February 14, 2020 At Work Learning to Die: An Interview with Jenny Offill By Rebecca Godfrey “All around us things tried to announce their true nature,” observes Lizzie, the heroine of Jenny Offill’s new novel, Weather. “Their radiance was faint and fainter still beneath the terrible music.” In Weather, as in her groundbreaking novel Dept. of Speculation, Offill captures both the “terrible music” and the “quiet radiance” of contemporary life. She allows us to see the world anew, as a place where we can—and must—encounter both discord and poetry. Lizzie, a librarian “not young or pretty enough to matter,” moves through a stunned city during and after an election. As she grows “edgy and restless,” she listens to podcasts and lectures about glaciers, and to the seemingly trivial worries of Uber drivers and competitive mothers; she meditates with Buddhists before watching TV shows about extreme shopping and drug addicts ambushed by their families. Like the Wife in Dept. of Speculation, Lizzie is a keen, often hilarious observer, fiercely intelligent but utterly ignored and relatively powerless. Yet Lizzie attempts, even achieves, something heroic by the novel’s end. She sympathizes with the flawed and the flailing; she investigates and instigates survival strategies, and, like Offill herself, she finds the “quiet radiance” despite it all. Offill and I live close to each other in the Hudson Valley. Reading Weather, I recalled two moments where her presence had shifted something from the ordinary to the beautiful and then to the terrifying. In the first, we went for a walk on a route that was private and, to me, unknown. She had said something about a beach, but I thought this must be an exaggeration, as the landscape around us is forests and hills. Yet when we broke through the clearing, there was not only a beach but a small island and a cove set off from the rest of the Hudson. Something shimmered in the water; I thought it might be a bird. Instead, a naked woman rose out of the water and began to swim toward us. My daughter screamed with joy, thinking she’d at last seen a mermaid. Jenny shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, This is where I live. Strange things happen. Years later, as she drove me home from a party, I mentioned that I was having trouble breathing but it was likely nothing, probably an allergy to dust in my attic or pollen in the fields. I might have ignored the fact that I was often winded and dizzy, but Jenny insisted I go the ER in a manner that felt somehow sage and inarguable. When I went to the hospital the following day, the doctors discovered a collapsed lung and something “suspicious.” All around us things tried to announce their true nature. Recently, I emailed Jenny to ask about post-Trump anxiety, preppers, and how the novel, and the author, can create quiet beauty in a time of terrible music. INTERVIEWER Was there a particular moment that led to the inception of this novel? OFFILL The novel came out of years and years of talking about extinction and climate change with my friend, the novelist Lydia Millet. At a certain point, all of it just added up and I thought, what is wrong with me that I still think about this so abstractly, that I still don’t feel it? So in a way the process of writing Weather was about trying to move from thinking about what is happening to feeling the immensity and sadness of it. I was also struck by an article I read about how a well-known British environmentalist, Paul Kingsnorth, was walking away from years of campaigning because he believed hopes were being raised falsely that we could still stop or contain the climate crisis. The article was rather glibly titled “It’s the End of the World as We Know It … and He Feels Fine.” In fact, he went on to found a group for artists and writers called Dark Mountain. You can read their manifesto here. It begins quite chillingly with this passage: Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die. The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives. What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. A very early draft of Weather had the working title “Learning to Die.” Read More
February 11, 2020 At Work Witchcraft and Brattiness: An Interview with Amina Cain By Martin Riker I met Amina Cain in the early aughts, when I took over her spot as roommate to a mutual friend in a Wolcott walk-up in Chicago. Amina would come by with her new roommates, a perfectly friendly couple who nonetheless seemed rather fancy to me, as did anyone back then who talked easily about Roland Barthes. But Amina was not fancy; if anything, she had a sort of radical simplicity. Long before I’d read her writing, even longer before I published any of it (my wife and I published her second book through our press, Dorothy, in 2013), my impression of Amina was of a unique soul, quietly pursuing thoughts and concerns outside the more or less conventional life everyone else was living. People change—I, for one, have come to love reading, teaching, and talking about Roland Barthes. But Amina seems less to have changed than to have become more fully the person she always was, with this important difference: over the interceding years, she has beautifully articulated her vision in two story collections and, now, a novel. Indelicacy, out in February from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a work of feminist existentialism, or existentialist feminism—searching, like Lispector, and lucid, like Camus. The story follows Vitória, a poor cleaning woman at an art museum, who marries into money and begins a journey of artistic self-discovery as she navigates society, friendship, and marriage. It is a novel about class and art, about the roles available to women and the instinct for something more. In 176 nimbly woven pages, it brings together many recurring themes or concerns of Amina’s earlier work, things like looking, walking, art, freedom, self-awareness, silence, and the possibilities of life outside the patriarchy. This interview was conducted by email over a couple of weeks in December. INTERVIEWER There’s a story about how the young Donald Barthelme, wondering what sort of writer he wanted to be, attended an early performance of Waiting for Godot and discovered in Beckett a path toward his own sound. Not his voice or his style, but his sound, like a musician. Like Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk. Miles didn’t just have a style, he reimagined what a trumpet sounds like. In thinking about what makes your writing unique, the best starting point I’ve come up with is that you have not just a voice, but a sound. I suspect that what I experience as your sound has as much to do with your attitude toward literature as with the particular words you choose to use, so I wanted to ask first about your relationship to writing in this general way—what sort of experience does writing give you and what sort of experiences do you hope your writing will give others? CAIN I like imagining Barthelme making this kind of discovery while watching Waiting for Godot. I’m so used to talking about voice and about tone, but I think you’re right, sound more specifically comes into it, too. To consider sound when thinking about fiction is reorienting in a really nice way, and it may actually be what’s drawn me to certain writers, that I’ve heard the sound of their writing so strongly and satisfyingly in my mind. And some stories and novels do that more than others. Sometimes, as a reader, you’re just sinking into the world or space that’s appearing before you, or you’re urged on by the story, but sometimes fiction presents itself in this other way as well, to be heard. I’m happy to think that my writing has a sound. I certainly hear it when I work, and when writing is going well, I’m pulled along by it. Sometimes I whisper or mutter what I’m writing. With particular sentences, it feels like I am in them somehow, or that they are taking me over, that I am sitting at my desk with them, that they are part of what gives me access to a story. In order to write at all, I suppose I need this kind of experience, to be possessed by something, carried along, and this is what writing gives me, a kind of space that becomes more animate and striking than the physical space I’m in, or that joins with it. And in turn this is probably what makes me continue to write, to have access to this kind of moment, which sometimes feels closer to experiencing a work of music or art than reading. I want the reader to be able to encounter this kind of moment as well, and I hope I’ve been able to do that. On a very basic level, I want to create experience itself for readers, not just a narrative, whatever that experience ends up being for them. Read More
February 4, 2020 At Work The Body Is a Place: An Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch By Cornelia Channing Two pages into Lidia Yuknavitch’s story “The Pull,” a young girl recalls her childhood as “the kind of story that makes your chest grow tight as you listen.” This would be a fitting description for most of the stories in Yuknavitch’s new collection, Verge, a bracing and frequently brutal book that explores the darkest margins of human desire in hybrid, fragmentary prose. As the title suggests, Verge is a book full of precipices. The protagonists include a child trafficking organs through an Eastern European black market, a teenage girl fantasizing about the men at a prison near her house, and a boxer with a threatening heart condition. Despite their differences, Yuknavitch’s characters share a certain precariousness. They are at moments of transition, standing on ledges of various kinds—emotional, societal, ethical and, in one case, literal—grappling with whether or not to jump. I first encountered Yuknavitch’s writing in college, when a friend thrust her memoir The Chronology of Water into my hands at a party. “You have to read this,” she insisted. “It broke my brain.” The book, which has developed something of a cult following, opens with Yuknavitch standing in the shower after the stillbirth of her daughter. The intimate account of sexual abuse and drug addiction is as formally innovative as it is harrowing. It broke my brain (and my heart), too. In addition to her memoir, Yuknavitch is the author of four novels, including the best sellers The Small Backs of Children and The Book of Joan. Verge is her first collection of stories. Yuknavitch writes about the body, particularly the ways bodies function as sites of emotional experience, intelligence, and memory. In an essay in The New Yorker, Garth Greenwell writes: “Yuknavitch’s sex scenes are remarkable among current American novelists, not just for their explicitness but for the way she uses them to pursue questions of agency, selfhood, and the ethical implications of making art.” Whether depicting sex or trauma or splendor, her writing is visceral. At several points while reading Verge, I found myself curled into a ball, my fingers gripping the pages so tightly they almost tore the paper. It was as if the words had crawled off the page and under my skin. For this interview, Yuknavitch spoke with me over the phone from her writing studio in Portland, Oregon, a room she describes as “a big mess full of all sorts of trinkets and talismans—bones, rocks, hair, weird shells, and other witchy things.” She was generous and precise, frequently pausing midsentence to clarify her use of a particular word or phrase. “The way we say things matters a great deal,” she explained. “But I’m longing for the day when we invent beautiful and agitating new words for all of it.” Read More
January 21, 2020 At Work Errant Daughters: A Conversation between Saidiya Hartman and Hazel Carby By Saidiya Hartman Left: Hazel Carby. Right: Saidiya Hartman. On a rainy winter morning, Hazel Carby arrived at my office in Columbia University’s Philosophy Hall to discuss her new book, Imperial Intimacies, which is a history of empire, slavery, colonialism, and migration written in the form of a memoir. This eloquent and moving account of the entanglements of empire is narrated from the perspective of a young black girl of Welsh and Jamaican descent trying to survive in postwar Britain, a world that would prefer for her not to exist at all and that never for a moment fails to see her as an outsider, an eternal alien. “Where are you from?” is the question that each day challenges her right to belong, that routinely marks her as a foreigner in the country where she was born. The narrative advances on dual tracks and the story oscillates between “the girl” and the “I” of the adult narrator, a scholar and researcher, in search of the pieces of her past and reckoning with what it means to be black and British. Imperial Intimacies sets out to challenge “the binary thinking that opposed colonial center and colonized margin” and the conviction that British identity is predicated on the non-belonging of black and brown people, whether citizens, migrants, or refugees. The book does so by traversing the “geographies of pain” that emerge in the wake of empire; connecting the rural hamlets of Wales and Jamaica; linking the factory, workhouse, and plantation; following the dense web of connections between the lives of peasants and workers, soldiers and the enslaved; and tracing “the perverse lines of descent” created by racial slavery. The movement of conscripts and migrants and young working women and errant daughters reveal the forms of violence and domination, exploitation and precariousness that connect the imperial metropole to the colony. Imperial Intimacies is an assemblage comprised of the recollections of a precocious and lonely young girl in postwar Britain and the arduous research of a scholar “pitting memory, history and poetics against each other” to produce a story comfortable with the unresolvable contradictions and mysteries of the past. Stories shared in the kitchen and recollected from the sick bed compete with the archive regarding the truth of what happened when. The scholar’s research discloses the rifts and failures that no one can bear to admit—a stint in the work house and the lines of kinship ruptured by the categories of human and slave, master and object of property, free black and chattel. Imperial Intimacies explores and intensifies the conflict between familial stories, national histories, imperial accounts, and archival documents. Carby writes across these registers to trouble and unsettle national and imperial projects. Hers is an account of Britain articulated in the relation between two islands and in the explication of personal and public inventories, which range from the political arithmetic of imperial governance and the double-entry bookkeeping of the slave ledger to the brutal and terrifying acts staged in a kitchen—a mother’s lessons in duty and sacrifice and a suicidal father lying unconscious on the linoleum floor. At every turn, Carby refuses to tell a tidy or convenient story and instead produces an account of empire that is as expansive as it is heartbreaking. Read More
January 14, 2020 At Work Promiscuity Is a Virtue: An Interview with Garth Greenwell By Ilya Kaminsky I first met Garth Greenwell when we were both undergraduates. At that time, Garth had studied music and wrote very beautiful poetry. His native talent with the English language was evident to anyone who met him or saw him speak. His commitment to writing was inspirational; even as a young student, he lived in a room with two cats and many, many hundreds of books. He could talk about poetry for hours, and everything he said was formulated in eloquent, unpredictable sentences. Twenty years have passed since then, as have many poems, three books of prose, and thousands of miles between us. Garth and I have since crossed paths in Michigan, Washington, DC, New York City, Iowa, Texas, and several times in Sofia, Bulgaria, where he lived for a number of years and where all of his books are set. He still speaks in more beautiful sentences than anyone else I know. There is simply no one like him, no one so able to give musical shape to ideas both on a page and in person. His books, the prize-winning novella Mitko, the much-acclaimed novel What Belongs To You, and now the new work, Cleanness, all vibrate with intelligence and passion, and with exquisite control of language. Garth Greenwell has received the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, What Belongs To You was selected as a best book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. He lives in Iowa City. When we conducted this conversation, Garth was in Iowa and I was in Atlanta, so the following took place over email. INTERVIEWER As I was reading Cleanness, I couldn’t help but think of lines from Louise Gluck. “I thought / that pain meant / I was not loved. / It meant I loved.” I thought also of Catullus’s famous line: “I hate and love.” Your work captures this tension with enviable clarity and precision. Can you speak a little bit about this? GREENWELL The whole point of art, for me, is to give us tools to explore feelings or situations or dilemmas that defeat our other ways of making meaning. When a situation is so vertiginous, so ethically complex, so emotionally fraught, that I feel like I’m staring into an abyss—that’s when I feel moved to make art, when I feel I need the peculiar tools of fiction to figure out what I think. I mean, to inhabit my bewilderment. I think art is the realm in which we can give full rein to the ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt that we often feel we have to suppress in other kinds of expression—in our political speech, say. I think an ability to dwell in ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt is a central virtue of humanness. I think it’s crucial to any thinking that might adequately capture the complexity of reality. INTERVIEWER Between is the word reviewers of your work mention most often. Your work is described as mapping the territory between vulnerability and sustainability, between love and alienation, between desire and shame, between passion and confusion. Where do you locate this “between”? GREENWELL The “Ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds,” Stevens calls for at the end of “Idea of Order at Key West” have always seemed to me like a goal of art. I’m drawn to art that expands and multiplies complexity, art that seeks ever finer gradations of feeling and thought. When do we ever feel a single feeling, or for long? When are we ever wholehearted? How long can we stay in a single place, or stay there happily? Between-ness is the human condition, it seems to me. Certainly itinerancy has characterized my life. Between-ness is also the condition of art. We love to draw lines and borders. Desire and art-making are border-crossing impulses. Promiscuity—an eagerness for mixture, excitement at the new things arrived at through unexpected encounters—is one of the virtues I most admire in thinking, in art-making, in life. Read More
January 9, 2020 At Work Silicon Valley Hustling: An Interview with Anna Wiener By Pete Tosiello Anna Weiner (Photo: Russell Perkins) As a contributing writer for The New Yorker, Anna Wiener files dispatches from San Francisco that home in on the Silicon Valley’s human stories with a subtlety elided by consumer data sets and algorithmic models. Contextualized by her own professional experience at a succession of Bay Area internet platforms, she’s plumbed LinkedIn-friendly headlines about earnings reports and funding rounds in order to interrogate the culture: the restrictive gatekeeping of seed accelerators and venture capital, the unlikely marriage of California bohemianism with corporate libertarianism, and the lonely homogeneity of modern, online cities. By analyzing the structures behind the tech industry’s most valuable and ubiquitous products, she conveys these phenomena as natural, if not inevitable, byproducts. Wiener’s memoir Uncanny Valley maps her own coming-of-age during the Valley’s 2010s rush, as well as the industry’s simultaneous loss of innocence. Frustrated at her dead-end assistant job with a New York literary agency, she jumps at the opportunity to join a short-lived ebook start-up, then sets west to work at a series of big-data SaaS (Software as a Service) companies that promise excitement and equity in exchange for cultish devotion. As a support specialist, she inadvertently finds herself witness to Gamergate, Pizzagate, data breaches, and the ad-tech surveillance boom that fed the 2016 election. The Bay Area, and soon the nation, are seized by palpably unsustainable wells of funding, and the visible indicators of gaping income inequality in the city itself are viewed as markers of progress. Eschewing the caffeinated, self-referential keenness that defined the decade’s online writing, Wiener is cerebral and diagnostic in her observance of escalating corporate surveillance. I first emailed Anna in early 2016 to express my appreciation of her n+1 story on start-up burnout; at the time I’d been pulling eighty-hour weeks at a doomed Flatiron District data start-up, and her portrayal of infantilizing conformity, circular marketing speak, and opaque executive boys’ clubs seemed remarkably true to my own experience. In December 2019, we met at a bar in her native Brooklyn neighborhood, which, like San Francisco, has been transformed by coworking spaces, fluorescent fast-casual chains, and a shiny new arena that houses a professional basketball team owned by a consortium of local tech czars. INTERVIEWER I’m interested in the idea of a professional meritocracy. You write about, on the one hand, being conditioned by traditional liberal arts values, and then landing in Silicon Valley where the “meritocracy” is almost flipped. It’s less about degrees and accomplishments than hustle, ambition, and the ability to sell oneself. Looking back, which of those, if either, do you find more empowering? WIENER I wouldn’t call either one empowering. I think they just have their own rules, their own networks. In practice, the two value systems aren’t that different—it seems to come down to marketing. Publishing has a ton of problems. Gatekeeping, tiny networks, compensation low enough that, when combined with the emphasis on cultural capital, is prohibitive and exclusive. I’m a beneficiary of this—I went on five networking coffee dates, a chain of referrals, before being sent the job listing for the assistant position I took in publishing. Both industries are pretty homogeneous. In tech, meritocracy seems to be used as a cover story for social inequities. Not everyone has the opportunity to prove themselves in the same way. My sense is that underrepresented minorities in tech don’t get a pass so easily—I think you’ll tend to find that those groups are heavily credentialed. At the first start-up I worked for in San Francisco, the job listing for customer support representatives came to read, “Relevant work experience or a degree from a good college.” The CEO, it’s worth mentioning, had left college to found the company at age nineteen or twenty. It’s like the difference between someone who went to Yale and someone who dropped out of Stanford. I think both of these industries inherit the problems of a larger social landscape. Something that’s really valuable in publishing is the idea of taste. The concept of taste is riddled with sexist, racist, classist assumptions. But for a lot of people, it comes down to an individual feeling, an individual orientation toward a form of cultural production. It’s not measurable. Like you said, in tech it’s more about your capacity for hustling, less about who you are than what you say you can do, what you generate or say you’ll generate. Both strike me as forms of storytelling, in the branding sense. Read More