decided to sell F&W so he and Lois could devote more time to philanthropy. Not wanting to see STORY fall into the mercenary hands of a publicly held corporation, they chose to shutter the magazine rather than include it in the sale of the company. STORY published its final issue in early 2000.

Lois has been plenty busy since then. She and Dick built an arts academy for underprivileged kids, funded the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art (the first major American museum designed by a woman, architect Zaha Hadid), gave the Cincinnati Museum of Art $2.15 million to keep admission free in perpetuity, became chief benefactors of the Institute for Justice at the University of Cincinnati, and, well, you get the picture — major good works supporting social justice and the arts.

About the only thing Lois isn’t doing these days is reading manuscripts. Even so, she is (along with my wife) the imagined reader I write for — which is funny, because I never asked Lois to read my work when I was at STORY. I didn’t feel I had the right, and I suppose I was also a bit cowed. But here she is, after all these years, still looking over my shoulder each time I sit down at the computer. Adjusting her glasses. Tapping her impeccably shod foot. Hoping to read something that will grab her and not let go.

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Not only did David Sedaris include one of Jean Thompson’s short stories in his anthology of personal favorites, he was so smitten with her first collection that he sold copies on his own book tour.

Proselytizing feels effortless when you love a work of fiction. But at least as often, writers are asked to blurb things they’re not wild about or read manuscripts on impossibly short notice or participate in dreary and interminable luncheons, and their responses to those requests are trickier but just as telling as spontaneous outpourings of support. Below Thompson, whose Throw Like a Girl appears next week, reflects on the realities of the writerly favor economy.

 

In his later years, the writer and critic Edmund Wilson (at right) famously responded to unsolicited requests with an engraved card, reading, in part, “Edmund Wilson regrets it is impossible for him to: Read manuscripts, Write articles or books to order, Make statements for publicity purposes, Do any kind of editorial work, Judge literary contests, Give interviews, Conduct educational courses, Deliver lectures, Give talks or make speeches…” The list goes on for some time, since Mr. Wilson wished to be exhaustively complete about all the things it was impossible for him to do.

You have to admire the pure crankiness of such blanket refusal, and Wilson’s unwillingness to be a professional good sport about favor-mongering. Because for most of us, to be a writer is to be part of the favor economy, the business of asking, dispensing, and trading them. We acquire and we bestow the jacket blurbs, reviews, and recommendations that are the currency of book publishing. One does what one must, and whether one regards it as a necessary evil or a necessary good probably depends on one’s own position in the food chain.
 

I like to think that what goes around comes around. Over the years, as a teacher of writing, I’ve generated quantities of recommendations — measurable in bushels or perhaps bales — for students needing admission to graduate school, or fellowships, or jobs. I’ve blurbed books for friends and for strangers, and in turn I’ve been the recipient of generous words from, among others, David Sedaris, Kent Haruf, and Rick Russo. I’ve been happy to recommend promising writers to editors and agents and I’ve often benefited from the same sort of reciprocal good will. At best, the favor economy is about the sharing of enthusiasm. At worst, it can leave you feeling craven, unworthy, and paranoid.

When it comes to jacket blurbs, if you’re lucky, your editor will contact the target of your intentions and make the request. The editor can then either relay the happy news or buffer the bad. You yourself are spared having to interpret the silence of the oracle, wondering if a message has gone astray, or if non-response is simply refusal. If you’re not lucky, of course, you have to manage the business yourself. You summon all your language skills in an attempt to be respectful without seeming obsequious, confident without seeming presumptive, charming rather than desperate. There are no guidelines or formulas for writing a successful letter of supplication, but if you feel a kind of nausea at your own artfulness, you’re probably coming close.
 

And what do you do when the tables turn, when you’re the one being solicited, and for whatever reason the request is unwelcome? That’s a different type of nausea.

Strangers can be ignored, or given the Edmund Wilson treatment, but these are usually not strangers. They are friends, or friends of friends, or spouses of friends, or long-lost acquaintances (often very long and very lost indeed). They have written works you hesitate to endorse, for one reason or another. The book is just not your thing, or is lacking in artistry, or perhaps you have been importuned, as I once was, by a young writer who claimed to have almost but not quite studied with me, and meanwhile here was his upcoming book, and because of his editor’s criminal negligence no one had blurbed it, and since the deadline was imminent, could I take a look at the manuscript and send him some praise via FedEx overnight?

I couldn’t and I didn’t. I confess that I’ve evaded and ignored and made my share of feeble excuses. Blurber or blurbee, the favor economy makes cowards of us all. Yes is a blessing, No is most often an apology, since the still, small voice within us is probably saying that the writer you kick in the head today might hold the whip hand tomorrow. The robust ghost of Mr. Wilson sneers. The man knew how to say No, but he gave out his fair share of Yes as well. We shouldn’t forget that, as literary critic of the New Republic, he first brought to the world’s prominent attention a couple of new and untested writers named Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

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Colin Channer’s The Girl With the Golden Shoes centers on a smart, driven girl who becomes an object of suspicion and gets kicked out of her fishing village after teaching herself to read. “She’d not been led to reading by a great ambition — that was something reading had produced. But this wasn’t easy to explain.”

Setting out for the city with a bar of soap, a change of clothes, and 50 pounds and 50 pence, Estrella is determined to buy a pair of shoes, get a job, and someday travel to Europe. Temptations arise, mostly in the form of sweet-talking men, but she stays focused.

This is not Channer’s first powerful female protagonist. Geoffrey Philp observed in an interview last year that he excels at creating them. “What’s wrong with you?” Philp joked.

“I don’t make a real distinction between [male and female characters],” Channer said. “For me it comes down to this, an interesting person who wants an interesting thing for an interesting reason. Weak women are not interesting so they’re not worth placing at the center of a narrative.”
 

In an afterward reproduced with permission below, Russell Banks accurately paints

The Girl with the Golden Shoes as a “nearly perfect moral fable.” You can read an excerpt from the novella here.
 

We don’t see it attempted much these days, perhaps because American writers (and readers) are so blindered by standard-issue realism on the one side and escapist fantasy on the other, but Colin Channer’s The Girl with the Golden Shoes is a nearly perfect moral fable. It’s an ancient, essentially European literary form, the moral fable; but think of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea or Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Think of Faulkner’s The Bear or Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Those are the modern American classics in the form. A more recent example is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Like them, The Girl with the Golden Shoes is a short narrative, shorter than a conventionally realistic novel, that is, but not so short as to be confused with a mere story. Like them, it’s set more or less outside of present time, yet is not meant to be read as historical fiction, and happens in a place that’s slightly outside the known or at least the familiar world. Even the title, The Girl with the Golden Shoes, calls to mind those old fables and fairy tales, pre-Christian European folk tales and medieval romances.

The protagonist is individualized, yes, a recognizable Afro-Caribbean country girl of the early 1940s born and raised on a recognizable Caribbean island that’s a little like Cuba, a little like Jamaica, and a little like Hispaniola or Trinidad, yet none of the above. She’s a spunky, intelligent girl named Estrella — ah, yes, the star — poised at the exact end of childhood and the exact beginning of adulthood. But she’s from a world that does not recognize adolescence; that is to say, a world way older than ours, in which there are children and there are adults and nothing in between; and thus, of necessity, she seems flattened somewhat, a pre-modern “type” — or better yet, an archetype. Estrella is the archetype of the innocent provincial youth who one day sets out for the big city, here called Seville, to find her fortune and her fate. To become somebody. It’s usually a boy on this journey, rarely a girl, but Channer knows that archetypes are gender-blind. And given his tripartite theme of dependency, trust, and betrayal (about which, more later), it’s a more intriguing tale morally if it’s a girl. She’s adopted, sort of, raised by her grandparents, which is to say she’s a child without real parents, a foundling without a binding self-defining family, making it necessary for her to locate her true identity outside the family, to find it even, as is typical, outside the community she’s been raised in. For the community has cast her out. The reason being — again, typically — she’s the solitary bearer of a curse, the unintentional cause of widespread, otherwise inexplicable suffering in her village. This makes her an exile, a wanderer who can’t go home again.

Condemned to travel the open road, she will be tested and tempted, and the tests and temptations will create her character, which, by the end of her tale, will be different than it was at the beginning. By the end, no longer a child, no longer innocent or naïve, after many trails and tribulations, Estrella will have arrived at adulthood, wise and walking in a state of grace that is apparent to all who meet her there. Still dependent (she’s a black woman, after all, and this is a racialist society, and sexist); but no longer trusting. She’s protected therefore against betrayal and thus is able to place a wholly legitimate claim on those emblematic gold shoes. It’s Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and The Frog Prince all rolled into one. With a little Huckleberry Finn and Tom Jones thrown in for good measure.

Well, it’s all fine and dandy, all well and good, to admire the ease and intelligence with which Colin Channer has engaged the ancient and honorable, essentially European tradition of the moral fable, and important to praise the way he’s introduced into it elements that are native to the Caribbean archipelago and therefore to the African diaspora, bringing it up to date and speed, as it were, and in the process reinvigorating it. He’s creolized the form, given it a strictly New World DNA without cutting off its Old World roots. That alone is an extraordinary achievement. But we ought also to admire the apparent ease and intelligence with which he has addressed a modern (actually a post-modern, post-colonial) linguistic conundrum: the problem of representing on the page the music and clarity of creolized English, which is, of course, the language his character think, argue, make love, and dream in — except when they happen to be speaking to their colonial masters or to the inheritors of the masters’ linguistic standards of excellence and correct articulation. The problem is that if one is a writer from the Caribbean, one has to write both. It’s a challenge that few of Channer’s literary forebears, even great writers like V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, have been able to meet, and few if any of his contemporaries. Perhaps only the polyphonic Caryl Phillips has solved this problem as effectively as Colin Channer.

The perennial question for Caribbean writers is how to represent creolized English without making of it a mere dialect, a diminished version of the mother country’s mother tongue — that’s the problem, the post-colonial problem: to somehow use and abuse the language of the oppressor in order to both subvert the oppressor’s mentality and tell a tale that’s true to the teller’s deepest, most intimate experience. Channer is the master of this bait-and-switch. Look at how skillfully he slips between the two kinds of diction and grammar; check his smooth moves as he slides his narrative in and out, ringing the changes from subjective to objective point of view, following the float from first person to third, simply by switching language tracks from creolized English (a Caribbean patois) to so-called standard English and back again.

But is jealous they jealous like Joseph brothers. And one day, one day — it might take awhile, but is sure to come — a blight going to take this island, and they going have to come to Seville. And they going to see me and ain’t even know is me until I tell them. That is how much I going change.

“Mister, don’t mind,” she whispered to the rifleman beside her. She tapped his shoulder through the heavy wool. “Mister, don’t you mind.”

Without looking, he removed her hand and gently squeezed it with condolence. For her. For him. For history. For life.

“I’m sorry, miss,” he muttered.

His father and brother laughed.

“Is okay,” she said. “Is awright.”

 

Nobody does it better; at least nobody I know.

A few words concerning the themes of this fable. Without being reductive, it strikes me that there are three interwoven themes or conflicts being dramatized here. Moral conflicts, if you will, since this is after all a moral fable. They are dependence, trust, and betrayal. Because Estrella is a trusting soul (still a child, remember), and because she can’t escape being dependent — on men, on white people, on mixed race people, on people who possess the authority and power (and arms) of wealth and the law — she is betrayed over and over again. We see early on that she’s got to lose that trust; she’s got to become disillusioned. It’s the only way she can protect herself against being exploited by others. And so the narrative is at bottom an account of the long and arduous process of becoming disillusioned. It starts at home in an impoverished fishing village, where Estrella is betrayed by her own grandparents, on whom she depended and whom she trusted to keep and protect her, and ends in the capital city of Seville, where she finally is somebody, regardless of her station in life, because she can no longer be fooled. She says to the white man who has just offered her a job and a home:

“I ain’t want to wear you wife old shoes, Mr. Rawle. I walk too far from country for that. I need a ride to Salan’s. I need to buy my own.”

“I thought you didn’t have any money.”

“I lost it. But is

your fault, so you going have to give me back fourteen pounds and fifteen pence.” Then she remembered the money from Wilfredo, whom she thought of as Simón. “Plus twenty pounds on top of that.”

“That’s a lot.”

“That’s my point.”

“I don’t know if I have that.”

“If you ain’t have it, put me out.”

 

Now that is no easily duped girl talking; not anymore. That is a woman to contend with.

Finally, it might be asked if we should add The Girl with the Golden Shoes to that short list of American classics I mentioned earlier, The Old Man and The Sea, The Bear, and so on. It’s unfair to compare it to those great and finally incomparable works, as this is the work of a relatively young writer still mapping the shape of his imagination, and consequently there is here and there then occasional stylistic tentativeness one associates with such a writer. Nonetheless, his standards for his book are set as high as those set by the American masters of an earlier generation, and that is how great literature gets made. Give thanks and praise, then. This man, Colin Channer, is clearly in the business of helping make great literature.

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Nick Antosca’s first novel, Fires, is just out from Impetus Press, and sits in my to-be-read pile. He contributed this appreciation at my request.
 

If you pass down the gospel of James Salter, you are probably a writer. Salter’s austere and humbling fiction is mostly unknown to the casual reader but canonical for a disproportionate number of widely admired authors, particularly those of a certain era: Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Reynolds Price, among others.

It was John Crowley, the novelist, and at the time my professor, who first spoke the name to me. In retrospect, this may have been because I was struggling to write seriously about sexual obsession and he thought I should read someone who actually knew how to do it.
 

In his collection of travel essays, There & Then, Salter wrote,

There is the knowledge of the senses that includes carnal happiness, and a greater knowledge that comes from intellect and reason. In the life we admire, one succeeds the other but does not dislodge it.

In the life we live, though, it is sensual knowledge, its promise or memory, that usually leads us. Intellect and reason cannot offer the same pleasure. All Salter’s fiction is about that unfortunate fact.

His characters tend not to live admirable lives. They lust, they betray, they strive to acquire. Then they look back on their lives and the most blissful memories are crimes. If not admirable, though, their lives are almost enviable, in the same way one wouldn’t mind being any of Nabokov’s characters, if only to apprehend the world with such meticulous fury.

Unlike Nabokov, however, Salter carves his stories down, always to the purest core. Every paragraph is a vein of ore uncovered. In the magnificent story “Platinum,” from the collection Last Night, a married man visiting Paris with his five-year-old daughter feels the first throb of unrest:

He could hear the couple talking. The woman, blond and smooth-browed, was in a glittering silver top. They were going out for the evening, into the stream of lights, boulevards, restaurants brimming with talk. He had only a glimpse of them setting forth, the light on her hair, the cab door held open for her, and for a moment forgot he had everything.

How skillfully and with such concision Salter pits the desired happiness against the one already lived. It’s that final clause, of course, that makes the paragraph resound — makes it a monument to everything this man stands to lose. And then the line is crossed, an affair is initiated, and it is not sordid but luminous:

He came home filled with forbidden happiness, forbidden but unrivalled, and embraced his wife and played with or read to his children. The prohibited feeds the appetite for all the rest. He went from one to the other with a heart that was pure.

And in the company of the beloved mistress:

Summer mornings with their first, soft light. Amorous mornings, the red numbers flicking silently on the clock, the first sunlight in the trees. Her stunning naked back. The most sacred hours, he realized, of his life.

I will not reveal the story’s excruciating, perfect conclusion except to say that no moral reckoning arrives. It never does in Salter’s stories. His frank sensualism might even be called amoral, but I think this is not true. It is just a different kind of morality, one that regards the experience of the senses as almost holy.
 

Nowhere is this more evident than in his best-known book, A Sport and a Pastime. In that novel, which takes its title and epigraph from the Koran (”Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime…”), a nameless American living in France narrates with exquisite but largely invented detail a brief, intense sexual affair between his friend Phillip Dean, also an American expatriate, and Anne-Marie Costallat, an eighteen-year-old French girl. The narrator is infatuated with both lovers, idolizing Dean (not platonically) and eroticizing Anne-Marie, but he’s also just intoxicated by sensory experience, by food and poetry and sex and everything else he would like to engrave on his memory. Intoxicated by it and helpless against its impermanence. Here he imagines Dean and Anne-Marie together:

He is watching her. Her nakedness compels him. No matter what he does, he cannot commit it to memory. It seems to be given to him in a series of revelations that are like flashes.

Of course it’s actually the narrator who’s trying to commit everything, even what isn’t real, to memory. Doesn’t matter. What’s important is that it isn’t important how much of the affair as he tells it is real. Details that Dean described to him are indistinguishable from those he invented, and so to us they’re all real in the sense that great fictions outlast the truth.

The moments Salter creates with these details, as concise and pure as scriptures, are the reason so many writers value him so highly. Like the nude in A Sport and a Pastime, his fictions demand to be committed to memory. Reading them stirs a desire not just to write with a skill equal to the author’s but to know and preserve the experience of the senses as carefully as he does. You can learn from Salter’s work. Not just about how to write but how you might prefer to live.
 

Salter photo found here.

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Maximus Clarke (AKA Mr. Maud) saw David Lynch Upstairs at the Square last month. This belated report appears here and at his own site, Voltage. (Lauren Cerand of The Smart Set publicizes and helps mastermind these events, and MaudNewton.com friend Katherine Lanpher hosts them, but I can attest that Max’s fascination with all things Lynch is bona fide.)
 

Upstairs at the Square host Katherine Lanpher puts authors and musicians on stage together at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. The result is an unique, unpredictable hybrid of interview, reading, and performance.

January’s installment featured surrealist filmmaker David Lynch, and indie synthpop group Au Revoir Simone. I’ve been a big fan of Lynch’s film and TV projects since watching Twin Peaks during its original run — but he wasn’t appearing at this event to plug his new movie. Instead he was there as the author of Catching the Big Fish, a short book about his creative process and his longtime practice of Transcendental Meditation.
 

Au Revoir Simone performed a few songs and briefly answered questions from Lanpher. But Lynch was the focus of the evening. His newly revealed zeal for Transcendental Meditation is a bit unexpected, but there have long been hints of mystical preoccupations in his work. (Visions beyond time and space played a key role in Dune, and Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper had supernatural dreams, studied Tibetan Buddhism, and traveled between dimensions.)

Over the years, critics of TM have called it cult-like, attacked some of its more grandiose claims, and questioned its $2500 initiation fee. (Other groups charge far less to teach similar techniques.) Lanpher didn’t get into this, instead letting Lynch expound his basic worldview: that the world is defined by consciousness, and that we have to expand our consciousness if we want to “catch the big fish.” Said fish might be artistic or personal goals, or larger aims like global peace.

A universe defined by our experience of it is a compelling idea, and arguably a very humanistic one. The “inland empire” after which Lynch named his latest film might really be the realm of human experience. He is sometimes derided as merely a sadist or an ironist, but on close observation of his work, it’s apparent that he is a student of all facets of human nature, who believes in the reality of both good and evil.
 

One might venture that his films portray the light and dark sides of humanity, by projecting them into a world where anything can happen. In any case, there’s only so much he’ll say directly about the content of his art. He told Lanpher that, while all the things he puts into his work are meaningful to him, he doesn’t like to “explain” them to people, because that reduces their impact and freshness.

Even when talking about art, consciousness, and other heady topics, Lynch has a plainspoken, all-American quality that can come as a surprise. His sincere, un-intellectual manner makes him resemble one of his own small-town characters from a bygone era, or, as Mel Brooks described him, “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.”

As for his book, it’s basically a series of short observations, of varying profundity, padded out with a lot of white space. (I bought a copy, mostly to get his autograph.)
 

I’d seen Au Revoir Simone a few years back, at a small show in Brooklyn. At the time, I was underwhelmed. Their twee melodies seemed geared to the level of a kindergarten music class. And their live configuration — five women all playing keyboards and singing — was overkill, especially because some of them weren’t that great at doing either.

But the group has evolved. Now they are three; all can play their instruments and sing in key. They are also all rail-thin, strikingly tall, and have long straight brown hair. Their music is better-produced and maybe a bit more intricate, if still on the simple side to my ears.

Nonetheless, they should do very well among devotees of independent rock whose taste in pop and electronic music runs to mild fare like The Postal Service. The same crowd is likely to swoon over the group’s Wes-Anderson-perfect prep/geek coltish schoolgirl image.
 

I can definitely see a kind of synergy between Au Revoir Simone’s blank cheerfulness and the sometimes absurdly innocent sweetness that shows up in Lynch’s work. (Of course, Lynch counters the sweetness with large doses of darkness and mystery.)

The pop trio could easily fit into the niche that Julee Cruise filled in some of the director’s earlier projects. So if a few ARS songs, or the girls themselves, show up in a future Lynch movie, you’ll know where and when the connection was made.
 

You can listen to a podcast of the David Lynch/Au Revoir Simone Upstairs at the Square event. Max took the photos.

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