Condalmo

Psychosis and the 19th-century butler.

They did more than buttle:

1) On the most basic level, how different are some of the narrator's requests from the precise, arcane, and well-practiced moves of 19th-century butlers and other house attendants? In other words, what appears to be mania in a person hit on the head by an unidentified piece of technology falling from the sky is seen as tradition, class structure, and ritualistic social role in the lives of others.

First of three very interesting questions to be posed to Tom McCarthy, Mr. Remainder, in an interview.  Is a transcription forthcoming?  Stay tuned here.  (via Steph and Maud)

Wendell Berry interview.

The always formidable Wendell Berry - most certainly not an avid Condalmo reader - is interviewed in the new issue of The Sun.  I let my subscription lapse, as one will do when money is tight, but they've begun putting up some of each issue here on the internets.  Excerpt:

Fearnside: In your recent talk to the Sierra Club, you mentioned “foodsheds.” Can you explain this concept in more detail?

Berry: Cities attract food products from the countryside the same way that a major stream attracts water from the smaller streams in a watershed. A foodshed would be the tributary landscape around a city from which the city’s food would come. It goes back to the ancient concept of the city as a gathering point for the products of its landscape. And since we haven’t had cheap petroleum for a while — and we’re probably not going to have it ever again — we need to think this way once more. Sooner or later, we’re not going to be able to afford to haul food in from everywhere in the world.

Another reason to think in terms of local food economies is that an extended food system concentrates food at collecting points and transportation arteries, so it’s extremely vulnerable to blockades or acts of terrorism. A third reason — and this may be the most important reason of all — is that if you’re going to have sustainable agriculture, it has to be adapted locally. Local adaptation means that you observe in the economic landscape the same processes that you find in healthy natural landscapes: You must have diversity. You must have both plants and animals. You must waste nothing. You must obey the law of return — that is, you must return to the ground all the nutrients that you take from it. You must protect the soil from erosion at all times. You must make maximum use of sunlight. In those circumstances, you may leave the crops and animals pretty much to fend for themselves against diseases. The farm will have some disease, but it won’t have epidemics. If you look at a healthy forest, for instance, you see some prematurely dead trees, but not massive numbers of them.

Sarvas on Titlepage.

Mark Sarvas, he of The Elegant Variation, he of Harry, Revised which I finished two nights ago and will write about later (it was good), is on the new(est) episode of Titlepage.

Dude's on tour.

Steve is not happy.

Charlie Rose, by way of Beckett. 

(via.)

George Saunders and Bill Clinton.

Well, as you may have heard, I'm mainly a fiction writer. So I apologize in advance for my ineptitude. But to start: People like yourself and Ira Magaziner and Tom Hunter and Paul Farmer and so on—can you tell me, what's the difference between those people and other people who are just as gifted and accomplished but don't choose to go in the direction of service?

Well, I think the people who do it, do it because they feel morally obligated to do it—because they can, because they have the capacity to make a contribution, because they believe it will make a difference. Maybe because someone asked them to do it. And because they find it more rewarding than the other things they could do with their time or money. It's pretty straightforward. I don't think most people who do it consider themselves any better than anyone else… If you think you can make a difference—if you know enough to know that there are things that you can do that empower other people, so that you actually give them the opportunity to change the way things work—then you should do it. I also think it makes people happier when they do it.

Here's the rest. 

Lopate/McCarthy.

Leonard Lopate interviews Tom McCarthy.  McCarthy addresses Lethem's eyebrow-raising cover blurb.

Burning up.

Fever is broken, at least at this hour.  Thanks for the kind e-mails. 

Nice when I can tie it all together.  Very much enjoying Brock Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, which I mentioned some time ago with regard to Algonquin's unusual publicity campaign.  The September issue of Bookslut has an interview with Mr. Clarke.  Tidbit:

In many places, An Arsonist’s Guide is explicitly about writing. The judge at Sam’s trial gives a short speech about stories and how they work and if they are good for anything or can do anything. And Sam is writing An  Arsonist’s Guide, which is a memoir but he also wrote the novel An Arsonist’s  Guide, which the reader is reading. And the title isn’t even his, it’s from the memoir-writing bond analysts he meets in prison. Were you worried about making the novel too explicitly postmodern or metatextual?

I was terrified of that. That was one of the problems I had writing the book. I ended up just bloviating about literature in the beginning. It was becoming awful. But I think about these things and I think the answers are usually too simplistic.

I hope my treatment of the issue is ambivalent enough that it’s not too academic. Sam, after all, isn’t a reader. I try to come at it sideways. Believe me, I read novels that cover this ground and I tend to loathe those books about what novels can do.

Wall of background/window of background.

The always-thoughtful Brian of Five Branch Tree considers Joseph Coulson's Of Song and Water (the former) in relation to Steinbeck (the latter) - grist for further thought, given the comparison made between Steinbeck and Coulson with regard to his prior work, The Vanishing Moon.  I haven't read Steinbeck in many years, so can't really comment on his take.  I greatly enjoyed Of Song and Water and interviewed Coulson in March.

Interview: Sheila Heti.

Sheila Heti and I corresponded when Ticknor was first released - I was working with a local bookstore to try and get some funds toward having Sheila do a reading here in Portland.  That never came together, but when I re-read Ticknor recently for a review, I e-mailed her to see if she'd agree to an interview.  We wrote back and forth through e-mail; what resulted is a little bit disjointed - a professional reviewer, I'm not - but there's some interesting ideas that are worth seeing the light of day. 

I'm reading Ticknor for the second time now, and I'm that much more impressed this time through with how you took someone respected in his field, made him largely unsuccessful and thoroughly unlikeable, and then made a very likeable story out of that unlikeable person's thoughts. 

Thanks.

Early on, Ticknor describes Prescott as a man solidly, stubbornly rooted in the habits of his youth, and then as someone disinterested in recapturing the past. Ticknor seems to have access to a lot of Prescott's life, before the fame, and would seem to know him quite well, but then we get statements like these, Ticknor contradicting himself, which give the impression that he doesn't really know him at all. 

At some points in the book, Ticknor seems to approach mental illness-levels of personality disorder.  Do you see him that way? 

I think we read literature in a funny way. We try to make sense of it the way we make sense of life, and by this route, look at the characters as though they're our friends, by which I mean: we gossip about them and cheaply psychoanalyse them. I find this to be a very funny thing to do to a character! In a lot of interviews I'm asked to speculate on Ticknor in this way, as though he is something separate from myself, someone I know, that I can talk about objectively. But of course, he is only my words, my head, my understanding of things, my aesthetic – not a person at all. And so that makes it difficult to say what he's like much the way that saying what you yourself are like is difficult. It's stupid to ask an author about their characters, I think.

Well, I suppose I would hesitate to address my character questions in terms of asking you questions about your character - of course he came from your head, but Prescott did as well, and other characters you've written (such as in The Middle Stories).  Or are they all more or less reflections of you, to some degree? 

I'm maybe too conscious of the fact that everything I know is enclosed in this ridiculous little box of a head, and the constellation of everything to everything else is pretty much what I've been able to make sense of, given my upbringing, my nature, my experiences, my feelings, my interests. We all know this. I'm only bringing up to make the point that it's hard sometimes know what in common you share, perception-wise, with the other people of the world. I have faith though, that there must be commonalities somewhere, or else literature would not exist. I'm just not always sure where these commonalities lie.

What about you?

I think primarily two things: emotions and basic animal needs.  The differences between people come in the different ways people find to meet those animal needs, and also in the different ways people create meaning in their lives to fill those emotions.  Do you think that covers it, or am I boiling it down a little to far, reducing our commonalities to two?

Well, I'd be reluctant to say "that covers it" but I think that's pretty good. Not only animal needs, though -- spiritual needs, too. I think that's parly why romantic love is such a powerful source of story in our culture -- it marries our animal and our spiritual and our emotional needs. And completely fails in fulfilling any of them.

I'm wondering: is part two of the book imagined by Ticknor?  I didn't catch it the first read through, but a lot of those character traits that make him who he is seem absent here - he seemed to me to be much more focused on others, less dismissive, less paranoid. 

It's like how in war or combat you have to arm yourself with a force equal to that of your enemy. In Part 2, Prescott is dying. He is weaker and less of an obstacle to Ticknor's well-being than he was in the full burst of his strength and his youth. If the enemy deflates, then we are deflated. That's why it matters to have a solid wall to push up against always.

Back to the mental illness question: I suppose there is some of that "cheap psychoanalyses" involved - like with that link I sent you, it's a western thing to do, to try and break characters down into their diagnoses.  I came at it that way, I think, for two reasons - one, that's the field I'm in for my day job: I work with people who have mental illness, and have become pretty familiar with the "checklist" (of sorts) for personality disorder.  Do you reject the idea of seeing mental illness in characters, or simply the idea that it applies in Ticknor's case?

I think envy, his paranoia, his sense of inferiority -- these aren't such uncommon things for a person to feel, even at the heightened level at which Ticknor experiences them. I mean, everyone I know is pretty fucked up in the way they go about trying to create happiness for themselves, and often ending up sabatoging their happiness on a path which they think will lead them to satisfaction. I don't know if that's mental illness...

Besides, don't you think those checklists are pretty liberal? Like, what is a 'healthy personality' in your profession's definition? I like Freud's idea that the aim of psychoanalysis is to get one to an adequate level of unhappiness -- rather than the aim being any kind of definitive happiness; but that maybe gets forgotten.
I think we're all so sensitive to ourselves, like we're such fragile plants. Like we're going to die of being human, having feelings, thinking too many things...

Well, I think - for those practicing ethically - that "healthy personality" is a misnomer.  There's only varying degrees of healthy, and we all have shit we need to work through.  So Freud wasn't far off, at least on that.  I think it becomes unhealthy when that aspect of the personality bleeds into a majority of interactions/thoughts with/about others; when it becomes disabling for the person.  (This is me talking, not the profession.)  I think in that sense Ticknor certainly meets the criteria; but, then again, we are only presented with his thoughts during the walk on one evening, which is hardly enough to base any sort of diagnosis on.  I guess, in the end, he reminded me more of people I know who live with the mental illness than people I know who, of course, have some of these traits from time to time, but not to the degree that Ticknor does.

Well, what I was trying to do was portray the brain -- how it feels to be inside a brain, and not so much a complete person -- but the brain's dialogue with itself; its incessant chatter, and the way it whirls around a few tiresome preoccupations, like for instance, how great Prescott is vs. how shitty I am. Why can't we rid ourselves of these annoying habits of thought? I think the only solution is to bypass the brain on most things.

Joseph Coulson interview.

I recently reviewed Joseph Coulson's fine Of Song and Water (Archipelago Books)for The Quarterly Conversation.  I took up the book for review knowing very little about it - read a short blurb about it somewhere, saw that jazz was involved, said OK - and, frankly, I was at a bit of a burn-out point on reviewing.  I couldn't have picked a better book to turn that around.  Coulson's writing has jazz in it like an old 50's nightclub has smoke.

He graciously took time from a busy schedule - including preparing for a book tour - to be interviewed via e-mail for Condalmo.

--------------------------

M:  Let's start with some background on your writing.  Lots of ink being spilled about young writers these days, but then The Nation turned that around and made hay about you delivering your first novel a few years past your "young turk" days.  Were you biding your time?  I haven't read The Vanishing Moon yet, but I don't think Of Song and Water could have come from someone in their twenties, or even thirties.

J:  I started writing The Vanishing Moon when I turned forty, and I don't think I was ready to write a novel before that time. I'd been carrying pieces of the story around with me for several years, but I was waiting for those fragments to reveal the full measure of their meaning. I have to have some sense of what the story is about on a level beyond plot and character before I can start writing. It's not that I want to reduce the story to a single theme, but when I begin to recognize the recurring moods, patterns, analogues--the common threads that link or underscore what seem to be, at first, disparate elements--I begin to see how a longer narrative can take shape. For me, the implications that emerge from the first scenes in a novel provide direction and, ultimately, serve to hold the story together.

While I was waiting for all this to happen, I was mindful of something I heard Vonnegut say when I was much younger. He was giving advice to writers who wanted to write a novel. He said, "Make sure you have something to say." It's also true that as a teenager and college student, I never imagined that I would be a novelist. The idea of writing a lengthy piece scared me. I started out writing songs and then I gradually moved to poetry, feeling comfortable with the lyric impulse, particularly given its musical possibilities. I eventually went to graduate school at the State University of New York at Buffalo to study with John Logan and Robert Creeley, and in trying to understand the rigors of their poetics--very different but both very rich--I slowly learned to write, which in large part was developing a better ear for the music of language--its euphonic, dissonant, and rhythmic possibilities.

M:  I was especially taken with the scene that had Otis holding forth on the "death of jazz" and other topics, while simultaneously playing for Coleman:  "it came off as some sort of musical essay, an extemporaneous lecture with a soundtrack."  Then, when he runs out of things to say, he takes all those pieces he'd been noodling over and tries to tie them together, just working it out as he goes.  It's one of my favorite passages in the book, and leads me to two questions: first, do you see Otis as a sort of a surragate father for Coleman?  I got the impression that you were trying to suggest this without it being implicit, necessarily.  Second, where did you draw from in coming up with Otis?

J:  It seemed to me that if I showed the disconnect between Coleman and his father, and then had Coleman seeking out the company and counsel of Otis, then the idea of Otis as an artistic or even spiritual father would emerge. My life was shaped by wonderful teachers, and I was lucky enough to spend a great deal of time with some of them outside the classroom. As a student, I listened carefully to their conversations--Creeley could riff all night--and I tried my best to understand and remember. So Otis is probably a composite of those teachers that had the greatest influence on me. I dedicated the book to my mentor, Steve Tudor, and there's a good bit of him in Otis. Al Young, now the Poet Laureate of California, by way of Mississippi and Detroit, was also a conscious model.

M:  In my review of Of Song and Water I tried to put some emphasis on the skill with which you took jazz and not only made it one of the central pieces of the storyline, but also found a way to evoke a feeling of jazz in the writing itself.  I see that as a high-wire walk; it could easily fall into jazz cliches, maybe some noir cliches, but it doesn't.  I'd love to hear about how you made it work.

J:  When a jazz musician plays what we call a standard, a classic tune, it's very much about the phrasing--how the musician executes a particular line or measure, perhaps a familiar one, and makes it fresh or compelling. Through phrasing, tone, and tempo, the musician can evoke a mood, imbue the song with his or her emotional pitch, and color the piece in ways that are specific and original. I wanted to do the same thing with the words in Of Song and Water. While writing poems, I came to understand the line as a unit of sound and meaning, and I was deeply influenced by the notion of measure in poetry, especially as practiced by William Carlos Williams and Creeley. So I wondered if I could get some of that same feel into the prose. Interestingly, the passage you chose to quote in the review, though it's not about music in any literal sense, is actually a good example of how musical devices contribute to the emotion of a scene and, in this case, shift and increase the tempo to build narrative momentum. The thing I always had to keep in mind while writing Of Song and Water is that Coleman and his trio play ballads, the sort of slow-burn pieces that you referred to in your review. So, in the sentences, I tried to sustain measures and cadences and tonal flourishes that would suggest a song like "Stardust" or "September Song."  I've been interested for a long time in how the language of a story can mirror the situation. I first saw the power of this technique reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness. A contemporary example would be The Hours by Michael Cunningham.

M: I also liked the way you shifted back and forth, timewise, revealing H.M.'s past, Dorian's past, revealing it both to Coleman and to the reader.  Did you work with this idea from the start - the shifting - or did it evolve as you were writing?

J:  The temporal shifts were there from the beginning. It was the only way I could make the story work. I also felt that Coleman's interior life, and this is true for H.M as well, would be the point of entry for the reader, at least in terms of empathy. Surfaces alone are not often attractive or inviting. But I also wanted the energy and inventiveness of improvisation in the prose. The shifting in time and the fluid movement from one image or idea or memory to the next gave me the latitude to try and create the equivalent of jazz riffs and solos.

M:  You dedicated the book to Stephen Tudor, who, like Coleman's father, was lost at sea.  Tell me about that - was Tudor's disappearance one of the starting points of the book for you?

J:  Here, again, there's a lot of time involved. Steve was lost on Lake Huron in 1994, but I didn't start writing the book until August, 2003. So it wasn't so much his disappearance, though the grief of it fuels the book in many ways--instead, my starting point was what he taught me about the lakes and sailing and about the profound connection between art and a life well lived, the importance of craft and precision in all things, and the transcendence of sailing free, whether on water or in a poem. I had no emotional or intellectual relationship with my own father, and so, for many years, Steve took his place. Perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime does one experience such generosity of spirit.


M:  Finally, given the role of music in this story, I'd like to borrow a page from the fine Largehearted Boy site and ask you about some of the music that would comprise your "soundtrack" for this book - jazz that you listened to while writing it, that informed and inspired the story, that you would envision being on Of Song and Water - The Soundtrack.

J:  Coltrane's "A Love Supreme"; Chet Baker's "My Funny Valentine"; Joe Pass playing Duke Ellington; Kenny Burrell, "D.B. Blues" and "Summertime," and Wes Montgomery, "Bumpin' on Sunset" and "Down Here on the Ground." Just to confuse people, I might toss in Willie's Nelson's renditions of "Stardust" and "September Song."

David Mitchell podcast: ask and ye shall receive.

Apparently, some bloke (because he's over there, a bloke, not a dude) thought he'd e-mail David Mitchell, ask him a couple of questions.  Next thing he knows, he's got the whole wide world in his hands.