Category: Blog

“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

 

 

As a teenager, I was a huge fan of John Cage. He seemed more cutting-edge than the coolest rock star.  If it had been possible, I would have papered my bedroom wall with his posters. (I used to have recurring dreams of meeting Cage). But as with most teenage crushes, my enthusiasm waned. Eventually I came to find Cage and the whole Zen-mystique surrounding him almost embarrassing.

But I’ve been thinking about Cage a lot lately. I even pulled out his books from the same basement bookshelf that holds my senior high school yearbook. In Silence, his book of writing and lectures, I read the following story:

After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, “In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.” I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, “In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.”

Twenty years after setting Cage aside, I have a whole new admiration for his head banging. Beneath all of the Zen gentleness I can see how hard he fought to push music to new places.

I thought about Cage often while reading For The Fighting Spirit of the Walnut. Originally published in 1982, but translated into English for the first time in 2008, Takashi Hiranide’s writing doesn’t look like traditional poetry. The book is composed of 111 interlinking prose paragraphs that often resemble Cage’s Indeterminacy lectures.

These poems range from the truly prosaic:

(28) I walk along the clear patch of sun that is still too cold for batting. Nevertheless, on the riverbed, the young boys shouting and pelting the abandoned car with stones.

To surreal:

(32) Why not use your fluttering tongue to wipe the sweat off of that starling who is trying to strip off her wings. It’s so distant of you, my arboreal lover on the outskirts of town. From the shadow of the clothes hanging in a thrift shop, a single antelope watches you. Steel-colored eyes of contempt.

To scientific:

(13) The strange insect called scarabaeus skillfully constructs round pellets from the dung of hoofed animals such as sheep, cows, horses, and takes them to an appropriate place to be slowly consumed. For its larvae, special pellets are made by selecting only the dung of sheep, which has the most nutritional value and is easiest to digest.

But many of my favorite “poems” are those which reflect back on the book’s own making:

(44) Verse finds strength in being segmented. Dependent on neither future nor past, it persistently dangles between line space and line space. Like a child who cries all alone in the dark for a long time, it tries to tear itself as far away as possible from the shadows of time. Moreover, they are the ones that are, through segmentation, placed into lines.

(77) I have been organizing fragments for a long time now. Individual cul-de-sacs filling a tote bag are each driven into a form with much less leeway, and before they manage to connect with one another, are left in the hands of yet another display-belt of chance. The longer the work continues, more hands that cross over from one fragment to another change into an intermediate term equivalent to a fragment.

While reading Fighting Spirit of the Walnut, I pictured Hiraide clawing away at the formal limitations of the medium, forcing it to do something it doesn’t normally do. As with Cage, this is achieved as much with silence as with sound. On his website, Hiraide describes himself as “one who writes and erases poems in Japanese.”

Hiraide’s “fighting spirit” ignited my own long-lost teenage obsessions for Cage and quiet boundary pushing. It also led me to crack open that old high school yearbook. For a long time I was embarrassed of my high school ‘Memories,’ but now I’m kind of proud:

I don’t know if it is the change in altitude or the pollen count in Minnesota, but my normal post-Dispatch funk after traveling to Colorado has reached clinical levels.  The other day it got so bad that I checked webmd.com for the symptoms of depression. One of them was “Loss of interest in activities or hobbies once pleasurable.” I guess that explains why I’ve been avoiding this Popsicle assignment. To get back on track, I made a trip to Barnes and Noble. In hopes of curing my post-Dispatch blues, I first visited the Eastern Religion section. But the various “Tao of” books just made me want to go home and watch more episodes of Burn Notice (another sign of depression?).

Eventually I made my way to the graphic novel section where I found a copy of Wilson by Daniel Clowes. The book is a portrayal of a self-obsessed, misanthropic blowhard named Wilson. After twenty minutes of reading the book, I felt cheered up.

In the middle of the book, Wilson goes to prison. “I actually used to kind-of fantasize about going to prison,” he says, “it seems like a good place to do some serious thinking…collect your thoughts, y’know?” These six panels represent Wilson’s unsuccessful search for enlightenment during his six years in prison:

“To read Wilson is to grapple with some bleak truths about ourselves,” writes Glen Weldon on NPR, “We are self-involved, ungenerous, even cruel.” Here’s the question: why does such nihilism provide comfort? Would I have been better off in the long run if I’d chosen a book from the Eastern Religion section?

It turns out that Wilson eventually finds a bit of Zen wisdom. On the last page of the book, an elderly Wilson stares out the window and has a revelation:

 

 

I’m still on the road in Colorado without much time to read. But the other day in the van Brad made me aware of the storyteller Spencer Holst. As we continue to troll in and out of the Rockies looking for people with interesting stories, finding this little fable by Holst was just about perfect:

The Zebra Storyteller

Once upon a time there was a Siamese cat who pretended to be a lion and spoke inappropriate Zebraic.

That language is whinnied by the race of striped horses in Africa.

Here now: An innocent zebra is walking in a jungle and approaching from another direction is the little cat; they meet.

“Hello there!” says the Siamese cat in perfectly pronounced Zebraic, “It certainly is a pleasant day, isn’t it? The sun is shining, the birds are singing, isn’t the world a lovely place to live today!”

The zebra is so astonished at hearing Siamese cat speaking like a zebra, why—he’s just fit to be tied.

So the little cat quickly ties him up, kills him, and drags the better parts of the carcass back to his den.

The cat successfully hunted zebras many months in this manner, dining on filet mignon of zebra every night, and from the better hides he made bow neckties and wide belts after the fashion of the decadent princes of the Old Siamese court.

He began boasting to his friends he was a lion, and he gave them as proof the fact he hunted zebras.

The delicate noses of the zebras told them there was really no lion in the neighborhood. The zebra deaths caused many to avoid the region. Superstitious, they decided the woods were haunted by the ghost of a lion.

One day the storyteller of the zebras was ambling, and through his mind ran plots for stories to amuse the other zebras, when suddenly his eyes brightened, and he said, “That’s it! I’ll tell a story about a Siamese cat who learns to speak our language! What an idea! That’ll make ’em laugh!”

Just then the Siamese cat appeared before him, and said, “Hello there! Pleasant day today, isn’t it!”

The zebra storyteller wasn’t fit to be tied at hearing a cat speaking his language, because he’d been thinking about that very thing.

He took a good look at the cat, and he didn’t know why, but there was something about his looks he didn’t like, so he kicked him with a hoof and killed him.

That is the function of the storyteller.

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.