Vulnerability and Awe and Trouble

Here's more of that Q&A with Jim Cihlar (see previous post for more):

J.C. Critics have praised the poetic quality of your prose style, calling it dreamy, lush, and evocative. The first chapter of The Burning House was first published as a poem in The Literary Review and on Verse Daily. You use techniques commonly associated with poetry: ellipsis, imagery, and compression. How do the two genres inform each other?

P.L. I'm not very good at sticking to my category. My MFA is in fiction, but I mostly hung out with the poets back then. With a few exceptions, I still hang out with the poets. I love the attention that poetry asks of its readers--you can't read a poem with one eye on the Twitter feed. It asks for complete immersion. It's a bit of puzzle, a problem. You must work. You are implicated in that work. And I love the space it gives to the reader. A good poem doesn't tell you how to think and feel. It honors ambiguity, contradiction. I've always wanted to write prose that does those things.

J.C. Your books honestly portray human sexuality wherever and whenever it occurs, even in unconventional instances. In The Burning House we see the sex-lives of high-school sweethearts as they enter middle age. Isidore’s attraction to his wife’s sister may be a metaphor for nostalgia, but it is also an accurate snapshot of how the body thinks. Perhaps due to our Puritanical origins, American literature hasn’t always deglamorized sex, and yet your characters’ matter-of-fact attitudes makes desire normative, neither ignoring nor enhancing its relevance to other aspects of the human experience. Is this a conscious mission in your writing?

P.L. I think we've all read the kind of fiction that pretends desire is a little less interesting than tying our shoes in the morning. A tasteful ellipses, an excuse to clear our throats, something hurried through, subordinate to the drama at hand. I do think most of us care about our sex lives more than we're willing to admit, and I want to make sure I make a space for all that. It would be dishonest not to do that. I don't have a particular agenda, but I am interested in the whole unwieldy, interior nature of it: theater of vulnerability and awe and trouble.

Artica, Princetonia

Here's just a piece of an interview conducted by Jim Cihlar for Etruscan Press's upcoming anniversary brochure/catalog. Later, it shook loose a memory, which I'll mention afterward--

*****

J.C. In your new novel, The Burning House, a coastal New Jersey town battles encroaching development. Narrator Isidore Mirsky, an unemployed auto mechanic, knows the score: “But look, those ranch houses with their clerestories, open rooms, tongue-and-groove ceilings, and pocket doors were exactly what serious architects were aping these days, even as the dodos in our zone were tearing them down.” With your previous memoir titled Famous Builder and an upcoming collection of essays called Unbuilt Projects, architecture and civic planning appear to be abiding concerns in your writing. What fuels this?

P.L. I wanted to be a developer, city planner, architect--all of that--when I was a kid. I was pretty passionate about it. I spent the better part of my pre-teenage years designing developments on posterboard, filling up notebooks with house plans, drawing advertisements.

It's probably impossible and ultimately futile to explain desire. I was sick a lot as a kid. I had one illness after the next, so I spent a lot of time at home, by myself, away from school. I knew, as early as I can remember, that I needed to make things or else I'd go crazy. Maybe I didn't feel in sync with the world I was in, so I needed to conjure up worlds of my own--that might explain a little of it. All of that replica-making also seems to me like an excuse to name things: project names, street names, model home names. Repositories of names: it was the beginning of my attachment to words. I learned that a name--or a cluster of names--could create an atmosphere or texture. So through these books, I'm probably furthering the unrealized dreams, the unbuilt projects, of that lost kid.

*****

So here is the memory. I'm down on the floor, drawing one of my new cities I talked about above, and I say to my mother, I need an A-name. (Meaning: street name beginning with A.) She lifts her head and says, Artica. She goes back to sewing a button back on a blouse. A minute later, I say, I need a P-name. And without a blink, she says, Princetonia. Artica, Princetonia: where did she come up with them? Distinctive names, not like any names I'd ever seen on a map or a street sign. They seemed to come from thin air, and how did I know she wasn't going to say, I don't know, Pinewood? Small evidence of a original mind that often didn't know how original it was. And, after two years, I'd almost forgotten she could do things like that.

Speaking of Artica, which inevitably conjures the Arctic world: the view outside our kitchen window at 6:30 this morning.

Galley

Almost thirteen years ago, when the galley for my first book came in the mail, I wouldn't let it out of my hands. It took it with me to the gym, to the store. I even took it with me to the Galleria, the enormous mall in Houston, where we were living at the time. It was in my hand at the shoe store, and when the salesman asked me what I was holding, I said it was my first book. I felt simultaneously embarrassed and pleased when he made a bit of a fuss, when he said he'd look for it when it came out in the stores. As galleys went, it wasn't even a splashy galley. My wonderful then-publisher, Jonathan Rabinowitz, had told me, "my galleys are weird," with a kind of sweet pride, if by weird we mean something that didn't look like the other galleys that were out and about in the very late 90s. Completely basic, completely unpretentious, the color and cover-stock close to something that used to be called oat tag--do we still have oat tag? Nothing that approximated the elegant final book that was to come out months later.

On Saturday, the galley for THE BURNING HOUSE turned up in the PO Box. Turned up is probably not so accurate, as I'd been told of it coming, and had by Saturday morning inadvertently employed the faculties we use to prevent longing and excitement from taking up too much space, distracting us from the matter at hand. This time, though, the galley was so beautiful that I don't think I was able to fully take it in till today. It has been up over the fireplace for three days, and I've only now just started to handle it. Part of it is that this version is pretty close to the finished book, and it is astonishing to see it nearly finished, when it is still so many drafts, so many design possibilities-- multiple in the imagination. All of a sudden years and years have been distilled into a single object, a single object that wants to trick you into thinking it came in a single breath, a single urge. That's what art wants to do, I think, but a part of me would like to make available all the outtakes, the three voices that were part of earlier drafts of the book. I might just do that on my Tumblr after it's officially out.

May I be honest? My fear--at 126 pages it looks and feels closer to a book of poems than it does to the kinds of novels we typically see on the front tables of Barnes and Noble. I think poets will get it--maybe it is a big old poem, though it's accessible too. I do think you'll be able to read it in a single sitting, if that's the kind of reader you are--say, on a cross-country flight. I think the life off the page is as important as the life on, and that's the kind of thing I've always been interested in writing, perhaps more so now than ever.

And here's nice news. It made the wonderful Laura van den Berg's list of Ten Anticipated Books of 2011 on yesterday's Dzanc blog. Thank you, Laura.

Casino

I pretty much love this video more than I can say. Not because ruin and neglect are things to take delight in, but because the deep quiet of the soundtrack leaves room for the viewer. Plants green the concrete; winds blow through broken lanterns, and skateboards slam the tile where iceskaters once stood on line, waiting to pay the entry fee.



I took this recently:

Huzzah!

There is excellent news to pass on about a number of my former students. Congratulations and pride!

Tea Obreht just received a starred review in Publishers Weekly for her novel The Tiger's Wife, forthcoming from Random House in March. She's also interviewed in the most recent issue.

Alexi Zentner's novel Touch, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in April, was just selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program.

David Fitzpatrick, whose memoir is forthcoming from HarperCollins next year, was featured as part of an article about the New Haven Review in a recent issue of the New Haven Advocate.

Nick Ripatrazone's Oblations is due out in late April from Gold Wake Press.

And Benjamin Hale's The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve) will be out on the shelves (and will be Nook, Kindle, iPad-ready) any day now.

Hour of the Wolf

Some have been writing me to ask me how Mark has been recovering from surgery. That's probably harder than to talk to than you'd think. Good days and bad days, just what you'd think. The good days often include visits from friends. Visits from friends take on the significance of a vacation to a Caribbean island when you're confined to the 480-square feet of your apartment. The bad days--the bad days are those days when all you are are those 480 square feet, or worse, the months ahead. The likelihood of further surgery, further restrictions of activity, movement, the position you must hold. Boredom. Agitation. But even on bad days there are hours of interest. Placing orders from Fresh Direct. Listening to Jane Eyre, a chapter at a time. Watching Ingmar Bergman's The Hour of the Wolf, and for eighty or so minutes you're stranded on a Swedish island with a tortured painter and his wife, and as much as you're transported by the rocks, windblown bushes, and Liv Ullman's transparent face, you're tremendously relieved that the apartment is not that Swedish island.

At least he's not hurting physically. That is the very good thing.

All this stillness in the house has had other beneficial effects. On this weekend we would have been driving back to New York from New Smyrna Beach, where we'd been scheduled to teach all week at a conference. Instead, I am finishing my new book: the friendship book, the Denise book. The book that had a title not so long ago, and now I'm not sure whether that was ever the title. The book, in that way, has a mind of its own. I'm in the process of naming individual chapters. As some of you already know, I like lists. Here, then, is a list of chapter titles. (The repetitions, by the way, are intentional.)

Volcano
Still
Process Analysis
A World Out There
Mask
Palace of Empty Rooms
Romance and Betrayal and Fucking
Dig
Animal
Good Deeds
Space Dog
Lava
Sometimes Relationships That Didn't Happen Are Worse Than The Ones That Did
Emma and Cathy
Implosion
Famous Writers
Alp
Tsunami
The Mother of the Book
Monster
Sex is Charging Up the Air
Furious
Tilt-a-Whirl
Neatness and Niceness
If This Were a Movie
Through the Window
You've Done It
Wave
Technical Writer
Artist Colony
Table

Break

Oiled, Sooted, Smeared
Spill, Spill
High Maintenance
Dream
Ain't No Mountain High Enough
Windstorm
Romance and Betrayal and Fucking
Stunned
The Fall
Flu
If This Were a Movie
Homing Pigeon
Mystery Beast
Yes And No
Treehouse
You Who I Don't Know How to Talk to Anymore
Another Life
It is Hard Work to Be Dead
Is This Just Vulgar Electricity or the Edifying Fire?
Damage
Palo Alto
Bye
The Dead Can't Talk Back
The Freedom of Failure
Chemicals and Chance
Failure
Mask (Reprise)
The Narrow Door
Pasture of Darkness
Intruder

The Unwanted Guest

There is something undefinably appealing about taking a daytrip to a town, especially a shoretown, just before a snowstorm settles. It's not so much what you see (the plows gearing up, the clouds thickening, the birds hunkering by the dozens on the golf course) but what you can't. The what-you-can't makes some people talk a little faster, higher; it makes them silly, edgy. It makes some people fill their carts at the supermarket with bread and cheese when they don't usually eat bread and cheese.

I am heading back to the city--we just passed Westhampton--on what I imagine to be the last train out of Long Island's East End before the flakes start to fly. Will anyone be on the next train, at 11? I hope not, for their sake; I've read too many horror tales of people caught on snow-stalled trains between stations without lights, and heat and places to go to the bathroom. I went out to the Springs house to drop the car off in the driveway (a savings of at least 350 a month, the price of a lousy Manhattan garage) and to pick up some medicines for Mark and Ned. Fortunately, Mark has friends coming in to check in on him for the day. I'd been thinking about my trip back and forth as a sort of mIni vacation, only to find out that a creature (raccoon? squirrel?) had gotten into the house and chewed into the power cord of the refrigerator. Thus, spoiled food; thus, throwing out the food that neither of us probably wanted anyway, and scrubbing down the slopped shelves. And just as I'd finished that most delightful task, it was time to call the taxi to be sure I could make that three o'clock train.

But hours (and many miles) before I had any idea that an unwanted guest had been rooting behind the stove and refrigerator, I turned off the Belt Parkway, headed south on Marine Parkway. I went over the steel deck drawbridge and turned east. It was still sunny, it was just past nine, and the only sign of a storm coming was a hump of crosshatched clouds out over the ocean. I found a parking space between two alps of dirty snow. I stopped the car, walked across the deserted street to the deserted boardwalk, and there I was: Rockaway Beach.

Reading Jane Eyre Aloud

I don't know how we agreed upon Jane Eyre, but agree we did, instantaneously. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we'd heard that people could be divided into two types: those who love Jane Eyre and those who love Wuthering Heights. I immediately declared myself on the side of the former, though I really didn't know what I was talking about. I hadn't read either book in years, but I'd been haunted by the opening chapters of Jane Eyre ever since I was teenager.

To the point: because of his eye surgery, Mark isn't allowed to read for the next week. (Those of you who are on Facebook know that he is cheating a bit, but we won't discuss that here.) What better time then to read a book aloud? When offering to read Jane Eyre aloud, I'd somehow forgotten it was 500+ pages, but we won't discuss that here. Today will be Day Three of reading. I believe we are up upon Chapter 6--page 64. The method: Two installments per day, a chapter at a time, the best way to take it all in.

I am learning a lot about what it takes to read a lengthy work aloud. When reading a poem aloud, or one of my own pieces aloud, I'm better able to think into the word, the syllable in front of me. I'm not holding back the fear (slight as it is) that I'm not going to have the stamina to get to the end. It is interesting to think of a block of pages as a block of time, real time, clock time. Reading a long book aloud to someone is not quite the same as reading a long book to oneself. I can't jump up and get a glass of water mid-paragraph. I can't get up to pee, or leap up to check my email just for the sake of checking my email. Oh, I suppose I could, but it would ruin things. It occurs to me that everything about the way we live now (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, texting) wants to undo that kind of extended verbal immersion.

But what a wonder Jane Eyre is. Not just the book, but Jane Eyre herself. Wounded and very strong, suffering and defiant. Funny, I hadn't remembered how funny the book was, in a dark way. I was reading the passage below the other night, and I had stop for a minute, the way one has to pause, hang back when one is reading an emotional text in front of a group. There's nothing sentimental about this passage, even vaguely so. And I'm not even sure I was on the verge of welling up because I was identifying with the narrator's recognition that the Beloved Book had emptied out on her. If anything, I was awakened by writing itself, by clarity: another human voice making use of my tongue, my teeth, my breathing.

***

From Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte

Bessie had been down into the kitchen, and she brought up with her a tart on a certain brightly-painted china plate, whose bird of paradise, nestling in a wreath of convolvuli and rose-buds, had been wont to stir in me a most enthusiastic sense of admiration; and which plate I had often petitioned to be allowed to take in my hand in order to examine it more closely, but had always hitherto been deemed unworthy of such a privilege. This precious vessel was now placed on my knee, and I was cordially invited to eat the circlet of delicate pastry upon it. Vain favor; coming, like most other favors, long deferred and often wished for, too late! I could not eat the tart; and the plumage of the bird, the tints of the flowers, seemed strangely faded. I put both plate and tart away. Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word book acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver's Travels from the library. This book I had again and again perused with delight; I considered it a narrative of facts, and discovered in it a vein of interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales; for as to the elves, having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under mushrooms and beneath the ground-ivy mantling old wall-nooks, I had at length made up my mind to the sad truth that they were all gone out of England to some savage country, where the woods were wilder and thicker, and the population more scant: whereas Lilliput and Brobdignag being, in my creed, solid parts of the earth's surface, I doubted not that I might one day, by taking a long voyage, see with my own eyes the little fields, houses, and trees, the diminutive people, the tiny cows, sheep, and birds, of the one realm; and the corn-fields forest-high, the mighty mastiffs, the monster cats, the tower-like men and women, of the other. Yet, when this cherished volume was now placed in my hand--when I turned over its leaves, and sought in its marvellous pictures the charm I had, till now, never failed to find--all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions. I closed the book, which I dared no longer peruse, and put it on the table, beside the untasted tart.

See the Matchstick!

It is a mark of life right now that it actually sounded like good news when the doctors told Mark he had to be upright for the next eight weeks. That's right, in upright position even in sleep.

It is also a mark of life that I walked (actually, sprinted) by a car explosion on West 15th yesterday and forgot all about it until later last night.

The better news is that we're learning to manage on the minute-by-minute. The tasks seemed close to overwhelming this morning, but we also have help from half of NYC, old students and friends. Right now, Susan is helping him answer emails, Rob and Geary are taking Ned to Union Square, Guy is bringing him lunch from the West Side Market, Jaime is doing more extensive human and dog food shopping.

The lovely people who are eager to assist.

And all will be well. Sometime.

(And is it okay to pass along the witty title page of THE BURNING HOUSE? The final page proofs are due soon. See the matchstick!)

Snow Boy

Mark is in surgery as I type, and I appear to be incapable of forming an extended thought--at least of the bloggish sort. I've had any number of blog ideas coming to me in the last days--the last poems of Reginald Shepherd, a rare video of Laura Nyro--and while some of them might indeed become posts in the days to come, they don't want to be posts right now. Instead, a picture of Ned taken by our dogwalkers, Rob and Geary, at Union Square. I've been thinking about the challenge of keeping the dog posts in check when Ned is the life in the house right now. Maybe it is a fear of indulgence, a fear of subjecting readers to the canine version of the Facebook vacation picture. Or, maybe more accurately, the worry that the complicated psyche of Ned be reduced to an "aw." Not that an "aw" is anything to be ashamed of, but it doesn't quite take in the side of the creature who would dash down three flights of co-op steps after Mark's departure, to jump up and nose the front door's glass. The top of his head was unusually creased; he practically pulled me down the block to leap after a man he suspected was Mark, though Mark was already gone, heading across town in a cab to the hospital. I thought of a line from J.R. Ackerley's wonderfully pungent My Dog Tulip, though you'll have to substitute a "he" for a "she" here. These words are spoken by Tulip's best vet, after the speaker is chased out of surgery: "She's in love with you, that's obvious. And so life's full of worries for her."

I'm sure I'll have some news later today. Heading over to the hospital when I get the call.

Irreverence and Reverence

Nick Ripatrazone, the author of Oblations, an excellent collection of prose poems coming out soon, interviewed me recently for The Fine Delight, his brand new website. Here's a portion of the interview, along with a link to the complete exchange. Nick's previous post contains a thoughtful analysis of "The Didache" from Unbuilt Projects.

*****

4. Could you discuss your appreciation for the writing (and ideas about writing) of Flannery O'Connor?

I've always been stirred by the relationship between disruption and growth in her work. Grace doesn't often happen without confrontation, especially confrontation between strangers. I'm also interested in the relationship between irreverence and reverence in her stories. You can't have reverence without the other, you know? The Grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" doesn't reach out to touch the Misfit's face until after she mumbles, "Maybe he didn't raise the dead." That's the first point in the piece where she actively doubts, the first time she asks a question. The religion of complacency and denial and reward for social achievement--gone up in a flare. I don't think that she would have come to that radical connection with the Misfit unless she'd opened herself up to doubt.

I also love what O'Connor does with tone--the almost slapstick, vaguely sitcom-y opening of "A Good Man" morphing into something so grave and pressurized that it's almost unbearable. Try reading that whole story aloud in a group setting: It's on fire. I'm always relieved by any piece of art that escapes its original terms, that's given permission to leap and stretch and go to strange, anarchic places. Of course there's still humor, dark humor, in the gravest parts of the story, but the story's become another animal in its final pages. There's such a lesson in that, not only in terms of content but form, too.

5. Any Catholic literary influences (besides O'Connor)?

Ah, definitely Denis Johnson. JESUS' SON is about as important to me as anything, not just its thinking, its accommodation of heightened perception, but its economy, its disjunctions, its room for inference. A beautiful, wounded mind that's always struggling toward clarity, grace--and what it means to recognize other human beings. It's music in language.