Babel in the East Village

This afternoon, I stopped by the St. Mark’s Bookshop to look through the Collected Stories of Isaac Babel on my way to buy groceries for dinner. I found the book in the back of the bookstore, on a shelf below Paul Auster and above Italo Calvino. I knelt down and read about how Babel had been killed by the NKVD, after he was arrested, forced to confess, and shuttled to a prison camp in Siberia.

To my left, beyond the table of discounted books, an agitated man with white-hair and a short, neat beard was talking politics with the woman behind the desk. When he mentioned Rumsfeld, he swung his arm above his head to make a point. When I looked over to him I noticed that I was crouching next to a rack of postcards with photos of the president and his administration. Their faces had been doctored, certain features were elongated, others erased. Rumsfeld was a monster with tiny eyes and a sharp pointed head.

“The people I know who have been shot,” man with the white hair declared, “were shot because they were thoroughly understood.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” said the woman. “It’s better to be misunderstood.”

“I totally disagree,” he said. “I want them to understand me. That’s what’s important.”

“But then they’ll shoot you.”

“Great.” He threw both hands above his head.

“But you’ll die.”

“At least then they’ll understand who they were messing with.”

The Slush Pile and the World

I recommend Sven Birkerts's introductory essay, "Finding Traction," in the new issue of AGNI, issue #63. He starts with the daily tackling of submissions to the magazine:

When I sit down with a huge stack of envelopes, each one containing some hard-won, deliberated expression, I am not the tabula rasa—the fantasied clean slate—that I perhaps ought to be. No, I am a man of my time, a besieged reader, creating a specific occasion within what is, day in and day out, for me as for most everyone, a near-constant agitation of stimuli, an enfolding environment of aggressively competing signs and meanings. And my attitude, when I remove a clump of print-covered pages from their envelope, is not "Send me more and more new information" but "Reach me, convince me that this news is different, that this is the news I need."

And he somehow works his way from there, from the speed with which he's able to make his way through the slush pile each morning, to a consideration of the enormous changes that have taken place in the culture in the past ten years, in which, if I understand him correctly, we have all become robots. Or maybe it's that we're all still human, but our flesh and blood has been mold-injected into the invisible husks of robots. No wait, it's like we all now have little tiny microscopic robots that squat in our frontal lobes, dug in like a first assault, like a world-wide brain tissue Oklahoma land rush. Or maybe it's just that AGNI refuses to publish stories and poems written by robots, even though robots pretending to be humans are submitting to the journal all the time, but they give themselves away, because robots always use Tyvek envelopes, and their manuscripts are covered in little metal shavings, the residue of their tears.

The Paper Cut

After alcoholism, heart-disease, near-sightedness, divorce, bankruptcy, and depression, the paper cut is the most serious occupational hazard of the writer. Its menace passes largely unnoticed, and we are all its silent victims.

All paper cuts are not created equal, but each is nasty in its own way. The truly painful paper cut seems to hurt more than it has any right to. We understand the justice of bruises, burns, and scrapes - the pain we feel seems proportional to the evidence of the injury, but the case of the paper cut confounds us. A little epidermal slice, a spot of blood, are all we have to show for our affliction. Any calls for sympathy are in vain. The paper cut infantilizes the writer. We suck our fingers in disgrace.

Moreover, the paper cut is the painful reminder of the physical nature of the book. As much as we may wish to believe that in the beginning was the Word, we know that things were here first, and that they will remain long after the last remnants of language have disintegrated.

Kafka Was the Rage

"The competition was friendly, laced with admiration and respect, but it was as fierce as only a match between close friends can be, and it brought out the best in them [...] It was, in fact, competition as much as collaboration that linked Ashbery and O'Hara and Schuyler and Koch so tightly that they acquired a group identity with a collective force. 'Collaboration, a direct extension of O'Hara's mode of living, is a good metaphor for the manner of his relationships--an intimate competition in which each participant goads the other toward being at his best,' the poet and art critic Peter Schjeldahl perceptively noted. Or as Koch advised the young poets who came to him for instruction at Columbia, 'Have some friends who are so good it scares you.'"

--from David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, p. 71 (in chapter two, "Band of Rivals")

Note also, in the author interviews on the One Story site, Andrew Foster Altschul's answer to the question on writing advice and the importance of having friends who are also writers, as well as Kelly Link's answer to the same question, about the importance of having friends who are not writers (or rather, friends whose lives are melodramatic; I'm jumping to the conclusion that writing and melodrama are mutually exclusive, which was certainly not the case with the New York School).

He Also Did The Crossword (in Pen)

The latest piece of evidence submitted in the case against I. Lewis Libby Jr. includes articles from the Times, the Post, and the Chicago Sun Times, as well as an image scanned from Cheney's copy of the Joseph Wilson Op-Ed piece, "What I didn't find in Africa." Written above the title are a few jotted down notes in what Fitzgerald believes is the VP's neat, confident handwriting, including the question: "Did his wife send him on a junket?" The image was printed in Sunday's Times, and is available online (together with the rest of the evidence) as a pdf.

Interview: A Retrospective

In light of my recent EWP interview, I've been reflecting on past job interviews. Here are some of the highlights:

Smith-Craine Finance, San Francisco, 1999: Receptionist

Ed Craine: The job requires a lot of Xeroxing. How do you feel about that?

J: I feel good about it. (pause). Great. (pause). I actually find the sound of the Xerox relaxing. The smell of toner is not at all offensive to me.

Interaction Associates, San Francisco, 1996: Assistant to Office Manager

Inspired Office Manager: Interaction Associates wants to inspire. Our job is to inspire. Your job is to keep the candy tray full.

J: Yes, I see.

Inspired Office Manager: Any questions?

J: Do I need to fill the candy in an inspiring way?

Alta Vista Car Wash, San Diego, 1994: Guy who stands in the middle of the car wash while wearing a rain slicker and scrubbing the cars

Racist Jock: I usually hire Mexicans. They're good workers.

J: I'm a good worker.

Racist Jock: But you're not a Mexican.

J: I used to work at Taco Time.

Taco Time, San Diego, 1994: Cook

Girl with a face like a day-old enchilada: You have to wear this stupid visor.

J: That's okay. I like it.

Girl with a face like a day-old enchilada: And this stupid t-shirt.

J: Lovely.

Girl with a face like a day-old enchilada: Do you have a girlfriend?

J: I just want to make tacos.

Edwards Cinema, San Diego, 1994: Guy who rips tickets

Sad 46-year old: You get free movies.

J: Great.

Sad 46-year old: Yeah, and free popcorn.

J: Even better.

Sad 46-year old: It's really not so bad. I've seen True Lies 23 times. Do you maybe want to see it later?

J: Is this an interview?

(I was later fired from my position and replaced by a retarded person).

The Great American Novel *

* - As determined by a plurality of votes from the hundred or so judges chosen by the NYTBR, a number of whom (according to A.O. Scott) "declined to answer, some silently, others with testy eloquence."

From the Times website:
"Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.'"

Their list of "literary sages" includes everyone from Harold Bloom to Aimee Bender.

The results are posted here.

A.O. Scott's effort to make sense of the results is worth reading.

An Oral History of Our Time

Thanks to Joseph Mitchell's book everybody knows Joe Gould's secret. The great project he told everyone he was working on, the oral history of our time that would encompass the chitchat at artists parties in the Village, the political speeches at rallies at Union Square and the talk in the hallways of flophouses on Bowery, that grand work that would make him the equal of Gibbon, was never realized. The dime-store composition books he left behind contain only a spotty diary account of his own habits:

June 7, 1946: I saw Bele De Triefant. He said he had a pair of shoes for me. I had an ale at the Minetta.
June 8: De Triefant had not brought the shoes. I had a drink at the Minetta.
June 11: I saw De Triefant. He had shoes for me. I took them. I went to the Minetta. I drank.
June 12: I went to Goody's. I had some beers. I lost my shoe. I went to the Minetta.
(from Charles Hutchinson & Peter Miller's article in the Voice)

The books are now housed on the 3rd Floor of Bobst.

There a few brave souls today who seem to have taken up his project. Like Gould, they believe that "what people say is history." One of these brave souls, of course, is the guy behind OverheardinNewYork. Another is whoever put up this story from a rapper named Saigon:

"I was at 23rd and 9th Street, that’s where everybody goes after the club," Saigon told HipHopGame.com. "I’m out there with me and my man. My man is 135 lbs. soaking wet. I have an $18,000 chain on. I guess someone thought I was food. They were probably scheming the whole time. I didn’t even realize it. One of them asked my man if he sold weed. My man was like, “Nah.” We were with these girls. One of the kids walked up to me. I thought he was a fan. He snatched the chain right off my neck. I took it right back from him and my man knocked him out. My man dropped him. We’re stomping this nigga out thinking he’s crazy that he’s going to come and snatch my chain.

We didn’t know he was with somebody else. His homeboy came behind me and stabbed me in my temple. I lost a lot of blood. When he stabbed me, I started fighting the nigga but I was losing a lot of blood. I faked a jack like I had a ratchet on me. I didn’t have no burner. I was like, “Hit the nigga, hit the nigga.” They started running. Me and my nigga were standing there and they ran.I had my chain and both of their cell phones. They dropped their cell phones when they started running. I’m out there like, “Yeah nigga!” but at the same time I’m losing a lot of blood..." [More]

Saturday Night Minutiae

When I finished reading the last sentence of my story, I took my two pages, which I'd folded over two or three times to fit in my back pocket, and I smacked the lectern with the vertical crease, as if to indicate "the end," or "I am done reading now." I smacked on impulse, not thinking about it. It felt appropriate, although the gesture might have been so small as to not even be noticeable to the audience. I don't know.

Immediately after, as I squatted next to the bar, my hands still shaking, I thought about Will Ferrell's line from Old School: "That's the way you do it! That's the way you debate!" Maybe some variant on that, I thought, would be the best way to end a reading.

It could certainly be beneficial to writers facing the conundrum of having brought their serious material to a almost entirely humorous event.

Or it could turn the whole proceedings into something not unlike kabuki?

Which, in the world of readings, would not necessarily be a bad thing.

Reading Report

The old man got up to the podium. He said a few words before he read his two poems by the dead poet, the poet whose memory this reading was honoring. He said the dead poet would have been great without the disease. The disease that was the poet's subject, a subject that spanned three books. He said he'd made this comment before to the poet's companion, who was there, sitting in the front row. But where did this comment's emphasis lie? I wanted to give this old man the benefit of the doubt, I wanted to believe he meant the emphasis to land on the "without" (I'm paraphrasing here, I think he might have actually said "hadn't had"), meaning that the greatness existed regardless of the subject matter, rather than what it sounded like he was saying, what I feared he was saying, which was that the poet's work had been hamstrung by the singularity of the subject. When he sat down, the air of the room shook with the sound of the old man's sheaf of poems, which he struggled to cram back into his inside suit coat pocket, his hand shaking uncontrollably, a Parkinson's tremor, his face locked in the expression of an old man's revulsion at his own crippled body.