August 28, 2018 At Work The Answers Are Not Important: An Interview With Catherine Lacey By Yevgeniya Traps Catherine Lacey (Photo by Daymon Gardner) I read Catherine Lacey’s first novel, the gorgeously despondent Nobody Is Ever Missing, in a gulp. It unfolds like a hungry gasp. Nothing much happens really: one day, Elyria takes off for New Zealand to visit a poet who had once extended an offhand invitation. In sentences that hurt you with their icy precision—that make you envious of their implacable beauty—Lacey stages a woman’s internal disintegration as though it were an especially potent bit of performance art. Her second novel The Answers has an almost sci-fi premise: an actor hires women to play out distilled threads of a relationship, i.e., the Anger Girlfriend, the Maternal Girlfriend, the Intellectual Girlfriend, the Intimacy Team of Girlfriends. Mary signs up for the “income-generating experience” of playing the Emotional Girlfriend, because she needs to generate income. Like Elyria, she is desperate—for a cure, for reprieve, for release. In many ways, The Answers is a more plot-driven novel than Lacey’s first, but its title is ironic: answers are not possible, resolutions a misbegotten fantasy. In her new collection of short stories, Certain American States, Lacey’s characters are in mourning, aggrieved, disappointed by life and hurt by death. “You are still alive, so you have to keep living. That’s all you can do,” the narrator of the story “ur heck box” is told by a friend after her brother dies. But the insight of the eponymous story may be more true: “The loneliness of certain American states is enough to kill a person if you look too closely.” I recently spoke with Lacey about the new collection, which includes several stories written before Nobody Is Ever Missing, about her sense of herself as a writer and about the meaning and politics of “certain American states.” INTERVIEWER Where do these stories intersect with the timeline of your novels? How has writing stories been different for you than writing novels? LACEY There’s a big difference, although I will say that when I first started writing, I wanted to write essays and profiles and nonfiction. As an adult, I had pretty much been just doing that for a while. And then—I’m not really sure when it started—I started writing fiction a bit more seriously. I started by writing a bunch of short stories. That was really all I had time for, all I felt I had enough stamina for. The stories all belonged together, and they needed to talk to each other in order to find their cohesion. So I had a series of stories that ended up turning into Nobody Is Ever Missing. I backed into writing that first novel by just repeating the same perspective. I hate the phrase “finding my voice,” but inevitably, when you are a younger writer, there’s a period in which you are straining, and you just throw everything at the wall and see what comes out that is meaningful to you. Two or three of the stories in the new collection were first written around the same time that I was writing my first book. They were outliers, they didn’t fit in Nobody. And that’s been true the rest of the time that I’ve been writing stories. There have been stories that I either finished and published, or finished and didn’t publish, or finished and even believed were going to be in the collection until another story showed up and was just a better fit. The oldest story in Certain American States is the title story, but at the point of writing that story I had no sense of working toward a collection, I was just writing stories that were appealing to me. Read More
August 28, 2018 On Language Dwelling Places: On Renee Gladman’s Turn to Drawing By John Vincler From Renee Gladman’s Prose Architectures After we acknowledge it is writing that cannot be read, how is it that we then go about reading it? I wrote this question down in my notebook after first seeing Renee Gladman’s volume of collected drawings, Prose Architectures, in a bookshop. I found myself wondering often over this second mode of working—drawing—that seemed to have emerged from Gladman’s long-established writing practice. The marked precision of thought that characterizes her prose, in both her series of speculative novels set in the fictional country Ravicka and in her most recent essays in Calamities, seems initially counter to the form of her drawings. Except for a few identifiable syllables and words, and occasionally the beginning of a sentence or phrase, the drawings take the form of stylized but illegible writing in lines that often cluster to suggest architectural silhouettes or urban skylines. What would cause a writer to turn to a mode of drawing that looks like writing? I intuited that this second practice made sense in ways I hadn’t worked out yet. The drawings share many of the same concerns and preoccupations found in her prose but are addressed through line, gesture, and space, rather than language. I’ve thought about Gladman’s turn to drawing over several months with an oscillating sense of urgency. This is what I wanted to know: What are we reading or seeing when moving through books of writing containing only gesture and abstraction? What does it mean to write free from language? Read More
August 27, 2018 The Big Picture The Art of Wanderlust By Cody Delistraty Casper David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1817 In Caspar David Friedrich’s most famous painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), the German Romantic artist depicts a young, aristocratic-looking man in a green overcoat as he stands atop a jagged rock, taking in a misty, high-altitude scene of mountains and cliffs. The image shows a moment of ultimate self-reflection in the vein of Immanuel Kant—a privileged man working out his interior feelings through exterior Romantic symbolism. The fog parts for him, but only just so, revealing not verdant hills and lush forests but dense mountainsides and jagged rocks. The man is at once a master of the universe and entirely subservient to it: even from high above, he can only see a challenging sliver of what he might otherwise think he controls. Read More
August 27, 2018 Arts & Culture Is Literature Dead? By David L. Ulin William Michael Harnett, To This Favour, 1879 One evening not long ago, my fifteen-year-old son, Noah, told me that literature was dead. We were at the dinner table, discussing The Great Gatsby, which he was reading for a ninth-grade humanities class. Part of the class structure involved annotation, which Noah detested; it kept pulling him out of the story to stop every few lines and make a note, mark a citation, to demonstrate that he’d been paying attention to what he read. “It would be so much easier if they’d let me read it,” he lamented, and listening to him, I couldn’t help but recall my own classroom experiences, the endless scansion of poetry, the sentence diagramming, the excavation of metaphor and form. I remembered reading, in junior high school, Lord of the Flies—a novel Noah had read (and loved) at summer camp, writing to me in a Facebook message that it was “seriously messed up”—and thinking, as my teacher detailed the symbolic structure, finding hidden nuance in literally every sentence, that what she was saying was impossible. How, I wondered, could William Golding have seeded his narrative so consciously and still have managed to write? How could he have kept track of it all? Even then, I knew I wanted to be a writer, had begun to read with an eye toward how a book or story was built, and if this was what it took, this overriding sense of consciousness, then I would never be smart enough. Read More
August 24, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Documentaries, Snapshots, and Glossy Color Images By The Paris Review In his 1962 essay ‘The Poet and the City,’ WH Auden designs the curriculum of his “dream-day College for Bards.” “The library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.” Artful parody, Auden knows, is the most demanding species of critical writing. It requires, simultaneously, an understanding of the parodied work so total that it shades convincingly into empathy (the parodist has to be able to think and create within the boundaries of the parodied work) and an unfaltering critical distance. The parody documentary series Documentary Now! on the IFC channel—created by Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, Seth Meyers, and Rhys Thomas—is a sustained masterclass in just such artistic acrobatics. The series rambles back and forth through the history of documentary—from 1922’s Nanook of the North to 2012’s Jiro Dreams of Sushi—producing unpretentious 21-minute gems that crystallize and elaborate some aspect of the source classic. They are as much commentary as they are comedy, but they are in fact very funny, and often quite affecting—Bill Hader is, I believe, without qualification one of the best working American actors. These are films that the creators have deep affection for, and they put in astonishing, obsessive, painstakingly loving effort to re-create their look and texture, apparently even going so far as to track down the original lenses that Errol Morris used to shoot The Thin Blue Line. Finishing an episode, I want nothing more than to go and immediately watch the original again, to marvel at both the technical and critical achievement of Documentary Now! and the fresh light it retrospectively casts. —Matt Levin Read More
August 24, 2018 At Work There Are No White People in Heaven: An Interview with José Olivarez By Andy Powell The first poem I encountered from José Olivarez’s forthcoming book, Citizen Illegal, was “A Mexican Dreams of Heaven” at The Adroit Journal. When I read it, I started cracking up in the living room. I read it out loud to my partner, who was in the bedroom, and she also cracked up. The poem elicits the painful laughter that comes with so much truth: there are white people in heaven, too. they build condos across the street & ask the Mexicans to speak English. i’m just kidding. there are no white people in heaven. Olivarez’s poems span gentrification, gentefication (which Olivarez defines in this interview as the returning of a neighborhood to the communities who are being displaced), migration, anger, love, cheese fries, family, loss, therapy, white America’s engagement with immigrants and people of color, futures (including defecating donkeys), pasts (including a very sweet imagined recollection of his mother out dancing), more love, tough love, generous love, and, of course, as a Chicago poet, The Bulls. I met Olivarez for a coffee in Chicago to speak about the book. He was coming from a Teaching Artistry workshop at the Poetry Incubator, a conference for poets who integrate activism and community engagement into their creative practice. I already knew of José—he used to work for the same organization, DreamYard, that I work for in The Bronx. He has since worked for Urban Word, and now is at Young Chicago Authors, all organizations centered on building with youth through poetry. His workshop at the Incubator focused on the transformative possibilities of poetry and the imagination. These possibilities are at play in his own work. In “A Mexican Dreams of Heaven” he shifts the power balance and makeup of what heaven is, who gets to go to heaven, what it’s like. I suspect these visionary reversals derive partly from his work with kids, with the desire to imagine a future for them, to start imagining one with them. INTERVIEWER What scares you the most about this book? OLIVAREZ I wanted to make a book of poems that the people I love will be proud of. A lot of the poems are about my family, my experience as a first generation Mexican-American Chicano, and I wanted to write poems that were not shameful, not ashamed. I wanted them to be poems that my brother wouldn’t be embarrassed to show his co-workers, that my mom could share with the family, with her co-workers, that my students would want to give to their friends. I didn’t want them to look at the poems and think wow, José is so ashamed of us, or, José is so sad to be a part of us. I am very proud of my people, where I come from, and my community. Read More