How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive Is An Essential Manual for the Romanticist In Everyone

Remember that old red pickup truck you had when you were in high school? The one with the bench seat that was so narrow the middle seater had to straddle the stick shift while you awkwardly rested your arm on their leg when shifting gears? You loved that car, even kept it filled with gas and fresh washing fluid sometimes. Then one afternoon when you were rolling over the last speedbump in the afterschool exodus line the engine fell out, splintered on the cement. You sat for a few moments behind the wheel while the impatient honked behind you, remembering the time you sat in the drive-in theater and kissed that girl until the movie’s soundtrack turned to static. You haven’t seen it in years, but now here it is and damn did you love that automobile.

Christopher Boucher knows how you feel; he’s been there with his ’71 Volkswagen too, broken down in the middle of 91 just outside Northampton, Massachusetts. His bleeding manual How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive instructs on more than how to find the beating engineheart of your VW: it also teaches about the anger, regret, and love that motivate us after the death of a parent.

Written with brilliant wit and a sensitive touch, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alivemimics the style of John Muir’s 1969 manual of nearly the same name, slipping in and out of surrealist car maintenance passages while telling the story of Boucher’s son, his ’71 VW, as they both process the death of Boucher’s father at the hands of the Heart Attack Tree.

I know it sounds like a bizarre premise (it is) and it can be confusing when Boucher guts the definition of words, but the story, and new words, are injected with a glowing, wistful emotion that turn piñatas into evenings filled with small moments of time and girlfriends into women made of stained glass that shatter if they get too cold and are impossible to resist.

Simply, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive is an essential manual for the romanticist in everyone.

A Portrait of a (Would-Be) Jersey Artist Reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I was a sophomore in college when I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man all the way to the last line for the first time. I was about the same age as Joyce’s hero Stephen Dedalus, though not nearly so well educated. I had working-class New Jersey to thank for that. Joyce’s Stephen had his narrow Ireland, “the old sow that eats her farrow,” as Dedalus describes the country of his birth in his monumental colloquy with his friend Cranly in the penultimate section of the novel — Ireland with its strident priests, dour schoolmasters, inebriated fathers, and demanding God. But also with its classical curriculum.

My New Jersey was much less forthcoming with its lessons. We had no England bearing down on us, only Manhattan, twenty miles away and across the river. That was almostenough. City life set a standard for us on the west bank of the Hudson, and as soon as we were able we made foray after foray into Manhattan, at first by bus, or by ferry over to Tottenville on Staten Island, and then by rapid transit — the “rattletrap” — to the ferry to the tip of Manhattan. And then up the borough by subway — or, on glorious autumn or spring days, by foot.

Standing up on that jouncing train, I read Portrait for the first time. I had already tried some Faulkner and a high-school chemistry teacher had snatched a copy of The Sound and the Fury from my hand during study hall. “Seedy book,” he said, refusing to return it to me until the end of the day.

Portrait was worse than seedy. Some Catholic kids I knew told me it was listed together with Dubliners and Ulysses on the dreaded Index of books good Catholics shouldn’t read. That first time around I had no idea why Catholics might consider it worth banning. As far as I read I had found no obscenities or even euphemisms for obscenities as in the substitution of the coinage fug for fuck in my coveted copy of The Naked and the Dead.  (“Oh,” critic Diana Trilling is supposed to have said upon meeting Mailer at the publication party of his grand novel, “You’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck!”) The hellfire sermons seemed to me something Catholics were accustomed to. I just had no idea.

After my sophomoric reading of the book I finally understood why the book might have been “indexed.” The story of young Stephen’s progress from tormented but assiduous Catholic to budding aesthete stands against everything the church would have him believe, even as his serious Catholic education prepared him for arguing on behalf of his aesthetic. Without Aquinas and Augustine, Dedalus might have tarried longer in the chapel. But with Aristotle and the theologians as the wind at his back he moved faster and faster toward his vocation as a writer — that is, toward the point at which he could look back and write the story of his life and education.

The essential self-reflexiveness of this narrative education was lost on me that first time around. I read for the story, as all naïve readers do, and God save the naïve reader in us, I loved the opening pages, got lost in the family discussions, skimmed through the middle section until the retreat sequence and was mesmerized by the depictions of a hell no Jewish kid ever was raised to believe in — and then I settled in to the torpors of Dedalus’s sinfulness and his subsequent evolution into the aesthete of all aesthetes. I could not have imagined in what good stead the discussion of beauty and its component parts with his university friend would stand me over the years.

The long flowing pages of epiphanic wonder close to the end of the novel more than repaid the squint-eyed attention I gave to the more scholarly parts. The beautifully noticed details from the “eyes of girls among the leaves” to the louse crawling over the nape of our hero’s neck made up a world I might have felt but never could have imagined.

O Jersey boy! Or should I say, Oi! You there, standing before the gates of the 1960s, trembling book in trembling hand! What a connection to make! To feel more kinship with a fallen turn of the century Dublin Catholic aesthete than with one’s own family and friends!

My first reading, though exciting and stirring, was incomplete. Over the years I would return to it many times — the way this novel repays the returning reader makes it an exceptional invention. Other novels beckon, but none like Portrait, none has the same effect, none more instructive for the would-be writer about the pain of education, the struggle with family, the search for a vocation, the vision of a world more beautiful than one ever could have imagined if it weren’t for that vocation opening one’s eyes and allowing one to write about what one sees and feels and hears and touches and tastes — this dazzling novel, a first love that happens over and over again.

__________

Editor’s Note: “A Portrait of a (Would-Be) Jersey Artist Reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is modified from a version that first appeared in the Autumn 2006 issue of The Sewanee Review.

An Interview with Gabriel Brownstein

Gabriel Brownstein and I conducted this interview by e-mail, using the addresses provided us by St. John’s University, where he is a professor and I was once a student. During my years as an English major and a grad student, I took a handful of fiction writing workshops with Professor Brownstein. His classes were immensely popular — four or five of my peers and I comprised a cohort who registered for any class with Professor Brownstein’s name attached to it. During workshop, we’d write down the names of authors and books he gushed about; we’d jot down writing adage after writing adage, some of them his own (“What happens next in your story? The worst thing possible.”), some of them borrowed from others (Flannery O’Connor: “Dramatize, don’t report.”).

But class was not enough for me. I would visit his office hours regularly. We talked about my work, we talked about what we were reading, the steam from his Lipton tea drifting between us. And I would leave his office trying to decide which I would do first when I got home: read or write.

After conducting this interview with Gabe — which felt a lot like a written version of the sort of conversation we used to have in his office — it was easy to see what I’ve always found so inspiring about him, which is that while he is professorial in his depth and breadth of knowledge, he is also amateurish in his giddy enthusiasm. When he talks about anything literary, the subtext is always: I just love this stuff, don’t you?

*

STEVE WILLIAMS: Maybe you could start by talking a little bit about the new book.

GABRIEL BROWNSTEIN: There’s not really a new book. There are new stories, and they’re coming out here and there in quarterlies. I’m not sure where they’re going, collectively, but they’re going somewhere. I think.

SW: Your first novel, The Man from Beyond, tells the story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini’s Spiritualism debate from the perspective of reporter Molly Goodman. In one of your more recent stories, “Occupations, Settlements, Territories” — which was published in the Spring 2010 issue of the Harvard Review — the young, male narrator works at a socialist Zionist summer camp and converses with the spirit of his father. What about the subject matter of spirits interests you?

GB: I once read an interview with Robert Stone, where the interviewer asked why his characters drank so much and did so many drugs and he said something like, “I don’t know, but they keep doing it.”

I think that everything I’ve published has something to do with ghosts, something to do with haunting. And I like books with ghosts in them. I think ghosts work in stories when they make the ineffable into something dramatic and ironic and maybe even comical. But there’s a limit to this: as soon as you make the ineffable a ghost it becomes, in terms of the story, pretty effable. So it’s a ham-handed move in a way. But it’s my move.

SW: What, for you, are the differences between novel writing and story writing? What different challenges and pleasures does each form offer, and is it always a conscious decision to write one and not the other?

GB: I’m finding that right now stories suit me temperamentally, and I’m not sure why. I feel a little looser in the short form, a little more at ease. I don’t think I can imagine myself ever going 500 pages for a novel, I’m not that kind of guy. At the same time, there’s pressure in story writing — stories demand a kind of perfection. As they say, a novel with a flaw can be a great novel, but a flawed short story is a dud.

SW: It seems fair to say, though, that our literary culture favors and even has more respect for the novel form. Just to give one example of this, a quick Google search reveals that since 2000, only two story collections have won the Pulitzer, and none have won the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. Which brings us back to the old question: is the short story dying?

GB: My favorite book of 2010, the one where I discovered a writer who blew me away, was Memory Wall, by Anthony Doerr, a knock-out of a short story collection. There were two collections this year by favorite writers of short stories, Jim Shepard and Steven Millhauser, plus the National Book Award-nominated collected stories of Edith Pearlman, a short story writer who, I’m embarrassed to say, I had never heard of until this year. None of these books, I believe, were listed in the NY Times Best Books of the year.

So is the story dying? No. Is it undervalued? Oh, yeah.

It’s tough to argue that contemporary novelists are more serious artists than story writers, or more successful artistically. What is true is that the markets for short stories are vanishing, fast. The Atlantic has (I think) moved its story publishing on-line. Even the Paris Review has, over the last decade, geared itself a little more towards non-fiction. It’s just about impossible for a writer to get a collection of stories published by a mainstream press, without promising said press a novel. There are lots of good new story quarterlies, but these don’t get much attention.

Funny thing: The last three stories I published, all in very high class quarterlies, did not have on-line presence (the magazines did, but not the stories), which means in certain ways that for most readers the stories did not exist. I have a feeling e-reading may change the relationship of short stories and readers. A short story seems a very natural thing, to me, to download on an e-reader. More so than a big fat novel. But maybe I’m dreaming.

SW: I’d like to open up my last question about the state of the story to the state of American fiction in general. Alexander Nazaryan recently wrote a piece for Salon in which he suggested that the reason an American hasn’t won the Nobel Prize since Morrison in 1993 is that America’s great writers exist in “self-enforced isolation” from the rest of the world — their work is too insular.

The writers many Americans see as deserving of the nod — Roth, Oates, DeLillo, McCarthy — are all, according to Nazaryan, what David Foster Wallace once called Great Male Narcissists (even Oates). And things are not getting better: many of the great writers of this generation, he says — naming Franzen, Foer, Tan, and Lahiri — are guilty of the same insularity.

In what direction do you see American fiction going, and is this a direction you’re pleased with?

GB: I haven’t read the article, so I can’t respond to its particulars. But there are real problems with translations coming into America. Go into any good bookstore and ask for new books of European stories in translation — books from anywhere but the US — and outside of the classics, you’ll be lucky to get three. It’s true that other nations read American books, and US readers don’t read much in translation. It isn’t a good thing.

I have a hard time, though, with the suggestion that American writers are more insular than they were sixty or seventy years ago. It seems just basically true that more US writers come from more places and backgrounds than they used to. You mention Lahiri and Morrison, I’d add Junot Diaz, Edward P. Jones, and without even going further note that these are all writers with huge historical and political concerns. And the force of multiculturalism has been a good thing for writers who are as you say, Great Male Narcissists.

Operation Shylock, my favorite book by my favorite living writer, is supersonically engaged with the issues of Zionism, history, identity, imperialism, racism, antisemitism, and (yes) narcissism. I mean, it’s not like men’s tennis: American writers are not getting beaten by European writers.

The Nobel is a lousy measure. If the Swedes had gotten to vote on the number one player of my youth, they would have always picked Borg over McEnroe. On the other hand, when you get to the most celebrated youngish novelists right now, there is this strange phenomenon of the massive novel about a few friends from college — Freedom, The Emperor’s Children, The Marriage Plot — and without dissing any of those writers or books — I am a big, big Jeffrey Eugenides fan — it’s just notable that the characters are quite likely to have gone to the same kinds of schools as the reviewers and editors and publicists hyping the books.

I’m not saying there’s no insularity going on in the world of US marketing and publishing. But the Nobel — or any prize — seems a lousy way to gauge the work of writers. I’d give the same answer about US novelists as I did a while back about US story writers. Every year, there are more good writers writing more good books than I can find time to read.

SW: That leads nicely into my next question, which is about an article you wrote for The Millions called “The Big Show: Franzen, Goodman, and the Great American Novel.” In the article, you explore why Franzen’s Freedom gets dubbed The Great American Novel and Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector does not. You examine — among other things — how this difference in reception is related to the formal differences between these works, and one of the comments you make about Freedom is that it “sometimes feels like a guy at a dinner party who’s talking very, very loudly.”

How and to what extent does a novel “talking very, very loudly” relate to that novel being narcissistic and/or insular? Because in your answer to the last question, you sort of set up a dichotomy: writers with political and historical ambitions, and writers who write about old friends from school. I’m not saying these are rigid or mutually exclusive categories, but I am wondering to what extent you think Freedom being insular (although it does have political ambitions) relates to it being so loud.

GB: Look, Franzen is a great writer. Freedom is (to my mind) his second best book so far. But it’s really, really good. And sweeping, and large. And though sometimes his sympathies can seem pinched, in the end he reveals himself as a big-hearted writer. Reading it side by side with The Cookbook Collector — another really good book that is really similar in form and theme — I began to wonder, why all the attention for one book and not the other?

The disparity seemed extreme given the quality of the books. So I stumbled to my answer to that question as best I could. One thing I noticed is that Goodman is, as she said in a response to my article on the excellently named website Bookslut, interested in invisibilty. (I’m not quoting her exactly.) Franzen, to put it mildly, does not seem so interested in invisibility. He’s interested in showing off — not a bad thing in a novelist. (It’s a thing you could say too about James Joyce. Big show off.)

I don’t think Franzen is at all an insular novelist. People love to take swipes at “American fiction” and usually when they do they take a swipe at Jonathan Franzen — I saw a panel where a British novelist of Pakistani extraction kept talking about the failure of the American 9/11 novel—she had written a 9/11 novel too. And privately, I thought: really? You’re going to say that all the writers in the US are all writing badly about 9/11 and that poor writing is because they’re American?

There’s such a diversity of writers in this country, such a diversity of outlooks among them. I think writers do what they can. And I think sometimes writers who seem “insular” are, on close inspection, working at very intricate complicated powerful stuff. It’s an easy way to dismiss writers, and it’s a charge that gets leveled mostly at domestic, female novelists. Who’s more insular than Jane Austen? Who’s a better novelist?

I do not think that the Big Subject results in a Good Novel, and a lot of my favorite readings can seem small and domestic at first blush. What I was saying about the bunch-of-friends-from-school novel wasn’t intended as a dig at the novelists — I think theirs is a real way of describing current middle class existence in this country. The insularity might be more in the marketing and the publishing world.

But I’ll make a stab at a big idea here: writers are insular. They sit at the island of their desks, alone. Many of my favorite books are about that kind of insularity. Borges? Bernhard? Are they “insular”?  They write a lot about being stuck in their own heads.

SW: You teach in a department that features M.A. and D.A. degree programs, but no M.F.A. program. Yet your fiction writing courses are consistently filled with students used to writing critically who are eager to try their hand at — for lack of a better term — creative writing. What’s your understanding of the relationship between creative writing and literary criticism? Does the study of one enhance the study of the other?

GB: I like to quote the poet William Matthews, “Poetry is not criticism backwards.” But literary criticism and creative writing classes intersect around an easy point, which is reading. I think in both kinds of classes, if they’re taught well at the undergraduate level, the teacher’s not trying to turn to room into a bunch of critics or a bunch of poets — but getting people to put their attention on language, and on literary language.

I do wonder, at the doctoral level, what a student gets out of my class — I can’t imagine that writing a short story in any way helps them pragmatically with their dissertations or their contemplations of Derrida. But maybe it allows them in the face of literature to be completely amateurish, which, if you ask me, is the best way to approach a good book, out of love and not professionalism.

In that way, I particularly like my students. I like that it’s not my job, as it would be in an MFA program, to kind of move them toward getting an agent, toward thinking about publication. I don’t have to pretend that my class is much more than an intellectual play pen.

SW: Could you talk a little bit about your process and your habits as a writer?

GB: Two or three good hours every day without interruption is the idea in weeks when I have lots of time. When I don’t have time, I try to fill all the time I can get. Which can mean a six hour writing day and then a half-hour writing day. I write the same thing over and over and over again for a really long time. I go back and forth from draft to draft between computer and long hand. I usually have more than one project cooking at once. I wish all the time that I were better.

SW: You mention that you write longhand. What about writing longhand appeals to you?

GB: It’s just my habit, I guess. I mean, I can give justifications: mostly that I go more slowly writing than I do typing, and so my brain is always a little ahead of my hand when I write long-hand, and so the length of my attention is stretched a bit.

Also, I don’t have the distractions of the computer when I write in a notebook — I don’t go back and polish my sentences as I write them. But I think what helps me most is going back and forth from the notebook to computer to the printed page, to the notebook, and so on. I see the work a little bit differently each time.

I used to suggest that students write longhand, but my guess is that it’s very foreign to lots of people these days. I do find, for me at least, that writing only at the computer tends to make me focus on tiny perfectionist details of words and sentences in a way that’s not always good.

SW: What have you been reading lately? Are there certain works or authors that you find yourself rereading, works you return to for some type of guidance in your own writing?

GB: My reading of fiction the last few months has been all over the place. The stand-out recent literary work has got to have been Denis Johnson’s novella, Train Dreams, just a beautiful book by one of the great living US writers. I reviewed it, which gave me the opportunity to reread a lot of Johnson. Fiskadoro and Jesus’ Son are both astounding works.

I also recently read the Fire and Ice books, George R.R. Martin, which I just could not stop reading. I went through all five books in a row. And — since I can — I’ll just put in my two cents about those: Everyone is comparing him to Tolkein, but I think the more appropriate, immediate influences on him are probably Roger Zelazny and Michael Moorcock — favorite writers of my teen years.

Who do I go back to most often? I’m a big re-reader. Over the summer, I reread a lot of stuff from my childhood — Salinger and Le Guin and Hammett. And, yes, I recently reread Anna Karenina, but every writer says that, right?

"Normally Special is like a diary, but it's not the kind of diary you would keep writing for years. It's the kind of diary you would burn after one entry."

xTx’s Normally Special is a collection of the painful stories women tell themselves to make it OK for the stories to have happened in the first place. Each story is an open secret. The kind strangers will read right off your face.

When I was little, I begged my parents to buy me a diary. They said I had to call it a journal. “Boys don’t have diaries.”

I asked my parents if I could still tell secrets to a journal. I had a secret I didn’t have words for yet. My parents humored me. I know they laughed later. We lived in a small house. “Ha ha. Boys don’t have secrets.”

I trusted my parents not to look at my journal. I left it out. I drew a penis on the first page. My parents found it and had a fit about how genitals are a private thing and I shouldn’t be drawing them in my journal. My journal was also supposed to be a private thing. I learned there’s no such thing as privacy, even though Americans sometimes have that illusion because the United States is so big. Everyone spread out and hide!

Normally Special is like a diary of different women’s secrets. It’s more complex than that, though, even if these are some of the shortest stories you’ve ever read. We live in a culture where small is supposed to equal simple, but reading Normally Special makes you feel like you’re in a closet that’s somehow bigger than the house around it.

In “The Duty Mouths Bring,” a woman is breaking down boxes in a factory while trying not to break down herself. She feels a duty that seems like pride, but by the end of the story we realize she’s a mother struggling to feed her children, her “smaller mouths.” As she says early on, “There are no choices in poverty.” You do the things you have to do, and you have an audience, and each member of that audience has a mouth telling you its own painful story. There is no privacy because everyone is connected.

Normally Special refuses privacy even as the characters in each story cling to it. In “Water Is Thrown on the Witch,” a woman is hoping to drown the fantasy she has when she sees her husband’s empty clothes laid out, as if he melted while getting ready for work. The woman isn’t afraid her husband will find out she has this fantasy. The woman is afraid to acknowledge the fantasy even exists, as if by accepting the fantasy, she’s accepting she’s the type of person who would have the fantasy to begin with.

There’s a relief in confession because the secret is no longer a secret; it’s a shared piece of information. But the woman in “Water Is Thrown on the Witch” doesn’t confess her fantasy. She buries it. The horror is that you can give something so empty a meaning so uncomfortable you refuse to confess the secret even to yourself. You can’t read your own diary because of what it might say about you.

Normally Special is full of these small potatoes that turn out to be rocks when you try to eat them. The people in these stories aren’t just scared of revealed secrets. They’re scared that other people might be unfathomable too. This is more explicit in some of the longer stories, like “The Mill Pond,” where fascination with a stranger and implied child abuse are different glasses of the same Kool-Aid. People will agree to be together in hideous ways before they’ll ever be alone.

I said Normally Special is like diary, but it’s not the kind of diary you would keep writing for years. It’s the kind of diary you would burn after one entry. These stories walk the line between keeping things to yourself and keeping things from yourself. There’s fear and denial in that, of course, but there’s also relief and surrender. You made your mark. You survived. Now move the fuck on.

Some Conversation With Roy Kesey About Pacazo

Through college and some few years after, I regularly wrote music reviews. This took me to concerts 2-4 nights a week, and I could rely on receipt of a couple promo CDs each day. Having absorbed that volume of music means that, even now, any record or live show is diluted, watered-down. It takes something truly extraordinary in a record for it to rise above the rest.

The same holds true for books, of course. On more than one occasion I’ve remarked that the more I read, the more I learn what I haven’t read. But as with records, there does occasionally come along something that breaches the surface of all that dilution, and when it does, it must, naturally, do so at a higher level.

I think it was March that I first read Roy Kesey’s remarkable novel Pacazo, a 500+ pager that rose up and knocked me flat. I read it over several sittings, while wading through the regular assortment of chapbooks and magazines on the bedstand. Over Memorial Day weekend I dove in again, but this time on a beach in Long Island with only beers and kelp-plucking seagulls for company. Kesey makes time and language something like liquid in the book, and I wanted to do this second read without distraction, to do nothing but drink it in and focus on how the hell he pulled it off.

I could happily drown in this book, is what I’m saying.

Pacazo takes its title from a large lizard indigenous to Peru, what on the first page is described as “nothing but an uncommonly large iguana.” Our hero of the novel, however, prefers “to believe [the pacazo] is some imp of history, coincidence made scaled flesh, a god no one worships anymore.” This dual interpretation, conflicting between the dullness of common present and romanticization of heroic past, is just one of the many currents stirring beneath the surface of the book.

Floating messages between New York and Peru these last few months, Kesey and I did our best to go a bit deeper. . . .

* * *

Joseph Riippi: Put bluntly, one could say Pacazo begins as the story of a man tortured by his past, but who seeks guidance or solace in the history of his adopted homeland. I’ve never been to Peru, but the book nevertheless left me with the impression of a deep, richly historical place. What was it about the country and its history that led to your writing this novel?

Roy Kesey: It’s interesting to me to hear it framed that way. Our Hero (OH) spends much of the book fairly sure that he doesn’t need guidance, and doesn’t deserve solace; but you’re right, there are senses in which he nonetheless turns to history for both straight and twisted versions of both. That throat-clearing aside: yes, unquestionably, Peru is (like most places, I suspect) neck-deep in complicated, fascinating history, and somehow I managed to spend the first 8 drafts (read: first 9 years) of the novel running away from that fact. That’s how long it took me to realize that I needed to embrace history (or histories, really: national and regional and familial and individual and linguistic and et cetera) as content, and also as structural conceit, if the novel was going to fulfill the hopes I’d had for it starting out.

Or, if the question was Why Peru instead of Ecuador or Kenya or Sweden or Malaysia?, then: Peru is where I was (and am, for the time being.) Life gifts you access to certain things, and you can make use of them, or go off looking for other things. Like most writers, probably, I do a bit of both for each book, but this one is grounded in a place (not just Peru generally, but northern-desert-coast-of-Peru specifically) that I knew well in actual day-to-day life, which, while not exactly essential, rarely hurts, in my experience.

Or, if the question was In what sense did Pacazo become what it is precisely because it’s set in Peru? (as I’m now suspecting it [the question] was all along — I’m a little slow), then: that’s one of the questions to which the novel itself is the answer. But just to sort of tug at one thread as an example: what does it mean for your psyche and life when almost all of your National Heroes died in battles subsequently lost?

JR: What you do with language and time in the first chapter is remarkable. The narrative often moves mid-sentence and within present tense, from modern Piura to centuries-old explorers. You write in that chapter, “In Spanish, tense and time are a single word.” With language so important to this work, I’m interested how you think the limitations and/or advantages of English over Spanish affected the story you told?

RK: Thanks. Also: I have a terrible feeling that any legitimate attempt at an answer to this question would run a hundred pages. Plus footnotes. Plus indices. But, so, okay:

There may well be ways in which one could occasionally speak meaningfully of the advantages of one language over another for a given task or field, but those ways are, I suspect, a lot weaker and fewer in number and in the end less interesting and less useful than one might guess. And that question (i.e. about the relative betterness of a given language in a given context) wasn’t really one I was trying to ask in the course of writing Pacazo. I was more interested, I guess, in playing in the neurolinguistic intermuck where (some) long-term expats pitch their tents.

That is, the book takes place almost exclusively in English, which happens to be OH’s L1. Now, he does great work in Spanish, his L2, but it (his L2) (along with a bunch of other things) is messing with his L1 (and with his brain more generally) in what I hope are interesting ways. For example, because language matters to him, and (in part) because translation and interpretation and TEFL are constants in his workaday world, he often comes up against the fact that some of the English phrases that most native English speakers use regularly make no literal sense, and at times make anti-sense, which can (a) work against any sort of clarity, but also (b) be kind of weird and beautiful. There’s also the question of his students’ L1-induced English errors, and the eddies those errors create in OH’s mind. And the question of the neural consequences of the more experimental Spanish he reads — the Oquendo de Amat poems, etc. Plus also the question of regionalisms in the Spanish he hears every day, of which the title is one — their place within Spanish generally and Peruvian Spanish specifically, et cetera. Plus also et cetera.

So that’s one level of it. Another is where you’d find the technical or logistical matters that interested me as I was working on the novel: how to have the question of which language a given character is speaking at any given time be perpetually clear for the reader but (almost) never overtly addressed, for example. Another example, one still closer to my heart, maybe even inside it, like cholesterol, blocking arteries left and right: the question of how to rid the world of interlingual italics. This has become an absurd little crusade of mine. It drives me crazy, this “the campesino ate an empanada outside the hacienda” business (and I owe that example, however misquoted, to Paul Theroux — wish I could remember which book it was — maybe the Patagonian Express one?). So I have taken it upon myself to convince all current and future writers to join me in repeating, cultmantra-like: All Non-English Words Become English Words The Instant I Use Them Unambiguously In An Otherwise English Text! And Thus (With The Help Of A Retroactive Microsecond’s Worth Of Magic) Do Not Need Italics! Plus Also Now The Entire English Corpus Has Shifted Toward The Other Language’s Corpus, And Vice Versa! (And The Same Goes For Whenever An English Word Is Used In An Otherwise Non-English Text!) And All This Is A Good Thing! Because Of Empathy! Et Cetera!

My next two absurd little crusades will involve stamping out the use of exclamation points and non-standard capitalization, respectively, naturally.

JR: I am almost sure it’s the Patagonian Express one you’re referring to, but it’s been awhile since I read that. Theroux has enough books it might be in multiple.

One last question / thoughtfodder-catalyst, because it seems it only took a couple questions to get a rather wonderful bit of thoughtfodder on the page: When I first sat back from Pacazo and breathed and considered it in the context of your other work, I thought immediately of the story “Wait” from All Over, in which airline passengers are kept captive by the weather in an airport terminal of purgatorial limbo. Would it be fair to compare Our Hero’s memory of his wife with that fog, keeping him in a sort of misguided purgatory? To be grand, I could see extending that personal past to a nation’s historical / social past, clouding the direction home, obfuscating us as nations / societies from getting anywhere. In your story “Invunche y voladora,” too, also from All Over, there’s a disconnect between the newlywed couple’s anticipation / expectation of their South American honeymoon and the reality of the days, a reality which may continue to the future of the marriage. Am I just italicizing hacienda here, or is this a theme you’re consciously engaging with when you sit down to the crusading?

RK: During the actual crusade-type crusading, the hardcore first-drafting, there’s no themework at all — you’re just doing what you can to follow the voice, thinking with your hands, the vorpal blade, valley of death, et cetera. But then afterwards, when you’re icing down those tendons, and securing victuals against the fact that ‘vorpal blade’ made you think of ‘snicker-snack’ which made you hungry, you survey the field, and sure, sometimes the bodies lie in patterns that please you, patterns that can be made sense of, and sure, what the hell, let’s call those patterns ‘themes.’ At which point you finish up your snickerdoodles and mingle with the mess, adjusting a severed head here and a fallen standard there, palpating this wound and stretching out these bowels just a tad, not so much (in my experience) in the interest of clarifying the themes, exactly, (though sometimes that too,) as of complicating them in ways that will (if all goes well) get them (if you will) talking amongst themselves.

Now. Are there certain questions I return to? Sure. Am I — to take your premise gently by the hand, look deep into its eyes, and smile just so—absurdly interested in the means we employ in our (successful or unsuccessful, makes no never mind) attempts variously to deal with / conquer / ignore / escape / endure / tunnel through / vault / sidle past That Which Obstructs Us? Yes, yes I am. And will That Which Obstructs Us have landed in our path having leap-frogged us from some point in our past? Not necessarily, but sometimes, probably — maybe even most of the time. As to whether a specific set of circumstances will occasion an attempt requiring the use of a luggage carousel, a hot air balloon, a bus ride into the highlands or something else entirely, I submit there is no knowing in advance, least of all for this writer hisownself.

Published occasionally, and for good reason, Armchair / Shotgun is a very good buy at $10.00.

Armchair / Shotgun, a journal of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry edited in Brooklyn, is, as the masthead states, “published occasionally, and for good reason.”

They do not lie. Issue No. 2 appeared recently and, in addition to literary work, it features a stunning selection of color photos by LA photographer Cory Schubert. Mostly shots of Los Angeles architecture, both melancholy and kitschy, the photos are drenched in blue and white, ochre and orange, are nearly devoid of humans, and together create a landscape, in Schubert’s own words, “timeless in the wash of the California Sun.” There’s also a spread of photos in an archaeological vein by visual artist Sono Osato.

It should be said that the art doesn’t stop at these two photo spreads, however. Each new section of poetry or fiction is introduced by a black and white reproduction of something like a real estate plan or topographical chart. Altogether, Armchair / Shotgun is beautifully laid out and printed, a bold statement in this twilight time of print.

“The Kill Sign,” a story by Marvin Shackelford, is a weird riot about a guy named John Peters, whose dog Roscoe offends the neighbor, Angel van Gogh, by constantly humping her dog. Angel, fetching in her bad-toothed way, becomes a suspect when Roscue turnes up having ingested antifreeze. As John opines, “It’s sweet so you can bet he ate a lot.” While poor Roscoe’s fate remains uncertain, John gets his revenge and then some. An oddly delightful tale for when you’re feeling used.

Through a series of sharply etched conversations, Armchair’s editor Kevin Dugan creates a kind of living CV profile of novelist Jesse Ball, writer of the novels Samedi the Deafness, The Way Through Doors, and most recently, The Curfew. It’s a great full piece about a writer still in the early years of his career. Dugan grounds the piece with ruminations on Ball’s influences, including Kafka (“I actually find him really funny. I would be riding the subway reading The Castle, and I’d miss my stop because I’d be laughing and laughing”) and Hawthorne (“I like Hawthorne. He also has a delight in words”).

The poetry has a delight in words, too. Alanna Bailey must have been tickled pink when the journal accepted her poems: they are her first to be published and read as solid, midcareer work. They’re featured along with poems by Alicia Dreilinger, Matthew Montesano, and others, ranging from more or less traditional (Bailey’s “Pomegranite”) to Brian Morrison’s prose poem, “When the Cinderblocks Came.”

The journal’s an intelligent mix of writers from inside and outside the academy, and of newcomers and established writers, and the whole thing is packaged with an artful and comforting sense of the importance of quality. Published occasionally, and for good reason, Armchair / Shotgun is a very good buy at $10.00.

Breaking Bones for Meaningful Marrow: A Review of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club

Like many people, I discovered Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 debut novel, Fight Club, after seeing its film counterpart (released in 1999). I loved the absurd sexuality, violence, and profanity of the film (which, considering that I was 12 years old, made me a stereotype). I thought that the book would be equally awesome. And it was. However, while most of my peers enjoyed only these same superficial qualities, I recognized that there was more to Fight Club. A lot more.

Fast-forward ten years and I’m currently teaching Fight Club at the same university where I earned my BA two years ago. I chose to teach the book for three reasons: (1) it is ripe for discussion, (2) it was pivotal in my decision to become a writer, and (3) Requiem for a Dream is too complex structurally and American Psycho is way too violent (right?). In any case, I felt confident that Fight Club would provide enlightenment, engagement, and entertainment for my students.

The main themes Fight Club examines are the soapbox effect of religion and the horrors of cult mentality. Fight club begins one night when the narrator and Tyler start beating each other up outside of a bar. Eventually, they hold meetings in the basement of another bar, and week after week, more and more people come. Tyler and the narrator compile a list of rules, and we’re told how men from every walk of life exorcise their demons and frustrations by beating each other. They’re rebelling against conformity and society. The narrator says, “fight club exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends.”

Eventually, the members wear their bruises and stitches (as well as Tyler’s burned kiss, which is an entirely different issue) like badges of honor; they’re committed to the club. As the novel progresses, Tyler begins starting more and more fight clubs without the narrator’s knowledge. About halfway through the book, the narrator meets an old friend, Big Bob, whom he knew from a cancer support group. Bob informs him that he no longer goes to support groups because he’s found something better:

“there’s a new group . . . called fight club . . . it meets every Friday night. . . . On Thursday nights, there’s another fight club . . . the rules [were] invented by the guy who invented fight club. . . . I’ve never seen him myself, but the guy’s name is Tyler Durden. Do you know him?”

Naturally, the narrator has no idea that Tyler is starting a cult, and eventually, fight club becomes the catalyst for Project Mayhem (and then the sh!t really hits the fan!).

While examining religion and cults through subtext would be enough for one novel, Palahniuk doesn’t stop there. He also criticizes American materialism, considers self-preservation vs. self-destruction, and combats injustice within social hierarchy. Oh, and he interweaves the foundations of Marxism with the foulness of mixing food with bodily fluids. It’s simultaneously perverse and profound.

Going beyond its social commentary, Fight Club is notable for its brilliant (and arguably impossible) twist. Throughout the book, the skewed relationship between Tyler and the narrator is complemented by ambiguous statements and odd symmetry. Once readers understand what’s really going on, everything changes, and it’s fascinating to reread the book and discover all the foreshadowing and symbolism Palahniuk places so smoothly. As my classes and I discuss the book every Monday afternoon, I’m consistently amazed at how lines like “Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth” and “If you ever mention me to her, you’ll never see me again” go completely over their heads.

While Fight Club isn’t technically Palahniuk’s first novel (his third, Invisible Monsters, actually predates it), it’s likely his most complex and important. Underneath all the depravity, violence, and dark, dark humor, Palahniuk investigates human nature and critiques the way we live our lives.