Weston Cutter's Blog, page 26

Problems of Solipsism

On the one hand, I'd like this site to stay relatively a-political—good literature should be about empathy and new views, both of which should be ideals of any political party. However: two books have come out in the past two months which, unfortunately, must be read and considered. Please note that these two books are pretty fantastic—well written, clear-headed, sober; the reason it's unfortunate we must read them is that they're reflections of the increasingly shit political world we're living/suffering through.

The two books are The New Hate by Arthur Goldwag and The Fox Effect by David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt, and Media Matters. You should purchase and read them both, and, after reading them, you should pass them along to your friends, Democrat and Republican alike.

            I'll admit at the outset some anxiety even in talking about this stuff, simply because, from all available evidence, anyone writing about politics at present's bound to be furiously bombed + engulfed in comment-flames. That said, we are, truly, in one of the shittiest political worlds any of us have experienced in a long time. It's not just that the 112th congress is among the most do-nothing congresses ever gaveled, or that politicians have now become so polarized that there's no common ground—not even any potentially arable ground—between the most liberal Republican and the most conservative Democrat (really); it's certainly got to do with aspects like those, but among the biggest, nastiest aspects of this political moment is, honestly, how bad-off voters are. We don't know what we want (and, arguably, we're now incoherently dumb about current politics). Five minutes spent watching the circus that is the current Republican nominating contest should provide all necessary evidence (watch the anti-Romney video Gingrich's sugar-daddy Super-PAC guy financed—the thing's more rabid than anything Obama would've done).

So, with all that in mind, where to start about two books which are very good books covering, in excruciating detail, very bad crap. Maybe this: my wife asked what I thought of the Fox book, and I said that it was really, really sad reading, and that I'd been thinking, as I'd been reading, if I'd feel the same way about a book covering some (at present nonexistent) far-left "news" outlet, and I was pretty sure I'd feel just as shitty.

Let's be real clear: however passionately right-wing news consumers believe the media's a liberal moutpiece, owned and run by Rothschilds and Jews and commies and beholden to hippie leftist snobs and elites in power, there is, at present, no left-wing analog to Fox. Whatever your beliefs of the Big Three networks, not one of them takes part in the sensationalistic slanting of facts as does Fox. Further, no network besides Fox has such an unclear (or, better, permeable) barrier between commentary and news—bias and fact, basically. Hate Diane Sawyer, or Anderson Cooper? Fine, but at least they're attempting to, without bias, cover, not create, news.

I understand that covering news is part of a process by which news is created—Kony was abducting children long before the video hit last week, and the flexibility inherent in the enterprise of deciding what's news is what makes it possible for Fox to even exist: they can plausibly hide behind claims that they're simply covering 'popular outrage,' every day, about every single idiotic last tiny aspect of the present administration, in the same way Cooper covers, say, violence in Syria. We're all, of course, free to pick the news we find most compelling or crucial or whatever.

But the difference is that Anderson Cooper has a phenomenal track record of merely and dispassionately and disinterestedly telling the story as it appears in front of him, and he's done so with basically little to no idealogical bent getting in the way of presenting a story. Not so Fox, as The Fox Effect will make stomach-achingly clear. Here's a simple example which also, conveniently, provides something of a litmus, just so you can (if you haven't already) decide how much to give a damn about all of this: when Santelli freaked on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and announced, essentially, the start of all this Tea Partying, Fox not only covered it (Santelli after all worked for them) but began to trumpet the other Tea Parties—Fox continued its move from being an organization which covered news to being an organzation which helped instigate and create news (and of course simultaneously covered the self-created news—why wouldn't it?). Lots of people don't find any problem with this trend; again, we're all certainly welcome to our opinions.

            But there is a huge problem with this issue—or, at least, the last 70+ years of journalism are in direct opposition to this Foxy development. I think it's shittily sad that Fox attempts to create news and cover it simultaneously; in other contexts, that sort of shit's wildly illegal (if you're okay with Fox doing this, answer this: how quickly would you want someone prosecuted for, in some massive public context, incessantly speculating about a stock's drop, which public speculation eventually led to the stock's drop? Is that okay, to do stuff like that? I'm being sincere: if you have an opinion on that, please leave a comment). Mostly I think it's deeply sad that Fox manufactures divisiveness for the sake of ratings and an agenda—not because I more often than not disagree with that agenda, but because I don't believe people are suddenly unhungry for news and knowledge, regardless of political orientation. Fox could be serving the same function as, say, Reason, yet Fox chooses, minute after minute, to be this font of the absolute lowest levels of idiocy. Fox is sad because of how measly and small it makes all of us, regardless of political orientation, come off.

And look, the truly execrable stuff Fox does has nothing to do with manufacturing news, either. Fox lies, period. That whole ACORN bullshit, about that worker who gave info to a supposed pimp about how to run a brothel? She claimed, in her (hugely-edited) response, to also have killed her husband, and she gave the info about how to run a brothel in jest—she noted, in later interviews, that she understood the f-tard idiots from Brietbart were clearly staging something, and so she played along. Not only that, but the Fox crew decided, after the video aired, to question, over and over, if maybe this woman had really killed her husband—though she'd been divorced twice, and both of her husbands were in good health—and they claimed nobody had investigated any of it, though the police in the town she lived in, in fact, *had* investigated. The problem ultimately isn't whether or not Fox has the integrity to ensure a more solid and separating line between its news division and it's entertainment division, or whether it's got the decency to cover news instead of helping to promote very specific news stories which promote its agenda—the problem is that Fox lies. Period. (Here's a fun and simple example: Fox derided the shit out of ACORN—and [successfully] led a campaign to get their funding cut—for submitting voter registration forms which were clearly false. The best example? A voter registration form in Florida under the name of Mickey Mouse. ACORN, let's not forget, is a community organizing group, and they do voter drives, of course. So: they did drives in Florida, got some real registrations, got some fake ones, including one for M Mouse. Fox went to bat, cackling at how many resources ACORN was wasting in submitting such an obviously false form for verification. The problem? Under FL law, every single damn last voter registration form must be turned in; if not, ACORN could've been fined $1000/form not submitted. So, here, Joe Q Public, is the question: is ACORN awful and wasteful for submitting the form, or are they just trying to follow the fucking law? And further Q: if ACORN *had* withheld the forms, can you imagine the Fox story then—ACORN BREAKS THE LAW, right? From lying about death panels to claiming legislation will lead to America's ruin to hyping a nonexistent potential for financially bankrupting the country, Fox is over and over just fucking flat-out lying. We're an embarrassment as a country every time we pretend to use anything but the harshest language about this.)

And here's where the double-whammy of these books comes in: Arthur Goldwag's The New Hate helps lay bare and make excruciatingly clear why the populist right is what it is at present. Honestly, The New Hate is a riveting read, but you're well served by approaching the book with Hofstadter's "Paranoid Style in American Politics" in mind. The New Hate is, hugely, a useful book—if you're just coming to (socio-political) consciousness and want to understand how we've moved in the ways we have for the past decade+, this book's where to go. I think Goldwag would back this up as well: his book's an iceberg's tip: he in this interview talks up Hofstadter, and Goldwag would (I'd imagine) be the first to agree that his book should be read as a primer or roadmap showing that things now are, yes, truly bad, but aren't outlandishly different—there's always been hate, there's always been this racism (come on, food stamp president? Seriously?) and sexism in right wing politics, it's just that now it's far more virulent, and far more scary.

Most striking about The New Hate, at least in conjunction with The Fox Effect, is this level of solipsism that's evident on the part of right wingers, this faith that events are all about them. Watch Fox, or read a far-right newspaper (the Washington Times, say) or blogger (guh…Malkin)—to a one, right-wing info outlets tell or report stories in tones of total grief and attack. It's not that the Obama administration is messing with health care in this country, it's that the Obama administration will ruin the country with its health care measures and is trying to kill you. It's not that Chris Rock shoved a photographer after being cornered (at Sundance, at what's clearly a social gathering, at what's clearly the venue's equivalent to a backstage) about his views on the Tea Party's racism, it's that "Chris Rock Attacks Conservative Author Over Tea Party Question."

The saddest part about this sort of thinking is how terribly lonely and self-centered it must be—to view the world, day after day, as a place in which everything's an attack on you, on your beliefs + worldview. Weirdly (or not), DFWallace addressed this exact sort of thing in his This Is Water (download the audio, don't buy the book)—the fact that it takes work to get away from (this is paraphrase) the hard-wired self-centeredness we all have (in that interview way back with the Believer, he said something like "it's a comforting delusion to believe everyone with whom you disagree is a total asshole" instead of having to do the work and see those with whom we disagree as legitimate folks with legitimate concerns and valid ideas and thoughts. Which, of course, is another vector of sadness about Fox and the rest of the right wing media: they're not only lying and sensationalizing and all the rest, but they are, in the worst way, peddling empty info-calories. They sell the most sugary, candy-based news there is. Almost none of what they provide is nutritious news—the bulk of it is aimed at keeping people engaged with their fears and biases instead of trying to help America become a great place again by having an populace engaged with big, complicated ideas—and, most crucially, a populace engaged with each other, all our neighbors, even—especially—those with whom we disagree.

I don't know what to say. These two books make me more depressed than I can properly articulate. The worst part? The mere existence of these two books will (I guarantee) be used to prove that the left 'controls' the media—because both of these books have been released by large, significant publishing houses (the last chapter of The Fox Effect is, in fact, about Fox's attacks on MediaMatters. I don't know how to fight this. Glen Beck's usually the idiotic one to fake a tear about how the country he loves is being torn apart, but read these books and try to keep faith, try not to cry. I'd like to believe I let go of my angry young man act a bit back, but it's still here, and it's still fueled by the sort of idiocies and lies that politics seems to attract.

Same Old Same Old: Pelecanos, Lightman, Hassman

I've been doing a shit job lately here and have nothing but busyness to blame, plus of course the fact that once a week I'm dumping energy into the Kenyon Blog and not here (latest [about masterful John Leonard's great Reading For My Life] here). Whatever.

I've actually been reading lots, have a stack here of 11 books I've read since the year's start, but we'll see how long it takes to cover each. I'm not making any claims: I just want to get through this stuff in decent time.

What It Was by George Pelecanos

This actually might be my favorite Pelecanos novel so far—simply because the threads were so deeply buried I couldn't, by page 120, remember all the plot complications that'd led me through those pages. The cast of characters in What It Was is bigger than anything of his I've read before, and the twists slicker, the sleight-of-hand surer. Weirdly, it feels like a less oomph of a book—less somehow deep-digging as his last two, though I think this book simply feels lighter because 1) it's set in the 1970′s, and 2) the whole book is, the reader understands, a conversation between two dudes at a bar, present-day. One of the guys is telling of his start as a private detective, and the story's about as satisfying a pulpy crime novel as you're likely to read in a good while.

Mr g by Alan Lightman

I'll admit to being one of those Einstein's Dreams dorks—I think I've purchased and given away like 5 copies of that thing (it's like The Alchemist but less treacly)—and that therefore I was hugely pumped to read Mr g, which—it says right there on the cover—is a novel about the creation. Yes! Speculative fiction from the great Lightman! People, no: this might be the least compelling novel I've ever read. It's not that it's bad—I don't think Lightman's a bad writer—it's that it's boring, and it's silly, and it's pretentious as hell, pretending to bite off the most compellingly mysterious chunk of life and then playing emptily with it. Read it only for frustration, and hope Lightman's next outing will take him some place much more fruitful than this.

Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman

I was hoping to be able to feature an interview with Ms Hassman along with a long review of her book, but she never responded to the questions. I'm gonna go ahead and jump on Megan Mayhew Bergman's review of the book from a few weeks back at the NYTimes, which I thought was thorough and accurate if, of course, slightly shorter than it could/should be. Girlchild is, actually, a fucking great book—the first great book of 2012, for my money. It's not just that Rory Hendrix is an unstoppably entertaining and heart-breaking and vivid character, or that the book's got its share of post-modern trickery (blacked-out passages, sections written by Rory's mother's social-worker), or that the book's balance of startling frankness and incredible fragility should be enough to make anyone real grateful for the book's existence—it's all of those, plus the fact that Hassman's made a novel, a real story. This isn't just some stuffed-together nonsense: the book adds up, and you close the pages feeling changed, weight added to your inside bits. This one's a stunner: I'm amazed the book hasn't gotten much much bigger and more notice—it sure as hell deserves it.

Elsewhere and a Pair of Novels

1) The buzz lately seemingly everywhere's been about D'Agata and Fingal's Lifespan of a Fact. The good thing is: it's a book well deserving of lots of buzz. The bad thing is: every goddamn thing that's written about this book seems wildly off the mark. Bullshittilly bad recent NYTimes stuff here and here, and my thoughts on the thing here at the Kenyon Review blog, plus, bonus, here's an interview with Fingal and D'Agata about the book. If you give a shit about books, keep your fingers crossed that this one starts getting talked about in adult, interesting ways and unlike it's being talked about presently (which, obviously, are infantile, dull ways).

2) Other recent Kenyon stuff here and here.

3) I've got a stack of books to review and the next two weeks will hopefully see them all covered, so let's begin.

Spring  by David Szalay

I decided in December that this year, 2012, would be the year of the novel, and Spring was among the first two or three I read. Sadly, the book hasn't seemed to get the attention it should have, which makes some measure of sense, given that the book's among the absolute most quiet narratives I've read in I can't think how long.

The novel's fairly simple to paint in broad strokes: it's a novel of a relationship between James and Katherine, and the year's 2006 and the setting's London and the only aspect of the previous that really ends up mattering at all while reading the book is that it's a novel of a relationship. Incidentals, should you be interested: Katherine works at a hotel, James works not at all in the present tense of the novel (thought he was once worth more than a million, and was part of an internet start-up of promise, about which more in a second).

The deal with the relationship at this book's heart is that it's not a good relationship. Scratch that: it's a terrible relationship—James doesn't love Katherine, nor she James, but the sparks and energy created by the narrative is in how they miss, how they each attempt to, ultimately, use each other to fill these holes in their lives, and how they both fail—in filling the holes for themselves, and in being the person able to fill the holes for the other. If nothing else, Spring would be devastating for how surgically exacting it was in dissecting an imperfect relationship.

However: there's this whole other level to Spring, which has to do with the aughts and the laziness the easy wealth of that time engendered. James is equal parts tempting and repulsive exactly because he was at one point so recently potentially worth so much—you're embarrassed for wanting to be near someone who almost was worth millions, yet it's hard to get fully away from it as well. Szalay maps that toxic area of repulsion and appeal—moral, I mean, not physical—better than anyone I've ever read.

Be appraised: this book is a quiet and slow burner. I can't say I finished it breathless and enraptured, but I can say it's been nearly two months and I haven't really shaken its spell. Read up, pronto.

The Odds by Stewart O'Nan

Though I'm a huge O'Nan fan and have loved his last 5 or 6 absolutely without reservation, The Odds is, unfortunately, a huge miss. It's not that it's bad—O'Nan's writing's never bad—it's just that it's frustratingly blah, a novel so easy to check out of you find yourself, page 50, wondering why you're still reading (which is doubly hard in this novel, given its brevity—you feel like if you get 50 pages in, you may as well finish it, given that's nearly halfway through the thing).

Art and Marion are headed to Niagara Falls—the scene of their honeymoon—to celebrate the final days of their marriage. They're about to, for financial reasons, divorce. They're about to lose their house, and Art's been fired, and the life they've known has, in all ways, broken down (there's backstory, deeper aches: Art had an affair [heterosexual] that Marion found out about; Marion had [a lesbian] one that Art's never found out about). They're here to gamble it all: Art, mathematically inclined, has a system for playing European roulette, the odds of which are just remotely in their favor, and if they can bet big enough at the right time, they can win.

The Odds ends up being decent as character work for both Art and Marion, though best of luck finding a way to care about these two: Art's nice but feckless, and Marion's insufferably bitchy, a scene-ruiner every time she's on the page, someone who in real life would be, if not friendless, just barely put up with by friends.

Ultimately, the book's got a complicatedly earned ending, and it's fine and decent enough, but the problem is that you don't care about Art or Marion—they're just not worth the amazing firepower of O'Nan's prose and attention. You're best off skipping this one and rereading Last Night at the Lobster.

A (Failed) Interview with Mike Doughty

What follows is a failure of an email interview with Mike Doughty, an interview that was an attempt to talk about his recent book The Book of Drugs. It's the worst interview I've been part of, and I'm not sure it's smart to bother being public with this, but, as you'll note, Mike threatened to post it on his own blog, so it was seemingly going to be public regardless. What I'm ultimately trying to do is put this in the context it was written in.

What follows is what I sent Mike and what he sent back. I changed nothing. I'd like to note that I was asking about his book + writing, a book I'm not alone in finding "mostly enjoyable but unremarkable," and I stand by my earlier review, and I wish this interview had gone much better. For what it's worth–Mike seemingly wanted to explode and then not take part: I replied to him, on getting his responses, apologizing hugely for whatever in my tone had made him feel attacked, and asking if he'd be willing to go through more questions so that we could clear the air and try to get down something of value, but he declined, saying he couldn't see how I'd meant that question as anything *other* than rudely.

Read at your own risk. I wish I hadn't read it.

Can you talk at all specifically what working with Sekou Sundiata helped you get to, in terms of writing? One of the things I like most about your work—certainly older SCoughing stuff, and the book as well—is the distinctive tone you've got, this consistent wordplay (though it seems also likely that it's just that you're around truly strange stuff: I've never had a friend named Wind-him-up-and-watch-him-go-Joe). Mostly I'm just interested in your language, how it works—if it was hugely different in writing nonfiction vs writing songs (I know you addressed this in other interviews—I'm not necessarily asking about just the fact of writing, but the sense of how you use words).

One of the great things Sekou taught me is that soul is the deepest version of yourself. If I were to ape rappers, as opposed to locating my own weirdness, there'd be a ceiling on what I could reach artistically.

Night and day, in terms of prose vs. lyrics, or poetry. Songs are assembled line by line, or phrase by phrase, whereas for the book I had to start in one place and work my way towards a well-defined point on the horizon. I did it by focussing on particular stories, whatever I happened to be interested in on a particular day, then assembling them chronologically at the end, and writing connective tissue where it was needed.

There were two huge things in my recent life that were great boons in taking up prose non-fiction: Twitter, and my intensive study of German. Twitter because I did it obsessively, and so I had this exercise, many times a day, where I had to tell a compelling story  with all extraneous language removed.

I studied German because I became intensely interested in the sound of the language. I went to tutors for–four years? Five years? In German, the grammar is so complicated–for instance, to say, "Because I am hungry, I want to go to the store," you'd say "Because I hungry am, must I to the store I go." Very elegant, and very tricky. So I had this kind of Jedi training in sentence structure.

(Saying "Jedi" might be appropriate, in fact, because I've wondered if Yoda-speak came from somebody's Yiddish-speaking relatives. Yiddish and German are extremely close to each other.)

Another thing about German: they don't have progressive tenses, as English does (and, in fact, very few languages do). I'd say something, in German, like, "I have been going to the store every day," and I'd be told that this doesn't exist in German. So I was very conscious of just using the simplest past tense.

Also, just because I'm curious: did the way you use language change when you got sober? Your music since 2000 seems to lack some measure of both violence and really wild associative stuff. That's not any judgment, it's just the way it seems. Is that remotely close? Did you see a change in your own writing? Do you feel a change, still? Is this totally wrong?

That is a judgment. You say "lack." That, and other ways of phrasing your questions demonstrate that you're clearly a Soul Coughing person. That, of course, is just fine.

(ed note: I cannot resist, just for the sake of language: lack is not a judgement. The sky presently lacking visible stars does not mean it's bad.)

I've done a couple of interviews lately that, when I read the finished article, are extremely kvetchy about my dislike for, and abandoment of, Soul Coughing. I suspect yours will be along those lines. You certainly don't have a responsibility to appease your subject–you have to write for your readers– but in these situations, I feel like I've been treated unfairly.

I see heart, and honesty in the songs I've written since 2000. There's a lot more depth and complexity. The lion's share of the Soul Coughing songs seem glib to me. My guess is when you say "violence" and "wild associative stuff" you're referring to a certain style I mostly see as juvenilia, en route to the work I'm doing now.

It's frustrating to be obliged to speak of work that I feel utterly disconnected to. Particularly at this time in my life, when I'm truly engaged in the work I'm doing. I feel like the work has expanded immensely, really exploded. When I speak to you, I have to navigate your taste. What I'd like to be doing with you is talking about the work I'm doing–and, in fact, for the purpose of promoting the songs to your readers.

I was one of those fervent mid-90's dorks who actually read what you wrote about 90210, and you of course bring it up in the book, though when you bring it up, it's pretty casual. You were, of course (or, at least, seemed) For Real Into the show—you took it seriously. I don't know if there's a legit or good question here, but I'm curious about your treatment of 90210, and how you wrote about it. Basically: was it ironic? Does it matter? This might be a sort of bullshit question, but I've been wondering about it for awhile.

It was both real and ironic. I dislike the word irony–I'd say sardonic, or wry.

Irony implies, to me, a kind of sneering viewpoint. Irony has served a cultural function, in the past few decades, of building a bridge to what's beautiful in something that's considered corny. Irony can be a pose; Karen Carpenter was amazing, those songs are amazing, but her fans, among the groovy people, were unable to just state that aloud.

It started, for me, with the title: "Peach Pit Babylon." Kind of putting this David Lynchian, Kenneth Anger layer in the very glossy and bland essence of that show.

I'm kind of proud that Peach Pit Babylon was a blog before the term existed. I posted it in an AOL message board every week.

This might take some work. I really like Soul Coughing, and I certainly understand your frustration with the group, and with its legacy in your life. I get that it was toxic and terrible, and I'm emphatically not that fan who'd ask you to like it—I truly don't care. I guess I'm more interested in this tone that pervades the book—you seem to be trying, in the book, to have the cake and also consume it. You talk about being sober, and, at least for those of us who know about meetings which feature anonymous in the title, we know about making amends and all these other aspects. In the book, it seems like you're trying to be a good person now, but you're not at all willing to give yourself or your bandmates a break on the years you spent together. I'm sure this is thorny and too big to answer, or at least gets toward stuff that's likely too big to answer, but the vitriol and anger toward your band is so at odds with this otherwise seemingly open, nice attitude toward things. I don't know if you even want to address this, but it's striking. (there's also this whole other thing, of how openly you hate the band and all things about it, but at the same time talk about what it could or should have been—which just seems striking, that you could both resent it and love it enough to still lament it somehow)

It makes me frustrated, sad, and angry to be asked this by you, Weston. I hope you run this piece as a straight Q&A, because this answer is, in all respects, in the context of your question.

My interpretation is that you believe I don't have a right to my feelings.

"I certainly understand your frustration with the group, and with its legacy in your life. I get that it was toxic and terrible, and I'm emphatically not that fan who'd ask you to like it—I truly don't care."

I think this is disingenuous. I think you might believe that you can get a pass for saying hurtful things by tacking that on the top of the paragraph.

Soul Coughing was an emotionally abusive marriage. Having read the book, you know the specifics of this: my bandmates were a decade older than me, and they denigrated me, telling me that I was untalented. They played this bizarre trick on me, in which I wrote songs, and they told me I wasn't writing songs. In fact, I own just a minority share in the copyrights of songs that I wrote in their entirety.

I felt, and feel, so, so violated.

"…so at odds with this…"

Do you think that feelings must be neat, non-contradictory, in line with rules of logic to be valid?

They're not. They won't be. I'm curious whose feelings, in any kind of human relationship, would be.

"Give myself or my bandmates a break." A break? What does that mean? To omit stories? To insert an excuse for their behavior? To say, "Though I'm deeply disappointed in the music, there must be something that I like about it, that I've buried"–?

Do you think my feelings about that music aren't valid? That my feelings are, actually, somehow, a mistake?

A hallmark of abusive relationships is that someone will live with abuse, and yet somehow be unable to leave. The break I've been trying to give myself is forgiveness for having stayed in such a toxic, destructive place. I'm just as angry, if not angrier, at myself for remaining there, and continuing to be hurt, for a long, long time.

"Have your cake and consume it too." Wow. What's the cake here? What a horrible thing to say to somebody who got fucked up by emotional abuse.

It's curious that you'd bring up amends in this context. You want me to make amends with my former bandmates, i.e., to apologize to them? Do you feel that, by taking responsibility for my own behavior–which I tried hard to do in the book, doing my best to be very honest about my behavior, who I was–I must then stuff the trauma? Pretend it's gone?

Speaking of amends, what you're referring to is the 9th step: "We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others."

I read that and see a suggestion to take responsibility for my own actions. I don't see a suggestion to forgive.

I certainly don't see a suggestion to pretend that I haven't been hurt, and I don't have the feelings I have; to stuff the trauma because it's wrong to be traumatized.

What's your definition of forgiveness? Can you forgive through gritted teeth?

What is forgiveness if you can't let go? Do you see me as being unable to let go because I'm not doing something correctly? Is forgiveness a decision?

Do you think that someone still deeply hurt should stuff the pain? Or say something to the effect of, "Though I'm hurt, I know, on some level, that it'd be better to let this go"–? Should I also say it's a personal failing that I'm still hurt?

Do you realize that the function of the twelve steps is to keep you clean? Do you think that stuffing trauma, or minimizing it, or denying it, would be helpful?

What sort of magic trick could I do to be cured of toxicity and trauma?

"It seems like you're trying to be a good person now." Underline the "seems" and the "trying." I diagnose that as passive-aggressiveness.

"Hatred and vitriol." I reject that. I'm telling stories. I painstakingly did my best to exclude intentional hurtfulness. If I had forgiven–either by your definition of forgiveness, or mine–would these stories be substantially different?

"Which just seems striking, that you could both resent it and love it enough to still lament it somehow."

Mystifying. Where do you see the "love it"? Are you assigning that to me because you want me to love it? Are you trying to convince me that, in fact, I love the music?

Is disappointment or frustration a sign of love?

Do you feel that, because you love the music, I must be mistaken? Can someone's opinion of music be a mistake?

It seems to me that you repeatedly disown your questions by telling me how impossible it is for me to answer them. I'm curious–if this is truly how you see it–why would you ask them?

It's a big fat paragraph–double as long as any other question–and you say you don't expect me to answer it. Is that true?

If that's truly the case, why would you spend that much time typing it? Did you include it as a backhanded means of telling me you think I should alter my opinion?

Are you, actually, trying to be hurtful?

Would you ask someone you knew to have been in another kind of emotionally abusive relationship these questions?

Did you truly feel comfortable saying this stuff to me? Who else would you feel comfortable asking these questions to? A non-writer? A non-musician?

(I may blog your question, and my answer, if you don't publish this in full. Please keep me posted.)

(ed note: Again, on getting this hurt a response, I apologized profusely, asking Mike to let me try again, which, again, he declined, saying that it's clear that I *meant* to hurt him with the above question.)

Do you still love and believe in New York City? I'll absolutely admit I moved there (like an idiot, in 2005) because of bands like yours—believing the place was some great energy playground. Do you still like it lots? I know you said somewhere that being sober makes you appreciate the city even more, that there's beauty and craziness there and all, but I'm curious if you feel like there's been a huge change in the 20 years you've been there, and if it still offers just as much.

So many people that I love are in New York. That's why I stay. I love the place in a much different way than I felt when I arrived–on Easter, 1989–at the age of 19. That was utter enthrallment. I still love it, but love changes in a funny and wonderful way.

As a teenager, and when I was just out of school, I ran around the East Village and the Lower East Side. I guess I could still afford to live there, but there's nobody I know, nothing I need, nothing that I'm involved in there. It's like Manhattan left me for a rich dude. It's cool, she wanted to move on, she grew up, but, you know–it stings a little.

I've been getting my hair cut at Astor since the 80s. Every time I go back, I wonder when they'll disappear.

What's the view out your window?

I'm en route to New Orleans from Alabama, on I-20. So: Shell, Waffle House, Denny's, Burger King, Hampton Inn, Super 8, Chik-fil-A…

What About These Other Quartzes : An Interview with Andre Dubus III

I miss far more great stuff than I pay attention to, as does everyone—that's just the breaks, given the sizeable amount of good stuff in existence and the limits of attention—but sometimes things work out. For instance: friends told me Andre Dubus III's Townie was fantastic last year when it came out, and I thought, yeah, I should read that—but I didn't. But now it's just come out in paperback, and I got to it, and hot damn: put down or finish up what you're reading and get to this.

Here's the thing: Townies is lots of things—it casts a wide net. If you're interested in an unsentimental yet deeply felt portrayal of what childhood is really like, especially the realities of bullying, you should get this book. If you're interested in kids growing up in the northeast, without money, with divorced parents, or with a dad who was a legendarily great writer, you should get this book. If you're interested in manhood, and the difficulties of how that aspect develops (or doesn't) in folks in the US, get the book. Weirdly, though, the best reason to get this book is just this: it's beautifully, beautifully written. I interviewed Dubus (pronounced, by the by, like 'abuse' but with a D), and though we talked about process, and though you can read his thoughts and comments on the issue below, what you need to know is that all the sentences in Townie feel cared for, feel worked over and presented in service to the reader. I can't emphasize enough how big a deal this is. If you write, you know how hard it is to get just *one* sentence to feel and resonate in real/true ways; to craft a book with a decent percentage of such sentences is an astonishment, and to get a book with so many sentences like that, all of them singing so well, is borderline unbelievable. You'll likely become a better person for reading Townies, but, even if not, you'll certainly be happier to be alive, having consumed some serious art.

The following interview's been compressed and edited, and I'll last add that talking with Dubus is a hell of a good time. If you're lucky enough to bump into him, buy the guy a beer and get chatting. Final note: because of the compression and clean up here, Dubus doesn't necessarily come across as the hugely fun talker that he actually is. All the following was said with laughter and great good feeling—even when trawling thicker stuff, Dubus sounded hugely kind and generous.

WC: Let's try this at the start: since Townie's release last year, it seems like 1) there's been a dramatic increase in the sort of cultural chatter having to do with bullying and violence—topics the book's deeply steeped in—but also 2) the NYTimes has started a regular column, named Townie. How much do you feel the book has been a part of some national conversation? Or if that's too egotistical and grand: what've been some of the surprises about how the book's been received? What's been the biggest surprise?

ADIII: I have to say: I avoid anything having to do with me. I find it completely unhelpful. I don't Google myself, don't read reviews, I try not to see any reaction. I guess I have this deep-seated feeling, a philosophy that if there's any enemy to art, it's self-consciousness. Artists can't have one eye in the mirror. We need to let go of our reflection as much as we can.

But there's also—there's two sides. There's authors vs. writers. You're an author when the book comes out and it's reviewed and people pay attention to it, and you're a writer when you're doing the work. And that's where I put 95% of my energy—showing up with my pencil and my notebook, writing.

But I'm not in a bubble.

I fucking loved that Mellencamp line—he did an interview recently where he said the internet is worst invention since the atom bomb, and I just thought: fucking AMEN.

I am aware that people are reading the book, and that it made it onto the NYTimes bestseller list. I'm susprised that anyone pays attention to anything I write. It's hugely gratifying, and it's a privelige. The truth is, I've gotten so many letters and emails, and the biggest surprise is—the consistent thing has been that people, in email or just coming up to me, they say This is my life, thank you for writing my life. I think childhood's hard and scary for lots of people, and there's violence, and there's poverty, and there's divorce. I don't think for a second my story's unique.

But too much past all of that—I can't go too deeply. I try not to. The writing is the job.

WC: Have you read Donald Ray Pollock?

ADIII: I'm really, really looking forward to—I've had his stuff on the pile for awhile now, I've got the galleys of his books, and I'm excited to get into it soon.

WC: I ask just because I'm—what's awesome about Townies is that the writing's this strong, true, felt thing—Pollock writes sentences like that, too—this shit gets often called 'muscular' in reviews. But I also really, really like nerdy, postmodern stuff—I get sustenance from that stuff. But what's weird is that I get, in fact, lots of similar things that I got from Townies—this sense of connectedness, of being in the experience with another consciousness that cares, that's aware. Do you like that sort of writing at all?

ADIII: I think we're talking about craft here, and, honestly, a lot of the postmodern stuff seems self-indulgent. Postmodernism makes it cool to be a smart guy with glasses. And it seems like they often end up writing these big 900 page books, and they're almost all white guys. That shit just doesn't work for me. I think a lot of it comes off as self-aware, and of trying to seem smart. You know Hemingway's line? "Writing's easy till you think of the reader." I think a lot of that postmodern stuff is just about, Look at me, look at all this intersting shit. And I just—I don't want to look at the writer, I want to forget I'm reading a book. As a reader, I want to—it's that John Gardner line. Gardner says the job of the writer is to cast the reader in a fictional dream.

But have you read Tim O'Brien's essay called "The Magic Show"? In it, he says "Writers tend to be the kind of people who want to enter the mystery of things." But I think this is true of the reader, too. Readers don't go into books to escape, they go to books to get deeper into things. And Tim O'Brien, shit, his "In the Lake of the Woods" has got all this weird postmodern stuff in it—he directly addresses the reader and tells the reader, you know, this stuff that came up about the wife a little bit ago, that's not gonna resolve neatly. So I think—I think some of the postmodern stuff can be done well, if it's in service to something else.

(ed note: the way ADIII is talking about tricks in fiction, though he's not experimental like Wallace + co, is shockingly similar to how Wallace talked about fiction, just for what it's worth.)

I'm a sociology/political-science guy, and I'm pretty ignorant of this discourse. I cut my teeth in social services, and working in bars and restaurants, and I ended up hearing about all this from the backdoor. What I love about art in general—painting, music, film, what have you—is like what Janet Burroway says: "When we go to the book, we're saying Give Me Me." Speaking the truth to empathize with another human being. I want to go so deeply and honestly into whatever the fuck is in front of me that the reader can't help but go there too—so that that Give Me Me is going to happen.

WC: Which all makes total sense, but then there's still this thing, and maybe this gets even deeper and more impossibly into craft stuff, but how the hell do you know when you're there? I'm not asking as some young writer, asking for lessons—I mean for real, when you're sitting down and doing this stuff. How do you know when you're doing it? Does that make no sense?

ADIII: No, that's good. You know Tolstoy's definition of art?

WC: I'm sure I've heard it, but I don't know it.

ADIII: Tolstoy's definition of art is that Art is transferring feeling from one heart to another. Isn't that great? Nothing's better than that. You know, why is Adele so popular? I watched the Grammys last night on my flight, and Adele is so popular because she's got soul, because she's transferring feeling. She's loved for a reason.

But as far as knowing—you know that line, I don't remember who said it, but it's something like No writing's ever done, it's just abandoned. You know who said that?

WC: I've heard that. I feel like it's Didion. (ed note: not even close. Oscar Wilde.)

ADIII: And then there's the Martha Graham line: "No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissastifaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others." Honestly, I never fucking know if it's there or not. I don't know. It's all intuitive at this point, I just rely on my built-in shockproof bullshit detector, what Hemingway talked about. What I'm most interested in is cooperating with the truth of the piece and the moment.

The thing is, writers aren't special. We're not. I trust the internal truth meter, the shockproof bullshit detector. I know when it's not there, and I'll—I write alone, with a pencil in notebooks, and when I'm going over stuff, I'll start blushing when I haven't done it well, and that's the best measure. When my face doesn't heat up with shame, I'm doing something right, that's what stays.

Pascal said that anything written to please the author is worthless, which is why postmodern stuff leaves me so cold—I think lots of those guys are ultimately better at talking—at nonfiction—than they are at dreaming, which is what fiction is, good fiction. Good fiction is dreaming, and I think writers are the last people who get to have what we want to happen happen. Writing's got to be larger than the writer. It's an act of humility, to show up to this thing. We know about the sperm and the egg, and we know about death—we know how we become alive, but the mustery of being alive? We'll never know. The best we can do is demystify the tools of writing—how to do certain things, how to shape characters or create dialogue, whatever—but we can't demystify the mysteries behind that. Why do stories feed our souls? We all know how we got here, but we don't know why we're here. I feel as if a sentence is working for me when it's got nothing to do with my desire for it. When it's heading someplace I may not even want it to go, except I always want it to go more deeply into it.

WC: It's intersting that you talk about all this stuff this way, with this recognition of not just mystery, but the necessity of the mystery. And it's striking in that—in other interviews—you've talked about how Townies became a book—you'd started by writing an essay about baseball. How much of that backing-into-it, being-surprised-by-it aspect of writing's necessary from you? Or was that just the case for Townies?

ADIII: No, that's true of all my stuff—they've all been Phoenixes that rise from the ashes other stuff that failed.

I'm working on a new book—a collection of novellas—but the first two I published years ago, in '99 and 2005, both, as I wrote them, heading to be what I'd hoped to be a novel. I wanted to do something about a type of predator, a guy I've read about in the newspapers that I wanted to explore. I don't want to go too much into this, just because I still hope he'll show up, and there's one more novella to write for the book. But on the way to wanting him to show up, in these novellas, real characters turned up, and I had to follow them—they felt more real. The process of backing into Townie is something that always happens.

Richard Bausch says if you think you're thinking when you're writing, think again.

Even in the revision process—which is like the cigarette after the sex—you're still cooperating with the dream, you're still working in the intuitive level.

(ed note: there's a digression and question about Hemingway, and this apocryphal story I can no longer find evidence anywhere of, about Hemingway having once punched Plimpton for asking a question about birds, though on further examining it seems like I was imagining the punch part, but not the question itself. It was an overly jumbly way of asking about how aware ADIII is about what gets into his work—the actual things that happen and turn up—if he's aware of repeated motifs or ideas, whatever).

ADIII: I don't outline or plot—I don't arrange anything. I think about it later, and work to get it right, but you have to write the story first. I was doing a reading and this woman stood up and said I'm a psychiatrist—are you saying you just dream your way through your fiction? So readers are just interpreting dreams? Hell yes: writers are dreaming.

When I was writing Townie, when I realized this wasn't a baseball essay anymore, that I was writing this MEMOIR (ed note: he pronounced it mee-moir, with some disdain, though not in a way that was critical necessarily of other folks writing memoirs)—I read an interview with Mailer—this may have been right when he died, it must've been—and someone asked him: why haven't you written a memoir? And Mailer said I don't think writers should write memoirs. He said: I think a writer's childhood is like a big piece of quartz, and for the rest of his life he's shining a light through that quartz. He didn't want to look too closely and risk not having something to refract the light afterward.

I read this and though: oh shit. But I was so grateful I'd found a way into this early 70′s, single mother, drugs and violence things—stuff I'd been trying, we're talking 6 or 7 years of me working in different ways to get at some of these ideas through fiction—I thought, If this is my last book, who gives a shit. It's worth it.

Because here's the thing about that Mailer line: what about these other quartzes? What about being a husband and a father, which are the best parts of my life? When I look back at my own fiction, I see a lot of what I dealt with directly in Townie. I've never believed in the idea that there are good or bad people—I just don't buy the distinction. There's a line by Waits, in a song on Heart Attack and Vine, he says: There is no devil, there's just God when he's drunk. What I'm saying is: in my GREs, I scored a 96% in the analytical section. I'm good at critical thinking and all that, and I enjoy taking apart art and essays, I just really don't do it with my own stuff. I don't want to.

There's this great William Stafford essay, this small essay—it's a short essay, not a small essay—called "The Way of Writing," and he says "A poet must put himself into a state of openness or receptivity. You know you are receiving the poem when 1) you are willing to accept anything that comes, whatever it is, and 2) you're willing to fail." I have all this stuff today—I'm an athiest who prays my ass off—but I'm going to teach some today, and do a reading, I'm doing all this stuff, and I don't want to fail. But that's what we have to do in writing—we have to risk that.

And then I think: if we allow ourselves that openness, that receptivity, we're gonna tap into something more universal. Because there's only one thing: if art is Tolstoy's definition, there's only one thing that can transfer from one heart to another like that: the truth. You capture the small truth, you'll capture the big truth. Because the thing about the truth is it's visceral—you know when you're in the presence of truth, in whatever way, in whatever form. My wife's a dancer, we've been together for 23 years, and I'm amazed when I can watch her do something and it makes me feel something. I'm amazed at how that stuff, even if we don't have a language for it, can be transmitted.

Some stuff we missed in 2011

Because we work full-time–and spend what little free time we have pretending to be real-life writer-type people (like those Sex and the City chicks!)–it's hard to cover even a fraction of all the books released each year. This was especially true for 2011, which saw a huge range of works from some very talented authors, as well as a few clunkers. Let's start there:

A Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks

It was the premise that got me: our protagonist, known only as the Kid, fresh out of prison for a sexually-based offense, moves into a homeless camp beneath a Florida overpass, where he is forced to wear a tracking device on his ankle. After a police raid on the camp, the Kid befriends an enigmatic sociology professor, who is drawn to him because of his similarities to Huck Finn. To be sure, this is a stunning premise, full of wit, suspense, and the kind of compassion for characters that very few authors can pull off, particularly when the characters are as reprehensible as the Kid. The problem, however, lies in the prose; clunky, lumpy, and dry, it bumbles on seemingly without direction (until almost halfway through the 400+ page book), nudged along by a plot that at times demands a little too much suspension of disbelief from the reader. Also, Banks seems to have some aversion to commas–a stylistic technique, no doubt, intended to underscrore the Kid's wild nature, but really it just makes the prose difficult to follow through much of the book.

 

The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

I've read every single thing that Tom Perrotta has ever written, and I will continue to do so, as long as he continues to write books like The Leftovers. An interesting departure from the author's customary Cheeveresque comfort zone, The Leftovers is is at once a new take on the post-apocalyptic genre and a subtle skewering of that Left Behind series, in which the "survivors" of the Rapture have to contend with their wretched lot (and the rise of the antichrist). "The leftovers," in this case, are exactly that–those people left behind after a Rapture-like event, as the critics are fond of calling it, empties the planet of several billion people. In fact, that term–"Rapture-like event"–is strikingly appropriate since Perrotta does not preoccupy his characters with theological speculations as to why all these people just up and vanished. Rather, the book focuses on societies' efforts to rebuild, to forge ahead in the wake of what, at the end of the day, is really an immense tragedy. Perrotta navigates the story with a deft kind of humor (for example, the hipsterish doomsday cults that have sprung up in response to the "event"), as well as the same dramatic precision that one would expect from the author of Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher. And while the plot does edge toward the convoluted side, especially in regard to those cults, The Leftovers is ultimately an extremely enjoyable read.

 

The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard

Easily one of the best books of 2011, this one surprised me. I'm guessing it was Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides that made first-person inclusive tense so fashionable (see: Justin Torres' We the Animals), and so naturally I had already decided before reading that this book was simply another spin-off of that ilk. However, in the same way that Suicides was so powerful because of the first-person inclusive, so too does Fates' collective narrative voice make it resonate. The story begins with the disappearance of 16-year-old Nora Lindell, but the book's focus is the teenage boys who knew her and admired and/or resented her. Moving back and forth through time, the narrative tracks the lives of these five young men and the ways in which Nora's disappearance (which quickly becomes a secondary issue in the book) has contributed to their transition into adulthood. Paralleling this is a gorgeous hypothetical narrative about what might have happened to Nora–or perhaps what these young men would have hoped happened to her, if only to put their own minds at ease about the probable circumstances of her vanishing. Pittard's prose is swift, elegant, and the characters frighteningly plausible in their fear, hopefulness, resiliency, and foolishness. The Fates Will Find Their Way is one you don't want to miss.

Pollock!

Donald Ray Pollock blew my mind massively almost now four years back on the release of his story collection Knockemstiff, stories for which the term gritty's almost comically simplistic (interview I did with him from that time right here). Here's what I can remember as clearly as anything else: an alcoholic in one story rubbing the nub of his distended liver, which was poking out from his torso, forming a bump on hi skin, a fact I've assumed is truly possible though I've made no effort to verify such gruesomeness. There are other distinct moments of the book's stories I recall, though what's been lastingly significant about the thing is less the specifics and more the feel of the thing. You've likely already read something that comes close to the Pollockian feeling in fiction—if you've read Woodrell, you've got a sense of it (though), ditto Frank Bill—and, happily, for those of us with the good taste to appreciate it, Pollock's style seems of late to be getting a foothold (seen Justified? Sure, that's Leonard, and it's funnier than Pollock's stuff, but that hilly thriller stuff—the middle-south world of Kentucky and Tennessee, West Virginia and southern Indiana and Ohio—seems to be catching on more and more).

What Pollock absolutely excells at is a sort of righteous awfulness. In this, of course, he's working terrain also covered by a different voice: McCarthy, Cormac. There's a scary but amazing lack, in all of Pollock's stuff, of moralizing: folks do terrible, terrible things, and badness ends up often just as punished (or barely, or un-) as good stuff. This happens: the child orphaned by his dad's suicide, or the other child orphaned by her mother's murder (at the hands of her father). These things happen.

In the briefest sketches, The Devil All the Time is the story of Arvin Russell—he's the one orphaned by his dad's suicide (which suicide transpires shortly after the agonizing death, by cancer, of his wife Charlotte [a woman Willard, the dad, meets literally on the busride back to his hometown after WWII, meets her at a coffee shop, and you should be aware early on that the sweetest, most tender relationship in this book—the one seemingly built off inevitability and fate, stars and all that—is so gruesomely snuffed so early on there's no way to not catch some slight whiff of certain structural impossibilities in Pollock's world—basically that such innocence hasn't heat or meat enough to last against badness's throttling]), and he's the one we track as he grows up with his grandmother and uncle, and he's the one we track as he rights the wrongs he's able to. He rights wrongs pretty mercilessly himself, yes (the bodycount in this book is in the double digits, though most of them aren't Arvin's doing), but you cannot stop rooting for him—there's this righteousness that Pollock so perfectly nails, and Arvin's ultimately an innocent who, in learning some of the world's darker depths, has to stick his head under that water as well.

I'd gladly quote at length from this book, but you're best served by just picking it up and reading a passage on your own. Actually, though, nobody picks up books now. Hm. Okay, here then: at random, here's a passage so you can get some tonguefeel of what Pollock does:

 

Arvin unwrapped the cloth carefully. The only gun his father had kept at home was a .22 rifle, and Willard never allowed him to touch it, let alone shoot it. Earskell, on the other hand, had handed the boy a 16-gauge Remington and took him to the woods just three or four weeks after he came to live with them. "In this house, you better know how to handle a gun unless you want to starve to death," the old man had told him.

 

That's not even all that great evidence of the strength of Pollock's writing, but it certainly gives a clear enough view of 1) the solidness of his sentences, as if each is carved, able to support whatever comes, and 2) the confidence, the propulsion of the story. This book's got not a bit of navel-gazing, no moments of characters suddenly having introverted flights of consideration, chapters carried along through one person's deliberation over minor trials. Which is the other thing to note: the violence of this book, about which I've said plenty, but you'll soon have your fill of anyway. Here's your phrase: prayer log. When you read the book and understand, you'll half wish you didn't.

Knockemstiff was auspicious as hell, a terrific debut, but I'm here to make clear two big things. First: The Devil All the Time is among the very best books of last year (it hit last July, I think, and I just missed it, had it shelved, skipped it for too long, who knows), which confirms that, no, Pollock was not just fucking around in Knockemstiff. Which is the second point: Devil is a great book, and Pollock is now, officially, no mistakes made, the Real Deal. Devil's got a layered, nuanced, complicated, massively satisfying plot, and features a dozen fully-fleshed characters, and Pollock's no longer a guy who hit the ground running with some of the tightest short fiction going anywhere. Now he's got a Hell Yes novel. Now we know how good he can get from book to book. Now we have some idea about how excited to get for whatever he does next.

Rock + Roll (+ ghosts)

            There've been two recent rock books which have each been, in their way, intersting. First was This Is a Call, the Dave Grohl bio, and there's just about nothing bad to say about the book (written, by the by, by Paul Brannigan). It got knocked a bit for being surfacey or topical, but, the truth is Grohl's music is such that it awesomely resists navel gazery, and it's fair to say his music's a good reflection of the man. Grohl's someone who, toward the book's end, says such awesomely rock stuff (I don't have the book in front of me–lent it to a friend–but he says something along the lines of we just kicked Detroit's ass, and now we're gonna head up to Toronto and rip their balls off [except of course it actually sounds cool in the book when he says it]) you just can't help liking him. He is, as famously as he was the drummer for Nirvana and the *everything* of Foo Fighters, the nicest man in rock, and this book will do nothing to change your mind. If you're in the mood for a good rock bio, this is damn near perfect.

            Then there's The Book of Drugs by Mike Doughty. This one's far, far harder to parse. I'll put this glad and easily on the table at the start: I fucking love Soul Coughing, still have their music on iTunes, still happily listen to it, and still think fondly of the shows of theirs I saw. I'll argue hard about how great they were and how well they (I think) hold up. I'm also enough of a fanboy to admit I've got Skittish, Doughty's first solo disc, which I love fervently, and I've even got his book of poetry, Slanky, which, no, I don't read as much as I read other books of poetry, but it's now made it through 4 moves in the last decade, so clearly it's staying around. All this by way of saying: the following review's written by someone who had very very high hopes.

 

For the first part of The Book of Drugs, Doughty's actually a rolickingly interesting guide—he talks about his brother, his parents (huge fighters), his own chemical imbalances (bipolar), his background (here's rad amazement: his dad was a professor at West Point, which is [probably obviously] where Doughty grew up). SC or Doughty solo fans will quickly note that Doughty's skill with turning cool phrases or including merest and essential detail is 100% present in the book, just as in his music. I'd argue the first forty or so pages of The Book of Drugs are as rivetingly good as the early pages of just about any recent rock book.

Things begin to fall absolutely the fuck apart when Doughty gets to Soul Coughing. For the first fifty or so pages, Doughty sounds like an averagedly troubled, fuck-up drug kid—yes, he's engaging in all sorts of risky shit, and is being generally youthfully unwise, but there are all sorts of folks with such stories, and lots of lives (especially white, middle-class lives) progress through such periods without getting much scathed. He drops casual mention of some phenomenal folks (Sekou Sundiata and Jeff Buckley, for instance [the latter of whom Doughty pretty dickish about]), tells fun stories of strangely-named folks (Wind-Him-Up-And-Watch-Him-Go Joe), and generally is an okay guide.

But as of page 55, things turn toxic. Let's be real clear: I 100% believe Doughty that the Soul Coughing guys (who he can't even bring himself to name in the book, I shit you not) were pretty bad. I've no reason to doubt the veracity of Doughty's account. The problem with The Book of Drugs is that Doughty is so overwhelmingly hateful, still, of his bandmates. On the one hand: sure, of course—he's welcome to be hateful, still, of his bandmates. But the hige psychic whiplash the reader feels in this section is in watching Doughty transform from a dude who'd been, in the first chunk of the book, a basically good narrative guide, into a dude who's got such a monumental axe to grind and so much shit to iron out that the book's just infinitely bogged down.

Here's what I mean: on page 55, we're given the first instance of drummer Yuval Gabay refusing to play a beat Doughty wants him to—explaining that the beat's been played out. Doughty's got his vision/idea for what he wants the song to sound like, Gabay's not doing it. Okay, so that's some friction. There's of course plenty more friction—Mark De Gli Antoni, the sampler, claims credit for coming up with samples that Doughty did, and Sebastian Steinberg, the bassist, seems to just generally be a disagreeable asshole. Worth noting is that Doughty's a decade younger than his bandmates, and, over and over, he mentions the age difference, and that problems arose from his assumptions that these guys knew better (but that, in retrospect, they were using him).

So: Soul Coughing had assholes in it. This makes them like 100% of all bands everywhere, ever. The difference is that Doughty's axe can not seem to be ground enough: he stresses the toxicity of the band, but he never escalates the issues of the band enough to make it clear why finally, in 2000, he had to call it quits. There's static in how shitty things were: the band was made of assholes who seem to verifiably have dumped over and over on Doughty (easy measure: tell me when you've heard a fucking thing from De Gli Antoni, Steinberg, or Gabay since the early 2000s [Gabay in Coded Language and De Gli Antoni in Horse Tricks, both '99; Steinberg in 2001 playing bass for Beth Orton (I know Gabay's still doing stuff, but I can't imagine anyone claiming what he's doing is culturally tracked and serious)]), who was the one guy in that crew who had and has a legitimate, interesting, awesome musical sense to him. Doughty, certainly, was the one who made SC, and the others made it shitty. Okay.

But Doughty belabors the absolute shit out of this point, how pissed and screwed over he was. It's painful to read (and reader! this shit begins on page 55 and continues through page 175; it's almost exactly half the book, Doughty complaining about his old bandmates and documenting his escalating drug problems), and particularly painful because Doughty comes across as a smart, basically self-aware guy. Yet his old SC demons are so fierce he seems unable to get around them. Here's something from page 199:

"There is a Soul Coughing fan reading this whose heart I've just broken, who picked up the memoir of the guy form a band he loves, and it turns out I hate what brought him to this book in the first place. Some Soul Coughing fan is going to read this and come to a sow to implore me to love what he loves, to sell me on it. How can you hate this? It's yours."

Here's the problem with that paragraph: in the fucking next paragraph Doughty writes "My bitterness demolishes me, wakes me at 5AM…" Dude admits his bitterness fucks him, yet this book's soaked thick with such bitterness. When Doughty's not pissing on the legacy of his band, he's articulating how he used people, how he abused drugs, how bad things got, how he's getting better. There's some way to pitch this book as something gimlet-eyed and raw and without sentimentality, but that's not fair: the book has one of the most cloying, Hallmarky endings I've ever seen, and Doughty's clearly not afraid of sentiment. I don't know. Maybe all this is a false dust-up over a no-big-deal thing to begin with, but ultimately Doughty and his The Book of Drugs fails because Doughty's far too hugely conflicted for this to work. Doughty's bandmates were assholes, and his band was toxic: okay. He hates the work that Soul Coughing did (it's complicated: he says at times that he hates it, or that he just wants it far in the past [obviously there's a distinction]): fine (though if you hate the work from before, maybe you should resist saying it could've been Led Zeppelin or the Beastie Boys). Doughty, whatever else he wants to believe, should at least recognize that there was magic and beauty in the misery of Soul Coughing. This is not one of those good-work-comes-from-suffering claims (listen to El Oso—that's the weakest album, and certainly the one in which Doughty was suffering mightiest), but let's be real: Doughty solo has neither created as compelling music as what Soul Coughing did, and he doesn't draw/sell as he used to. I don't want to pretend that second metric should matter at all, but the first one's worth acknowledging: in an interview, Doughty says that if he'd had his way, SC's songs would sound much more like his solo stuff now. That's fine and all, but be honest and put in Irresistible Bliss and his latest, then say which features more compelling music. Maybe this is just me, but I'll take one "Lazybones" for every thousand "Na Na Nothing"'s.

Which, again: this is not to claim that good art must come from suffering. The whole point of The Book of Drugs is to document Doughty's experience in drugs and Soul Coughing, and his drug experience sounds as gruesomely harrowing as anything (and if you saw him solo or with SC, knowing now how fucked he was then might change how you recall the shows). But let's not pretend, for however good Doughty may now feel, that his music's got anything like the sparky charge of his earlier stuff. He's welcome to hate the old stuff, obviously. But his insistence that he's moving away from that stuff in a desire to leave a painful past behind misses a telling aspect: however painful that shit was, something sure as hell was generative and going on back then. Rick Moody, interviewing Doughty, says he doesn't begrudge the man his feelings toward his former bandmates and all that, and I don't either. What sucks, though, is that Doughty, for all the energy and time he spends talking about getting sober and going to meetings (AA and NA, one'd imagine), seems ultimately a pretty unwise, small-hearted dude. There's a great line—some old proverb—that says I know what I've given you; I don't know what you've received. In his unwillingness or inability to imagine his former music in any way other than that in which he experienced, Doughty comes off like one more Rivers Cuomo, a ton-eared man claiming to dislike what's clearly good to lots of other ears. That's not criticism; it's just too bad for all involved.

(final ed note: I'd hoped to interview Doughty about this, but things didn't work—there are compellingly interesting interviews with him here and here and here and here.)

An Interview with Tom Zoellner

Tom Zoellner should be on your radar for his book Uranium, and if not that then his The Heartless Stone. The former's about what the title says it'll be about, and the latter's an earlier work about diamonds and the diamond industry. Both are fantastically good books: Zoellner's among the group of microhistorians who can take seemingly inertly boring objects and tug riveting stories from their histories.

His latest, however, is a harder, sadder, couldn't-see-it-coming book. A Safeway in Arizona is Zoellner's book on, at the most basic level, the Gabby Giffords shooting, though limiting the book to that boilerplate is like saying Infinite Jest is about tennis. A Safeway in Arizona is a book which tries to take measure of the various factors that led to that morning in Arizona when a clearly troubled young guy opened fire. What is it about America, and Arizona in particular, that makes such a catastrophe possible? In chapters which examine the infamous Sheriff Joe, talk radio, the ease of purchasing a firearm, the community college which Laughner'd attended, and the come-reinvent-yourself, don't-worry-about-community atmosphere that's been Arizona's calling card seemingly since its statehood, Zoellner, with tenderness, and while involving himself (he loved Gifford; they've been friends for years) in the narrative, offers no answers, but provides a markedly new way to consider atrocities like these.

I of course would be interested in this book regardless of my background, but the fact that I was at Virginia Tech on 4/16/07 certainly influences my interest in this topic—not in catastrophes, but in looking at them and considering more than knee-jerk, most easily denounced factors. What Zoellner's offering in this book is a consideration of the factors as a whole which lead to his friend being shot in the head (along with six others dead and 18 others wounded)—how did the factors add up. It's a hugely sad—the pages feel thick with a friend's grief—and necessary book (here's Slate's take, for the record). I was lucky enough to spend some time on the phone with Mr. Zoellner at the end of December and, compressed a bit for clarity, the following's the interview.

You're in LA now, right? Why LA? And what, in general, is your biographic story—you touch on this in the book, of course, but any more color'd be great.

I'm in LA now because I took a job at Chapman University. My story in brief is that I'm from Arizona and I wanted to get the F out of AZ for various reasons. I wound up at Lawrence University, in Appleton, WI—which is not a perfect school, but it's what I needed at the time. After graduating, I worked for really small newspapers for quite a while and then ended my journalism career in 2003 at the Arizona Republic.

I'm really curious about this book—I think it's incredible, and hugely moving, but I'm curious how you did it—literally, how'd you put it together, how'd you make decisions about a book which is so clearly deeply felt and personal. Was there anything like a model you had to work with? Also: you were finishing a book right before the shootings, right? You mention that in the book.

The book came of a firm belief of mine that most events don't happen in isolation, but they're embedded in a fabric of contributing factors. And so when I started to write the book it was without any model in mind, but only a couple of vague but strong beliefs. I really didn't know what I was doing—I was working from the knowledge/certainty that there was something important to say here. It came out in a way that's somewhat rough but unpolished. The other thing to know is the book was written very quickly—essentially in four months.

The book I was working on—which was finished just a couple days before Gabby was shot—is a book called The Train. It's a biography of the railroad, how it irrevocably changed the world in ways we can't or don't fully understand. A navigable landscape, far-flung nation states—none of that would be possible without railroads. This is an invention which made it possible for humans to travel faster than a horse could run. Prior to trains, transit required muscles, wind, or water, then here's this machine which might have even been invented by the Romans (there's evidence that they were, before the fall of the empire, close to building a crude system), but it wasn't till the 1820′s that it all came together.

How hard was it to allow yourself to become part of the story? And I don't know how to ask this, but I wonder about the difficulty of this book—you mention in the acknowledgements that you sort of had to be convinced to do this. How much reluctance did you feel as you wrote, or as the book came up to being published?

When you're a newspaper reporter covering a story in which you're involved, there's always a disclosure, for ethical reasons. My entanglement with Gabby, both in friendship and in a political way, had to be disclosed, if only for ethical reasons. But the disclosure says something which I think plays into the point of the book, which is ultimately, openly about human connection. The urge toward isolation and privacy—it's not necessarily a bad thing, but there's a narrative in Arizona that tends to drive people apart. And I had a lonely time of it in Arizona­—some of it was my fault, another part of that was that I don't think it's is a landscape that's particularly concerned with forging communities that foster a sense of connectedness. And Arizona's not a weird, freakish outlier; this has been going on for years in the US.

Just to round this out: there was this innate belief that Gabrielle had that we have to build people who have this common belief, she is such a wonderful maker of friends—she befriended me—who had a different set of values. I've always been about having a distant, superficial relationship with community, to sort of observe and understand but not really take part—which is a journalistic pose—and Gabby was more about get in and get your hands dirty, plant crops, live there. That was a revalation. She embraced Tuscon in a way I never did. Going to work for her was such a privelige, such a new thing for me.

As far as difficulty or reluctance: the only reason a book should exist in the world is because it's necessary, because it says something insightful about the world. It should bring some greater understanding. I think this book tries to do that. But, yes, it was a hard book in a lot of ways.

The book ends up being amazing without necessarily being prescriptive or heavy-handed—I think its amazingness is actually because it refuses to say "We need to do all this." There's that last bit, right at the end, trying to bring certain aspects to this sort of set-together clarity, but nothing overt. I don't know if there's a question about all that—I just really like that you chose not to make the book's tone hectoring or combative.

I think we have to understand that ecomonic uncertainty breeds an antagonistic flavor of politics. We reflexively look for domestic enemies, but we need to understand that much of what we hear on talk radio is about entertainment—it's not a genuine search for answers. We need to look at the incredible ease of purchasing a firearm without any meaningful review as well as safety training—had, for instance, Laughner been forced even to just take an hour-long course about how to handle firearms, there's no way the shooting would've happened, either because he wouldn't have done the class, or because someone there would've recognized the mental trouble he was in.

I think we need to understand that the types of communities that are created for us are not those that we want to live in. The isolationist impulse is fixed in physical place by how our neighborhoods are configured, in sunbelt towns like tuscon, and if you add on to that the transience, the way that we restlessly move about as Americans—and I'm as guilty of this as anyone—but for every 3 people moving into tuscon, there're 2 moving out.

The other thing too is we need to recognize that there's great social value in a basic public health network. The government absolutely has a role in making sure that impoverished citizens who are mentally ill have access. In a place like Arizona where they had to sell their state capitol (for a cash hit)—these services are not glamorous, they're sort of quotidian, and nobody gets elected on this stuff, but when it's neglected, it's devastating.

I'm curious how you ended up with the structure you've got for the book. It feels wonderfully organic, like it follows a very natural course, but I'm interested in how it felt with a mountain of info.

There were a number of things to talk about, starting with the absolutely toxic campaign of 2010—this real vicious talk radio, guns, paranoia, created a sense of disquietude in the state. There's no evidence that Laughner cared about immigrants, for instance, but the shooting was connected in some way to the nastyness that was in the air after that election.

So there was mental illness to talk about, schizophrenia to try to explain, and tracing his trail in his quite miserable post-high-school life. And then there's my relationship to Gabby, and the history of Arizona, all these bits of tile that had to go into it. There was not the clean narrative through line I'd've liked.

Are you happy with the book then?

Am I happy with the book? I did the best I could. I wish the book did not have to exist. I'd give almost anything to make the thing at the Safeway not happen. Without that kind of discussion—how does this sieckening rip in the social fabric not take place—the shooting would be a greater tragedy.

Who are some other writers you like? Are there are folks who do writing that you read and think: that's along the lines of what I'm trying to do, too.

John Gunther wrote a series of books—he was a reporter for the Chicago Daily News for many years between WWI+II, and after the war he wrote a series of books called Inside Europe, Inside the USA, Inside South America, Inside Africa—doorstop length books on how a continent worked. The writing is just robust, and the deep sociology in the books still holds true.

In fiction, two of the greatest living authors are Richard Ford and TC Boyle. Boyle's medium is the short story and he's the reason I wanted to be a writer in the first place. There's also Charles Bowden, and being able to befrind Bowden has been a tremendous privelge.

One of the more fun apects of interviewing people is asking them to explain certain un-understandable things. For instance: I can ask the editor of Texas Monthly what the deal is with Texas, since I'll never, in my midwesternness, really get it. Similarly: what the hell's the deal with Sheriff Joe Arpaio?

(laughs) Sheriff Joe's very good at figuring out what motivates people on an emotional level and he is personally very compelling—he's got charisma, he's got this unabashed self regard that makes him extremely hard to dislike. He's harsh, certainly, but he's charming. It really is a certain sort of rogouish personality that's from a distance likeable. There are antagonistic universes which the sheriff creates and then uses to come in and look like a superhero. He sets up this paranoid scenario—there are dark forces that are ready to come through the window unless we've got someone to come take care of things. And he's of course that someone.

And, of course, Sheriff Joe's work is the opposite of the slow, boring work to build compromises or structures that're necessary to do real policy, to get things done.

But Joe's got great appeal to voters who are disconnected from their communities, or those that are just passing through and may not even be voting anyways—the center tends to slip to the extremes in primaries, and you have the quality of electing people based on fear or emotion rather than competence. You see this just a little bit clearer focused in AZ—because of disconnectedness, and the high grade of newcomers, the high grade of paranoia. People in Arizona are bellwethers for some of the more troubling aspects of life in the US.

 

"It ain't rainin anymore": A review of Ryan Adams' Ashes and Fire

If it seems like just a few months ago we were talking about Ryan Adams, that's because we were. Dude comes out with an album like every other day. He's the Woody Allen of the music world–only, Adams' work is consistently, mind-bogglingly good (and yes, that's an unnecessary but nonetheless justified jab at Mr. Allen; Vicky Cristina Barcelona was a load of crap–you know it, I know it, the world knows it).

Whereas his previous album III/IV showcased the songwriter's bubbly indiepop side, Ashes and Fire finds Adams returning to the same soft, brooding, folksy aesthetic that made his first solo album Heartbreaker such a hit. It's infuriating enough that he's able to flip-flop so easily between styles (did you know that during his downtime in recording III/IV he wrote and produced a sci-fi metal album about interstellar warfare? Seriously. It's called Orion, for chrissake), but even more infuriating is the fact that he does it so well.

The songs are unabashedly basic, stripped-down, raw; the instrumentation is minimal. Tunes like "Save Me" and "Kindness" are driven by simple melodic hooks that, while not necessarily jaw-dropping, offer just enough cleverness to hold your attention. Then you've got songs like "Dirty Rain," which resonates with rich, haunting  imagery that cleverly belies the song's relaxed sound:

Last time I was here you were waiting/ You're not waiting anymore

The windows broke and the smoke's escaping/ a book's scattered across the floor

and the church bells ringing through the sirens/ and your coat was full of bullet holes

Last time I was here you were waiting/ You ain't waiting anymore.

But the real winner here is the title track "Ashes and Fire." It's a loping honky tonk number full of jangly guitar and a rowdy piano melody. Like all of the songs on the album, it is brief, uncomplicated, buzzing with images and ideas that refuse to coalesce into a single concept but instead demand that the listener interact, however briefly, in order to summon a "point." And this, I think, is one of Adams' largley unsung talents: his ability to craft songs that are both utterly simple and wonderfully complex. In the same way that Gram Parsons was able to get such economy from only a few chords, Adams' work is pointedly straightforward, accessible, at least in terms of melody; the complexity arises from the listener's interpretation: he isn't interested in handing us just a lovelorn narrative like some of his alt country contemporaries. Rather, Adams offers us a bouquet of poetics, sometimes seemingly at random, in each song; what we do with it is up to us, but whatever we come up with is guaranteed to move us.