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
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