February 21, 2019 At Work Love Is Claustrophobic: An Interview with Mark Mayer By Carmen Maria Machado On the surface, Mark Mayer seems like a normal enough guy. He’s polite, a little awkward, and a little anxious to please. When we were at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop together, it was his job to set up the chairs and the mics for readings, and the chairs were always arranged in nice, straight, punctual rows. His stories, too, have a veneer of normalcy. Model-train enthusiasts dutifully mind their toys, a nephew worries about his anorexic uncle, a parks-and-rec employee tries to get laid. But you can sense, beneath the normal, an abiding weirdness and darkness, a fascination with the sinkholes in the back of the mind, the places where consciousness plunges through the cloud floor of this world and into some other one. Mark’s weirdness has something to do with tenderness. Weirdness for its own sake is just quirk, but in Mark’s stories, solid-state relationships undergo a phase change right at the moment when love gets hard. A nephew worried about his aunt and uncle sits in the kitchen creating patterns in the linoleum squares, telling himself there must be some combination that will “unlock” the floor and let him get back to a place he thinks he remembers, a place he calls “the There.” A girl copes with her father’s depression by pretending to have a telepathic connection with a deaf-mute friend, whom she then telepathically dumps. A guy on his way into the navy writes a detailed description of his neighborhood into a text-based online world, imagining it will be a place where he and his girlfriend can have sex while he’s at war. A couple of Mark’s stories are concerned with how the straight male imagination turns toxic, about how misogyny lives in the mind. One young narrator receives dueling lessons in masculinity from his dad and from his mom’s new lover, a female bodybuilder. A guy who finds a “pet” mountain lion in his tree starts obsessing about his own tameness in his new relationship. In one story, a real estate agent for an ascendant Republican client moonlights—or else imagines himself moonlighting—as a homicidal clown. Strongman, lion-tamer, clown… each of the stories in Aerialists links, somewhat sneakily, to a different circus act or sideshow. As a whole, the book is a spectacular of the weird. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Mark and I were never in class together, but we’ve stayed in touch and occasionally swapped work. I conducted this interview through emails to Paris where he, his wife (the poet Ashley Colley), and their two rabbits are living this year. INTERVIEWER There are so many tender relationships in this collection—children and their uncles and aunts, parents, brothers, friends. What is your interest in these dynamics? MAYER Love is a really hard thing to do right in life. I love reading stories where the hero is affronted by something external, a mean neighbor or an alien, but those kinds of conflicts can feel safe to me because all the character has to do, really, is figure out some way to close the relationship, walk away. Intimacy is more vexed. We’re all carrying around our histories—our bad programming, our genders, our wounded egos, our stink—and then we build little brick houses and try to live in them together. It’s a crazy thing to attempt. So I’m interested in stories that go into that space where we can’t escape each other. Family is claustrophobic, love is claustrophobic, which is what makes it meaningful, too. We can’t help but actually encounter each other. Read More
February 21, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Still, Somehow, We Breathe By Sarah Kay In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I recently had an uncomfortable interaction with a member of my fiancé’s family. This person met my dad, and then later commented to me that they were surprised by “the way he looked.” What they meant was, even though they knew of my pacific-islander ancestry, they were surprised my father was brown. I have been stuck on this interaction, and on other moments in my life when someone has made thinly veiled racist comments to me assuming that my light skin color means I am willing to listen to their derogatory, bigoted bullshit. Is there a poem to help with the frustration and guilt of moving through a world that affords me more safety and privilege simply because I was born with lighter skin than my dad and the other people whom I love dearly? Sincerely, Passing Through Life Read More
February 21, 2019 Revisited Revisited: Watson and the Shark By Elizabeth McCracken John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778 We were brought to the museum, as children often are, to look at ancient things from Egypt. Elsewhere in the galleries were ancient things from Rome and China and Greece, but only in the Egyptian collection was there the threat of seeing a dead body. The promise. We were ten. Of course we wanted to see one, even if it was the teachers’ idea. Perhaps they thought: if you satisfy the bloodthirstiness of children in an art museum they will be less likely to stab each other with compasses during math class. This was 1975, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It was the era of disaster movies: ships upside down, towering infernos, earthquakes. I liked disasters. The year before, in fourth grade, I had written a paper on the immolation of the Hindenburg. Mummies weren’t a disaster: so many dead, so little interest in how they died. On the way to the mummies we happened upon Watson and the Shark. It’s an odd painting, awful and hilarious, charged, inexplicable, literal. A disaster movie, an eighteenth-century one. There’s Watson, a naked figure fallen into a city harbor, hair streaming behind him. There’s the shark, rising up with its awful mouth, getting ready to bite off the swimmer’s head. Read More
February 20, 2019 Arts & Culture Mrs. Stoner Speaks: An Interview with Nancy Gardner Williams By Patricia Reimann Much of my life has been lived in such secrecy. It has never been politic for me to let another know my heart. —John Williams, Augustus Nancy Gardner Williams, John Williams’s widow, lives in a small bungalow in Pueblo, Colorado, close to the desert. This town near the Rocky Mountains was once known for its steel industry. Nancy, a tall woman who holds herself straight, is attentive and observant, friendly yet somewhat reserved. She is not decisively talkative, but you realize immediately that she and her husband must have been on equal terms. “No bluster, no fashion, no pomp,” as Dan Wakefield once remarked about John Williams. That seems to be true for her as well. Nancy studied English literature at the University of Denver. One of her lecturers was John Williams. INTERVIEWER Ms. Williams, you met John in Denver in 1959. He was your professor. What was he like? WILLIAMS He always wore an ascot and was always smoking cigarettes, even while he was lecturing. I don’t think he ever came to teach not wearing his ascot. And he was a good teacher. He fancied his stuff neat, and had a neat and tidy demeanor. INTERVIEWER He came from a rather poor background. WILLIAMS Yes, his family was poor. His mother loved to read true-romance magazines. When he was twelve years old, he got a little job at the bookstore in town, and the guy in the bookstore took an interest in him. Sometimes John would find his mother crying, but those were tough times, my God. It’s hard to imagine, the worry and pressure to make enough money to have food on the table. They farmed, so they did have food. John once showed me the farm. It was very small, a small building, small acreage. Read More
February 20, 2019 Mess With a Classic Weird Time in Frankenstein By Elisa Gabbert In Elisa Gabbert’s column Mess with a Classic, she revisits canonical works of literature and addresses the anxiety of confronting the art of the past (and the past in general). In her short nonfiction book Ongoingness—a single long, fragmentary essay—Sarah Manguso writes a meditative exegesis on her own diary, a document nearing a million words that she has added to daily, obsessively, for twenty-five years. This practice felt like a necessity, a hedge against potential failures of memory, and a way to process the onslaught of time: “I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.” It started when she was a teenager. She went to an art opening with a dear friend, drank wine from a plastic cup, looked at paintings—“It was all too much,” the moment was “too full.” She wouldn’t have time to “recover” from the beauty of the day, she realized, since tomorrow would offer only more experience: “There should be extra days, buffer days, between the real days.” (I’ve often thought there should be a little buffer between months: a monthend.) When Manguso became a mother, this anxious relationship to time changed: In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. Read More
February 20, 2019 Arts & Culture Meet Your New Favorite Poet By Anthony Madrid James Thomson (1700–1748) I like to tell poetry students about pleasures that are “on reserve” for them—meaning pleasures they’re too little to have now, but which they will have, someday, if they just stick with it. Good example of this: owning other poets. How can you own a poet? Simple. You have to find a poet whom no one has read in a long time, a poet with no living fans. Then you have to sincerely love that poet’s work. That’s the hard part. But if you love the poet’s poems, and no one else has even read them, there’s your opportunity to plant your flag. That poet is now your private property. Your interpretation of that poet’s work is by definition correct. Your right to be there is indisputable. And why can’t beginners have this pleasure? That’s easy. ’Cuz they cannot bring themselves to read material that’s “not gonna be on the test.” And even if they do somehow read such material, they do not love it. They are beginners; they love each other. Everything else is homework. • James Thomson (1700–1748) is my private property. I keep him in my pocket and take him out and look at him sometimes. He always looks good. There are many James Thomson poems that I have never read. Consequently, those pieces do not exist. The ones I have read I have read many times. I’m talking about The Seasons, a 5,500-line poem that used to be approximately as famous as the Aeneid or whatever. It was translated into a bunch of different languages, Goethe revered it, it was imitated all over the place. People used to sit there, stunned or rocking back and forth, muttering “Oh man, oh man, oh man!” about The Seasons. These days, however—2019—the sun has quite gone down on this great poet. It’s not hard to see why. His stuff doesn’t sound like it’s going to be good, at all. Number one, it was written in the eighteenth century. Nobody likes that century’s poetry. Number two, it’s in twisted-up Miltonic blank verse. In other words, it’s hard. Number three, it’s 5,500 lines of nature imagery. There’s no plot, no characters—it’s nature imagery, floor to ceiling. Do not adjust your laptop. That sound you hear is fleeing multitudes. But! It’s one of the best and most moving poems I’ve ever read or ever hope to read. There are parts that cause me to rain tears.There are parts whose eloquence is right up there with Shakespeare and company. Let me show you a handful of passages. Exhibit A: This is just to give you an idea what kind of diction-syntax we’re talking about. This is really early 0n in the poem, and Thomson has been talking about how the coming of spring affects the air and the wind; now he draws your attention to the soil and leaves: Read More