Paul Auster is an incredibly prolific author, whose style is as distinctive as it is dynamic. In his 15^th novel, Invisible, which hit the shelves last week, Auster traverses the streets of both New York and Paris examining the anxiety, complexity and malaise that accompany urban life. It is the story of Adam Walker, a young and brilliant second-year student at Columbia, and his relationships with a series of characters including a mysterious and treacherous Frenchman named Rudolf Born, Walker’s older sister Gwyn (with whom he has an incestuous affair, which she later denies), a young woman named Celine, and Jim, a classmate from college—decades later—who becomes Walker’s confidant, and the novel’s keeper.

I have been in hot pursuit of an interview with Paul Auster for over a year now though I’m glad it took this long, because Invisible is truly indicative of what makes Auster a master of his craft. Invisible may be my favorite Auster novel to date, and for all its complexity, it is overall a beautifully written and utterly involving story about confusion, obsession, experience and love—in all of their various forms.

The Rumpus: What were you doing before we met today? What is a typical day in the life of Paul Auster?

Paul Auster: Well, there are two kinds of typical days. There’s the typical day when I’m writing a novel, and there’s the typical day when I’m not. I just finished something new, so I’m unemployed again so I had a pretty lackadaisical day. When I’m writing a novel I stick to a rigid routine. I get up between seven and eight, I have orange juice and tea, read the paper then I go off to a little apartment I have in the neighborhood where I work. I stay there until five or six. It’s a very Spartan environment. I don’t even own a computer. I write by hand then I type it up on an old manual typewriter. But I cross out a lot—I’m not writing in stone tablets, it’s just ink on paper. I don’t feel comfortable without a pen or a pencil in my hand. I can’t think with my fingers on the keyboard. Words are generated for me by gripping the pen, and pressing the point on the paper.

Rumpus: You’re a very prolific writer. You’ve published works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, translation, critical essays and screen plays. When and how did you decide that you wanted to be a writer, and what do you recall as your earliest formative reading experience?

Auster: For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read. By the age of 9 or so, I was writing little poems—don’t ask me why, they were wretched, wretched, awful little things—but I enjoyed doing it and I graduated to writing short stories. When I was twelve years old, in the sixth grade, I wrote a long short story, and the teacher of the class let me read out loud to the other students in the last five or ten minutes of every day of school, so that was my first public work. It was a mystery story about someone hiding pearls in a typewriter. I don’t know where I came up with the idea, I probably stole it. I remember doing drawings of all the faces of the characters too…ridiculous. But as I got older and entered my adolescence, I got more serious about all this. The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist. But there were a few little ups and downs in my thinking. I remember I thought I should become a doctor, even though I had no talent for science whatsoever. Then of course, until I was about sixteen, I thought I might have a shot as a major league baseball player. But once I hit my full adolescence I lost all interest in that. I discovered, in rapid succession, books, girls, alcohol and tobacco, and I’ve never turned back. Those are the four things I’m most interested in, still to this day.

Rumpus: You’ve got a new novel out, Invisible. In part two of Invisible, one character says to another, “Fear is a good thing. Fear is what drives us to take risks and extend ourselves beyond our normal limits. Any writer who feels he is standing on safe ground is unlikely to produce anything of value.” What kinds of risks do you take as a writer, and when is the last time you truly felt you were not standing on solid ground?

Auster: I never feel I’m standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear. As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice. You challenge yourself aesthetically, morally, psychologically. You go into terrain that can be very uncomfortable, and you have to do it with a certain boldness. You can’t shrink from the task, but that’s what makes it all so interesting. Otherwise, better to do another job. With Invisible, the structure is very strange, it’s very risky, as was Man in the Dark. That one loops in on itself, then takes a sudden right-turn about two-thirds through so it didn’t have the ideal classical structure of a novel. As does this new one; it just breaks into pieces by the end. There are not only two male narrators, there’s a female narrator at the end of the book as well. I thought that was risky, but organic. It’s the way the story seemed to demand being written. Then there’s the business that takes place in part 2…which was territory I’d certainly never even gone near and it was difficult. But I wanted to do it in a very open and honest way, and it was demanding emotionally. I don’t even know where it came from. So much of what I do comes out of my unconscious, and if I feel it’s the right thing to do I just go with it, but I can’t gauge it. There’s no scientific measurement to say whether it’s right or wrong, it’s intuition. It felt right for this troubled young man, this passionate, intelligent young man.

Rumpus: Do you have a particular process, or do you find that you invent a new process with each new book you write?

Auster: It’s new, it’s always new. I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I’ve never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it. The tone of every book is slightly different; there’s a music that each has that is distinct from all the others, and even the new book that I just finished—it’s shaped differently from anything I’ve ever tried before. There are very long sentences, sentences that are three pages long, but it just felt right. There was some sort of inner cadence that I was trying to create and I felt that by using long, rolling, run-on sentences it gave the book more propulsion.

Rumpus: You seem to have a fascination with writers, and they tend to play very central roles in your novels. Sometimes it seems like you explore the act of writing as a form of therapy, as if writing about something somehow makes it more real, gives it more meaning. But you also write about writing as a compulsion, as a tool that can unlock dark, difficult parts of the unconscious that you might not even know exist. Aside from a career, what role does writing play in your life? In short, why write?

Auster: I don’t know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn’t have to. But it is a compulsion. You don’t choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. When young people say I want to be a novelist, I’d say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won’t make any money, you probably won’t become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive. You have to have a tremendous taste for solitude. I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else. On the other hand, when I am writing, even though it’s hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I’m not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I’m not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic. I feel that the act of writing, in and of itself, is a tool towards probing that which you wouldn’t without that pen in your hand. It’s a strange, almost neurological phenomenon, and the words seem to generate more words—but only when you’re writing. You can’t do it in your head. There are certain phrases in books of mine, and I don’t know where they came from, or how I was capable of thinking up these formulations. It’s only in the heat of composition that these things occur to you.

Rumpus: So solitude is healthy for you?

Auster: Up to a point. I wouldn’t want to live alone. I like having my wife Siri to talk to and share things with, but our days are spent apart, each one, alone in a room.

The Rumpus: You’ve worked as a translator, and you are obviously very sensitive to language, and you do often write about words themselves as being particularly important in and of themselves. Are words simply a vehicle for expression, or can they be the inspiration?

Auster: It can be both, and it shifts. I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that’s not possible, but it’s some sort of idealized goal. To see right through it, into the matter itself. Other times, the material of the words becomes the very subject of what I’m doing. In Timbuktu, there’s a schizophrenic homeless poet rambling to his dog these long monologues, and it’s all about the language; the careening of free association. It depends.

Rumpus: I’ve read in several places that you are heavily influenced by Herman Melville. In Moby Dick, the narrator Ishmael is decidedly unreliable. As readers, we don’t know who he is, or where he came from, and are given nearly no history of him at all. Similarly, in Invisible, and some of your earlier work, your narrators are unreliable as well, playing with the notion of what truth is, and whether or not it can be qualified. When you craft your characters, do you endow them with histories? Do you always know exactly what forces drive them? Do you have emotional relationships with them, and why are some of them so opaque?

Auster: My characters, I find them as I’m writing. It’s quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them. I don’t think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am and you are. I was very touched when, about a year and a half ago, I was in Denmark out by the water. I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet—an imaginary character becomes so important to people, we think about them so much that we name a ship after them. The imaginary lives on in the real.

Invisible is the most complex book of mine, in terms of narration. But in Man in the Dark, as August Brill says at one point, “the real and the imagined are one.” Thoughts are real, even thoughts of unreal things. It goes around and around. Once you accept the fact that the inside is also part of the outside, all bets are off. It’s a bit like a flashback in a movie. Even if someone later says that it didn’t really happen, you’ve seen it, and you are convinced by it. With a character like Adam Walker, whether these things happened or not, you read it and you’re convinced by it. Everything else is secondary.

Rumpus: So much of your work is centered in and around cities. Cities are unique because they are purely human constructions, but at the same time incredibly isolating. Can you explain your involvement with cities, as a construction, as well as New York City as a real place.

Auster: Actually, I’d like to talk about space first. It’s about space—there are rooms and houses, there are streets and cities. A lot of this is tied to the body, which is tied to the unconscious. In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that, in a funny way, when people are cooped up in rooms they are freer than when they are wandering about in the world. Someone like Nash in The Music of Chance—he hits the road and nothing but trouble follows. Or, as I keep quoting in the Invention of Solitude, Pascal says, “All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room.” Now cities—I’m attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York…it’s my place. In Invisible, I wrote about Paris a little bit—another city that is very close to me, because I lived there. Only once before, in The Locked Room, my narrator goes to Paris and runs into a lot of trouble there. So it was interesting, in my mind, to revisit Paris of forty years ago. But luckily a lot of things are still there unlike New York, where nearly everything from forty years ago is gone now. The hotel described in the book is a real place, and I did stay in that room in 1965. But the place is long gone, completely gutted and turned into an apartment building. It cost $1.40 a night to sleep there. And the mattresses really were U-shaped. It was creepy, but interesting. Walker, about that room, said, it was so awful, but it was the room for poets—those who have to battle just to survive and not go into a suicidal depression. Rooms matter a lot, rooms in cities particularly. But I’ve also enjoyed writing about openness too, and wandering around. I started exploring this early on, but in the Invention of Solitude, when I was talking about S. the composer, really you can’t imagine how small his room was, but he had it all organized—it was like Robinson Crusoe. It was his own little world, his microcosm. I was overwhelmed when I saw that a man could live this way, and actually be happy. It made a big impression. In my life, I’ve lived in very different kinds of places—very tiny rooms when I was young. And you do learn to cope with it. The funny thing is, as you begin to inhabit larger places, it’s very interesting how quickly you adapt to your space. What seems enormous at first becomes natural after a few weeks.

Rumpus: Brooklyn is, as it has always been, a creative hotbed for writers. What about Brooklyn do you like so much? What inspires you about this borough?

Auster: I’ve been here for thirty years now. My mother grew up in Crown Heights. First they lived in Brighton Beach, and my mother had asthma. The doctor said she has to go to a higher place. My grandfather said, ok we’ve got to move then. He took out a map, and he said, “Crown Heights, that’s it! High up there, we’ll go to the heights!” My daughter was born in the same hospital that my mother was born in. Brooklyn has a bit of everything—some of the most beautiful things in America, and some of the most wretched, ugly, impoverished things. In Blue in the Face, there’s a Brooklyn jazz musician who said, “Brooklyn’s got everything. We’ve got high lands and low lands, we got swamps and mountains, we got people from all over the world, every color, every race. The only problem is we don’t know how to get along.” But, I think we get along better than most heterogeneous communities around the world. It’s better than Belfast or Jerusalem, right?

Rumpus: What now, what’s next?

Auster: I guess I’m unemployed again. But I’m still ruminating on the novel I just finished. I’m still under the spell of it. I wrote the last pages at the end of August, but then there was the typing, correcting. I think I was done three weeks ago.

I’ve written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months. But I have a new rhythm now. Up until the Brooklyn Follies, I knew what I wanted to write next—a backlog of books in my head. But after that, the drawer was empty. It was as if I plucked my last four books out of thin air, with long gaps after writing, five, six, seven months. But after something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years. When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I’ve ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.

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If he were alive, today, August 1st 2009, would be Herman Melville’s 190th birthday and on this occasion I’d like to take the opportunity to pay a small, humble tribute to an author who has single-handedly taught me so much about writing and literature, patience and perseverance, and the staggering potential of language and prose. But first, a little history:

Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819, to a prominent New England family. His father, being a successful merchant and importer, offered Melville and his brothers and sisters a well-to-do lifestyle, however, when Melville was an adolescent his father’s business failed, leaving the family bankrupt. Shortly thereafter, in 1932, Melville’s father died and the family relocated to Albany, New York, on the banks of the Hudson River. There he attended a prep-school, on and off, before moving back to New York City and working odd jobs around the docks. In 1839, Melville secured a job as a cabin boy and set sail on his first sea voyage, bound for Liverpool, England—a tour that provided much fodder for Melville’s early novels. Just a few years later in 1841, Melville joined the crew of the whaling ship Acushnet in New Bedford, Massachusetts, but deserted on an island in the South Pacific after just 18 months at sea. He boarded another ship bound for Hawaii, and subsequently signed on as a seaman aboard the USS United States, which ultimately dropped him off in Boston in 1844. In the following years upon his return, Melville published several novels documenting his experiences at sea, before marrying and moving to Arrowhead, a residence in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he would live for thirteen years. There, he befriended neighbor Nathanael Hawthorne and wrote his most famous work—which is said to have been inspired by a pair of hills, visible from Melville’s piazza, that resemble the head and arched back of a Sperm Whale—which brings me to Moby-Dick.

Though Melville was able to make a living as a writer in his earlier years, Moby-Dick was met with great criticism and, after falling out of the literary limelight Melville sold his estate to his brother and moved back to New York City where he died, relatively unknown, working in a customs house.

It’s hard to believe that a work like Moby-Dick—now considered one of the quintessential great American novels—was completely glossed over upon publication. I read Moby-Dick for the first time three years ago, during my junior year of college, and am now in the middle of my second re-reading of it. Each time I pick it up I manage to glean more from it, absorb the language in a new way completely separate from the last.

Know right away that this is, by no means a review, or even an analysis; it is simply my experience. Moby-Dick is my favorite book. In fact, it is one of my most favorite things. I suppose it is commonplace with favorite books and favorite things to believe that you, and you alone, have a connection that is stronger, more intense, more real than anyone else could ever have with it. Moby-Dick demands attention and patience in a way I’ve never experienced with any other piece of literature, but also gives more in return. Because there is so little plot—a narrator, a crew, a doomed ship, a captain possessed—the novel relies on emotional pull, the prevalence of basic human desire, to keep it afloat.

And what’s more: by any traditional standards, Moby-Dick is a mess. The narrator is perhaps the most definitive of unreliable literary sources, while the climax occurs in no more than a handful of pages. But at the same time, it manages to encompass absolutely everything: madness and obsession and humanity at its best—the brotherly bond between Ishmael and Queequeg, and humanity at its worst—Ahab’s insatiable thirst for vengeance.

Moby-Dick, as a novel, is all-encompassing. It compels you forward: from the shores of Manhattan to the docks of New Bedford to the planks of the Pequod—as Ahab has no choice but to pursue “one grand hooded phantom, like a snowhill in the air”—the reader, like the crew, has no choice but to follow him to the very depths of madness.

“But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come.”

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Rumpus: What did you do today?

Hill: I just went to the gym and am just coming down from yet another killer workout. I suppose that’s not too surprising since I’m pretty ripped and all. I have been trying to jump rope because my friend told me it’s really good for you. I suck at it though. As far as I’m concerned, jumping rope is the hardest, most painful thing that anyone could ever do ever. I don’t know how little girls do it.

Rumpus: You started out as a freelance writer. Writing is so behind-the-scenes most of the time. What made you want to make the move from writing to performing?

Hill: With comedy, the only reason I’ve had even the tiniest bit of success is because I had absolutely no expectations or goals at all. I never did it. I was just retarded with my friends and now it’s getting worse, now it’s my career!I just want to have fun, and maybe have people be slightly nicer to me than they would a normal person. With writing, I always liked writing funny stuff, and I was writing on this hidden camera comedy reality TV show and from acting idiot on set they asked me to audition so I did but the network said I was too strange and volatile to be onscreen, but then I got to thinking, maybe I should perform. Then I got hired as a writer at another show so I brought the tape to show them. They said I should be a correspondent, so my plan totally worked! But then the network, Court TV, was like, “absolutely not.” The network’s quote was: “Dave is good in small doses.” And four years ago my friend told me about his show at Parkside Lounge and invited me to come down and do something. At this point, I had already been on television but I had never performed for a live audience, it was kind of weird and backwards. So I did it. It was a horrible, horrible experience.

Rumpus: How do you come up with your ideas? Do you incorporate personal experiences into your comedy?

Hill: Most of what I do is based on personal experiences in some way or another. Lately, I have been telling rambling stories about my recent trip to Japan. I have been more interested in just talking more as opposed to some of the other stuff I normally do lately. That way I don’t have to carry around that big sledgehammer and all that produce. It’s career suicide, I know, but my shoulders are getting sore.

Also, I just think about what my friends and I would have liked when we were 15 and hanging out in each others’ basements. I haven’t matured much since then, so it’s not too hard to figure out. And just knowing that I have booked a show and have to show up somewhere and do something or I might get pelted with rocks or not get any money for candy (and by candy, I mean drugs, lots and lots of drugs)—that creates a little external pressure to keep thinking of stuff. Mostly though, I view what I do as a sort of secretion or, perhaps more accurately an excretion. You know that slimy stuff that a snail leaves behind on the sidewalk? It’s pretty much like that only sometimes it costs five bucks.

Rumpus: How do you bounce back from a really, really bad performance that totally backfires?

Hill: Well ever since I started, there are people who just do not like what I do at all, and then there are people who love it. If you go on Youtube, the comments are that I’m a fat faggot. I’m either a genius or a fat faggot. It’s fifty-fifty. I guess I kind of always think I should quit, like somehow I pulled a huge scam thinking I could do it the last few years. But as much as I complain and want to kill myself, I think what do I do all day? I have a really fun existence. I don’t do anything I don’t think is really fun. I have to do my taxes once in a while, that’s not very fun.

Rumpus: So much of your comedy exists on the internet. What are some sites you visit often/videos you watch regularly?

Hill: I pretty much just watch that one video of squirrel on water skis over and over again. No matter how many times I see it, I still never see it coming for some reason. I don’t know who is more awesome- the squirrel or the guy who was all like “I’m gonna put that squirrel on water skis.”They are both champions in my book. I have no doubt the squirrel will have the last laugh though.

Rumpus: Do you like stand-up or video better and why?

Hill: I like both. With TV or video, I don’t have to wear pants, so that’s nice. If you leave the house to see stand-up though, there is a bar and greater chance of making out with someone in the bathroom. It seems silly to go into the bathroom to make out with someone in my own home. I still do it, but I feel silly about it. As a performer I like both too. TV and video take longer to do than stand-up, but there are usually more snacks so that is nice. I am a man of low standards, so if you give me a bagel, some bottled water and maybe a Kit-Kat I will do pretty much anything.

Rumpus: Where did you find such a large fluffy microphone?

Hill: That belongs to my friend Keith Goldberg. I like them because in addition to looking like a big furry donger, they are really good at picking up sound, which is good for a guy like me who doesn’t always talk very loud or point the microphone in the right direction much of the time.

Rumpus: You write, play music and do comedy. What are some of your favorite writers, bands, comedians? Major influences?

Hill: As for writers, one of my favorites is my friend David Rakoff. He’s insanely funny and is a linguistic acrobat. Even when he speaks, he manages to form sentences most people couldn’t construct even if they worked on it all day and had five friends helping them. I have also been enjoying Joan Didion a lot lately, not that I get it. That having been said, I am a firm believer that people should read whatever they can get their hands on, even the back of a cereal box. The guy who reads even just the back of a cereal box will have a stronger brain than the guy who read nothing at all. There- I just wrote a public service announcement for PBS. Run with it.

As for bands, my favorites are Lucy Wainwright Roche, Alessi’s Ark, Led Zeppelin, the Smiths, Husker Du, Bad Brains, the Kinks, Cheap Trick, T. Rex, the Replacements, Dinosaur Jr., Sweet, Guided by Voices, Rufus Wainwright, Big Star, the Raspberries, the Jam, New Pornographers, Walter Schreifels, Teenage Fanclub, Corrosion of Conformity, Fleetwood Mac, Walt Mink, the Roches, Brian Eno, Slade, Teenage Fanclub, Thin Lizzy, Pentagram, and Elvis Costello. In other words, I am a fairly predictable white guy in his 30s. Sometimes I listen to jazz or some organ or theremin music or maybe Marlene Dietrich, but that is rare and I only really do it because I want to seem more interesting to whomever finds my body.

As for comedians, I like way too many to mention and I will forget to mention a million of them right now, but some of my all-time favorites are Chris Elliott, Paul Reubens, Fred Willard, Woody Allen, Andy Kaufman, David Letterman, Dick Cavett, Bill Murray, and Steve Martin a whole bunch. Other than that I will say that I think Todd Barry is great and I am not just saying that because we are friends and he probably has himself on Google alerts and might read this. And I love, love, love Tig Notaro. Also, I still say that if I were a bazillionaire, I would pay Nick Kroll and John Mulaney to follow me around all day doing their “Oh, Hello” characters. That would make me forget all of my problems (and probably create all new ones).

As for influences, I guess I like whatever makes me laugh the most or whatever makes me the most uncomfortable. Everyone I just mentioned does that really well. Especially Nick Kroll. Honestly, I can’t stand the sight of him.

Rumpus: Tell me what your idea of a “super successful” day would be.

Hill: Hmmm. That’s a tough one but I’ll try. To keep it realistic, I’ll make it include only stuff that I actually do sometimes. Otherwise, the entire day would take place on horseback and the whole thing would get too complicated. Anyway, the boring, realistic version of my “super succesful day” would go like this:

I’d wake up at 7:30am and somehow not want or need to go back to sleep. Neither would the hot naked chick I just woke up next to. We’d go to La Taza de Oro on 14th and 8th for a Puerto Rican breakfast of rice and beans, eggs, sweet plaintains and cafe con leche. If I could somehow magically still be hungry, I would then walk to Chinatown for dim sum. The super hot naked chick could come with me if she wanted. Then I’d walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and go see a movie maybe. I’d probably need a nap after that followed by an hour of playing heavy metal guitar solos, something I am awesome at. Then it would be fun to do a comedy show or play a rock show or both at some point, but just a real quick one so I could get back to eating and drinking stuff. I would wear fancy Paul Smith clothes the whole time, which I do a lot anyway because I am super, super fancy. Also, there would be an adorable puppy with me the whole time and for some reason they’d let him in everywhere. He’d always be getting into trouble. But you know what? I just can’t stay mad at him.

Rumpus: If you were stranded on a desert island and could only take three things with you, what would they be?

Hill: I would bring a guitar, some sunscreen, and maybe the hot naked chick from before.

Rumpus: What’s the best news story you’ve read recently?

Hill: I’m always a fan of when animals attack humans as a result of their having been domesticated or humans encroaching on their natural environment. I say this not because I like to see people get hurt, maimed, or injured in any way. It’s just nice to know that animals aren’t taking human dominance sitting down. My favorite, fairly recent story was about a panda in China named Yang Yang that bit a college student who snuck into its pen to try to give him a hug. I don’t think anyone was too surprised about the attack aside from maybe the college kid. That guy probably never saw it coming. In case anyone’s thinking that I will get mine one day for being amused at such things, the important thing to know here is that I was bitten and pretty severely injured in the face by my family dog when I was eleven. So I’ve already gotten mine and I am okay with it. Plus, the odds of me ever getting close enough to a panda to hug him are really, really slim. I have held a monkey on more than one occasion though. And also a baby tiger once. That was pretty cool for me, but I felt really bad for the little tiger.

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Probably the coolest thing I heard today came from Rick Joyce of Perseus Books Group, who has designed a project in direct response to the changing landscape of publishing and media. It’s called the 48-hour book challenge, through which Joyce hopes to prove that, though publishing is certainly changing, these changes can be good and should be embraced as opportunities for growth in and of the industry. Here’s how it works: Perseus launched a website in mid-April soliciting ideas for book sequels, asking interested parties to submit the first sentence of a sequel to any book ever written (think, Call Me, Ishmael: A Guide to Dating at Sea, the sequel to Moby-Dick, for one). This afternoon they closed their submissions, and in the next 48 hours there will be a series public editorial and design meetings at the expo, culminating in the creation of a book, to be published in various physical and digital formats by the end of the Expo. The book will fittingly be called, Book: The Sequel.

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Reading Saunders isn’t like reading at all, it’s more like consuming—or being consumed, sucked into a world almost the same as this one but a little bit stranger, darker, funnier, more devastating. Everyone looks and talks the same, but then maybe you’ll be hanging out in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-esque nowhereland and you’ll think you’ve found an awesome new friend, but then his feet are really claws and that’s a problem. Or you’ll be sitting around in the housing projects with a couple of deadbeat cousins minding your own business, when you look over and your dead/half-dead/undead aunt is sitting in the rocking chair in the corner with her nose in her lap and her arm on the floor. Like Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions, doodling American Flags and vaginas on your cocktail napkin as you sit together in a dark bar, Saunders’ world is all encompassing and, as a reader, you become a sort of participant. Things are bleak there, and odd and full of pain, and peppered with moments of belly-busting humor that can only truly come from a place of genuine humanity. He is a master of walking the line between the bizarre and the banal, the artificial and the real. His exploration of all that goes on just beneath the surface of things both absurd and mundane, which are so often one in the same somehow—a man working as a caveman in an amusement park to raise money for his sick child, a blue-collar community dependent on a Civil War reenactment park smack in the middle of gang territories, a motivational speaker who gives terribly detrimental advice to his devoted followers—reveals, in the midst of its humor and weirdness, the complexity and the difficulty of the human condition.

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Jaclyn Friedman is an author, blogger, performer and activist. Friedman edited the recently released anthology, Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Poets and Writers Magazine, poetsagainstthewar.org and the Lambda Award-nominated anthology Pinned Down by Pronouns, among others.

Rumpus: How did you come up with the concept for the Yes Means Yes Anthology, and how did the idea develop as you began collected pieces? How did you choose the writers and topics?

Friedman: Yes Means Yes developed in response to one article too many warning women about the risks of wearing short skirts and partying in public, without putting any responsibility on rapists to police their own behavior. We are calling for a world in which women can enjoy their bodies and their lives with out shame or fear, and we believe that effective rape prevention has to start from there. There were quite a few topics we knew we wanted to cover in the book, so we did solicit certain writers to write on certain topics. But a good number of essays also came in through our open call, illuminating the possibilities, implications and limits of our approach. It was a pretty thrilling process – but also really hard, because with a book you’ve got some serious space limitations, and there was a lot of great stuff we had to leave out.

Rumpus: When did you first become interested in writing a book about rape?

Friedman: I’ve been interested in talking and educating about rape, safety and sexuality for most of my adult life. The book really is just an evolution of that interest. The specific idea to do the book developed out of a conversation I had with Jessica Valenti (my co-editor), about an article I had recently written on new approaches to talking about drinking & rape, and about how long it had been since a book about feminist responses to rape had been published.

Rumpus: This is a book about rape, but it is about so much more. What is it really about?

Friedman: This book is about creating a world where pleasure is a basic human right, where men and women have equal and safe access to enjoying the pleasure of their bodies on their own terms. It’s about creating a world where consensual sex means each partner has a responsibility to ensure that their partner is not just not objecting, but enthusiastically consenting. It’s about shifting our cultural approach to sex from one where sex is seen as a commodity which women have to protect and men have to get, to one where sex is a shame and pressure-free collaborative performance between two or more willing people. Ultimately, it’s about healing our profoundly diseased sexual culture.

Rumpus: Can you explain a little bit about the title, Yes Means Yes. It’s clearly a play on the famous “No Means No” mantra. What message are you trying to send?

Friedman: What Yes Means Yes is saying is that “No Means No” is not enough to make women both safe and free. Don’t get me wrong – “No Means No” is a crucial principle, and we’re deeply indebted to the countless activists who’ve worked decades to ensure that most people understand that if a woman says “no” to sexual interaction, you need to listen to her and stop. But when all women have access to is “no” – when we’re shamed for being sexual beings in our own right, and blamed for our own rapes unless we’re young white virgins – we’re not safe, and we’re not free. For that to happen, we need the culture and our sex partners to listen to our “yes” and to our “no.”

Rumpus: I know that you, Jessica Valenti and a few of the other contributors are bloggers. What influence did new media have on the format of the book (ie: the “tags” at the end of each essay)?

Friedman: The choose-your-own-adventure structure was completely influenced by the way hyperlinks and tags work in the blogosphere. Honestly, when it came time to split the anthology into traditional anthology “sections,” we just found we couldn’t do it. Not only do each of the essays we chose touch on multiple and intersecting themes, but we ourselves are completely out of practice when it comes to that kind of analog thinking. So we thought – wouldn’t it be great if we could just use links and tags instead of sections, so that readers could navigate the essays in the order that makes sense to them? And then we thought – well, why can’t we?

Rumpus: Tell me a little bit about your piece in the anthology, “In Defense of Going Wild.”

Friedman: The essay is an expansion of the piece that started it all – the article I wrote for Women’s eNews about how to discuss drinking & rape without blaming women or erasing men from the equation. The argument is pretty basic – women should be able to do risky, fun, even “stupid” things, like partying and enjoying sex, without being raped, and without being held responsible if we are raped. Because the only person who’s ever responsible for a rape is the rapist. But it also goes beyond that and gets to the heart of why fear-based rape prevention strategies will never work, and makes the argument for pleasure as a basic human right.

Rumpus: This is clearly a feminist anthology. However, it seems that one of the central themes stressed over and over in so many pieces is the importance of rape education for men. Writing books that confront these issues is definitely a step in the right direction, but where do we go from here?

Friedman: I think it’s important to understand a few key things. The first is that rape is everyone’s business, not just because we all should care about it, but because it impacts every one of us directly, whatever our gender, whether or not we’re a survivor or a perpetrator. When we have sex right now, we’re having sex in the context of a rape-enabling culture, one that shames women for having sexual appetites and shames men for not “scoring” at every opportunity. We all take that into bed with us, at least in part, and the things that make women safer and give women better access to their own authentic sexualities also directly benefit men in numerous ways.

The second thing to understand is that, although most rapists are men, most men aren’t rapists, and that when we talk about educating men, we’re talking about educating the ones who aren’t rapists. I don’t think you can “educate” rapists about not raping. Most rapists are perfectly clear that they’re violating their victim’s wishes, or are fully unconcerned with their victim’s wishes. That’s sociopathic behavior, and basic education’s not going to crack that. What education will do is to create a hostile environment for rape. If we educate people of all genders to expect not just the absence of “no” from their partners, but the presence of an enthusiastic “yes,” then most rapes will be come much more obvious, much less culturally tolerable, and much easier to prosecute and prevent.

Rumpus: What are a few of your favorite books and authors? Feminist theorists? Any major influences?

Friedman: Well, Jean Kilbourne’s classic presentation on how the ad industry uses images of women to sell gave me my original feminist “click” moment at Wesleyan in the early 90′s. And the anthology Transforming a Rape Culture introduced to me the powerful idea that we can’t end rape until we can envision what a world without rape would look like. More general influences include bell hooks and Carol Gilligan’s work on women and pleasure, Alice Walker and Jeanette Winterson’s novels, Mary Oliver and Mark Doty’s poems, Suzan-Lori Parks’ plays, Eve Ensler’s merging of art and activism, Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi’s gorgeous graphic memoirs, Julia Serano and Kate Bornstein’s work on gender identity… the list goes on and on.

**

Purchase Yes Means Yes from Powell’s Books.

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“I’ve heard other novelists say this, which makes me feel like I’m not crazy, that the problem with every novel is finding the key to it, finding the way in.”

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of three novels and one collection of short stories. He is a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, and is currently working on his fourth novel, which is allegedly about time travel. His latest book, The Story of a Marriage, has appeared on many lists as of late, including Washington Post Best Books of 2008, San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of 2008 and The Financial Times Best Books of 2008.
Greer first exploded onto the proverbial literary scene with his 2004 best-selling novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which chronicles the life of a man who ages backwards (not to be confused with the mediocre yet wildly popular film adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which nearly caused Greer to have panic attack.) Max Tivoli got a rave review from John Updike (RIP) in the New Yorker.

From regulating the passage of time through the tracking of a comet in his debut novel, The Path of Minor Planets, to documenting 19th century San Francisco through the eyes of an anomaly in Max Tivoli, to negotiating the painful politics of race, love, marriage and war in The Story of a Marriage, Greer always manages to ground his imaginative and sometimes fantastical stories in real emotional power and careful language. He usually lives in the Bay Area but currently resides in the West Village, where this San Francisco-to-New York transplant managed to track him down for a chat.

RUMPUS: So, you’re living in New York? How long have you been here?

GREER: I’ve been here since September 7, and it’s January so…that’s four months? Wow, it’s been a long time. I love it! It’s exciting, and, just in terms of literary life you run into people you would never normally run into. Like, last night we went to dinner and there was Salmon Rushdie. That’s just kind of amazing to me.

RUMPUS: What are your favorite things to do in New York when you’re not working?

GREER: I get really trapped in the village. It’s a lot of walking around. I’ve only been to central park once. I mostly go to the bookstores and go to thrift stores.

RUMPUS: So, right now you are working at the New York Public Library as a Cullman fellow. The terms of the fellowship state that each recipient has to be reliant on the library’s stacks. Can you tell me about what you are working on now and what kind of research you are doing?

GREER: The great irony at the library right now is that there’s lead poisoning in the stacks, so we’re not allowed to take any books out! So, I can’t believe that we’d have to be reliant on the stacks because they’re not accessible.

RUMPUS: Are people disappointed?

GREER: For some people it actually took them awhile to catch on because they weren’t really using those stacks. There are also all these other smaller libraries in there that haven’t been affected. For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I’m working on, I’ll say, it’s a time travel novel. I haven’t written very much of it. That’s the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don’t write their fiction there, they just do their research.

RUMPUS: You aren’t originally from San Francisco yet so much of your work takes place there.

GREER: Are you originally from San Francisco?

RUMPUS: Yeah

GREER: Oh, you are so lucky!

RUMPUS: I know, I am really lucky. I just went back a couple weeks ago after a year and I forgot how beautiful it is.

GREER: I had gone to San Francisco when I was 20, one summer when I was in college, and always knew I would go back there. For fiction writing, and for Max Tivoli, setting the book in 19^th century San Francisco made it work in a way that’s hard to explain. It was very easy to find characters that I wanted to use, easy to find settings and costumes, it just made it easier. The Story of a Marriage is also in San Francisco. I tried to put it in Kentucky because it’s based on a story about my grandmother in Kentucky. But I couldn’t do it there.

RUMPUS: And in The Path of Minor Planets, not a lot of it is set in Northern California, but some of it is and it always kind of comes back there.

GREER: You read that?! Nobody read that book. Yeah, I guess he does have an apartment in San Francisco…

RUMPUS: Yeah, right at the end and that’s one of the best parts of the whole book, when his character finally finds himself happy in San Francisco.

GREER: Well, for that one I had just moved to San Francisco. It’s just such a malleable landscape. People go there to reinvent themselves and, God, what is a novel about except that? If you are choosing Massachusetts you are choosing people in a strict society that won’t let them move. But San Francisco has this Western landscape of solitude and beauty, and also the intense urban experience too.

RUMPUS: In The Story of a Marriage, how did you make the decision to write in the voice of an African American woman, and how did you approach this challenge?

GREER: Oh my god. I mean, I’ve heard other novelists say this, which makes me feel like I’m not crazy, that the problem with every novel is finding the key to it, finding the way in. I spend the first year just turning it over and over and writing pages and pages, and throwing them away, just to find my way into the book.

For The Story of a Marriage, I tried it lots of different ways, from different points of view, and it came down to first person, San Francisco, retrospective, wistful. But in a lot of ways it still wasn’t working. In the beginning, I had a white woman. But then, I thought wow, it’s really annoying to hear her complain. I mean, she has it hard in the 50s, but at the same time she has so many options, why wouldn’t she leave? I just don’t get it! Also I felt like I was being cowardly. That’s the feeling I get before I make some crazy move. That I was being cowardly, and I wasn’t really addressing, in 1953, the real issue. And then I thought, oh God! Please! I don’t have to do this, do I? No, I don’t! But for me, the book became so much more interesting to write when I realized that here was a white man coming to buy a black man. It doesn’t feel very romantic. It feels more complicated. It’s made a lot of people really mad. The book was very controversial in the UK of all places. It was the most controversial book of the year among the blogs. I think because they are having an argument in Europe in general about the novel, and how natural or artificial it should be, and the book came across to some people as very artificial and manipulative.

RUMPUS: How did you arrive at the decision to reveal such a major secret at the beginning of the story? I mean it propels the plot because the rest of the book relies on those details, but when I read it, I was like woah! This is something crazy to put at the very beginning.

GREER: It happened by accident. It was a surprise to me, but then I realized, and you do this when you write a book, is you write a lot more than needs to be there, and then you look for everything that repeats. And it’s in that repeat in things that you see the theme unfold, which is not something you can decide beforehand. It’s different from what you thought you were writing about, and you just have to go that way, and not the way you planned. For me, it was a book about assuming things about others around you, and about ambiguity, and about the solitude of our lives and the invention, the way we almost completely invent the people around us.

RUMPUS: Max Tivoli received so much critical acclaim and attention, did you feel anxious about releasing this one, just knowing that people would take notice? Especially since you were taking a risk writing in a voice so different from your own?

GREER: The thing I was more afraid of was that it would be ignored. The thing I was really afraid of is that Max Tivoli would be the book that people would notice and that would really be it for me. Then the great thing happened, which is that John Updike reviewed Story of a Marriage in the New Yorker, and he hated it! Hooray! It was good news. It made me cry, I was sad. But, to be taken that seriously again was such a shock and an honor. I realized that people hadn’t forgotten about me. You never know when you put your book out how other people are going to read it. You can’t even talk about your book until it’s out because you don’t even really know what you’ve done, it’s the weirdest thing.

RUMPUS: So, all of your books have a historical element to them.

GREER: I really didn’t expect that to happen. I am a terrible researcher. And I’m not a history buff. I think it’s like renting a furnished apartment versus an unfurnished one. It’s all done for you, but it’s not quite to your taste. You have to replace some items and paint some of the walls, but it’s just so much easier. When you set something in history it comes with its own sets and costumes, and own characters already.

RUMPUS: What is your research process like? I mean, you said you aren’t a good researcher but you can write a book about comets and then Max Tivoli, there must be something to it.

GREER: Actually, I think you fake it. The trick to it is to put in as little as possible of what you research, as little as you can possibly stand because the less you put the more it looks like you know. It looks like the tip of the iceberg. But if you put in everything, then they know that’s all you know.

So, in every book I remove so much detail. You can’t believe what I’ve had to remove from my books! The Story of a Marriage to me doesn’t have any research in it at all but, really, you can’t believe what didn’t go in there. I had huge binders of newspaper clippings that I got.

RUMPUS: Is that how you got a feel for the time period? Through looking at old newspapers?

GREER: That’s it. Yeah. I couldn’t figure out another way to do it so I just read the newspaper in 1953, through almost the whole year, every day.

RUMPUS: A lot of your fiction is fantastical. But the characters and the intensity of all of their emotions are very real, and very relatable. To what extent is your work grounded in your own experiences?

GREER: None of it is autobiographical to me at all, not even in a hidden way, which seems to be the only way I can work it out. You know, the way in your dreams you work it out and it doesn’t seem like it’s you at all. With novels, you are in the realm of metaphor, and that’s the part I love. For Max Tivoli, I sat and I thought about the first boyfriend I ever had, and about that feeling of intense love and passion. I thought about that every single day. For The Story of the Marriage, I wasn’t married at the time, but I thought a lot about other people’s marriages, the people I knew.

RUMPUS: You mentioned that The Story of a Marriage was based on a story that your grandmother told you.

GREER: My grandmother told me a story about a young man who took her aside one day and said, I’ve been your husband’s lover since the war and I want to leave with him. This is in rural Kentucky in the 1950s. But I don’t know anything more than that. She said no, and sent him away. He was a schoolteacher in town, but that’s all. My dad would be furious when I talked about it. Everyone believed that she was a crazy person and that it couldn’t possibly be true. She never left him, they stayed married the whole time and they never talked about it, which is why in The Story of a Marriage they don’t talk about it. A lot of people ask why she doesn’t confront him. And I tell them, for me that’s how it was. My grandmother was a chatty woman but she didn’t chat about that. It was too dangerous, somehow, for her. After he died she’d tell it to anybody who’d listen. She said her only regret in life was that she hadn’t slept with more men.

RUMPUS: On the topic of love, “We think we know the ones we love,” is the opening line of The Story of a Marriage, and “We are each the love of someone’s life,” in the case of Max Tivoli. Both refer to one person loving another, but don’t suggest that love is something that necessarily exists between two people. I was wondering about your feelings towards love and the institution of marriage.

GREER: Oh dear God! I’ll give an easy answer first. What I think I’m doing is just making conflict and resolving it in ways that aren’t entirely sentimental. I want to create emotion that is intent and strong, but not cheese ball and there’s a fine line. I think a lot about compromise and how much I really dislike it as time goes on. It’s almost an untenable institution, and yet I’m married and very happy so, we’ll see what happens, But I’m very curious how people work it out. Sometimes they don’t, but sometimes they do and there is some other reward, some different kind of love than the new, young, passionate love.

I remember talking about this with a high-school group, they had read Max Tivoli. One of them had a question was about the difference between young love and adult love, and how could people settle for the kind of love that seemed to exist in marriage in my book instead of this intense passion that Max has? I said, I can’t describe it to you, but it is longer lasting. Intense passionate stuff isn’t sustainable.

A lot of people think of Max Tivoli as a romantic book but I think he’s a very destructive character, and I think that kind of love is very selfish and thoughtless and hurtful and exciting and thrilling and what life is all about. All of those things at the same time. I’m in conflict I guess.

RUMPUS: Ok, this is my last question. What is your editing process like? You say that you write so much and you throw a lot of it away, and that sometimes you’ll try an angle and it doesn’t work and scrap it. Once you find a way into your novel, what’s it like after that?

GREER: Well once I do that, I write three pages a day and I get to a certain point where I do look back on it. Usually the novel reaches a certain breaking point, where the plan doesn’t work anymore and you have to give it up and it feels like it’s a crisis in the book. And it’s great for the book but terrible for the writer. But I don’t show it to anybody until I have a complete first draft. And I don’t talk about it with people, I tell them misleading things about it, like that it’s a time travel novel…because I don’t want anyone’s input. Not because I’m a GENIUS, but I just don’t think you should say anything to a novelist except to keep going, because they don’t know what they are doing so you can’t know what they are doing. They are really just finding their way in the dark.

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How One Accidental Pin-Up Changed the Face of Feminism Forever

A perfect pair of pouting red lips, an electric smile, signature jet-black bangs and a magnetic personality that somehow managed to transcend the two-dimensionality of the magazines across which her image was plastered, launched the legendary Bettie Page, crowning queen of the pin-ups, into 1950s superstardom. Though her career lasted just seven short years, Page’s legacy as a model, sex symbol, fashion icon and preliminary pioneer of the sexual revolution has pervaded for over five decades and will continue to influence the face, form and image of femininity and feminism as it is re-imagined and re-appropriated by each new generation.

Page, who died on December 11, 2008, will be remembered not only for her striking beauty, and the thousands of photographs and film reels that exposed it to America en masse, but also for her unabashed willingness to allow the camera to truly access to her dynamic personality. Whether clad in high heels and a bikini, leather gloves and a ball-gag or nothing at all, the very image of Bettie Page became synonymous with sexual freedom, obliterating the boundaries of what is traditionally considered appropriate for mass consumption. In addition, while Page’s openness to exploring a wide range of sexual personae in the public sphere was revolutionary at the time, her image has been revived and reincarnated time and time again, acting as an inspiration, a vehicle through which future generations of feminists could define sexuality in their own terms.

In the course of her life, Page appeared in more than 20,000 frames for amateur photographers, or “shutterbugs,” in notorious camera clubs across New York City; graced the covers of countless magazines (she even landed one of the first centerfolds in Playboy Magazine) and inspired biographies, films, comic books and fashion lines. However, her fame and cult status was somewhat of an accident, brought about by a little bit of luck.

Page was born in 1923 into a poor family in Jacksonville, Tennessee, and grew up with five siblings. Her family life was somewhat unstable: her mother was stern and often scolded her daughters. Her father, after cheating on his wife and impregnating a 15-year-old girl, left the family only to return four years later, when he began sexually molesting his children. The family struggled to make ends meet, receiving welfare from the government. As a result of the hardships she faced as a child, Page decided at a young age that the key to a better life was education, and dedicated most of her time to studying and earning high marks in school. Page also performed in several school plays, though her family took little interest in her endeavors, forcing her to become independent early on in her life.

After high school, Page went on to attend George Peabody College, where she continued to pursue acting as an extra-curricular activity. By 22, Page had married and moved to San Francisco where she got her first shot at modeling, for local shops and businesses, while working a variety of secretarial jobs. After her husband, who was in the army, was shipped off, she landed a job that sent her to Haiti for four months. Afterwards, she moved back to Miami, then briefly to New York, back to Tennessee, to New York again, to Washington D.C. and then, at last, to New York once again, where she would eventually be discovered. Throughout her travels, she suffered through unfulfilling jobs, several brushes with sexual assault and a divorce, but when she finally landed in the big city she had no idea that what was to come.

One day, Page was sitting on the beach when a gentleman approached her and asked if she’d ever done any modeling. He introduced himself as an amateur photographer, and offered to create a portfolio for her, free of charge. He was the first to photograph Page, and helped her establish her signature look: he recommended that she cut her hair in bangs. He then introduced her to another photographer friend of his, who owned a camera club: a studio that would invite models to come and pose, and photographers who would pay a fee to shoot them. Eventually, Page became the most popular model in the camera club circuit, drawing crowds of 35 photographers or more to each of her sessions.

Camera clubs were a unique entity, pushing the limits of what was considered respectable and socially (and sexually) appropriate. Because the photographers were shooting the models for their own personal use and not selling the images to magazines, models were allowed to be much more scantily clad, and in more suggestive and compromising poses, than if they were participating in a magazine shoot, which had to operate under certain censorship laws. As a result, camera clubs cultivated a reputation of being sleazy, classless and somewhat unsavory. Hundreds of the frames captured in these clubs were the very images that made Page most famous, and most appealing to mainstream publications. Her agreement to model at the camera clubs—often wearing very little or nothing at all—suggested Page’s willingness to experiment and to push social norms and traditional femininity to its limit very early on in her career, paving the way for what would later make her revolutionary: her famous pin-ups, and her outlandish bondage photographs.

Word began to spread of Page as the hottest model on the scene. She soon landed covers of several men’s magazines, including Wink, Titter, Beauty Parade and Eyeful. Though these magazines were certainly considered to be scandalous, Page was never shown fully nude, and was often depicted in gag situations, setting her apart from other models as fun-loving, dynamic and adventurous, gracefully combining personality and humor with unabashed sexuality.

After gaining serious notoriety, Page began modeling for brother-and-sister team Irving and Paula Klaw, who catapulted her into cult stardom when they began integrating Page into fetish photography. They began making 8 and 16 mm films, starring Page in a variety of different dominant and submissive roles, often including whips, ropes, leather and, of course, very high heels. In these films and photographs, Page was often stripped, bound, blindfolded, gagged, and sometimes even spanked by other models. In one of her most famous stills, a cover of Bizarre magazine, Page was tied up and gagged while suspended on a pair of elevated steel bars.

While these photos brought Page much fame, they also landed her in the hot seat with the law. In 1955, a U.S. senator formed a Senate subcommittee to investigate the influence of pornography on juvenile delinquency. Page’s erotica was considered pornographic. She was taken to court and interrogated. In the years following, Page was continually harassed by the law and eventually left New York for Florida, never to model again.

Though Page’s modeling career was relatively short, she managed not only to redefine the very aesthetic of the pin-up (most, if not all, pin-ups at the time were blond), but also pioneer the process of breaking down the stringent barrier between traditional notions of femininity, womanhood and human sexuality.

The years spanning World War II offered women an opportunity to explore roles and personae from which they had previously been barred, however sexuality was still very much off limits. As they flooded into the workplace for the first time, women were allowed to occupy a public identity different from that of a housewife. Sex, however, was still very much off limits.

Pin-up images had become wildly popular during the war, but female sexuality was considered to be for the benefit of male onlookers, instead of a vehicle through which the women in the photographs were allowed to express their own sexual desires. The sexual icons of the era occupied very specific roles at polar opposite ends of the social spectrum. Marilyn Monroe, for example, perhaps the most famous of all pin-ups, portrayed sensuality, seductiveness and undeniable sexuality, albeit one of naiveté. Her brand of sex was seemingly accidental, pure and coquettish. On the other end of the spectrum was Doris Day, the eternally virginal figure, whose sexuality was safe, tame and appropriate. Feminist scholar Maria Elena Burszek, author of Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, explains this as the “Doris Day/Marilyn Monroe Binary,” which Page would eventually defy, setting herself apart from all other pin-ups of her generation.

“Page presented a possibility of a range of female sexuality between the traditional binary of virgin and whore,” Burszek said. “The fact that she made such a profound impact with a career that ranged from underground S&M photography to silly gag magazines by doing the exact same thing in all of them, which was being herself, based on the range of personalities and identities she brought to those images.”

According to Burszek, in a time when one was either a sex symbol or a virgin, Page managed to create a public persona that encompassed both identities and everything in between. Her ability to pose for such a wide range of photographs, and to allow different aspects of her personality to penetrate each image, was a testament not only to her unwillingness to be typified in other people’s terms, but also her insistence on owning, defining and enjoying her own brand of sexuality that, as her photographs suggest, was varied and complex.

Though Page’s modeling career was over by the time the 1960s rolled around, her image and influence had a great impact on what would later be referred to as the “sexual revolution.”

“She was a pioneer in terms of how women could present their sexuality that is playful, self-controlled and very much about her own pleasure. She never disavowed those images because she so obviously felt that they were beautiful, the circumstances under which they were created was empowering, and that it was about play and the natural inevitability of sexuality,” Burszek said.

Since page hung up her high heels, her image has been constantly reappropriated by new generations of feminists, invoking several Bettie Page revivals. Page has become a symbol for the sexual agitator, refusing to play by socially constructed rules. Her image has become one of power, sexual liberation and ownership that has inspired comic books, fashion lines, characters in countless films and the re-imagination of the form, function and purpose of the pin-up.

Burszek sites an instance where a lesbian magazine, On Our Backs, ran a centerfold entitled, “Bull Dyker of the Month.” In this spread, founder and contributor Susie Bright posed as Page in one of her most famous shots: tied to a bed with a ball gag in her mouth:

“Here, as in Page’s classic bondage imagery, Bright shouts in mock protest while bound spread-eagle to a bed frame. The new twist to Bright’s sexual persona, however, is that unlike the original (who would have been dressed in appropriately seductive lingerie or bondage), the postmodern feminist version finds the subject wearing a T-shirt (promoting the butch lesbian folksinger Phranc) over a pair of cigarette pants, and instead of beautifully arranged makeup and hair Bright wears a facial mask and curlers.”

While her style might be constantly copied and her image published and republished and republished again, it’s safe to say that Bettie Page was certainly more than breasts, bangs and an impossibly perfect body (even though she had those too). She paved the way for the sexual revolution and liberation that would come after her, and her legacy continues to inspire women to define their own sexuality, and to be unashamed to show it.

***

Juliet Linderman is the managing editor of the Greenpoint Gazette in Brooklyn, New York

This Rumpus Reprint originally appeared in Caravan

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Darren Aronofsky’s fourth feature film, is the story of a wrestler, Randy “The Ram” Robinson, 25 years past his prime. While at the height of his glory The Ram reigned as champion of the professional wrestling world. But now older, battered and physically exhausted, instead of filling arenas he performs in sparsely attended matches at high schools and community centers. He holds odd jobs on the side, barely making ends meet and living in a trailer in a blue collar suburb. The drab New Jersey backdrop provides the perfect compliment to the story: difficult, bleak at times, understated and, most importantly, sincere . The streets and the trailer parks evoke a distinct sense of the everyday, of the American working-class experience. Rourke imbues his portrayal of Randy, a fundamentally good man engaging in relatable struggles, with humanity and honesty.

The Wrestler is a film as graceful and delicate as it is brutal. While we are invited into a world characterized by its own artificiality (the wrestlers, nearly all of whom just as over-the-hill as Randy, convene before each match to orchestrate it), the film itself paints a heartbreakingly realistic and true portrait of a man, down on his luck, trying to make sense of his life through the sum of its parts. Despite the meticulousness of the theatrics—glittery tights, ridiculous stage names, hair dye and steroids—The Ram ultimately turns back into Randy, whose real name is actually Robin (a name he repeatedly begs not to be called in public), bearing a body pushed past its limit, covered in stitches and scars, a heart condition and a damaged ear drum, forcing him to wear a hearing aid.

The outrageousness of professional wrestling helps to highlight the depth of Randy’s character: one so vulnerable to the real world that he immerses himself in an all-encompassing, and completely absurd, fake one. It’s easy to understand why Randy was at the top of the wrestling profession, his unflinching dedication to each performance, as well as his willingness to mentor newbie wrestlers, dolling out advice before matches and congratulations afterwards, is a testament to his sincerity. But time has caught up with him, and the profession is unforgiving. Though The Ram is just a character, an enormous, hulking figure with a mane of artificially blond hair, the man underneath the costume is very much flesh and blood.

Like his character, Rourke has been dealt some serious blows throughout his career. He left the acting world to pursue a short-lived career as a professional boxer. While Rourke was, to some extent, the architect of his own downfall, he embodies Randy with wisdom, lending not only his raw, surgery-ravaged face and broad body to his character, but also his own experience and sensibility, making his performance believable. In addition, Marisa Tomei, who plays the role of Cassidy, a stripper with whom Randy cultivates a relationship, delivers a fantastic performance in her portrayal of an equally damaged individual. Like The Ram, Cassidy (also a stage name), is a performer, making her living pretending to be someone else. And, like The Ram, as she gets older the circumstances of her real life and those of her career become more and more at odds. Though she is mostly naked throughout the entire film, Cassidy is overtly guarded and contemplative, careful never to reveal too much of herself despite her inherently public profession. Both live double lives: One in front of a crowd, another behind closed doors, and it is this mutual understanding that allows the two to form such a strong and believable bond (though the extent of their romance can, at times, feel like a bit of a stretch).

Aronofsky doesn’t shy away from the graphic nature of both the strip club and the wrestling matches that punctuate The Wrestler (there is one in particular, involving a host of props including barbed wire, a ladder and a staple gun), he does so with grace and purpose. In Requiem for a Dream, for which he became instantly famous, Aronofsky confronted the grittiness and devastation of unshakable addiction. He decision to include scenes and images so gruesome that the film was originally released into theaters without a rating wasn’t for shock value. In the context of the film as a whole, each is crucial in expressing just how poisonous the promise of the American Dream can be. In The Wrestler, the bloodier bits, never gratuitous for their own sake, are equally important. Blood is shed and pain is inflicted during each and every performance, but it is planned pain, carefully mapped out for maximum effect as competitors agree on the terms of the fight before either leaves the locker room. Though the blood is real, and ultimately takes a serious toll, the ring provides Randy with a controlled environment in which to manage, and hold ownership over, his pain, which is why despite his failing health he continues to play the game. Throughout the course of the film he toys with the idea of retirement only to ultimately wind up, once again, with his back against the ropes. Even the consistency of choreographed violence is, to Randy, a fine alternative to the volatility of real life, especially if it means that he, as The Ram, gets to come out on top. As it turns out, The Ram always wins, though Randy is seldom so lucky. Out of character, he drifts through the frozen New Jersey streets, attempting to repair his relationship with his long-estranged daughter, played by Evan Rachel Wood, and to mend his broken body so he can continue to wrestle.

Previously, Aronofsky has used extremely fast cutting and shaky cameras to force a sense of panic on the viewer. Here Aronofsky captures the gruesome, theatrical details of the wrestling matches, but also makes use of the film’s quieter moments, filling silences and pauses between sentences with Randy’s strained breath and heavy, uncomfortable wheeze. The violence is expected, it’s the subtler blows that linger: the scars not from wrestling but from heart surgery, the unfolding of a childhood photograph of his daughter who has grown up, the thumb wound he acquires working at a grocery store, the sparse attendance at a convention where a host of has-been wrestlers man tables covered with their own memorabilia, each older and more physically damaged than the next.

But it would be a mistake to suggest, though definitely grim at times, that the film is wholly bleak or sentimental. Its tenderness is punctuated by humor. While making light when appropriate, the funny parts are never meant to cheapen Randy’s experiences, and instead humanize him further, making the film even more effective as a sort of meditation on a lonely and confused, fundamentally kind-hearted man trying his best to manage the blows.

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