AJS’s Work Here Is Like An Acidic Trance

Anna Joy Springer’s The Vicious Red Relic, Love is a grotesque, deteriorating castle. A self-made castle that like the resilience of outlying sheds remains as it (and the life it is describing) is falling apart.

AJS calls the book “a fabulist memoir” and I agree that in it there is the esteemed norm of “memoir”-tone being turned by choice or necessity into something beautifully disgraceful. There is a rigor of bends in this book. Bounties of fracture: “Scar[s] on the mouth of a cave.”

In addition to other very exciting aspects, the book exceeds many of the usual limits of book and bleeds into the heat of contemporary gender and identity. This is one of the reasons that this book has made itself a primary for me. “I’m not a woman and I’m not a man. So, no matter what I do, I lose. But I want my loss to count” or “we had sex and she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and the wise whore (as all whores are), and me the dumb hermaphroditic girl /  boy, and I was jerked off and devirginated by this whore because I was going to learn how to be a boy whore” or “femininity is wounded masculinity.” I mean, really? This writing just turns me on. The blatantness. The naming. The pain of becoming and being revealed by way of the prurient requirements of our relations. The viscosity of the gaps and the radicality of “things made hybrid without their consent.” This writing is entirely bodily even as it taxes and puts pressure on current political identities (ie: “queer”) in order to progress them.

In AJS’ brilliant book we are sucked into a new kind of nature. If not new it is a nature that has been underground or out of normative view. A nature where violences of many kinds are mandatory and once they are engaged act as a sort of respite. “After practicing my violence so often, the practice seemed to tilt toward virtuosity.” Here stimulation and violence slowly become synonymous.

AJS’s book is mixed media in every facet of the term. There are collages, sketches and snippets from synopology articles. There are old diary excerpts and fragments of myth. There is an origami tin foil friend / confidante / guru often referred to as “winky.” There is “Gil” the bindery-needing lover. There is fear of aids. There are feminist declaratives and extravagant “conceptual-emotional experiences” of many kinds. AJS’s work here is like an acidic trance. “Let them ride through the nights on the backs of bright smears.” A kicking queer king becomes us by way of this amazing beast of a book!

On Writing and Jazz

Quite often I re-visit books I’ve enjoyed as a younger man to make sure they “hold up,” and almost every time, on each subsequent pass, I discover new levels of emotion elicited by the works. They hold up, all right. Re-reading Charles Mingus’s mercurial, non-linear autobiography Beneath the Underdog has once again left me melancholic for what once could have been. Beware brothers and sistahs: I’m about ready to get soft on you: I love writing — I make a decent living working at it . . . but more than anything I adore playing Jazz.

I mean Jazz Jazz. . . . “Jass,” as some, more naughty New Orleans bateristas used to sheepishly write on their gargantuan bass drums at the turn of the 20th century, while they swung hard both rhythm and bottle. Jazz, brothers and sistahs, amen! Not the “smooth” bullshit that now passes for this once pure, most original American jambalaya of blues, race, sex, whisky, and pimp life. Not Najee jazz. Not Kenny G jazz. Jazz! Specifically Modal Jazz. And Hard Bop.  And Bebop. You know the kind: Dizzy and Miles and Coltrane and Dolphy and Mingus and Monk and Bird played it. Invented it. Perfected it. The Jazz that evolved in the mid ’50s from the original Fathers (Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Oliver, Bechet, Armstrong) but that, for unfortunate reasons, stopped resonating with American audiences somewhere around 1965.

Before I came to realize I would write for a living, I was convinced I would work as a musician; a drummer, to be more specific. And I was on the right path, too: early lessons in percussion and the kit, sight reading, music theory / history. But back then (age 11) it was rock music that muscled its way in and brainwashed the grey matter. I came to understand Modal Jazz and Hard Bop much, much later than a trained, wannabe-working musician ought to have. And so rock music diverted my attention and, I feel, made me miss my Jazz train (‘Trane?). Sure, I played rock / pop music in some cool, local (Washington D.C. / Baltimore) venues (even toured the east coast for a short time) and had a bit of fun for a handful of years, but my regret of not having come to study Jazz sooner persists and haunts me to this day. I coulda been a contender. I coulda swung with the best of ’em: Rich, Krupa, Morello, Webb, Blakey.

It’s all right, don’t feel sorry for my shattered dreams (I’m quite adept at self pity as you can see); in a way it’s a very good thing. The realization that I’d never be Max Roach provided for a seamless transition to a life built upon writing. After all, I had been an avid reader since age 5 or 6 — a positive byproduct of being an only child growing up in Communist-era Romania throughout the ’70s.

But (fiction) writing and Jazz are such diametrically-opposed ways to make art . . . at least for me. Whereas one requires relative silence, isolation, a solitary chunk of time during which the (this?) writer flirts with addiction, madness, and descent into one of Dante’s various circles (or temporary residence in any Hieronymus Bosch painting), the other is an uplifting, instantaneous experience of an improvised, running dialogue with your fellow artists: intuitive phrasing, call and response, blue notes, prosody . . . an immediate validation or rejection of that which you have just created. Listen, you gotta have giant balls to get up on that stage night after night, play something different every time, while being instantly judged by your peers and audience. Yessir, you can’t hide your shortcomings or mediocrity behind pseudonyms or the relative anonymity of the Internet. You’re out there hanging yourself out to dry. And you better deliver. Every night. Now that’s bollocks and tough-as-titanium skin, mates. That being said, both processes necessary for writing and music improv are extremely attractive to me.  They’re the yin yang in my life. I crave to experience both. I am selfish, I know.

Writing well, and sustaining that brilliant level for the duration of a novel is ambitious and challenging for me. A full time job, marriage, fatherhood, mixed in with the daily, soul-grinding details of life that infringe upon that elusive chunk of quality time, make the craft of writing sacred, but at the same time quite fractious. I envy those lucky scribes who have somehow stumbled upon those oases of temporal nirvana, and who can afford to, as Gertrude Stein once said, fuck about for 23 hours a day, in order that they may write for that particular one. OK, I paraphrased that. But you get the point of my coveting.

Truth is, for me, writing has always come in sudden and sometimes unexpected spurts. I’ve never truly had the luxury to cogitate and compose for too long, and so, like an infantry grunt, I’ve remained vigilant and prepared myself with Moleskine (given my financial state) and pen for those magical times “it” hits me. Consequently, I’ve written just about anywhere you can imagine — including more than a few men’s room stalls in federal and state buildings’ washrooms. I am proud of those venues, all of them. They’re like constant boot camp. They are Sergeant Hartman on your ass, relentlessly.

Lately I write strictly on a computer, as it seems there is a machine available no matter where I am. Between laptops, desktops, iPads, and even their smaller cousin iPods (which I mainly use to take notes or jot down ideas), I have nearly full time access to writing. I know, I am lucky. I don’t take that for granted. But I cannot say that during those dog days of emergent technology when I wrote with stubs of broken #2 pencils in ruffled notebooks on packed subway trains, writing was necessarily more dynamic or more “legit.” That would just be me romanticizing things. And if you know me, you’re laughing uncontrollably now. What I am trying to say: the computer hasn’t mechanized or destroyed my creativity; it hasn’t taken away the humanity or emotional dynamics of my writing.  Nor have the inconsistent settings or the venues, although lately I’ve settled in a comfy enclave tucked into a corner of my bedroom, by a window overlooking some really nice oak trees.

I like the idea of incorporating Modal Jazz techniques into the process of writing prose. That is to say, I enjoy improvisation, particularly of dialogue, within a larger framework or mode, rather than plot twists and turns, or devices as the framework itself. Nowadays, most of the dialogue I write, particularly in my short stories, I don’t edit. Dig what Jackson Pollock said to interviewer William Wright in 1950: “I don’t use the accident. I deny the accident. I do have a general notion of what I’m about and what the results will be. I approach painting in the same sense as one approaches drawing, that is, it’s direct.”

I wrote my book Short Lean Cuts in the same manner, and the prose is experimental; short sentences and fragments, meant to be very much like improvised solos — crescendos and diminuendos — exploring  a particular mode in rhythmically and melodically varied ways. The mode is the chapter. And in a greater sense, the chapters themselves further act like solos within the mode (the theme) of the entire book. I know it may sound pretentious, but it’s not meant to be. The book is an experiment; a fusion of my love for Jazz and literature.

In Beneath the Underdog, Charles Mingus is often all over the place, but not without losing that most important thread: his humanity. His account is not linear, it’s at times ugly, utterly personal, and by no means a simple factual narrative like you would expect. It’s a work of art. It’s deranged. And it’s so beautiful.

They both are — writing . . . and Jazz.

Chapter 16: Swimming with Amateurs

It says a lot for an author when, after a week of eighteen-hour days spent reading and analyzing literature, I choose (as in can’t put down) to read her book instead of paint my nails and watch Clueless as planned.

I picked up Lidia’s book last Friday to get a feel for the text and what questions I should be considering in preparation for writing this guest post. My intention was to only read a few chapters, because there is little time for pleasure reading while I’m in school. (That’s where I am now, by the way, sitting in a stiff-backed chair in the thin-walled library with a stack of essays on nineteenth century aesthetics, Virginia Woolf, and psychoanalytic criticism of The Sound and the Fury. [Seriously, if I have to read one more essay about the gravity of female virginity, I’m going to start burning books.])

Not only do I barely have time to read for pleasure (let’s be real: I barely have time to read everything I need to for class), but the last thing I want to do after reading from sunup to well after sundown is read anything I don’t absolutely have to.

Except, last Friday I picked up Lidia’s book, and my evening of watching Amy Heckerling’s retelling of Emma and licking Doritos crumbs from my fingerprints went out the window. [Resist temptation to make textual connection to Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway.] Where I’m going with this is here: this book is good. Like chest-grabbing, can’t-turn-the-pages-fast-enough, someone-get-me-a-book-light-because-I’m-going-to-be-reading-this-all-night good.

The chapter “Swimming with Amateurs” is about an evening Lidia spent “night swimming” with Ken Kesey and three other friends who are all “totally, completely, unapologetically, rocket shot high.” In this chapter, Lidia and Ken speak of their deceased children (his killed at the age of twenty in a car crash, and hers “pink and rose-lipped” and stillborn). As they swim under the occasionally shadowed moon, Lidia uses piecemeal memories of the evening to explain to how meeting Ken “so close to death brought writing into [her] hands.” In this moment of utter grief, a moment in which Lidia admits to being numb from the death of her daughter, writing, like a way out, is put in front of her.

And writing is a way out, isn’t it? Putting experience into words, whether it is through writing or retelling, objectifies it. It puts it outside of us, in front of us, and into concrete terms to be manipulated and examined objectively.  It’s why talking about loss is better than not talking about it. It’s why authors obsessively rewrite the same story until it takes adequate shape outside the confines of their minds. Last year, for a class I took on Trauma and the Literature of Survival I read more trauma theory than any one person should. I read a lot of Freud, yes, but I also read a wonderful book by a woman who met with holocaust survivors and asked them to tell their stories. Unlike many historians who had approached them, this author was trying to capture the feeling of their experience, not the historical truth. Faced with this open-ended ability to talk, these men and women began forming a narrative: they told of losing friends, of losing their homes, of losing fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers. After decades of dealing with the most immense of traumas, talking about their experiences was the only way they were able to make sense of them. It didn’t lessen the pain (nothing, I imagine, ever does), but it did give it shape. Telling their stories took their repeating memories of trauma and put them into words.

In “Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf (yes, you’re going to have to get used to the Woolf and Faulkner references for the next five weeks) describes how writing, rewriting, and finally capturing her mother successfully in the form of Mrs. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse was helpful in laying the trauma of her mother’s death (she died when Virginia was thirteen) to rest: “I ceased to be obsessed with my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her. I suppose that I do for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.” Narrative objectifies traumatic experience and renders it comprehensible. Even though Virginia would sneer at the suggestion, writing is therapeutic.

Of course I don’t mean to be emotionally simplistic and insensitive. I don’t mean to suggest that writing about trauma instantly cures one of its effects. In Virginia Woolf’s biography by Hermione Lee, the author questions whether Virginia “exorcise[d] her mother as completely as she tells herself she has” since she “goes on, after To The Lighthouse, calling her death to mind, and is still trying to describe her—and still finding it difficult—at the end of her life.” Creating narrative does not necessarily “cure” trauma, but it can certainly aid in its integration.

Here’s my admission of bias on this topic: I went night swimming once, not too long ago. I belly-flopped into the black water of Lake Champlain with my nose plugged between my thumb and forefinger, while the man I had loved for ten years dove over me and into the water, his perfect body curved like a parenthesis. Like Lidia, this night inspired words, words that served as a means of objectifying my experience. “I don’t want to forget this,” I thought the next day after we had parted on the side of the road. I wanted to get it all down, but I also wanted to make sense of it. If I wrote the right words, I thought, if I saw it all there in front of me—his toe rubbing against mine on the bed, the tart pop of blueberry pie, the suddenness with which he had reached under the water and inside the wet lip of my bathing suit, his goose-pimpled skin submerged and blue in the moonlight—I could understand it. I needed to give it form. I needed to get it out of my head. So I sat on my bed and wrote and cried and tried to remember everything.

* * *

Does writing help you sort through your experiences, or do you write only after you’ve made sense of your experiences? Are you more like Julia Alvarez who believes that one should wait seven years before writing about an event (an experience, like a wound, she says, needs time to breathe before it is assigned words)? In what ways has narrative helped you process difficult and/or traumatic events in your life? In what ways is your writing therapeutic?