Paul Lisicky

Song (& Video) o My Heart

2012-01-19T10:35:00.001-08:00

Nat Baldwin - "Weights" from Willy Berliner on Vimeo.

Maybe the Mountain

2012-01-13T17:53:00.000-08:00

A cold night in Orlando. Not as cold, obviously, as a cold night in the north, but a projected low in thirties might as well be ten in Philadelphia, especially when you've arrived without a sweater. The sprinklers are misting on the plants outside. It's been a long, sweet, occasionally intense week. After leaving New Smyrna, I drove south to stay with my brother in Miami, then one more night with my father, where I didn't do much of anything but start a few paragraphs of a story and put off working on my syllabi for the spring term. The highlight of the seven days? The huge (white?) owl in the royal palm across the street from my brother's house. We watched him for a while, then he watched us back from his perch, fifty feet up. And when he'd had enough of our looking, he flew off, with a soft bubbling sound and a wingspan as wide as a garage door. (Well, not really, but it looked somewhat like that from down on the sidewalk.) Unfortunately it was impossible to take a picture. It was night of course, and it seemed to be more important to be Present, rather than holding up some device between the experience of it and me. Who needs any more distance from felt life? Don't we have enough of that already? And must we necessarily reproduce something and pass it on in order to experience it as real? In lieu of all that, I'll pass along some pictures from the week (see below) and a new piece, "Maybe the Mountain," which went up on the Tin House blog today as part of their Flash Fridays series.

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Maybe the Mountain

It wasn’t easy to live in the woods, especially when we wanted the light on our heads. If only to know shoal and wave and dune. Maybe The Mountain thought so. Or maybe not. Maybe The Mountain was too busy pointing his chair in the direction of the house he’d lost to think any of us deserved such things.

So we did what we could to convince The Mountain. We fed his hummingbird with a dropper. We built an enclosure for his baby deer. We bandaged The Mountain’s wounds after he fell asleep one night, but when he caught us tending to him, he brushed us away. When we walked him through the hospital we’d built for the animals, he said, you’re cold and ruthless. His tone couldn’t have been further from fury which made it that much harder to take. And when we tried to lift our heads to meet his eyes, we couldn’t see past his disappointment, big enough now to blot out the country we’d built in his name.

That of course made us work all the harder. In the coming days we broke some bones, we fused them back together. We worked 24 days and nights to build a suspension bridge–the highest in the world at that time–across the water to the house he’d lost. He let us drive the pylons into the muck even though he must have known we were wasting ourselves. We needed to do something with our love, or whatever it was, which could have taken the whole town down if we hadn’t committed to giving ourselves up first.

One day it came to us that he wanted us to hurt him back. There was no other way out of it–he wanted us to destroy him. We weren’t the kind of children who were wont to hurting back. We knew such children existed but we wanted to believe in peace. So one day, with a regret greater than our names, we walked to the store and rented the biggest cannon they had on hand. It took all our might to push it out the door, to roll it up the slopes to the jungle. We lit the wick, we counted to ten and put our hands over our ears. The turmoil roiled inside our heads, so much louder than the sound of the blast, which split The Mountain into a thousand pieces. We tried our best not to catch the flying pieces, but we couldn’t help ourselves. We put him underneath our hats, we put him inside our pockets, but not before we kissed every third piece, although he tasted of aluminum.

Were we surprised when The Mountain reassembled himself in front of our eyes? Not really. Somehow the mountain got even bigger after he’d been split apart. When he calmed himself down and took in what we’d done to him, he laid us on the slab and lifted a piece of himself from his pocket. My God, he said, lifting his eyes in confusion. And just before the rock met our faces, we felt the force that he’d summoned calm us from deep within, and The Mountain went flying apart for good.

Three Pictures (And One More)

2012-01-09T08:36:00.001-08:00

...of the beautiful Atlantic Center for the Arts, in New Smyrna Beach, FL, where I'm giving a reading tonight at 8 PM. Please come (or please tell people you know to come). A few pictures of the ACA below.

Here's the one more, one week later....

Flying in Tight Fast Circles

2012-01-07T09:38:00.001-08:00

At about 10:45 this morning my blog voice came back to me. That might sound strange given that this is year five of this blog, but I don't joke. The blog voice is not always the interior voice. The blog voice speaks to actual people (to you really), while the interior voice, the voice of the stories I've been writing, speak to--what? It is hard to name that what without sounding pretentious, at least in this context. So while the blog voice is still talking, I thought I'd say some words about Dana Spiotta, whose novels I've been reading over the break. I know I'm late to the game; more than a few of you know that Dana Spiotta's first novel, Lightning Field, came out in 2001, and I'm sure she published stories or excerpts long before that. What can I say about the work that won't be obvious from the passage I'm posting below? I can't think of anyone else who writes with her mixture of charisma, braininess, warmth, coolness, poetry, music, compassion. It's a bit Don DeLillo, a bit Jennifer Egan, a bit Mary Gaitskill--and completely itself. It's already ended up in my category of favorites, by which I mean work that sits alongside the people I've mentioned above, and a handful of others. I'm already rereading.

from the novel Stone Arabia
by Dana Spiotta

By now I should have been used to his--what should I call it? Need? Requirement? Accomodation, maybe? He wouldn't call it an addiction. He would call it his consolation. As far back as I can remember, Nik always used--the consoling part came later--whatever was at hand whenever he could. He just wanted and needed to get off his face, out of his head, expand, shut down, alter, spin, fly, sleep, wake up, float. When we were small kids, we would grab each other's arms and swing in circles faster and faster until out brains' equilibrium was nauseatingly off. We would wake in staggers and feel the earth come up to meet us in giant waves as we collapsed in breathless laughter. This odd feeling was a pleasure, and enjoying it is common, right? Nik also loved to wind the chains of a swing in creaking twists, pushing his leg off the support poles until the chains would twist to their very top, then he would push himself in the opposite direction, flying in tight fast circles as the chains unwound, throwing his head back to augment the spin. I read somewhere that the brain needs disorientation to properly develop. That childhood desire to feel dizzy has something to do with increasing the vestibular and cerebellar interaction in the young brain. Proprioception is the activity where the brain orients the inside world with the outside world. Spinning throws off your proprioception and the brain works and develops as it tries to get it back. The desire to spin around is healthy, I guess, because it teaches the brain how to get a stable fix on the world under any circumstances. But Nik got stuck there, somehow, and had to do these activities over and over. Getting dizzy-high was just the beginning. Swing sets were his gateway drug. Nik had an intense appetite, a special extra need, and as he grew older he grew more hungry for any and all alterations. I watched it; it was impossible to miss his difference, how he craved anything that undid his equilibrium.

He began drinking coffee in third grade. He would make it with instant coffee crystals and lots of sugar. He would mix it cold with tap water. He often stayed up all night (which is another childish and cheap way to get high--stay up all night and the fatigue alone will make you giddy). He drank OTC medicine, all kinds: decongestant to get speeded up, cough syrup to sleep. I swear he always smoked cigarettes, but of course that can't be true, he started at maybe twelve. By junior high he was taking any drugs he could get his hands on, and he could get his hands on so many.

Like the most serious druggies, he lived by the PDR, the Physician's Desk Reference, the well-thumbed paperback book that made his drug experimentations seem so rational and considered. He would root through his girlfriends' mothers' medicine cabinets. He would take a few of these, a few of those. The PDR would tell him what the drug would do, what the pill looked like, and it would tell him what it would interact with. He knew what he could mix or not mix. Nik became the guy yu asked, How many should I take? Nik was the guy who helped the kid who turned blue or the girl throwing up in the bathroom at the party. And his gleeful hunger to alter his brain never abated and was never apologized for. In his youth he extolled theories of the need and even the obligation to get high. He quoted the usual hallucinogenic pantheon of Huxley and so on. He didn't miss any rationales for his enthusiasms: Huichol Indian peyote, Freud's cocaine, Leary's LSD, Richard Harris's scotch.

As others of us (me, for instance) grew bored with taking drugs, of "experimenting," he never stopped. He wasn't experimenting. But as he lived longer and longer into his aging, creaking habits, he stopped trying to extol them to everyone, or at least to me. If it came up at all between us, it was usually because I decided I wanted him to change his habits out of simple health or plain decency, or even economy (the cigarettes I never mentioned were now five dollars a pack). He would simply tell me that this was his consolation. And what could a sister say to answer that?

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Here, a podcast. Brad Listi interviews Dana Spiotta. Be sure to keep with it. Interesting things said about studying with Gordon Lish, working at The Quarterly.

Spectator

2012-01-01T20:00:00.000-08:00

I know this is practically sacrilege, but I couldn't bear the thought of the parade that Philadelphia is best known for, especially as its route took it a block from my building. ("Pissing in the streets!" said a stranger. "You have to go!" Then added that he hadn't been since he was ten, which was quite enough for one lifetime, thank you.) So I ended up driving an hour and a half to Asbury Park, where it turned out another sort of parade was taking place: The Polar Bear Plunge. This one struck me as sweeter, though; dozens threw themselves in the water with a variety of attitudes: some screaming as if they were hurling themselves into acid, some nonchalant, wading up to their nipple regions and standing in place with relaxed face as if it were mid July not January. It couldn't have been a better day for craziness, with a blinding winter sun and a high in the fifties. Later that afternoon, the temperatures fell, the wind picked up off the ocean, and the town cleared out. The boardwalk itself took on a shiny quality in the rain. It almost looks as if I'm standing in the water with the others, and I might have actually stripped down to my gotchies--as my favorite used to call them--if I'd had a spectator along.

A post has been composing itself...

2011-12-31T13:39:00.000-08:00

...at the back of my mind all week, but the longer it composes itself, the more it runs away from me, and competes with the short stories I've been working on. So for now I think I'll pass on an interview that John Berrios did with me for Small Doggies Review. It just went up last night, and I got to talk about things I usually don't get to talk about in interviews. I hope you like it. And beneath that, four pictures of my brother Michael's dog, Tillie, who can't get enough of her Stuckeys. These were sent from the road between Savannah and Maryland.
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Happy New Year! Thanks so much for staying with me during the strange and erratic passage of 2011....

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John Barrios: Where do you write? Is there a structure to your writing time?

Paul Lisicky: I used to sit at a desk for a set numbers of hours most days, and I’d pin myself to that chair whether anything was coming or not. A routine like that works for some people, but for me it was probably tied up with certain anxieties about legitimacy. In other words, taking on my father’s work ethic. I still write most days, but I’m much more likely to write when I’m not planning to do it, when I’m not trying. Writing might happen when I’m on the train. It might happen when I’m walking down the sidewalk, and I have to stop and thumb a paragraph into my phone.

JB: Do you think technology has helped you in finding your rhythm as a writer in this way? 5 -10 years ago you wouldn’t have had the luxury. Do you carry a notebook or do you use technology exclusively?

PL: I’ve always tried to find a new portal for my writing whenever I’ve felt too settled on any one device. My thinking and sentence-making tend to shift whenever I’m confronted with a wider (or smaller) field between the margins. Like most people, I tend to type a lot faster than I hand-write, so that must certainly effect how a paragraph comes into being. Back in my twenties, when I first started writing, I’d wake up at six in the morning, scrawl on a legal pad for an hour or two, then transfer the work into my laptop later. Technology helps, sure, but I think of my phone as just a sibling to that old legal pad. It’s certainly easier to carry around.

JB: Do you rely more on technology when drafting your work, or do you still write things down. I tend to caught up writing directly to my netbook then I edit right off the page without having those early drafts saved (which is my misuse of technology I suppose). I do still write all of my first drafts in a notebook, but after that, changes are lost as I edit.

PL: I do edit off the page for the most part. The drafts I keep are usually written months, maybe years, apart. I think I’d become an insane person if I kept too many versions around. I want to assimilate all those versions; I hope all those considerations and deletions inform the page that you read, but I wouldn’t want to refer to all those drafts when I’m putting that version together.

JB: Paul, you said:

I used to sit at a desk for a set numbers of hours most days, and I’d pin myself to that chair whether anything was coming or not. A routine like that works for some people, but for me it was probably tied up with certain anxieties about legitimacy. In other words, taking on my father’s work ethic.

Can you explain what anxieties you are referring to? What do you mean by legitimacy? Do you just mean because that is how it has been done by previous generations of writers? Perhaps technology has given writers like yourself more legitimacy because you can write in the way that best suits your modern lifestyle.

PL: Well, I grew up in a family in which my brothers and I were given permission to be artists, but if we did so, we were expected to be good. Not just good, but successful. My father grew up poor, so a high value was placed on achievement. I’m sure he and my mother probably would have been happier I’d decided to go med school or law school, so in the early days I think did whatever I could to make the practice of my writing look as arduous as possible, especially in those years when I was still living at home.

JB: I am also piqued by your mentioning your father’s work ethic. Perhaps you are meaning legitimacy with his ethic versus your personal style?

PL: Honestly, I think I’m much more like my father than it might appear. I get terrifically bored when I’m sitting still, when I’m not making something, or challenging myself. We certainly look like we come from different worlds–we have radically different politics, different ways of thinking about the world–but sometimes I worry about the fact that we might be versions of the same person.

JB: The Burning House is very poetic. As I read it, I immediately wanted to break it down into verse. I also really loved reading passages aloud, which i don’t always do with fiction (Ondaatje also carries that gift with me). I could almost argue that this is a long form prose poem. Was there a point where this was, in some part, poetry first? Can you discuss any difference between your approach to writing poetry and your writing fiction?

PL: Thanks, John. I think I started to make use of my musical background in The Burning House, or at least my interest in vocal phrasing. My previous books were pretty dependent on sensory description for their effects. I was probably under-utilizing my ear without knowing it at the time. I started giving many more public readings after Famous Builder came out, and that might have helped too. I wanted my work to have some sonic energy when I stood up there at the podium.

JB: Perhaps I didn’t do my homework well, but I didn’t realize you had a musical background. Were you a singer? Did you write your own music? Knowing that now speaks a lot to me as to why I find a certain flow in The Burning House and why I like to read passages aloud.

PL: I was a singer, but not an especially gifted one. I certainly know what inventive phrasing is when I hear it, but it’s not something I could ever transfer to my own singing. I don’t really like the timbre of my voice; it’s not as textured or as complex as I’d like it to be. It’s all one color, and I’ve never been able to do anything about that without punishing my voice–and/or sounding false. For whatever reason, many of these worries fell away when I started to write, even though I still think of my writing as a kind of singing. I wrote my own music for years. I have been on hiatus for longer than I want to admit. For years, I told myself I’d left that world behind, but who knows what’s coming?

JB: Burning House reads very differently than your previous novel Lawnboy. I found myself reading it slowly, taking in the subtleties and impact of each line, much as I do when I read Henry James. The writing almost insists that you slow down. Was this intentional in your approach to writing it?

PL: I probably got better at doing what I wanted to do in Lawnboy. Sometimes you get better chops over time, through practice. Some readers seem to think that The Burning House speeds along, which is just fine, but I’m glad to hear that it slowed you down. I honestly don’t want there to be any wasted words in the work. I don’t want it to feel mannered; I don’t want it to feel too worked, but I want the writing to capture the cadence of a very particular state of mind.

JB: I think cadence can work differently for different readers as well as different reading styles. I have seen Vanessa Veselka (Zazen on Red Lemonade Press) read twice, both very different readings and both made me see something in her work I missed on my own reading the first time around. For instance, I didn’t recognize the humor so prominent in her work, as I read it more seriously at first. Her different interpretations of her own cadences stretched the narrative for me in different directions, opening new readings. Sort of like different actors interpreting the same monologue. Do you find that in your work as you read it aloud to an audience?

PL: The interpretation does sort of shift depending on the emotional temperature of the room, whether I’m comfortable, whether I feel people are with me or not. I never want to over-perform. I was just at a reading the other night when I heard any number of readers pushing too hard, but I like the experience of hearing someone’s work shift each time she reads it. That might happen through speed of delivery, variation of volume, pauses between sentences and paragraphs.

JB: The Burning House brings to the surface a lot of emotions some men tend to bury. I suppose I am referring to naturally being aroused or at least sexually curious about other women,specifically his wife’s sister. Is there an intentional connection between these internal struggles and the use of architecture in the novel? Does architecture as a subtext speak to the emotional building, confusion and potential destruction of the main character?

PL: No, I can’t say that was intentional, but I do like the connection you’re making. I always try to write toward a space that’s smarter and more knowing than I am, where I feel the *possibilities* of connections in the atmosphere without actually naming them. Then I sort of trust that the reader will be able to make the links himself. Every time I’ve tried to will those connections, it hasn’t served the work. It’s seemed deliberate.

JB: I’d like to turn our discussion to your upcoming book, Unbuilt Projects. 25 pages in and I have tears. My heart is broken. This collection reads as a collection of emotions rather than straight narrative, which is really what I love about it. Perhaps this gets back to what you said regarding allowing the reader to make their own connections. I suppose that is more my impression rather than a question, but I’d still like to know what you think when I say that.

PL: I do think that some readers will probably not read the book linearly. It’s designed so you can read it like a book of poems. So my guess is that some are going to leap around in the book, and in doing that make their own meaning. That’s perfectly fine with me. And I love the description of it as a collection of emotions. Thank you.

JB: How do you categorize this book? Is this a memoir? A short story collection? A novel? The approach feels very much like Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, which is to my understanding, is based on Johnson’s early experience’s.

PL: A good deal of that work has autobiographical roots, but some of it takes little liberties with the facts. Most of the pieces are in first person, but some are in third, one is in second. Because of all that, it wouldn’t have been honest to say memoir. We’re calling it fiction, even though some of the pieces have been published as poems, a couple as lyric essays. Fiction is more capacious than the other two categories; and by that, I’m not at all suggesting fiction is better or more evolved than the other forms, but fiction doesn’t seem to come with expectations, conventions, and so on. In all honesty, I’d prefer it not to have any genre label–I don’t think Lydia Davis’s Varieties of Disturbance has a label on the front cover. I think of my own book as a hybrid.

Regarding Denis Johnson… Jesus’ Son is incredibly important to me. I know a lot of people say that, but I love the fact that that voice sounds like it’s just come into being. It’s half plain, half heightened and sensory. It’s as close to music as any book I’ve ever read, and I’ve never tired of it, even though I’ve taught from it dozens of times.

JB: Can you speak to any style change from The Burning House to Unbuilt Projects? Both forms feel appropriate to the subject matter. With Unbuilt Projects, the short chapters give immediate emotional resonance. Did you know what form you wanted when you began, or do you just let it flow and let the material tell you how it wants to be shaped?

PL: I never really know what I want when I begin anything. I write and write and I’m usually not even vaguely interested until the work takes me in a different direction from the original plan. I think at a certain point I tried to write The Burning House with very short chapters. For a while, I was really taken with D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land. I love the spareness of that work, that repetitions in the language, the emotional understatement of the speaker. But Isidore refused to be hemmed in like that. The Burning House is a spare book, but the narrator needs a little more space to roam. It just wasn’t in his character to be strict; he needed some expressive range and the chapters and scenes needed to accommodate that. Unbuilt Projects is a little different in that it’s essentially about language, or what happens to us when someone we care about loses her language, memory, identity. Every word needs to count, because so much is at stake behind speech itself. Each of those pieces is probably more concentrated than any of the chapters in the novel. The reader needs breaks, places for the mind to breathe. Unlike the novel, they were also written at various points in time over a 2-year period. The last few were written just a couple of weeks after my mother’s death, and then they stopped coming. There seemed to be a reason for that. Then I looked at what I had, put one piece next to another, tried to think of how one piece made an argument with the next. The book started to take on a shape.

JB: Lastly, totally off topic, can you tell me what inspires you to almost wholly tweet fascinating articles on animals on Twitter?

PL: That was pure accident. I joined Twitter early in its life when there weren’t that many other writers on board. How to make use of its weird forum? It took me a while to get it. I started casually going through newspapers on-line, and the stories that interested me were inevitably the stories of animals–especially the incursion of animals into human life. So I started posting links. Gradually my project took on a life of its own. Along the way, I came to learn more about animals and why they mean so much to me. And found others who were interested as well. Now my writing is full of animals!

Here's Tillie:

Just back from four days in Miami...

2011-12-24T10:35:00.000-08:00

...a fertile and frenetic time, little trips, lots of comings and goings, lots of time in the car, more often stalled in holiday traffic on US 1 than speeding along. At one point yesterday my father remarked--without melancholy, I should add--that it didn't feel so much like Christmas. I don't think he was exactly referring to the weather: 81 degrees and sparkly, with a breeze from the Gulfstream that clattered the frondage overhead. He had other things to think about. The night before he and I drove across the drawbridge, parked the car, and stumped through the dark to a Christmas light display. Cars crept along, other humans lurched in our direction, their shapes barely discernible, shoes mushing the tough Florida grass. Somehow we wandered into a Fellini film. The night smelled of mulch, church, sprinkler. It struck me, quietly, that the two of us were alone, though my father's had longer practice at it: three Christmases now? We stood before the lights. One car went by, and then another. What wonder, what a waste. We stared and stared until our eyes burned, as if there might be something to see in all that wattage.

Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! (More trip pictures to come tomorrow)

UPDATE: And here goes...
My brother Bobby's backyard

Lisickys exchange presents

That backyard through the bedroom window

Vagabond Motel

Coppertone Girl at Night

Read about it here: Coral Castle

Key Largo dog visits my car

Endangered Florida house in Pompano Beach

Iconic beach walkway in Pompano

Pompano Beach Fishing Pier

Musicality (Or: Attack Sentences)

2011-12-18T07:30:00.001-08:00

HTML Giant put up a fine post yesterday about the Gordon Lish workshops. It opened with a provocative statement from Lish himself (not a big surprise). But the best part was a list of sentences culled from those workshops back in 1986. Some of the writers of those sentences have gone silent, wandered off, while others have become quite well-known. Still others never published outside that single issue of Story Quarterly as far as I know. As a fan of lists, I couldn't help but be interested, especially as this isn't your usual top ten list--curious that Amy Hempel, Gary Lutz, Mark Richard, and Diane Williams aren't represented. But that's another story. The sequence here begs to be read aloud: hear the architecture, the breathing, the musicality. See the unit of meaning between first word and period. Below, two brilliant sentences from two friends of mine, Victoria Redel and Noy Holland, whose books you should know if you don't already.

“Here’s how I like to do it: I lay the paint on thick and race gravity, catching the drips before they go over the tape.” --Victoria Redel

"My father, hallowed be, flush with crisis, has seen the thing, the black wind gouging the Warrior’s banks.” --Noy Holland

Pleased (Or: We Will Be Disorderly)

2011-12-16T19:29:00.000-08:00

I probably would have been pleased even if it hadn't been in the fifties all night, warm enough to keep the window open. I would have been pleased even if my hotel room hadn't turned out to have been on the fourth floor, with a balcony, and a good view of the ocean, which was constantly making sound, relaxing sound, but violent too, like whipcracks on skin. I'd been wanting to go to Rehoboth Beach in southern Delaware all fall, and I finally did so as a present to self after finishing up a busy, all-consuming, happy, satisfying term at Rutgers. I was so pleased that I can barely move my aching back and legs this morning. Two long nature trail walks, walks through town, walks along the beach, along the boardwalk, not to mention 35 ten-page term papers on the contemporary American short story, which I read in a cache of coffee places on or off the main drag.

Speaking of contemporary American short stories, please come to hear Lynne Tillman and me read as part of the Experiments and Disorders series at NYC's Dixon Place, this Monday night, December 19, at 7:30 PM. We will be experimental. We will be disorderly.

In It

2011-12-14T08:17:00.000-08:00

I've been wanting to pass this along all week: a photo of the classroom that housed my fall 2010 NYU fiction workshop. It comes via my former student Eric Kim, who's now applying for MFA programs. Sometime within the last week, he walked back to that classroom, which happened to be in the ground floor of a dorm, and took this picture. Something about that gesture moves me. ( Moves --is that the right word?) Maybe it's just that we know that the emptiness of the room is an illusion. Once a week, one fall, ten people made something together in that space. Sometimes it's hard to see that when we're still in it, busy talking and trying and pushing papers around.

Bulldog: A Fable

2011-12-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

I didn't intend to write a fable, but it's certainly looking like I did right now, with a little distance. Here's "Bulldog," from the second issue of Cobalt Review, which just went live today. It also includes interviews by Rick Moody and Patricia Smith, and a memoir excerpt from Hayley Hughes, a former student of mine from the Juniper Institute.

*****

BULLDOG
(Paul Lisicky)

The bulldog kept the woman alive, but the woman didn’t know that. She had other problems on her mind, such as where did she put her keys, and what was her car doing in Florida when she’d parked it in Tennessee?

The bulldog got very still when the woman started shoving her fingers into bowls. He figured he could make the earth spin a little slower if he were sitting on its axis, so he’d quiet his panting. He’d look straight ahead, neither left nor right. The woman would trip on him, wince at him for being in her way, then lean down and palm the top of his head, thus assuring him they were in their correct positions to one another, and they’d get through one more day.

After she loaded the dishes in the dishwasher, the woman headed to her recliner every night. It was always a bit of a production. First the blanket went over the legs, then the cushion went behind her neck, and once she settled in, the bulldog commenced his stunning leap and landed in her lap. The woman always told herself she was watching her favorite program, but she was inevitably sound asleep before the first commercial. And inside the warm nest of the lap, the bulldog began his work, which was to calm the woman while the woman dreamt of lost things. It took great work to be her purifying organ, but he always felt better when he did so. It gave him the illusion of aliveness even if it made him tremble, even if he had to play dumb and weak in order to get the tenderness he craved.

What was the woman thinking when she looked at him as if he were an intruder? Her eyes went wild that day; her hands flew up. But there was a quiet in her too that took away any desire he had to speak. He didn’t go out to pee as he usually did but let go right there on the rug, by the umbrella stand. And when he tried to leap on the woman’s lap, his nails snagged in her afghan. Gone was her old face of curiosity and concern. In its place was something more remote. Her face might have been made of granite, which wouldn’t have been so bad if granite hadn’t smiled.

When she could no longer tell the difference between the phone and the channel changer, the woman faced the front door. She stood there a few minutes more before she was guided by two strangers to a car outside. How new she looked to the bulldog. Though she could barely put one foot in front of the next, she might have been walking into the world for the very first time, learning to make it through a day all over again. And in taking that in, the bulldog’s face went completely white in an instant, as if someone had taken a match to it.

He never saw the woman’s face again. The apartment grew dirty, he took to whatever was left in the cabinets: raisins, mice, the bristles of an old brush. It might have been years, it might have been days. And when he grew tired of living the life of the saint, he squeaked out through a crack of light beside the door, and lived longer than he’d ever predicted.

My wee tree.

Seven Lauras

2011-12-09T06:22:00.000-08:00

I've never cared about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, nor for top ten lists in general, but I was unexpectedly excited on Wednesday to hear that Laura Nyro is to be a 2012 inductee. I was almost as excited as if I'd won the award myself, and I beamed about the apartment for a good half hour, humming to myself and cleaning, before I went off to teach. It's strange to be excited about such an award, especially as it comes from an operation that hasn't had a history of being too kind to idiosyncrasy or to modest record sales. At the very least, it will help to keep the work around, just at the point when it felt like Laura was about to slide out of awareness. Here are seven I love. The first two are covers, the last five are originals.

Happy Birthday, Joan Didion

2011-12-05T04:28:00.001-08:00

"I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it."

--from JD's 1975 Commencement Address at UC Riverside

Dirty One

2011-11-30T05:44:00.000-08:00

Here's the Band of Thebes' List of the Best LGBT Books of 2011. As a contributor, I get to say a few words about Michael Graves' excellent first book, the story collection Dirty One.

For just a few minutes this morning, The Drake throws its shape on some buildings a few blocks away.

This Post Needs a Good Title

2011-11-26T18:48:00.000-08:00

I haven't looked at this--I hardly ever look at videos of myself--but the Sunday Salon just put up a snippet of my reading from last April (as well as readings from Ben Hale, Emma Straub, Jess Row, Justin Taylor, Kathy Fish, Elizabeth Eslami, and others). I'm not even sure what I read, but my guess is that it's the opening pages from The Narrow Door. Or maybe something else? You can let me know.

Sunday Salon Readings

Lucky

2011-11-24T05:51:00.000-08:00

Maybe it was because my ten-day sinus infection was just about out of my system, or maybe it was that the end of the semester was days away. I was feeling lucky, so I took the train to Atlantic City. Not because I cared at all about gambling, but because I wanted to see, hear, and smell the sea. (Wouldn't it be better to do my school prep on the train, in motion, instead of inside the four walls of my apartment?) So these photos come from my two hours on the boardwalk last Sunday. I did end up leaning into a slot machine on my way back to the station, and just when I felt vaguely bored and sick from distant cigarette smoke and annoyed with myself for losing close to 40 bucks, which could have gone toward a shirt or shoes or bills or food, some electronic bells went off, and I ended up winning 75, thus leaving the rundown town with an extra 35 in my pocket.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

They Call You An Animal

2011-11-19T09:33:00.000-08:00

Though I've already posted these links on Twitter and Facebook, they're too good to pass up here. The entirety of Kate Bush's wondrous 50 Words for Snow, which might just be her best album yet. (Listen to it soon, as I can't imagine it's going to be up for long). And a video segment of "Wild Man," the song that's getting the most play.

And Now for My Good News...

2011-11-15T09:30:00.001-08:00

My memoir THE NARROW DOOR--my book about friendship and my late friend Denise--is coming out from Graywolf Press in 2014.

Two Reviews

2011-11-10T18:32:00.000-08:00

Two reviews this week:

Lovely words on Myfanwy Collins' blog about The Burning House.

And a mention in a piece about the new Wag's Revue, which features "Palace of Empty Rooms," an except from my memoir The Narrow Door.

And stay tuned for some very good news, which I'll post in a little bit.

Replica (And Not)

2011-11-08T18:17:00.000-08:00

Here I am on Plant Talk, the New York Botanical Garden blog. Some thoughts on the Swiss Mountain Pine--and otherness. Below that, "Flair," the piece I was asked to write last spring. You can look for it on a placard by the tree in question. It will be up in the Garden for the foreseeable.

Replica (And Not)

The sandy soil, the boggy ponds: whenever I feel an inexplicable sense of geographic safety (say, in parts of Cape Cod, coastal North Carolina, or Florida), I understand soon enough that I’m looking at a replica of my childhood backyard–or at least the woods and marshes nearby.

And yet I once wanted to be elsewhere. Or at least I wanted my plants and trees to be elsewhere. I wanted them to grow in unexpected shapes, leaves large as shovels. I wanted them to be a little scary, a little closer to life as I knew it, which felt to me both beautiful and a little brutal. (Don’t children always know that consciousness is darker than their parents remember?) On childhood trips to Florida or California, my eye went first to the plants. The plants in warmer climates weren’t bound to restraint or to the pressures of some unnameable force, the codes always changing, impossible to decipher. Their oranges could be brighter; their trunks could be thicker, their vines could grow and twist until they made a mess of themselves, until you had no idea that the plant had once been a beautiful thing.

The Swiss mountain pine, the plant that stirred my attention, struck me as one of those exotics when I first saw it last spring. Only later did I realize that the plant was something else. I’d pictured it growing on the hot slopes of Greece, the foothills of the Catalinas north of Tucson. In actuality, the Swiss mountain pine is a giant version of the sweet, benign mugo pines that my parents had planted decades ago, around the paper birches and cedar diadaras in their Southern New Jersey yard. As much as I liked our mugo pines, ours were no wider than basketballs. Here something familiar had gone large, stark, and mysterious, and maybe that was why my spine straightened when I first saw its crooked branches. Two contradictions fused: my childhood home, and my incessant longing for other.

*****

Flair (On the Swiss Mountain Pine)

Usually the trees of our region do not make statements of themselves. Usually they’re a sprawl of thick green, never one, never singular. Austerity is a part of this tree's flair. It stops you in your walking. You want to touch its cones and needles, though you wouldn't dare. This tree makes you wish there were more trees like this around, trees that take you somewhere, trees that shake you out of yourself, trees that conjure up animals. You never wanted comfort or obliteration, though you’ve been led to think you should want those things. You want to smell the resin. You want to be pulled into the work of comparison, so you are not just looking at the tree, but looking at yourself too, whether you know it or not. The nouns start flying: a chandelier, a menorah, a torch, some antlers, a sea fan.

Elisa's Interview

2011-11-02T18:10:00.000-07:00

This interview went live on Elisa Rolle's website on October 31st.

The Water Had Always Stopped His Wanting

2011-10-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

Here's my piece "Winston and the Ocean" from Issue 28 of La Petite Zine, edited by Melissa Broder and D.W. Lichtenberg.

WINSTON AND THE OCEAN
Paul Lisicky

Winston stayed in the ocean longer than the other children. He'd stay in all afternoon, even if his neck turned blue, even if a wave pulled him under, scraping his chest raw against the shells. The mothers looked out at Winston from their tidy circle of primary-colored chairs. They'd shake their heads and laugh, puzzled that Winston was capable of such endurance. But whenever the subject of Winston came up, Winston's mother stood, offered to run off for iced tea or cigarettes. She loved Winston, of course, but not as much as she loved her injections. As long as they didn't focus too much on Winston, they wouldn't focus too much on her, and never wonder what she did to her thigh late at night. She always waited till Winston was fast asleep, after the last cars dragged their headlight beams around the bulb of the cul-de-sac.

Thirty years later Winston still bodysurfed hours at a time. He still went in when it was fifty-six degrees and foggy, still went in when the seaweed was slopped with oil. But something about the going in no longer lived up to his hope for it. He'd think about the sea all week, at work—the beryl color when the sun hit the swell, the wafting of ions and oxygen—but once he got to the sand and peeled down to his trunks, he felt an empty box inside him. It opened its lid and stayed like that. It wasn't desolation, nothing as extreme as that, but he was aware of wanting coffee or gum or a beer not five minutes after he went in. He'd look back at the shore and think, it hasn't stopped my wanting. The water had always stopped his wanting, though he'd never said that to himself. The cold turned the hint of extra skin around his waist a cherry red, and he looked down and slapped it, reminding himself he had more miles to run.

Someone else might have moved to the desert or to the mountains or to an ashram but not Winston. He wouldn't let the sea get away from him. It had been his safety for too long. It had turned him into a dolphin—at least he'd liked thinking he had that slick black skin—when he was tired of his human form. But something so intrinsically him was about to be just another force: the wind, a highway, a billboard, a bucket. He reached into his backpack and felt around for the bottle of Klonopin. He tapped two, three into his palm. He swallowed them, dry, and looked up to the sun. He wasn't going to do what someone else would do. He'd stay in the water, past lunch if he had to, until he came to love that water again.

He was in the water for so long that he hadn't realized it was getting dark. Not only had the sun gone down, but the wind was blowing from the north. He rose and fell on the waves like a board ripped loose. The lights of the island burned and then they didn't. He thought he should be concerned—what was dragging at his feet? Could it be that he'd forgotten to take off his dress shoes? When he opened his mouth for a drink, he was reminded all over again that you can't drink salt. He took just one more sip and then another just to contest that notion. And before he knew it, he was taking in drink after drink. It tasted as pure as a spring, clean as a tap cooled by moss—he was impressed with those ideas—when a mountain of wave crashed down on his back with a sound of metal breaking.

How long had he been on the shore when his mother walked toward him from the direction of the snack bar? "Get up," she commanded. A piece of hair fell over the left lens of her sunglasses. She blew it off her face with a wry, efficient gust. "Mom?" Winston said. "Get up. Now," she said again, not unkindly, holding out her arm to him. And just when he reached out for her wrist, tanned, shining with bracelets, she walked off a second time, as if certain she was giving him the right thing.

45 Days or So

2011-10-26T10:29:00.000-07:00

It might seem that I've run out of steam here. The fact is every puff of steam in me has been going to my teaching this semester. Two grad classes, a fiction workshop and a thesis workshop. A large undergrad lit class in the short story. Two independent studies. It is all going extremely well; I'm lucky to have smart, gifted, dedicated students. But just want to say I'll be back in full force in a matter of days, weeks. In the meantime, here are a few images from the past month and a half.

Sandy, my sister-in-law, as Elephant Ear. Labor Day Weekend, Beach Haven, NJ.

Ned falls asleep while waiting for my father to come out of hardware store. September, Somers Point, NJ

Ned as cat. September, Anchorage Point, NJ.

Where I gave a reading for the Poetry Go Round series. September, Cafe in Bridgeton, NJ.

Ned and my father. September, Anchorage Point, NJ.

Blimp outside the window of Philadelphia apartment.

Empty rides, empty boardwalk. October weekend, Ocean City, NJ.

Peculiar light outside the apartment. October, Philadelphia, PA.

The Philadelphia apartment. October.

The Walt Whitman Center: building that sponsors the Rutgers-Camden MFA program student readings. October, Camden, NJ.

Swans at Cape May Meadows. Columbus Day weekend, Cape May, NJ.

Beach at Cape May Point. Columbus Day weekend, Cape May Point, NJ.

Porch of Congress Hall. Columbus Day weekend, Cape May, NJ.

View outside the Philadelphia apartment. October.

Second Blurb

2011-10-02T09:06:00.000-07:00

Unbuilt Projects' second blurb is now in.

And look who it's from.

"I've always liked Paul Lisicky's work, its integrity and haunted memories. His clean, comfortable prose always manages to break your heart for he has the diviner's gift for finding the wellsprings of quiet sorrows."

--Joy Williams

Two Fine Sights

2011-09-25T06:35:00.000-07:00

The Burning House at Three Lives in New York City.

The Burning House at Powell's in Portland, Oregon.

With a Force of Its Own

2011-09-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

Below, the text to my piece about liturgical music that the people at the National Endowment for the Arts asked me to write for their Art Works blog. Here's the link if you'd like to see the site.

With a Force of Its Own (On Liturgical Music)

1. One voice syncs with another voice. Until the singers listen to themselves, they had no idea how much they’d missed making a single sound together. The work of it involves not just their tongues, teeth, lips, jaws, and lungs, but their whole bodies, all the way down their spines. A tenor joins in, and then the bass. Now the chord has legs. In a minute the cantor will raise his arms, inviting the assembly to join in. Out there, the trained singer in the tenth row holds back for fear that her timbre has lost its cool pure tone. Two rows ahead of her, a young man sings with a gusto suggesting he has the best voice in the pew, although he doesn’t have the best conception of pitch. Soon the whole lot of them—choir, presider, assembly—are a great swinging beast, too big and joyful for the building that’s trying to contain them. The friendly beast moves with a force of its own. Sometimes the beast bows down, raising its head, bowing down again; sometimes the beast swings side to side; sometimes the beast wants to get up out of there, rise through the roof, and sit with the dead, where the beast was always meant to be. Right now its spirit spills out onto the sidewalk, out the front doors, down six steps. The young woman walking by cannot ignore what comes down at her. She pretends not to feel its harsh warmth, but it holds her still for a second; it pushes all thoughts of her sick mother or her raging boyfriend out of her head, before she shakes the cellphone at her ear and walks on.

2. I’ve been that person who’s passed a church when there’s been singing inside. I used to be inside. When I wasn’t in school, I spent hours inside those walls, writing music, playing music, guitar, organ, piano, percussion. I sang too, as songleader, choir member, soloist. How did I end up there? I didn’t come from family especially concerned with devotion or matters of the spirit. We went to church, of course, but that was part of suburban routine, a way to mark the weekend. But suddenly a parishioner who knew of my musical abilities told the choir director that I’d make a good accompanist—they were in need of an accompanist, not just for liturgies but for choir rehearsals. That morning after Mass, I sat before the piano. I pressed the keys, I sight-read the music on the stand; I was too afraid to say no once the choir director told me to show up at seven p.m. on Tuesday. There was too much relief and satisfaction on her face, and I couldn’t disappoint her now. She was already making plans. Maybe that’s how all life-changing things happen to us: as the stuff of accident.

3. I’m thinking now of a choir member from that time—I’ll call her Natalie Thornton. You’d never say Natalie Thornton was an accomplished singer. If anything, she was the kind of singer who made the teenagers in the congregation redden, look away, and hold in their laughter until their father told them to knock it off. It wasn’t just her tendency to waver when she held onto a low note—she always held on too long. Or her habit of flattening her A’s in the upper registers. It was her complete lack of self-consciousness, which couldn’t have been more threatening to how teenagers knew themselves. Weren’t teenagers always waiting for something to go wrong in themselves, in others? How could we not, with so much information coming at us, telling us what to be, what not to. But even if you held back your laughter, it was impossible not to be stirred by the passages of animation that broke through Natalie’s solo, as the choir backed her in four parts. Back in school, the music directors of our choirs would never have admitted the younger version of Natalie into the most competitive choirs. Her voice was too uncooked, too pungent, too her; her alto would never have been able to meld with the others. It couldn’t have navigated the more demanding passages in Handel or Mozart, where attention to craft came first. Every Sunday morning I accompanied a band of people who shared Natalie’s unique mixture of strengths and weaknesses. It would be simplistic to say that rigor and craft are secondary to artistic expression. But Sunday after Sunday I took in something large about the beauty of process, of amateurism, of imperfection. Or maybe just this: a deep respect for doing what we don’t yet know how to do.

4. Once upon a time we sang in groups, around the campfire, in the taproom, without embarrassment or awkwardness. We sang at harvest; we sang when someone in our community was moving away, to a village on the other side of the river. Song took us out of ourselves and made us know ourselves more deeply at once. It was as essential as breathing, food, sex, laughter, talk, touch. It never would have occurred to us that opportunities for public singing, group singing, would dwindle in the time ahead. We never would have thought singing would be something we’d give over to the professionals (or those hoping to be, as in the case of the talent shows on TV). Our houses of worship might be the only place left where any of us have the opportunity to sing, where we can still be too sharp or too flat, too strained or completely tone deaf. The friendly beast is greater and more alive than dogma or denomination. He can’t be corrupted or contained. That might be why some of us keep walking in and out through church doors. Anyone who’s felt himself to be a part of him knows.

Long Poem

2011-09-15T05:15:00.000-07:00

Such a busy passage here: it's been bothering me that I haven't had even ten or fifteen minutes to pass on an update. But here is an especially wonderful thing, a review of The Burning House by Angelo Nikolopoulos in Homo.

Paul Lisicky goes straight in The Burning House
Angelo Nikolopoulos

If a good man wasn’t hard enough to find already, Paul Lisicky has made the search even more precarious with his second novel, The Burning House, a smoldering exploration of how desire both nurtures and consumes us. The author of Lawnboy, an achingly beautiful coming-of-gay-age story, Lisicky tries his hand at the complexities of heterosexual male desire, as complications arise for the leading man when his wife’s sister moves in and attraction becomes palpable.

“Was it ever possible to love two people,” his narrator asks, “wholly, equally, at once?”

In language that is simultaneously muscular and tender, both butch and queer—like the sweat-stained cotton shirt of a man laboring in his rose garden—Lisicky questions what it means to be shoehorned into a body, with its appetites and fancies, its impulse to please and be pleased, to touch and be touched.

Though desire gets his characters into a beautiful jumble, there’s nothing clumsy about the delivery. The Burning House is clearly the work of a writer well-versed in the art of description, that old habit of taking notice: “Peonies in their vases, knives in the drawers. Out through the window, sodium vapor orange pummeled the bayberry across the lagoon. The light transformed the plant, otherworldly now, a hot trashy gold.”

Using all the techniques of a poem—ellipses, disjunction, compression—The Burning House presents us with prose at its lyrical best: language that both asserts itself in its grandeur while simultaneously questioning its ability to capture the marrow of experience. Of his own novel, Lisicky says, “I think of it as a long poem, and I hope poets will get what it’s up to.”

At Least a Semblance of Peace

2011-08-31T08:31:00.000-07:00

"Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size—the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lockkeeper’s lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children’s bothy in the garden—are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins."

--from Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald

Small Loss

2011-08-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

My brother Michael drove down to our childhood shore house from Baltimore Thursday just hours before the Hurricane Irene evacuation order. He put some patio furniture in the living room, put other things in the car. Now that the storm is a hundred miles north, I'm thinking about what my other brother, Bobby, and I asked Michael to take away. I didn't even know that I cared about the oversized wooden spoon and fork set on the wall, just as I didn't know Bobby had any interest in the rattan chair with the dark turquoise seat. That chair had more or less receded in my memory, but now that it's been saved, I have to admit it does have a kind of authority and charm. The ideal person for that chair: someone large, smart, and jovial, with thin, sturdy arms and broad back. As far as we know, the house is still standing, un-flooded, as I write this today. But that doesn't mean we all haven't passed through a small loss, for better or for worse. Maybe that's why I'm oddly stirred up right now, and have the urge to walk, walk somewhere fast, in spite of winds still blowing trash around. Is there any place sweeter than a loved place poised on obliteration? That's the story of these photos Michael sent me yesterday, taken the evening--and morning-- before the storm's arrival.

Covered by Water, Emptied of Water

2011-08-22T18:01:00.000-07:00

An update (with photos) is on the way soon. Till then, which might be tomorrow, which might be the next day, two pieces, which came out within the last two days: my TNB Self-Interview, with an excerpt from The Burning House, and Birthday: A Playlist in the inaugural issue of trans-portal. Below, the shortest segment from the TNB piece.

*****

Q: In one way, The Burning House is a book about a protecting a community. Lumina, the community in your book, is just a few feet above sea level. Could you say something about water in your work?

A: I grew up on a lagoon, off a bay. It wasn’t our family’s usual, practical house, which was an hour inland, but it was the house that mattered to us. I knew early on that it could have been swept away by a storm in a minute. Did that make me love it that much more? It shaped me hugely to live right alongside marshes, black pines, seabirds, salt water. This sounds weird, I know, but I feel more than a little out of sorts whenever I’m too far from a marsh. That sense of landscape in constant flux–-covered by water, emptied of water–-is crucial to how I think of home.

First Blurb

2011-08-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

Unbuilt Projects' first blurb just came in, from the terrific D.A. Powell....

"Stories, like bodies, lean into each other, entwine and complicate each juncture of the new century in Paul Lisicky's Unbuilt Projects. With brief, electric sentences (for isn't that how we communicate in the 21st century?) of consummate beauty, Lisicky starts out from the joy in childhood and relates the sad and wondrous details of intimacies both familial and romantic that occur 'sometime between that time and where we are now.' If there's a place for poetry and prose to co-habitate, it's here in Lisicky's world: under the snowy rooftops and inside the empty rooms of apartments built, unbuilt, and destroyed. 'The songs are blue and glistening.' And they build."

--D.A. Powell

Deadline Time

2011-08-11T08:11:00.000-07:00

Thursday, August 11, 2011

It's major Deadline Time, though why deadlines should fall in the slowest part of summer makes little sense. In the last nine days I've 1) written a short essay about Flannery O'Connor, 2) written a short essay about Joy Williams, 3) prepared (some) for my upcoming classes, 4) finished a self-interview for The Nervous Breakdown, which will go live on August 21st. I know I'm forgetting things, forgetting. Oh, a reading for the Polestar Poetry Series at New York City's Cake Shop with the wonderful Nick Ripatrazone and a second reading with Nick tonight, at the excellent Clinton Book Shop, on the far side of New Jersey, near Pennsylvania....

And is it any wonder that I'm blog-challeged these days? I don't want to be blog-challenged!

Paul at Cake Shop

Nick at Cake Shop

****

Friday, August 12, 2011

I write this morning from a coffee place this morning with an outdoor patio, right alongside the Clinton Falls. I have a jacket on, the first jacket I've worn since June, during that cold weekend in Provincetown. There's a snap of fall on the air, especially in the tree shadows, but there's a hot sun on my bare knee. I usually don't think of myself as a fan of fresh water, but the falls are stirring up a pleasant smell, of smashed plants and stones and mountain-cooled minerals, certainly not a smell I grew up with, but the appeal I get right now. In this spot, I might as well be someplace in Vermont--I'm thinking downtown Middlebury--but that's not quite fair to New Jersey, which is always more bewildering and harder to categorize than we're ever supposed to say. The cicadas in the trees overhead seem to know that. The older man pruning trees on the other side of the retaining wall, high on a slope above the creek, seems to know that too.

Okay, off to Ikea in Elizabeth, which always starts off light--as in, isn't capitalism fun?-- and ends up requiring a head transplant by the time you push your cart to the loading bay.

Around Town, Clinton, NJ

Mill, Clinton, NJ

Bridge, Clinton, NJ

Museum, Clinton, NJ

Falls, Clinton, NJ

Sweet, Quiet Drive (Visit to the Childhood Summerhouse)

2011-08-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

It's funny how fast we slip into roles outside us. No sounds from the dogs, and I walk outside to find Ned and my brother's dog, Tillie, digging a veritable Grand Canyon in the lagoon-side of the yard. No! I cry, sounding more parental than I've ever sounded in my life. No! Which prompts Tillie to look up at me with tearful expression only meant to be read as: I had nothing to do with it, blame Ned. Before all that, though, I'd taken the two of them on a sweet, quiet drive through Ocean City, all the way to Corsons Inlet and back again. The two of them looked out the windows the whole time, especially partial to marshes, sea gulls, bays, bay mud. It is incredible how well the two appear to like each other, given the disparity of their ages, given the fact that they'd only met yesterday for the first time. Over and over, I feel like I'm looking at the canine version of my cousins and me. There was never any question that they'd get along, though there's more distance, more carefulness between them than if they were siblings. They have wandered out onto the deck now, where Ned has flung himself on his side, panting, Tillie standing over him just to make sure everything is as it should be. Meanwhile, I am planning to steal some of my niece's candy before she gets back with my brother and sister-in-law, who have spent the afternoon in Philadelphia. The candy is called Toxic Waste, which purportedly has so much citric acid in it it's liable to burn a hole in your tongue.

Beach Haven

2011-07-31T05:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a short interview by Ryan Holden for the Four Way Books blog concerning Unbuilt Projects, which will be out in a little more than a year. I couldn't help pairing it with the picture above, which features my mother (on the left) and two unknown friends of hers. It was taken by my father, in the 1950s, when he'd first met her at a party near Beach Haven, on Long Beach Island. I could have scanned it, but the phone shot of the snapshot gave it some things I liked: a blurriness, and two inexplicable streaks of light.

*****

Ryan Holden: The title of the collection seems to offer an ironic take on how some might perceive flash fiction pieces. Was this a conscious gesture on your part? Did the title become apparent as you were working on the individual pieces in the collection?

Paul Lisicky: The title was a happy accident. I was at a museum in Miami; there was a show for a prominent midcentury architect, and I saw the title “unbuilt projects” below some renderings on the wall. It seemed fascinating and poignant to me that the architect’s best buildings were never realized. (I wrote about one of those in the piece “Modernism.”) The metaphor stood for so many things relevant to my book--not just the form, but the mind of the mother, who’s in the process of losing her memory. I liked the way that title talked back to Famous Builder, my second book. The pieces in that manuscript are fuller, more narrative, while any number of the Unbuilt Projects pieces play with disjunction, leap, gap, tone shift. You might say the unbuilt.

RH: Some of the pieces, especially “Mothers in the Trees,” reminded me of the way myths were presented in some of my childhood books. How did you cultivate that mythic feel in your stories? How strong is the influence of fable in your collection? Were there particular mythologies (or individual stories) that had strongest influence?

PL: I’d never let the mythic element into my previous books, but you can feel it try to nudge its way in. Just about all the pieces were written during the time of my mother’s last illness; dementia tore up everything I thought I knew about narrative, truth, character, identity. The mythic seemed to be truer to how I experienced consciousness then. I wasn’t a big reader as a young kid, so I can’t attribute that impulse to being influenced by any specific narratives. But I remember being taken with pictures of animals, plants, trees, water, turbulent weather. The cover of the book is actually taken from my favorite childhood picture book.

RH: Many of the pieces include a relationship between mother and son that draws upon the array of emotions churning between them throughout their lifetimes. It is tempting to read the mother and son as the same throughout the collection. Would that be reading too much into it? Or was that a guiding intention?

PL: In one sense, the mother and the son are the same from piece to piece. They have the same bodies, same faces, similar speech patterns. In another sense, they're not the same, especially when the mother's interior reality shifts from minute to minute. That sense of flux can't help but shape the speaker's sense of himself, and the ground he walks on. Can the book have it both ways? I hope so.

RH: This collection often undercuts nostalgia. How much focus did you put on the perspective shift between childhood and adulthood as you were working?

PL: The speaker's sense of time is fluid; childhood and adulthood aren't exactly distinct from one another. The past infiltrates the present and the present anticipates the future. Time is all mixed up; it's shadowed, impure. The book is wary of a nostalgic point of view, because nostalgia thinks of the past as something containable, separate, inevitably preferable to the present. The idealization of the past strikes the speaker as troublesome. It prevents us from seeing the world in front of us, ahead of us.

RH: There’s a good mix of humorous stories and stories that take a more serious position; they are interspersed throughout the book. How did you decide on the order of your collection? How do the humorous stories inform the more serious pieces and vice versa?

PL: I’m glad to hear that you think some of the stories are funny. I’m not sure I’m the best judge as to which pieces are humorous and which aren’t. I often think my funniest lines are heard as stark and grave when I give a reading. Then people will laugh and laugh when I think I’m being deadly serious. Humor is such a subjective thing--who knows what it is?--but I always take it as a compliment when people respond physically to my work. I think of laughter as recognition, assent. As to the structure of the manuscript, I want the pieces to form an extended conversation. It’s often the case that the piece following the piece in question will contradict the argument of the original piece, and I think there’s something inherently funny about that.

Existence, A Novel of

2011-07-30T18:40:00.000-07:00

At the Union Square Barnes and Noble tonight I came upon the 2011/12 annual issue of Provincetown Arts, which features a great review of The Burning House by the writer Michael Hinkin, whose fiction I've been a fan of since I first read it a few years back. The review is too lengthy to put up here, but I thought I'd type out the last two paragraphs.

****

...Novelist Milan Kundera in his slim and wise book The Art of the Novel says, "a novel examines not reality, but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he is capable of." The Burning House is indeed a novel of existence, less grounded in history or an objective reality and more in the complexities and mysteries of one man's heart. As Isidore interjects at a particularly raw moment, "Was it ever possible to love two people, wholly, equally, at once?"

How to measure love? Is it better to choose a love that burns brightest or longest? Can we even choose who we love, or are we subject to forces beyond our control? What are the costs of acting on these mysterious forces? Can we ever be happy? There are no easy questions posed by Lisicky's novel. No easy answers. But what the novel offers us instead is space to encounter these questions, to watch them play out with various degrees of resolution and disappointment. The Burning House is indeed a novel of existence, one that allows us to confront large, important, unanswerable questions, to live alongside them as Isidore does, inside his confused and brimming dislocated heart.

My Summer of Don DeLillo

2011-07-28T12:28:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking of this summer as my summer of Don DeLillo. I've gone through Don DeLillo periods before, back in 2004 when I read White Noise and The Body Artist for the first time, but I've revisited him with new intensity. What can be said about the beauty of these sentences, which move like music: effortless, unbidden, understated, precise? They sound to me like the sound of breathing, which might have explained why I saved the incredible last pages of The Falling Man for four this morning, when I woke up for a half hour before falling back asleep again, dreaming, I hope, the pulse of this language.

from The Falling Man
Don DeLillo

She was only a girl, always a daughter, and her father was drinking a Tanqueray martini. He'd let her add a twist of lemon, giving her comically detailed instructions. Human existence, that was his subject this evening, on the deck of somebody's beat-up house in Nantucket. Five adults, the girl on the fringes. Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be. She loved the sound of that, like chanted verse, and thought of it now, alone, over coffee and toast, and something else as well, the existence that hummed in the words themselves, was and is, and how the chill wind died at nightfall.

People were reading the Koran. She knew of three people doing this. She'd talked to two and knew of another. They'd bought English-language editions of the Koran and were trying earnestly to learn something, find something that might help them think more deeply into the question of Islam. She didn't know whether they were persisting in the effort. She could imagine herself doing this, the determined action that floats into empty gesture. But maybe they were persisting. They were serious people perhaps. She knew two of them but not well. One, a doctor, recited the first line of the Koran in his office.

The Book is not to be doubted.

She doubted things, she had her doubts. She took a long walk one day, uptown, to East Harlem. She missed her group, the laughter and cross talk, but knew all along this wasn't just a walk, a matter of old times and places. She thought of the resolute hush that fell over the room when members took up pens and began to write, oblivious to the clamor around them, rap singers down the hall, barely school age, polishing their lyrics, or workers drilling and hammering on the floor above. She was here to look for something, a church, near the community center, Catholic, she thought, and it may have been the church that Rosellen S. used to go to. She wasn't sure but thought it might be, made it be, said it was. She missed the faces. Your face is your life, her mother said. She missed the forthright voices that began to warp and fade, lives that dwindled into whisper.

She had normal morphology. She loved that word. But what's inside the form and structure? This mind and soul, hers and everyone's, keep dreaming toward something unreachable. Does this mean there's something there, at the limits of matter and energy, a force responsible in some way for the very nature, the vibrancy of our lives from the mind out, the mind in little pigeon blinks that extend the plane of being, out beyond logic and intuition.

She wanted to disbelieve. She was an infidel in current geopolitical parlance. She remembered how her father, how Jack's face went bright and hot, appearing to buzz with electric current after a day in the sun. Look around us, out there, up there, ocean, sky, night, and she thought about this, over coffee and toast, how he believed that God infused time and space with pure being, made stars give light. Jack was an architect, an artist, a sad man, she thought, for much of his life, and it was the kind of sadness that yearns for something tangible and vast, the one solace that might dissolve his paltry misfortune.

But this was crap, wasn't it, night skies and divinely inspired stars. A star makes its own light. The sun is a star. She thought of Justin night before last, singing his homework. This meant he was bored, alone, in his room, making up monotone songs of addition and subtraction, presidents and vice-presidents.

Others were reading the Koran, she was going to church. She took a taxi uptown, weekdays, two or three times a week, and sat in the nearly empty church, Rosellen's church. She followed others when they stood and knelt and watched the priest celebrate the mass, bread and wine, body and blood. She didn't believe this, the transubstantiation, but believed something, half fearing it would take her over.

Night, Day: A Beach Trip

2011-07-26T18:57:00.000-07:00

Tree frogs; crickets; laughing gulls; song sparrows; rays; hawks circling; dolphins lunging, thunderheads; marshes; weeds; swimming in warm ocean in the rain; crack of wave against the eyes; grains of sand in the eyes, pull of riptide; slide of water in the ear; wooded road; fox running across that road, ahead of headlights, red eye flashing; radio tower; mosquito ditch; humidity as a swimming pool, trapping sea smell, pine smell, smoke; wet on windshield, wet on bare arm, back of neck--these are all the things not seen, heard, etc. in the pictures below, pictures taken on a road trip my brother Michael and I just went on together that covered Ocean City, Maryland; the Delaware Coast; and Cape May in a little more than 24 hours.

Five Neds, One Day (Plus a Reading)

2011-07-20T10:50:00.000-07:00

Poolful

Chewful

Lightful

Playful

Thoughtful

I'm reading at the Southampton Writers Conference tomorrow, July 21st, at the ripe hour of 10 AM. It would be great to see you there. Ned, alas, won't be coming. He is simply being used as bait.

On the 21st Floor

2011-07-13T17:27:00.000-07:00

If I can't be in a house on pilings in a marsh or a bay, then I'll be high in the sky, in an urban area. The Drake, in Philadelphia: my (part-time) home for the next academic year, if it all works out.

Inside a Current, Definitely

2011-07-12T09:10:00.000-07:00

Shome Dasgupta has an excellent blog, The Laughing Yeti, in which writers talk about the act of reading and what it means to them. Here's my short contribution, which went up yesterday. I'm also including a link to the posts of other participants including Aimee Bender, Stephen Elliott, Matt Bell, Kyle Minor, Kevin Sampsell, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Susanna Daniel, and others.

On Reading:

I'm taking note of breaths, phrases, lists and their components. I'm looking out for disjunctions and associations, the pattern of thinking in a paragraph. I'm steeped in the work of the senses: the scrape of a knife against a plate, the smell of mulch dropped on the ground. Sometimes I'm not even taking in the facts I'm supposed to be taking in, the stuff of plot or cause and effect. But I'm inside a current, definitely. I'm a particle in a stream of sound, a wave pushed this way and that. How often does it come to us? Once, twice in a year? But I pick up new books in the hope of getting that back, that raw state where we're simultaneously escaping the world and feeling more present in it.

The Roofers, Bunny, Some Other Things

2011-07-11T09:01:00.000-07:00

I was rooting around the internet the other day, when I came across this reading from the 2009 Port Townsend Writers Conference. I'm not so much in the habit of listening to myself, but thought I'd put it up anyway. It was a hard moment; I didn't quite know how hard it was, then. My mother had died just a few weeks before; my friend Denise was to die a few weeks later, and from my introductory comments--that was all I listened to--I can hear myself trying to sound cheerful and okay, when I must have been shell-shocked. It's bewildering that two years can feel like lifetimes ago; I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I hope you find something you like here. I remember reading "The Roofers," "Bunny," some other things, all pieces from Unbuilt Projects.

Flair

2011-07-07T04:47:00.000-07:00

A week ago today, I took the train to the Bronx Botanical Garden to record my piece on the Swiss Mountain pine. All went smoothly, so smoothly that I was in and out of there in twenty minutes. Four takes, and it was actually fun, even against the sound of the lawnmower out the window. Come September a part of the text will go up on a sign near the pine, along with a phone number to call to hear the recording. It will be up for the foreseeable, not just at the garden, but on the web. Till then, here's a preview.

FLAIR
(On the Swiss Mountain Pine)

Usually the trees of our region do not make statements of themselves. Usually they’re a sprawl of thick green, never one, never singular. Austerity is a part of this tree's flair. It stops you in your walking. You want to touch its cones and needles, though you wouldn't dare. This tree makes you wish there were more trees like this around, trees that take you somewhere, trees that shake you out of yourself, trees that conjure up animals. You never wanted comfort or obliteration, though you’ve been led to think you should want those things. You want to smell the resin. You want to be pulled into the work of comparison, so you are not just looking at the tree, but looking at yourself too, whether you know it or not. The nouns start flying: a chandelier, a menorah, a torch, some antlers, a sea fan.

And We're Off

2011-07-01T18:20:00.000-07:00

I sent in the final edits to my next book, Unbuilt Projects, today, and to celebrate, I was going to do what I'm not yet supposed to do, which was to give you a sneak peek of the cover. The image comes from a favorite childhood picture book of mine, but as soon as I uploaded the snapshot--I thought, no. One wants to honor our good publisher's wishes. Instead I'll pass along a different image from that picture book, one we almost went with. You might recognize the style from the previous design incarnation of this blog. Remember the thunderstorm, the running animals, the chickens looking out of their coop?

Downpour

2011-06-30T18:16:00.000-07:00

When I probably should have been cooling down my hot brain, I took Ned for a ride. We went two hours south to Long Beach Island, specifically to that fine stretch from North Beach through Barnegat Light with its lagoons and Japanese black pines. I suppose I needed to be in motion after a week of sitting in hard chairs. As soon as we reached the causeway, though, the clouds swelled up. The rain wouldn't let up, even after we tried to wait it out at the inlet with the engine off. Ah, motion: so much for it. Fogged windshield, smell of wet dog--already the sensation that our day was going to be better in memory than in the experience itself. The experience itself was air conditioning vs. muggy air, fleas in the weeds, one black fly biting my ankle over and over again in the closed-up car. But it's something else inside these frames. This landscape's always been my ideal vision of seashore: trees beside water, red channel markers, gravel, style, a little wildness.

My Week at Juniper 2011

2011-06-27T08:39:00.000-07:00

1) Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst

2) Charles D'Ambrosio

3) Eileen Myles

4) Jenny Offill

5) Buy those Books!

6) Noy Holland

7) Mark

8) Heather Christle and Mark

9) Thomas Sayers Ellis

10) Dara Weir

11) Joy Williams

12) Joy's hand on Autumn (Autumn was actually one of two landscaping goats at the party for faculty and staff at Dara's house. Let the goat loose and it takes right to brush.)

13) Dan the Goat

14) Autumn and Dan

15) Me caught in a funny moment (via Justin Dowd)

16) Mallards outside the Art Building, where I taught my workshop

17) A rainbow is pretty hard to resist

Sink and Float (Or: Pillar of Stillness)

2011-06-19T13:38:00.000-07:00

Maybe it would have been different if I'd grown up on a mountain. When summer comes around, I not only want to be around the sea, but in it. So when I have to go many miles inland, even if it's for something I like to do, really really want to do, in this case a week of teaching at the Juniper Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts, I get logy when it's time to leave. That feeling's lifted considerably now that I'm here, writing from a coffee place in town, looking out at trees and people walking by, but earlier today, just when I was packing up, I came across this excellent Dean Rader poem, which I liked so much I copied it out by hand after I'd already packed up the laptop. The poem is of course not about the ocean, even if the ocean is the occasion of the poem. Maybe it will sink in and float me for the week.

Ocean Beach at Twilight: 14
from Works & Days
by Dean Rader

Who's to say the stars understand
their heavy labor, or the moon its
grunt work across the hard curve of absence?
Who's to say the gulls taut on their tiny strings

believe the air? Everything seems surprised
by the fat slab of pink strung up against the blue:
the dogs dark in night's watch, the fishermen
buoyed to the beach's pillar of stillness

Even the teenage boy playing in the spoor
of foam and backflow pauses longer
than expected, his father's voice dissolved

in the din-drop of surf and sea hush. Night
is no curtain. When he stares out across
the wave of waves, who's to say he looks inward?

Two T-Shirts (Or: A Weekend in Provincetown)

2011-06-13T20:37:00.000-07:00

Never pack during an excessive heat warning, especially if you're headed north, to the coast. That's my note to self, note to you. On Friday afternoon, I arrived in Provincetown with two T-shirts, two pairs of shorts, two short sleeve shirts--you know where this is going. By Saturday night, I could have used a wool coat, wool hat, rain boots, etc. Still, a full, sweet weekend, in spite of clouds, off and on rain, marrow-chilling damp. Three highlights: Staying up late with my old friend Polly Burnell; teaching a short prose workshop to a group of great writers; trying out some brand néw pieces ("Little Kingdom," "In the Time of Great Building," "Winston and the Ocean," "Sally and the Nursery," "Prehistoric," "Tungsten") Saturday night, when I shared the podium with the excellent Elizabeth Bradfield and Mark Adams.

A Half Hour at the Beach

2011-06-10T08:29:00.000-07:00

It certainly looked like the low-key Brighton Beach I knew: same Russian restaurants along the boardwalk, same jut of Breezy Point across the channel. I don't think I'd ever been there when it was pushing on 100, though. I had to prep for my Fine Arts Work Center class, and the thought of all that reading at home, in the dry blast of air conditioning, just sounded like work.

So--the beach. Reading at the beach seemed like a better idea. But once I got to the Brighton Beach station, I was so confused by the pour of teenagers coming out the subway car, onto the platform, down the stairs, that I went up a side street, in the wrong direction, away from the ocean. Maybe the heat was doing something to my compass points. Or it was the roar of voices coming up from the sand, from two blocks away. When I turned myself around, and walked up on the boardwalk, I felt: no. I couldn't even put words to it. Not crowds, not heat. I don't think it was even the footballs flung, or the moving sandstorm the soccer players were kicking up on the beach. An animal sense, even though people were laughing, were having a good time, a great time. I heard a gunshot--or something that resembled a gunshot; heads turned toward the sound; maybe it was just a balloon popping--and I headed back to the brain-freeze of the subway car to read Lydia Davis.

Less than an hour later, someone shot eight shots into the crowd, at the very spot on the boardwalk where I'd parked myself on a bench. Who knew about turf wars, or gangs, or the long history of trouble in the neighborhood on Brooklyn-Queens day? I'm just trying to get my head around the fact that I might have talked myself into staying had I relied on reason alone, whereas the animal in me said go.

In the Dreamy State

2011-06-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

I certainly didn't wake up with the intention of taking the train to Philadelphia, but there I was, two hours later, looking out the window at the Meadowlands, already sweltering. Perhaps it was my way to take back time, as they say; June is always a month of big teaching (Fine Arts Work Center this weekend, the Juniper Institute the week after next). In a more practical sense I was thinking of the academic year ahead. I'll be back in my childhood stomping ground (stomping ground?--that must have to do with horses, right?) for three days a week when I'm doing my stint at Rutgers-Camden, where I'll be the New Voices Visiting Writer. Three days a week down there, the rest of the time back home. The incredible thing is that I haven't had to think of finding my own place since Mark and I were first together, back in 1995. Well, it won't exactly my own place--maybe Mark and Ned will come down sometimes--but given our hectic schedules, which only seem to be getting more hectic, that doesn't seem terribly likely.

So I spent the better part of the day simply walking around. I walked around in Philadelphia, around Rittenhouse Square; I walked across the river in Collingswood, thinking, where do I want to live? where do I want to live? A luxurious question, which will inevitably be tempered once I confront what's actually available--and how much things actually cost. But it was good to spend some time in the dreamy state. I was walking down Haddon Avenue in Collingswood, and suddenly it occurred to me--I swear I'm not making this up--that I was walking in the direction of my mother's old house, where she lived in her 20s. Four blocks later, I was on East Palmer Avenue, and though it's unlikely that I'd ever get a place Collingswood (it doesn't seem all that possible without the car), I was happy to see my mother's old block looking better than it ever did when I was kid. Whoever knew the houses were so stylish and smart, with a Prairie Schoolish look about them? Was she pulling me there? Did she want me to see it? Who am I to say--or not? Above: a pic of that block--I must confess I don't know which house was hers--and below: some of a quirkier nature along the way.

Instantánea

2011-06-05T18:39:00.000-07:00

The anthology Cincuenta Cuentos Breves arrived from Cátedra, the publisher in Spain, the other day. Among other pieces, it includes a translation of my early piece "Snapshot: Harvey Cedars, 1948," which originally appeared in W.W. Norton's Flash Fiction back in 1992. Here's the text, in its entirety. I'm hoping I typed it correctly, diacritical marks and all.

Instantánea, Harvey Cedars: 1948

Mi madre se toca la frente y deja en sombra sus ojos verdes. La boca es rosada, el pelo rubio como el trigo. Está bronceada. Es la mujer más bonita de la playa, aunque es la ánica que no lo reconoce nunca. Se envuelve el esbelto cuerpo en un alirnoz y hace una mueca, porque cree que sus caderas son como una campana. Aún ahora está calculando y esperando oír el chasquido del cierre de la máquina de fotos.

Los brazos de mi padre la sujetan fuertemente por los hombros. Es musculoso y con el estómago plano como una sartén. Mira hacia adelante y aparenta estar con mi madre, pero está y en Florida, edificando nuevas ciudades, drenando manglares muertos llenos de arena. se imagina construyendo, construyendo. Estará sano. Tendrá buena suerte. Y, en años futuros, como sus compañeros del ejército, se habrá vuelto blando y afeminando, todo se le volverá duro trabajo, pero la gente recordara su nombre.

Los hombros se tocan. La postura dice, así es como se supone que deben ser las parejas jóvenes. Obsérvenlos, son felices. Pero la cabeza de mi madre esta ladeada. ¿Qué está mirando? ¿Mira al jugador de tenis que está junto a la ducha, al aire libre, el de las manos suaves, el que le esenó a olvidar las cosas?, ¿o quizá ya oye el disparo del revólver que mi padre apretará contra su sien veinte años después?

Little Screen

2011-06-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

Over Memorial Day weekend, I read my first full book on Kindle. I hadn't exactly been resisting an eBook reader, but I hadn't exactly wanted one either. And then there were several books that I wanted to read now. As in five minutes from now. What I didn't realize is that most of those books aren't in eBook form. Will they ever be?

I hadn't anticipated the allure of the little screen, or more particularly the frame around it, which both intensifies and contains what's inside it. I also didn't expect to see another aspect of my reading experience changed. If I'd read the book I'd read in print--Andrew Ross's Celebration, about the first year in the Disney-built development southwest of Orlando-- I'm sure I would have skipped around to the most specific sections, the parts thst were of obvious interest to me. Flipping ahead and back, while certainly possible, struck me as a challenge, a little more effort than it was worth. I didn't want to lose my page, even though I know there's a page-holding function. So I ended up reading about the interrelationship between school performance and property values, which I came to be fascinated with.

What I miss? Page numbers, the capability to copy a page on a machine, all the underrated wonders of book design, from book cover to font to page size. (And why the sloppy, sporadic, non-justified right margins?) I guess it could be said there's a purity to the experience--all texts made equal, which seems like a good idea politically--but I miss my Kapo Ng cover. Yes, I did buy a copy of my own book just to see what it looked like. At least there's still the graphic of the match, on the very first... I was about to say 'page.'

Probably this seems like old news to some of you--or most of you. This morning I read a headline that said, Gwyneth Paltrow joins Twitter. My gut reaction was, how cutting edge (with unexpressed eye roll). I guess I am sounding a little Gwyneth to myself right now, but I think that that might just be the condition of modernity: all these products and technologies feeding the anxiety that we're two steps behind, while everyone else is ahead of us.

In Today's Boston Globe...

2011-05-31T07:02:00.000-07:00

...an excellent review of The Burning House written by Joe Peschel.

Another Outtake (Or: Summerhouses)

2011-05-30T16:47:00.000-07:00

One more outtake from The Burning House, from one of the earliest drafts, in Joan's voice. It goes without saying that this voice is radically different from the voice and style of the finished book. Happy Memorial Day night.

*****

But why leap ahead when the story starts earlier in time?

Before the New York Times’ cover story about the revitalization of Lumina; before Jersey Central Power and Light persuaded the officials of Ingles Township to approve a nuclear plant on the banks of Oyster Creek on the promise of tax benefits to its residents and businesses, the U.S. launched a satellite, Explorer I, which confirmed what astronomers had long suspected: the earth was not perfectly round. The first submarine passed beneath the mentholated icecap of the North Pole. The American economy was in slowdown after years of unprecedented expansion, while the situation in the south was as volatile as a parched forest struck by lightning: resistance to school desegregation couldn’t have been more impassioned. On the western edge of Ocean Ridge, an honor student, an African American six-grader named Mona Strong, walked into Hyatt’s Drug Store to buy a Milky Way and was turned down by the behind the counter. “We don’t sell to Negroes,” he told her, with the same affable detachment with which he might have said, “White pelicans don’t roost at Island Beach State Park.”

June, 1958.

Thirty miles down Route 9, Boris Letzky leaned his forearms onto the pitted rail of the Oyster Creek Bridge. Looking east, he saw a 300-foot-wide stream, two duck hunting lodges built of scrap lumber, and an impossibly broad marsh crosshatched with mosquito ditching. The cordgrass flexed, a field of green, undulant knives. Though he was undeniably taken with the curve of the stream, and its equal parts combination of salt and cedar water, his real concern was channel depth: was it deep enough to accomodate a 14-foot powerboat? Why even consider digging lagoons off the creek if the main channel at low tide was as shallow as a baking pan? All along the Ocean County shoreline, developers were building canalfront ranchers at the rate of four per day in places like Beach Haven West, Barnegat Lagoons, and Mystic Islands, and Boris had ideas of his own. He was tired of feeling overshadowed by his brother, Roman, the apple of his mother’s eye, who at 25, had already performed the cello before several of the world’s major symphonies. He was tired of feeling he hadn’t quite moved into his life. The channel markers tilted this way and that, red triangles and green squares nailed to saplings stuck in the mucky bottom. A Chris Craft moved almost soundlessly through the staked path, with no signs of its engine blades churning up the mud behind the stern., and that was that: Boris made up his mind. Inside a thicket of common reeds a redwing blackbird trilled. A station wagon flled with produce approached from the north. He instinctively half-shielded his hornrims with his left arm, expecting one of the teenagers in the backseat to throw a peach at his forehead, but when he looked closer he was unnerved to see that they were grinning, as if inviting him, if only figuratively, to share in their abundance.

Boris bought the initial land that was to become Plat I of Lumina directly from Ingles Township, later renamed the more euphonious “Lumina” Township by citizens voting to cash in on the prestige of the Lumina name. He assembled the tract through tax foreclosure. From what I’ve pieced together from local newspapers, permits were quick to come by in those days, swift as water through an opened inlet: no dredge and fill applications necessary to the Army Corps of Engineers or any federal agency. Instead, approvals were granted by the state alone, and the riparian right included in the purchase price assured the possibility of development to the existing pierhead line—no matter that the land was submerged 90 percent of the year. It certainly didn’t hurt that the mayor, Harold Sadkin, had been conveniently related to Boris through marriage. (The uncle of Roman’s wife, Goldie, it turned out that Harold owed Boris a favor for towing his car after he’d run it off the road following a particularly unsatisfying tryst, and one cocktail too many, into a Coppertone billboard off Atlantic City’s White Horse Pike back in 1947.) But if Boris had lain awake at night, worrying about the fate of his project, he needn’t have done so. In 1958, “soil stabilization” and “land reclamation” were imbued with genuine social merit, if not quite as laudable as space exploration, then certainly high up on the list. And the land itself had long been deemed a certifiable nuisance, 2000 acres of cordgrass that the citizens of Ingles Township associated with the mosquito and greenhead welts they scratched at on their insteps and upper backs on breezeless summer nights. Only the duck hunters raised a stink once the project was discussed outside Blacky’s Clams—wasn’t that land the prime source of good table food between Toms River and Tuckerton? What kept them from rallying was the thought that there was still so much open marsh to be tromped through in those days, as well as their belief that no one would be flat-out foolish enough to buy a house on land that was guaranteed to flood during the new moon tide.

Two months after the initial approvals were signed and signed, Boris’ high school friend, Jack Despirito, stood behind the controls of a rusting, twenty-year-old red dredge that Boris had paid to tow up the coast from Elizabeth City, North Carolina. The smell in the air was worse than anything you could imagine. It was a musty, eggy, gassy kind of smell, the smell of rotting salt hay laced with oyster, barnacle, sea lettuce, sour weed. It was a smell that clung to Jack’s hands and his hair, a smell that no amount of hand washing, or special cleaning solvent, could take away. He’d later come to associate that complicated smell with the smell of trauma itself, not only with the perspiration that soaked his shirts when he was on the job (in addition to working the dredge during the day, he fielded phone calls from prospective homebuyers from the evening hours of 6 to 8 PM) but with the plight of the sea life he’d seen torn to little pieces as it joined the pumped up sand, first brown as good chocolate, then wet and gray once it dried, the color an of elephant hide.

But whatever Jack had come to think of his job, Boris couldn’t have been more dedicated to the making of the summerhouses he sold to middle class workers from Towamencin to Blackwood to Manalapan. These weren’t the houses of Beach Haven West or Forked River Beach—little four-room bungalows with flat roofs and jalousie windows and asbestos siding in turquoise and pink and pale yellow—but houses with tongue-and-groove mahogany ceilings; long thin windows that cranked open to let in the breezes, half-baths off the larger bedroom, and a range of custom options including extra picture windows; hooded, free-standing fireplaces; extra picture windows; and a landscaping package—no pallid imitations of inland suburban lawns here, but a range of seaside plantings including pitch pine, dusty miller, Russian olive, and prickly pear. Not a single structure faced the street. Instead each one was staggered at a 45-degree angle, to avoid the depressingly straight rows you saw upon driving down, say, Jennifer Lane in Beach Haven West. A single exhibit home opened on Panorama Drive, followed by a full-scale model on the 7th floor of Bambergers’ Department Store in Newark through which potential purchasers could actually pick up the plates, towels, and toothbrushes included in the basic purchase price. The basic purchase price? $10,990. Designed by Andrew Geller, the architect later acclaimed for his designs of angular beach in The Hamptons, “The Seaspray,” as it was called, was featured in House Beautiful magazine as an archetype of sophisticated, populist style. It was also featured in the American Life exhibit in Marseilles, at which the French cultural minister was overheard to say, after expressing the predictably aloof appreciation, “The higher the satellite, the lower the culture.”

Though sales surpassed all expectations, with contracts numbering well over a hundred in the first year, Boris’s competitors took bets among themselves to determine the precise date on which he’d lock the front door of the exhibit home for good. They were certain that he was underselling his houses by at least two thousand dollars apiece (who in their right mind would offer custom options for free in some cases?) and it would only be a matter of time before he couldn’t pay his subcontractors, and he’d default on loans to his creditors, and their three separate corporations would come in to divvy up the remaining lots, bought directly from Ingles Township, at tax sale, whereupon they’d build their exceedingly dreary, if practical, asbestos-shingled bungalows.

Up Came a Fish

2011-05-26T10:46:00.001-07:00

In some recent Q&A's, I've often spoken to the fact that The Burning House was originally a much longer book, almost three times as long as the published version. Isidore was one of but four narrators, who included Joan, who actually had more stage-time than any of the others; her mother; and--this probably sounds cracked-- a stray dog who looks back at the Earth from the afterlife. After working with these characters for years, it became clear that the story was Isidore's. It was always his, whether I knew it or not. That didn't mean it was easy to set aside all those pages, but the concentrated essence lay in his music and perceptions. I can only hope that the other voices help to energize his voice and his story. I think of it as a painting. In a painting, we're not aware of all the versions that lay beneath the final canvas, but we know their energy stirs up the surface. Here's just a little bit of an old prologue set aside, in Joan's voice.

*****

Shoulder presses to shoulder. Heat passes from body to body. The three of us lie awake on the living room floor, the remnants of the evening beside us: a bottle of wine, a nutcracker, a bowl of walnuts, shells strewn across the table. Next door, the new house with the overhang crowds in on us. Spotlights shine into our windows. Somebody calls, coffee? And we crash and bang into each other, thinking we have a guest. Sometimes we hold hands just to reassure ourselves that they haven’t moved in. And the dead? Well—the dead haven’t exactly gone away, but we can’t escape them either. Just last week someone dug a hole in his crawlspace, and up came a fish, mummified, perfectly preserved.

Underfoot

2011-05-24T05:34:00.000-07:00

I was reading The Long Goodbye, Meghan O'Rourke's excellent memoir of mourning her late mother, when it occurred to me that the second anniversary of my own mother's death had passed the week before, on May 15th, a Sunday. The fact that that date hadn't been uppermost in my mind stunned me, and not in the way you might think. I sat there for a while, the book in my hands, the light on my hands, looking out at the sprawl of leaves through the window. The living room smelled of sand-- wet. For a minute, I wondered whether she was touching the top of my head through the realm of the book. It would be wrong to think I had a clue as to what any of this meant.

from The Long Goodbye
Meghan O'Rourke

It's been fifteen months and one week since my mother died. A year, three months, a week.

Tomorrow, it will be a year, three months, a week, a day.

And so forth. What can I say? There is nothing "fixed" about my grief. I don't have the same sense that I'm sinking into the ground with every step I take. But there aren't any "conclusions" I can come to, other than personal ones. The irony is, my restored calm is itself the delusion. I'm more at peace because that old false sense of the continuity of life has returned.

I have learned a lot about how humans think about death. But it hasn't necessarily taught me more about my dead, where she is, what she is. When I held her body in my hands and it was just black ash, I felt no connection to it, but I tell myself perhaps it is enough to still be matter, to go into the ground and be "remixed" into some new part of the living culture, a new organic matter. Perhaps there is some solace in this continued existence.

When I was talking to my father about my mother's decision to be cremated, one spring night after dinner, sitting at the kitchen island, drinking wine together, he said, "She just kept saying, 'I don't want to be buried in the ground,' and she said, 'I want to be everywhere.' And I brought up the fact that you kids might want to have a place to visit, to be with her--I thought of that. But 'I don't want to be buried in the ground' is all she would say." He paused and drank some wine. Every time I looked at him I had the impression of a streak of white paint disappearing into a colorfully painted wall. It was almost as if he couldn't focus on us, or I couldn't focus on him. His eyes were walled and melting at once, circles dripping down under them into his face. "Knowing your mother, I would think she thought there was something sad about cemeteries. Sure, a grave is a place where we can go remember the dead when we want to, and that is important. But the rest of the time the grave just stands there unlooked after, segregated from the living, and you're there alone with all the other dead." He stroked his beard, like the professor that he is. "She would have thought that was sad," he said.

"I can see that," I said. "I can see that she would've wanted to be like the Whitman version of the dead, all underfoot." I was thinking of the lines from the end of "Song of Myself": "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles." One never has the impression that Whitman means look for him under your boot-soles in the cemetery; he means in the living world.

Academy Awards

2011-05-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

Some shots of the American Academy of Arts and Letters ceremony this afternoon, where Mark, Alice Fulton, John Koethe, Colum McCann, Suzan-Lori Parks, Alex Ross, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Joseph Stround won Academy Awards in Literature.

Old School Elegance on 155th St.

Mark on 155th St.

The Academy Stage

The Members of the Academy (Well, Many of Them)

Mark accepts his Academy Award in Literature from Phil Levine

Alice Fulton accepts her Academy Award in Literature from Phil Levine

Joy Williams

Karen Russell Accepts Her Award from Joy

Thomas Mallon Accepts His Award from Lorrie Moore

Edward Albee

Chords of Inquiry

2011-05-17T11:29:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Adam Day asked me to write a short essay for Memoriousmag Blog's Think Music feature. Here's the text, which just went up yesterday, along with three videos of the influencers in question.

CHORDS OF INQUIRY

I could hear a song, say a pop song on the radio, go home and play my version of it on the piano. This was when I was in second grade, before I started taking piano lessons. I couldn’t read music yet, but I had the ability to transcribe what I heard, in the original key, with the same harmonic structure. Michael, my youngest brother, a symphony musician, calls this absolute pitch. Others might call it perfect pitch. Whatever you want to call it, he has it. He says I have it, too. We wonder if our middle brother, who doesn’t play music, has it. Apparently, bats, wolves, gerbils, and birds can have it. I don’t think it’s a learned thing. Absolute pitch is probably written into your genetic code. Some people, for instance, can curl their tongues and make a little wet flute of them, while others can’t.

I couldn’t curl my tongue if you held a gun to my head, but I can certainly listen to a note and say: G. That made it next to impossible to listen to music while writing. There I’d be, trying to lose myself in the woods, and there was the music, and I couldn’t help from graphing out the structure in my head, making a map of what I heard. I had to work in silence. Sometimes I pressed my palms over my ears, but I dislike silence, as it puts too much pressure on the words. At least some sound from outside–whether its taxi horns or laughing gulls–can help me focus, and maybe those sounds can be pulled onto the page in ways that are beyond my ability to know.

I had a realization not so long ago. If I listened to music that was written and performed in an open guitar tuning, I couldn’t graph the music in my head. By open guitar tuning, I mean tuning the strings to non-standard pitches. In other words: EADGBE retuned to CGDFCE. Think: Joni Mitchell, Sonic Youth, Nick Drake. Plenty of examples exist, but those are the ones I like best. Why would anyone retune his guitar, possibly stressing the neck of the instrument? Maybe because you have a hunger for harmonic difference, dissonance; you don’t want things to be too resolved; and you want to sound just like your inner life, which is no small feat. You never get it exactly right, especially as your sense of weather might be changing all the time. Joni calls them her “chords of inquiry.” That seems to be an accurate description by a musician who’s been taken to task for not using the root of the chord.

So– a long way of saying that I can listen to the music of Joni Mitchell, Sonic Youth, and Nick Drake when I write. When I hear them, I’m lost, but it’s a lostness that feels like home. I can’t map it. It’s as if the map has been tilted off the NSEW directional and I don’t know where the ocean is, I don’t know where the sun sets. If it were possible, I’d retune the strings of language to a harmonic structure that might make you sit up and say, what the hell’s that? But you’d like it, too. I guess that’s what I’m trying for in my own loopy way, even though I know I’ll never get it exactly right.

*****

What I Did in San Francisco, in 40 Hours

2011-05-14T12:12:00.000-07:00

1) Read with the excellent Ryan Van Meter at Booksmith on Haight Street.

2) Took a long walk up Haight Street, all the way from Union Square to the bookstore.

3) Looked at various plants and trees.

4) Had a happy lunch with my friend Algis Sodonis at Cafe Flore. (Not his outfit at the time.)

5) Read with Ryan and Tracy Seeley on Thursday night. Here, Ryan in foreground, Tracy in background, to the right, before things got underway.

7) Hung out with my former students Cascade Wilhelm and Morgan Levy after the reading.

6) Ate breakfast at Daily Grill, the San Francisco branch of Joni's (one-time?) favorite restaurant.

7) Went to Glen Park with my friend Genine Lentine, where we stopped by an old gym.

8) Was mesmerized by a half-circle of rocking horses near Glen Park Canyon.

9) Met a wonderful St. Bernard I wanted to take home with me. A sister for Ned?

Why I'd Never Been to the Garden

2011-05-12T07:12:00.000-07:00

In the midst of much movement, I had two hours to look at plants and trees. This was Tuesday, at the Bronx Botanical Garden, which I'd once passed hundreds of times on the train to Sarah Lawrence. For seven years, that stretch between Grand Central and Bronxvilke seemed to be all about getting to work, which might explain why I'd never been to the Garden. That track was Conduit, with Capital C, so it felt like good to be sent there, to smell wet leaf, woodchip, and lavender; to feel earth beneath my shoes; to be present in space and time, especially at a hectic time. (I think I finally processed all that twenty four hours later, as I wrote this from the plane over Tonopah, Nevada, on the way to San Francisco.) I've been invited by the National Book foundation to write a short text about a portion of the garden--or a particular tree or flower or plant. A part of the text will be posted on a sign beside the plant--indefinitely--including a number to access a recording of the text. Here, a few pictures of the walk I shared with the lovely Emma Straub, who's also writing a piece. An hour later, Camille Rankine joined us, and soon the three of us were bumping around the garden on an electrically undernourished golf cart, wondering what to write, what to write.

Tour

2011-05-08T14:36:00.000-07:00

Three readings in three days. That might sound like an exhaustion, but Book Three is different from Book One. Back in 1999 (1999!), I was much more consumed with what to read for each event, what to wear, how many people would show up--or not. An endless rehearsal in the mind, which never came close to matching the event as it played out. Now I'm even managing to write in the midst of all this. I pretty much finished a new piece on the bus out to the reading at Canio's in Sag Harbor last night. I have a few days off ahead (and in book time a few days off feels spacious to the point of infinite) then off to San Francisco Wednesday for a reading at Booksmith with Ryan Van Meter, and another with Ryan and Tracy Seeley at the Hotel Rex on Thursday. Below are a few pictures of the past few nights of my co-readers, Ann Hood, Alix Kates Shulman, and Nick Ripatrazone, along with Angelo Nikolopoulos who gave me one of the smartest, wittiest introductions ever.

Angelo Nikolopoulos (at NYU)

Ann Hood (at NYU)

Alix Kates Shulman (at NYU)

Nick Ripatrazone (at Watchung Booksellers)

The Builder

2011-05-04T18:48:00.000-07:00

From Anthony Carelli's new book Carnations, which I am loving tonight...

The Builder

If I were called in to construct a religion
I would make use of lumber, and naturally
I would find the best lumber in the land.
There's no shame in wanting your religion
to last. If I'm building to accommodate the gods,
I figure the platform should be nice
and sturdy; the gods might be really heavy.
Besides, all kinds of people are sure to come
and climb all over it, wear the thing out.
Therefore, if I build in Wisconsin, I'll use oak;
in New England, ironwood. And in Parguay
I hear there's a flowering tree called lapacho
with wood so rigid and heavy it outlives men.
I'd like to get my hands on some of that.

Do Not Feed, Tease, or Harass!

2011-05-02T08:30:00.000-07:00

Below, my contribution to the May 1st Aboutaword blog. Click here to see the text formatted with images.

1. There’s an alligator two long blocks away. He’s not in some preserve or a visitor in some urban park with a wild streak, but in a retention basin behind Sam’s Club in Wilmington, North Carolina, where I’ve been a visiting writer at the UNCW MFA program. I’ve been going out there every day, since I read about the alligator in the local paper. I never see him, though. I’ve been looking for alligators since I’ve been here: at the lagoon around the Battleship North Carolina, in the turtle pond at Greenfield Lake, just south of downtown. I bet I’d see one if I weren’t looking for one. I’d be walking by some pond, and there he’d be, shy, resting beneath some plants.

2. In a matter of days, I’ll have a new book out. A novel this time, though I think of it as a long poem. It uses all the techniques of a poem–ellipses, disjunction, compression–and I think poets will get what it’s up to. One Tuesday night, when I feel especially restless, I head over to the Barnes and Noble at Mayfaire Town Center on the east side of town. It’s after nine, and this shopping area feels especially ghosty and deserted because the place is meant to resemble a real town, with shops on the ground floor, apartments overhead. City planners call it New Urbanism. Somehow Mayfaire feels less like a town tonight, and more like the usual shopping center pretending to be something else. I walk in the store, one of the few places still open, and head into the fiction section, which is, as predicted, buried deep in the store. Will The Burning House find its way here? Most of the covers feel bright and needy, not what the writers would really want for their books. I pick up two books, head over to the cashier, and when I leave the store, I have the feeling I’ve done something completely out of sync with the moment. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt like that upon buying a book: fastened, printed, built of sturdy paper. Maybe that’s because all the other people inside are hanging around the coffee bar, looking at their screens. Luckily the book will also be out in eBook form, just a few days after its print release.

3. Alligators have a mythic status here, maybe because we’re at the northernmost end of their habitat. People talk about them more than they do a few hundred miles south. Sightings are big news, which would make sense given that there are only thousands of alligators in the region. If there are so few, why have several been spotted in the ocean nearby over the last year or so? Alligators aren’t meant for saltwater; they’re fresh (or brackish) water creatures. And yet they’ve chosen to put themselves out in the least protected places, in Topsail Beach, in Carolina Beach, in Myrtle Beach.

4. I take a drive to North Myrtle Beach, an hour south, hoping to get a kick out of the place. If a 13-year old boy were given the chance to plan a beach resort, I bet he’d come up with something like North Myrtle Beach. Pancake houses, an alligator attraction, miniature golf courses with elaborate fixtures. In one, a three-story volcano spews water the color of grape Gatorade. I drive and drive, expecting to feel: exuberance! humor! Instead it feels like a manifestation of human desire out of control. In other words, need, need, need, need, need.

5. Desire gets the characters in The Burning House in trouble. There’s a funny thing about desire: it feeds us–we know that–but it can also get us into big trouble. The book is interested in that big trouble, the damage that one man might do unconsciously in order to see his wife once again, as she is right now. He must sense that he has fallen for a romanticized notion of her, and held fast to that notion at his own peril. He wants to be in sync with her again, whether he knows that or not, and maybe that’s why he falls so hard for his wife’s sister.

6. I walk through the long campus house on College Acres Drive, where the creative writing program has put me up for the month. The house would not be too big for a family, but for one person, it feels spacious, empty, a little ghosty. There are bedrooms I never walk into. How could one person fill it? The space couldn’t be further from the one-bedroom Manhattan apartment I share with my partner, Mark, and our retriever Ned. Three big lives packed into 480 square feet. I’ve wonder if I’ve lost my ability to live well in a space with room. I try to let myself sprawl, then take inordinate interest in picking up the cups and papers, and keeping it fanatically neat.

7. My work has always been interested in houses. The search for them feels primal and animal, especially in a world that often feels like it’s coming undone around us. In The Burning House, the narrator’s sister-in-law has joined a group that’s trying to stop a townhouse project on a nearby island, home to a colony of endangered shore birds. That’s the only way she knows how to protect the community around her, which is being torn up (teardown after teardown) by greed. The characters in the book love wildness; if given the chance, they’d probably chose living outside over inside, but they also know that homes, of whatever sort, are meant to be protected.

8. After I finish my last workshop, I reward myself with an overnight trip to Charleston, South Carolina. I am only here one more week, and I figure I’ll never get to Charleston again. I spend the evening out at Isle of Palms, stirred up by what’s left of the maritime forest. Why have we allowed our beaches to be scraped all up down the east coast? I walk by a pond with the sign Warning Alligator and walk out to the beach. I fear that I’m indulging my love for the beach at evening, when a smart person would be across the river, walking up and down the city streets. I save that for the next day, and once I’m in the 18th century city, I’m entranced. Colonial houses up against palms and jasmine, pelicans and gulls overhead. The kind of hybridized place that stirs up my imagination. I walk up and down through one residential zone, aware that these houses were built on the backs of slaves; aware too that it feels loved, like few places are these days.

9. Why would a crocodile venture as far north as the Isle of Palms fishing pier, hundreds of miles north of South Florida, their usual zone? But that’s exactly what I find out in the archives of the Charleston Post and Courier. A crocodile did that back in 2008, and after a trapper caught him, he was trucked back down to the Everglades, where he might still be lurking in some creek, among the mangroves.

10. Tomorrow morning I’ll be flying back to New York. My stint here is done. My book is out, and I’ve been productive here, writing-wise, a very good feeling. Maybe I’ll delay my packing and head out to Wrightsville Beach just one more time. I am looking forward to being home, but there’s that part of me that will miss sitting out on the back porch, miss the humid air on my arms, the squeak toy sound of laughing gulls overhead, the thunderheads, the hum of the university’s physical plant, the fifty foot-tall pines. I will probably even miss the University’s water tower, which has pretty much commanded my view for the past thirty days. It has helped me keep my head up.

Small Pond

2011-05-01T14:08:00.001-07:00

1. It would make sense that we'd end up soaking in a small pond, a hot spring actually, 61 miles northeast of Fairbanks, at Chena Hot Springs, after having spent a month of looking at small bodies of water for alligators in the Carolinas. The water was almost too hot for me--I started to feel like boiled shrimp--so I climbed onto a rock and lay out in the sun in my swimsuit, while Mark and our good friend and host Derick Burleson talked about poetry. There I was, lying out in the sun in my Fred Meyer-bought swimsuit, not too far south of the Arctic Circle. I could have lain there all day, though I'm not sure what "all day" could mean when the sun rises at four AM and sets at 10 PM right now.

Later that night I slept better than I'd slept in month. We could all use a hot spring every now and then.

2. When we weren't giving readings or craft talks at UAF, we were looking for moose. We saw impeccably neat clusters moose droppings along the Chena River, right in town, no more than an hour after we landed on Monday, but you probably already know that the trip was moose-less. That didn't so much matter, as the looking was the interesting part. I couldn't take my eyes off those woods as we streamed out of town and back again.

3. The morning of our departure, Amber Flora Thomas, Derick's colleague at UAF, took us for a ride to Murphy's Dome, about twenty miles out of town. It's the highest point near Fairbanks, and if you look south, you can see mountains, startling snow-coated mountains, higher than anything you've seen in North America. The air felt completely unfiltered up there, nothing between the sun and our foreheads. And all around us, hints of the tundra before it was seeded with evergreen decades ago. Was it by plane? I think that's what I heard.

4. In the thick of things, I forgot to say we saw a reindeer giving birth! It happened so quietly, so effortlessly, no other humans in sight, that we'd convinced ourselves we weren't seeing what we were seeing. Certainly, that dark-haired calf wasn't really half inside her mother as she (he?) wiggled her ears and lifted her head to take a look at the world. Sure enough, though, when we drove back from Murphy's Dome, we stopped at the UAF's reindeer pen, and there was mother again, calm now, busy, chewing what was left of the umbilical cord.

5. The students were wonderful. The people we met after the reading were wonderful. But on the last day we couldn't stop thinking of the duties that awaited us on the other end. We left at 5 on Thursday to arrive in NYC at 9 the next morning. Two quickish layovers--Seattle and Detroit. Somehow my luggage made it through, and we made it too. Mark got to his lecture in Princeton at five o'clock Friday, and I got to the One Story Ball in Brooklyn, in Boerum Hill, where I escorted the wonderful Jerry Gabriel through the throng. I got back to the apartment at 1 AM Saturday. I slept till 1 PM Saturday. I've never slept that late--or that long--in my life.

Some photos of the event. In the first, the One Story debutantes: Jerry, Robin Black, Seth Fried, Susanna Daniel, and Jim Hanas. (Some people I talked to: Hannah Tinti, Josh Henkin, Elliott Holt, Jennifer Gilmore, Jordana Rosenberg, Larry Dark, and so many others.)

6. The Burning House is out this week. Officially. Many readings! Come to one! Watchung Booksellers in Montclair Thursday, NYU Friday, Canio's Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday.

We Turn the Light on Your Lonely Home

2011-04-28T09:48:00.000-07:00

Two new pieces about THE BURNING HOUSE went live today: My Book Notes playlist for Largehearted Boy and the brilliant Susan Stinson's interview with me on Lambda Literary.

Some pictures from Fairbanks and Chena Hot Springs...

Seven Pelicans Flew Over Bright Waves

2011-04-26T08:40:00.000-07:00

My post in today's Write Place, Write Time.

(Off to Chena Hot Springs soon, the closest thing Fairbanks has to a North Carolina beach. 12 and a half hours of plane travel within 24 hours = back needs hot springs.)

Squirrel

2011-04-25T20:41:00.001-07:00

Somewhere on my hard drive there's a photo of chunky, inquisitive squirrel looking in our living window. It's a probably a good thing it's not turning up, or else s/he would have swallowed up this post. Instead, I'll just put up the text of my "Squirrel," which is The Rumpus's poem of the day for National Poetry Month. And say a weary hello from Fairbanks, Alaska, where it is 61 degrees, and startlingly bright at eight PM.

Isle of Palms & Singing Museum

2011-04-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

I spent Tuesday night at the Isle of Palms. I felt slightly guilty not spending the night in Charleston across the river, if only because I thought I was indulging in my love for beach, and there was plenty of beach near Wilmington, where I've been spending the past month. But I loved Isle of Palms, especially a block or so of the beach, where there was still plenty of maritime forest. Woods at the beach and I am inside my skin. Woods at the beach--why have we scraped everything down to the ground up and down the east coast, with the exception of this place, and a few others?

***

I couldn't stop from writing. I wrote later that night in my hotel room. The next morning I pulled off the main drag in Mount Pleasant, and roughed out the draft of a piece. I wondered how long it would take for that impulse to burn out if I stayed.

***

I didn't end up in Charleston till about noon on Wednesday, and once I headed down King Street, I couldn't stop walking. The combination of colonial houses (part French Huguenot, part Barbados) and tropical plants and trees! Another hybridized environment, and as I wandered away from the shopping street, I felt like writing again. Sure, it is a museum, a little ghosty, but it is a singing museum, bird sounds overhead, and I didn't want to get back in the car, but I had to.

Compress & Leap

2011-04-20T06:41:00.000-07:00

I got back to Wilmington from an overnight trip to Charleston last night (SC not WV). Pictures tomorrow--or soon; till then, I thought I'd pass along this interview I did with Sadye Teiser for the UNCW Creative Writing Department newsletter. Maybe you'll find something of use here.

Sadye Teiser: First off, thanks very much for sharing your time with our program. What has your experience here been like?

Paul Lisicky: I was here for the Spring 2004 semester, and it's been an experience to come back seven years later. The city, the river, the beach, the birds, the trees--all of it had imprinted itself in me more deeply than I knew. I seem to know where everything is. At the same time, I think the program is in a really good place right now, and I feel lucky to be working with such excellent writers.

S.T.: Would you talk a little bit about Unbuilt Projects, your forthcoming anthology of short prose pieces? How do they compare to the novels you've written? What are the challenges / rewards of working in each form? What sorts of ideas do you find best suited for a novel vs. a piece of short fiction?

P.L.: I've always felt at home in the shorter form, but for years I fell into that old trap where you equate duration with depth. Then my mother was diagnosed with dementia. Her state of mind challenged everything I knew about identity, character, narrative, emotion, time. Who are we if our truth shifts every two minutes? The short, disjunctive piece seemed to be the only form that made sense to me for a while. I've always been interested in pitting one layer of time against another--none of my books are exactly linear--but I gave myself permission to compress and leap in Unbuilt Projects.

S.T.: Who are some of your favorite authors?

P.L.: Flannery O'Connor, Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Mary Gaitskill. Among newer writers: Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Salvatore Scibona, Victor LaValle, Paul Harding. I'm a great fan of lists, but I'm leaving so many good people out.

S.T.: In workshop, you were talking about the complexity of figuring out what a piece of fiction is "about," what aspects you want to focus on as you tell each story. Could you talk a little bit about this process? Have you ever, in your own writing, figured out what you want your book to focus on while writing and then had to backtrack?

P.L.: About-ness is such a tricky thing. I don't think we ever want our work to be wholly explainable, or to support a thesis. We want it to be mysterious. We want it to move like music. But we also want it to be bound by meaning. A lot of that meaning is already embedded in our metaphors, whether we know it or not. The trick is to write toward a space that knows more than we do. And that often involves throwing out the original plan.

S.T.: What is your approach to revision? How much and how do you revise?

P.L.: I think that that's determined by the individual piece. I have a one-page story that I actually wrote in an airport baggage claim that came to me fully formed. Then I have a novel that went through probably a hundred drafts. For years I thought it was going to be a multi-voiced narrative at 350 pages, then after six years I winnowed it down to one voice, half the original length. The hardest thing is to pay attention to what the piece wants to be. How to turn off all those external voices and listen to what's there?

S.T.: Do you have any general advice for aspiring writers?

P.L.: Flaubert said it well: "The library of a writer should be composed of five or six books, sources that he should reread every day. As for the others, it is good to know them, and that’s all.”

Stormy

2011-04-18T04:44:00.000-07:00

The sky needed to express all day. The winds were strong. This was Saturday. Traffic lights swayed, chairs blew across the deck, and a pelican flew over the shopping center nearby, holding itself in place, as if it were testing its ability to ride out the updrafts, which must have swirled with a strange mixture of warm and cool. And when it finally came through Wilmington, the sky churned and flashed and spat some drops of rain, and that was it. The startling part was the aftermath: a bright, full, dry-air moon high in the sky while lightning flashed beneath it, out over the ocean.

The last two shots come from the front porch of my friends, Robert and Karen, where I was having dinner when the storm passed over.

Great Humming Hive

2011-04-16T09:44:00.000-07:00

Friday was a free day, no school or social engagements, so I got in my rental car, and ended up driving south on Route 17. I didn't know how far I'd go and I liked keeping my options open. I thought, maybe Southport, maybe Oak Island, maybe Ocean Isle Beach, maybe Sunset Beach. An hour later I was in Myrtle Beach, which was too bad, if only because the sparkling spring day went moody just as I crossed the state line. Instantly I sensed Myrtle Beach is best seen in the sun. See Myrtle Beach in the sun, and you think: alligator farms! miniature golf! pancake houses! exuberance! Myrtle Beach in less-than-perfect weather? Manifestation of human desire out of control, great humming hive of need, need, need. I don't think it's exactly fair to give the Gator Hole Plaza sign the last word (seeing should be more complicated than that; light and dark, belief and disappointment, too easy to say: elegy) so I'll give it over to an old beach cottage, or better yet, the ocean, which is always indifferent, greater than our capacity to project onto it.

North Carolina Time

2011-04-15T07:16:00.001-07:00

It turns out that there's an alligator nearby. As in, down the street. As in, ten-minute walk if I were brave enough to cross the six-lane South College Road. He's not in a wildlife preserve, or even in an urban park, such as Greenfield Lake Park mentioned a few posts back, but behind the Sam's Club, in a retention basin. I found this out in the local paper Wednesday night, just before I went to bed, and perhaps I woke up content the next morning, knowing there was something prehistoric to look forward to. I drove--not walked--to Sam's Club. I parked off to the corner of the lot, walked past the auto repair bays. And there they were, two retention basins, one fenced, scummed with pea-green vegetable matter, the other out in the open, in a brighter location, surrounded by slopes of mown grass. If I were the alligator, I'd have chosen the latter, and though both ponds must sound dismal--cars and trucks always thumping by--I'm sure the shallow water was warmer than any creek off the cooler Cape Fear River, and I'm sure there was plenty to eat nearby: some waterfowl, the greasy dark turtles stretching their necks in the sun, perhaps even a stray chicken nugget tossed out a car window. It's probably already clear that I didn't see the alligator, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop looking. I have ten more full days here, which is big time in North Carolina time.

To read the report in the Wilmington Star News, and see a photo of aforementioned beast...

And, below, the Johnnie Mercer Pier in Wrightsville Beach a few nights back.

Sunday Salon

2011-04-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

The writers and musicians I read with last night at the Sunday Salon. From top: Erika Dreifus, Bino Realuyo, Karen Abbott, and Karen and the Sorrows.

Busy days these. Back to North Carolina later this afternoon. Hello, plant life. Hello, running around. Goodbye, verbs.

A Broadside for THE BURNING HOUSE

2011-04-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

A wonder from the UNCW Publishing Lab. This was made for my reading Monday night.

Water and Fire

2011-04-05T14:53:00.001-07:00

My father sent me an email this morning, and he mentioned that he'd done basic training near here, and I was reminded that the first ocean he'd ever seen was a North Carolina ocean, and he was in awe of it, the openness and wildness of it, as he looked out at the waves from the top of a dune. I wonder if it looked a little like this to him.

In other matters, a box of something came to the PO box in New York yesterday. Two copies arrived from Mark this morning, and I'll see the whole lot of them this weekend, when, among other things, I'll be back in the city to read at Sunday Salon at Jimmys43. Please come if you're in town.

Warning Beware of Alligators

2011-04-02T19:46:00.000-07:00

My gut sense was that it was right kind of weather: warm, windy, good for soaking up some sun on the bank. But first I had to write. I found a good place to write: the Port City Java on Market Street. And once I drafted a piece I've been fiddling with for some time, I drove a mile south to Greenfield Lake, where I thought I'd see some alligators. No alligators, but I had a good walk, where I did see cypress knees, cypress trees, and an oddball landscape with one foot in the subtropical (palmetto and Spanish Moss) and another foot in the temperate (cherry tree and birch). And overheard more than one story of alligator sightings in the not too distant past. There's probably more talk about them here than in places further to the south, where they're a lot more abundant, and thus, a lot less mythical. In any case, it was enough for me to see a good swamp. Give me a swamp, and I'm a happy clam.

Cape Fear

2011-03-29T18:18:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-24T15:17:00.001-07:00

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