Interviews
Offbeat with Andrew Gallix
by Jennifer Cuddy on Monday, June 2, 2008 03:32 pm
A self conscious 'movement' calling itself 'the Offbeat Generation' has been emerging in the blogosphere. This generation got its name from Brit-lit Andrew Gallix, founder and editor of 3:AM magazine, who has been described by underground writer, artist and activist Stewart Home as "the Breton of the post-punk generation, the Rimbaud of the Net, Beckett to my Joyce, and Trocchi to my Beckett."
Home also says: "Leaving myself aside (although I don't really see why I should), there aren't many writers I'd rate higher than Gallix" And who wouldn't agree? This is from Gallix's 'Forty Tiddly Winks':
Others can just doze off as soon as their heads hit the pillow. Not Tim, though. He needed knocking out flat by dint of drinking himself into a stupor. Otherwise, he was condemned to toss and turn till dawn at the thought of Time's winged chariot hurrying near: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang you're dead.
Instinctively, Tim would tune into the hypnotic ticking of his wristwatch on the bedside table. Like a clock in a crocodile, it grew closer by the minute with the implacable inevitability of tragedy until the din became truly deafening. Now, he just knocks back another stiff one and waits for the effect to kick in. The clockodial starts melting, Dali-style. The ticking gradually fades into a tiny, tinny background backbeat. Soon it is drowned out by Pomme's sonorous snoring. Forty tiddly winks.
Another major author in the Offbeat scene, and possibly the most revered, is Tony O'Neill. His debut novel 'Digging the Vein' is an accurate portrait of the life of heroin addiction, with its superficial relationships and endless searches for drugs. This book supports the idea that 'addicts tend to befriend other addicts', and the constant activity of the protagonist reflects someone desperately attempting to avoid introspection.
Mathew Coleman is another "Offbeat Generation" player who predominately writes erotic fiction. Yet his erotic stories are emotionless, misogynist and often downright vulgar (though he may take this to be a compliment.) His stories are more interesting when not alluding to sex, and he shows more depth in his 'Rants, to Self':
My greatest challenge in life is to try and let go, to pull off the many masks that I wear and to try and be who I am, to not be afraid anymore. This is perhaps one of the hardest things to conquer -- the self.
Joseph Ridgwell, the only true 'East Ender' of the Offbeat bunch, writes engaging stories that are strikingly real and down to earth. His stories manage to be edgy without straining to be so. Ridgwell's stories take you down the dark alleys of the underground, as only someone who has quite literally 'lived first and wrote later'. You can find Ridgwell's stories on his blog.
Ben Myers is my personal favorite of the Offbeats. His debut novel "The Book of Fuck' is a pleasure to read, uproariously funny, story-driven, and remarkably sensitive for a book with such a hard-core title:
I locked up and left the flat dressed for war: knee length overcoat, beanie hat, scarf wrapped around my head PLO-style, hooded top and a couple of jumpers. I had decided that i wasn't going to allow a British winter to get me this year, I was going to hoist up the portcullis, pull up the drawbridge and close myself off to the world and its cruel elements. No chinks in the armour, it's all about layers.
Myers is a pugilist poet, novelist, biographer, and frequent journalist for The Guardian'. You can view his writings on his blog, Ben Myers, Man of Letters.
The Offbeats often delve into the unpleasant experiences of the lower middle to lower classes; engaging their characters in 'street smart' behavior that supports their struggles to survive. The stories are mostly commonplace and unheroic, the fate of the characters the necessary result of the controlling force of society. Drugs, poverty, alcoholism, alienation, anger and nonconformity are recurrent themes.
I recently asked Andrew Gallix a few questions about the Offbeats, beginning with the definition of the generation.
Andrew: Offbeat writers are nonconcomformers who (at least in their work) feel alienated from mainstream publishing, which is increasingly dominated by marketing people, and often draw inspiration from non-literary material. In some ways, it's a continuation of the post-punk Blank Generation writers. Some Offbeats also have an offbeat, experimental style, but that's certainly not the case of all of us. It's not a movement with a manifesto. All of the Offbeats write in very different styles. What brought us together was our hostility to mainstream publishing."
Jennifer: Is there a criteria for inclusion or exclusion?
Andrew: It's not a club, so in theory anybody can be an Offbeat writer. There is no criteria as such. There are webzines out there made by people we don't know who claim to be Offbeat publications, which is great because it means that the movement is growing. In fact, some people who were very dismissive, and even hostile, at first, are now blowing the trumpets for the Offbeats. The original Offbeats coalesced around 3:AM Magazine, and in particular the events we organised in London. We started 3:AM in 2000. By 2003, we started organizing readings and concerts: The future Offbeats started coming along, but didn't know one another. By 2006 I became aware of the fact that all of these people needed to be brought together. The first thing we needed was a name so I started speaking of the 'Offbeat generation'.
Jennifer:I have to wonder if it is not the writers who reject the mainstream, and alienate themselves from society through their writing, rather then being rejected and alienated by it. Should we compare this movement to the Naturalist/Realist movement? Why are these periods being repeated in modern literature?
Andrew: Well, I would partially disagree. Some Offbeats like Tony O'Neill are writing in a naturalist tradition, but others like HP Tinker, Tom McCarthy, Steven Hall, or dare I say me, certainly aren't. The Offbeat scene covers many genres and styles.
Jennifer: Why do you feel that the marketing departments are dictating what is being published?
Andrew: Publishing houses used to support authors simply because they were good or interesting; that's almost unheard of these days. More and more books are being published, but alot of them aren't worth publishing (one thinks of Ecclesiastes: "Of the making of books there is no end"!). More and more books are being published, but there's less and less choice in book stores.
Jennifer: If there is a large market out there of writers who want to read ( and buy) more literary type books, then why are the marketing departments not seeing this as reflected in sales?
Andrew: I think they are, when they're ready to take a risk. Tom McCarthy's extraordinary success is a good illustration of this. The good writers are not being drowned out by the dross; there's just more choice out there. If a band creates its own label and releases a record, everybody applauds their sense of enterprise; when a writer does the same, some people cry out "vanity publishing"! However, writing is not all about marketing and money. Or at least it shouldn't be.
I do sense some contradictions in Gallix's responses. He proclaims that there are less and less choices out there due to the increase in books being published that are basically just crap; and then he says good writers are not being driven out by the dross! With this in mind, I have to wonder why the Offbeats are "feeling alienated from mainstream publishing, which is increasingly dominated by marketing people, and often draw inspiration from non-literary material." Are good writers being published, but no one is buying? Or are the Offbeats just not adhering to golden rule of thumb of book publishing: you have to write stories that people want to read, not just stories that you want to write?
In photo above: Andrew Gallix and Travis Jeppesen eating sushi.
Hettie Jones: Prisons and Poets
by Bill Ectric on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 07:10 pm
Branching Out, a joint project of Poets House and the Poetry Society of America, with funding from the National Endowment for Humanities, presents Hettie Jones on the Beat Poets, Tuesday, May 6 @ 6:00 PM.
In New York’s Greenwich Village from 1957 to 1963, poets Hettie Jones and her then-husband LeRoi Jones (who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka) published a magazine called Yugen, showcasing poetry and writings by Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen, and others. Hettie also started Totem Press, which published poets such as Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Frank O’Hara, and Edward Dorn.
Jones is currently involved with PEN American Center's Prison Writing Committee and teaches writing at the New School in New York. She also runs a writing workshop at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women at Bedford Hills. The Bedford Hills workshop has published two books of poetry, More In Than Out and Aliens At the Border. I purchased a used copy of Aliens At the Border and I agree with Bibi Wein of the PEN American Center when she says, “Each of these women has a unique voice, and the writing is luminous, surprisingly lyrical, tender, and hopeful as a candle in the dark.”
You can enter Shelby’s Coffee House from the street, or through the new Downtown Public Library in Jacksonville, Florida. I arrived early, hoping I could meet Hettie Jones in person before she took the podium. It paid off. Hettie arrived an hour before the event was scheduled to begin, accompanied by a guide from the city. I introduced myself and she invited me to sit at her table while library staff rearranged the chairs and tables to face the microphone.
“This is a beautiful library,” she said. “With a great children’s section.”
When I gave her a brief summary of the revitalization projects of downtown Jacksonville, Hettie’s first question was, “Has anyone been displaced by all the new construction?” I didn’t know for sure.
I said I was interested in her prison writing classes, and wanted to if she would be talking about that aspect of her work. Jones said she wasn’t really supposed to talk about anything but the Beats. “That’s what they brought me here for,” she said.
“Will you take questions from the audience later?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said.
“Well, then, if I raise my hand and ask about Bedford Correctional, they can’t blame you for talking about it.”
“True!” she said.
I apologized for being a pest, but I wanted to talk some more, in case we ran out of time later. Hettie is as cool as anyone I’ve ever met. “No, it’s quite all right,” she said. “I like talking about the prison workshop. It’s important to me. The thing about teaching in a correctional facility is, you accept people for what they want to become, not what they have done in the past. I got my start in 1988 when I got paid $50.00 to teach a prose workshop in Sing Sing. It went well, but the funding ran out. Soon after that, I got the chance to teach at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, and I did that for about a dozen years.”
“Is that through PEN?” I asked.
“No, PEN is different. I was elected to PEN in 1984, and because of my involvement with prisons, PEN insisted that I join their Prison Writing committee.”
By now, most of the chairs were filled and it was time for Hettie Jones to speak to the audience. She gave a brief introduction to the Beats, and spoke about several key players individually, reading a sample of each writer’s work.
“I first met Allen Ginsberg,” said Hettie, “When I was 24 years old. Allen needed to hear the Jewish prayer called the Kaddish, to help with the poem he was writing. He had never learned it. LeRoi brought me over to Allen’s place because I knew the Kaddish. And here you have a good picture of how the Beat movement mixed people from different backgrounds together. Here I was, a Jewish girl disowned by my parents for marrying a black man (LeRoi Jones), chanting the Kaddish to a homosexual poet who would later become a Buddhist!”
Speaking of Kerouac’s spontaneous prose, Hettie said that Jack didn’t say that writers shouldn’t rewrite or keep journals. The best thought may be the best thought, and you write that thought in a journal, but you still must “Edit, edit, edit,” said Hettie. “And that is a hard lesson to learn.”
Asked about LeRoi Jones’ relation to the other Beats, Hettie said, “The fact that he was a black man was less important than the fact that he and I were publishing people.”
Someone wanted to know about William S. Burroughs. Hettie said that Burroughs was a loner, didn’t hang out at parties, and was hard to know. “Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, although gay, still had female friends to whom they showed love. Burroughs seemed to have no use for women at all.”
I raised my hand and asked if there were any paid positions for teachers in prisons.
“Nobody wants to pay you to do it,” said Hettie. “You have to raise your own funding, that’s what I did. Prisons are like little fiefdoms. It’s hard to get in the door. Most prisons have an Office of Volunteer Services, and that would be the place to start.
“If you teach at a university, it’s a good antidote to go teach at a prison for a while. The poetry is as good, sometimes better, than poetry written elsewhere. It’s rewarding. You go in with the attitude of accepting people for what they want to become, not what they have done.”
The last questioner asked if their were any writers today that Hettie would compare to the Beats.
“We have one running for President,” she said, to a smattering of applause. I assumed she was talking about Barack Obama because of articles like this, and when I asked her later, she confirmed that I was correct.
“We have many good poets today,” Hettie continued, “And a lot of them are not coming from universities. In New York, we have the Bowery Poetry club run by Bob Holman, a dear friend of mine. We have the Internet. We have Hip Hop. We have Def Poetry on television.”
After the event, I had one more question. A friend of mine wanted to know if there was ever a rivalry between Hettie Jones and Diane De Prima. This was a sensitive subject because both women had been involved romantically with LeRoi Jones during the fifties.
I got up the nerve to ask.
“You should just tell your friend to read my book, How I Became Hettie Jones,” she said. “I tell all about it in the book.”
Hettie Jones, to me, is a reminder that we have to keep improving. An important question for fans and students of Beat Literature is, where do we go from here? We know about the restless few, post-World War II, seeing beyond suburban conformity, crafting fresh free forms of verse, and of course, looking for kicks. But a lot of young writers seem to ride Kerouac’s Mobius road in circles. Hettie Jones is moving forward.
Eight Questions With Linda Plaisted
by Jamelah Earle on Wednesday, May 7, 2008 03:12 pmAnd now for something completely different ...
Linda Plaisted is a visual artist whose work I've been following on Flickr for a few years now (full disclosure: sometimes Linda and I send each other neat stuff in the mail, and I have a few of her prints around my house). Lately, I've been thinking about storytelling and how it has a broader reach than writing alone, and while browsing some of Linda's images, I was struck time and again by the narrative quality of much of her work. Linda agreed to let me interview her about her art, and about being an artist, and her answers are interesting not only from a literary standpoint, but also from the perspective of being a person who is driven to create. Enjoy. -- Jamelah
Jamelah: Where do your ideas come from?
Linda: I am informed and inspired by literature, mythology, popular culture, history, current events, my personal life experiences, and by my roles as a woman and mother. I pull in bits and bytes of data and imagery by osmosis and allow these pieces to gestate in the back of my mind until larger thematic ideas emerge. I find I get the best results when I just allow ideas to develop organically without overthinking or trying to analyze the process or even the product.
Jamelah: I see a narrative quality to much of what you create. Do you see your work as a form of storytelling? What stories are you interested in telling?
Linda: I have been making up stories since I first found words and crayons to use as a small child. In addition to driving my mother crazy, I guess I have just always found a way to express something in whatever form was at hand, hence the origin of Manymuses Studio. I have always drawn, written, painted, sang, acted or otherwise found a narrative voice. I am interested now in telling the stories that often go un-noted in our world; the simple, small truths about being alive and aware. The subtle suggestion in the gesture of a woman's hand or the particular arch of a bare branch against the sky speak more to me about what is real than the constant barrage of "must-see" media.
Jamelah: While it's true that looking at images allows a lot of freedom of interpretation on the part of the viewer, do you have something specific in mind when you create that you hope viewers read into your final creations? How do you direct them? (Examples?)
Linda: I have learned that the lens through which I see is not the same one that others use to view and interpret the work. Though I do sometimes use archetypal symbolism or suggest an underlying message in my work, I don't otherwise like to direct viewers. So, while it pleases me when people "get it" or make a connection with a piece, I am happy to allow for other interpretations. I am sometimes surprised when people read into some of my images a "darker" meaning than I had intended, but perhaps the images act as a collective clearinghouse for the subconscious hobgoblins that might otherwise rattle their chains at midnight. Examples -- Four and Twenty Blackbirds series.
Jamelah: Describe your process.
Linda: I try to get out nearly every day to shoot a steady stream of images of my sights and surroundings. This is my daily practice and well of ideas that I draw upon just as a writer would make notes in a daily journal. I use this "stream-of-consciousness" archive as my starting point to express larger thematic ideas that pique my interest, but I also send myself out "on assignment" with specific project ideas in mind, whether it is shooting a model, a still life set up or a specific kind of landscape for an evolving theme. These images are my "rough drafts." I also shoot a large body of texture images, backgrounds, lighting effects, borders and incidental images to use in my illustrations for future reference. I then come back to this varied archive of photographs when inspiration strikes and layer many different images to create my finished narrative pieces. I like to work in series to expand on a concept and see an idea through to some sort of resolution.
Jamelah: How much of what you read finds its way into your work? How does it influence you?
Linda: I have always been an avid reader of everything from children's picture books to literary fiction and everything in between, so I'm sure what I read finds its way into my work, but it's not an immediate process. I tend to internalize stories and characters that might reappear months or even years later in some form. I just did a series based on Shakespeare's female characters, harking back to my years as an English major.
Jamelah: In looking at some of your series, particularly Girlie, Thy Name Is Woman and The Women, I see images that confront the notion that women -- their bodies, their names, their lives -- are objects to be acted upon by outside influences (scientists, writers, lovers). Do you see your work addressing the gap between this tradition and reality? How?
Linda: In my own quiet way I am certainly out to confront the rusty, ill-fitting notions of a woman's place in society. The honest history of the world's women has yet to be told. The story of women's lives are still not being told when history is written as the dates of wars and the men who won them. By heredity, by history and by simple biological necessity, our voices have been muted and the full spectrum of our powers reduced to black and white. Simone de Beauvoir wrote, "The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams" applies to so many of us, myself included. I have made it a personal goal of mine to show and tell more womens' stories in 2008 and going forward. The pretty pictures I make pay the way for the important work.
Jamelah: Whether it's writing or painting or photography (or some other art form), many people dream of being able to create for a living, and that's what you're doing. Do you have any advice for people who want to pursue an artistic path?
Linda: I spent nearly a decade giving my creativity away to others while not creating anything from my own heart or for my own soul. Your creativity is your gift. Share it. Do what you love and the universe will reward you.
Jamelah: Bonus: Anything else you'd like to add?
Linda: Always wear sunscreen. Seriously.
Photos -- October, Ecce Cor Meus, and Baptism -- copyright Linda Plaisted, used with permission. Manymuses.com.
Linda Plaisted is a visual artist whose work I've been following on Flickr for a few years now (full disclosure: sometimes Linda and I send each other neat stuff in the mail, and I have a few of her prints around my house). Lately, I've been thinking about storytelling and how it has a broader reach than writing alone, and while browsing some of Linda's images, I was struck time and again by the narrative quality of much of her work. Linda agreed to let me interview her about her art, and about being an artist, and her answers are interesting not only from a literary standpoint, but also from the perspective of being a person who is driven to create. Enjoy. -- Jamelah
Jamelah: Where do your ideas come from?
Linda: I am informed and inspired by literature, mythology, popular culture, history, current events, my personal life experiences, and by my roles as a woman and mother. I pull in bits and bytes of data and imagery by osmosis and allow these pieces to gestate in the back of my mind until larger thematic ideas emerge. I find I get the best results when I just allow ideas to develop organically without overthinking or trying to analyze the process or even the product.
Jamelah: I see a narrative quality to much of what you create. Do you see your work as a form of storytelling? What stories are you interested in telling?
Linda: I have been making up stories since I first found words and crayons to use as a small child. In addition to driving my mother crazy, I guess I have just always found a way to express something in whatever form was at hand, hence the origin of Manymuses Studio. I have always drawn, written, painted, sang, acted or otherwise found a narrative voice. I am interested now in telling the stories that often go un-noted in our world; the simple, small truths about being alive and aware. The subtle suggestion in the gesture of a woman's hand or the particular arch of a bare branch against the sky speak more to me about what is real than the constant barrage of "must-see" media.
Jamelah: While it's true that looking at images allows a lot of freedom of interpretation on the part of the viewer, do you have something specific in mind when you create that you hope viewers read into your final creations? How do you direct them? (Examples?)
Linda: I have learned that the lens through which I see is not the same one that others use to view and interpret the work. Though I do sometimes use archetypal symbolism or suggest an underlying message in my work, I don't otherwise like to direct viewers. So, while it pleases me when people "get it" or make a connection with a piece, I am happy to allow for other interpretations. I am sometimes surprised when people read into some of my images a "darker" meaning than I had intended, but perhaps the images act as a collective clearinghouse for the subconscious hobgoblins that might otherwise rattle their chains at midnight. Examples -- Four and Twenty Blackbirds series.
Jamelah: Describe your process.
Linda: I try to get out nearly every day to shoot a steady stream of images of my sights and surroundings. This is my daily practice and well of ideas that I draw upon just as a writer would make notes in a daily journal. I use this "stream-of-consciousness" archive as my starting point to express larger thematic ideas that pique my interest, but I also send myself out "on assignment" with specific project ideas in mind, whether it is shooting a model, a still life set up or a specific kind of landscape for an evolving theme. These images are my "rough drafts." I also shoot a large body of texture images, backgrounds, lighting effects, borders and incidental images to use in my illustrations for future reference. I then come back to this varied archive of photographs when inspiration strikes and layer many different images to create my finished narrative pieces. I like to work in series to expand on a concept and see an idea through to some sort of resolution.
Jamelah: How much of what you read finds its way into your work? How does it influence you?
Linda: I have always been an avid reader of everything from children's picture books to literary fiction and everything in between, so I'm sure what I read finds its way into my work, but it's not an immediate process. I tend to internalize stories and characters that might reappear months or even years later in some form. I just did a series based on Shakespeare's female characters, harking back to my years as an English major.
Jamelah: In looking at some of your series, particularly Girlie, Thy Name Is Woman and The Women, I see images that confront the notion that women -- their bodies, their names, their lives -- are objects to be acted upon by outside influences (scientists, writers, lovers). Do you see your work addressing the gap between this tradition and reality? How?
Linda: In my own quiet way I am certainly out to confront the rusty, ill-fitting notions of a woman's place in society. The honest history of the world's women has yet to be told. The story of women's lives are still not being told when history is written as the dates of wars and the men who won them. By heredity, by history and by simple biological necessity, our voices have been muted and the full spectrum of our powers reduced to black and white. Simone de Beauvoir wrote, "The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams" applies to so many of us, myself included. I have made it a personal goal of mine to show and tell more womens' stories in 2008 and going forward. The pretty pictures I make pay the way for the important work.
Jamelah: Whether it's writing or painting or photography (or some other art form), many people dream of being able to create for a living, and that's what you're doing. Do you have any advice for people who want to pursue an artistic path?
Linda: I spent nearly a decade giving my creativity away to others while not creating anything from my own heart or for my own soul. Your creativity is your gift. Share it. Do what you love and the universe will reward you.
Jamelah: Bonus: Anything else you'd like to add?
Linda: Always wear sunscreen. Seriously.
Photos -- October, Ecce Cor Meus, and Baptism -- copyright Linda Plaisted, used with permission. Manymuses.com.
A Philosophical Chat with James Morrow
by Bill Ectric on Monday, May 5, 2008 11:05 pm
As teenagers, James Morrow and his friends made short 8mm movies based on Coleridge and Poe stories. Morrow went on to earn a master's degree from Harvard University, then published his first novel, The Wine of Violence, in 1981. His latest, The Philosopher’s Apprentice, prompted the Library Journal to compare Morrow to enlightenment luminary Denis Diderot, “A man who believed that literature and philosophy marched hand in hand and who was not afraid to discuss serious matters in a comic tone.”
For his numerous books written between 1981 and 2008, Morrow has received the World Fantasy Award (twice), the Nebula Award (twice), the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire (once), and the 2005 Prix Utopia at the Utopiales SF Festival in Nantes, France.
Morrow and I discussed his latest two novels. The Last Witchfinder concerns a brave 18th century woman who teams up with Ben Franklin to discredit her zealous father’s persecution of witches. Philosopher’s Apprentice is the fantastical tale of a graduate student hired to teach morality to a teenage girl with a blank slate for a conscience.
Bill: You once said it took eight years to develop The Last Witchfinder. When you are writing a book, do you ever worry that someone else will have a similar idea and “beat you to the punch”? Is there a battle between taking your time to get it right vs. getting it published before someone else does steals your thunder, like Tesla vs. Marconi?
James: For me, the greatest pleasure of novel-writing is living inside the same fictive world for several years running, playing with its possibilities. The composition process normally finds me drawing inspiration from the cultural mood of the moment, though by the time the book actually sees print that same cultural mood will have shifted. I can easily imagine some posthumous biographer noting that James Morrow always managed to be slightly out of phase with the zeitgeist.
My satire on the Reagan-era arms race, This Is the Way the World Ends, followed in the wake of a half-dozen Armageddon novels. That’s probably one reason my publisher released the novel with no particular fanfare. I like to think my treatment of nuclear war was unique, but Henry Holt never figured out how to make booksellers understand what set This Is the Way the World Ends apart from Riddley Walker or The Postman or Warday. Had the manuscript landed on my editor’s desk a year earlier, it would almost certainly have generated more in-house excitement.
A similar fate befell The Last Witchfinder, which features an unusual fictive take on Benjamin Franklin. While I was writing that novel, the country in general and Philadelphia in particular were gearing up for a Franklin tricentennial -- he was born in 1706 -- and I had high hopes that these celebrations would offer me some promotional opportunities. Alas, by the time the book appeared, late in 2006, Philadelphia had been “Ben Franklined out,” or so my publicist was told by an impresario who’d spent the past two and a half years organizing Franklin festivities throughout the city.
Presently I’m writing an historical novel about Charles Darwin, who’s been in the news lately. I’m thinking of both the landmark “intelligent design” court case in Dover, Pennsylvania, and the Darwin exhibit that’s been traveling around among the major natural history museums. Once again, I’ll probably miss the critical period for capitalizing on the media attention being accorded my chosen subject. The Darwin brouhaha will peak early next year, in honor of his 200th birthday, and yet my novel won’t be ready until 2010.
Of course, any serious novel is intended to live outside its time, and the writer who rushes to capitalize on the zeitgeist is probably committing artistic suicide. For whatever reasons, This Is the Way the World Ends remains in print, and it’s still taught in several college classes, to students who weren’t even alive when Reagan was rattling his nuclear saber, so in a sense I’m having the last laugh. And I believe that both The Last Witchfinder and the Darwin novel (tentatively titled Galapagos Regained) touch on universal themes, so in theory they’ll attract future generations of readers who won’t especially care how popular these books were when first published.
Bill: You mentioned on your blog that The Philosopher’s Apprentice is, among other things, your homage to Frankenstein, both Mary Shelley’s original novel and the various movies from Universal Studios and Hammer Films. Which of the Hammer Frankenstein films is your favorite and why?
James: When I read your question, Bill, my answer was immediate and instinctual -- and yet I’m prepared to defend it. The Revenge of Frankenstein is not as scary as The Curse of Frankenstein, as cleverly plotted as Frankenstein Created Woman, or as emotionally wrenching as Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. And yet it has a cadaverous elegance not found elsewhere in the cycle. Director Terence Fisher and writer Jimmy Sangster suffused The Revenge of Frankenstein with a graphic sense of the unhallowed Nietzschean bravado, at once diabolical and darkly glamorous, through which the medical profession established itself in the Regency and Victorian periods. This is a wholly subjective reaction, of course, doubtless informed by the fact that I first saw The Revenge of Frankensteinwhen I was only thirteen, an age when horror movies are especially resonant.
Bill: In his book The Art of the Novel Milan Kundera speaks of “the truth that is to be discovered,” by which he means that, beyond a writer’s conscious realization of their novel’s theme, there is also, as Kundera says, “The poem hidden somewhere behind.” Kundera calls this discovering of truth in one’s own novel “the dazzlement.” Do you experience this dazzlement when you write a book? That is, of discovering a theme or a variation on your intended theme, which you didn’t anticipate?
James: I regard most of my novels as “thought experiments,” analogous to the Gedanken calculations --unstageable demonstrations conducted entirely within the confines of one’s skull -- routinely performed by physicists, cosmologists, and philosophers. It’s never enough simply to ask “What if?” You must actually run the thought experiment. You need to write the damn book. And that usually entails being surprised by the outcome.
No matter how carefully I outline a novel, it will normally get away from me during the composition process -- and that is all to the good. If there’s “dazzlement” in the writer, then there will probably be “dazzlement” in the reader. Indeed, the only reason I go to all the trouble of writing fiction is the expectation of discovering some hidden but astonishing potential in the themes and premises with which I’m experimenting.
One of my favorite James Morrow novels, Blameless in Abaddon, finds the hero, Martin Candle, trekking though the brain of a comatose Supreme Being in search of counter-arguments to the great theodicies, a theodicy being a rational explanation for God’s apparent indifference to human suffering. Martin needs these anti-theodicies so he can successfully prosecute the Almighty before the World Court in the Hague. Strangely enough, God proves perfectly willing to make the case for his own depravity. And as I was writing those scenes, I said to myself, “Of course, wow, damn, yes, that’s exactly what a Supreme Being would do. This is God, after all, not some cleric or politician or demagogue. God’s not out to defend his reputation. God’s out to be God.”
The Last Witchfinder involved a similar moment of dazzlement during its gestation. When I outlined the plot, I knew that my heroine, Jennet Stearne, would write a book that effectively critiques “the demon hypothesis.” But I didn’t realize that, to advertise her argument, Jennet would end up posing as a witch and arranging to be put on trial for Satanism in colonial Philadelphia. I was delighted when I stumbled on that idea, because it elevated Jennet to truly heroic stature.
Kundera has evidently articulated all this better than I could. Thank you, Bill, for drawing my attention to his insight.
Bill: We can both thank Jamelah Earle for hipping us to Kundera’s book on novel writing.
Besides the 8mm movies you made in high school, you also made some 16mm films as a young adult. Could you tell me about those films?
James: Most of these films were sponsored efforts celebrating the Philadelphia Cooperative Schools Summer Program, which ran for four successive summers between 1966 and 1969. The idea was to bring together adolescents and pre-adolescents from the public, private, and parochial schools -- students, in other words, whose formal educations had heretofore allowed them to interact only with people from similar backgrounds. Nobody was claiming that the racial, economic, and religious diversity of the PCSSP students would prove enlightening per se, but the program’s directors did believe that if you led such a heterogeneous group through a carefully structured humanistic curriculum, they would learn as much from each other as from the formal lessons. I would describe the movies as poetic documentaries that attempted to show how the students grew in self-knowledge over the course of each summer. You’ll find vestiges of my PCSSP experience in The Philosopher’s Apprentice.
But I also made my own independent films during and after this period. The one that springs to mind is a comedy called A Political Cartoon, which I produced with two of my best friends from high school, Joe Adamson and Dave Stone. I suppose this 16mm short foreshadows some of the more outrageous social satire found in This Is the Way the World Ends and The Philosopher’s Apprentice, though it’s a much gentler, less sardonic endeavor than those novels. A Political Cartoon combines live action with animation to tell the story of Peter President, a cartoon character who gets elected to the highest office in the land. It was ultimately released on a VHS anthology from Kino on Video called Cartoongate!, and it’s easily available via various dealers at Amazon.com. By the way, both Joe Adamson and Dave Stone went on to success in Hollywood. Joe won an Emmy for his PBS documentary called W.C. Fields Straight Up, and Dave received an Oscar for cutting the sound on Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula.
Bill: Do you think The Philosopher's Apprentice fits into the “cyberpunk” category? Do any of your other books fit into the cyberpunk category?
James: I must confess to a certain ambivalence toward cyberpunk. On the one hand, the movement was certainly a breath of ... not fresh air, exactly -- gritty air, I guess. Gibson, Sterling, Shirley, Cadigan, and company recognized that, for most citizens on planet Earth, the future was not going to be a gleaming utopia of domed arcadias linked by hyper-efficient monorail systems, nor would it be characterized by off-the-shelf jackbooted dystopias. Something else lay in store for us, something urban, grungy, corporate, computer-driven, world-weary, hardbitten, and alluringly noirish. The cyperpunk vision was a real breakthrough, and I salute it.
That said, I have always been much more in the romantic-rationalist camp. It’s difficult to find much affirmation in cyberpunk. I felt that the movement contained the seeds of its own enervation -- a kind of unearned cynicism verging on adolescent whining. Nihilism, I find, is often sentimentality by other means. Of course, I’m as vulnerable as anyone to the glamour of the abyss. Several critics have argued that my second novel, The Continent of Lies, features some Gibsonesque conceits, most especially in its use of what we would now call virtual reality. As for The Philosopher’s Apprentice, while it indeed contains some hi-tech cyberpunkian imagery -- the ontogenerator is the most conspicuous example -- I would say that its sensibility is ultimately humanistic.
Bill: In The Last Witchfinder, when Jennet finds herself surrounded by bottles displaying embryos with birth defects, in the wagon of Dr. Cavendish, it made me think of being down among the unfortunate “unblessed” people, those who would tell the Church, “We are human, too.” It reminded me of the story of when the Buddha left his safe kingdom of his father and walked among the common people. It also reminded me of the bottled people in The Bride of Frankenstein, although I know it’s not the same idea.
James: I’ve always been wary of Christ figures in fiction -- it’s too damn easy to create parallels between your protagonist and the hero of the Gospels. Much as I love John Irving’s work, I really thought he dropped the ball with A Prayer for Owen Meany. (Beginning with that inversely symbolic name
An Interview with Matthew Eck
by Levi Asher on Monday, December 10, 2007 02:33 pm
The Litblog Co-op has chosen Matthew Eck's debut novel The Farther Shore as the Winter 2007 READ THIS! Selection. This war story by a young veteran of US actions in Haiti and Somalia is one of the most impressive books I've read this year, and I was happy to have a chance to interview the author via email last week.
Levi: Your novel's main character joined the US military to pay for college. Why did you join the US military?
Matthew: I joined the army because I always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I'd been reading Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O'Brien and Ernest Hemingway and it just seemed like the right thing to do to gather life experience and meaning and understanding all those cliches. But the GI Bill was a huge attraction as well. And I knew that I wanted to go to college one day as well. I actually enlisted for four years because I wanted as much of the GI Bill as I could get, and my reasoning at the time was this: high school went by pretty fast. I also joined because I never thought at 18 that I'd be in a war. At 18 death seems so far away. I felt invincible. Somalia was one long memento mori.
Levi: I hope your real-life experience in Somalia was not as harrowing as that depicted in The Farther Shore. But would you mind sharing some details about what you personally experienced when engaged in actions overseas?
Matthew: I appreciate that "hope". It wasn't as harrowing as that depicted in the novel. But after I wrote that book I felt like I owned Joshua Stantz's experience. These days the line between the reality of my war and the reality of Joshua's war runs a bit blurry.
We were mortared a lot in Somalia. It was surreal early on. I worked during the night most of the time I was in Somalia so it was rare that I was scared out of sleep.
I was telling a story to a friend about the war while I was working on my novel. I was telling this story about a mutual friend and watching as mortars landed all around. About how I remembered watching as bright orange bits of burning shrapnel sprayed about him. And my friend stopped me and said, "That was you. That wasn't Zoldak. That was you." It all came back and my heart just dropped. I remembered it all.
The story goes thus:
"Zoldak and I were working at the "hot point" when mortars started landing in the camp and we jumped out of our Humvee and hid in a trench that ran the entire length of the runway. When the mortaring stopped we were walking back to the Humvee when I noticed that I didn't have my radio on me. I was walking back to get it when my friend yelled at me and I turned around to see this luminous green round flying at me. I took off running for the trench and it was like I was underwater, the world was going so slow. I dove into the ditch at about the same time as this green little glowing round started its decent into the same trench and only a few feet away. I remember vividly thinking in that moment of Wile E. Coyote. I remember thinking, this is un-fucking real. This thing just followed me down here. It landed a few feet away and bounced a couple of times and just sat there glowing. It wasn't a mortar it was a flare. And I just sat there staring at it. I was shaking as I climbed out of the trench, again forgetting the radio. I turned to jump back down in the trench for the radio when three mortars landed in quick succession around me. That orange flash, "the big spooky," someone called it, all that bright orange burning shrapnel flying about me. When the mortaring was over I slowly crawled back down into the trench and just sat there until my friend walked over. That moment led to the line in the novel about how you never know where to stand in a war. I should have known to get out of there when I saw that green flare. It was someone gauging the distance for the mortar rounds. They were spotting us."
In the end the radio was destroyed and the Army seriously considered making me pay for it because it wasn't on me at the time. That radio did me a huge favor.
Levi: How did you become a writer, and which writers and books have inspired you the most?
Matthew: Obviously the writers that influenced me the most with this novel are all those creative writing instructors I've had over the years. Kevin Canty and Deirdre McNamer were highly inspirational when it came to the writing of the novel. I took a novel workshop with each of them at the University of Montana and they helped me tremendously. I really learned the workings of a novel from the two of them. Kevin was reading my stories and knew I was writing about war and he bought me a book for my 30th birthday, a copy of The Red Cavalry Stories by Isaac Babel. Kevin told me that if I wanted to write about the absurdity of war I needed to read Babel. He was right. But most of what I learned from Kevin and Dee, I learned from their writing.
I read James Crumley's One to Count Cadence right before I moved to Montana for my MFA. That's one of the most beautiful novels about war I've ever read. Then one afternoon in Missoula I'm drinking at a bar and in walks James Crumley. I couldn't muster the courage to go over and tell him how much that book meant to me, then my wife just walked over and introduced herself. I walked over and Jim and I hit it off immediately. That man taught me a lot about writing and being a writer over Coors at Charlie B's in Missoula. I heard him say two of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. Right after his great friend James Welch died, I walked into Charlie's and he was sitting at the end of the bar by himself. I sat down and I could see that he'd spent some time crying that day. Then he said about the loss of one of his greatest friends, "I feel like I've been gut-shot and left alone to die on a ridge."
The other is, and he said this to me just last night, he was telling me that he needs heart surgery soon. And he was explaining how he'll have to travel to Seattle for the surgery because the heart center in Missoula just doesn't have the right equipment. He said, "The irony is that my heart's too big." Jim has one of the greatest smiles ever. Big as a bear.
The other big one: Walter Kirn. Walter is a great friend. I first met him in a workshop he was teaching. People were offering up advice for a story when Walter stopped them and said, "You don't need a workshop, you need an editor." Walter asked to look at a draft of my novel. A week later he said he wanted to mail it to his editor at Doubleday. In my eyes Walter is a huge reason The Farther Shore was published. Walter was championing me when I needed it the most. And just like others, I learned even more from Walter when I started reading his books closer. All of his books are gorgeous. The man's a fucking genius. Let's just leave it at that.
Shakespeare and Dickens. I can't get enough of them. It's a wonderful moment when you connect with either of them, when you see the beauty and the anguish there.
The biggest influence for my next book has been my editor at Milkweed, Daniel Slager. Watching him edit The Farther Shore was absolutely beautiful. He found the heart of the novel and edited it true. Watching him help my novel and my writing taught me to appreciate the editor and writer relationship.
Levi: There have been several recent novels about Americans engaged in foreign wars, but yours seems to me the most minimalist, and the most intensely focused of all those I've read. Was this a desired effect? Does "stripped down" prose come naturally to you, or did you have to work hard to achieve this?
Matthew: I always knew that the novel had to be immediate and intense in order for the audience to go through all of the trials and tribulations with Stantz. I'd write those sentences out as long as possible and then edit them down. That's just Stantz's voice.
I like to write first paragraphs over and over. I like discovering the voice the novel needs. I like finding that key.
Levi: I could find very few explicit literary references in The Farther Shore, so I was pleased and surprised when one of your characters suddenly spoke about a classic writer who had been shocked on his wedding night to discover that women had pubic hair. What was Pre-Raphaelite John Ruskin, of all people, doing in Somalia? Do the Pre-Raphaelites have special significance to you, or to this story?
Matthew: That's great. When I was in Haiti an ex-girlfriend sent me some odd little book about sex and that was in there. You caught me on that one. The Pre-Raphaelites, I had to look at that one to spell it out. Perfect. One of the best questions ever.
I was glad to make Matthew laugh, but I still insist there is something about his book (tragic, strange, intense) that resonates well with the Pre-Raphaelite allusion. Please check back with the Litblog Co-op this week for much more coverage of Eck's fine new novel.'
Talking Green Publishing with Raz Godelnik
by Levi Asher on Thursday, November 22, 2007 12:17 pm
Eco-Libris is a company created to help the book publishing industry adopt more environmentally aware practices. Activities include tree plantings in collaboration with organizations like RIPPLE Africa in countries like Malawi (shown in photo). I recently got a chance to ask the company's CEO, Raz Godelnik, a few questions.
Q: How did you first become involved in environmental causes, and how did you become involved in the specific cause behind Eco-Libris?
Raz: After I completed my MBA in Tel Aviv University, I worked as an economist and in several business development positions in high-tech and advertising industries. Following this, I served as an Advisor to Israel’s Minister of the Interior and worked on policy issues relating to foreign workers, refugees and citizenship which introduced him to social causes. It was very different from being an economist or in the high-tech industry. I felt like I was making a difference and doing something for the benefit of many groups that were, for lack of a better term, weaker groups in society. When I finished working at the ministry, I was determined to do something that would make a difference.
My interest in hemp and other environmental issues brought me to Hemper Jeans, an eco-fashion venture I co-founded that makes fashionable jeans from hemp, a more sustainable alternative to cotton. I also started writing about green business for a newspaper in Israel.
The idea of Eco-Libris started when I began thinking about paper and the environmental impacts of its production. I realized that it might take a while to get to the point where eco-friendly alternatives (from the use of recycled paper to e-books) will replace virgin paper. Then, I talked with some friends about the idea of giving people the opportunity to balance out their paper consumption by planting trees and received good feedback about it.
The decision to focus on books was made after learning that only about 5% of the paper used for printing books is made of recycled paper and because most books don’t have yet an online eco-friendly alternative (e-book), like magazines and newspapers. So, if you want a book, you usually can’t avoid purchasing the paper-made version, unless you go to the library or get it from websites like BookCrossing or BookMooch, which are all excellent choices. You also can’t tell people to stop reading books, so it seemed to me only natural to give book lovers a new alternative to make their reading habit greener -- planting trees for the books they read.
Q: I'm surprised to read on your website that even the "greenest" publishing companies don't often use recycled paper. What are the hurdles to overcome before this changes? Is there a visible difference when a book is printed on recycled paper that readers might resist? Or is it a matter of cost, or something else?
Raz: I know that it is common to think that the main problem is with the price, supply or quality of recycled paper, but I think this is not the main barrier -- recycled paper has achieved today a very high quality and it meets the same technical specifications and performs as well or even better in some cases than virgin paper. The cost is also more competitive than ever and even capacity is not an issue. Just look at the last Harry Potter that is a bestseller and was printed with partially or fully recycled paper worldwide.
Harry Potter is in my opinion a good example that this is mostly about awareness, will to make a change, vision and leadership. I definitely hope to see publishers follow this example and act to become greener. We also aim to become a strong voice of all the eco-conscious readers out there. I am positive that if publishers will know that many readers care about this issue, it will also contribute to move them towards printing books in an eco-friendly manner.
Q: Does Eco-Libris interact directly with publishing companies about these issues, and if so, at what level? What kind of response have you gotten from the publishing industry to your initiatives?
Raz: Yes, we certainly look to work with anyone involved in the book publishing industry, including bookstores, writers and publishers. We already correspond with few publishers and we receive very good feedbacks. There is more awareness to the impacts of printing books on the environment and to the need to make things differently. Our goal is to assist publishers to move in the green direction by balancing out books printed on virgin paper and increasing the awareness to the need to use more recycled paper. I see Eco-Libris as the first step towards sustainable reading and for many publishers looking to start making these steps, we're a perfect fit.
Q: To help put your company's mission into perspective, can you describe how the ecological impact of book publishing compares with, say, the ecological impact of newspapers and magazines, or (more broadly) of other industries more commonly discussed as environmental concerns, such as the automotive industry, the construction industry, etc.?
Raz: Deforestation is a significant contributor to climate change. If you look at the last IPCC report that was published this month, you can see that it is responsible for 17.4% of GHG emissions. Only energy supply and industry contribute more. You asked about cars - well, transport contributes 13.1%. Forests have also other important ecological functions, and anyone who is interested to learn more about this issue, the damages created by deforestation and the need in reforestation is invited to check out the Billion Tree Campaign of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
The paper industry on all its uses (books, newspapers, catalogs, etc.) is a large consumer of the trees cut down worldwide. Just one example - 65% of the trees cut down in the Boreal Forest in Canada are used to make paper - 80% of it goes to U.S. consumers.
Q: I've noticed that your website doesn't address the ecological difference between hardcover and paperback book publishing. Also, what about the industry's "peculiar tradition" of printing and shipping huge runs of potential bestsellers, which are more often than not shipped back and pulped? Shouldn't we examine whether or not publishers like Random House are printing (and then destroying) far more books than they can sell before we call them "green"?
Raz: There are many issues related to the book publishing industry that have environmental impacts. Eco-Libris is focused on the usage of virgin paper for printing as we see it as the most significant issue. It doesn't mean that improvements shouldn't be made in regards with other problems like the current wasteful working models. On the contrary. Still, I think you would agree with me that the materials books are made from are the basic layer of the industry -- take care of it and you got yourself an healthy foundation that can guide to more changes on the way to making this industry eventually environmental friendly.
An Interview with Katharine Weber
by Levi Asher on Monday, August 13, 2007 03:09 pmKatharine Weber's Triangle is a Litblog Coop Summer 2007 Read This! Nominee. I had a chance to ask Katharine a few questions about this enigmatic novel:
Levi: Your grandmother once worked in the Triangle factory. Can you tell us more about her, and about the way you heard about the Triangle tragedy when you were growing up?
Katharine: I cannot recall my grandmother ever mentioning the Triangle to me. She died when I was twelve. But my father talked about her work at the Triangle quite often, and about the impressive trajectory of her life from there, her last job in the garment sweatshops, finishing buttonholes at the Triangle in 1909. She left that job because she was pregnant with my father. Pauline Gottesfeld Kaufman had very little education, but she helped support both her brother Ben and her sister Esther through law school. She was, as they say, street smart, and starting with a tiny grocery store on Stagg Street in Brooklyn (my father was born in the back of that store in 1910) she and my grandfather (who had begun living his American dream in 1905 as a pack peddler and then a pushcart peddler, switching from pants to fruit and then finally to that store), went on to own the building, and own another building, until they owned a row of tenements on Ten Eyck Street, and an auto supply store. I have always had the sense that she was the more motivated and canny of the two. (My one memory of Sam Kaufman, who died when I was six was that when we visited he would go into the coat closet and close the door behind him to drink schnapps from the bottle he kept in an overcoat pocket. This fascinated me because it was a closet with a light that went on when you opened the door, and I could see him swigging from the bottle because he didn't close the door all the way when he went in there.) Once when I was perhaps eleven and was sewing a button on a shirt, my father stood over me for a moment, watching, and then he said, "When your grandmother was your age, she had to work for a living doing that all day long." It made a huge impression on me.
Levi: While your book is obviously a work of fiction, you based the courtroom scenes, in which Esther Gottesfeld's testimony is discredited for appearing too rehearsed, on the actual trials of the Triangle owners (readers can learn more about this in David Von Drehle's historical account Triangle: The Fire That Changed America). Did you feel you were skating on the edge of non-fiction with this part of the novel, or any other aspects of the novel? How did you approach the balance between truth and fiction as you were writing Triangle?
Katharine: Although I had read the trial transcript in the Von Drehle book, I wrote the trial chapter in my novel sitting at a desk in Ireland, with no supporting materials of any kind at hand. In that sense, I simply made it up, and I never looked again at any historical documents or records. I was especially focused on the way Max Steuer, the brilliant attorney defending the owners, had neutralized the power and effectiveness, just about nullified the truth and meaning of the testimony altogether, of one key witness, an easily intimidated garment worker whose testimony, while true, was clearly memorized. By forcing her to repeat her testimony twice more, he was able to demonstrate just how memorized her words were. It was a clever strategy that may well have been the turning point for the trial. Given the immense significance that repetition plays in Triangle, from the various iterations of Esther's story to the fundamental way that all music depends on and has a relationship to repetition for its pleasing form, this was something I wanted to appropriate and give to Esther's testimony.
The names of the attorneys and the judge in the trial transcript in my novel are the true names of those people, but since it is the testimony of a fictional character whose experiences, motives, and intentions are all fictional, I never felt that I was any closer to the edge of nonfiction in this chapter than in any other appropriations of the actual events of the Triangle fire. I hope it is evident that I have been respectful of true events and the true experiences of people who were there on March 25th, 1911. In a way, I hope it is clear how much my novel honors those true experiences. At the same time, I am not a historian, and for me it is always about the novel, about serving the fiction, about telling a story. A novelist appropriates facts, but you never want the facts to get in the way of the story.
Levi: I bet many readers were surprised, as I was, to find an experimental musician who uses molecular biology as the basis for his compositions at the core of Triangle. I think this works, but I'm not exactly sure why. Can you shed any light? Would you say that DNA is a significant metaphor in this book?
Katharine: Triangle is a novel about all the ways information comes to us, all the ways history is transmitted. Your history is in your DNA. Your DNA tells your story -- in a certain way. How do you know what you think you know about anything, starting with your own molecular structure?
I have been asked why I put all this music in a novel "about" the Triangle fire. I can only say that the novel was conceived in my mind with this music as an essential and integral part of the story before I wrote a word of it, and that the eway the novel concludes was something I had fully worked out before I had written any of it, as well. The music was always going to be the key that turns in the lock.
Levi: You've mentioned to me another personal source of inspiration for this book, involving your other grandmother. Can you tell us more about this? (Another way of asking this question: Is there a reason your musical genius is named "George"?)
Katharine: Triangle is dedicated to both my grandmothers. In a clear sense, they are both very present as inspirations for the stuff of the novel. My maternal grandmother was the composer Kay Swift, who is probably best known in musical theater circles not for her own work but for her romantic involvement with George Gershwin. I was very close to her, I am named for her, and I am quite involved in all kinds of projects around her music, from works towards reviving her 1930 hit Broadway show "Fine and Dandy" to consulting on a feature film in development about Kay, George, and the complex triangle that was a consequence of her romance with him, given that it occupied the last ten years of her marriage to my grandfather, James Warburg. As I was writing Triangle I was involved in the production of a restoration recording of Fine and Dandy with PS Classsics, in the studio with a 26-piece orchestra and a wonderful cast of Broadway talent. And so while I am actually a musical illiterate, I do spend a certain amount of time in a musical realm, and I know that there was a lot of cross-pollination. The machine shop opening number of "Fine and Dandy" certainly has its echoes in the "Triangle Oratorio" with which the novel concludes.
My composer George Botkin is indeed named after George Gershwin, but he is not based on Gershwin as a personality, his music is not like Gershwin's music, and the relationship between Rebecca and George is nothing like my grandmother's relationship with Gershwin. However, the genius and endlessly imaginative ambition to make new, wonderful music -- that's borrowed from the spirit of Gershwin. The public's confusion with Botkin's music -- is it high or low? The critical suspicion of this inventive music that is so deeply appealing -- that is very directly inspired by the way our culture has never known quite how to locate Gershwin on the high/low continuum. (Let's not forget that Virgil Thompson dismissed so viciously the "gefilte fish orchestration" i n "Porgy and Bess.")
Levi: I really enjoyed the intimate and realistic portrait of a lovingly married couple in post Sept 11 New York City. How do you feel when you hear Triangle described as an example of a "Sept 11 book"?
Katharine: I am pleased by that, because writing indirectly about the events of September 11th seemed like the only solution, and in a way, writing about the events of March 25th, 1911 became a gesture in the direction of September 11th inevitably, like it or not. But the contrast and relationship will be so present and vivid for the reader, it would have been less effective for the novel had I instructed and made that any more literal or obvious. My editor, John Glusman, was very wise about this, counseling me against writing that day into the story. It's there anyway. Even though I wrote the first chapter of Triangle before September 11th, 2001, it can only now be read in a post September 11 world.
Levi: How do you feel about the way Triangle has been received?
Katharine: I have been immensely gratified by the reviewers who really got it. I have been bemused by the readers and occasional reviewers who really didn't get it. In that sense, this is what publication has been like for all four of my novels. I have had a lot of wonderful response for this novel of a kind I have not had in the past, in a commercial sense (Book of the Month and Literary Guild, a large-print edition) to a lot of blog interest, including the Litblog Co-op attention. On the other hand, although my first three novels were New York Times Notable Books, Triangle was never reviewed in The New York Times. But it got wonderful attention on public radio. So -- win some, lose some. Triangle was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize and for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award.
One thing that's different with this novel is that I am being read for the first time by readers who don't especially read fiction, who have no interest in literary novels, but they have a lot of interest in fire (fire in general, and the Triangle fire in particular), or Jewish history, or labor history, or New York history, or women's history, or some combination of those things. I hear from a lot of people whose mothers or grandmothers or great aunts worked in the needle trades in New York in the first decades of the 20th century. I don't disagree when a great number of people tell me at readings or in email or mail that their great aunt or grandmother worked at the Triangle but "she didn't feel well and didn't go to work that day," even though there are a lot of reasons this isn't entirely likely. (For one thing, if you didn't go to work at the Triangle because you didn't feel well, you lost your job.)
Firefighters have come to my readings. A number of people who were in the towers on September 11th have come to my readings or written to me to talk about the relationship between my descriptions of Esther's experience and the fire at the Triangle in 1911, and their own weirdly parallel experiences surviving the events of that horrific day.
I will always wonder if Triangle would have been receieved differently, or written about and talked about differently, if it had been written by a man.
Levi: Can you give us a hint what the next Katharine Weber novel will be?
Katharine: I am under contract for my next two books with Harmony, where John Glusman, who edited my last two novels at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is now Executive Editor. My fifth novel, Temper, is about a fourth-generation chocolate candy business in crisis. If I finish it on time, which is my intention, it would presumably be published in 2009. After that comes a memoir, Symptoms of Fiction, so I am thinking about that all the time in the background, and doing a certain amount of reading and note-writing for that as well.
Levi: Your grandmother once worked in the Triangle factory. Can you tell us more about her, and about the way you heard about the Triangle tragedy when you were growing up?
Katharine: I cannot recall my grandmother ever mentioning the Triangle to me. She died when I was twelve. But my father talked about her work at the Triangle quite often, and about the impressive trajectory of her life from there, her last job in the garment sweatshops, finishing buttonholes at the Triangle in 1909. She left that job because she was pregnant with my father. Pauline Gottesfeld Kaufman had very little education, but she helped support both her brother Ben and her sister Esther through law school. She was, as they say, street smart, and starting with a tiny grocery store on Stagg Street in Brooklyn (my father was born in the back of that store in 1910) she and my grandfather (who had begun living his American dream in 1905 as a pack peddler and then a pushcart peddler, switching from pants to fruit and then finally to that store), went on to own the building, and own another building, until they owned a row of tenements on Ten Eyck Street, and an auto supply store. I have always had the sense that she was the more motivated and canny of the two. (My one memory of Sam Kaufman, who died when I was six was that when we visited he would go into the coat closet and close the door behind him to drink schnapps from the bottle he kept in an overcoat pocket. This fascinated me because it was a closet with a light that went on when you opened the door, and I could see him swigging from the bottle because he didn't close the door all the way when he went in there.) Once when I was perhaps eleven and was sewing a button on a shirt, my father stood over me for a moment, watching, and then he said, "When your grandmother was your age, she had to work for a living doing that all day long." It made a huge impression on me.
Levi: While your book is obviously a work of fiction, you based the courtroom scenes, in which Esther Gottesfeld's testimony is discredited for appearing too rehearsed, on the actual trials of the Triangle owners (readers can learn more about this in David Von Drehle's historical account Triangle: The Fire That Changed America). Did you feel you were skating on the edge of non-fiction with this part of the novel, or any other aspects of the novel? How did you approach the balance between truth and fiction as you were writing Triangle?
Katharine: Although I had read the trial transcript in the Von Drehle book, I wrote the trial chapter in my novel sitting at a desk in Ireland, with no supporting materials of any kind at hand. In that sense, I simply made it up, and I never looked again at any historical documents or records. I was especially focused on the way Max Steuer, the brilliant attorney defending the owners, had neutralized the power and effectiveness, just about nullified the truth and meaning of the testimony altogether, of one key witness, an easily intimidated garment worker whose testimony, while true, was clearly memorized. By forcing her to repeat her testimony twice more, he was able to demonstrate just how memorized her words were. It was a clever strategy that may well have been the turning point for the trial. Given the immense significance that repetition plays in Triangle, from the various iterations of Esther's story to the fundamental way that all music depends on and has a relationship to repetition for its pleasing form, this was something I wanted to appropriate and give to Esther's testimony.
The names of the attorneys and the judge in the trial transcript in my novel are the true names of those people, but since it is the testimony of a fictional character whose experiences, motives, and intentions are all fictional, I never felt that I was any closer to the edge of nonfiction in this chapter than in any other appropriations of the actual events of the Triangle fire. I hope it is evident that I have been respectful of true events and the true experiences of people who were there on March 25th, 1911. In a way, I hope it is clear how much my novel honors those true experiences. At the same time, I am not a historian, and for me it is always about the novel, about serving the fiction, about telling a story. A novelist appropriates facts, but you never want the facts to get in the way of the story.
Levi: I bet many readers were surprised, as I was, to find an experimental musician who uses molecular biology as the basis for his compositions at the core of Triangle. I think this works, but I'm not exactly sure why. Can you shed any light? Would you say that DNA is a significant metaphor in this book?
Katharine: Triangle is a novel about all the ways information comes to us, all the ways history is transmitted. Your history is in your DNA. Your DNA tells your story -- in a certain way. How do you know what you think you know about anything, starting with your own molecular structure?
I have been asked why I put all this music in a novel "about" the Triangle fire. I can only say that the novel was conceived in my mind with this music as an essential and integral part of the story before I wrote a word of it, and that the eway the novel concludes was something I had fully worked out before I had written any of it, as well. The music was always going to be the key that turns in the lock.
Levi: You've mentioned to me another personal source of inspiration for this book, involving your other grandmother. Can you tell us more about this? (Another way of asking this question: Is there a reason your musical genius is named "George"?)
Katharine: Triangle is dedicated to both my grandmothers. In a clear sense, they are both very present as inspirations for the stuff of the novel. My maternal grandmother was the composer Kay Swift, who is probably best known in musical theater circles not for her own work but for her romantic involvement with George Gershwin. I was very close to her, I am named for her, and I am quite involved in all kinds of projects around her music, from works towards reviving her 1930 hit Broadway show "Fine and Dandy" to consulting on a feature film in development about Kay, George, and the complex triangle that was a consequence of her romance with him, given that it occupied the last ten years of her marriage to my grandfather, James Warburg. As I was writing Triangle I was involved in the production of a restoration recording of Fine and Dandy with PS Classsics, in the studio with a 26-piece orchestra and a wonderful cast of Broadway talent. And so while I am actually a musical illiterate, I do spend a certain amount of time in a musical realm, and I know that there was a lot of cross-pollination. The machine shop opening number of "Fine and Dandy" certainly has its echoes in the "Triangle Oratorio" with which the novel concludes.
My composer George Botkin is indeed named after George Gershwin, but he is not based on Gershwin as a personality, his music is not like Gershwin's music, and the relationship between Rebecca and George is nothing like my grandmother's relationship with Gershwin. However, the genius and endlessly imaginative ambition to make new, wonderful music -- that's borrowed from the spirit of Gershwin. The public's confusion with Botkin's music -- is it high or low? The critical suspicion of this inventive music that is so deeply appealing -- that is very directly inspired by the way our culture has never known quite how to locate Gershwin on the high/low continuum. (Let's not forget that Virgil Thompson dismissed so viciously the "gefilte fish orchestration" i n "Porgy and Bess.")
Levi: I really enjoyed the intimate and realistic portrait of a lovingly married couple in post Sept 11 New York City. How do you feel when you hear Triangle described as an example of a "Sept 11 book"?
Katharine: I am pleased by that, because writing indirectly about the events of September 11th seemed like the only solution, and in a way, writing about the events of March 25th, 1911 became a gesture in the direction of September 11th inevitably, like it or not. But the contrast and relationship will be so present and vivid for the reader, it would have been less effective for the novel had I instructed and made that any more literal or obvious. My editor, John Glusman, was very wise about this, counseling me against writing that day into the story. It's there anyway. Even though I wrote the first chapter of Triangle before September 11th, 2001, it can only now be read in a post September 11 world.
Levi: How do you feel about the way Triangle has been received?
Katharine: I have been immensely gratified by the reviewers who really got it. I have been bemused by the readers and occasional reviewers who really didn't get it. In that sense, this is what publication has been like for all four of my novels. I have had a lot of wonderful response for this novel of a kind I have not had in the past, in a commercial sense (Book of the Month and Literary Guild, a large-print edition) to a lot of blog interest, including the Litblog Co-op attention. On the other hand, although my first three novels were New York Times Notable Books, Triangle was never reviewed in The New York Times. But it got wonderful attention on public radio. So -- win some, lose some. Triangle was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize and for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award.
One thing that's different with this novel is that I am being read for the first time by readers who don't especially read fiction, who have no interest in literary novels, but they have a lot of interest in fire (fire in general, and the Triangle fire in particular), or Jewish history, or labor history, or New York history, or women's history, or some combination of those things. I hear from a lot of people whose mothers or grandmothers or great aunts worked in the needle trades in New York in the first decades of the 20th century. I don't disagree when a great number of people tell me at readings or in email or mail that their great aunt or grandmother worked at the Triangle but "she didn't feel well and didn't go to work that day," even though there are a lot of reasons this isn't entirely likely. (For one thing, if you didn't go to work at the Triangle because you didn't feel well, you lost your job.)
Firefighters have come to my readings. A number of people who were in the towers on September 11th have come to my readings or written to me to talk about the relationship between my descriptions of Esther's experience and the fire at the Triangle in 1911, and their own weirdly parallel experiences surviving the events of that horrific day.
I will always wonder if Triangle would have been receieved differently, or written about and talked about differently, if it had been written by a man.
Levi: Can you give us a hint what the next Katharine Weber novel will be?
Katharine: I am under contract for my next two books with Harmony, where John Glusman, who edited my last two novels at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is now Executive Editor. My fifth novel, Temper, is about a fourth-generation chocolate candy business in crisis. If I finish it on time, which is my intention, it would presumably be published in 2009. After that comes a memoir, Symptoms of Fiction, so I am thinking about that all the time in the background, and doing a certain amount of reading and note-writing for that as well.
Talking Hiphop with Brian Coleman
by Levi Asher on Monday, August 6, 2007 04:16 pmOld school New York City hiphop has a true friend in Brian Coleman, author of 2005's Rakim Told Me and the new Check the Technique, a passionate and down-to-earth collection of interviews featuring classic hiphop artists describing how they made their best records. We're talking about the late 80's/early 90's here, the golden age of hiphop lyricism and poetry, and the artists included in Coleman's books are the ones I've been telling you about.
Along with EPMD, this book will bring you memories and surprising factoids from Mobb Deep, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, M. O. P., Beastie Boys, Run-DMC (of course), Biz Markie, Digable Planets, Keith Murray, Das EFX, KRS-One, Cypress Hill, Marley Marl, Redman and Onyx. I got a chance to interview the supreme interviewer myself, and found Mr. Coleman ready to compare notes on many topics relative to the state of hiphop and hiphop poetry today.
Levi: Let's start by focusing here on the lyrical content of the great old school hiphop you profile in your book. Of all the artists you cover, which are the ones you admire most strictly as lyricists? Can you share some examples of hiphop lyrics that mean a lot to you, and tell us why?
Brian: You can't discuss hip-hop music without going into lyrical content, so that's obviously always going to be a big part of any fan's appreciation -- me included. From my own standpoint there are two kinds of lyricists who have always impressed me: (1) MCs who are more straight-forward and have a lot to say and get their points across in a powerful way and, (2) technical MCs who just kick your ass with the complexity of their rhymes. If group #2 also has a lot to say and gets their points across, then that's obviously the ultimate.
From the first group I'll point to Chuck D and Ice-T as two of the ultimate examples. They never tried to get all tongue-twisting or never went for style over substance. They both spoke as much as they rapped (Chuck was just a bit more powerful, mostly because his voice is just so deep and strong), telling tales and speaking their mind. I'd point to a track like Public Enemy's "Don't Believe The Hype" (from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back) and Ice-T's "High Rollers" (from Power) as great examples of how to be a powerful lyricist -- talking to listeners by either telling great stories or just speaking your mind and engaging your audience.
From group #2 you'd have to put Rakim at the top of that list, as a technical, "scientifical" rapper who was incredibly complex but also had so much substance to his rhymes. For example just check out "Follow the Leader" from Eric B & Rakim's second album (Follow the Leader), among many other of his classics. Big Daddy Kane also falls into that category, just below Rakim. "I'll Take You There" from Long Live the Kane is a great case in point.
And the musical portion of any hip-hop track is a huge part, and all of the above had amazing tracks to rhyme over. Without that, they wouldn't be half as classic as they are. You have to have the mix.
Levi: I like it that your book hits on some of the literary connections in hiphop -- the fact that Phife Dawg learned poetry from his mom, the fact that Digable Planets reference Jorge Luis Borges. Do you think hiphop gets the respect it deserves from a literary/poetic point of view? And do you think this is a question that many of the top artists you've spoken to particularly care about, or not?
Brian: Hip-hop lyricists still haven't gotten the poetic respect they deserves, in my opinion. But I don't think that a lot of the top lyricists out there -- people like Rakim, KRS-One, Q-Tip -- really care that they're not accepted as poets in the poetry community. They care that their fans and peers respect them as lyricists. But I definitely think it's due to ignorance in the older academic or poetry community (or whatever term people would use to describe it) if there is that kind of disconnect. A lot of especially older academics seem to have a view of hip-hop like it's just a bunch of thug kids playing loud music and that's the end of it. Which is, of course, ridiculous. Younger poets and academics understand, because they grew up with hip-hop music. And they are the reason that hip-hop studies in academia continue to grow. I challenge any poet out there to go up against Rakim or Sadat X [from Brand Nubian] in a one-on-one a capella showdown, they'd lose. It may not be in the form they're used to, but like it or not, rappers -- at least the most talented ones -- are poets, no way to deny that.
Levi: What was the first hiphop record that grabbed you (and I'm going to disallow "Rapper's Delight" as an answer)? And how did you become involved in hiphop journalism?
Brian: I was only nine when "Rapper's Delight" came out, so I never heard that song until many years after that. And honestly I'm not 100% sure about the first hip-hop record that grabbed me. Unlike a lot of the artists in the book, I don't have that one moment when it all clicked for me in the beginning. My journey into hip-hop was a gradual one. I definitely remember loving the first Run-DMC album and I must have heard "Rock Box" first, and seen the video on MTV, to be drawn to it.
I was also a big fan of one of the most slept-on hip-hop groups of the early-to-mid '80s, the Fat Boys. Their first two records were both very popular and are both pretty amazing, and I loved both of them. Throughout the '80s I just kept paying more and more attention to hip-hop and it became more and more a part of my record collection -- alongside the rock (mostly punk) that I was listening to concurrently.
Regarding my foray into journalism, that was more by accident. It basically boiled down to the fact that I really just wasn't finding enough coverage of hip-hop in Boston media in the mid-'90s, so I took matters into my own hands. There was one guy in town who knew what was up -- Ken Capobianco from the Boston TAB, who still does lots of great work for the Boston Globe. But other than that, it was really sketchy and I thought that was ridiculous. So I just started writing for a local monthly paper called Boston Rock, for free. Covering groups like the Roots when they first started making waves, Organized Konfusion, that kind of stuff. That led to stints with Boston Phoenix, CMJ Weekly, CMJ Monthly and into national hip-hop mags like XXL and Scratch. It's been gradual and random and I've loved every minute of it. Right now I'm a bit bored writing magazine reviews and articles -- books are where I'd like to be. 500-word pieces don't really do it for me anymore.
Levi: Judging from the interviews in your book, it seems that different hiphop artists have widely varying approaches to being interviewed. For instance, I got the feeling that A Tribe Called Quest would have talked to you all day, whereas EPMD didn't seem to want to get too analytical or share too much. What strategies did you use to get the best interviews possible from these artists?
Brian: Actually, I think EPMD would have talked to me for a lot longer, but they were just really busy at the time I did those interviews, especially Erick Sermon. But even despite that, both of those guys gave me a lot of great info and I loved talking to them.
The thing I love about all the chapters in the book is that they each have their own personality. There's no set structure (although most of them are the same -- the Boogie Down Productions one is a notable exception), no set word count. They each just happen like they happen, and the quality of each is determined by how much time I'm able to spend with each artist.
My only real strategy in talking to the artists is really just talking to them person-to-person, on the same level. Not as fan-to-superstar or even journalist-to-interviewee. Of course I'm a fan and a journalist, and a lot of these artists are indeed superstars, but I try and push that to the side whenever I can. Surprisingly, every one of these artists seem to be fine with that.
The way I see it, they've all done way too many interviews in the past that kiss their ass and just stay on the surface, so they all seem to find going in-depth like I try and do a refreshing change. I think that's too bad, that they aren't used to really digging into an interview. But I really have one rule -- I won't talk to artists on their "press days" when they have 10 interviews lined up and they just bang them out one after the other. That's a horrible way to do an interview, although it's obviously a necessity if you're a big, in-demand star. But I'd rather wait a month or two (or more) to get a real interview, rather than take a 15-minute slot.
Levi: Did you feel intimidated by any of these artists? Are there any hiphop artists so great that you would be too nervous to interview them?
Brian: I'd be totally full of shit if I didn't admit to being intimidated by some of these artists at first, just the thought of interviewing them. But not because I'm star-struck, because that's one thing I've never been. It's more because I just have so much respect for them and because their music means so much to me. So people like Chuck D or Ice-T or Rakim definitely got my butterflies going. But not for long ... once things got going that all went away. And, in fact, those guys were some of the most fulfilling interviews I've ever done. That's not surprising, though, because all of them are huge fans of hip-hop, and fans always have great conversations with other fans. That's really the dialogue I'm trying to get going -- to get the artists to, at times, step outside themselves as the artist and look at what they've done on a more objective level. To look at their albums like I look at them, as a fan.
Levi: Finally, if you don't mind I'd like to bounce a theory of my own off you. Obviously, your book pays respect to old school hiphop, but I've been wondering if possibly the current decade, rather than the decades before, will go down in history as the greatest decade for hiphop.
Now, before you tell me I'm crazy, here's the evidence: Jay-Z's Blueprint ... Dre's 2001 ... 50 Cent's first (and only good) album ... D-Block ... Fat Joe ... Mike Jones. Do you think the hiphop of today stands a chance of being remembered as equal to the legendary era, or not? And do you think you'll ever write a book about the hiphop that's on the radio today?
Brian: In my opinion, someone would be treading on thin critical ice by comparing D-Block or 50 Cent with actual hip-hop trailblazers like Public Enemy or Wu-Tang Clan ... I would have to respectfully disagree with anyone that said that the last decade's music can stand up to the innovation and artistry as the groups covered in Check the Technique [1986 - 1996].
And I think it's important to point out one thing: selling great numbers of records doesn't mean you're a great artist. It means that you're making music that people want to buy, for whatever reason. A lot of major label artists, in my opinion, have gotten it in their head that sales are more important than skills. Which is fine if you want to be rich. But don't equate record sales with artistic greatness. De La Soul and Vanilla Ice both went platinum back in the day. Are they both great artists?
On the other side of the coin, the other aspect of what makes artists and albums classics is how much impact they had -- on the industry as a whole, and on the music and artists that came in their wake. Will Mike Jones or Kanye have as much impact as Das Efx or Pete Rock & CL Smooth or the Geto Boys did? Maybe. Ask me in another five or ten years. I hold out hope that some of the stuff coming out today holds up in another five years and ten years. Every artist in Check the Technique does, to me at least. That's why they're in there.
As I've said in other interviews, as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be much reward in 2007 in the major label game (aka the stuff people hear on the radio) for being original or being great. In fact, if you want to get on -- or stay on -- a major label, you generally get demerits for being different and going against the grain. Outkast, Timbaland and the Neptunes are exceptions, but they've all had to put up with a lot of bullshit in the industry before they got their current "carte blanche" status. It's probably no surprise that those are the kinds of artists I'm drawn to -- innovators, whether they sell a ton of records or not. When you can innovate and get paid, then that's the best thing possible. I don't have much respect for rich rappers who don't have any real skills.
So ... sorry D-Block or Diplomats or Ying Yang Twins, don't wait around for my call about the next volume or the book. (I'm sure they'll be heartbroken!)
Brian Coleman will be appearing in New York City on August 9 and in Philadelphia (with Q-Tip) on August 18. Check his website for more info.
Along with EPMD, this book will bring you memories and surprising factoids from Mobb Deep, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, M. O. P., Beastie Boys, Run-DMC (of course), Biz Markie, Digable Planets, Keith Murray, Das EFX, KRS-One, Cypress Hill, Marley Marl, Redman and Onyx. I got a chance to interview the supreme interviewer myself, and found Mr. Coleman ready to compare notes on many topics relative to the state of hiphop and hiphop poetry today.
Levi: Let's start by focusing here on the lyrical content of the great old school hiphop you profile in your book. Of all the artists you cover, which are the ones you admire most strictly as lyricists? Can you share some examples of hiphop lyrics that mean a lot to you, and tell us why?
Brian: You can't discuss hip-hop music without going into lyrical content, so that's obviously always going to be a big part of any fan's appreciation -- me included. From my own standpoint there are two kinds of lyricists who have always impressed me: (1) MCs who are more straight-forward and have a lot to say and get their points across in a powerful way and, (2) technical MCs who just kick your ass with the complexity of their rhymes. If group #2 also has a lot to say and gets their points across, then that's obviously the ultimate.
From the first group I'll point to Chuck D and Ice-T as two of the ultimate examples. They never tried to get all tongue-twisting or never went for style over substance. They both spoke as much as they rapped (Chuck was just a bit more powerful, mostly because his voice is just so deep and strong), telling tales and speaking their mind. I'd point to a track like Public Enemy's "Don't Believe The Hype" (from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back) and Ice-T's "High Rollers" (from Power) as great examples of how to be a powerful lyricist -- talking to listeners by either telling great stories or just speaking your mind and engaging your audience.
From group #2 you'd have to put Rakim at the top of that list, as a technical, "scientifical" rapper who was incredibly complex but also had so much substance to his rhymes. For example just check out "Follow the Leader" from Eric B & Rakim's second album (Follow the Leader), among many other of his classics. Big Daddy Kane also falls into that category, just below Rakim. "I'll Take You There" from Long Live the Kane is a great case in point.
And the musical portion of any hip-hop track is a huge part, and all of the above had amazing tracks to rhyme over. Without that, they wouldn't be half as classic as they are. You have to have the mix.
Levi: I like it that your book hits on some of the literary connections in hiphop -- the fact that Phife Dawg learned poetry from his mom, the fact that Digable Planets reference Jorge Luis Borges. Do you think hiphop gets the respect it deserves from a literary/poetic point of view? And do you think this is a question that many of the top artists you've spoken to particularly care about, or not?
Brian: Hip-hop lyricists still haven't gotten the poetic respect they deserves, in my opinion. But I don't think that a lot of the top lyricists out there -- people like Rakim, KRS-One, Q-Tip -- really care that they're not accepted as poets in the poetry community. They care that their fans and peers respect them as lyricists. But I definitely think it's due to ignorance in the older academic or poetry community (or whatever term people would use to describe it) if there is that kind of disconnect. A lot of especially older academics seem to have a view of hip-hop like it's just a bunch of thug kids playing loud music and that's the end of it. Which is, of course, ridiculous. Younger poets and academics understand, because they grew up with hip-hop music. And they are the reason that hip-hop studies in academia continue to grow. I challenge any poet out there to go up against Rakim or Sadat X [from Brand Nubian] in a one-on-one a capella showdown, they'd lose. It may not be in the form they're used to, but like it or not, rappers -- at least the most talented ones -- are poets, no way to deny that.
Levi: What was the first hiphop record that grabbed you (and I'm going to disallow "Rapper's Delight" as an answer)? And how did you become involved in hiphop journalism?
Brian: I was only nine when "Rapper's Delight" came out, so I never heard that song until many years after that. And honestly I'm not 100% sure about the first hip-hop record that grabbed me. Unlike a lot of the artists in the book, I don't have that one moment when it all clicked for me in the beginning. My journey into hip-hop was a gradual one. I definitely remember loving the first Run-DMC album and I must have heard "Rock Box" first, and seen the video on MTV, to be drawn to it.
I was also a big fan of one of the most slept-on hip-hop groups of the early-to-mid '80s, the Fat Boys. Their first two records were both very popular and are both pretty amazing, and I loved both of them. Throughout the '80s I just kept paying more and more attention to hip-hop and it became more and more a part of my record collection -- alongside the rock (mostly punk) that I was listening to concurrently.
Regarding my foray into journalism, that was more by accident. It basically boiled down to the fact that I really just wasn't finding enough coverage of hip-hop in Boston media in the mid-'90s, so I took matters into my own hands. There was one guy in town who knew what was up -- Ken Capobianco from the Boston TAB, who still does lots of great work for the Boston Globe. But other than that, it was really sketchy and I thought that was ridiculous. So I just started writing for a local monthly paper called Boston Rock, for free. Covering groups like the Roots when they first started making waves, Organized Konfusion, that kind of stuff. That led to stints with Boston Phoenix, CMJ Weekly, CMJ Monthly and into national hip-hop mags like XXL and Scratch. It's been gradual and random and I've loved every minute of it. Right now I'm a bit bored writing magazine reviews and articles -- books are where I'd like to be. 500-word pieces don't really do it for me anymore.
Levi: Judging from the interviews in your book, it seems that different hiphop artists have widely varying approaches to being interviewed. For instance, I got the feeling that A Tribe Called Quest would have talked to you all day, whereas EPMD didn't seem to want to get too analytical or share too much. What strategies did you use to get the best interviews possible from these artists?
Brian: Actually, I think EPMD would have talked to me for a lot longer, but they were just really busy at the time I did those interviews, especially Erick Sermon. But even despite that, both of those guys gave me a lot of great info and I loved talking to them.
The thing I love about all the chapters in the book is that they each have their own personality. There's no set structure (although most of them are the same -- the Boogie Down Productions one is a notable exception), no set word count. They each just happen like they happen, and the quality of each is determined by how much time I'm able to spend with each artist.
My only real strategy in talking to the artists is really just talking to them person-to-person, on the same level. Not as fan-to-superstar or even journalist-to-interviewee. Of course I'm a fan and a journalist, and a lot of these artists are indeed superstars, but I try and push that to the side whenever I can. Surprisingly, every one of these artists seem to be fine with that.
The way I see it, they've all done way too many interviews in the past that kiss their ass and just stay on the surface, so they all seem to find going in-depth like I try and do a refreshing change. I think that's too bad, that they aren't used to really digging into an interview. But I really have one rule -- I won't talk to artists on their "press days" when they have 10 interviews lined up and they just bang them out one after the other. That's a horrible way to do an interview, although it's obviously a necessity if you're a big, in-demand star. But I'd rather wait a month or two (or more) to get a real interview, rather than take a 15-minute slot.
Levi: Did you feel intimidated by any of these artists? Are there any hiphop artists so great that you would be too nervous to interview them?
Brian: I'd be totally full of shit if I didn't admit to being intimidated by some of these artists at first, just the thought of interviewing them. But not because I'm star-struck, because that's one thing I've never been. It's more because I just have so much respect for them and because their music means so much to me. So people like Chuck D or Ice-T or Rakim definitely got my butterflies going. But not for long ... once things got going that all went away. And, in fact, those guys were some of the most fulfilling interviews I've ever done. That's not surprising, though, because all of them are huge fans of hip-hop, and fans always have great conversations with other fans. That's really the dialogue I'm trying to get going -- to get the artists to, at times, step outside themselves as the artist and look at what they've done on a more objective level. To look at their albums like I look at them, as a fan.
Levi: Finally, if you don't mind I'd like to bounce a theory of my own off you. Obviously, your book pays respect to old school hiphop, but I've been wondering if possibly the current decade, rather than the decades before, will go down in history as the greatest decade for hiphop.
Now, before you tell me I'm crazy, here's the evidence: Jay-Z's Blueprint ... Dre's 2001 ... 50 Cent's first (and only good) album ... D-Block ... Fat Joe ... Mike Jones. Do you think the hiphop of today stands a chance of being remembered as equal to the legendary era, or not? And do you think you'll ever write a book about the hiphop that's on the radio today?
Brian: In my opinion, someone would be treading on thin critical ice by comparing D-Block or 50 Cent with actual hip-hop trailblazers like Public Enemy or Wu-Tang Clan ... I would have to respectfully disagree with anyone that said that the last decade's music can stand up to the innovation and artistry as the groups covered in Check the Technique [1986 - 1996].
And I think it's important to point out one thing: selling great numbers of records doesn't mean you're a great artist. It means that you're making music that people want to buy, for whatever reason. A lot of major label artists, in my opinion, have gotten it in their head that sales are more important than skills. Which is fine if you want to be rich. But don't equate record sales with artistic greatness. De La Soul and Vanilla Ice both went platinum back in the day. Are they both great artists?
On the other side of the coin, the other aspect of what makes artists and albums classics is how much impact they had -- on the industry as a whole, and on the music and artists that came in their wake. Will Mike Jones or Kanye have as much impact as Das Efx or Pete Rock & CL Smooth or the Geto Boys did? Maybe. Ask me in another five or ten years. I hold out hope that some of the stuff coming out today holds up in another five years and ten years. Every artist in Check the Technique does, to me at least. That's why they're in there.
As I've said in other interviews, as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be much reward in 2007 in the major label game (aka the stuff people hear on the radio) for being original or being great. In fact, if you want to get on -- or stay on -- a major label, you generally get demerits for being different and going against the grain. Outkast, Timbaland and the Neptunes are exceptions, but they've all had to put up with a lot of bullshit in the industry before they got their current "carte blanche" status. It's probably no surprise that those are the kinds of artists I'm drawn to -- innovators, whether they sell a ton of records or not. When you can innovate and get paid, then that's the best thing possible. I don't have much respect for rich rappers who don't have any real skills.
So ... sorry D-Block or Diplomats or Ying Yang Twins, don't wait around for my call about the next volume or the book. (I'm sure they'll be heartbroken!)
Brian Coleman will be appearing in New York City on August 9 and in Philadelphia (with Q-Tip) on August 18. Check his website for more info.
Tom Bissell In Turkey
by Bill Ectric on Wednesday, June 6, 2007 09:58 pmSurreal photographs show towering abandoned ships in the middle of a desert. The ships had once been part of a thriving fishing industry in Uzbekistan, formerly part of the Soviet Union. The "desert" was once a seabed, until poorly planned irrigation practices, chemical dumping, and nuclear testing turned the area into a wasteland. The Aral Sea, once the size of Lake Michigan, is now one-third of its former size. This is the subject of Tom Bissell's book, Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia. Bissell, a former Peace Corp volunteer, returns to Uzbekistan where he and his young, American-slang-talking Asian interpreter avoid arrest by bribing crooked cops, visit historic landmarks, bars, rural mountain dwellers, and bureaucratic government workers.
Bissell is known as a travel writer and his fictional God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories, is a top-notch collection too. He's like a fresh, modern Hemingway. One story from that book, Death Defier, was selected by Michael Chabon for Best American Short Stories 2005.
He also wrote The Father of All Things, in which Bissell accompanies his father, an ex-Marine, to retrace his father's tour of duty through Vietnam.
Tom Bissell is currently doing research for a book about the tombs of the 12 Apostles. I caught up with Tom (by email) when he was in Turkey.
Tom: Hey, Bill--I'm traveling in Turkey right now with only intermittent email access, so it might take me a couple of days to answer these. Sorry! I'll be in touch ASAP...
Bill: What are you doing in Turkey, searching for an Apostle's tomb for your next book?
Tom: I am, indeed. The empty (his body disappeared sometime in the middle ages) tomb of Saint John is in Selcuk, Turkey. Lovely place, actually.
Bill: What advice would you give to anyone who was thinking of joining the Peace Corps?
Tom: A) If you're in a serious relationship, seriously consider the possibility that joining may destroy it. And seriously ponder how much that would bother you. B) Prepare yourself for the possibility that the things you don't think you'll miss, you'll miss, and the things you think you'll miss, you won't miss. C) If you're looking for something extraordinary to happen to you, don't count on it. The most extraordinary things most PCVs experience is other people--both their fellow volunteers and the host-country nationals they meet and befriend. Peace Corps does its best work, I believe, on a one-on-one basis. It may not change cultures or save nations, but it definitely changes individual lives.
Bill: When you stood on the former floor of the Aral Sea, were you concerned about radiation or chemical poisoning?
Tom: Not overly, but it's funny you should ask. I now test positive on every tuberculosis test I'm given, because I now carry the bacilli of the disease in my blood. It's never become symptomatic (and, thus, contagious) but it's a little gift from having spent so much time in the Aral Sea basin, home to one of the world's worst TB epidemics.
Bill: In Chasing the Sea you describe how Stalin artificially created countries by dividing Central Asia into Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajik, etc. Would it be accurate to say that the act of designating these territories as countries encouraged them to feel autonomous?
Tom: I try to address this a bit in the book. Historically speaking, these places never had national understandings of themselves, so when the Soviets came along and created these boundaries, I don't think a national consciousness happened right away. That took at least a generation. There were some Uzbek intellectuals who thought of themselves as belonging to a new nationality, but most of them were committed Communists, so there was no lunge for autonomy. Even when the Soviet Union was falling to pieces, all of the Central Asian states resisted breaking away.
Bill: You seem familiar, and somewhat sympathetic, with the evangelical Christian type who goes out into the world and discovers that reality, people, and even themselves, are more complicated than what they learned in Sunday school. Any personal experience along those lines?
Tom: No, not at all. I haven't had a religious bone in my body since I was at most 17. But I'm fascinated by religion and, yes, the religious, and I'd like to think my own (by now) pretty extensive reading into religious history and religious texts has given me some familiarity with the caves and crags of the deeply Christian brain. And I would say I'm empathetic to my Christian characters, but not at all sympathetic, as I've seen the missionary work they do in Central Asia tear too many families apart. But I do think the shock of first experiencing a place such as Uzbekistan translated, for me, into something like a religious crisis: the world you thought you knew and understood is torn away from you, and you're stuck howling in this strange new void. So that sense of loss and confusion is definitely transferable.
Bill: Did you ever write that essay, "Some Notes on an Abandoned Novel" that you mentioned to Robert Birnbaum when he interviewed you?
Tom: I never did, actually, and wound up incorporating a lot of my abandoned novel notes into the book proposal I wrote for my new book about the apostles, since the novel I abandoned was about one of the twelve apostles (John, in fact). But I think I'll be giving a lecture one of these years at Bennington (where I teach in the low-residency MFA program) about the necessity of giving up on projects at a certain point. I think people don't abandon things often enough. The world could be saved a good deal of mediocre books if people just scrapped them and started over again. The counter argument is a book like Franzen's The Corrections, which any sane person would have scrapped after the the five-year mark of struggling, but, as history now knows, he didn't--and thank god for that.
Bill: To what extent is the internet available in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and neighboring countries?
Tom: I haven't been to Central Asia since 2003, but back then there were plenty of Internet cafes that offered minimally censored web access, though in Uzbekistan at least I believe this access has been tightened considerably.
Bill: Reading Chasing the Sea reminded me that history seems to be one long, violent land-grab, right up to and including our present time. I was reading earlier today about Gene Roddenberry's dream of world peace. Do you think it's possible, or do countries simply pretend, for the sake of the media, that they want peace, when they really want to keep grabbing land?
Tom: Man, you're asking the wrong guy on this one. I think land is really no longer a motivating force for a lot of conflict in the last decades. Much of that has characterized war since, say, the 1970s has been mainly ideological. Will there ever be world peace? I have my doubts, but I do think the world will probably be a lot more peaceable someday, probably after some horrible conflagration that makes us all -- at least, those of us who are still alive -- sickened by the prospect of pressing a button capable of erasing an entire culture. Mechanized war is probably over, by and large. Ideological, terrorist-driven war--that seems to be what we and our children will face, and if we can't figure out a way to fight such wars without playing into the hands of the terrorists themselves, it will be a long, long century.
Bissell is known as a travel writer and his fictional God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories, is a top-notch collection too. He's like a fresh, modern Hemingway. One story from that book, Death Defier, was selected by Michael Chabon for Best American Short Stories 2005.
He also wrote The Father of All Things, in which Bissell accompanies his father, an ex-Marine, to retrace his father's tour of duty through Vietnam.
Tom Bissell is currently doing research for a book about the tombs of the 12 Apostles. I caught up with Tom (by email) when he was in Turkey.
Tom: Hey, Bill--I'm traveling in Turkey right now with only intermittent email access, so it might take me a couple of days to answer these. Sorry! I'll be in touch ASAP...
Bill: What are you doing in Turkey, searching for an Apostle's tomb for your next book?
Tom: I am, indeed. The empty (his body disappeared sometime in the middle ages) tomb of Saint John is in Selcuk, Turkey. Lovely place, actually.
Bill: What advice would you give to anyone who was thinking of joining the Peace Corps?
Tom: A) If you're in a serious relationship, seriously consider the possibility that joining may destroy it. And seriously ponder how much that would bother you. B) Prepare yourself for the possibility that the things you don't think you'll miss, you'll miss, and the things you think you'll miss, you won't miss. C) If you're looking for something extraordinary to happen to you, don't count on it. The most extraordinary things most PCVs experience is other people--both their fellow volunteers and the host-country nationals they meet and befriend. Peace Corps does its best work, I believe, on a one-on-one basis. It may not change cultures or save nations, but it definitely changes individual lives.
Bill: When you stood on the former floor of the Aral Sea, were you concerned about radiation or chemical poisoning?
Tom: Not overly, but it's funny you should ask. I now test positive on every tuberculosis test I'm given, because I now carry the bacilli of the disease in my blood. It's never become symptomatic (and, thus, contagious) but it's a little gift from having spent so much time in the Aral Sea basin, home to one of the world's worst TB epidemics.
Bill: In Chasing the Sea you describe how Stalin artificially created countries by dividing Central Asia into Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajik, etc. Would it be accurate to say that the act of designating these territories as countries encouraged them to feel autonomous?
Tom: I try to address this a bit in the book. Historically speaking, these places never had national understandings of themselves, so when the Soviets came along and created these boundaries, I don't think a national consciousness happened right away. That took at least a generation. There were some Uzbek intellectuals who thought of themselves as belonging to a new nationality, but most of them were committed Communists, so there was no lunge for autonomy. Even when the Soviet Union was falling to pieces, all of the Central Asian states resisted breaking away.
Bill: You seem familiar, and somewhat sympathetic, with the evangelical Christian type who goes out into the world and discovers that reality, people, and even themselves, are more complicated than what they learned in Sunday school. Any personal experience along those lines?
Tom: No, not at all. I haven't had a religious bone in my body since I was at most 17. But I'm fascinated by religion and, yes, the religious, and I'd like to think my own (by now) pretty extensive reading into religious history and religious texts has given me some familiarity with the caves and crags of the deeply Christian brain. And I would say I'm empathetic to my Christian characters, but not at all sympathetic, as I've seen the missionary work they do in Central Asia tear too many families apart. But I do think the shock of first experiencing a place such as Uzbekistan translated, for me, into something like a religious crisis: the world you thought you knew and understood is torn away from you, and you're stuck howling in this strange new void. So that sense of loss and confusion is definitely transferable.
Bill: Did you ever write that essay, "Some Notes on an Abandoned Novel" that you mentioned to Robert Birnbaum when he interviewed you?
Tom: I never did, actually, and wound up incorporating a lot of my abandoned novel notes into the book proposal I wrote for my new book about the apostles, since the novel I abandoned was about one of the twelve apostles (John, in fact). But I think I'll be giving a lecture one of these years at Bennington (where I teach in the low-residency MFA program) about the necessity of giving up on projects at a certain point. I think people don't abandon things often enough. The world could be saved a good deal of mediocre books if people just scrapped them and started over again. The counter argument is a book like Franzen's The Corrections, which any sane person would have scrapped after the the five-year mark of struggling, but, as history now knows, he didn't--and thank god for that.
Bill: To what extent is the internet available in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and neighboring countries?
Tom: I haven't been to Central Asia since 2003, but back then there were plenty of Internet cafes that offered minimally censored web access, though in Uzbekistan at least I believe this access has been tightened considerably.
Bill: Reading Chasing the Sea reminded me that history seems to be one long, violent land-grab, right up to and including our present time. I was reading earlier today about Gene Roddenberry's dream of world peace. Do you think it's possible, or do countries simply pretend, for the sake of the media, that they want peace, when they really want to keep grabbing land?
Tom: Man, you're asking the wrong guy on this one. I think land is really no longer a motivating force for a lot of conflict in the last decades. Much of that has characterized war since, say, the 1970s has been mainly ideological. Will there ever be world peace? I have my doubts, but I do think the world will probably be a lot more peaceable someday, probably after some horrible conflagration that makes us all -- at least, those of us who are still alive -- sickened by the prospect of pressing a button capable of erasing an entire culture. Mechanized war is probably over, by and large. Ideological, terrorist-driven war--that seems to be what we and our children will face, and if we can't figure out a way to fight such wars without playing into the hands of the terrorists themselves, it will be a long, long century.
Yiddish In America, 2007
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 09:28 pmYiddish was my Grandma Clara's native language. She spoke English (with a cute little accent) when we kids came over, but the newspaper she read was printed in odd, sylvan characters that were as incomprehensible as hieroglyphics to me. There was never any thought that I or my siblings would learn the language, and I guess we always felt a sad sense that Grandma and Aunt Rose spoke a private language that the rest of the world barely knew existed, a language that was fast disappearing.
Well, not with Jews like Michael Chabon around it's not. I'm fascinated by the fact that this quirky writer has somehow made Yiddish buzzworthy in 2007 with his acclaimed new novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union. I'm drawn to this book, even though I have mixed feelings about Chabon's execution of the concept. Maybe that's just because I can't help having high expectations for a book like this.
Sarah Weinman has high expectations too, since she happens to be a native Yiddish speaker. This gives her a unique perspective on Chabon's outsider's vision of the Yiddish-speaker's world. Many Yiddish speakers bristle at Chabon's condescending use of the language as comic metaphor, Weinman points out. She's also not satisfied by the novelist's felicity with the language:
"... even though I enjoyed the book, I couldn't quite shake the inborn expectations I had in hoping somehow that there would be a more living, breathing personification of a Yiddish-speaking homeland instead of the more ersatz, mainstream-friendly result that is winning Chabon a lot of praise from my critical peers."
My own gripe with the book? I can't go for that movie-set noir pastiche. You've got to be Paul Auster to pull this mystery mood off, and Michael Chabon strikes me as more of a bush-league Jonathan Lethem in the genre territory.
And yet the book's concept fascinates me, and I keep browsing the pages, tempted to dive back in. Perhaps I will. I've always known about the power of modern-era Yiddish writers, from the gentle evergreen humorist Leo Rosten to the awe-inspiring Isaac Bashevis Singer, who I had the honor of taking a class with at Albany State. I love his stories, but my all-time favorite piece of Yiddish-oriented literature is a work of fiction written in English: Envy, or Yiddish In America by the formidable Cynthia Ozick.
In this acidic story, Ozick the bespectacled battle-axe out-Bellows Saul Bellow with a bitter but hilarious portrait of a raging Yiddish writer and translator apoplectic with fury at the fact that another Yiddish-writing associate of his (said to be based on Isaac Bashevis Singer himself) has just become a smashing literary success. It's not clear which infuriates the story's hero more, the fact that Yiddish is dying or the fact that a different Yiddish writer has just hit the jackpot.
It's true that I. B. Singer was a superstar in Yiddish circles. When I came back from college and told my Grandma Clara and Aunt Rose about my class with the unforgettable Nobel laureate they were both impressed, and Aunt Rose told me that Singer's assumed middle name is an inside joke, because "Bashevis" means "Mamma's boy" (I never knew if she was making this up or not, but now I see that, according to Wikipedia, Aunt Rose knew her stuff).
Grandma Clara's younger son turned out to be my father (oh, you haven't heard that story?), who never took an interest in Yiddish as far as I know, but he has a friend from Brooklyn College named Al Grand who has made a name for himself translating Gilbert and Sullivan plays into Yiddish (his recent version of Pirates of Penzance is a hit).
It happens that Sarah Weinman wrote about Al Grand's comments on a previous Michael Chabon/Yiddish controversy in her blog post above, which just goes to prove how small this yiddische world is. Inspired by Sarah's article, I couldn't resist the chance to ask Al Grand some of my own questions, and to enjoy hearing about this language -- the language of my own heritage, though I know nothing about it -- from someone with a lot of knowledge to share.
Yiddish seems to be in the air these days. Why do you think that is?
There are so many organizations, writers, entertainers, etc. who are passionate about keeping Yiddish alive and who are working assiduously towards that endeavor that it would take a large book to answer this questions adequately. But I could do worse than to begin with The National Yiddish Book Center a vibrant, non-profit organization working to rescue Yiddish books and celebrate the culture they contain. Supported by 30,000 members, they are now the largest and fastest-growing Jewish cultural organization in America. Then there's Mendele - a moderated mailing list dedicated to the lively exchange of views, information, news and just about anything else related to the Yiddish language and Yiddish literature. Mendele has world wide subscribers who explore every conceivable topic related to Yiddish. Yiddish courses are taught in colleges throughout the world. A four-week Summer Program in Yiddish was begun in Oxford, England in 1982 and transferred to Vilnius in 1998. Since then, Vilnius University has been home to this highly praised university-accredited course in Yiddish language and culture. In 2001, the course became an integral component of the new Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University. Yearly, it has drawn participants from as many as nineteen countries across the globe. A large number are university students; overall, however, the most varied backgrounds, pursuits, and professions are represented. As I said -- I can go on for the length of a book but I'll stop here.
Do you consider yourself an expert in the language?
The majority of Jews in the USA and approximately half of the 3 million Jews in Israel plus a substantial number of French, British, Russian, Argentinian Jews are Ashkenazi Jews of central or eastern European origin who share a religious subculture with Yiddish as its lingua franca. I am not a Yiddish expert in the sense of being academically trained. Also -- Yiddish is not my native tongue -- so in that regard I am also not an expert. However -- I grew up in a household wherein both of my parents, whose native tongue was Yiddish, spoke it constantly. I absorbed it very naturally. I am basically self-taught through the use of Weinreich's Yiddish/English -- English/Yiddish wonderful dictionary as well as his College Yiddish. I also own and consult Mordkhe Shchaechter's Yiddish Tsvey, Dovid Katz's Grammar of the Yiddish Language and numerous collections of Yiddish poetry, novels, proverbs, music, etc.
Have you read Chabon's book and do you have any opinions on it?
I have not read Chabon's book -- but I understand that he has a limited background in the Yiddish language.
I've always heard that Yiddish is a mash-up of Hebrew and German, but when I see it it seems more German than Hebrew to me. Am I missing something?
Although most of Yiddish vocabulary is from ancient German -- still about a fourth or so of the vocabulary is from Hebrew. Take the three words in the title of my piece DI YAM GAZLONIM. The only Germanic element therein is "Di". The word "YAM" means "ocean" both in Hebrew and in Yiddish. And "GAZLONIM" is the plural of "GAZLEN" which means "robber" both in Hebrew and in Yiddish. Thus "DI YAM GAZLONIM" means, word for word "the sea robbers" or in more graceful English "the robbers of the sea". Historically Yiddish stems from medieval German so it retains many of the medieval elements of the German language that no longer exist in modern German. Thus German linguists who specialize in old German studies are interested in doing scholarly studies of Yiddish.
Where do you think Yiddish studies will be 100 years from now?
My hope is that it should continue to live. But prophecy is not one of my strengths.
Can you quote a couple of favorite verses from your Yiddish "Penzance" for us to enjoy? Naturally "Major General" comes to mind but I'd leave it to you to select verses you like.
(breaking into song)
"Ikh bin der Groyser General un ikh bin oykh a guter Yid"
Ikh gey oysrekhnen yetst mayne ale mayles in a Yiddish lid,
Ikh hob a klugn kop un ikh farshtey Einstein's teoriye,
Ikh ken dertseyln ales fun der gantse velt historiye,
Kh'bin zeyer gut bakant mit ale mayses fun de Maupassant,
Ikh tants, un zing, un makh a shpas - ikh bin a mentsh mit groys talant,
Ikh ken gut bakn lekekh un ikh veys fun fotografia-
afia","rafia","shmafia"-A-HA!
Ikh ken gut shisn un ikh hob nit moyre far der Mafia!
Ikh lern gut Gemorah un mit Toyre bin ikh gut bakant,
Un alemol bay tog un nakht halt ikh dem sider in der hant
In kurtzn vil ikh zogn aykh ven ikh farendik shoyn mayn lid,
Ikh bin a Groyser General un ikh bin oykh a guter Yid!
Ikh bin a talmid khokhim un an opera zinger bin ikh oykh,
Der "Barber fun Seville" ken ikh gut zingen mit mayn shtime hoykh,
A khale ken ikh bakn un a lokshn kugl makh ikh fayn,
Ikh makh a kiddish erev Shabos un gey glaykh in shul arayn.
In shul ken ikh gut davenen un leynen toyre ken ikh oykh,
Un chiken zup mit kneydlakh es ikh biz es tut mir vey der boykh,
Ikh kokh a Purim tsimes un makh latkes yedn Khanike "anike","lanike","panike", A-HA!
Kh'ken tantsn gut a "hora" un ikh shpil af der "harmonica"
How would one say "Literary Kicks" in Yiddish?
"Literarishe Klep". Note that every "a" is pronounced "ah".
* * * * *
Literarishe Klep says thanks to Al Grand for an interesting interview and a great Yiddish "Major General".
Well, not with Jews like Michael Chabon around it's not. I'm fascinated by the fact that this quirky writer has somehow made Yiddish buzzworthy in 2007 with his acclaimed new novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union. I'm drawn to this book, even though I have mixed feelings about Chabon's execution of the concept. Maybe that's just because I can't help having high expectations for a book like this.
Sarah Weinman has high expectations too, since she happens to be a native Yiddish speaker. This gives her a unique perspective on Chabon's outsider's vision of the Yiddish-speaker's world. Many Yiddish speakers bristle at Chabon's condescending use of the language as comic metaphor, Weinman points out. She's also not satisfied by the novelist's felicity with the language:
"... even though I enjoyed the book, I couldn't quite shake the inborn expectations I had in hoping somehow that there would be a more living, breathing personification of a Yiddish-speaking homeland instead of the more ersatz, mainstream-friendly result that is winning Chabon a lot of praise from my critical peers."
My own gripe with the book? I can't go for that movie-set noir pastiche. You've got to be Paul Auster to pull this mystery mood off, and Michael Chabon strikes me as more of a bush-league Jonathan Lethem in the genre territory.
And yet the book's concept fascinates me, and I keep browsing the pages, tempted to dive back in. Perhaps I will. I've always known about the power of modern-era Yiddish writers, from the gentle evergreen humorist Leo Rosten to the awe-inspiring Isaac Bashevis Singer, who I had the honor of taking a class with at Albany State. I love his stories, but my all-time favorite piece of Yiddish-oriented literature is a work of fiction written in English: Envy, or Yiddish In America by the formidable Cynthia Ozick.
In this acidic story, Ozick the bespectacled battle-axe out-Bellows Saul Bellow with a bitter but hilarious portrait of a raging Yiddish writer and translator apoplectic with fury at the fact that another Yiddish-writing associate of his (said to be based on Isaac Bashevis Singer himself) has just become a smashing literary success. It's not clear which infuriates the story's hero more, the fact that Yiddish is dying or the fact that a different Yiddish writer has just hit the jackpot.
It's true that I. B. Singer was a superstar in Yiddish circles. When I came back from college and told my Grandma Clara and Aunt Rose about my class with the unforgettable Nobel laureate they were both impressed, and Aunt Rose told me that Singer's assumed middle name is an inside joke, because "Bashevis" means "Mamma's boy" (I never knew if she was making this up or not, but now I see that, according to Wikipedia, Aunt Rose knew her stuff).
Grandma Clara's younger son turned out to be my father (oh, you haven't heard that story?), who never took an interest in Yiddish as far as I know, but he has a friend from Brooklyn College named Al Grand who has made a name for himself translating Gilbert and Sullivan plays into Yiddish (his recent version of Pirates of Penzance is a hit).
It happens that Sarah Weinman wrote about Al Grand's comments on a previous Michael Chabon/Yiddish controversy in her blog post above, which just goes to prove how small this yiddische world is. Inspired by Sarah's article, I couldn't resist the chance to ask Al Grand some of my own questions, and to enjoy hearing about this language -- the language of my own heritage, though I know nothing about it -- from someone with a lot of knowledge to share.
Yiddish seems to be in the air these days. Why do you think that is?
There are so many organizations, writers, entertainers, etc. who are passionate about keeping Yiddish alive and who are working assiduously towards that endeavor that it would take a large book to answer this questions adequately. But I could do worse than to begin with The National Yiddish Book Center a vibrant, non-profit organization working to rescue Yiddish books and celebrate the culture they contain. Supported by 30,000 members, they are now the largest and fastest-growing Jewish cultural organization in America. Then there's Mendele - a moderated mailing list dedicated to the lively exchange of views, information, news and just about anything else related to the Yiddish language and Yiddish literature. Mendele has world wide subscribers who explore every conceivable topic related to Yiddish. Yiddish courses are taught in colleges throughout the world. A four-week Summer Program in Yiddish was begun in Oxford, England in 1982 and transferred to Vilnius in 1998. Since then, Vilnius University has been home to this highly praised university-accredited course in Yiddish language and culture. In 2001, the course became an integral component of the new Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University. Yearly, it has drawn participants from as many as nineteen countries across the globe. A large number are university students; overall, however, the most varied backgrounds, pursuits, and professions are represented. As I said -- I can go on for the length of a book but I'll stop here.
Do you consider yourself an expert in the language?
The majority of Jews in the USA and approximately half of the 3 million Jews in Israel plus a substantial number of French, British, Russian, Argentinian Jews are Ashkenazi Jews of central or eastern European origin who share a religious subculture with Yiddish as its lingua franca. I am not a Yiddish expert in the sense of being academically trained. Also -- Yiddish is not my native tongue -- so in that regard I am also not an expert. However -- I grew up in a household wherein both of my parents, whose native tongue was Yiddish, spoke it constantly. I absorbed it very naturally. I am basically self-taught through the use of Weinreich's Yiddish/English -- English/Yiddish wonderful dictionary as well as his College Yiddish. I also own and consult Mordkhe Shchaechter's Yiddish Tsvey, Dovid Katz's Grammar of the Yiddish Language and numerous collections of Yiddish poetry, novels, proverbs, music, etc.
Have you read Chabon's book and do you have any opinions on it?
I have not read Chabon's book -- but I understand that he has a limited background in the Yiddish language.
I've always heard that Yiddish is a mash-up of Hebrew and German, but when I see it it seems more German than Hebrew to me. Am I missing something?
Although most of Yiddish vocabulary is from ancient German -- still about a fourth or so of the vocabulary is from Hebrew. Take the three words in the title of my piece DI YAM GAZLONIM. The only Germanic element therein is "Di". The word "YAM" means "ocean" both in Hebrew and in Yiddish. And "GAZLONIM" is the plural of "GAZLEN" which means "robber" both in Hebrew and in Yiddish. Thus "DI YAM GAZLONIM" means, word for word "the sea robbers" or in more graceful English "the robbers of the sea". Historically Yiddish stems from medieval German so it retains many of the medieval elements of the German language that no longer exist in modern German. Thus German linguists who specialize in old German studies are interested in doing scholarly studies of Yiddish.
Where do you think Yiddish studies will be 100 years from now?
My hope is that it should continue to live. But prophecy is not one of my strengths.
Can you quote a couple of favorite verses from your Yiddish "Penzance" for us to enjoy? Naturally "Major General" comes to mind but I'd leave it to you to select verses you like.
(breaking into song)
"Ikh bin der Groyser General un ikh bin oykh a guter Yid"
Ikh gey oysrekhnen yetst mayne ale mayles in a Yiddish lid,
Ikh hob a klugn kop un ikh farshtey Einstein's teoriye,
Ikh ken dertseyln ales fun der gantse velt historiye,
Kh'bin zeyer gut bakant mit ale mayses fun de Maupassant,
Ikh tants, un zing, un makh a shpas - ikh bin a mentsh mit groys talant,
Ikh ken gut bakn lekekh un ikh veys fun fotografia-
afia","rafia","shmafia"-A-HA!
Ikh ken gut shisn un ikh hob nit moyre far der Mafia!
Ikh lern gut Gemorah un mit Toyre bin ikh gut bakant,
Un alemol bay tog un nakht halt ikh dem sider in der hant
In kurtzn vil ikh zogn aykh ven ikh farendik shoyn mayn lid,
Ikh bin a Groyser General un ikh bin oykh a guter Yid!
Ikh bin a talmid khokhim un an opera zinger bin ikh oykh,
Der "Barber fun Seville" ken ikh gut zingen mit mayn shtime hoykh,
A khale ken ikh bakn un a lokshn kugl makh ikh fayn,
Ikh makh a kiddish erev Shabos un gey glaykh in shul arayn.
In shul ken ikh gut davenen un leynen toyre ken ikh oykh,
Un chiken zup mit kneydlakh es ikh biz es tut mir vey der boykh,
Ikh kokh a Purim tsimes un makh latkes yedn Khanike "anike","lanike","panike", A-HA!
Kh'ken tantsn gut a "hora" un ikh shpil af der "harmonica"
How would one say "Literary Kicks" in Yiddish?
"Literarishe Klep". Note that every "a" is pronounced "ah".
Literarishe Klep says thanks to Al Grand for an interesting interview and a great Yiddish "Major General".
