Cape Fear

Did I ever say that I'm the Visiting Writer in the MFA Program at UNCW in Wilmington, North Carolina, for the spring? In the flux and havoc of winter, I probably never got around to mentioning it, but I've been here for all of three hours, during which time I was met by my friend Robert Siegel, who teaches here; picked up my rental car; took a quick jaunt out to Wrightsville Beach and back; and shopped for food at the Tidal Creek Food Coop and the Lumina Station Harris Teeter. If it sounds like I know the place, I do, at least partially. Both Mark and I were here for the semester back in 2004, where Mark taught a poetry workshop, and I was a guest at Writers Week. It was a dark time, in retrospect. Our dog Arden's health was rapidly failing and our worries about him--he died days after we returned to our then-house in Provincetown--shadowed the days. But it's a different experience to come back by myself, at a different time. The department has put me up in a brick, three-bedroom house with a big front yard, just a block south of campus. There's a long-stemmed blue watertower out back and banks of blooming azalea out front. Across the street: the Catholic Campus Ministry. I'm hearing lots of souped-up undergraduate car engines--the house is close to a busy intersection, but the sound isn't bothering me as of tonight; the noise reminds me that there's life and motion out there. My duties here are few: a workshop once-a-week, a reading next Monday night. I'm visiting my friend Karen Bender's fiction class tomorrow night. Mostly I'm hoping to get some writing done, and to take a few rides and day trips. Topsail Beach, Sunset Beach, even hot and trashy Myrtle Beach. I want to see pelicans and alligators. Spanish moss, live oak, pindo palm, oleander, magnolia. The Cape Fear River: all the things I associate with this landscape. And I hope I'll be able to bring some of that to these posts in the coming weeks.

Below: the Wrightsville Beach pier at dusk tonight.

Eagle and Snake

Not long ago Michael Montlack, who edited the Diva anthology which contains "Seeds and Orphans," my Wendy Waldman essay, was kind enough to invite me to write about Joni Mitchell for an anthology of poems to come out sometime soon. Here is my contribution, which wants to think about Joni and the contradictions of love through her unorthodox guitar tunings. Those of you who know the Don Juan's Reckless Daughter period will get some of the references embedded here.

Eagle and Snake
(after Joni Mitchell)

You wrecked the guitar; you made it yours.  I know which side I'm on, though that doesn't mean I get what it was like to stand up to the men.  Tune the bottom string down to what?  The top string to—That's twisted.  I hear them saying it, and they never get used to it.  Tighter strings can stress the neck, but you cracked open the orchestra, C to restless C.  All you had to do was lay a finger behind the fret.  The guitarmaker must have winced when he saw you coming, reckless daughter of Don Juan, and he must have hidden his favorites in the back room. You went through guitars like you went through men, though I bet it was kinder than I'm making it sound. They took to your hands on them.  You stayed friends with them.  They wanted you to show them what they'd secreted away, though none of it came without breakage: busted strings, slack action, fret buzz. This is what love might be.  It took us years to get there, but you heard it long before we did, even before you lifted the instrument. Eagle and snake, kindness and wreckage: six strings holding us down between saddle and machine head.  And just when it gets to be too much, a song comes.

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter:
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter - Joni Mitchell by ctdmedia

Little Boat

I didn't even realize reviews were on my mind until the first one came in today, the big one, from Publishers Weekly. There's inevitably a sense of averting an explosion; wanting more--one always wants more, that's the condition of this position; and feeling lucky and happy for what one has been given--there is a long pull quote or two, always hard to come by, in whatever the venue. And the sense of the little boat leaving the dock, all out of my hands from the here on out.

Moving On & Then Stopping Again

I began the day doing what I've been doing every day for the past week: reading everything I could about Japan. I couldn't help thinking that the crisis had started to resist our attempts to describe it in language ("recriticality?" what?) which made the tragedy feel more distant and more sinister, simultaneously. Then I came on these words in today's New York Times, in an article about radiation fears and distrust pushing people from their homes.

One who left was Koichi Tsuji, 53, a truck driver from Minamisoma, who said only those stuck in the tsunami shelters — who had lost their cars as well as their homes — were left behind. “Everybody was leaving my neighborhood,” he said.

Munehiro Okamoto, 36, who works for a drug making company, led a convoy of four cars and 15 people, and one golden retriever, to Yamagata from Namei, a town right by the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

He described a situation in which the parents feared that their children would get radiation sickness. He said the group would reach a city, stop, then fear that it was not far enough, and resume their journey westward. “We didn’t want to keep panicking and moving on and then stopping again,” he said.

That passage pierced the skin around all the language preceding it. I went all the way back to the beginning and reread it. Then I just happened to pick up Nick Flynn's The Captain Asks For a Show of Hands, which was out on the coffee table. And this poem pierced the skin all over again:

"greetings, friend (minotaur)"
Nick Flynn
from The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands

O heart weighed down by so many wings / isn't it time to admit / we are more machinery than gods / that our house is more maze than temple, that contrary / to popular mechanics we cannot, anytime / simply change the channel. Basho / year after year, saw on the monkey's face / a monkey face. Here we are, friend, year out / year in, in our bodies, inside then, seemingly, everything / as promised, ten percent off. You say / the family car was always warming up. You say / wasn't there a tv show about a minotaur? You say / O heart weighed down by so many wings, where / is my monkey mask now?

Sempre Susan

I suppose it's a sign of an exaggeration-prone temperament to say, "it's one of the best things I've ever read" of two things in one month. But I can definitely say that of Mary Gaitskill's "The Lost Cat," which I referred to a few posts back, and I can also say that of Sigrid Nunez's book about Susan Sontag, Sempre Susan, which I finished just minutes ago, and which I'm still in thrall to--and will be for some time. I can't imagine a more dignified, concise, compassionate, and devastating biography, whatever the subject. And not a false note. Here's a little bit.

from Sempre Susan
Sigrid Nunez

She said a writer should never pay attention to reviews, good or bad. "In fact, you'll see, the good ones will often make you feel even worse than the bad ones." Besides, she said, people are sheep. If one person says something's good, the next person say it's good, everyone says it's good." At a certain point, people simply made up their minds about it based on what had already been said about it.

But there were times when she was piqued about the person to whom one of her books had been assigned for review because she didn't believe that person was smart enough or important enough to write about her.

She said it was a mistake to care too much if others liked or disliked you. To be despised in certain circumstances, or by certain people, could be a high compliment.

She said, "Don't be afraid to steal. I steal from other writers all the time." And she could point to no few instances of writers stealing from her.

She said, "Beware of ghettoization. Resist the pressure to think of yourself as a woman writer." (I winced when I entered a bookstore recently and saw her shelved under the sign Celebrate Women's History Month. Just her, Anais Nin, and Zora Neale Hurston.)

She said, "Resist the temptation to think of yourself as a victim." (She had no patience with weaklings who couldn't take care of themselves; those without armor brought our her aggression.) She believed that women were raised to be masochists and that this, too, was something a woman had to struggle against. Though she saw herself as utterly different from most other women, she deplored what she saw as her own masochistic tendencies. "Like my grotesque way of panting after people who don't want me." ( Grotesque was another one of her words.)

Mark and Paul's Montauk Experiment

Here are some pictures of our walk at Montauk's Camp Hero State Park on Sunday. We ended up there after driving through town and finding nothing much of anything open. The park is part of an old military base, but that doesn't explain why the experience of walking up its paths felt simultaneously riveting and, well...surreal is an emptied-out word, but I couldn't stop myself from saying it. Along the way we saw dozens of empty picnic tables on the burnt grass and a red radar screen poking up above the trees on a knoll. A complicated landscape one part inland woodland, one part Northern California, sea cliffs as high as those you'd see just south of San Francisco, with slick black rocks on the sand down below, where several yards out, surfers in black wetsuits waited for the next wave to rise up. Later, after we got back home, I read that the property was the site of something known as the Montauk Experiment. After the military took off in 1969, experiments were alleged to have taken place in bunkers underground. Mind control, space and time travel: it's tempting to roll one's eyes at such reports, but I know a charged landscape when I'm walking through one, even if you'd never sense it from these pictures. There's Ned, and the distinctly Ned-colored sand around and beneath his feet, which he practically disappeared into.

(Those black dots you see in pictures # 2, 3, and 4? Zoom in. Surfers.)

Wasn't it a Freakish Night?

Lo-Ball Issue 3, edited by D.A. Powell and T.J. Di Francesco is here, with work by Steve Almond, Dina Hardy, Honoree Jeffers, Fanny Howe, Sophie Klahr, Cate Marvin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Matthew Siegel, and David Trinidad, as well as two pieces from Unbuilt Projects. "Rope Bridge" had its origins in Ithaca (think gorges), while "The Piss of New York" remembers the summer our neighborhood went from neighborhood to destination. This was the summer a transgendered person, dressed head to toe in pink, spent her days and nights on the steps of the furniture store around the corner. She was just as imposing as the piece would lead you to think: as swaggering as a longshoreman, though impeccably turned out in eye makeup, lipstick, and foundation. Somebody not to be messed with, even if she wasn't actually 75-feet tall. One day we just stopped seeing her, then she wasn't heard from again.

Little Fugue

About 300 people turned up at Lydia Davis's reading at Rutgers. It couldn't have been a better night, brainy and satisfying and high-spirited. She opened with "A Mown Lawn," which first appeared back in Samuel Johnson is Indignant, then read a cache of entirely new pieces, including the entire chapbook The Cows, just out from Sarabande Books.

Here is the full text of my introduction....

ON LYDIA DAVIS
Paul Lisicky, March 9, 2011

Any dedicated reader of Lydia Davis knows what a Lydia Davis sentence is. It is a sentence that probably wouldn't open with "it,” and it probably wouldn't end with “is.” The sentence takes the work of the sentence seriously, though it would go about such work with play. The sentence matters; every syllable matters. The sentence is attached to grammar, even as it’s wary of grammar and its hunger to lock down meaning. The sentence believes in the relationship between breath and thought. The sentence believes in the relationship between breath and music. If a Lydia Davis sentence could be compared to music, the music would be Bach’s: you could use all the same adjectives: clarity, exactitude, detachment, mystery. Every comma, every embedded clause, is considered, but there is never anything deliberate about a Lydia Davis sentence. Lydia Davis makes sentences that look both authoritative and effortless, which might be one way to describe art that lasts. Yet somehow she manages to make art look like great fun. As a reader, you want to participate in that fun, as if you've been given a puzzle or a tricky lock to pick.

But a Lydia Davis story is always more than a constellation of star sentences. The sentence contributes to a unit of meaning and sound that's often committed to the logic of a particular subjectivity, even as it manages to make logic sound absurd, as wonky as a stand up routine.  These paragraphs find wonder in patterns, repetitions, definitions, categories, lists, and circularities. They find wonder at the way we hold chaos and hysteria at bay with those patterns. They are amazed by our touching, baffling tactic to cling to words, empty, weighty, meaningless words: enlightened, interesting, right, wrong, excitable, phlegmatic. Though Davis’s abstract word-plays might not always look like they’re about the body or the emotional life, they are precisely all about those things. What might we be when our heads grow too big for our bodies? Oh, Frightening Human Head that gets us into trouble over and over and over again. Oh, Frightening Head that can do us in when the body might want to go in a different direction. As the speaker of "The Strangers" says: “The house does not seem big enough to hold all the people who keep appearing in it at different times.”

Stories, essays, poems, parables, manuals, logic games, diatribes, aphorisms: the reader would diminish Lydia Davis’s work (and to fall into the trap of the categorizations that she means to dismantle) to refer to her pieces as any one thing. Davis’s pieces are all these things and more, which leads me to think she has found the form for our time. There will always be those readers who want to get lost in the big book, but Davis knows that we’ve lost our ability to get lost and we need another way to read. She understands that our age is best understood in miniature. It is a cliche to say that we are inundated--weren’t people thinking things like that long before mobile phones and the internet?--but what a relief it is to read a piece that has the heft of a big book in the space of an iPhone’s face. To read that piece over and over again, to come just a little nearer to it, as we’re standing on line for coffee, or passing the backs of houses on New Jersey Transit, a small gift that tells us what we are, and where we might be headed. Here I am, little fugue of irony and grace.

Lydia Davis’s work has garnered extraordinary praise. Rick Moody calls her “the best prose stylist in America” while Dave Eggers says her work “blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction.” In addition to The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, she is the author of Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award; Samuel Johnson is Indignant; Break It Down; The End of the Story; and Almost No Memory. Her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and for her translations of Madame Bovary, Swann’s Way, and other books. She lives in upstate New York where she teaches at SUNY Albany.

It is a happy night to have Lydia Davis here at Rutgers. Let’s all make her feel at home.

Anything of a Certain Shape

If you're in New Jersey or in New York City tomorrow night, come to Rutgers New Brunswick. Lydia Davis will be reading from her work, which needs no introduction, as they say. Yours truly will be introducing her, preceded by Mark, who will be introducing me. It should be a great night, as has been the case with all Writers at Rutgers events. Here's the text of one of her superb and funny stories.

In this Condition
by Lydia Davis
from Almost No Memory and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

In this condition: stirred not only by men but by women, fat and thin, naked and clothed; by teenagers and children in latency; by animals such as horses and dogs; by certain vegetables such as carrots, zucchinis, eggplants, and cucumbers; by fruits such as melons, grapefruits, and kiwis; by certain plant parts such as petals, sepals, stamens and pistils; by the bare arm of a wooden chair, a round vase holding flowers, a little hot sunlight, a plate of pudding, a person entering a tunnel in the distance, a puddle of water, a hand alighting on a smooth stone, a hand alighting on a bare shoulder, a naked tree limb; by anything curved, bare and shining, as the limb or bole of a tree; by any touch, as the touch of a stranger handling money; by anything round and freely hanging, as tassels on a curtain, chestnut burrs on a twig in spring, a wet tea bag on its string; by anything glowing, as a hot coal; anything soft or slow, as a cat rising from a chair; anything smooth and dry, as a stone, or warm and glistening; anything sliding, anything sliding back and forth; anything sliding in and out with an oiled surface, as certain machine parts; anything of a certain shape, like the state of Florida; anything pounding, anything stroking; anything bolt upright, anything horizontal and gaping, as a certain sea anemone; anything warm, anything wet, anything wet and red, anything turning red, as the sun at evening; anything wet and pink; anything long and straight with a blunt end, as a pestle; anything coming out of anything else, as a snail from its shell, as a snail's horns from its head; anything opening: any stream of water running, any stream running, any stream spurting, any stream spouting; any cry, any soft cry, and grunt; anything going into anything else, as a hand searching in a purse; anything clutching, anything grasping; anything rising, anything tightening or filling, as a sail; anything dripping, anything hardening, anything softening.

*****

In a not completely unrelated matter, I will be teaching a weekend class in short prose forms this coming June at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Click here for the details. (You'll have to scroll down.) Lydia Davis's work will be central to our discussions, along with whatever work of your own you want to bring in.

Listening to Some Pigeon Wings

A couple of days ago Etruscan's Julianne Popovec asked me some quick questions for the Press's website and catalog and here is the product of all that.

(Photo: The Golden Beast has a thought. Actually he was listening to some pigeon wings at the time.)

Q: What kinds of things inspire your writing?

A: The truth is, I feel much less awake and alive when I'm not making something, so I'd venture to say that the not-writing makes me want to write.

Here’s another way to put it: Every time I read something I love, I can’t help but feel I want to do that. Not copy it per se, but do my version of it. I’m not talking about competition as far as I can tell, but something more animal than that. Maybe it’s what birds do.

Q: What is your writing environment like?

A: I used to have a house with a study and a desk, and I used to work only at the desk. But in the last ten years I've written just about everywhere, from the busy coffee place down the street, to planes, to the train, to the subway. I seem to do my best work when I'm not trying to do my best work.

Q: Tell us about a poem, story, or essay you've written that has special meaning to you.

A: That's tough. Every time I write something, it has some kind of necessity about it--at that time. I'm trying to figure something out. Then you finish the piece, and you realize there's so much more that needs to be said, and you repeat the whole damn process all over again.

Q: Who are some of the authors you like to read

A: Flannery O'Connor, Joy Williams, Mary Gaitskill, Elizabeth McCracken, Denis Johnson, Nick Flynn, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Salvatore Scibona, Jane Bowles, John Edgar Wideman, Diane Williams, Sigrid Nunez, Anne Carson, Noelle Kocot, Lydia Davis, Junot Diaz, Lorrie Moore, ZZ Packer, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mark Doty, and that's only a beginning.

Q: What things do you like to do to get away from pen and paper?

A: Going to the beach. But even more than that, I like the heading toward the beach, anticipating being there. I love the water, but I was never one of those people who could spend a whole day in a chair in the sun. Once I'm there, I'm already thinking about when I'm going to go back home.

Other things? Music: always my first love. Saying stupid things to my dog. Spending an afternoon with a friend. Exploring neighborhoods, not necessarily faraway neighborhoods. Even better if they're close by--and under-appreciated.

Q: What do you hope readers find in your writing?

A: I hope they find something musical in it, not just in its phrasing, but in its spirit. I want there to be some essence beyond the spoken, the literal--whatever you want to call it. I want it to have a hidden life. And I want it to be felt like music.

Q: Anything else you'd like readers to know.

A: Find something you love and tell other people about it. Pass it around.

A Recording: Trespasses

Story Quarterly 44 is out--or has been out for a little while. But the web version just went up, featuring readings of any number of pieces in the issue, including the story "Trespasses" by my late friend Denise Gess. Although it's not labeled, Mark and I did a joint reading of the story. He took the first half, I took the second. I hope you like it. I remember liking Mark's reading, then remember being very conscious of making a few mistakes and/or sounding too intense when we turned the microphone to me. We recorded it back in November 2009, the week of Thanksgiving, just three months after her death. I'm not exactly up to listening to what we did--it is what it is, a record of a time and place--but I hope it's as alive aloud as it is on the page.

Here's the link. You might have to scroll down some. It's the seventh from the top.

Below: the quickest shot of Princeton, where I took the Princeton shuttle (a.k.a. the Dinky) to hear the wonderful Elizabeth McCracken and the wonderful Claudia Rankine give brilliant readings on Wednesday.

The Bigger World

In the last few days I've been reading and re-reading the poems in Noelle Kocot's The Bigger World. To my surprise, the work has been talking back to the work of Flannery O'Connor, Joy Williams, Mary Gaitskill, Denis Johnson, and all the work that's meant the most to me. I'm happy to be falling deeper into it, happy to be taken up by its spell of funny, grave, poignant voices. To be learning.

Two poems: "Noneness" and "On Becoming a Person," read by Noelle herself:

"Noneness"
by Noelle Kocot
from The Bigger World

Seymour left the beach and traveled
Down a dirt road. He met a naked
Nun, and said, "Hey, what kind of
Dominoes are you slicing?" The nun
Was solemn, even though she was
Naked. She proceeded to sing
A tortured love song about her husband,
Who died before she entered the convent.
Seymour was bored. He wished
The nun was not a nun, but merely
A naked woman without nun-ness.
He ran away from the nun who was
Still singing, and ran smack into
A railroad of infirmity. A bird with one
Leg stopped for coffee, then flew
To the railroad to greet Seymour,
Who was his oldest friend. "We are
Drifting toward, drifting away from,
Eternity," the bird warned. "I've seen
A lost civilization, some prayer beads,
And I felt an immense calm. Seymour,
You have yet to be saved, from what
I don't know." Seymour basked in
The magical light which was growing
Dimmer by the minute. The nun crawled
Off somewhere and died, and when
Her body was found, all anyone knew
About her was that she was a naked
Woman. A lazy happiness overcame
Seymour, and the bird felt content.
Hours passed like this, then days,
Then months, until they were frozen
With winter in an unknown land.

Animality

I know I just talked about Mary Gaitskill seven posts ago, but I had to bring her up again, especially after spending a couple of hours today with "Lost Cat," a memoir of hers that appeared in Granta in 2009. I didn't intend to give over my writing time to reading time today, but Mark had been mentioning the piece, asking me if I'd ever read the piece, and once I started reading the piece, there was no lifting my head. For a time I wasn't so much in the bedroom or in my brain, but inside an enclosed psychic space, where everything felt raw and new, shot through with wild light. It is, in part, about trying to track down a lost cat. It is also, in part, about parents and children, and how love, more often than not, can devastate us, but not in the ways we expect it to. Insatiability, control, compassion, tragedy, trauma, grief, performed emotion vs. real emotion, aspiration--so many lens working all at once that it would be impossible to talk about all that in a single paragraph. Let's just say that when I looked up from the laptop, it had already been dark outside for a while. And I felt like I'd been given enough sustenance to write for weeks.

Here's a link to the memoir.

And here's an excerpt:

I found Gattino in Italy. I was in Tuscany visiting Beatrice von Rezzori, who, in honour of her deceased husband, the writer Gregor von Rezzori, has made her estate, Santa Maddalena, into a small retreat for writers. Beatrice knew that I love cats and she told me that down the road from her two old women were feeding a yard full of semi-wild cats, including a litter of kittens who were very sick and going blind. Maybe, she said, I could help them out. No, I said, I wasn’t in Italy to do that, and anyway, having done it before, I know it isn’t an easy thing to trap and tame a feral kitten. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought you liked cats.’

The next week one of her assistants, who was driving me into the village, asked if I wanted to see some kittens. Sure, I said, not making the connection. We stopped by an old farmhouse. A gnarled woman sitting in a wheelchair covered with towels and a thin blanket greeted the assistant without looking at me. Scrawny cats with long legs and narrow ferret hips stalked or lay about in the buggy, overgrown yard. Two kittens, their eyes gummed up with yellow fluid and flies swarming around their asses were obviously sick but still lively – when I bent to touch them, they ran away. But a third kitten, smaller and bonier than the other two, tottered up to me mewing weakly, his eyes almost glued shut. He was a tabby, soft grey with strong black stripes. He had a long jaw and a big nose shaped like an eraser you’d stick on the end of a pencil. His big-nosed head was goblin-ish on his emaciated pot-bellied body, his long legs almost grotesque. His asshole seemed disproportionately big on his starved rear. Dazedly he let me stroke his bony back – tentatively, he lifted his pitiful tail. I asked the assistant if she would help me take the kittens to a veterinarian and she agreed; this had no doubt been the idea all along.

The healthier kittens scampered away as we approached and hid in a collapsing barn; we were only able to collect the tabby. When we put him in the carrier, he forced open his eyes with a mighty effort, took a good look at us, hissed, tried to arch his back and fell over. But he let the vets handle him. When they tipped him forward and lifted his tail to check his sex, he had a delicate, nearly human look of puzzled dignity in his one half-good eye, while his blunt muzzle expressed stoic animality. It was a comical and touching face.

They kept him for three days. When I came to pick him up, they told me he would need weeks of care, involving eye ointment, ear drops and nose drops. Beatrice suggested I bring him home to America. No, I said, not possible. My husband was coming to meet me in a month and we were going to travel for two weeks; we couldn’t take him with us. I would care for him and by the time I left, he should be well enough to go back to the yard with a fighting chance.

So I called him ‘Chance’. I liked Chance as I like all kittens; he liked me as a food dispenser. He looked at me neutrally, as if I were one more creature in the world, albeit a useful one. I had to worm him, de-flea him and wash encrusted shit off his tail. He squirmed when I put the medicine in his eyes and ears, but he never tried to scratch me – I think because he wasn’t absolutely certain of how I might react if he did. He tolerated my petting him, but seemed to find it a novel sensation rather than a pleasure.

Then one day he looked at me differently. I don’t know exactly when it happened – I may not have noticed the first time. But he began to raise his head when I came into the room, to look at me intently. I can’t say for certain what the look meant; I don’t know how animals think or feel. But it seemed that he was looking at me with love. He followed me around my apartment. He sat in my lap when I worked at my desk. He came into my bed and slept with me; he lulled himself to sleep by gnawing softly on my fingers. When I petted him, his body would rise into my hand. If my face were close to him, he would reach out with his paw and stroke my cheek.