And Then I Read Normally Special & Knew I Feel Fucked Being A Girl Or The Legend of xTx

“I’m a mess. Dirty, like he said. I’m feeling every bit of being a woman. I resent the weakness of my sex.”

—from Normally Special by xTx

Where would you like to begin? With the good news or bad?

Bad news is more girls have read Twilight than Normally Special.

Good news is if you’re a girl and have read Normally Special, you know weakness isn’t romantic. Men don’t save us. Art is an offensive play. Female empowerment exists. But it’s fragile. I’m tired. Is this the handbook for girls like these, torn knees, slanted eyes, Kool-Aid in dirty jars, and secrets? Maybe this is a precautionary tale. Maybe you’re fucked being a girl.

Where would you like to start? With the writer or the book?

Normally Special, available for $9.99 from Tiny Hardcore Press, is smaller than my hand, which might disappoint if size matters, if you’re accustomed to the weight of a man, I mean a book, upon you. Don’t worry. You’ll feel the weight of this book.

Ninety-four pages. Twenty-three stories. Many of them a page or two long.

Still you could tie this book to your ankle and walk into a river and drown.

Good-bye, Virginia Woolf.

In writing this review, I spent a great deal of time thinking about Normally Special, re-reading the stories, and quizzing the author by email. Around all this, I lost my job, boss laid me off, and so my situation as a single mother with a mortgage, a car payment, and bills-bills-bills became precarious, or in spirit of Normally Special, more precarious. Because ladies life according to Normally Special is this: womanhood is weakness, degradation, terror, exhaustion.

There is a rampage. There is a tornado of anger. Men will come for us, sometimes as children, and they will show us no mercy, not relent. In “There Was No Mother In That House,” pages sixty-four and sixty-five of Normally Special, a girl realizes her act of rebellion, knocking over her brothers’ fort, is as bright and short-lived as a sparkler.

Her brothers finally find her in a tool shed and beat her senseless.

There you go. Snuffed out.

The cover photo for Normally Special provides a brilliant, if not beguiling, hint to what we’re in for. The picture by Robb Todd depicts a street scene, trash bags nearly off camera, a bike, a view into two shop windows and maybe the reflection of Christmas lights. But here’s what’s striking: a baby girl in a yellow dress framed by an enormous door looking off camera in contrast to a man in a red shirt stepping into the street and so closest to camera and therefore the largest image in the picture. The impression is, he’s charging into the frame. Impression is the girl is stunned. At least bewildered. The photo renders her diminutive.

And even if she grew six feet tall and sprouted fangs, the girl remains a timid monster.

You should be glad there isn’t a part of my brain that clicks, breaks, and changes Wolfman-style into something that can break skin razor sharp into every piece of every part of you. Something that needs to feed on the fear screaming in your pupils of your green fucking eyes, bites your sweet throat warmest of veins screaming for my warmest of mouths, stubble a delicious obstacle to the smoothness of my tongue. You will never need a single silver bullet for me. You will not need a stake made of wood. You will not need holy water or a Jesus cross or torches or pitchforks or any other sort of protective weapon made for monsters such as me. I’m the most timid of monsters. They have removed me from my position within their ranks citing words such as fail, coward, reject, weakling, useless, stupid, worthless, dumbass.

Where would you like to start? With a whisper or a scream?

So many of the women in Normally Special never scream, either they can’t or won’t.

In “The Importance of Folding Towels,” a woman crosses her arms over her chest. That’s it; that’s defiance. Yes, her scream. Another woman smashes fireflies in place of screaming. And still another in “She Who Subjected the Sun” sits on a chair trying not to choke to death while a man mouth fucks her with his hand and another woman is murdered beside them.

We never see the murdered woman. The narrator never looks. She imagines the tracks she makes in wake of what’s left of the dead woman behind her on the floor. Later, she stares into the sun without blinking, which will fry your pupils, leave you blind, but then tries to convince us she’s won. I’m not sure this is triumph, except when I ask the writer about female empowerment in the context of her book she provides a list of examples.

The woman in "The Duty Mouths Bring" distracts Juan with a smile and slows his box making.

The mother in "Standoff" is empowered in the end, the author says, because she gives up, which is sad, but then it’s something she has power over. Well. Yes. Each of us has the power to give up.

Another woman in the book fantasizes control over a boy in “Good Boy, Fritos.”

I feel I would have the emotional advantage over Fritos in that he would need me more than I would need him. This would be a first for me and I would feel a sick power in this feeling. I know if I asked Fritos to hurt himself because it would make me smile that he probably would.

Yes, Fritos like the corn chips. The story begins with the narrator eating them. Fritos is young and Hispanic and “almost chubby” and the narrator orders him to jab himself in the stomach with a drink sword, thirty-three times. The end is ambiguous. Either Fritos continues jabbing himself in the stomach or he turns the sword on the woman’s naked tit with it and stabs her.

Female empowerment in Normally Special isn’t Spice Girls, isn’t Angelina Jolie kicking ass in Salt, isn’t women who attend college or own businesses or run for President. Sure, a few times female empowerment appears in a familiar guise, a woman turns a man on sexually or preys on a boy, but usually it’s less familiar. More dire. Like if you live through this, you’re empowered. Or maybe it’s more twisted than that, far more uncomfortable.

For instance, if your father fucked you when you were a child, and now as a woman you’re able to masturbate then come while fantasizing about your father as he was from your childhood days, is that empowerment or symptomatic of trauma, psychosis? Both?

Normally Special asks this question with “I Love My Dad. My Dad Loves Me.” I wanted to know the genesis of the story, but the author refused to go into it. She did say, “Incest is a horrible thing. It’s disgusting. It’s probably one of the hugest betrayals that can be perpetrated on another. It fascinates me. It’s probably ugly to say that but I’m hiding behind my fake name so it makes it easier.”

Where would you like to start? With who the writer is or isn’t?

xTx isn’t a feminist. She isn’t an anti-feminist either.

“I hope I’m not a let down to my sex for saying so.”

She’s a girl of undetermined age and race. Her name is a pseudonym.

Her name started out as a joke.

“xTx is an alphabetical version of a dick-and-balls,” said the author. “It’s a shield.”

The discussion could go two ways from here. One, the author’s name represents a dick-and-balls, which is ironic in light of her subject matter.

Like, being female sucks.

So invent a name that’s not female. That represents the oppressor.

But here’s another way the discussion could go.

“Maybe I ought to have a dick, on accounta how I seem to approach certain sexual things,” said xTx. Meaning masturbation and porn.

When xTx first began publishing online as a blogger, she didn’t want anyone to know who she was, which isn’t uncommon in the blogosphere, especially among women who write about human sexuality or confront taboo topics. This is twofold is you’re married, threefold if you’re a mother. Plenty of my female peers write erotica or sexual memoir using pen names because they don’t want the world-at-large to burn them at the stake or ostracize their children.

Lest they be cast out as the spawn of whores.

I don’t think xTx is married. I don’t think she has children, although two of the stories in Normally Special are narrated by mothers. In both these stories, “An Unsteady Place” and “Standoff,” the mothers come unglued, unravel, give up.

“Mothers are not given permission to be breakable,” xTx told me. “Yet they are probably the most breakable things in the world.”

Yeah, but what about the children? They could end up living an xTx story like the girl in “There Was No Mother In That House,” or another, “The Mill Pond” in which a mother worries more about her daughter’s weight than well-being, which leaves the girl at the mercy of a child molester.

“I can only speak from my experience of being a girl and a woman,” said xTx, “but I think we have a lot of stuff happen to us because of our sex. I just think that’s how it’s always been and how it always will be and I like to ‘look at it’ by writing about it. I wish I could protect all the little girls in the world so they don’t have to write stories like mine.”

Perhaps the characters xTx breathes fire and life into are more witch than princess, more perverse than pristine, heroic in ways we don’t expect or readily celebrate, yet isn’t that what both literature and pop culture need, a hotshot of anti-heroine so we all OD, in order to eradicate sexism and prejudice?

Jerry Stahl once described JT Leroy as “Flannery O’Conner tied to the bed and plied with angel dust.” xTx is a young Joyce Carol Oates on meth careening down the middle of the highway in a red Fiat without the headlights on. Frantically, bravely. Miranda Lambert on the radio. “Your fist is big. But my gun is bigger.” Her light is the moon. Every time a woman writes, she commits a political act.

Sometimes she writes a love letter to her gender.

A part of me inside a part of you . . . a part of you inside a part of me . . . Those times you put down the razor, that was me forcing your hand. Those moments where you told them no, that was me giving you strength. Each time I stepped back from the ledge, that was you pulling me back. Whenever I kept walking instead of falling down, that was you holding me up. We were saving each other then so we could save each other now and so we do. And so we are.

Blake Butler said if he knew xTx’s true identity he’d file a restraining order against her, which is either sexist or isn’t. xTx says the majority of her audience is male. At least men review her book more often, and more men frequent her blog. What the hell does that mean?

The author has no explanation.

More girls have a copy of Twilight than Normally Special.

Michael Stewart Has Nothing to Apologize For

Michael Stewart’s The Hieroglyphics is a book we had to publish, & here’s why: We are our roots, and books that take those roots, both linguistic and visual, and churn them / crank them / rev them up into something modern and lyrical and rife, that is what drives Mud Luscious Press forward.

Michael Stewart came to us with The Hieroglyphics in its completed manuscript form, headed by the following description (read disclaimer):

"Horapollo Niliacus, who most likely never existed, wrote the original Hieroglyphica. It was a collection of some 189 interpretations of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, which were entirely, & unintentionally, fallacious. The collection was divided into two books, the first -- the one I am using in the excellent Boas translation -- dealt with seventy hieroglyphics & the second book with the remaining 119.

Using Horapollo’s original chapter titles & order, as well as incorporating many of his sentences with my own, I have attempted to engage in a kind of conversation. To this end, I have also incorporated lines from the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Enoch & the Old Testament among others.

I apologize to Boas, Horapollo, & the unknown writers of those other books for what I have done to their work."

I immediately dug in and was astounded by what he had carved out of and from these baseline texts. Michael Stewart has done in The Hieroglyphics not mere translation or redefining but the building of a new world from a previous one without losing or burying or wrecking the story.

Michael Stewart has nothing to apologize for: These hieroglyphics that he read and then rendered into words mount until they topple over and through us. Mud Luscious Press will forever be grateful to have had a small hand in the largeness of our collective history.

In Please Don’t Leave Me Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Patrick Levy shows us what we want: connection, sex, power over others.

“O Scarlett I don’t know what mountains these are,” but I know longing when I see it.

Longing for connection “when I swim into your white dress.”

Longing for pain in footsteps “still pressed across my chest,” longing for release in lipstick that can explode a face.

“And sometimes Scarlett I am afraid to touch you with these hands I’ve broken over steering wheels.”

There is brokenness here.

A sweaty shaking heart.

A radio moaning.

A man cut “into equal mounds of dough.”

And there is sex. Heels braced against bedposts, tongues like kite strings. Berry-flavored hips. “A strong ocean of paint spilling out from the fold of your neck when I kiss you.”

In Please Don’t Leave Me Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Patrick Levy shows us what we want: connection, sex, power over others.

He shows us what we fear: loneliness, unfulfilled longing, that we don’t even have power over ourselves.

He shows us who we are.

Read this book.

Find out.

Q&A with xTx

Where did the name xTx come from?

It is a shortened form of a longer name I used to blog under. It is the alphabetic version of a dick and balls. It is the stupidest pseudonym ever. It is a fortunate mistake. It is a shield.

Why do you call your pen name a "fortunate mistake?" This intrigues me. After all, your name is a "dick-and-balls.”

My pen name is "fortunate" because it seems to get attention/stand out and it's a "mistake" because I never expected it to become "something" and now it's more well-known than my real name is or will ever be (maybe) as it pertains to the online lit scene.

The "cock and balls" likeness was something I just recently realized it sort of resembles -- in my twisted mind, anyway. Maybe I subconsciously equate being powerful/having a protective shield with the strength of a male, i.e. the cock and balls imagery. Maybe not. I dunno.

I'd like to know more about you. How old you are. What you look like. If you're a mom. Were you sexually abused a child? What else do you do, aside from writing? Are you in school?

Those are the lots of things that lots of people want to know about me. If you want to know what I look like there are a handful of people that met me at AWP who can do some artist renderings. For the other things, well, when I finally meet you for burritos and margaritas at that place you mentioned, I will tell you all about them.

Have you discovered a particular freedom in anonymity?

Of course. I don’t (often) have to worry about what others think. I don’t have to censor myself. My tits out, paper bag over my head, sitting on a sidewalk.

Honestly, if I stepped out from behind the shield I would feel vulnerable as hell. I mean, sometimes I already do. This year I met a bunch of "online people" at AWP and kept thinking they were thinking, "She's the one that writes all that fucked up shit all the time," and then I think maybe they are judging me. I don't know. Either which way, it's nobody’s fault but my own.

But maybe eventually I would feel empowered, like, finally own my shit and be proud of it and be like, "YUP, THIS IS ME TOO!" Maybe that would be a huge relief. Maybe that would be a Sybil-like, multiple personality integration party in my soul. Double-lives are hard.

Do you think writing anonymously is one way to keep art and the artist separate? Should art always speak for itself regardless of the artist, like who he or she is and what personal stake he or she has in the material?

I do think the art should speak for itself. When I read a story or love a painting that is all there is. I wonder about the creator, but, really, the creator is separate. Sort of how a baby is born; first one with the mother and then separate into the world. They are always together, but yet, they are individuals. It’s interesting to know the parents, to get some background or perspective on the child, but in the end, the child is its own thing. I hope that makes sense.

Name three writers who've lent you courage as a writer.

Roxane Gay, Ethel Rohan, and Lidia Yuknavitch just because of the very personal and intense subject matter they write about USING THEIR OWN NAMES. Reading them makes me feel ashamed of how I hide. Their courage gives me courage. One day I hope I will act on that courage.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? An anti-feminist? What?

I’ve never classified myself as much of anything. I don’t think I’m either of those things. I hope I’m not a let down to my sex for saying so. Please let the record reflect that I’m a huge fan of boobs and vaginas and the owners thereof.

If you described Normally Special in one sentence, compound but not complex, how would you describe it?

A tiny, hardcore collection of brutal, ugly, and beautiful.

"Normally Special" is an oxymoron, isn't it? Talk to me about that.

Normally Special is taken from the last story in the book which is a story about a woman obsessed with a man but who is trying to convince him that her obsession is a safe one, but in the convincing she is making it obviously clear that it is not safe at all. The full sentence is, “I did not Google Earth you, so none of these thoughts took place and you can go on speaking to your neighbors who think you are only normally special.” I love the contradictory nature of the term, “normally special” because how can one be both?

On the cover for Normally Special we see a man first and then in the distance a small girl. The photo seems to represent a power dynamic going on in the book, between men and women. Talk about that power dynamic and why it became so central to your stories.

I love the cover shot. I can’t get enough of this photo which is why I chose it. (“Little Girl in Yellow in SoHo” taken by my friend, Robb Todd.) The tininess of the girl, the way she is framed in that huge doorway making her appear even more tiny and vulnerable, the faceless man in the foreground wearing a color that makes bulls charge, the contrast between them that evokes a subtle feeling of danger, the fear of the obvious vulnerability of the little girl. How I worry about her. This cover does sort of capture a lot of the themes of Normally Special.

I can only speak from my experience of being a girl and a woman, but I think I am drawn to the men/woman power dynamic because of how much shit women are subjected to along the path of their lives by boys/men. I think we have a lot of stuff happen to us because of our sex. I just think that’s how it’s always been and how it always will be and I like to “look at it” by writing about it.  I wish I could protect all the little girls in the world so they don’t have to write stories like mine.

But this power dynamic in the stories. "The Duty Mouths Bring," for instance, has a great deal of this going on, a competition between the sexes. When I read your stories I feel like being a woman is a slippery slope, fucking precarious. What about this attracts you as an artist?

I guess I am drawn to writing about the woman as a victim in a lot of different ways; a victim of circumstance, a victim of a man, of herself, etc.  I’m not sure if this is considered a “power dynamic” or if it’s just showing how someone might struggle when faced with dealing with different life events/experiences. One woman is forced by her husband to fold towels “properly,” one woman is abused by an “uncle,” one woman gets almost taken advantage of in a bar bathroom, one woman struggles to feed her son, one young girl gets abused by her brothers; I like to explore the ugly most of the time. It just always seems to be man vs. woman in most of the cases.

You tackle a taboo subject in Normally Special, incest. The story "I Love My Dad. My Dad Loves Me" opens with, "It is difficult to masturbate about your father, but not impossible, as it turns out," and walks a thin line between titillating and horrifying readers. Talk to me about the genesis of this story.

Incest is a horrible thing. It’s disgusting. It’s probably one of the hugest betrayals that can be perpetrated on another. It fascinates me. It’s probably ugly to say that but I am hiding behind my fake name so it makes it easier. The inner workings of a parent who uses their child as a thing for sex is crazy fucked up shit. I don’t understand it. I think that’s why I have written about incest, in various forms, from time to time. Especially the aftermath. How does a child “go on” from something like that? How does that affect them later in life? The confusion of loving a dad despite what you know he did was wrong and that you might even hate him for it but the child’s voice still whispering to you, “but he’s my daddy” and “but I love my daddy, my daddy loves me.” How the desire for a father’s love can make a little girl/woman’s voice of denial so loud that she chooses to believe nothing ever happened, even when she goes looking for it and maybe even thinks she finds it. It’s easier to cope with what we tell ourselves.

I won’t talk about the genesis of this story.

What are your thoughts on "Writers should write what they know?" Does an artist have to be or come from a place in order to write about it? Or are you able to relate to characters unlike yourself because you're able to identify with like emotional experiences?

I guess we are all a bit limited to the things we know but I don’t know if that means we don’t write about the things we don’t. Maybe they won’t be written as well as if we did, and if a writer wants to take that chance, go for it. I stay within whatever I feel comfortable writing about. If it begins to extend into unfamiliar territory, and I feel the story needs it, I’ll do my best to learn as much as I can in order for it to be as “true” as it can be.

Dads show up a lot in your stories, don’t they?

Well, now that you mention it, I guess (they do.) I probably will never show my dad this book.

I've been rereading stories and decided my favorite is "An Unsteady Place." Where did it come from? When did you write it? What was going on at the time?

I wrote this story while in a beachside vacation rental house on the Oregon coast. I wrote the first section longhand, in a notebook, sitting in a sunroom on the top floor. Man, I loved that sunroom! I could’ve written there for a month! The first paragraph of that story is basically what I wrote in my notebook, no revisions. The décor of that house really was ridiculous. You couldn’t get away from the seaside imagery. It was literally everywhere. The ridiculousness made a feeling in me that had to get out which is my “writing feeling” and so that’s where I started; the décor. When I got to the part about all of the little instructions everywhere -- notes on how to use the microwave, the oven, where to put the trash, etc. -- and I wrote the line, “There is no way you can make a mistake here.” I think that set me on the path of, “What IF you could make a mistake here? What would that look like?” and that’s when I think I knew the story would be a dark one. I love the contrast of what is supposed to be this happy, family getaway turning into one woman’s unraveling. I love how the rest of the family just goes on like nothing is happening and still expecting her to be a mother, a wife. As I said before, so much is put upon that dual role that people who depend on that dual role forget the person is breakable, can be broken. And, quite often, the mother/wife feels obligated to her duty so much so that she sacrifices herself in the process.

Were you and I discussing "unreliable narrators" on Twitter? The narrator of "An Unsteady Place" is certainly unreliable because she's going crazy. Did you consider allowing readers to see around her as a way to reveal the validity of her perspective?

It wasn’t me you discussed that with on Twitter. I think if I let readers “see around her” to really know if she was going crazy or not, the story wouldn’t be the way it is. It would be an entirely different story. I like the not knowing. I like how it isn’t grounded all the way. I think we all feel a bit unsteady in our lives even when beautiful things are all around us. Sometimes we are living her without the imagery. I wanted the reader to be able to feel that/relate to that.

Ernest Hemingway once said the best writing happens when emotions run high. Talk to me about tapping high emotion. Do you find power as an artist in anger? Is it a traditionally impolite thing for female artist to do, get pissed off?

Emotion is imperative for writing. Dead cannot write exciting. I frequently have to put myself into an emotional place in order to get what I need to get for certain stories. If I am losing a vibe in a story, I have to stop, sit, and put myself in the proper feeling and write from there. I have to feel what the narrator feels so I can tell the reader properly. I like showing my readers my guts. I want them inside my skin.

Anger is good. Anger is impolite if you are a woman, which is stupid. Which is why I would write about something like that. I like making people look at things they don’t want to look at. Car crash, eye surgery, aborted fetus.

A couple stories in Normally Special come across as letters, don’t they? Talk to me about how this worked for you as an artist, writing stories addressed to a "you." How do you think they work on readers? For instance, does it create intimacy between writer/reader?

Ha, I do that all the time -- writing to a “you.” Anytime you see a story I’ve written addressed to a “you” know that it was an easy story for me to write. I have a lot of “yous” in the world who I (insert strong emotion/feeling here) and those pieces usually start with one of those feelings and move on from there. I’ve never thought of them as letters, but I guess maybe they are. I could probably print them out, fold them three times, stick them in envelopes and mail them to the people who inspired them. Some would be happy to receive them, some would be horrified and some would be scared. A lot of times when I write them, I am glad I use “you” because I know a lot of people will think, “Me?” and I  like having thin walls between us -- me and the reader. I want people to want to be the “you” in my stories. I usually want to be the “you” in other people’s stories. I like the intimacy of it. I wish I could do one on one readings with each of my readers in dark rooms with thighs touching, both of us with nervous hearts.

Who did you picture as your audience while writing Normally Special?

Honestly, I am a pleaser. I have a huge problem with wanting people to like me. When Roxane (Gay) asked me to do this book, all I cared about was impressing her. The mantra of, “I hope she likes this,” was always humming away, always in the back of my mind pushing me to do my best. I didn’t want to disappoint her. If she was happy with my stories, then I knew everyone else would be. I don’t write with an audience in mind, unless, of course, I’ve been asked to do so. I just write. The audience will come.

What is most fun to me about Svalina’s work is watching reviewers try to nail this book down to a genre or a category or a placement.

Mathias Svalina’s I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur is a book we had to publish, & here’s why: Mud Luscious Press seeks to exist in the space between fiction and poetry, and there is perhaps no greater recent example of this than Svalina’s poetic fictions about failed businesses.

I knew from Svalina’s previous books Creation Myths and Destruction Myth that his vibe was our vibe, but when I read his Cupboard Pamphlet Series mini-book Play, I had to get in touch with him directly to see what else was in his writerly pipeline. And what was in there, sitting amongst his other brilliant words? I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur.

The reviews have been very favorable and sales have topped 500 copies in just two months, but what is most fun to me about Svalina’s work is watching reviewers try to nail this book down to a genre or a category or a placement. They aren’t sure whether it is a novella or a collection or a series of linked poems or something else entirely, but that is exactly the feat of Mathias Svalina: He exists as we want to exist, between the between.

If Mud Luscious Press is building a niche inside of a niche, our feet our squarely planted in a writer like Mathias Svalina and a book like I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur. He is one more very important building block in the work that Mud Luscious Press wants to be known for decades from now.

Blake Butler's Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia

This story is old; I’ve told it before but I’ll pinch it to this: In the spring of ’08, I read his story “The Gown from Mother’s Stomach” in Ninth Letter and felt a hard hurt in my throat. I flipped to his bio, discovered his blog, and for the next days I systematically clicked and read my way down the entire list of his online publications. I discovered journals and writers I never knew existed. And fell in love — deeply, head over heels — with this world that he had led me into. It dawned on me that maybe it didn’t take a story in The New Yorker to become a real writer. I even wrote him fan mail and he wrote back! Encouraged, I submitted to Lamination Colony. He responded, Yes. And there it is, my not-so-well-kept secret: Blake Butler was my gateway drug to the Internet — into the online scene of writers and readers and editors and publishers for which I am and will never stop being grateful. Every day I wake and check it still exists when I open my laptop to make my rounds: email, Facebook, Twitter, Reader, etc. This is, I realize, what I am doing every day when I go online — I am making sure the Internet didn’t go away in the night.

Or, in my case, in the morning hours. Like Blake, but not at all like Blake, I have trouble falling asleep. These days, because my job and schedule allow it, I usually work until 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning (it’s 4:28 right now, hello) until my eyes close, until suddenly I’m asleep after hours of agitation and thoughts that will not stop unless distracted by “work,” by which I mean staring or reading or Interneting or Netflixing or whatever else I do in the company of dark rooms lit by lone lamps and probably mostly I just waste time thinking nothing then sleep the sleep of the dead as if drugged until 10 on work days or noon on non-work days and two on days it doesn’t matter. Whenever it is though, I always wake and reach for the laptop. Something that now, after reading Nothing, seems maybe like a problem. Or addiction. Something not quite right yet comforting all the same. And the only reason why, for me, is because it’s there.

Those who follow, or have ever followed, Blake’s blog will know that he is an insomniac. I knew this about him early on, probably from the first blog posts of his I read. Perhaps this is one reason beyond his fiction that I gravitated toward him. It was his blog that kept me coming back, that drew me in. I’m not sure if he’s doing much with it these days, but there are many who will remember how his blog could become, in minutes, a hot-spot, a place where it seemed like everyone who was anyone and everybody else who was interested could pop up in the comments and party, a place where, suddenly, five comments could explode into a hundred or more. I came late to this, as I only ever got to witness it once or twice, and of course it had been going on for who knows how many years before I found it. But even so, it was exciting to be around Blake. To be in the presence of him, online, immersed in the buzz and hum surrounding him. And then, on slower days, if you were paying attention to his posts, he would write something true and heartbreaking, or something you felt or wanted to believe was true and heartbreaking — you never could be sure — and if you were me you would leave a comment that usually had the words “big” and “hug” in it.

I have been waiting for this book, for Nothing, since “The Gown from Mother’s Stomach.” I’ve known it was coming, without question, since the blog days. I hoped it would be readable, or comprehensible, or that it would show an extreme amount of care and love or trust — in you, in me, in us. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, I doubt. Scorch Atlas is one of those books that will stay on my favorites shelf forever. I’ve taught it, I’ve bought it in bunches, and I still seem to keep running out of copies because I loan it out and never get it back. But I have one copy, sent to me by Blake himself, that I will never give away. It is signed, of course, and tucked inside is a strip of denim fabric. It is the book’s bookmark. I don’t know exactly where the fabric came from but I think I have a guess. If that guess is correct, then I feel special. If not, it doesn’t matter; I’ll still treat the fabric as if it’s special, because it is anyway, because I make it so. Ever, I struggled with. There Is No Year I couldn’t read, but not because I didn’t want to or didn’t like it; no, but because that book begins with such heavy iambics I couldn’t make sense of the words making sentences — I could only hear their sounds, their syllables. It was distracting. It also felt too big, too wide and heavy to hold or read comfortably. I put the book on the shelf and told myself I’d come back to it. I never did. But I will. It waits.

Nothing is different. Nothing is Blake, is like Blake’s blog back in the day and like Blake’s Scorch Atlas stories about mothers and fathers and children — like the free-throw father and the gown mother. There is love and pain and sadness and love and suffering and confusion and love and words toward sense-making all throughout these pages, on every page. There are also brackets and all caps and footnotes, but none are used to distraction.

There is this:

“ ] SAY MY MOTHER’S NAME, MY FATHER’S”

And there is this:

“I go to get a glass of water. I’m watching my dad again today so Mom can go to quilt guild and get out of the house. Dad in time has gotten stranger, more far gone from knowing who or when or where he is or was. Around the house he walks and knocks on glass and punches his own hand, in endless iteration. He seems continually waiting for something to happen, though when things do happen, it’s not the thing. In the late years of his life, he seems newborn in certain ways, definitionless, no longer knowing where to aim, though in his eyes and in the knocking and the skin around him, you can see that he has lived. None of this is his fault, or anyone’s. It is days.”

And this:

“Here I am not asking, not saying, moving past, for how these hours, new to him, for me repeat. That how, in my father’s blanking and often disoriented, disturbed flesh, in his forgetting, confusing ways he’d walked inside of so long now every day — how underneath that, in the moment, in the sheer bulk of his frustration, the bulge of his tongue pressed in the fury behind his bottom lip, same as mine in the same spot — how in the deliberate way he chews, in all his pacing, staring, seeing, I see him still right there — caught or clogged inside a self of other self, a fully breathing body mask — how underneath that, at its center, beyond the fluttered veils, and no matter how gone — he is there.”

I worked my way backwards with these quotes. This section of the book, which comes at the end, this section or chapter from which I have quoted all these moments, actually begins like this:

“Somewhere in this sprawl of hours is my father, and the destruction of his aging brain.”

Other, previous sections of the book seem to offer separate things, and function in different ways. An early section builds and builds to its conclusion with constant footnotes. A middle section reads vast and encyclopedic, researched, and structured upon a timeline of facts of sleep-related history. And other sections, too, provide brief glimpses of a mother — Blake’s mother, yes, but here, as ever, he paints her not as his own but as anyone’s. Always distinctly his mother. Yet somehow, also, everyone’s:

“To keep me calm or to recalm my internalizing terror in the fake light the house held to keep the night out, my mother read to me aloud. She read me books beside my bed about boys or men who, waking, moved — through forests to find fathers or ride on rivers, men who walked because they could. Her voice gave a calm and even glove of warming, one like an endlessly played album I can in my head alone invoke: a soft pocket right there all through the veils of junk recorded on my brain’s ends. With her there nearby, projecting softly aloud, the larger world felt far away — the crushing veils of silence in which the evil things could hide and approach suddenly filled with protection, an eye. She would stay there, predicting end points for our evening when she would need to leave me and always staying when I asked for further, more.”

And then, even earlier, near the beginning of Nothing:

“ . . . my mother goes to look more for the baby books in which throughout those years she wrote us down — sentences rendered in her looped handwriting, making claim of what she’d feed me, how I’d laugh. It’s a practice she still has not given up — each evening before bed now ends with her writing out the full day of her life, word by word. She is often up late into what is called the witching hour, sewing, singing, awake alone in the house, as my father has always been prone to nodding out early. My sleep complications, as is so much of me, are likely sewn from her: aura transferred into flesh in bridging time — a pattern printed on the lengths of lymph that make my brain and lung meat, which, if I decide to mate, I may too funnel into another body, here, a child. My mother’s journals — there must be a dozen of them now, each fat with ink and clippings from her hands — I already feel my skin tightening against me at their presence, as my incessant selves insist on realizing how one day, under the event of a thing I will not name here, those pages will become a tunnel back through and into her, her own sleeplessness, her longing, her days in step and click — the words the image of her thoughts and ways and ideas given from her as each day passes, written into text instead of me — as for every instant I am not there, her child, or anything I was not there for her to say, will be another wall that breaks my body in a maze that will not end.”

My final quotation, which I debated including, seems especially impossible not to include, though I worry I’m quoting too much, or that if allowed I’d keep on quoting, but, OK, here is the one I’ll end with:

“That I am writing these sentences in the same bedroom where this dream came for me seems only fitting — that old bedroom now converted in my parents’ house to a makeshift office where I come most days to be around to help my mother care for my father in his dementia — a constantly degrading state in which he less and less can recognize his surroundings or himself and how to move within it as he had — though no matter how hard I try, the ceiling of the room here now is just short and flat and white. There is nothing visibly disrupted in it. The nightglow stars have been removed. The walls, having been painted over purple and populated with my mother’s things, are different enough that the room itself seems not that room from back then here at all — though in the air, the presence, I can feel it, I’d rather not let it know I do.”

There is more. There is so much more I want to say. About this book and about my own parents — my mother, my father — but I won’t. Can’t. But I will say this. For the past four or five minutes I’ve been scrolling through old emails I sent to Blake. They reveal back to me a very young, often gushy, mostly exuberant me that is recognizable but not. I’ve grown up maybe a little since those early emails. It seems I used to share all kinds of news; it seems I maybe used to direct a lot of excitement his way. It’s been a while since I’ve done this. Since before December 2010, which Gmail indicates was our last correspondence — a PayPal exchange for books, the one that got me that mysterious denim bookmark. So much has happened since December 2010, since that spring of 2008 when I first discovered him in print, and online, and followed as best I could his lead, inspired and optimistic. In some way, this post feels very much again like one of those old emails, transmitted across space and time unseen, but meant, very much, to be read and hopefully heard and understood.

It is 5:00 now. It is Monday morning. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I’ll post this to the site. It will be a very happy day, a cause for celebration and excitement about this book, about Nothing, about what seems though, really, to be about everything and everyone that matters. Congratulations Blake, and big hug.

Writers don’t make a lot of money. They don’t live glamorous lives. They want to be near the action. . . . Where to stay?

Evan Hughes’s delightful new book, Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life, is both a geographical history of the famous borough and a collective literary biography. It’s a kind of subway through time, starting with Walt Whitman and stopping at Hart Crane, Truman Capote, Bernard Malamud, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, then on to Edwidge Danticat, Paul Auster, Jonathan Lethem, and dozens of others who called Brooklyn home. It’s the kind of book you find yourself sampling here and there, but that would be a mistake because one of its greatest treats is what amounts to a miniature history of 20th century American literature.

When Hughes quotes one-time resident William Styron’s opening to Sophie’s Choice, he pretty much describes what everyone used to feel:

“In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn.”

That sentiment — Brooklyn as a second-tier borough, a wannabe Manhattan, a mezzanine to the orchestra of New York — has long since died. But for much of the last hundred and fifty years the idea of Brooklyn as a place for cheap rents or (as Hughes puts it) “as a treehouse with a Manhattan view,” was very much the reason the borough has a literary history at all. Writers don’t make a lot of money. They don’t live glamorous lives. They want to be near the action, but they can’t necessarily afford it. Where to stay? Hmm. Somewhere with a bridge. . . .

Brooklyn’s bohemian atmosphere and cheaper lodgings (read: seedy) made it a place for writers on the fringe of the publishing autocracy, including black writers — most famously, Richard Wright. Wright was a brief part of the well-told shenanigans at Middagh Street, the so-called February House whose tenants at one time or another included Harper’s Bazaar editor George Davis (a la Capote’s Answered Prayers), Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, and Gypsy Rose Lee, among others.

The borough’s reputation may have started to change in the 1950s. Certainly by 1959, when Truman Capote wrote his famous essay, “A House on the Heights,” (which he boldly begins: “I live in Brooklyn. By choice.”) the gauntlet was already down. The borough was asserting its independence from frivolous Manhattan and proclaiming its own grittier sense of literary identity. By the time the seventies roll around, writers are settling in Brooklyn for its own virtues — its quiet streets of classic brownstones and sense of working community, its refuge from the shallow sparkle of Manhattan.

Hughes has done a tremendous amount of homework, culling the relevant parts of scores of biographies, essays, novels, and poems. But the effort hasn’t made his book dry in any sense of the word. You’ll find yourself moving from chapter to chapter, into and out of your favorite writers, and that’s part of the purpose, I think. At first “. . . And the Story of American City Life” seems a very grand phrase for what Hughes does essentially in passing, as he can fit a broader history into each chapter centered on a specific writer, neighborhood, and decade. But by the end the book, the reader’s amassed a living sense of the borough as a home for writers and a breeding ground of some of the best literary work in the last century. Hughes’s cumulative history is one of the best things about the book.

In passing, I want to laud this new-ish trend by major trade publishers to release original paperbacks of first-rate books whose authors or topics may not have built enough of an audience, but that deserve to get out there. FSG published Elif Batuman’s series of essays on Russian literature, The Possessed, last year to excellent reviews. Picador released The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, which went on to win the PEN/Faulkner Award. Tom Paizza’s Devil Sent the Rain has just come out from HarperPerennial, containing essays pre- and post-Katrina on music and literature. Dan Fante’s memoir about his father, Fante. Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme. The list goes on. New Directions has been doing this for decades, of course, but it’s nice to see other houses catching on.