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The Rumpus Interview with Jason Polan

Jason Novak — Fri, 24 May 2013 19:02:43 +0000

Michelle Tea’s new novel, Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, was illustrated by Jason Polan, an artist who obsessively draws spot sketches of people and things around New York City. His life and background are fascinating, but he prefers to remain as anonymous as possible and let his work speak for itself. The following testimony was gathered from my research into his story, and then wildly embellished.

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Original Rumpus art by Jason Novak.

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Click here for excerpts of Jason Polan’s Mermaid in Chelsea Creek illustrations.

A Peek Inside Mermaid in Chelsea Creek

Jason Polan — Fri, 24 May 2013 18:58:47 +0000

We wade into Michelle Tea’s new novel, Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, with a collection of enticing excerpted illustrations by Jason Polan.

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Click here to read The Rumpus Interview with Jason Polan.

Songs of Our Lives: Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” and the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy”

David Grossman — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:30:15 +0000

It’d be a stretch to say that Johnny Cash and Iggy Pop are connected in any meaningful way. Both are patron saints of The Holy Order of White Dudes With Guitars, sure, and drugs, but that’s about it. They’re forever glued together in my mind, tied together by my putting a razor blade to my neck when I was 16.

It wasn’t because of Johnny Cash or Iggy that I did what I did; I’ll get that out of the way right now. I was 16 and didn’t understand a lot of what was going on in my own mind. I imagine that’s a common trait among everyone who is 16. Like the Italian noble convinced the world had to be flat, I’d spend an inordinate time after high school tearing down established fact. I knew I had ADHD when in reality I had Asperger’s, I knew I was hopelessly addicted to masturbation when in fact I was just 16. But above all, I knew that I was dead to the world, that I’d never feel anything. I often imagined myself as a cold, practically dead body, floating down a river until I actually died. After the razor blade I’d be diagnosed with clinical depression, but before that, the only real kicks I got were out of listening to The Stooges Raw Power.

That’s an oversimplification, of course: I listened to other music in 2002. But somehow, thinking about The Vines doesn’t conjure as powerful memories as coming home from yeshiva and blasting “Search and Destroy,” the original testosterone blast from Hell. “I’m a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm!”, it begins. What does that even mean? It’s insane, it’s horrifying, and when James Osterberg brings it to your attention, you know it’s true. It switches between desperate cries for help and endless machismo, the type of things that would later mark the best Black Flag songs. And on top of that add a boa constrictor guitar, one that paralyzes and strangles you until you’re just left with twitching, unable to comprehend anything that isn’t James Williamson owning your soul. I’d put on headphones and stare at myself in the bathroom full-length mirror, pacing back and forth while silently mouthing the lyrics, hitting my chest in the faint hopes that the pure rage of the song could wake me up somehow, make me alive again.

When that didn’t work, I’d put on Johnny Cash. As American IV’s name suggests, it was the fourth in Cash’s series of comeback records under Rick Rubin’s direction, a Lana Del Rey-type “new music with old roots” thing that was, like Del Rey’s rise to fame, helped by the fact that Cash had a voice that could cut through any barrier, time or otherwise. Any song he covered, it turned out, would instantly be his, torn asunder from its original form and born anew, rising from the gravel and the dirt into the stars. That’s what happened with “Personal Jesus,” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and it’s what happened with “Hurt.”

I didn’t know who Trent Reznor was back then and didn’t need to; the song was Cash’s. The video, set in a decrepit Cash family museum, sets the tone: falling apart, physically, spiritually, emotionally. “What have I become, my sweetest friend? Everyone I knows goes away in the end.” The video makes it clear that Cash is talking to his departed wife, June, but there’s a universality in Reznor’s words that could apply to anybody. What got to me was, “You are someone else, I am still right here.” That was it, that’s what I had been trying to tell the therapists and the doctors for all those years. At yeshiva, Cash was mocked as feeble and weird, an old guy putting his hat on backwards and rapping. But I was convinced that if I just listened to the right songs for long enough, things would get better. They didn’t.

Through no one’s fault I had been taking a medication for my ADHD/Asperger’s that triggered terrible brain chemistry, tacking paranoia onto a growing depression. My therapy sessions started getting creepy, I would stare at a wall in Dr. Selin’s office in silence for an hour, convinced that I was proving something to the world. Even if they couldn’t completely heal me, Cash and The Stooges provided the only bandages that felt like they were worth a damn.

So, the actual suicide attempt? It came on one of those nights where I would yell along to Raw Power (“Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell”), insulting myself as usual and trying to force some semblance of what I had deemed “real feeling” (a shorthand for “happiness” since I had dismissed the idea that depression could be a real feeling, a real place that it was okay to be in at times). The blade only moved a couple inches along my neck. That was enough to make me nearly collapse in tension. Mad at myself for failing and happy, for the first time in a while, to be alive, I turned to my mind’s “Pretty Face” b-side: Cash’s cover of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Fiona Apple’s background vocals make it a gorgeous duet, one full of love and tenderness. “I will ease your mind,” they both sang, and they did. I listened to that song about fifty times that night, crying and figuring out two things: that I’d hit rock bottom, and that even if music couldn’t save me, it could be my best friend, for arguing and for reminiscing and for feeling like tomorrow might be okay. I haven’t listened to either album since.

For me, to paraphrase the poet Wallace Stevens, Raw Power and American IV are one. Raw Power and American IV and a razor blade are one. Music doesn’t just change us, I learned. We change the music we listen to, just by living every day around it.

Godzilla

Paul Crenshaw — Fri, 24 May 2013 07:22:44 +0000

Godzilla, great grey-green monster, rises up out of the ocean, makes his way toward Tokyo. Is always making his way toward Tokyo. Perpetually swimming in cold waters, bubble trail on the surface, until he nears land and comes screaming to the surface and all the people cover their faces with their hands and one guy points and says “Godzilla” with his eyes wide and his heart full of fear.

Godzilla, sleeping peacefully at the bottom of the ocean, dreaming whatever monsters dream, of ravaging and pillaging and plundering, perhaps, asleep with his breath curled about him, Godzilla breathing and the earth tremoring around him, Godzilla forgotten lo these thousand years, a creature from prehistory, asleep in the cold depths of the ocean, until the first nuclear bombs rattle the earth’s crust and Nagasaki and Hiroshima are wiped out in one brief flash of fire. Godzilla awakes, angry, comes storming out of the ocean, roaring his terrible roar and gnashing his terrible teeth, his breath like fire and lightning and thunder and smoke all in one, fanning the still smoldering flames of Japanese cities, stomping on trains and pulverizing buildings and lighting up the sky as the tiny people at his feet cover their mouths in horror at what has come crawling out of the ocean.

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Godzilla first formed from unknown forces. Stones and dragon’s teeth, bones salted on unhallowed ground. Somewhere in the earth’s core, perhaps, where flames boil like the roiling ocean, sulfur vents and acid pulling skin and scales tight over stone bones. Claws and teeth stretched like stalactites, the eyes like opals, clear gems that somehow see. And when he is born in the primordial stretches of time a roar rips out of the earth as Godzilla rises.

But in the millions of years before the dawn of man, Godzilla slept. In the depth of the ocean, ancient dinosaur hibernating while the world changed around him. Meteors hurling from the sky. The earth growing cold, then warm again as man is born, walks upright, learns to build weapons. And when the atomic bomb wakes him, Godzilla changes as well. Mutates and grows and rises, is rising, as alien a presence as anything man could create. Built on no known paradigm. Part lizard, part alligator, part dragon. Scales and armor plating, teeth-like rows down his back. Eyes the color and texture of nuclear winter. The only recognizable thing about Godzilla his dragon breath, which is not dragon breath at all, but nuclear radiation.

The name evokes the old gods. Giant lizards. Something exaggerated beyond all common knowledge or sense. His name in the Japanese is Gojira, a combination of gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale). A gorilla-whale. Or an alligator in the guise of a god.

He is a manifestation of fears, meant to evoke terror. After all, what does one do to stop an elder god or an ancient dinosaur reawoken? How does one stop an alligator-lizard with atomic breath and scales hardened by waves of radiation? How does one stop a gorilla-whale?

Godzilla impervious to all conventional weapons, his armor too strong for slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, bullets and bombs, missiles and whatever magic our puny sorcerers can hurl at him. Little toy tanks line up and fire, their toy turrets rotating, spitting smoke. Planes scream downward, rattling off rounds from belt-fed machine guns and missiles streak skyward and arc spinning back to the earth where Godzilla stands, shrugging off all fire. Then opens his mouth and the airplanes go hurtling downward to land in a blast of fire from Godzilla’s wicked atomic breath, his scales glowing as he roars triumphant, victorious, unscathed, his roar laughter at the puny insects attacking.

His roar is missiles and thunder, lightning and fire. It comes from some primordial distance, part frenzy and fury, part ancient depths of time. His roar shakes buildings, causes lesser creatures to cower. It is like a tornado in the night, a tsunami surging along the ocean floor, fierce wind howling through burning cities. It is designed to invoke fear. Here is a creature who crawled from the ocean, was woken by what forces we conjured in our thirst for destruction. And it is angry, it’s roar says. It is very, very angry.

Godzilla drawn to fire the way other beasts are drawn to fire. Drawn to heat and light as if reminded of his awakening. Godzilla is not fazed by the cold ocean waters. His inner workings full of atomic energy, warmed by fission or fusion, something that splits or comes together with such force as to rip worlds apart.

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In the original movie, Godzilla was defeated by the Oxygen Destroyer, which removed all the oxygen from the ocean and suffocated him. For most of the movie, the inventor, Daisuke Serizawa, would not allow the weapon to be used. Like the use of atomic energy, it was, to him, an ethical decision, weighing cost versus reward. Only after witnessing the destruction of Tokyo and hearing the choirs of children sing of death did he relent and allow his fearsome weapon to be used. Then he burned his notes and drowned himself in the ocean so his knowledge could never be used again.

But always, Godzilla returns. In the depths of the ocean, Godzilla regenerates to raid again. After being avalanched into ice in the second movie, an errant ship strikes frozen Godzilla. Always, some blunder of man brings him back to stomp and roar.

After Godzilla came Rodan and Mothra and Anguirus and a dozen or a hundred others. A testament to our love of monsters. Godzilla swimming like a submarine, a torpedo, a missile that works even underwater. Rodan dive-bombing like a kamikaze, hovering like a helicopter, sending out sonic booms, sound transformed into a weapon. Anguirus built like a tank or a battering ram, his body all spikes and armor plating. Mothra poisons the air with chemicals, all our favorite monsters demonstrating abilities we created, then swore to abhor.

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Enter Monster Island, i.e. island full of monsters. Rodan, Godzilla, Mothra, Anguirus, et al, sequestered and studied, all of them stomping and thumping and screaming around, eyeing each other on a secluded island. An attempt at controlling forces beyond our ability to control, and all of us thinking: “What if they ever find a way off?” Here we have contained them, all our fears corralled on this tiny stamp of land in the middle of the ocean, but what if they somehow get free? Make their way toward Tokyo and stomp through the streets kicking over buildings and derailing trains? What forces will then crawl out of the ocean to save us?

But, in Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, Godzilla, along with Rodan and Mothra, defends the earth against the alien Ghidorah. Godzilla becomes a sort of anti-hero, proving that even monsters can rally together against a common enemy, one from outer space that reminds us what forces can be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

Then there was Mechagodzilla. A metal Godzilla made to look like Godzilla. Complete with weapons of war: plasma ray, missile claws, electric beam and lightning wrist blade. It could fly. Could shoot missiles from its shoulders, hips, and fingers, and electricity from its mouth and ray beams from its eyes. It could create an energy field around its body, could spin its head 360 degrees and could absorb Godzilla’s atomic breath to power its own weapons. It was taller and stronger and faster than Godzilla and though it came closer than any other monster to killing him, it ultimately failed when Godzilla pulled its head off, showing us that even technology can never defeat the atomic forces that we have created.

The first Mechagodzilla was built by aliens. The second was built by man. The first built to look like Godzilla. The second built to destroy him. What we create somehow less scary than what we created.

Godzilla then both destroyer and savior. Ancient creature changed by modern technology. Blasts of radiation raise him from the ocean, and Godzilla destroys. But at some point he becomes protector against powers that come from beyond our Earth. A paradox, dilemma. A weapon used for protection. As all weapons once were. But a dangerous one, that might turn at any time on its wielders. As all weapons are.

Out of his mouth go burning lights; sparks of fire shoot out. Smoke goes out of his nostrils, as from a boiling pot and burning rushes. His breath kindles coals, and a flame goes out of his mouth. . .His row of scales are his pride. . .[they] are joined together; they are firm on him and cannot be moved. . .When he raises himself up, the mighty are afraid. . .Though the sword reaches him, it cannot avail; nor does spear, dart or javelin. . .He makes the sea boil like a pot. . .He leaves a shining wake behind him. . .
—Description of Leviathan in Job, Chapter 41, KJV.

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Like the dragon in Revelations who was bound, Godzilla had lain dormant for thousands of years before the atomic bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It must have been terrifying to have seen monsters that could destroy entire cities in a matter of seconds.

Of course, Tokyo is only a toy city. Only toy buildings, toy trains. Toy tanks fire at Godzilla, toy airplanes on obvious wires streak toward him. Godzilla is just a man in a grey suit, the kind you might see at any time of day walking into any building in the world carrying a briefcase, readying to make decisions.

“These monsters are as stupid as human beings[1].”

I keep using the participle because Godzilla always is. He is breathing wicked breath, rising, stomping, roaring, destroying. Even when he is somehow defeated, he rises again. Is always rising. I could use the present to say Godzilla returns. Or the future to say he will rise. Or the past to state that he was not dead. Because there’s always the feeling that Godzilla is circling somewhere. Or lying in wait beneath the dark waters. As if, once this force was unleashed upon the world, it is something we forever are dealing with, forcing ourselves to understand what we have unleashed, are unleashing.

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All last night I dreamed of Godzilla. In the thunder shaking the sky and fire flashing in intermittent warnings like danger signals from the heavens, Godzilla roared outside my window, destroying what I hold dear. Godzilla in my dreams devastating armies. Godzilla in my dreams changing geography, vaporizing oceans and leveling mountains and toppling buildings. Godzilla destroying vast swatches of land, like tornados in Western Arkansas where I once lived, or the cataclysms crawling from the earth in the Book of Revelations. Godzilla decimating barren hamlets in the mountains, and war-torn cities in the deserts. Godzilla some unstoppable machine full of atomic energy and blasts of fire, either descended from on high or else risen from the ocean, deus ex machina, god in a machine, as if the world were a great tragedy. Godzilla in my dream not Godzilla at all but a metaphor, something the audience understands only as a vague warning.

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[1] Quote from the movie Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster.

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The Rumpus Book Club Discussion with Ru Freeman

The Rumpus Book Club — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:00:18 +0000

The Rumpus Book Club chats with Ru Freeman about On Sal Mal Lane, war as seen through children’s eyes, and Sinhalese cuss words.

This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month the Rumpus Book Club hosts an online discussion with the book club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview. To learn how you can become a member of the Rumpus Book Club, click here.

This Rumpus Book Club interview was edited by Lauren O’Neal.

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Rebecca: Oh gosh. Where do I start? Maybe here: so I was thinking about how ambitious this novel is—with all of the characters and the history of Sri Lanka. Where did you start with this? Were you planning all of this history from the start?

Ru Freeman: I wasn’t planning the history. The book began as a sort of reflection on the people down a lane, the children, really. And then I began to see that there was this larger story I wanted to tell, and this was the vehicle for that story. I stayed close to the kids—it kept me grounded to do that, in the original story—but now I had this “feel” for the events that were swirling around those children.

Rebecca: Oh, yes! I’m so glad we stayed with the families, the Heraths and the Bollings and Raju. It grounded the novel so much.

Brian S: I will also cop to having spent some time on the Sri Lanka Wikipedia page while reading this, especially as I got toward the end.

Ru Freeman: Ha. Good! I mean, there are other sources, but Wikipedia is a good start.

Rebecca: Oh yes. I tried to explain the history of Sri Lanka’s civil war to someone when I was explaining the book, and I realized I didn’t understand it as well as I needed to yet. I felt like I was learning history here, but I never felt like I was being talked down to.

Brian S: I was impressed with the pacing in this book. It started off lush and maybe even a touch slow, but I could always tell it was building, and tension kept ratcheting up, but slowly, until the last hundred pages or so, and then BOOM! That’s not really a question, though.

Rebecca: Oh gosh, yeah. The pace at the beginning was slow—lots of characters, lots of history to tell. And I kept reading because it was so well-written and because I started to fall in love with the characters. And then everything hit at the end! Did you plan for the pacing to be that way?

Ru Freeman: So to answer the question on pacing, once again, I just let the characters unfold, and where they went is where I followed with the words. It wasn’t so much a deliberate intention to change the pace, but this is in fact how things unfold in real life. You don’t see things coming and then they hit.

Rebecca: Ah, yes! The ending felt as inevitable as the ending of Appointment in Samarra. (Inevitable but NOT predictable.)

Ru Freeman: That’s high praise.

Rebecca: I mean that praise.

Brian S: How did you deal with what must have been the temptation to have some character (or the narrator) just tell some of the history, given that much of your American audience probably can’t find Sri Lanka on a map, much less know the history?

Ru Freeman: I really try to avoid, you know, rolling out the history. The people are so important to me, and what happens to them, how they react, how things happen to them, this is what is important. I feel that if I can tell THAT story well, then people will go and Google the rest and fill in what they need to know. Nobody gets interested in the history just because we lay it out in chronological order after all, so that’s my guide when doing this.

And I was interested in writing something that has meaning in the larger context of global conflicts anywhere. So while this is about Sri Lanka, it is also about war in general. How it happens, how it can end—even though it can seem endless.

Brian S: In this case, it felt a little more about how war can begin, though the tensions had certainly been there for a long time.

Rebecca: Yeah, I didn’t realize until I hit Wikipedia that the civil war lasted until 2009…wait, is that the right year? One of my best friends went to Sri Lanka about two years ago, and I had no idea she was there so near the end of the civil war.

Ru Freeman: Yes. 2009. May 18th is the official end of the war, and it is also the day on which the book comes out in Canada.

Rebecca: That’s a good date.

Brian S: And it was really interesting the way you played with the lack of information that kids have when they’re trying to make sense of the world.

Rebecca: Yes! I felt right there with the kids, in my ignorance, in trying to figure it out.

Ru Freeman: Yeah. That part was not as easy. Because as an adult writer, I know things, but I really had to inhabit their head space, that unknowingness that kids have, but also the things they suspect—slightly, usually, the wrong things, but they do suspect that something is amiss.

Brian S: I could relate to that—not in the sense of facing danger, but in the sense of realizing that big stuff is going down and I don’t really get it. I was 6 when the Vietnam War ended, for example, and 11 during the Iran hostage situation, just getting interested in the news.

Rebecca: Okay, here’s a question I have: so I understand from your background that you grew up in the U.S. but your parents are originally from Sri Lanka, right? Did you have to do much research—I mean, I imagine you did—to feel like you could accurately portray Sri Lankan children and families, especially in those years?

Ru Freeman: I grew up in Sri Lanka, actually. I came here to go to college. So these were events I lived through. War defined my entire childhood and youth and most of my adulthood too—and in the US, it continues to do so since we are, after all, a country at war.

Rebecca: Ahhhh! I’m so sorry I missed that, then!

Ru Freeman: But it was not only this war but the conflict between the communist South and the right-wing government, death threats, and bomb blasts. My brother in prison…a lot of things.

Brian S: I’ve always assumed that in the US, especially in the last 30 years or so, much of the population is insulated from the effects of war. Was that the case in Sri Lanka? Was the fighting limited to certain areas? I’m showing my ignorance here.

Rebecca: Yes, we are a country at war, but I really don’t think we feel that most of the time.

Brian S: Not unless you have friends, family, students in the military, or unless you live in one of those very few places that have been hit with violence in the US. But that’s a small percentage of the country. It’s easy to forget that there’s a war going on, which is crappy.

Rebecca: I just remember living in France and having my neighbors take me to French cemeteries. And my neighbors kept telling me, “We remember what war is like. We won’t forget.” Meaning that Europe—and France in particular—was more peaceful, less willing to go to war or support the U.S.’s wars because they had had war on their soil.

Ru Freeman: You are absolutely right, Brian. This country is at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and how many of us know soldiers? I’ve written quite a bit about war and politics on my blog (if you go to http://www.rufreeman.com/blog and click on “American Politics,” you should get a few). In Sri Lanka, it was different. It is a small island, and the war affected everybody. Everybody knew somebody who was killing or being killed. The suicide bombers—in the capital city, etc.—makes it hard to insulate oneself from it. The checkpoints, the military.

Rebecca: So, I have another question for Ru (and I hope it does not sound ignorant): Have you read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things? Did you feel any of its influence in writing this novel?

Ru Freeman: None whatsoever from The God of Small Things.

Brian S: Which brother was in prison (if that’s not too personal)?

Ru Freeman: The one who is a journalist and is now the editor of one of the largest English language newspapers there. : ) You can ask me anything.

Brian S: So I’m guessing he was jailed because of his journalistic activities? As opposed to being a Sonna-esque character?

Ru Freeman: No, he was a student then. He and some others were trying to form a new political party, and they were abducted. It is a miracle that my mother was able to find him. It was a time of the disappeared, much like in El Salvador. We were (and are) a left-wing family. He was much younger then. There were human rights lawyers who agreed to appear for him and the others pro bono, and they filed a case against the government, which they ultimately won. It is a landmark case in Sri Lankan history re: fundamental rights. Some of those imprisoned are now in government.

Rebecca: Wow. Abducted.

Melissa: Hi, sorry to join late. Your book is beautifully written—I love what you say in the prologue about who is telling the story. So reminiscent of magical realism for me, which I love. How do you keep track of all the characters, by which I mean, make them all so rich and complex and consistent? Were they living in your head constantly while you wrote?

Ru Freeman: Hi Melissa. Thanks for that. I write very quickly. I think a lot, so I don’t spend a lot of time actually writing—I do that part very quickly. That helps, for me. To keep track of the characters.

Rebecca: I felt like I knew the characters, like I couldn’t put them away even when I was done with the book.

Rebecca: Ru, did you have a favorite character?

Melissa: Do members of your family or people you knew growing up influence your characters, and if so, would they recognize themselves in the characters if they read the book?

Ru Freeman: I am very fond of Sonna, actually. And Nihil.

Melissa: I love Nihil.

Ru Freeman: Sonna in particular was a very minor character at the beginning but grew into himself in revision.

Brian S: So am I. Sonna is painfully tragic, and I recognized kids I grew up with in him.

Ru Freeman: Great!

Rebecca: I loved Sonna so much, and to me, his death was more tragic than Devi’s. Just because everyone grieved over Devi, remembered her, but who would remember Sonna? Maybe his mother. And Nihil’s book of worries! I loved that he tried so hard to prevent what seemed so inevitable.

Brian S: It wasn’t his death that hit me so hard—that was inevitable. It was that moment when he irrevocably turned into who he would become, and that it was all just a waste that hit me hardest with him. When you could see that it was going to turn out badly. That it couldn’t turn out any other way.

Ru Freeman: Interesting you say that about his death. There was a moment in the editing process where I was debating about writing that scene out more, his death, but in the end I wanted it to be that abrupt and leave him pretty much still dying and being mourned by the reader, rather than my writing it out. Thanks for reminding me of it.

Rebecca: Yeah. I felt my heart breaking. I’m glad you left it where it was, where only we, the readers, would be the ones mourning. I felt like the full weight of Sonna’s death was left for me (the reader) alone to grieve.

Brian S: I think it was a good choice to write it that way, as a matter of fact. The second I read that Raju had picked up the handlebars, I knew what was going to happen. It had to. There was no other way.

The readers and his mother. She grieved as well.

Did you ever consider having one of the other residents of Sal Mal Lane killed as a direct result of the mob violence?

Ru Freeman: No, I didn’t. I don’t know that having three deaths of fully realized characters in the same book would have worked. As it was, between Devi and Sonna, it was tough to strike a balance. And writing Devi’s and keeping Sonna “unsung” helped me to, I think, keep things on an even keel in that regard—emotionally.

Brian S: So an odd question: Did you try to get the publisher to put out a soundtrack of the various classical pieces the children play in this book? Because I would so love to hear those. (Maybe in the e-version—have the music pop up in the background on those pages.)

Ru Freeman: Ha. Interesting! I’m doing a piece for Largehearted Boy where I will be talking about those various pieces. That will have to suffice for now, but good idea!

Rebecca: I think the most unexpected relationship for me was Nihil’s friendship with Mr. Niles. I don’t know how to phrase this into a question other than: How did that come about?

Ru Freeman: There’s something about Nihil’s prescience that gelled with Mr. Niles and his way of being an observer who had already lived through a long history of loss. It seemed destined.

Rebecca: It did. Much of this book seemed destined, nothing forced. Were you always planning on including a glossary in the end? So much of the time I’d go back to look up the word and then you’d explain it in the next sentence.

Ru Freeman: The glossary came after. Graywolf thought that it would be good to include it. I know it was missed in the first novel, so…

Rebecca: I wondered about that! I think publishers are always thinking that way.

Brian S: I only really looked at it near the end, mainly to see the translation of—I can’t remember if it was Rose or Dolly’s—cursing at the men in the mob.

Ru Freeman: Ha. Did you learn something from that cursing, Brian?

Brian S: It was impressive.

Ru Freeman: I know Terry Hong from the Smithsonian’s BookDragon called this a “fan-huththa-tastic book.”

Brian S: Does the name Nihil have the same basic meaning in Sinhalese that it does in Latin, or is that a false cognate? Because it seemed to me like he was kind of empty until his relationship with Mr. Niles—his life was based around protecting Devi.

Rebecca: I also wondered about Nihil’s name and the emptiness of the word.

Ru Freeman: Nihil, frankly, is not a common name in Sri Lanka. And it isn’t a Sinhalese name. It just came out of the blue and stuck. It worked for that boy.

Rebecca: As far as your first book goes: when I Instagrammed the arrival of On Sal Mal Lane, a friend on Tumblr asked me how I got my hands on the book already, because she was already anticipating it being out in May. She was waiting!

Ru Freeman: That’s good to know. Graywolf has created a tremendous amount of buzz around the book—I am very grateful.

Rebecca: Oh, well, my friend on Tumblr had read your first book and I think some other essays, and has become your fan!

Brian S: How long did this book take you to write?

Ru Freeman: The first draft was very quick. My life is very busy with a lot of things, and so I don’t get uninterrupted time. When I do, I can just write all day. So it was like that. I was at Yaddo for three weeks. I wrote the whole thing, took a day off, revised it once. All there.

Brian S: Wow. That’s amazing.

Ru Freeman: Which is not to say it was perfect, but at least it was written down as a book.

Rebecca: Wow.

Melissa: Wow. (Sorry I keep disappearing—toddler drama.)

Ru Freeman: But, as you all know, then the real work begins…

Rebecca: Did you do much revising after Yaddo?

Ru Freeman: Oh yes. I did.

Melissa: Was it a lot longer before the revision, and did you lose anything you wish you hadn’t?

Ru Freeman: No, it got longer in revision, actually. Things intensified.

Rebecca: It got longer with revision? Wow. I usually see it the opposite way, where things get cut.

Melissa: So you laid an amazing foundation, then built the dream home later.

Ru Freeman: Kind of, yes.

Brian S: I can’t see this book as shorter than it is, honestly. I don’t think I would have enjoyed it as much without that slow burn to get started.

Melissa: I totally agree and was just going to say the same thing.

Rebecca: I agree, Brian. Without the beginning and middle, where I was starting to get invested, I wouldn’t have felt the ending as such a big loss. The book stayed with me for a long time.

Ru Freeman: Thanks for saying that. It’s a hard decision.

Melissa: In the description of the lane, it builds and builds until at some point, I just immediately visualized the street, the homes, the verandas—all of it—as soon as I picked up the book again. It was all there in my mind, so perfectly painted for me. Remarkable.

Rebecca: Did you get much pressure by editors to cut it before they’d publish it? When I was doing my MFA, I took a fiction class with one writer who said he was getting pressure to cut most of his stuff to 250 pages. Is that still true?

Ru Freeman: No, not really. Fiona McCrae is a really amazing editor. Really smart and very astute about what a story needs.

Rebecca: That’s great. I like it when novels can be what they need to be, when writers can do what the story needs, rather than what the publisher needs.

Brian S: Who are you reading right now?

Rebecca: Oh! I always forget to ask that, Brian, but I’m always so glad you do.

Brian S: Keep that one in my hip pocket, I do.

Ru Freeman: I’m reading Kite by Dominique Eddé (translated by Ros Schwartz). It was recommended by Rick Simonson of Elliott Bay Books. I respect his opinion.

Rebecca: My question follows Brian’s question about what you’re reading: What are you writing? What’s next?

Ru Freeman: I’ve got so many NF essays and interviews and stuff to do right now with the book that I’m only dabbling in the other stuff. But I—this week—had a piece up on PEN/Guernica, flash fiction to do with the festival that is a kernel of the new book…I’m thinking.

Rebecca: Oh! I’m definitely going to check that out, then. I might have to form a new Ru Freeman fan club (that’s my gushing!).

Ru Freeman: Form away!

Brian S: Glad to hear it! Probably the best thing that running this book club has done for me is help me find new people to read. Like I don’t already have enough to read, but hey, that’s what piles are for.

Rebecca: I have a serious book-buying problem. And reading. This club is fueling my reading, too.

Brian S: Mine is only made worse by the fact that I actually like reading on my iPad. Hear about a new book? Download it and have it in six seconds! So boned.

Rebecca: I haven’t had a chance to read your first novel yet, but do you feel like you grew as a writer in between the two?

Ru Freeman: Yes, I did. I mean, you always do. Every new thing is a result of everything you wrote before. But this also was a new realm in some ways. That book was very different from this one. It was like staring intently at a diorama for that one—something contained—to stepping back and taking in a vast expanse for this one. Still trying to maintain that closeness, but also being fully conscious of a large whole.

Rebecca: Ahh! I see.

Brian S: That’s the top of the hour. Thanks so much, Ru, for meeting with us tonight, and for writing such an interesting book.

Melissa: Yes, thank you!

Rebecca: Thanks, Ru! I’m so glad I read it.

Melissa: It was a wonderful choice, Brian. It doesn’t always happen that I get both perfectly crafted sentences and a compelling story. I’m glad you are picking my books these days…

Brian S: For the record, I am only one of many who have input into this process. I’m just the face of it.

Ru Freeman: Thanks, Brian. And you can always holler if you have any other questions: ru@rufreeman.com. Enjoy the evening! If you are on the West Coast, somewhere close to Seattle, enjoy the activism!

Brian S: Good night, everyone!

***

Author photo by Brenda Carpenter.

A Brief History of Swans

Tara Isabella Burton — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:42:12 +0000

I like to imagine that they are waiting for us. I like to imagine that they check the reservation (“Burton, for three, are you sure?”), that they bite their nails and tap at their watches and wait breathlessly for us to enter.

And so we enter. I am wearing my mother’s clothes, and my mother is wearing my grandmother’s clothes, and my grandmother is wearing velvet. Our hair is long, it is golden, it is identical, and this is one of our splendid illusions. My mother and my grandmother have strenuously, assiduously, dyed their hair to match mine. Now, when reminded, I dye it too. In this way, we resemble one another.

We sit in the same table every time. We have argued for ten years about the draft, the clang of the waiters, the noise. We have harassed maitre d’s, we have gotten up and changed tables mid-meal, we have weighed the case of sound against the issue of smell, and now at last we cling to the only spot that suits us, underneath a six-foot-tall statue of a giant breast.

This I love. This is home. We argue loudly, and by dessert, at least one of us has slammed our napkin down on the table and threatened to leave. Our arguments are sonorous; they are meaningless. We argue about books we have not read and politics we know nothing about. We argue about my mother’s sleeping habits and my grandmother’s eating habits and my inability to pluck my eyebrows evenly. We argue about my mother’s timekeeping, my grandmother’s worrying, about the mess I have left piled up in my room. We tell one another to be quiet—“You’re making a scene,” we hiss—and still we are no quieter, because this is what we do.

We make scenes. We frighten away boyfriends, lovers, strangers, and we do not mind, because we are together: together, we are glorious. We are effortless, inevitably overdressed, and we return on Sundays to the restaurant that knows us, that pours us free prosecco and sneaks us chocolates with the bill, where my grandmother flirts with the waiters and my mother and I shout at each other about politics, and where they save a table for us under the marble statue of the exposed breast, because this is New York, and this is home.

With them, I am beautiful. With them, the streets of New York spread out toward the rivers and come to occupy the whole world. With them, the world does not exist south of 57^th Street; and the sky and the earth are made of city lights.

This is what I am so afraid of.

***

I may have had Cinderella, but I do not remember it. The stories I remember most vividly, the ones which I begged my mother to tell me, which I repeated to my friends with pantomime wordiness, were her stories—stories of business trips and old lovers who took on the characteristics of dryads and giants, stories which I or she have made into myth and from which even now I’ve never tried to sift out truth. I made her tell me about her escape from rabid monkeys in the Punjab. I made her tell me about a businessman in Cairo who mistook her (dressed, naturally, in a djellaba) for a beggar and struck her; how she fell and hit her head; how he spent months nursing her back to consciousness, and how, when she opened her eyes, he proposed. She may or may not have been a spy, but she was almost certainly the woman about whom Jimmy Carter had famously impure thoughts. (“I danced with him once,” she says, “and he made that speech not long after.”) I made her tell me about the men whose hearts she had broken, and the men whose hearts my grandmother had broken, and about the counts and poets in seven continents who longed for them, and the financier who, twenty years on, still called my mother for advice about how to win my grandmother back.

And then I was eight, and in the back of a taxi, and my mother was telling me about a love affair in Rio, and I remember—though she does not—the rare tantrum I threw, inexplicable in my grief. “You’ve already done everything,” I wept. “What’s left for me?”

***

So I set sail. At seventeen, I moved to England, as far as I could from our familiar restaurants, from waiters who knew us, from home. It was, predictably, largely an illusory escape. My mother and I still argued, all the more splendidly for the distance between us, about whether or not to straighten my hair, whether or not I had adopted the English tendency toward frump.

England was one of the few places my mother had rarely been. She liked to complain vaguely about its food, its weather, its unfashionable footwear. It was nothing like Paris, where she had lived, or like New York, which was home.

I clung to it with atavistic stubbornness. I did not brush my hair. I wore skirts my mother hated. I never wore make-up (this I could not bear to admit to my grandmother, who even when being rushed to the emergency room insisted on a judicious layer or two of mascara, but I boasted about it to my mother in the hopes that it would annoy her). I hurtled into a faithfully domestic relationship with Brian, a waistcoat-wearing Catholic who got annoyed when I dried my dishes on the wrong side of the sink. (“Couldn’t you at least date someone with a motorcycle?” my mother pleaded, barely mollified by the fact that he was, at least, an actor.) I went by my middle name. I got my boots muddy and carved out a routine: I found a sandwich shop on Oxford’s North Parade where the owner knew me, and turned up at seven in the morning in my pajamas for take-out coffee.

I did not come home for Christmas that first year. The thought of our traditions—the pageant, the Christmas Eve party at the bookstore, the inevitable fight when my mother arrived a half-hour late for dinner—galvanized me. They terrified me. If I went home, I would wear my grandmother’s jacket and let my mother straighten my hair. I would pluck my eyebrows and then we would go to dinner, and shout, and swan, and then I would never leave.

Instead I visited Brian in England, where his mother served roast pork and we all played board games and drank tea around the kitchen table, where I marveled at a full-stocked fridge and grew restless at such easy conviviality. In five days, nobody argued. I began emailing my mother New York Times op-eds, desperate in the hope that she would disagree with me.

***

I took this as a sign I had not yet weaned myself off home. My visits, when necessary, were brief. There were no rabid monkeys in the Punjab, nor amorous businessmen, nor broken-hearted financiers, but there was a house, several college degrees, preparations made with Brian toward a partner visa, English citizenship. My grandmother had broken every heart in New York, I told myself, and my mother had fought off wild beasts in every country in Asia, but England belonged to me. I took pride in learning new shibboleths, in the fondness I developed for cider in Sunday pubs. I scandalized my mother by informing her that I enjoyed baked beans.

“You’re becoming so English,” she would say, throwing up her hands at my perverse domesticity. For years I took this as the ultimate affront, a reminder of how I had failed to live up to the legacy of the Burton women, unencumbered by husbands or other disloyalties. Only now do I realize that she missed me.

***

And then my mother and my grandmother flew to Oxford for my master’s graduation, and we changed tables ten or twenty times at an Italian restaurant on North Parade. We argued over the kitchen’s limited supply of Dover sole, my mother’s wariness of carbohydrates, the veracity of the Italian recipes. For three days, my grandmother’s mascara was perfect and my mother and I made increasingly ridiculous statements that could only be countered with argument.

But Brian was there, now. Unfailing polite, impeccably English, he sat discomfited and silent, straight-backed and rational. He did not raise his voice. He made helpful mediating remarks and tried to change the subject.

I was furious. “You’ve got to argue, too,” I insisted. Our family wasn’t like other families. The love we showed was messy, grand, performative. It bubbled over out of conflict. His silence, I felt, was a judgment on us, on our way of doing things.

“How could I?” he said. “I haven’t got a view.” He had never felt more foreign to me.

I found myself missing New York, and the ease of it, and the overwhelming beauty of city lights that do not go out. I started to miss the arrangement of telephone numbers, the availability of everything bagels, the restaurant on 57th Street with its plaster statues of giant breasts. I missed arguments. I missed home. All my stubbornness reared up in defense of what I had left behind. We broke hearts, we escaped monkeys, we almost brought down governments. We were the Burton women: beholden only to each other and to the illusion we did our best to create, and to the city that we liked to think was watching us.

I asked Brian if he’d ever thought about moving to America.

***

The last time I was in New York, we three sat at our customary table, in the shadow of the enormous plaster breast. The waiter hugged me and snuck us glasses of prosecco and told me how much my grandmother had talked about me in the years that I’d been away. We drank too much and stuck our forks in one another’s food, and then, dizzy with the joy of homecoming, we drank more and argued long and loud about aimless things.

The bill, the waiter said, was on the house. “Your grandma’s missed you,” he said. “She’s been waiting for you to come home.”

So we stumbled to the coat check. So the girl at the counter, watching the other patrons turning toward Broadway, asked us if we were going to see the show.

“You must be new here.” My grandmother slid her fur onto her shoulders. “We are the show.”

So we walked out into the city that would never end.

***

Rumpus original art by Liam Golden.

Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Sam Benjamin

David Henry Sterry — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:00:10 +0000

The second of four interviews by David Henry Sterry with some of the contributing writers from his current anthology, Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Clients Writing About Each Other.

Click here to read “Admit You’ve Paid For It: The Savage Honesty of David Henry Sterry,” in which Rumpus sex columnist Antonia Crane flips the script and interviews Sterry.

***

I am so stealing Sam Benjamin’s pet name: ‘The Ivy League Pornographer.” Sam attended Brown University. Shortly upon graduating, he found a home in the LA porn industry. His memoir “American Gangbang: A Love Story” was released in 2011. “Sex, Drugs, Ratt and Roll,” co-authored with Stephen Pearcy of the glam metal band Ratt, comes out in May. When he gives readings, he usually has bizarre 70’s porn music playing in the background on an ancient ghetto blaster. He is also unapologetically adorable.

***

The Rumpus: How did you get started in the sex business?

Sam Benjamin: I’d love to say I got started shooting porn as a total lark but in fact, I was deadly serious about it. It was probably the most intentional thing I’d ever done. At 22 years old, I imagined I’d make revolutionary sex films: spectacular, feminist, clever, ornate, Brechtian fuck flicks. Porn with a heart, basically. I fell far short of my goal, of course, but for a time there I really believed.

Rumpus: Best experiences being a sex worker?

Benjamin: Getting to push the boundaries of my self-conception.

Rumpus: Some things you learned about the sex industry?

Benjamin: I learned how to mix up a convincing fake-cum mixture that looks good on camera. Equal parts 30 SPF suntan lotion and pina colada mix. Bam.

Rumpus: Did you tell your friends and family you were a sex worker?

Benjamin: I told my folks that I was shooting porn, yes. I used to tell girls in bars, too, not only because once entrenched in the sex industry, I fell victim to a sort of snow-blindness, wherein I believed that my dirty lifestyle had a kind of validity and richness that your average 9-to-5′er would find deliciously interesting, but because I was philosophically opposed to lying. I alienated the hell out of people for a couple of years there with my potent blend of narcissism, over-sharing, and reverse snobbery. It’s like I was a character on Girls. Ahead of my time, I suppose.

Rumpus: Other jobs?

Benjamin: Transition from porn to respectable work was the absolute worst. I was used to making a grand a week, working negligible hours. My first job back was working in the customer care department at Wells Fargo in Portland, Oregon, answering handwritten letters from irate customers. Not that many people write letters to banks anymore. Most call. Turned out most of my new “pen pals” were incarcerated. Earning slave wages myself, trapped in a life I didn’t understand, I felt a certain kinship.

Rumpus: Do you think sex work should be illegal?

Benjamin: My sex work was actually always legal. Confusingly legal, in fact. Many of the actresses I shot escorted on the side, and they had to approach that side of their professional life with some discretion. Porn, on the other hand, kosher in the eyes of the LAPD by dint of having a running camera on the premises, allowed for all the salacious chest-thumping and idiotic, out-loud braggadoccio the world could bear. It made zero sense.

Rumpus: Did you ever have a crush on a client?

Benjamin: I had a crush on several of the porn actresses I shot, but none more than Belladonna. It wasn’t even that she was remarkably pretty—which of course she was. Bella had a wonderful, kind personality and possessed the sort of charisma that actually allowed me to believe that the stuff I was engaged in making might be worthwhile; might be valuable.

Rumpus: Would you recommend the sex business as a way to make money?

Benjamin: The adult film industry was a great way to make money in my heyday, which was 2000-2005. You had to be a complete, desperate drooling fool to avoid making at least a middle-class income for yourself. But the bottom’s since dropped out, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend this path to any graduating college seniors, unless they could approach it from an extremely inventive and resourceful marketing angle.

Rumpus: Good things about working in the sex industry?

Benjamin: The best thing about working in the sex industry was that it made me—a child of Hebrew School carpools and shinguarded soccer teams—feel unique and somewhat daring, even if that sense of “authenticity” proved increasingly difficult to hold onto as the years progressed.

The worst part was that the sex I managed to cadge was usually disappointingly bad. It was the raison d’etre, ya know? That was probably the main reason I had gotten into directing porn, if you want to get right down to it, and, to my surprise, it was horrid, cold, weird, unsympathetic sludgy coupling. I’ve had far, far better sex since I left the sex industry. That was my big lesson.

Rumpus: Are you still in the business?

Benjamin: I left porn about eight years ago. I still live in LA, and I’m tied to the adult film industry by a few friends, but that’s about it. I simply don’t have the heart for it. Porn was always stronger than me, and it still is.

0–9

Lauren Eyler — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:59:09 +0000

0) The beginning of all this, maybe. This woman who insists I could have loved anybody. We saw the Atlantic from Normandy. We saw the Pacific from San Francisco. This is not “my love is like an ocean.” We’d been through that already.

I know—and on looking, knew—that I’d never seen the ocean’s shapes from these angles. But I was well aware that their immensity and depths would swallow anyone up without remorse. After she left me, I felt like I was skimming the bottom of the Pacific with rotting whales and polar bear bones.

I rose out of it, but was infused with the way these things decayed. I made my own home brew with this decomposition as its base. I drank cases and cases.

I floated in the Atlantic, but from the coast of South Carolina.

Now as I float, I understand why she left, but when I dry off, my dryness causes me to forget.

I have a picture in my mind, but I don’t know if the smiles we had on our faces were real. And if anything exists in 0–9, it must be true.

***

1) I’m standing on a street in Amsterdam, leaning against the canal wall, staring at row houses. I can’t discern which building was Otto Frank’s store.

“Which one is the annex?” I ask my best friend. “They all look the same.”

“No,” she says, “they don’t.” She crosses her arms. I look again.

One house has a triangular roof. Another nine windows. The last concrete steps that lead up to its entrance. The sun is setting now.

“The dusk sets over them all the same,” I say.

We stand for a minute that turns into two. I’m looking into the canal and see the building’s reflections. I’m not looking close enough. I feel I have committed a crime. This not knowing.

Looking back on this image, I realize that it comes from a postcard I bought in the gift shop. I used the postcard as a bookmark on and off for a year until I set it down in a coffee shop or the university’s library. Perhaps I left it on a patch of grass under the tree I sat beneath in the commons.

The image on the postcard was easy enough to find online. The answer to my question was easy enough to find, too. A blogger had taken the time to highlight the store in blue, the horrible blue of a highlighter. That blue revoked the sun. It revoked the water in the canal. It revoked the black and white photographs of the movie stars that Anne had hung while in hiding.

***

2) I’ve read two memoirs in my life, one being Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. In Europe, they call it If This Is a Man, and it is a man. Man is a pretty pitiful thing to be.

I’ve read Survival in Auschwitz, but not If This Is a Man. I won’t be able to read it until I can read Italian. I can guess why it’s altered. American books need heroes, and since Levi survived, he was good enough to be named one.

Our publishers wanted to tattoo the name Auschwitz on the cover. A title with Auschwitz in it is far more interesting than some philosophical meandering. We want the details that make us grimace, but also titillate us. So in the way that Americans do, the publishers pushed aside Levi’s title. This is not for us, this philosophy.

But don’t you think he earned the right to name the book what he wanted?

***

3) The second memoir I’ve read is Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, in which she writes, “This record lays a claim to being historical—that is, much of it can be checked. If there is more fiction in it than I know, I should like to be set right.” McCarthy is one of the few who took the time to acknowledge that there is fiction in nonfiction. She invites correction. She wants her fiction set straight.

What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction? The nonfiction writer chooses subject matter from the real world. Its defenders say that the story being told does not originate from invention, but from people who once lived and are living. These people are not characters.

But what if I take the written words, the things I have recorded, and place them in a tiger’s mouth? It is subject matter from the real world. The words that the tiger speaks are not fictional. I have them recorded on a Dictaphone.

You can have your mother speak, your abusive stepfather scream, but they are reconstructions in
your head. They are primary players. They are the actors you set in motion in your play.

The tiger speaks truth.

***

4) Nonfiction from found autobiographical moments (note: not created).

Tara, my ex, experienced suicide at the age of twelve. Her boyfriend Steven tied a sheet around the metal bar in his closet and hung himself, leaving his little brother Robbie and his mother, now half-crazed, behind. One Christmas, long after Steven died, Robbie gave Tara an ice cream scoop with a polar bear handle.

At the age of sixteen, Robbie went quarry diving. He and his friends made it through the first jump. One of them said, “Let’s go one more time.” Of course, we know what one more time means. We’ve seen this before. Robbie broke his neck. Robbie drowned.

My uncle went to a park and shot himself in the head. However, he pinned a piece of notebook paper with his name and phone
number on it so that the police would immediately know who he was. But what is interesting about a man shooting himself? Stories like this have been suffocating me since my uncle’s death. Here’s the proof of the suffocation.

Three weeks ago, a classmate of mine sealed herself in her car. She took sheets and jammed them in places where air might find its way inside. When I heard she was dead, I thought of her at the end of a rope, a bloated face, her glasses fallen off. But she lit a small gas grill and suffocated as the carbon monoxide gathered in her car. A friend told me what my classmate looked like when she found her lying dead in the backseat of her car. She’d made a small bed and was lying on her back. My friend said she looked like herself, but her face was a bit purple.

***

5) Fiction that is nonfiction.

See all of the above.

Also known as realism: Madame Bovary, etc.

Also known as This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen in English or Farewell to Maria in Polish, written by Tadeusz Borowski. The stories in the text were inspired by the author’s concentration-camp experience, “inspired” meaning “historical subject matter chosen from the real world.”

***

6) Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

***

7) Primo. Weisel, on the day of Levi’s death, informed his audience that Levi died forty years earlier in Auschwitz. If Weisel is correct, Primo Levi’s writings are the act of a living corpse. I could write this six different ways, but why bother with oxymora?

Primo threw himself down the stairs (according to the coroner and three of his biographers). He fell (according to one good friend and an Oxford sociologist). Why two possibilities? Memory, survivor’s guilt, aging mother-in-law, no suicide note, discussions of feeling dizzy, plans for the future. He was a chemist, his friend said. It would have been a hell of a lot easier for him to poison himself. “You stupid fucking bastards, it would have been easier.”

***

8) I will map out the last year.

Uncle’s suicide

↓

Grandfather’s death

↓

Grandfather’s death

↓

Classmate’s suicide…

→ → Further, my mother’s mother had a stroke right at Christmas. A few weeks later, my mom wrote me a note with two cards in it, one for my father’s mother and one for hers. On Grandma Carolyn’s write a note telling her how you are, how the weather is. Tell her to have a Happy Birthday. On the one for my mom just write hi and your name. I’m not sure she’s with it.

I did what she asked and turned back to her note. This note with a bit of commentary could make a good short-short.

I can’t write that story though. We are used to hearing that our loved ones have forgotten. There has to be a metaphorical way to fictionalize it, but I would rather meditate on what has happened. She does not remember me → I remember her → When I think about calling, I remember that she has forgotten me.

What is this gap between her erased memory and mine that is intact? “It just happens when you get old,” my wife said. “People get dementia, get Alzheimer’s.”

You can call it these things. You can provide the scientific explanation. But what is the name of that space between choosing to forget and a seizure choosing for us?

***

9) Now the question is: Does it mean more if Primo Levi committed suicide? Do his books mean more, that is? Or if he accidentally fell down the stairs, does the fall stem from the weight of memory? Did he choose to forget and only know one way to do it? Or did he want to remember and accidentally fall down the stairs? It’s more moving, more tragic, if Levi made the choice. No, it’s more moving if we listen to Wiesel: Levi died forty years ago at Auschwitz.

Elie Weisel (Night)…living. Bruno Schulz (The Street of Crocodiles)…killed in the Warsaw Ghetto. Robert Desnos (État de veille)…killed in Theresienstadt. Tadeusz Borowski (This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen)…suicide after the war. Primo Levi (Survival In Auschwitz/Se questo è un uomo)…suicide? Accidental? Suicide—

The Rumpus Interview with Susan Wright

Diane Mehta — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:00:14 +0000

While working diligently on my historical novel and watching sales of Fifty Shades of Gray skyrocket and take over the mainstream consciousness, I started wondering what in it, beyond the S&M relationship, was so compelling. What did it take to find a breathtakingly large readership—and could I, too, dig into our collective pathos in a way that meant something to so many women? What are women really doing in bed, I wondered. What do they want, and how is Fifty Shades of Gray giving it to them?

So when I heard that the terminology around acts that our culture considers to be “sexually deviant” was being changed in the May update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), I was curious. The DSM-5 is a field guide for the mental health community and it was being updated this month for the first time in thirteen years. There was considerable noise in the press over how the DSM-5 might newly characterize healthy sex versus deviant sex.

I looked around to understand what appeared to be a very confusing run-up to the May update, and found the activist and author Susan Wright to be the most eloquent commentator on the topic. Susan founded the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF), a national advocacy organization for the BDSM, swing, and polyamory communities, in 1997. I asked if we could talk for an assignment I’d gotten for Details on the subject. But what I was chiefly interested in was writing a book that looked at women and sex in a way that might be counterintuitive.

We spoke on the phone at length one night in April, after my son went to sleep. Our conversation left me humbled. In 1991, when Susan got into the kink community, she got a lucky break to get her first book published. But when her editor discovered she was in a kinky triad with a married couple, he told her that if she wanted to get her book published, she would have to sleep with him, too. “I stood up and walked out,” she said. “It was one of the defining moments of my life, and it sparked the activist inside of me.”

I wanted to get her voice out in the world to color the hard-facts reporting that didn’t dig into the issues deeply enough. Susan had smart things to say about consent versus rape not just in “fringe” communities, but in the sexual lives of people of every persuasion. Her sharply-worded thoughts of media influence on the persecution of alternative sexuality gave me a serious education. But what hit me most was how much we yielded to contemporary notions about sexuality. Sexual deviance is a subjective thing. What was considered deviant decades ago (homosexuality) is no longer so. What’s still unacceptable in some countries and communities (pre-marital sex) is a given in the West.

What is our cultural moment, I wonder. Whatever it is, Susan makes it clear that talking about sex yields a different kind of intimacy than most of us have come to expect.

***

The Rumpus: Since the third edition of the DSM, the manual defined “non-normative” sexual behavior as “paraphilias,” or sexual deviation. Back then, a “sexual disorder” included homosexuality—and that was removed in 1973. So there are different opinions about what’s considered “deviant” at each cultural moment. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) said they may add “paraphiliac disorder” to the manual to differentiate between healthy people who enjoy kinky sex and those who are mentally ill. How does that sit with you?

Susan Wright: The DSM’s rationale section for each diagnosis includes the APA’s thinking and possible language on paraphilia: clear non-normative sexual behavior that’s practiced by healthy people.” Paraphilia in general has been defined as “non-normative sexual behavior that is not solely focused on the genitals or breasts.” By itself, it doesn’t require psychiatric intervention. That’s different from what they call “paraphiliac disorder,” which is when someone is causing severe distress or inflicting harm upon themselves or others.

Rumpus: The language is cloaked in secrecy until May. What is the main issue?

Wright: How they’re going to define “distress” is the issue. There’s a lot of societal pressure because of the stigma around kinky sex.

Rumpus: How would you define distress or harm, say, if you’re in a dominant/submissive relationship? Is it distress or harm, say, if you’re a sub and your partner spanks and bruises you consensually? What is distress?

Wright: Distress is about the person who’s actually doing it. This is how the APA would like to diagnose mental illnesses: “Is this person suffering distress over the fact that this is happening?” Some people don’t at all, and some may overlap with sexual sadism, such as psychopaths who don’t suffer any sort of distress over what they’re doing. Those people also suffer “impairment” to themselves in that they can’t have real relationships with people and don’t have the social skills to form bonds.

The other important part concerns harm to others. I’m not sure if that should fall under mental illness, but that’s what sexual sadism as a paraphiliac disorder would be: someone who harms other people. And either they do it non-consensually or in a way that’s so extreme, that it actually causes damage to the other person.

Rumpus: So the language in the DSM-IV (TR), the 2000 update to the 1994 fourth edition, was vague?

Wright: The line wasn’t drawn before regarding what is mental illness. They had a vague criteria, four out of five, that could have applied to anyone who was suffering some kind of distress because they weren’t out. Or distress because they hadn’t found the kink community yet. Or because they felt alone, ashamed, or confused about what they were doing. That kind of shame is not mental illness.

Unfortunately such diagnoses were used not only by psychiatrists but by people in the legal field who used the DSM without the qualifications to interpret what it really said. We need that hard, bright line and that’s what the APA said they were going to give us. A lot of persecution comes because people think that kinky people might be mentally ill. If we can disprove that, it gives them no reason to have a problem with us.

Rumpus: What did you wean from your conversations with the APA?

Wright: On behalf of NCSF, I was able to talk to the paraphilias sub-working group and educate them about the discrimination and persecution that’s going on because of the DSM. Frankly, they were quite surprised, and they didn’t want the DSM to engender that sort of discrimination. So I think the information that the APA released to the public—the distinction between paraphilia and paraphiliac disorders was a response to that. It was a way of saying: “Hey, listen, we’re not talking about healthy kinky people. They shouldn’t be discriminated against because they’re not mentally ill.” I’m really hoping they follow through.

Rumpus: Are there legal repercussions around the language they include in the manual? You mentioned that laws around “bodily harm” vary from state to state.

Wright: A good example is family court, when you’re trying to get child custody. The judge evaluates the parents and if an accusation is made that one of the parents is kinky and that they’re not a fit parent, the judge will turn to the DSM. Then he might say, wow, you won’t give up your sex partner who happens to be kinky, so therefore you require this and you are mentally ill.

The language included in this new edition will have repercussions across the board—in psychiatry, in legal settings, and also in our understanding of what kinky sex is. It already has an impact. One out of three people in NCSF’s surveys say they have been persecuted. Some were attacked, some discriminated against. That’s a huge number.

Rumpus: What about accusations that kink can go too far? Since highly emotional events often take place around kink, what happens when someone goes over the edge? How do people differentiate within these gray areas?

Wright: If we can take away some of the stigma of this, it’s easier for someone to report something inappropriate. Say you meet someone and decide to have kinky sex and you get assaulted. Right now it’s difficult for the person to report that to the police because of the stigma around kink. They’re also afraid they’re not going to be believed. Removing the stigma will give us more access to the judicial and legal framework that’s in place so we can protect ourselves and get the education we need around this.

Of course there are limits. And there will always be legal limits in terms of what you can do to another person. If you enter somebody, and you damage them in way that injures an organ or you impair a limb, that’s absolutely harm. Even if it’s consensual, it’s harm. If you tie someone up and cause nerve damage in somebody’s arm, you harm them. And there are questions about the liability involved—and there have been cases about things like this. I’m sure in the future, as the stigma’s removed, we’ll be able to deal with these in the right setting and really grapple with these questions.

Rumpus: You’d prefer states follow the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code.

Wright: When people go to court over things like this, it varies from state to state. Some states already follow the Model Penal Code. Then you’ve got a legal interpretation regarding what is “serious bodily injury.” In appellate court cases, which set precedent, things like using a riding crop or dripping candle wax on somebody have, in the past, been considered serious bodily injury. But those are very old cases and I don’t believe that a judge or jury today would rule that a crop or candle wax used consensually is assault.

There are gray areas in all of this regarding consent. None of these court cases are clear-cut. That’s the problem when they create precedent—we’re left not knowing where those lines are. But the Model Penal Code lays out a very good framework for looking at these issues in terms of actual physical injury.

That said, most people who are kinky are not even into the extreme, intense things that people who do body piercing like to do with their bodies. Most want to be kinky in a power exchange kind of way, or they want to cross-dress or engage in some sort of role play. Others are kinky in a BDSM or S&M kind of way. Those people like really intense sensations. They are not harming each other—they’re giving each other intense pleasure through intense sensation. That’s the goal of BDSM. The people who do it non-consensually, they should be arrested. And the people who go over the edge, well, there are going to be penalties because they’ve harmed somebody and they, too, should be arrested.

Rumpus: An earlier piece in Salon addressed rape and sexual assault at “play spaces” in San Francisco’s kink and bondage community. It quoted Carol Queen, the co-founder of the Center for Sex and Culture, saying she doesn’t go to commercial dungeons anymore because of this issue.

Wright: These kinds of stories are why NCSF has Consent Counts, an activism program we’re doing to decriminalize consensual BDSM that doesn’t result in serious bodily injury. We did surveys on consent in BDSM because we believe that’s the most important thing for the kink community to be talking about right now. We need to understand consent: what is it? What is it in a legal sense, in an ethical sense, and where do you cross that line?

For example, we put out a guide, which we call a “fact,” called “Is This Assault?” “Was I assaulted” is a fact—people really have this question—that explains questions such as, “Was it assault if I said yes right up until I said no?”

These are basic questions that are not being explained to people—kinky or vanilla. Unfortunately there’s a gap in the sexual education of adults in America. The kink community is trying to fill that gap. There’s a lot of date rape out there. It’s often someone you know who crosses the line in a small way or in a major way. We need to do a lot more education to teach people this is the line you can’t cross. And we need to do more than teach people how to protect themselves. We need to draw the line ourselves.

At NCSF, we also have a Guide for Groups with a consent policy we’d love to see BDSM groups and clubs use—it says you don’t touch anyone or anything without the other person’s permission, you respect it when somebody says “no,” and you don’t renegotiate in the middle of a scene when someone’s all happy and will say yes to anything. We’re hoping that if we create hardcore lines, it will help form boundaries for people and give us all the education we need.

Rumpus: Besides the DSM-5 update, is there a larger cultural issue that needs to be addressed?

Wright: There’s not a single person out there whose life hasn’t been touched by the issue of consent. When do you consent, when are you coerced, pressured, or manipulated into doing things you don’t want to do sexually? We all need sex education about consent, and safe sex is what it comes down to. Perhaps the kink community is ahead of the curve because we do such complicated, interested games, that we have to understand each other and need to have a way to follow the rules in order to do this—because millions of people are doing this millions of times. That is important for everyone to hear because we aren’t hearing it from anyone else.

Rumpus: Has the Fifty Shades of Gray phenomenon helped make these issues more prominent? The book sold seventy-million copies worldwide.

Wright: You know why Fifty Shades of Gray is so popular? Because it’s barely kinky. It’s popular because they talked the entire time about what they wanted sexually. They negotiated, they compromised. It was a real lesson. Most people don’t even talk about it before they have sex. They don’t know what’s really turning on the other person. To be able to communicate in that way creates an intimacy like no other. And that’s what we have to teach other people. This is something that needed to be said and shown—here’s how you have a great sex life. And you get to confess your deepest, darkest secrets.

Deep Throat #4: On Being and Unbeing a Singer

Hanne Blank — Wed, 22 May 2013 07:01:59 +0000

It is not a coincidence that among the synonyms for “practice” is “ritual,” and for “ritual,” “practice.” When you do a thing over and over—even if it is only so banal and small as lighting a cigarette—it will assume a shape and a meaning, a weight and a force. Rituals do things. They transform.

Practice transforms whether we seek it out or not. Our terrified training-wheeled wobble with a firm parental hand on the back of the bicycle seat becomes a confident look-ma-no-hands around the block. In the minds of medieval nuns, the repeated daily practice of reciting liturgy conjured a miraculous-seeming gift of literacy. Suddenly, yet without being explicitly taught, they could actually read the texts from the books they’d for so long merely held for form’s sake. You don’t have to mean to. You just have to practice.

When you do mean to, it ups the ante. Like other musicians, singers practice to transform themselves into musicians. Talent is not a substitute. Neither is the physical capacity for making beautiful sounds. They can only make it easier or faster. Singers must be created by practice just the same as skaters or shipwrights, sculptors or soccer players or public speakers. Practice is the only bridge that exists that can get any lump of raw human material to any kind of fluency at all.

But musicians also engage in a different kind of practice, one that seeks to turn fluency to transcendence. Fluency is only fluency, after all. Shakespeare was a fluent speaker of English, but a fluent speaker of English is not necessarily a Shakespeare. To have even a chance at becoming a Shakespeare, or whoever his nearest equivalent is in your field of endeavor (Spielberg, Shaq, Streep, Sills…) you have to level up, become a virtuoso. That means doubling down, practice-wise. No, tripling. And more. If you are going to get there at all—and you may not, for no matter how hard you practice not everyone is physically capable of virtuosity, let alone the transcendant—you will only get there via ongoing, profoundly self-aware, self-disciplined refinement of your skills. You must chase transformation, even if you never so much as catch its tail.

Unless, like me, you leave the chase.

There was no single day on which I stopped practicing singing, no date circled on the calendar to which I can now refer. Once I realized I hadn’t sung in a few months, though, I was appalled by how easily the rhythm of practice had slipped away. I had practiced singing daily, or nearly so, for the lion’s share of my life. My singerly system should, I felt, not have allowed it. I should at least have had to pick a day on which to stop by force of will. But I didn’t. I simply started practicing not-singing.

As any recovering alcoholic can tell you, practice works just as well in the realm of not-doing as anywhere else. My not-singing skills grew by leaps and bounds thanks simply to the fact that entropy takes its cut. Musicians are a bit like sharks. If they do not keep swimming, going through the specific physical motions of their music-making, their skills wither and die. I could feel muscle memory getting fuzzy, my instincts growing less reflexive. When it saddened me, as it inevitably did, I told myself I wasn’t a singer any more, and it could not possibly matter.

Practicing not-singing took more effort than you might think, at times. I had to inform people, many of whom had only ever known me as a singer, that I was no longer in the game. Sometimes they would forget. I would remind them. Lest you imagine that this was easy I will simply say that turning down your grandmother’s request that you sing at a family gathering is not for the weak. Nor is telling yourself, on the quiet afternoons when you are standing with tears dripping from your chin because you listened just a bit too hard to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on the radio and a bit of the pleasure and art and magic of making those noises had crept back into your body, that not-singing was better. Simpler. Less painful. Less costly.

Anyway, I didn’t sing any more, so it didn’t matter. It couldn’t. By such well-disciplined practice, I became very, very good at not-singing. I even learned how to not mind it much. Except for one thing.

There is, you see, a quotation that has dogged me as long as I can recall. It turns out to have been written by Rabindranath Tagore, though before I asked Uncle Google just now I suspected it to have been the motto of some Calvinist choirmaster. The line in question has been pinned to the studio bulletin board of almost every voice teacher and coach I’ve ever had: God likes me when I work, but He loves me when I sing.

No pressure. Really.

You don’t have to sing. It’s just that God won’t love you any more.

Disappointing your grandmother is pretty miserable stuff. Disappointing God? Even if you’re not particularly religious and you’re not always sure you believe in Him? Well. Let’s just say that the promise that he’ll still respect you in the morning—if you work hard enough—seems like a crappy consolation prize.

I didn’t grow up religious. I’ve known singers who did, for whom the pressure to “use your God-given gifts” had been not just literal but downright sectarian. But even raised as I was, I was reminded that my gifts were gifts and gifts came from somewhere, a sign of favor. After I stopped working as a musician, and there were no more performances to practice for, my sense of practicing as a professional obligation dried up. There was no one depending on me to practice, and no one to disappoint by not practicing.

Except in the ways that there was.

When I began to sing again, though, I did not do it out of fear, or because of some imagined whiff of brimstone. I’ve come to believe in God, though not the Angry Sky Daddy sort, and anyway, if there is a Hell more desolate than being forsaken, I’m not sure I know what it is.

I began to practice again because I wanted to. I’d been circling the desire for years and been too fearful, too hidebound, too ashamed to try, until my life shifted under my feet enough that I decided I had nothing to lose. If I had already been forsaken for quitting, then it wasn’t as if I could do any further damage by trying to start over. I just felt like singing. That was enough.

Besides, my housemates were in Paris. In a stocking-feet-and-empty-house episode that otherwise bore no resemblance whatsoever to any portion of Risky Business—I was fully clothed and no alcohol was involved—I decided fuck it, God, you gave me a present. It’s mine now. I get to do what I want with it. I didn’t know what that was. I decided I didn’t care. I was done practicing not-singing. I hoped there was something left for me on the other side.

My first practice sessions were glorious and terrible and, no surprise, frequently interrupted by tears. My technique, of course, was gone to seed, and slow. The part of me that somehow still expected to be driving a Maserati was appalled to discover itself behind the wheel of a school bus. My voice itself had also changed. I had guessed it would—voices like mine, voice teachers say, don’t reach their full range or color or power until the singer is in her forties—but I had no idea what that would be like, or feel like, or how it would work. For a while practicing was not so much transformation as excavation, figuring out what, if anything, lay buried under a decade and change of rust and cobwebs.

Then, not so long into the excavation project, I sang some downward scales and landed in a pile of velvet, a bucket of caramel. My eyebrows shot up. I tried it again. There, at what had always been the troublesome bottom of my mezzo-soprano midrange was something I’d always wanted, something my teachers and I had always coaxed and bullied but never achieved. A cluster of notes around middle C that used to be unfocused and wan had somehow turned firm and strong entirely of their own accord, as imperturbably at ease as a cat that has just marched into your kitchen and decided it is no longer a stray. Each time I practice now, my newfound bit of plush and purr is a delight and a pleasure, still a wonderful surprise.

Practice is not a transaction, it is only a ritual. Like prayer it is the persistent offering of effort, desire, and hope. We like to think that it is the effort that transforms us. We love to believe in the force of our desires. But there is no technique, no yearning translated into action, that could’ve forced my vocal cords to mature in the subtle precise way that they did in order to blossom into velvet and sweetness just where they did, just as they did. Some transformations will not be chased. We can only hope, and try, and, once in a while, get lucky.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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