September 19, 2017 At Work Type Writing: An Interview with Jim Shepard By Lesley M.M. Blume Jim Shepard is always funny in conversation, but never more so than when he’s imparting dark musings about the future of the country or about human nature in general. And he can often be found musing about these dark things, for he is, as he puts it, “resourcefully pessimistic.” As evidence, he cites the title of his just-released book, The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Essays on Movies and Politics. Many of us nursing the bitter cocktail that is the Trump administration are familiar with this sentiment, but Shepard’s book has been decades in the making. There has always been something to despair about, he announces jovially: The title “reflects the sinking sense I’ve had following American politics since the late 1960s. It’s been an ongoing cycle of progressive and thoughtful people saying, Well, this is a new low, but we have something to look forward to—and then hitting a new low after that.” An award-winning, seven-time novelist and professor of English and film studies at Williams College, Shepard has studied certain iconic, influential American movies, from Casablanca to Goodfellas to Schindler’s List—along with “what they’re selling us”—for clues as to why this country keeps finding itself in the soul-crushing cycle of Icarus highs and lows. They provide, he concludes, a constructive road map. He pulled his book’s title from an anecdote about the 1974 noir film Chinatown, in which scriptwriter Robert Towne told director Roman Polanski that the dark ending was like “the tunnel at the end of the light”—much like the circumstances contributing to the déjà-vu political landscape Shepard sees now. He and I spoke last week about how movies both reflect and generate the circumstances that made the presidency of a creature like Donald J. Trump possible in the first place. INTERVIEWER So are we doomed forever to the despair-redemption political cycle you describe? I mean, how much lower can we go? SHEPARD Well, it’s generated by a pretty toxic combination of late-model capitalism refracted with Americanism. And part of what The Tunnel at the End of the Light is about is the way the myths we tell ourselves as Americans, and the things we cherish most tightly, interact so poorly with late-model capitalism. The two together create a sort of spiral that’s very hard to break out of. Is it possible to get out of it? Yeah, but each time I imagine the pessimistic future, the future out-pessimists me. INTERVIEWER Where do you see yourself on the spectrum of pessimists? SHEPARD My good friend, Elizabeth Kolbert, the climate writer for The New Yorker, loves to come over and visit because she says that as Cassandra-ish and apocalyptic as she is, she always feels upbeat after she leaves my house because “at least I’m not as depressed as Jim is.” Read More
September 19, 2017 Bulletin Six Young Women with Prize-Winning Book Collections By Nadja Spiegelman Jessica Kahan’s collection of romance novels from the Jazz age and Depression era. Imagine a book collector, a person who has devoted their life to seeking out rare tomes in dusty shops, who arranges their finds, these prized possessions, purposefully and carefully, on a shelf just out of reach. Chances are you will have imagined a man, perhaps one with graying hair and spectacles. And a pipe. Heather O’Donnell and Rebecca Romney at Honey & Wax Booksellers, in Brooklyn, are hoping to broaden our imaginative capabilities. This summer, they announced their first annual book-collecting prize, open to women under thirty. O’Donnell and Romney had observed that although the young women who entered their store were passionate about their collections, they rarely referred to themselves as collectors. Their hope is to “encourage young women who are actively collecting books to own and share that part of their lives, and to think strategically about the future of their collections.” An advisor warned them to expect eight to ten submissions, a dozen at most. When the dust had settled, they’d received forty-eight essays, from young women, age fifteen to thirty, around the country, all with accompanying bibliographies and wish lists. We are pleased to unveil their first winner, who will receive a thousand dollars, as well as five honorable mentions, who will each receive two hundred dollars. Read More
September 18, 2017 Baseball, On Sports Robert Coover’s Dark Baseball Fantasy By Daniel Roberts A miniature Woodstock Field, designed by longtime Strat-O-Matic gamer Larry Fryer. Robert Coover’s oft-forgotten 1968 baseball novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., opens in the middle of a game: “Bottom half of the seventh, Brock’s boy had made it through another inning unscratched, one! two! three! Twenty-one down and just six outs to go!” Brock is Brock Rutherford, retired star pitcher, and Brock’s “boy” is his son, the rookie pitcher Damon Rutherford. But Brock doesn’t exist, Damon doesn’t exist, and the game isn’t real. It’s being played out with dice and a pencil by Coover’s protagonist, Henry Waugh, alone in his kitchen. The Universal Baseball Association is a novel about fantasy baseball, though the word “fantasy” never once appears in the book. When literary people talk about Coover, who is eighty-five, they talk about him as a postmodernist and a master of metafiction. He’s known chiefly for his short stories or for his 1977 novel about Richard Nixon, The Public Burning. But in 2011, Overlook Press reissued The Universal Baseball Association in paperback, and the book is more relevant now than ever before. Read More
September 18, 2017 Procrastination Confessional Rearranging the House at Night By Ann Beattie In our new series, Procrastination Confessional, writers share the strange things they do to avoid writing. Ann Beattie’s procrastination still life. It has long been my assertion that writers will do anything in order to avoid writing. Ask any of my former students. Teaching used to be the perfect way to avoid writing, as seminars and private conferences took up a lot of time, along with written comments. Have you heard that writers are a bunch of narcissistic alcoholics? (Probably Trump could not be so eloquent, but don’t we suspect that’s what he thinks?) Narcissism, itself, is time consuming—and drinking may be more alluring to some than dyeing all their white shirts black (yes, that was one writer friend’s method of avoidance) or midnight gardening wearing an LED visor (why start writing so late?). I happen to be a night owl. To avoid writing, I might Google this, tap my dictionary icon—etymology, another way to drive away serious thought—or look at some of my husband’s paintings and ask why he’s painted so few birds (a guaranteed rousing discussion). But now I’ve avoided writing this piece long enough, so let me confess: At night, feeling I should be quiet because of aforementioned husband, I try to avoid writing in my favorite time period by assembling—is there any way I can make this sound more dignified?—tableaux of found objects from within my own house, so that something funny will await the unsuspecting. (We have guests, too—my life is not just a prolonged prank pulled on my husband.) Imagine my delight, muffling a chuckle [professorial interjection: Exactly what would this sound like?], as I realize that the eBay hat with foxtails (go on, trolls, hate me—that will provide me with diversion) might be put atop my husband’s sculpted bust of me, with the faux-fur (I’ve got some shame) “stole” looped around my neck to dangle in a casual way. Alongside this, one of my favorite gifts, ever, from another writer who shall be known only as “E.” A turkey with a leather nose, so lifelike that the night I received it, I laughed and laughed, then placed it, inadvertently, below an air vent, so that when I saw it in the middle of the night, feathers ruffling in the breeze, I almost had a heart attack. Back to the assemblage: Why not add, oh, the jester’s hat bought in Prague? (One time, when another writer came to dinner, my husband and I, in a major miscalculation, put on our hats, only to be told we’d worn them TWO YEARS IN A ROW) … Anyway, with so much tabletop to spare, good to add the tiger mother with cubs that bob at the flick of a finger, and, in a moment of inspiration, drop the Edgar Allan Poe mask (a gift from a journalist friend who also avoided writing by wrapping and mailing, a really serious method of avoidance) on the bust, then replace the jester’s hat and see if the shark fin could be added atop the hat like a cherry on the perfectly demented sundae. Add the lion hand puppet with the kindly face and rearrange with politically incorrect fur tails, and voilà. All that’s needed is the white mouse to bring up the rear with Lioness, and to step back. Read More
September 15, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Morphine, Martyrs, Microphones By The Paris Review McDermott & McGough, The Stations of Reading Gaol (IV. Oscar Wilde taking his constitutional.), 1917 (detail), MMXVII, oil and gold leaf on linen, 24″ x 18″. The other evening, after my colleagues had all gone, I slouched into one of our office reading chairs and dipped into Paul Yoon’s latest collection of short stories, The Mountain. I didn’t get far—I read “A Willow and the Moon,” which opens the book, and stopped—but only because Yoon’s prose is far too mesmerizing to rush through. The story, a beautiful amalgam of sorrow and longing and hope, follows a boy through to adulthood, from the First World War to the Second, from the sanatorium high in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, where his mother volunteers, to the basement of an English hospital, where bombs fall around him. As a boy, he looks on as his mother wrestles her addiction to morphine, as his father loses his interest in the family, as his best childhood friend falls ill, all the while making of himself what he can on his own. Though every page of the story heaves with lonesomeness and despair (for the lives that could have been had his parents never married or wars never begun), “A Willow and the Moon” nevertheless warmed my heart: the boy harbors neither resentment nor rage for the lot he’s been given, only sadness for all that’s happened and hope for all that’s still to come. —Caitlin Youngquist On Monday, I went to the opening of the Oscar Wilde Temple, an installation at the Church of the Village by artist duo McDermott & McGough. The temple’s Stations of the Cross depict phases of Wilde’s arrest, trial, imprisonment, and release; its altarpiece is a linden-wood sculpture of the author; and the walls are draped in fabrics and hues from the contemporaneous Aesthetic movement. It also includes a half dozen small portraits of LGBTQ “martyrs,” such as Brandon Teena, Sakia Gunn, and Martha P. Johnson. If the installation sounds minimal, its impact is otherwise: housed in a small room underneath the church, the temple feels consecrated, and also invigorating. Wilde celebrated his homosexuality openly, even in the face of persecution, and in him, McDermott & McGough have found a martyr and a saint for today’s LGBTQ community. The temple is a project the pair started thinking about in the eighties and have only now produced. But the timing is apt, McGough says; considering the political moment, he quotes Toni Morrison: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work.” Wilde’s example provides inspiration for resistance of all kinds: his subversion was public and powerful. —Nicole Rudick Read More