The Paris Review's Blog, page 753

Karen Green’s Bough Down

From Bough Down, Karen Green, 2013. Siglio Press. Copyrighted by the artist.

For several years during childhood, my younger brother and I shared a room. When silence eventually fell after we’d been put to bed, I often began to worry. If I couldn’t hear his breathing, if he didn’t shift in his sleep or answer my urgent whispers (“Hey … hey … ” “What?” “ … Nothing”), I willed myself motionless, listening for signs of life. If I still couldn’t hear anything, I got up, tiptoed across the room, and leaned over him. He was never not breathing. Yet I continued these fretful nocturnal journeys throughout our childhood.

As we grew older, my concern became more practical. I wondered how I would react if I found his breath had stopped, what course of action I would take, and whether I would be able to even move from the spot where I’d be helplessly rooted to the floor. I was haunted by his possible death—an absence I could not understand as a child—and by my inability to conjure a suitable reaction.

I do not fear my own death as actively as I worry about being left to cope with the death of someone I love. And while I have lost loved ones, I’ve managed, because those deaths made sense, to hover at the edges of grief. From there, I watched others muck through it, station to station. (Inevitably, I imagine each of the stages of grief less as a pilgrimage than as suburban park trail, where Denial is a set of monkey bars, Anger a stepping post, etc. Mourning, to me, is a compulsory obstacle course.) From the safety of the path, so to speak, I found myself rationalizing away what felt like an improper response to loss with the argument that we all manifest grief differently. In my case, I insisted, it was by maintaining my distance. As a consequence, I have avoided mourners. I’ve skipped out on funerals. In shameful moments, I’ve forsaken those in need. Never because I didn’t care, I insist, but because I am too weak.

And so I didn’t want to read Bough Down, Karen Green’s memoir of loss and mourning. Despite myself, I brought the book home and put it on the shelf, where I intended it to remain, a vellum-shrouded apotropaic object, its presence enough to ward off misfortune.

Yet I was drawn to it. Not out of morbid curiosity—rather, it was the object itself, an evocative, elegantly designed book, that lured me. Its translucent dust jacket overlays a ghostly collage; it is printed on thick stock, giving it thoughtful weight. Those of us under the sway of books understand that these are not insubstantial qualities for an object to possess.

I found myself reading it. First in pieces, dipping into a few pages over morning coffee, a handful at lunch, maybe a passage or two before bed. I kept a novel nearby as a safeguard, in case I found myself pulled too close. I was never “reading” Green’s memoir, even as I read it. My casualness was deliberate, though it proved ineffective. As much as I hoped approaching the book at random in this way would keep me from falling under its spell, I returned to it again and again, until it was, suddenly, done.

Upon reaching the end of the book, where Green confesses in the last line that she “can’t wrap this up,” I skimmed the pages under my thumb and returned to the beginning.

From Bough Down, Karen Green, 2013. Siglio Press. Copyrighted by the artist.

Bough Down is composed mostly of emptiness. Set amidst this emptiness are blocks of chipped, broken off prose that bear evidence of its ruinous cause. The text is encroached upon by its margins, which threaten to overwhelm the insufficiency of words. As if written against this encroachment, Green’s sentences are often sharp, though their lyricism bears evidence of painstaking work. The polish tempers but doesn’t blunt the rawness of this harrowing chronicle of the period following Green’s husband’s suicide. He—who, remaining nameless in the book, will be unnamed here—hung himself. She found him. “I worry I broke your kneecaps when I cut you down,” she writes in one of the haunting visceral passages scattered like shrapnel throughout the book. “I keep hearing that sound.”

The memoir opens in the fogged months after the unbearable act and returns throughout to pivotal moments or impressions from what Green’s doctor calls her “non-linear, inelegant progress.” Despite its collage-like composition, Bough Down does have a narrative arc: it adheres loosely to the five classic stages of grief as it moves gradually and painstakingly toward the sea: “March, pace, slog, storm. Trudge, progress. Advance, move on, march,” she writes, as if reminding herself that onward movement is possible. There is anger (“I always feel like saying he died is letting him get away with something.”) and regret (“The garden and the husband, well, I was confused about what I was keeping alive.”) and heart-wrenching sadness:

I am mean and I am suffering and I need more help than you but you are like the moon; you shed light on my insignificance from a great, wordless distance.

Thankfully, Green is not afraid to be funny, which saves the memoir from sinking under the weight of its burden. Her wry humor brings moments of relief: “There is a church bell in town made out of the mortared skulls of everyone who ever had a migraine.”

The graceful handling of the tension between emotion and its articulation is among the reasons Green’s work feels destined to become a classic. Bough Down exposes the contradictions and ambiguity of what in less sensitive hands would verge on the sentimental. It’s reductive to say, I know, but a great work of art demands honesty—however veiled. In acknowledging this messiness, Green doesn’t shy away from the absurdity of being left to live after. At times, while reading, I could almost feel a shuddering: the widow bracing against herself, her dead husband, even the well-meaning “support guys” whose good intentions clutter her path toward recovery, if that’s what it’s called. Any time she slides toward self-pity, she cuts herself off.

What strikes me as most admirable is Green’s ability to manifest her grief, to inhabit it fully, while at the same time existing beside or beyond it, locating and isolating its patterns under her unequivocal gaze.

I call the doctor: I am suffering, it’s embarrassing, and I need I need I need. He says something back. He says ginger beer, hot bath, sanctuary, but I cannot breathe in the bath; I resent my floating body’s demands, spleen and bowel and aperture; there is no refuge in architecture, don’t patronize me. The doctor says if you were so quote perfect for me unquote you’d probably still be around, no offense.

From Bough Down, Karen Green, 2013. Siglio Press. Copyrighted by the artist.

Bough Down also includes several dozen miniature collages. Many of these pieces resemble postage stamps: Did Green intend them as the payment necessary to send her words to the man now lost in the great, wordless distance? Layered upon these stamps are strips of text—lines appropriated from Marianne Moore, Thoreau, and others—that are washed out or painted over, obscured by fog, as if to say, This is not enough.

A few critics have questioned the necessity of the collages, suggesting that they distract from the harrowing beauty of the text. I wonder why anyone would think so. They speak as much and as eloquently as Green’s words. Looking at them, I am reminded of a line in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, where she confesses, “This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning.”

The collages complement the text, illuminating a world that for Green has lost vibrancy. Color, or rather the intense desire for it, streaks through the book. Whereas once she “sorted unimaginables by color,” Green, who found herself in the most unimaginable situation, is left groping for color as if for salvation. Her dead husband’s arms appear an “irrational color.” In an incantatory passage, she writes that “Merle is a color and merle is a bird but merle is not that color of the bird, it is a bluish or reddish gray mixed with splotches of black, the ‘color of the coats of some dogs.’” This longing for the return of color is felt most keenly in several of the collages, which dissonantly list names in wrong colors—light red written in green, brown spelled backwards in blue—as if evidence of Green’s failed pursuit of meaning.

From Bough Down, Karen Green, 2013. Siglio Press. Copyrighted by the artist.

A friend who recently lost two family members in an accident confessed that she is now “muscling through the days” by focusing on her sport. Green, too, reminds us that grief is not only of or in the mind, though it may flash most vividly there. Grief is in the body, in the air; it leaves its patterns on familiar items: “His pillow is a sweat-stained map of an escape-plot, also a map of love’s dear abandon.” The couples’ dogs sense it and react. Uncomprehending, they pad into the narrative again and again, often the realest creatures in a book of ghosts.

Let’s circle to show him how much we love the word walk. Don’t get mad. Is he crying? Say the word. Something smells wrong in the yard; it smells like revenge. His voice is gentle but the fur on my back is up. Are we in trouble? He is up too high, and we pledge our allegiance, so bite at the tennis shoes. But we are not allowed to eat shoes anymore. Pull down. Strong square jaws designed to pull down. No, howl and bark until all paws levitate and summon her at the window. Windowcarwindowyardwindowwindow.

From Bough Down, Karen Green, 2013. Siglio Press. Copyrighted by the artist.

If I didn’t want to read Bough Down, I certainly didn’t want to write about it. It has something of the sacred about it, something I should know better than to touch. I’m not a critic: I don’t think every creation demands an articulated response. But I found myself circling the book. I wanted to say something. Is it immodest to use someone’s loss as a magnifier of my anxieties? Is it selfish to filter my response to death through the prism of Green’s grief?

When Green came into Green Apple Books in San Francisco, where I work, to sign copies of Bough Down, I asked her, perhaps tactlessly, how it felt to now exist in the world alongside her book. She answered as if she had already considered the question—or had been asked it already. She looked at me, then at the stack she’d just signed, and said that she could only think of the book as an object. It was there, she said, with that there sounding as if it referred to a remote place.

That conversation cemented my feeling that for all that is deeply personal about Bough Down: the book is an argument against the contingency of life. It doesn’t contain a line of advice. It doesn’t dispense with hard-won wisdom. Yet in its honest refusal to gloss over the occasional ugliness and pain of continuing in a world marked by “absence grown immortal,” it offers consolation. Its fragile, luminous beauty lights the way, bringing color to a world gone dim. Though I hope I never have to return to it in a time of need, I find great comfort knowing it’s here.

Stephen Sparks is a bookseller and writer in San Francisco.

 

If Looks Could Kill

Melville House captions this “vintage bookmobile drama,” and we challenge you to imagine exactly what was going through the brunette’s head. Or, more to the point, why.

 

Harry Potter Looks Different, and Other News

Hunger Games vs. Twilight: a textual analysis.
Endangered shop alert: Main Street Books in St. Charles, Missouri, needs a buyer. But for once it’s not all gloom and doom; the store is solvent, and the owners say they simply want to travel and spend more time with their grandchildren.
Twelve deeply weird Christmas stories.
Artist Jim Kay is illustrating the reissue of the Harry Potter series, and it is my sad duty to inform you that word makeover is being employed.

 

Tragic, Indeed

If selfie was , can the slightly more literary shelfie be far behind? Nothing if not forward-thinking, Neil Gaiman legitimizes it on WhoSay:

“A tragic shelfie. We are preparing to move. The books are in boxes…”

 

T. S. Eliot’s “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”

In 1927, Richard de la Mare had an idea for some Christmas cards. Because he was a production director at London’s Faber & Gwyer, his cards were festive poetry pamphlets that could be sent to clients and sold to customers for one shilling a piece. Because two years earlier Geoffrey Faber had lured a banker from Lloyd’s Bank to work as an editor at his publishing house, Faber & Gwyer had T. S. Eliot to contribute to the series.

Named for Shakespeare’s sprite, the Ariel poems each addressed the Christmas holiday or a seasonal theme. G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell, and W. B. Yeats all contributed. The Ariel series followed a strict formula: identical cardboard bindings; title, illustrator, author, and occasionally an illustration on the cover; and two interior sheets folded to make four pages. The first page repeated the title information; the following three featured the poem and an original illustration.

T. S. Eliot wrote six poems for the series: “The Journey of the Magi” (1927), “A Song for Simeon” (1928), “Animula” (1929), “Marina” (1930), “Triumphal March” (1931), and, later when the series was revived, “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” (1954). Only thirty-four lines long, that final poem is like a whisper in the whirlwind of dramatic plays and long poems that characterize most of Eliot’s later work. “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” came decades after “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) and The Waste Land (1922), years after Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) and The Four Quartets (1943).

I think of Eliot’s Christmas trees every year around this time: when firs, pines, and spruces appear in living rooms, storefronts, and town squares around the country. Eliot wrote the poem when he was sixty-six years old. His voice is wizened, yet wistful as he reaches through all the years of his life to recover “the spirit of wonder” from his earliest Christmases. Though formal and serious, the poem seems almost saccharine when compared to his earlier work. It will surprise many that the poet of fragments and ruins eventually turned his attention to the pretty packages and bright lights of Christmas.

Eliot had been baptized and confirmed in the Anglican Church in 1927, a profound religious experience recorded in his earlier Ariel poems, most notably “The Journey of the Magi.” Most of his literary contemporaries did not understand his conversion or the poems that followed and his faith remains divisive for readers and scholars of his work. For many, Eliot’s work was ruined by religion; the young secularist produced better criticism and poetry. For others, even those who aspired to admire his faith, Eliot the believer became too conservative and returned to the anti-Semitism of his youth.

By 1954, when Eliot wrote “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” the pains of conversion had waned and the poem conveys the hopeful joy of his faith. It was also perfectly illustrated by the Catholic painter and poet David Jones. The poem begins declaratively: “There are several attitudes towards Christmas,” then promptly rejects all but one of these. The speaker will not waste words on “[t]he social, the torpid, the patently commercial, / The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight) / And the childish.” He will not concern himself with those, only with the attitude “of the child.” Eliot borrows the distinction from the Gospels between childishness and the abiding sincerity of children. There is no Saint Nicholas here, only the martyr Saint Lucy and her “crown of fire.”

The speaker of the poem yearns to be like “the child / For whom the candle is a star,” the young soul for whom “the gilded angel / Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree / Is not only a decoration, but an angel.” He wants to return not to childishness, but childhood, when “the spirit of wonder” filled whole days, not only fleeting moments. He desires “the glittering rapture, the amazement / Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree.”

For those who celebrate Christmas religiously or even culturally, the earliest Christmas produces an inventory like the one offered by the poem. Returning to your first Christmas recovers the verdant odor of the tree, the soft pierce of its needles, the colorful paper or popcorn chains wrapped round it like a scarf, all of the ornaments that hook by hook made the tree your own. 

Like some fairytale of foliage, every Christmas tree tells a story in a season filled with stories, and Eliot is right to hang his argument about innocence on its branches. “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” is not about raising evergreens, but curating our own lives. Eliot writes with the hope that “the reverence and the gaiety” of childhood might linger, and “not be forgotten in later experience, / In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium / The awareness of death, [or] the consciousness of failure.”

This terrifying litany has always been the center of the poem for me. Eliot captures so many of life’s distractions and duties, which can deaden Christmas and blur all the days that fill our calendars. Experience need not be the end of innocence, yet “bored habituation,” “fatigue,” “tedium,” and “failure” often are just that. Eliot catalogues all that dulls candles so they no longer burn like stars, everything that clips the wings of angels so they no longer sing on high but sit speechless.

The poem’s syntax dramatizes this tedium of experience: though four stanzas long, it is only two sentences. The first is compact like a snowball, contained entirely in the first stanza; the second falls like a long, slow snowstorm across the remaining three stanzas. While infant sight is frenetic, age inures our vision, so what the child lives in frenzied lines, the experienced adult belabors in three long stanzas. Eliot’s hope is that “accumulated memories of annual emotion / May be concentrated into a great joy,” that we might not be jaded like the final three stanzas, but joyful like the first.

I return to Eliot’s poem to be reminded of that joy. At Eliot’s invitation, every December I try to remember my first December. I smell logs burning in my family’s woodstoves, their smoky scent mingling with the living odor of a tree my father felled himself, that reached eight feet high, like a redwood into the heights of our log cabin’s cathedral ceiling. I see the beautiful angel that my mother made herself: porcelain head and hands that she shaped and then fired in a friend’s kiln, all joined by a cotton-stuffed fabric body, all covered by a white satin dress. I hear the soft symphony as my sisters woke that angel, strings of bubble lights, and ornaments from their deep sleep between sheets of tissue paper in cardboard boxes.

I was a child for whom those lights were stars and that angel was more than a decoration. I read “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” to remember that what Eliot says was once true for me, and to hope that it might be true again. But December after December my memory fades and “the spirit of wonder” seems like something traced in the vapor of a breath on a cold windowpane: once visible, but long since disappeared.

Year after year, tedium finds its way into even this holiday: “the fatigue” of appointments and meetings; “the consciousness of failure” in bills unpaid and friends neglected; “[t]he awareness of death” in my mother’s arthritis, my father’s slowing steps, and my own grey hairs. The bubble lights look less like stars; a few of them aren’t even working. The construction paper links on the paper chains are faded and loose. The stained glass I made in preschool is really only bits of cellophane pasted crudely between squares of shiny paper. My parents now have an artificial tree that doesn’t need watering. Even the angel is only a tree topper, a porcelain doll with improbable wings.

I look back to Eliot’s poem where hope stretches from the first Christmas to “the eightieth Christmas,” explained in a tender parenthetical: “By ‘eightieth’ meaning whichever is last.” Eliot himself would not make it to eighty. He died in January of 1965, having celebrated only seventy-six Christmases. He continued writing criticism, delivering lectures, and even wrote another play, but “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” was one of the last poems that he published.

The poem’s closing couplet reads: “Because the beginning shall remind us of the end / And the first coming of the second coming.” Eliot invokes a distinctly Christian belief about the birth of Jesus and the return of Christ, moving deftly between Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and the Second Coming, but he also conveys a more universal idea about the bond between life and death. The poem will hold special significance for those who share Eliot’s faith, but its appeal extends beyond those beliefs.

There are always beginnings and endings, springs and winters, whether those seasons call to mind the heavenly seasons of creation and restoration or only the human seasons of birth and death. The symbolism of evergreen trees predates Christianity, and the Christmas trees of Eliot’s poem have meaning beyond their religiosity. The cultivation in the poem’s title is not really of trees, but of persons. Joy is born naturally, but it requires tending if it is to last.

If our senescence is to be anything like our infancy, then it will require cultivating a sense of wonder. In appealing to first and lasts, Eliot is, as in the rest of his poetry, at the edge of despair; only in “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” he stands firmly on the side of joy. I love the poem because he invites us to join him, to look again for enchantment and wonder in our lives, to stare at Christmas trees until the electric lights twinkle like stars.

 

Amazing Headline Alert

NPR Books asks, “Was Gollum Done In By Vitamin D Deficiency?” The query is prompted by a new paper in the Medical Journal of Australia, positing that creepy cave-dwellers (rarely the hero) are often victims not of motiveless malignancy, but a lack of sun. “Systematic textual analysis of The Hobbit supports our initial hypothesis that the triumph of good over evil may be assisted to some extent by the poor diet and lack of sunlight experienced by the evil characters … aversion to sunlight … may lead to vitamin D deficiency and hence reduced martial prowess.”

 

LA Story

I have just moved to Los Angeles from the Middle East, and everyone keeps asking me if the city is too quiet—Am I bored? Is it safe?—and the answer is, No, I am not bored; yes, it seems safe, and yes, that’s fine by me. Mostly I am in a state of awe, blown away by a grocery store, the knock of the mailman at the door, the speed of the Internet; the easy friends you can make on the sidewalk or on the bus or while watching your kids play soccer or walking down Venice Boulevard, waiting for a light to change, en route to the University of Southern California, where I found myself the other day, seeking out the next thing I might do with my life, right before things went wrong again.

I was facing new and mostly pleasant options. Such as: Should I wish to travel across the east-west spine of Lost Angeles, in the fall of 2013, from Venice to the urban campus of USC, did I want to walk four or five hours, doing ten miles on foot; drive thirty minutes; ride a bike for an hour and a half; or, as I ultimately resolved to do, take a city bus to the Culver City train line.

Showering, lacing up a pair of suede boots, donning a clean shirt, loading up a satchel with books and water, I crossed Lincoln Boulevard, behind a smog-check shop, whose sign made it clear they’s only do checks, not repairs, and then I followed an alley parallel to six lanes of heavy afternoon traffic.

In front of a crumbling apartment complex, on a set of concrete stairs, I admired a selection of jars, bowls, fire-rimmed tin cans, and handmade signs. Next to one pagan cup leaned a pair of tongs, perhaps for a hookah, and then I was accosted by a man who stood beside the open door of a midnineties Ford Explorer.

“Yo, this is a brand new home theater,” he said, gesturing at a large brown box resting on a leather seat. “You want this shit?” He tapped the box.

Since leaving Beirut, my wife and I had been in Los Angeles for about a month. It was true I didn’t have a home theater yet, but then I didn’t have much. The whirr of a car wash behind us made it hard to hear the rest of his sales pitch. Did he think I lived nearby? Could I carry the box to USC and back? In the roar of the car wash, it sounded like someone was screaming.

“No thanks,” I said.

“What?” he said.

“I’m good,” I said, backing away. “I’m good.”

Next up was a bike shop and a massage parlor and a nail place and a vacuum repair shop and a shoe repair shop and in their presence I considered my shoes and my nails and my muscles and the condition of a vacuum we left behind in Lebanon, and then I found myself standing in front of a tidy burger place, where all employees wore paper hats and some had white aprons secured with oversize metal pins, like for a diaper, yet the potatoes were peeled while I watched and it was all more than I might have imagined a burger place might be in America, in 2013.

Intent on not greasing up my clothes, I watched a regal woman as she peered through sunglasses at a ketchup dispenser. Done, she walked away, a sack in one hand, in the other a small paper cup of ketchup. But in so doing, she left behind a milkshake, which sat on the counter, melting.

Watching, too, was a man who looked like Kevin Costner, who wasn’t sure what to do. First, he reached to grab the shake. The cup would have been cold to the touch. He paused, frozen. Hovering, he seemed to debate whether to make contact, or not. Then the woman came striding back in. The guy who looked like Costner tried to look away. In the bathroom, I washed my hands and hoped the soap would get rid of the smell of meat.

On the train, there was a crazy lady and a madman. I was amazed at how sleek and silent the cars felt, and then I noticed all were made in Japan. The crazy lady started raving pretty much immediately, once we passed into South Central LA. There was Crenshaw Boulevard, and this woman was railing on about whether we were selling our mothers for crack. She’d also really like some health care, she said, but she probably would’t get any health care, she said.

The madman was a tall white guy with a greasy pony tail down to his waist. You could tell when a guy like this was dangerous. He had filthy shoes and long fingernails, a spoiled gallon of coiled rage in the pit of his belly. He balled his hands into fists, rocking over and over, muttering. In his sight line, a nurse in scrubs laughed with/at the crazy lady, who continued to rave.

“Fuck you laughing at, bitch?” the madman said.

At the next stop, the nurse in scrubs got off, and I considered going, too. In stepped a father in his forties and his teenaged son, both of whom wore sensible shoes and black T-shirts. The madman turned on them, his mouth parting in a sneer.

“Sup boss,” said the father. “How you doing today?”

“I am A-1 okay, brother,” the madman said, disarmed.

The three joked and laughed and the madman loosened up enough to unball his fists. When the father and son got off at the Natural History Museum, the madman said, “God bless.”

On the USC campus, an orange balloon arced into a blue sky, and everyone was young and no one seemed angry. I canvassed a main quad, looking for the right place to sit. More bikes than I’d ever seen were parked on the sidewalk. A woman wearing headphones nearly ran me over. Others rode by on beach cruisers, a parade of identical jean shorts, while young men preferred baggy cut-offs and skateboards of various size and trajectory. Through the thicket of wheels and oiled chains and sandpaper gripping, a sleek undergrad with perfect skin swished down the sidewalk, wearing an elegant blue suit. His tan brogues made a smart clapping sound as he passed. Nonstudents were easy to spot, with their posture, scuffed shoes, pale skin, and satchels. I entered a campus coffee shop, where the line was thirty-five deep. I adjusted my satchel. Two young students in front seemed to know as much as anyone else.

“Listen, it’s all about King Fahad,” the tall one said.

“I just totally can’t remember how Jordan fits into all this,” the other said.

Together, they worked to draw an extensive flow chart, blue ballpoint pens working. At the register, I couldn’t understand what the guy was saying. I did not want whip cream, no. There was another line to wait for my drink, so I leaned against a pleasant wooden table, beside a redhead in a green sweatshirt.

“This is a great spot,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is.”

“Totally,” she said. “We are smart.”

Our coffees came. Her name was Emily and then she was gone.

That weekend, in Los Angeles, someone stole my wallet. In twenty-four hours, they racked up various charges: $70.11 at a grocery store, $30.52 at a convenience store, $31.75 at a music shop, $88.88 at a clothing store. At Day & Night Food Mart, it was $21.03.

I tried to picture that money in a pile. At a Day & Night Food Mart in Venice, you could spend $21.03. I allowed myself to get angry. Nobody would ever pay for this. We’d all pay for this. Then I called the credit card company. A careful man in Arizona told me I was good. His name was Xavier. If anyone was ever found, Xavier told me, I could press charges.

Nathan Deuel has contributed to Harper’s, GQ, the New York Times, and many others. His debut collection of essays, Friday Was the Bomb, will be published by Dzanc in May 2014. He lives in Los Angeles.

 

Lisbeth Salander Lives Again, and Other News

Amazon workers in Germany have gone on strike (at what we need not say is a busy time.)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo lives on: using Stieg Larsson’s comprehensive outlines, a new writer will reanimate the Millennium series.
The British Library has made available a million images from seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century books for public use.
Not shockingly, people are less than chuffed about Jason Segel as DFW: John Gallagher calls it “a terrible, terrible idea.”

 

Jewel-Toned Insides: Talking with Throwing Muses and Tanya Donelly

The debut album by Throwing Muses was released in 1986, at the beginning of my sophomore year of college. Back then I had a friend who listened almost exclusively to artists on the British independent label 4AD, and I wanted to have musical tastes as esoteric as his. He told me that Throwing Muses—who lived in Boston, like we did—was the label’s first American signing, and I bought their record without having heard a note of it, only moments after a clerk in the Harvard Square branch of Newbury Comics slipped it into the “new releases” bin. I reasoned that since the record had come from England, and Boston was the easternmost major port in the United States, I was probably the first person in America to buy it, and for a long time I went around saying this. At that time my friends and I played a lot of I-heard-them-before-you-did—I saw R.E.M. in a tiny club with only fifteen other people before they were famous—and naturally there was a little of this involved, but my proprietary feelings toward Throwing Muses were more personal. I had finally found the music that was meant for me.

Back in my dorm room I studied the inner sleeve of the record trying to make sense of the lyrics.

Follow the road, swallow a snake, find shoes in the corner, run away.

Break your arm, it ain’t no face, wear shoes jealous fuck you stand up.

Sometimes an obvious meaning broke through. “Home is a rage, feels like a cage”: I understood that. But even when coherence was just out of reach, the music completed the logic of the songs. I heard the anguish and frustration in Kristin Hersh’s thin, quavering voice. The instruments churned and chugged, or mapped out herky-jerky rhythms, and frequently broke into a wild, cathartic hillbilly dance.

He won’t ride in cars anymore
It reminds him of blowjobs
That he’s a queer
And his eyes and his hair
Stuck to the roof over the wheel
Like a pigeon on a tire goes around
And circles over circles.

I had never before heard a song with the words queer and blowjob in it. But I had just come out of the closet, and this song, “Vicky’s Box,” somehow made me feel acknowledged. The wheel and the pigeon were mysterious, but they felt true. It was as though the band had detected the dark, metallic sadness that I was so urgently trying to believe wasn’t there.

“Kristin puts a lot of pictures in front of you, and you draw your own conclusions about how they all fit together,” David Narcizo, the drummer for Throwing Muses, tells me during a recent Skype conversation. “You also don’t have to if you don’t want to. I used to liken it to early R.E.M. and Cocteau Twins. I didn’t know what they were saying, but there are moments in those songs when I would think, I totally feel that. You get a sense of something genuine, but you don’t have to define it.”

Hersh formed Throwing Muses in the early 1980s with her stepsister, Tanya Donelly, while they were teenagers growing up on Aquidneck Island on the Rhode Island coast. Both played guitar and sang; in the DNA of Hersh’s early songs you can detect traces of such inventive and intuitive punk bands as the Raincoats and X. The sisters recruited Narcizo, a childhood friend, to play drums, and Leslie Langston, a local musician, to play bass. Hersh was the primary songwriter; Donelly contributed one or two songs per album.

An impressionistic timeline:

1987: Throwing Muses play a surprise Saturday afternoon show at the Rat, a grubby basement club, and I watch while standing on a chair at the side of the room. The ceiling is so low that I can touch it. The band performs a few new songs, and this is when I first hear Hersh’s “Cry Baby Cry,” a rallying cry against despair that still has the power to remind me of why it’s good to be alive. The room swells with sound, and for a moment I have the exhilarating sense that I’m actually inside the music. “The whole point of doing a show is to turn a room into a church,” Hersh says twenty-six years later when I interview her by telephone, and I remember how that concert gave me a feeling of transcendence that I had never felt inside a real church.

1988: At Newbury Comics (I lived at Newbury Comics), a bossy friend whose every word I hang upon sees me pick up House Tornado, the band’s new, second album, and says, “You’re not going to buy that, are you?” I sheepishly let it fall back. I’ve started frequenting Boston’s dance clubs, and my friends and I are fans of arch and polished British bands like Pet Shop Boys and New Order. It takes me a while to learn that I don’t have to take sides.

1991: I read a glowing review of a new Throwing Muses album, The Real Ramona, and regret that I ever turned my back on them. I buy all the albums that came out while I wasn’t listening.

1992: Donelly begins writing more songs and leaves to form Belly, her own band, which includes two brothers with handsome surfer looks. I so eagerly await the appearance of their first album that on the night before its release I have a dream that one of the brothers asks me to be his date to the launch party. Meanwhile, Throwing Muses regroups as a three-piece, with new bassist Bernard Georges.

1994: Hersh’s first solo album, Hips and Makers, appears. Her songs have by now taken on a yearning sweetness. Nonetheless, when I play the single “Your Ghost,” for my guitar teacher, because I want him to teach me the fingering, he has difficulty figuring out the time signature. “Who’s that singing with her?” he asks me. “Michael Stipe,” I reply. “Oh,” he says, “well, no wonder.”

1996: I pretend I am sick, employing some dramatic fake coughing, so that I can leave work early and buy a Throwing Muses album called Limbo on the day of its release at an HMV in midtown New York that is now a Build-A-Bear Workshop. (And maybe, since it’s barely lunchtime, I am once again the first person in America to buy it.) Not long after, the band leaves behind the world of corporate rock. Living in different parts of the country, they tour and record together less frequently—their next album doesn’t appear until 2003.

2011: Hersh, an early adopter of the pay-what-you-wish model, posts solo demos for a new Throwing Muses project on the CASH Music Web site. I am immediately convinced that they are among the best songs she’s written.

Purgatory/Paradise—the band’s first album in ten years—comes with a downloadable commentary track during which Hersh and Narcizo chat about the music while it plays in the background. There’s a heartbreaking song called “Dripping Trees.” “You a clean spark or a twisted parody? Well, look at me,” Hersh sings. “These wicked memories—it all comes down, eventually.” The melody sounds like something tumbling earthward, in slow, sad, stately spirals, and yet still landing perfectly on its feet. “This is such an ‘us’ song,” she says on the commentary, and laughs. “It’s so us because you can’t tell if it’s saying something good or something bad … Anthemic and pathetic at the same time.”

Hersh’s songs traditionally have dramatic time shifts partway through. On Purgatory/Paradise, it’s as if the songs broke apart and the pieces started mingling. (For example, the third track is called “Sleepwalking 2.” “Sleepwalking 1,” its sonic cousin, is the twenty-seventh track.) “A bridge will show up as a chorus or as an instrumental later on,” she explains, “or a song will show up again but not really. Some of the songs are thirty seconds long, but they’re not unrealized for that.” The result is a little like a landscape as seen from a passing car: a hill, a valley, a dense patch of trees, another hill, a stretch of wide-open field, another valley. Narcizo describes Purgatory/Paradise as a fusion of Hersh’s band and solo sounds: “I hear within this record a little more of her personal acoustic feeling. Our other records were always vying for your attention—in a good way. This one is more delicate. It sits down next to you.”

Hersh says that this is the album that they can die after making, and for this she credits the fact that, being now listener-funded, she can take five years to record and revise. “We had this lump of granite, about seventy-five songs written over the last decade, and we just erased and erased until we had thirty-two.” The result has “a nice, Velvet Underground, flow-y feel. We didn’t want to sound too experimental. When you’re erratic you can hurt people’s feelings, and I’m not about that.” She has said that she writes songs after first hearing them as auditory hallucinations. “The music that I’ve always heard is not the music I’ve put down on records, because what I hear would freak people out. It would sound like alien sounds. So I’ve always tried to be nice and package it—not with lipstick, but maybe with a bow.”

Purgatory/Paradise comes packaged as a book designed by Narcizo’s graphic design firm, Lakuna, and published by HarperCollins. (The CD is tucked inside.) The album takes its name from the intersection of Purgatory Road and Paradise Avenue on Aquidneck Island, and the murk-green cover is a close-up Narcizo took of a local landmark called Purgatory Chasm, a long cleft in a high rock ledge overlooking the ocean. “I was going for a kind of Hardy Boys look,” he says. But the endpapers are warm gold, and the book’s pages—filled with essays by Hersh and photographs by Hersh and Narcizo—are overlaid with bright tints. “I wanted it to look like fruit. You peel off this dark husk and get all these jewel-toned insides.”

I point out to Hersh that twenty-seven years is true longevity. “It’s also poverty,” she says. “If you’re never in, you’re never out. We never made much of a living but we’re still here. We were happy over the past decade to play for each other and the sky and whoever showed up, because that’s what music really is. You can’t count the number of people paying attention. That certainly doesn’t make it matter, and sometimes it makes it matter less. You just have to measure the impact, and that can be measured even if there’s nobody there.”

Since Belly broke up in 1995, Donelly has released solo albums at a leisurely pace—her last came out in 2006. Meanwhile, she began a career as a postpartum doula. “This is something that nobody likes to hear,” she tells me over the telephone, “but I was happy disappearing into my own life for a while. But a few years ago I had this epiphanic week where I realized, I think I’m retired! Am I retired? I’m not doing music any more! And it made me panicky and made me think I didn’t take ownership of my own endpaper. It just happened to me.”

In 2009 the musician and novelist Wesley Stace invited Donelly to take part in his semiregular Cabinet of Wonders variety shows, where musicians, writers, and comedians perform together onstage. “Afterward we would all hang out and everyone would say, Hey, we should do something,” she says. “And I classlessly took them up on it.” The result is the Swan Song Series, an ongoing project launched in August that is turning out to be as epic in its own way as Purgatory/Paradise. Four of a projected five digital-only EPs have been released, with another on the way in January. Each is comprised of collaborations—with Donelly’s musician husband, Dean Fisher; with former Throwing Muses and Belly bandmates; with friends from the Magnetic Fields, the Breeders, and Buffalo Tom, among other groups that rose out of the Boston music scene; and with fiction writers. So far the series has featured two ravishing songs cowritten with Rick Moody, and another with lyrics Donelly adapted from an original short story that Mary Gaitskill sent her. Contributions by Tom Perotta and Paul Harding are in the works.

“[Donelly’s] lyrics have become breathtaking,” Moody writes in an e-mail. “These songs are about conflicted and elegiac adulthood, parenting, long love, disaffiliation, grief, loss. They are in the Leonard Cohen category, at this point, in terms of how pinpoint their accuracy is about adult things. My wife, Laurel, and I actually begged her to sing her song ‘This Hungry Life’ at our wedding recently, even though it’s a wistful thing, for just this reason. Because we wanted to decorate our nuptial event with her kind of pinpoint accuracy.” A few minutes later, a corrective e-mail arrives, stating that Laurel quarrels with that last line. “She says, ‘It’s the most moving song I’ve heard in my life and I was honored she sang it.”

Donelly’s music is often described as brighter and poppier than Hersh’s, but that comparison overlooks the long struggle with anxiety and doubt at the heart of her songs. Her albums often end in crashing apocalypse. “Judas My Heart,” the finale of Belly’s King, is about “a lady who walks everywhere on her hands, doesn’t trust where her feet want to take her.” Beautysleep closes with a dove falling into the sea. “I can’t stop the fallout,” she sings at the finish of Whiskey Tango Ghosts.

The flipside is that so many of Donelly’s lyrics are directly consolatory. There was a period when I spent a lot of time listening to a slow, hallucinatory song from Beautysleep called “Another Moment,” a letter to someone having to face things they’re not prepared to. “Time to move your sorry bones up off the floor,” she sings, “time to make sure the current pauses at your door.” The “you” in this song must be a downcast partner, I thought. After a few more listens, I began to wonder if the “you” was actually the singer. “It was!” Donelly says when I ask her. “That’s a song to a mirror. What’s funny is that I had at least four of my close friends come up to me and say, Are you talking to me?”

It may be in the nature of creative work that you’re always quitting and never quitting. When I ask Hersh if she thinks that the band might be able to record more frequently in the future, she says, “Either that or never again.” Narcizo imagines Throwing Muses working in the manner of a European art collective, releasing “stuff”—songs, essays, whatever arises. (He’s currently planning the reincarnation of his musical side project, also called Lakuna.)

In interviews, Donelly has intimated that, per its name, the Swan Song Series is the last music she’ll release—a kind of prolonged retirement party. But as we talk, it becomes obvious that new collaborations keep lining up and that the project is self-generating. “I still have more songs than volumes at this point, so after the EPs we’ll be trickling it out song by song,” she says. I happened to speak to Narcizo the day after Donelly visited him in Rhode Island. “When I told her I was going to do more Lakuna stuff,” he tells me, “she said, Oh, I’ll take one of those for Swan Song. I said, What’s the deal with that—is it done? She said, It’s never ending, I’m just going to keep doing it.”

Purgatory/Paradise is out now. Donelly’s Swan Song Series can be downloaded here.

 

Updike on Free Parking

Check out this nifty video, produced by Blank on Blank and PBS Digital Studios, to accompany audio from a 2002 interview with John Freeman.