June 5, 2018 At Work My Own Boundaries Seem to Be Fading: An Interview with Lauren Groff By Lucie Shelly Photo credit: Megan Brown. “I still wouldn’t choose Florida as my home state, but I’m glad it chose me,” Lauren Groff replied when I asked why she had chosen to live on the peninsula full of snakes and rains, marshes and forest. Still, the author, whose works include the Obama favorite Fates and Furies and the acclaimed collection Delicate Edible Birds, named her new book after this unchosen habitat. Florida brings together eleven stories written over the course of the dozen years Groff lived in the state, but she never intended to pay homage. “The fact that these are all Florida stories comes out of the fact that I feel ambivalent or unsettled about the place where I live,” she said. It seems almost contradictory that ambivalence, as a mode, would be the seed for such potent fiction, but one of Groff’s distinguishing skills is the ability to write within such contradictions. Her work is subversive, but quietly—it captures what’s mysterious about the inevitable, what’s bizarre about the inescapable. This collection has some familiar motifs from her novels—long marriages, frightful domesticity, foreignness, and the surreality of motherhood. And while most of the stories have appeared elsewhere and received big awards, brought together, these narratives of young families, divorced couples, and unconventional women vibrate with something new. These are stories about how human nature is an extension of the natural world, how our relationships are contoured by greater forces, and how time is delivered by nature—regardless of the checks and measurements we superimpose. The rains in Florida are biblical, to say the least. The margins between earthly and celestial routinely dissolve. From the little girls abandoned alone on a tropical island in “Dogs Go Wolf” to the mother in “Flower Hunters” who reads the naturalist William Bartram while her children trick-or-treat in a storm, the characters in Groff’s stories experience the fluctuations of the outdoors on an elemental level. Nature is eroticized in a way that is not quite sexual yet wholly sensual. I asked the author for a word to describe this writing technique, one that transforms humans into phenomena, creatures—while at the same time placing, with precision, those characters in their environment. Her suggestion was wilding. This call-and-response between domesticity and nature animates quotidian banalities, such as adultery in “For the Love of God, for the Love of God” and “Eyewall,” parenthood in “The Midnight Zone” and “Yport,” and aging in “Above and Below” and “Salvador.” Groff takes the structures we mistake as essential to life and makes them look absurd before nature’s implacability. The stories in Florida suggest that the relationship between humans and our planet—that home none of us chose—transcends the power struggle of dominance and submission. I corresponded with Groff as she was bouncing between Iceland and the state that claims these stories. “I love Iceland—and yet I felt immediate relief on touching down here,” she wrote. “After twelve years, Florida has, despite everything, become home.” INTERVIEWER Many of the women in this collection are Florida transplants, once northerners “dazzled by the flora and fauna.” Do you still feel that sense of wonder? GROFF Most days, I have a moment or two of wonder. Yesterday, when I took the dog for a walk after dinner at sunset, there was a giant dead rat snake on the sidewalk that I marveled at, and then I came home in the dark through such a pungent smell of jasmine, which is in full bloom right now, and my head got a little swoony from the potency of the scent. Read More
May 31, 2018 At Work Carnival and Chaos: An Interview with Herbert Gold By Robert Kaiser Herbert Gold, now ninety-four and still clacking away on his Royal typewriter, was once a famous author. His most successful novel, Fathers, was admired by critics and read widely: it was a best seller for many weeks in 1967. In the New York Times, Eliot Fremont-Smith called it a “beautiful … book, the best and most deeply felt that this talented, sensitive and dispassionate author has yet produced.” It was Gold’s seventh published volume of fiction; there would be nearly twenty more, plus six books of nonfiction. Saul Bellow was a personal friend and an admirer; he published short stories by Gold in his magazine, The Noble Savage. Vladimir Nabokov put one of Gold’s stories, “Death in Miami Beach,” on his personal list of favorite American short stories. When the success of Lolita allowed Nabokov to give up academia to write full-time, he chose Gold to succeed him as a lecturer on Russian literature at Cornell; and in 1967, Gold interviewed Nabokov for The Paris Review. Gold was neither as successful nor as famous as many of the Jewish American writers of his generation, but he was no slouch. He’s left his mark on twentieth-century American literature, even if he rarely made a splash, and has lived as a writer for nearly seven decades, outliving many of his contemporaries. He knows that his end is nigh, but he’s in no hurry to leave. He has been writing poems for the first time in decades, and has a new collection of verse called Nearing the Exit. An interview with Gold is challenging because—despite his remarkably good health—he is nearly deaf. This interview took place in Gold’s rent-controlled apartment on Broadway, near the top of Russian Hill, in San Francisco, where he has lived for half a century. It’s a quiet spot with a glorious view of the Bay Bridge. Gold won’t say exactly how much rent he pays but admits that it’s less than a thousand dollars a month, surely one of the best housing deals in the city, and a fitting spot for telling the stories he’s been telling for most of a century. Read More
May 24, 2018 At Work This Flesh Container We Call a Body: An Interview with Rita Bullwinkel By Patrick Cottrell Rita Bullwinkel’s first story collection, Belly Up, is a kind of miracle. Imbued with darkness and absurdity, the stories in Belly Up announce Bullwinkel as a writer of deep intelligence and bold style. A snake thinks of himself as a pear in a tree, two high school girls fantasize about turning into plants, and a woman becomes slowly unhinged after witnessing a car accident. Bullwinkel is a gifted technician of words and moods. The quotidian is turned on its side. The economy is so bad that instead of buying a bra, a mother pays a man off Craigslist to hold up her daughter’s breasts. A missing thumb leads to a suicide. Desire for knowledge leads to misery. The dead come back. The scale of what is possible in Bullwinkel’s worlds is overwhelming. Upon finishing this book, I was deeply moved. A couple years ago, when Bullwinkel and I first met, she told me that she had walked from where she was staying in East Los Angeles to our meeting place, in Chinatown. In Los Angeles, there are no direct walking routes; there are no grids or city blocks. There are steep hills and chickens in backyards and sidewalks in disrepair. She said the walk took her over an hour. And yet, I was surprised to find, she wasn’t sweating. A year later, I spent a few nights in her apartment above a hardware store in San Francisco, where she lives with her partner, a musician. I remember art on the walls, various musical instruments, and plants with bright-green waxy leaves spilling over the edge of a kitchen table. Bullwinkel is very good at keeping things alive. Her home, like her writing, gives one the impression of a peculiar and generous mind. This interview was conducted over email. INTERVIEWER When you were young, were you focused on writing, or were you interested in other arts? BULLWINKEL I didn’t start writing until I was in college. Before college I had never read any books of fiction that I liked, so I thought I didn’t like fiction. I used to make all of my own clothes. I also painted and made furniture out of broken surfboards and other trash I found in dumpsters. I was not very good at any of these things, but I knew I liked making things. The thing I was best at as a child was sports. I was recruited to play water polo in college, which I did all four years. I now view that as a completely insane and irrational thing to have done. I have almost no connection anymore to that part of my identity. Read More
May 23, 2018 At Work The Life and Times of the Literary Agent Georges Borchardt By Michael Meyer There’s a good chance Georges Borchardt was responsible for shepherding at least one of your favorite writers to publication. After immigrating to New York from war-torn France at age nineteen in 1947, Borchardt found work as an assistant at a literary agency. One of the first sales he completed on his own was a play by an Irishman titled Waiting for Godot. Over the next seven decades, Borchardt introduced American readers to works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Eugene Ionesco, and found a home for Elie Wiesel’s oft-rejected Night. He has represented John Gardner, Mavis Gallant, Stanley Elkin, and John Ashbery. Today his clients include Ian McEwan, T. C. Boyle, and Susan Minot as well as the nonfiction writers Tracy Kidder, Anne Applebaum, Adam Hochschild, and—somehow—me. Wry and self-deprecating, Borchardt’s French-accented answers are often punctuated with a laugh that sounds like a mixture of joy and disbelief. This isn’t surprising when you consider the path his extraordinary life has taken—from hiding in plain sight in Nazi-occupied France to representing five Nobel laureates and eight Pulitzer winners. For his contributions to literature, in 2010 he became the first literary agent to be awarded France’s highest award, the Legion of Honour. Borchardt and his wife, Anne, have run their own agency together since 1967. We spoke over sandwiches in his office on East Fifty-Seventh Street and Lexington. INTERVIEWER When you began in 1947, were agents as entrenched in publishing as they are today? BORCHARDT When I started working as an agent, I didn’t even know what an agent was. I had never heard of the profession. And there was no such profession in France. The job I had, it didn’t even say “agent” on the letterhead. It said “Authors and Publishers Representative.” It took me at least six months to figure out what we were really doing. Agents were not held in great esteem. For a long time, publishers felt that agents were like parasites. When they were polite, they called them “middlemen”—not realizing that they themselves were middlemen and that the only important ones were the authors and the readers. INTERVIEWER How did you get that first job? BORCHARDT After I arrived in New York, I went to a number of employment agencies, and they always said, What’s your American experience? Well, I had none. But then again, I didn’t have any experience. I was nineteen. The son of a man who had worked for my father in Paris—a high school kid—helped me write a classified ad for the New York Times. I put two ads in the Times, and two letters came in response–both from the same person, Marion Saunders. She owned an agency that specialized in foreign writers—they had recently sold Albert Camus’s The Stranger for $350 to Knopf. In addition to getting coffee and bookkeeping, I was supposed to read French books. I thought that was amazing—I could get paid to read, and I could get free books. I mean, during the war, there were no books in France. There was no paper, there was very little being printed, and all of my books and the family’s books had disappeared. At the office in New York, I would see things that were interesting and think, I may not be able to sell this, but I may as well read it. It was a way to build my library. Did I know I was an agent? Of course not. I really didn’t know what that was. One thing the war had taught me was a dislike for owning things. Because everything I liked as a child had disappeared—my stamp collection, my books. I mean, in those days, when you gave a book to a child, it was not an insult. If I didn’t ask for a book for Christmas, I asked to have one of my favorite books bound. They came uncut, with paper covers. I would go to a place and select the end papers and the leather for the binding, and then I would have this beautiful object to take home. Well, all these things were gone. INTERVIEWER What did you read as a kid? BORCHARDT In the lycée at the time, the world more or less stopped at the end of the nineteenth century. I wasn’t taught Proust or Gide. You didn’t learn anything about foreign literature. If you wanted to read Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky—that’s not what was being taught. But I was fond of translations—Ivanhoe, James Fenimore Cooper. I collected a whole series of “tales” books—Tales of the Aztecs, Tales of the Greeks, Tales of the Bible, and so on. In school, I was always first in récitation, memorizing scenes by Racine or Molière. I always got the main roles. I thought I might become an actor. Read More
May 16, 2018 At Work Boy Genus: An Interview with Michael Kupperman By Eric Farwell Michael Kupperman’s work traffics in one-off and absurdist premises and is immersed in a certain kind of Americana nostalgia. His ongoing series Tales Designed to Thrizzle, which comprises eight issues collected in two volumes, features jokes that riff on everything from Dick Tracy villains to the Hardy Boys; Mark Twain and Albert Einstein team up for raunchy adventures; and fake 1940s-era ads for haunted chewing gum punctuate oddball comics about magicians and Picasso. Kupperman’s work is notable not just for its impeccable comedy but for lampooning its subjects in a contemporaneous style and language, making the comic simultaneously irreverent and ahistorical. It was a surprise, then, to learn that his latest effort, All the Answers, isn’t humorous. The graphic memoir is a serious look at his father’s time as the math whiz on the popular 1940s radio and television program Quiz Kids, a show that featured hyper-bright children and teens answering difficult questions on topics in their area of expertise. While most kids ended their tenure on the show before high school, Joel Kupperman stayed on well into his teens, spending a decade or so living as a minor celebrity—a life that was fraught with anxiety and discomfort. As an adult, he repressed the experience and refused to talk about it until Kupperman began researching his years as a child and teen sensation. On a sunny day in April, Kupperman and I spoke by phone about the book’s impact on his family and his own understanding of his father’s trauma. INTERVIEWER All the Answers begins with your early awareness of a decline in your father’s mental acuity. Why did you decide to make that decline the subject of a book? KUPPERMAN It was really a combination of personal and professional coming together. I was looking for a more serious project to do, because all my work up until that point had been humorous, and my career trajectory was not going in a positive direction—it felt like things were falling apart. I also realized that my father was losing his mental cohesion and that I had very little time if I was going to get anything from him. In some ways, honestly, I didn’t want to do this book because it was so personally painful. If I’d had any excuses not to do it, I would probably have abandoned it in the early stages. Once I passed a certain point with it, and some realizations about my family and myself had become apparent, I really had to complete it. Read More
May 4, 2018 At Work Sound Tracks: An Interview with Simone Forti By Barbara Browning Simone Forti, 2012. “Someone must have handed me a piece of flexible tubing from the hardware store and shown me that I could play it, the pitch rising and falling according to how hard I’d blow through it. It was around 1970. I tied a red kerchief to this horn and called it my molimo, after the instrument the Mbuti Pygmies play to wake up their mother, the forest … They claim that the molimo is the sound, not the object.” (From the notes in Al Di Là.) Photo: Jason Underhill Simone Forti is primarily known as a central figure in American postmodern dance, but her work in movement has always been interdisciplinary. The foundational pieces she called Dance Constructions, for instance (first performed at the Reuben Gallery in 1960, and, the following year, in Yoko Ono’s loft), were, as the name implies, sculptural as well as choreographic.Lesser known are the soundscapes she’s created, both alone and with others, throughout her career. The first time her sonic experiments received serious attention was in a 2012 gallery show, “Sounding,” at the Box Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition featured recordings of her soundscapes alongside projections and images of original performances; the gallery included areas with benches, carpeting, and earphones where visitors could, presumably, close their eyes and pay focused attention to those sounds. A piece titled “Bottom” (1968) is composed of four five-minute “blocks” of sound: monotonous drumming, three voices holding a chord, a vacuum cleaner, and Forti whistling. Another, “Censor” (1961), involves loud singing accompanied by the noisy shaking of a pan full of nails. Today, Forti is releasing Al Di Là, her first full-length collection of recordings: nine tracks, compiled with the assistance of the composer Tashi Wada. The Italian title of the album is a slight alteration of the title of one of the tracks, “Dal Di Là” (1972). The former might be translated as “toward the beyond,” the latter “from the beyond.” Forti’s own translation of the song’s lyrics, which she sings in a haunting a cappella, is “I’m awaiting a song from afar, from afar, a song of goodbye from afar. For now I’ve seen the game I was playing, slowly leaving the earth and drifting far among the stars.” Read More