The Fugue, Alison Bechdel's ARE YOU MY MOTHER, DFW, and the Resistance to the One Thing

Some of you have been asking for the text of the talk on simultaneity I read at the "Progression by Digression" panel at AWP in March. Below is an excerpt of the full piece which went live on ESSAY DAILY" today. (Thanks to those who have been waiting for it.)

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Rainy night, windy night. Subway Platform, A Train, 59th Street, Columbus Circle. Four bearded young men huddle by the turnstiles, lift their horns and begin to play Bach. Four melodies, four tones fill the tunnel at once. My eye fix on the tracks, on the junk down there. A little rat runs through the junk. Like everyone else on the platform, I pretend I’m not a struck tuning fork. That’s what the city exacts of us. We’re already dreaming into the thing we’re on the way to: workout, hookup, business deal, drink, dinner, that meeting with an editor. And yet something important is going on here. I know it, I suspect the men and women beside me know it. It’s our secret. This isn’t just music, but a village. Four voices in conversation, mimicking, talking back to one another. Sometimes in sync, sometimes in argument. I think there is something beautiful moving among them, between them. The sounds lean into one another. They lift us above the trash. The one light of my train is coming up the tunnel. Soon the village will be taken down into the noise of it, but that’s all right: that’s a part of the pact. Perhaps the playing (and listening) wouldn’t be so animated if there weren’t some shared awareness of interruption. And then it occurs to me: this might not just be a village we’re listening to but something nearer, inside us. It’s the sound of consciousness, the song of the human brain thinking four different things at once.

Other Voices, Other Writers

Here's an interview I just did with Amy Yao, a student in Jill Talbot's Male Gaze class at St. Lawrence University this term.  I'm happy to be one of the writers chosen for this project, who include Edmund White, Mark, Adam Haslett, Peter Cameron, Scott Heim, Michael Lowenthal, K.M. Soehnlein, Ryan Van Meter, and many others.

*****

Amy Yao: After reading a large selection of your work, I’ve noticed that there seems to be a strong trend of lists and segments in your pieces. Any particular reason for why you’re drawn to the form? Is there a story behind why you choose to incorporate lists into your writing?

Paul Lisicky: I’ve always been drawn to fractioned work, all the way back to when I first read Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” as an undergraduate. I love the way fractioned work looks on the page, the sense of breath, or an eye blinking: open and closed, open and closed. Some of my earliest stories were in list form, but in grad school I got directed away from that. Or maybe that was my choosing. I felt that I didn’t do “connective tissue” well. Over the course of those two years I learned to do connective tissue so well that the pivotal moments in my writing started to lose their force and concentration. I had nothing but connective tissue.

So I ended up going back to the segments with LAWNBOY, my first novel. I’ve always been stirred up by juxtaposition, leap, gap. I’m a collagist by heart, and it took me a long time to recognize that. Somewhere along the line I learned that a list form makes a different kind of meaning on the page. It’s less concerned with cause and effect, logic, resolution. Its interest is in process, associativeness, what can be learned along the way.

AY: I’ve got to be honest here–I wanted to interview you precisely because I was wholeheartedly impressed by your mastery of the “fractioned” form, as you call it, and I can definitely sympathize with your desire to break free of the narrative cause-and-effect. I came across one of your blog posts, in which you wrote about running away from things, about never being able to stay in one place, and I particularly loved this:

“I’m talking about the allure of certainty. You can be caught in the thick of that, and not even know you’re stuck. And who could actually blame anyone for deciding what they think? We spend years and years not knowing anything, and it can be a relief to take on any narrative, a vocabulary of belief part our own, part something out there. 

This is a long way of saying: I’m running around a lot, I’m realizing that. And though a part of me still wonders whether I’m running from something, I also don’t think anyone necessarily gets clearer to himself by staying put, sitting in one place, in one’s room.”

Going back to the idea of focusing on “what can be learned along the way,” as opposed to merely being concerned with a logical progression, I’ve found that I often struggle with “centering” myself in a segmented essay. I’m curious–how do you center yourself in a fractioned work, especially now that you’re moving away from the “connective tissue”? Do you take one thread and run with it, per se, or do you feel that your writing isn’t meant to have one overarching meaning?

PL: Virginia Woolf says, “The test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say. This proves to say that a book is alive: because it has not crushed anything I wanted to say, but allowed me to slip it in, without any compression or alteration.” With the exception of something like JACOB’S ROOM, Woolf’s own work is devoted to continuity. It closes up the gaps. It’s more interested in the appearance of fusion than in brokenness, but I do think her words apply to what we’re talking about. The hard breaks in a fractioned work practically invite multiple streams of perception, time, reflection. I’m not sure whether the stunning juxtapositions of Eula Biss’s "The Pain Scale" would be possible without hard breaks. It’s a great example of Woolf’s dream of accommodation and inclusiveness.

That said, I don’t think a good segmented piece is exactly a free-for-all. We’re not advocating “anything goes.” It has to have an organizing principle or the reader is just going to shut down. It’s going to read as chaos–or worse, an exercise in self-indulgence. Patterns are crucial, probably even more so than when a piece is held together by narrative or theme. Repeated images, sonics–these can suggest order, formal awareness. Ideally these effects aren’t willed into the work, but arise intuitively, as part of the process. It’s musical, incantatory.

At best, a fractioned work tries to capture the spontaneous sense of a mind mulling over a question; perhaps the inquiry itself is the thing that holds the work together. In that way you could say that a fractioned piece moves and thinks like a poem. Is there some corollary between a stanza and a passage in a fractioned work? Maybe.

AY: Your thoughts on patterns and themes really resonated with me–in class, we’re working on writing flash nonfiction chapbooks, and we’ve been set the task of developing threads that tie the entire collection together. We’ve learned to hone our “recognizable palette” as writers, which is essentially an amalgam of our common topics, essay structures, and word choices. What are the main elements of your “recognizable palette”?

PL: The titles of my books all have some relationship to architecture and homebuilding and the books are full of communities: imaginary cities, failed subdivisions, unbuilt projects, hurricane-wrecked developments, developments just barely above sea level. I wanted to be a builder as a kid. I was very serious about it, and I suppose my writing is one way to rescue and rehabilitate the dreams of that lost kid. Some of the books consciously use that lens, others not so much. The truth is this pattern pretty much happened organically, through paying attention to what the material wanted to do. It’s all been a happy accident.

Aside from the architectural-building thing, I think the palette changes from book to book. In THE NARROW DOOR, the memoir out next year, the palette includes volcanoes (and other explosions), the human face, animals, and Joni Mitchell. I’m not sure I’d ever use that particular set of tropes again (with the exception of animals, which are becoming more and more central to my work). I’m wary of repeating myself. I like the challenge of starting from scratch with each book, working from the position of an amateur, or at least attempting to. What is there to be made from what I don’t know? I’ve never quite shaken this quotation from Joy Williams: “Effects repeated become false, mannered. The writer’s style is his doppelganger, an apparition that the writer must never trust to do his work for him.” The rigor of that both haunts me and excites me. It makes me want to write.

AY: How do you find inspiration as a writer? Is there a particular place you need to be in order to produce your best work, or a preferred state of mind?

PL: I seem to do my best work these days when I’m trying not to write. I can crush something if I’m bringing too much pressure to it. I’ll write every day during those rare periods when my schedule allows for that, but the real paragraphs often come to me, say, twenty minutes before I have to leave the house for an appointment. Maybe because I don’t have the chance to fuss too much with the work–I don’t know. I seem to do better in public places when there’s just enough white noise and stimulation to help me focus. (I need something to shut out. Too much noise–at the moment I’m trying to ignore a cellphone conversation–can be a problem, obviously.) I do especially well when I’m on a train, or a plane. That feeling of motion, that sensation of the world going by, or below–that’s a help. I have a beautiful desk at home, with cactus and shells and a white marble fish on a pedestal, but I hardly ever spend time there.

Inspiration is a different thing. I’m not sure you can actually force inspiration. Any encounter that challenges what you think you know–well, that can shake you awake. But I wouldn’t recommend taking lots of drugs or stepping into a cage with a gorilla. I don’t think inspiration is ever that neat. There isn’t a one-to-one relationship–usually. I think the best we can do is to be open and receptive to all the sensory life around us. And every so often your ability to access language will be in sync with your psychic material. And you’ll tap into that vein for a little while until it empties out.

AY: Unfortunately, this email interview is limited to five questions, but I’m curious. If you were interviewing yourself, what question would you have asked yourself? Did I miss anything? Feel free to, of course, answer your own question!

PL: Question: What would you be if you couldn’t be a writer?

Answer: I’d sing and write songs in weird guitar tunings that no one had ever thought of before. The songs would be dreamy and beautiful but sort of hard to listen to. The songs would be on the verge of falling apart. They wouldn’t be afraid of accidents or wrong notes. They’d be backed by a jazz bass and a string quartet. Not everyone would like them. In fact, some people would really despise them, but the people who were fans would try to foist them on their friends who’d resist for a bit and throw up their hands until they became fans too. Then they’d foist them on their friends.

Time Passes in the Constant State

In the Unlikely Event (and two other pieces)

This event took place on Valentine's Day at Google headquarters in NYC, where I read with Alex Dimitrov, Victoria Redel, and Jonathan Wells.

Simultaneity

Back on February 13, I introduced Mary Gaitskill when she came to read for the Writers at Rutgers series on the campus at New Brunswick. Here's a section from that intro.

*****

We will start where it always starts, with the writing itself. Here, a paragraph from the novel VERONICA.

The new songs had no humility. They pushed past the veil and opened a window into the darkness and climbed through it with a knife in their teeth. The songs could be about rape and murder, killing your dad and fucking your mom, and then sailing off on a crystal ship to a thousand girls and thrills, or going for a moonlight drive. They were beautiful songs, full of places and textures--flesh, velvet, concrete, city towers, desert sand, snakes, violence, wet glands, childhood, the pure wings of insects. Anything you could think of was there, and you could move through it as if it were an endless series of rooms and passages full of visions and adventures. And even if it was about killing and dying--that was just another place to go.

Instantly we get the sense of multiple registers. Although VERONICA is a work of fiction, it's not so pure as that. This isn't simple realism, where characters predominate and characters rarely have ideas of their own, but another thing: it's up to something dirtier and more beautiful. It's worldly. It steals from the here and there. We hear the voice of the essayist. If it's the duty of the essayist to test and try, it's all here: "The songs had no humility." We're swept by the dark allure of that and we want to know more. And we're not surprised that that more isn't just sociology, but something more disconcerting: minds changing down to their cells. It makes sense that this shift doesn't happen through direct statement, but through metaphor, the tool of the poet. The songs are vandals. The songs have mouths with knives in their teeth. The songs stun the houses that we thought were safe, and while there's something awful about the figment of those songs in our shoes and in our beds, it's also a relief to say that the world isn't simply light and white and golden. To be given permission--at least when it comes to our dreaming. And how is that relief conveyed on the page? Through music. Or rather, language becomes music, through the device of a list, which escapes syntax, cause and effect, linear thinking. Abstract word against sensory impression, the general against the particular, the cooked against the raw, the monumental against the miniscule--"the pure wings of insects"--all of it animated by slyness, wit, and the beauty of our precariousness.

To put it simply, we're participating in simultaneity when we read a paragraph like this. We're entering a fugue, though it sounds more casual than a fugue at first. It is idea and feeling fused, and if the work makes us feel more alive, it's because it's hammering multiple notes in us at once. My guess is that we could take any Mary Gaitskill passage and spend an hour talking about its contradictions and interrogations. I suspect it would keep yielding. I believe it would resist any plan to demystify it. Why? Because it isn't afraid to say that the world is inscrutable, and it is our task to bear into that predicament with the keenest perception--which might be the only way out: the one way to grace. As BOMB says of her most recent book: "With...uncanny...bluntness and high lyricism, DON'T CRY takes its place among artworks of great moral seriousness."

Concentrated Joy

Here I am reading "The Physics of the Known World," as recorded by Brian Turner in a little room at Sierra Nevada College, January 13, 2013.

(More posts on the way.)

This is Not to Say My Snow is Bigger Than Your Snow...

I know it isn't, especially if you live in East Setauket, Long Island; or Storrs, Connecticut; or Worcester, Massachusetts right now. But I wanted to show you Asbury Park last night, around midnight. I went for a walk. Not another creature out on the streets, only the occasional car crept past, in that inexplicable snow-quiet (tires on cream cheese). I walked to the boardwalk, turned, then the winds picked up. I was walking against a force that wasn't the more benign force I'd walked against just five minutes before, but something else. It snow-blasted my peacoat, my cap, the skin just beneath the eyes, and I leapt up the front steps, panting, dessicated: abominable me.