A City Made of Words Read online

  These decisions about where to be born, where to grow up, one makes them almost arbitrarily, like the character details at the beginning of a story. But they are so hard to correct when things go wrong. I read an article recently by a man who had grown up in a Christian cult and then escaped into academia, only to discover many of the same structures: the abusive hierophants at the top, the un- or undercompensated labor at the bottom, the cruel assumption of superiority based on self-serving definitions of excellence, either spiritual or intellectual. My parents were priests in that cult, and it took me a long time to recognize the insidious ways in which privilege disguises itself as merit, or “merit,” among upper-middle-class Americans. On the other hand, it’s a lovely little town; I still live there.

  Soldiers of Paradise was your first work. Or was it? Where did you try to place it? How did it end up with Hartwell?

  I wrote a novel before Soldiers of Paradise about a murder in a monastery. I was living in New York in the 1970s, working in an advertising agency and hating it. So I quit to work in a squash club and write Lamb’s Blood, which was never published. S of P came later, after two years in Asia. I was less green by that time and knew enough to get an agent, which took a year or so. Adele Leoni agreed to represent it with David in mind. He was with Arbor House then, and I remember the whole process taking about a week. The advance was not large.

  Ever spend a winter on Block Island?

  I did! Maybe in 1973? My parents had a house by the water, unheated except for a kerosene stove in one room. I ate a lot of Gorton’s Codfish Cakes. I read Russian novels, and my dog and I walked all over the island, which was far more rural in those days. It would be easy to plot out a story that would make that winter a pivotal episode in my life, if you liked those sorts of stories.

  You sometimes appear in your own stories. Is that by invitation?

  I used to think it was a bad and politically retrograde idea to borrow anything from your own experience and put it in your work, except in the most glancing and indirect way. So calling characters “Paul Park” was my little joke. The name always seemed improbable to me, and artificial, since no one used it when I was a child. Once when I was working at Smith/Greenland I put it into a sample advertisement, and the client accepted everything but that detail. They told me, “No one could ever be named ‘Paul Park,’” which seemed reassuring and right to me, and I took those words to heart. I had the art director substitute “Frank Masters,” which the client liked and I did too, because it is a phrase that means something—I once had a student named Chace Lyons. Lately, of course, I’ve found characters more like myself haunting my stories, and I give them all sorts of made-up names.

  When did you start fooling around with metafiction? What is metafiction, anyway?

  A metafictional story is one that is aware of itself and knows that it is artificial. In most stories you are asked to imagine you are finding out about real people and their problems. So, for example, in this interview the reader might imagine an actual author answering actual questions in a way that suggests what he actually thinks. But what if that becomes increasingly unlikely? What if the response to a question about metafiction appears foolish or fraudulent, in a way that suggests either (a) that the interviewer is manipulating the answers and the author doesn’t exist, or (b) that there is no author and no interviewer either, and the whole exchange is being manufactured by some unknown writer for a new purpose. Usually there is a metafictional break in the story, as, for example, here, where the reader understands they’re being toyed with. In theory, the whole tone of the interview might change, as every subsequent answer is now suspect.

  This way of thinking has always been interesting to me, as it turns out—recently I was cleaning up after a fire and came across some stories I’d written in school. Metafiction. I think it might be because I’m bad at conventional plotting, the straight line between A and B that “takes away all hope,” as Grace Paley describes it.

  Didn’t you write a Dungeons & Dragons novel? How did that come about?

  I was in Seattle teaching at Clarion West, and at a party I met one of the editors at Wizards of the Coast, who publish the Forgotten Realms books. My son had started to play the game with a posse of his friends, and I thought it would be fun to write a story for Dragon magazine, which I knew he read, and have it show up on his screen. Later, the same editor approached me for a novel, and I accepted under the condition that I could borrow the characters my son and his friends had invented for their game and base the novel under them. And one other condition: I could write it under a pen name, which would then appear in a metafictional novel called All Those Vanished Engines, about, among other things, a man named “Paul Park” who writes a Forgotten Realms novel under the same pseudonym and quotes from it inaccurately.

  You seem more interested in ceremony than actual behavior. Are you aware of that? Does it worry you?

  Is there such a thing as actual behavior, for conscious beings? How would that even work? Isn’t everything a performance of itself? When I was living in the Congo, sometimes foreign guests would want to go to so-called tribal villages, where people who make a show of eating their traditional meals, wearing their traditional clothes, pursuing their traditional activities. So: melancholy and pathetic, and only tolerable if you remembered that everything is like that.

  Do you ever workshop your own stuff?

  No—that would be awful. And what would be the point?

  You furnished the soundtrack for a museum installation. How did that come about?

  I’ve done two museum shows, one at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and one at CityPlace in West Palm Beach. In both cases I provided the text for a mixed-media sound installation assembled by the artist Stephen Vitiello. Both turned into wonderful collaborations. They were his commissions, but he asked me to be part of the team, because when he accepted the assignment at MASS MoCA, he remembered from one of my author bios that I lived in the same town as the museum, and he asked them to hire me. They were like, “Who?”

  Are you a Christian? What’s with all the Jesus and Mary books?

  I tried to be a Christian for a while, when I was in New York. I loved the smell of the old stone and polished wood. I loved the music. That sounds superficial, but I responded to those things in a way that still seems significant to me. I didn’t love trying to convince myself I believed things I actually didn’t. I got belief all tangled up with faith. Nobody really believes anything, it turns out. The books came later and are unrelated. At least I think they are.

  Your father was a physicist, at Princeton for a while. Ever meet Einstein?

  Yes, my father was at the Institute for Advanced Study in the early 1950s. He knew all those guys: Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman. Not well, I think. Freeman Dyson was the only one who became a family friend. Once my father introduced my mother to Albert Einstein at a party. “I was expecting someone so much taller,” she said. Later she suggested he might not have not found that funny.

  One sentence on each, please: Carol Emshwiller, Mick Jagger, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

  Carol Emshwiller is the only great writer whose smile can light up all of lower Manhattan. I regret pretending, when Mick Jagger checked into the racquet club where I was working, that I didn’t recognize him and indeed had never heard of him, which was a pointless and pathetic lie. Despite quoting him once in a short story, I have never read a word of Ludwig Wittgenstein and never will.

  Favorite whiskey?

  Whisky, please: Laphroaig (Islay). For blended whisky (stirred, really): Ye Olde Earl (Edinburgh, London, Kathmandu).

  You once brought me a bottle of Ye Olde Earl. Fortunately, it was tiny. You have taught writing at Clarion and several colleges. Ever have a real job?

  No, I don’t think so. I worked for the City Council in New York. I worked in advertising and in health clubs. I was a janitor. I worked in retail and sold Chinese antiques. I wrote catalog copy and artists’ profiles. Now I’m a c
ollege professor. Real jobs are as chimerical as real Americans.

  Do your students ever actually read SF? Do you have two or three things in particular you teach? Any things you have to unteach?

  No. They used to have read Orson Scott Card but not anymore. I teach a number of different kinds of writing: Utopian Fiction, Imitations and Parodies, Science Fiction of the African Diaspora, Expository Writing for Art Historians, as well as Creative Writing. My college is generous that way, possibly because, to put it mildly, I lack formal credentials. I try to teach (a) punctuality, (b) basic hygiene, and (c) gun safety. I try to unteach Raymond Carver, show don’t tell, and write what you know.

  What was your first literature? Were you ever a reader of SF or Fantasy?

  I read myths and fairy tales, Arthurian legends, Tolkien, and Le Guin. I never read any comics or hard SF. I wish I had. It’s too late now.

  You were friends with James Sallis in New Orleans, and now with John Crowley in New England. So tell me, why is it that some major, even celebrated, writers, given the opportunity to jump ship from genre, don’t?

  I think it turns out to be hard. When I tried to strike away with the Jesus books, The Gospel of Corax and Three Marys, David Hartwell told me it was never going to work, that I’d never climb out of the box. He turned out to be right. The stain of genre doesn’t necessarily affect the work, but it affects the perception and reception.

  How come you haven’t won any major awards? All your friends have.

  It’s true. Every single one of them. And not just participation trophies, either, but major, national awards. They put them up on the mantelpiece and dust or polish them. They survey them with quiet pride. Sometimes they stroke them with anxious, feverish fingers, I hear. By contrast I am forever denied that experience. That glass case is closed to me. And yet …

  Do you have a regular drill for writing? You know what I mean.

  Nope. Not anymore. When I was living by myself, my routine was to piss and moan for a solid year until I had built up enough panic and distress, then pound out a book in a few months. That system turned out to be unconducive to domestic life and fatherhood. When the kids were young, I developed a more disciplined schedule and got up every morning at four so I could write before they woke up for school. Now they’re gone, and I’m sorely in need of a new way.

  You sort of slip and slide among genres. Do you use them as fences or chutes?

  I never developed the hook of self-imitation, from which commercial success so largely depends. Do you think Jasper Johns wanted to paint all those flags and stars? This is especially true in genre, where one is rarely rewarded for change. I think it has helped me to never have made much money. If the Princess of Roumania books had been a great success, I could imagine sitting around thinking, “So, what about Bulgaria? Moldova? Transnistria?”

  What’s your position on the big bang? Evolution? Are you aware that they are just theories?

  It’s hard for me to believe in things I can’t visualize—I mean actually believe in them and not just be comfortable saying so. The big bang theory sounds more like a religious moment than a scientific one, possibly because it seems so fiat lux. As for evolution, I don’t dispute the facts of the case, just the theorizing that rise out of them, which seems to me reductive and depressing. In general, I have no interest in abstract thought.

  Your wife is a theater professional. Ever write a play or a screenplay?

  No, but I’ve thought about it. I’m not alone in this, I hear. Three Marys would make a good play.

  When you were a kid, did everyone call you Pogo or just your mean sisters?

  That particular cognomen, from the great Walt Kelly comic strip, started with my parents, who disliked the actual name they’d given me. Everybody called me that except in the most formal situations. And I don’t think they were being mean … except, wait a second now. Wait just a gosh darn minute. “Dagnabbit,” as Pogo might say.

  The Gospel of Corax about the “lost years” of Jesus was based on what?

  I was going on a hiking trip to the Garhwal Himal and had a few hours to kill while the Indian consulate processed my visa. So I walked over to St. Bartholomew’s on 51st Street and Park Avenue, which is a beautiful neo-Byzantine pile. I sat in a side chapel, and the whole shape of the novel fell in my lap all at once: Jesus’ trip to India. I had been primed for thinking about it for some years, ever since the time I’d spent in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh years before. I had gotten interested in theosophy because of all the references to it in Indian cities, roads named after Annie Besant or Madame Blavatsky. And it was commonplace in famous temples to hear people tell you Jesus of Nazareth had worshipped there. I was aware of the theosophist legend that Jesus had lived and studied, and even died, at Hemis Gompa in Ladakh—my great-grandmother had run a theosophical society in New Haven. There I was in St. Bartholomew’s. Old stone, polished wood, half-heard music from the nave. It was as if the book was already in my hand.

  You were part of the Mount Thoreau expedition in 2015. Are you an admirer of Thoreau or do you just follow Stan Robinson and Gary Snyder around?

  The latter, sadly. I like to read people only after I climb the mountain named after them. It gives me a better sense of what they’re like, what to expect. Walden had always seemed a bit hectoring to me. But I’d loved The Maine Woods and wrote about it for Laurie Glover’s anthology. Step by measured step, until the man is way off the deep end.

  What poets do you read for fun? Ever read mysteries? Why not?

  I disapprove of mysteries. I’m not sure why. Disapproval is like that, for me. It comes from a place of stupidity. I imagine them as over-determined and controlled, and I don’t care to be told differently. Poets? I read a lot of poets. Right now today? Ocean Vuong and Celia Dropkin.

  My Jeopardy question. I provide the answer, you provide the question. Answer: A boathouse on an undiscovered bay.

  What is a fine and narrow cylinder of neglect?

  You were one of the first to buy a Saturn, yet you rarely write about space travel. Explain.

  Why write about it when you can live it? Those early models, I remember, when the company was still independent—down-shifting into ninth gear on a summer night, at the old abandoned wooden ski ramp near my house, you could break out of the troposphere at an incline of sixty degrees, and she’d stop shuddering and shaking, and spilling all the coffee in your lap. Such bliss to hit that cold still quiet place. One tank of gas—Jesus. Past the Kuiper Belt, you could wrap up in a sleeping bag and coast. And in those early days they had refueling stations along the way.

  If you could low-orbit any planet or satellite in the solar system for several hours, which would it be?

  Haven’t you been listening?

  You were spotted at Everest Base Camp some years ago. What were you doing, collecting empties?

  Yes, the place is a trash heap. I prefer the corpses higher up. The things people leave, they should take away. The things they take away, they should leave. Go figure.

  So what’s next?

  I’ve been working on short fiction, mostly, for the past few years. And a novella called Lost Colonies of the Ancient World. It might be that I never finish it. Maybe it’s important always to be working on something that defeats you. And I’ve been researching a new historical novel set in Roman Gaul. “Vercingetorix” is a name that holds, in my opinion, irresistible and universal appeal. I’ve been rolling it around my mouth since I was a child.

  A Resistance to Theory

  SHE STOOD OUTSIDE THE lecture hall examining the poster. The image was murky, perhaps a tattooed human face, perhaps a tribal mask. Under the title of the talk, Professor Farinelli had included this bio in small print:

  My writing has focused on developing a critical theory that would support an ethnography of the postanthropologic otherwise. My recent work examines the hegemony of the predeceased in late liberal settler colonies from the perspective of the politics of embodiment, eroticism, and narrat
ive form. My ethnographic analysis is illuminated by a critical assignation with the traditions of American pragmatism and continental theories of immanence and intimacy.

  Seldom had Yvette felt such excitement. And yet her hands did not shake. It had been raining outside the library, a cold November drizzle. Momentarily she laid her right palm against the polished surface of the wall, and laid her forehead there too. She caught a glimpse of a blurry reflection before she turned away. “Immanence,” she whispered. “Eminence. Imminence.” The words themselves were interchangeable, designed for a purpose not limited to comprehension. Even she, defeated as she’d been by stuff like this, could see the beauty of that purpose if you let your mind go.

  Crowell Concert Hall, 4 p.m., November 19th—here she was. The text promised a manifestation of great power. She could only hope she’d come prepared. Combing her left hand through her wet, stringy hair, she pulled open the double doors and took her seat.

  Yvette knew she would have to be careful. She had purposely come late. She had already achieved a limited celebrity because of the disruptions she had caused, not here, but in colleges and lectures elsewhere on the East Coast. Once she had taken the train down from Boston to New York, hoping to confront Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian cultural theorist, in the quadrangle at Columbia University, to express her admiration or else maybe kill him. But at the last moment she had paused, irresolute, struck dumb by what he’d said about false consciousness.

  It wasn’t so easy, distinguishing the postanthropologic from the predeceased. Sometimes the evidence was mixed. Now she unbuttoned her raincoat in the cavernous uncrowded room. She had chosen a seat near the back next to the aisle, in case she had to escape. Attempting to project a sense of confidence, she spread her knees apart while she examined the bald head of the man in front of her. She could hear the speaker at the podium below her in the stepped well. Momentarily she closed her eyes, not yet ready to look. In preparation, she listened only to the sound of Professor Farinelli’s voice, seductive and low. She did not listen to the words, not yet. Instead, and in order to provide a sense of contrast, she found herself remembering one of her favorite quotations from Judith Butler, a printed text, as it happened, which she now recomposed in a separate mental theater, analogous to this one: