Poor Sap Publishing

“This is not a Wells Tower Interview” & The ‘Receptive Experience’

Posted on January 4, 2012 by John Francisconi

On a freakishly sunny day in early November I kidnapped Wells Tower and took him on an impromptu tour of Pittsburgh (fueled by my lack of knowledge of the city) and we had a conversation and some whiskey. We talked a lot about the dangers of the internet, kittens, whiskey, bicycles, Foucault, tombstones, Lydia Davis, beach houses, Samizdat, favorite childhood books, what it takes to write well, punk bands, PDX, writing letters, Iceland, kayaking, having brothers, revising, Post WWII male writers, Amy Hempel, future writing cabins, key lime pie, the love of tiny dogs adopted out of guilt, ‘The Loss of the Creature,’ New Orleans, the history of Zines, Thin Lizzy, chocolate chip cookies….and much more. I wrote it all down, typed it out, cut and pasted it, added original artwork from a wonderfully talented Los Angeles based artist and filmmaker, some clip art, and I old school Xeroxed the thing. The great thing is that you can actually HOLD this interview in your hands, you can read it. It’s awesome. (via Hot Metal Bridge)

My publicity copy of “This is not a Wells Tower Interview” arrived with a handwritten note from Jen Howard, the not-interviewer, asking that I refrain from directly referencing any of the zine’s content on the Internet.

When I first read about “This is not a Wells Tower Interview” (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn), I knew right away that I wanted a copy. I didn’t love each and every story in Tower’s collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, but I return to certain stories (“Executors of Important Energies,” “The Brown Coast,” “Retreat”) to study the construction of his “fiery, ecstatic word[s], Molotov cocktail[s] against syntactic dreariness.”

I have no experience with zines. Punk rock has only recently started making sense to me, its communitarian message and spirit finally loud and clear above all that noise. In the zine, Wells Tower offers sage and slightly-ecstatic words (which I’m not permitted to quote here) about how all zine cultures are informed by democratic ideals, as well as a sort of informal apologia for the selective (perhaps even exclusive) communities they create.

Meghan Daum’s recent essay, “Haterade,” about how the Internet is uniquely suited to infectious (as well as democratic) forms of invective, has some relevance to this unusual small-press venture:

Whereas the old-fashioned letter to the editor involved crafting a letter, figuring out where to send it, springing for a stamp, and knowing that its publication-worthiness would be determined by an actual editor who might even call and suggest some actual edits, today’s readers are invited to ‘join the conversation’ as if the work of professional reporters and columnists carries no more authority than small-talk at a cocktail party. And although some sites are making efforts to weed out the trolls by disabling anonymous posting, filtering comments through Facebook, or letting readers essentially monitor themselves by flagging or promoting comments at their own discretion, most are so desperate to catch eyeballs wherever and however possible that they’re loathe to turn down any form of free content.

Later in the article, Daum writes:

Ugly commentary doesn’t just litter the internet, it infects it. It takes the act of reading an article or watching a video or listening to a podcast and turns it from a receptive experience into a reactive one.

“This is not a Wells Tower Interview” provides its reader with a purely “receptive experience.” It doesn’t send one flying quick-fingered or high-and-mighty to the keyboard. Instead, in its analog beauty, the zine functions as an intimate document about Jen Howard’s experience talking, and drinking, and self-reflexively thinking about talking and drinking, with Wells Tower. Its form partly resembles a personal essay, utilizing chapter marks to indicate Howard’s various digressions from the original assignment: an interview.

Yesterday, The Rumpus announced a new service called Letters in the Mail. A subscription guarantees letters from founder Stephen Elliott, Marc Maron, Jonathan Ames, Nick Flynn, Peter Orner, among others. In his “Daily Rumpus” e-mail, Elliott writes:

They’ll be letters, just like the kind you remember getting from your more creative friends twelve years ago or so. I’ll write some of them, longer letters that I would have sent as a Daily Rumpus maybe, but Letters In The Mail will not be available online. Ever. This is a totally print only publication [...] Nick Flynn has already agreed to write one, as well as Wendy MacNaughton. I’ve also asked Tao Lin, Lidia Yuknavitch, Emily Gould, Dave Eggers, and Steve Almond. Any of those people might say no, but I have a good feeling.

In that “I have a good feeling,” I sense not cheap nostalgia for a bygone era of print media and letter-sending, but an unwillingness to submit totally and completely to screens, and the vast wasteland — immeasurably vaster than television — of the Internet.

A large part of “This is not a Wells Tower Interview”s appeal is its limited availability. It won’t be filed invisibly away, archived, like every keystroke or piece of Internet writing. The owner of the zine enters a small community of dedicated, well-informed, and, it must be said, necessarily Internet-hooked (copies sold out from Hot Metal Bridge’s online site relatively quickly) readers. It resists existing solely as a novelty, or an arch example of neo-Ludditism, by offering incredibly original and high-quality content. It rejects the notion that “sleekness” is an indicator of quality, and instead fools the reader into believing that he could have designed the zine himself. This grateful reader, however, isn’t fooled; I’m simply awed by the wonderful work Jen Howard and Hot Metal Bridge have put into this special and inspiring product.

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Adam Larson Broder’s Pumpkin (2002): An Appreciation

Posted on October 5, 2011 by John Francisconi

[The following essay was conceived for an issue of The Latent Image. The issue's theme was "one-hit wonders."]

Sororities hardly need movies; they satirize themselves. To a cynic, the rituals, semi-religious spirit, and privileged lifestyle of Greek living seem self-parodic. A.O. Scott, in his review of writer/co-director Adam Larson Broder’s first, and to this day only, film, Pumpkin, refers to Alpha Omega Pi, the movie’s main sorority, as “pre-satirized,” and he’s right. One wants to describe the performances in Pumpkin as affected, exaggerative, but Broder could just as easily have meant for his film’s characters to appear as though they’re playing it straight.

The title character of Pumpkin (Hank Harris) is a wheelchair-bound competitor in the “Challenged Games,” who falls in love with Carolyn McDuffy (Christina Ricci), an upper-class, white co-ed, with her beach-blonde locks finely curled in waves at the ends, who has been assigned to help him train, as part of her sorority’s community service. The choice to work with “Challenged” athletes was made by head sister Julie (Marisa Coughlan) who wears a wide, contrived smile nearly as often as her eyes are open. As Julie sees it, if Alpha Omega Pi wants to win “Sorority of the Year” (S.O.Y.), thereby defeating the neighboring Tri Omegas, whose members Julie labels “mastodons,” noting that not one of the predominantly blonde sisters stands less than 5’8”, it would be in the their best interest to choose an easily pitiable charitable cause. The situation is complicated when Carolyn starts to return Pumpkin’s feelings of romantic affection, breaking the sorority’s rules of mentor-athlete interaction (both written and unwritten, contractual and social) and effectively severing ties with her all-American beau, Kent (Sam Ball).

Any condensed account of Pumpkin’s plot is bound to inspire tired sighs. The easily-offended movie-goer will possibly remark on the poor taste of playing disabled athletes’s physical and emotional struggles for cheap laughs. Comedy-lovers should rightly be wary of a premise that so easily could have resulted in an insultingly unfunny film. Thankfully, Pumpkin is not morally reprehensible. Nor is it devoid of smart humor, occasionally infused with high-minded ideas. It satirizes in mostly broad (sometimes deplorably broad), but sporadically nuanced strokes, and it’s well worth watching for its peculiarities, its flaws even, which in the end amount to a film like few others.

After a short and rather somber sequence, shot in close-up, of Pumpkin preparing to practice throwing discus, the opening credits roll against a vaguely dirge-like, string-laden tune that, especially later in the film, recalls Clint Mansell’s overblown compositions for the films of Darren Aronofsky. As the score broods in the scene in which Carolyn and Pumpkin are introduced, we’re led to believe that for Carolyn the horrors of working with this particular community are equal to those faced by the heroin-addicted characters from Requiem for A Dream. Yet the humor early on doesn’t suggest a tone of terror. Initially, we’re shown the artificiality of the sister’s interactions, in addition to their flagrant racism (Julie and her sisters search among the incoming rushees for the semester’s “diversity girls,” which include a Filipina with “really light skin and cute Caucasian features”) and absurdity (the rushees feast on “sausages of all ethnicities and sizes” at an outdoor event, following an inexplicable, erotically-charged hula dance performance by Carolyn and her fellow “jungle dancers” [?], tropical only in costume) at work within the system. In great satirical fashion, right away Pumpkin’s tone is a bit muddled, inflecting its audience’s response to the work with slight discomfort.

In many respects, Pumpkin strongly follows formula. When one learns that Carolyn has enrolled in a poetry workshop, one imagines that there will be a voice-over poetry recitation toward the film’s close. (There is.) As Pumpkin grows physically stronger, one wonders whether he’ll triumphantly win gold at the “Challenged Games.” (He does.) In its last twenty minutes, the movie seems rushing toward an ending that will suggest that, sometimes, happiness and love can be found in the most unlikely of places. (Uh-huh.)

But it’s the breaks from convention that make Pumpkin a significantly overlooked movie. Most memorably, in one sequence Carolyn arranges a blind date between Pumpkin and Cici (Melissa McCarthy), an overweight classmate of Carolyn’s who, when their professor offered the banal dictum that “poetry comes from what’s inside of you,” raised her hand to dryly, darkly, and hilariously ask, “What do you do if everything inside you is ugly?” We learn later that she workshopped a poem about “suffering and being alone.” Carolyn, with her boyfriend Kent, take Pumpkin and Cici to a sun-coated West Coast beach. Realizing the severity of Pumpkin’s condition (immobile, near-mute), Cici flees the date. An argument breaks out between Pumpkin and her boyfriend:

KENT

What were you thinking? You really hurt her feeling fixing her up with… him.

PUMPKIN

What about his feelings?

KENT

His feelings, too!

It’s an unexpectedly unsettling scene that’s played less for laughs than it is for unease. The ethical complexity of the blind date’s arrangement, and its emotional consequences, is a frankly refreshing feature to find in a collegiate-based comedy, as is the apparent irony, earlier in the film, when Julie chastises Carolyn for voicing her concern that associating with the “Challenged Athletes” might hurt the sorority’s image (clearly a self-serving judgment), without recognizing that she herself, in her relations with the handicapped athletes, is no less motivated by the guiding forces of personal achievement and popularity (S.O.Y.).

Another area of the film that smartly conflates humor with serious pain is Pumpkin’s relationship with his mother (Brenda Blethyn). Throughout the first half of the film, Mrs. Romanoff seems a considerate, positive influence on Pumpkin’s young adult life. Despite having a maid, one gathers that the Romanoffs rest on a far lower rung on the social ladder than the McDuffys. (There’s a great cut between Carolyn and her bigoted mother at a five-star restaurant, and Mrs. Romanoff with Pumpkin at McDonald’s.) As Pumpkin progresses, though, developing a strange connection with Carolyn and, miraculously, not only walking but, by the film’s finish, running, Mrs. Romanoff regresses. She develops a drinking problem, is constantly seen with an empty glass in hand, and encourages Pumpkin to not have such lofty, hopeful impressions of the world. She forbids Pumpkin from seeing Carolyn and implies that he shouldn’t expect much from life, a severe attitude that seems in direct opposition to his best interests and his happiness. Without physical or emotional inhibition, Pumpkin becomes a larger problem for Mrs. Romanoff; he becomes someone that needs fixing on even more levels than was initially the case, which she has difficulty coming to terms with.

After Carolyn realizes her true feelings for Pumpkin, the film flies gloriously off the rails. The second half of Pumpkin includes: a visit by Carolyn to the university’s psychologist, one of the movie’s best ancillary characters; a supposed suicide attempt, filmed in a lampooning cold blood light, wherein a character tries to overdose on several over-the-counter medications, such as Nyquil; an incredible fist-fight between Pumpkin and Kent, complete with crowd control; a truly spectacular car crash (followed by a scene that contains the film’s best gag); and, of course, the climactic “Challenged Games.”

Pumpkin is not a movie to make complete sense of as soon as the credits start to roll. It is an unusual synthesis of silliness and heart that fans and detractors alike will have trouble, initially, making sense of at all. Broder cleverly chose to designate his “Challenged” main character with a name that always doubles as a term of endearment, though no one – besides his mother, and later Carolyn – ever means it in that comforting sense. For the most part, though, one doesn’t think of viewing Pumpkin as an emotional experience. This is not one of the movie’s failures; in fact, it points to one of its strengths. So much of a viewer’s response to Pumpkin’s comedy and story depends on the viewer’s sense of morals, ethics, rightness and wrongness. The viewer’s active self-consciousness occasionally obstructs their emotional engagement with the film. It’s that rare comedy that will make you wonder when it’s OK to laugh, and what your response reflects about yourself, as a fan of film and as a person. It’s banal but truthful to remark that the happily-ever-after endings typified by films representative of the formula-based comedy genre are debased by critics for their unbelievability, their rejection of reality and its complexity, its disorderliness. Pumpkin’s ostensibly cheery ending is as open to this criticism as any mainstream “romantic comedy,” a label that could strangely but accurately apply to Broder’s independent film, but because its subject matter deals deliberately with certain social taboos, namely the profound social division between the mentally handicapped and those who self-righteously volunteer to offer them assistance, it inspires a follow-up question not often considered. That would never happen in real life, one thinks. But why not?

Critical reaction to Pumpkin upon its theatrical release was mixed. It had the bad fortune to be released on the heels of Legally Blonde, whose protagonist Carolyn was frequently unfavorably compared to, as well as Storytelling, a Todd Solondz feature which dealt with similar subject matter in, arguably, a more artful and focused manner. Peter Travers, in Rolling Stone, bemoaned Pumpkin’s admittedly laughable pat, tidy resolution, claiming that “complex characters” were reduced to “sitcom stooges,” calling the film an “opportunity missed.” In The Village Voice, Dennis Lim complained that most of the film “[took] aim at fish in a barrel (Greek-system cruelty, suburban hypocrisy),” but found some enjoyment in the “dimly reckless” direction the film took in its final act. Roger Ebert gave it a complimentary review (***1/2) and acknowledged its daring, self-mockery, and the commentary it seemed to make on “the political correctness of other movies in its campus genre.” At the box office, Pumpkin earned a meager $308,552. In its entire domestic run.

The most common criticism against the film is that it doesn’t know quite what it wants to be. Throughout the picture, you think that it’s satirizing the type of sentimental movie-of-the-week films shown on the Hallmark Network, and it is, but by the end, it seems to have morphed into one itself, with its unsurprising plot progression, and its staid visual aesthetic, aping, perhaps, the unremarkable style of made-for-TV productions. It appears to have finally become that which it set out to harshly critique. The decision to end Pumpkin on such a falsely clean and heartfelt note may have been made for a couple extratextual reasons. It might have been written as a safeguard against criticism from organizations like The Special Olympics. A bleaker ending might have also been avoided for practical purposes; a script with a more brutal ending may never have materialized into a feature film. While the ending that exists may leave one feeling that Broder didn’t push far enough, (e.g. that he didn’t justly punish his characters for their mercilessness), it manages to, in its obvious, knowing insincerity, bring a brilliant conclusion to Pumpkin’s story. There’s even a curious final line and fourth-wall-break that, if you find it effective at all, will inspire you to reconsider the entire film.

None of this is to suggest that Pumpkin is high art, nor that it’s a Great Film, only that it has a quiet intelligence that deserves wider recognition. It is simply an enjoyable comic send-up of social mobility and stigmas, about the differences between true and self-interested compassion, with a few very memorable moments. There’s a montage set to Belle and Sebastian’s “Stars of Track and Field” that may well have been the inspiration for the entire project, and fans of the twee band (as well as the group’s most vehement critics) will find the sequence exemplary of unforgettable filmmaking. Pumpkin pokes fun at the sorority system, indisputably an easy target, but it also seems to dismantle the myth of exceptionalism, suggesting that neither Carolyn nor Pumpkin are “special” in any significant way, if not physically then at least spiritually, humanistically. Pumpkin likely won’t change your worldview; it might not even make you reconsider the space kindness occupies in your heart. It may perhaps, though, make you wish that Broder, wherever off the grid he is today, would pick up his pen and set his satirizing sights on something, anything, again.

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Posted on September 20, 2011 by John Francisconi

I wrote about Tom Perrotta’s disappointing new novel, The Leftovers, at em Magazine.

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Posted on August 31, 2011 by John Francisconi

A brief article about what I’ve been reading lately is now available at em Magazine.

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Just Kids by Patti Smith

Posted on May 23, 2011 by John Francisconi

150 pages into her National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids, Patti Smith expresses an interest in alchemy. She recalls working on an illustrated poem called Alchemical Roll Call, a present for a friend. Just Kids is a work of alchemy, too, a personal account of her time spent in New York in the 1960s and 70s, focusing specifically on her incredible relationship/creative partnership with fellow artist and spirit Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith’s hasn’t been an easy life, especially during the time of her creative flowering. Financial worries, as well as social anxiety within the mythical art and poetry scenes, marked her young adulthood. But so did bliss. Smith somehow makes the reader feel attracted to the lifestyle she candidly describes, even though it’s filled with risks, occasionally deprivation. The only kind of security Smith ever knew wasn’t financial, but personal: the love and support of fellow artists, her family, and, most of all, Robert. She writes about him, about the world entire, with boundless compassion and love. Her writing makes a great case for the divine. Just Kids is told with great wisdom, hard-won, by one of America’s finest and truest voices. It’s a gift I can’t wait to open again and again.

Posted in Literature, Poetry | 1 Comment

Inferno (a poet’s novel) by Eileen Myles

Posted on May 22, 2011 by John Francisconi

In her autobiographical “poet’s novel,” Eileen Myles works toward an understanding of herself and her life’s experiences. She writes about the New York poetry scene in the 70s and 80s in great depth. Each paragraph, it seemed, had a new story to tell. Patti Smith, John Ashbery, and a host of other poets and personalities make cameos in Myles’s remembrances. The book addresses issues of human sexuality, the politics of poetry, and the role of community in the artist’s life. It’s this last point that seemed most important to me. So much of the book is concerned with Myles’s personal relationships with fellow poets. While the act of writing a poem demands solitude, the same is not necessarily true of the poet’s life, generally speaking. In fact, one gets the impression that the collective of artists who met at St. Mark’s Church to read and be read poetry needed each other to survive, artistically. They needed to feel like they all belonged to something. They needed confirmation that their beliefs about art and poetry and life were shared by others. Once this connection was made, art could flourish. It could spring forth from their conflicts and passions.

Inferno is lit with incredible feeling, as is befitting a “poet’s novel.” Myles zeroes in on certain emotional truths of moments from her life, and she frames them in metaphors, similies, images. It’s a charming idea, the idea of this book. Not only was Myles’s life her own, but now she’s contained it some. She’s cut it up and made it art. In choosing the novel form, Myles granted herself permission to invent where she saw fit, or where memory failed her. Her inspiration was her real life, but she had to re-contextualize it as a novel — albeit one most readers know to be based on true events. Did having to imagine her life as a story, a fiction at that, affect her re-telling? I’m certain it did.

The experience of writing Inferno must have been seriously self-reflective. It must have involved a rigorous questioning of the self. This perhaps explains why the novel sometimes feels like a wild bombardment of thoughts and ideas. The mind lacks discipline, and expression, as one of the book’s chapters recalls, naturally lacks but demands “form.” While Inferno, as a novel, does have a fairly well-defined form, split as it is into three large chunks meant to recall Dante’s epic poem, on a sentence-by-sentence level, the book lacks traditional structure. Thoughts sometimes appear only loosely related, unfiltered. There are word pairings peculiar to read outside the context of a poem. Words move hectically across the page. It has a strangely intimate effect. Inferno feels as though it arose from a place close to the soul. It might even be an articulation of the soul.

There’s a colloquial pacing to the book that makes for a unique reading experience. It actually feels like a conversation. It’s undoubtedly literary, but not in the ways most books are literary. It’s a story told with incredible confidence, humility, and honesty, the poet here never cheating herself, one imagines, for the sake of a sentence. A poet of Myles’s caliber, with her observational gifts and understanding of language and the way in which words bump against each other, doesn’t need to.

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Badlands (dir. Terrence Malick)

Posted on May 20, 2011 by John Francisconi

Inspired by David Edelstein’s thoughtful review of Tree of Life, I watched Terrence Malick’s first feature film, Badlands, tonight.

I have always considered Malick a deeply religious filmmaker. I think it has something to do with his use of the sun, particularly its early and dying light. Malick’s compositions overwhelm. His characters are more often than not secondary to the scenery. They catch light in the most arresting ways. The meditative quality of his images is probably what he’s most known for. Another of Malick’s defining characteristics as a filmmaker is his interest in violence, man’s defenselessness against it. He seems ardently reverential for the natural world, and fearful of man’s natural state of being. This, too, lends his films an almost biblical tone, similar to that of Cormac McCarthy’s writing.

On first viewing, what struck me most (besides, obviously, Malick’s imagery) was how greatly Badlands seemed inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. There’s one scene early in the film where Sheen and Spacek walk lazily down a suburban road. In style and appearance, it closely mirrors a famous sequence between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Herald Tribune-selling Jean Seberg. In Breathless, Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character stops contemplatively before a photograph of Humphrey Bogart, an icon of American cool. He runs a finger over his lips, and it’s like a prayer. Martin Sheen’s character in Badlands is told he resembles James Dean, a likeness he cultivates with his affectless swagger. Dean’s raw emotional expressiveness is absent from Sheen’s performance, though, which points to the two movies’s biggest similarity: the main characters of both Breathless and Badlands seem distrusting of their own feelings, and divorced from their emotional epicenters. Moments of intense violence, murders, are treated laconically. Futures don’t seem considered. “Fun” is prized over lasting connection. It’d be hedonistic if the characters seemed capable of pleasure.

Badlands is moving without being remotely personal, which is quite an achievement. Malick creates a visual language with the film, which becomes his primary means of expression as an artist. His observational camera forces you to pay close attention to the movie’s world, its physicality, and, in that first or last heavenly light, its spirituality.

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To-Read: Memoirs by Female Poets

Posted on May 19, 2011 by John Francisconi

The next three books I plan on reading are Inferno (a poet’s novel) by Eileen Myles, Lit by Mary Karr, and Just Kids by Patti Smith. Inferno is a genre-less “novel” that smudges the line between fact and fiction. (Many have noted the similarities between Inferno’s author, Eileen Myles, and its main character, Eileen Myles.)

All three books are critically-acclaimed. All three authors are poets. Not only will these books provide insight into the lives of their minds, the shapes and weight of their memories, they’ll do so in song!

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TRBC: Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

Posted on May 19, 2011 by John Francisconi

Like Daniel Orozco, Tayari Jones deserves respect for her willingness to take narrative risks. Her new novel, Silver Sparrow, follows the young lives of two sisters (Dana and Chaurisse), the bigamist father they share (James), and their respective mothers (Gwendolyn and Laverne). Bigamy isn’t something that much gets talked or written about in this country. It’s not a practice common enough to be part of the American dialogue. Exploring the implications of living the bigamist life, or, more accurately, the bigamist’s daughter’s life, Jones examines the emotional and social consequences of a lifestyle burdened by secrets and lies of omission.

The most remarkable part of Silver Sparrow is its pacing. The novel moves at a very steady rhythm, Jones’s words on the page like musical notes. While the subject matter could have easily inspired some over-the-top, Lifetime Original Movie-worthy writing, that’s mostly not the case with Silver Sparrow. There are scenes of melodrama, but they aren’t without subtlety, as Jones, in her writing style, often opts powerfully to suggest rather than spoon-feed. This is especially true of her fascinating characterization of James’s best friend, Raleigh.

One of Jones’s many accomplishments with Silver Sparrow has to do with persuasiveness. Her story isn’t one that many readers will be able to literally relate to. Jones’s gift for writing authentic-sounding dialogue, as well as her frequent appeals to universal human fears and desires, make Silver Sparrow an incredibly approachable and weirdly convincing book. Convincing in the sense that, chapter to chapter, one develops a sort of trust with the author, that no matter which strange, unfamiliar places her story goes, no matter what takes place, she will be able to eke out the essential truths of that particular moment. She’ll direct light on them. Reading Silver Sparrow, especially its suspenseful second half, is an eye- and heart-opening experience. I never doubted Jones. I think this is what it means to be “won over” by a book. To totally believe in it.

A bigamist’s love is necessarily boundless. Is it a greedy love? Perhaps. But more importantly, it’s a love that must be divided. A bigamist’s love is never total. To his secret daughter, Dana, James gives love that needs hiding. Identities, one’s idea of self-worth, are challenged, opportunities denied. Jones achingly chronicles a particular vision of a lifestyle that rejects convention and complicates ideas of love and family in its effort to enlarge them. The story of James Witherspoon and his life as a father split unevenly between his two families seems at times mythologically big, so extensive and rich are the Southern family histories Jones concocts for her characters. Her story’s themes, too (family, morality, truth) are literature’s oldest and biggest. High in spirit, heart, and grace, Silver Sparrow soars.

Posted in Literature, The Rumpus Book Club | Leave a comment

TRBC: Orientation and Other Stories by Daniel Orozco

Posted on May 17, 2011 by John Francisconi

I should read fiction only at night, before bed. I’ve found that reading mid-day, before meeting with a friend or answering to this or that responsibility, can take a small toll on my mental health. It is sometimes a challenge, navigating between my world and the worlds I visit in print. A good story, one rich in detail or suspense or heart, will, upon completion, invariably stay near the fore of my consciousness, distracting me from, among many other things, finding solutions to my real-life problems. I dedicate myself to the stories that I believe deserve my dedication. This means mulling over a story’s meaning(s), looking for consolation or comfort in an author’s words. It can feel like a job in the sense that, when I read a particularly moving or revelatory or flat-out beautiful story, I feel as though I’m giving myself up to something greater than myself. The mission of the job of reading, I think, has something to do with this cosmic awareness of one’s smallness. (Notice how Orientation’s cover features not one but a flurry of disembodied, multi-hued heads, each dependent on one another for support.) The self needs constant reminding that love, happiness, and security can’t ever really exist without the help of others: co-workers. The daily grind a kind of means to whichever ends one has set up for oneself: fulfillment, contentment, peace.

Daniel Orozco’s long-awaited story collection, Orientation, begins with its title story, which saw publication in 1995. So Orozco’s book, from its outset, demands some workerly dedication. Using second-person narration, Orozco walks the reader through their first day of employment at a comically transparent workplace, rich with life. “Rich with life” accurately describes all of the stories contained in Orientation. Each of Orozco’s characters is made real by his vivid and sharp characterizations, and they’re each burdened with pain, prettified by his prose.

The story collection is made up of moments, one after another, of startlingly poignant yet ostensibly ordinary interactions. A woman shamefully, self-consciously buys cookies for herself and only herself. Bridge painters change their attitudes toward the youngest crew member after he experiences trauma on the job, their every word or gesture toward him charged with new meaning, and profound sorrow for the kid’s lost innocence. In “Officers Weep,” Orozco shows his playful side, using a police blotter template to illustrate the private thoughts and feelings of his characters:

5600 Block, Fairvale Avenue. Traffic stop. Illegal U-turn. Officer [Shield #325] approaches vehicle. [...] Officer tucks errant lock behind ear, secures it in place with a readjustment of duty cap [...] Officer [Shield #647] observes intimate sequence from his position behind wheel of Patrol Unit. Officer enthralled. Officer ascertains the potential encroachment of love, maybe, into his cautious and lonely life. Officer swallows hard.

The collection’s final story (though it feels wrong calling it a single story), “Shakers,” is a devastating depiction and deconstruction of the effects wrought by a (minor) California earthquake.

Orozco took many years to complete Orientation. Its slimness (160 pages) would be dispiriting, if they weren’t 160 carefully-constructed pages that bear all but a physical mark of the love and hard work and serious thought that Orozco put into each and every line. They are the best 160 pages they could be. Time has been a friend to Orozco, who seems to have used the years of pre-publication to cut away the fat that fills too many story collections today. The stories where he goes out on a narrative limb (such as the formally daring “Officers Weep,” or “Somoza’s Dream,” a fictionalized [to what degree, one is unsure] account of the assassination of former Nicaraguan President “Tachito” Somoza Debayle) don’t fall under their own experimental weight. They are skillfully contained and whole. Orozco takes risks, and spins stories in directions new to me, as I’m confident they’ll be new to many readers. What makes Orientation so significant is that the forms Orozco’s stories take, while fresh and newly-imagined by its author, feel somehow already perfected. The nine stories in Orientation are stunning models of how to excitingly breathe life into a process (the telling of stories) that too often feels tapped of new possibilities. For this reason, Orientation is one of the most inspiring books I’ve read this year.

Posted in Literature, The Rumpus Book Club | 2 Comments

How To Be A Great Artist: A 16mm B/W Short

Posted on May 8, 2011 by John Francisconi

Here’s a short film I made this semester about mimesis, and the artist’s need to actively engage with the world.

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A Summer Pledge: Resisting The End

Posted on May 8, 2011 by John Francisconi

I’ve recently taken to mourning the loss of a culture that might never have existed.

Though Emerson College publishes one of the country’s finest literary journals (Ploughshares), in addition to boasting a fairly impressive Writing, Literature & Publishing program for undergraduates, I worry for the school’s reading/literary culture. I realize the obnoxiousness, the pomposity, of that last sentence. Who am I (a film student) to dare worry about a culture I don’t even have full authority to speak on? Because I don’t take WLP classes, or belong to WLP clubs, I can’t write with certainty about Emerson’s literary culture, as a whole. So instead here are some scattered thoughts, peppered with doubt, about the occasional sadness of reading solo.

While composing his famous Harper’s essay (“Why Bother?,” collected in How To Be Alone), Jonathan Franzen consulted Shirley Brice Heath, a linguistic anthropologist from Stanford. Heath identified for Franzen two kinds of readers: 1) those encouraged or molded to be readers by their parents or environment and 2) those who are social isolates. Both Franzen and I readily identify with the “social isolate” reader:

What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can’t share with the people around you — because it’s imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren’t present, they become your community. [...] You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world.” (77-78)

Immersion in a text can be an effective method of staving off the complications of social interactions. Yet reading itself is a conversation, between writer and reader. When done right, reading is as much about engagement as a dinner between friends. It’s a dialogue, something shared. Borders can be breached, beliefs broken or formed. It’s difficult to say anything innovative of literature’s power, but in his essay, Franzen proposes the rather novel idea that books can have a primarily social function, that they can truly and adequately serve as a person’s closest friends.

What I’ve realized is that I’ve spent an incredibly large portion of my life lately doing something (reading, mostly books printed by small presses) that rarely means the same thing to me as it does to someone else. To put it more clearly and solipsistically: it torments me when the books or stories or essays or poems that excite me fail to excite others. Call it a curse of our culture, that we sometimes value a person’s tastebuds more than their goodness or other, more imprtant qualities. A friend put it bluntly when he told me that it’s sick to expect other people to like the things you like. Like a secret too good to keep, though, a powerful piece of writing can sometimes seem as though it demands additional sets of eyes. It’s not hard to summarize a story to another person, to explore it with someone in that way, picking apart specific instances or themes or ideas from the piece, but it’s also not entirely satisfying.

I have a history of being a half-hearted Internet apologist. Keeping brief, I believe that the Internet has been something of a boon for literacy. I feel as though I would read less, were it not for the Internet. The way in which I read articles on the Internet, though, is different from the way in which I read a book or story. Books and stories demand a kind of single-minded attention that the Internet doesn’t at all foster. This single-minded attention to something, inanimate, color- and image-less, seems lacking at Emerson. Or, perhaps it exists, but only in the context of a classroom or an assignment. It doesn’t extend to life beyond academia. I would call very few of my friends (recreational) readers.

I have a utopian idea of a reader-friend, who will take the time to closely read whatever I thrust upon them, and consequently pick it apart with me, as a means of keeping the book or story or essay or poem alive. That’s why we talk (or used to talk) about these things: to keep them alive. The pleasure of reading, for me, is in the process. A well-turned sentence can change my day. But almost every time that I finish a book I’ve enjoyed, it feels like graduation. Closing a book’s cover is, more often than not, a goodbye, and though its memory might fuzzily linger a little while after, the ideas, plots, and sentences (the very same ones that have the capacity to turn a bad day good) usually get buried by new memories, new stories. “The End,” too often, is actually The End.

I know that physical communities exist, (in San Francisco, for example) whose members are bound to each other by their literary interests or ambitions. The Rumpus Book Club, with its lively Google Discussion Group, does virtually what I wish could be accomplished in reality (in Boston, at Emerson College, as a film student). Those who participate in the discussion have not only a dialogue with the author while they’re reading, but also with fellow readers, with an actual community of people who have all shared the experience of being told the same story. What each individual reader brings to and gets out of that shared experience, of course, is beautifully varied. My personal understanding of certain books, even certain passages of books, has changed because of my involvement with TRBC. Too often, I feel, I’m a passive reader. (For this my laziness, not any lack of community, is chiefly to blame.) As noted above, for me the pleasure’s in the process, so when I put a book down the place it had just previously occupied in my mind-space empties and refills, usually with waste: Facebook statuses, anonymous Internet commenters.

Poor Sap Publishing seems, in some small way, a solution to this problem of mine. Keeping a blog, and writing student-quality literary criticism, can keep a conversation going, a story alive. I intend on actively contributing to this site over the summer, writing about the stories that have/will change me, reset my ego or worldview or perspective. When I encounter something that inspires me, and I lack that utopian reader-friend, I’ll come here. (Is the Internet the closest I’ll come to having that utopian reader-friend?) Doing so, I believe I’ll worry less about my intractable memory and my historically poor retention skills. I’ll worry less, too, about connection. It will be a record of a culture private, or possibly only imagined, no more.

Posted in Literature, Solipsism | 1 Comment

The Gospel of Anarchy by Justin Taylor

Posted on February 19, 2011 by John Francisconi

What would Anarchy look like if we simply started calling it Faith?

To the best of my knowledge they haven’t yet been labeled. “They” are Justin Taylor, Joshua Cohen, Blake Butler, Mike Young, Zachary German, Tao Lin, Stephen Elliott, and others. I think of these talented contemporary writers as a collective of artists linked not by geography or, really, style, but by techno-proximity, their strong online/virtual presences. They write for similarly hip, erudite, and engaging websites (most notably HTMLGIANT and The Rumpus, pages that Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott has referred to as “sister sites”). One doesn’t have to wait for an author interview to learn their influences; an early excitement of reading Taylor’s fantastic new, debut novel, The Gospel of Anarchy, comes from reading the G.K. Chesterton epigraph. Seeing it, my mind traveled back to the fall of 2009, no doubt when Taylor was writing/finishing/polishing his novel for submission to his editor at Harper Perennial. On HTMLGIANT, he posted a series of Chesterton “Power Quotes” (the epigraph not among them). I didn’t know it at the time, but by reading a blog I was seeing the gears turning in the great machinery of creation, creativity. I was watching part of the process: an author attempting to understand and define his own work through the words of another. This special access granted by the Internet, along with their formidable talent, make this group of writers distinct from any previous.

The Gospel of Anarchy knocked me flat, and signals Taylor as a prominent voice of the unnamed movement referred to above. I had read most of Taylor’s short fiction from last year’s much-heralded collection, Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever, and liked them enough. His voice, though, carries exceptionally well, better even, for the novel-length.

The novel’s rambling story (and it does ramble, from an ontological investigation of 90s internet pornography to dumpster diving, orgies to politics, this character to that) surrounds a group of desperate, young, and possibly divinely-inspired anarchists scrounging about northern Florida, just before the turn of the twenty-first century. Drugs are ingested, sermons sermonized, relationships formed and anarchically destroyed. The story takes an abrupt turn after a talismanic journal, written by a revered punk-runaway, is unearthed. The titular “gospel” contains, mostly, ponderous rhetoricals, circular statements, and theses for “Anarchristianity” (“Joy is a better form of prayer than prayer, but prayer is also a better form of joy than joy.”) From there, Taylor explores the paradoxes of belief, the peaks of passion, and the rewards (or lack thereof) of living according to one’s wants.

The book’s acknowledgments page cites Joshua Cohen, whose tome Witz is recalled toward Gospel’s end, when it is suggested that one character has begun to think himself a savior. Cohen expressed his artistic ambition with his book’s epic length, “scope,” as Taylor’s characters often say. The Gospel of Anarchy is, at a compact 238 pages, ambitious, too, but Taylor simply lets his big themes dictate his book’s grandeur. His book actually seems to call for a narrowcasting of vision. His characters dabble in the supernatural so long they lose sight of the natural, physical world. As the novel’s stunning cover evokes, Taylor’s characters frequently don’t see the forest through the trees. What they see may actually be nothing at all.

If Taylor’s plot sounds jejune, as if Gospel is a book only a writer as young as Taylor is permitted to write (or worse, enjoy), one will still find something to like in his prose. Influenced in equal measure by Barry Hannah (“Nobody ever meant for here to be anyplace special”) and DFW (pitch-perfect dialogue), his style is a pleasure to read.

A criticism of Taylor’s novel that’s been expressed at least twice (1, 2) is that his narrative voice is lazily or ineffectively inconsistent. While the third-person shifts that infrequently occur are occasionally jarring, they have the delightful quality of a God-ly, holy distance from the novel’s action, as if the sections are being writ by God himself; not the Judeo-Christian God, but instead the deity whose infinite wisdom and eminence Taylor’s “drunkpunks” spend most of their time lionizing.

Taylor’s novel doesn’t seem to have made as big a splash as his story collection made last year. It should. It’s much better. While he wears his literary influences on the page perhaps a bit too clearly in both books (with Everything… his hero Donald Barthelme, with this novel a host of writers, including blurber Sam Lipsyte), Taylor’s talent is something to closely watch out for. (Besides, I’ve learned from the Internet that Taylor’s a huge fan of Harold Bloom’s criticism, and so is likely very much aware of the “anxiety of influence.”)

In a scene from The Gospel of Anarchy, one of Taylor’s Floridian punks rides her bike around a “solar walk,” a series of sculpted models arranged to resemble the solar system. She thinks: “The sculptures themselves are not especially impressive, but like so many other things in this world, their value is not in what they are so much as in what they represent, or better — point toward.” The Gospel of Anarchy is valuable for what it is, as well as what it points toward, and it’s one of the best books I’ve read in 2011.

Posted in Harper Perennial Reviews, Literature | Leave a comment

Winter Break Reading

Posted on January 16, 2011 by John Francisconi

Here are some brief, mostly inarticulate and/or incomplete thoughts about stories/books/writers I’ve read so far, this new year.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis: Story collections suit my attention span (as of late) well. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve read Davis’s first book of short-shorts (Break It Down) in full, as well as a few stories from her more recent collections. Few writers that I know of are capable of breaking your heart so quickly, sometimes in the space of a page, or a paragraph. Her longer stories especially, though, like “The Letter” and the “Break It Down,” have stuck with me. I’ll be taking this compact collection with me to film school, perhaps even for the purposes of a future project, should a story lend itself particularly well to adaptation.

Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories by Barry Hannah: Hannah’s sentences, I can tell already, are going to mess me up the way Wallace’s did when I first read him in high school. Hannah seems to have an innate gift for Gordon Lish’s technique of “consecution.” I haven’t read anyone to compare Hannah to. I’ve maybe listened to music that I could compare Hannah to. His early story “Love Too Long” ruined me. My only complaint about the writing on display in Long, Last, Happy is that sometimes the awe-inspiring sentences overwhelm the stories. But that’s a little like saying that sometimes fireworks overwhelm the stars.

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel: I read Hempel’s most well-known stories (“In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” “The Harvest”) and a smattering of others from throughout her career. More in line with Davis than Hannah (though Hempel, like Hannah, studied under Gordon Lish), her stories are very affecting, very feminine, big-hearted, and occasionally very brief. The fourth-wall-break that takes place in the middle of “The Harvest” is astonishing, and is as valuable a text, I believe, to short fiction writers as it is to memoirists. Or any writer, really. Looking forward to spending more time with her work.

A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan: One of the many pleasures of reading this novel is felt the moment one of its many characters utters the line, “Time is a goon.” Ah, of course. Egan’s book serves to remind the reader that time’s visit is sadly, immutably, unending. Patterned like an album, this cross between a story collection and a novel is well worth reading for its architecture alone: the relationship each chapter has to the one that precedes and follows it. Egan’s sentences, generally speaking, didn’t strike me as very strong, but this may have been because I had read the three micro-minded stylists above directly before starting in on Goon Squad. I’ll be revisiting certain stories from the book frequently, especially “Safari,” the brief and devastating “You (Plural),” and “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” or as it’s come to be known: “The Powerpoint Chapter.” This book aged me, I think, is the best compliment I can give to its force and power. It certainly made me feel old, as I closely identified with many of Egan’s characters, each attempting in their own way to impossibly reclaim their younger selves. In this regard, Goon Squad earns its right to use two Proust quotes for epigraphs.

Light Boxes by Shane Jones: This, I didn’t love. For reasons well articulated here, I just didn’t connect with this small mythological-novel. Interspersed throughout are nice images, which was apparently Jones’s intent (“[I] decided to write a few pages of something completely image based. I’m not sure what that means. I know I wanted to write something that kind of overloads the reader with images [...]“). They didn’t leave a deep impression, though, and I haven’t yet considered picking it up for a second reading, nor even a skimming. Similar to Sascha Fletcher’s when all our days are numbered marching bands will fill the street & we will not hear them because we will be upstairs in the clouds. There seems in both, simply, a dearth of ideas, or any substantial thoughts about the world. Images, no matter their delightfulness, only hold my attention for so long. A strong reliance on metaphor is sure to bore, being how I feel in rhyme.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson: Oh boy.

Markson emulates human consciousness very deftly with this book, maybe better than any writer I’ve read before. A long, discursive journal entry, essentially, recorded as a single log, no chapter breaks, no marked breaks of time at all, each separate thought (usually as short as one or two lines) seems simultaneously wildly random and completely reasonable. Such is the unpredictability of the mind, prone to jumping about from one thought to another, with often no apparent order. Arranged a little like Maggie Nelson’s bittersweet Bluets, and so a little like Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Just a lot of cool stuff going on here. Observations on referents and the difficulty of true and accurate expression, the trickiness of linguistics. There are historical anecdotes about artists and the Greek myths that were often their subjects. There are bountiful leitmotifs and refrains. All from one of the most self-regarding narrators I’ve ever encountered. In Markson’s mad diarist, Kate, there is a self-doubt, self-reproach, self-interrogation. More prevalent and more important, though, there is a constant interrogation of language.

Markson occasionally seems to write something purely for the pleasure or wit of its language, in an effort to draw the readers’s attention to a word or sound, such as his ostensibly meaningless reference to baseball player Stan Usual. Usual.

Kate bemoans her skittish, fragmented memory, frequently seeming apologetic to the reader for her disorganization. Her ceaseless desperation is what makes the book so heart-rending.

David Foster Wallace called Wittgenstein’s Mistress one of the “all-time best U.S. book about human loneliness.” And on that topic, which DFW was intimately familiar with, this book does deal outstandingly. Markson’s book reads, too, like a 240-page novelistic explication of the Wallace quote about good art creating a bridge between artist and observer/reader, thereby attenuating the existential loneliness of day-to-day living. (Wittgenstein’s Mistress’s narrator, ever the semantician, would be the first to point out that my last sentence didn’t make clear sense, seeing as how Markson’s novel was written well before DFW was quoted about good art attenuating existential loneliness.) You start to wonder if Kate’s madness was spurred because of loneliness, or whether the reverse was true. You wonder why it is that she spends so much of her log concerned with the half-remembered lives of artists, rather than her deceased son, or other family, or friends. In this sense, the book is very clearly about art-as-inocculation, from reality, from pain; art as consolation not for any loss, but for the stubborn permanence of memories, even those remembered only in pieces. Very, very powerful — exhaustingly so.

Posted in Literature | 1 Comment

Best of the Back-End (A Postscript)

Posted on January 4, 2011 by John Francisconi

Here’s an addendum to my Best of ’10 post: the year’s movies, albums, songs, and books I didn’t come around to seeing/hearing/reading/loving until over winter break. My late-year film picks aren’t very surprising, but hopefully the others will turn you on to some good stuff you may have missed or overlooked.

Movies: