May 10, 2017 On the Shelf Seduced Yet Again by Colonel Sanders, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Tender Wings of Desire. You know that Borges story, “The Library of Babel,” where he imagines a world containing all possible books? Perforce, one such book would have to be a romance novel in which a Kentucky-born fried-chicken magnate—the very same one whose face and name are emblazoned on fast-food franchises around the world—seduces an errant noblewoman at a dockside bar. And now, I’m happy to report, that book actually exists. True, it was a statistical inevitability. Someday, someone would sit down and string together the letters properly, and a Colonel Sanders romance would come to be. But who would’ve thought we’d have the good fortune to be alive for it? Kate Taylor writes, “To celebrate Mother’s Day—the chicken chain’s best-selling day of the year—KFC published Tender Wings of Desire, a novella following the love affair between Lady Madeline Parker and Colonel Harland Sanders … ‘The only thing better than being swept away by the deliciousness of our Extra Crispy Chicken is being swept away by Harland Sanders himself,’ George Felix, KFC’s U.S. director of advertising, said in a statement.” (As for the novella itself, here’s a representative passage: “They were so consumed that it took every ounce of their restraint not to give into the first right then and there. The flames would continue to rage throughout the night until the fire was too much, and at last they could let it engulf them.”) Speaking of things I’ve always wanted, here’s another one: a museum that gives American writers their due but makes literature seem so anodyne and boring that no visitors get any bright ideas about becoming writers themselves. (I don’t want the competition, you see.) And here, too, my dreams have come true. Witness the American Writers Museum, which makes a protean, deeply expressive art form seem like a neat self-improvement project. Jennifer Schuessler writes, “Instead of manuscripts and first editions, there are interactive touch screens and high-tech multimedia installations galore, like a mesmerizing ‘Word Waterfall,’ in which a wall of densely packed, seemingly random words is revealed, through a constantly looping light projection, to contain resonant literary quotations … Head from the entrance in one direction into a gallery called ‘A Nation of Writers’ and you get what might be called the logical, left-brain approach to literature, anchored by an eighty-five-foot-long wall that tells the chronological story of American writing through 100 significant writers. (The museum is careful not to say ‘best.’) … Visitors have to dig to get past the overall mood of inspirational uplift and moral progress and find knottier currents. Those who skip [the NPR critic Maureen] Corrigan’s video commentary on literary experimentalism, for example, may not realize that Lolita is more than a novel that ‘hinges on a road trip—a classic American genre—and riffs on motel and teen culture,’ as the brief wall text dedicated to Vladimir Nabokov puts it.” Read More
May 9, 2017 On Film Master of Light By Noah Gallagher Shannon Cinematographer Roger Deakins uses his blog to pull back the curtain on the lighting tricks that have made him famous. Roger Deakins, 2004, via Buena Vista. Sometime in the late nineties, the cinematographer Roger Deakins took a kind of pilgrimage to visit his friend and mentor Conrad “Connie” Hall, who was living in semiretirement on a tiny island off Tahiti. The timing found Deakins visiting the older Hall—a three-time Academy Award winner and sort of tribal elder to directors of photography—as the industry-wide shift toward digital cameras was being met by a renewed nostalgia for film, and Deakins was excited to share how he’d recently remodeled his LA home to include a darkroom. “My expectations were shattered,” Deakins later wrote, “when Conrad pronounced the photochemical process ‘antiquated.’ ” Hall praised the possibilities of digital, telling Deakins he was happy to indulge any “technique that might have helped him develop as a visual storyteller.” That was Hall’s guiding mantra, and one the younger artist soon took up: “Story! Story! Story!” Read More
May 9, 2017 At Work Misplaced Logic: An Interview with Joanna Ruocco By Martin Riker Hilarious, possibly impervious, Joanna Ruocco is, of all the writers I know, the one who writes most purely in order to write—or so I’ve always imagined. I’ve long wanted to ask her about the impetus behind her wonderfully weird assortment of prose, so when I learned she has five books coming out this year—two last month alone—each utterly different from the others, it seemed the perfect opportunity. The Week is a collection of stories that could be the offspring of Padgett Powell’s and Thomas Bernhard’s comic shorter works. From “Paparazzi”: “It is best to be a mediocre person, a person that can be easily replaced. In the succession of generations, there will be many people who think and do what you think and do, and who inspire the same kinds of feelings in other people that you yourself inspire in other people, and you know that it works the other way too, that before you were born there were people who thought and did what you think and do, with adjustments made for available technologies and prevailing opinions.” The Whitmire Case, a novella-length chapbook, is a comic/surrealist detective story about a young woman who “resembles, in form, in spirit, nothing so much as a sourdough starter,” whom one day everyone suddenly fails to recognize. Another chapbook, The Lune no. 12, extracts “The Boghole & the Beldame,” a lyrical account of a witch (I think?) that reads more like an immersive poem. The novel Field Glass, written in collaboration with Joanna Howard, is a grim fragmentary series of what seem to be radio transmissions concerning the inhabitants of a postapocalyptic hostelry. It is fiction in close conversation with theory, starting with an epigraph from Paul Virilio and ending, in the acknowledgements, with the opening of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (“The two of us wrote Field Glass together. Since each of us were several, there was already quite a crowd.”) Last—not least!—Dark Season, written under the pseudonym Joanna Lowell, is a 327-page historical romance novel about an epileptic young woman and a brooding nobleman; it is the fourth romance novel Ruocco has written, under three different names. INTERVIEWER Can we start with the romance novel? Dark Season is the first I’ve read, but in dipping into some others for comparison, I was delighted by how good you are at it, how seriously you take it. Why do you write romance novels? RUOCCO I’m glad you think I’m good at it. One of the rejections I got from an agent who read Dark Season said it was “fourteen times too literary,” which was very funny and specific. It did make me think about literariness—what constitutes literariness as an appealing or off-putting quality in a text—and I realized that I tend to create metaphorical linkages when I write. A metaphor can provide narrative continuity, but it didn’t work in the romance novel. It needed to feel more literal, or maybe more literal, less literary. Anyway, I write romance novels for the money! Or at least, theoretically—I haven’t actually made any money. But I told myself I was writing them for the money. And I like to write them. I like how formally constrained they are. I spend so much time tending to language when I write that it’s fun to be forced by a form to focus on macro-level plot arcs instead—the overcoming of the central antagonism, the libidinal slide from antipathy into desire, all the preposterous barriers to delay the inevitable. In nonromance writing projects, I never want to repeat myself stylistically. I always want to find some new way into sentence making/arranging—that’s part of the project—but this is also why I find romance so pleasing. I get to repeat with variations the same form again and again. INTERVIEWER You’ve written other romance novels under other pseudonyms—Toni Jones’s No Secrets in Spandex is my favorite of your titles—and I wonder why you don’t stick to a single pseudonym. Don’t romance writers build up an audience, book to book? RUOCCO I think they do, and I am always in the process of utterly failing to market myself through those kinds of choices. But the pseudonym is part of the feel of each book for me. Toni Jones couldn’t have written Ghazal in the Moonlight. She’s way too sporty. Joanna Lowell is a good pseudonym for Victorian romance, so I’m going to stick with her. INTERVIEWER In some ways, I think every one of your books should have a pseudonym, or heteronyms, like Pessoa—where part of the point of fake names is to allow you to be an entirely different writer each time. RUOCCO I want that! A new name for every book. I published this steampunk kind of story in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet last year, and I really wanted to publish it as Jo Ruocco instead of Joanna Ruocco because it was much more of a Jo Ruocco story, but then I couldn’t figure out how to ask for a name emendation without feeling crazy. Maybe I’ll publish something as Hildebrand von Schlange. Read More
May 9, 2017 On the Shelf The Politics of the Mosh Pit, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The mosh pit at Endfest, in Washington, D.C., 1991. The mosh pit is a great place to reach a state of pure being. It’s also a great place to break your glasses, your jaw, or your spirit. The pit has been construed alternately as a punk utopia and a Hobbesian state of nature. As the nation immerses itself in a debate about what constitutes a safe space, the politics of moshing—with its questions about who gets to have fun, and at whose expense—make it an ideal bellwether. As Hannah Ewens writes, newer punk bands tend to see the pit as an oppression: “In hardcore and metal scenes, a lively mosh pit is still the real indicator of a successful show. But rock has been changing over the past couple of years—notably by listening to women within its factions. Punk has long claimed to be about community while, at the same time, managing to marginalize minorities. Yet the scene does now seem to be actually changing. DIY punk groups such as PWR BTTM, Diet Cig, and Adult Mom have introduced safe spaces at their shows—and mosh pits have often been the first casualties … The bands bringing in these changes most enthusiastically tend to be those with female and LGBT members. The biggest defenders of mosh pits are usually straight men. Most women I know who go to shows are either agnostic or hate them. Yet, the majority of rock bands want mosh pits to stay … Emotional responses are demonized and feared in modern culture. To the outside world, a mosh pit looks like the nonsensical activity of a Neanderthal—which it is. It appeals to base instincts; a positive thing, surely, in a modern culture where gigs are Snapchatted and documented, and wrapped in self-awareness that takes audiences away from experiences.” Good news for people who love tall red boots: they’re about to be everywhere. If the latest runway shows are accurate, no fewer than four dozen fashion labels will include red boots—I mean red red, fire-engine red, Crimson Tide red, Communist red—among their Fall 2017 offerings. Their sudden ubiquity suggests a nostalgia for post–Cold War style, in which, as Natasha Stagg writes, clothing reflected an uneasy symbiosis between capitalism and communism: “The Russians who embraced Capitalist ideals in the nineties—if they could afford to—faced antagonistic audiences. New iterations of the specific style that emerged from this time period reference a disparity between ideal and real: Ideally, American styles were carefree, but in Russia, they were associated with pornography and prostitution. A tight, red, thigh-high stiletto boot worn under a one-size-fits-all dress easily captures this contradiction of American culture feeling dangerously ostentatious in the context of 1991 Russia … It works in the nineties fascination with the ugly and the beautiful, or the Baba Yaga and the sexy spy Natasha. A sort of undercutting of frumpiness and androgynous Party dressing, this is a styling choice more than it is a direction for the clothing … The choice is especially provocative at a time when Russia is constantly on the front page of the Washington Post. The boots are as smooth and tall as the Red Army’s, and as strangely sexy as jeans were when they were first worn by women.” Read More
May 8, 2017 At Work Relationships Normally Beyond Our Knowing: An Interview with Madison Smartt Bell By Andrew Ervin Linear time doesn’t exist in Madison Smartt Bell’s new fever dream of a novel Behind the Moon, at least not for long. The fractured narrative centers on a young woman named Julie who falls into a deep Badlands cave while fleeing would-be rapists. In her liminal, un-, or semi-conscious state, she’s able to interact with the prehistoric paintings on the cave walls. Elsewhere, in interspersed sections, her mother—who gave her up for adoption years earlier—is lured to the hospital to which Julie has been transferred and where she remains in a coma. A shady shaman also steps in to help, or to attempt to. The novel works in disordered and mystical ways. It maintains a remarkable ability to surprise. Bell is likely best known for his trilogy of historic novels about Toussaint L’ouverture and the Haitian revolution and the widely taught craft book Narrative Form: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form, but it would be a mistake to snooze on his back catalog titles like Save Me, Joe Louis and Waiting for the End of the World. I find myself going back to his short stories every few weeks, especially those in Zero db and The Barking Man. Over the past three decades, Bell has proven capable of changing direction in his work, but a singular American voice resonates throughout his oeuvre. A. M. Homes has called Behind the Moon “a visceral, full-body primal experience.” Bell cotaught (with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Spires) the one and only creative class I took as an undergraduate at Goucher College. In a letter at the end of the semester, he wrote to me, “We’ve already gone over most of these stories pretty thoroughly so I won’t go into them again except to admire your patience for painstaking revisions—much greater than mine as a student (or even now, sometimes).” I’m still an obsessive rewriter. Something I wrote in that class formed, many years later, the basis of my first published story, so to claim that Bell’s guidance and inspiration have been foundational to my own writing life would be a vast understatement. But that’s only part of the reason it was such a joy to exchange emails with him about Behind the Moon near the end of April. Read More
May 8, 2017 Bulletin Now Online: Our Interviews with Claudia Rankine and Alasdair Gray By The Paris Review Claudia Rankine, 2016. The two Writers at Work interviews from our Winter 2016 issue are now online, in full, free to read for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. In the Art of Poetry No. 102, Claudia Rankine talks to David L. Ulin about finding the lyric in nontraditional spaces, reaching as wide an American audience as possible, and having a breakthrough with her collection Citizen: It felt like the first time I could actively be involved in a public discussion about race, in a discussion that, to me, is essential to our well-being as a country. It wasn’t simply about publicizing the book, it was about having a conversation. It was also an opportunity for me to learn what others really thought and felt. The responses were various. One man said he was moved by a reading I gave and wanted to do something to help me. I said I personally had a privileged life, which I do, and that I didn’t need his help. What I needed was for him—this was a white gentleman—to understand the urgency of the situation for him and to help himself in an America that was so racially divided. It wasn’t about him coming from his own position of privilege—of white privilege—to take black people on as a burden, but rather to understand that we are all part of the same broken structures. He said, I can take what you’re saying, but you’re going to shut down everybody else in this audience. And all of a sudden I was like, What? I thought you wanted to help me! To remove him from the role of “white savior” was to attack him in his own imagination. A white woman, a professor, told me that what I was calling racism was really bias against overweight black women. You might think they were just a defensive man and a crazy professor, but again and again I was coming up against what was being framed as understanding and realizing that it was not that. Read More