An Interview with Tom Zoellner

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

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

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

“It ain’t rainin anymore”: A review of Ryan Adams’ Ashes and Fire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updates + Microreviews

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

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

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

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

Microreviews

Is that a Fish in Your Ear by David Bellos

The Poetry of Thought by George Steiner

 

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

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

 

American Desperado by Jon Roberts and Evan Wright

 

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

 

Best Music Writing 2011, edited by Alex Ross

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

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

 

The Shadow World by Andrew Feinstein

 

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

TELLS US NOTHING: A Quick Interview with Jeff Alessandrelli

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

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

Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound had a fairly long gestation. In brief, though, I started listening to Satie in the winter of 2006 when I lived in Portland, Oregon at a 2 story house that had no heat; when I woke up one morning I could see my breath. Every day before I went to work I put on a Satie mix cd that my friend Dylan had made me, one that had on it Satie’s “hits,” as it were—the “Gymnopédies” and “Gnossienne” pieces, as well as a four minute version of his 18 hour long “Vexations.” At the time I didn’t know anything about Satie’s life and simply liked the music because I didn’t have to listen to it; it was soothing background music, music that asked absolutely nothing out of me as its listener. For about 8 months I listened to that Satie mix cd nearly every morning. Then I lost it, forgot about it and moved to Lincoln, Nebraska in August of 2008. No Satie at all for a year. But in Lincoln I began reading (sometimes rereading) a lot of serial/ longer poems–John Berryman’s The Dream Songs and Homage To Mistress Bradstreet, Wallace Stevens’ “The Auroras of Autumn,” Anne Carson’s Short Talks, a hefty amount of Jack Spicer’s work, Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, Louis Zukosky’s All: The Collected Short Poems,1923-1958, Mathias Svalina’s serial-poem-chapbook Creation Myth–and also began listening to a lot of instrumental/ vaguely electronic music, particularly Boards of Canada, Tortoise, Brian Eno and John Cage’s “Ryoanji.” One day—it’s a bit murky, as these things often are—I thought of Satie again and on a whim bought a box Satie set (6 cds) online for something like $25. It came in the mail, I listened to it a lot and one day I Googled Erik Satie and found out how much of a weirdo he was; I had not known this before.

Flash Reviews + Other Updates

Some from-wherever stuff:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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