Author: admin

“Once when I was driving through Colorado with a friend, traveling down a narrow mountain pass, we came upon an accident. A pickup truck and a car had collided, and from fifty feet away we could see the blood. We pulled over and ran to help. All the time I was running, all the time I was trying, with my friend’s help, to pry open the door of the car in which a nine-months-pregnant woman had been impaled through the abdomen, I was thinking: I must remember this! I must remember my feelings! How would I describe this? I do not think I behaved less efficiently than my nonliterary friend, who was probably not thinking such thoughts; in fact, I may possibly have behaved more swiftly and efficiently, trying in my mind to create a noble scene. Nonetheless, what I felt above all was disgust at my mind’s detachment, its inhumane fascination with the precise way the blood pumped, the way flesh around a wound becomes instantly proud, that is, puffed up, and so on. I would have been glad at that moment to be a literary innocent.” – John Gardener, On Becoming A Novelist

If Adam Gordon, the poet-protagonist of the poet Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, were to encounter the grisly accident Gardner describes above, he wouldn’t use it as fodder for a novel. He’d probably just walk away from the scene and begin crafting a poem about his own creative listlessness compared to Gardener. Where Gardener laments the novelist’s detachment, in Leaving the Atocha Station, Lerner laments, and praises, the poet’s double-detachment.

On the third page of Leaving the Atocha Station, Gordon says: “Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.”

The closest Gorden comes to a moment of true empathy during his time in Madrid is while instant messaging with his friend Cyrus in Mexico. Cyrus tells a gruesome story about a drowning that he and his girlfriend witnessed. But the focus of Cyrus’s story is the argument that this event created with his girlfriend.

Cyrus: She was shaken up in her way. She said she wished she’d never got in the water. But she also seemed excited. Like we had had a “real” experience.

Me: I guess you had

Cyrus: Yeah but I had this sense – this sense that the whole point of the trip for her – to Mexico – was for something like this, something this “real” to happen. I don’t really believe that, but I felt it, and I said something about how she had got some good material for her novel.

Me: is she writing a novel

Cyrus: Who knows

After finishing this remarkable novel, I read a dozen interviews with Ben Lerner. Like everybody else, I guess I was curious the extent to which Ben Lerner is Adam Gordon. My favorite interview was done by his friend Cyrus Console.

Cyrus: Adam Gordon…is always wondering if he’s capable of having a genuine experience of art. And yet the novel is full of Adam’s profound insights into the arts, especially poetry. I wonder if we could start by discussing this tension or complexity of Adam’s? It strikes me as central to the novel.

Ben: I think you’re right that it’s central. And I think the way a suspicion about and a commitment to the arts can coexist is one of the most interesting things about that domain of practices and experiences we think of as artistic. For the narrator of my novel, the issue isn’t just that there is bad art, or that there is a lot of bullshit in the arts, or bullshit artists, or that people pretend to be moved when they aren’t—what he’s trying to come to terms with is the fact that his interest in poetry, painting, etc., is largely grounded in the distance between the supposed potential of art and actual artworks.

Toward the end of the interview Console and Lerner discuss Lerner’s use of photographs in the book.

Cyrus: How does the novel’s use of images—I mean the photo- graphically reproduced images you’ve included in the book—relate to these concerns about mediation and spectacle?

 Ben: One of the things that interests me about the use of images in a novel is how it complicates the prose’s relationship to what you could call “optical realism,” the way novelistic writing is often given the goal of dissolving itself into an image, a vision of a world. The claim of writing to make you see is interestingly strained, simultaneously restricted and enhanced, by the juxtaposition of prose with actual images, even ambiguous ones: the difference between reading and looking is more acutely felt.

But then Lerner goes on to discuss the unreliability of photography’s supposed “optical realism.”

Ben: There is an image that might be of Teresa, or somebody who looks like Teresa, but it’s a fragment, cropped so as to withhold the eyes, which the novel, as I mentioned, often, but never fully, describes—whatever “fully” would mean. And then there are captions that inflect how we view the images, so that they end up illustrating the problematic nature of the illustrative as much as actually anchoring the prose in a visually intelligible world.

After reading this, I decided to do a Google Image Search on Atocha Station bombings. This is one of the first images I found:

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this picture and have a bunch of questions:

• Is the man holding a baby or a jacket? Does it matter?
• Why is the blood so perfectly covering one side of the man’s face? If the other side were shown, how would it change the picture?
• Is the woman looking at the photographer, the bloody man, or somewhere else?
• How is the photographer’s sense of engagement or detachment different from that of the novelist or poet?

Answer: Who knows

Photography, it seems to me, has as hard of a time dealing with the real as novels or poetry. And if the picture above isn’t good enough at “illustrating the problematic nature of the illustrative,” look at the way this picture of Atocha Station was reproduced in two British newspapers:

After looking at these pictures, I decided to track down the John Ashbery poem “Leaving the Atocha Station”  from his 1962 book, The Tennis Court Oath. An excerpt:

Leaving the Atocha Station      steel
infected bumps the screws
          everywhere      wells
abolished top ill-lit
scarecrow falls      Time, progress and good sense
strike of shopkeepers dark blood

I also read the book’s title poem and was struck by the first two lines: What had you been thinking about / the face studiously bloodied

This brought me to a final question/joke/koan: A poet, a novelist and a photographer leave Atocha station after the massacre – which one sees the event more truthfully?

Answer: His girlfriend

 

 

Brad in Boulder. Photo by Tim Carpenter

I’m currently on the road with Brad Zellar and our fantastic tour manager Tim Carpenter in Colorado (follow us HERE). As usual with the Dispatch trips, there is little time for reading and writing. But following up on last week’s popsicle, I did bring along a copy of Denis Johnson’s collected poems, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. As we push onward in Colorado, this poem seems appropriate:

Passengers
by Denis Johnson

The world will burst like an intestine in the sun,
the dark turn to granite and the granite to a name,
but there will always be somebody riding the bus
through these intersections strewn with broken glass
among speechless women beating their little ones,
always a slow alphabet of rain
speaking of drifting and perishing to the air,
always these definite jails of light in the sky
at the wedding of this clarity and this storm
and a woman’s turning — her languid flight of hair
traveling through frame after frame of memory
where the past turns, its face sparking like emery,
to open its grace and incredible harm
over my life, and I will never die.

When I was in my twenties, Denis Johnson’s masterpiece, Jesus’ Son, was my favorite book. It’s like a homemade airplane skidding along the bruised tarmac of reality, occasionally rising a few feet in the air, then finally catching air and soaring into the dream world. It is pretty much the perfect book for a twenty-something dizzy with longing.

When I was thirty-one, Johnson came to Minneapolis. He was there to perform some sort of musical collaboration, but I’ve pretty much forgotten all of the details. All I remember was nervously waiting for the event to end so that I could hand Johnson a copy of my book dummy for Sleeping by the Mississippi. I’ve also blocked out the memories of that exchange. All I know is that Johnson took the book and later informed me (by letter? did I dream this?) that he couldn’t write the introduction.

Twelve years later, I still think Denis Johnson would have been the perfect person to write an introduction to Sleeping by the Mississippi. And now, after reading Train Dreams, I think he probably should have written the introduction to Broken Manual as well. Broken Manual is my mid-life crisis book. It is about realizing that youth is slipping away and the fantasy of escaping into nature. It is about coming to terms with being a broken man.

Here are some passages I highlighted from Train Dreams:

“He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.”

“By most Januaries, when the snow had deepened, the valley seemed stopped with perpetual silence, but as a matter of fact it was often filled with the rumble of trains and the choirs of distant wolves and the nearer mad jibbering of coyotes. Also his own howling, as he’d taken it up as a kind of sport.”

“God needs the hermit in the woods as much as He needs the man in the pulpit. Did you ever think about that?”

“Grainer still went to services some rare times, when a trip to town coincided…He very often wept in church. Living up the Moyea with plenty of small chores to distract him, he forgot he was a sad man. When the hymns began, he remembered.”

“Beyond, he saw the Canadian Rockies still sunlit, snow-peaked, a hundred miles away, as if the earth were in the midst of its creation, the mountains taking their substance out of the clouds. He’d never seen so grand a prospect. The forests that filled his life so thickly populous and so tall that generally they blocked him from seeing how far away the world was, but right now it seemed clear there were mountains enough for everybody to get his own. The curse had left him, and the contagion of his lust had drifted off and settled into one of those distant valleys.”

On the back of old 35-mm film cameras, there is a slot where you can put a tab from the film box to remind yourself which type of film you are using. I recently encountered a camera in which the photographer had a put a picture of David Lynch in this slot. As I leave for a shooting trip to Colorado this week, I’m thinking I should put a picture of Denis Johnson on the back of my camera. Who knows, maybe he’ll write the introduction to my next book. A boy can dream.

 

While photographing baseball players a couple of weeks ago in North Carolina, I was reminded of why I have an aversion to photographing people in uniform. Uniforms are like personality shields. Instead of seeing a person, you see a type. But uniforms aren’t just limited to athletes and police officers. A few years ago while working on a project with the fashion designers Rodarte, I was asked to photograph punk kids in Oakland. What I mostly encountered were gutter punks. To me their dreadlocks, ear gauges and facial tattoos made them as one-dimensional as their cardboard signs.

For this reason, I’ve always avoided Mike Brodie’s pictures of young train hoppers. This has been particularly hard to do in the last couple of months with the release of Brodie’s book and exhibition, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity. Making this even more difficult was the fact that the work was being championed by a great person, Paul Schiek, and was being shown in a great gallery, Yossi Milo. Most difficult of all was that the book was being published by one of my favorite publishers, Twin Palms.

While recently visiting Ampersand, the great art bookstore in Portland, I couldn’t resist any longer. After spending thirty seconds with A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, all of my preconceptions dropped away. Everything about this book is perfect: the size, printing, sequence, cover image, title and essay. Even the acknowledgements are perfect (“My mom, Frankie, for letting me go; my dad, Gary, for not being around;..and Savannah Locklin, my first love, for introducing me to and amazing new life worth living. Thank you all.”)

A Period of Juvenile Prosperity opened my eyes. The cliché lifestyle dropped away and I could see past the uniform to the ‘life worth living.’ At the end of Brodie’s brilliant essay, he writes “I don’t want to be famous, but I hope this book is remembered forever.” I have a feeling it will be.

– Alec Soth

Note: Over the last week littlebrownmushroom.com has been repeatedly hacked. We think we’ve finally resolved the issue. But if you encounter any difficulties, please email us at orders(at)littlebrownmushroom(dot)com. Thank you.

A couple of months ago I wrote about David Foster Wallace’s commencement address, This is Water.  He begins his talk with the following story:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?

Wallace knows that it is a corny cliché to use a “parable-ish” story in a commencement address, but by the end of the talk, he brings the message home with real weight and seriousness:

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe even 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
“This is water.”
“This is water.”

I couldn’t help thinking of Wallace’s parable when I picked up Jess Walter’s recently published collection of short stories, We Live in Water. At the beginning of the title story, a young boy repeatedly asks his father, “Do we live in water?” It is only at the end of the story that father understands his son’s question:

And there was the boy, staring into Flett’s giant aquarium, tropical fish swimming around in the blue light, a big square-headed whiskered thing probing the glass, and a skinny one with streaks of gold and a flitty little yellow one that darted in among the phony rocks. Michael was so close his nose almost touched the glass and his face was as blue as the fish, as he watched them swim the way he watched traffic out the window of Oren’s apartment, the way he looked at Oren in the car, the way he looked out at the world. And that’s when Oren understood.

Do we live in water?

He watched the fish come to the end of its blue world, invisible and impassible, turn, go around and turn again as he sensed another wall and another and on and on. It didn’t even look like water, so clear and blue. And the god-damn fish just swam in circles, as if he believed that, one of these times, the glass wouldn’t be there and he would just sail off, into the open.

As a collection of short stories, We Live in Water is like an aquarium. Each story describes a couple of fish, usually male, swimming in circles and smacking into the glass. I loved these stories, but was always disappointed when they ended. I wanted to watch one of Walter’s characters swim in a bigger tank.

So after finishing We Live in Water I picked up Walter’s 2009 novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets. It tells the story of Matthew Prior, a business reporter whose dream of quitting his newspaper job to start a website devoted to financial news told in poetic verse ends up leading to his family’s implosion. Reminiscent of Walter White in Breaking Bad, Matthew Prior’s desperate decision-making is pathetic, hysterical and wildly entertaining. It is also, as you might guess, poetic. Prior’s free verse is sprinkled throughout the story. As with his financial poetry, most of these poems are cheeky and intentionally average. But every now and then Walter slips in something serious. In a poem entitled ‘Dry Falls,’ Prior writes about the rural home along a dry riverbed that his father retreated to after leaving his mother.

And I wonder if we don’t live like water
seeking a level
a low bed
until one day we just go dry.
I wonder if a creek ever realizes
it has made its own grave.

Both We Live in Water and The Financial Lives of the Poets were enormously pleasurable to read. Along with being entertaining, they manage to lyrically address the ‘capital-T Truth’ of keeping your eyes open to the world hidden in plain sight.