The Paris Review's Blog, page 752

The Best Christmas Card Ever

At the Paris Review offices, several of us were lucky enough to receive, in recent days, a mailing from a friend and contributor to these pages. It was a plain cream Christmas card on which was printed,

“‘Merry Christmas!’ the man threatened.” —William Gaddis

We all agreed it was quite the best Christmas card we had ever seen.

The quote comes from Gaddis’s first novel, 1955’s The Recognitions, which, like the rest of his work, is noted for being challenging. (In his Art of Fiction interview, Gaddis objects to this characterization, preferring to think of the labor involved as “a collaboration between the reader and what is on the pages.”) 

And while he may not seem the most festive of authors, Gaddis might have approved: in a letter he sent his mother from Harvard in 1943, young “Bill” writes,

Have got Christmas cards—fifty—do you know where that plate I had for engraving is? It must be perhaps in my desk or somewhere—I’d like to have them done and mailed from here if possible—would appreciate it if you should run across to send it up—

Merry Christmas, Bill!

 

Mysterious Skin: The Realia of William Gaddis

Most people with scholarly inclinations will visit a novelist’s literary archive to follow the paper trails, as manifested through gathered correspondence, stray postcards, marked-upon stationery, and scattered drafts. A couple of months before the recent publication of his collected letters, I visited the William Gaddis Papers at Washington University in Saint Louis in search of something near the polar opposite.

I had harbored a minor obsession with the novelist for years, even before reading a single word of his writing, probably due his reputation as a writer who crafted a string of unapologetically dense works while almost entirely avoiding the fickleness of the literary limelight. I had bought a used hardcover of Carpenter’s Gothic, one of Gaddis’s shorter novels, at a library booksale just after my early-twenties Pynchon obsession had tapered off a bit. That book sat unread on a shelf for a few years until I decided to make the plunge into Gaddis’s work after seeing his specter, both his name and the titles of his books, floating through David Markson’s great anecdote—and allusion-heavy novels.

More dilettante than scholar, I was on the hunt for certain pieces of the novelist’s realia, that archival category of physical, three-dimensional objects rather than the usual rectangular flatland of manuscripts. Gaddis—who wrote “only” five books over the course of a forty-odd-year career (though amounting to around 2,640 pages in total), with each tome encompassing every possible spectrum of American vernacular and obsession; who won a MacArthur Award and two National Book Awards; and who was famous, as Cynthia Ozick once put it, for not being famous enough—had one object in his collection that I had never seen in a library catalog before. I found this particular entry buried deep within the online finding aid for the Gaddis Papers:

“Box 166.2/- : Zebra Skin, (1 item), Stored in oversize; box on order.”

After scanning across this listing while doing cursory research for something else, I instantly became obsessed with the idea of the zebra skin in the library. What, exactly, did it look like? How was it stored among Gaddis’s papers? Why had he owned it? What was it doing in the special collections of an academic library?

“Box 166.2/- : Zebra Skin, (1 item), Stored in oversize; box on order.”

Box 166.2/- : Zebra Skin, (1 item), Stored in oversize; box on order.

If you are a certain kind of person, there is a unique form of pleasure to be obtained in an archive. With an important writer’s notes—or, even better, journals—there is a sense of ceremonious trespassing involved in having a specialist present you, the researcher, with a revered figure’s highly personal, and often rather trivial, belongings. The special collections room becomes an equalizing space where we can ogle at the humdrum remains of those we esteem the most; by looking through their assorted paperwork—through their receipts, to-do lists and preserved desk detritus—they become somewhat less elevated and more earthly. This is even truer in the case of the three-dimensional realia: due to the combinations of death, achievement, fame, and rarity, the worn and used objects of everyday life are eventually deemed research-worthy.

I pondered this in only the vaguest way as I stood at the long end of a broad, sternum-high wooden cabinet that would act as a makeshift examination table for the Gaddis zebra skin, which was slowly being wheeled out in its stored cylinder form on a standard library shelving cart, which became a makeshift gurney for this occasion. When I first approached Joel Minor, the curator of the Modern Literature Collection and Manuscripts at the Olin Library, I thought that my request would be rebuffed. Not only was I not a student, but I was asking to see what is surely one of the more obscure and cumbersome items in the entire library. Without hesitation, he informed me he would arrange for it to happen, and seemed slightly excited to do so. “That’s what it’s there for,” he told me. I still wasn’t entirely sure myself what it was there for and why I felt like I had to see it. Luckily, I didn’t have to know

Joel, and Sarah, the special collections assistant, hoisted the approximately four-foot-long tube onto the short end of the cabinet and slowly unfurled the specimen, which was rolled between two sheets of off-white, archival-quality muslin. Once it was spread flat, the three of us stared at the striated tones of skin for a silent moment. The item had only once before been removed from the shelf space that it has been occupying for the decade since the university had first acquired the novelist’s full archives. Joel had never seen the zebra, Sarah had seen it that one other time, and I have the dubious honor of being the first person to ever request Williams Gaddis’s zebra skin from the library catalog. Though the cabinet was fairly huge, the animal’s legs and tail draped over the edges. (The Internet tells me that an average zebra is about four feet tall and seven feet long; imagine those dimensions without the scaffolding of bones and muscle, then splayed apart into a stiff sheet). The head would have drooped over the border as well, but it was still rigidly curled, fresh from its long-term storage position. The zebra’s mane was tufted into a dense ridge along the animal’s wrinkled neck, leading between a pair of flattened ears and into a hollow face.

We spent some time speculating. Where had Gaddis kept this? In his office or before a fireplace? On a wall or on a floor? Had he bought it secondhand from a dealer specializing in exotic animal hides, or did he hunt it himself during his travels in Africa? (There was a small, clean bullet hole just above the negative spaces where the eyes once were.) I mainly wanted to know how this rather unwieldy and academically useless object came to be considered worthy of being part of the Gaddis literary archive and how it found its way into the library’s collection. Joel and Sarah told me that the entirety of the author’s archives ended up at the school largely through the persuasiveness of the novelist and essayist William Gass, who taught at Washington University for thirty years and was a long-term friend and associate of Gaddis. Rare-book dealer Ken Lopez guided the acquisition process between the library’s special collections department and the Gaddis family, who had assembled the enormous lot of what would become the entirety of the novelist’s permanent archives. The great mystery, the Question of the Zebra, was just as elusive to them as it was to me.

A former professor of mine once told a seminar about a sabbatical trip that he had made to the British Library to do research on gay culture in Victorian London. I don’t remember the exact details, but as I recall it, he was studying one periodical of early pornography so rare that a white-gloved attendant had to turn the pages for him, with the professor nodding each time he was done looking at a particular early photograph of parlor orgies or chaise-longue fellatio. Did the library attendant stare blankly at the wall, or would he steal a glance over the professor’s shoulder? Was there an inherent tension in being observed while looking at these magazines, especially under the guise of arousal-free research?

This strange kind of voyeurism has unfortunately never been part of my experience in rare-book rooms, though a certain level of inconvenience for the librarian on hand usually does figure into the equation. Several years ago, having been infatuated with the Fluxus art movement and its various tributaries for some time, my girlfriend and I decided to make a trip to the special collections at the Amherst College Library, where dozens of small, boxed Fluxus pieces are strewn throughout the guarded stacks. For the unfamiliar, aside from the multitude of books, prints, installations, films, concerts, performances, and happenings, a hefty channel of the creative energy within Fluxus in the 1960s was devoted to creating boxed ready-mades and multiples that could be viewed as either naïve abstract jokes or refined trickster koans. These crude and elaborate Fluxkits mostly baffled the art world at the time, despite their art-historical precedents. Their absurdity has surely only heightened, as they are now carefully kept among the rare books and manuscripts in a prestigious New England liberal arts college library.

After individually requesting an item—say Alice Hutchins’s Jewelry Fluxkit (1 box [magnetic ring, springs, and metal balls] ;  7 x 7 x 6 cm.), or possibly Geoffrey Hendricks’s Flux-reliquary (1 box [7 relics + label] ;  13 x 10 x 3 cm), the “relics” being “fingernails in a capsule … electrical wire … ball point pen … stone … ‘shit’ in a plastic box … bottle with liquid … small brass nails in a capsule …”—the librarian would disappear for several minutes, only to reappear with a small bundle wrapped in multiple layers of thin, stark-white tissue paper. Wearing latex gloves, she would delicately and precisely unwrap each item on the stained oak tabletop where we were sitting, peeling away the paper from the object as though she were removing a sleeping newborn from a wet blanket, until the kernel revealed what she, possibly unfamiliar with her library’s holdings in avant-garde history, likely viewed as a prank, which wasn’t entirely off the mark. There wasn’t much that we could do with the objects besides look at them for a minute, museum-style, and maybe giggle a bit before sending it back to the stacks. We inflicted this cruel punishment on the librarian by making her repeat this tedious process perhaps a dozen times, each slow unwrapping only revealing an artwork that functioned as a punchline to an undelivered joke, as it surely seemed with Ben Vautier’s Flux Holes (1 box [15 plastic straws] ;  10 x 12 x 1 cm.).

Having spent enough time with the zebra skin, even feeling the coarseness of its shoulder for a second, I considered this element of inconvenience as I left the special collections room that day, with Joel and Sarah deciding the best way to rewrap and reroll the animal hide for possibly another decade of storage, possibly more. Where the Fluxus pieces are, on all levels, more confounding than Gaddis’s zebra skin, they were still the end product of the group’s artistic activity. Gaddis’s realia, like that of any writer, was merely part of his daily life, rather removed and tangential from the process of crafting his five difficult and brilliant novels over the course of a multidecade career.

What the researcher, or even the dilettante, might want to know is how an author’s material surroundings and posthumous personal effects might distill and leak into their work. Most often, the realia from a literary archive are the typical objects that we would associate with the physical act of writing, such as it is: fountain pens, stationery, reading glasses, ashtrays. Essentially, these objects are to dead authors what the items in Hard Rock Cafe display cases are to dead rock stars: memorabilia. Hendrix’s famous acid-soaked headband or Faulkner’s famous tin of beloved pipe tobacco, take your pick. This fact makes an author’s nonwriterly objects stand out and seem more significant, more imbued with potential coded meaning. Indeed, zebras and their skins do make appearances within Gaddis’s fiction, so the poor beast in the special collections isn’t entirely irrelevant when considering his corpus. A rolled-up zebra skin appears midway through Carpenter’s Gothic (“He’d kicked aside a cobwebbed roll of canvas, the black on white, or was it white on black roll of a hide …”), sporadically emerging from the silent background and into the incessant stream of dialog that makes up the majority of the text. In JR, the downtrodden composer Edward Bast is commissioned to write a score of “zebra music” for a documentary being made by the big-game hunter and stockbroker Crawley, in a lobbying effort to convince Congress to introduce various African species, zebras included, into the U.S. National Parks system:

“Zebra music Mister Bast, zebra music. Just take a minute to fill you in here, friend of mine and I have gone to no damned little expense to put together a little film, —fellows you see up here mainly … and he herded the stares of the wall gallery indiscriminately together with a sweep of his arm,and zebras, damned lot of zebras in fact, whole idea is to wake up some people down in Washington to the idea of stocking our public lands with something more suitable than a lot of trailers and beer cans.”

Box/Folder 166.1/- Perforated Foxtrot Roll for Player Piano, (1 item)

Box/Folder 166.1/- Perforated Foxtrot Roll for Player Piano, (1 item)

Stored in black box.

After my time with the zebra skin, I wanted to look at another piece of realia that I knew related to the writing of JR, the doorstopper of a second novel that won Gaddis the National Book Award in 1976 and cemented the author’s reputation as a bedrock figure in modern letters. The pairing of this book with Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions, published twenty years earlier, is largely responsible for his reputation as an unapologetically difficult writer. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, after being re-issued last year by Dalkey Archive Press, JR was also the unlikely candidate for a summer-long online reading group (#OccupyGaddis, in case, like me, you missed it) that attracted curious new flocks to the author’s work.

Clocking in at just over 750 pages, the novel is a kaleidoscopic volume told largely through a barrage of finely-tuned dialoge spoken through dozens, possibly hundreds, of spoken and overheard unattributed voices, with the occasional hall-of-mirrors, paragraph-long sentence put to use as interstitial flow. Like all truly encyclopedic novels, JR is “about” many things: the tentacles of modern finance, the greed of corporate growth, the awkwardness of adolescence, the neglect of the artist in the webs of capitalism, the dilution of education through technology, among others. It is also about—though like the zebra skin in Carpenter’s Gothic, this only pokes through the fog of the narrative at opportune moments—the player piano. One of the primary plotlines in JR deals with the soon-to-be inherited ownership of the General Roll Corporation on Long Island and the jockeying of various family descendents over the company’s accumulated fortune, which was made through the production of rolls for player pianos in the early parts of the twentieth century.

The second of Gaddis’s archived objects that I wanted to inspect was one such roll, a “Foxtrot for Player Piano” stored in a plain, oblong, black box. Like the zebra skin on a miniaturized scale, the piano roll was unfurled before me on a table. I looked at it, briefly examined its strata of miniscule holes, took a photo, and the roll was carted off for indefinite storage. It looked just like any other player-piano roll that can easily be found for next to nothing at an antique store.

The Metaphor of the Player Piano in the Works of William Gaddis could be, and probably already is, the grounding for an entire doctoral dissertation. In brief: for Gaddis, the invention of the player piano represented the growing mechanization of the arts and the related dismissal of the artist in the process. In a 1951 essay for the Atlantic Monthly titled essay “Stop Player. Joke No. 4,” Gaddis wrote that player pianos provide “the opportunity to participate in something which asked little understanding; the pleasure of creating without work, practice, or the taking of time; and the manifestation of talent when there was none.” (Clearly he had never heard the work of the great inventor-composer Conlon Nancarrow—a mere ten years older than Gaddis and active during the roughly same timespan—who manually punched the paper rolls to his own liking and put them through modified player pianos to create wild, dynamic flurries that no human hands could play on a traditional piano.)

The confluence of technology and artistic purity was an obsession that took hold of Gaddis early in his writing career and never let up. The cornerstone for any dive into the life of the author is the work of the literary historian and Gaddis scholar Steven Moore. At the international colloquium “Reading William Gaddis,” in the spring of 2000, in Orléans, France, Moore delivered a wonderful speech that was concerned almost exclusively with the rather esoteric topic of player pianos:

It was when Gaddis was working as a fact-checker at the New Yorker, in 1945–46, that he first became interested in the player piano, the subject of an article he was assigned to work on. He quickly became interested in this musical contraption not for its own sake—I don’t think he owned one or played one—but as a popular manifestation of what he considered a dangerous trend, namely, the growing use of mechanical reproduction in the arts and a corresponding loss of the autonomy of the individual artist. After he finished the assignment he decided to research the history of the player piano further and to write something of his own on the topic...The following summer, Gaddis made his first appearance in a national magazine with “Stop Player. Joke No. 4.” The fact that this essay is only a few pages long suggests that it was indeed only an excerpt from a longer work, and thus that longer work would be the basis for what he eventually called Agapē Agape.

Later, a supposed book in progress on the history of player pianos is briefly mentioned in The Recognitions, his first book from 1955; twenty years later, in JR, the disgruntled novelist Jack Gibbs, a clear stand-in for Gaddis himself, is working on a “social history of mechanization and the arts” called, of course, Agapē Agape. As Moore observes in his speech, the eventual sale of Gaddis’s project was reported in a 1997 issue of Publishers Weekly, which stated that a nonfiction work titled Agapē Agape: The Secret History of the Player Piano had been acquired by an editor at Henry Holt. The project was finally published posthumously in 2000, though as a slim novel rather than a nonfiction study, two years after Gaddis’s death and fifty-five years after the idea first sprouted in the author’s brain.

Unidentified pair of shoes. Sheri Martinelli’s?

Box/Folder 166.1/- Pair of Women’s Shoes, (1 item)

The final fragment of Gaddis realia that I wanted to see was a mysterious pair of women’s shoes. Like the zebra skin, it was a rather confounding entry for a dignified literary archive. When the shoes were brought forth, they were set unceremoniously within a plain box; each had white tissue stuffed from the heel down into the sharply pointed toe. These three-inch heels were eggshell white, slightly creamier than the tissue filling out the void where an imagined woman’s foot would be. Long and narrow, with a thick, gaudy bow at the slope of the toe, they were of fairly standard midcentury appearance and rather drab.They were in remarkable shape considering their likely age. I inspected them for a minute, took a few pictures and let them be carted back into their storage place amongst the valise, the stapler, the Olympia typewriter.

What was notable about these particular drab shoes was that they likely first belonged to one of the greatest under-recognized, cross-sectional muses of twentieth century arts and letters, the painter and poet Sheri Martinelli. Her cultivated social and creative connections to mid-twentieth-century bohemia were astounding: she was muse and mistress to Ezra Pound; Charlie Parker frequented her West Village apartment; Marlon Brando was a known admirer; e.e. cummings collected her paintings; she was known as the Queen of the Beats in 1950s San Francisco and was a close friend of Allen Ginsberg; she corresponded with Charles Bukowski and was one of the earliest publishers of his writing; she acted in Maya Deren’s Ritural in Transfigured Time; she appeared in the writings of figures as diverse as Anaïs Nin, David Markson, H.D. and Anatole Broyard. (All of this is gathered from, yet again, Steven Moore, who wrote what is surely the definitive essay on Martinelli’s life.) She was also the direct model for the character of Esme in The Recognitions. Like Martinelli, Esme was an artist with a printing press in her apartment, had a young daughter, lived on Jones Street in the West Village, and was the object of desire for countless bohemian would-be suitors.

The two met while circulating in the same Greenwich Village scene of the mid-1940s, where Martinelli, by all accounts, emitted magnetism wherever she went, constantly attracting hordes of male painters, musicians, and writers. Gaddis was no exception, yet it is uncertain whether this infatuation was reciprocal, and, if so, how long a possible relationship may have lasted. (In the novel, Otto, the stand-in character for Gaddis, sleeps with Esme after meeting her at a party and for the remainder of the novel, within a complex plotline loosely orbiting art forgery and other broad topics. The love is bitterly unrequited and subsumed into an equally complicated love quadrangle.) Martinelli was thirty years old to Gaddis’s twenty-five when they met, and apparently thought of him as a “mama’s boy.” According to Moore’s essay, she recalled seeing the young writer, at that point unpublished, at an opening at MoMA wearing a pair of borrowed shoes that were slightly too roomy, causing them to emit audible clops against the floors of the gallery.

Another mystery. What were these white heels were doing in the possession of William Gaddis? Did she give them to him as a going-away gift before he moved from the Village to Panama? Were his clopping shoes at MoMA, a possible moment of early humiliation, somehow cause for Gaddis to take her shoes hostage at some point and keep them as a memento? Could they have belonged to another woman, a former wife, and misidentified? Why were they in the archive?

 For the dilettante, as opposed to the scholar, the great thing about realia is that it is what it is, initially just objects on their own, whereas the notes and the drafts and the manuscripts all connect and threaten to pool together, drowning you in their paper mass. While a scholar might want to, say, do a study on the various corporate jobs that Gaddis held for most of his adult life and see how his various written reports have cycled back into his fiction—my sources at the library say that several different scholars have traveled from far and wide to undertake this “unique” study—the dilettante just wants to take a starry-eyed stroll through the museum of mundane objects. A zebra skin, a player-piano roll and a pair of women’s shoes. Any one of them is just the kind of artifact that could be found by accident at a quality estate sale, yet the fact that these once were part of the rote material life of a reclusive and complex novelist make the dilettante want to hunt them out and take a closer look, one by one. Why, though? “That’s what it’s there for.” That’s why.

 Matthew Erickson currently lives in Saint Louis.

Masterpiece Theatre: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning

All this week, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays!

My favorite movie of last year—the best movie of last year, I would argue—wasn’t nominated for any Academy Awards. It wasn’t even part of the conversation. That’s because the movie is Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning. You might think I’m just being ironic, that I’m taking pleasure in saying what no one else is saying. The latter may be true but the former is not. This movie is a secret masterpiece.

Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is a movie Werner Herzog, David Lynch, and Shivers-era David Cronenberg might make if they teamed up to shoot a Bourne knockoff in Louisiana on a shoestring budget. This thought experiment works even better if we imagine Gaspar Noé dropping by the editing room later on.

The actual director, John Hyams, has a distinctive voice and style. He and his cinematographer, Yaron Levy, create a nightmare-scape of blighted semisuburbia through which the hero drifts like a damaged samurai, occasionally getting sucked into maelstroms of berserk, finger-hacking, foot-severing violence. The compositions are beautiful. The cheapness of the sets only enhances the lush and lurid atmosphere; everything seems hypnotic and dreamlike. Interiors look like Gregory Crewdson photographs and exteriors look like William Egglestons. This is not your standard VOD action movie.

Day of Reckoning is the sixth installment in the critically disregarded sci-fi/action franchise that begins with 1992’s Universal Soldier. The original starred Jean-Claude van Damme and Dolph Lundgren as reanimated military men with stony expressions, superior combat skills, and the ability to absorb tremendous amounts of punishment. I have never seen it. I did see Universal Soldier: Regeneration, the fourth sequel, which John Hyams also directed. Regeneration is not as deliriously weird and memorable as Day of Reckoning, but it does have a terse, haunting Dolph Lundgren monologue (really) that precedes his character’s excellent death scene.

In Day of Reckoning, which is only distantly related to the other Universal Soldier movies, a man named John wakes up to find a trio of black-clad thugs in his home who brutally assault him and murder his family. The entire opening sequence is shot exclusively in John’s POV, creating the disquietingly immersive sense that awful things are coming and when they do, you will be forced to look right at them. Maybe Noé dropped by the set, too.

Once he recovers, John searches for the killers, but at every turn, he encounters baffling irregularities. Strangers seem to know him, even hate or fear him for mysterious reasons. He gets an ominous, rambling phone call from an unfamiliar voice: “They’ve been calling ... I don’t know what it’s about ... I think they’re watching me, man, I don’t think I’m safe ... ” A bearded, silent plumber stalks him with an axe. At one point, he has a traumatizing strobe-pulse vision in which the plumber transforms into Jean-Claude van Damme. Audience members with epilepsy, consider yourselves warned.

This is less an action film than a horror film. The fight scenes unfold not to the usual pulse-pounding score but to a low, queasy drone, like background noise from Twin Peaks. The primary sounds are the wild, guttural bellows of the combatants as they hack and bludgeon and lunge at each other like beasts. These are not exciting scenes. They’re grim and mesmerizing.

But the movie is more than just a feast for connoisseurs of composition and atmosphere. It both invites and supports a close reading. Eventually (and unsurprisingly) John learns that his past is not as he remembers it, and his motives and actions are not entirely his own. In Day of Reckoning, the history of the individual is an alterable commodity, subject to manipulation by both the state and those who oppose it. There is no such thing as free will, the movie suggests; the closest thing to it is the self-delusion that you have achieved it.

At the same time, John’s search for his family’s killers folds back on itself to become an investigation into his own identity and then a radical recalibration of his moral code; in addition to being a political parable, the story is a subtle and elegant portrait of a consciousness maturing from psychological childhood to adulthood. When he realizes his memories are untrustworthy, he faces a climactic choice (much like the one faced by the hero of Park Chan-wook’s revenge classic Oldboy, with which Day of Reckoning shares certain themes and directorial fetishes) about the most fundamental of human questions: Who am I? How should I live? Which fiction should I embrace, and how much truth can I tolerate?

Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is the most exceptional movie of 2012 in part because it has no right to be as good as it is. I begrudge nothing to films like Silver Linings Playbook and Django Unchained (which I loved and saw three times) when I say that, given their extraordinary pedigrees and healthy budgets, they had at least a fair shot at being excellent. On the other hand, all John Hyams had to do was get van Damme and Lundgren in the same place at the same time and string together a few coherent fight scenes, and he would have exceeded expectations. Yet somehow he made a strange, haunting, sometimes even beautiful odyssey that lingered with me more than any American movie in recent memory. Despite a few surprised critical notices (like this and this), it was too disreputable to be talked about during awards season, but that’s okay. Anything this unusual deserves its own conversation.

Nick Antosca is a novelist and screenwriter living in Los Angeles.  His story collection The Girlfriend Game will be published this summer and a novella, The Hangman's Ritual, will be published in the fall.

 

Darkling I Listen

All this week, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays!

Herewith, Benedict Cumberbatch reads John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”

 

Gchatting with George Saunders

All this week, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays!

On Valentine’s Day, George Saunders agreed to Gchat with The Paris Review Daily to discuss his use of the modern vernacular in fiction; his new book, Tenth of December; as well as Nicki Minaj and what is, according to Saunders, one of the great undernarrrated pleasures of living.

 

George: Hi Katherine - ready on this end when you are

me: Hi George!
I am prepared

George: Well, I’m not sure I am. But I am willing. :)

me: we could just do the whole thing as emoticons

:/ :l :?

George: Man, you are a virtuosiii of emoticons.

me: A symptom of my generation...

George: I only know that one.

me: You only know happiness, then.

George: No - I only know the SYMBOL for happiness. Like, I can’t do ENNUI.

me: Well, in this space the symbol and emotion are one.

George: :)

me: So I thought this would be a good format in which to discuss your use of modern vernacular in fiction

George: Sure.  A perfect format for that, I’d say...

me: and also free and direct discourse - since gchat has that flow in real time
so if that sounds fun let's get into it?

George: Let
Let
Let
Let’s do it, I meant to say. I was “g-stuttering” there...

me: Ain’t nuthin’ but a g thang...
My questions are written out formally which should be a nice contrast to my otherwise bad capitalization and punctuation
And quoting Snoop Dogg

George: And I shall answer them with aplomb, dear lady, forthwith.

me: So, you’re able to both relish and lampoon modern vernacular - the “so, likes” and “i doubt its’ that pop throughout your fiction. How did this balance of celebration and satire develop?  

George: When I was starting out I had some basic tightassedness re literary diction - thought that “real” literature had to occur in a space slightly higher than you could actually enact in real-time. This had its origins in the fact that I didn’t know any writers etc etc. So it was a breakthrough (hardwon, late in coming) when I realized that there is really no difference between high and low speech - they both “indicate,” they both scan, they both give off energy when read. So that was a great thing, to suddenly be able to consider ALL language as possible candidates for what we might call “poetic elevation” - that process of compression/exclusion that takes a diction and kicks it up into (hopefully) a kind of super-expressive purity....

me: (omg so much aplomb!)

George: Suddenly you could literally “hear American singing” - just as it was. Whatever you heard was de facto a candidate for inclusion in fiction.
Yes, I have an excess of aplomb today.

me: In your new collection a lot of the vernacular you select feels so specific to “now” - how do you make these choices when speech patterns and memes are shifting so quickly? Is there a standard of durability?

George: Honestly - and this is where things get gauzy - so much of that process is intuitive. Just deciding minute-by-minute, over and over again, over the period during which you’re writing the story. Sort of like seasoning to taste or something like that. I think that’s one of the maybe under-discussed aspects of process - the difference between a good writing day and a bad one is the quality of the split-second decisions you made. And that is dependent upon - well, who knows? So, for example, you might put in some little nugget that seems/feels current - and then, four months later, re-reading it, it feels “too” current - then out it comes. But I can honestly say that whenever I feel myself formulating or invoking something that is conceptual/theoretical (ala “my policy on brand-names”) I veer away from that so fast. I just know from experience that my instincts are better than my cerebration.
Cerebrate good times, come on!
Sent at 11:08 AM on Thursday

[GEORGE GOES GRAY]

me: Are you gone or just invisible?
Oh, it seems you are invisible...
In that case: where do you pick up most of the argot you appropriate from pop culture?

George: Sorry - my battery died and I had to race frantically down the hall for the cord. Am back. And winded.

me: Always a joy to be so lucid online and then have to run down the hall and be reminded of one’s corporeality.

George: I think I just pick it up by osmosis, you know? Have always been a pretty happy TV watcher and so on. Plus it’s interesting to me. Maybe the way it works is that if a person is sort of a language-wonk, bits of language (overheard etc) “sticks” to that person a little more aggressively. Like - I’m not sure how obscene I am allowed to be on here, but I’ll assume totally...A few yrs ago I got a sort of anti-fan letter that said I was “cocksuckworthian.” That word has stayed with me. As...well, as I guess it would. And yes - corporeal for sure. And through it all, our two dogs were here in the room, sleeping through the crisis.

me: What are some of the most inspiring television shows to you?
and: hi dogs!
hi guys!

George: Well, we live out in the country now, so we don’t have “real” TV or cable. So what we watch is on DVD But I pretty much (when on the road, say) just whatever happens to come on. Like the other day I watched that show re Nicki Minaj’s tour. Whatever. It’s all input.
And every- and anything can tell you something essential about the species. Even if it’s only by observing the falseness of the frame, if you will - the internalized distortions the particular program has taken on etc etc.

me: Speaking of distortions, Nicki is a judge on American Idol at the moment
and she frequently takes on this british accent and becomes a different character - I think psychologically to make crushing people’s dreams easier on her psyche.
She’ll be like: “I’m so sorry dahling but we just cahn’t do it today”

George: I do that myself, all the time. Like at the grocery store: “Dear lad, this pepperoni rather bloody appears to be past its expiration date. And that lady appears to be going into labour.”

me: “Sir, if you could just not put the blasted eggs at the bottoum of the bag...”

George: I find it exciting to think that whatever language the culture produces can be grist for the literary mill - well, and that it would HAVE to be, you know? And that goes for extra-linguistic things too - whatever thought patterns are manifesting out there, have to be interesting to us as writers. Part of “growing” ourselves as writers (there...there’s a mod usage there) is to keep expanding our vision of “what is art” outward to accommodate whatever is...out there, in reality.

me: Do you have a phrase you really like in this moment?
Something you heard recently and felt YES?

George: Nothing’s coming to mind. I’m still feeling the pain of “cocksuckworthian.”
Funny thing - I think g-chat is a little...Catholic. It always says “katherinebernard is busy. You may be interrupting.” It’s like it has an auto-nun feature.

me:  I’m soooo busyyyyyy

get in linnnne George!
Since it’s Valentine’s day may I tell you a love-and-Saunders story?
are you ok on time?

George: Sure - and it’s ok with me if we go a bit past the time allotted, btw.

me: A friend of mine once expressed doubts about a potential suitor because he was unable to grasp Saunders Capitalization in e-mails.
It turned out to be a red flag for cultural miscommunication.

George: Eeek, though. I’d be careful with that. It can become An Obnoxious Thing. As was once pointed out to me in a Stinging Review. After which I stopped Doing It.

me: I will let her know.
I am still a Fan.

George: I mean -
I mean - you
You’d hate to exclude a Worthy Suitor.
Nice typing there. That’s what I get for trying to g-chat while making an omelet and changing my piston rings and writing a short memoir.

me: Turns out in the end he was Unworthy in Every Way

George: So many are. These dudes today. And always.
Such as me, circa 1986.

me: What about circa 2013?

George: My wife and I have been married 25 years so we are just going out to lunch, very happily - I’ve been out of town for awhile and it’s just nice being together.

George: One of the great under-narrrated pleasures of living: long-term fidelity & love.

me: That’s so lovely!
Happy valentines day to her!

George: And happy valentie
Happy valentine’s to you too.
Someone rigged this computer up with a secret “send-before-done” button.

me: That was me actually
I wanted to get the whole truth you know...

George: Good luck with that. A worthy ambition for life, however.

me: Do I still have time for one more question?

George: Sure.

me: Um, so, many office workers spend a lot of their days streaming here on gchat, producing these casual literary documents.
What effect do you think the Everyman’s growing comfort with articulating his thoughts and feelings in a written format, and absorbing the thoughts and feelings of others from written language, might have on literary culture over the next decade?

George: I’m not sure. The one sort of obvious thing is that there’s a big gulf between all of those thousands of in-the-moment typing bursts and what I would consider “the literary” - and that is revision. For me, that process of taking a first draft and working with it over a period of months is EVERYTHING. That’s where a person finds out what he really means and (you could argue) who he really IS. So I suppose one danger is that we might get the idea that, you know, “to blurt, is to be.” The idea that whatever comes out is good and is us. Whereas someone who has really worked with text realizes - well, that neither one is “really” you, but that the considered version might represent a “higher” you - brighter, less willing to coast or condescend, funnier, and (mysteriously) also, I think, kinder.

George: Not to say, btw, that some spontaneous text isn’t brilliant - but in my experience, you can also do the sort of revision where you are trying to sort through and link up a series of good spontaneous moments.

me: (The commenters on this post can keep in mind that kinder part.)

George: As should we all.

me: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to type to me

George: I’ve really enjoyed it, Katherine - thanks so much.

me: This has been awesome and amazing.

George: My pleasure - hope we meet in person someday.

 

The Carolers

Several years ago, my mother announced she was through with Christmas trees. She and my father were tired of buying the thing, lugging it home, and decorating and taking it down. There would be no more tree unless we, their four grown children, put it up ourselves. That year my siblings and I drove to the Quincy Artery Garden Center, ten miles outside Boston, and dragged an eight-footer home. It was like wrangling an alligator; the sharp needles dug into our hands and the peak scraped against the living room ceiling, leaving a long gray trail across the “Cotton Balls” ultra-white paint my father had applied mere months before. That was the last yuletide tree at my parents’ house.

Each year I’ve urged my older brother to revive this tradition; naturally, the job falls to him, since, in the Vietnamese custom, he lives with our parents in their house along with his wife and children. The rest of us have moved out. But his two jobs sometimes don’t afford him time to sleep or eat, let alone embellish a tree. My sister has her own family’s tree to tend to now, and I don’t expect my younger brother, the baby of the family, to take action. I am the biggest tree enthusiast, but my returns home from New York City are always too late. My mother firmly believes in getting maximum use out of any purchase; our pine usually went up right after Thanksgiving and lasted into late February through the Asian Lunar New Year.

As a child I always thought our tree was special. My cousin’s tree, carried up from the basement each year by my uncle, looked creepy to me, the flame-retardant branches screwed into a skinny wooden pole painted green. My family kept fresh spruces that filled our living room with a peppercorn smell. The ornaments, whose individual histories and significances we’d forgotten or simply didn’t know, seemed to have come from a Goodwill bin. Most had been passed along to us by my parents’ housekeeping clients, people they cleaned for in the wealthier neighboring towns. I remember a baked clay piece shaped like a Christmas tree, looped through with green ribbon and painted in cursive across the base: Merry X-mas, Kilborns! There was also a glazed ceramic baseball player in a striped jersey holding a bat over his shoulder that read BENJAMIN; each year, we celebrated the athletic talents of some little-league slugger we’d never met. The glue on some pieces had yellowed and cracked, and various parts had fallen off—the bow on a ceramic wreath, the plastic googly eyes of a square snowman fashioned out of Popsicle sticks. Instead of the usual star, we had an angel whose rubber head was constantly rolling off. To get her onto the tree, you had to stick the top branch up her velvety skirt.

When you looked closely it was an odd thing, mismatched and ramshackle, but I took pride in the fact that ours didn’t look like it had come out of any department store, choked in tacky plastic garlands or strung with matching glass orbs. Our tree had history, even if it wasn’t our own. My mother never used tinsel, and I appreciated her insistence that we stick with classic white lights. I’d sneak downstairs after everyone else had gone to bed, slide a sofa cushion under the tree, and lie down with a book. Sometimes I just stared up at the winking pricks of light.

I grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts, home of John Hancock, the man who signed the Declaration of Independence with such style and largesse that his name became synonymous with signature. The city also bore to history the likes of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Sam Adams. The regional newspaper is The Patriot Ledger, and Quincy boasts seven National Historic Landmarks, most of them connected to the legacies of the political families that laid roots there. Besides being home to the nation’s founding fathers and progressive, intellectual women like Abigail Adams, the “City of Presidents” is a working-class town of immigrants and their descendants. The Irish, Italian, and English migrated to Quincy in the late 1820s to benefit from the granite quarrying and stonecutting industries that earned the town its other nickname, “The Granite City.” Names like Quigley, Conley, Steadman, Cappellano, and Kennedy dotted my class rosters.

My family lived in a neighborhood of Quincy called Germantown that consisted primarily of public housing projects for low-income families. Our unit sat across from Germantown’s main rotary where the tall deciduous tree in the center was illuminated each Christmas with colorful lights, and our stoop doubled as the neighborhood’s principle bus stop. Whether or not they waited for the #214 to Quincy Center, kids lingered all night on my family’s front steps, smoking and screaming and blasting their boom boxes. The morning after a rock crashed through a window in the bedroom my sister and I shared, I joined my father outside to survey the scene. Broken beer bottles littered the icy lawn and milky disks of spitballs had frozen on the sidewalk. The front door was covered with black, jagged writing.

I asked my father about one unfamiliar word.

He told me, “Gook.”

I asked him what it meant.

“It’s a bad word. They’re making fun of us,” he said, “because we are Vietnamese.”

It was one of the few times my father taught me English.

Now during the holidays, my mother makes up for the house’s arboreal absence in other ways. She loops shiny garlands around the stair banister. She layers big puffs of white cotton against the windows and sets out electric candles. The front and back doors are wreathed, and the two small trees in our front yard each get a short string of lights. My mother’s biggest pride though, now that the tree is out of the game, is her collection of handcrafted Caroler dolls. She noticed them while cleaning a client’s home some years before, and told us she was drawn to their antique look. Before the ease of Internet shopping had become familiar, I had a hard time finding the dolls. I finally tracked them down at a cramped holiday boutique in Quincy Center, and for the next several Christmases, my siblings and I took turns buying a new figurine to add to my mother’s collection. The store closed several years ago and I began getting her more useful things: gloves, sweaters, underwear. This year, though, after a seven-year hiatus, I decided to search online for a Caroler.

In her taste for traditional holiday décor, the creator of the Carolers, Joyce Byers, sounds a lot like my mother. Feeling disappointed with the garish decorations she found in stores in the late sixties, Byers, an amateur artist with a degree in fashion design, set out to create a figurine that embodied the holiday warmth and traditional feel that was so important to her. Her first Caroler doll adorned the Byers’ dining room table that Christmas and soon, creating the Carolers became her full-time job. With her husband and sons eventually joining her, her dolls grew into a family business.

The artisans in the Byers’ Choice workroom in Bucks County, Pennsylvania sculpt, paint, dress, and accessorize the dolls entirely by hand. Within the limited editions of one hundred figurines, no two Carolers are exactly alike, something I can vouch for having spent hours comparing seemingly identical dolls in the store. The differences are slight: the tilt of the heads and torsos, the eye shapes, how the highlights in those eyes are applied. The paint on one face can look a little brighter than the paint on another doll of the same model. Their one constant feature is the trademark open mouth: a long hollow o carved into each face.

Through the years, the company has supplemented their regular line of traditional Caroler dolls with several special editions: Holy Family, Cries of London, Specialty Santas, Salvation Army, 12 Days of Christmas, and what have become my favorite, dolls based on A Christmas Carol. This edition features a Bob Cratchit doll carrying Tiny Tim on his back, and as if the artisans feared that an open-mouthed Scrooge would appear, naturally, to be crying in anguish at being cast in an act of Christmas cheer, the notorious miser’s puppet wears an unambiguously wide grin.

At first I hated the Caroler dolls—their expressions always appeared to me frozen in screams of terror or pain. The sharp bone structure and pasty hues of the dolls’ thin faces recall Munch’s The Scream. I was also recently reminded of them as I stared up at the mournful, grief-stricken visages of Giotto’s angels in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy.

The dolls also make me think of colonial America. Their miniature bonnets, fur muffs, wire-rimmed spectacles, and crushed velvet jackets belong less to eighteenth-century Revolutionary America than they do to early Victorian England, but I didn’t recognize these distinctions when I was younger. Byers’ Choice has since affirmed for me this sense of Americana within the Carolers by releasing Colonial Williamsburg and Historical editions.

As a kindergartener at Thanksgiving time I paraded around the baseball field behind my school in the “Turkey Trot,” an ingenious opportunity for teachers to kill a couple of hours. In the first and second grades I became a Native American with a colorful headdress fashioned out of construction paper, and by the third grade I wore the somber gold-buckled, black paper hat of a colonist. Each year on April 19, we celebrated Flag Day around the flagpole in front of the school by waving mini American flags while singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”

I have a photo of myself at one celebration, wincing in the spring sun with a crayoned flag plastered to my forehead. I sang those patriotic songs over and over at home, and if my parents understood the lyrics, they were probably bemused to see their immigrant daughter’s newfound passion for the country. My mother and father always made clear the importance of remembering where we came from; for a period of time my father even forbade my siblings and me to speak English at home. “In Vietnamese!” he’d yell when we argued over chores or whose turn it was in the bathroom.

Beginning in elementary and throughout junior high, I went on field trips to Lexington and Concord, the first site of the battle between the American militia and British troops and home of “the shot heard ‘round the world”; Plymouth Rock; the birthplace of John Adams and John Quincy Adams; and other Massachusetts landmarks. I distinctly remember lining up against the stone wall in front of the Adams’ family mansion for the first of many occasions, and the secret disappointment that pricked my throat when I realized it was nothing like I’d expected—no mustachioed Gomez or elegant Morticia gliding down the stairs to greet me, no dismembered hands or spooky organ music—nothing to see throughout the tour, in fact, but a bunch of old furniture.

I learned about Paul Revere’s big ride and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. By the seventh grade I’d memorized the preamble to the Constitution and heard Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech in my dreams. But I was fairly sure some stories were missing. I wanted to know more about the Japanese internment during WWII, the Holocaust, the Tuskegee airmen. On my own I read The Diary of Anne Frank and Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, and I asked my parents about the Vietnam War, although they never told me much.

So I too fell prey to this Yankee fever, although my own attachments fell closer to the Civil War. I read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women countless times and forced my best friend to role-play with me after school; she could be Marmee or almost any one of the March sisters, or Laurie if she felt so inclined, but the bold and literary Jo was off-limits—she was mine alone. In my parents’ bedroom, we zipped each other up into my mother’s eighties ruchéd dresses, wrapped our shoulders with shawls and scarves, pinned back our black hair. We pretended my parents’ room was the Marches’ pre-war house in Concord and attended society balls hosted by wealthy snobs.

To the dismay of my classmates, Quincy High’s mascot was a presidential top hat in blue and white. Many of the football players and cheerleaders averted their eyes when the huge foam hat toppled out onto the football field following the rival high school’s mascot, Mr. Yakoo, a guy painted red with a huge feather headdress who would streak out onto the field howling and waving their school flag. From our end of the bleachers, we, the ever-civil Presidents, watched politely as the North Quincy fans stomped and yelled for their Red Raiders.

When we earned our learners’ permits and cruised around town, we were greeted by the billboards Quincy real estate agent Sam Rounseville posted on Newport Avenue near the Wollaston T station. Rounseville had his name legally changed to ‘Uncle Sam’ and for years graced over tens of thousands of dollars worth of billboards in a royal blue suit with red-and-white striped lapels and cuffs and a red bow tie and top hat. Staring down from his high perch, our own Doctor T. J. Eckleburg pointed his finger at us and reminded us to donate to our local charities during the holiday season, to stay in school, to stop smoking: “kick butts.” He pointed out, “It’s a man’s world unless women vote,” and “This Yankee loves the Red Sox.”

My friend and her family suffered taunting and several break-in robberies as the first Asian family to move into our neighborhood. But soon the Fangs came, followed by the Wongs, Chans, Tans, Caballeros, Sanchezs, Carrasquillos, Triantifliakos, Nguyens. Quincy High offered the only English as a Second Language program within the surrounding cities. We were the Ellis Island of high schools, a shelter for the newly arrived Albanians, Romanians, Greek, Chinese, and Vietnamese. I heard “Speak English!” snarls directed at the groups of immigrant students and watched a boy spit in a Chinese girl’s face as he strode past her in the hall.

The most prevalent first languages of Quincy residents now are, in descending order, English, Mandarin or Cantonese, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Italian. Along with Presidents Plaza in Quincy Center and stores like Abigail’s Crossing where I first bought my mother’s dolls that pay homage to the Adams, the city’s main street, Hancock Street, is now lined with a Mongolian hot pot joint, a Brazilian barbecue, several Chinese, Thai, and Punjabi restaurants, Pinoy and Indian groceries, and trendy sushi bars where local bands play. After school, kids drive to Kan Man, an Asian grocery center, for bubble tea and pho.

Recently, though, while jogging in Quincy, another friend of mine was hit by a baseball hurtled out of a passing car along with yells of Go back to China. The ball left a monstrous mark on her arm, the sickly yellows and indigos so saturated they looked like they bloomed from the core of her small bicep.

The songs that most of us recognize as carols date back thousands of years. They were originally pagan songs sung during celebrations of fruitful harvests and seasonal solstices in Europe. During the early seventeenth century, after Christians adapted these songs to celebrate the birth of Christ, carolers began singing door-to-door, in public spaces, and at home. Peasants roamed about singing for their suppers at the doors of the wealthy, and the celebration of the birth of Christ was an especially generous time when lords invited poor villagers to their manors to feast and drink. Groups of young men called wassailers would sing good tidings in exchange for food or money. Neighbors learned the same songs and sang them in unison with and for each other; caroling was a community event. In the 1994 film version of Little Women, the March sisters sing “The Wassail Song” as they take food, arm-in-arm, to their impoverished neighbors on Christmas morning.

Looking at the latest line of Caroler dolls on the Byers’ Choice web site, I was surprised and pleased to see that the African-American line is growing: there are African-American Salvation Army dolls and African-American Santa and Mrs. Claus dolls. Black toddler figurines in the “Winter Fun” edition decorate eighteen-inch trees outfitted in mini blinking lights, and sled and hold snowballs alongside white dolls. In their arms they bear the same accessories as their white counterparts: wrapped gifts, toy trains and teddy bears, candy canes and wreaths, gelatin molds and gingerbread houses. My favorites are the African-American Sock Hop Girl in a baby blue cardigan set and poodle skirt clasping a tiny Elvis Presley record to her chest, and the African-American Sock Hop Boy sporting a letterman sweater, a football the size of a lozenge tucked under his arm.

Within the Thanksgiving Caroler edition there’s even a Native American family now: a solemn-faced father, a mother wearing a string of colorful beads with a papoose strapped to her back, and two older children in moccasins, carrying baskets of maize and vegetables.

There are no Asian-American carolers.

Not all of the graffiti on my family’s old front door was racist or hateful. I remember the declarations of love with initials and hearts and the repeated scrawls of someone practicing his tag name in different inks, the tails of y’s and g’s dipping sharply in some renderings, rounder in others. Mostly, people simply stated their presence on our steps, variations of Nadine waz HERE and 5-14-91 TJ and Amanda K. Even after my father applied several layers of paint, it looked like everyone in the neighborhood had been at our door. Although the scribbling was innocuous enough, it reminded us that this was their neighborhood. Each etching was like a dog marking its territory.

Surely I was not the only kid thoroughly fatigued with colonial American history; the kids who defaced our front door grew up with the same stories I was taught. Why can’t I remember learning about any other Native-Americans than Squanto, the native guide of Plymouth Colony’s commander Myles Standish? The indigenous peoples of Boston’s South Shore are commemorated mainly through school athletic teams: the Hanover Indians, Blue Hills Warriors, Braintree Wamps, South Shore Christian Academy Warriors, and Quincy’s own rivals, North’s Red Raiders. To some of these teams, showing up to games in red-face is their way of honoring Native-Americans.

Each year Quincy holds the largest Christmas Parade in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on the Sunday following Thanksgiving, the time when our tree used to go up. The Parade is part of a weeklong celebration of events including the arrival of Santa and his elves—airdropped by parachute into Pageant Field—and the annual “Turning on the Lights” in the city center. My parents never took us to these events, and we never asked to go. Every Christmas Eve, instead of going to St. Boniface church just several streets from our apartment as we did each Sunday, we drove the seven miles or so to St. Peter’s in Dorchester for Vietnamese service, where my usually sullen older brother belted out hymns with the choir and my sister and I twirled in our matching holiday dresses. I think my parents felt uneasy sharing a pew at Christmas with the Irish-American family we hardly spoke to that lived next door, about reading along to scriptures they couldn’t quite grasp with the freckled mother who narrowed her eyes each time she saw us come into our shared backyard.

Maybe it’s the glow from the new miniature lamppost from the Caroler collection my brother ordered that literally cast my mother’s dolls in a new light or the realization that they’ve been with our family for so long, but I’m regarding the arrangement on the bay window sill of my parents’ house—their own and no longer in Germantown—with less skepticism this year. Looking at the Carolers’ open mouths, I try imagining beautiful ballad rather than pain or ugliness spilling from them.

I imagine other things, too. Maybe back in Germantown some night I might have straightened from my crouch behind the window where I conducted my worried spying and drawn the curtain aside. I might have shown myself to those kids on our old doorstep. The huge blinking tree on the rotary will illuminate their figures against the darkening street. They’ll drop their beers and black Sharpies silently onto the grass, and taking the cold air into their lungs, open their mouths to sing.

Titi Nguyen lives in New York City, and therefore was too busy to get a Christmas tree this year. Find her at titinguyen.net.

 

What We’re Loving: Racetrack Murals, Lovers, A Child’s Christmas in Wales

One of my favorite novels of the past few years is Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century, an ambitious “total novel” that is many things: a love story, a murder mystery, and, most of all, a novel of ideas. While his latest, Talking to Ourselves, is much more brief and intimate, it is no less moving and intelligent. And while Traveller was set in an imaginary place, Talking to Ourselves is grounded in our reality, alternating between the voices of a father, mother, and son as they all deal with the father’s illness. None of them dares to express the complete the truth to the other two; instead, it’s up to us to put the pieces together. As the mother, Elena, expresses near the end, “Let’s be honest. All honesty is a little posthumous.” —Justin Alvarez

When I last left America, an airport official confiscated Dos Passos’s USA trilogy to reduce my hand-luggage; I learnt my lesson and flew back in bearing only one light paperback, Open City by Teju Cole. As I read it over three months, its narrator, Julius, walked through the same streets of New York (then Brussels and back to New York) in a headspace James Wood astutely calls “productive alienation,” nourishing common encounters on the street with memories (of his father’s funeral, Nigeria, schoolmates illnesses, the first illicit consumption of a pornographic magazine or a Coca Cola). His narrative is besieged by loss, and calibrated, in the end, to omit rather than include. Cole’s novel is paradoxical, “turned in on itself” as Manhattan itself is: “water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused.” —Lucie Elven

“Years and years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.” If one story conjures the youthful enchantment of tossing snowballs at neighborhood cats and building snowmen, of chimneys emitting plumes of smoke, surely it must be Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Published in a slim blue volume by New Directions, this comic tale of family and friends of Christmas past is sure to delight; I joyfully revisit Thomas’s word-drunk reverie each year. —Adam Winters

This week I’ve been reading the Barbara Bray translation of Marguerite Duras’s L’amant (The Lover). On more than one occasion I found myself reading it aloud, not just to hear the pleasant tensions of translation, but to also listen to the heartache of Duras’s language. Against the backdrop of prewar Indochina, Duras paints the most tempestuous of love affairs. Yet amidst the novel’s unabated despair—the affaire de coeur, the family torn asunder by poverty, the mother’s madness, the young girl’s insatiable desire for another young girl’s body—shines a beacon of hope: the narrator’s inexorable determination to become a writer. “I’m still part of the family, it’s there I live to the exclusion of everywhere else. It’s in its aridity, it’s terrible harshness, its malignancy, that I’m most deeply sure of myself, at the heart of my essential certainty, the certainty that later on I’ll be a writer.” To second Maxine Hong Kingston’s remarks in her Introduction to the novel, “The Lover is a story about a girl and a woman becoming an artist.” —Caitlin Youngquist

Sportswriter Joe Palmer once warned that those of us who’ve spent time at the races may develop an “unreasonable fondness for certain places,” and if you’ve ever been to Aqueduct—the neon lights, the cinderblock walls, the geriatric thugs crowding the parimutuel windows—no doubt you’re familiar with the sentiment. A certain charm, one might say, if one were drunk on Wild Turkey—and yet the kids have not caught on, or at least not yet. The New York Racing Association recently commissioned thirteen street artists to liven up those cinderblock walls, resulting in several murals diverse in style, size and subject matter (including portraiture based on archival photos supplied by the NYRA). On a recent afternoon the grizzled throngs were still in evidence, though I also spied a few fresh-faced twenty-somethings looking only slightly ill at ease. Aqueduct’s current meet runs through December 31. —Abby Gibbon

 

Slip of the Tongue

The Dictionary of American Regional English is an epic compendium that’s been in the works since 1965. Now, it’s done and all 60,000 words are available on a great interactive site. Just to give you a taste of the myriad riches contained therein, the following are all regional variations on informing a woman her slip is showing:

“It’s snowing down south”
“Your father likes you better than your mother”
“Whitey’s out of jail”

 

The Horror, and Other News

Check out this new Heart of Darkness , illustrated by Matt Kish … if you dare.
By now you have  probably heard the allegations that Shia LaBeouf allegedly plagiarized a Daniel Clowes book. Then he plagiarized his apology. Now, there’s this.
This Detroit residency just gives writers houses. Forever.
The word Americans hate.

This Author Hates His Book’s Cover

“I was realistic about the book’s marketing … it was, after all, a memoir about some cats, and no state-of-the-nation literary epic. Nonetheless, Simon & Schuster’s birthday-cardish cover—an anonymous actor kitten sitting in a pair of jeans, against a sky-blue background—seemed a curious choice.” —Tom Cox