April 27, 2018 At Work Technical, Tactical, and Merciless: An Interview with Marcus Wicker By Alex Dueben Marcus Wicker. Although both his books are influenced by the rhythms of hip-hop and spoken word, Marcus Wicker’s second book of poetry, Silencer, is a noticeable departure. His first book, Maybe the Saddest Thing, looks at Dave Chappelle, RuPaul, and Kenny G in an exploration of masculinity and pop culture. But after the killings of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and so many others, Wicker decided to turn his second book toward the conversation around race and blackness in America. In Silencer, Wicker explores fear and rage, the need to be hyperaware of one’s surroundings, and the worlds of suburbia and academia—worlds that can sometimes lull people into a false sense of security. His poems find joy in language and nature, comfort in religion, and express both pride and vulnerability—often all in the same poem. In his first book, Wicker writes, as many writers do, about his faith in the act of writing. In Silencer, there are no such poems. Instead, he refuses to be silent and refuses to settle for easy answers with the confidence of a poet saying what matters most. I reached Wicker by phone in Memphis, where he teaches at the University of Memphis M.F.A. program. We spoke about code-switching, prayer, the power of individual experience to address political topics, and the Wu-Tang Clan. —Alex Dueben Read More
April 26, 2018 At Work The Child Thing: An Interview with Sheila Heti By Claudia Dey Sheila Heti. Photo: Sylvia Plachy. I met Sheila Heti at her home in the west end of Toronto on January 31, 2018, three months before the publication of her novel Motherhood. Heti opened her front door with one hand while the other gripped the leather collar of her dog, a Rottweiler named Feldman with a handsome boulder-size head. They led me up the stairs to a rambling second-floor apartment. Heti washed fresh fruit and made black tea before we retreated to her writing studio. We sat facing each other on a velvet couch, Heti’s desk and a hard chair in the opposite corner. She explained that her boyfriend had just rearranged the seating area and with the positioning of the armchairs, coffee table, and bookshelf, it was now much better. Feldman moved between the furniture, negotiating a space for his massive, shining body. He curled himself between us and panted heavily. When I listened back to the tape of our conversation, his breaths sounded as if something were being inflated. Heti explained that she and her boyfriend gave him the name Feldman so he wouldn’t seem so scary to others. Feldman eventually relocated to the floor. As we spoke, Sheila occasionally dropped fruit into his mouth. Sheila Heti was born in Toronto on Christmas Day in 1976 to Jewish Hungarian parents. After high school, she went on to study playwriting at the National Theatre School in Montreal (she dropped out after one year), then art history and philosophy at the University of Toronto. She began publishing in her early twenties with the short story collection The Middle Stories (2001) and went on to produce work in nearly every form: collaborations in The Chairs Are Where the People Go (2011) and Women in Clothes (2014); a play, All Our Happy Days Are Stupid (2015); a book for children, We Need a Horse (2011); and the novels Ticknor (2005), How Should a Person Be? (2010), and now, Motherhood. Alongside her writing, Heti cofounded the lecture series Trampoline Hall and served as the interviews editor at The Believer. In Motherhood, Heti takes on her most controversial and private debate yet—whether or not to have a child. A brilliant, radical, and moving book, it is sure to cause the cultural riot her earlier work has. Heti answered every question without hesitation. Her attention never wavered. We laughed often. At times, she turned the question on me. I was struck by her precision and curiosity. We edited the conversation over email for length, but otherwise, it reflects the hours we spent together in her studio as it darkened, neither of us wanting to move from the couch to turn on a light. Though its red glow did not enter the curtained room, it is worth noting that we met on the day of the rare astronomical phenomenon called the super blue blood moon. Heti and I talked about the noxious divide between mothers and nonmothers, art as a form of offspring, and how every book has its platonic ideal. We talked about the dog I dog sit, who inside the house is aloof and manly but outside becomes the cliché of a dog: leaping at other smaller dogs and peeing on pee. Heti and I agreed that writers must also have inside and outside versions of themselves. As Heti said, “Outside, you have to be a different dog.” —Claudia Dey Read More
April 18, 2018 At Work The Tragedy of Going Back: An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri By Dan Piepenbring In 2012, having published four books and won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome. There, she experienced what she described as “a radical transition, a state of complete bewilderment.” A set of preconceptions had hardened around her writing, and in Italy, Lahiri hoped to jettison these in pursuit of a new vulnerability. She looked to the Italian language to reinvent herself on the page, restoring the joy and freedom in her work. One consequence of this immersion was In Other Words, Lahiri’s memoir about language, and her first book written in Italian. (An English translation by Ann Goldstein appeared in 2015.) Just as important, in their way, were her first efforts at translation—a pair of novels, Ties and Trick, by her friend Domenico Starnone, the author of more than a dozen books and a winner of Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize. Ties, published last year, tells the story of a marriage in extremis and dissects a lifetime of accrued routine, deception, and petty resentment. When it came to light that Starnone is married to the writer who goes by Elena Ferrante, critics returned to Ties, suddenly eager to read it as a counterpart to Ferrante’s own Days of Abandonment. Trick, Lahiri’s second Starnone translation, out in March, is another vivisection of family life, a novel as lean and unflinching as its predecessor. An elderly illustrator, Daniele, visits his childhood apartment, now his daughter’s home, to babysit his four-year-old grandson. The boy’s frenetic energy fills Daniele with foreboding, forcing him to reckon with his past and his senescence—to accept that his creative powers are waning and his body is failing him. In a pair of phone conversations—one last year, after Ties came out, and one more recently, following the publication of Trick—I talked to Lahiri about the raw power behind Starnone’s work; about her approach to translation and her love of the Italian language; and about balconies, which are scary. Read More
March 19, 2018 At Work Big-Tent Recovery: An Interview with Leslie Jamison By Chris Kraus I read the manuscript of Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering last summer in Winnipeg, Canada, when I was going to several twelve-step meetings a week. I knew and admired Jamison’s 2014 breakthrough essay collection, The Empathy Exams; her ability to transparently render her meticulous, passionate process of thought astonished me. But The Recovering changed my life. It’s an antimemoir: generous with details of her own experience of addiction and recovery, Jamison insists on the existence, or primacy, of other stories as well. A personal story, she suggests, can be told only in the context of other personal stories and the conditions that shape them. Perhaps most importantly, the book challenges intellectual snobbery. Jamison explains the paradoxically profound and sloganeering rhetorical logic of twelve-step philosophy in ways no one has before. As she’s observed elsewhere, “Clichés lend structure and ritual and glue: They are the subterranean passageways connecting one life to another.” She writes beautifully, with furious clarity. I finished the book wondering why the active, nonjudgmental listening of twelve-step recovery can’t be applied to all realms of life. During the first weeks of the New Year, we wrote emails back and forth. INTERVIEWER In The Recovering, you move between three constellations of material—your own experience with addiction and recovery, the experience of other writers like John Berryman, Jean Rhys, and Charles Jackson, and the history, culture, and ethos of twelve-step programs. Did you always know you’d need to explore all three areas, or did your subjects emerge from the research? JAMISON I always knew I wanted the book to function as a kind of chorus—placing my own story among other stories—rather than offering any single perspective. Though I knew it could become a kind of boast to say, This won’t look like a memoir in the traditional sense. And the book ended up interrogating that, too—exploring the shame of memoir, especially the shame attached to the idea of the addiction memoir as an overplayed and overly familiar genre. Read More
March 15, 2018 At Work I’m the Marmalade: An Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum By Ben Shields In the fall of last year, I found myself in Tenth Avenue’s 192 Books, chatting with a stranger. The man (whose enviable green coat had temporarily distracted me from his visage) was thumbing through a copy of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation. This volume was, we quickly learned, a shared obsession. I was about to ask the man’s name when I suddenly realized there was no need: it was the critic, poet, novelist, performer, and academic Wayne Koestenbaum. A few weeks later, I traveled to Koestenbaum’s nearby apartment to sort through manuscripts, long-forgotten first drafts, personal notebooks, and correspondence as far back as his undergraduate years at Harvard. I had begun cataloguing a daunting portion of his collected works—from academic journal articles to Vogue magazine columns—into a comprehensive bibliography. (The bibliography was the distillation of Koestenbaum’s literary archive, purchased last year by Yale University.) To handle a writer’s work in this way puts one in the privileged position of speaking with the writer about it. The release of Koestenbaum’s new poetry collection, Camp Marmalade, which was published last week, provided another occasion for us to talk of his work. This excellent book is the second volume in a trilogy of what the author calls “trance writing”; the first is The Pink Trance Notebooks. Put simply, the approach allows language to move freely through Koestenbaum as he improvisationally explores subjects dear to his heart and intellect, including stars, sex, and Susan Sontag. The language that appears does not often adhere to expected thematic, syntactic, or logical patterns. Throughout our conversation, we discussed the book’s eccentric aesthetic, as well as subjects ranging from Agnes Moorehead to the theories of Donald Winnicott. Though the interview took place virtually (Koestenbaum in New York, me in Tel Aviv), our sensibilities jibed the same as ever. Read More
March 8, 2018 At Work Buy High, Sell Cheap: An Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky By Elianna Kan Still from El Topo, written, directed, scored, and starring Alejandro Jodorowsky. For more than half a century, Alejandro Jodorowsky has been revered as a master of the surreal—a puppeteer of grotesque fantasy and psychedelic excess. In 1962, he became one of the founders of the Panic Movement in Paris; an avant-garde art collective inspired by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, the group staged extremely violent theatrical “happenings” meant to shock and repel. At the 1968 premiere of Jodorowsky’s first feature-length film, Fando y Lis, a riot broke out. The film was later banned in Mexico for its brutal violence and graphic sexual content. He went on to become a cult figure of American counterculture with his films El topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973), and later, Santa sangre (1989). A falling out with his financial backer resulted in the former two films being embargoed for nearly three decades. Their recirculation, along with the 2013 release of the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune and The Dance of Reality—Jodorowsky’s first film after a twenty-three-year hiatus—restored the filmmaker as a figure of mass worship and fascination. When I encountered Jodorowsky, a wild filmmaker with the mischievous eyes, he seemed more tranquil than I’d expected him to be. I interviewed the now eighty-nine-year-old artist in March of 2015 around the English-language publication of his book Where the Bird Sings Best. The fictionalized autobiography tells the story of his Jewish family’s emigration from Ukraine to Chile and the impact of this history on his own coming-of-age. The book served as the basis for Dance of Reality and his most recent film, Endless Poetry. In both the film and the book, Jodorowsky turns his surrealist wand away from the allegorical figures of his past work toward the members of his own family, spinning them into characters of mythic proportions. They’re over-the-top fairy tales so full of light and sentimentality that they’re almost hard to reconcile with the violent angst of Fando y Lis. We spoke on Skype in Spanish for more than an hour. I was in New York, he was in Paris. I told him my parents were Soviet Jewish refugees and that questions of inherited memory preoccupy me, too, and we talked of how family stories from our past inform our identity, how we reshape and retell those stories. I worried my questions were too personal—more about his own family history and less about the films that had made him a legend—but he responded ecstatically, his voice often rising to a giddy high-pitched tone, and he laughed constantly. About an hour into our conversation, Jodorowsky’s wife, Pascale, interrupted to remind him he had to go soon. He asked if there was anything else I needed to know, anything at all. When we ended our conversation, he forgot to hang up the call. I could hear him walk away and exclaim, with childlike joy, “She was a Jew!” I sat and listened to the rustlings of their domesticity. After about ten minutes, they continued into the next room, and I could no longer hear their voices. The house eventually fell silent. What follows is a translation of our conversation. Read More