All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com

Author profiles are bunk

essays, literary lint, ,

There was a fascinating profile of writer Lauren Groff in last weekend’s New York Times, “How Lauren Groff, One of ‘Our Finest Living Writers,’ Does Her Work.” Groff is an excellent writer in the middle of an already distinguished career. Though I prefer her stories to her novels mostly for idiosyncratic personal reasons, she is on my mental list of people to always read. Even if it’s just a little bit of the latest novel, I will read some of it to see what she is up to now.

First, a tenet: profiles are a hoax. I realize that there are some profiles that are “good,” both good journalism and good writing, perceptive, useful, aesthetically pleasing, not completely dishonest and fraudulent. But most profiles are fraudulent. All celebrity profiles are fraudulent, and the New York Times profiles of writers are a specific breed of fraudulent. One could say there’s a long tradition of fraudulence with respect to this category at the New York Times. The fraudulence comes from the two-step conspiracy between profile writer (in this case journalist Elizabeth A. Harris) and profiled subject. You have a journalist desperate for a story, any kind of story, any kind of angle toward something interesting, combined with a writer who by necessity must spend the majority of his or her time inside, alone, listening to voices inside their head. Not the most fertile ground for interesting journalism. Combine this fraught set up with the need to do some myth maintenance. Who can forget David Foster Wallace asking Frank Bruni, “Do you have my saliva?” in that very same august publication? That profile also had Bruni going through Wallace’s medicine cabinet. On the one hand this seems like a creepy invasion of privacy. On the other, this seems like a desperate young journalist looking for anything they can find to hang a paragraph upon. (Upon reread, that old profile has a heroic amount of persona-building from both journalist and subject.)

That’s a long way of saying that profiles of writers are the softest of soft journalism and are usually filled with gargantuan mounds of self-aggrandizing BS, and the Groff profile does not disappoint. In fact, it might win a medal for the highest frequency of raised eyebrows from this humble reader. I realize that profiles like these are basically commercials for the writer and commercials for the sensitivity of the reporters. But even so, this one is an everlasting gobstopper of weirdness.1

“The outing was unusual for an author interview — and, given the pace of the hike, not an insignificant amount of exercise. Typically, these conversations take place over coffee or lunch, at a publisher’s office or maybe in a writer’s living room. But Groff had chosen something different: a five-mile hike through the woods and a swim in a pond, followed by a lunch of chickpea salad and a beet slaw with pistachio butter, all of which she made herself.” 

Where to even begin? What a disappointing lunch. Why would you do that to those poor pistachios? And she “made it herself”? What is this, the Ladies Home Journal from 1983? 

Groff knows exactly what she is doing, taking your lazy ass on a five-mile hike and swim. She’s giving you the Hook, which simultaneously frames her as a flattering combination of writer/athlete. It’s like something out of Veep. She’s not like these other writers, etc. She is not just accomplished and talented but also athletic and cool with her “goofy sense of humor” and she knows her way around the kitchen when necessary and above all seems like someone you would want to hang with, or barring that someone you would at least look up to. 

“A former college athlete who still runs, swims and plays tennis regularly, Groff, 45, has a physicality about her that is central to how she lives and writes.” We also learn that Groff’s sister was an Olympic triathlete, so the jock is strong with this one. One can only imagine how intensely competitive the holiday sessions of Pictionary are up in New Hampshire. 

“Groff and her family remain close. Though she lives in Gainesville, where Kallman (her husband) owns and operates off-campus housing for University of Florida students, she spends every summer in New Hampshire, close to where her sister and her brother live, and where her parents have a house.”

First thought: that’s a good job. Second thought: that’s an excellent job for the spouse of a writer. Solidly remunerative and filled with interesting stories. I can only imagine the horrors that greet her spouse daily as he deals with the living consequences of the standard male UF undergraduate. Just think what has been done to all that carpet. 

“When Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a banker’s box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most vital bits survive.” 

Really, Lauren. Really?

“It’s not even the words on the page that accumulate, because I never look at them again, really, but the ideas and the characters start to take on gravity and density,” she says.

Her “really” is doing a lot of work in that quotation. Seems like the hardest way to climb that mountain but what do I know? 

“When Groff agreed to move to Florida 17 years ago, she did so conditionally. She’d relocate, she said, only if she could travel as needed — for writers’ retreats, for book tours — and if Kallman agreed to reassess periodically. There’s a physical contract stating those terms, signed by her and Kallman, somewhere in her files. The document also delineates some of their child care plans — an arrangement that allows her to wake up at 5 a.m. and disappear into her writing for hours, without having to manage the routine of getting two children fed and out the door.

“Groff and Kallman wake up together, they said, but the morning is not a time to chat

“‘I get so mad at him if he tries to talk to me,’ Groff joked about her husband.”

Here’s where the profile goes from strange to fascinating. First, I bet the “getting mad at” is not actually a joke, no matter how jokingly described it was to the reporter. You don’t have to be Derrida to detect the undulating reservoirs of resentment at being drug down to north Florida to live out her adulthood, a compromise that in all likelihood also financially allows her to write full time. Now, I don’t know that for a fact. I don’t know how much money she makes from her writing. It is not my business and I don’t care. However, I am fascinated by “literary writers,” that is people who write novels and stories that attempt to be art, rather than say genre stuff or TV stuff, and how those people also make enough money to live. It’s the age-old double question: how do you pay the rent? And who takes care of the kids? 

To be clear, I don’t care who does what in any kind of gender-role sense. Please. Every family is its own island. A Dr. Moreau-like island, to be sure, but still an island. My hands are too full of grocery bags to throw stones. But one does want to know (per the headline) how the work gets done; one wants details. This profile has the depth of nail polish. Who packs the lunches? Etc.

Second, a good journalist would have asked to see that contract. This is the most provocative part of the profile.  She is a mother of two kids and doesn’t have to deal with getting them out to school every morning? I’m a middle-aged father of two kids and I can attest that getting people to school in the morning is a scene, a daily steeplechase of bad yogurt, missing laundry, and rolled-through stop signs. 

I wonder if she has hired help around the house. No judgment. Strictly a logistical financial curiosity. Is there a nanny figure? 

“‘I like the morning because it’s empty of people and ideas and you’re still sort of in a dream state until the caffeine kicks in. It’s the best time of day, for sure. It’s a very gentle time of day.’” 

It’s only a gentle time of day if you’ve got a contract saying that your husband will deal with all that crap so that you can write! It’s not a gentle time of day! It’s a nightmare time of the day! It’s like Wes Craven’s Busytown! If you think morning’s are calm, you’re either medicated or isolated or childless. Just think of the routine caffeine-doped gridlock on the interstate loop of a mid-sized US city. Those people are driving to work — fortunate enough to drive to work. It’s a lot of things but it ain’t gentle. 

“She estimates she reads about 300 books a year.” 

Don’t believe it. Sorry. And I’ve read press releases with a more developed sense of skepticism. 

“Her editor . . . said that Groff reread all of Shakespeare so she could write a version of The Vaster Wilds in iambic pentameter ‘just for fun,’ as a way for her to master Elizabethan rhythms.” 

Lauren, honey. Sweetie. You’ve got all morning. Every morning. Please don’t waste it on crap like this. Want to write 30 pages of iambic pentameter, 50 pages, okay fine. But the whole novel? Come now. 

Then, the reporter gets a quotation from Hernan Diaz, one of Groff’s friends who she provided a blurb for and who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. His bit that praises Groff is hyperbolic and cliched, overwritten and underthought (“to make the syntactical edifice as sound and capacious and beautiful as possible”) and shares many of the same problems outlined in my ranting against blurbs. First, Groff should not be spending the valuable remaining hours of her life writing blurbs. (She writes them in the afternoons when “Groff deals with the business of being an author.”) No one should be writing blurbs, but we can be hierarchical about it. If Obama wrote you a letter saying how much he dug your novel, you don’t have to write blurbs any more. They are beneath you. And you shouldn’t have to give logrolling quotations to publications about your writer friends either. Jesus. What are we doing here, people? 

Groff’s not any good at this either. In a Lorrie Moore profile from earlier this year (I know I know, stop reading them if they make you so mad) by Dan Kois, a writer who should know better, Gross says of Moore’s famous kid cancer short story, “It’s so complicated and brutal. . . . You feel her great reserve is gone, and she’s bearing down with all her might.”2

“Bearing down with all her might”? What is she cracking walnuts? I realize we can’t grade all of a writer’s language output with the same eye we might take to her novels, but level up a smidge.3 & 4

But back to the praise of Groff by Diaz. What else is he going to say? He’s certainly not going to say anything critical, but the larger disappointment is that he’s not going to say anything interesting. I’ve seen more hard hitting reportage from the CBS Sunday Morning Show, in segments about, like, birds. This is embarrassing just in terms of journalism. (Harris, pay attention, I am talking to you.) 

Well you’re just jealous, one might say. You’re goddamned right I’m jealous! Granted, I don’t know who the intended audience for these profiles is if it’s not mildly embittered, middle-aged failed novelists. But yes, I am jealous. I’m also jealous of Heidi Julavits’s life, as cataloged in both The Folded Clock and Directions to Myself.5 She summers in Maine! People, I live in Mississippi, the very seam of Satan’s jockstrap. Do you know how much I would give to summer in New Hampshire or Maine? I’d even take up hiking if necessary. When summer arrives I just do what I do during the entire rest of the year except a) the structure provided by school vanishes completely, and b) it’s so hot even the lizards are frightened.6

So yes, I am jealous, but not just of the success and the talent. I am envious of the relentlessness and the discipline and the ruthless vision. To have those oceans of time to focus on your writing. And to actually get it done. The profile is correct in its Hook. Groff does approach writing like an athlete: regular, intense training, and religious routine. Let’s do some math. She’s 45. She made this contract 17 years ago when she was 28. 2006. Her first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, came out in 2008. She already knew, before that book came out. Or what’s more likely, she had the faith. She had the belief in herself to say this is what I’m going to do and you’re going to help me. You’re going to deal with the kids. And I’m not going to have another job. It’s this confidence in one’s own abilities, this self-validation that impresses me. And then the follow-through, actually getting the work done. Making the time for yourself and then using that hard-won time. Think of the arguments. Think of the familial judgment. Think of the clucking that happens at their kids’ school. Think of the strain of having to hack out that path over twenty years and then having to maintain it. People are always talking about how books are “brave” and “necessary,” literary criticism made of styrofoam. But Groff actually did what was brave and necessary. You want to see actual bravery by a writer? That’s bravery. Saying I am good at this and I deserve this time, this freedom. 

All of which is to say that I suppose this profile works, because I do admire Lauren Groff, novelist. Props are due. 

  1. The most honest writer profile I have ever read was written by Boris Kachka, published in New York magazine, of novelist Claire Messud. It’s a collaboration in frankness.
  2. Kois, a sophisticated journalist for Slate and a novelist in his own right, has all the guile of Bambi in that profile. But then again, it’s Lorrie Moore!
  3. She does drop the valuable intel that Moore is “very, very good with [men],” which totally tracks. 
  4. The story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” was devastating when I read it as a 20-year-old childless idiot, and the story was devastating when I read it as a 30-year-old father of a baby, and now that I am a mid-40s parent of two teen-ish kids, you could not pay me enough money to reread that story. I can’t handle it. It’s like an emotional Gatling Gun. Just give me another 20 years to recover. Jesus. Leave me alone. 
  5. I know these footnotes are annoying, but I have a lot to say. In both Groff’s story collection Florida and in Julavits’s memoir Directions to Myself, there is much metaphoric soup made from tide pools and the young boys who play in them. There is a nature/nurture, maternal presence metaphor in both, and both lean into the idea that “my boy won’t be like that.” The that in this case is the predatory adult male, the bully, the chauvinist, the rapist, the assaulter, the vicious threatening male presence that we all know and love. There is much forced wishing and hoping going on in these passages. A mildly unnerving parallel thread of parental paranoia. 
  6. To have the financial and logistical wherewithal to summer in New Hampshire? To have the imagination to even begin to think of summering in New Hampshire? I didn’t even conceive that was something you could do until I was 40. Talk about a failure of imagination.

New York Review of Book Design

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Most book covers are terrible. Most book design is terrible. It’s terrible in that it’s over-designed. Too many words trying to describe, capture, sell what’s inside. Too many overly literal cover images. Too much goddamned art. Are there instances of visually complex covers that successfully complement the book? Absolutely. But in my more curmudgeonly moments, when I see covers for books that I like, I think they would have looked better had they looked plainer. They would look better if they’d had the cover removed, if they were left with the stark honesty of the title page. Honestly, I like the example established by French publisher Gallimard. Plain cover, title, genre, publisher, author name. Leave everything else off. I am compromising by allowing any genre indications. Everyone’s life would be more interesting if readers were forced to figure out the genre themselves. There is too much overt, aggressive, front-end explanation and style categorization of art these days. 

And I hate blurbs. They are marketing copy coerced from the author’s friends and acquaintances. Or (if one is extremely lucky) they are quotations from reviews pulled out of context. The blurb forces writers to become ad copywriters, and I don’t know if it’s lack of skill or resentment at the unpaid labor, but the blurbs aren’t any good. They fail as description of the work contained inside, and they fail as provocative enticements to read the work inside. And they turn writers of literature (briefly discarding the quotation marks that typically shackle that word) into harvesters of clichés. It’s worse than a grade school awards ceremony, because we are all adults and theoretically should know better. Do blurbs even work? Has there been one reader pulled in by the canned hyperbole of some secondary author? It seems like by now there should be some data on this question. 

And no, I don’t like author photographs either. And I think the downfall of American literary journals is tied to when they, collectively, began including author photographs alongside their essays and poems and such. What is this, high school? Facebook? Have a little pride. America, let your writers be ugly and at peace!

And since I’m being thorough here: I also hate contributor’s notes in literary journals that list anything more than where the author is from and if they have an interesting job. (No one has interesting jobs anymore. They all teach.) The contributors’ notes now are so bloated they read like a more insufferable version of LinkedIn. If the blurbs are a kind of inter-personal logrolling, the contributors’ notes are a kind of institutional logrolling. I realize that logrolling occurs. I’m not that much of a Pollyanna. But I just wish it wasn’t so glaringly obvious, boring, and poorly written. Not even your mother cares about all those awards!

Are there exceptions? Sure. The black-and-white, windswept-yet-embalmed, deb-in-heat photos of Marion Ettlinger are, of course, provocative, making even the most agoraphobic sweater-covered humanoid temporarily alluring. The Vintage Contemporaries series from the 80s was wonderful, bright, surreal, associative covers that are instantly recognizable. And yes, I think Chip Kidd and Peter Mendelsund are brilliant. They’re great, but they can’t design everything. 

Really what I want is the covers of John McPhee. He’s written 40-ish books, and the majority of them have been published in paperback editions by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and they all look the same. I love the stark uniformity of all these McPhee titles, even more so because the topics he covers in his somehow non-boring nonfiction is so sui generis. Rural inbred pine tree people living in the inner wilds of New Jersey? The smuggling of Russian paintings? The historical attempts to control the Mississippi River? If you line up all your McPhee titles on the shelf, they are wearing their uniform, unassuming, diligent, neat, immediately identifiable. Yes, I know the front covers typically have some kind of art smear that hint at the thematic contents inside. Don’t be pedantic and ruin my point. These books look good and they look like they belong together. 

I realize that if all the new books adopted a McPhee-like minimalist approach and paranoia regarding graphic design change, the world would grow that much plainer, without all that shouting cleavage everywhere. Perhaps I would grow bored when I entered the bookstore. But I’m willing to give it a try. Someone somewhere figured out a visual language for McPhee and stuck with it through the decades. 

I should further confess that I prefer paperback editions to their more stately hardback older brothers. I find the hardbacks too nice, trying too hard to be museum quality. I have a love-hate relationship with the dust jacket. With my purported attraction to plainness, one would think I would simply throw the cover away, and yet I can’t do it. Chip Kidd once described his dust jacket work as designing grocery bags — a temporary container that’s destined to be discarded. I can’t decide if this self-evaluation is mature or nihilistic, or both. I also resent the time window variations between the hardback and the paperback editions. I realize this is a historical legacy of publishing, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and what I want, apparently, is for all books to publish first run as a mid-90s era Vintage International paperbacks. Matte cover, usually abstract, trade paperback width, paper quality just this side of feeling cheap. I never got on with mass market paperbacks, though I like the ideology. They’re too thick to hold comfortably, and there’s not enough margin to write down comments, and I am still trying to make a decent grade. I realize that by discovering my latent favorite what I might be asking for above all is to be young again. You know: back when they did things better. 

Currently, here in the Middle Ages, Fitzcarraldo Editions is close to my idea of perfection, one color for nonfiction titles, another for fiction titles. It’s simple and calming, and all of your books from that publisher can wink at each other smugly from the shelves.

But whatever you do, book designers of the future: no deckled edges. 

Notes on ‘Directions to Myself’

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There are some books you enjoy so much that you immediately and automatically buy the author’s next book as soon as it comes out. Such is the case with Heidi Julavits’s new book Directions to Myself: a Memoir of Four Years, which came out this summer. Her previous book, The Folded Clock, was surprising and delightful. I don’t even remember why I started reading it, but I found it funny and sharp and shorn of narrative cliche. It has the fragmentary scattershot nature of a journal but without the self-justificatory stuffing of a conventional memoir. Plus it’s funny.

The new book is a fragmented journal of her interactions with her son between the time he’s about five until he basically becomes a tween. The time chronology is a little furry. She has two children and the older one, a daughter, has cruised into adolescence, and the youngest, a boy — her baby — is quickly following, and this is her catalog of instruction to that boy. Complicating this narrative scenario is the sexual-political climate of the past decade, the Me Too movement and the cascading revelations of sexual misbehavior both small and large, petty and gruesome, that have come to light, with varying levels of actual consequence, and the book becomes charged. How to raise a man in a world like this?

I agree with Julavits on just about everything in the book and yet I left it feeling lukewarm. The writing is still sharp and sometimes funny, but the book grows static and repetitive, her narrative persona seems to lack self-awareness, and she comes across as overbearing. And it’s not that I’m uninterested in the subject matter. I also have two children, one boy and one girl, and sit there stunned at the kitchen table after another depleted meal wondering how these two humans will make their way through the world once they leave the house, what the world will do to them and what they will do in response. It’s too much, it’s like fractals, I just sit back and hope the patterns come out pretty.

Perhaps as a middle aged parent, I’m simply too close to the material to have enough distance to enjoy it. I found myself saying aloud to the book more than once, “Geez, Mom. Lighten up.” Every interaction with the son is so relentlessly pedagogical. Everything is a lesson about male threat and future behavior. I realize that it’s this way because that’s the very theme of the book, but it makes the reader question if Julavits is this relentlessly one note in life. Let him play his video games, or don’t. But quit giving in to upper-middle class tangible goods while trying to police his behavior on such goods while not also simultaneously recognizing that you’re trying to have it both ways. It put me in mind of Huck Finn and the Widow Douglas who is constantly trying to civilize poor old Huck. This book is from the widow’s perspective, which could be fun, but instead I just feel a little trapped by everything.

A recurring motif in the book is how people mistake the boy for a girl because of his long hair. This happens over and over again, and then a third of the way through the book, the motif expands and takes a slight, incomplete turn. A man has been watching the son play in a park and mistakes him for a girl, and the daughter corrects him. He then proceeds to argue with the daughter that her brother is in fact a girl. Then he walks away in a humph:*

“We watch him hurry away. . . . I could use this as a teaching moment, the lesson reducible to a single sentence. What an asshole that guy is.

Instead, my daughter sees an opportunity to teach me.

You know he wants to cut his hair, right? she says. He’s just scared to tell you.

We’ve had this discussion before.

That may or may not be the case, I say. However, I do want him to keep his hair long. While my reasons might not strike you as good ones, I want to tell you what they are. . . .

Reason one, I say. His hair is like the tree in your uncle’s yard, the one he wanted to chop down because it made his grass brown, which was no reason to cut down a tree, in my opinion, in the same way that strangers’ failures of imagination are no reason to cut your brother’s hair.

Reason two, I say. Which isn’t really a reason but more of a matter of interest. According to the websites I’ve begun to visit, because my old friend has suddenly started to believe in 9/11 conspiracies and the power of “the universe,” and I want to be able to knowledgeably discuss these things with her, the bones of the forehead are porous and allow light to transmit information to the pineal gland, also known as the Third Eye. Hair, according to these websites, should be kept long, so that it can be coiled or otherwise secured, thereby keeping unobstructed the lines of communication with the universe. . . .

Reason three, I say. Again, according to these websites, long hair produces calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D, which enter the spinal fluid through the top of the brain, thereby promoting greater intelligence, brightened empathy, kindness, intuition, and the ability to sense enemies.

Your brother, I say, is very empathic and intuitive and kind, and maybe this is why.

My daughter rolls her eyes. She believes her brother’s displays of basic humanity are strategic ploys to make me love him more.

She then correctly observes: Her father, who is also empathic and intuitive and kind, is bald. . . .

Reason four: I refuse the implication, made by the uncle on the island [who warned the mother to protect the boy, along the lines of his prettiness and hair could make him a victim], that if I don’t cut my son’s hair, then his risk of being harmed is greatly increased, and so whatever future abuse he suffers is my fault and then, because he’s pretty, it’s also his.

Reason five: I’d recently had a dream in which I was following my son, on my hands and knees, across a ladder pitched horizontally over an abyss, and he’d slipped, and fell and I’d dropped to my stomach, and reached through the rungs, and caught him by the hair, and saved him.

Reason six: my students and I recently discussed what a writer could or could not imagine fictional people, who in no way resemble the writer, to feel. One of my students said, I’m one of those people who believes there are limits to empathy.

I’m one of those people, too. The fact is, most hours of the day, my son is not with me. He might encounter a stranger in a park and, as happened to my daughter and me, would not be believed, would actually be dismissed, if he corrected that stranger’s assumptions. His hair offered him a brief chance to experience what some never do. It helped him sense the enemy, and hopefully that enemy would never be me.”

I find myself becoming exasperated when I read this. I find myself judging Julavits as a mother rather than riding along with her as a narrator. The line between instructing the child and controlling the child is too fine. I find the final idea, that long hair will create a kind of radical gender empathy within the son, dubious. I don’t know what to make of the final clause, where the mother becomes the potential enemy, unless she is hinting at the possibility that her very instruction and protection is a Widow Douglas-like threat. The whole scene strikes me as preposterous, overdetermined, unreasonable, riveting, and maddening in terms of parental logic. I find myself arguing the entire walk home. I can’t tell if Julavits is joking or not, or how much she is joking and when.** Before I read the book, I would have disagreed with the writing student who said there are limits to empathy in fiction, but now afterward, perhaps he and Julavits are correct. Perhaps the problem is that I just don’t understand what it feels like to be a mother, to live under that totalizing atmospheric burden, a lifelong heat dome of danger. So what strikes me as unreasonableness on her part as a parent (a type of controlling, wacky, sentimental to the point of paranoid dream-logic), or unreliability on her part as a narrator (a type of inconsistency in tone and authorial irony), is actually my inability jump over that crevasse of understanding. I just don’t get it. I am just a dad, with short hair.

* I’m trying out a different way of formatting block quotations. The default way it’s done in this theme makes the quoted text too large and, furthermore, italicized, which for some reason today just seems entirely wrong.

** “I was making jokes no one got but me. I was making jokes that weren’t, technically, jokes.” The Folded Clock, p. 191.

All houses are haunted

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Moving is terrible. “It’s traumatic,” more than one friend said. “It’s the second most traumatic thing after a death in the family.” Well, I don’t know about that, but it has been an old-fashioned pain in the ass, a pain not quickly remedied because the infection is the mountain of your own stuff and how to organize it within a new space. There is a brief moment of excitement, trying to figure out where the golden-spined series of Faulkner novels is going to reside, strategizing about the best drawer in the kitchen to house the spatulas, which hid from you for three days after the movers left so that you were left to flip your eggs with your mind, like some yuppie jedi. But this feeling quickly leaves, and what’s left is all your crap and the endless march of assigning it new places within the home. 

All my routines are shot. I’m writing this at 5:42 in the morning on a Tuesday on a desk that needs a shim. I pray the arrhythmic clicking I’m creating with each space bar doesn’t wake the dogs. I haven’t eaten a proper breakfast in weeks. I don’t know when to shower. I can’t find the kids’ lunchboxes. I need a USB cord. God only knows where that blue umbilicus lies within the boxes still unpacked, and we’re mostly unpacked. But there are always the straggler boxes, the boxes scribbled “whatnots,” the boxes that should just as well be incinerated because if you’ve lived without the USB cord for three weeks, you probably don’t need it and should learn to live without it. Purge your sins. 

Plus, it’s not just my stuff, but my entire family’s, which brings to mind George Carlin’s bit “A Place for my Stuff,” the central conceit of which is that your own belongings are your stuff, while everyone else’s stuff is indeed shit. Which pretty much sums up my entire theology regarding material plenty. I’m sorry I have to briefly pause my avoidance of cursing with this post in order to make my objects/waste point. I am overwhelmed by my stuff. And I’m horrified by everyone else’s shit that they’ve brought into this house. Brought into the old house and now moved across town to the new house. It’s like the beginning of White Noise except it’s all in my house, and I’m tripping over it. We have met the enemy and the enemy is us. 

Plus, all houses are haunted. The sounds in a new house are maddening. The air conditioner kicks on in an odd way, with clicking beforehand. And then the air return is like a giant seashell of swooshing up in the ceiling. The washing machine is inexplicably loud. The laundry room is the coldest room in the house for some reason. I have yet to fully determine the hottest room in the house but tradition indicates that it will be the master bathroom. The ceiling light in the kitchen is not centered, thereby destined to inch several members of my family just that closer to madness. The garbage container area sticks and must be yanked with egg-yolk covered hands. There is a bug in the garage that I can’t find, though it flies by my ear in Top Gun-ian fashion. Part of the yard is a swamp. The garage is still half filled with alien crap, there is entirely too much of it, none of it seems relevant or needed, and yet I can’t find whatever it is I have decided I need to find. When I get home from work, goddamnit the dogs have heard me, when I get home from work I feel compelled to re-enter the trench of unpacking, but I seem to be the only one still at war with our household. Everyone else has settled in. I’m in the trench (the attic), being shelled by the enemy (the invisible insect), while I dig further for shelter (organize our Christmas decorations). We moved because we wanted to change and now everything’s different. 

Perhaps this entire project would be easier if I were not so extravagantly uptight. I am like the Liberace of stress. I am like the Pavorotti of coming unglued. I am like that pickle jar your uncle dipped his fingers in over Thanksgiving and then wrenched back so tight that no one has been able to unwrench it since. The briney thoughts are swirling around and off-gassing and creating a further vacuum of anxiety. I can barely enjoy anything for longer than ten seconds without my mind undertowing all that came before. I realize this analogy could be workshopped. My pickle jar is a riptide is what I’m saying. The dogs are whining and perhaps they’re right. Perhaps I should just flip on the lights and start the coffee and get on with my day. Chores are at least manifestable, accomplishable. I haven’t finished the novel but by God I have taken out the trash. 

The complete eruption of routine triggers the motion-sensitive driveway light in my mind. My routine, as it was, was not the best, and I need to fashion a new one in this strange environment that I have put myself in. Are you writing? Are you still writing? What are you working on? Please, friendly acquaintance, don’t ask. Please forget I ever wrote. The landfill turnover of my accumulated personal affects reveals just how hopelessly sentimental I am, how hopelessly aspirational I continue to be, even at this late date. Did I really think I was going to read Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination? How vain I still am, hoping someone, anyone will come over one day and admire that small-format Mary Miller short story collection, the one put out by Hobart. Even better, I’ve got her first chapbook, too! Or perhaps someone will appreciate my unblemished run of the first three years of n+1. But no one is coming over, no one cares, and literary theory is an ugly hill. There is not enough space to house every book I have ever read and every book I thought perhaps I might read one day. There are libraries for this, even here in the suburbs, though of course none of them stock the right books. So sayeth the permanent grad student. 

The dogs have a hierarchy of discourse in the mornings. First there is the high pitched whistle, a kind of test whine. I am the only person on the planet who can hear it. It’s like my own version of dog ears. Then the whining gets lower pitched, becomes more vocal, more syllabic. Finally the little one just barks haughtily. A couple of paws stamped in the dark, then quiet. If I sleep too late, he will really get going as if he’s barking at an intruder from his crate. But the only person he’s barking at is me. That’s the only intruder I ever find when I stumble in. I thought I wouldn’t be able to hear them in this new and improved house, but even though I’ve reached middle age, I still won’t learn. 

Thick in Orlando

essays, ,

In Terminal B of the Orlando International Airport, there is an art installation. A cube of glass contains a man, sitting on the ground, resting against his bags. He is the Weary Traveler. He has fuzzy hair, a mustache, a Polo shirt, bad sneakers, love handles. He looks tired. The mannequin is eerily lifelike, so that there is a vibe of “is this man alive and sleeping? Or is this man actually fake?” outside the glass cube. Spectators, all in some stage of arriving or departing, circle warily, take pictures with their phones. It’s an unsettling scene, because the man is so lifelike and also because the level of irony is difficult to detect. Is this a sincere depiction of weary first-world travel, the culturally compelled hauling of children to tourist sights that are brand extensions of intellectual property franchises owned by an international entertainment conglomerate? Or is this installation making fun of everyone for doing the schlep? Are we being represented or implicated? Both? When headlines ask rhetorical questions in the New York Times or the Atlantic — “Will AI change pancakes forever?” — the safe answer is always No. But whenever I think of a binary question and wonder aloud if a particular situation isn’t both , the answer is yes, of course, it’s both. If it can be both, it is both. 

I have traveled to Orlando, Florida, for work and pleasure more than any other American city. There are other cities where the in-laws live that I have traveled to more often, but that’s different. That’s for family reasons. It’s almost a sub home. Truthfully, I mostly come to Orlando for work. I’ve been here maybe fifteen times for two to three-day stretches, and what I remember every time I arrive is how little I remember about Orlando. Nothing in Orlando seems familiar, while still always being familiarly shallow. The sites of Orlando: toll roads, retaining ponds, screened-in swimming pools, flat highway vistas under construction. Palm trees. Malignant levels of sunlight. But there’s no emotional familiarity. The town feels conceptual, abstract, a 3-D printed version of a city. It possesses no nostalgic pull. 

I have a friend who calls some locations “thin places,” and I think he means it in a kind of C.S. Lewisian sense of thinness, that is, a place whose pull on you is so strong that it seems to pull you into another dimension — of memory, of nostalgia, of friendship. This is unscientific, admittedly. And it sounds hokey, but I feel it, too. My prime example would be Oxford, Mississippi, a college town built on a square. It has the right mixture of incremental change and decade-upon-decade of sameness, so that it always feels utterly familiar. Also, it has an uncanny ability to act like a portal that leads to everyone else in Mississippi. I often joke that if you want to find someone in Mississippi, just go to Oxford and hang around for an hour. They will appear. Something will have brought them there. In this way it’s much more a hub of cultural activity than the capital city, Jackson, where I live. Oxford possesses a magnetism, and it’s not because of the football team. 

In Orlando thickness reigns. I wonder if it has to do with the amount of construction in the city. Perhaps I just always go to different places? But that’s not quite right either, because I’ve stayed several times at the same hotel, though I don’t know what it looks like or how to get there. Its geographic relationship to the airport feels arbitrary, ad hoc, improvised each time upon my landing. The very entrances to the hotel property feel re-drawn before my arrival, deliberately unmemorable. I know I am near the “parks,” but I don’t know how near, or which ones. 

At the Brookstone, in Terminal B, they’re selling the new Metallica LP. I read somewhere that Metallica had to purchase their own vinyl pressing facility in order to keep up with consumer demand. Life just keeps getting stranger. The electrical outlets inside the rows of chairs don’t work. Everything here is life As If. It’s not a trip if you don’t take notes.

Perhaps it’s because Orlando is in many obvious ways a deliberately fake city, a city whose primary economic engine is tourism, and not just tourism but a kind of live-action role playing of childhood entertainment, a deliberate fantasy land, a structured nostalgia. (Which I have taken my children to, and yes, they enjoyed the Uncrustables, just like everyone else, so what of it?) 

It’s Vegas for children. (No smoking, no copulation.) It feels temporary. It feels season-less, and yet the buildings are simply this season’s model. It’s not necessarily bad. This is old news. This is meant to be observation not indictment. This is what happens when I show up too early for my flight. It’s a place that makes me want to buy a nine dollar coffee-adjacent beverage that contains a thousand calories. I feel there will be no great stories set on a Monorail. 

Maybe the fact that I have no sticky memories from my trips to the city is just a consequence of middle age. Maybe I’m late to the magic of Orlando, or anywhere. Maybe it’s not the city but the traveler who is too thick to retain detail. Maybe I am the fake man, weary from my adventures through the fake landscape. The prepared environment. Is it any wonder that Terminal B is the only place that feels familiar, that feels somewhat homelike? It’s where I always end up. It does, after all, have a Chik-Fil-A.

All plots move toward adultery

literary lint, ,

I first read White Noise the year I was fresh out of college. I remember being perplexed. It didn’t rise and fall like I anticipated. It more or less just hummed. I had come to White Noise directly from David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” where he quotes long sections from the novel to illustrate how DeLillo was an important monument of postmodern fiction who dealt directly with dominant U.S. televisual image culture, a rock who everyone had to flow around. Several years passed, and I found myself in Boston and picked up a copy of Libra. Then began a yearly routine of reading a new DeLillo each year. A couple of years ago I reread White Noise and loved it, now as a middle-aged father. It struck me as wonderfully funny and prescient in its treatment not just of news as data but as the family as “cradle of misinformation,” and the father’s role as ad hoc arbiter of that misinformation. “Ask your father,” etc. The scenes of family chaos dialogue are the best parts of Baumbach’s movie — the detail I was most thrilled to see embodied on screen. 

Watching his screen adaptation of White Noise this past weekend brought back a simple observation from my years of incremental DeLillo, one that I don’t think has been remarked upon, though its simplicity makes me think that surely someone has remarked upon it somewhere. I fully confess I’m not up on the DeLillo criticism. Nevertheless, original or not, here is that observation: a significant number of DeLillo’s novels are structured around adultery. For all his deserved postmodern importance, with the placeholder caveat that “postmodern importance” is itself definitionally fraught, many of his novels are structured around a woman cheating on a man, just like in Madame Bovary, Ulysses, as well as countless other more historically vanilla novels. One could argue that the central plot of realistic fiction for the first half of its existence is the marrying of young women, and the central plot of the second half of its existence is adultery, that secret within a marriage, a room inside a room. The building of this secret and its inevitable discovery forms the theme and the structure of so many novels that it’s unremarkable, like streets laid out in a grid in a city. 

And though I’m not arguing that DeLillo’s novels are really about adultery, I am struck how this simple and even rote plot device is used over and over again. In White Noise Babette is sleeping with Mink in order to obtain Dylar, the experimental drug that might combat her fear of death. Gladney discovers the truth and embarks on an absurdist revenge scene, complete with gunfire. The Names, ostensibly about international insurance markets and hidden language cults in Greece, turns on the discovery of adultery. It’s a hinge that turns the plot forward, such as it is. Cosmopolis, arguably, is structured around the protagonist’s extramarital liaisons, culminating in coitus with his actual wife at the end. Obviously the novel is not about adultery, but the day is organized, punctuated really, by the trysts. And most importantly, Underworld, the massive, most DeLillo of DeLillo novels, that’s about so, so much, ends with the protagonist confronting his wife’s lover in the wastes of Kazakhstan during a nuclear test. Despite all of the human history and technology that are depicted in DeLillo’s novels, there is so often the secret, the revelation of the secret, the male jealousy, and the enactment of revenge. That old plot technology ain’t obsolete yet.  

All of which is to say this is not what we come to DeLillo for. Ex cathedra utterances defining our contemporary life, yes, absolutely. But not this. And yet, there it is, lying beneath the tires.

On giving up

essays, ,

Well I finally quit Twitter. As in I stopped going there everyday, all day everyday intermittently, little bursts of scrolling, the networked reading version of smoking. For the first couple of weeks, Twitter would send me emails saying that I was missing notifications, and I would dutifully (that is, addictively) click over and see that the notifications were bogus. Someone had retweeted someone else, etc. No one was actually talking to me or about me. These emails seem to have stopped. Now Twitter doesn’t even care that I’m not there. 

It’s a strange feeling. At first, I felt completely lost regarding the news. For some people, for normal people, this would have felt freeing, but I felt anxious. Something out there was happening, and I didn’t know the first thing about it. I didn’t even know the bad jokes about it. I didn’t know the memes. I hadn’t followed its digestion through the memeplex. I was losing touch with the references. Has my other internet usage increased to make up for the absence? For sure. I admit this with shame. The problem is that Instagram is, at its core, hopelessly boring. It’s mostly bad pictures that are advertisements. Even the people who think they are being sincere are posting advertisements, ads for their own vestigial sincerity. I gave up reading the Facebook wall a couple years ago (helpfully blocked by an app). Youtube is briefly distracting, but it is filled with so much algorithmic garbage that it’s like the broader streaming services: unless you already know what you intend to watch, you’re already lost. Plus Youtube is enough like sitting on the couch and watching an old-fashioned TV that it triggers my goofing-off alarm more reliably. It doesn’t have the academic veneer of reading. It doesn’t give the clean-burning freebase jolt of Twitter. 

So there’s nowhere to go now. I have nothing to do. There are about five sites I routinely check, even though it’s mostly muscle memory at this point. They no longer spark joy, as the saying goes. There are three individuals whose tweets I miss. I will not name them. About every other day I google their names, and the search results include their last five tweets, which I can read without visiting the forbidden site itself. This has proven to be enough, a methadone for my madness. I don’t want to see all their tweets all the time anyway. I just miss their voices, their quips, their amusing links to other bits in the web of distraction. It helps that there are only three people who I can remember to google. There are others who are totally lost to me, who I only knew via Twitter and their prose-forged personalities there. I miss them, but I am also happy to be free of them because their near-constant presence was agitating. This is especially fraught for writers who are so composed in one form and so un-composed on Twitter. We’re all just so annoying on Twitter, myself included. 

I wish I could say I quit because of Elon or some political reason, but the truth is that I quit because it was ruining my life, if just in a small way. When your kids joke that you’re addicted to Twitter; when you go to the bathroom in the middle of a dinner out mostly so you can look at Twitter; when you keep erecting barricades to prevent yourself from seeing so much Twitter, only to figure out ways to tunnel through regardless, it’s time to stop. It’s embarrassing. It’s a waste of time. It’s corrosive to your sense of proportion. If you could have moderated your interaction with all that decontextualized language, you would have done so long ago. Except for the occasional promotional link to a blog bost I had almost entirely stopped writing tweets. It was the reading that was always a problem, getting caught in the machine zone, which had been fun, could still be fun, but in smaller and smaller proportions. One went scrolling for the 5% of fun to be found, somewhere. When had it stopped being fun? I don’t want to depress everyone, myself included, by doing that math right now. 

Of course none of this has solved the main problem, that being the internet and how it is the perfect complement to my own will to distraction. I don’t really mean the useful parts of the internet. Google maps is great. Zillow is provocative. Uber is handy on a trip. Having a boarding pass on my phone? Also neat. I like texting everyone. Big thumbs up for texting. Sending pics of the dog doing something cute. All that. I do have a thing now where the sound of texts arriving throws me into a medium panic, but that’s an essaylet for another day. What I mean really is the news, the updates, the media. I would say social media but really it’s anything that’s remotely close to “media.” Anything that moves faster than an ebook. (My review of all ebooks: convenient, but hard to browse.) Wikipedia is addictive in its own way, but it’s like gorging on steel-cut oats. You’ll get full before you do any serious attentional damage. Instead it’s the trolling for stimulation under the guise of being informed, checking one’s internet traps for tasty bits of dirt. What would it be like not to check anything, not to feel the need to check on stuff, to use the internet purely as a tool and not as a mechanism to goof off, which really is mechanism for entertainment, which really is a mechanism for self-soothing, self-care, if you will, a soothing agent, a drug, an opiate for the masses. Hey, if that phrase hasn’t been taken yet, dibs!

I like the idea of Lent, even if I never give anything up. Lent is a reminder, an italicization of the last third of winter, the final blow, the bleakest turn, the unambiguously worst part of the year. You should give up something for Lent, because you have to give up something for Lent, because the root cellar is nearly exhausted along with one’s patience for shoveling snow. My affinity is mostly gestural here in the south, where today it was in the mid-80s. This is one of our false springs. 

For years I have joked that “this year for Lent I am simply giving up.” But perhaps I should make it more literal and give giving up a try. I should give up keeping up. Stop reading the news. Stop diverting myself. Stop checking in. Stop refreshing. Stop looking, stop searching. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Thus spake Bono, so many moons ago. You probably didn’t realize that he was singing about my problems with the internet back then. 

I don’t know what I would do with this free time created by not checking on the internet. It would take me being a different person to accomplish it, but through this effort I maybe then could become yet another different person. And maybe I would like that person better? Or maybe I wouldn’t recognize that person at all.

Charles D’Ambrosio Interview

The Quarterly Conversation, ,

Originally published in the Winter 2007 issue of The Quarterly Conversation

Living Near the Wound: An Interview with Charles D’Ambrosio
By Barrett Hathcock

The following interview with Charles D’Ambrosio took place on October 2, 2007, in Birmingham, Ala.

D’Ambrosio is the author of two books of short stories, The Dead Fish Museum (2006) and The Point (1998), as well as two collections of essays, Orphans (2004) and Loitering: New and Collected Essays (2014).

Barrett Hathcock: These days, the vast majority of writers also teach, and because they’re in teaching as a profession, they tend to move around a lot, and I think it’s interesting how people have to move away from where they’re from and how that then affects their writing. They’re moving away to sustain a career and the writing refracts that in some way. But you grew up in Seattle and now live in Portland, and I was wondering how has that return to the west coast affected your writing? Because it seems like some of your stuff is so specifically tied to the west coast, but then some stories, like “Screenwriter” — it takes place in Manhattan . . .

Charles D’Ambrosio: But [it’s] always in the back of my mind. I mean, if I set a story in Manhattan, it’s probably some version of — I’m probably taking the weather. I’m dipping into that palette and putting rain there, and the rain I know is the rain in Seattle.

You know I’ve moved around some. I’ve lived in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles and Iowa. Montana. I’ve bopped around a little bit but always for my own purposes, whatever [. . .] they were. I like being in the northwest. I like being close to family. I like being close to the people I know. It’s partly just personal. I have an American life so that means I have a very broken continuity — a fragile relation to my own history. And so the northwest represents the best chance I have of having a deep relation to place.

And also you know on some level, Seattle’s partly my wound. I want to be near it. Whatever that is, and I don’t know what it is, but I find it kind of important and exciting and vivid in a way I don’t find other places. Not to say — I mean, I love other parts of the country. It’s strange being down here because the narrative about the South and the narrative I’ve constructed about my life in America is a very different narrative. It’s western. It’s got a bit of Ellis Island and the Italian immigrant side. That kind of thing. But very different than down here.

Place matters a lot to me though, as a writer and as a person. I don’t know if it’s true or not but I feel like once I cross the Mississippi going west, I kind of know where I am. I lived in New York and Los Angeles, and I have to say that I understand Los Angeles better. I felt more at home. I understand getting in a car and driving two miles for a quart of milk, you know? And Manhattan was very interesting, but it was just too different for me. A place I like to visit but would not want to live there.

[…]

It’s interesting thinking about the South because I don’t know anything about it really outside of books, southern literature, and thinking about Seattle as a place, and place is very important to me, but it’s really because [Seattle’s] sense of place is tenuous because it doesn’t have the same deep history, and I imagine the sense of place in the South could almost be oppressive because of its thickness and the reality of the history.

Thomas McGuane has this quote — Out west you need a shovel to find history. It’s just nowhere available.

[…]

BH: So this is kind of a dork’s question, and the only reason I’m asking is because of “Drummond and Son,” which has so much great writing about typewriters. But and so, well: do you actually use a typewriter?

CD: I do. I mean, I use the computer too. I wouldn’t want anyone to have the impression that I’m like anti-, but I do. I’ve got tons of typewriters at home nobody wants. The main one I use now is an Olivetti — just like the story, an Olivetti Lettera 32. And actually I got the idea for that story after I’d been to my typewriter repair shop in Seattle getting that one cleaned. I got home and wrote a single-spaced page of notes for a story that I didn’t write for another three or four years but on that typewriter. But the typewriters I have are kind of a 50s and 60s, very usable, portable manual. But they’re not collector’s items so I get them for nothing. The Olivetti I got in Republic, Washington, for $1.99. Pristine. I don’t know why they decided it was $1.99 but they did. And they’re very usable.

BH: On the one hand I think it’s kind of a dorky question, but on the other hand, I think it’s actually really interesting, because I’m curious: How does that affect the actual composing?

CD: You know to me it’s the switching around. I also use a pencil and paper, and a pencil specifically, not a pen. I like the scratchiness of a pencil and the sort of delible quality. It’s not indelible. It’s not being put down for all time. And rather than turn around and erase, I just scratch stuff out. Its lack of permanence actually feels freeing. I do that a lot for dialogue. I like to arrange things with pencil on a sheet of paper, something off in the right hand corner and then down on the bottom — so you have a [spatial] change.

The same is true with a typewriter. I feel like with a computer you get into that left-to-write down into the void, that bottomless void, too easily, and I feel sometimes you think you’re writing but you just fall into word-processing tricks. But with the typewriter, I just roll a clean sheet in and you’ve got to start writing sentences. They’re not there on the page and you get into a rhythm and throw things down, and you don’t back space and delete. If you make mistakes or don’t like the sentence, you have to start writing it again. So I like the work of it.

I think of all those things as kind of layering into a story. A lot of the times if I get stuck, I turn to the typewriter, too. I do compose some on the computer, but if I get stuff, I’ll just kind of turn my back on that and just type and throw out things and not worry about misspellings and all that stuff that the computer tracks for you, but it’s annoying and distracting at the same time.

[…]

BH: You’ve written two collections of short stories and a collection of essays, so my perception of you before I met you was, That’s what he does. He’s a Short Story Guy. But you are now working on a novel and have worked on one previously, and I’m curious if the progression or transition between stories and a novel has been deliberate or simply more circumstantial?

CD: What happened is that I started writing something I realized that it wasn’t a short story. Really, I think among the many mistakes I’ve made over my life one of them was caring so much about the short story. I mean really until I went to an MFA program, I didn’t care about the short story. I had no prior interest in it. But then you’re in a program and the very format of the program is sort of biased in favor of the short story and against the novel or longer things. And you know, I think I maybe a little bit lost sight of my primary interests. I’m not primarily interested in the short story as a form. I never was. But I think I got steered in that direction and maybe that was one of the bad consequences for me [coming from] a MFA program.

[…]

One of the things I’ve done this time around in writing a novel is that I am treating it like I treat short stories. With a short story, I’ll work on it, change it, let it evolve. But I never feel like there’s some truth, some ideal form of that story that I have to be true to. It evolves. It evolves quite a bit. And if I pick it up a week or two weeks or a year down the road and start writing, I let it change in search of the story.

And I think with the [first] novel I kind of froze up and got kind of architectural like there’s some pre-existing form I had to measure up to or find and now I’m treating it more like a story and letting it change.

BH: But do you think the stories are at their ideal form now that they’ve been published and collected? Or is this just the point where they’re like fish and they’re caught and this is how they are?

CD: This is how they are, but some of the ones that I’ve rewritten and rewritten and rewritten off and on over the years, I know that if I had another whack at them, I’d probably start writing and change them again. 

[…]

With the short story, no matter how many drafts, I believe man once you write that first sentence, you are in the business of trying to shut it down. That’s how — and even though I write fairly long stories — I’m always thinking, How am I going to get all this in? I start thinking that right away. It’s like a dense ball of gas that just explodes but it’s right there in that first sentence to first paragraph. If it isn’t in that, then there’s no story as far as I’m concerned.

Maybe it’s partly because in a short story, you feel the whole thing inside you at once. I think a novel you look out, you see kind of a broad feeling, but some of the internal mapping of the story or how you progress from little point to little point is unknown to me, as I’m working.

BH: If you’re thinking about how you’re going to shut it down when you begin it, does that mean you know what the ending is?

CD: No, no. In fact, I don’t like to know what the ending is. Very often you have a provisional ending. You have an idea of a temporary ending. You just kind of erect this idea because you think you’re going in some direction. It usually changes. In fact I sort of have this thing where if I, at a certain point in the writing of it, if I see the ending, then by definition that’s not the ending. It gets eliminated as a possibility. It’s too conscious and I’ll start steering toward it and it’s too arranged. If I can see it that easily, then it’s not subtle enough. It’s not even worthy of being an ending. I have to be a little bit surprised by where it goes.

BH: That’s interesting, because a lot of your endings in The Dead Fish Museum initially frustrated me because of their open, unresolved quality.

CD: It’s one of the questions I pose to myself. There are times in certain stories [. . .] I was purposely doing that and I wondered to myself if that was the way to go. Some of the endings are really open-ended and all the tightness is in the first two-thirds, and then there’s this last couple of pages that are very, very unresolved. I don’t know. Well, life doesn’t resolve itself, but stories are different. But I was right in that place between how little can I do this, how open-ended can I be?

[…]

Am I doing something that’s right within the story or am I abandoning the story’s need? There are two endings to every story. There’s the one that’s the story, the tidy, and you could push it toward a morality, but then there’s the need to resolve it aesthetically and my question is: I don’t care about resolving the tidy moral life of a story, but did I end it aesthetically?

BH: I was curious about the amount of restraint in the stories. There’s no formal self-consciousness, and the prose doesn’t reach for extravagance, though that’s not to say that the prose isn’t beautiful in places.

CD: You know, I would never do that in a short story. For instance in my essays, in my book of essays, a lot of the writing in there is slightly show-offy and people have asked me, Why don’t you write your stories like your essays? And the essays, they’re obviously me in a way, and I’m just stepping out, but in a short story it would just seem undignified.

In the stories, at a certain point only the story matters and everything serves it and I find myself in the latter stages just subservient to what’s there. Like in “Drummond and Son,” at one point in looking over and editing that story it referred to the boys having to put down their dog or give it to the pound, and I had given the dog a name and the dog’s name was Pookie, and it was a little bit of a jokey name and I just kept reading it and thinking, You know what? I’ve got to pull that name out. Because it’s a little joke I was having [with] myself in the moment of composition. I was going to give it a silly name, and I didn’t want any of that story to seem clever or self-conscious. But just a little thing like that. Would a reader ever know? Maybe not. Probably not. It’s just a story. [. . .] I pulled that name out. I knew it was slightly self-conscious. You start serving the story. That’s all that matters.

Flannery O’Connor says somewhere in Mystery and Manners that you kind of have to absent yourself in order to see more clearly the thing that needs to be seen — the writer does.

[…]

In the short stories — if I can make a very lumpy contrast — in the shorts stories, I feel like the lives of the people have a kind of prior desperation and a prior need and my longing is for the story and their lives to somehow come together, even if not finally or forever, to face some thing; and it felt like a lot of the time with the essays, I was wading into situations where there was an assumption of finality of understanding, and I felt like I could wade into any understood moment and tear it apart and make it fall apart. So in the short stories, I want have such a deep drive to have things come together, and in the essays I have an equally strong desire to make things fall apart. Whether it’s political understandings or moral understandings that seem readymade and seem too pat or too easy, even by good-thinking people, you know. I like taking on public issues.

[…]

The accent in the essay might be: This is how I figure out what I’m thinking. In a story: this is how I feel out what I’m feeling. Just slightly different emphasis.

BH: I read that your wife is in a band and plays drums, and so I was curious about music and its relation to stories. I think it was in the 2004 Best American Short Stories, the one from 2004 that Lorrie Moore edited and which includes “Screenwriter.” She has this bit in her intro where she says that short stories are similar to songs; they have the same sort of interests in compression and carrying emotion, and I was just wondering if — being married to a musician — do you see any relation between songs and stories or music and stories, or is it a separate animal?

CD: Yeah, you know, I’m so musically illiterate. I can’t hold a tune. I can barely sing “Happy Birthday.” But I always loved music. Short stories are like a song certainly in the writing. I work a long time to get the sound right, and I feel a lot of time until I get that sound right — it’s the sentence by sentence sound — that I can’t go forward in the story, that actually the sound contains a good part of the narrative, and it won’t unlock until I find the note. And also I think short stories, like songs, have an associated feel. That’s me now speaking as a reader. There’s certain stories that I can just turn to even though I’ve read them a dozen times, I want to have that feeling, like you’d turn on some oldies song or some song you’d listen to in college.

For short stories, the experience is different. A friend of mine pointed this out to me. Tom Grimes, a writer and teacher who runs a program down in Texas. He said, I went into class and asked everybody: Who are your favorite characters in literature? And of course people say Nick Caraway or whatever . . . I don’t know. And then he says, What’s common there? Everybody’s like quiet. And he says, None of them are from short stories. Name a character from a short story — No one can. You never can. I mean there are some. Johnny Hake, “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” John Cheever. There are a couple that you can name, but you don’t remember them. And that’s not what’s important. And it’s partly the music that’s important, it’s maybe the narrative, but it’s not the character. Lorrie Moore’s a great example in “The People Like that Are the Only People Here” — they don’t have names. You don’t need them for the short story to come alive. We participate, we sync into it in a different way. Just like a great song, you almost don’t need the lyrics.

How to gig outside

essays, View from the Bandstand, ,

First, get a fan. I like this Lasko fan. It pivots. It comes with outlets built in and it has one bitchingly thick power cord. This fan don’t play. You can angle the breeze so that it blows directly up your keister, should you wish. Or you can do what I do and position it in front of you, so that the hair I still have blows like I’m singing in an 80s music video. Don’t fool around with a box fan. Please use my years of box fan failure as your guide. Those things are top heavy, and they take up too much room. Yes, these Lasko fans are pricey, but that’s a realization that comes with middle age. Sometimes the nicer things cost more money. I don’t care if it’s conspicuous consumption. I’m about to have a heat stroke out here.

Second, forgo alcohol. Forgo anything that’s not straight water. Stop drinking Gatorade! You’re not a child. You don’t need Death Water, or whatever the rebranded water is called. Are electrolytes even real? Just get a bunch of regular water. You don’t need a cocktail. You don’t need that IPA. You’re not celebrating. You’re working. Is the event staff drinking? No. Are they doing illicit drugs in the van? Well, maybe. But that’s their choice. You’re a responsible adult, and you’re not going to do any of that foolishness while you’re working outside in the elements.

Relatedly, don’t eat too much. Eat a third of what you want to eat. Don’t go hungry during the gig, because then you will eat too much when they save you a plate of barbecue. Again, let my mistakes guide you. Instead, a banana is your friend. It’s too hot for much more. You can eat a decent meal later at home under calmer conditions. If the idea of finishing that plate and then running around the block seems like a bad idea, then step away from the plate. Because when you’re gigging outside, you’re running on the inside, if that makes sense.

Fourth, compromise is a part of adult life. Remember you can’t spell travel without disappointment. And you can’t gig outside without being uncomfortable. It’s like camping. I mean, I don’t camp so this analogy might not track. I’ve got friends who go camping with the inflated air mattress and fan systems and a battery pack for their CPAP machine. I don’t get it. I don’t choose hardship. But sometimes gigs happen outside. People love to put the band outside. I think they’re afraid of the sound. People want live music. It’s like a vestigial desire to see actual fire. It feels primordial. But then, as soon as the band sets up, you can see the mother of the bride’s eyes go wide at the size of the PA. And I get it. We’ve all been at events where the volume was just excruciating. But the answer is to tell the band to turn down and then not hire that band next time, rather than hire live music and then put them out back, behind where the staff parks the golf carts. The solution isn’t just to hire DJs. God knows they can be too loud, and no one needs that much bass.

Five: remember that everything sounds different outside. Do your drums sound deep and pleasing, thickly warm and exuberant to the touch inside your house? Well, they’re going to sound like wet grocery bags outside. An unamplified acoustic guitar just disappears outside. Amplified it sounds like chopsticks chewing on pine straw. The electric guitar player is going to turn up even more. The only thing that still sounds semi-okay is an electric bass. Everything else sounds like hell. It’s okay. You’re not a DJ! You’re a bunch of human beings creating music on the spot. You’re not robots. You shouldn’t sound like them, especially when perched in a gazebo that’s held together by spiders.

Remember the fundamental riddle of live music performance: what you hear is never what the audience hears. We try to affect but ultimately don’t control what happens in the outer dark.

Hats are your friend. As is sunscreen. Don’t be a child. Put on sunblock. Your mother was right about all that stuff. You’re not less of a man by copping to all this quality knowledge. It’s a cliché for a reason. Screw getting a good tan. What you want to avoid is a difficult conversation with your dermatologist, the one that ends with you getting cancer boogers cut off your face. Do you really have time for that? Getting tan is for teenagers and professional models. Everyone else should know better. An adult with a tan line is an adult who doesn’t know how to take care of themselves.

An extra shirt is your friend. If, again like me, you’re going to sweat like a halfback while unloading the trailer, and you are then supposed to play for a wedding, sometimes it’s prudent to bring a change of clothes. In Mississippi, it’s too hot to wear pants nine months out of the year, and that’s if you’re just sitting there. Throw in some speaker cabinets and it gets grim. But also, you’re not in the Pips. Let’s not be too precious. What’s the gig? Are you being paid enough to bring a change of clothes? If not, just wipe your face and truck on.

Screens disappear in the sunlight. You’re not at work in your cubicle. You’re not at home on the couch. I know that contemporary middle class society has rather rapidly disappeared almost entirely into a touch screen interface. Look, I can control my monitor levels with my iPad! While also reading my Tweets! Sure, that’s great, but first, as soon as you get that backlit screen anywhere near direct sunlight it becomes essentially invisible. (This goes for those little clip-on tuners, too.) Second, you know how annoying all that technology is to use in the comfort of your own home? That place is perfectly climate controlled with very little chaos energy, the exact opposite of an outdoor gigging situation. Remember all the precious crap that you haul to the gig is going to get rained on. Not if, but when.

If there’s a 10 percent chance you will be cold, bring a jacket and a hat and don’t leave them in the car. Put them right next to you, perhaps underneath the floor tom so they can be donned at a moment’s notice. Again, I know whereof I speak. Last April we played outside, and everyone in the crowd was fine. They were under those propane heat contraptions, vibing. Mingling generates warmth. Meanwhile I was behind the drumset, arms folded in a pretzel knot of rage between each song. It was awful. And I had a jacket. I just left it in the car like a moron.

And remember cold and heat are relative outside. I maintain that ideal conditions to gig outside are somewhere between 74 and 77 degrees. Everything else is just a version of intolerable and necessitates the aforementioned fans and water and layers. If it hits 77, you have to start thinking about the dew point. If it gets below 74, any kind of wind at all can be brutal.

Also, if there is a piece of gear that the wind knocks over, that means you don’t need that cymbal, or whatever it is. That’s the hand of God saying you brought too much crap. Listen to Him/Her.

If the conditions are extreme, treat it like an out of town gig: ask for double. Sometimes you have to vote with your wet frozen feet.

Discomfort is a part of life. There’s no real comfort in the world. Sorry to be a downer. There are momentary pockets, but something will interrupt the comfort before long. The dog will vomit on the rug. The roof will begin to leak. Something. Why should gigging outside be any different? Why should it be less troublesome than sitting at home watching yet another series on Netflix? Once you embrace the inherent discomfort and disappointment of life, then everything becomes a little more tolerable. Is this depressing? It’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be comforting. I just think that everyone would be happier if we lowered our expectations about, well, pretty much everything. I don’t want everything to be crappy all the time, but I don’t want to cruise through life with the illusion that everything is going to be like a commercial with beers and footballs and hot pockets being thrown at my face all the time. Sometimes life is just waiting in line. Sometimes life is trading yet another email with the insurance agent. And rather than these disappointments and logistical aggravations being assaults against my existence, I am instead trying to recognize the ineluctably harsh grain of life. Every day is a winding road, all that.

So: Playing music outside is like eating outside, inherently ridiculous. And there’s a reason bagpipes sound best outside. They’re designed to frighten the enemy.

What I can’t live without

Product Reviews

I keep waiting for New York magazine to call and ask for my take on the “What I Can’t Live Without” column, but for some unexplained reason they never do, so I figured I would go ahead and describe those items here. 

Birkenstocks. Specifically, the Arizona: the traditional ones, the ones without a heel strap, the ones without fur, or any kind of bling. The ones with strong arch support, cork footbed, and an ugly, European disposition. They take a little while to break in. I’ve probably run through six pair over the past twenty years. I use them until the cork looks like desiccated coral, flaking off on the kitchen flooring. They don’t like getting rained on, and I think there are cork sealant products that I could apply, but I always forget. I don’t intentionally get them wet, but sometimes one is out walking the dog and an early evening thunderstorm pops up, and one is simply up the creek, as the saying goes. I like how the waffle-like indentions in the rubber soles slowly wear away with time. Perhaps this happens equally with other footwear but it’s particularly pleasant with Birkenstocks. Practical, comfortable, ugly, the ideal footwear. Plus, the sight of my uncovered toenails frightens away predators. 

Spotify. I realize that there is a long list of valid criticisms of Spotify, namely that it pays artists fractions of pennies through an algorithmically rigged application that primarily benefits the already mega-successful. But in listener terms, it’s a revelation. As a kid in the 80s and 90s it was a dream to be able to call any song forth and listen to it at that very moment. I remember driving through rural Georgia in the middle of the night in 2003 on the way to Florida to attend my own wedding when I desperately wanted to hear a new song that I’d heard perhaps twice, only in fragments, irresistibly catchy, and I scrolled through the static-y radio stations for an hour until I found it. Now you can just call it up. If it’s not on Spotify, then it’s probably on Youtube. I realize not everything is available, and I realize that this near-perfect availability is bad for the artists, but what can I do? It’s 14-year-old me’s version of the Holy Grail. Points deducted for trying to use the app while driving, always a pain. I know I should not be doing that. I should keep my eyes on the road, on what’s coming next, but sometimes you want to synchronize your commute to the perfect tune. P.S. that midnight-through-Georgia song was “Hey Ya.”

Google Docs. After a certain word count, it gets a little squirrelly, and I don’t ever do any serious formatting. But for typing words, keeping words, being able to access words on multiple machines in multiple locations, it works. What I hate about software generally is its apparent need to update frequently. Just when I am comfortable with an application, someone somewhere changes it, and it takes me forever to figure out how to replicate my cherished routine. I don’t always want a better design. I just want to live with the original mistakes because by now I am used to them. Those features are no longer mistakes but just the way the world works, the way this piece of hardware or software was put together, how one’s life panned out, and any structural improvement only creates more friction. I use Word less and less now, a shocking realization, as twenty years ago I lived in Word. Now my preferred on-the-machine word processor is the humble Notepad. Yes, that’s right. I am working on a Dell. I used to be able to afford those silver sexy laptops, but then I had children, and now I work in a Dell world. There is no formatting with Notepad, no pages, no sex appeal. But it has two fabulous attributes. It is screamingly fast, and it can be transferred to any other kind of device. (In case my child let’s me borrow their silver laptop.) No, you can’t use italics, but I overuse italics anyway, and besides one should be adding that kind of stuff later. For getting words down in an order somewhat approaching an English sentence, it’s the best freeway. Google Docs has more latency, but the access and the inherent cloud back-up makes it mostly worthwhile. I keep waiting for Google to start charging me money for storing all of those rough drafts, like an abandoned self-storage megalopolis of unfinished dreams, but I keep skating by year after year. Another quality I like is that Docs makes computer work (at least the prosaic kind I do) more independent of the actual machine. I work on my documents and my spreadsheets, and they are saved to a server somewhere, and then I access them again. I don’t want to work on the machine itself. I don’t want to customize. I am not a programmer. Some people are! I am grateful for them. But I want my toaster to make toast, and I want to be able to get to my toast wherever I am. I want to be able to burn my toast or not burn my toast, but otherwise I don’t really want a lot of toast-gradiation leeway. I don’t need predictive toasting. I just want to make the bread browner, toastier, depending on the day. I want to be able to send and receive short bits of text and add and divide various combinations of numbers in peace without having to think of how the machine works, if it’s good for human civilization, or perhaps talking behind my back to the HVAC. Occasionally I want to watch old footage of Little Feat playing “Cold Cold Cold” in Holland and send it to my friend. No, I haven’t binged that new 7-part series. There’s no time for that. I still haven’t finished all those books I bought when I was 24.

Polo Ralph Lauren Oxford-Cloth Button-down. Color: blue, the only color that matters. The perfect shirt, appropriate for any occasion, somehow perfectly sized for my arm length, torso length, progressively expanding abdomen. The perfect meridian of dressiness. Whenever I wear a different shirt, at some point in the day I regret not simply wearing the Polo. 

Icees. As a kid I used to get these all the time. I would get them at the tote-sum, my regional adjective for the convenience store. My wife’s people calls these establishments handy-ways, and routinely cringes at my use of the hickish “tote-sum.” Whatever: it’s the place where the Icee machines lived. I prefer the traditional Coca-Cola–flavored Icee above all else. I don’t go for that blue stuff. And I don’t go for slushies or slurpees or whatever ice-filled liquified candy Sonic is pushing this week. Just a Coke Icee. These days, these days of the expanding man, I only get them when I take a child to see the latest IP iteration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That cineplex has an Icee machine that actually works — another wrinkle. Growing up, traveling up into the Mississippi Delta to see my ancestors, my parents preferred stopping for a chocolate milkshake at a restaurant called the Pig Stand. They made the best milkshakes, but their milkshake machine was often broken. There is some corollary between the deliciousness of the processed beverage snack treat and the hypochondriac unreliability of the machine that makes it. It’s as if its genius can only manifest every 72 hours. More than once did we stop by the Pig Stand and leave empty bellied. Maybe what was delicious was its own brokenness. Eventually the Pig Stand followed its milkshake machine’s lead and closed permanently, leaving only the bitter aftertaste of nostalgia. Inversely related: the ubiquity of fully functional Smoothie Kings throughout the south correlates to how I find all of their products hopelessly mid. 

Voice Memos. Technology for people who hate technology or are afraid of technology or become so helpless and distracted in the face of options, in the off-chance of dopamine sparks flying. If you give me switches, I am going to flip them in an effort to see what they do and optimize the pleasure of the experience, but then I get so caught up in optimizing the potential pleasure, I never do the original task that I came to do so many moons ago. I am swamped by options. I have 18 tabs open full of articles where I have read two paragraphs each. There is always the potential next best thing if I am not sufficiently trapped or harnessed into the current thing. The voice memo is the perfect recording studio for someone like me: all you can do is record and send it to someone. Perhaps you can edit it? I haven’t figured that part out and please don’t tell me how. It’s linear. It’s got one button. If it sounds bad, you have to do it over. There is no patching available. No punching in. No tracking. I still have a microcassette recorder in my desk, which I used back in college. A great invention. Just enough technology to be useful but not enough technology to be interesting. Put that on a T-shirt. I’ll wear it under my Polo. 

Kolaches. Have you had a kolache?