 |
| My fortune from Su Xing House in Philadelphia tonight |
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Jake Wanted the Cop
Here's "47 Days," a new story, in The Utopian. Also be sure to check out "Animals," in the same issue, by my former student Jaime Karnes.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
The Possibility of Animals...
The possibility of animals turning up, not always benign. The sounds of birds--owl, parrot, parakeet, laughing gull--heard from inside dark rooms. The presence of palms when wind knocks them around. What to call that sound: clattering? Creaking? Neither seems right, as if I'm dredging them up from some cold lake bottom of the mind, and that sound asks for better.
Anyway, some photos of my trip to Miami and the Keys, where I just spent the last four days with my brother and father. We had all sorts of weather in those days--a wet, prolonged, slop of a storm; its dry, windy aftermath; and one of those iconic afternoons where the sun soaks into everything: foreheads, leaves, feet, rooftops, deck planks. I'm still holding that heat inside my ribs, twenty hours after my return, as if it's still growing me.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Strange Bacteria
I've been listening to Bear in Heaven's new album, I Love You, It's Cool, almost constantly since last week. If you described the music to me, I'd probably think politely that it wasn't my kind of thing, I like acoustic music. And so on. Maybe that's part of the thrill of liking the unexpected so much, getting to meet another side to oneself, the streak that was always there, but hidden and unknown. It's hard to get down what feels distinctive about the music other than to say the usual, or at the least the usual for me: the harmonic movements, the attention to texture and atmospheres. Maybe this patch gets at a part of it. From an interview with Jon Philpot, in Consequence of Sound, in response to a question about how the band's music comes into being.
It was really just kind of see what happens. Each song was written differently. Some songs started as drumbeats; some songs started as vocals or piano or guitars or bass. Each one started off differently, and then we just let them shape-shift into what they were. For me, that’s kind of like my favorite thing about writing music, especially collaboratively, where somebody can kinda say almost something that’s like they don’t understand what they’re saying. They make a suggestion, and then you do something, and it’s interpreted to the best of your ability or understanding what they are trying to say, and these songs just evolve on their own. They grow like these strange bacteria.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Wonder Sauce
Who reviews readings these days? Electric Literature--that's who. Here's a report of the Fence fiction reading at Housing Works the other night. (With thanks to Ryan Chang.)
 |
| Book Table |
 |
| Lynne Tillman |
 |
| Fiona Maazel |
 |
| James Yeh |
 |
| Me (Courtesy of Housing Works)
WONDER SAUCE
She told herself she went there for the view of the Gulf through the trees, but really she went for the taste of orange, lime, ginger, and jalapeno. And nothing pleased her more than when her friends ordered it too, that sauce with the silly name, that seemed to come from childhood, not the realm of debt and insurance. When she looked at her friends' astounded faces, she felt she were being commended for her own good taste, or her ability to toss up a hand at convention, as the palms made sounds over their heads.
The day wasn't radically different when the restaurant took the sauce off the menu. The palms still made their sounds, the shrimp boats still pinned themselves to the horizon. But the fish she usually ordered was radically different without it. The fish wasn't just dull, it was stale, like the inside of an old lover's mouth. And just when she realized how much of her life she'd been coating with that sauce, she held onto her legs, rocking, thankful her friends were nowhere around to see the look on her face.
|
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Friday, April 6, 2012
Sliver of Stone: An Interview
An interview by Nick Garnett in the current issue of Sliver of Stone, the literary magazine of the MFA Program at Florida International University.
Magazine version here.
Transcript alone below. Thanks for reading.
Nicholas Garnett: One theme that runs strongly through your work is the mutability of identity and the ability to redefine ourselves. Reinvention seems so closely linked to the American experience and the American Dream, where upward mobility and success meant one could wipe the slate clean, often at the expense of heritage and tradition. In your memoir, Famous Builder, you describe your family’s relocation to a new suburban housing development in the 60s, and the way that new house helped define your family’s sense of identity. How do you think that reinvention and the search for identity have shaped you and your writing?
Paul Lisicky: I grew up with the sense that you could make up your life. If you wanted to be, say, a trumpet player, you could do it if you had some talent, but you had to want it, and terribly. A lot of the kids I grew up with ended up doing extraordinary things in the arts when they were still young. We didn’t think there was anything unusual about that. But we also knew that aspirations could be dangerous. How would we support ourselves? In that way we were different from kids who came from money, who took their privilege for granted, who had something to fall back on, as they say. They were more sophisticated than we were. They were more likely to know the limits of what they could do. So–a long way of saying that our naiveté had some use. A certain kind of naiveté about your potential isn’t always a bad thing. I don’t know if you could be good at any art without believing, at some unspoken level, that you had the capacity to do something amazing.
NG: Since Famous Builder was published back in 2002, the foundations of the American Dream have taken a hit: First, the attacks of 9/11, the targets of which were iconic structures. Then, the great recession and subsequent housing market crash, which ruined the value of people’s homes and the identity they had placed in them. These days, the world seems a far less optimistic place than the one in which you dreamed to be, literally, a famous builder. That book explored the power of reinvention in an essentially positive way—the building of self. In your forthcoming memoir, The Narrow Door, you portray a slow dismantling of self: Your friend’s death from cancer. Your mother’s dementia. How do you think your more recent writing has been shaped by changes to the American psyche?
PL: I actually think Famous Builder has a really dark current inside all its brightness. The speaker’s role models fail as much as they win. The father is hunted by the possibility of being poor again; the stylish next door neighbor thinks about suicide; Bill Levitt goes broke, loses his mansion and yacht, and on and on. I’m not sure the speaker is able to make links between these situations; he sort of assumes that their struggles are character-based, rather than about something larger. He gets it, finally, after that embarrassment in the recording studio. Achievement and failure are interdependent. Is there something American about that? Maybe.
You’re right that the world is a much less optimistic place than it was when I started that book. When was that–the late 90′s? As I was writing, I did have this gut feeling that the book was becoming an elegy for a world that was about to pass on. You could just feel it in the atmosphere: the sense of a world about to change hugely. As for my more recent work? There’s no question that a lot of it’s darker than it was. Part of that is the state of things, the state of the world. Part of that is going through life stuff–the kind of life stuff we all go through at some point. I couldn’t possibly write another Famous Builder now. Even if I were to write about the same situations, I’m sure the focus wouldn’t be self-reinvention.
All that said, I think it would be cheap and false to say that darkness is something that necessarily comes with getting older. I feel as optimistic as I feel desolate, and I feel both of those states simultaneously, all the time. I hope that that simultaneous-ness is on every page of my work.
NG: Your stories often explore the power of labels and the naming of things, yet your recent work obliterates the traditional notions of genre. Stories from the forthcoming Unbuilt Projects have been published as poetry, fiction, and memoir. Are you making a conscious effort to subvert genre?
PL: I love lists and labels in general, while I’m also really, really wary of the power of classifications. I know how they limit us, keep us in our space. An artist needs to roam, and I think my mind feels most at home when it’s in some in-between place. There’s something fertile about the edges. They’re not so tramped on. The edges haven’t already been interpreted. I get excited by the compression of poetry, the questioning that moves an essay along, the attempt to represent the inner life, which I associate with the project of fiction. I want to make something that borrows from the three worlds. I’m certainly not the first one to do that–think of Amy Hempel, who’s been doing that for years, longer than anyone was able to see it. But I do think I might be getting bolder as a hybridist.
NG: In stories such as “The Boy and His Mother Are Stuck!” you defy traditional storytelling by making us conscious of it, undermining the “vivid, continuous dream”—the fantasy world many of us are taught to create and maintain by writing teachers. Are you getting even with your instructors, or trying to make a larger point regarding the artifice of story?
PL: I think a story like that is really conscious of writing against the reader’s expectations. By that I mean, credibility, sympathy, linearity, coherence–all the characteristics we often assume make a story. I wasn’t so much getting back at my teachers or students or workshops in general (I teach workshops) but felt the need to lampoon the need for narrative. The story incorporates the ghost of a workshop experience, as if the speaker is imagining the workshopping of the story as he’s telling it. “The Boy and His Mother Are Stuck” was written at a time when I felt absolutely changed by my mother’s dementia all the way down to my cells. Linear storytelling seemed artificial to me then. Language was breaking down. Communication was gap, disjunction. Cause and effect? Meaningless. I was just trying to find a container for all that confusion, which is how Unbuilt Projects came to be.
The irony is that I’m now writing a series of mostly linear short shorts, often in the form of fables, parables, and little myths. The mind must be impatient for some kind of order again. Or at least a one-foot-in-front-of-the-next kind of order in which plot is predominant.
NG: Your writing is beautifully lyrical. It is also characterized by exactness in the language and a powerful, almost sermon-like quality to the prose. Perhaps that’s not so surprising, given two of your earliest passions were diagramming entire housing developments (right down to the street names) and singing and composing liturgical music, both of which require precision and great attention to detail. I imagine your house is spotless and meticulously organized! Seriously, is your writing process similarly structured and ordered?
PL: You’re making me laugh, because I just realized I won’t leave my apartment until everything is straightened up. I don’t like coming back to a mess. Evan in Lawnboy cleans motel rooms; Isidore in The Burning House cleans houses. I’ve been revealed, my God!
Seriously, I think I have to subvert my inclination toward neatness when I write. I used to be one of those people who sat at his desk, in his study, for a set number of hours a day. That’s not true anymore. Here’s an example. I was trying to write a few days ago; nothing was happening. I was feeling weighted so I started distracting myself with Twitter. I decided I’d feel a little less pressure if I went out to get something to eat. I went out to get something to eat. I don’t know what it was that made me take out my phone at the restaurant. I wasn’t trying to write. People were chatting to my left and right, there was music on, someone knocking into the leaves of the plant in the corner, and within a minute I was thumbing sentences into the notebook on my phone. The commas seemed to be coming at all the right places; the meaning was in sync with the sound. I did as much as I could until I could feel myself about to force the next sentence, a kind of closure to the paragraph. I stopped. I emailed the paragraph to myself. When I got home, I looked at the paragraph, copied it into an email, changed the font to 18-point so that every word mattered more than it would in another format. That night I went back to the story again. By writing it in an email, I was tricking myself into thinking I wasn’t actually working. I was having fun, playing, or hoping to. By the time the story got further along, I started working on it in the usual way, in a document on my laptop. But as you can see my way into all that was pretty sneaky. And far from orderly.
NG: Many writers struggle with how to reveal character, especially through detail and description. You have mastered that technique. In your novel, The Burning House, your narrator describes his wife’s younger sister, with whom he is falling in love: “Same sweet crooked mouth, same moist hair falling down her back, same tendency to keep her shoulders raised, as if she had to correct what her posture really wanted to do.” And, on the next page: “The corners of her mouth turned up as if she were about to smile, the kind of half-smile you learn to make when you’re used to getting news you’re not exactly able to hear.” These descriptions are so specific and telling. How do you come up with them? Do they come naturally to you, or is this an element of craft you’ve consciously had to develop?
PL: I’m sure I learned that from studying other writers. When I was working on The Burning House, I was teaching the stories of Mary Gaitskill, Alice Munro, and Lorrie Moore, who are all masters when it comes to getting their characters’ physicality on the page. They’re interested in bodies, facial reactions, gestures, and how these might reveal their characters’ inner lives. In other words, what they withhold, what they might not be able to disguise, what they might not even know about themselves. In those two quotes, it seems clear that the narrator is seeing his sister-in-law’s attempts to hold herself together in the face of disappointment. I’m always compelled by the tension between the spoken and the unspoken. Not a small percentage of our daily exchanges are dedicated to maintaining agreeableness, a kind of social equilibrium. We’re terrified of awkwardness, at least overtly. I don’t think that that’s necessarily a bad thing. What kind of world would it be if no one had a filter, if everyone spoke exactly how they felt at any given moment? As much as we might prize honesty, it would be unbearable. We wouldn’t be able to stand it! So there’s always another layer of communication that’s revealed by the body. And I try to do my best to make use of all that.
Magazine version here.
Transcript alone below. Thanks for reading.
Nicholas Garnett: One theme that runs strongly through your work is the mutability of identity and the ability to redefine ourselves. Reinvention seems so closely linked to the American experience and the American Dream, where upward mobility and success meant one could wipe the slate clean, often at the expense of heritage and tradition. In your memoir, Famous Builder, you describe your family’s relocation to a new suburban housing development in the 60s, and the way that new house helped define your family’s sense of identity. How do you think that reinvention and the search for identity have shaped you and your writing?
Paul Lisicky: I grew up with the sense that you could make up your life. If you wanted to be, say, a trumpet player, you could do it if you had some talent, but you had to want it, and terribly. A lot of the kids I grew up with ended up doing extraordinary things in the arts when they were still young. We didn’t think there was anything unusual about that. But we also knew that aspirations could be dangerous. How would we support ourselves? In that way we were different from kids who came from money, who took their privilege for granted, who had something to fall back on, as they say. They were more sophisticated than we were. They were more likely to know the limits of what they could do. So–a long way of saying that our naiveté had some use. A certain kind of naiveté about your potential isn’t always a bad thing. I don’t know if you could be good at any art without believing, at some unspoken level, that you had the capacity to do something amazing.
NG: Since Famous Builder was published back in 2002, the foundations of the American Dream have taken a hit: First, the attacks of 9/11, the targets of which were iconic structures. Then, the great recession and subsequent housing market crash, which ruined the value of people’s homes and the identity they had placed in them. These days, the world seems a far less optimistic place than the one in which you dreamed to be, literally, a famous builder. That book explored the power of reinvention in an essentially positive way—the building of self. In your forthcoming memoir, The Narrow Door, you portray a slow dismantling of self: Your friend’s death from cancer. Your mother’s dementia. How do you think your more recent writing has been shaped by changes to the American psyche?
PL: I actually think Famous Builder has a really dark current inside all its brightness. The speaker’s role models fail as much as they win. The father is hunted by the possibility of being poor again; the stylish next door neighbor thinks about suicide; Bill Levitt goes broke, loses his mansion and yacht, and on and on. I’m not sure the speaker is able to make links between these situations; he sort of assumes that their struggles are character-based, rather than about something larger. He gets it, finally, after that embarrassment in the recording studio. Achievement and failure are interdependent. Is there something American about that? Maybe.
You’re right that the world is a much less optimistic place than it was when I started that book. When was that–the late 90′s? As I was writing, I did have this gut feeling that the book was becoming an elegy for a world that was about to pass on. You could just feel it in the atmosphere: the sense of a world about to change hugely. As for my more recent work? There’s no question that a lot of it’s darker than it was. Part of that is the state of things, the state of the world. Part of that is going through life stuff–the kind of life stuff we all go through at some point. I couldn’t possibly write another Famous Builder now. Even if I were to write about the same situations, I’m sure the focus wouldn’t be self-reinvention.
All that said, I think it would be cheap and false to say that darkness is something that necessarily comes with getting older. I feel as optimistic as I feel desolate, and I feel both of those states simultaneously, all the time. I hope that that simultaneous-ness is on every page of my work.
NG: Your stories often explore the power of labels and the naming of things, yet your recent work obliterates the traditional notions of genre. Stories from the forthcoming Unbuilt Projects have been published as poetry, fiction, and memoir. Are you making a conscious effort to subvert genre?
PL: I love lists and labels in general, while I’m also really, really wary of the power of classifications. I know how they limit us, keep us in our space. An artist needs to roam, and I think my mind feels most at home when it’s in some in-between place. There’s something fertile about the edges. They’re not so tramped on. The edges haven’t already been interpreted. I get excited by the compression of poetry, the questioning that moves an essay along, the attempt to represent the inner life, which I associate with the project of fiction. I want to make something that borrows from the three worlds. I’m certainly not the first one to do that–think of Amy Hempel, who’s been doing that for years, longer than anyone was able to see it. But I do think I might be getting bolder as a hybridist.
NG: In stories such as “The Boy and His Mother Are Stuck!” you defy traditional storytelling by making us conscious of it, undermining the “vivid, continuous dream”—the fantasy world many of us are taught to create and maintain by writing teachers. Are you getting even with your instructors, or trying to make a larger point regarding the artifice of story?
PL: I think a story like that is really conscious of writing against the reader’s expectations. By that I mean, credibility, sympathy, linearity, coherence–all the characteristics we often assume make a story. I wasn’t so much getting back at my teachers or students or workshops in general (I teach workshops) but felt the need to lampoon the need for narrative. The story incorporates the ghost of a workshop experience, as if the speaker is imagining the workshopping of the story as he’s telling it. “The Boy and His Mother Are Stuck” was written at a time when I felt absolutely changed by my mother’s dementia all the way down to my cells. Linear storytelling seemed artificial to me then. Language was breaking down. Communication was gap, disjunction. Cause and effect? Meaningless. I was just trying to find a container for all that confusion, which is how Unbuilt Projects came to be.
The irony is that I’m now writing a series of mostly linear short shorts, often in the form of fables, parables, and little myths. The mind must be impatient for some kind of order again. Or at least a one-foot-in-front-of-the-next kind of order in which plot is predominant.
NG: Your writing is beautifully lyrical. It is also characterized by exactness in the language and a powerful, almost sermon-like quality to the prose. Perhaps that’s not so surprising, given two of your earliest passions were diagramming entire housing developments (right down to the street names) and singing and composing liturgical music, both of which require precision and great attention to detail. I imagine your house is spotless and meticulously organized! Seriously, is your writing process similarly structured and ordered?
PL: You’re making me laugh, because I just realized I won’t leave my apartment until everything is straightened up. I don’t like coming back to a mess. Evan in Lawnboy cleans motel rooms; Isidore in The Burning House cleans houses. I’ve been revealed, my God!
Seriously, I think I have to subvert my inclination toward neatness when I write. I used to be one of those people who sat at his desk, in his study, for a set number of hours a day. That’s not true anymore. Here’s an example. I was trying to write a few days ago; nothing was happening. I was feeling weighted so I started distracting myself with Twitter. I decided I’d feel a little less pressure if I went out to get something to eat. I went out to get something to eat. I don’t know what it was that made me take out my phone at the restaurant. I wasn’t trying to write. People were chatting to my left and right, there was music on, someone knocking into the leaves of the plant in the corner, and within a minute I was thumbing sentences into the notebook on my phone. The commas seemed to be coming at all the right places; the meaning was in sync with the sound. I did as much as I could until I could feel myself about to force the next sentence, a kind of closure to the paragraph. I stopped. I emailed the paragraph to myself. When I got home, I looked at the paragraph, copied it into an email, changed the font to 18-point so that every word mattered more than it would in another format. That night I went back to the story again. By writing it in an email, I was tricking myself into thinking I wasn’t actually working. I was having fun, playing, or hoping to. By the time the story got further along, I started working on it in the usual way, in a document on my laptop. But as you can see my way into all that was pretty sneaky. And far from orderly.
NG: Many writers struggle with how to reveal character, especially through detail and description. You have mastered that technique. In your novel, The Burning House, your narrator describes his wife’s younger sister, with whom he is falling in love: “Same sweet crooked mouth, same moist hair falling down her back, same tendency to keep her shoulders raised, as if she had to correct what her posture really wanted to do.” And, on the next page: “The corners of her mouth turned up as if she were about to smile, the kind of half-smile you learn to make when you’re used to getting news you’re not exactly able to hear.” These descriptions are so specific and telling. How do you come up with them? Do they come naturally to you, or is this an element of craft you’ve consciously had to develop?
PL: I’m sure I learned that from studying other writers. When I was working on The Burning House, I was teaching the stories of Mary Gaitskill, Alice Munro, and Lorrie Moore, who are all masters when it comes to getting their characters’ physicality on the page. They’re interested in bodies, facial reactions, gestures, and how these might reveal their characters’ inner lives. In other words, what they withhold, what they might not be able to disguise, what they might not even know about themselves. In those two quotes, it seems clear that the narrator is seeing his sister-in-law’s attempts to hold herself together in the face of disappointment. I’m always compelled by the tension between the spoken and the unspoken. Not a small percentage of our daily exchanges are dedicated to maintaining agreeableness, a kind of social equilibrium. We’re terrified of awkwardness, at least overtly. I don’t think that that’s necessarily a bad thing. What kind of world would it be if no one had a filter, if everyone spoke exactly how they felt at any given moment? As much as we might prize honesty, it would be unbearable. We wouldn’t be able to stand it! So there’s always another layer of communication that’s revealed by the body. And I try to do my best to make use of all that.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
The Other Man
I had the great good fortune of introducing Denis Johnson, one my writing heroes, at the Writers of Rutgers series last week. Here's the text of my remarks along with a picture that will always make me happy.
DENIS JOHNSON INTRO
Paul Lisicky
Some prose writers only claim care about story. Or story and character--that’s what they’ll say. But when it comes language? Some will use this time to clear their throats. Others might say it’s the writer's duty to transcend his sentences, as if language is mere contrivance, something that stands iDn the way of an experience that wants to be rightful and true.
Denis Johnson knows that each sentence contains a story in itself. A story--a novel--is a constellation of little stories, all of which tell us about consciousness. Or is it dreaming? In Denis Johnson’s work, consciousness and dreaming are the same things, and this is achieved by sentences, by which I mean a meticulous attention to perception, to disruption, to the sound of human thinking.
Take, for instance, this paragraph, from "The Other Man," in Jesus’ Son.
This man was just basically one of those people on a boat, leaning on the rail like the others, his hands dangling over like bait. The day was sunny, unusual for the Northwest Coast. I’m sure we were all feeling blessed on this ferryboat among the humps of very green—in the sunlight almost coolly burning, like phosphorous—islands, and the water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God, despite the smell, the slight dreamy suffocation, of some kind of petroleum-based compound used to seal the deck’s seams.
Here we meet a vision of things. It is not a coherent vision--the very casual offhand second sentence slams up against poetry. It is paragraph-making as collage. It is the story of God versus the manmade, the lyric versus the earthbound. It is a world of oppositions, in which it’s possible for sunlight to be hot and cool at once. It is irreverence; it is prayer. There is energy in the collisions. And is there really an island embedded in that sentence? Yes, between the word “green” and the word “islands,” we see an island, in the distance, in the syntax, which strikes me as both funny and a little revelation. And what better way to drive home the manmade than to seal the paragraph with the smell of petroleum, dirty petroleum, the ruin of us, which lingers, longer than the end of the paragraph.
But Denis Johnson’s work is never merely content to dwell in the ruin of us. That’s an old story by now, and his work wants more than that. Even in his work’s most violent moments, there’s a current toward what--Light? Quiet? Eternity? His characters can look anything but divine, and it is sometimes hard to see past their actions, which can be brutal or frustrating, but all of them are struggling with what it means to be present. The work goes about this in a pretty sneaky fashion. It doesn’t clobber us over the head with it. It is never simplistic or moralistic. And it doesn’t profess to have answers, which might be why this fiction is always active and alive. In that way it keeps company with the likes of Flannery O’Connor and Joy Williams, whose stories seem to escape our ability to stake them into the ground. As soon as we think we know what grace is, they slip out of our reach and rise into air.
There’s a Denis Johnson moment that I can’t get out of my head. It is from the novella Train Dreams, his most recent book. At this point in the story, Grainier, the central character, revisits the land where he lived once with a wife and daughter. That wife and daughter were lost in a fire that burned up their cabin. In this passage, Grainier is stumbling through the next life when he comes upon a young dog.
Grainier felt sure this dog was got of a wolf, but it never even whimpered in reply when the packs in the distance, some as far away as the Selkirks on the British Columbia side, sang at dusk. The creature needed to be taught its nature, Grainier felt. One evening he got down beside it and howled. The little pup only sat on its rump with an inch of pink tongue jutting stupidly from its closed mouth. “You are not growing in the direction of your own nature, which is to howl when the others do,” he told the mongrel. He stood up straight himself and howled long and sorrowfully over the gorge, and over the low quiet river he could hardly see across this close to nightfall. Nothing from the pup. But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good.
I cannot say in a few words why this matters. Maybe it simply gets down the pain and beauty of being alive, the animal need to make contact with wordlessness. It recognizes what’s been lost along the way. It is as close to pure music as anything I’ve ever read on the page.
Let’s give Denis Johnson a warm welcome to Rutgers tonight.
DENIS JOHNSON INTRO
Paul Lisicky
Some prose writers only claim care about story. Or story and character--that’s what they’ll say. But when it comes language? Some will use this time to clear their throats. Others might say it’s the writer's duty to transcend his sentences, as if language is mere contrivance, something that stands iDn the way of an experience that wants to be rightful and true.
Denis Johnson knows that each sentence contains a story in itself. A story--a novel--is a constellation of little stories, all of which tell us about consciousness. Or is it dreaming? In Denis Johnson’s work, consciousness and dreaming are the same things, and this is achieved by sentences, by which I mean a meticulous attention to perception, to disruption, to the sound of human thinking.
Take, for instance, this paragraph, from "The Other Man," in Jesus’ Son.
This man was just basically one of those people on a boat, leaning on the rail like the others, his hands dangling over like bait. The day was sunny, unusual for the Northwest Coast. I’m sure we were all feeling blessed on this ferryboat among the humps of very green—in the sunlight almost coolly burning, like phosphorous—islands, and the water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God, despite the smell, the slight dreamy suffocation, of some kind of petroleum-based compound used to seal the deck’s seams.
Here we meet a vision of things. It is not a coherent vision--the very casual offhand second sentence slams up against poetry. It is paragraph-making as collage. It is the story of God versus the manmade, the lyric versus the earthbound. It is a world of oppositions, in which it’s possible for sunlight to be hot and cool at once. It is irreverence; it is prayer. There is energy in the collisions. And is there really an island embedded in that sentence? Yes, between the word “green” and the word “islands,” we see an island, in the distance, in the syntax, which strikes me as both funny and a little revelation. And what better way to drive home the manmade than to seal the paragraph with the smell of petroleum, dirty petroleum, the ruin of us, which lingers, longer than the end of the paragraph.
But Denis Johnson’s work is never merely content to dwell in the ruin of us. That’s an old story by now, and his work wants more than that. Even in his work’s most violent moments, there’s a current toward what--Light? Quiet? Eternity? His characters can look anything but divine, and it is sometimes hard to see past their actions, which can be brutal or frustrating, but all of them are struggling with what it means to be present. The work goes about this in a pretty sneaky fashion. It doesn’t clobber us over the head with it. It is never simplistic or moralistic. And it doesn’t profess to have answers, which might be why this fiction is always active and alive. In that way it keeps company with the likes of Flannery O’Connor and Joy Williams, whose stories seem to escape our ability to stake them into the ground. As soon as we think we know what grace is, they slip out of our reach and rise into air.
There’s a Denis Johnson moment that I can’t get out of my head. It is from the novella Train Dreams, his most recent book. At this point in the story, Grainier, the central character, revisits the land where he lived once with a wife and daughter. That wife and daughter were lost in a fire that burned up their cabin. In this passage, Grainier is stumbling through the next life when he comes upon a young dog.
Grainier felt sure this dog was got of a wolf, but it never even whimpered in reply when the packs in the distance, some as far away as the Selkirks on the British Columbia side, sang at dusk. The creature needed to be taught its nature, Grainier felt. One evening he got down beside it and howled. The little pup only sat on its rump with an inch of pink tongue jutting stupidly from its closed mouth. “You are not growing in the direction of your own nature, which is to howl when the others do,” he told the mongrel. He stood up straight himself and howled long and sorrowfully over the gorge, and over the low quiet river he could hardly see across this close to nightfall. Nothing from the pup. But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good.
I cannot say in a few words why this matters. Maybe it simply gets down the pain and beauty of being alive, the animal need to make contact with wordlessness. It recognizes what’s been lost along the way. It is as close to pure music as anything I’ve ever read on the page.
Let’s give Denis Johnson a warm welcome to Rutgers tonight.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Another Interview (Or: The Five-Story Me)
Here's the full text of an interview that the poet James Cihlar did with me for The Superstition Review. It just went up within the last few days (See the published version here.) At post's end is a picture of Ann Napolitano, whom I read with in the East Village, along with Meg Wolitzer and Mitch Levenberg, last Tuesday as part of the Fiction Addiction series. All readers are projected on the wall of the Chase Bank across Avenue A. Still no word from the five-story me.
Happy April.
****
James Cihlar, an editor for Etruscan Press and the author of the poetry book Undoing (Little Pear Press, 2008), the chapbook Metaphysical Bailout (Pudding House Press, 2010), and the forthcoming volume Rancho Nostalgia (Dream Horse Press, 2013), interviews Paul Lisicky about the artist’s role as commentator on issues as diverse as architecture, sex, and the economic downturn.
Jim Cihlar: 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?
Paul Lisicky: 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 furthering the unrealized dreams, the unbuilt projects, of that lost kid.
JC: 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?
PL: 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.
JC: 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 former 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?
PL: 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.
JC: Isidore Mirsky in The Burning House is openly heterosexual. The novel’s take appears to be that masculinity is masculinity, period. I don’t know if it is the remnants of identity politics that make me ask this question, in which case I find it suspicious myself, or if it is a genuine desire to understand how a fiction writer navigates issues of character identity versus an awareness that readers are used to generalizations, in which case I’ll let myself off the hook—but, what was it like as a writer known for convincingly portraying gay characters to take on this challenge?
PL: I never set out to write Isidore. The novel was initially a much longer book; Joan, Isidore’s sister-in-law, was the primary narrator. I put a lot of work into early drafts, and while I think there was probably some decent writing in those pages, it still read like work—a little too willed. It didn’t sing. I must have been in an impatient mood when I thought, what if I give a section of the book to Isidore? Almost instantly the story had a cadence. I didn’t know where the voice was going, and that’s what brought me to the laptop every day; I wanted to hear what Isidore was going to say. It gradually became clear to me that Isidore had some of the same concerns as Evan in Lawnboy. Sex is locus for both trouble and sustenance for the two of them. How do you reconcile your streak of wildness with your desire for domestic life? Who are you if you don’t fit into any established external category? Those are a few of their obsessions.
JC: Are there double standards for gay fiction writers with straight characters and straight fiction writers with gay characters?
PL: I’m probably not the best one to answer that question. If I took that kind of worry in too deeply, I’d probably never write. Still, I’d be lying if I didn’t have some worry about all that during the submission process. Some of the initial responses from editors were enthusiastic but also vague—such as, this is your best writing, but . . . And the “but” was never followed up on! Maybe it was simply not the book some expected of me, but then again, Famous Builder was a lot different from Lawnboy. Anyway, that vagueness seems to have disappeared upon publication of the book.
It’s hard to talk standards, because standards are elusive. They’re changing all the time; that’s just the nature of standards, whether we know it or not. I guess we can help to change standards, at least on a micro level, if all of us simply make a pact with ourselves to write what we want to write, regardless of what we think we should do.
JC: You’ve mentioned that contemporary writers as divergent in their aesthetics as Mary Gaitskill and Joy Williams inspire you. Going back a generation or two, whom would you describe as your literary ancestors? Your thorough investment in character and perception reminds me of, say, Virginia Woolf, or Christopher Isherwood, for instance. Do you share Mary Gaitskill’s admiration for Vladimir Nabokov, and his ability to mine transgressive behavior for literary metaphor?
PL: I’m a huge Woolf fan; she continues to mean a lot to me. I feel like I’m being taught by her work all the time: its swing, its specificity, its attempt to capture the motion of thinking. In content, her work is about as far from transgression as you could get, with the exception of some of the work in Moments of Being or A Room of One’s Own or Orlando. Her real rebellion expresses itself in form, through all the experiments from Mrs. Dalloway on.
Jane Bowles, too, is important, though her strategies feel a lot different from Woolf’s—she might be not be so overtly interested in consciousness and perception, though her work suggests the inner life, with all of its disjunctions and non sequiturs and trailing offs.
As for Nabokov—I’m a Speak, Memory fan. I remember teaching that book when I was I writing Famous Builder, and I’m sure I took its example in. I was crazy about Lolita as an English major—my earliest stories are full of nods and winks to its characters and place names—but I haven’t revisited it in a long time. Transgression is another one of those things that’s fluid. This is an obvious thing to say, but as the culture changes, what’s transgressive changes. Transgression is subjective too. The writing of Famous Builder felt transgressive, not because of its content exactly, but because it was turning out to be such a friendly book, and I’d never written a friendly book before. Where is the angst? I kept thinking. Where is the dread? And my worry over that ended up feeding the work. It felt like I was breaking some rule to myself. It always feels good to do that in my writing, in part because I’m usually so well behaved in life.
JC: Isidore Mirsky’s behavior may seem questionable to some. He desires his wife’s sister and has an affair with another woman in town. And yet the novel avoids imposing heavy-handed moral judgment. Is it perspective, stream-of-consciousness, that allows you to accomplish this?
PL: It’s impossible for me to write a narrator—or speaker—from the position of judgment or certainty. I like Isidore, even though I know he’s sometimes wreaking havoc on those he loves. I hope the reader likes him too. I suppose I wrote the book to understand someone like him, and to do that I had to step in his skin. I think it helps that he’s fairly hard on himself. He might try to justify himself at certain points, but I think he knows deep down that all that’s a cover for his own sense of pain and inadequacy.
JC: You have said your fear about The Burning House is that some readers would discover that the novel is one long prose poem, and you describe your next book, Unbuilt Projects, as short prose pieces. Although you’ve published poems in journals, am I right in sensing some hesitation about describing your work as poetry or presenting yourself as a poet?
PL: I think of myself as such a hybridist that even to say I’m a Novelist doesn’t feel true to who I am. Same goes for Nonfiction Writer. I love poetry, I studied it in grad school before I went on for my MFA. I wrote papers about Blake and Dickinson and Shelley. I was much more comfortable writing about poetry than I was about, say, Faulkner or Joyce. Sometimes I’m even more comfortable teaching poetry—you have access to the whole text. It’s all right there in front of you, the whole trajectory, the constellation of images. But identifying as a poet? I think I’d feel more authentic about doing that if I felt driven to lineate. I know what makes a poetic line; I’m very good when it comes to suggesting line breaks in the poems of others, but in my own work I seem to need that damn right margin. And maybe it simply comes down to that.
JC: The Burning House has love and lust, lies and truth, sex and politics. It includes climactic scenes of public testimony about a planned development on critical wetlands. In part, Isidore’s attraction to Joan seems fueled by her activism. Particularly in an election year, do you believe sex is a subtext for politics in American life?
PL: Well, it’s probably a subtext for anything involving change, power, money, anything desirable and/or endangered. I’m not sure Isidore is initially stirred by the object of Joan’s activism as he is by her sense of belief—there’s something enthralling about being a spectator to her passion, just the way he was audience to his wife’s singing once upon a time. Of course, Isidore is swept over to anti-development side soon enough, but that probably wouldn’t have happened without that old erotic pull, which is always stronger than abstraction. Flannery O’Connor says, “the beginning of human knowledge is through the senses.” She might not have been talking about sex exactly, but I think it applies.
JC: I see in The Burning House and perhaps in your other work the idea of architecture as a manifestation of history, a means by which past, present, and future are made tangible in the moment, laid out side-by-side before our eyes. For GLBT writers, the past few decades have been momentous: the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the AIDS pandemic, Harvey Milk’s election in 1978, all the way up to the recent victory in New York. There is perhaps only one gay character in The Burning House although you accurately portray the homoeroticism and narcissism of hyper-masculinity. Heteronormative behavior exists in tandem with what could be transgressive, or at least unconventional, behavior (Isidore, for instance, gets pleasure from housework.) Is there a sense in which this novel by a gay author about straight characters is a commentary on the history of gender roles in America since mid-century?
PL: Wow. I love your question. I’d never be able to start with a consciously grand plan, but I suppose the novel does want to de-center. I think the world around us is de-centered in so many ways. For instance, I don’t think many of my younger straight male students feel any obligation to be hyper-masculine in terms of self-presentation. But there might be other sides of them that are in sync with old roles. That’s just the way we are now. We’re much more marbled than we used to be. We just haven’t caught up to it yet in our literature.
Happy April.
****
James Cihlar, an editor for Etruscan Press and the author of the poetry book Undoing (Little Pear Press, 2008), the chapbook Metaphysical Bailout (Pudding House Press, 2010), and the forthcoming volume Rancho Nostalgia (Dream Horse Press, 2013), interviews Paul Lisicky about the artist’s role as commentator on issues as diverse as architecture, sex, and the economic downturn.
Jim Cihlar: 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?
Paul Lisicky: 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 furthering the unrealized dreams, the unbuilt projects, of that lost kid.
JC: 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?
PL: 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.
JC: 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 former 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?
PL: 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.
JC: Isidore Mirsky in The Burning House is openly heterosexual. The novel’s take appears to be that masculinity is masculinity, period. I don’t know if it is the remnants of identity politics that make me ask this question, in which case I find it suspicious myself, or if it is a genuine desire to understand how a fiction writer navigates issues of character identity versus an awareness that readers are used to generalizations, in which case I’ll let myself off the hook—but, what was it like as a writer known for convincingly portraying gay characters to take on this challenge?
PL: I never set out to write Isidore. The novel was initially a much longer book; Joan, Isidore’s sister-in-law, was the primary narrator. I put a lot of work into early drafts, and while I think there was probably some decent writing in those pages, it still read like work—a little too willed. It didn’t sing. I must have been in an impatient mood when I thought, what if I give a section of the book to Isidore? Almost instantly the story had a cadence. I didn’t know where the voice was going, and that’s what brought me to the laptop every day; I wanted to hear what Isidore was going to say. It gradually became clear to me that Isidore had some of the same concerns as Evan in Lawnboy. Sex is locus for both trouble and sustenance for the two of them. How do you reconcile your streak of wildness with your desire for domestic life? Who are you if you don’t fit into any established external category? Those are a few of their obsessions.
JC: Are there double standards for gay fiction writers with straight characters and straight fiction writers with gay characters?
PL: I’m probably not the best one to answer that question. If I took that kind of worry in too deeply, I’d probably never write. Still, I’d be lying if I didn’t have some worry about all that during the submission process. Some of the initial responses from editors were enthusiastic but also vague—such as, this is your best writing, but . . . And the “but” was never followed up on! Maybe it was simply not the book some expected of me, but then again, Famous Builder was a lot different from Lawnboy. Anyway, that vagueness seems to have disappeared upon publication of the book.
It’s hard to talk standards, because standards are elusive. They’re changing all the time; that’s just the nature of standards, whether we know it or not. I guess we can help to change standards, at least on a micro level, if all of us simply make a pact with ourselves to write what we want to write, regardless of what we think we should do.
JC: You’ve mentioned that contemporary writers as divergent in their aesthetics as Mary Gaitskill and Joy Williams inspire you. Going back a generation or two, whom would you describe as your literary ancestors? Your thorough investment in character and perception reminds me of, say, Virginia Woolf, or Christopher Isherwood, for instance. Do you share Mary Gaitskill’s admiration for Vladimir Nabokov, and his ability to mine transgressive behavior for literary metaphor?
PL: I’m a huge Woolf fan; she continues to mean a lot to me. I feel like I’m being taught by her work all the time: its swing, its specificity, its attempt to capture the motion of thinking. In content, her work is about as far from transgression as you could get, with the exception of some of the work in Moments of Being or A Room of One’s Own or Orlando. Her real rebellion expresses itself in form, through all the experiments from Mrs. Dalloway on.
Jane Bowles, too, is important, though her strategies feel a lot different from Woolf’s—she might be not be so overtly interested in consciousness and perception, though her work suggests the inner life, with all of its disjunctions and non sequiturs and trailing offs.
As for Nabokov—I’m a Speak, Memory fan. I remember teaching that book when I was I writing Famous Builder, and I’m sure I took its example in. I was crazy about Lolita as an English major—my earliest stories are full of nods and winks to its characters and place names—but I haven’t revisited it in a long time. Transgression is another one of those things that’s fluid. This is an obvious thing to say, but as the culture changes, what’s transgressive changes. Transgression is subjective too. The writing of Famous Builder felt transgressive, not because of its content exactly, but because it was turning out to be such a friendly book, and I’d never written a friendly book before. Where is the angst? I kept thinking. Where is the dread? And my worry over that ended up feeding the work. It felt like I was breaking some rule to myself. It always feels good to do that in my writing, in part because I’m usually so well behaved in life.
JC: Isidore Mirsky’s behavior may seem questionable to some. He desires his wife’s sister and has an affair with another woman in town. And yet the novel avoids imposing heavy-handed moral judgment. Is it perspective, stream-of-consciousness, that allows you to accomplish this?
PL: It’s impossible for me to write a narrator—or speaker—from the position of judgment or certainty. I like Isidore, even though I know he’s sometimes wreaking havoc on those he loves. I hope the reader likes him too. I suppose I wrote the book to understand someone like him, and to do that I had to step in his skin. I think it helps that he’s fairly hard on himself. He might try to justify himself at certain points, but I think he knows deep down that all that’s a cover for his own sense of pain and inadequacy.
JC: You have said your fear about The Burning House is that some readers would discover that the novel is one long prose poem, and you describe your next book, Unbuilt Projects, as short prose pieces. Although you’ve published poems in journals, am I right in sensing some hesitation about describing your work as poetry or presenting yourself as a poet?
PL: I think of myself as such a hybridist that even to say I’m a Novelist doesn’t feel true to who I am. Same goes for Nonfiction Writer. I love poetry, I studied it in grad school before I went on for my MFA. I wrote papers about Blake and Dickinson and Shelley. I was much more comfortable writing about poetry than I was about, say, Faulkner or Joyce. Sometimes I’m even more comfortable teaching poetry—you have access to the whole text. It’s all right there in front of you, the whole trajectory, the constellation of images. But identifying as a poet? I think I’d feel more authentic about doing that if I felt driven to lineate. I know what makes a poetic line; I’m very good when it comes to suggesting line breaks in the poems of others, but in my own work I seem to need that damn right margin. And maybe it simply comes down to that.
JC: The Burning House has love and lust, lies and truth, sex and politics. It includes climactic scenes of public testimony about a planned development on critical wetlands. In part, Isidore’s attraction to Joan seems fueled by her activism. Particularly in an election year, do you believe sex is a subtext for politics in American life?
PL: Well, it’s probably a subtext for anything involving change, power, money, anything desirable and/or endangered. I’m not sure Isidore is initially stirred by the object of Joan’s activism as he is by her sense of belief—there’s something enthralling about being a spectator to her passion, just the way he was audience to his wife’s singing once upon a time. Of course, Isidore is swept over to anti-development side soon enough, but that probably wouldn’t have happened without that old erotic pull, which is always stronger than abstraction. Flannery O’Connor says, “the beginning of human knowledge is through the senses.” She might not have been talking about sex exactly, but I think it applies.
JC: I see in The Burning House and perhaps in your other work the idea of architecture as a manifestation of history, a means by which past, present, and future are made tangible in the moment, laid out side-by-side before our eyes. For GLBT writers, the past few decades have been momentous: the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the AIDS pandemic, Harvey Milk’s election in 1978, all the way up to the recent victory in New York. There is perhaps only one gay character in The Burning House although you accurately portray the homoeroticism and narcissism of hyper-masculinity. Heteronormative behavior exists in tandem with what could be transgressive, or at least unconventional, behavior (Isidore, for instance, gets pleasure from housework.) Is there a sense in which this novel by a gay author about straight characters is a commentary on the history of gender roles in America since mid-century?
PL: Wow. I love your question. I’d never be able to start with a consciously grand plan, but I suppose the novel does want to de-center. I think the world around us is de-centered in so many ways. For instance, I don’t think many of my younger straight male students feel any obligation to be hyper-masculine in terms of self-presentation. But there might be other sides of them that are in sync with old roles. That’s just the way we are now. We’re much more marbled than we used to be. We just haven’t caught up to it yet in our literature.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)