Author: Roxane Gay

Confessions from a Dark Wood, by Eric Raymond (A Review by Chris Vola)

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Sator Press

$15/204 pgs

 

No other time in history has been more inundated with public creative outpourings than our current Internet-seduced zeitgeist. With every tweet, Tumblr, and wall update, content is generated at an ever-maddening pace, arguably devaluing itself because of its sheer mass and filter-free characteristics, shrinking an already near-extinct collective attention span. No surprises there. But have all the worthwhile ideas already been spewed? And if so, can it be possible to profit, vastly, by simply plucking from a storage bin of useful but already used templates, and regurgitating them with a new-car foamy, pixilated sheen? Armed with Douglas Coupland’s mass-cultural savvy and a satirical panache that might be a bit more restrained than Bret Easton Ellis’ and less grim than Don DeLillo’s but no less biting, Eric Raymond, in his first novel, Confessions from a Dark Wood, chronicles one young man’s immersion into the post-idea marketplace, and his hilarious and heartbreaking search for meaning in an economy where authenticity is the least fashionable commodity.

Nick Bray is a 33-year-old San Franciscan by way of Florida who toils at a temp job for Purv, an Internet company specializing in “the unity of woman and machine,” basically videos of young ladies fornicating with reassembled dishwashers. After getting fired, Nick returns to his childhood home for his English professor father’s funeral and is accosted by an “intern” who provides him with a mysterious invitation to interview for an executive position at LaBar Partners Limited, a global capital brand management consultancy firm whose CEO, Pontius J. LaBar, is a former student of his father. After an epic round of bullshitting- in which his ‘exemplary moral lassitude’ is lauded profusely- Nick begins work as a highly paid vice president at LaBar, joining a coterie of likeminded “utterly [otherwise] unemployable” corporate swindlers (including an orangutan named Shelby living in his own glass-walled office) who attempt to subdue clients with avalanches of impenetrable jargon and carefully orchestrated urbanity. Nick’s suddenly opulent lifestyle is funded by the outlandish Pontius, a man who keeps a full-size replica of his “driving” Porsche in his penthouse office and lives in constant fear that his faceless competitors’ “air of exclusivity” surpasses “his own manufactured enigma,” and who funds Nick’s endless days of travel and lackwit brainstorming that are only broken up by Sadie, his possibly underage quasi-girlfriend-slash-apartment-mate whose hobbies include getting tattoos of major corporations and making plans to be the nation’s first domestic suicide bomber, and the constant, inconvenient appearances of the smart-aleck ghost of his father. Continue reading →

Logophily: Editing + Knowledge, part 2

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Please join me as I continue my fascinating journey through someone’s shopping list:

Flour=flower, jerks. Don’t believe me? Good. That sort of skepticism is important, particularly for to this sort of linguistic phenomenon. The general rule is that if something sounds likely, it’s not true. But in this case, it’s true: what we call flour was originally the best part -the flower- of the wheat meal. I’d be interested to know why the spelling difference was codified. . . maybe an early phenomenon like lede in the newspaper business [1].

Eggo waffles / syrup go together like sweet potatoes / marshmellows. The latter two items go together in sweet potato casserole, in which recipe sweet potatoes are boiled (possibly before they were canned), mashed with stuff (most importantly butter), topped with marshmallows [2], and baked. It’s the one southern foodstuff I can think of that fits in with what I generally think of as Midwestern oddities, generally grouped under the rubric of salad: things that should be dessert [3], but which are just sitting there with the rest of lunch or dinner [4]. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Danez Smith

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In the third PANK queer issue, Danez Smith gave us two poems, ‘Mail’and ’10 RentBoy Commandments.’ Below, we discuss the violence that tries to stay hidden, the nature of performance, and the very same hands we use to pray to God.

1. Both of these poems have an undercurrent of violence to them, a fury that manifests itself in bruises, in hands around necks. This violence, enacted and repressed, does it come up often in your writing?

Violence has a tendency to show up in a lot of my work, but not always in gruesome ways. Sometimes violence shows up in sexy or innocent ways, sometimes with teeth and tools. It might even be in all my work, even if underlying it, it just waits for its turn on the page, waiting for me to ask “How would you like to dress today?”

2. ‘Mail’ is constructed via a series of increasingly terse and explicit letters, which take on both a sinister and confessional quality. It’s a fragmented poem of terrific implication- how do you choose how much to reveal?

That poem was a mess and a half to write. I wrote it several years ago after sitting down and looking at my work and wondering if I had ever told the truth within my poems (and it was a resounding Heeeeeeellllll No!). I let it all flow out, making no choices about how the voice appeared, just listening to it and letting it say more than needed. The sinister tone is something I struggle with in the poem; it came from a ridiculous level of guilt, and not knowing how to manage that, there was a bite to the confession. I think there is a gentler poem that wants to show itself, but I’m not sure I was (or am) distanced enough from the subject to hear such a soft voice. Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: The Wild Iris, by Louise Gluck (A Review by Rachel Mennies)

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Ecco

80 pages, $15

When I first read Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris, I was not suffering. I sat on my futon several years ago preparing for discussion of the text in my graduate workshop the following week, and I took in the book quietly and then I read it again and again, entirely consumed. I consumed Gluck’s sharp lines, her exacting verbs. (Her prosody will instruct young poets forever on the bold and crucial task of word choice, of the image so precise and correct that this reader dares to call them perfect.) I mourned, and found comfort in her bravery in the face of her own mourning- but when I read Wild Iris the first time, I was not suffering. Instead, I wore Gluck’s suffering like a coat in summer- puzzled by its trapping force, unsure I would ever need the thickness of its pain.  Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Anne Hays

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In our latest queer issue, Anne Hays’ “You’re Like This And I’m Like” gave us clashing narratives on either side of the generational divide. Here, Anne gives us a look at this glorious mashup, this myth of memory:

1. To me, this story operates on two levels: on one, it’s the narrator’s development through time, through memories and moves, the tonal shifts of personhood; on the other, it’s the reflections of the narrator’s parents, reflected back on those same memories. What made you decide to structure the story this way?

In terms of structure, I actually took three old failed pieces and wrangled them into one: an oral history workshop exercise which involved interviewing oneself, a short story (ie fiction) about an abusive lesbian relationship, and a prose fragment piece about aspects of life that make a person feel trapped. I started writing the new hybrid piece at 11pm one night and finished in a frenzied, dizzy state at around 3am. It was a wild experience for me, writing it, because it seemed to come flying out as a coherent story all on its own, despite me. Over the next few days I crunched it, editing, but for the most part my feverish midnight exorcism remained intact. But I’m glad you asked this question because the original title of one of the failed pieces had been ‘I know This Is true,’ and my intention was to interrogate varying versions of memory and truth, and what are those things.

2. In this piece I also felt a clash of remembrance, a struggle to reconcile two sides of the same memory, sometimes one that the speaker herself doesn’t even remember. What do we learn from the so-called “mythic impressions” and “crazed technicolor versions” of the memories we’ve left behind?

Ah, yes. The narrator finds her own memories more satisfying than her parents’ renderings of similar events, but the reader can see that the stories don’t actually directly conflict. Their stories aren’t even all that crazed, but because they’re being told to the narrator over bottles of wine, the storytelling scenes themselves have a crazed quality to them. Maybe they’re more shrill than crazed. ‘The fucking suicide list,’ for instance. I think (in real life) parents often tell stories that stand in for the way we were as children, and in the re-telling, the stories get stronger and sturdier, perhaps more sturdy than those memories really should be. I try to make sense of myself sometimes through my parents’ stories about me, so I wanted to give that to this story. You know, “you were always artistic!” and suddenly, just like that, I always have been. I feel this way about photographs, too; I remember photos better than the scenes they represent- the photo becomes and then replaces the memory. Also, because the first half of the piece emerged out of an oral history-style “self-interview,” the tone of voice sounds as though the narrator is interrogating her own life as a detective, not based on how she feels or remembers feeling, but entirely based on what she tells herself, and then versus what others tell her about herself. It’s a very specific and disorienting way to try and tell a story. Those are the qualities that, I think, give the story a zany, blurry, technicolor feel to it. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Laura Tansley

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From the queer issue, Laura Tansley’s “The Wake She Leaves Like A Whirlpool,” bring us ever in circles:

1. Much of “The Wake She Leaves Like A Whirlpool” piece seems to be about proof- the evidence we have that we are who we are, that we’ve done what we’ve done- the ways we demonstrate our hurt to others. What is your favorite scar?

When I was young I remember deliberately kicking a metal climbing frame because someone in my primary school had said that hitting your shin-bone was particularly painful and I wanted to find out for myself. I’m not sure if I should be proud or embarrassed by that kind of bravery mixed with stupidity.

2. A sense of place feels very important in this piece, from the viaduct to CrownGate to Severn Bridge and the park. Can you share something with us about the physical context for this story?

The story is set in a place called Worcester in the UK. It’s near to where I grew up although I’ve been living elsewhere for a number of years now. It was a frustrating place to be a teenager, and I think that frustration has become a useful thing to channel when writing. I’ve become fond of Worcester because of its ability to inspire in this way; it’s appeared in a number of guises in a number of stories.  Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Anna Joy Springer

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In the most recent queer issue, Anna Joy Springer gave us a fairy tale in the form of a rebus with “The Forest of Despots’ Daughters.” Here, Anna shows us her creative process, the decoding of her particular art:

1. This story has a subversive yet very fable-like quality to it, constructed like those children’s books designed to teach moral lessons and cleverness via rebuses and illustrated puns (a cartoonish eye representing “I,” for example). What implications about the telling of stories and inculcating “morality” might we tease out from the presentation of the material this way?

“The Forest of Despots’ Daughters,” in a recent LGBTQ Pank is a rebus adaptation of a chapter from my book, The Vicious Red Relic, Love. I took the images from a variety of children’s books printed between 1950 and 1980. I never thought of the rebus form as a didactic form, because I associate it more with puzzles on the inside of beer caps, but I see now you are right. Rebuses are often simple puzzles in children’s magazines and activity books that invite a deeper engagement with a text, because it forces a reader to decode while reading, and therefore engage with the piece actively rather than as a passive lesson-receiver. I also like to force active engagement and do sleight of hand with my readers, rather than directly advise. I suppose you could call this approach “manipulative,” “sneaky,” or “tactical.” We see faster than we read, so putting pictures in a row of text seduces a reader’s eye across the text to the image, and then (in a rebus) they have to decode the image. In my rebuses, there is no “right answer,”- all decodings are rather queer. And I suppose the desire to prompt “an unpredictable reading (or response)” is one of the most consistent moral underpinnings of my work. The moral of the entire novel, of which this piece in its written form is just one part, is that if life mimics art, it may be possible to have a more interesting (less proscribed) life if attention is drawn to art’s cultural functions and conventions, especially to the conventions of art that are so repeated and so supported by the ruling paradigm that they’re often seen as seamless, seen as natural (natural law-bound) rather than artificial. All story is allegorical in some way or another, and all figurative comparison is didactic, even when the antecedent has faded from historical memory and the figurative relationship is more or less severed. In my book I draw attention both to the artificiality of story-making and to the historical contexts from which the stories emerged to de-neutralize narrative conventions, i.e. heroes win (a tautology, and not a politically or interpersonally neutral one) – the method of presentation is, as you’ve said, didactic. But, the bright and not overtly ironic illustrations may hold the interest of even the most imaginatively dull pupil. Unless of course that pupil is a reformer. Reformers seem always to prefer minimalism of some sort, without too many scents, curves, or visible rhetorical maneuvering or “game playing.” “The Forest of Despots’ Daughters” is a playful, didactic game that’s impossible to win (or lose). It’s only possible to engage or not to engage. That’s a moral prompt, right there. Continue reading →

Hypotheses on Rawness

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Vulnerability is the second before the joke registers. Or maybe it’s dreams of arriving at work in your underwear, naked from the waist up, fielding imploring glances from casual acquaintances who tilt their heads out of their cubicles. It’s the fat lady’s name on the fashion show roster, the chalked out diatribes and impressionist’s genital depictions on public bathroom walls. It’s “hello class, my name is so-and-so and I’ll be your teacher this year,” or “Mom, Dad, I have to tell you I’m (gay, an atheist, dropping out, HIV positive, sad.)”

Maybe it’s saying “I love you,” or the soft plunk of fish in a bucket still waggling their silver tails in wet wild piles and flashing their glittering bodies in the blue. For the socially anxious, vulnerability is a chain of “hellos” that wedge in the throat, ghosts of scraps that might fly out at cocktail parties or over late-night diner counters, scarves that keep necks tied to heads on windy nights when it feels like all the trees are bowing down on pavement. It’s a stripper’s first day on the job, and knocking on the door of a new friend, glancing down to make sure your pants are zipped. It’s somehow crying in public although you never meant to, the bramble in your throat that you remember from age four when a dog got kicked in front of Target, yelped, and slunk away. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Mary Lou Buschi

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In the history of our past, the dog days of July, we presented two poems by Mary Lou Buschi, “Eddie” and “When That Phone Call Comes.” We find them reinvigorated, in this interview with the author:

1. Who is Eddie?

Eddie is my archetypal “heart of darkness.” He is both man and child- victim and villain. When I met him I was living in an unfamiliar place. Nothing made sense. I didn’t make sense. Eddie was the embodiment of my own horror; my own misunderstanding of a landscape and a people.

2. Both poems offer the sense of something striven for, a quest incomplete, something gathered at roots. Is this a frequent theme in your writing?

Yes, I believe all of my poems have some sort of quest, as you call it. Or, perhaps they are journeys. Some are literal and some metaphorical. I realized recently that so many of the poems take place in cars. The poem, “When that Phone Call Comes” began with a real script that I found on my husband’s desk. We were turning in our first leased car and he was researching the best way to negotiate. When I saw it I thought he had been writing and read it like a poem. The moment I realized I was reading a script sent from a dealer, I began writing the poem. Continue reading →

Sympathy from the Devil by Kyle McCord (A Review by Anne Champion)

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Gold Wake Press

80 pages/$12.95

Kyle McCord’s Sympathy from the Devil crosses a myriad of celestial and earthly terrains. In this collection, readers encounter God, Gabriel, and, of course, the Devil; they also ride trains named for endangered birds, get tossed off a rusty mechanical bull, all while colliding with pop culture references such as the TV show Lost, werewolves, and Batman. While weaving through themes of love, spirituality, and philosophical meanderings, these poems take the reader to surprising places and topics: necromancy, rude birds, the ship of fools, astronomy, the zodiac and even law school. Each page is a treasure trove, a roller coaster ride of dips and spins- the reader never knows what to expect, but each turn is both terror and thrill.

Poems about God are a long standing subject matter for poets to interrogate, and some even say that poetry itself is a form of prayer. In the essay “Facing Altars: Poetry as Prayer,” poet and memoirist Mary Karr writes: “People usually (always?) come to church as they do to prayer and poetry- through suffering and terror. Need and fear. In some Edenic past, our ancestors began to evolve hard-wiring that actually requires us (so I believe) to make a noise beautiful enough to lay on the altar of the Creator/Rain God/Fertility Queen. With both prayer and poetry, we use elegance to exalt, but we also beg and grieve and tremble. We suffer with prayer and poetry alike. Boy, do we suffer.”  McCord’s collection reminds me of Mary Karr’s Sinners Welcome, both in its use of God and its unabashed employment of humor and the bizarre to broach the Holy Ghost. In my favorite poem of the collection, “Sympathy from the Devil,”McCord writes:

 “When you laugh at Satan, the Lord laughs also.  But Satan does not laugh

when you laugh at your own apish posture in the mirror.  He has an antelope

look in his eyes.”

Later in the poem, he writes:

“…When you deny

Satan, it’s not like confetti falls or heralding trumpets sound. You go on

relishing your Cobb salad on the promenade.” Continue reading →