SUSAN STEINBERG + Free Books

by Weston Cutter

            I got Susan Steinberg’s Spectacle  (out from the of-course-they’re-still-killing-it Graywolf Press) I think in November and, sure: I’m just like everybody, and so I scanned names on the book’s back, seeing if the blurbs offered a hint of the DNA within and, therefore, if it’d be something I’d need, and for the record Spectacle has got blurbs from folks I very very much believe in, and also for the record (you know this already) blurbs mean very very little (though they can be sort of associatively helpful), and the work inside a book is always what’s important, and the blurbs on the back are very much the equivalent of a bib on some beauty, meaning at best a useful accessory.

Can you tell I don’t know how to talk about Spectacle? I don’t know how to talk about it. Spectacle is a dazzling jolt of a book, beautiful like few collections I’ve seen, ever. I don’t know if this is just a start-of-the-year temptation, the desire to freak out and proclaim that the literary world is doing well, hale and vital, etc., but it seems every year I’ get thrilled by something or a few things Jan-April, and this year’s first OH WOW is Spectacle. Here’s why:

1. Here’s how “Superstar,” the book’s first story, begin:

I once hung out with this shit group of kids and they were just such shit.

            This is to say I made some mistakes.

I don’t want to do much other than draw/force attention to such lines, as they’re representative of the glory available everywhere in this book. If I were to present this in some lit-analysis way, I’d be forced to admit that Steinberg’s stuff is crunchy as bad gravel, crunchy as bones with cartilage gone raw between them: her sentences are wonder/dangerfully sharp things, and you less apprehend the story as it’s being built but feel it, like it’s being injected or tattooed or tapped against you with moderate roughness.

2. There’s a better feel for order and structure in this book than any book of stories I’ve seen, ever. That’s bombastic and too-much, but fuck it: the thing is better tailored and organized than many novels. That feeling you get sometimes from very good books of poetry in which there’s a thread your hands can’t help but find and catch again and again on? This book feels like that. To do Steinberg’s ordering genius justice would take several thousand words, and I’ve got a sick wife and daughter upstairs and so will not here go into it, but maybe this: the ordering of a book is, seemingly, a sort of minor thing. It’s hard to think of when a book’s ordering really hurts it, but when the ordering’s done well, the help it offers is shocking, immense: it turns a good book great and unforgettable. Spectacle is that book. I tried/failed to get at this down below, in the interview with Steinberg, and she addressed it, but please just pick up the book and be dazzled by this.

There are more than two points to make, but I’m forcing you to tread water instead of offering you the good parts, which are as follows:

++ down below is a brief back-and-forth-over-email interview with Steinberg. She’s dynamite. She’s also got two other books, and you’re damn right you should be purchasing them (that’s as much to be as it’s to you).

++ I have TWO COPIES OF SPECTACLE TO GIVE AWAY. If you live in the US, please write to wlcutter(at)hotmail.com by 5pm this Friday, 1/25, and I’ll draw two names at that point and be in touch to get yr address.

 

Okay, now the good stuff:

 

In the loosest and/or most general way, how did you come to writing and/or what are some influences on your stuff? I know these questions can be toxic. I’m real interested, here, in the fact that you seem to be torquing the hell out of your stuff at a language level a la Lish + co, yet your work ultimately gives a lot in coherence, in narrative, in ways (I don’t think) the reader’s given such by Lish + co (+ co being, I guess, Lutz, Williams, Hempel, those sort of folks)(that’s not a dig on them: your work just reads like it’s giving more in terms of emotional/narrative stuff, though that could easily just be my reading). Is this remotely close to anything like what you’re aware of doing, or trying to do?

 

I came to writing short stories via the visual arts—I was a painting major in an art school.  After graduating, I shared a studio with some friends in Baltimore, and after that, I moved to Boston, because Baltimore had gotten too small and Boston was a place I’d completely idealized.  I found a studio there too, and I painted in the days and wrote late at night while my paintings were drying.  Writing was a way to keep going I guess, to keep working through the stories I was trying to tell through painting, and after a while, I only wanted to write.  All to say, my writing didn’t grow out of reading fiction so much, and I wasn’t even aware that my work was dealing with language in any different kind of way until my peers in grad school pointed it out.  As for Lish and Co., I became aware of this in my grad program as well, and I felt about it as I did other schools:  I liked some of the work that came out of it, but not all.  But I think what you’re asking has more to do with prioritizing emotional content over aesthetics?  Or balancing the two?  I’ll just say it’s important for me to try to achieve this constant balance between form and content, presence and absence, emotion and withholding of, among other things, even mechanical things, while I’m writing.  And this was how I painted, as well.  I think the tension in the work can grow out of this struggle in the process.

 

There’s this awesome symmetry to Spectacle, as if it’s almost palindromatic—Spectacle to Spectator, Signifier to Signified; a mimicry in structure or style in some stories (particularly those beginning with a semi-colon, which jump right out, obviously); the feeling (maybe just for me) that “Underthings” represents this a) other voice in the collection and b) a voice that’s equivicating more, or seems more about seeking than some of the other voices do. Anyway: does this notion of symmetry or palindrome ring remotely true for you? Was that an attempt? Or maybe just: that by the book’s conclusion there’s been a revision of things, these issues of exposure and sex/intimacy and family, these things are picked at again and again and set in different places/ways by the end than the start. I don’t know. This might be a lost question. If any of the bones of this make a bit of sense, I’d love to hear anything you’ve got.

 

I think a lot about how writers tell the same stories over and over, and how we’re not even always aware of these obsessions or recurrences.  And I also think a lot about how it hasn’t always felt right to repeat myself as a writer, whereas, as a painter, I painted different versions of the same thing for years.  The sort of “pairing” of stories in Spectacle started as a desire to retell the story “Cowboys.”  It didn’t seem like telling it once was enough—not because I thought it was a good story but, rather, because it was a painful one, and now that I had taken a risk in telling it, I wanted to go through the experience again from a different perspective.  I thought that retelling it would reveal something new or deepen the narrative.  And I wanted to give myself permission to repeat unapologetically, to redo, to be unoriginal.  This opened up other opportunities to push more connections throughout the book, connecting lines, images, forms, and titles to complicate the notion of narration and structure, to create echoes, and mostly to try to make sense of things.

 

Only because I’m inordinately fond of writing that’s specific in terms of place (I’m from the midwest, and doubtless you know enough midwesterners to know the sort that loves the place fervently and Believes in it, etc. [I'm that type, obv]): is there a place to these women and their stories? I know they mention specific locales (Warrensburg, Baltimore), but there’s little sense of being of any of those places, nothing rooted. Does this play at all? I guess the only real possible q would be how come, but I’m curious about intent and anything behind the how come as well.

 

No matter where these stories take place in the real-time of the narratives, I realize I’m mostly thinking about Baltimore, my hometown.  It’s a place I’m deeply connected to and the place I can’t seem to stop writing, no matter how far west I go.  I understand it more than I do any other place, and I suppose it’s the place in which I feel most understood.  And yet I also had to get away from it to write about it (see question 1).  So while my characters are in Boston or San Francisco, like me, their stories are often rooted elsewhere.  All to say, place plays a part in this collection, but in a quiet, internal, minimally described way.  It’s like it lives inside the characters, as opposed to being where the characters live.

 

This might be hilariously/awfully off, but there seems to be this almost morality to the book, at least if one reads start to finish and one gets to this woman whose voice is basically in the reader’s head by that point, and the final words have to do with (what I read anyway) just being present, with the voice/performance/story that’s ultimately (as I read it) connecting. Is that remotely fair? This doesn’t seem a dour book at all—it’s one of the strongest, most ultimately positive books I’ve read in a good bit. I don’t know. I’m curious. It’s just interesting: the women in this book are all sorts of steel and edge, but the drive to connect, the baseline significance of reaching out (and not in a life’s-fucked-let’s-connect way, but more life’s-fucked-we-can-be-in-some-small-thing-together-briefly way) seems to ring like a bell in this. Who knows.

 

“…life’s-fucked-we-can-be-in-some-small-thing-together-briefly…”  That sums it up.

Getting There Late

by Weston Cutter

Out of Sight by Eamon Grennan

I assume we all do this, yes? It’s not even the massively simple dismiss that Eggers talked about way back in that interview; it’s something simpler, weirder—it’s the this-is-always-here, it’s the taking-for-granted. For instance: I must’ve spent years passing up stories by Alice Munro in the New Yorker. Why? I don’t know. Because, at one point, they always just seemed there, easy enough to find, nothing to salivate over. We have authors like this—J.C.Oates is lots of my friends taken-for-granted writer—and there’s nothing good or bad about it, it just is.

Here’s the thing: Eamon Grennan’s been one of my oh-yeah-him writers for a long, long time. Stupidly. Maybe this tendency happens more in poems, too, I’m not sure (for instance: I’ve lately come to regret every missed Levine poem, and two years back was jolted into being upset with each Hass poem passed up; in both cases, I simply passed over those dude’s poems because…well, just because—because I’d picked up the issue of Agni for Hicok or Wallace or whoever else, because I, in my righteous youthful idiocy, believed those poets to be stuffy, For Older People, whatever). Anyway: Eamon Grennan. Maybe he’s someone you’ve passed over, too. Maybe he’s on your list. If he is, let’s take a hot minute to correct that. Here’s his “Encounter”:

The lake that was caked ice is ice no more,

but waves scudding and making foam, although

if you plunged your arm in up to the elbow

you’d touch the hard table-truth of ice, under which

brown trout tell their own story. A man with a gun

patrols the shore: be not a woodcock or a snipe

this rainy afternoon, or—if you are—sit still as stone

while his spaniel noses the drenched heather. Still,

he says, he’d never shoot a pheasant, For aren’t there

only a few about, the lovely creatures. We stand

for a cigarette, his gun cracked open, and in his hand

two cartridges of shot (wine-coloured, with gold

bands closing them) lie, like matching rings.

Ah…….hah! You see? Grennan does this, over and over: the natural setting’s as regularly present in his stuff as a pulse, and always, always, sooner into the poem than you’d expect, he cracks this world open, allows strange sounds to come out through his lines. For instance: how’s the reader take/make sense of “brown trout tell[ing] their own story”? Like a sneak, like a quick play, he stuffs notions of narrative into this otherwise lyric scene, and the reader just feels the pow of amazement. And that’s just the first stanza—let’s not ignore the address to the reader—be not a woodcock or snipe—and then this guy, this tender gun-toter who won’t kill a pheasant. And that last moment, smoke and wine and rings? Take it in: sit with that.

This is why I’m embarrassed I’ve never read Grennan before. Because he does stuff like that, and has been doing stuff like that (“Encounter” is from 2002′s Still Life with Waterfall) for years and years, and I’ve been sitting here, ignorant and missing it. Please don’t make these mistakes. Please read Grennan.

“Instances of Delightfulness are Always Beautiful.”—Robert Walser

by Weston Cutter

Robert Walser, Microscripts

Here’s a theory: the reason small presses are so vital is because they put out books like this, books which could not be demographically tested or vetted by bigger publishers, books which don’t have an easily-identifiable point, books which are simply good and fascinating. This, of course, is why we need places like Graywolf, and Milkweed, and Coffee House, and Two Dollar Radio, and Dzanc.

And, of course, the granddaddy: New Directions (still published for J. Laughlin, every last one of their books). Among such devastators as Thalia Field’s Bird Lovers, Backyard, and whatever latest newly translated Bolaño, along with (of course, how could it possibly be forgotten) A. Carson’s magnificently sledgehammering NOX, Robert Walser’s Microscripts, the latest ND book I’ve read to knock me sideways from my chair, is printed proof that wonder is vital, that the unknown is critical, that life is better when, at least once in awhile, we come into contact with works of art which don’t fit any preconceptions.

Microscripts is, like Carson’s NOX, a book which is as interesting as object/gestational idea as actual narrative-through-text. Meaning what? Meaning Walser, an early modernist (a big deal modernist, too: there’s a Walter Benjamin essay in here about Walser, and I’m part of whatever group who feels bad for not having known Walser earlier [even if I got halfway through his The Tanners, even if I keep meaning to finish it]), spent his last decades locked up in a sanitarium (to which he had an interesting relationship, if Wikipedia’s to be believed) and writing using something he called his ‘pencil method,’ which method sounds (and looks, vaguely) cunieform-ish (actually, that’s not true: it looks less cunieform and more like the invented language in the Codex Seraphinianus). His pencil method, though, allowed him to cram massive textual info into/onto exceptionally small places (shortest story reproduced in Microscripts: maybe 1″x2″, maybe; there are several reproductions in Microscripts of the original scraps Walser attacked and good lord, the stories themselves are satisfying, but the effect of seeing such writing is to get a megadose of inspiration, honestly: you find, in the introduction, that Walser chose small scraps of paper, and that, unlike the easiest image, he wasn’t some wild-man of urge and overwhelming need, scribbling and scrabbling on the back of whatever was nearest, but there’s no way to see the texts without feeling a tug of that sensation).

It’s a fantastically strange book, Microscripts: it’s valuable and great because Walser’s stories are generous and strange, featuring the ho-hum weirdness that makes some early 20th century stuff akin to David Lynch. Here’s how “Somewhere and Somewhen” begins: “Somewhere and somewhen, in a region quite possibly furnished with all manner of agreeable sights and significant figures, there lived a peculiar girl—being at once beautiful and clever—who was capable both of making merry and of handling her income or assets in a thrifty, economical manner.” The line, while generally establishing the narrative world of the story, raises at least as many questions as it may eventually answer (Who’s the narrator? Why make it maybe/maybe-not that the regions furnished with sights/figures? Why is there an implied divide between merriness and fiscal responsibility?), and Walser does this, over and over and over. The actual fiction in Microscripts is fascinatingly wild in just this way, page after page, and it’d be a good book if what the reader got were, simply, the stories, translated and transmitted finally, all these years later.

But it’s better than that, of course: the story of Walser’s ‘pencil method,’ and the story of the microscripts sitting for decades untouched, untranslated (having been thought scrap, of little importance), the fact that he wrote this stuff after he was locked up in a sanitarium (seemingly against his will) though a sanitarium he, in his later years, refused to leave Microscripts offers (especially awesomely for the contemporary anything-goes reader/writer) is a lesson or idea or template in borders, in restriction. Writers, presently, can run any direction, we’re invited to knock all walls down, we can approach limitlessness if we choose (AMonson’s latest book of nonfiction and attendant website, as an example). Walser, however, is a faint and necessary reminder, though, of the beauty of rules, the shocking possibilities that arise because of, not despite ridigity.

Interview with Catie Rosemurgy

by Weston Cutter

That woman there on the left is the author of one of the best books of 2010, and the book is called The Stranger Manual, and it’s out from who other than, and the thing’ll knock you sideways each of the first thirty times you open it.

And, awesomely for us, Ms. Rosemurgy answered questions over email a bit back, and so consider this part of a 1-2 set-up: here’s Ms. Rosemurgy in her own words answering questions, and in a few more days I’ll post a lengthy review of the devastatingly great and fun The Stranger Manual.

1. Just in the hugest and most inclusive way possible: what are some of your influences? De-emphasize or look askance at that word ‘influence,’ too–literally, stretch the whole thing wide. Are you deeply moved by the sound of old Russian church bells and so write always toward some inner brass growl? Do you really, really love the look of 1980′s Chevy trucks, and so part of your aesthetic is influenced in ways you can’t quite described by those beautiful and square-faced vehicles?

I am very influenced by place, by the particular place and small town culture in which I grew up. This place is Upper Michigan, on the lake, and it’s a place where talking about oneself too seriously at length and with obvious relish is discouraged. But that really didn’t take with me.

In the spirit of honesty, I’d have to say that I became interested in aesthetics through listening to music. My parents are great readers and there were always lots of books around, and there was always music playing. I read and loved books, but when I was young, I worried about songs. What made a line or an ending good or bad? Why did a bad, damaged singing voice move me more than a soaring, clear one? I was very concerned, very piqued by the performance of music as well. No matter how much I liked the music, a soulful soul with a guitar seemed disingenuous to me somehow, though I couldn’t say how. An androgynous guy in a dress barking and winking about misogyny, that seemed very right, very unfixed, very aware of itself, though it also broke my heart: the self is an ironic performance, each word a troubled act. That truth, though it’s only one among many, still haunts me. Miss Peach, in all her hyperbole and malleability, is an effort to look at the poses we strike as well as the poses we are helplessly bent into.

1. a. Also: What’s yr here’s-how-I-got-into-poetry story?

I don’t know that I ever got into poetry. I gradually stopped stewing quite so much over rock songs and meanwhile books came to seem less removed and sacred and more immediately relevant. What I was writing changed, what I was reading changed. I’m not sure what I think about the professionalizing of poetry writing, but I’m ridiculously happy to be able to worry about lines and endings for a living.

2. What’s your favorite part of Philadelphia? Have you ever done the Rocky run and ended up at the top of those stairs, arms pumping? Were you bummed at the World Series this past year?

Favorite part of Philly! What a treat to be asked! There’s a lovely block on Green Street with great old trees. My favorite neighborhood is West Philly, around Clark Park. Never done the Rocky run, no. I was bummed about the series, very. Particularly the Yankees angle. That is one extremely distasteful sports team.

3. Talk, in whatever capacity and at whatever length you’re willing, about Miss Peach. Did you know her quickly and start writing poems about her because she’d come to you formed, or were there poems first and then the thunderstrike later that, in fact, this woman was the same woman over and over?

Miss Peach…She came not formed but first. Then she kept reforming and deforming. She is maybe more a concretization of a series of questions than a character, per say? She’s a vehicle. She embodied ideas I didn’t know I was wrestling with.

4. Yr stuff deals just astonishingly awesomely with duplicity of sorts, or not even duplicity but a sort of slipperiness that’s both verbal and experiential (i.e. Miss Peach/Aging British Rock Star/Beautiful Woman saying “I Love You”). I don’t know if there’s really a question about this as much as it’s something I’d be curious to hear you talk at any length about

Yeah, the self is such a grab bag, full of wonderfully gauche swag and old gym socks and gum wrappers. Contemporary poetry’s subject is slipperiness, though really, and it can get predictable. What was so vital and bright in so much great poetry is fading a bit through reproduction? I’m really excited, though, about the relationship between the instability at the level of the word/line/ sentence and at the instability at the level of persona/narrative/community. Miss Peach is like a word I’m saying over and over and over, and her town, Gold River, is the larger grammatical construction.

5. [question redacted because of innapropriate length and stupidity].

Yeah, you know, at base, it’s a book about the relationship between a person and a small American town.

Joan Silber + Sally Mann: Time and Husbandry

by Weston Cutter

The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber

America’s best press has been putting out these slim little books for a bit now, and this last batch (and the next few) seem like the best ones yet. That’s not a knock on what’s come before, but, seriously, how can you go wrong with Joan Silber? The woman’s a dynamite writer of fiction and, it turns out now, a writer of non-fiction, too.

I know all of us who teach this stuff love to talk about questions of craft when making fiction, and it’s a pleasant little delusion, to talk as if we actually understand how these issues of craft work, but the truth is, by and large, we don’t quite know how they work. Character? Setting? These things we load up and charge, but we rarely have the pure gimlet-eyed glance we proclaim in class as necessary to execute fiction masterfully.

Even more complex: time in fiction. The ways in which sentences do or don’t sing, and in which keys. Put it this way: a class in which elements of craft are emphasized and studied would be a breeze compared to a class in which, say, one were to read Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff back to back in an attempt to understand how time fundamentally works in their short fiction. It’s a minefield, unmitigated disaster: from the first sentence, the writer either writes “he said” or “he says” or “he will say” or some other conjugation, but how does one even delicately approach that loaded world of choice?

I’ve yet to see a more lucid and delicate and well-written account of this sort of consideration than Silber’s The Art of Time in Fiction (I didn’t read Birkets’ Art of Time in Memoir, so apologies if that’s just as good and I’m simply a poorly-read heel), and I will absolutely admit that the book, in the best ways, doesn’t offer answers: this is not an entry-level book in which one can suss out tics or tendencies which could help a story’s momentum. No, the book’s a stellar complexifier, a whisk in milk: Silber’s thin book blasts wide and open ideas of time and momentum in a story, and the reader will, at the book’s end, be unable not to, somewhere deep inside, hear new tickings each time some book of fiction’s cracked. And, as ever, all praise to Graywolf for having the luxurious daring to put out these strange and life-changing little books.

 

Proud Flesh by Sally Mann, with a contribution form CD Wright

If you don’t like Sally Mann, there are only two explanations: 1. You aren’t familiar with her work, or 2. You’re wrong. Here’s who’s keeping American photography as lively and great as anyone could hope. It’s diminishing to call her stuff more backwoods stuff “like a southern Diane Arbus” or this latest collection “like Sarah Moon’s stuff but more emotional,” but those little aesthetic touchstones are mildly helpful in this context.

What you need to know, more than anything else, is that Sally Mann’s photography is chronically at work trying to get at and into stuff through photography, in ways that, in all honesty, seem to me most reminiscent of some of the stuff Avedon did. They’re entirely different artists, of course, but there should be, somewhere, some well-written and -thought-out piece that examines the split in photography among those whose work is fundamentally capturative and/or topical in nature vs those whose work is probing or examining in nature. If it seems a silly distinction, pick up a copy of, say, Vanity Fair, in which the pictures are all lovely but are also, essentially, time-capturing in nature: here’s Tom Hanks like this, Stephanie Seymour as that, etc.

Not so Sally Mann: this collection of images documents the body of her husband, and Mann’s got a sympathetic eye anyway, but, honestly, this collection is about as tender and loving a series of photographs as imaginable. Who other than a spouse can so carefully, lovingly capture another’s body with such delicacy, such concern? And to charge this instance further: Sally Mann and her husband Larry have been married 40 years, and he has muscular dystrophy.

It’s an astonishing collection—one of those things which, once you see it, you cannot fundamentally get back to who you were before. Mann’s got a terribly interesting mini-essay about the whole thing here, and it’s worth reading and perusing the pictures just to get a sense of this stuff, and to hear her own take on these things, but the truth is, the pictures, largely, speak for themselves: Proud Flesh is, in magical ways, a work grounded in dialogue—between Mann and her husband, between the viewer and Mann’s husband and, most frighteningly, between the reader and him/herself and his/her own ideas of what it means to look at a beloved.

As if you needed further inducement to own this book, C. D. Wright‘s intro is, like the rest of her stuff, mysterious and wild and canny and twisty and liquidly electric. Surely someone you know needs this book right now: buy it and have it on hand when the time arises to pass it along.