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Brooklyn Transcript

Proceedings of the Chekhov-Saunders Voltron/Humanity Kit Test Drive, held in Brooklyn on November 15th 2016. Participants: Sarah Miller (SM), Ryan Bradley (RB), David Lipsky (DL), and Maria Bustillos (MB).

Sarah Miller is the author of Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl and lives in Nevada City, CA.

David Lipsky’s cultural history of American climate is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster; he is the author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.

Ryan Bradley is a writer in Los Angeles.

Maria Bustillos is a journalist and critic living in Los Angeles.

* * *

DL was asked to comment on his writing classes at NYU; he said, “I’m teaching The Hunger Games this week,” provoking bitter, election-related laughter. “And I taught Saunders last week, just by chance. I think In Persuasion Nation is literally a perfect collection, so… I taught that.”

There was a lot of heated literary disputation aside from Chekhov, regarding among other things Martin Amis, E.M. Forster, and the film, “Don’t Look Now.” (SM: “If only this were how we did our battles in America. Wouldn’t it be great? If the Senate and House fought, with like: ‘Your interpretation of The Red Badge of Courage is totally off, and that’s why we will—’”)

* * *

SM and MB confessed to a general preference for novels over stories.

MB: I don’t want to live on potato chips. It’s just… it’s over too soon.

DL: There’s a certain amount of lying you have to do to make any piece of fiction work, don’t you think? You have to compress, you have to exaggerate. What I mean by ‘lying’ is: the odds of Ivan Ivanovich being at the shitty estate on the day that [his brother] Nikolay gets his first taste of his own gooseberries?—they’re extremely low. Do you know what I mean? There’s a certain amount of exaggeration…

So if the story is a few pages, let’s say there’s going to be a certain amount of lying or compression just to make the story work. And you only get—like out of the thirteen pages—you’ll get maybe five or six just really good things that come out of all the other work. Whereas for a novel, you don’t have to do that much. You have the characters set up, right? You have the situation; you have the few basic things that are not believable or that have to be kind of shifted, to make it go. And then you’ve got . . . if it’s two hundred pages, you’ve got a hundred and twenty pages of great product. And that’s why I think it’s more fun to read novels than stories.

* * *

DL: One of the weird things about the literature that lasts? It’s obsessive, and it’s personal . . . .You can pick up Jane Austen; she is fucking pissed off. Doesn’t matter how polite she is. And Flaubert! Flaubert is so pissed off — Flaubert would have found our election funny, Flaubert hated conventionality, he spent thirty years compiling a dictionary of shitty phrases people repeated to be friendly: it’s called The Dictionary of Received Ideas. That’s somebody who is, in this delightful way, full of hate.

MB: That’s like Wallace, yeah.

DL: Yeah, exactly. I mean the stuff that actually sticks is obsessive. And might not have been that likeable –

MB: Petty and terrible.

DL: Exactly.

RB: So what do you think Chekhov was obsessed about?

MB: Freedom.

DL: Chekov is obsessed about—I’ll go with freedom. And he’s obsessed with indeterminacy. Saying, “Look, you guys want there to be big stories. You want characters to be heroic. It’s just these fucking people.”

RB: Yeah! Right?

MB: Yeah!

SM: Yeah…

DL: [In “The Lady With the Dog”] this guy’s just a pretty good philanderer. And he likes to sleep with a new someone while he’s on vacation. He sleeps with someone, he likes her, pretty much. And she really feels upset about the adultery—and while she’s in bed after they’ve had sex he just picks up a watermelon and cuts off a slice and just is eating it. And then he goes home and he realizes: “I really like that person—wait!” And he starts organizing his life towards her. Then they are just completely stuck in love, and the story ends when they both realize that the hard part is just beginning. And the story is over. Like that is a ballsy, cool thing, he’s saying “I’m not going to resolve it.” Right?

MB: I love that.

DL: And he uses the same joke that you love so much from “Gooseberries.” He takes a friend of his out to some club or whatever and says, “You know, this amazing thing happened when I was on vacation: I met a great girl.” And he’s kind of confessing the adultery, and the friend doesn’t say anything. But they walk out to get a cab and as the friend gets into the cab he’s like, “Oh, I wanted to say . . . ” and then [the philanderer] thinks, “Ah, now he’s going to respond!” And the guy says “You were right!—the fish in that restaurant—”

* * *

RB: Chekhov had a day job, right, where he saw a lot of people—he had this like really good ear. And probably heard a lot of half-finished stories that people tell all the time. All the time! Because he has this amazing ear, being able to realize that people start stories that they never finish, they tell themselves stories they don’t really know the meaning of—they’ve not thought about why they’re telling the story, it’s just the story they tell—this is how people pass the day, all the time.

SM: Right, right.

MB: Not the day…

RB: Their—their lives.

MB: Their lives.

RB: But like—

MB: Our lives—

RB: —he’s seen them in glimpses in his practice, in between the horrible life-and-death shit that he’s dealing with.

* * *

SM: At the end of the stories there’s the two men, sort of bored by [Alyohin’s] story. And then there’s Ivan saying, “I want to tell you a story” and Burkin says, “Not right now.” Game over! And there’s another instance of somebody sort of expressing their sort of lack of interest in someone else’s narrative or—

MB: Oh, many!

SM: —fending them off from telling them another story.

RB: In “Gooseberries,” there are several—before the story happens—“No, no, we’re doing other things.”

SM: Yeah. It’s so funny, really his whole message is, like: No one cares!

[Uproarious laughter]

RB (shouts): Yeah!

MB: I know!

RB: It’s so true!

SM: Long, long stories about how nobody cares.

RB: Yeah! It’s just so fitting with his life experience, he’s in his office day in and day out, a doctor, listening to people’s dumbass stories all the time.

MB: Yeah! You guys ever read The Interpretation of Dreams? Ever? Of Freud?

DL: He’s really gone out of fashion.

MB: It’s so good!

RB: Yeah?

MB: I was thinking of it because here’s this titan of 20th century thought, and he’s going on about how your mind works itself out while you sleep, and The Unconscious and all this, and how part of the function of dreams is to keep you sleeping. So he tells this story, he had a boil on his testicle, and in the dream he’s riding a horse. There’s no way he can have this boil on his testicle and also be riding a horse; therefore he doesn’t have a boil and he can keep sleeping.

[slight pause to digest this]

DL: You’re saying all of this is like having a boil on your testicle?

MB: Yeah.

[That is, a story is like a dream that allows you to live through the truth.]

DL: Making sure I heard this properly: So . . . he’s saying the dream is like the brain’s in-flight movie

MB: Yes.

* * *

RB: Chekhov’s descriptions of landscape really are beautiful. And quick

SM: Yeah, even of a really squalid landscape.

RB: Way more than like—Flaubert gets a ton of props for his amazing descriptions of landscape, but these are like sketches of the natural world that are really efficient, but gorgeous.

DL: That was Baudelaire who said that Flaubert “gets a ton of props,” wasn’t it?

* * *

DL: I have a question: who tells the third story? Alyohin is talking—but someone else is telling it.

RB: You’re right! That’s something I totally missed… you’re so aware of the voice coming through the characters in the other two stories, and then it’s abstracted in the third one.

DL: They’re all frame stories—like Frankenstein is a frame story. They’re all sitting there and someone says “Here’s something bad that happened: ‘I really just wanted to reanimate the dead, and it all went wrong.’”

[laughter]

DL: There’s Burkin and Ivan—and then the third [story] shifts, and there’s an “I” who’s saying, “We were all sitting around and I was looking at Alyohin, and he started speaking.” I was curious about that. Did Saunders talk about that?

MB: He did, he said he thinks there’s maybe an inconsistency in it, a mistake.

RB: Even though it’s told by this third party, you get internal stuff from [Alyohin], but you don’t get anything about the woman he is in love with, aside from her reactions to him; you don’t get any internal stuff from her. But then you get that wonderful… after they have their declaration of love, he just like, goes into the other train compartment and cries while the train is already… which you wouldn’t…

MB: Oh. I loved that so much because it seemed like exactly like what would happen, something so freaking awkward and ridiculous.

* * *

MB: So George goes: if somebody tells you, you know,“I don’t like dogs.” And you think: What a jerk!” But then somebody else says: “You don’t really mean that.”

DL: Oh, that’s very clever.

MB: So compact. When the answer comes back: “You don’t really mean that.” “Yeah! Yeah, I do, I do mean that.” Or: “Well… I guess maybe I don’t.” Or maybe afraid to answer, now, because I don’t really want to admit that I don’t like dogs; I’ve been shamed. It’s this huge mise en abyme… you know, like when you look between facing mirrors and you see a million of you?

DL: What’s the phrase for that?

MB: Mise en abyme.

* * *

A long talk about the politics; generalized confusion and sadness.

SM: I just don’t even know what to do.

MB: We’re going to figure something out.

* * *

SM to DL: You’ve written one novel? I’ve written two. One okay one, and one okay-plus one.

[RB and MB have only dabbled in fiction.]

RB: I I don’t even know necessarily how to pay attention to the craft of storytelling. I know what I like, and I definitely steal all my best moves in my nonfiction from fiction, from short stories I like. And I think about structural moves. But these minutiae that you were pointing out—

DL: I think all that comes from rereading. The weird thing . . . when you’re going through high school and college, you tend to look at stories always as an audience member, and you just keep getting more and more adept as a member of the audience, you can catch more stuff.

And one of the nice things about a class like George’s, is that it allows you to be on the other side of the desk. Where you’re looking out at the reader from the writer’s side . . . Because when you do, then you understand what’s going on. The first time you’re just like “Wow, that’s really cool: Katniss ended up in the Hunger Games?!!? Who’d have seen that coming?! I was so worried about Primrose, I didn’t see Katniss coming.”

[uproarious laughter]

* * *

[After a description of George’s class is read aloud.]

RB: It makes me think a lot, [George’s] background as an engineer… let’s diagram this [story], the shape: there’s one guy in darkness, one in light. One’s awake, one’s asleep and then—switch. I was like—very attentive to the sudden turns in tone, and—

MB: There’s a stillness to [Chekhov], it’s static, it’s boring, in a way! There’s no effects, there’s not like, gorgeous clothes or witty women, or—

SM: That’s kind of funny, because that’s what they say they wish they were talking about… “This is boring. can we talk about chicks?”

DL: What was your favorite of the stories?

SM: “About Love.”

DL: Just Sarah? Because you like adultery stories.

[laughter]

DL: There are so many adultery stories. Because it’s an immediate secret—it’s immediately dramatic. You can’t tell your friends, for better or worse. You can’t tell your partner most of the time when you are committing adultery: “Here’s the way I fooled you: isn’t this pretty cool?” The only time you can get good data about what it feels like to be an adulterer is from fiction. So it is a natural writer’s subject.

SM: It wasn’t just that! I said this in my piece (which you should memorize): I also liked that I didn’t know what was going to happen next, and the other ones were a little still, for me. I felt like the characters were, like from Forster, the difference between flat and round characters: these characters were all kind of flat characters. I like more story; I’m not super interested in “ideas”… in fact, I find ideas kind of… I have kind of a knee-jerk anti-sexist feeling—a misandrist reaction to “ideas.” “Oooh, let’s talk about this, are we all in shells?” Who gives a shit.

DL: So when Maria was quoting George talking about the structure—and how at the end, they’re walking into sunlight—were you kind of rolling your eyes and internally thinking, “That seems kind of bullshit, and what does it matter?”

SM: No, no no.

DL: Oh, because I have to say that I kind of was.

[lols]

DL: Just talking about the twists and all that, and about how different people are responding at the end of the story? That to me doesn’t seem to have much to do with how the story works. And I don’t think it even is how Chekhov was composing it. That to me is the kind of stuff where I’m like Sarah: I don’t care about that.

SM: I wasn’t really paying that much attention. Like… I went to college in the late 80s early 90s and I had this guy [REDACTED], was my professor, and he was kind of… such a dick.

DL: He’s an Updike scholar.

SM: And everything he talked about was like [pompous voice] How Does This Story Work. And I was like “Literally, who gives a shit.” But I was also like seventeen and I went to public school, and everyone just clearly had been at Exeter and Andover, so this had been a thing. And at my high school, we didn’t do this. How does a story work? Who cares? But I also didn’t understand it.

So I’m interested in the form of things. And as someone who writes fiction, the form is the only thing abut it that really matters. That’s why people like things. I mean you have to write it well, but if you don’t have a good form—if the puzzle does not fit together well—you don’t have anything.

RB: How does a story work? Do you want to keep reading after every sentence? Answer yes or no. If the answer is yes every time, then the story works.

[Back to “round” and “flat” characters, according to E.M. Forster’s definition in Aspects of the Novel.]

DL asked each to name a favorite novel.

SM: The Cazalet Chronicle by Elizabeth Jane Howard. All five of them. She was Kingsley Amis’s [second] wife.

DL: Yeah I remember, of course, there’s that lovely photo of them looking glamorous.

MB: She’s not the one who wrote on his back in lipstick?

[No—that was his first wife, Hilly.]

SM: I’m not sure…

DL: Yeah. Then his first wife moved back in to see him to the grave, btw, with her second husband.

DL: So what is your favorite book of fiction? One of your favorite books of fiction.

MB:            Tom Jones

RB:            The Left Hand of Darkness

SM:            The Cazalet Chronicle

DL: I’ve never read Elizabeth Jane Howard, but I know at least in [Tom Jones and The Left Hand of Darkness], those characters aren’t round or flat, so those distinctions are kind of bullshit, pretty much. It’s just what works. And I love George’s work, I think George is the best short story writer now. But his characters are not what you’re there for, do you know what I mean?

SM: Yes!

MB: Yes!

RB: Yes!

DL: The degree to which people are spending time thinking about whether their characters are round or flat? We are misleading them, and taking their time away. If they actually watched The Simpsons, or an okay movie on Hulu, they would spend their time better, in terms of learning to write stories, than in thinking about whether or not their characters are round or flat.

MB: But like… I feel that way about, hmm… Anna Karenina, definitely.

DL: Of course! There are some stories where you’re there for the characters, and others where you’re not at all.

SM: But in Chekhov, in these stories? You’re not there for the characters.

MB: You’re there for the characters they’re talking about, not the ones they are.

DL: Well said. I’d go with that. Because Belikov I’m curious about; I’m curious about Varenka. And I’m really curious about Nikolay and the berries.

MB: You know what, I think that’s almost the brilliance of it. The people who are telling the stories are like us and with us in a potent, intimate way. All are looking, watching.

RB: And these are stories about people whom they vaguely know, and who are also in the village? Like… the truest form of human social bonding there is, is telling each other stories about people you know.

* * *

DL chose a favorite book: Pale Fire.

RB: The summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I went to Iowa City with the Young Writers program… My teacher—a student, I guess—was a poet, and he assigned us only two books to read before the class: Moby-Dick and Pale Fire.

MB: David carries John Shade’s poem in his telephone.

DL (shyly): On my phone, yeah.

RB: That’s so awesome.

DL: Because it’s a really good poem.

RB: Because it is!!

MB: It’s so good. I find it so insulting that people don’t understand that he is the best poet ever to live.

SM: Who?!

MB: John Shade.

DL: Nabokov spent about ten years doing really elaborate annotations for the English translation of Eugene Onegin, and it must have told him that would be a really cool way to do a novel. Because once Lolita came out, and he was kind of freed up from ever doing anything again for money, the next thing he wrote was the novel, Pale Fire. Which is a 999-line poem, and then the annotations on it, and the annotations end up telling the story.

[Chekhov was an early innovator in this exact technique. “Sarah Bernhardt Comes to Town,” for example, is an 1881 short story consisting bits of telegrams, notes, excerpts from letters. (“FROM NADIA N. TO KATYA H. Dear Katya. Last night I went to the theater and saw Sera Burnyard. Oh Katya, how many diamonds that woman has! All night I cried at the thought that I’ll never ever own such a heap of diamonds.”]

* * *

Which was your favorite story in the Little Trilogy? SM loves “About Love” best; the others choose “Gooseberries.”

RB: “Gooseberries” is the weirdest, and has the most going on. Also—about how I believed about the U.S.—I am going to reread this story and come to it in a very different way, and focus on a different part of it.

MB: This is the weirdest thing that has happened [after the election]. What happened last week is going to color how you think about everything henceforth. And that’s sad.

SM: Yeah. That’s what I hate about it so much. Like: Why do I have to carry this around with me.

MB: Just one more note about the flat character thing. Chekhov to me is the opposite of what Forster is talking about. I feel like Chekhov leveled up from Forster.

[Because there are no rules, as DL suggests, other than “what works.” Like George Saunders—both writers anticipate what you’ve been thinking, moment by moment: MB brings this up specifically.]

SM: Hmm.

MB: It’s a rare, amazing beautiful thing, and it’s too little remarked. I asked George about this directly and he said, “That’s the goal, to know where my reader is at any moment and do the next thing with that in mind.”

SM: That’s a really good way to think about… an interesting way to think about how you would proceed.

DL: Can I respond to that? One of the things that Wallace said is that you shouldn’t do that, right? Wallace said that if you’re always thinking about what the reader’s going to like, you’re not going to do anything good . . .

MB: That’s different.

DL: The aim is not just to write stuff, but to be able to project what an alien consciousness might make of it, right? Obviously both those thoughts can’t co-exist? So let’s put that aside for a second.

MB: It’s very easily resolved –

DL: Yeah, yeah, but one of the . . . wait, why is it easily resolved?

MB: The question of liking doesn’t enter into it. You just know where they are.

DL: Martin Amis, do you like his stuff?

MB: No!

DL: OK. I think he’s great.

RB: Really? You don’t?

MB: No.

DL: I’m getting, I’m getting a real fix on Sarah’s face.

[inaudible uproar]

DL: Amis had a great thing—

SM: Elizabeth Jane Howard was his stepmom… and his mentor.

DL: That’s right: actually, without Elizabeth Jane Howard he wouldn’t even have gone to school.

[“When Jane took me on I was averaging an O-level a year, and read nothing but comics, plus the occasional Harold Robbins and (for example) the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley’s Lover; I had recently sat an A-level in English – the only subject in which I showed the slightest promise – and I failed.”]

SM: That’s right.

DL: He’d still be a fucked up kid at—

SM: Exactly. Thank you, now we’re getting somewhere.

* * *

[A long exchange here on the theme, roughly speaking, of anticipating the reader’s needs. Must we like the author. Is he doing a sales job on us? A con job?]

RB: What I love about fiction is the dealing in the ambiguities; that to me is where fiction is a much better mirror for reality. Where non-fiction really fails, so often, you’re very clear who the heroes you’ve developed are; the non-fiction I really like is [saying], these are people who are making deeply complex choices, and I do not know if I would like to be around them.

DL: I can read Chekhov and think, “This guy might not like me. I like his work a lot, but he might meet me and might not like me, I might not like him”. I can read Joan Didion and I might think, “She might think I was too easy on people, or she might think I’m a dick, right?” You can read Pauline Kael (who I really love) and think: “She might think my taste was all wet.”

SM: She’s a terrifying person.

DL: Yeah.

RB: Totally.

MB: I love her so much.

SM: Which is why, like, whenever you’re mean—I can be so mean. sometimes. And whenever I’m mean it’s because I just… feel bad, right? Whatever. It’s like, so Lorrie Moore is someone who you go, “This person feels fucking awful sometimes.”

DL: That’s right.

RB [laughing]: Ye-heh!

SM: Actually I can’t deal with people who I never think feel awful? I don’t really care if people are mean, I only care if they are mean and then ask, like, “What are you talking about?”

* * *

DL: “Gooseberries,”—anyone else could have written the story where he’s a dick. But then they wouldn’t have allowed him to murder his wife for the cash. Make him actually culpable.

RB: It took literally a paragraph in the story. Crazy.

DL: Or, it would be like “OK, like, he never actually buys the farm.” That would be the ironic ending, right? Or he buys the farm and the gooseberry bushes don’t yield.

[general assent]

DL: But the thing that’s surprising, it’s a double surprise, is that only Chekov would have the really dirty human truth he’s giving us—he buys the farm. The bushes yield, the berries are sour. He eats them anyway, thinking they’re sweet. Both Updike and Raymond Carver said the same thing about fiction. Which is: it’s always bringing news from one world to another. And they’re such different kinds of writers—if those two guys say the same thing, it’s kind of worth thinking about. (And this is news, a deeper, sadder headline: that our tastes might not even be our tastes at all.)

Did you ever have a thing—like, with your boyfriend or your parents, and they’re really wanting to like, have a good holiday? Thanksgiving is coming, it’s more like for family, and you’re really just hoping that the fight won’t get that bad this time, right? Or the food will be okay. And so we can class this thing, this day, as successful, when it’s over, and just ignore all the shit that’s going on.

And that’s kind of like the “Gooseberries” story. Which is: he’s going to grow those gooseberries, he wants them to be good. And even though they suck, he’s going to eat them.

RB: And enjoy ’em!

DL: Yes. He keeps getting up in the middle of the night, to have more of these shitty berries.

RB: Yeah!

DL: And that is dirty, useful, jubilant—the “jubilant awful truth” that Updike is talking about. And that’s why I love that story.

RB: Like, there’s zero, like real come-uppance to him.

MB: No, not a bit.

RB: Right, his brother gets everything that he wants, it’s only, it’s only in that, it’s through the lens of, of, Ivan, telling it—

DL: Yeah.

RB: That will tell you, “These gooseberries were gross.” And bad.

DL: And the second joke—which is your joke, Sarah—when it’s over? He tells the story, and the story is a great thing to have told somebody. And the listeners, the other people didn’t get it: “That wasn’t the kind of story I wanted to hear.”

MB: God yeah. “Uh… I wasn’t digging that.”

DL: And that’s great. That’s the reverse. They were served, those three people were served a really sweet plate of gooseberries. And they didn’t realise they were sweet, they thought they were hard and sour, and that’s the third joke.

MB: Yeah. The brother had this whole other concept. He was so disgusted by the idea that you would be taken in by these shitty…

DL: Yeah.

MB: Like, what the hell? You know, you gave up everything. And this is what you got.

RB: In my re-reading of it I really latched on to… in the politics section, in his rant, his notion of… like, if only there were a guy behind the door with a hammer reminding you of all the tragedy. I think that is the problem of being a free person in the world.

There are people who accept the constant horribleness of reality; that people are suffering really tragic, really unjust deaths, not just people but animals, like there is tragedy all around us, but [caustic laugh] just to get by, most of us… ignore it.

MB: Have to.

RB: Have to. Just to exist in the world, we have to ignore it. But in order to be a good person and make the right choice, always, you need the guy behind the door, the dude with the gun pointed at you, like, you know, because… we’re constantly making choices that are not [sardonic laugh] morally the perfect choice.

MB: Or even… vaguely defensible.

RB: Or even defensible! Right! You’re right! Like, I’m constantly making choices that are not defensible, really morally.

SM: Really?

RB: Oh yeah. Like…

MB: Like flying here in an airplane.

RB: Yeah. Exactly.

SM: Ah. Okay.

MB: Yeah, it’s almost like… The artificial structures that you create in order to be able to, uh, sort of posit the idea of a good answer… This is why I love Chekhov, I didn’t realize… he doesn’t create the scenario by which you even could decide that there’s a good answer. He just creates a scenario and says, “I’m sorry, you’re on your own now. I have absolutely no idea. Sorry! That’s all I got.”

DL: Sarah, what were you about to say just now?

SM: Oh. It just reminds me of Grizzly Man, how—does this guy deserve to get eaten by a bear because he’s so fucking dumb?

RB: Right.

SM: That’s kind of what that movie’s about, isn’t it?

RB: No, yeah. Like, a dude made a choice to hang out with bears a lot, and he got eaten.

* * *

DL: Czeslaw Milosz said, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished. . . . ” But the reality is the reverse. If you think about that Updike thing, Updike’s early work—his family is still sitting at that table in the stories, even though everybody is dead. If you write honestly and directly, right? When a family is born, when a writer is born into the family, the family is saved.

SM: I should tell my parents that when they write me and say—

[general hilarity and noise]

SM: “You guys are going to live forever on the page.”

* * *

MB: I had such an affinity with Ivan, because I am boycotting my family holidays this year because of the election, and I told them, I can’t come to this party, I can’t do it, you know, it’s unfortunate, but I can’t, when so many of you guys voted for someone who has directly threatened harm to me and mine. And my niece wrote back and said “I understand and I respect your decision blah blah,” and I’m like, you know what? If I never see you again, and I love you, I—I have very confused feelings about this, so I kind of feel like that’s that’s… that’s how Ivan feels. He’s basically saying to his brother: “You have ruined what I thought was good by being such a dick.”

RB: It’s funny though, because he never told the brother off.

MB: You can’t! What good would it do, I feel the same way. It’s like what am I going to say: “You’re an idiot.”

DL: Maria, there’s this Flannery O’ Connor story called “Revelation.” This woman who thinks really well of herself—she’s in a waiting room for her doctor, and she’s congratulating herself on her politeness and her model behaviour at all times. And there’s like a kid who like obviously has some control issues. And she’s like judging this girl, and is being in her own eyes very Christian. And at one point the girl says “Oh get away from me, you old warthog from hell.” And she realizes, “I am a warthog,” and that’s how the story ends. So it can be useful, actually, to tell somebody off.

* * *

MB: This is one of the best nights of my life.

DL: I feel you might be exaggerating because of the pleasure of the moment.

MB: That’s all there is! As Chekhov teaches us.

* * *

Don’t Call My Daughter Princess. Call Her Madam President.

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Sarah Stankorb | Longreads | February, 2017 | 12 minutes (2,917 words)

 

My daughter Zoe was about 11 months old. Other strange men with silvered brows had referred to her as princess before. I’d read Cinderella Ate My Daughter during my third trimester, and while I deeply feared how the world would subtly limit her options, I usually bit my tongue over the princess thing. But we were on a trip to Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, and maybe it was thoughts of presidents, or the emotional toll of slipping between the fancy house and its slave quarters, or maybe I was just tired. But I looked at the man who’d just called my daughter princess and said, “Not a princess. She’s going to be president.”

He looked at me like I was talking gibberish—he’d just been trying to be nice to a baby—and walked away. I got used to that taken-aback look, because from that point forward, not-a-princess-but-president became my default. By the time we went to Disney World last spring when she was 4, my daughter had heard the message enough times that as park attendants and characters called her princess, my daughter corrected everyone (except Elsa, because evidently one does not mess with the ice queen).

Zoe would sling a hand to her hip and say, “I’m not a princess.” When they’d ask what she is then, she’d reply “President.” Or “Jedi” on a day spent scouring for and failing to find Rey.

Zoe identified with Hillary Clinton from the start. While I was weighing Sanders versus Clinton, my 4-year-old had determined “Hillary is a girl president, like me.” She made up songs about Hillary and developed a granddaughterly deep, unfaltering affection for her.

Meanwhile, I dug Bernie Sanders’ laser focus on economic issues, his willingness to put words to the crush of student debt that weighs on most people of my generation. Hillary Clinton, it seemed, had almost always been there floating in my vague awareness of the political realm. As a young teen, I respected that she used Rodham—and knew zero women in my own life who’d kept their given surnames, or hyphenated them. I certainly didn’t understand why there was so much hubbub over her lack of interest in baking cookies.

My own mother had set my life’s trajectory, firmly pointing me toward college and a career of my choosing. “You don’t need a man for anything,” she asserted, frequently. Marriage, if I wanted it, could wait. Children, if I wanted them, must certainly wait. Mom launched into informal sex education when I was in elementary school to ensure I would understand and have control over my reproductive choices. Who cared if the First Lady didn’t want to be reduced to lurking in kitchens? Neither did my mother and neither did I.

But years on, grown up and with kids of my own, Clinton’s presidential bid felt about two generational steps removed from me. Her nineties positions on feminism and health care, treated as so radical at the time, were an assumed part of my world. My life was evidence of progress. I didn’t need her anymore. Read more…

Writing Our America

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Scott Korb | Longreads | February 2017 | 32 minutes (8,200 words)

 

The following essay is adapted from a talk presented at Pacific University’s MFA in Writing Program. It includes advice from writers of “YA fiction, writers for television and stage, of novels and essays, investigative journalism, and criticism” on how we might produce meaningful work in the next four years.

* * *

I often teach a piece of writing by David Foster Wallace, included originally as the introduction to the 2007 edition of The Best American Essays. He called the piece “Deciderization—2007,” a title that jabbed at the then-current president, George W. Bush, who, in the midst of his second term—in the midst of the Iraq war, which as fought had been lost—reminded the country during a press conference insisting he would not fire Donald Rumsfeld, whom he would later fire, that he, George W. Bush, was “The Decider.”

The moment seems far away now, but Bush’s choice of words here, it was said at the time, “struck the national funny bone.” Writing in the New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg said,

On the Internet, it was memorialized to the tune of “I am the Walrus,” by the Beatles. (“I am me and Rummy’s he. Iraq is free and we are all together.”) On late-night television, the Decider emerged as a comic-book hero, courtesy of Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show.”

In other words, in making fun of Bush, Wallace was not alone and, as he was well aware, was far from the most high-profile or widely observed jabber. Opening the book’s introduction, he wrote, “I think it’s unlikely that anyone is reading this as an introduction.”

Most of the people I know treat Best American anthologies like Whitman Samplers. They skip around, pick and choose. There isn’t the same kind of linear commitment as in a regular book. … There’s a kind of triage. The guest editor’s intro is last, if at all.

This sense of being last or least likely confers its own freedoms.

When I’ve taught his introduction before I’ve tended to highlight how Wallace considers and reconsiders the essay form itself—“one constituent of the truth about the front cover,” he writes, “is that your guest editor isn’t sure what an essay even is.” This confusion is fun in a way that Wallace is often fun. It does what this particular writer tends to do—puts his own subjectivity front and center in an effort to pull a rug out from under us. What do you mean you don’t know what an essay even is?

Continuing on, Wallace then addresses his lack of both confidence and concern with the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction—more fun for us—only to change course a moment later, explaining that he does care about such differences, but conceding that they’re “hard to talk about in a way that someone who doesn’t try to write both fiction and nonfiction will understand.” At which point he dives into the part of the essay I’ve always been most interested in talking about with writing students, who tend—as I am—to be interested in how to do what writers are trying to do. What is writing supposed to feel like?

Writing-wise, fiction is scarier, but nonfiction is harder—because nonfiction’s based in reality, and today’s felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex. Whereas fiction comes out of nothing. Actually, so wait: the truth is that both genres are scary; both feel like they’re executed on tightropes, over abysses—it’s the abysses that are different. Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

The intergenre debates that go on in our culture have been a great pleasure to me over the years. I like what journalist Jeff Sharlet says on the point: “Fiction’s first move is imagination; nonfiction’s is perception.” And to be sure, I’m always delighted to hear from someone about the abyss under poetry’s tightrope. Read more…

A Shot in the Arm

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Josh Roiland | Longreads | February 2017 | 14 minutes (3,710 words)

 

“Who’s sticking today?” the man asked.

He wore tan work boots and rough jeans. He told a friend in the waiting room that he had a couple hours off work and thought he’d stop in for some extra cash. The receptionist told him the names of that day’s phlebotomists. He paused. Sliding a 16-gauge needle into someone’s arm is tricky, and the man reconsidered. Instead of signing in, he announced to the room that he’d come back tomorrow and try his luck.

I’d driven 107 miles from my home in Bangor, Maine to the BPL Plasma Center in Lewiston to collect $50 for having my arm punctured and a liter of my plasma sucked out. The actual donation takes about 35 minutes, but the drive and its attendant wait makes for an eight-hour day. I clocked in for that trip five times this summer.

I’m a professor at the University of Maine. My salary is $52,000, and I am a year away from tenure. But like everyone else in that room, I was desperate for money. Read more…

Practical Cartography: I Am Mapped, Therefore I Am

Cantino's map, one of the most important pieces of 16th century cartography. (Image in the public domain.)

Lois Parshley’s wide-ranging, fascinating story on mapping the unmapped — from black holes, to the bottom of the sea, to the populations of the Congo and Haiti — looks at not just the science of map-making, but the morality.

“I like maps,” Gayton says. “But really what I care about is equitable distribution of health care. As long as 1 billion people don’t have it, sooner or later it’ll come bite people in rich countries.” He scoffs at the idea that there are no blank spaces left on Earth. “Anyone who says the world is mapped, ask them to show you where the population of Congo are living. Ask them where the villages are. If they can do it, please let me know.”

To Gayton, it’s not an idle distinction. “When you have a place like South Sudan, where millions of people live and die without ever figuring in a database anywhere, their names will never be written down. There’s not a lot of dignity in that—to not be on the map is quite a powerful statement of uncaring.” That’s what Missing Maps is about. “We still don’t know who they are, but at least we know where their house is. At least the map actually contains them, rather than a blank wash of green,” Gayton says. “I tell people at mapathons sometimes, ‘That house you’re tracing right now, that hut—that’s the first time in the history of humanity someone cared enough about them to take note.’” Things don’t exist because we name them, but giving them a name engenders new meaning. At its most basic, to exist on a map is to have value.

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Making Sense of Our Compulsions

Photo credit: Kayana Szymczak

Jessica Gross | Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (3,932 words)

 

Checking our smartphones every few minutes. Making sure every spice jar is in the exact right place in the rack. Shopping. Stealing. Working nonstop. Hoarding. “Compulsions come from a need so desperate, burning, and tortured it makes us feel like a vessel filling with steam, saturating us with a hot urgency that demands relief,” Sharon Begley writes in her new book, Can’t Just Stop. “Suffused and overwhelmed by anxiety, we grab hold of any behavior that offers relief by providing even an illusion of control.”

In a time of extreme anxiety for many of us, Begley’s book feels particularly relevant. In chapters that run the gamut from obsessive-compulsive disorder to compulsive do-gooding, Begley—a senior science writer for STAT, whose previous books include The Emotional Life of Your Brain and Train Your Mind, Change Your Brainexplores how behaviors that range widely in both character and extremity can come from a common root. “Venturing inside the heads and the worlds of people who behave compulsively not only shatters the smug superiority many of us feel when confronted with others’ extreme behavior,” she writes. “It also reveals elements of our shared humanity.” Begley and I spoke by phone about what anxiety is, exactly; her own compulsions; and whether it’s possible to have no compulsions (not likely).

What is the definition of “compulsion,” as compared to addiction and impulsive behaviors?

This was the first thing that I had to grapple with. The first thing I did was go around to psychologists and psychiatrists and start asking, “What is the difference between these three things?” To make a long story as short as possible, they really didn’t have a clue, or at least they were not very good at explaining it—to the extent that the same disorder would be described in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from the American Psychiatric Association, using “compulsive” one time and “impulsive” the next.

So where I finally came down, after finding people who had really thought about this, is as follows. Impulsive behaviors are ones that go from some unconscious part of your brain right to a motor action. There is very little emotion except for that feeling of impulsivity. There’s certainly little to no thought involved.

Behavioral addictions—and this is where I thought it started to get interesting—are born in something pleasurable. If you’re addicted to gambling, it probably is because, at least when you started, it was a whole lot of fun. You loved it. You got a hedonic hit, a pulse of enjoyment. And certainly as things go along, a behavioral addiction like gambling can cause you all sorts of distress and destroy your life. But at least at the beginning, it brings you extreme pleasure.

Compulsions are very different. They come from this desperate, desperate need to alleviate anxiety. They’re an outlet valve. The anxiety makes you want to jump out of your skin, or it makes you feel like your skin is crawling with fire ants. And what compulsions do is bring relief only after you have executed the compulsion, whether it is to exercise, or to check your texts, or to shop, or to keep something if you’re a hoarder. And crucially, compulsions, although they bring relief, bring almost no enjoyment except in the sense that if you stop banging your head against a wall, then it feels good to stop. Read more…

How the ‘Girls’ Cast Came to Be

There was always something distinctly Obama Era about Girls — the post-recession angst, the clunky conversations around race and diversity, the ability to worry about money, art, and love, rather than the looming end of constitutional democracy. So it makes sense that the sixth and final season of the show is about to start right as a new administration rolls in. Before it does, though, Lacey Rose at The Hollywood Reporter gives the show’s cast and creators (from Lena Dunham to Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner) the full oral-history treatment.

JENNIFER EUSTON, CASTING DIRECTOR It was 2010, and I’d done one or two network shows and did not have good experiences. Then Kathleen McCaffrey called and said: “I have this script. It’s Lena Dunham, and Judd’s attached.” I’d seen Tiny Furniture, and I’d worked with Judd, but I told her, “I’m not doing TV.” She kept hassling me; she had me sit down with Lena, and eventually she just wore me down.

APATOW We used a few people from Tiny Furniture. I was always a big proponent of Alex Karpovsky [the nebbishy Ray] as my personal way in, and Lena wanted to have [her childhood friend] Jemima Kirke play Jessa.

JEMIMA KIRKE (JESSA) I said no a couple of times. I was working as a painter at the time. Honestly, it was the money [that convinced me]. I was 24 and about to have a baby, so I was vulnerable, and the contract was very long. (Laughs.)

ALLISON WILLIAMS (MARNIE) I had just moved to L.A. from New York very dramatically after I graduated from college. I came in to audition, and we improvised a scene where I braided Lena’s hair, which was … dirty.

DUNHAM I called Allison before we cast her, and I asked her how she felt about nudity. She said, “I don’t want to do nudity.” I was like, “We have to get back to you. I’m gonna be naked, people are gonna be naked — that’s a big part of what this show is.” She told us she wasn’t scared of sex, she just didn’t want to show her vagina, her nipples or her butt — and she never did.

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Hello, Lenin? (Berlin, 1997)

East Berlin, August 1990. Image by Sludge G (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Rebecca Schuman | Schadenfreude, A Love Story | Flatiron Books | February 2017 | 10 minutes (2950 words)

 

This excerpt was adapted from Schadenfreude, A Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Awkward Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations that Only They Have Words For, Rebecca Schuman’s memoir of her adventures in German culture.

* * *

Ostalgie. n. Longing for the good old days of the German Democratic Republic, from east and nostalgia.

My German flatmate was named Gertrud, and I lived with her in the former East Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, which was, according to Herr Neudorf, my professor back in the U.S., where “all the punks lived.” Gertrud was from Chemnitz, a town in the former German Democratic Republic that was once called Karl-Marx-Stadt. And while she definitely possessed her genetic allotment of efficiency — she was punctual everywhere she went; she never ran out of or misplaced anything; she traveled everywhere by bicycle, even in the dead of winter, and knew how to maneuver through traffic with a deft mixture of caution and aggression — her tenure as my mentor, cultural ambassador, and only German friend led me to the greatest epiphany about the Germans of my short life: It wasn’t that Germans didn’t like me. It was that West Germans didn’t like me.

East Germans (Ossis) like her were patiently curious about the way I did certain things — walked around barefoot, answered the phone “Hello?” instead of barking my last name into it, failed to stand up and move toward the train door a full stop before I was due to exit the U-Bahn — whereas West Germans (what we would now consider “Germans”) could be mortally offended if I changed from my outdoor shoes to my indoor shoes (Hausschuhe) five minutes too late for their liking. According to Gertrud, this was not because, as I had assumed before, I was a patently offensive person — it was because Wessis were spoiled pains in the ass, who assumed they were better and more cultured than their Eastern counterparts just because they’d had uninterrupted access to Coca-Cola for the last half-century.

Look, I’ve seen Good-Bye Lenin! and The Lives of Others more times than I can count. I’ve taken a tour of the Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison led by a former inmate, who described in excruciating detail the time she was made to sit in the water-torture machine for seventeen straight hours. I am aware that the division of Berlin ripped families apart and killed people. I know the Stasi were among the most brutal surveillance forces ever to exist. But I’m just saying: there were things about the Ossi mentality that I very much preferred. Things that had less to do with guaranteed employment and lack of toxic late-capitalist morality than people being way less uptight about all of the things I did wrong, such as drink water from the tap.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one suffering from early-onset Ostalgie. In this I was joined by a rather sizable demographic — one that has, alas, all but disappeared in the intervening decades. This disappearance is not, as you might think, the natural result of twenty-first-century German capitalism’s sensible-suited dominance, but rather it owes to the whims of Mother Nature herself. I speak here of the venerable extinct creature known as the East Berlin Oma, or granny: violet of hair, slow of gait, thick of dialect, crotchety of disposition. If, in the late 1990s, you happened upon a purple-coiffed Dame of Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg, Treptow, or Lichtenberg and asked her about reunification, chances are she would tell you without hesitation she preferred things the way they were before. Read more…

Who Is Supreme Court Nominee Neil Gorsuch? A Reading List

Photo: AP Images

“Echo of Scalia.” “Originalist.” “Hostile to women’s health care.” These are some of the descriptions of President Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee following the announcement Tuesday night. But The New York Times Editorial Board argues this morning that Neil Gorsuch’s resumé or temperament is beside the point: The Supreme Court seat was stolen. Read more…

The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s Feminist Struggle

Photo: AP Images

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong | Longreads | January 2017 | 8 minutes (1,800 words)

 

Mary Tyler Moore died this week at the age of 80, leaving what might be the most important feminist legacy in television history: Her Mary Richards, the main character on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, inspired generations of women just by being among the first single, professional, over-30 women depicted on TV when the show premiered in 1970. Her iconic beret toss and theme song—”you’re gonna make it after all!”—encapsulated the Women’s Lib moment perfectly. So perfectly, in fact, that Mary’s character was the subject of fierce debate among feminist leaders at the time. Like any “first” of an underrepresented group to break through in mainstream culture, Mary was attacked from all sides. While many male fans wrote letters voicing their disappointment when Mary stayed out all night on a date, feminist leaders voiced disappointment that Mary called her boss “Mr. Grant” while everyone else called him “Lou.” This conflict came to a head when one of the show’s co-creators, James L. Brooks, participated in a panel discussion at a women’s conference in 1975, as described in this excerpt from my book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, a history of the show. Read more…