Back with McManus, Wondering on Porter

by Weston Cutter

Cowboys Full by James McManus

I’m glad to see McManus back to form on this—his last book, Physical: An American Check-up, was a blah book not because the writing was bad (McManus is a stellar writer, always), and not because the subject was dull (hell, national debate of the moment), but because the book just fundamentally didn’t work. And of course, for outsiders (read: those of us not J. McManus himself), we could only look helplessly at his work and wonder why the hell the best writer on poker and gambling wasn’t, you know, writing on poker and gambling.

And so the first twenty pages of this thigh-crusher of a book are like breathing the best possible breaths after too much time spent underwater: fucking book starts by talking about presidents and poker and, specifically, dear ol’ pres #44. Deft and funny and interesting as hell (like: to the point of distracting you by making you want to call friends to share tidbits), Cowboys Full is absolutely the best/last book on poker anybody’s gonna need or be able to imagine for quite some time.

The Theory of Light and Matter by Andrew Porter

I really, really wanted to like this book—I’m a sucker for debut story collections, and the Flannery O’Connor Prize has had some great picks in the past, plus it seems like there’s a mile-long list of writers who fell all over themselves praising this collection. So: all high marks.

And, in fairness, it’s a good book—Porter’s a skilled writer, and the stories are, largely, interesting and worthwhile and none of them are terrific struggles to get through. However: they’re just…not great. They’re good, but they’re not holy-shit great, and I’ll absolutely acknowledge that it’s a matter of taste, but Porter’s The Theory of Light and Matter is another in a long, long list of debut collections by dudes which make me frustrated and/or sad (I’ve written about this before, elsewhere, but it’s a perennial stink flower, and one that’ll get revisited ad infinitum, I suspect).

Here’s the first give-away: each story is first person (again, note: I know this is about taste). Seriously? Every single story gets an “I”? (I’m all for 1p narrators, for the record: the three best American stories in the last 40 years—Barthleme’s “The Balloon,” Carver’s “Blackbird Pie,” and Wallace’s “Good Old Neon”—all have 1p narrators. Note, however, that none of those stories is part of a larger work in which every other fucking story in the collection is also written in 1p) Though there are differences between these “I”s, there are infinitely more similarities—they’re dudes, they’re white, they’ve got some sense of internal fracture (or they, during the actual course of the story, map out some of that internal fracture), they’re roughly in the same socioeconomic bracket, etc. [I'll block off the following in brakcets so you know it's not necessary reading, and so you'll know it's a rant: Here's what's flawed and awful about the milquetoast blandness and head-slappingly frustrating overlap of those narrators: it's intellectual and/or creative laziness on the part of the author to only include narrators who seem pretty goddamned similar to himself. It is. I write stories; lots of people who read this site probably write stories. Just about everybody'd have to agree that the fundamental act of writing has to do with empathy, with trying to imagine what the inside of someone else's skull must look/feel like, and to be so blatantly cocky/unassuming (literally) as to always stick to narrators who look like the writer is just, well shitty. It's shitty, and it's a disservice to stories, and to anyone who wants fiction to be great. There's plenty more to this rant, but in the half-interest of half-decent taste, let's move on.]

Here’s another thing: this collection, like so many others like it, is largely humorless. There seems to be some crappy secret equation passed among students at the big MFA programs, which equation reads “serious ≠ funny. Not Ever!” Are there funny moments in these stories? Absolutely. But no stories in which humor plays any key function.

So that’s the 1-2 of this tango: all “I,” all serious. I acknowledge that this is taste—not everyone wants, say, Blake Butler and Aimee Bender and Ron Carlson and Eudora Welty (good lord, she’s the queen of serious + funny)—but if anyone’s out there reading and if anyone actually gives a rat’s ass about this, let’s all agree to quit with the debut-books-by-dudes thing in which all narrators are the same and almost nothing’s funny. There’s plenty funny out there, and there are plenty more voices than the average bearded white dude who wonders about his own internal brokenness and bleak navel ruminations and etc. Worse, there aren’t all that many writers who can write as well as Porter, and great writing needs all the help it can get, and he seems capable of way, way more than we’re here receiving.

Happy Holidays

by Weston Cutter

We’ll resume in a couple weeks. Enjoy some time–the phrase should be “Read, Eat, Drink, and Be Merry.”

An Interview with Matthew Ryan

by Jeremy Griffin

“I’m much more of a writer than I am a talker.” This was what Matthew Ryan said when I asked him if he’d prefer to do this interview over email. This response seemed strikingly appropriate, given that most of the reviews I’ve ever read about his work refer to him, in one context or another, as a poet, usually rendering a justified comparison to Dylan, Springsteen, and/or Cohen (just look here and here and here). Of course, Ryan is certainly not the first artist to sing about heartache and isolation, but he is one of the few who can do so in a way always manages to feel fresh and new and interesting. This is due in no small part to his eagerness to experiment with his Nashville-cultivated roots-rock sound, often infusing it with elements of new wave and dance music, as demonstrated on his twelfth and most recent album Dear Lover. He was kind enough to take some time out from touring in support of the album to talk briefly about its creation and about his musical career as a whole:

CB: Tell us a bit about Dear Lover. How would you describe it to your
listeners?

MR: Well, it was recorded at home for the most part, so it has an immediacy and intimacy about it. It’s a cinematic record, but not polished. I’ve often said I make music for humans, but that’s not to say it’s for everybody. Dear Lover is a very filmic record, it circles around a theme. It’s trying to define what holds love together, particularly in the modern context of speedy culture, war and economic uncertainty. You can’t remove the experience of an individual from the turmoils of the time they live in. Dear Lover is looking for a rock, a certain intimacy in cold times.

CB: You mentioned in an interview back in 2008 that your more recent work is much less cynical than that of May Day (his first album, released on A&M in 1996). Having just released a new album–making this number twelve, I believe?–is this still the case? What do you think accounts for this?

MR: I find my hope leans on the more elemental themes of living as I get older. Love, persistence, and optimism. Because contrary to what a lot of less dimensional marketing and entertainment tells us, life is a dynamic struggle. It’s beautiful and scary, it’s full of the sublime and the gutting. It’s just how it is. Tying myself to the more positive characters inside us keeps my hope intact. Darkness is seductive, and I write about darkness a lot. One has to acknowledge it, otherwise what I’ve said is pollyanna. Happiness is defined by your ability to honestly negotiate and come to terms with the harder parts of living. I’m looking for real happiness.

CB: Do you have a particular process or routine you use when crafting a song, or is it more organic, unpredictable? Was writing the songs for Dear Lover any different than writing for previous albums?

MR: Don’t take this as snide, but I don’t craft songs. I let songs come. It can get dangerously mystical talking about songwriting, but for me it’s a form of meditation. For Dear Lover though, the process was unique because 99% of what you hear was written on the mic. I recorded the music first, and sang the lyrics as they came. I believe it makes for a particular kind of conversation in music. I hope the listener agrees.

CB: Your songs—to me anyway—have a kind of literary sensibility to them, often in terms of narrative structure or the poeticism of your lyrics. You’ve made reference in other interviews some of your favorite writers, and you mentioned to me that you are much more of a writer than a talker. What is the relationship between your music and literature? Does one inform the other?

MR: I love art. Art inspires and converses with our humanity. So my influences tend to be everything from great films, to great writers and poets, painters, singers, photographers and speakers. I am what I eat guess.

CB: You’ve said that, in regard to song lyrics, the words should be personal without crossing the line into diary writing. I think it’s fair to say that there’s a lot of heartache and emotional chaos in your songs; the fact that you can render these things in such an original and stirring way is, I think, one of the things that makes your music meaningful for your listeners. How do you negotiate that line between autobiography and writing about, I guess you could say, the “concept” of love or romance or desire, etc.? Where or how do you draw that line?

MR: To write from a personal perspective about the universal experiences of being human is not diary writing. I guess the goal is to tell the truth as best you can. If you’ve done that people can generally see themselves in it. People are complex, feeling, seeing and hopeful things. Nobody wants conflict, yet conflict is everywhere. It’s in that space between what we are and how we come to terms with the perpetual motion of victories, peace, love, war, disappointment and loneliness where art is found. And that’s the space I’m writing about.

CB: Having come into your own in the Nashville scene and having worked with veterans like Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams, how much have these experiences influenced your songwriting sensibilities? Similarly, how have these sensibilities evolved over the years, and what do you think were the causes of this?

MR: Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle taught me that persistence, dignity, conviction and a cause greater than yourself are the nuts and bolts of being an artist. I’ve embraced that idea, and it’s all that motivates me.

CB: What is in your CD player/iPod/etc. right now?

MR: I still listen to albums separately as a piece. Glasvegas is my latest love as far as records go. Found them through a friend and real advocacy. That’s the way it s now. And I hope people find Dear Lover the same way. Like through interviews like this, Jeremy. Thank you for taking the time to ask me these questions.

(This last question I asked simply for my own curiosity without the intention of including it in the finalized interview, but the response seemed so pertinent to the site’s goals and the last line is just so badass that I went ahead and threw it in.)

CB: You were on track to become a school teacher before going into music, is that correct? I find this interesting because, as a teacher and musician myself, I have noticed a huge correlation between the two (everyone at Corduroy–I think there’s like 4 of us–is in some way a teacher and musician). For you, what is the connection between teaching and playing music?

MR: Teachers and artists want to contribute something useful to the world. I believe that’s the correlation. Art and education are essential tools in building the tomorrow we all suspect we’re capable of. Not that today is so horrible, but tomorrow can always be better.*

*For tour dates, videos, merchandise, and all manner of cool MR stuff, check out his website.*

Bertrand Russell and the Simpsons

by Weston Cutter

Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna

Again: I don’t read graphic novels often, though this is the second I’ve read this year and it was a second very strong argument for reading them far more often than I presently do. Subtitled An Epic Search for Truth, the book functions both as a sort of historical novel slash intellectual bio of Bertrand Russell (the guy who said he would, if he ever got to heaven and was asked why he hadn’t believed in God, say “You didn’t provide sufficient evidence.”) and as an exploration of the ideas of logic.

Which term could, of course, be swapped out for something like ‘pure truth’—that’s what the mathematicians and semanticians are seemingly after in logic, after all: some totally True (meaning: purely, blemishless reflection of reality) depiction of how the world actually is. So here’s what’s totally messy and hard and strange about this book: if you’re like the majority of us, you don’t let real fundamental questions of logic undo you on a daily basis. In truth, you sort of can’t afford to: raising a fork to your mouth and getting the day’s work done present enough challenges of their own without necessitating significant excavation of what we conceive of as basic, simple, day-to-day steps (for the simplest/easiest example: math fundamentally relies on logic, and it’s impossible to even conceive of logic without language).

But this book will, in fact, make you ask questions you might not’ve otherwise asked, questions about real essential ideas of logic and Truth, and it’s like the good ache from a run or something, how this book can make you feel. If you’re at all like me, you’ve felt a sort of emotional, tactile thrill at the actual process of thought—those early days in JH or HS or whenever in which you started to piece thoughts together into coherent tapestries. In lots of ways, if you’re the sort of person who ever liked thinking like that, ever, this book’ll act as something like a crush, a new flirtation: it’ll get you amped up to do some fun thinking again. Also: Bertrand Russell was one of the coolest men ever, and he seems even moreso once you’ve read this book.

The Simpsons by John Ortved

A posit: the best histories are oral histories, and all the evidence you need to support that claim could be found in three books: What Goes Up, a sadly under-appreciated messy nightmarishly great book on the history of Wall Street; Live From New York, about SNL; and, now, Ortved’s The Simpsons, which’ll all but force you back to those multi-dvd sets you got, holidays past, of the first ten or so seasons of The Simpsons.

First, for those of us who would wish for things to be otherwise: no, there’s not enough George Meyer, Sam Simon, or John Swartzwelder, and so that sucks tremendously (and by ‘not enough’ I mean, essentially, none: Meyer’s bits are mostly from interviews elsewhere, and by ‘elsewhere’ I mean The Believer). Second: yes, there’s plenty of Conan, though (of course) there could always be more Conan.

Third, for those who don’t want their idols besmirched: Groening doesn’t emerge from this book whistle-like re: cleanliness. In fact, Groening ends up getting quite a hammering herein, and, unfortunately for maybe everybody, he seems to sort of earn it in lots of ways, though I’m horribly biased: it’s hard to read anecdotes about Swartzwelder or Simon or Meyer or Conan and not just wish the story and The Simpsons had remained theirs.

But, of course, it wasn’t just theirs, and Groening’s talents have everything to do with the show getting made, season after season, and being the cultural phenomenon that it has become. Last: this book does a fine balancing job between being one of those for-the-choir-only books and an entry-level primer-like deal: it is, in the best ways, a book for anybody who cares (at any level) about The Simpsons.