Pam and Jess Walter discuss stuff at my house. Hopefully they're not talking about the weird smell.

Pam Houston visited EWU last year for a reading and a craft talk.  I got to do the introduction at the reading, have dinner with her, and then she came to a party at my house and we got to chat about literature, my cats, and kids. I was a big fan before that, though, which was why I jumped at the chance to host.  I first read Houston’s only work marketed as creative nonfiction, A Little Bit More About Me, a book of personal essays, and I took to her right away, as they say, because she has a voice that you just don’t forget.

Houston says her fiction and nonfiction alike is around eighty percent autobiographical, and being drawn to nonfiction and still sort of unsure about where the boundaries lie, for me personally, between fiction and nonfiction, I loved listening to her read some sections of her newest novel, Contents May Have Shifted, with the narrator named Pam, who is a writing instructor and world traveler, an animal lover and an athlete, as is Houston in for reals life.

The novel is structured in 12s.  Each section is titled with a flight number, and then followed by a dozen tiny travel essays.  Wow, has she traveled.  Tibet, Spain, Mexico, Scotland, Newfoundland, Iceland, France, New Zealand, Tunisia, Laos, Argentina, Turkey.  And that’s only a dozen of the places she writes about.  Houston doesn’t give us any concrete indicators of chronology, but if you read carefully you definitely see a narrative unfolding.  It’s not a new story, certainly (Sam Ligon was known to say there are only two stories anyway—was it sex and death, Sam?), but Houston chronicles relationships and her own vulnerability.  The relationships with men change and sometimes end, but her friends stay and accumulate, and the relationships with beloved animals also provide a subnarrative.  There is camaraderie and heartbreak, love and loss.

What sets Houston apart from a lot of other folks writing about these same things is, first of all, that her narrator doesn’t just rattle off flights and trips and terrific emotional struggles.  She lays them out carefully, reflecting on each one, sometimes drawing from an earlier story, reminding us of the movement.  Read more »

A brief and partial defense of Lionel Shriver’s new book, “The New Republic.”

Claire Dederer, writing at Slate, hates this book. I have yet to read it, so I cannot address what should be the bulk of her critique–the actual book.  But I can rebut Dederer’s unfair, childishly immature, and Gawkerish interpretation of Shriver’s author note.

There’s so much that’s wrong with this paragraph. First and foremost, there’s Shriver’s condescending tone about provincial Americans of 1998 and their supposedly dismissive attitude toward terrorism. (In 1998, al-Qaida bombed the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.) Shriver, American by birth, has lived for over 20 years in the United Kingdom, and there’s a whiff of snobbery in the implication that she used to be one of those people, but fortunately has moved on to the higher cultural elevations of Europe, leaving all us dumbasses behind.

Gnawing on a Thin Man
By Ray Amorosi
Acme Poem Company: Willow Springs Editions
37 pages, $10

Today, I will take a walk, and I will observe the loose black dog, children choreographing a dance, the cardinal in the redwood blossoms, the fire truck driving in circles, the blond woman weeping on her porch. If the sky unfolds for me, and I begin to question the invisible forces controlling my life, I will not think about them in a tense, collegiate way. I will forgive them. I will forgive them because today is actually a startling, nice day, and I’ve picked up a renewed appreciation of the present while reading Ray Amorosi’s new book of poems, Gnawing on a Thin Man.

After twenty years of not publishing poems, Amorosi has been back in full force with his second book out in three years. As he tells it, he moved to a place of “marshes upon marshes,” and he couldn’t write about himself—he had to record what he saw. His poems are grounded in this observation the natural world, rich with startling imagery from Marshfield, Massachusetts, or from the distant past, perhaps Italy is there, perhaps Amherst or one of the other towns where Amorosi has taught, perhaps our eyes linger on a still life instead, and we move with the poem from the exterior to ekphrasis to a cracking, inward moment.

“They were all written here in Marshfield,” Amorosi said in an interview with Micah Flores at Gatehouse News Service. “I’m about a two-minute walk to some of the most beautiful areas you would want to see. [That beauty] drives you out of your soul.”

He presents his observations so that they reader may follow along on a journey that often leads to a surprising conclusion. In the tradition of many poets, Amorosi walks each evening with his dogs. When he returns, he simply asks, “Ray, what did you see today?”

The poem answers; we repeat the walk: Read more »

Being Flynn is a newly released movie, based upon the best-selling memoir by Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.   At some point over the next few weeks, I plan to see this film.  But before I do, I wanted to write a review so as not to be over-influenced by the subjective experience of it.

First of all, Nick Flynn is a poet and prone to madness.  That is to say, he’s genetically predisposed to delusions of grandeur, which is the non-technical name of the condition suffered by Nick’s father, Jonathan Flynn.  Plus, and this truly sucks, the mother of the writer committed suicide when he was 22 years old.

Second, Robert DiNero plays the part of Jonathan Flynn, which is reason enough to fork over the funds for a $9 matinee viewing.  Spoiler alert:  it’s his best role since playing that scary father-in-law in Meet The Fockers.

And third, I’m now officially wondering (and worried about) what my children, presently ages 17 and 20, may write about their dear ol’ M.F.A. student Dad.   I mean… don’t misunderstand:  I would be proud to have the same thespian who honed his craft on “taxi driver” interpret my curiously complex personality in his dotage.  There are things far worse than having your own chromosome-kin write something like  Cartoon Physics, Part 1, only to then revisit and rehash your own life’s closing chapters:
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I wonder if Whitney Houston knew, if the musical artist knew what the London Times recently has said that “everyone should know” — that certain  “Love Poems” are requisites for understanding the import of Valentine’s Day.   Judging from her own song lyrics, it would seem so.   But there’s the problem.

***

In terms of “Love Poems” that we — as in, “everyone”–  ”should know,” nearly all have been penned by Brits with one rebellious colonial (e.e. cummings) and two women (Dorothy Parker and Christina Rossetti) who’ve made the list because of some editor’s deference to fairness.

Well, fairness be damned.  (Haven’t you heard of Bill Gate’s Rule #1, delivered in a speech to Mt. Whitney High School in 2003???)   Euro-centrism be damned.  (Haven’t you heard the U.S. Helsinki Commission demographic report on the declining population in the west???)  Moreover, the fact that the crack-staff in London didn’t acknowledge the existence of homosexual love, and therefore include someone like Sappho, is not my bailiwick at the moment…

None of these is the issue at hand when it comes to love and the poetry of love.  My issue relates to what we truly desire in poetry with erotic or romantic themes.  And what we want in such verse poetry is something that the moral tone of “should” and the overly ambitious “everyone” works against.  We want specificity.  (No one else will do.)

C’est l’amour!  N’est-ce pas!

We don’t want the obligation to express affection as if it’s a chore.  We want the gushing torrent of it to carry its readers away.

We don’t want the standard Hallmark card that nearly anyone (if not “everyone”) can purchase at Walgreens on this very day.   We want uniqueness, originality, passion that issues from the deepest reservoir of the human psyche.

Whereas Nikos Kazantzakis can write eloquently — “There is one woman in the world.  One woman,  with many faces” —  a love poem wouldn’t dare give way to that sort of temptation.  A love poem has already jettisoned its cargo of “fond regards” for fear of running aground on the shoals of cynicism.   And let me be clear, this cynicism goes by another name that doesn’t smell as sweet.  In fact, it gives off the toxic stench that’s often been associated with a cache of discarded bones, bones that have been picked clean over time, bones from previous relationships where individuals have been reduced to their functions and roles.  That is, narcissism.

And so, even though I love Kazantzakis, and believe the author when he loves the hell out of life, I also believe a person to be irreducible and irreplaceable.   That stance, of course, suggests something that only some love poems may address; and that’s the delicious mystery of an individual who loves another individual for reasons which diverge from the mutual meeting of needs.

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I’m going to go ahead and assume that since you’re here, this isn’t the only literary blog you read. Maybe I’m wrong, which happens far more often than I’m capable of admitting, but I’m betting you read something, whether it’s The Millions or HTMLGIANT or The Rumpus or your local indie bookstore’s blog. So you’re lurking around these places, and one day you realize, they’re all writing about the same shit, over and over again. And then you realize, Hey, I could write about the same shit over and over again, too! And to that I say: of course you can. And I’m here to help you crank out that very shit. Here’s how:

1. Post something incendiary about gender or race. If you could get something like a transcript of a Caitlin Flanagan interview, that’d be awesome. Or you could just take quotes from her book and put them in Q&A form. Wait…DIBS.

2. Insult a famous writer who most literary people consider a god. But choose carefully. Look, it’s not shocking if you don’t like Munro, okay? We don’t need to hear you describe at parties how you don’t like her stuff, as if you were soooo anti-establishment for not liking her work, and you want to make sure everyone knows how anti-establishment you are. If you don’t like that aesthetic, you don’t like it. Cool. But to make a really controversial post, you’ve gotta go after someone legit in a way that isn’t lame. It’s gotta be semi-researched and vaguely believable, but mean as hell. Throw in some cheap shots for good measure, to ensure the crazies comment on it.

3. You’ve always got an ace up your sleeve: the ol’ MFA or anti-MFA debate. Everyone whines about how they’re tired of arguing over it, except that those same people read the arguments and comment like crazy. You could get away with between 4 and 16 of these a year, maybe more. You can point-counterpoint that baby to your highest traffic of the year.

4. This is key to any literary blog: if you are the main person running it and everyone knows you’re the main person running it, you’ve gotta promote the shit out of yourself. Your story just got published? One of your editors should probably mention that in a sidebar. You have a film coming out? Your blog should review it, and that review will be favorable, of course, even if it’s tempered with a few gentle criticisms like, “I questioned the casting of the sixth-most-important character” or “I thought it could have been longer.” Your band is playing a show after the local Rotary Club meeting? Perfect. Make sure to use your blog’s social media to promote your personal accomplishments. That’s what it’s there for, right?

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Body of a Dancer by Renée D’Aoust

Here’s something I don’t usually say: I majored in theatre. Normally, I opt for the also-true: I studied playwriting. But, really, the first gives a more complete picture. Like all the other playwrights, directors, designers, and stage managers in our program, I took classes in acting, in movement, in voice. I took stage combat where I learned to pretend to fight with a rapier and dagger. I took stage makeup where I learned to give myself realistic-looking wounds and bruises using latex and pancake makeup. I was no good at any of this. Worst of all was anything that involved me moving my still-awkward, recently post-adolescent body across a stage. The problem, according to the acting faculty, was that my brain got in the way.

At one point, I remember worrying myself into near-paralysis trying to remember whether it was natural to walk with arms and legs in opposition (right arm with left leg) or in tandem (right with right). Flummoxed, I wrongly opted for the later and went across the stage like some kind of retarded marionette.

This total incapacity for movement when I think anyone else is watching is my point of entry into Renée D’Aoust’s new book Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press). Unlike me, D’Aoust (pronounced “Dao”), who trained at the elite Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, is competent of mind and body. Her book is a series of essays that chronicles her immersion in New York’s strange world of modern dance.

To call this a memoir is reductive. It is a history of modern dance, a critique of Martha Graham, a rendering of the world of dance both inside and outside the studio. Read more »

Fine, this is what it looks like.

It took me forever to get this review written.  I bought Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s latest work, in November, soon after it came out.  It’s a small book and I figured I could read it in a day and get to work. I started it pretty quickly and read 40 pages.  And then it sat on the night stand by my reading chair in my bedroom.  I took the cover off, and the back photo haunted me every time I saw it—Didion’s daughter, young, sitting on a chair, elbows on knees with towhead in hands, too serious. And I couldn’t read it.  I knew it was about mortality, and as Didion says “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.” I knew her daughter, so ill in the first memoir, was going to die, had died, and so I spent a lot of time not reading it.  And when I went back to Blue Nights in January, I opened my reading journal to see what I’d written, to remind me.

“There’s a sense of clinging about this…it’s humbling and haunting and it makes me want to stop reading it and go read a book or play a game with my kids.”

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No one likes to be misunderstood.

At least I’m assuming, and shamelessly projecting upon others the alienation that I myself do not savor…

The fact is — as I write whatever I write — I do not really know what I’m intending to mean, and therefore appreciate another soul making the effort to comprehend that proposition or observation or truth claim around which my words take tentative and perhaps over-confident stabs in the dark.

This, I’m afraid, is the best any reader or any literary critic can offer by way of definitive credentials.   “Ours is in the trying,” muses T.S. Eliot (italics mine).  We put our stuff out there and hope for a dialogue partner, and at our best, do not react with a hyper-critical defense which degenerates into the slinging of mud or jello…  Or even the defense which ostensibly folds its arms and snickers in condescension.

Daisy Fried, in her New York Times articles and in her Poetry Foundation commentaries, has exercised her readership’s cerebral capacities for over a decade now.  I love that about the poetic graduate of Swarthmore College — that she pushes and prods and gets our synapse connections firing on all cylinders.   And I want her to know that I used to ride my bike through that upscale campus and pick up, as through osmosis, the academy’s deepest thoughts.   I did this, however, not for the sole purpose of one day asserting that  William Carlos Williams is the Dante of the American twentieth century (a comment that makes me want to dig further into the Inferno and perhaps learn the epic in the original Italian).  But I thought those thoughts, which were clearly above my blue-collar rank, because it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that no one owns this dialectic terrain… that intellectual property is nothing more than a cold, stony seat in the amphitheater where scholars and non-scholars may cool their heels, listen and perhaps chime into the conversation.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard and/or read about Marie Calloway. But if by some miracle, you’ve been enjoying your life and ignoring sordid internet shitstorms, I’ll be your tour guide today. Put on your raingear and some goggles. Note: This whole thing began more than a month ago, which in internet time is approximately 1.7 million years. Even though I avoided reading it/writing about it for weeks, I’m doing so now mostly because I was bewildered by some of the comments made in a recent interview with the writer in question. But we’ll get to that.

(I feel sort of like Inigo when he’s trying to explain to Wesley what’s going on after they wake him up from being almost-dead. “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”)

So there’s this young female writer who had posted a couple of pieces on Thought Catalog about losing her virginity and spending a day as an escort in London.* She had her own blog under the pseudonym Marie Calloway, which she has since taken down, but many of her posts were about sexual encounters with men she contacted through the internet, and a few times she posted naked pictures of herself. She read and admired some writing by an older man in New York, who is apparently in or on the fringes of one of the cool kids’ clubs of writers in the city. (As a non-resident of New York, an unpublished writer and a decidedly uncool kid, let’s just say I’d never heard of the guy in question.) She made contact with him, and suggested they meet up and have sex while she was in the city. They met and did have sex, despite his admission that he had a girlfriend but that he was “bored,” and the fact that she was traveling with another man who’d paid for her trip and who she was also sleeping with. (She says the other man, Patrick, was supportive of her plan to sleep with the writer, and that he was happy with how he was portrayed in the account/story.) She took some photos on her phone, and wrote a detailed account of the whole liaison for her blog, using the real names of everyone in question, publishing the photos she took (including one of her face with the writer’s semen supposedly all over it), and essentially giving a play-by-play of all their conversations. Oh, and also play-by-plays of all the fucking.

So people started to notice it, and her blog exploded with hits, and then (this is where I get fuzzy) for some reason she took the post down. Not sure what that was prompted by. But then, a couple of days later, lo and behold: nearly the exact same account, in its entirety, was published on Muumu House as fiction, with one main change: the male writer in question’s name was changed to Adrien Brody, at the suggestion of Tao Lin. Ms. Calloway had communicated with him previously and sent him her writing, so she sent him her 15,000 word piece and he agreed to publish it, advising that she change the man’s name to that of a celebrity.*

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