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Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Russell Jaffe’s sly, watery end of all things, “Doritos,” appeared in our April issue. He and Simon chat, below.
1. Hi Russell. If this is “after Cassandra Gillig,” can I ask what came before? Or after, assuming that the world was re-populated?
It’s after her because she suggested the idea for it! I do love the idea of a post-Cassandra-Gillig-world (PCGW).
Never assume anything about repopulation.
2. This piece is basically two people floating on a boat in the middle of watery nothingness, where all entertainment and civilization have been utterly wiped out. If you’re in love with the last viable person on earth, how do you deal with rejection?
I think that’s what real rejection feels like, at least in my life, be it romantic or job-related. Let me tell you, I once dreamed of working for the WWE as a creative writer. And I had an interview with them to be a content writer for the website! And I gave them some rad ideas and they had me sign a form that just because I had given them any ideas did NOT mean I could keep them or copyright them or that they hadn’t come up with them themselves. Then they USED ALL MY IDEAS ON THE WEBSITE, right down to a series about specific wacky pro wrestler gimmicks of the past and more interactive Facebook-page-like wrestler profile pages. And they told me they had just let 5 people go, which was true. The economy had just tanked. I felt like I was basically the last man in a barren landscape. I cried sitting on my car in Stamford, Connecticut, by a big thing of water and all these big white houses. It was like I had slept and this flood had killed everyone and devastated everything. Dealing with rejection is every step you take and breath you inhale and exhale. You just do it by continuing. Next thing you know, you’re like, fuck, I would have hated that job. I would have hated that relationship.
3. “Doritos” basically reads as optimism: crushed. Is it hard to be cheery when the (your) world is ending?
It’s not because I love the end of the world so much that it’s usually a positive thing for me. It’s a beautiful finale, and this poem is a particularly memorable part of the episodic series we’re all gifted by the universe whose narrative we kind of scrape together and determine day to day, maybe second to second. I can’t write anything if I feel sad, even brutally sad stuff. I feel like the sicker and sadder my poetry is, the happier I am IRL.
4. How important is Cassandra Gillig – the exclusive, notable human – to the meaning of this piece? That is to say: when you write poems, how often are you writing specifically about someone?
This poem was really after her, not to her. She had explained in a Facebook status her idea for a story or play about people on a boat and that it would be called Doritos, but she never actually did it (that I know of) so I did. I’m always writing to someone specific in the way I think we all do when we explain or process information and relate it to people or specific things to us. We experience people the way rockets experience liftoff from launch pads. We have to have somewhere to go from. Because all great art is theft, because all great thought is theft, which is to say in general there really isn’t much theft at all in the world. It’s imagined. I was reading this article about robots—I substitute taught for a class called “effective reading strategies” for very low English literacy test scorers (basically ESL students or ones who really struggle with reading and writing) and the teacher gave me an article to assign about robots. And part of that article talked about “symbiotic autonomy,” which is a totally brilliant term that goes way beyond robotics, but basically problem-solving robots that attempt forms of artificial intelligence. And they’re limited. They might not have arms or legs that work like a human’s, or they might be limited in how complex their programming allows them to respond to things. So they rely on humans. They’ll patrol hallways but come up to a person and be like, excuse me, can you please press the elevator button for me? And some roboticists (that’s what they’re called) call this cheating, and that’s hilarious bullshit. If that’s cheating, being human is cheating. Thought and understanding are collaborative efforts. I just think we’re always writing to someone, or someones, and when it applies to us all, that’s humanity right there.
5. This piece has a lovely tone – restless and casual, but descriptive and entirely imaginable. Which line did you start with, and how did you proceed?
Actually, I started with the lines about the milk in the water. I was thinking about Cassandra’s evocative idea a lot, and I imagined a lot of detritus in the water, a very apocalyptic thing but on a sunny day. The hot sea filled with trash—how alien it feels even though it’s an every day occurrence to see dust on everything or stains. I built the scene around there.
6. In your life, what has been the most horrible emotional defeat? Triumph?
HORRIBLE EMOTIONAL DEFEAT
I try not to focus on them, mostly because I change so much. I see them, as annoying as it sounds, as positive growing experiences as time gets further away. Like my first girlfriend—I was 19-21, very immature, had a great spirit but was not too bright and generally reckless. She dumped me for her ex-boyfriend, and I had no job and had just studied abroad in Glasgow, which was brutal and industrial and punishing and taught me how unprepared I was to live in the “real world” beyond my small liberal arts school. I had one more year at college and I was living at my parents’ house and my grandma was doing badly health-wise. One day shortly after the breakup, I went to my cousin’s bar mitzvah. I drank probably 5 glasses of wine—I had turned 21 about two weeks earlier—and I called my ex and left a message begging her to give me another shot. Whatever I said to people that day I don’t remember but know wasn’t good. Then she left me a sad message—she bypassed making my phone ring so she could go right to voicemail—about how she “felt like such a stupid bitch” but in this really annoyed, calm tone. She was not emotional, just understanding. Then I got a ride to my friend’s house and drank whiskey with a couple of them and started crying, so one of my friends drove me home. I put the seat all the way down and talked about how stupid and awful life was, and he told me not to puke in his car. Then I passed out. This was probably around 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and I woke up dizzy and sick and the sun was going down, and my mom looked at me when I came down and said, “you look terrible.”
I look back and that ex girlfriend was a wonderful person and great learning for me and this whole thing really made me sit up and decide to straighten out and think about the control I had over my emotions and life. But at the time, man. It was the lowest I’d ever felt. To this day it is, and I don’t think I can ever get back to that feeling. I had no idea what I wanted to do! I had no idea what poetry really even was!
TRIUMPH
I was a very chubby and very sheltered early teen with a strange wanderlust, and I went to this really intense camp in the Cascade mountains in Washington. Dehydrated, I made it to the top of a mountain my group had hiked up and was looking down. The sky was extremely blue. There were sparse clouds like teeth. I saw an eagle go by and it made me feel like I was thin and everything else was thin, too: the pines creeping along the fading treeline’s mountain-faced stubble, the ant-tiny roads and trails miles below (this was maybe a 2000 foot elevation.) When I had vomited on the trail above the treeline in the sun, I saw some ants, very big ones, in the yellowy-orange dirt. The rocks were the color of silver VCR/DVD combo players. I finally understood what “evergreen” meant as I wiped strings of vomit from my mouth and saw the molasses waterways of it pass from my mouth down into the vantage point blur where the last switchback shrugged along the trail aimed like a slug for the big gulp of trees, like a giant green hole, so unrelentingly green, so unapologetic constantly, and I thought about what a joke it was to think humans had “dominated nature,” and that nature could—and does—push us over all the time, and is benevolent, and mature, and wild, and maybe even ignorant of our presence, and if it needs something it will come in and take it. I can’t even explain how humbling it was. I stopped thinking so much about how brutal and twisted life was and more about how lucky it was to even cosmically exist, how the odds were so astronomically beyond us ever being, how humbling and ordered the natural universe is, how things provide and sync up so closely. I never felt quite this way again until I met Carleen and realized what real, true love is like. That pine tree chasm like the maw of yawning mouth, big as America, long as a very powerful nap.
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Simon Jacobs curates the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for work of fewer than 30 words. He may be found at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.