AWP is approaching, and for some odd reason, I'm excited about going to Chicago on Wednesday. The truth is my last two AWPs have been wonderful, in spite of the sickening, social overload. I am need of seeing the people I love. I have probably said yes to too much--a book signing for The Burning House on Friday, a panel on Saturday, a group reading on Saturday. And two offsite events: a group reading on Thursday night at six, and the VIDA benefit on Friday at ten PM. Someone you know might be singing sometime after 10 AM. By which I mean in front of the crowd. Be forewarned.
I ended up writing out my introduction to the VCCA Anniversary event, where I'm reading a poem by Melissa Stein, and two short pieces of mine. I thought I'd give you a preview. The introduction at least, which was delight to write.
***
Fence on the left, fence on the right. Worn dirt road down the middle. Creature of black with white patches. Curious, cautious. Lumber to two-legger in green. Is that grass? Wearing a jacket of grass? Hand reaches out to rub the head, oh so good to have the head rubbed. Good, good, so much good behind the ears. Tongue plunges, the big pink, and drags up buttons to collar. Two-legger laughs, pulls back, goes back in again. Need rub: please. Tongue plunges once more, wiping down the jacket of grass, but it isn't grass, no, not the crisp bitey sweet. Turns, storming the field with a snort, mashing the grass to join the others.
Two-legger is me, obviously. And that is my first encounter with the cows of the VCCA. Animals and writing: who knew that that's where it would start for me? I did not know back then that animals were the missing thing in my life, and I might not have recognized that had it not been for the VCCA, which put cows right in the center of all that making.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Friday, February 24, 2012
The Fine Delight
I'm honored to be featured in this excerpt from Nick Ripatrazone's forthcoming book of criticism, The Fine Delight, which will be out a year from now. It looks like it's going to be an absorbing, spacious read, "everything from William Gass to Flannery O'Connor" represented, as Nick says.
And below, three photos from my stay at the Delaware shore last weekend. You've seen versions of these shots before--I took them at Cape Henlopen State Park and Gordons Pond, just north of Rehoboth--but I've been fooling around with the filters on Instagram, which seem to have their own private mind.
And below, three photos from my stay at the Delaware shore last weekend. You've seen versions of these shots before--I took them at Cape Henlopen State Park and Gordons Pond, just north of Rehoboth--but I've been fooling around with the filters on Instagram, which seem to have their own private mind.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Washington's Face
Presidents Day has come and gone, but I've been thinking more than usual about George Washington, especially after having given a reading at Washington College, in Chestertown, Maryland last Thursday. The first president was one of the founders of the school, and images of him turn up on every wall, around every corner, especially in the Brown Cottage, where the college put me up for the night.
It's hard not take Washington's image--which we come across many times in a day, on the dollar bill--for granted. By that I mean, it's a challenge to see any endlessly reproached image until it's been re-contextualized. That's not news of course, but I never realized till last weekend that Washington is always seen looking out the side of his face, rather than straight on. I'm sure that that must have something to do with the conventions of portraiture for the day, but who would the father of our country be for us if he were looking directly at the viewer, with a kind of frankness? Do such portraits of him exist?
I was wondering about all that as I stepped up into the school's Writer's House, which must be one of the finest writers' houses I've ever seen. I was so much in awe (the signed posters, the framed pictures of former visiting writers) that I didn't get the chance to take many pictures, but I did get this shot of the letterpress room, from the top of the stairs, in which this incredible broadside of my piece "Bunny" was made. Soon it will make it up on those walls of that house if it's not already there.
It's hard not take Washington's image--which we come across many times in a day, on the dollar bill--for granted. By that I mean, it's a challenge to see any endlessly reproached image until it's been re-contextualized. That's not news of course, but I never realized till last weekend that Washington is always seen looking out the side of his face, rather than straight on. I'm sure that that must have something to do with the conventions of portraiture for the day, but who would the father of our country be for us if he were looking directly at the viewer, with a kind of frankness? Do such portraits of him exist?
I was wondering about all that as I stepped up into the school's Writer's House, which must be one of the finest writers' houses I've ever seen. I was so much in awe (the signed posters, the framed pictures of former visiting writers) that I didn't get the chance to take many pictures, but I did get this shot of the letterpress room, from the top of the stairs, in which this incredible broadside of my piece "Bunny" was made. Soon it will make it up on those walls of that house if it's not already there.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Sex! Classification! Music! Cities!
In the last week or so, I did a longish and fun interview with Richard Schemmerer for a new magazine called The Pride Review. The content isn't posted on-line, but you can get a digital or printed copy here. I pulled four q/a's below: everything you ever possibly needed to know about sex, classification, music, cities.
UPDATE 2/18/12: You can read the whole thing here.
***
Richard Schemmerer: When does writing become pornography?
PL: I think there is such a thing as good porn--by that I mean representation that feels inspired, spontaneous, a little dangerous, something that takes you out of the here-and-now. It calls on you to express. But received language about sex? What good is that? It’s just mechanics. And it sort of misses the point. It doesn’t understand that sex is a gateway to something else. Sometimes we lose ourselves; sometimes we think about things we wouldn’t think about if we weren’t attempting to make contact bodily. Sex, in a way, is really about the inner life, as much as it is an attempt to escape time. As fun as it can be, profound things can happen. Sometimes roles that are hidden in us can be brought forth. It can feel elemental; aspects of our complicated selves can be purified and intensified. It can be boring. It can be a disappointment. It can make us feel inadequate--sometimes our bodies don’t exactly want to cooperate with want our minds think they want to do. I can’t think of anything that’s more interesting to write about, frankly, and it surprises me how little of it makes it to the page.
***
RS: How important is it for you to not be classified and why?
PL: I just read an interview with John Barth, who said: “I know we can’t live without categories. They are useful. But remember: The muses don’t know or care about them.” I love that. So much of classification in our day has to do with marketing, and once we write toward that artificially-created space, we’re writing what’s already known, intellectually, emotionally, structurally--all that. I’ve always been wary of my style doing the work for me. Joy Williams refers to a writer’s style as his “doppelganger.” It’s your friend on one hand. It’s you, stylized. On the other hand, it can help you cheat, take shortcuts, rely on repeated effects. Ideally, I’d like to approach each book as an amateur all over again. Of course that’s scary as all get-out, and you run the risk of alienating some of your readers, who might want you to do the book they liked all over again, with different character names. But I figure if I’m interested, my reader will be, too.
***
RS: Who would you want to be if you could reinvent your self?
PL: I’d definitely want to be a singer. He’d be someone who had the capacity to sing high husky notes without ruining his voice. He’d have relaxed, authoritative phrasing. He’d never make a sound that he wasn’t invested in, but he wouldn’t be deliberate about it either. He’d be a little like Al Green and Marvin Gaye and maybe even David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors. How’s that? (I’m making myself laugh here.)
***
RS: If you could build anything what would it be?
PL: Famous Builder is so much about my childhood desire to build cities, so I’m afraid that would still be true. It would have lots of woody areas, houses wound into forests, swamps, bogs, marshes, beaches. The houses would probably have a midcentury modern look to them, but be relatively modest, like the Eichler houses in the Bay Area. My cities would smash the divide between the wild world and the built world. But how to build a city that doesn’t wreak havoc on animals, air, the water supply? If I knew the answer to that I’d probably be out there digging and nailing.
UPDATE 2/18/12: You can read the whole thing here.
***
Richard Schemmerer: When does writing become pornography?
PL: I think there is such a thing as good porn--by that I mean representation that feels inspired, spontaneous, a little dangerous, something that takes you out of the here-and-now. It calls on you to express. But received language about sex? What good is that? It’s just mechanics. And it sort of misses the point. It doesn’t understand that sex is a gateway to something else. Sometimes we lose ourselves; sometimes we think about things we wouldn’t think about if we weren’t attempting to make contact bodily. Sex, in a way, is really about the inner life, as much as it is an attempt to escape time. As fun as it can be, profound things can happen. Sometimes roles that are hidden in us can be brought forth. It can feel elemental; aspects of our complicated selves can be purified and intensified. It can be boring. It can be a disappointment. It can make us feel inadequate--sometimes our bodies don’t exactly want to cooperate with want our minds think they want to do. I can’t think of anything that’s more interesting to write about, frankly, and it surprises me how little of it makes it to the page.
***
RS: How important is it for you to not be classified and why?
PL: I just read an interview with John Barth, who said: “I know we can’t live without categories. They are useful. But remember: The muses don’t know or care about them.” I love that. So much of classification in our day has to do with marketing, and once we write toward that artificially-created space, we’re writing what’s already known, intellectually, emotionally, structurally--all that. I’ve always been wary of my style doing the work for me. Joy Williams refers to a writer’s style as his “doppelganger.” It’s your friend on one hand. It’s you, stylized. On the other hand, it can help you cheat, take shortcuts, rely on repeated effects. Ideally, I’d like to approach each book as an amateur all over again. Of course that’s scary as all get-out, and you run the risk of alienating some of your readers, who might want you to do the book they liked all over again, with different character names. But I figure if I’m interested, my reader will be, too.
***
RS: Who would you want to be if you could reinvent your self?
PL: I’d definitely want to be a singer. He’d be someone who had the capacity to sing high husky notes without ruining his voice. He’d have relaxed, authoritative phrasing. He’d never make a sound that he wasn’t invested in, but he wouldn’t be deliberate about it either. He’d be a little like Al Green and Marvin Gaye and maybe even David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors. How’s that? (I’m making myself laugh here.)
***
RS: If you could build anything what would it be?
PL: Famous Builder is so much about my childhood desire to build cities, so I’m afraid that would still be true. It would have lots of woody areas, houses wound into forests, swamps, bogs, marshes, beaches. The houses would probably have a midcentury modern look to them, but be relatively modest, like the Eichler houses in the Bay Area. My cities would smash the divide between the wild world and the built world. But how to build a city that doesn’t wreak havoc on animals, air, the water supply? If I knew the answer to that I’d probably be out there digging and nailing.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Turtles
There is perhaps nothing harder than packing up a decade-and-a-half of a different life--anyone else who's been there knows what I'm talking about--but in doing that, several things thought to be lost came to be found: a light-brown T-shirt with a flying prairie dog on front; a framed picture of Mark and me, happy outside some coffee place in Provincetown, in 2001, just two weeks before September 11th; three posters from three different readings I'd given, one in Massachusetts, one in Miami, one in San Diego; and these two (rubber?) turtles I'd bought on the boardwalk, in Rehoboth Beach, late last July. I was sure I'd accidentally tossed them out in a fit of summer cleaning, and there they were, knotted up inside their original plastic bag, one head up, one head down.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Unbuilt Projects: The Cover
See the image below? That's the cover for Unbuilt Projects, the book of mine that's coming out this fall. The images come from an early picture book, The World Around Us, given to me by my late Aunt Vicki, a school principal in Haddon Township, New Jersey. It was old back then, in the era that championed everything new: new journalism, new math. But new seemed beside the point here. Everything penetrated: seeds pressed in wet cotton, lightning startling cattle, baby foxes feeding from their mothers, dark bulky cars getting stuck in the snow. Beautiful images, but anxious, too. Sometimes they're even filled with terror. I think a good deal of my grown-up sensibility was steeped in the hours I spent with these pictures. I believe I must have carried the book around with me everywhere, to the store, to the beach: the white cloth of the cover rubbed through the dark green surface of the spine. I can imagine food being spilled on it. At some point it got lost and then decades later another copy turned up, in a yard sale, off Bradford Street in Provincetown, when I was in my 30s. How do images talk to one another? How does transformation bear on us, wear us down, push us forward? What is time? Those seemed to be that book's unspoken questions, which are pretty much the same questions of Unbuilt Projects.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Afterlife
As my former student, Matt Charles, said to me on Facebook: "If there was a religion where the afterlife consisted of hanging out with 42 Saint Bernards, I'd totally sign up."
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Home?
About this needing to get out of Pennsylvania business...
Pennsylvania probably has nothing to do with it. Or maybe it does, in that Pennsylvania isn't the ocean, though it's close enough (fifty-some miles away) to make one think about it all the time. More likely it has something to do with the building I'm in. Granted, it's only temporary--I'm moving on once my lease is up. But after a while it's wearing to be in a building where people rarely say hi in the elevators, where my neighbors are mostly students, anxious to get on with their real lives. No one could blame them for that. But if buildings have souls, then my feeling is that this building does not like the use it's been put to. My guess is that it would rather be inhabited by elderly stylish Jewish ladies who've lived here since the 60s or the sort of nutty gay men who would give their lives in order to save the faded Art Deco come Marrakesh exterior. My guess is that the building is probably haunted, not in the corny, Hollywood way, though there are scratching sounds in the walls, especially on cold days, but haunted in the manner of the house in Kelly Link's "Stone Animals," which I taught to my undergrads last fall. In that story a family's personal effects begin to feel Other, one by one by one. I haven't felt that about my personal effects, at least not yet, but I am wondering about the walls, the elevators, the laundry room and gym...
On top of all that, birds, trees, the smell of grass, even thawing winter grass are missed up here, 21 flights up. In a transitional time, it would make sense that I wasn't ready to be close to the earth. And yet...
Did I ever say anything about my day trip to Allentown? No, I didn't. My brother Michael was eager to go up for a visit, and since I wasn't teaching on a Tuesday, I said, of course. It is always fun to be with my brother. We can make each other laugh for hours, which is not something to be minimized. Once we drove over the small mountain into Allentown, we drove to my father's old neighborhood. I hadn't seen it in decades, probably not since the 80s. On one hand, it's become a neighborhood in which the current inhabitants make the best of it. Though the people who live there probably would rather live elsewhere--my sense is that they all come from elsewhere--they've obviously tried to make a home of where they are. I think that's probably been the story of that neighborhood over generations; maybe that's the story of many poor neighborhoods, and at once I understood my father in a way I hadn't understood him before. It was a felt understanding rather than a theoretical understanding. It took me days to shake that feeling, including the feeling that his current life--in a condo tower, seven stories above the Intercoastal Waterway in South Florida--is probably a product of accident as much as anything else. In the old days, by which I mean a dozen years ago, I might have drawn a straight arrow between Point A and Point B. Cause and effect had more meaning then, as did words like "will" and "aspiration." It would be simplistic to say that will and aspiration aren't a part of the story, but I'm sure he's as baffled about the notion of home as I am.
Pennsylvania probably has nothing to do with it. Or maybe it does, in that Pennsylvania isn't the ocean, though it's close enough (fifty-some miles away) to make one think about it all the time. More likely it has something to do with the building I'm in. Granted, it's only temporary--I'm moving on once my lease is up. But after a while it's wearing to be in a building where people rarely say hi in the elevators, where my neighbors are mostly students, anxious to get on with their real lives. No one could blame them for that. But if buildings have souls, then my feeling is that this building does not like the use it's been put to. My guess is that it would rather be inhabited by elderly stylish Jewish ladies who've lived here since the 60s or the sort of nutty gay men who would give their lives in order to save the faded Art Deco come Marrakesh exterior. My guess is that the building is probably haunted, not in the corny, Hollywood way, though there are scratching sounds in the walls, especially on cold days, but haunted in the manner of the house in Kelly Link's "Stone Animals," which I taught to my undergrads last fall. In that story a family's personal effects begin to feel Other, one by one by one. I haven't felt that about my personal effects, at least not yet, but I am wondering about the walls, the elevators, the laundry room and gym...
On top of all that, birds, trees, the smell of grass, even thawing winter grass are missed up here, 21 flights up. In a transitional time, it would make sense that I wasn't ready to be close to the earth. And yet...
Did I ever say anything about my day trip to Allentown? No, I didn't. My brother Michael was eager to go up for a visit, and since I wasn't teaching on a Tuesday, I said, of course. It is always fun to be with my brother. We can make each other laugh for hours, which is not something to be minimized. Once we drove over the small mountain into Allentown, we drove to my father's old neighborhood. I hadn't seen it in decades, probably not since the 80s. On one hand, it's become a neighborhood in which the current inhabitants make the best of it. Though the people who live there probably would rather live elsewhere--my sense is that they all come from elsewhere--they've obviously tried to make a home of where they are. I think that's probably been the story of that neighborhood over generations; maybe that's the story of many poor neighborhoods, and at once I understood my father in a way I hadn't understood him before. It was a felt understanding rather than a theoretical understanding. It took me days to shake that feeling, including the feeling that his current life--in a condo tower, seven stories above the Intercoastal Waterway in South Florida--is probably a product of accident as much as anything else. In the old days, by which I mean a dozen years ago, I might have drawn a straight arrow between Point A and Point B. Cause and effect had more meaning then, as did words like "will" and "aspiration." It would be simplistic to say that will and aspiration aren't a part of the story, but I'm sure he's as baffled about the notion of home as I am.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)