Weston Cutter's Blog, page 27

Updates + Microreviews

1) Latest Kenyon thing here. Not sure it holds well, or makes tons of sense, but there we are (but for real: that new Orner's crazy fantastic). Same obsessions, new year.

2) Poem in the latest + always-great DIAGRAM.

3) Here's Erika Wright's blog. She's the poetry editor at Guernica, which is a great venue for good poetry, and she's apparently gonna choose one poem each week to focus on. This week, the inagrual week, she chose one of mine. Pretty rad.

4) I'll post, in the next few days, an interview with Tom Zoellner, but just know that his latest book, A Safeway in Arizona, is now available, and even if you, like me, have decided that in 2012 you need to spend more time reading fiction and poetry and less reading nonfiction, you still need to read this book. This book, unless criminally neglected, will be on lots of year-end lists in 11 months. For real.

Microreviews

Is that a Fish in Your Ear by David Bellos

The Poetry of Thought by George Steiner

 

            Both of these books are ultimately about language and thought, and the valences of strangeness and difficulty that obtain in considering language and thought. Frustratingly, I don't know how to clearly or well talk about these two books (here's maybe the background: I realized, on coming up to the new year and tallying [very roughly] books read and attention paid in the preceeding 12 months, that I'd read *way* too much nonfiction—like a toxic amount, like I'm not sure how to talk about nonfiction anymore and not all that clear how to read fiction and poetry well at present. After this many books of nonfiction, all I feel I can end up saying is: this book is good and it's about ______.). I will say this: Bellos is a translator, and any black-and-white notions of that art or skill you currently possess will be wiped, colored clean by his work—though if you've no interest in translation, that's fine; ultimately the book's about language and communication and thought.

            Steiner's book's thicker (though shorter) and less bouncily playful and fun than Bellos's (I'd love to know if there's such a thing as a bouncily playful Steiner book). You know Steiner: he's hard and fervently worth it; his books are delicious challenges, things which make your brains seethe good heat in effort. The Poetry of Thought tries to consider ways we're presented language, and what the structural aspects of the presentation of language de- and connotes and makes happen to the language, and the book has exactly the same sort of he-was-made-to-write-it whiff that Didion's Blue Nights did—in other words, this is Steiner's most Steiner book. Just get the thing and read it.

 

American Desperado by Jon Roberts and Evan Wright

 

A bit of a ploy, the set-up of the book: it's Evan Wright writing Jon Roberts' story. Here's the subtitle: My Life: from Mafia Soldier to Cocaine Cowboy to Secret Government Asset. If you've seen the easily Netflixable Cocaine Cowboy, you know Roberts; if you haven't seen that movie, imagine a character similar to the lead in Blow, that old JDepp movie. Regardless: this book's a yankingly riveting thing, and Wright's exactly perfect for the thing: dude writes gorgeously but has always clearly had a hankering and not-secret love for pulp and gunsmoke that makes this thing just a fucking blast. Get it and go.

 

Best Music Writing 2011, edited by Alex Ross

This is a Call: the Life and Times of Dave Grohl by Paul Brannigan

The former book's just a necessary purchase—Da Capo released Best Music each year, but A Ross's editorship is fantastic—they maybe haven't had this fun and clever and readable and sensible an editor since back in '01 when Hornby did it. The latter book's just (to quote Sleater-Kinney) good rock and roll fun: Grohl's apparently the nicest guy in rock on earth, and even if you're not some fanatic for Them Crooked Vultures or Foo Fighters (or if you're not dork enough to care that Grohl drummed for Tenacious D), you'll still have a hard time not enjoying yourself.

 

The Shadow World by Andrew Feinstein

 

Do not read this if you're at all prone to conspiracy theories. Just don't. I don't even know how much is wise to get into here. The book's subtitled Inside the Global Arms Trade and it's just fucking terrifying—you will be compellingly convinced that the arms industry is just hands-down the scariest thing on earth, and its influence + pull is shockingly terrifying (to say nothing of the massive corruption involved). What's that you say? What about the oil industry, or the pharmaceutical industry, or something like that? Here's the only answer that matters: the arms industry's the only one in which, as soon as the customer's purchased his good, he can literally instantly kill whoever sold him the good. This is a harrowing book. Read it, for sure, but have someone around who can talk you down from believing the whole world's some f'ed set-up.

TELLS US NOTHING: A Quick Interview with Jeff Alessandrelli

This has happened before, but every time it happens I still love it: someone I've never read writes and asks if I'd be willing to take a look at some recently published thing, and I almost always say yes, and then sometimes, if I'm very lucky, the thing I'm looking at ends up being one of the more interesting and lovely books of the year—in this case, Jeff Alessandrelli's Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound, a book about which I've been struggling for a few days thinking how to talk about. The book is beautifully lyric and is—in ways I don't think I'll be much good trying to articulate—a quiet book. I read it off and on three times in a bit over a week and I don't think I once played music while listening to it. The weirdness of this fact has to do of course with the fact that Erik Satie was a musician, and there are poems in this book which are on the page as musical scores. But stick with it: ultimately the book doesn't urge one toward some (boring, or at least foregone) appreciation for the music of poetry or some such; what the book does, I think, and very very well, is it ends up proposing questions about limits and silence and music and self. That's a fairly vague and broad way to talk about this book, but it holds, for me: the (according to Alessandrelli) little book packs quite a punch in terms of ideas. It's just a fantastic thing—you should get and read this book as soon as possible. For real. Here are five questions with JA re his book:

In however you can address this, how did this book come together? It's got a cohesive elegance that doesn't at all feel forced–doesn't feel like it was engineered or anything, yet clearly it's been put together with care. However you want to address this, go for it. Also: extra points for how the f you found your way to watusies, which is maybe the perfect whimsy word for the whole endeavor.

Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound had a fairly long gestation. In brief, though, I started listening to Satie in the winter of 2006 when I lived in Portland, Oregon at a 2 story house that had no heat; when I woke up one morning I could see my breath. Every day before I went to work I put on a Satie mix cd that my friend Dylan had made me, one that had on it Satie's "hits," as it were—the "Gymnopédies" and "Gnossienne" pieces, as well as a four minute version of his 18 hour long "Vexations." At the time I didn't know anything about Satie's life and simply liked the music because I didn't have to listen to it; it was soothing background music, music that asked absolutely nothing out of me as its listener. For about 8 months I listened to that Satie mix cd nearly every morning. Then I lost it, forgot about it and moved to Lincoln, Nebraska in August of 2008. No Satie at all for a year. But in Lincoln I began reading (sometimes rereading) a lot of serial/ longer poems–John Berryman's The Dream Songs and Homage To Mistress Bradstreet, Wallace Stevens' "The Auroras of Autumn," Anne Carson's Short Talks, a hefty amount of Jack Spicer's work, Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, Louis Zukosky's All: The Collected Short Poems,1923-1958, Mathias Svalina's serial-poem-chapbook Creation Myth–and also began listening to a lot of instrumental/ vaguely electronic music, particularly Boards of Canada, Tortoise, Brian Eno and John Cage's "Ryoanji." One day—it's a bit murky, as these things often are—I thought of Satie again and on a whim bought a box Satie set (6 cds) online for something like $25. It came in the mail, I listened to it a lot and one day I Googled Erik Satie and found out how much of a weirdo he was; I had not known this before. I became intrigued and interlibrary loaned (it's out of print, costs $89.75 used, $373.60 new and I'm way too cheap) his A Mammal's Notebook: Collected Writings of Erik Satie. It's a great, odd book, and after flipping through it for a week I checked out a couple of (often musty) biographies of Satie from the library also. I kept listening to his music and one day the phrase/title Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound popped into my head. Do I know how or why this occurred? I do not, although the word "watusies" is one that I've always liked because it's 50's era old and disused and not-so-faintly antiquated. I wrote a poem called "Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound" and liked it, but I liked the title of the poem as much if not more than the actual poem, so I decided to write another poem called "Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound." Then a bunch of poems with that title. From there the 5 sections of the book came together somewhat "organically" in the sense that I was reading a lot of serial poems in tandem with my listening to Satie and at one point it occurred to me that I myself was writing a serial-poem also. Initially every poem in the book was going to be entitled "Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound" but at a certain point I grew tired of such insistence, and came up with the other primary titles/sections in the book. The title of each section was arrived at in different ways—various quotes by Satie played a large role—with the exception of the "Gnossienne" sheet music pieces—for those I wrote to each particular "Gnossienne" composition while listening to it (hence my inclusion of the sheet music for each). All told I started working on the collection in late 2009 and was done by March of 2011.

I'd imagine someone somewhere's asked you about this, but I'm real interested in how repetition works for you, in this book or in your work in general. You've got lots of poems in here with the same title, so that the reader reads one and then the next and feels (at least I felt) like it was this sort of stereo experience, two things making sound together. Plus then there are the poems which are written along with music notation. Again: I hate to be so general and vague, but however you want to tackle that, I'm all in.

Repetition of titles, phrases, etc.—for the most part while working on the collection I tried to mirror Satie's notion of repetition, one that he, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, placed a premium on. I mean, although a lot of people believe he was just screwing around, Satie's "Vexations" takes 18-20 hours to play and consists of the same series of chords over and over and over and over and over and over and over. One dude played it for 15 hours and then had to stop because he was experiencing intense hallucinations. While writing Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound I decided pretty early on that I wanted the book to have a minimum of titles, ones that the reader kept seeing over and over, layered, ones that hopefully accrued more meaning as the collection progressed. "Tells us nothing" is one phrase that I repeat several times in the book because if Satie was one thing it was contrary, and he was adamant that who he was as a person had absolutely nothing to do with who he was as a musician (he claimed to not even be a musician) and vice-versa. This is total crap, of course, but I wanted to express this belief of his in some of the poems in the book, and repeatedly using the phrase "Tells us nothing" seemed to be the most direct way of doing so. And my use of repetition in the book is also, of course, a way of reflecting my own poetic laziness—coming up with good titles is hard work and simply using some of the same ones left me off the hook to a certain extent.

Are you big into music? This might end up being a retread of the first one, but how/why Satie? And, for those of us whose understanding of Satie is almost entirely academic/through free-jazz friends, does Satie *as* Satie in here really matter? I mean that with kindness and generosity: I guess maybe I'm curious how it's Satie in here *for you*—I read the thing without knowing thing #1 about the man other than the barest bio crap, yet I feel like I ultimately got the book, felt it. Was your intention maybe to introduce Satie?

Music—I'm definitely into music, always have been and probably always will. I don't have a readymade quote or sentence about the fairly hefty role it plays in my life, but music (of all kinds; certainly not just Satie or jazz/classical related stuff) plays a fairly hefty role in my life. I like the Notorious B.I.G. a lot. I like Nina Simone and David Bowie and the Fiery Furnaces and Silver Jews and Marianne Faithfull and Stan Getz and Will Oldham and The Grouch and Sleater-Kinney and the album "Ascension" by John Coltrane and the album "Aftermath" by The Rolling Stones. I don't really like Tupac, Morrissey or The Smiths—I know, I know, sorry. But other than that I'm open and often game.

As for Satie "as" Satie in the book—you're right. In some of the poems he's staunchly a historical figure and in other poems he barely appears or when he does appear it's only to highlight a dog's overly long snout. All the Satie quotes in the book are accurate and I did go to some length to use historical information—the aforementioned A Mammal's Notebook, of course, as well as, by the end, 4 biographies on Satie and some online info also—but I hope that even if someone doesn't know Satie or his music in at least a few of the poems it's a moot point; in those poems "Erik Satie" isn't the historical version of "Erik Satie." I did this for a number of reasons, the most pertinent probably being that I'm not a historian, I'm a poet, and I didn't want to only use historical info in the book—this probably sounds cliché, but I wanted to utilize my imagination also. In an ideal world my intention with Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound was to introduce my personal version of Erik Satie to the world, one that no doubt also has a healthy dose of Jeff Alessandrelli in it. I'm not sure if I succeeded in this, but that was/is definitely my end goal with the book.

 

What writers do you like? Are there folks with whom you feel something like aesthetic allegiance? In other words: is this book arriving (or did you intend it to arrive) in some aesthetic context alongside other stuff (not that it'd *have* to be read with other stuff, of course, but you know)?

Writers I like: I like Jules Renard a lot. I like Plutarch. I like Graham Foust and Michael Earl Craig and Sarah Manguso and Benjamin Péret. I like all of the aforementioned writers I mentioned in question #1 quite a bit and Chris Adrian and David Markson and Blake Butler and Lyn Hejinian and Marjorie Perloff and Frank O'Hara. Satie's prose in A Mammal's Notebook is caustic and sarcastic and often cynical and thoroughly enjoyable on the whole. My favorite writer of all time is Samuel Beckett—I named my dog Beckett Long Snout after him. I really like Mary Ruefle's poetry.

As for particular aesthetic allegiances/contexts, I'm not entirely sure—it's a book of poetry that was inspired—both directly and indirectly—by a half-obscure 19th and 20th century French avant-garde composer. Certainly while writing it I worried about this fact, mostly because the audience for contemporary books of poetry is small as it is, and it's made even smaller (in this case at least) by my insistence on using Erik Satie as both an oblique and direct subject matter/ point of reference/inspiration. I would hope that the serial-poem aspect shines through for people and I read and re-read farcical serial-poem works of Jack Spicer's like "A Fake Novel about the Life of Arthur Rimbaud" while writing Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound. But I feel influenced by so many different writers, thinkers, musicians, etc. that it'd be hard for me to explicitly state the definitive aesthetic context the book groups in with. I'd like to be more well-read, I can say that for sure.

What's the view out your window?

Right now the view out my window is snowy. In the neighborhood where I live in Lincoln the houses are grouped too tightly together and sometimes I feel encroached upon by garage doors and whitewash. I can see an old urn in my backyard that has 4 inches or so of snow blossoming out of it. It's washed-over today but I often have a great view of the Nebraskan sky—and at night I can sometimes hear the clouds moving above me.

Flash Reviews + Other Updates

Some from-wherever stuff:

1. Still going strong @ the Kenyon Review blog: interviews with the fantastic Roxane Gay and Richard Buckner, and some mild ramblings about one of the year's absolute best books: Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. I wanted to write more about the thing, but nothing I could write would be as interesting as what Kahneman already has. Get and read that book pronto.

2. Not only do I have new work in Nashville Review (which is totally, totally badass: check their archives for some serious mind-blowing), but see that image to the left? That's the cover art for the new issue. I've been waiting years to have my name noticeably on the cover of something. That may make me sound preeny and whatever, but I don't care: it's a thrill.

3. Also new work in Devil's Lake, a badass mag I've been excited about for a long while.

It occurs to me there's been this stack of books I've had next to me for a bit, books I've wanted to write long things about but which, given the year's coming end and that I'd rather these things at least just get mentioned, I'm gonna flash review here, for now:

Damascus by Joshua Mohr. Roxane Gay interviewed Mohr @ HTML, which you should absolutely read. I've liked Mohr's stuff before (Some Things that Meant the World still floors), but I wasn't wilded by this one. It's good, yes but didn't knock me sideways—it's a lot kinder book than his previous burners, but also the language feels less leper-y, less fall-apart-at-the-touch, and also moderately less torqued. It's still—that said—10x the book most other books are—a 2 Dollar Radio/Mohr book's head/shoulders above the bulk of what passes for bookery otherwise.

Blue Nights by Joan Didion. You've seen this one written about elsewhere, over and over. Fine. And of course you're a fool to miss anything Didion, and of course you know the tragic awfulness of things, how, immediately following publication of her Year of Magical Thinking her daughter died and so she lost *all* family at age like 77 all in the span of like 3 years. She looked like a wizardy gnomic seen-too-much being when I saw her read in NYC in 2005. And so now Blue Nights, about the loss of her daughter, and here's the thing: Didion's been writing of world-ending issues forever, or _______-ending issues forever (lest you believe this is the second big thing she's written after the death of someone close to her, recall After Henry, about her editor), and so the shock of this thing's not the circumstances or specifics of the loss, and it's not even Didion's style, or whatever's left of it after she's had so many aspects of her life shocked into unrecognizable new twists—it's that she still fights her way into dashing to and for and around meaning. This book's a pricey miracle.

Pulp and Paper by Josh Rolnick. Great stories expertly done. I don't know that much necessarily to say about a book like this—years back when Thisbe Nissen's Out of the Girl's Room and Into the Night hit, I thought I'd never read anything like it again, but then, of course, one does—one reads, again and again, well-crafted, gorgeous books in which characters take center stage and you close the thing feeling as if you've fully entered, smelled, touched certain lives other than your own. It's a book you close feeling full, larger than when you'd begun.

 

 

 

A Plague of Prisons by Ernest Drucker. If you're at all interested in social justice, and if you're looking for the scariest but maybe most necessary companion read to the all-time great social-problem-non-fiction books (Random Family, of course, but also last year's crazy excellent Just Like Us plus also maybe that great old Fist Stick Knife Gun), Plague of Prisons is what you've got to get to next. It's of course terrifying: Drucker's looking at prisons themselves as a social sickness, instead of just focusing on the crime and violence we believe leads to prisons. It seems to this reader not remotely coincidental that Sheriff Joe, in Maricopa County, has just been called out for being the racist f*ck he is: his ability to get away with what he's for years gotten away with would, Drucker'd argue, be almost predictable: given the sickness of overprisoning in this country, Sheriff Joe's an almost automatic result. The book's scary and genius like that, and it came out in September and I should've mentioned it a long long while ago. Read the thing.

Going All the Way with John Jeremiah Sullivan: An Interview

John Jeremiah Sullivan's got a modest, measured voice, a thing that I can't help but thinking of as having sounded sturdy. His voice sort of reminds me of someone's, though I can't think of who that person is.

In my eight or so years of interviewing people I've yet to comment on anyone's voice though Sullivan seems worthy to be the exception—his voice, on the page, has been among the most fantastic and gorgeous of the last decade or so. Tempted though I am, I will not here mention at length how Sullivan's voice is among the very best going in contemporary nonfiction, and I will absolutely not go to lengths about how, for those of us who will never be able to get enough Wallace, Sullivan is who we should now be tracking (reasons for not going to lengths on that: seemingly everyone everywhere puts Sullivan and Wallace together).

What I will say is that Pulphead is among the year's best books, and any time Sullivan's got new work in any magazine anywhere is reason for celebration, and also this: there is a difference between Sullivan and Wallace, a significant and real difference. Though both writers will, if you're reading them correctly, make you a better person, and will make you see the world bigger and with more color and strangeness and also more love, Sullivan's work ultimately seems to be asking for or providing something different from Wallace's, a less whiz-bangy burst of stuff and more a deep thrum—ultimately the feel is a matter of connection in Sullivan, whereas for Wallace it felt more about recognition. At the end of Sullivan's best stuff (the piece about his brother's near death is up there), the reader feels less like something's been revealed but that something's been awakened, some deep part of himself made aware.

Sullivan awesomely spent almost an hour on the phone answering these questions on a Wednesday and Friday morning. There were tributaries that've been compressed or cut for clarity, but this is fairly accurate.

How's it going? (ed note: Sullivan had to call back like a quarter hour after the first call, saying there was a plumber situation going on). What's this plumber thing?

There's this candlelight tour through historic homes in our area, and we've used the opportunity to attend to some home maintenance we'd been meaning to get to. I've also been reading ships logs from 1722. I've been working on this book for many years set in the first half of the 18th century, and the plan was to have a chapter about that done and excerpted in the Paris Review by the end of the year, but the plan is shrinking.

What's the book?

It has to do with two tattooed Native American warriors, who were taken to Europe and toured around.

Nonfiction?

It is nonfiction, but it's meticulously researched nonfiction, more academic and scholarly than what I'm used to, and so I'm appropriately nervous to be wading into that.

I ask this of all writers I know who've felt some pull or influence from DFWallace. The interesting part about him is that there are so many different possible things to take from him. So I'm curious if you can talk about Wallace at all, and what you've taken from him, or what he means to you, or whatever.

(long, long pause)

What do you say about your influences? They're necessarily opaque. I know that he…encountering him changed me as a writer and a thinker, partly in himself, and how he led to other writers and ways to understand what was happening to English prose in the 90′s.

But talking about him as an influence is very, very hard. It requires taking him out of context to see him like that. For me he was—he didn't dominate my writing; there were so many competing voices. But during the Harper's years, when I was there and he was still writing for them, when his copy came in, there was a radioactive quality to it. At any given time, there are only a limited number of writers who are operating at that level, who are sustaining that much weight in their prose, and we can argue if we like what they did or not till the end of time, but it's a Gulliver's Travels situation—we're crawling around on a giant.

Stylistically, in my own work there are things stolen from him, reactions against him—but in describing him this way, it's only to place him on a shelf with other writers, and in the end…in the end it doesn't matter how you rank writers. The rankings of writers for their own contemporaries, once they get beyond the most obvious crude distinctions, it becomes almost meaningless. There's this distortion of the present. Talking about influences at all is complicated, and has more to do with those one encounters than those one'd put on a favorite list.

That makes sense. But so I guess then I'm curious—are there any other writers going at present with whom you feel something like an alignment or kinship—writers who are doing stuff you look at and see something moving in ways you'd like to see your own work move?

I'm really excited about Ben Metcalf—his sensiblity instructed mine. He was trying to figure out what a pure English prose would sound like right now. What would it look like right now, what would it look like on the page, but also with this Attic quality.

That's interesting—just in that your writing features this pretty wide swath of styles—I'm thinking specifically of the Real World piece, in which you deploy all these bros, and putting that up next to something like "Mr Lytle" seems real striking. In talking about Wallace and Metcalf, you've mentioned in each aspects of style, of how English can/could/should sound at present. Can you talk about that at all?

For me, it's all—it's just all—these things are all just prose experiments. I get to show up somewhere, and I don't care where I'm doing it, and they're paying me to do it. Ridiculous! I feel like—this may be pretentous—do you know the book Giacometti Portrait by James Lord?

No.

It's an amazing book. Lord sat for Giacometti for two weeks and each day he'd write an account of his time there, and Giacometti's like a moth in the studio—he moves from painting to sculpture, and is there for a bit, and then from sculpture to writing, and scribbles for a bit. I'm not saying that's me, but that willingness—stylistically—has some aspect of how I think about things. Just in terms of style itself, specifically, piece by piece: the places in which these were published had very different formal requirements, which has something to do with things reading as they do.

I get what you're saying but there's—even given all those as background, you still have to admit some level of agenda in how you write this stuff, right? Anybody could've written about Axl Rose, but you wrote about the Indiana aspect of him, the nowhereness of being from Lafayette.

But to answer that, I have to admit that some of it stems from the randomness of the process of putting together an anthology like this. You almost talk yourself into seeing this unity that maybe isn't there. The truth is, the process of putting this together was about: what is the best stuff, what's the stuff that people could stand re-reading. But I also included pieces that felt real in some way—I know that sounds silly in the context of a piece about the Real World—but if they failed, they failed in an attempt to get somewhere. You know, just the fact that that Real World piece wasn't a complete joke in the end, that in and of itself called me back to it.

And it's partly the wounded song of a person who's in search of some kind of self-actualization. These are the works of someone who had vast swaths of his childhood worked on and deformed by this thing [MTV]. Isn't a big part of being American to realize our own barbarianism? That was the ore I was groping toward in that RW piece and the Axl piece.

You should know at the outset that I'm a massive fan of your work, and I teach "Upon This Rock" each semester, and love that piece like I love few other pieces of prose in existence, like a top-5 type thing.

I feel quite differently about that one and what I was doing in it now. It leads to a strange, uncanny feeling now when I read it aloud. A lot of the things I wrote and felt about Christianity then were less informed, not necessarily from a religious point of view. My empathy had some intellectual weakness in it. If you really subscribe to the enlightnment, which I'd like to think I do, there's something patronizing about the piece. I feel like it's ultimately a snapshot of a mind that was trying to crawl out of some stuff.

I love it. I hear what you're saying, but I fucking love that piece. I want to talk about place more, too: you were born in southern Indiana and grew up in Louisville?

Other way around—born in Louisville, grew up in southern Indiana, just across the border.

This I'm curious about. I'm from the midwest, and I'm living and teaching in Fort Wayne, and I'm real curious about what you think of as regional writing. In some interview you mentioned how you're interested in both southern-ness and in music (saying in the PW interview that the book's theme could be identified as "The South's history and music"). Can you talk more about that at all?

(There's a brief discussion about Fort Wayne, about the nowhereness of certain places in Indiana a la Lafayette [read the Axl Rose piece], during which Sullivan points out that the Panther Pipe—"among the most beautiful of Native American art"—comes from NE Indiana.)

That part of the world is unified in some ways, and it's concretely different from what's farther west. It's really the first west. It features a kind of rawness that you don't find when you get farther west when it gets emptier. When I've written about that, I've tried to dig into that in-between-ness.

I'm not a southern writer—I've never said that, and I won't. But I'm interested in American psychogeography. And specifically, that carstick landscape—Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee—that's like—I feel most at ease there physically, and I have a huge sentimental attachment to the place. In terms of the subjects, that's been a laboratory in which to let that stuff play out.

Are you asking how do I pick them, how do I come to them in terms of writing about them?

Not necessarily—just that there's a way in which your work seems to circle somehow back to some of these things, certain geographies. I don't know if that makes sense.

When I started working for magazines regularly, I realized I'd been given this wonderful little box in which to prosecute different questions that interested me as a writer. You can either try to do their thing, and write things you know the mag you work for may need in order to stay employed, which is a totally honorable thing to do, but you can also sort of hijack their thing in order to do your thing. So I looked for ideas that gave vent to the stuff you're talking about—the obsessions.

Can you talk about those obsessions? That essay on Fahey + old spooky blues in Harper's was great for lots of reasons, not least that it announced in the bio note that you were working on a book about American music—which, for the record, please write that book. But can you talk more about this stuff? There's a sense, in reading your stuff, of this almost Harry Smith aspect—someone combing through stuff to find a secret history. Does that hold for you at all? Is that something that feels somewhat close?

I still have hopes to write more on music, absolutely. There's a book called Beneath the American Renaissance by David Reynolds. He's looking at the period of the American renaissance, the age of Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, but culturally he's widening the lens, he's consciously suppressing some high/low distinctions we almost instinctively make and was looking at the whole culturescape that was happening in those decades.

And the arguments he makes are totally illuminating. The writers we praise and admire now were paying very close if not conscious attention to the lower stuff going on—Melville loving sea romances, for instance. I read it for the first time in 2000 and definitely started wondering why you couldn't do that in the present tense. So some of the pieces are experiments following out from it.

That experimental feel in your work is one of the best aspects, I think. Not that the work's experimental, but that you're allowing yourself along this path, willing to be surprised by things—like your work can actually sort of package surprise.

You can actually capture the experience of it. An essay, among the many other things it is, can be a window through which you can watch the writer's consciousness follow itself.

Which is this other fantastic aspect of your work: on finishing one of your essays, the reader's rarely offered some pat closure, or some ah-hah. It's almost as if you write toward some hum, if that makes sense—like your writing's moving toward some frequency.

I think that makes sense, that's a good way to talk about it. As you write you're trying to make it vibrate in the way you'd make an instrument vibrate, and there are sounds in the way, and you've got to write until all that other sound is out of the way. The things I write are products of a very urgently felt need to understand the world in a way that's livable. And it would be strange if that didn't infuse some of them with a kind of energy. That's the real unifying thing: in a way, it's not anything more than saying you're another writer.

That makes all sorts of sense. I want to ask one last thing before finishing up: are you interested in writing fiction? Is that something you can see yourself doing?

(long pause) I can feel myself moving toward it tectonically. Nonfiction will impose necessary limitations, if only in that you don't want to make everyone you know hate you. If you're at all interested in human relationships, fiction feels pretty necessarily where you have to go if you want to go all the way.

Best of '11: Sarah Jaffe

Sarah Jaffe's The Way Sound Leaves a Room is, hands down, among the very best recorded things released this year. Maybe it's a function of aging, but the idea of besting certain things, ranking absolutely #1 on down, seems silly. There have been a handful of necessary things to listen to this year, and Jaffe's ep is among them. Decide for yourself what sort of rank you'd like to give it.

To prime the Jaffe pump, here's a video:

What's remarkable about that is how seemingly simple the whole thing is. Watch Jaffe open her mouth and just pour gorgeousness as if it was as simple as throwing the wash into the dryer. Notice how absolutely controlled the thing feels and seems—the song seems perfectly boundaried, something with real edges but flexible as well (all that background sound, all the tiny pieces coming together like elements suddenly perfectly aligning over and over).

You think it's a rarity somehow? That she doesn't do that every damn time? Here's more:

I was lucky enough to see Jaffe with friends in Omaha and we were among maybe 30 people in the audience, and Jaffe herself was incredibly cool and kind and drinking whiskey or bourbon, I can't remember which, and the reason she's worth talking about as among the very most exciting musicians at present is how shockingly quickly she's growing. Before talking at any length about The Way Sound Leaves a Room, let's revisit Suburban Nature, her 2010 debut. It's a gorgeous, compelling disc, and it was among my favorite records of last year, but it was also, indisputably, younger, less sure of itself. For the audacious confidence of tracks like "Perfect Plan" or "Before You Go," there were shakier, less certain tracks like "LUV." Weirdly, the song that at the time seemed to me the absolutely most compelling thing imaginable—"Clementine"—still holds up to a degree, but its murmury hesitance is striking now, in the context of Jaffe's latest.

The Way Sound Leaves a Room is an audacious and confident collection of 8 tracks that I think offers pretty inarguable proof that Jaffe's the most exciting thing going. Evidence? Fucking ep starts off with a cover of Drake's "Shut it Down," the song stripped down and given harmonies and pianos and a tiny sandpapery casiotone drum beat in the track's back, and if you hear Jaffe's version before hearing Drake's, you'll never hear the original again—Jaffe owns the thing, absolutely. The ep would be fantastic enough just for that cover (which for the record is, in my mind, among the best covers of the year, a category which'd have to include the two amazing covers Bon Iver dropped this year [Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" and his cover of Bjork's "Who Is It" at his DC show]), but of course there's more.

There is a piano version of "Clementine," which to me feels weaker than the original, but even that's not a mis-step or anything, just a track that doesn't quite hang as awesomely as the rest. For my money, the second half of the ep, from the title track to the haunting, almost Imogen-Heap-ish "All that Time," is why this thing stands so tall and powerfully. What the listener gets in these four tracks is a level of confident messiness that was developing in parts in Suburban Nature but is hugely, awesomely more pronounced now. There's also just more noise: electronics in "When You Rest," and, in the ep's single, "A Sucker For Your Marketing," a hard bass line couples menacingly with the lyrics ("Whatever you put out, I'm gonna buy it / so what's your latest, I wanna try it / are you still in love, are you over it again / when the damn thing grew with no intent,") to make one of the most aggressive I-want-you songs I've ever heard.

Jaffe's been at the top of my list of holy-shit-she-can-do-anything artists for awhile, and this new ep bodes exceptionally well for her. It's past time to consider what she might do next, how she might do it: look what she's doing. No one is doing anything close to what she's doing; no one's taking such big, masterful steps. Listen now, if only so you can brag later, when she's got all the attention she already deserves.

(If yr interested, here's a brief interview I did with her last year)

The Word Modern

Yeah, okay, I realize I've been a little lax with the music reviews lately. Apologies, etc. Some of that has to do with the massive national job hunt I've recently undertaken, which is pretty much it's own damn job (mothers, don't let your kids grow up to be academics–just sayin). But mostly it's because there hasn't been that much good music to write about. Sure, the past couple years have brought the infrequent glimmer of novelty and talent, but mostly it's been a bunch of derivative pseudo-indie garbage that makes a brief bang and then fades from the collective American consciousness.

Am I bitter? Maybe. Probably. It's that time of year. In which case, thank God for bands like The Word Modern.

A collaborative effort by Lish Starshine and The American Tragedy's Adam Dale, the band's debut album A View From the Basement is full of jubilant synth beats, crunchy guitar grooves, and heartfelt, melodic vocals, the culmination of which is an extraordinary collection of tunes. 

The sheer volume of unique sound texture combinations–including piano, controlled static, theramin, and strings–is enough to keep the listener tuned it all the way through, like in "Cold Water Skin," an elegiac track that merges the sonic aspirations of tweeny mainstream rock with those of an old fashioned acoustic ballad. Or you've got "Is This the End?" a haunting electropop number that continually builds and diminishes in intensity in a way that compliments the alternating vocal styles of Dale and guest vocalist Chelsea Norman.

Maybe it's cliched to point out the interesting ways in which advances in technology have affected the recording process, but it is worth mentioning that Dale and Starshine were never in the same room together during the production of the album. Instead, they communicated simply through the tracks they put down, after which they would wait to see what the other would come up with in advance. This fascinates me, though I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's because it underscores the notion of musical collaboration as a form of communication–a notion that seems to be waning in popularity within the mainstream music world.  But musicians will tell you: making music with other people is its own kind of relationship, one whose success depends upon the individuals' ability to communicate (go watch a really solid jazz ensemble, and you'll see what I mean). And like any relationship, the bands that excel at this are the ones that stick around. Dale and Starshine share such a remarkable musical chemistry–here's hoping that A View From the Basement is just the beginning.

An interview with Matthew Ryan

This is the second interview we've conducted with singer/songwriter Matthew Ryan, whose 9th studio album I Recall Standing As Though Nothing Could Fall was recently released, and I've gotta say: I've honestly never met a more approachable professional musician (nor have I met one as grammar-conscious). Ryan recently took time out of his schedule (he's currently on tour with his band the Red Needles) to discuss the new album as well as his views on songwriting as a craft.

1. You recently moved from Nashville. Tell us a little about what led to that.

I've actually moved to a small town northwest of Pittsburgh. Real severe landscape and that particular architecture that expects cold weather. Lots of bridges and old stone churches. It's a town I fell in love with over the course of the last ten years and several visits. It feels a bit like Woodstock, NY. I felt it was time for a change; if you live one place for too long you can start to live in the past that you built there. I felt change was almost overdue and I needed to reengage with the present, shake it up, look at different streets, buildings and places, hear different accents. Nashville was great to me, and I'll miss the day to day with many of my friends. But it was time to move on.

2. So, let's talk about the new album, I Recall Standing As Though Nothing Could Fall. You started recording in your home studio a few albums back, and you began this one last year, and from what I understand you finished it in nine months, is that correct? What was that process like? How do you think recording at home has changed your songwriting process, if at all? Is there a greater degree of freedom, an incentive to experiment?

It did take 9 months, maybe 10. It was a bear. I had no choice with this album, but these songs insisted on coming together at this particular time. It wasn't the album I intended to make, but whatever it is that pulls these things from you should be respected. The times we're living in are provoking action, and for me that generally manifests itself in songs. So I hunkered down with it, did all I could to honor it and tell the truth as I see it as best I could. As far as the approach, it's a utilitarian philosophy that drives the process. I have 3 recording systems at home and options outside my home to work with others in various studios when the songs dictate. It's really about curiosity and following what excites me.

The last couple albums have been more home projects that were followed through at the pace of what the creativity allowed along with great contributions from friends. I love working at home because there's no acting, the songs are captured at the moment they arrive. Seems to me there's a certain purity to that because the moment a song is finished it can be difficult to reengage with that original spark and it can often just become performance. The approach will continue to adapt to what the work requires. I feel an earthier album coming. But we'll see, the muse has been stubborn lately.

3. I've done my best to keep up with interviews you've done, and one thing I've noticed that a lot of them seem to have in common is the tendency of the interviewers to comment on the perceived "grimness" of your music, which comments are usually followed by you politely pointing out that you really don't perceive your work as "grim" at all. What is it about the way in which you craft songs that you think leads people to often view it in such a way?

I really don't know, Jeremy. I don't know what lives those that say those things are living. Everyone I know is suffering some sort of weight, some sort of heartache. And through happiness, beauty and great events in our lives there are other plots. My songs engage with all of it and above all want you to persevere. There's so much we don't know, the world we're sharing is beautiful and hard. There's great wealth and great despair. And I guess there's a part of me that feels it's wrong to whistle past the graveyard, so to speak. And some may view that as a bummer, and maybe that's what they're really saying. I understand the need for escapism and preoccupation. There's plenty of music for that, but that's not my lot. I've always felt stronger and ultimately comforted by confronting what daunts or troubles me. I guess that's what my work hopes to offer: a certain beauty or resilient poetry to the harder things in living. Life is beautiful and worth every aching moment, and life is better if we suss it all out.

4. Following from this, you said in our last interview that you were definitely more of a writer than a talker, and I've noticed in interviews the difficulty that often arises when trying to explain in words what you try to get across with your music. Without a doubt, you're not alone in this regard; most musicians I've spoken to seem to feel that talking is inadequate for conveying their musical goals. What do you think is the hardest part about discussing your music, how you write, and what you hope to accomplish?

I never want to understand how I write. I admire craft, but I prefer that sensation of discovery that the way I work offers. I open myself up to it, and allow it to arrive. The less I think while writing, the better the song is. It's difficult to discuss because with all the punk rock and bravado and all the reasons someone does what I do, I above all have very earnest hopes for what my work accomplishes with listeners.

5. This album comes an interesting time in regard to the sociopolitical climate in America, and it's clear from songs like "I Don't Want a Third World War" that you remain a very socially engaged artist. How do you think the current political, economic, and social discourses in America influenced this album (if at all)?

We're at a very delicate intersection in our country and the world, Jeremy. This album is informed completely and thoroughly by this current friction. "I Want Peace," "Hey Kid," "Third World War," "My Darker Side," "Here Comes The Snow," "Kings Of Trash" and above all "I Still Believe In You" all speak directly to my feelings on the situation and where I believe the solutions are.

6. You've rejected the notion that your work is a kind of complex diary-writing, although you have also claimed music to be a kind of meditation for you. When you write, how much of it is done with the fans in mind? Do you write exclusively for your own peace of mind, or is there an awareness of how your fans might react?

I rarely have written with listeners in mind. That's not because I don't care, but because my process doesn't flourish that way. And the truth is, whenever I did let notions of what listeners might want or think or feel for a song, well, let's just say things got messy. I've buried every song I ever happened to finish in that fashion. Something just rings untrue about them. My voice requires a certain timbre in intent, language, rhythm and melody. I write because I feel compelled to; it's a beautiful thing that's indescribable. Meditation is a clumsy word for it, but on some level it works because it feels like I'm communing with something greater than myself when I achieve a certain resonance. I only have an awareness of how a listener will react weeks, months and sometimes even years after a song is done. However, there are times I get excited about a song immediately when it feels as though I tapped a particularly rich vein.

7. You very recently performed at the Replacements Tribute at Bowery Electric. What is your favorite Replacements tune? (If your answer is anything other than "Alex Chilton," "Left of the Dial," or "Can't Hardly Wait," then you are wrong and I pity you.)

Ha! "Can't Hardly Wait" is on my list, so I guess I've escaped your pity. I also love "Skyway," "Here Comes A Regular," "The Ledge," "Achin' To Be," "Bastards Of Young," "A Little Mascara" and "I'll Be You" is a great rock n roll song regardless of all the slack Don't Tell A Soul gets. There's too many to list to be absolutely honest.*

Well played, sir. You can check out the new album, tour dates, interviews, and Matthew Ryan's discography here.

An Interview with Paul Maliszewski

It's been awhile since we've had the chance to run an interview this fun and in-depth in awhile, which makes this all the more satisfying: a long, interesting-as-hell interview with Paul Maliszewski, he of Prayer and Parable and Fakers, both of which I thought were excellent (reviews here and here). I'm not sure there's all that much critical info one needs to get into this, aside from this: this could've been much, much longer. Maybe this'll be some on-going thing, a Checking In With Paul feature on Corduroy. Regardless: enjoy the interview, but, obviously, more critically: go purchase the man's books and read them and pass them along. A formatting note: no, I don't know why the footnotes don't automatically jump you to the page's bottom, nor how to make them do so. 

Do you feel like there's anyone writing at present who's writing with any sort of similar aesthetic goals as you?

You're supposing I can know other people's aesthetic goals, when I can't reliably explain my own. But let me say this: two recent books that gave me strong feelings of recognition were Adam Gilders's Another Ventriloquist, a collection of stories, and Deb Unferth's novel Vacation. Our sentences aren't outwardly similar. Unferth's are more arresting, the syntax torqued, where mine are plainer on the surface, to the point of seeming flat. This business of recognition is tricky, though. It's a little like hearing a song on the radio and thinking, That sounds so much like my life! She must be singing for/about/to me! There's guesswork involved, and one finally has to make a great interpretive leap. Both Gilders and Unferth pay particular attention to the thoughts of their characters, and they do so in not-typical ways, i.e. not just saying, so-and-so thought, quote-unquote, I'm not happy at my job. I appreciate when characters are allowed to think, and at some length. I like when they're given access to sophisticated language, too, even literary language. I'm not a fan of the terse, uncommunicative school of character, where the author gets to be occasionally lyrical and the characters are all like, Hey, what's up? Not much. You? There's also some attempt in these books to capture the grammar of consciousness. This is not to say Unferth and Gilders are writing stream of consciousness. It's more an interest in people's logic, how people try to explain who they are and what they're about, and how they deceive themselves with their accounts, which can seem carefully constructed but are rarely complete.

I really like your work, and I really like Helen DeWitt's work—it seems like you two have this weird overlap, just in the reliance or utilization of something like rational rigor, or something like that: the worlds in which each of your works are set matter , the rules and orders of it. I don't see this lots of places. Do you?

DeWitt is near the top of a lengthy list of authors I really need to read already. I haven't even read The Last Samurai. I have been reading about the new one in reviews and interviews, so I think—operative word, think—I know what you mean. My book has some stories that are prayers and some that are parables. The parables are more like fables—things in them stand for other things, or hold out that possibility. The parables also often have some unrealistic premise that is dealt with initially and then just becomes the ground situation for the story. It is like you say, these worlds have different rules. In my stories, most of the rules are the same as in our world except for one significant thing, which is slightly off. It's like, okay, gravity, for this story, will be green—and then I just try to deal with that as part of the new world and develop it in fairly realistic ways.

I also like logic. Logic was one of my favorite classes in college. I tell people that sometimes, and they're always like, Really? Logic? But yes, I like logic. An old girlfriend once told me that if I were a Greek hero, my tragic flaw would be that I always think people can be convinced by a good argument, and I'm forever disappointed, of course, just crushed. I also think logic is funny, when it breaks down, or when people fall before logic and become frustrated by the terrific binds it puts them in. That drama is endlessly compelling.

You see a lot of attention to logic and what you're calling rational rigor in satire. Satire is an argument strapped like a bomb to the underside of a humor-delivery vehicle. And DeWitt's Lightning Rods seems (if I may) like a work of satire. That said, I don't think of the stories in my book as satiric. I like satire, and I doubtless have learned a lot from reading my way around the satiric canon, and I've even written satires at times, but these stories are not satires. They do have that attention to logic. It's just not my logic as the author/satirist trying to put forward some argument that unpacks, say, the hypocrisies of the human animal. What interests me is the characters' ways of thinking. Where do they get stuck? What do they keep circling around, trying to figure out?

You're right on DeWitt, and it's funny that you liked logic in college—I'm predisposed toward math[1], and I end up finding more and more writers whose work comes from a non-belletristic background (Blake Butler, for instance, went to GTech to study computers), and I think there's a wiring difference that obtains because of it (DeWitt studied classics at Oxford). Also: I don't think your work's satiric, either: that idea of people going to war with their own logic, that makes total sense—and the ultimate reveal is character , whereas satire's ultimate aim/reveal is a deflation of something external, or so it seems to this very non-scholarly person. Do you feel like your work's coming out of some specific tradition?

Well, you'd have to put Beckett on that list. People are always being undone by logic in Beckett, and it's a great source of humor, their undoing, as well as empathy. I always feel, reading about them, close to coming undone myself. Kafka's important, too, for similar reasons, as well as for his premises and the way he develops them: guy wakes up as a bug; guy wakes up and is arrested; imagine an artist whose work is starving himself; imagine an execution machine that inscribes on the body of a condemned man the law that he violated; imagine the world in which such a device exists; then imagine, and this is the most important part, the mental landscape of the people who operate the execution machine. There's definitely a stronger European tradition for this sort of work. I would also mention here Flann O'Brien, Thomas Bernhard, and Robert Walser.

Years ago, I read Milan Kundera's Immortality, and there's a moment in that novel where two of his characters, two sisters, as I recall, are used to illustrate some point he wants to make about people. The sisters, you see, represent two types of people, and Kundera has a character draw the sisters as simple diagrams. Kundera has this great ability to treat his characters as characters—full-bodied, three-dimensional, completely human, all a realist could want—as well as illustrations, and he can move back and forth, with the illustration not compromising the realistic work of character-building, but rather enriching how we see his people. Thousands of students in thousands of workshops might suppose differently, but so be it. You can find examples of this fluidity of character throughout his work, especially The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where he smoothly switches between realistic story and literary essay and allegory and dream and history. The book hardly needs me to declare it a masterpiece, but I will.

I don't want to make it sound like your work's somehow radically different—it's great—but it does seem like it's fundamentally doing other stuff than, say, Franzen's, or Eugenides', or whoever's.[2]

No, that's fine. I get it. I'm an odd bird, I know I am. I wanted to say, though, despite all my European credential-flashing, there's a part of me—a big part of me—that loves Raymond Carver and Richard Yates and Denis Johnson, and I don't think it's a stretch to say I owe a lot to their work as well. You know that old Dostoevsky quote, "We all came out from under Gogol's 'Overcoat'"? Many of us were born and are still standing in Carver's "Cathedral," mouths agape. There's a lot of room inside to hunker down and do our work. My point is, I don't see my writing as unrealistic or even—I dislike this word, but it's so widely used that it's pointless to fight it—experimental. I'm writing realism. It's different from other people's realism, but only because I attend to different aspects of reality. It's not, however, unrealistic.

Eugenides I can't really speak about. I haven't read any of his books. My wife read The Virgin Suicides and recently started The Marriage Plot. The other night I asked her, Why do you think people like his stuff? I was curious. Maybe I'll read it someday, you know. She thought about it for a second and said, The writing's good but it's not off-putting. It doesn't make you work. And then she said: also, he's describing things people already know. I asked what she meant. Well, she said, he describes, for instance, what it's like to wake up with a hangover after graduation. It's all familiar.

As for Franzen, I read Freedom like everyone else, and I liked parts of it a lot, the beginning especially. When I read that opening section, I thought, This is our Revolutionary Road. I don't think he sustains that, unfortunately, but that opening held so much promise. It was so sure and had such depth. The novel as a whole is deeply flawed, though. Structurally, it lurches from story to story, beginning things but not always digging in and developing them. It's like Franzen would rather start something new rather than finish something in the works. But what I liked and what I was impressed by are his psychological insights. He has complicated insights into his characters—into people. He's good on the nasty interpersonal stuff that people do, especially smart people, as they're trying to get the upper-hand or figure out where they stand in relation to one another. I haven't seen him praised for that, which is a shame, because I think it's better writing, ultimately, than the big-picture, ripped-from-the-headlines, portrait-of-the-culture-as-a-whole stuff that people fawn over.

I agree with that last bit—he does that well—but I think he chooses awfully easy characters to do this sort of work on—he chooses, basically, iterations of him… which is fine, okay, but he really doesn't stretch, I don't think.

Iterations of him, yes, I get that. Maybe we know Franzen too well, though. He's put so much of himself out there, not just in his personal essays, but also in his appearances as a bonafide media figure, which he has been—he may like it or not—since the days of The Corrections and that whole mess with Oprah. Reading Franzen is like seeing George Clooney in a movie. The essential and unalterable Clooney-ness never completely disappears.

Maybe this is awful of me to think this way, but there's a… I don't know how to say it. Look, we've both read Freedom : by the end of that novel, we know these characters by significations—the who-gives-a-shit musician guy, the mom, the spineless dad, whatever. But we don't actually get lots of their insides—it's the same thing with the shitful new Eugenides as well.[3] I don't want to sound too mean, but those books and the hundreds/thousands that do that thing don't ultimately seem to be trying to do the stuff you're doing (or DeWitt, or Unferth, or Diane Williams, or Barthelme, or Kelly Link, or whoever). Someone who maybe straddles that line's Lorrie Moore. I'm young, too—I'm 32 and freshfaced and all. Maybe I just don't know a secret lineage of stuff like this work, but it does seem like there are books I get—yours, stuff by J. Robert Lennon, etc.—that feel fundamentally different, start to finish, than other fiction.[4]

Freedom was a disappointment. It's easy (but not inaccurate) to summarize the characters. Pious liberal environmentalist who gets his comeuppance. Young, idealistic intern whom the liberal, of course, has an affair with. And yet, I still thought there were human insights. I'd have to get my book down and hunt for examples—don't make me get my Freedom out, Cutter!—but I think I appreciated his character-making more than you. I was still frustrated by the novel, but there were times when I thought, I haven't seen a fictional human think like that before. There were just complexities that the summaries don't contain. A lot of the complexity comes when Franzen writes about the rivalry between his two male leads, but I also thought the stuff between Patty and her mother was great. Still, those summary versions are so handy that it's difficult not to think of a Franzen character as a big box with a crude label on the top: Long-Suffering Wife being the most obvious.

One thing to say is that you're talking about art on two different scales here. It's not apples and oranges, but it is, on one hand, a variety of apple that has proven to be enticing/wonderful/delicious to millions and, on the other hand, an apple that is more of an acquired taste, oddly bitter perhaps. To put this in other terms: Franzen is like network TV, a program that is both the most popular and the most acclaimed. If he were a late-night talk-show host, he would have great ratings and the critics, even the hardest-to-please ones, would adore him. Whereas I—I can't speak for anyone else on your list—I'm like this scruffy comedian who erratically shows up on random street corners, does his little performance, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for just a single joke, nobody ever knows in advance, and then he moves on, having probably alienated or insulted as many people as he's entertained. My point is not to run Franzen down or aggrandize myself. My point is to say: Jay Leno doesn't want to be that street comedian. Moreover, if you asked him to comment on the work, I'm not sure he would have much to say. Would you trust his reading? Would you bother asking him for a quote? At the same time, the street comedian doesn't want to be on TV and perhaps can't readily understand what Leno's up to either.

As for the secret lineage, what differentiates the writers you mention from Franzen, say, is the difference between society books and individual books. Franzen wants to capture the whole society. It's a white society, predominantly, middle- to upper-class, but let's leave that alone for now. Franzen wants to get at "the way we live now," to quote that awful name for a column in the New York Times Magazine, a column which has been discontinued, though its guiding spirit lives on. At times, Franzen's canvas is so large that chunks of the novel read like articles in the Times or New Yorker features. I'm thinking of that unwieldy fact download about mountaintop removal that Franzen tries, absurdly, to smuggle in as dialogue. The writing's very newsy. I wondered as I read how it will age. Will it become dated quickly? At times, it gets hamstrung by its relentless pursuit of currency. There was a scene where an older man—the father of that woman (Jenna) that Patty's son (Joey, I'm having to look this up, the names are already fading from the picture) falls in love with—uses the term app figuratively. He's talking about Judaism and is saying that the good thing about it is "You can choose your very own apps and features, so to speak." That line stopped me. Is that believable from this guy? Was app even in the language at this point? If it was, had the word bled into non-technical, figurative uses? Had app trickled up to the generally-out-of-touch set? What year is this supposed to be, anyway? All these niggling questions, but the reality of the book—of any book—can be shook by the slightest tremor of doubt.

Every now and then there was some bit of language that struck me as anachronistic, which is, at one level, crazy, because can something from 2007 be that out of place in 2004? Were the times really so different? But that's the steep downside with these of-the-moment books: you get mired in the incidental reality. As I did when I found myself asking, Would Pirates of the Caribbean be an in-flight movie at this time? Would it be shown on a flight from the Caribbean? Even if that's all true in the fact-checker sense, my attention has wandered. It's like I was watching a movie but ignored the actors in order to scrutinize the furniture. And this was a book I was reading for pleasure. Maybe the passage of time will iron out these problems. I should have waited twenty years to read Freedom.

Individual books don't get bogged down in set dressing. Often they just leave it out. These are books more concerned with a person, or maybe two people, or a family, though not a family in any sociological fashion. These books are much less worried about depicting "the times." What is the society in Molloy or Murphy or, for that matter, any Beckett? You can get a sense of the world, I suppose, but it's not the point. It's not even a tertiary point. Waiting for Godot is not a play about what a mess the world has become. It's not a warning to heed. It's not some environmentalist tract about the peril we face in a world without trees. It's about the individual, the world just happens to be barren to focus our attention. And it's about the mind of the individual, and the language that remains. Nobody comes out of Godot and asks, But how did the world get wrecked? You accept the premise and just listen to Vladimir and Estragon.

Here's a question for you, if I may. You described my work as being "fundamentally driven by non-character engines." Since this seems like an insight that could explain myself to me, I have to ask: What are these engines? You mentioned the scenario and the world of the story. Are those the same? Are there other engines, either in my work or others? Are you interested in non-character engines as a writer as well?

This is a really good question, which sucks for me, because I'm lazy. How about this: two of the stories I most enjoy teaching are Saunders' "Sea Oak" and John Leary's "Scenarios for Lee's Forgiveness." Both stories feature massive enginery in terms of scenario/world of story ("Sea Oak"'s got the grandma coming back to life, "Scenarios" features a list of feasible ways for this couple to forgive each other, all set at a birthday party [this story's been, from my finding, totally underloved: it was in One Story ]), but the characteristics of Saunders' characters are much more critical than those of Leary's. I think the first person I read who knocked me sideways in terms of this stuff is Millhauser: his stuff's got characters, but the situation of the story, the unfolding of plot, the uniqueness of the situation: these fundamentally drive the story and keep the reader going.

I really, really like stories that harness this sort of energy—I don't know how accurate the comparison might be, but the feeling's akin to a microphone which picks up the sound of the whole room vs. one that just picks up the voice singing into it.[5] I really liked, say, Harbach's Fielding , and I loved the characters and miss them etc., but I'm also really, really interested in and enjoy hugely stories from folks like Kelly Link and Aimee Bender—stories where the situation of the story dominates, and the characters are there and all, that's fine, but who they are, the memories of them skinning their knees, age nine, etc.—this stuff doesn't ultimately drive the story the way other works by other folks demand.

Millhauser is a maker of some great, well-wrought worlds. I like Martin Dressler, a William Dean Howells novel except with more lyrical and imaginative flights about the development and evolution of a department store. I see what you mean about scenario-based fiction. With Millhauser, I get this image of a jeweler bent over an intricate box, like something by Fabergé but more elaborate and larger. He's setting tiny bits of wire into his beloved box, soldering them into place, and then moving onto the next piece of filigree. There are characters, like you say, but they're figures inside the jeweled box, among many other figures. It's hard not to appreciate the box as a box as much as one does the figures inside. It's all so ultimately crafted.

I'm curious, too, in what the difference is, for you, between the prayers and parables in your book. I'm a shittily unfocused reader sometime—I don't remember the names of characters, for instance—and I rarely track titles, so I know I didn't pay all that much attention to the differences between Prayers and Parables for you. How's the distinction shake out?

That distinction came late to me. For quite a while, they were all prayers, but what happened is I got into a lazy habit with the titles and just thought, Oh, another prayer, okay, the title will go "Prayer for…" or "Prayer against…," and that was that. I stopped thinking about it, which was a blessing at the time, because I find it hard to come up with titles. When the manuscript was starting to feel complete, though, I stepped back and thought again and realized that some of the stories were different and, too, maybe there should be some way to distinguish them. I didn't want to have a book divided into two sections, like halves. So that's how the parables came into it. It was just a way to acknowledge a difference that I'd been denying with my uniform titles. As for the distinction itself, basically, the prayer stories are more realistic (I think), and the parables operate on a metaphorical level. To use your terms, the parables are more scenario-based.

What do you think fiction should do? I know this gets dicey, all sorts of moral/Gardner-esque stuff, but I think the above does a fair job of acknowledging that there's a different lineage, or at least another lineage of "realist fiction"—stuff which takes as its focus different aspects of reality, or at least different tastes/feels of reality.

This makes me think of two Robert Coover quotes, only one of which I've been able to track down, sorry. He recently told a Guardian reporter who asked about realism: "I learned my realism from guys like Kafka." I've also seen him say somewhere, I swear, that as far as he's concerned, he's been writing realism all along. People may call it postmodern or black humor or magical realism or whatever they want, but to him it has always just felt real. So is "The Babysitter" unrealistic because it's broken into many parts, parts that sometimes backtrack and revise or contradict one another? Or does it, with its twisting variations and its fractured quality, get at some real psychological stuff, the interplay and repetitions of fantasies, stuff deep in the brain, deeper certainly than well-put details about the cut of a character's pants?

Or take Barth, for instance. In his early stuff, he has these great anxious characters, just incredibly worried people. I'm thinking of the narrator in The End of the Road and the title story in Lost in the Funhouse. You can't have that very real anxiousness without what's innovative or—I should really stop using this word—experimental. The anxiousness is actually heightened by the experimental form, making what's real more palpable, more felt.

As for what fiction should do, I've hinted around about this somewhat, but I'll spell it out here: fiction should be mapping the reality of the inner landscape. To me, that's the strength of fiction, what it can manage that other art forms can't, or at least not as well. That said, our outer reality, the reality we share—call it the world—is still always interesting, worth describing and narrating. As I've said, there's as much Carver in me as Beckett. I just happen to believe that outer reality cannot be the end point of art.

How'd you end up writing the ways you write? I know little about your background other than Syracuse, so I've got nothing. But certainly this strain of realism that you work within—that's an overt choice against some other competing dogmas or whatever.

If I stop and think about it, I guess I prefer x over y, but I don't sit down and think, Time to work against the major dogmas of the day. Really, I think it's more like that TV comedian/street clown analogy. I'm always going to be the street clown. I woke up this way. I can only do what I do, finally. I don't know how I ended up writing this way. We read Carver in college, but we read him alongside Barthelme, Where Are You Calling from? and Sixty Stories, back to back. That was the contemporary American story as I was taught it. Barthelme and company weren't some misguided detour taken during the 60s and 70s. They were a still vital part of literature. This was at Rice University, in Houston. Barthelme was still teaching across town, at U of H, when I started there. After his death, Gulf Coast, the U of H literary magazine, published an issue of reminiscences and had a reading at Brazos Bookstore. I went to that. I received strong doses of the moderns (Pound's Cantos in a poetry class) and the postmoderns. We read Gravity's Rainbow in seventy-six page chunks, discussing it over, I think, five weeks of class.

Our creative writing teacher then was Max Apple, who in his work finds a sweet spot between formal innovation and telling a human story. See for instance "An Offering," from his collection Free Agents, which reads like a corporate report announcing the sale of twenty thousand class-B shares in Max Apple Inc. It's a story that works as a satire of commodification—everything stickered, everything with its price—as well as an earnest offer to the unknown reader. It's a story about a writer that manages to be clever and sympathetic.

The English department then was distinctly pre-theory. There was one young professor, basically, who did theory. So we weren't, you know, reading Barthelme in light of the poststructuralists. We read him as literature. Friends and I would talk about Barthelme stories the way people talk about movies. You know: Remember that part where the guy says… Just recounting favorite bits, quoting lines, laughing. "Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby" was a monument to us. We gathered around it. Not that I understood what I read. Initially I read Barthelme as this license to do anything—you want to put pictures in your story, put pictures in your story—which I guess is encouraging to a novice. It took years for me to grasp that there was a structure underlying the inventiveness. It wasn't just page after page of antic carrying-on. When he writes, in "Rebecca," that "one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page," it's not just a bunch of lovely, striking words strung together. And yet I stared and can still stare at that final phrase, that warm tympanic page, repeating it, listening to it, wondering where in the world it came from. It took me a while to realize that when Barthelme says one should never cease considering human love, he actually means that one should never cease considering human love. Sometimes he says just what he means. Eventually I learned that lesson.

When I got to grad school, I realized pretty quickly that I'd read a different set of books than some of the other students, who were more of what you'd call traditional realists. For the first workshop, Michael Martone asked us to bring in copies of a story that meant a lot to us, a story by another writer. I brought in "The Distance of the Moon," by Italo Calvino, from Cosmicomics. Other students brought in Steinbeck, Carver, John Knowles, Cheever, and Stuart Dybek. One student, I think, knew Calvino, and he'd lived and taught in Italy. Most of the students had never heard of him. I remember Michael talked to me after class about how great it was to see Calvino, because, as he said, it's what you'd expect someone to bring up in the 1970s. My Calvino photocopy got passed around outside of class. Weeks later, a poet told me how much he liked it. That Calvino story, he said. Man.

How big was Prayer and Parable? How'd you come to understand and perceive of its shape? Were there prayers or parables you cut? Were there ones you were missing that you, on putting the thing together as a collection, realized you needed to write? The book's awesome for lots of reasons, not least that it feels cohesive, and of course I'm curious about how that shook out for the organizer of the thing.

There were two or maybe three pieces that I cut. Mostly that was an issue of the stories feeling to me like they no longer worked. My writing changed over the time I worked on these stories. I worked on them for a while, and I revised the old ones—I had to in almost every case, sometimes heavily—but a few just refused to be revised. I couldn't make them work. Really, I just couldn't find any urgency in them, or any energy. They didn't feel like what I was at that point calling stories. I didn't believe them any longer and, worse, I couldn't get my head back into them. I assume at the time they excited me and felt vital, all that, but something had expired in them, an important ingredient had turned sour.

I did want to write some new stories. I had scribbled notes for a bunch of new things, but as I read them over, they seemed either no longer necessary—already covered by an earlier story—or just unintelligible. Only a few ideas were really asking to be written, and those were ones I didn't need to remind myself about. I'd been thinking about them off and on for years and knew the book wouldn't be complete until I turned to them. Coincidentally (or not), they're the last three stories in the book. The collection is not chronological in terms of how I wrote them (there are newer and older stories mixed together); it just worked out that the newest stories appear last. I do think of the collection as having a rough chronology in terms of what the characters go through. It's like the book is a partial biography of the central characters. It begins with a boyfriend-girlfriend story and then, in the second-to-last story, a couple is talking about having a baby, the woman of the couple thinks she might be pregnant but isn't sure. In the final story, another couple has the baby. It's not perfect, this chronology, just like how the division between parables and prayers is far from tidy, but the arrangement meant something to me. There's an arc there, and I make a gesture of tracing it in the air. Not that any of this was apparent to me all along. I didn't have a grand plan. I usually don't. I just try to finish one story.

[1] How so? And how has math influenced your writing?

WC: I'm naturally better at math than writing or English—tested well, excitedly/voluntarily captained the HS math team, was a class away from accidentally minoring in math in college simply because I'd taken classes I liked which were math. I know my mathematical needs and urges get more obviously manifest in structural ways—I put poetry on the page with something like an arithmetic ear toward balance involved. I'm pretty taken with systems—prose to me ultimately works or doesn't by the gorgeousness of its system as much as by its characters (DeWitt in an interview talked about this—the thrill of what if—that might be the way to talk about math, too: a story which ultimately functions as a postulation). My writing's not quite as math focused as it used to be, but my early stories didn't feature much character; mostly I was taken with structural questions. By and large, Barthelme and Mark Danielewski did this to me. I think the impulse has faded, but it's not too far beneath the surface.

[2] What is this other stuff? Or, to put it another way, what's missing for you in Franzen?

WC: All this should be read in the context of me having had a shitty fall in terms of reading fiction—aside from Harbach's Fielding, I was massively disappointed in novels (Eugenides + Whitehead at the top of the list)—and my recollection of Freedom has dimmed significantly since I read it (I loved it when I read it—was 100% enraptured—but I'm not at all sure it holds up; it feels awfully of its exact moment, calendrically inert). What's also weird: I really didn't like Reality Hunger when it hit, but I fundamentally agree with (what I took to be) one of its big arguments—that Dickensian, linear fiction fixated on verisimilitude doesn't obtain at present. I agree with this. I don't think fiction's made great strides (or poetry, for that matter) in challenging itself and allowing its form to shift in significant ways. Wallace did it, Danielewski did it, I think DOUnferth does it in Vacation, and Orner's Love and Shame and Love is great and pushes well into a new form for a contemporary novel, but overall I don't think fiction's done that great a job of finding organic forms which'll allow it to more closely and well map the reality of contemporary experience. So there's that: I think Franzen's form is just sort of eh—I thought the journal in the novel was old fashioned and easy, more of a neat trick than a character-based necessity.

I think your work, unlike Franzen's, is fundamentally exploring characters on the page—exploring real people, getting in heads. I think Franzen's work, and Eugenides, and lots of folks's work, is fundamentally getting into types of characters' heads. By way of example: I'm an early-30's white MFA guy, professor at a college. I believe in buying a Prius, though I haven't; I purchase and use Apple products; I have certain hopes for not destroying the earth. However: I'm also aware and alive enough to occasionally find it odd that I lie in bed and tap imaginary buttons on the glass screen of my phone, and my thoughts don't follow overt paths based on who I am or how I'd appear on a page. If I were to be written as what I am in pretty obvious ways, I think it'd be a terrible robbery of the interior I possess. I think there are writers who are okay with the level of chaos that comes from truly opening someone wide, as a person instead of a type, and writers who are not. I think those who are not write fiction that's more comfortable, and those who are write fiction that's a bit weirder. I think Wallace was a genius who could somehow do both those things—balance perfectly the surprise and expectations of the reader. Franzen, ultimately, is someone who gives too much to expectations.

[3] Shitful how? I was leaning toward skipping it, but now you have me curious.

WC: The ways in which the Eugenides novel fails are too numerous to count. Ultimately, I didn't remotely care about the characters or story. There's a moment in the book which both my wife and I paused at (I asked her to read it because I was reviewing the book for a newspaper and was doubting my intensely negative reaction), a line about a book which plods on for pages but then feels like it's finally working—this is a horrible cobbling of whatever it was he said—but that tiny part of the book felt very knowing—like Eugenides was aware of how ploddingly bad the thing was. Ed Champion blasted the thing on Good Reads, and the review in the NYTimes is on the right track as well. I'll also say that Eugenides's "not true at all" response to the inarguable fact that he's got a DFWallace character in there is sad and stupid. Dude in the book literally uses Wallace's words—sad that a writer won't at least cop to it. A really crap read. For real.

[4] We're circling something. It's important, but it's hard to articulate. What is the difference? I'm not convinced I've come close to putting my finger on it.

WC: I've now been thinking about this for close to five days. I think you're accurate on Franzen approximating broadcast television and other voices being distinct, farther afield. What I've ended up being fairly confident feeling is that Franzen and Eugenides and that range of writers (KGessen of n+1 is certainly part of that group; there's plenty—would be nitpicky, exhausting fun to create a thorough taxonomy of it) are ultimately creating characters they depend on the reader recognizing. What I'm sure of—and I'm not about to run upstairs to pull books and prove it, but I'm nearly certain—is that Franzen/Eugenidies/etc. are creating characters that depend on the reader recognizing stuff, types. That's a broad way to put it. But there is, in reading certain fictions, a feeling the reader gets of the author either anticipating us recognizing something and letting us—needing us to—fill in certain blanks, and that gets awful and exhausting. Easy example: of course Walter and Patty drive a Prius at the end of Freedom. Of course they do. Is that a) a smart detail on Franzen's part, a recognition of who these characters are and a supply of what the reader wants/needs or b) a bit of an obvious sham, given that there's no other car they could possibly drive? I think that q's hard to say, and I'll admit it's a tiny point, but shit like that, at that level, is where Franzen fails, for me: it's in the details, and they add up. These tiny, cellular-level decisions which make the books bigger and realer or not, realer meaning ultimately able to surprise the reader. Freedom offered lots of satisfactions but not much surprise. For the record: I think Eugenides in Virgin Suicides totally does this, and well and gorgeously—that novel's a masterpiece—but his latest one misses in exactly these ways.

[5] What do you think about the overlapping sound and dialogue in an Altman movie versus some more traditional and highly filtered or edited handling of sound? Is that a useful comparison or am I muddling things?

WC: I don't know if you're muddling, but I don't know enough Altman to comment with any decency. I think, though, that the binary being attempted here's part of the problem: it's not just that one microphone picks up the specific voice and one mic picks up the sound of the room; it's a difference in how we understand what makes a song (using the mic example). What's created by capturing the sound of a song being made vs. what's created by capturing what we believe to be the discrete bits which we understand to make up the song? You talked about this in the One Story interview—said it was Martone's line—how you can never have too much peripheral detail; ultimately the thing we may be trying to talk about is what constitutes peripheral; the folks I like seem more willing to engage in stuff that's not overtly in service to the obvious plot machinations of the story at every second; there's just cool stuff, all over.

Not Entirely Asleep: One Big Complaint, 3 Microreviews

I promise things will pick back up shortly here–October's been travel-filled and otherwise engaging. Here: here's some elsewhere for the moment:

An interview with good old yrs truly at the Kenyon Review, and here you can read the two poems I've got in the latest issue

My review of The Marriage Plot over at the Star Tribune. Please know that I was 1/10th as hard on the book as I'd be in conversation–because, obviously, I was writing for a newspaper, and one cannot just be a wild-eyed maniac in a newspaper. Regardless: it was scary to see the book get starred reviews in Kirkus and PW, but it's been nice since to see it get lots more cautious, critical reviews since.

I don't want to get too much into this, but the Eugenides book seems, to me, part of a pretty shitty batch of anticipated fall fiction. First, this guy needs his f-ing head checked, and B+N reviews should now never be trusted (also: could there be a more say nothing review than this?), and I want someone to honestly tell me that Whitehead's Zone One is even remotely worth reading. I forced myself to read the thing and feel used and betrayed because of it. Whitehead's a phenomenal writer—any single paragraph in Zone One is interesting and full of vim and vigor and pep—but paragraph after paragraph with multiple sentences given over to cleveristic fireworkery about hallways and cool cultural asides…come the fuck on. Also: time does not work in this novel. The first 80 pages take place in a single afternoon–there's flashback, but it's shit. Time doesn't work, and the paragraphs are festooned with so many larded, overly clever/cool shit that a reader—this reader—has to just walk away. It's a terrible, terrible book.

As is, for the record, Drew Magary's The Postmortal. I love Magary, and have jumped up and down about how great he is before, and I actually hope he'll answer the interview questions I sent him through his publicist and, in doing so, maybe help me understand why I'm wrong about his novel, but lord almighty is The Postmortal a falling apart shitfest. Here's the thing: it's a dystopian book about what happens when aging is cured. Fine. The book's presented in brief snippets—Magary's a blogger, after all—and features characters who make stick figures seem fully developed and fleshed out, and the book ends up feeling like the cheapest, easiest possible book Magary could've written—a failure at character level, a failure at idea level, all of it (and how in the fuck it got a B+ is just beyond me—I'm guessing it says more about the fact that Magary's got active, online fans than it says about the book). Look, I don't love dumping on books, but this fall's been a batch of shit, and it's been miserably frustrating to feel just nut-kicked by (count em) THREE books.

Now that this has become a review, let me point out three books that are good—not amazing, not knock you sideways, but very very good.

1. Karaoke Culture by Dubravka Ugresic. No, I don't know how to pronounce the name either, and no, I'm not necessarily crazy about this book just because of the essay on the minibar that's been floating around for quite awhile, but this book of essays by Ugresic's just vinegar and caustic enough to be fun without feeling cutting. She writes, basically, on pop culture, and the former Yugoslavia, and she's entertaining and weird, if sometimes a little predictable (it seems a pretty facile thing for a smartish book person to think about Big Brother, for instance: no matter how much shitty television tells us about ourselves, we don't need every smart person to note the same things shitty television tells us about ourselves). Still: mostly fun.

2. Cerulean Blues by Katie Fallon. This is, full disclosure, by a friend, and it's I believe the debut book from Ruka Press in DC, and I personally love this book—I'm massively interested in Cerulean Warblers, how their habitat's being destroyed (both in WVirginia and Central America), why anyone should bother saving a bird smaller than the palm of a 12 year old. It is, however, a book which mimics the form (and therefore causes some of the same frustrations) of food writing that I got bent out of shape about here at KR. Regardless: it's a good book, and once you read it you can be the dick at the party who tells folks when they talk about Freedom that there's actually a book about Cerulean Warblers far better than the one Franzen wrote.

3. Groove Interrupted by Keith Spera. The book's subtitle's Loss, Renewal, and the Music of New Orleans, and if you care about American music you're gonna want to read this. Good companion book: It Came from Memphis. This book's worth reading exclusively for chapter on Alex Chilton, but then there's one on Toussaint and Anselmo and Davenport and all this other great stuff and you're deep in, the night half over and you with all this great noise in your head.

Apologies for the nasty frustration—it's been a hard fall for reading. Maybe I should be blaming Harbach's Art of Fielding for being so satisfying, so early on, and therefore leaving everything else seeming damn paltry. Anyway: more in a bit, back to regularly scheduled programming.

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Bondy's Believers

            Of the several pretty incredible albums that've already been released this year (top-of-head list of some incredible ones: Buckner's Our Blood, Bon Iver's Bon Iver, Wilco's The Whole Love, Sarah Jaffe's The Way Sound Leaves a Room, Blind Pilot's We Are the Tide), the one I'm having the hardest time shaking is A. A. Bondy's Believers. I also find it compellingly hard to talk about the album, just because the maybe common or easy buzzwords one'd perhaps use about it—or not even buzzwords, just connotations, typical mentions—don't catch the thick weirdness of this album. Maybe that's the best way to do the album, honestly: the two words I'd be tempted to use in describing Believers are "folk" or folkish and "Americana," but those terms are pale misses on what this album fully contains. So here follows my takedown of the words I'm tempted to use.

 

Folk-ish. This album—like Bondy's other stuff—is ultimately made of ingredients we'd recognize from elsewhere: guitar, piano, reverbed bass (worth noting that most everything's electric on this, whereas on his earlier albums one could smell the spruce of the acoustics). Drums on these albums always seem like if they were to become a person they'd be a very nice, very relaxed dude. But, so: quiet, mostly. There's a way these things are built (Buckner and Bon Iver, for what it's worth, also have folk-ish tendencies and also both stretch the term to new shapes and potentials).

Here's the thing though: Believers's first track, "The Heart is Waiting," sounds like a hundred storms decided to come together and stuff themselves all into the same cloud, and then as if that cloud became an electric guitar. I don't know how to talk well about this. The song doesn't bang to a start and doesn't snap to a shut, it rumbles in and out like the sound of the ocean as one drives past, and so because of that, at least for/to me, the whole album sounds like something that's already out there, and that hitting play's merely a matter of opening a door. And what's out there?

The reviews I've read've mentioned dread. I suppose there's that. What's weird about Believers is that it's so loaded with a thick music that the listener's damn near bound to make associations: there's heavy organ throughout, so it sounds sort of creepy or Neil Young-ish at points. There's a plaintive stridency in Bondy's voice—I can't tell who I hear hints of. Ultimately, the album sounds like a soundtrack, though, is the thing, and it actually I think sounds like the perfect soundtrack to Drive, the recent Ryan Gossling flick.

Here's the thing: that film's got this 80′s synth-rock thing going on. It works well for the movie. I still have the sndtrk in my head at least every-other-day. But Believers would be the weirder, darker, more sparse version, and in that version there'd be no question about if the scorpion jacket was ridiculous or not. I'm not doing a good job with this. Onward.

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Americana. This is weird. On "Drmz," which Bondy admitted was titled that way just because he likes fucking with spellings, the opening's so similar to a Velvet Underground song it's almost funny—it sounds like it could easily lead to "Some Kinda Love" or "Jesus," easy. "Rte. 28/Believers" could be an outtake from The River-era Springsteen. What I'm trying to say is you can see and hear grandpaternity in these tracks, almost instantly, and that lineage is what we've all now come to agree is "Americana" or something. Some essential river that flows through certain music. Plus just look at that cover! The fuzz, the solitude, the black-and-white.

But the truth is, those songs start one way but headfake fast. "The Twist" starts like the dirgiest 1982 Neil Young track, and when Bondy says "I hold the blade with the midnight arm," you're welcome to think the darkest thoughts you're able to. Here's the chorus

 

In ritual positions

I kneel before this love

Sometimes in benediction

a mouth to sing the flood

far away from the world.

 

You're, again, welcome to get that as darkly as you'd like. I'll submit that though the song may not make overt narrative sense, it works terribly well—he sings "I'll hold the mirror for the ghost," and the rightness of that image or idea totally, totally works.

Bondy's been making good albums for awhile now (longer, even: Verbena, anyone?), but this, Believers, is something magic and different, darker by double and more lasting and unsolvable, than anything he's yet tried. I haven't been this hooked on an album in I don't want to consider how long. Do yourself a favor. Get this now.

 

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