literature

Hybrid (kitchen/language/literature) spaces: a conversation with Matthew Baker

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INTERVIEW BY JENESSA ABRAMS

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(LSU Press, 2018)

We are navigating a tight kitchen. Matthew Baker is peeling sprouts off potatoes that have been aging on the counter. He’s planning to make corn chowder. I’m pouring baking soda into a measuring cup. When he reaches for a knife, I am using it to chop garlic. The pot I’ve put out to boil water for my pretzel rolls, he places a square of butter in for his soup. We move in sync and completely out of tune. We’re wearing pajamas. We’re wearing pajamas because we’re both writers who work from home, and also, we live in that home together. Much before our co-habitation, we interrogated one another at an artist residency in Vermont. Ever since, we’ve bombarded each other with questions, sometimes in a hybrid of languages. We are not strangers to inquisition, and Baker is no stranger to formal experimentation, as his debut novel, If You Find This (Little Brown, 2015), a middle grade mystery about familial love and redemption, infuses mathematics and musical notation in the prose. Three years later, enter: Baker’s debut collection. Hybrid Creatures (LSU Press, 2018) is a four-story collection, each of which is told partially in a hybrid language: HTML, mathematics, musical notation and formal logic. I first read the book in an earlier draft in PDF form. Now there is a box of paperbacks from the publisher in my living room. The conceit of Hybrid Creatures is that there are some human experiences that can only be communicated through hybrid tongues. Here, as the author’s partner, now acting as formal interviewer, while cooking alongside him, I will try to do something similar.

JA: Most evenings, when we sit down to talk, we begin with the directive: Tell me a thing or en français: Dit moi un chose, so this shouldn’t be such a leap. Tonight, tell me a thing about the inception of Hybrid Creatures. From writing the first story, did you know you were going to sculpt a collection of hybrid pieces?

MB: (meticulously chopping potatoes in quarters)

My last semester of college, I did an independent study on comics and graphic novels, which got me thinking a lot about different storytelling mediums, and the types of storytelling maneuvers that you can only do in certain mediums. For instance, a really obvious example in film would be how you can switch back and forth between color and black and white, like in The Wizard of Oz, or even Schindler’s List. Or in comics and graphic novels, the types of maneuvers that Chris Ware does with stories told in diagram form. So, I was thinking a lot about that, and about prose, and trying to think of storytelling maneuvers that only prose writers can do.

JA: (watching pretzel rolls as they rise underneath oiled plastic wrap)

That shift into color in The Wizard of Oz is something so particular to the medium. It creates an emotional experience that works solely because we can experience an altered perception of the world visually. I’m wondering about the forms you chose for the stories in Hybrid Creatures. How did you decide which hybrid language was going to go with which narrative?

MB: (plops quartered potatoes into pot)

Well, I didn’t really. I started with the languages. Before I wrote the stories in the book, I wrote a collection of prototype stories, and in each of those, that was all there was, the artificial language, and then I would design the story around that—but I wasn’t satisfied with the prototypes. I wanted to find some way to write stories that not only would use artificial languages from these other fields, but that would incorporate artificial structures from those fields too. So, when I wrote the final stories—the stories in the book—I started with the language, then I chose a structure, and then I designed the entire story around that.

JA: So then the characters in the book, or at least the protagonists or narrators, became people who had a need for that language, or who had an ability to communicate in that language?

MB: (adding butter to sautéing potatoes)

Yeah, the narrator or the protagonist of each story was determined by whatever the lexicon of that particular story was going to be—someone who would speak that language, and who might interpret their experiences and understand their world through that language, and through the corresponding artificial structure.

I like that we’re doing this while we’re cooking, but I also wish that we could just look at each other while we’re talking.

JA: (walks over to stove, stares at Baker)

In contrast to those complex structures, I was struck by how traditional the stories themselves were. It felt almost like an equation—if you had equally complex narratives, in addition to the experimental forms, maybe the stories wouldn’t work.

MB: (stirring sautéing potatoes)

That wasn’t a realization I made until after I had written the prototypes. One of the prototypes was this story published in Conjunctions called “Proof Of The Monsters.” Not only was that story experimenting with the linguistics of formal logic, but it also was randomly written in diary form, and then it also had these speculative sci-fi elements—it was just too much. There was too much happening. So, that was a lesson I learned from writing that story: I needed to simplify things.

When I first started seriously writing, one of my writing mentors was the poet Jack Ridl. You’ve never met him. He’s this kind, wise old poet. After spending three semesters together, the final thing he said to me about my work, the one lesson he wanted me to take away was: If you are going to do a weird thing, only do one weird thing at a time. He probably phrased it much more articulately than that, but that was the gist of it and that was what I took away.

JA: My mentor, Elissa Schappell said something similar about how to balance language and action—the necessity to lower one when amping up the other.

MB: (adding water to pot)

Only do one weird thing at a time was very important advice for me as a writer—in some ways it was the key to figuring this project out.

JA: I have to ask about the mathematics story, “The Golden Mean.” I find that story to be the strongest in the collection, for several reasons, but one being that there is an emotional honesty and vulnerability that is enormously affecting. As you know, I write from experiences that very much look like life, situationally, although my characters are always fictively constructed. You have a very similar familial makeup to the protagonist in “The Golden Mean” in that you come from divorced parents and move between two families. What happens when we write from life?

MB: (laughs and turns the intensity of the stove burner up)

That’s a brilliant question. Can I respond with a question of my own: Is this all the corn we have?

JA: (grabs stool and heads to cabinet)

I believe so, but let me check—oui, mais we have two cans of black beans.

MB: Merci beaucoup, we don’t need them.

JA: Bien. I didn’t forget my question. And don’t forget to warn me when it’s time to start boiling pretzel rolls.

MB: Parfait, we aren’t quite there yet.

JA: The mathematics story—

MB: (adding corn to pot)

Right. When I wrote my children’s novel, If You Find This, I deliberately wrote a book about a dying grandfather as a way to try to process the experience of losing my grandfather. The process of writing that book was therapeutic for me. But for “The Golden Mean,” it wasn’t about trying to figure out anything for myself—it was about trying to express, the best that I could, what it’s like to be a person caught in the circumstance of existing in two families simultaneously.

JA: And you achieve that with the structural division. We feel the incompleteness. In your first book, even if you wrote it, in part, to process your grief, you were also able to intimately communicate the experience of loss to your readers. But here, I suppose what you’re saying is: the math story is less for you and more for us.

MB: Exactly. For me, this project was about taking these very familiar cliché storylines—having divorced parents, losing your spouse, having dementia—and attempting to find a way to make a reader truly feel those experiences. Trying to develop a storyline to use in conjunction with formal logic, for instance, I realized that writing about a character with dementia could potentially be very powerful, because for a character who thinks about the world in terms of formal logic, there would be nothing more devastating or world-altering than to lose the ability to think logically, in a clear sequential order.

JA: That devastation is palpable. It reminds me about what we were speaking about last night, the book and subsequent film Still Alice, and the play Wit. I think in all three examples, the third being Hybrid Creatures, there is a nuanced dimension of poignancy when the individual experiencing failing mental capacity identifies so deeply with their intellect.

MB: And of course, not everyone has a job that requires working with an artificial language or that necessarily shapes the way that you perceive the world. I think many people do experience this, though, across a wide range of fields. For instance, I have a brother-in-law who’s a chemist—maybe that’s a strange way to phrase it, because you know who my brother-in-law is, but for readers—

JA: He’s also very good at board games, but, yes, your brother-in-law, the chemist—

MB: I asked him recently how much his study of chemistry affects his everyday experience of the world. Like for instance, if he was cooking and he was caramelizing some onions and he had butter and sugar and salt and onions in a pan, was he thinking about the chemical reactions happening in the pan at that moment, as he was cooking, or was he just thinking about how good the caramelizing onions smelled?

JA: (hops onto counter)

I love that question.

MB: He said that the answer was both, that he’d be thinking about how good the caramelizing onions smelled, but that he’d be thinking about the chemical reactions happening in the pan too, and that to some extent he’s always thinking about it—that his knowledge of chemistry affects every experience he has. The first time I ever saw that phenomenon replicated in fiction was in the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin—have you read that?

JA: I have not.

MB: Oh, you need to read it. It’s brilliant—also, time to start boiling the pretzel rolls.

JA: (hops off counter and turns on oven)

On it. Now, I want to talk about the influence of research on your writing. I know you’re insatiably curious and your hunger for knowledge leads you to incorporate so much from the world into your work. The result is that it feels like you have an intimate knowledge of so many diverse fields—which is another way of saying, like I’ve often suspected, maybe you’re a robot—or another alternative: the internet has given you a way to be a specialist in everything.

MB: (stirring soup)

A lot of it is research. For instance, even though I studied music and knew how to read sheet music and music dynamics, I wasn’t intimately acquainted with the structure of a classical symphony and the structure of the different movements within a classical symphony. Nonetheless, it was important to me for “Movements,” the music story in the collection, that each of the four sections have the same narrative development as the corresponding movement would have in a traditional symphony.

JA: You do a lot of that work in everything you create, where you bury or embed things that an average reader may not pick up on. It seems deeply important to you.

MB: I love video games, and a wonderful and maybe unique tradition within that storytelling medium is the tradition of the Easter egg—hidden content, bonus content, that can be unlocked or discovered if you invest enough time in exploring the story. As a writer, I’m interested in trying to hide as many Easter eggs as possible in each of my stories, to make it as rewarding as possible for a story to be read multiple times—so that potentially, every time it’s read, the reader can make another startling and wonderful discovery. They’re usually in-jokes. Does that make any sense?

JA: (turns on burner for saucepan)

It makes complete sense. The veracity of your worlds comes through in all of your work. I keep thinking about the philosophy story and the conversations that take place throughout it in the background. It’s an interesting experience for the reader because we’re following a protagonist who is confused about where he is and who he is, and you’ve added all this external chatter. In a lesser narrative, that chatter might just be funny or mildly interesting, but here, the conversations feel inherently connected to the larger story.

MB: Well, this was a terrible idea, as usual—

JA: Interviewing while cooking?

MB: Well yeah, that, but also, I got this idea into my head that because “Proof Of The Century” was going to try to tell the entire story of a nearly hundred-year-old man’s life, and because it was also going to try to tell the story of an entire country over that same hundred-year period, I might as well, at the same time, try to incorporate every major subfield of philosophy into the story too.

JA: That is a terrible idea.

MB: So yeah, you’re right, those background conversations at the family “symposium” are meant to contribute thematically, in that these different characters—in a very casual, everyday, holiday get-together setting—are debating a wide range of subjects that philosophers have been debating for centuries. Ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, etc. Maybe that wasn’t your question.

JA: (watches over saucepan as water begins boiling)

I’m not sure I asked one.

MB: Something else I can tell you about “Proof Of The Century” is that it was also important to me that the proofs in the story include all the basic maneuvers used in formal logic. In the same way that in skateboarding there’s this basic vocabulary of tricks or moves that you can do, in formal logic there’s this basic vocabulary of moves or tricks that philosophers use. Modus ponens, modus tollens, etc—they’re the ollies and nollies of formal logic. In thinking about the various proofs embedded within that story, I decided it was important to incorporate all of those maneuvers at least once—which, again, was a terrible idea, but I did it.

JA: (dumping baking soda into saucepan)

You’re you. Of course, you did.

MB: (staring into foaming saucepan)

That’s a fun reaction! If only the chemist could be here to see it.

JA: (begins dropping in pretzel rolls)

C’est le meilleur. I think we should talk about loneliness. Since language is the way we communicate, I’m curious how isolation features into the book. For me, the reading experience created a connection and sort of broke the individual isolation of your characters and I’m wondering if that was intentional—if you thought at all about the fact that language is the means through which we communicate and that your characters exist primarily in varying forms of seclusion.

MB: Well, for a character who thinks about the world in a hybrid language, who is fluent both in English and some artificial language like HTML, I think that can be isolating—in the same way that if you grow up speaking English and Mandarin, when you’re around people who only speak English, sometimes there will be things you want to express that are impossible to say.

JA: (places pretzel rolls on baking sheet)

And I felt like the hybrid languages were a way to express that which would previously be inexpressible.

MB: Yeah, I think for some of the things you could paraphrase it in English or try to find a synonym, but it wouldn’t quite be the same. You translate stories from French, and I know you’ve said that there are words and phrases in French that no matter how close you get to translating them into English words, sometimes you can’t quite capture the meaning. And that’s just as true for HTML, or music dynamics, or math notions, or formal logic, as it is for French and any other natural human language.

JA: In a way your hybrid languages feel like a form of abstract translation. Let me put these in the oven—

MB: I wonder if this is the first author interview ever to be conducted while both the author and the interviewer were in a kitchen cooking a meal together.

JA: Both in pajamas, bumping into each other in a tiny kitchen—actually, let’s talk about us. We sometimes communicate in a hybrid tongue.

MB: Yeah, in this apartment we primarily speak English, but we also speak in French and Spanish and Italian and now Japanese. But yeah, what’s your question?

JA: Well, talk to me about that. I know for me, there is an additional meaning in saying I love you in very rudimentary Japanese. The texture and emotional experience is different than expressing it in English.

MB: Tell me about the experience.

JA: (walks over to where Baker is searching the spice rack)

I think there is this idea that when I say I love you in Japanese, you’re the only person I’ve ever said I love you in that language to before, and it’s this created thing, learning Japanese together—there is an added level of intimacy, not just in its singularity, but in that it’s connected to a culture that means so much to you. Maybe it’s the same thing in reverse with French. Does that make sense?

MB: (holding cayenne)

Désolé, I need to get to the pot.

JA: Tu est le plus romantique. I guess what I’m trying to say is, until I thought deeply about your book and even about having this conversation, I always just took us speaking in those different languages as an aspect of our relationship. I didn’t necessarily sit with what it meant—with why we do it. Or with why it’s so meaningful.

MB: Well, when you speak two languages, say English and HTML, it’s limiting in a way, because most people speak only one of those languages, but it’s also liberating in that with certain people it allows you to communicate in a richer way, or to communicate more than you could communicate before. And when you speak multiple languages—if you speak, like we do, in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese—then it’s even more liberating because it allows us to say things that we weren’t able to say with English alone. Like I love you, or J’adore tu or Aishiteimasu. Even if they don’t come with subtly different meanings, eventually they take on subtly different meanings, in the same way that sometimes you want to say I’m hungry and sometimes you want to say I’m starving and sometimes you want to say I’m ravenous. I think it feels special and meaningful because it allows us to communicate even very basic things in a deeper, more nuanced way.

JA: I think your stories do the same thing. And I think, in many ways, the characters in your stories probably wouldn’t be able to express themselves without the accompanying languages—or their emotional experiences wouldn’t be able to be communicated without them—Let me just quick check on the pretzel rolls. They’re done!

MB: The soup is ready too.

JA: Parfait, let’s eat.

(walking over to table with soup and pretzel rolls in hand respectively)

MB: (reaching for a pretzel roll)

I’m very grateful to the editors, both at the magazines that originally published these stories and at LSU Press, which published the collection. The formal constraints for this project added a layer of difficulty not only for me but for the editors too. Oh, these pretzel rolls are a masterpiece!

JA: Merci beaucoup, I had to work with my own constraints because we ran out of yeast.

MB: Zut alors.

JA: In thinking again about constraints and experimentation, I’m wondering about Hybrid Fictions, the course you’re currently teaching at my alma mater, The Gallatin School at NYU. Aussi, the soup is trés bien.

MB: Merci beaucoup, Parfait. In Hybrid Fictions we exclusively read and write interdisciplinary fiction: fiction that incorporates subject-specific language, forms, and concepts from other fields of study. Biology, physics, etc. We’re writing stories in the form of architectural blueprints. We’re writing stories in the form of chemical compounds. So, it’s a workshop in a hyper specific subgenre of experimental fiction.

My students registered for this course voluntarily, of course, but still, sometimes these writing prompts make them nervous. I think it can be terrifying, as a young writer, to even conceive of, let alone to actually dare, to break from tradition and to try something new. I think another great fear for young writers is that, if they do attempt something new, that their work will be perceived as gimmicky. Which is a legitimate fear, of course. I try to emphasize that it’s not enough simply to tell a story through some new interesting lexicon, or language, or structure, or form—that it’s still crucial for the story to have an effect on the reader, emotionally and intellectually, and that ideally the experiment should be used to tell a story that’s only possible to tell in this new way.

JA: It isn’t enough to be flashy. It has to actually do something. It has to be affecting.

MB: (dips a pretzel roll into the soup)

To me, that’s the difference between a gimmick and a story that’s worth reading. There are people who write experimental fiction in which there’s absolutely no connection between the experiment and the actual story—the plot and the characters. It’s just an experiment attached to some random story. No matter how brilliant and innovative the experiment is, work like that doesn’t interest me. It’s like watching somebody who’s invented a rocket shoot a rocket into the air for no other purpose than just to show everyone that they can build a rocket. Just to make a loud noise. A bright light in the sky. The experimental fiction that I love, the experimental fiction that excites me, are experiments that are done for a purpose: writers who aren’t just shooting a rocket into the air to show off, but because they’re trying to put a satellite into orbit, or because they’re trying to land astronauts on the moon.

JA: It seems fitting for us to end with space. Both you and your stories are not quite of this world.

__

Jenessa Abrams is a Norman Mailer Fiction Fellow and a Columbia MFA graduate in fiction and literary translation. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center and Columbia University. Her writing has been published in Tin House Online, TriQuarterly, Joyland, Washington Square, BOMB Magazine, Guernica, The Offing, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Recently, she was named a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest and both Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award and Fiction Open Award. Her work was nominated for the 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She currently holds a research fellowship at the New York Public Library and is pursuing a graduate degree in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.

Matthew Baker is the author of Hybrid Creatures, a collection of stories written in hybrid languages, and the children’s novel If You Find This, which was named a Booklist Top Ten Debut and nominated for an Edgar Award. His stories have appeared in publications such as American Short Fiction, New England Review, One Story, Electric Literature, and Conjunctions, and have been anthologized in Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Prairie Center of the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he has also taught at Vanderbilt University, where he was the founding editor of Nashville Review.

Life Within the Simulacrum: Status Update

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Life Within the Simulacrum is a featured column focusing on technology & social media, travel & literature.

BY DALLAS ATHENT

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If you’re reading this, it’s probable that you follow or are friends with a lot of writers on social media. Perhaps, you, yourself are a writer. You are on PANK, after all.

Assuming this is true your social media feed probably looks similar to mine. Every day I see at least 10+ links a day shared by other writers about how grateful they are to get again have a poem or story published. It usually goes something like this:

“I’m so honored to have [x] published in [x]. Thanks to [person tagged] for being such a force in the literary community.

[insert link].”

I, myself, have posted such statuses. I’m sure you have too.

On each post, the hearts start flying. The tagged individual who’s responsible for publishing said piece will not only “like” the writer’s post themselves, but then comment or reply with an additional “<3” emoji. The rest of us writers will continue to like said post. Sometimes we even love it. Who doesn’t love it when a person we know gets published?

There, technically isn’t a problem with this. I’d be a horrible person if I thought support for fellow writers was a bad thing. (Truth be told, I may be horrible, but for different reasons.)

My bigger question, however, is out of allllll of those likes, how many people are actually clicking the link and reading? Dear reader, I regret to say that I think that number is likely dismal; I personally confess to only going out of my way to read 1/10 of the links that I “like.” While that’s literally embarrassing to admit I know I can’t be the only one adding hearts to things I never have any intention on actually reading.

As I ponder this truth, I even realize I’ve probably liked things in the past that are probably, in fact, abysmal with no idea since I never clicked the damn link!

The thing is, we can’t possibly read everything that comes through our feed each day, but does that mean we should keep reacting to it? In the past I’ve done this to show I’m somehow supportive of the person who shared the post, even if I knew I didn’t have the time nor mental capacity to read it.

But I’m starting to realize this is more harmful than it is helpful.

Being published seems to have become more about having a status update to share with people about being published than having people actually read said piece. So here’s a pop quiz question for 2018:

Which is more valuable to a writer’s career:

  1. Having one person read their work, and really getting something out of it
  2. 100 people seeing on social media that the writer was published but not reading their work at all

Honestly, I don’t know for sure so don’t feel like you failed anything if you don’t agree with me, but it certainly seems like the latter, and that’s, well, just downright depressing. But you know what? I have faith we can change that.

Dear reader, I call on you. Stop hearting things you didn’t read! Join me and stop it.

Stop. It.

Because the truth of the matter is, this does nothing for the literary community. It forces us to live within a simulacrum of success, meanwhile the hard labor we put into writing goes into a vacuum and is swallowed up by yet more links and publications. In a desperate attempt to move literature forward and be noticed not as a craft of the past, we mistakenly believe the more we boost each other’s posts the more we’re giving visibility to poetry and fiction, and this is actually doing the opposite. It’s causing us to have a larger sense of engagement, when nobody is really engaging at all. The best thing we can do is try and entice people who aren’t into literature to read our sites by NOT liking anything we don’t read, try reading at least one thing a day, and then actively commenting on what we thought of it. It may feel as if we’re taking away support, but in fact, it will put responsibility back on the literary community to be strategic, purposefully and create an overall, better experience for online publications.

Long story short, let’s just stop aimlessly clicking in an effort to be seen, shall we?

–

Dallas Athent is a writer and artist. She is the author of THEIA MANIA, a book of poems with art by Maria Pavlovska. Her work, both literary and artistic has been published or profiled in BUST Magazine, Buzzfeed Community, VIDA Reports From The Field, At Large Magazine, PACKET Bi-Weekly, YES Poetry!, Luna Luna Magazine, Bedford + Bowery, Gothamist, Brooklyn Based, and more. She’s a board member of Nomadic Press. She lives in The Bronx with her adopted pets.

Like Gambit Hurling Race Cards…

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Author’s note: this was written in February, 2011–undoubtedly during a blizzard.

Two weeks ago, I grabbed my red marker and wrote on my noticeboard, “opinionated writers.” Earlier, I perused Twitter and my RSS feeds, feeling inferior about my own work. “I need an emphasis,” I said to myself. I’m troubled by my growing indoctrination. An emphasis? I had an emphasis. I think.

Once, I was a stupid twenty-something, espousing esoteric, anachronistic angst regarding racial disparity; I’ve since learned black people are as screwy as everyone else, and equally susceptible to self-sabotage.

Then there’s Egypt: Mubarak was comedic fodder for my tweets, and he bounced so—onward with the search. The world is a veritable cavalcade of wonders and horrors, of sunshine, lollipops and pistols. What the hell is my problem?

I’ll lurk in the shadows of my favorite sites and blogs. The topics are serious; even when the site is quirky and bubbly and replete with 80s references—can we move on to the 90s?—everyone seems so worked up, so passionate. I got worked up the other night. My wife was upset because the local hip-hop station played a song from 2003 and called it “old school.”

I got mad at the phrase; I proceeded to rant for ten minutes about the nebulous definition of “old school,” which devolved into a diatribe on hip-hop itself: how it refuses to grow up; how its Peter Pan complex is of its own design, making “old school” music a sliding scale, a term relative to the listener’s age. It’s a hollow phrase used by crusty old-heads clawing for the “golden age” of hip-hop, a period that never existed.

Let’s move on.

Pivot.

A fellow blogger called on me to add perspective to her post on the VIDA count. As I wrote, I listened to the emcee Common; his song started off with, “I heard a white man’s yes is a black maybe.”

My comment on the VIDA post juxtaposed gender disparity in literature with race, because the hesitation of black writers to submit, to say nothing of acceptance, is similar to that of women. Similar is the not the same as the same but same difference. I’m writing in circles.

It’s presumed black writers create for black readership, a tribal exchange spoken in foreign, culturally irrelevant tongues; I know when I pick up a novel written by a woman, independent of her race and nationality, I arrive at the same presumptions. What VIDA exposed was a truth we all knew, men and women, and my hurling race cards like Gambit was my passion expressed, though muted.

In my comments, I wanted to write, “Stop the self-aggrandizement because you read Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Diaz. Anyone can read Pulitzer winners. Widen your reading habits and all of this other shit will correct itself with time—at least it’ll expose sexist, racist pigs once everyone else is enlightened, for lack of a better word.”

Breathe.

I didn’t write that. I posted a comment without stating my stance. That bothered me, but what helped removed the irritation was the initial request. Maybe I undervalue my own opinions, or perhaps I over-inflate the vitriol I expect to receive, but I’m always shocked when someone wants my opinion. I’m not one to offer it unsolicited: such is the life of the fat introvert.

Author’s note: the previous sentence is no longer applicable to said author.

Bending of Spines: A Consideration on "Truth" In Literature

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Over the weekend, I purchased a copy of Granta, the splendid UK literary magazine. I was elated to see a copy lying there on its back, next to Tin House and The Paris Review, though I wondered how it got there. Only one copy; the sticker affixed to the cover read “US $16.99” a hefty price for a literary journal, no matter its size, its beauty. Did the bookstore order one copy? Maybe an older gentleman comes every three months to buy the copy, as part of a long standing, unofficial bond between he and the bookstore. If so, I swooped in, filled with the thrill akin to sniping an eBay auction at the last minute. I remembered the opportunity I squandered in London. Copies of Granta from the sixties and seventies, all adorned with fantastic covers and rock-bottom prices, were splayed across the table at an outdoor book fair along the Thames. I happily paid the exorbitant price.

And instead of working on this column, or a story, or the feasibility of turning a 200 word prose-poem-like thing into flash fiction, I brewed some coffee and cracked open Granta’s volume devote to Pakistan. Holding the book reminded me of my ongoing ambivalence to e-books, even though I buy them, read them and still come away with literary satisfaction (or otherwise). I am by no means a luddite, my vinyl record collection (sans turntable) notwithstanding. The convenience of the e-book for all parties involved (instant delivery and low prices for the consumer; low production costs, potential higher margins for the writer) outweighs the perceived and intangible values of a physical book. Then again, my copy of Granta evoked this sense of jubilation, of excitement, in the same way as when I held the hardback copy of Victor LaValle’s Big Machine; sometimes, the gorgeous artwork, the smell of the pages, the bending of spines, all conflate to create an unquantifiable value.

As I read the first story, “Leila In The Wilderness” by Nadeem Aslam, then moved to a poem, “PK 754″ by Yasmeen Hameed, I felt vindicated by the price I paid. Discovering “new” voices, and experiencing their styles, their word choices, their rhythms for the first time makes a book, any book, electronic or paper, worth the price of admission. Again, literary satisfaction trumps and triumphs over the mode of delivery. What did I know of Pakistan, past and present? What did I know of its customs, its idiosyncrasies, and its people? These questions, born of a symbiosis between writer and reader, between nations, each side rife with assumptions and stereotypes held against the other, are fluid, transcendent, and are communicated through literature with little concern with the “how.”

Later, I read two more stories: “Portrait of Jinnah”   by Jane Perlez and “Kashmir’s Forever War” by Basharat Peer. Unlike the excellent “Leila In The Wilderness” which preceded, the nature of these two other stories eluded me. That is, I was uncertain of their genres; were they fiction or nonfiction? When such a question is asked, another surfaces: does it matter? Some say “no”; some say “you damn right it does.”

During interviews on the subject of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, author Junot Diaz revealed that “facts” the regarding the Dominican Republic, which were contained within the footnote narrative throughout the book, were untrue. Perhaps those well-versed in Dominican history knew this, and got the joke immediately, but I wonder if this revelation pissed off a few readers. Even if the book is a novel—as in “fictitious”—do readers still take the writer’s word for it? A similar, older take on the saying, “If I read it on the Internet, then it must be true.” As for me, I took the “facts” at face value; if anything, I paid more attention to the narrative as it delved into the details of various comic books (which, of course, were all true).

There’s truth—and there’s “truthiness,” to quote Stephen Colbert. We’re all aware of the skewering James Frey received for A Million Little Pieces. He is literature’s poster boy for all that is believed to be wrong in creative nonfiction and, specifically, memoir. In David Shields’ book Reality Hunger, Alice Marshall was quoted to say:

I’m disappointed not that Frey is a liar but that he isn’t a better one. He should have said, Everyone who writes about himself is a liar. I created a person meaner, funnier, more filled with life than I could ever be. He could have talked about the parallel between a writer’s persona and the public persona that Oprah presents to the world. Instead, he showed up for his whipping.

Likewise, Shields himself wrote:

In the aftermath of the Million Little Pieces outrage, Random House reached a tentative settlement with readers who felt defrauded by Frey. To receive a refund, hoodwinked customers had to mail in a piece of the book: for hardcover owners, it was page 163; those with paperback copies were required to actually tear off the front cover and send it in. Also, readers had to sign a sworn statement confirming that they had bought the book with the belief it was a real memoir or, in other words, that they felt bad having accidentally read a novel.

The suggestion is that Frey should’ve created distance between A Million Little Pieces and the expectation of memoir—that is, “don’t you dare lie to me!”—which essentially deflects the issue of memoir, whether or not the writer is correct in each fact, each conversation quoted, each detail of the the event as it happened, back onto the reader. Frey burned at the proverbial stake because his book was called a “memoir”, a term that unearths expectations inside the minds of readers.

According to Vivian Gornick (quoted in Reality Hunger; originally appeared at Salon.com), the author of one of my favorite books, The Situation and The Story: The Art of The Personal Narrative:

Memoir is a genre in need of an informed readership. It’s a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting. Memoirs belong to the category of literature, not journalism. What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade him or her that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand. A memoir is a tale taken from life—that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences—related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements, it has the same responsibility as the novel or the short story: to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader.

Which is okay in my eyes, so long as the truth or, rather, the caveats are revealed upfront. No need to backtrack after the fact, to say, “well you read it wrong.” Ask Frey how that turned out for him. As for whether a story is fiction or nonfiction, It doesn’t matter to me. A safe, perhaps moderate stance to take, but yes, the quality of the story matters most to me. I’m a pessimist by nature and, while I don’t consider writers to be outright liars, I do assume that there’s a smidgen of embellishment, a slight, Plathian slant to the truth.

And there’s the whole philosophy of truth: what is the truth, what makes something real, etc. With truth in literature, I think what gets missed is the reader’s experience: did he sink into the world in which the story existed, with its sights and sounds, did he enjoy the characters (which is independent from liking or hating the characters), was the plot plausible, did the book earn its climax and ending, or were they mere bolt-ons, the results of convenient plot twists? In other words, was the story executed so well, that not only did it entertain the reader, but he could believe it to be true? Besides, isn’t that the litmus test, the “bullshit” test, so to speak, when we read books, fiction or non?

The terms “fiction” and “nonfiction” are mere containers, modes of delivery, along the lines of paper books or e-books. After reading the aforementioned Granta stories, I did ask myself where I should slot them. However, I knew it didn’t matter, further solidified by the fact that I didn’t want to research the dates, the times, the faces, the battles, the mountains, the unmarked graves, the political puppets, the stone-throwers, the tanks, the buildings pitted by artillery shells; I didn’t (and still don’t) know if the stories were fiction and the writers didn’t tip their hands. Rather, they both wrote rich, provocative stories and I, lonely reader, fell into their worlds, walked the streets, saw the markets, smelled the gunpowder, heard the cheers and moans. That’s how its supposed to go. Let someone else question the truth.

Bending of Spines: A Consideration on “Truth” In Literature

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Over the weekend, I purchased a copy of Granta, the splendid UK literary magazine. I was elated to see a copy lying there on its back, next to Tin House and The Paris Review, though I wondered how it got there. Only one copy; the sticker affixed to the cover read “US $16.99” a hefty price for a literary journal, no matter its size, its beauty. Did the bookstore order one copy? Maybe an older gentleman comes every three months to buy the copy, as part of a long standing, unofficial bond between he and the bookstore. If so, I swooped in, filled with the thrill akin to sniping an eBay auction at the last minute. I remembered the opportunity I squandered in London. Copies of Granta from the sixties and seventies, all adorned with fantastic covers and rock-bottom prices, were splayed across the table at an outdoor book fair along the Thames. I happily paid the exorbitant price.

And instead of working on this column, or a story, or the feasibility of turning a 200 word prose-poem-like thing into flash fiction, I brewed some coffee and cracked open Granta’s volume devote to Pakistan. Holding the book reminded me of my ongoing ambivalence to e-books, even though I buy them, read them and still come away with literary satisfaction (or otherwise). I am by no means a luddite, my vinyl record collection (sans turntable) notwithstanding. The convenience of the e-book for all parties involved (instant delivery and low prices for the consumer; low production costs, potential higher margins for the writer) outweighs the perceived and intangible values of a physical book. Then again, my copy of Granta evoked this sense of jubilation, of excitement, in the same way as when I held the hardback copy of Victor LaValle’s Big Machine; sometimes, the gorgeous artwork, the smell of the pages, the bending of spines, all conflate to create an unquantifiable value.

As I read the first story, “Leila In The Wilderness” by Nadeem Aslam, then moved to a poem, “PK 754″ by Yasmeen Hameed, I felt vindicated by the price I paid. Discovering “new” voices, and experiencing their styles, their word choices, their rhythms for the first time makes a book, any book, electronic or paper, worth the price of admission. Again, literary satisfaction trumps and triumphs over the mode of delivery. What did I know of Pakistan, past and present? What did I know of its customs, its idiosyncrasies, and its people? These questions, born of a symbiosis between writer and reader, between nations, each side rife with assumptions and stereotypes held against the other, are fluid, transcendent, and are communicated through literature with little concern with the “how.”

Later, I read two more stories: “Portrait of Jinnah”   by Jane Perlez and “Kashmir’s Forever War” by Basharat Peer. Unlike the excellent “Leila In The Wilderness” which preceded, the nature of these two other stories eluded me. That is, I was uncertain of their genres; were they fiction or nonfiction? When such a question is asked, another surfaces: does it matter? Some say “no”; some say “you damn right it does.”

During interviews on the subject of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, author Junot Diaz revealed that “facts” the regarding the Dominican Republic, which were contained within the footnote narrative throughout the book, were untrue. Perhaps those well-versed in Dominican history knew this, and got the joke immediately, but I wonder if this revelation pissed off a few readers. Even if the book is a novel—as in “fictitious”—do readers still take the writer’s word for it? A similar, older take on the saying, “If I read it on the Internet, then it must be true.” As for me, I took the “facts” at face value; if anything, I paid more attention to the narrative as it delved into the details of various comic books (which, of course, were all true).

There’s truth—and there’s “truthiness,” to quote Stephen Colbert. We’re all aware of the skewering James Frey received for A Million Little Pieces. He is literature’s poster boy for all that is believed to be wrong in creative nonfiction and, specifically, memoir. In David Shields’ book Reality Hunger, Alice Marshall was quoted to say:

I’m disappointed not that Frey is a liar but that he isn’t a better one. He should have said, Everyone who writes about himself is a liar. I created a person meaner, funnier, more filled with life than I could ever be. He could have talked about the parallel between a writer’s persona and the public persona that Oprah presents to the world. Instead, he showed up for his whipping.

Likewise, Shields himself wrote:

In the aftermath of the Million Little Pieces outrage, Random House reached a tentative settlement with readers who felt defrauded by Frey. To receive a refund, hoodwinked customers had to mail in a piece of the book: for hardcover owners, it was page 163; those with paperback copies were required to actually tear off the front cover and send it in. Also, readers had to sign a sworn statement confirming that they had bought the book with the belief it was a real memoir or, in other words, that they felt bad having accidentally read a novel.

The suggestion is that Frey should’ve created distance between A Million Little Pieces and the expectation of memoir—that is, “don’t you dare lie to me!”—which essentially deflects the issue of memoir, whether or not the writer is correct in each fact, each conversation quoted, each detail of the the event as it happened, back onto the reader. Frey burned at the proverbial stake because his book was called a “memoir”, a term that unearths expectations inside the minds of readers.

According to Vivian Gornick (quoted in Reality Hunger; originally appeared at Salon.com), the author of one of my favorite books, The Situation and The Story: The Art of The Personal Narrative:

Memoir is a genre in need of an informed readership. It’s a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting. Memoirs belong to the category of literature, not journalism. What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade him or her that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand. A memoir is a tale taken from life—that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences—related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements, it has the same responsibility as the novel or the short story: to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader.

Which is okay in my eyes, so long as the truth or, rather, the caveats are revealed upfront. No need to backtrack after the fact, to say, “well you read it wrong.” Ask Frey how that turned out for him. As for whether a story is fiction or nonfiction, It doesn’t matter to me. A safe, perhaps moderate stance to take, but yes, the quality of the story matters most to me. I’m a pessimist by nature and, while I don’t consider writers to be outright liars, I do assume that there’s a smidgen of embellishment, a slight, Plathian slant to the truth.

And there’s the whole philosophy of truth: what is the truth, what makes something real, etc. With truth in literature, I think what gets missed is the reader’s experience: did he sink into the world in which the story existed, with its sights and sounds, did he enjoy the characters (which is independent from liking or hating the characters), was the plot plausible, did the book earn its climax and ending, or were they mere bolt-ons, the results of convenient plot twists? In other words, was the story executed so well, that not only did it entertain the reader, but he could believe it to be true? Besides, isn’t that the litmus test, the “bullshit” test, so to speak, when we read books, fiction or non?

The terms “fiction” and “nonfiction” are mere containers, modes of delivery, along the lines of paper books or e-books. After reading the aforementioned Granta stories, I did ask myself where I should slot them. However, I knew it didn’t matter, further solidified by the fact that I didn’t want to research the dates, the times, the faces, the battles, the mountains, the unmarked graves, the political puppets, the stone-throwers, the tanks, the buildings pitted by artillery shells; I didn’t (and still don’t) know if the stories were fiction and the writers didn’t tip their hands. Rather, they both wrote rich, provocative stories and I, lonely reader, fell into their worlds, walked the streets, saw the markets, smelled the gunpowder, heard the cheers and moans. That’s how its supposed to go. Let someone else question the truth.