On Delmore Schwartz’s The Ego is Always at the Wheel

A century after his birth, and nearly fifty years since he died, alone, in a midtown Manhattan hotel, Delmore Schwartz, briefly considered the great American poet, remains relatively unknown. Hailed by the likes of Nabokov, Eliot, Bellow and Trilling, Schwartz remains relatively absent from the Elysian Fields of the Forgotten Author: The syllabus. Not even New Directions’ 2012 reissue of his story collection, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, revived Schwartz. Perhaps admirers were misguided in their attempted revivals. For it’s no longer the stories readers want, but the stories about the creators of stories, the interviews, origin tales, and advice to the novices. But in The Ego is Always at the Wheel—Schwartz’s undeservedly neglected personal essay collection—we find just that. Here he mythologizes, criticizes, sketches, and yarns to create a lucid and neurotic account of the role of the Artist.

Schwartz was a tormented genius. A literary Icarus; as much reputation as writer. That he wrote feels both fundamental and incidental to his biography. He made his name through his writing, but now it’s the torment interests us—posterity loves splitting authors into their work and their torment. But The Ego is a synthesis. It’s an account of Schwartz rendered by Schwartz: a deft construction distinct from the triangulation of journal, biography, and fictional alter egos. This is the public persona. Not the medicated melancholic who cataloged his drinks in his journal. Not the man who stole his wife’s typewriter because his work was more important than hers. Not the pill-popper who lay unclaimed at the morgue for three days. Here is the witty and humorous Delmore who left friends breathless with laughter. The man whose company “meant not only breathing with one’s lungs but with one’s mind.” The man whose death stopped clocks.

The collection’s longest piece, “Memoirs of a Metropolitan Child, Memoirs of a Giants Fan,” is a sort of bildungsroman squeezed into 22 pages. As a young man, Schwartz intended to split his adult as a New York Giants short stop and a poet—that is until he reads The Decline of the West. The book devastates him. “By New Year’s Day the Spenglerian sky . . . made the new year seem as hopeless and bleak as my own present and future.” He feels as if he were “born too late in a world too old.” If the West is in decline, he reasons, why do anything? Why be a poet? For the fame? Schwartz does, after all, publish poems in his high school literary journal—only to learn that nobody reads them. In the essay, Schwartz confronts the insecurity and fatalism of a young poet—the belief that he will never be good enough—as it clashes with the fantasy that poet need only work hard to succeed. Newspaper “reports of boy wonders and child prodigies”depress Schwartz. Talent is linked to genetics: “Was your father a poet? Was your grandfather a poet?” an uncle asks. They weren’t. So how can Delmore become one? The irony is thick. Reading the essay, we know that Schwartz, the son of no poets, became a great a poet. This provides a veneer of comfort (We really can become anything with enough work!) that Schwartz masterfully undercuts when he concludes “Experience has taught me nothing.” If he has learned nothing from experience, what can we learn from reading this essay? The essay isn’t advice for how a writer should be, but merely what happened.

The intersection of literature and personal life found in “Memoirs” reappears throughout the collection, notably in its literary criticism. In, “Hamlet, or There is Something Wrong with Everyone,” Schwartz begins by summarizing the play with the arrogance of a tenth-grader: “Ophelia was very much in love with Hamlet, and when Hamlet went to Germany to study metaphysics and lager beer, she thought about him all the time.” He dismisses a variety of scholarly readings—Hamlet was a woman, he was homosexual, everyone was blasted drunk—and concludes that Hamlet was manic-depressive. “No one knows the real causes of the manic-depressive disease . . . and that is why no one understands Hamlet,” he writes, with an urgency belying personal struggles with bipolar disorder. “You can have this gift or that disease, and no one understands why, no one is responsible . . . and yet no one can stop thinking that someone is to blame.” Like the disappointments of youth in “Memoirs,” Hamlet is used to confront a larger question: Can we, and should we, relate to great literature? Schwartz studies the play in order to understand Hamlet, with whom he has an affinity, but Hamlet cannot be understood. Associating with Hamlet means being misunderstood. It means having a gift and feeling like someone’s to blame. There are dangers, the essay suggests, in relating to art.

Yet his personal life is inextricable from literature. Where Schwartz, in his journals, might find despair in this fact, the author of The Ego plays it for comedy. In one essay, his nine-year-old brother-in-law advises him to give up writing and become a golf caddy—a comparably lucrative option he briefly considers. Asked by a reporter why he became a poet, Schwartz answers, “as an infant in the cradle I had cried loudly and received immediate attention . . . I tried crying out loudly in public and in blank verse, and the results had on the whole been most gratifying.” Attempting to define existentialism, Schwartz evades the facile definition that we are all alone and must die alone, to conclude that existentialism quite simply means “no one else can take a bath for you.” And in “Dostoyevsky and the Bell Telephone Company,” Schwartz teaches The Brothers Karamozov to Bell Telephone executives. Invited out for drinks after class, he surprises his students by accepting. “There seems to be some misunderstanding about those who read books having no time for guzzling,” he writes, “no class of people are more abundantly provided with time for drinking than readers of books.” Amen.

And we find Schwartz at his best when he writes directly about the relation between poet and audience. In “Poetry is Its Own Reward,” he reflects:

Every modern poet would like to be direct, lucid, and immediately intelligible, at least most of the time. In fact, one of the most fantastic misconceptions of modern literature and modern art in general is the widespread delusion that the modern artist does not want and would not like a vast popular audience. . . . The lack of popularity does not arise from any poet’s desire to punish himself of these glorious prizes and delectable rewards. The basic cause is a consciousness of the powers and possibilities of language, a consciousness of which cannot be discarded with any more ease than one can regain one’s innocence.

The desire for fame tormented Schwartz throughout his career—he began his career “passionate
with reveries of glory and power.” But as his notoriety waned, he took greater solace in the act of writing, seeing the work, rather than public attention, as poetry’s primary reward. Was this a rationalization, coming from a writer who so dearly craved adulation? Mastery is, after all, the final refuge for the unread author.

Throughout these essays Schwartz tries to understand, quite simply, how a should writer be in the world. This remains a problem today—recognizable not only in the myriad craft books pawning the trade, but in the brilliant work of Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, or Karl Ove Knausgaard. The ubiquity of writing advice and interviews from authors of varying talents puts writers in contact and conflict with an ideal Author. Writer and Author endanger one another, like a yin and a yang vying for space on the circle. Facing this same problem, Schwartz asks a friend if he would rather write great poems or be a poet? Is it best to be a writer, he asks, or a celebrity? And when, we might ask ourselves now, do we cease being the former and became the latter? Do we even notice?

Although it’s hard to tell what Delmore would say about the state of American letters, with its domesticated fabulists, its MFA industry, and its click-bait existential crises, the essays in The Ego come close providing an answer. The collection is reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses, with its lucid digressiveness, casual tone, and glib pronouncements. And the book shares many qualities with David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, where we see Dave Wallace playing the part of David Foster Wallace. The Ego is Always at the Wheel is a fascinating, funny, and sly self-portrait of an artist due for a renaissance.

Where Are the Brewers Buried?

Table Ale. Family Beer. Strong Ale. Extra Strong Ale. Porter. Brown Stout. Lager Beer. Bock. Maerzen. Pilzner. Kölsch. What do all of these beers have in common? They’re all brewed or have been brewed in Washington, D.C.

Not a beer fan? More a fan of Aquavit? A teetotaler eh? How about a good narrative thread then?

Picture 23-year-old Catherine Dentz, nee Winkler, who in 1874 helped her husband open and run the Dentz brewery. She was likely Washington D.C.’s first female brewery operator and operate she did.

It had been less than a decade since the end of the Civil War and the business of lager beer was booming. Two years after the opening of the Dentz brewery, Catherine became a widow. If helping her husband run a successful Georgetown brewery was hard work imagine doing it solo, with three young mouths to feed, and still another year before the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was founded.

What was a 25-year-old to do? Get busy. At this time, it was not uncommon for women to enter into the saloon business but to be a brewery operator was something unique for a woman at this time (it arguably still is today though thankfully that’s changing). Also making Catherine stand out was her status as an independent person, one competent enough to own a liquor retail license. But in the words of the Notorious B.I.G., mo’ money, mo’ problems.

In 1881 she was brought to court for operating an unlicensed bar, the case was dismissed. Later that year she was fined over $100 for selling liquor on Sunday. Not even 10 days later she was in court again, accused of stealing 5 kegs from the George Juenemann Brewery, a much larger lager producer. A year later she was back in the system for selling liquor by the glass (her license allowed her to sell packaged liquor but not by the glass).

In that same year, 1882, she was the victim of a sting operation where two African American men were sent into her establishment to each order a pint of beer. That’s when special license agent Henry Raff and his goons arrived on the scene. They entered Catherine’s saloon to be the harbingers of hairy news and when she saw the goon squad she tried to snatch the pints back. She did in fact grab one of the pints and was able to give one of her unwelcomed guests a beer shower. Hysteria ensued but miraculously no one was injured. The next year she was fined $5 for selling cigars on a Sunday.

The story of Catherine Dentz continues in Capital Beer: A Heady History of Brewing in Washington D.C. Author Garrett Peck sets out to accomplish a task unachieved in the history of DC Beer: to comprehensively cover Washington’s brewing history. Typically books with this aim turn into a dull historical narrative, recounting, or regurgitation. Peck’s book is more along the lines, and informs, the colorful narrative you’ve just read.

The book covers an immense span of time in 10 chapters. The chapters are as follows: Beer Beginnings, The Germans Are Coming! The Germans Are Coming!, Port City Suds, Christian Heurich: Washington’s Leading Brewer, The Beer War, An Open-Air City: Beer Gardens and Tied-House Saloons, The Road to Prohibition, The Fizz Falls Flat, Where Are the Brewers Buried? And finally, The Craft Revival. The book is littered with great finds from Peck’s deep archival dives, some appear in black and white but there is also a beautiful color spread that will appeal to all those with a profound love of aesthetics, archives, and history.

Peck uncovers many firsts in his book and notes, “It may come as a surprise and a disappointment to proud Washingtonians, but the first brewery in the district was not in the City of Washington, but rather across the river in Alexandria. In fact, it opened even before the American Revolution.”

As if the history wasn’t enough, you’ll learn about why Alexandria County was called “The Monte Carlo of Virginia.” You’ll learn about the casinos and brothels that existed not far from the Virginia breweries that were right over the river from the Capital. As gambling was banned in the district it made its way over the bridge to Arlington, then Alexandria County, only a few miles from the Dentz brewery.

Today, it is easier to find great beer in America’s capital then it has ever been. But due to the transient nature of the residents of Washington, most are unfamiliar with the rich brewing past that the city possesses. What Peck has done in Capital Beer is cover both Washington and DC. He chronicles the drinking habits of those who worked on Capitol Hill and those that worked down at the docks.

Peck finds many titillating sources. One stand out is a 1927 article, “Happy Days” from American Mercury. He quotes journalist Raymond Clapper who wrote about Pennsylvania Avenue during Prohibition. “It was an Appian Way of Bacchus, with forty-seven bars to its mile. Probably nowhere in America were there such superb drinking facilities in equally compact form.”

In olden times, D.C. was called “the Sodom of Suds” by teetotalers who felt beer was the work of the devil. More recently D.C. has been dubbed “Cologne by the Potomac” for the ubiquitous availability of a respectable Kölsch, a beer indigenous to Cologne, Germany.

What Peck does in Capital Beer is draw connections between the brewers of yore and those who are making beer in the District today. It’s not an easy task, one which requires many hours spent in archives and time pounding the pavement to track down the sites of breweries—some of which vanished a century (or more!) ago. The 19th century narratives, like the story of Catherine Denz, provide a beautiful backdrop to the stories of the 21st century and the women who are currently kicking ass in the land of DC beer. Peck profiles several women in brewing, notably Kristi Mathews Griner, Director of Brewing Operations at Capitol City Brewing Company.

Peck seizes on important moments in history and livens them with 21st century insight. Take fore example the Burning of Washington in 1814 “One might think that a conquering army would seize barrels of beer as a prize of war, but the British weren’t looters and were remarkably disciplined. After defeating the American militia at Bladensburg, the British occupied the city and torched only the public buildings. It may well be that the breweries escaped damage or looting during the Burning of Washington.”

This kind of historical reimagining is sure to please both lager-lover and teetotaler alike.

An Invisible Threshold that Can Ignite an Otherwise Unforeseen Epidemic: On Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point

My whole life, I’ve had this kind of crazy intuition that I was meant to change the world for the better somehow. It would happen much farther into the future, but not so far that I would already be dead. To this day, I still can’t quite explain the nature of this conviction myself, other than that I’ve felt it deeply within me for as long as I can remember.

Let me clarify. What I mean is that, yes, I really do want to change the world around me, and I’ve always wanted to. In my perfect world, everyone would be kind to each other, everybody would follow the rules, everybody would care just a bit more about each other’s well being. No one would be prejudiced, no one would suffer at another’s hands, no one would talk about another behind his or her back. Also, the general population would stop littering. That includes anything to do with cigarettes. Everyone would just behave and then get a little gold star for it at the end of the day. Or another color, if gold isn’t your thing.

My friends tell me that I am idealistic, and I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. I’ve heard stories of people who have done terrible things in the name of who they love or what they stand for, and with all my heart, I always just pray that I do not end up one of them. All I am saying is that as captivating as our world is, there is room for so much more improvement. Am I naïve for thinking that such a future is possible?

When I picked up a copy of The Tipping Point, I was given hope that perhaps I am not. The Tipping Point was actually a book my little sister was assigned to read over the summer for her upcoming Language and Composition class. I was interested when she began sharing these statistics and facts with me from this very book: “Hey, Sam, did you know that 80% of nearly all group work is done by only 20% of the group?” or “Wow, Sam, read this passage on conversational body language!” I was definitely interested. Once it was finally my turn to read it through, I was ready to learn just what this “Tipping Point” business was all about.

The “Tipping Point”, as it turns out, is an invisible threshold that, when broken, can ignite an otherwise unforeseen epidemic of immense magnitude that spreads almost instantaneously. Gladwell writes about this phenomenon:

We are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time. But the world of The Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is – contrary to all our expectations – a certainty.

Doesn’t that sound fascinating?

Gladwell argues in The Tipping Point that it is not the mass-scale actions that set the fiercest or most rampant trends into motion, but the small. “We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events,” Gladwell writes, “and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly.” The Tipping Point leads us through numerous real-world examples of the phenomenon and then dismantles completely the inner workings of how and why a certain social epidemics came to be. His argument appears paradoxical on the surface, but his prose makes understanding his argument relatively easy. Gladwell’s writing remains transparent and polished all throughout, and manages to craft an argument that is consistently convincing and conceivable. Furthermore, Gladwell supports his claims with numerous astounding facts and statistics from the most compelling and surprising of studies; it is evident that he is an experienced and nuanced researcher. Take, for example, this passage detailing the results of Zimbardo’s prison experiment:

In the early 1970s, a group of social scientists at Stanford University, led by Philip Zimbardo, decided to create a mock prison in the basement of the university’s psychology building…Zimbardo and his colleagues picked the 21 who appeared the most normal and healthy on psychological tests. Half of the group were chosen, at random, to be guards…The other half were told that they were to be prisoners…The purpose of the experiment was to try to find out why prisons are such nasty places.

So what became of the experiment?

What Zimbardo found out shocked him. The guards, some of whom had previously identified themselves as pacifists, fell quickly into the role of hard-bitten disciplinarians. The first night they woke up the prisoners at two in the morning and made them do pushups, line up against the wall, and perform other arbitrary tasks. On the morning of the second day, the prisoners rebelled. They ripped off their numbers and barricaded themselves in their cells. The guards responded by stripping them, spraying them with fire extinguishers, and throwing the leader of the rebellion into solitary confinement.

From this revolutionary experiment on the dynamics of people’s immediate environment, Zimbardo was able to conclude that “there are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions.” Thus, it is not fair to claim that prison is as horrible as it is primarily because of the people in it; the situation wields at least just as much significance.

Gladwell discusses this famous experiment to ultimately explain the sharp decline of a viciously rampant New York City crime epidemic in the late 1980s, which Gladwell attributes to one principle of the Tipping Point, the Power of Context, which states that humans are highly sensitive to their surroundings and will act in accordance with what their specific surroundings allow and encourage. The Power of Context is actually one of three major concepts that determine whether an epidemic will spark; the other two are the Law of the Few, which states that trends can begin in the hands of only several key types of people, and the Stickiness Factor, which asserts that the content and presentation of a message or product are critical, as well.

In addition, Gladwell explains plenty of other perplexing Tipping Point phenomena that have occurred throughout history. He explains, for example, what certain production values allowed the popular children’s shows Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues to become so successful, what particular traits of Paul Revere himself made his message so memorable on his “midnight ride” to Lexington, and what happens when a group’s population expands past 150. Particularly meaningful to me were his case study on why teenage smoking is so prevalent in Western society and his quest for the “unsticky” cigarette. Gladwell explores the impact of the really small factors that no one would suspect actually play a monumental role. Turns out, it’s a science.

Gladwell’s exploration of why big trends happen really did change my view of the world. I hadn’t thought of this before, but there are trends everywhere, from the latest political craze to the new hip iProduct. Why, exactly, are these messages or ideas or products so popular now? What do these obsessions hint about our intrinsic values? What do they say about us as humans?

Gladwell, as it turns out, had a second purpose for writing this book. Gladwell believes that if we can investigate specifically why social epidemics happen, surely we can harness the potential to ignite benevolent epidemics of our own. On one hand, the world of the Tipping Point is mysterious and unpredictable and very real, yet on the other, it has massive potential to do great good. Think about it. What if somebody, careful and intelligent in his or her actions, managed to start a major movement for health awareness or education reform, for example? The idea that such change is possible in the world gives me so much hope that my heart aches from it. Very few non-fiction works have made me feel this way.

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is such a magnificent read. I recommend that all my fellow idealists give this bad boy a swing. It lent me such a different perspective on how the world works, contrary to almost everything I have believed before. I am a strong believer that what goes in must equal what comes out, that what goes around is sure to equal what comes around, but The Tipping Point has revealed to me that such does not have to be a case. In fact, Gladwell has convinced me that the only way to cultivate these major changes is to make the small moves. He writes, “That’s why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.”

Don’t be ashamed to think that the world can be a better place. It can, and The Tipping Point will prove that transforming your vision into a reality is indeed possible. With just one small, smart move, everything can change drastically in a matter of days, hours, minutes, seconds. It will be beautiful, bigger than anything you could ever imagine. The world is in your hands. But there’s just one question.

Are you ready for it?

An Interview with David Corbett

David Corbett’s new book on craft is a thought-provoking read that is sure to become a favored resource for writing students and established novelists alike. The Art of Character forces the reader to think introspectively and draws upon a variety of fictional works, both written and performance-based, to create as three-dimensional a character as possible. The result is a method that is intelligently organized and well-executed; a method, in fact, that was originally tested in a university setting. David Corbett’s first foray into nonfiction reflects the full weight of his many years of writing, with the authority of a thoughtful and observant novelist.

David Corbett was kind enough to sit down and answer a few of my questions, shedding light on his new release, The Art of Character.

Diana Tappert: When developing The Art of Character, what were the first few elements that you were sure you needed to touch on? How did you narrow down these essential elements?

David Corbett: I actually first formulated the content that would evolve into The Art of Character while teaching an online class through UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program. With an online course you have to write out your lectures, obviously, and this was the first time I had to put my ideas into some kind of systematic format.

It became clear pretty early on that there were four major areas to cover:

Conceiving the Character
Developing the Character
Adapting the Character to a Dramatic Role
Rendering the Character on the Page

Once I had that, I could see the general arc the class — and subsequently, the book — should take.

DT: When reading The Art of Character, I noticed an eclectic mix of television, film, and book references. Everything from The Borgias to Macbeth makes an appearance; how did you decide which example would be the most illustrative of your points?

DC: It’s ironic, but since finishing the book I’ve often slapped my head and thought: “Wait, I just thought of a much better example than the one I used!”

My basic methodology, to the extent I had one, was to use examples from all three media — fiction, film, and TV — to underscore the fundamental unity of purpose and execution in the rendering of character across the board.

I also wanted to follow certain examples throughout the book — Macbeth, Blanche Dubois, Jake Gittes from Chinatown, Walter White from Breaking Bad, Kathy Nicolo from House of Sand and Fog — to provide a sense of continuity in the instruction, while also branching out with other examples to show the universality of many of the principles.

That said, I often just sat at my desk, scratching my head, thinking: “That’s a great idea. Now, where have you seen it in practice?” Sometimes it took a while for the answer to bubble up from memory. A very, very long while.

DT: As an author, lecturer, and editor, what was your goal in writing The Art of Character? Did you see a distinct lack of characterization guides in the current literary market?

DC: My goal was to return character to center stage, rather than as an adjunct to story, which has gained the upper hand with so many writing guides being written by screenwriters (Syd Field, Linda Seger, William Ackerman) or former story editors in Hollywood (Christopher Vogler, John Truby, Robert McKee).

Virtually all of these writers agree that story not rooted in character is at best facile, at worst just “one damn thing after another,” and yet I’ve found the discussion of character in their work often lacking, precisely because they focus largely on dramatic roles rather than a detailed, sophisticated exploration of the psychological, emotional, and moral subtleties in the human personality.

That said, I also believe, like all these writers, that the depiction of character works best in a dramatic rather than descriptive mode, which many aspiring writers of “literary” fiction, prizing language over action, often miss. My background in acting spared me this misconception. Not that I’m inimical to the depiction of inner life, but I feel thought and feeling work best in service to decision and action, because our actions engage us with the world and commit us to the consequence of our convictions in ways thought and feeling simply do not.

DT: Do you follow the strategy designed in The Art of Character when characterizing your own novels? Conversely, is it predominantly based on your own writing method?

DC: The second question first: I’d say the book expands on my own methodology.

In my introduction to the book, I refer to it as a toolkit, and advise students to use only those “tools” found in its pages that are necessary for the job at hand. I never use all the tactics I describe in the book while crafting my own work, but in my most recent novel I found myself often dipping into my own advice for guidance.

Some things I believe are fundamental—external desire and inner yearning, adaptation, vulnerability, secrets, contradictions. Others are helpful, some almost mystifyingly so, in conjuring the character more vividly: fear, shame, pride, quirks or bad habits, familiarity with death, relationship with food. Some necessitate your seeing the character in the context of her larger world: work, neighborhood, family (especially siblings), politics, faith. I explored all of this while developing my characters, with an eye for defining, emotionally traumatic episodes in their lives. And my newfound understanding of roles helped me craft the dramatic arc of the story more effectively and creatively.

DT: Regarding the title “Creating Memorable Characters for Fiction, Film, and TV,” would you say the characterization process differed a great deal when comparing the three mediums?

DC: The major difference is that fiction affords access to inner life. But since I believe this often becomes more a crutch than an advantage, I find the process quite similar regardless of medium. One has a great deal less time and space in film and TV to define the character — which requires a discipline all writers need — so discerning which actions are the most definitive and dramatic is crucial. I think much of the background work in characterization remains the same; deciding what to include, what to leave out, requires perhaps a greater capacity for “murdering darlings” in film and TV than fiction, but less is more for a reason: You’re trying to engage the reader or audience, not drown them in detail.

DT: Do you hold anything particularly close as an inspiration for characters in your fiction? Did you draw from these when writing The Art of Character?

DC: As I noted above, I consider five things essential in the depiction of any major character: the connection between the external ambition and the inner yearning; the way the character responds to frustration of their desires (conflict); what makes the character vulnerable; what potentially life-altering secrets does she bear; and what contradictions does she exhibit. I also think exploration of key moments of helplessness in the character’s past — moments of fear, shame, guilt, pride, joy, love — open the character up in ways nothing else can. I also seek to understand how her physical nature affects her interaction with others, and what her social demands and standing are in the home, the workplace, the community. Once I have a decent grasp of that, I’m ready to write.

DT: What did you find hardest when writing The Art of Character?

DC: Coming up with not just acceptable examples but truly instructive ones.

DT: If you could change anything in The Art of Character, what would it be?

DC: Oh what a miserable question to ask a writer. To paraphrase Mark Twain: If I’d had more time, I would have made it shorter.

DT: Where do you see your writing going in the future? Would you consider writing another book on craft?

DC: I’ve just completed a new novel, I’m working on a story that is waking me up at nights (a good thing), and I’ve been contacted on a script doctor job by a Hollywood producer. I’m also currently developing two other craft books, one on the connection between character and structure, and the other a deeper examination of rendering characters on the page, with special attention to subtext in emotionally complex scenes.

Trying to Survive the Day-in-day-out of Adult Life

Consider the Lobster is the first book I’ve read by David Foster Wallace. I’ve been interested in him since reading the commencement speech to Kenyon College’s Class of ’05, in which he suggests that the value of a liberal arts education is not that it teaches you how to think, but that it teaches you what to think about. Awareness of one’s thoughts, he says, is the means to the end of compassion, which “involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.” It takes real effort, he argues, to snap out of our default setting of seeing ourselves as the center of everything, to adjust our thinking. “This,” he continues, “is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.” And we all worship something—if not a god or gods, then money, or power, or our bodies. (Here he makes an compelling argument for religion when he suggests that theistic figures are the only things we can worship that won’t “eat [us] alive.”) Be aware of what you worship, what you grant value to, what motivates you. He concludes by saying that paying attention to our thoughts is immensely demanding to do while trying to survive the day-in-day-out of adult life, and is truly the work of a lifetime.

Consider the Lobster is a very varied collection, and none of these essays truly fit a type, but to generalize for now, the collection contains a piece of lit crit (“Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness…”); a personal narrative of 9/11 (“The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”); two pieces that see Wallace play journalist at huge-in-certain-circles type events (“Big Red Son” [The Adult Video News Awards], and the title piece [the Maine Lobster Festival]); two behind-the-scenes looks at rather niche industries (“Host” [conservative talk radio], and “Up, Simba” [political campaigning]); and four book reviews whose subjects range from Tracy Austin’s autobiography to A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (“How Tracy Austin Broke my Heart,” “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” “Authority and American Usage,” and “Certainly the End of Something or Other…”). The ideas articulated in Wallace’s Keyon speech in some way inform every essay in this collection, and I can say without reservation that every single essay is terrific. I feel ridiculous even pointing this out, but it’s all true: his gift for analysis of just about anything was surreal, and he was incredibly deft at writing with clarity about even the most abstract ideas. But most importantly, I think, he had the ability to ask the right questions without ever making an argument for his answer over yours; like in the Kenyon speech, he just wants you to be aware, to choose consciously.

Maybe this is best exemplified in the title essay, where he wraps up by encouraging readers to ask themselves a host of questions about eating meat:

“Do you think about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands? If, on the other hand, you’ll have no truck with confusions of convictions [. . .] what makes it feel truly okay to just dismiss the whole thing out of hand? That is, is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don’t want to think about it? And if the latter, then why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it? I am not trying to bait anyone here — I’m genuinely curious.”

See what I mean? He is not asking you to stop eating meat, but asking you to have some awareness about the thinking that underlies that decision. Consider.

Wallace had convictions, of course; but he was incredibly skilled at presenting his ideas without arguing for them. He seemed to approach everything with what he describes in “Authority and American Usage” as a Democratic Spirit, which “combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others.” For example: Wallace explains that on the topic of abortion, his stance is both pro-life and pro-choice. He is pro-life because he believes that if something might be a human being, “it’s better not to kill it.” On the other hand, he is pro-choice because given the “irresolvable doubt” of the situation, the Democratic Spirit requires him to respect your opinions and the decisions you make as a result of them.

He is never, ever, not once, dogmatic. In “Host,” Wallace talks with conservative radio show host John Zeigler, who is obsessed with the O.J. Simpson murder trial. John Zeigler, who is sure that he “know[s] more about the case than anyone not directly involved,” and even more sure that O.J. is guilty. John Zeigler, who after being fired from his radio show for making what he describes as “an incredibly tame joke about O.J.’s lack of innocence” blames it on the station’s “cav[ing] in to Political Correctness.” Zeigler’s worst offense? For DFW, it’s his refusal to acknowledge that he could be wrong—about O.J., about anything; it’s his absolutely certainty about everything: “. . .one can almost feel it: what a bleak and merciless world this host lives in—believes, nay, knows for an absolute fact he lives in.” Wallace’s response: “I’ll take doubt.”

He maintains the Democratic Spirit even while writing a totally scathing review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time. It’s surprising that Wallace would write a piece verging on a takedown, except that his main problem with both Updike and his protagonist is that they lack awareness, lack the consciousness of thought that he implores the Keyon Class of ’05 to have. Discussing Updike’s protagonist’s confusion at his relentless unhappiness, Wallace writes: “It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.” And Updike does nothing, Wallace suggests, to separate himself from his protagonist, to ironize him; he is guilty of the same lack of awareness.

And this, I believe, is what made Wallace such a very special writer. All the things that separate him stylistically are reflections of his commitment to seeing things from as many angles as possible. The footnotes? On the Charlie Rose show in 1996, Wallace linked them to a desire to create a fractured text, to disrupt linearity. This ambition is inextricable from his ambition to be conscious of thought — the enemy is always narrow-mindedness. The sprawling, multi-clause sentences, chock full of words you might never again see elsewhere? He needs each and every one of those obscure words if he’s going to give proper voice to his ideas and those of others; lest something be misunderstood, he needs each of those clauses to articulate his ideas — which he believes in passionately — in all of their complexities, and to articulate the convictions of others, for which he has nothing but the greatest respect. The humor? It’s mostly observational, the result of simply being open to seeing.

It is through this approach that Wallace achieves the trait he praises in Dostoevsky: he, as a deeply moral writer, is not moralistic. Wallace leaves you, his reader, thinking, pondering new questions and, most importantly, pondering your own pondering. And after reading this collection, you’ll be more open than you’ve ever been to the idea that maybe you don’t know.

Something About Being True to Yourself: An Interview with Chloe Caldwell

Here’s a moment that hit me early, from the end of an essay called “On Snooping”:

“I can accept that all I’ve ever wanted is not very special — all I’ve ever wanted, like most people, is proof of love.”

Chloe Caldwell’s debut, Legs Get Led Astray, is exactly that — a proof of love. Which is what writing ought to be. Be it love of the subject, love of the form, or just plain loving language, the best writing (and by that I mean what you, dear reader, consider “the best”) captivates us because it speaks some kind of truth directly to us. Great writing wants us to believe in it, to love it. I mean love here in the mutual sense. I mean love in the two-way-street sense. The writing we love most, we love because it loved us first.

Caldwell’s essays in LGLA take us around the world as it is in your early twenties. Everything is possible. Everything is art. Everything is as beautiful as it will ever be, or at least it will be when we’re done with it. Friends are family and family is unconditional love. You can become homeless when your apartment building collapses and wake up next to a bottle of gin in what may or may not be the Strand Bookstore. Jobs are not yet careers and careers are for your thirties. Work is the Strand Bookstore. Home is the Strand Bookstore. A friend is anyone with a yellow Strand bag in his or her kitchen. There are housewarming parties with buckets of black paint to make the walls more interesting. There are babysitting jobs with naked little boys as obsessed with their penises as their full-grown counterparts. There is music, so much music. And there is love, love, and more love.

If you couldn’t tell, I loved this book. And I was grateful to get in touch with Chloe over the last couple weeks to ask her some questions about it.

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Joseph Riippi: I’m interested in the role music plays in these essays. Many of the people you’ve loved in your life you associate with different songs — be it your mother and Rufus Wainwright’s “The Art Teacher,” the score of A Chorus Line as a child, or a past boyfriend and Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love.” What is it about music that works to plot point memory so well?

Chloe Caldwell: Music is a very strong trigger for memories because there’s an emotional response to senses. The sense of hearing (music) is much more of a layered and luscious sensation. Also — I grew up in a musical household and now I live above and work at, a music store. And when I first moved to New York, I lived with my brother who is a musician and we’d have lots of conversations, meditating on music, went to tons of shows, stuff like that. I guess it’s just a huge part of my life, so it comes through in my essays, like all of the other reoccurring threads.

JR: You write that most of the people you met upon first arriving in New York City worked at (or lived with people who worked at) the Strand Bookstore, and in Williamsburg you and your brother left a typewriter in the bathroom with “Please continue the story” written in sharpie above it. For all the references to specific songs in specific places in these essays, there are far fewer references to specific books or poems. How is writing’s role in memory different than music’s? How do they complement (or contradict) each other in your life?

CC: I did this subconsciously. I don’t craft my essays thinking about this kind of thing. I stick with what naturally comes out. But maybe music sets the tone more. Books more tell what kind of person you are.

A good example is from the essay, “My Mother Wanted To Be Betty Boop.” I open the essay with “My Mother wanted to be a dancer. In the living room when I was a kid we danced to “Stop In The Name Of Love. . . .” And later in the piece I say, “My mother’s books next to the toilet in the downstairs bathroom: Uncertainty. Anger. When Things Fall Apart.”

Which of these details is more affective? I guess that depends on the reader. Some people can hear the song “Stop In The Name Of Love” more easily than visualize the cover of When Things Fall Apart, and vice versa.

Also, books are maybe more internal and personal to you. Music is more universal or communal. Like, you’re at a party and a song is playing and you get excited. Someone at the same party might be reading a cool poem out loud but that just doesn’t happen as much. Maybe there’s this to consider as well: By the time a person turns 22 (ish), they’ve probably heard thousands of songs. But how many books have they read? It depends. Maybe 10. Maybe 100. But still, that’s like 10,000 songs verses 100 books. I’m just thinking out loud here.

JR: One of my favorite moments in the book is in “That Was Called Love,” a kind of love letter to New York City from Seattle, when you write: “Last night I described New York to a rock climber in Seattle. ‘It sounds like, New York is for you, what the mountains are for me.’” Since then you’ve moved back to New York (but now just outside the city). Have you found for yourself a permanent mountain?

CC: No. I think “mountains” or “homes” are specific to what you need at that time in your life. For a long time, I truly did think you could count on a place to make you happy. Like, when I moved to New York City, I was young and so affected by it that I thought it was alive. Now I see that just like people — there is not one person or place that you can get everything you want from. It’s all about compromise. If I could mix my mother’s backyard, Brooklyn, and Portland together, that would be a pretty sweet home. When I left the city to move to Washington, I thought that Seattle would be as new and exciting. But it was far from it and for a while, that was hard for me to cope with and accept. It’s like this quote by Fran Lebowitz: “When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.”

If you’re asking me what I’ve learned now about finding a “home” within the world, then I would say you have to find it within yourself. This is going to sound new age-ish but in yoga, they say to treat your body as a temple, not a dump. It’s kind of like that. If you keep moving cities or trying different drugs or men to feel safe, it will never happen. You have to look inwards and love yourself. Then you can be (pretty) comfortable anywhere, I think.

JR: I notice you left out Berlin in your answer to that last question, when you say you’d like to combine Brooklyn, Portland, and your mother’s backyard to make a home. You write in “Berlin: Strange Like the Music of the Doors,” that “every day in Berlin is an existential crisis” and you couldn’t wait to get back to “Metrocard land.” However, when I began reading the essay and found you’d gone to Berlin, it made sense: I was struck by the parallel of your falling-apart home at 156 India Street, where “the doorknob was hanging by a thread” and “‘the back wall of your building began to crumble,” with Berlin, a city that is itself constantly in a state of not only rebuilding, but finding a new identity. Your essay is beautiful in describing the “existential crisis” bit of your time there, (the regressing clock, etc) but at the same time I can’t help but wonder what deeper difference drove you away from the city. Was it just the wrong place at the wrong time, or something more? (I should disclose that it’s one of my favorite European cities, so I’m quite curious).

CC: Well, you just reminded me that I left a large component of why I was unhappy in Berlin, out of that essay. The original plan was that I was going to Berlin to visit my brother for five nights. But I never took my flight home; I decided to stay for a few months. That threw everything off. I was there, in Berlin with one pair of jeans, two shirts, one bra, one notebook, no job and no apartment. I totally forgot to mention that in my essay, huh? Whoops! Isn’t non-fiction a trip? So since I had no real reason or desire to be in Berlin, it was completely jarring. I was totally aimless and depressed. I’d also had my heart broken right before I left, so that was more fuel to stay in Berlin, slash, another contributing factor to why I was so upset there.

The thing about Berlin is that it’s amazing. That summer was incredible — we could drink outside, there were playgrounds for adults, the sun never went down, and I met a melting pot of interesting people doing creative things. But yes, it was bad timing and bad decision making on my part. I’d love to try it again at some point.

JR: Also in the Berlin essay is a moment when you ask your brother where he’d like his ashes scattered after he dies. He answers, “I don’t know. I don’t care. But wherever you do it, plant tomatoes. Then I could live inside tomatoes. That would be cool.” I love this moment so much. There is so much siblingness in it, tenderness, emotion. For a last question, then, I have to ask you to top your brother: Where would you like your ashes scattered? 

CC: I love that moment, too. Thank you. I would want my ashes scattered in the backyard of the house I grew up in, where my mother still lives, in the woods, near the dilapidated tree house and swings. It’s where I feel most at home, most like myself.

An Interview with B.J. Hollars

BJ Hollars likes tea. All kinds of tea. Has one entire kitchen cupboard jammed full of chamomile and green and white and Sleepy Time and citrus and black teas — and he’s really nice about sharing. It must be the tea that makes him one of the hardest working writers I have ever met. He rises at five in the morning to get started before his computer, then heads to campus to teach a full course load, then gets home to edit one of three anthologies, work on a novel, edit a few short stories, finish his grading­ — and he still somehow finds time to visit the gym, walk the dog, watch reruns of his favorite TV shows, and throw the occasional backyard barbeque. Oh, and his first child is due any day now. Hollars is also one of the most humble, happy, and approachable writers I have ever met. Maybe it’s the tea.

Assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Hollars is the author of Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America and is at work on another Alabama-themed book of nonfiction. He is also the editor of You Must Be This Tall To Ride (Writer’s Digest Books, 2009),  Monsters: A Collection of Literary Sightings (Pressgang, 2012) and Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). His writings can be found, well, all over the place: North American Review, American Short Fiction online, Barrelhouse, Mid-American Review, Fugue, Faultline, The Southest Review, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, Hobart, among others. I recently caught up with him over a virtual cup of tea to ask a few questions about his most recent work, a chapbook entitled In Defense of Monsters published by Origami Zoo Press.

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Megan Paonessa: Congrats on your new chapbook, In Defense of Monsters. I remember when you began this project, it was partly meant to demonstrate to a group of composition students that a case can be made for anything whatsoever — even Bigfoot — if one can write a strong enough argument. I recognize in these essays lessons I would teach my own students: how to use a counter-argument to strengthen a claim, how to introduce research with a signal phrase, etc. When did your chapbook’s opening essay, “In Defense of Sasquatch” stop being a teacher’s experiment and start taking on a life of its own?

B.J. Hollars: That’s a really great question, and to be honest, I’m not sure when it expanded beyond the classroom. Sasquatch simply held me hostage, would not let me go until I’d proved him back into existence. It was funny, wandering the University of Alabama’s Gorgas Library in search of proof of Sasquatch. I left that library with a two foot tall stack of Sasquatch books, but none of them got me much closer to the truth. When I stumbled upon Arizona State University’s “The State of Observed Species Report,” I think the essay began to gain traction. The report kept careful count of the number of species that vanish and are discovered each year, and the fluctuation of species was simply startling to me. Sasquatch no longer seemed like such an impossibility given the thousands of other species that emerge from the wilds each and every year.

MP: Your essays ask us to question the moment logic took over imagination and disallowed us to believe in monsters. The narrator is persistent in this respect, heaping eyewitness accounts upon legends upon history upon statistical representations of otherwise unbelievable claims proved fact. Outwardly, the narrator presents a logical argument for the existence of monsters. Why was it important to you to make a valid case for these monsters?

BH: I often fear humankind is too quick to lump all of the “unknowns” into the realm of impossibilities. It’s simply easier for the human mind to conceive of a reality it’s more comfortable with. Thomas Jefferson is a great example of a scientific mind willing to dream beyond the stifling boundaries of “scientific certainties.” In 1796, Jefferson examined some unknown bones and dreamed them into a giant American lion. They actually belonged to a giant ground sloth, though this wouldn’t be made clear for many years. I’ve always admired Jefferson for his ability to see the world differently, even when he was wrong. He didn’t view America as a land of limitations, but rather, a place of possibilities.

MP: Sounds like your next project should be about Jefferson!

So, your narrator believes in monsters — or wants, at the very least, for us readers to entertain the idea of their existence. But let’s assume the narrator’s voice and the author’s voice are not one in the same. On some level, don’t you-as-author need to jerry-rig the essays in order for the stories to come alive in their most successful ways?

BH: Ha. Perhaps jerry-rigging is the proper phrase for what I’m trying to do. Do I take some liberties of logic? You bet. But what makes these essays unique (I hope), is that they’re wholly grounded in scientific fact. I try to rely less on fringe science and moreso on national studies, such as ASU’s “The State of Observed Species Report” mentioned above. I try to keep an open-mind in order to pry the reader’s mind open as well. One can certaintly challenge my conclusions, but its far more difficult to refute the facts. This is why I’m careful to include a Works Cited page at the end of each essay. I want the reader to see what I see.

MP: A few notable writers have written mock-essays in the past — I’m thinking of Jorge Luis Borges in Labyrinths, or even your mentor’s book Michael Martone by Michael Martone — stories that the turn the idea of fiction on its head by posing themselves as nonfiction. Are you interested in this overlap? What is the appeal of writing a fictional piece posing as nonfiction?

BH: Good question, and I suppose the answer to it is rooted in the assumption that I consider these essays fictional. I’m not sure I do. I’m quite familiar with many fictional forms that pose as nonfiction (the literary equivalent of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, perhaps, though far less menacing), but I’m not sure that’s what I intended to do with these essays. I really am trying to talk straight about monsters, but, as you mention above, I’m simultaneously employing the vehicle of “monsters” to talk about imagination as well. There’s a link — however precarious — between monsters and the extinction of imagination. To write off monsters like Sasquatch and Nessie is one more giant leap down an already constricting pathway. I think imagination is paramont to creativity and maybe monsters play a role here, too. Why not let them be the cure to an ordinary life? We need to be capable of dreaming of Bigfoot prints in order to find our way back to a pathway of imagination.

MP: You’re a fan of monsters. You’ve gone to a Bigfoot convention or two, perhaps in the same way Trekkies and Gamers go to their respective functions, or perhaps more for research — but I don’t think you came back cynical, in an informant sort of way. In fact, you seemed sympathetic. Are you? Do you think these convention attendees need essays like yours to exist?

BH: Another great question, and you’re right — I did come back from the Bigfoot Conference quite sympathetic to my fellow Squatches. This sympathy, I think, came as a result of my understanding that the people who attend Bigfoot conferences are not necessarily die-hard believers as I’d assumed. In fact, the people in attendence were far more skeptical than I imagined. Most of the conference’s presentations were grounded in science, and many of the debates revolved around what form of science might best prove or disprove the case for Bigfoot.

I recently shared my chapbook with a few of my friends in the Bigfoot world, and I’m still waiting for a reaction. Squatchers are quite protective of Bigfoot; they’ve grown weary of the world thinking they’re crazy for even considering the possibility that a 600-pound hairy beast may, in fact, roam the wilds of America.  I’m not sure if they “need,” my defenses of monsters, but I like to think of myself as an ally to their cause. But in the end, monsters are only the half of it. I’m defending imagination as well.

MP: I’m a fan of any writer that pushes the imagination — so thanks for your work, BJ!