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
May 8, 2017 On the Shelf Witchcraft Is Still a Fine Idea, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From A Rehearsall both Straung and True, of Hainous and Horrible Actes Committed by Elizabeth Stile, 1579. Say you’re an uptight God-fearing Christian type, and it’s your job to stamp out the sinful specter of witchcraft wherever it may rise. Your central problem will be this: witchcraft is fun, it’s always been fun, it always will be fun, and by depicting it in any form whatsoever you’re probably just going to prove how fun it is. This is not a new dilemma for the antiwitchcraft set. As Jon Crabb writes, early sixteenth-century witchcraft pamphlets relied on a variety of woodcuts to plead their case, and these woodcuts made for perhaps overly exciting storytelling: “One of the earliest and most notorious British witchcraft pamphlets was published in 1579: A Rehearsall both Straung and True, of Hainous and Horrible Actes Committed by Elizabeth Stile, alias Rockingham, Mother Dutten, Mother Deuell, Mother Margaret, Fower Notorious Witches. Stile was a sixty-five-year-old widow and beggar accused of bewitching an innkeeper. The pamphlet describes her association with three other old women … as well as a man named Father Rosimunde, who could transform himself ‘into the shape and likenesse of any beaste whatsoever he will.’ Woodcuts show these old women and several animal familiars, which they reportedly fed on their own blood. The folkloric image of the crone was established through these images and repeated in similar pamphlets over the next century. These witches were usually bitter old women, who lived on their own, and kept cats or other animals as pets … Whether the authors intended it or not, they managed to make witchcraft seem rather exciting and attractive. The stories are easy, compelling reads and the images feature young men and women doing extraordinary things.” Kent Russell is watching the NHL playoffs and hymning the poetry of ice hockey: “Part of what makes the in-person experience of hockey so absorbing is the sound of the game. The shush of skates, the click-click-clack of sticks and puck (which sounds, to me, like an illicit substance being lined up). In-person hockey is orchestral in that the range of its sound is so wide, so rich: from the basso profundo of an errant slap shot booming against the endboards; to the jarring, early-days-of-electronica BARK! of a clearing attempt whipped against the glass; to the tantalizing, cherry-red ping! of puck off post; to the awesome flatulence of the goal horn—ice hockey is set to the best score in sports … You can hit people, hold them; you can use your body (and the tool in your hands) to obstruct or otherwise make difficult the progress of the other guy. You can physically enact the ressentiment of the lesser-skilled, is what I’m saying. You can (and are encouraged to) heave your body, wrench-like, into the gears of artistry.” Read More
May 5, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mothers, Metromedia, Murderous Amphibians By The Paris Review From Rachel, Monique… Last night, I dipped into Rachel Ingalls’s 1982 novel, Mrs. Caliban, which New Directions will reissue later this year, and am already agog over it. I’ll admit, its premise seemed a smidge too outré, even for me, but after the first few pages I was hooked. Mrs. Caliban follows a lonesome housewife, Dorothy, who—tormented by the malaise of domestic life, her husband’s infidelity, and the loss of their two children—takes up an affair with a six-foot-seven, murderous amphibian named Larry, who’s just escaped from the Oceanographic Research Institute. Thirty pages in, the two have already “made love on the living-room floor and on the dining-room sofa and sitting in the kitchen chairs, and upstairs in the bathtub.” As deranged as the whole thing is, Ingalls’s prose, strikingly austere, taps into a profound sadness, too: Is Mrs. Caliban a work of fantasy or are we inhabiting the psyche of a woman unhinged? Whatever the answer, the book is, as Michael Dorris wrote in his 1986 review in the Times, an “intriguing portrait of a woman’s escape from unacceptable reality,” and one that begs to be read over and over again. —Caitlin Youngquist Sophie Calle’s new project at Green-Wood Cemetery has gotten a lot of attention this week, deservedly, but I’m hung up on Rachel, Monique…, a memorial to her mother in the form of a lavish, clothbound book, with an embroidered cover and iridescent fabric. Based on Calle’s 2010 exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, the book arranges diary excerpts and family photographs to tell an oblique story about mothers and daughters, and the narrative that coalesces around a life glimpsed in fragments. Calle’s mother, who died in 2007, comes across as observant and sharp, with a charming fatalism waxing and waning over the years. Calle, unsurprisingly, likes to linger on her thinking about death. One diary entry says simply: “God, I hate spring!” In another, she writes, “I would already like Christmas to be over. Or perhaps I’d like my life to be over.” And elsewhere: “Good-bye, Diary! I’m off to New York. Let’s hope it will all be wonderful. If the plane crashes, here’s a cheery farewell to life!” —Dan Piepenbring Read More