September 13, 2011 At Work Ishmael Reed on ‘Juice!’ By J. D. Mitchell Ishmael Reed © Terence Byrnes. Seventy-three-year-old Ishmael Reed has been a major figure in American letters for more than four decades. In April, Dalkey Archive published Juice!, Reed’s first novel in more than fifteen years. Juice! tells the story of a struggling African American cartoonist whose personal and professional life is disrupted by the media frenzy surrounding the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Earlier this summer, Reed, who is based in Oakland, California, responded to some of my questions about his latest work. Juice! is your first novel since 1993. What inspired you to write another novel after all these years? I began this one as soon as I heard about the murders. I was vacationing in Hawaii, and the murders ruined my vacation. The media went berserk over the murder of Nicole Simpson, the kind of ideal white woman—a Rhine maiden—one finds in Nazi art and propaganda, murdered allegedly by a black beast. It was a story that reached into the viscera of the American unconscious, recalling the old Confederate art of the black boogeyman as an incubus squatting on top of a sleeping, half-clad white woman. It was also an example of collective blame. All black men became O. J. The murders ignited a kind of hysteria. Juice! does not have a conventional structure. The novel incorporates courtroom documents, television transcripts, and pieces of visual art. It also plays around quite a bit with time. What gave rise to the novel’s peculiar shape? I try to experiment. Writing a conventional novel would be boring for me. In this novel, I added cartoons. Cartoons were probably my introduction to storytelling as a child, because on Sundays we got The Chattanooga Times, and I’d read the funnies. A publisher wanted to publish Juice! but decided that the cartoons weren’t up to par. So, at the age of seventy, I studied at the Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco, and the cartoons improved so much that I now do political cartoons for The San Francisco Chronicle’s blog, City Brights. Read More
August 30, 2011 At Work Jesmyn Ward on Salvage the Bones By Elizabeth Hoover Jesmyn Ward. Photo: Nerissa Ward. Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones, is set in the fictional Mississippi Gulf town of Bois Sauvage in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. It centers on Esch—fourteen years old and pregnant—and Esch’s family in the aftermath of her mother’s death in childbirth. Her alcoholic and abusive father readies the house for the storm; her brother Randal dreams of a basketball scholarship; her brother Skeetah obsesses over China, his prize pit bull; and Junior, the youngest, clamors for attention. Bois Sauvage, also the setting of her first novel Where the Line Bleeds, was modeled on Ward’s hometown of De Lisle, Mississippi. Ward, the first person in her family to attend college, received her MFA from the University of Michigan and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She teaches at the University of South Alabama. INTERVIEWER Why did you want to write about Hurricane Katrina? WARD I lived through it. It was terrifying and I needed to write about that. I was also angry at the people who blamed survivors for staying and for choosing to return to the Mississippi Gulf Coast after the storm. Finally, I wrote about the storm because I was dissatisfied with the way it had receded from public consciousness. Read More
August 23, 2011 At Work Cathy Park Hong on ‘Engine Empire’ By Robyn Creswell The summer issue of The Paris Review includes a series of poems by Cathy Park Hong. Hong has published two books of poetry, Translating Mo’um (2002) and Dance Dance Revolution (2007). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. The poems published in this issue come from a longer work, entitled “Fort Ballads.” How does it fit into your forthcoming book, Engine Empire? “Fort Ballads” is part of the first section in Engine Empire. The poems in the collection range from a trilogy, ranging from Western ballads to love poems set in present-day industrial China to poems set in a virtual future. “Fort Ballads” follows a band of outlaw fortune-seekers who travel to a California boomtown during the 1800s. The boomtown isn’t real; it’s full of strange, violent, sometimes surreal happenings. It’s my own way of mythologizing California, which is where I’m from. The main character is “Our Jim,” who’s half Comanche Indian. In creating him, I was thinking of the typical iconic Western guys, like Billy the Kid, but his story is also reminiscent of Huck Finn and maybe a little of Faulkner’s Joe Christmas. He’s an orphan, a cipher, a boy trapped between identities, both innocent and vengeful. But the section isn’t all narrative—there are sound poems in there as well, where I let myself wallow in kitschy Western vernacular. Read More
August 16, 2011 At Work Emmy the Great on ‘Virtue’ By Peter Terzian Emmy the Great is the stage name of Emma-Lee Moss. (The moniker was a university joke that stuck.) The twenty-eight-year-old Anglo-Chinese musician first began to attract attention in the mid-2000s, when a set of her acoustic demos, recorded for a school project, began floating around the Internet, and she subsequently became associated with a group of young London-based folk revivalists that included Noah and the Whale, Johnny Flynn, and Mumford and Sons. Her debut album, First Love (2009), was built around acoustic guitar and her bright, quavering voice. But her early songs also reshaped classic indie pop and girl-group tropes into funny, wordy tales of romantic disappointment: a boyfriend who whiles away his life watching back-to-back episodes of 24; a girl who has a one-night affair with a guy who plays her the song “Hallelujah” (“the original Leonard Cohen version,” the narrator makes clear). Moss’s new album, Virtue, is both more mature and more heartbroken. The songs were written around her real-life breakup with her former fiancé, who left her on the eve of their wedding to join a religious order. We met one July morning on London’s Oxford Street (“About to meet Serious Journalist from Abroad … At Top Shop. #igottopickthevenue,” she tweeted) and went to a Soho café. Musicians often say they don’t want to explain their lyrics or talk about the autobiographical elements in their songs because they want the listener to be free to project his or her own stories onto them. But with this album you’ve talked openly to the press about the breakup of your engagement and how it led to these songs. Read More
August 9, 2011 At Work Helen Schulman on ‘This Beautiful Life’ By Brian Gresko Courtesy Denise Bosco. Novelist Helen Schulman doesn’t shy away from controversial subjects. Her last novel, A Day at the Beach, examined a marriage that falls apart hour by agonizing hour over the course of September 11. Her latest, This Beautiful Life, follows the Bergamot family. They seem a picture of success: Richard a high-powered if overly-committed university man, Liz the stay-at-home mom, Jake a high school student on the road to college, and Coco, their adopted daughter of seven. When Jake finds himself the recipient of an erotic video made by a thirteen-year-old with a crush, Daisy, he forwards it to his friends. The video goes viral, the story becomes tabloid fodder, and the repercussions undo his life and bring the fissures in Richard and Liz’s relationship to light. In Spring 1995, The Paris Review published the story that grew into her novel The Revisionist. Schulman, now the Fiction Coordinator of The New School’s Writing Program, chatted with me about the book over a campari and soda and homemade potato chips. What led you to write This Beautiful Life? It started with what was happening in the news—the beginning of “sexting.” One incident in particular, at Horace Mann, had been written up in The New York Times and caused a scuttlebutt among the mothers. I thought I would write a nonfiction book about it, so I wrote Horace Mann, but I was totally stonewalled. Nobody wanted to talk to me. And so I thought, Well then, I’ll make it up. Do you feel novelists have a responsibility to make social commentary in their work? If you tell the truth about the world, you’re always being political, because the world is so highly charged. In these last two books I looked at the times we were living in very closely, almost as if I were a photographer or a social historian. In A Day at the Beach, I was really interested in the culture at the moment of a big event. I wanted to write about the nineties, but I didn’t know how until 9/11 crystallized it. For This Beautiful Life, there were several events in the decade post-9/11 that interested me. One was the incredible, unparalleled greed and rush for money. Another was the Internet infiltrating our lives in a new way. The Internet created a divide between parents and kids even larger than sex, drugs, and rock had in the sixties. Read More
July 26, 2011 At Work Antonio Lobo Antunes on ‘The Land at the End of the World’ By Anderson Tepper Portuguese author Antonio Lobo Antunes is the author of more than twenty books, including the novels The Return of the Caravels, Knowledge of Hell, The Natural Order of Things, The Inquisitors’ Manual, and What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? His book of newspaper “crónicas”—a free-form amalgam of essay and fiction—was published in the U.S. in 2009 under the title The Fat Man and Infinity. Last month, his groundbreaking 1979 novel, South of Nowhere, was reissued in a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa as The Land at the End of the World, and this September Dalkey Archive will release another early novel, The Splendor of Portugal. Both books are dense, kaleidoscopic visions of a modern Portugal scarred by its Fascist past and its bloody colonial wars in Africa. Lobo Antunes has been called “the heir to Conrad and Faulkner” (by George Steiner) and “one of the living writers who will matter most” (by Harold Bloom). I spoke to Lobo Antunes, now sixty-nine, over a scratchy phone connection to his home in Lisbon. Your author bio mentions that you were trained as a psychiatrist and served as a military doctor in Portugal’s war in Angola before becoming a writer. This experience seems to be at the heart of The Land at the End of the World, which takes the form of the soul-baring rant of a Portuguese war veteran honing in on a sexual conquest in a late 1970s Lisbon nightclub. How do you see this novel now, which has since been acclaimed as a literary masterpiece on the absurdities and wretchedness of war? I started that book more than thirty years ago, as a very young man. In the first versions, there was no war at all. In many ways, it’s impossible to speak about the war directly. For me, it was a personal matter. When I arrived in Africa I looked up at the sky and said, “I don’t know these stars. Where am I? What am I doing here?” I just wanted to return alive. I remember we kept calendars and would cross off each day that we were still alive! Read More