A Brief Public Service Announcement

So, I’m all for (obviously) reading books, and of course there are plenty of amazing ones at the moment to keep you plenty busy. That said, it’s good to get around + see wider, and so here are a few places you should be sniffing toward:

 

 

Madras Press. Remember how excited you were when One Story hit (and then how excited you were when you got John Leary’s “Scenarios for Lee’s Forgiveness,” which is still one of the all-time great short stories ever [seriously, if you don't own that, buy it; if you know John Leary, tell him to write more and publish more and make all our lives better])? How cool it was, this one-at-a-time urge re: short stories? Or maybe you’re a McSweeney’s type, and so you remember with fondness issues 4 and 7, issues in which the stories were all individually printed/published? Well, now there’s another thing to fall for: now there’s Madras Press, and it’s a small house that’ll be publishing single novellas and short stories which, according to their site, “will cost about as much as a greeting card,” which is great, but maybe more great is the brass to, as everyone keep moaning about publishing, publish literary fiction on paper, in small batches, individually bound. For the record: the first group of stories will be available for sale tomorrow, October first, and you can go ahead and be sure to order the Aimee Bender (yes!) book that’ll be available. Seriously: check these guys out. It’s gonna be great to see what they do. And, as ever: don’t just get excited about the idea and pass it along—spend money. Buy this stuff.

 

Make Magazine. These guys are, in fact, not super new or anything–it’s been two years for them–but I haven’t seen another literary journal doing this much great stuff this quickly after their inception—I can think of few literary magazines which are this great period, regardless of lifespan and etc. (honestly: the last lit journal I thought was this good this quick out of the gate was Swink, which I adored, and which is now a husk of what it was and could’ve been, but which was, for a second there, devastatingly great). Full admission: I’ve got work in the latest Make (along with Blake Butler, who recently signed a two book deal with Harper Perennial, which is such great news it’s made my week), and I’ll be reviewing books for them regularly, and so of course I’m biased, but please believe this: I’m anxious to write for them because of how awesome the journal is; I’m not excited about how great the journal is because I’m writing. They’re a dynamite, dynamite publication (seriously, in this last issue, along with Blake Butler they’ve got Joyelle McSweeney, whose work is always worth the price of admission, plus this great interview with/among S. Elliott (Adderall Diaries) and Dave Daley (Five Chapters), plus they’re in Chicago, and they seem to throw good parties regularly, and the magazine itself is gorgeous and well put together, and just buy it and read it already, wouldjya?

 

The Outlet. Alright, have you seen what Electric Literature’s doing? Maybe it’s more fair to say what E. Literature’s trying to do, since they’ve only just begun, but seriously: holy crap. Really. First issue? Jim Shepard. I know! (there’s 5 stories total in the first issue, and they’re all pretty good, but I’ll gladly, chin-forward, follow Shepard’s stuff anywhere). And next issue? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something about Colson Whitehead. Again: I know! So let’s be totally honest, let’s get right down to brass tacks: publishing as we know it is, if not totally hosed and doomed, then it’s at least changing radically and wildly. While every prognosticator’s running around, talking about books on demand and e-books and readers and etc., I think what’s gonna happen, left of the dial/behind the scenes, is gonna be stuff like Make and Electric Literature and Madras (plus plenty of other great and fantastic and human-sized institutions—Pank Magazine, Two Dollar Radio, Dzanc Books [and The Collagist], Flatmancrooked) coming out and making waves and splashes. I think the reversion that the ‘death’ of ‘publishing’’s gonna enforce/afford/cause is gonna be one toward community, one toward smaller, tighter-knit groups. If that’s the direction things go—and all signs point to yes (take one second to consider that McSweeney’s has, as of this week, begun offering exclusive content through an iPhone app, which app costs $5.99/6 months; McSweeney’s, whatever you think of it, is one of the best community-building publishing ventures out there)—Electric Literature should, with luck, play a significant role in that community, should continue to be another wild fun playground of idea and art. Oh! by the way: The Outlet’s Electric Literature’s blog, which is what this is ostensibly all about. It’s a stellar site. It’s far, far better than this site–you should be reading that one instead.

 

Interview with Aimee Bender

            Maybe four years ago now, I got the lucky chance to interview Aimee Bender, and I’d been hoping to land the interview but ended up unable to find a home for it. Since I started this site, I’ve been meaning to put it up, and through some combo of laziness and insecurity (that the interview’s old, that I was young when I did it [and asked young questions, I think]) I’ve kept convincing myself not to put it up.

            All that’s over: here’s the interview. I’m pretty sure we did this interview in the summer of ‘05, when Willful Creatures was coming and after Ms. Bender’d recently had something in the great Secret Society of Demolition Writers. Aimee Bender’s personal site is here, a great interview with her is up here at Powell’s, here are three maps she drew and which were published in Ecotone (and here’s the book about the place Aimee’s mapping), and here’s an incredible essay she had this summer about moths and flies and marriage.

            If you haven’t read Aimee Bender yet, there’s a good chance that your life is more frustrating and less joyful than it could be. Consider her writing to be an experience similar to what life was like before you discovered tea or coffee, whichever’s your non-alcoholic beverage of choice.

            Three books she’s written: two collections of stories (Girl in the Flammable Skirt and, the most recent one, Willful Creatures) and the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own. She teaches at USC. She’s got dark hair and, if you can download her podcast from Powells.com, a fun voice to listen to.

: Okay, so questions. All of the following are just loose guidelines and if there’s something that’s more interesting to say than the answer I’ve set you up for, by all means. I don’t really suppose, actually, that any of this pre-ambulatory stuff is important at all, but just in case. No matter what: thank you so much for your books. As a complete aside: a few  years ago, like a year and a half, you got a letter from a kid in Minneapolis and you couldn’t read his name but you responded, addressed him W. That was me.

            Ah yes! I remember that letter! I’m delighted it’s you.  Hello then, again, now that you have more letters with your name.

: Who are you reading now? Who did you read before, and before that? Is there some group or style or school or anything that you see as particularly substantive and true at the moment?

            True in what way?  I am reading, currently– some Sharon Olds’s poems, and now even more happily so after she said she wouldn’t read at the White House.  I’m reading Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey.  I’m reading Ben Marcus’s essay on experimentation which I am liking a whole lot.  I am blurbing a couple of books– short stories and a novel.  I do think there’s a lot of very lively fiction out there right now– George Saunders has a new book I want to read, and Sal Plascencia’s The People of Paper is incredibly permission-giving and I hear Julia Slavin’s new novel is terrific. 

: How do you like teaching at USC? Did you teach before elsewhere? Is there (for example with People of Paper) some bright sense of pride when your students publish and are  well received?

            Before USC, I was teaching all over LA– UCLA, Caltech; before then, at UC Irvine.  Before that, elementary school.  I love it when students publish. It’s thrilling, and gives everyone hope, and it feels like winning a baseball game or something.  That said, someone like Sal knew from the get-go what his book needed to be, and it was just exciting to witness his process as it happened. 

: How did you get into writing, like as a way to live, as publishing and books and etc?

            It was slow.  I was in graduate school, and sending out stories, and then there were enough stories for a collection, and I went looking for agents and it started to happen from there.  I wanted to publish a book, but I was still amazed when it actually happened.  I still have moments where I am surprised, that I am a writer. 

: Do you have an equal affinity for both short stories and novels? Will the next one be a novel, or do you not think and work that far ahead?

            I work on lots at once, so I have a novel cooking along, and another novel that is either simmering or dead, and I work on short stories along the way.  I do like both forms so much– I write more stories more quickly, but I love that a novel is unknown for so long; it both pains me and thrills me.

: What do you listen to (Red House Painters, railroad cars late at night, coyotes)?

            I’ve been trying to listen more to real-world sounds.  I wish there were railroad cars nearby! What a great thought.  I just listened to Iron and Wine. They’re pretty great.  I listen to a lot of NPR.  I like listening to guitar without words, too.  John Fahey.  I like it when I can remember to take the time to listen to what’s happening out the window– be it birds or cars or people, talking.  Even on their cell phones.

: How did that profile thing in the NYTimes Magazine come about, where you talked about your house and etc? How, also, was the experience of doing the Secret Society of Demolition Writers?

            I knew the writer of that profile indirectly, and they were looking for a female writer, so from there it happened.  It was funny, and fun, and strange, talking about things like what kind of frozen pizza I liked.  The Secret Society was a treat, because Marc Parent, the editor, was such a pleasure to work with: supportive, thoughtful in his edits, enthused.  I have a terrible time guessing who’s who.

: One of the reasons your stories are so absolutely fucking breathtaking is how true they are of themselves: there’s a strength in them to just go wherever the story is bound to go, an integrity, I guess, that puts story above language, plot, anything. How do you…? I almost don’t know how to really ask the question. Here, perhaps: so one of the theories of evolution is that all the elements were right on earth and then, suddenly, wham: there was the presentation of some electrical field, some power applied, and cells joined other cells and suddenly things started moving in new ways. Your stories seem to be just the electrical/power current that comes along and zaps things to life. Are you aware of that while you’re writing? Do you revise endlessly? Did you go through some time where you just wrote the classic ‘straight’ story, terse and cutting sentences (I’m thinking of that just  because George Saunders, in an interview, said he did, for awhile, write the really terse Hemingway-ish stuff, but then realized it wasn’t where his power was)? This is probably just a really long, overtly unclear attempt at asking: how the hell do you do it?

            The thing is, your question is the same way.  You let the question associate to something within itself, and it’s a very compelling and great question!  I love the electrical field image. So, in that, you were following your thought and letting it ride.  Same thing with the stories.  I try to just go where-ever it’s going, and yes, I revise a ton. I reread a ton. I hack a lot out of the story and I add a lot, and I just try to sit with it and grope around in there.  When I’m stuck, I move onto something else.  I did go through a time, yes, where I was writing what I felt might be more acceptable stories, and they were dull as can be.  I read that Saunders interview as well, and strongly identified with that feeling, with the great relief of putting aside what felt like a writerly ’should’ and moving onto what was actually working.

: Simply because you’re connected, a bit, with the only overt ‘movement’ in literature (that I know of) at the moment, McSweeneys, and because they clearly have a political bent, do you also have a political bent that you think your books can/should/may address? Not moral fiction, but fiction with multiple citizenships, maybe: to itself and story, to good and left and more empathizing culture, to the color green?

            I suppose some of the bent comes from a desire to think freely, to let the story move freely.  To have space for all sorts of ideas and styles.  And in a way, that is political.  I feel so strongly that writing needs to be whatever it has to be to get a feeling across, and the form it takes should serve that feeling.  It’s also my belief in feminism– at a reading once, a student asked: “why are your women characters so broken? Do you feel a need to have strong female characters?” And I thought, well, no. Because brokenness is as true as strength, and it feels like a gesture of strength and freedom and progress, for women to write as honestly as we can.  Honesty is tough– I think I really rely on the surrealism/whatever you want to call it as a way to contend with the difficulty of stating things truthfully. 

: And what do you think literature can do, overall? Totally seriously. Not like validate your existence and books, but what do you think literature can do, what do you hope yours might do?

            Awhile back I was reading after watching a lot of TV and film, and the characters in the book I was reading were so flawed, so deeply flawed and unresolved, and I thought: oh.   Right. This is why it’s so key.  There’s something about the internal access to characters, to seeing what they’re doing and also seeing that they may improve/they may not that feels so, so important.  Although I love fairy tales, and I write fairy tales, I do think the neat ending, the pat finale is a dangerous expectation, and I honestly look to literature for complexity. Not to say TV and film can’t have that– sometimes they do. But it is harder, to see that complexity without a narrator, or without access into the internal life of a character, and that is what writing can do, without even blinking an eye.  And all this is done with language!  Literature reminds us about words, puts us face to face with words.  And like it or not, we are all married to words.

: Have you always lived in LA? What do you like and not like about it (loaded question: I don’t like the place and I’m always curious what others do enjoy of it)?

            I’ve lived in California most of my life, not always LA.  I have mixed feelings about LA but it is a good city– it’s a major metropolis, with such a huge range of people and art and style. The first layer of LA, the botox driving boob job shallow LA– yuck. But, in fact, it’s really easy to peel that layer back and suddenly find a really diverse, lively city, where all art forms that aren’t film are happily plugging along, and where it can be exciting, too, to happen upon a film trailer on the street next door, and where all sorts of interesting outreach is happening too.  I like big cities, and even though LA is a sprawling one, I like that it is an invigorating one, too.  And the beach is good.

: What’s the view out your window?

            A big leafy tree, and a pink building that reminds me of Greece, though I’ve never been to Greece.

 

On Quiet Mode

Corduroy will be quiet for the next couple weeks, due to a cross-country move. Awesome books that deserve and will get attention soon:

Nick Reding’s Methland, which Kirn reviewed in this past weekend’s NYTimes

Joan Silber’s The Art of Time in Fiction

Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever

 

All this and more, hopefully very very soon.

 

The Great Perhaps

            Does it seem like you can’t turn around lately without seeing Joe Meno’s name? It seems a bit that way to me, with Poets and Writers giving him a spread (which they’ve since seemingly taken down), and then the great Jonathan Dee giving Mr. Meno some love in the NYTimes Sunday Book Review. It’s good, this attention that Joe Meno’s getting: it’s a sign off things working well.

            Because Mr. Meno’s got a new novel, called The Great Perhaps, and if there’s justice this’ll be the book that pushes Meno into Tom Perrotta-type territory: this is a complicated, weird, challenging book that’s balances real serious emphasis on character, theme, and idea, and if that particular triumverate sounds easy to pull of a balancing act of, I’d encourage you to publish more.

            The book, in the most stripped-down way, is about a Chicago family of cowards, though that’s saying essentially nothing about the book (though, in fact, that’s statement’s one of the first on the book’s back, which I just now noticed, so maybe it’s more encompassing than I thought). What the book’s really about, of course, is not cowardice, nor is it about courage, even. (For the record: it’s a family of four—mom, dad, two daughters—plus a grandfather who is in an assisted living facility, and who [the grandfather] might be the most fascinating character in the whole book, the most rich and rewarding character.)

            Which, yes, is why this book is such a rad, rad thing: it’d be thirty-two flavors of simple for Meno to make a nice little book with a nice little swinging door marked Meaning through which we readers file at the end, our baskets filled, our understanding clicked like a Rubik’s cube into place. Joe Meno, however, makes his book a complicated and unsettled, unsettling thing, a story that is fundamentally resistive in the best ways. Because, obviously, the books resistance isn’t a source of diminished pleasure, but increased: it resists being made anything other than what it is, and so the reader gets the wonderful, wonderful sensation of coming mentally into contact with a thing that is, in all sorts of ways, post-post-post-post: the thing is itself. The Great Perhaps is exclusively a novel of almost, of (it’s right there in the title) perhaps.

(some cool interviews with Meno here here and here)

 

Interview with J. Robert Lennon

J. Robert Lennon’s got not one but two books coming out this week from America’s Best Bookpublisher, though one of the books is only now coming out in the States after having been released awhile ago in the UK (open Q to publishers: how/why did it take this long for Pieces For the Left Hand to get released here? Fools. You wonder why the business is hurting). Castle, Lennon’s latest novel, centers around a returning Iraq War vet who, on getting back to his old hometown, discovers way, way more than would here be decent to go into. Pieces For the Left Hand is a collection of 100 stories, each very short, each almost more like Borges-ian or Kafka-esque works than proper stories (I mean that as a compliment). Reading the book is, in the best ways, weirdly akin to sitting close to a decent and nice older man at a bus stop.

Lennon’s on faculty at Cornell and has been unbelievably kind and quick and cool with interview questions for the last two weeks or so. As if writing and teaching and answering questions asked by strangers weren’t enough, Lennon runs (with his wife) the blog Ward Six, plus he’s also a musician. Yes: you’re lazy compared to J. Robert Lennon.

1. First, just from reading an interview from Being There: what happened to the crime novel you were working on after Happyland (a novel which was serialized in Harper’s a few years back)? Is Castle the result? Also, has Happyland ever been picked up?

The crime novel is called Born Again–I finished it, even edited it pretty heavily with an editor at a major house.  But in the end nobody bought it.  Same with the unabridged Happyland–although I am hoping both will see the light of day eventually.

2. I’m curious about how much Castle is/was, fundamentally, a sort of political act for you, a way to maybe try to exorcize the really, really awful ‘intelligence’/military policy issues of the previous administration. That’s actually not that clear: the book seems, overtly, to be about exactly that, about working out the deception at the center/heart of our lives, and so maybe the question is, how much of that was intentional and planned? Is Castle your attempt to forgive/close this really really atrocious part of our recent past?

I wanted, very specifically, to write a novel about the collective damage that our torture policy has done to the American psyche.  That was my original intent.  I struggled for the better part of a year with a novel about an Iraq War vet in a fugue state who falls in with domestic terrorists, but it all seemed too contrived, and it wouldn’t get off the ground.  Then my wife told me about an article she’d read about a guy who discovered an abandoned castle in a state forest in New Jersey, and Castle suddenly sprang into focus.  I had the whole thing in my head a few weeks later, though it took a lot of revisions to get to the finished product.

I don’t see any fogiveness or closure here, though.  I mean, I am very happy with President Obama so far, but even he isn’t departing very far from Bush’s claimed privileges, particularly on the issue of so-called extraordinary rendition.  What I’m writing about is a chronic national sickness that is not going to be cured in my lifetime.  A few reviews of Castle have called its political message awkward or clumsy, but my obsession with politics had become so intense that to address these things any less directly would have been a kind of hypocrisy.  It’s the novel I needed to write at the time.

2.5. On the question/issue of forgiveness or closure at the end of Castle: something about the book’s finish strikes me as fundamentally about reconcilliation of a sort. The plot of the story itself—confronting this thing that’s in Eric—touches somewhat at these issues, but I read the ending not as a flight from the problems, but as an attempt to resolve the problems completely, fully (restoring the house, willfully choosing to keep working, to go on the next mission). You said before that you were writing about “a chronic national sickness that is not going to be cured in my lifetime.” This gets into that dicey area of author-saying-what-he-meant, but maybe it’s best to take this from a strictly personal point of view: what is it we won’t be able to cure ourselves of in your lifetime? Not just rendition, but our own acknowledgement of the atrocities (physical, psychic, mental) of the renditions and black sites we’ve already (consciously or un-) allowed?

 

Yeah, I think you’re on the right track there.  There is, I suppose, a closing of the circle at the end of Castle, but it’s a circle in the way that somebody’s hands around your neck is a circle.  Loesch accepts what he sees as his true nature–controlling and being controlled.  It’s a kind of giving up.  Yes, I do think that the guilt of having allowed our government to torture will be with us for the rest of our lives, and yes, I think there’s no redemption possible.  Not to be too much of a bummer.

I am fond of saying, though: if you want the wrong answer, ask the author.

3. This is only sort of tangentially connected to Pieces for the Left Hand, but here goes: you’re one of a small handful of writers I can think of who are (seemingly) fearless re: genre—Pieces is made of these wry and curling little shorts; Castle’s something like a mix between straight literary and a genre-ish pulpy page-turner; Happyland is outright satire; yr old story “Substitution Chart” is totally experimental. What’s coolest, though, is that you don’t (to this reader, anyway) seem to be ironically into various genres: on Ward Six, you’re authentically into mysteries and spy novels and stuff. I don’t even know how to formulate a question out of this, really, other than to just sort of set that stage and ask, maybe, why do you not mind fitting into all these different categories? Do you feel like  you’re sacrificing something by not being a strictly ‘literary’ writer (it’s dicey to even ask it that way, I know; you’re, certainly, a literary writer, but not exclusively so)? Do you think more writers should be less fearful of genre-hopping?

To be honest, except for the unpublished crime novel, I don’t think about genre at all.  There are just good books and everything else.  I do love some of the conventions of mysteries, and I think I incorporate a few of them into all my books.  But for the most part, it’s all just stories.  I don’t mean to oversimplify–obviously I’m aware of genre, and I do write about it a lot on the blog.  But when I’m writing something of my own, I don’t give the issue much thought.  This is probably why the crime novel didn’t sell–it’s really a literary novel that happens to be about a cop solving a murder, and it is probably too contemplative to be any kind of major hit.  A lot of editors said they liked it, but nobody knew what to do with it.  Or perhaps I’m kidding myself, maybe it just sucks.  I don’t think so, though.  In any event, I’m glad somebody likes the variety!

4. Can you talk a little about place in your work? Montana twice in the earlier novels, upstate NY in now three/four books. Place seems, in your stuff, to play a far larger role than merely ’setting,’ and if you can talk at all about that impulse—if there’s something specific about Montana and NY that makes you want to set stuff there, or if it’s simply a result of having lived in those places—I’d be curious/interested.

I love these kinds of places because they’re post-frontier frontiers. That is, they’re not frontiers in the sense that nobody’s ever been there, they’re frontiers in the sense that nobody bothers to go. Trammeled wildernesses, if you will.  Western Montana and Upstate New York really fit the bill–lots of small, unexamined places where all kinds of obscure dramas can unfold.  The book I’m working on now takes place almost entirely on a failing farm south of Albany.  For some reason this excites me enormously.

 

4.5. You wrote before, re: place, that you liked Western Montana and upstate NY because they’re “small, unexamined places where all kinds of obscure dramas can unfold.” At the risk of pushing too hard at something that doesn’t need to be pushed at, do you feel like the “obscure dramas” you’re drawn to don’t/can’t play out the same way in big cities? I feel like this is a pushy question, but I’m curious about what the background noise of a place means to your work. In Castle, the story demands some element of ruralness, but the stories in Pieces could be set in, say, NYC and still conceivably work.

Sure, the rurality of Castle is indeed important.  But New York is a city of small towns.  I could very easily see lots of my favorite literary themes transplanted there…think of, say, Paul Auster’s New York, which is as lonely a place as Joyce Carol Oates’s upstate.

I guess what interests me is the strange shapes that human relationships assume in tight places.  And ultimately this could happen anywhere.

5. Sort of back to some of the stuff in #3, about different genres and styles: is there a collection/group/cabal of writers you see yrself as part of, contemporarily? Like, do you see yourself as fundamentally close to someone like, say, Stewart O’Nan, who’s the only writer I can think of off the top of my head who writes across genres, too? (I feel like I’ve asked this question to all the writers I’ve interviewed, and I’m just starting to realize that it may be really dumb and might sound limiting—like “choose a side” type stuff. It’s not intended as such; more just that, for instance, someone like Mary Robison can say that her writing’s connected to the Barthelme brothers, or Lish, or whomever else [for her]. Do you have touchstones like that, artistically, creatively?)

Man, I wish I could feel allied with a group of writers.  It would be kind of nice.  I like Stewart and I like what he does, but I don’t know if we’re doing the same thing.  I loved David Wallace, I am excited and influenced by Lydia Davis, Junot Diaz, Kathryn Davis, George Saunders, Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, Kelly Link.  But when I’m at work I feel completely alone.  Sometimes I meet or talk with these other writers, and that’s a lot of fun, but it’s ships passing in the night…the work itself has a life of its own that has nothing to do with other writers’ work.  I mean, I’m sure someone else can identify influences, but I can’t sort that out myself.

5.5. Norman Mailer in an interview at one point said something about how Hemingway’s suicide was some sort of marker for the stakes involved in writing (I just searched for the quote but can’t find it). I’ve read a little of what you wrote about Wallace over at Ward Six, and I’m curious if you see his suicide in any way that’s got anything to do with writing.

Oh sure–a writer’s work is a huge part of who, and what, he is.  And so the inability to do it is like an inability to live fully.  It’s reductive to say that writing killed those writers, though–perhaps writing is the thing that kept them alive far longer than they otherwise would have.

Hemingway and Wallace is an unfortunate comparison, in my view.  I dislike Hemingway intensely. I have something of a thing about the notions of masculinity he represented in his life and work. Whereas Wallace seemed to me painfully sensitive and humane: personal and artistic traits I am sympathetic to.

6. And sort of connected to all that, too: is it even fair to ask about influences? Who are the musicians and writers and filmmakers and whoever else that’ve pushed/pulled you toward where you are?

Oh man, go ahead and ask, but I hardly know where to begin.  Recently I was thinking about how influential Monty Python and Steve Martin were for me–way more than most of the novelists I like. Early nineties indie rock.  Billy Wilder?  Maybe, or maybe I just like him.  I suspect that many of my most powerful infulences aren’t literary ones at all, but I am not sure what they are.

7. What’s the view out your window?

Well, the sun is setting and bathing our porch in light, and the afternoon traffic is roaring by on Ellis Hollow Road, and the catalpa tree is beginning to bud, and the soil is heating up under the straw in the garden.  Our chickens are slowly making their way across the porch. The front door is open and we are all wondering if they’re going to have the stones to cross the threshold into the house.  They do this all the time but never take that final step.  This morning the view out the window was wild turkeys.  All in all, a very nice view, even with the traffic.

(There’s another great interview with JRL here)