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 »

Local author Frank Zafiro was featured on KXLY News tonight. The feature included a shout-out to Get Lit! I’m not sure how I feel about calling novel writing “unconventional,” but anytime media celebrates authors, I’m happy.

Embedding the video in this post eludes me, but you can watch the segment here.

Books are slammed with a 19% tax in Chile, the highest tax on books in the world. This tax is nearly twice what the author earns from the sale of each book. In the United States, books are taxed at well under 10%. In most other Latin American countries, books aren’t taxed at all. The book tax in Chile was imposed after 1973 by Augusto Pinochet (who, by the way, has recently suffered a legal title change in primary textbooks, demoted from “dictator” to “military regime.”)

The consequences of the book tax for print literature have been grave. Readership is way down and people aren’t buying books. They are, however, using the internet. Chile has the highest internet usage per its population in South America, beating out even Brazil and Argentina. The most frequent internet activity is checking one’s email. 9 out of 10 internet users have Facebook, but more and more of these users are also accessing their news online.

As a writer who is interested in publishing in both Chile and the United States, these statistics offer a practical lesson. I’m realizing that an important part of being a writer is more than just “knowing your audience.” You have to know how your audience is accessing what its reading. If I want my work to be read in Chile, print publishing is clearly not the way to go. Yet its hard to find online venues that pay authors. Read more »

Since I stopped seeing girls as “soft boys who smelled nice,” (in quotations because I read that somewhere many years ago and it neatly sums up gender relations from the POV of a elementary school boy), until early adulthood, I nursed two fantasies about where I would meet my soul-mate.  The first involved wandering the aisles of a used book store (okay, Barnes and Noble).  The second was serendipitous seating on an airplane.  I never really outgrew this phase, and while working for Willow Springs I added a third category: the slush pile.  You might logically ask, how is that even possible?

In my head, I would find a great story by a fellow aspiring writer, and while the story wouldn’t be accepted for publication, I’d be tasked with sending her a personal rejection from my email account asking her to submit stories directly to me in addition to the online submission manager.  She would, and perhaps she would ask to see some of my stories, and then the timeline of this fantasy gets a little murky.  I suppose we’d somehow eventually meet up and live happily ever after.

I never pursued anything like that because, unlike the bookstore or airplane, it would have been super creepy.

It’s been many months since I’ve read Willow Springs slush, so I relegated this bizarre fantasy to the nether regions of the brain.  Then, a few months ago, I really hit it off with a woman on a date.  Like me, she had recently finished an MFA and was struggling to make it as a writer.  The date went so well that we started emailing and g-chatting later that night and I learned her full name.  And it was really familiar.  Tip of the tongue familiar.  But I couldn’t place it. I wondered and wondered, but the only possibility, longshot and all, was, you guessed it, “Willow Springs slush pile.”  Memory is not exactly my strong suit.  But when I asked, she went and checked her submission records, and sure enough, she had submitted to Willow Springs a couple years ago when I worked there.  The short synopsis of her story struck me as very familiar, and when she sent me the manuscript, my suspicions were confirmed.

I don’t like to brag, but this was pretty amazing.  Out of at least hundreds, if not thousands of manuscripts, her name had lingered.  To be fair, her story had been discussed at a meeting, so I’d read the piece at least twice, but still, this seemed like a sign.  Was it meant to be?

Unlikely.  As she flaked out on our next date, and flaked on our rain-date (get it?) and then didn’t respond to a third date request.  Such is life.  Time to buy some new books or do a little more traveling.

Fact: 71 days until the Get Lit! Festival begins.
Fact: A person who may or may not have a serious medical condition still showed up the other day, worked hard and stayed the whole shift without a whiff of self-pity or complaint.
Truth: I want to be more like that.

Fact: There are ___ days until your thesis is due.
Truth: Don’t count. Don’t even think about counting. Make sure everyone understands that if they continually announce the countdown until their/your defense date, you’ll punch them in the throat.

Fact: When you’re planning fifty events, every person thinks their event is at the top of your priority list.
Truth: Most of them aren’t. Sorry.

Fact: Everyone around you will assume that their level of stress about thesis is greater than yours.
Truth: Everyone will be stressed, to some degree. It’s not a competition. Be kind to each other.

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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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1. The essayist will take pride in neuroses. He will go on an on about the joy of scratching his ear with a pencil or brag about how long he hasn’t driven a car.

2. Everyday outings, such as going to the grocery store, will become overwhelming adventures. Huge adventures, like swimming with whale sharks off the coast of the Yucatan, will sound like everyday activities.

3. You will never know where she is. She will insist on trying a diverse range of activities, from accordion lessons to firing a machine gun, claiming it is research for a “Never Have I Ever” column.

4. You will realize that your world is more bizarre than a postmodern short story. You will start anecdotes with, “You can’t make this stuff up!”

5. You will not know whom you’re with at any moment: the character, the narrator, the persona, or the person. You will begin to wonder if you are a character or a person and sometimes narrate the recent past as if a memory from childhood. He will hear you and violate your POV.
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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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Alan Shepard with his Redstone rocket. Photo by Ralph Morse, one of his favorites

My thesis adviser sometimes tells me to “write like you wrote before you cared what other people thought.”

Most writers remember a time before workshop critiques or literary journal rejections, when they wrote simply because it was thrilling. Maybe it wasn’t the “best developed” method of writing, but it allowed for a degree of freedom and joy. I often think back to when I was 14 and wrote a romance novel. Though the story was embarrassingly horrible, my love for writing will never again be that pure.

I thought of this recently when I read an article in Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine, by Tony Reichhardt, about the engineers who worked on Project Mercury.
These were the engineers who were on the ground helping Ham the Chimpanzee and Alan Shepard enter orbit.

The world of space travel was so new the engineers didn’t even have call signs; they just used their first names. By today’s standards, the environment was shockingly lax. There was little documentation or paperwork. There were no consultants or technical contractors.  If something needed to be done, the engineers did it themselves. Read more »

I had never heard of this brand until recently.

About a week ago, I spent a Saturday evening drinking scotch, telling stories and having some laughs with a small group of people who all happen to be smarter than I am. Our hosts had some music on in the background, and I recognized a particular piece. In my typical self-deprecating manner, I pointed out how I loved the piece (Ravel’s String Quartet in F major), but my primary association with it was that it signified the title sequence of The Royal Tenenbaums. So as opposed to, you know, being a genuinely cultured person and knowing specific compositions by name, I only recognized the piece because of a movie. I didn’t have to make that connection out loud for everyone– as I said, they’re smart people– so our host, being a good natured person, smiled at my idiocy and proceeded to tell us a bit about Ravel’s history, alluding to some criticism he’d received as a composer and telling us that he’d died a virgin. Which was cool– I love that she knows stuff like that.

When I think about the evening, I think about it in two ways. First, as I said, it was lovely, and I went home glad I’d chosen to go. It was warm and cozy, the conversation was good, I laughed a lot, and I got to know one of the people a little better. But now that I’m writing about it, it’s changed. That’s what happens, right? We make decisions about how to convey scenes. As I’m thinking about the night through the filter of the music conversation, I can point to the various moments that exemplify my opening comment about the others being more intelligent than me. Two people were bantering in Russian, someone alluded to their time teaching at an Ivy League school, someone quoted an obscure passage from a Vonnegut novel I’ve never read, so on and so forth. Now, that doesn’t mean there weren’t penis jokes– even classy people like those– but as I drove home, the moment of noticing the music, and particularly noticing why I noticed the music, caused my mind to travel down a little rabbit hole and land in a room where all I could think about was why I like the art and pop culture that I do.

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