Curlew Quarterly - Issue No. 2 - Autumn 2017.

CURLEW QUARTERLY.

$19.95

A literary and photo journal of New York City neighborhoods.

Issue No. 2 - Autumn 2017.

Alexandra Bildsoe . Megan Cossey . Emily Fishman . Chris Gisonny Adrian Moens . Isaac Myers III . Jamie O’Hara Laurens . Friko Starc . Mervyn Taylor

1

2

“The essence of what the curlew felt now

was a nostalgic longing for home.�

Fred Bosworth - Last of the Curlews.

3

4

CURLEW QUARTERLY. Issue No. 2 – Autumn 2017.

DUMBO Market Report ..........................................................................................................9.

Prospectus - Issue No. 2 - Autumn 2017 - Isaac Myers III ......................................................13.

“Last quarter I wrote about a slight sense of delusion, and how it can help keep up the belief that the right opportunity is just around the corner.”

Reviews - Chris Gisonny - “Crisis Cinema: New York, Austerity, & The Movies.” ..............17.

“For much of the American population New York is a movie set, a celluloid city experienced at a distance, its jagged skyline glowing across screens large and small.”

Profile - Isaac Myers III - “How Instincts Explain the World - Friko Starc.”......................66.

“Friko Starc walks with the precision and focus of a man on a mission. He moves with an excitement and confidence which gives off the vibe that the party may commence (or keep going) whenever he walks into a room.”

Fiction – Megan Cossey - “Fathers & Mothers, Sisters & Brothers.”.....................................94.

“My mom called today to ask whether I thought my brother was depressed. ‘I don’t know, I’m not a therapist. Why, did something happen? Is he okay?’”

Poetry – Jamie O’Hara Laurens - “The Weak Calligraphy of Songbird Cages” & “The Return of Marine Life to the Gowanus Canal.” ...............................................................................150.

Poetry – Mervyn Taylor – “Nostrand Avenue” & “Things I Can’t Throw Away.”................178.

Interviews.

Chris Gisonny...........................................................................................................................36.

Megan Cossey ........................................................................................................................116.

Jamie O’Hara Laurens............................................................................................................153.

Mervyn Taylor.........................................................................................................................182.

Photography.

Alexandra Bildsoe........................................................................................... Cover-63;110-145.

Emily Fishman........................................................................................................64-93;146-173.

Adrian Moens.................................................................................................................174-End. 5

CURLEW QUARTERLY www.CurlewQuarterly.com Issue No. 2 - Autumn 2017 Published 2017.

Editor: Isaac Myers III, Esq. Contributors: Alexandra Bildsoe Megan Cossey Emily Fishman Chris Gisonny Adrian Moens Jamie O’Hara Laurens Friko Starc Mervyn Taylor Cover Image: Alexandra Bildsoe Printed by: Instant Publisher P.O. Box 340 410 Highway 72 W Collerville, TN 38027 Curlew New York 68 Jay Street, Suite 503 Brooklyn, NY 11201 212 - 804 - 8655 www.CurlewNewYork.com Info@CurlewNewYork.com Curlew Quarterly is available for purchase at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop, New York City’s only all poetry bookstore, located at 141 Front Street (take the F train to York Street), along with the following locations: McNally Jackson Books - 52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012; Foragers Market - Dumbo - 56 Adams Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201; Usagi New York - Gallery + Cafe - 163 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201.

For a complete list of bookstores and venues where Curlew Quarterly can be purchased, please visit our website at www.CurlewQuarterly.com. Submissions and inquiries may be mailed to 68 Jay Street, Suite 503, Brooklyn, NY 11201, or e-mailed to Info@CurlewQuarterly.com.

All rights reserved.

6

7

Illustration: Alexandra Bildsoe 8

DOWN UNDER THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE OVERPASS - SALES. Total Number of Apartments for Sale Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, as of December Eleventh, 2017*: 31.

STUDIOS: 3.

Average Price of Studio: $715,667.

ONE BEDROOMS: 6.

Average Price of One Bedroom: $1,475,333.

Average Price Per Square Foot for One Bedrooms: $1,292.

TWO BEDROOMS: 8.

Average Price of Two Bedrooms: $1,922,250.

Average Price Per Square Foot for Two Bedrooms: $1,545.

THREE BEDROOMS: 9.

Average Price of Three Bedrooms: $3,063,000.

Average Price Per Square Foot for Three Bedrooms: $1,892.

FOUR BEDROOMS: 5.

Average Price of Four Bedrooms: $4,237,800.

Average Price Per Square Foot for Four Bedrooms: $2,604.

*Brownstoner as of December Eleventh, 2017.

9

10

11

12

PROSPECTUS - ISSUE NO. 2 - AUTUMN 2017.

Isaac Myers III

Last quarter I wrote about a slight sense of delusion, and how it can help keep up the belief that the right opportunity is just around the corner. On the third Friday of this past September, I was interviewing Friko Starc.

We were sitting beneath the sun on the rooftop of 20 Jay Street, which looks out over the East River, and has one of those views of Manhattan that can leave you in awe; almost forcing you to stop, and look out over the skyline, and for a few long moments, stay within the quiet of your mind.

The air was crisp and still, though with the sun and humidity, the heat was sweltering ––– the almost perfect weather that arrives each September. As I was asking Starc about his experiences in New York, he pointed toward the plants and trees that were standing and hanging around us on the roof.

“I have a sense that some people are happier in nature. They can go fishing,

ride a horse, be by the lake, or by the beach; and so we have parks in the city.

It’s why we have beaches, and why we go on holidays. I think that’s where

we’re most at balance with ourselves. A certain peace comes with nature that

can’t be found anywhere else.

And what I’ve found, multiple times over in my life, and in friends’ lives, is that the city is a shiny new thing that attracts you. Women and jobs and positions,

and titles, and parties, and people and deals, and cars; whatever, new condos,

and new everything. New is the key word. The city is very good at distracting you from what you need.”

As the weeks passed, and as Alex and Emily and Adrian and I spoke with our contributors; with Megan, and with Jamie, and with Chris, and with Mervyn, a theme emerged. Megan said she loves it here, but that if she would ever leave, she would go to a place where there’s space for horses, and it’s warm. Jamie said she loves it here as well, but that she has to get upstate from time to time, to escape the noise, and recharge.

Chris mentioned how his courtyard, with its trees and plants, makes him feel as though he’s on vacation. And every January, Mervyn returns to Trinidad, to leave New York behind for a few months, and to soak in the sun and the heat of his native island.

So if New York is a city where anything and everything can happen, and where anything and everything is just about to happen, or in fact is already happening, then the question isn’t what’s next, or what awaits, but instead, what’s here, and what’s now?

13

It’s within these questions that I take a step back from Issue No. 1’s Prospectus. New York isn’t great because of what’s next. Like Chris drinking coffee and writing amongst the trees and leaves in his courtyard on a summer night in June, we’re here, and thankful for the now.

Like Megan finding a place in her mind where she can stretch out and ride a horse around a countryside that may or may not call to mind her Crystal River, Florida, roots, we’re here. Like Jamie stopping in the middle of a forest and paying close attention to the details within one certain leaf that’s caught her attention, we’re recharging. And Like Friko going for a run on the beach back home in Argentina, or Mervyn stepping off of a plane and walking out into the Trinidadian, sun once, we’re outside.

And as we’re resting, we’re noticing how New York is great not because there’s something that’s just about to happen, but instead, because it allows us all to be here, and together, and as best as we can, already feeling at home.

Isaac Myers III - December 11th, 2017.

14

15

16

CRISIS CINEMA: NEW YORK, AUSTERITY, AND THE MOVIES. Chris Gisonny For much of the American population New York is a movie set, a celluloid city experienced at a distance, its jagged skyline glowing across screens large and small.

This was the case for me during my childhood. Two films released during the mayoralty of David Dinkins shaped my early perception of the great metropolis. The first was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), whose opening sequence hammers home

the fact that New York has a major crime problem. Crowds hustle down congested sidewalks as April O’Neil’s news broadcast details the shadowy deeds of an “organized criminal element.” The camera focuses on a man beside a newsstand reading the New York Post, whose headline proclaims: “CITY CRIME ESCALATES.” Ironically, the Post-reading pedestrian becomes a victim of this crime wave that very instant, as a hand reaches into his pocket and snatches his wallet. The crimes turn out to be the work of a syndicate that exploits teenage delinquents, run by a swarthy Asian man dressed in a sinister assortment of sharp metal armor. Thankfully, a quartet of wise-cracking humanoid turtles manages to defeat these antagonists of law and order, whom the police forces are helpless to stop.

I encountered a nicer balance to this depiction of the city; however, in the form of Chris Columbus’ Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992). I remember seeing it in a multiplex on suburban Long Island, excited beyond belief. I also remember how my mother dutifully leaned over me as I munched my popcorn, informing me upon each devious injury suffered by the hapless burglars that they would most likely be dead or seriously injured, perhaps fearful that my young mind would fail to comprehend that setting someone’s head ablaze with a blowtorch is not desirable behavior.

Home Alone 2’s vision of the city was much more inviting than what I saw in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and made the city look quite fun, save for a sequence in which young protagonist Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin) is menaced by a cavalcade of grotesque paupers. Here New York was a veritable playground, a dizzying carnival of profligacy where you could indulge all manner of juvenile mischief, so long as you had your parents’ hard-earned cash in hand.

My family departed the strip-mall dystopia of Long Island for the wooded hills of Connecticut when I was a pre-pubescent nerd with an overactive imagination.

I escaped the traditional small-town ennui through movies, a habit that morphed into 17

Illustration: Alexandra Bildsoe

full-fledged cinephilia by the time my voice grew alternately deep and squeaky and a wispy fuzz of a mustache made me feel like some debonair sophisticate. My continuing visits to the city were exclusively of the family-oriented tourist variety, with major sights seen and embarrassing group photos requested of passerby. I can therefore say with confidence that my exposure to the Big Apple via cinema far outnumbered my experience of it in reality. And in this crucial phase of teenage movie mania, most of the New-York-based films I was drawn to weren’t contemporary productions but rather those that depicted the city during one of its most legendary eras: the gritty 1970s and ’80s, when the subways were splashed with spray paint, the citizens endured routine muggings, and murder was as rampant as the rats.

When I finally moved to New York in the middle of the Bloomberg era, I confronted a much different urban environment: a sleek cyberpunk metropolis steeped in spectacle and obscene wealth. Like many art students I fell prey to the nostalgia for the New York of the “bad old days,” which were also rather perversely the “good old days” when it came to art and culture. The downtown art scene, punk, disco, hip hop – the halcyon days of the period’s cultural advances are memorialized time and time again, even though the crime is not missed with equal longing, nor are the AIDs crisis or the crack epidemic. Still, for many navigating the city’s treacherous real estate market, it’s often with regret that we consider how we’ve traded the high murder rate and low rents for a low murder rate and rents so exorbitant it’s criminal.

Film theorist Andre Bazin once likened cinema to a process of mummification that preserves the dead. In this sense, movies have preserved for us the New York City of the 1970s and ’80s: people that are dead, buildings that are gone, socioeconomic situations long since past, political crises consigned to the history books -- all of these are still there, lingering on film, recorded not necessarily with the purported objectivity of documentary, but rather, organized into genre-specific narratives that utilize the city for certain purposes, their images suffused with various connotations, which taken together tell an interesting story of how both the city and the world evolved into the particular situation we find ourselves in now. But we must be sure to look beyond the surface details of these movies and turn a critical eye toward the ways in which they enshrined and also perpetuated crucial attitudes concerning the city and its role in a divided American value system, which is now undergoing its own period of crisis and tumult.

To place the films of the period in their proper context, we first need to grapple with New York City’s 1975 fiscal crisis. One can discover a great deal about this ignominious event from Kim Phillips-Fein’s Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis 18

and the Rise of Austerity Politics (2017). Phillips-Fein focuses on how “the 1970s crisis was a crucial point on the way to a new New York, helping transform the city into the highly stratified metropolis it is today -- a city of apartments bought as investment properties for the wealthy of the world even as almost 60,000 New Yorkers live in homeless shelters, a city that’s among the most unequal in a nation that itself has become radically more hierarchical than it was during the post-war era.” (7).

In general terms, the crisis marked the death of postwar liberalism and the expansive vision of the War on Poverty. Prior to 1975, New York City was practically an experiment in social democracy, boasting the tuition-free City University, welfare centers and anti-poverty programs, well-kept parks and libraries, numerous hospitals and health clinics, as well as sturdy unions that included not only private sector blue-collar employees but also municipal workers who won the legal right to collective bargaining under the “Little Wagner Act” of 1958. Overall, this municipal welfare state far surpassed those of other American cities.

This all began to collapse by the late 1960s. An unholy alliance of political and economic factors destabilized the benefits of the postwar boom, both in the city and across the country. Profits slipped as unemployment crept higher and higher; growth ran out of steam. New York found itself increasingly starved of tax revenue as manufacturers and corporate offices split town to set up camp in New Jersey and Connecticut, which they found much more amenable to business. Making a bad situation worse, new highways were constructed and federal housing policies enacted which lured white middle-class New Yorkers to the suburbs. The whites who stayed behind brimmed with resentment as they watched their tax dollars get sucked into a welfare state that seemed designed only to help Blacks and Puerto Ricans.

Spending much more on the social welfare state than they were taking in, city politicians patched up the budget with debt again and again until 1975, when the banks refused to buy any more bonds. Federal help came initially only in the form of Gerald Ford’s extended middle finger, captured in the infamous Daily News headline, printed on October 30th, 1975: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

This is the moment when the War on Poverty morphed into the War on the Poor. The bankers managed to sidestep the politicians and assert their control of the city’s finances and social services, prefiguring of the financial sector’s rise to prominence over society at large. The implications of this are explored at length in Adam Curtis’ entertaining and deliriously paranoid documentary HyperNormalisation (2016), which sees in the moment of the fiscal crisis a model for “how it might be possible to run the world without politics.” As to what would replace politics, Curtis explains: 19

A new committee was set up to manage the city’s finances. Out of nine members, eight of them were bankers. It was the start of an extraordinary experiment, where the financial institutions took power away from the politicians and started to run society themselves. The city had no other option. The bankers enforced what was called ‘austerity’ on the city, insisting that thousands of teachers, policemen, and firemen were sacked. This was a new kind of politics.

The old politicians believed that crises were solved through negotiations and deals. The bankers had a completely different view. They were just the representatives of something that couldn’t be negotiated with: the logic of the market. To them, there was no alternative to this system. It should run society.

The austerity conditions of the fiscal crisis thus transformed the city into a crime-ridden, graffiti-strewn backdrop for the cinema of the period. Prominent among the films produced as the crisis was underway is Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), a hallucinatory neo-noir masterpiece that has deservedly earned a reputation as one of the greatest films ever made. Taxi Driver has a particular resonance with the moment of the crisis: an alienated Vietnam veteran (Robert DeNiro), fed up with the deteriorating condition of the city, vows to take action and trains himself for battle like a guerrilla fighter in the jungle. He unsuccessfully attempts to assassinate a politician but finally gets his revenge on the degenerate city in the final sequence, which explodes in an infamous bloodbath in a seedy East Village building. Shortly after Taxi Driver completed filming, the fiscal bloodbath erupted in City Hall, plunging an already troubled city into the depths of dystopian despair.

Sydney Lumet’s dark satire, Network (1976), expresses a different concern than Taxi Driver: rather than sinister pimps and criminals stalking the streets, the dark forces at work in this film are the large conglomerates that seemed poised to transform the world for the worse. After firebrand newscaster Howard Beale (Peter Finch) destroys a potential corporate deal with Saudi Arabia in one of his populist rants, chairman of the Communications Corporation of America, Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), subjects Beale to his corporate evangel with terrifying biblical force. Jensen explains the “natural order of things today”: You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

20

When Jensen sums up his views by asserting that “the world is a business,” we

can only surmise his perspective does not deviate far from that of the financiers who took over the city in 1975.

The corporate violence Network depicted would have a far greater impact on the world than crime on the street, but this is what many of the post-crisis films concerned themselves with. Consider low-budget exploitation films like Abel Ferrera’s The Driller Killer (1979) and William Lustig’s Maniac (1980), which both feature deranged men on the loose in the city, leaving a bloodbath in their wake. Hollywood tried its hand at this bleak subject matter as well with William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980).

Cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino) goes undercover in the gay S&M leather scene in the Meatpacking District to catch a serial killer. Controversial upon its release, prompting protests from the gay community who felt the film was set to demonize their lifestyle as irredeemably violent and decadent, Cruising is at the very least a dour film, depicting a grim narrative that unfolds against the backdrop of a lurid and ugly New York.

Cruising is of particular interest here because it contains an essential dichotomy that emerges in other films of the period across genres: a tension between “normal” people (typically from Middle America, the suburbs, or the rising class of young urban professionals in the city) and the degenerate, crime-ridden, bohemian New York City. Cruising features multiple scenes in which Burns visits his girlfriend Nancy (Nancy Allen) in her spacious, homey apartment. This is the “normal” world, the sort of warm, well-lit interior which contrasts sharply with the garish S&M clubs, where sweaty, hostile gay men strut around in their leather harnesses, stroking their evil mustaches, cocking their aviator caps, huffing sinister drugs, and, in some cases, getting murdered by a gay Columbia student suffering from a bad combination of schizophrenia and daddy issues. From the perspective of a “normal” viewer of this era, the sordid nightclubs depicted in the film might produce deranged killers as a matter of course. Indeed, in the film’s notoriously ambiguous ending, Pacino’s character appears to have grown attracted to the scene he has infiltrated but, unable to reconcile himself to this budding desire within, has possibly picked up where the serial killer left off, hacking his way through his problematic gay lust. One year after Cruising’s release saw the debut of perhaps the most enjoyable New York City film of the period: John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. Set in the then-future of 1997, the film’s premise features a New York that is literally separated from the rest of the country. As the narrator explains in the film’s opening: In 1988, the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent. The once great city of New York becomes the one maximum security prison for the entire country. A fifty-foot containment wall is erected along the New Jer-

21

sey shoreline, across the Harlem River, and down along the Brooklyn shoreline. It completely surrounds Manhattan Island. All bridges and waterways are mined. The United States Police Force, like an army, is encamped around the island. There are no guards inside the prison, only prisoners and the worlds they have made. The rules are simple: once you go in, you don’t come out.

Carpenter had a special talent for taking B-movie premises and elevating them to something much more enduring. Escape from New York pulls this off with great success as it plunges renegade Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) into a New York City in ruins. Armed to the teeth, Snake blasts his way through a nightmarish labyrinth of violence and depravity. Carpenter’s film manages to capture the New York of the period through connotation and suggestion alone, avoiding realism as it projects contemporary anxieties onto the blank screen of a not-too-distant future. Extrapolating from the current situation, Carpenter managed to assemble a film that must have seemed very plausible to viewers in 1981, despite its ridiculous and highly entertaining sci-fi trappings.

The notion that New York’s disorder was somehow alien to the values of both Middle America and the emergent yuppie class can be glimpsed further in two comedies from 1985: Scorsese’s After Hours and Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan. Both are driven by an attraction and repulsion to bohemia, an ambivalence manifested by their straight-laced protagonists as they fall down the rabbit-hole of the vibrant and free-spirited downtown scene that so many contemporary New Yorkers romanticize. Scorsese’s protagonist is a yuppie office worker; Seidelman’s is a suburban housewife. Each character represents the “normal” person, straight-laced and fiscally responsible, who gets swept into the chaos that New York seemed to promise — and threaten — to so many.

In After Hours, Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) has some fascination with bohemia from the get-go. After all, it is the fact that he is reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer that prompts the unstable Marcy Franklin (Rosanna Arquette) to strike up a conversation with him in a diner. He goes to visit her in the Soho loft she shares with her sculptor friend. Hoping for a one-night stand, our ill-fated office worker eagerly hails a taxi, but the cab ride itself becomes the beginning of the nightmare. The cabbie drives like a maniac, swerving this way and that, signaling the chaos and lack of order which is presumed to exist in the bohemian downtown hell we are descending into. All of Paul’s cash flies out the window. Now he is a yuppie navigating a treacherous landscape without the one tool that gives a yuppie power and security: mon22

ey. One misadventure after another ensues, generating black comedy gold. Finally, after he is turned into a human statue when a sculptor covers him in plaster and then stolen from her studio by thieves Cheech and Chong, he falls from the back of their van and breaks out of the plaster, only to find himself standing before the entrance to his office building at dawn. By the film’s logic, this is where he belongs, and he cannot escape it; he is different from those in the downtown scene, and his attempt to just live a little for a single evening in their midst is foiled and, as if the fates decreed it, he is ushered back to his office for the start of another boring workday.

After Hours relies on the gleefully vicious logic of black humor to score its laughs. Desperately Seeking Susan is a much sweeter treatment of a “normal” person’s entanglement in the world of downtown New York City. Bored housewife Roberta (Rosanna Arquette again), discontentedly married to clueless hot tub salesman Gary (Mark Blum), grows obsessed from afar with Susan (Madonna), a free-spirited bohemian who captivates and frustrates all who become involved with her. After a farcical series of events, Roberta injures her head and suffers amnesia. She has Susan’s suitcase in her possession, puts on her clothes, and finds herself mistaken for Susan everywhere she goes. Roberta is thus playacting, draping herself in the costume of the bohemian free spirit, much like many of the suburban transplants to New York City in the post-gentrification era, for whom rebellion is not a political imperative but rather a style to be worn and performed. Pre-packaged rebellion is the risk entailed by abandoning collective political movements in favor of channeling dissent into art and performance, which encodes resistance in signs that can easily be exploited, transferred to magnets and postcards and t-shirts. Curtis explores this conundrum in HyperNormalisation, and avoids the usual memorializing and nostalgia that colors so much reflection on this period: Patti Smith and many others became a new kind of individual radical, who watched the decaying city with a cool detachment. They didn’t try to change it, they just experienced it. Instead, radicals across America turned to art and music as a means of expressing their criticism of society. They believed instead of trying to change the world outside, the new radicalism should try and change what was inside people’s heads. And the way to do this was through self-expression, not collective action. But some of the left saw that something else was really going on: that by detaching themselves and retreating into an ironic coolness, a whole generation were beginning to lose touch with the reality of power. One of them wrote of that time: ‘It was the mood of the era and the revolution was deferred indefinitely. And while we were dozing, the money crept in.’

23

This notion of dozing while the money crept in is discussed at length in Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre (1981), which is justly celebrated for deriving entertainment from two men having a conversation over dinner: Wally (Wallace Shawn), the film’s “normal person,” and Andre (experimental theater director Andre Gregory), who has recently suffered what appears to be a nervous collapse. Over the course of their celebrated conversation, two crucial philosophies of modern life emerge: Wally defends the individual’s right to comfort in the face of a world that has grown increasingly abrasive, whereas Andre believes the addiction to comfort and habit in modern life has forced us to perform our arbitrary social roles mechanically, which obscures what it is to be human and stifles the creative force of the imagination. Wally champions the pleasures of keeping an errand book and crossing out the errands once they’re completed; he claims most people, like him, do not have the sort of time or money or inclination to speculate on the universe in the grandiose terms Andre does.

Despite the film’s basis in the real-life friendship between the playwright and director, the Wally character is not quite the real Wallace Shawn, who observed in a 2009 interview with Noah Baumbach that he “wanted to destroy that guy that I played. To the extent that there was any of me there, that was the side of me that I wanted to get out of, wanted to kill that side of myself by making the film, because that guy is totally motivated by fear . . . he is the bourgeois human being.” Fear leads to an embrace of routine and its requisite boredom, under which Andre detects something sinister: We’re all bored now. But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money, and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? And it’s not just a question of individual survival Wally, but that somebody who’s bored is asleep, and somebody who’s asleep will not say no?

What does it mean for us, then, if Curtis is right that the artists were as “asleep” as the “bourgeois human being”? The nostalgia for the gritty New York, however romanticized, is predicated on the notion that the city allowed you to be “freer” back then, however terrible the austerity conditions. But the freedom the artists enjoyed was a chimera, enabled by the temporary cheapness of a ruined city.

As finance stealthily spread its tentacles across the city and the world, not only would street crime diminish, but so would the conditions of freedom that enabled the artists to pursue their radical visions. The sort of crime-ridden dystopia predicted by the 24

other great New York film of 1981 –– Escape From New York –– has not come to pass, but perhaps a version of the sort of conformist dystopia Shawn and Gregory sketched out in their conversational masterpiece is in fact living and breathing amongst us.

Art of course still exists in New York, but so much of it is strangled in the grips of finance. Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) contains a delightful scene that dramatizes the clash between the visionary dreams of the artist and the financial class’s penchant for materialism. Hip rock star “Dusty” (Daniel Stern) visits the brilliant and misanthropic painter Frederick (Max Von Sydow) at his Soho studio to purchase one of his works. Frederick throws a conniption when Dusty indicates that he wants to consult his interior decorator prior to the purchase. Huffing and puffing, Von Sydow declaims: “This is degrading! You don’t buy paintings to blend in with a sofa!” But of course, many of the rich not only buy paintings as forms of interior decorating, but also as forms of investment, which might be even more degrading. One wonders what Frederick and Andre Gregory would make of ARTSTAQ, a startup formed in 2015 that aims to be the NASDAQ of the art market, claiming on their website: “The art exchange model allows one to trade art like stocks and fully ensures that traders are able to base their investment decisions on the most up-to-date information.”

While New York City’s affluent clearly ascended over the city as the 1980s progressed, there were many who continued to suffer in the wake of the austerity conditions, particularly in the black community. You can see the difference in two prominent films from 1989: Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Their different genres, concerns, and tones notwithstanding, it is interesting that while both are set in New York, each seems to depict a wildly different city. In the former, comfortable, well-educated white people in large apartments find themselves in varying romantic entanglements, debating the ambiguities of love and friendship; in the latter, residents of a black neighborhood grapple with poverty and police harassment until violence explodes in the famous riot scene at the film’s conclusion. Two New Yorks, then, were firmly established in the wake of the fiscal crisis: one largely white and prosperous, the other diverse and riven deep with financial insecurity.

New York was not only different from the rest of the culture and its values; it also became split from itself.

In time, many of the marginalized classes of the city would become further displaced by a reverse-tide of white suburban influx. There are a handful of scenes in Penny Marshall’s Big (1988) that seem to prefigure many of the gentrification trends 25

that would occur once Giuliani “cleaned up the city” during his reactionary reign as mayor from 1994 to 2001. Suburban kid Josh is magically transformed into an adult (Tom Hanks). Fleeing from his suburban home after his strange adult form scares his mother out of her wits, he decides to go to New York City with the help of his best friend, who has stolen some money from his father for Josh to use. With trepidation they make their way through Times Square, spooked first by a crazy man talking to himself, then a homeless man, then a prostitute. Josh takes a room in the St. James Hotel, which is where the first murder in Cruising occurs.

Josh is able to land an entry level job as a computer operator at a toy corporation. After impressing his boss (Robert Loggia) with his natural understanding of what sort of toys kids will enjoy, he is promoted to a high-paid position as a toy tester.

He is able to purchase a loft in Soho, which he populates with toys, a trampoline, and a soda machine. As Josh skateboards around his spacious digs, a contemporary viewer might be reminded of the sort of laid-back atmosphere many tech start-ups try to cultivate. Indeed, when he nervously takes on an assignment to design a toy for the company, what he comes up with is the sort of product a tech start-up today might cook up: a digital device for reading customized comic books. And so we have a child disguised as an adult, designing what is essentially an app, living the life in a loft in a neighborhood formerly occupied by artists.

This brings us at last back to Home Alone 2. Big certainly paved the way for this film and they share the same logic, even if Home Alone 2 is much more biting and violent in its humor. Instead of a suburban child in the form of a grown man running amok in the city, we now have an actual child of the affluent suburbs subjecting the metropolis to his mischief. Home Alone 2 practically replicates the scene in which Josh is treated to a nervous glimpse of the city’s downtrodden in the same sequence. Kevin McCallister wanders the sidewalk along Central Park at night, witnessing an array of scary poor people lit rather garishly. The camera pans down as the sign flashes “Don’t Walk.” The score consists of threatening violin notes, more suitable to a horror film. A mentally ill woman wanders past him, muttering to herself, while behind her a homeless man sorts through a garbage can. Kevin regards her warily, his steps growing ever more uncertain. The homeless man lifts himself from the garbage can, eyeing our young hero with the deadened gaze of a zombie hungering for brains.

Then a long-haired gentleman nearly knocks Kevin over, subjecting him to the sort of sidewalk-hogging that has bedeviled all New Yorkers at one time or another. Kevin flinches as another homeless man yells, “Watch it kid!” laughing with the demented glee of a mad scientist. To cap it off, the terrified child passes two smoking street26

walkers, who taunt him with: “Looking for someone to tell you a bedtime story?” as they laugh like witches, McCalllister is compelled to flee for his life.

The poor and dejected are there solely to frighten Kevin out of his wits, and yet like Josh in Big, he encounters them clustered along one stretch of sidewalk, as if they have been sequestered from the rest of the city.

Kevin’s ultimate antagonists are Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern), the thieves from the first film who have now broken out of prison and find themselves coincidentally encountering their former tormentor on the streets of New York. One can only imagine that neither Harry nor Marv grew up in the sort of sumptuous suburban home Kevin did. Harry clarifies this when he tells the boy that he “never made it past the sixth grade.” It’s interesting that Kevin torments these two bumbling crooks inside a building undergoing renovation. This is a significant location in retrospect, as we have seen numerous new buildings replace the old ones, the cranes and construction vehicles paving the way for our new New York which continually seduces wealthy suburbanites to move in and displacing the poor. During the promised grand guignol of the film’s final act, Kevin constructs traps out of an assortment of wrenches, paint, heavy bags of plaster, ladders, pipes, toolboxes, kerosene, all the various hazards of a construction site, which serve to foil the nefarious plans of his lumpenproletariat villains.

The 1990s were when the big changes occurred. The Cold War had ended with a triumphant global capitalism; the US economy was booming; Giuliani initiated the “broken windows” policy which “cleaned up” the city at the great expense of its poor and marginalized communities. The look changed, the culture changed, and, of course, the films changed too. Suddenly the threat no longer came from within New York itself. The disaster blockbusters of the 1990s shifted gear, and what threatens New York in films like Independence Day (1996), Deep Impact (1998), and Armageddon (1998) typically involves alien invasion, asteroid, meteoroid, etc. But crime didn’t really disappear. New York went on to both experience and produce new sorts of criminal activities, which had much more global consequences. The first was the worst terrorist attack in United States history, largely an outgrowth of failed US foreign policy abroad and myopic covert action conducted within the purview of containment. The second was foul deeds of great proportion on Wall Street, where the weapons of New York’s greatest criminals were not knives or guns, cans of spray paint or bags of heroin, but rather collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. The third was the ascendance of an unscrupulous New York real estate tycoon and obnoxious media personality to the seat of executive power in the United States government.

27

It is hard not to flinch while watching the scene in Home Alone 2 when future President Donald Trump informs Kevin McCallister where the front desk of the Plaza Hotel is. Trump was at that time the owner of the Plaza and of course he made certain to get a cameo in the film, given his proclivity to have all the cameras in the world pointed in his direction at all times. Trump’s role in the aftermath of the fiscal crisis was unique and consequential. As Curtis explains: Trump realized there was now no future in building housing for ordinary people because all the government grants had gone. But he saw that there were other ways to get vast amounts of money out of the state. Trump started to buy up derelict buildings in New York and he announced that he was going to transform them into luxury hotels and apartments. But in return, he negotiated the biggest tax break in New York’s history, worth $160 million. The city had to agree, because they were desperate, and the banks, seeing a new opportunity, also started to lend him money. And Donald Trump began to transform New York into a city for the rich while he paid practically nothing.

Phillips-Fein further remarks on the implications of Trump’s strategy in Fear City: Donald Trump and the developers who exploited the city’s desperation to build their towers had little interest in the rest of New York. The fact that millions of dollars went to subsidize their building projects instead of restoring public services or promoting recovery in the poor and working-class neighborhoods of the city never registered as a moral concern. Quite the contrary: the mood among the city’s new elite in the wake of the fiscal crisis was confident and upbeat. (267).

The Harry and Marvs of the city have been vanquished, but the Kevin McCallisters are on Wall Street, in the lobbying firms, running the media companies, inventing the apps, occupying major positions in the president’s cabinet, wreaking their irresponsible mischief couched in privilege and entitlement. The city and the world have now entered another moment of flux. It does not stretch the imagination to suggest that vast changes are underway. New York continues to serve as a hotspot for film and television productions, which means the cameras will be there to capture the morphing city as people come and go, as buildings rise and fall, and as society is transformed in ways we cannot yet imagine.

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

Chris Gisonny majored in film at New York University, and graduated from the New School with an MFA in Creative Writing, for fiction in 2013. He moved into his apartment in Williamsburg this past February.

It’s a four bedroom flat that’s hidden away from South 4th Street. When you stop by to see him, you have to wait for a few moments along South 4th, as he makes his way toward the door. You’ll be looking up at the building that faces the street, and eventually you’ll notice when a door that’s just below street level swings open ––– Gisonny will be standing there, likely smiling, and waiving you down toward the stairs.

Once he leads you through a hallway that’s at the ground level, and then through the courtyard that’s between the buildings, you’ll walk into the apartment’s living room and open kitchen.

The exposed brick gives off a classic and well-established vibe, as though the place has always been and still is a salon for men and women of distinction to gather; discuss the state of the nation, and the world; drink Aberlour whiskey in the evenings; and gather around an Arduino espresso machine in the mornings, as all the while they try to set the course for the years to come.

Gisonny has a way of talking about important and contentious topics in a manner that’s still warm and inviting, and touched with a sense of humor. When Alex and I met with him on a bright and sunny Sunday morning in November, he talked about why it’s important to scramble codes, especially in a world that’s dominated by formula and algorithms, and automated thinking.

After about an hour of talking about the films that caught his attention as he was writing “Crisis Cinema: New York, Austerity, and the Movies,” we paused for coffee. Then afterwards, we went downstairs and into his bedroom, which we all agreed should be regarded as the revolutionary bunker.

Once we gathered down there, and just before we began batting down the hatches, Gisonny shared his thoughts about the merits of anarchy; considered how and when Occupy Wall Street will be resurrected; and offered and defended the idea that “art in general is political, because it allows you to conceive of things being different.”

PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEXANDRA BILDSOE - COVER--PAGE. 57.

36

Alex: This apartment feels very Chicago-like to me.

Chris: Well it’s a very bizarre New York apartment, and that’s kind of why I wanted to live here. It wasn’t really much more expensive than where I was, at Lorimer Street and Metropolitan, but I moved down here because the L is shutting down.

Sunday morning?

Chris: Sleep. Or maybe do some reading or writing. Sometimes I watch movies, or play video games. I only really play one video game though, Zelda, on the Switch.

Sometimes I do chores too, which is very boring; I don’t like them at all.

Isaac: What type of chores?

Alex: That’s a genius idea.

Chris: Laundry, or I’ll go grocery shopping.

Chris: And I also wanted an outdoor area, and to have a nice little yard, and my own door too.

Alex: But chores are like breathing.

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. You’re away from the street noise.

Chris: Yeah, it’s very quiet. I had noisy neighbors at the old place too, so now it’s just the four of us. And this place would be super expensive if you didn’t have to go through that sinister hallway.

Alex: Yeah, we looked at the door that you came out of before you came out of it, and I was like, “Isaac, do you think anybody actually lives down there? It looks like Igor might come out of the door, and then you came out of the door!”

Chris: Yeah, I should employ a creepy actor to let people in, like, “Come this way! The master is waiting.” I took a quick shower before you guys came over, to clean myself up for the world.

Isaac: You look great.

Alex: Yeah, very classy.

Chris: Yeah, since this is going to be preserved for posterity.

Alex: So what do you usually do on a

Chris: Yeah, I guess. Or I’ll do the dishes.

It’s just non-stop. The weight of existence. Just repetition.

Isaac: So can you take us through the chronology of things a bit, you were at N.Y.U. for undergrad, and then after you graduated from there, you moved away, and then you came back to the New School?

Chris: No, I went home for one summer.

I had lived in the dorm system, which was a mistake.

Isaac: Why? Chris: The dorms were just incredibly expensive, and boring, but my parents were convinced that having an apartment in the city would be too dangerous. It’s kind of like what I say in the piece, in that people’s vision of New York was so permanently shaped, and it was just constantly thought of as a dangerous place.

Isaac: What year did you graduate from college?

Chris: 2008. A hell of a year to graduate from college.

Isaac: How so?

37

Chris: The global financial crisis, which essentially meant that we were entering one of the worst job markets, and as I was graduating from college, I was assuming that I’d just be able to get a boring office job to support my creative endeavors, but then all of those were taken by people who had been laid off, who would say things like, “I used to be the CEO of a major corporation, but now I’m doing data entry at ‘boring corporation.’”

Isaac: So you went home the summer after you graduated?

Chris: No, I didn’t. I stayed. I had three jobs.

Isaac: What were you doing?

Chris: I sold tickets at a comedy place. I worked for one of my professors from N.Y.U. I typed his books for him, which

38

he would dictate. And I worked in film distribution. Eventually I got into copy-writing for a bit.

Isaac: When you were selling tickets for the comedy place, were you out on the streets, trying to bring people in, like you see in some places Midtown?

Chris: No, I was behind a booth, which didn’t have a working device through which people could speak. So people would bend over and speak to me through the window, and they would tell me that I had to fix the microphone, and I would always say, “I know about the microphone. I know we have to fix it.” It was as really fancy club.

They had big comics there. I think they had Louis C.K. there a few times, before he really blew up. It was on Fourteenth Street, on the west side. It

39

no longer exists. They were trying to do a lot of different things. To be a very fancy place, but also to kind of be a sports bar.

You know that kind of place, where they seem to have many different roles, and every one of those places will have a big Buck Hunter machine. This place just over-extended itself in that way.

Isaac: How did you find the place?

Chris: My friend and roommate at the time worked there, so he got me a job.

I’ve always gotten my jobs in New York that way. That’s the way to do it in New York, I’ve discovered, especially if you’re an artist.

Alex: I think that that’s just the way to do it in life.

Chris: Yeah, that could be.

Alex: Or hang out a place and volunteer and bug them until you get a job, which actually works much better than you’d think.

Chris: Right.

Alex: You just have to be patient.

Chris: That does work.

Alex: Tried and true.

Chris: Alright, well, hit me with some more.

Isaac: When did you first start writing for Slant?

40

Chris: For Slant? I did that years ago.

During the 2007 New York Film Festival I met a very generous gentleman named Keith Uhlich, and he was a critic for many different publications. He was Time Out New York’s film critic for a long time. I met him through my friend Vadim Rizov

who edits Filmmaker Magazine now, and back then Vadim was a freelance critic. And so I talked with Keith, and he gave me a chance. I don’t know if I was ever really serious about being a film critic, I really wanted to just write in general, so that was a good learning step to take, working with him. He was a very generous editor, and he gave me a chance. It was a scary thing for me -–– as an undergraduate, seeing my name it print, but it was pretty exciting. And I did scattered reviews over the years. I also did a few things for the Barnes and Noble Review. Barnes and Noble, I don’t know if they still have it, it’s like a review page for critics to go on. I think Greil Marcus had a column there, and Robert Christgau, and so I did a few reviews for them.

Isaac: Do you remember any of the reviews specifically, for Barnes and Noble?

Chris: I did a review of this movie called Lola Montes, which was a Max Ophüls movie from the ‘50’s. It was pretty great, very colorful, and it was a real feast for the eyes. And it’s a great story too. It’s a woman who is working as a courtesan, who winds up having affairs with everyone all the way up to the king of Bavaria, and then falls from grace, and then goes around with this exploitive circus company, which re-enacts her life, so there’s all of these circus performers around her. It’s a pretty bizarre movie to be honest. I watched it with a friend recently, and it became his favorite movie.

Isaac: Really?

Chris: Which it should.

Isaac: Why? Chris: Because it’s great. This guy’s a great director. He influenced Kubrick, and there’s a lot of moving camera. It’s just a masterpiece, you can tell when you watch it. It’s just one of those, when you get that feeling. There are just certain movies in the history of cinema where you can just kind of sense it, immediately, that it’s really special, very singular. When you see a singular movie it doesn’t mean that you like it necessarily, but you can sense that there’s just something about the way that it operates, and the way that its component parts form some organic whole. It sets out a certain logic and it always obeys that logic, and it allows it to flourish. I think that’s what makes a masterpiece. So I can recognize some movies as being that, ones that I still don’t really like, necessarily.

Isaac: Can you think of any that you would recognize, but not necessarily like?

Chris: That’s a good question. Give me a second. I’ll think of one . . . I think it kind of shifts from time to time. Well, there are some Ozu movies that I saw in the past, which I’m not a huge fan of, but I could tell that they were great, but they were just very slow.

Isaac: I guess a different question would be, do you think that Taxi Driver is in that category?

Chris: Yes. Isaac: What do you think that movie does particularly well?

Chris: Well, visually it’s beautiful. The colors are stunning. The camera work is

very inventive. It’s got sort of a patience and yet it’s still very vigorous. The score; it was Bernard Herman’s final score, and I think it sort of underlies the tension that’s in the movie. I think the voiceover is pretty amazing. So you’re working with a great script, a great score, a great cinematographer, a great director, great actors, and they all kind of come together. And it achieves this feeling where you don’t really know where it’s going to go next, when you watch it for the first time, and you just feel like you’re sinking into this really dark place. And then with the explosion in the end, with the violence, it really delivers on the promise. And it’s very layered. It operates on multiple levels, and it has an ambiguous ending. You don’t really know if that’s his dying thoughts, or if that’s actually what happened. Is he actually considered a hero by the news?

Does he actually take Betsy for the final cab ride, which is a way for him to show his indifference to her? There’s this whole psychological thing that’s going on with that movie, and the visuals are imbued with it. The soundtrack is imbued with it. The performances are imbued with it.

So everything is operating very smoothly together. There’s nothing in that movie where I would say, “Oh, they could have done that differently.” It’s its own thing.

It’s a real work that I feel like I can admire on multiple levels. I never get frustrated. I never roll my eyes and think, this is something that’s taking me out of the film.

Some movies have that. I never get bored.

I’m sucked in. I’m hypnotized. It’s this hallucinatory thing. It’s this fever dream of New York that captures it during this very special era.

Isaac: What’s the name of the senator, Palantine?

Chris: Yeah.

41

Isaac: And DeNiro’s character says something like, “I want to take this city and flush it down the toilet.”

Chris: Yeah, that’s that great scene, when they’re both in the cab, and he’s like, “Oh, hey, I’m a big fan of yours!”

Isaac: And Palantino’s like, “I’ve learned more about the American people while riding in the back of cabs than I ever did in a limousine.” Because he’s a man of the people.

42

Chris: Yeah, right, of course. With that whole thing. I can’t remember whether that movie was released before or after Squeaky Fromme tried to assassinate Gerald Ford. She was a Manson family member, and she tried to kill Ford, but it was foiled. I think the gun didn’t go off or something. And then Reagan of course was almost assassinated by Hinckley, who was inspired by Jodie Foster’s character in Taxi Driver.

Isaac: Is that right?

Chris: Yeah, there’s a connection between Taxi Driver and real life assassination of presidents.

Isaac: DeNiro’s character gets somewhat close, but eventually he’s able to flee before he really does anything.

Chris: Yeah, and then there’s that great scene when he talks with the Secret Service guy, and he gives him his zip code, and the Secret Service guy is like, “That’s six digits.”

Isaac: Oh yeah, “I was thinking of my telephone number.”

Chris: I think that of all the movies that are in the essay, the one that’s a true masterpiece is Taxi Driver. I think the rest are very fine films; some of them are kind of silly, but I think that one is particularly special.

Isaac: Would you say that there’s any movie that’s like Taxi Driver?

Chris: What do you mean? Is there another film in that genre of New York films that comes close?

Isaac: Yeah, and not necessarily in that genre, or in that era of New York films, but in terms of . . . I guess a film that gives you the same sort of feeling. Because I didn’t get a chance to watch Escape from New York.

Chris: That one’s more of like a genre movie that achieves this kind of excellence, despite its trappings.

Isaac: That’s Escape from New York?

Chris: Yes. Isaac: But in terms of films that give you the same feeling?

Chris: Something that’s singular . . . I’d say maybe Midnight Cowboy.

Isaac: Who directed that one?

Chris: That’s John Schlesinger. And it depicts a similar New York, just a few years earlier, and John Voight is a naïve Texan who’s a dishwasher who escapes his small town boredom to move to New York. He plans on being a hustler, and bedding these rich socialites who he thinks will just shower him with money. And of course it all goes wrong. And he winds up getting ripped-off, but eventually he’s befriended by a sickly conman played by Dustin Hoffman, Ratso Rizzo, and they have this touching friendship. It’s this nice bromance that occurs in the midst of this seedy Times Square, and just struggling poverty. And they do go to this Warholesque party at some point, so

it does have this very 60s sequence, and there’s people filming them, and waiving things around, and this film screen projected on the walls. It’s pretty great.

But yeah, in terms of other films, I think of Chinatown, I think that’s a perfect movie. Plenty of Hitchcock films: Vertigo, Psycho. They just have this completeness to them. In terms of modern movies, There Will be Blood. And I think some of the other genre films that were in the essay, like Home Alone 2 or Big, these were films that were devised to fill a certain formula, but they do it very well, and they also achieve something else, beyond just satisfying the code or the formula. They say something a little bit more. There’s just something about how they pull it off. I think John Hughes had a very special talent for that.

Isaac: What do you think Home Alone 2 says?

Chris: I don’t know if it quite says anything, or if it’s more so the way that the characters are drawn. The movie doesn’t just have a stereotypical bumbling villain.

There’s just something about those two.

Their chemistry, Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci, the fact that they have Joe Pesci essentially swearing, but he’s not. He’s just going like, “Frickin’, frackin’, frackin, frickin!” When you’re an adult and you’ve seen any other Joe Pesci movie, you know what he’s saying, so there’s a layered element to that. And Macaulay Culkin does have this bizarre screen presence, which he was never able to bank on again, once he grew up. I don’t really know much about his later career, whether he tried, or if he just faded away. But people would always say, “Oh, he looks so strange now.” And I don’t know if he really looks strange, or if it’s just that he doesn’t look like a little kid anymore.

43

Isaac: It’s interesting what you’re saying, about his presence in those films.

the sixth grade kid, but that doesn’t mean that you’re going to either.”

Chris: The eyebrows. He wags those eyebrows. He’s got this almost like Groucho Marx energy to him. And Tim Curry is amazing. All of the bit characters in that movie are amazing. All of the cops that the parents talk to. John Heard and Catherine O’Hara as the parents are pretty great too. Uncle Frank. Uncle Frank serves no purpose in that movie, other than just scoring some pretty funny laughs. And then the fact that a lot of the weird stuff comes back from the first film, for instance when he films Uncle Frank singing in the shower and it’s like, “Get out of here you nosy littler pervert or I’m going to slap you silly!” And then he puts that back on when Tim Curry goes to spy on him, to see if his dad is really there. And he goes into the bathroom and preposterously sets up the float thing ––– in three seconds he has this entire thing rigged up. But it’s delightful that it comes back like that. Things are set up and they’re fulfilled later. But that one is particularly ridiculous, and I think I turned on that movie a little bit when I was thinking about how to write about it ––– I became more cynical. I saw certain assumptions that it had, and I could no longer think just about that nostalgia that comes with watching it as a ‘90s kid, and thinking that it was so great. There was something that I noticed this time around.

Isaac: And then perhaps, you noticed more about how the film contextualizes class differences.

Isaac: I think you picked out a great line, when you mention that Joe Pesci’s character says something like, “I never paid it passed the sixth grade.”

Chris: Right, he says that when he’s about to shoot him, when he has the gun in the park, and he’s like, “I never made it past 44

Chris: Right. It’s a great sequel because it does the same sort of structure as the first film, but in a completely different setting. You remember the bearded man next door, in the first movie?

Isaac: Yes. Chris: He’s the same class as them in that movie. He owns a big house in that neighborhood. So they do that again in the second movie, but this time it’s a homeless lady, it’s the pigeon lady. That’s pretty ridiculous. She’s scary, but it turns out that she’s just a lovable old lady, and she lives above Carnegie Hall, so don’t worry about the homeless, they live in cool places too.

And I found that a little upsetting this time around.

Isaac: When was the last time that you watched it before this time around?

Chris: Probably every Christmas, my sister would have it playing at some point while I was home, and I would just go in and out, but never looking at it with the critical detachment that I felt was necessary for this. And my reading of it is sort of sarcastic. Obviously the film is not saying that Kevin McCallister is a paradigm for the future of suburban kids irresponsibly spending their parents’ money in New York, which will be gentrified. But I think it’s fun to read it that way.

Isaac: It’s not crazy to think of it that way.

Chris: It shows that those trends were already in play. And the fact that they thought it was okay. The fact that anybody would think that it was acceptable for a child to be lost in the city, and to do those kinds of things means that the crime rate had to have been going down already, by that time, which it was. You wouldn’t have that movie at the same time that Taxi Driver was made obviously, right? You wouldn’t have a kid out there, who was just going around and doing a bunch of wacky high jinks. And then I do think that it’s significant that they have the sequence along the park where they have the homeless people. That one really struck me this time around.

Isaac: “Do you want someone to read you a bed-time story?”

Chris: Right, and they just kind of cackle. The evil prostitutes who are mean to kids. They shoot it like a horror movie.

There’s no sympathy for them. Maybe it’s supposed to be through a child’s perspective, where you would find it horrifying.

Isaac: So refresh me, because I haven’t’ seen it sense I was a youth. How is that the Wet Bandits end up in New York at the same time as Kevin McCallister?

Chris: They’re in a truck, and I think it establishes that they’ve just broken out of prison. And I don’t know if the prison is near New York. They say something about there being tons of money in New York, but it is kind of contrived and feels like, oh, now look who’s here.

It’s not a very important part of the plot. You’re just supposed to go along with it, I guess.

Isaac: Yeah, maybe that’s why it’s a bit hazy for me. But just to switch gears, you’ve written quite a lot as a film critic, but you did the MFA at the New School for fiction. Which one do you think you enjoy more, or would you say you’re leaning more towards?

Chris: Fiction. But I’ve been taking my time. I’m juggling a lot of different projects at once. Grad school is good, but I feel like you’ve got to write your way through your mistakes. And for me, really trying to not just write about my personal experiences ––– I think that’s a tendency for a lot of young writers. But I want to incorporate a lot more of the history of film and of literature. So I’ve spent a lot of time researching, in order to bring in these references to other things. I’m also thinking of doing a historical fiction piece, so there are a lot of those ideas kicking around. So it necessitates more care and time spent on doing research.

And I think sometimes that’s how you get ideas. I think Sebald said something like “If you’re out of inspiration, all you have to do is start doing research on any old topic, and something will emerge that you’re interested in,” and that’s certainly been true with me. But with the film critic work, I think it’s fun to tackle one medium with another, so writing my way through these movies, in some sense, and trying to articulate my thoughts that way.

I like to write literary criticism too, and just essays in general. Working a job that’s intense as the one that I have, at this very intense high school, it makes me look back at the days of the MFA program as the great utopia of plenty of time to write. And I’m a binge writer. I like to really dive in and write for hours. I’m not particularly skilled at small batch lunch break kind of writing. Then I just do the 45

Oscar Wilde thing where I just put in a semicolon and then I take it out, that’s pretty much what I accomplish. And as I fiction writer, I don’t anticipate being particularly prolific.

maker ––– to always have to work within these restrictions, “Well, you can only make a ten minute film and it has to take place in this particular time and location,” and things like that.

Isaac: You mean throughout your entire career?

Isaac: How are you feeling?

Chris: Given my pace, given the research that I like to do. But who knows. Maybe I’ll get into more of a groove. But at NYU you were a film major?

Chris: Yeah, I was making films.

Isaac: What were those like?

Chris: They were pretty crazy. Pretty bonkers. It was fun, but I decided that I like the writing process better. The pre-production process was more exciting. I liked to write screenplays, and then as I was writing screenplays I realized that I liked writing the prose treatments describing what was supposed to happen, and that’s how I started to actually get more into fiction. It was a very strange and meandering process. But I think you have more control in writing fiction, than in making a film.

Isaac: How so?

Chris: You’re constructing something that’s going to occur totally as a construction of the imagination, and you can go much farther. In film you’re constrained by budget and the realities of trying to manipulate time and space, and it’s particularly difficult to do that. So it’s good to have some sort of stricture in place; you can operate very creatively within those strictures, but for the most part, my head was exploding with all of these different ideas, and I found it difficult ––– especially as a small independent student film 46

Chris: I’m feeling good. It’s kind of strange to talk about one’s self in this context. But this is definitely one of the more difficult essays that I’ve ever written, but I feel that I learned a lot.

And that’s one thing I realized, if I embark on any new projects, I want to make sure that I’m learning something new.

Isaac: So what made it difficult, and what do you think you learned?

Chris: It was difficult, time-wise, to watch all of the movies. I didn’t set out a thesis. I had a very vague prompt, and I was free to try to navigate the films, juxtapose them together, and try to figure out something that linked them, which I kind of imposed on them in the essay. But I think it was difficult to change a lot. To watch a new film and then suddenly think a different way, jot down those notes, and then watch something else, and then revise the notes, and then go back and look at clips and try to remember ––– wasn’t there a scene that might kind of confirm this suspicion that I had about this other movie? And then I would go back to another movie, and see that scene. But there were these great moments of flashes of recognition, for instance, in Hypernormalisation when he quotes from Luc Sante’s My Lost City. That’s that quote where he says something like, “While we were dozing the money crept in.” And I thought

that gelled very well with what Andre Gregory says about being asleep in My Dinner with Andre. So that was always nice, to find those superimpositions of ideas within the essay.

Isaac: I think those are great, when you can see a thread between the films, but also between the city.

Chris: Yeah, it took me a long time to be able to develop that critical eye. It took a lot of reading. It’s very political as well. It’s a political essay, essentially.

Isaac: I felt that after reading the essay, and then watching After Hours.

Chris: Had you seen that one before?

Isaac: I had never seen it.

Chris: That one is pretty great.

Isaac: It says so much, because he’s at his desk, and he’s training some guy, and the guy’s like, “I’m here now, but I don’t really want to be here. I really want to start this magazine about people who aren’t really read, but they’re going to be read,” and he doesn’t really have a clear sense of the idea. And then he’s just hanging out in this diner, and then Marcy, Rosanna Arquette’s character comes up to him.

Chris: And that’s great, because she plays a completely different character in Desperately Seeking Susan, so she plays both sides of the formula that I identified.

Isaac: Yeah, and he thinks, I guess I’ll give her a call. And then as soon as he jumps into the cab, things change, and he’s like, “Oh, you don’t have to rush, I’m not in a hurry or anything.”

Chris: And the driver just takes off!

Isaac: And he’s just implanted into this different world.

Chris: And it’s without money, that’s the source of his problems. Once the money disappears. He’s going to see what it’s like to be a crazy downtown artist, and he’s also going to see what it’s like to try to navigate that world without money, which would usually help him facilitate his social interactions and his ability to be himself.

Isaac: Right, and he has ninety-seven cents, but not a dollar and fifty cents, and just the day before the fares went up.

Chris: It’s a great dark comedy in that everything that he tries to do, he’s instantly foiled. There’s always something that goes wrong. When he tries to get the token from the guy at the MTA, he won’t give it to him, he’s being a cheap bastard, and then he jumps the turnstile, and of course there’s a cop standing right there.

Isaac: But I think you set out an accurate read of these films, where it’s not just one person who sets out downtown, but it’s more about the idea of what uptown thought about downtown.

Chris: Right, it’s a clash.

Isaac: And at one point he helps out with the paper mâché and he’s like, “Oh, I feel like a Soho artist,” which sort of shows just how detached he is.

Chris: Yeah, and he’s fascinated by it, because he’s reading Tropic of Cancer at the beginning, which is a classic bohemian work about a guy living without money and just having a lot of sex and drinking a lot in Paris.

Isaac: And he makes it clear, “This isn’t

47

the first time that I’m reading this,” right?

“I’ve read it multiple times.”

Chris: Right, and that sets up perfectly. To have him read any other book wouldn’t work quite as well as having him read that, and then trying to go into that lifestyle. And then Desperately Seeking Susan is a little nicer, and not as biting in its humor.

Isaac: Yeah, a similar idea, but more playful definitely.

Chris: She’s clearly separate from the city, and wants to be a part of it. And then due to farcical happenstance, she becomes mistaken for someone else, and so she gets to kind of play-act her way through it, with amnesia. She has to forget the actual responsibilities that she has as a wife, and as a more suburban person who is more responsible than the rest of these characters, so she gets to see what that’s like, and then gets to decide, at the end, that it’s better for her, but it’s still within the context of a stable relationship that’s defined by love with Dez, right, that’s his name. It’s fascinating to me that Big has the same sequence as Home Alone 2.

Isaac: How so?

Chris: With the homeless people. They’re all in one area, and it’s the same encounter. It’s a crazy person, a homeless person, and then a streetwalker.

Isaac: And that’s in Central Park?

Chris: In Big it’s in Times Square. And then he goes to the St. James Hotel, which is where the first murder in Cruising occurs. I thought that was pretty mind-blowing. It shows how much the city had changed at that point ––– the 48

genre shift, for that hotel to be used to set the scene for two different ideas in two different films.

Isaac: And Cruising was 1980 and Big was 1988?

Chris: Yeah, I think that’s about right.

––––––––––––––– [Coffee break.]

––––––––––––––– Alex: Where did you grow up?

Chris: Well, the first nine years of my life I lived in Long Island, Farmingdale, very classic suburbs, with sidewalks that I could ride my tricycle down. And then we moved to Connecticut, a place called New Fairfield, Connecticut, a tiny town near Danbury, Connecticut, not too far from the city, but that was a much more rural sort of suburbia. It was still suburbia, but it was definitely more one lane roads that would curve and were hilly, and it was more of a spooky Blair Witch Project sort of environment. And there was a Quaker graveyard in view from my childhood window that definitely had a kind of macabre effect on my imagination.

There was a decaying barn in the back too, just a very rustic kind of set piece.

And then I had to get out of there, so I moved to the city. So my background has the true suburbs, and then a more rural area, and then a big urban environment, so I’m lucky in that regard, to have those three experiences to draw from.

Alex: Did you always want to go to the city?

Chris: I don’t know. I think I was

always one of the weirder kids in high school, and I associated the city with the weirdos, so I decided that it was probably the place for me ––– art, culture, all of those things that were considered strange in the Catholic high school that I went to. I think the city drew me away.

Isaac: Has that borne out to be true for you?

Chris: Yeah, but it was difficult to make that transition, from the rural area to the city. But eventually ––– I started to gain a lot more confidence by the time I started grad school. I think college was a bit rockier because of that transition, the culture shock of moving.

Even though I was in the Tri-state area, it still felt overwhelming. And then by the time I was in grad school, I felt a lot more like, yeah, I got this.

Isaac: Do you remember a time when it turned?

Chris: After college it was difficult because a lot of people moved to Los Angeles to do film stuff, and I decided that I didn’t really want to do that, I wanted to stay here, and that was kind of an uncertain time. But it was about the time that I started applying to grad school, and I suddenly had a larger group of friends, and they were all interesting people, and it was really the root of the friend group that I have now, which I’m glad to say is quite extensive, and it’s nice to have a large group of artists, writers, and interesting people of all sorts as friends, and it’s easier to do that once you have a smaller group who you can build out from, and they introduce people to you, and you introduce people to them,

and things like that. And I work with a good number of my friends at the school where I teach, and then I meet new people through the school. So I think once I realized that there was life after the college set-up, where I realized that I didn’t need the college structure anymore in order to have friends, or in order to find amusing things to do, I think that’s when things changed.

Isaac: What can you tell us about Total Immersion?

Chris: It’s gone through many iterations.

I’ve been working on it for a long time, and it’s become very political. A lot of the things that I was writing about, I’ve had to revise now because of Trump, because of everything that’s happened. For instance, in the earlier drafts there was a Neo-Nazi group that I was writing about, and I thought it was kind of preposterous, I remember thinking that it was a bit farcical, and a bit too extreme to have those characters do the sort of things that they were doing, and then Charlottesville happened. And then all of the sudden I was writing about reality. And a lot of it, in general terms, is about a group of anarchists and conceptual artists who do these interesting projects in attempts to purge their political anger, and then their collision with this right-wing version of the same thing, which is this militia in the woods that’s set in this college town, and there’s a lot of politics on the campus as well, and with the locals. And it’s this kind of microcosm that I’ve tried to develop for the culture divide right now, and what that means for art, and for culture, and for politics, and thought, and for freedom, as well as other similar ideas.

Isaac: You started working on it while you 49

were at the New School?

Chris: Yeah, kind of, early iterations of it.

And I may salvage some of that material for short stories. Which is what I’m doing with the piece about the war re-enactors, which used to be a part of the whole structure of the novel, but eventually I decided that it didn’t really make sense in that context anymore.

Isaac: When do you think the book is going to be ready?

Chris: Hopefully soon. I’d like to have it ready as soon as possible. I’ll keep working on the stories as well; they’ll be pretty political as well. I don’t really see a way to be apolitical anymore, in art. I think art always has to be political.

Isaac: Could you say more about that?

Chris: Art in general is political because it allows you to conceive of things being different. It allows your brain to see a different world, which I think means that another world is possible, which is the main political imperative that we should all have, the ability to change things. So that’s why I don’t entirely think Adam Curtis is completely correct in Hypernormalisation, to just dismiss the downtown artists as just channeling all of the political energy into art, instead of a collective movement. I think the collective movements are of course, important, and the kind of hangover from the sixties was somewhat disastrous in that it allowed the corporations to take as much control from the state as they have, but I think that art, in general, still is what has helped keep open the possibility of things changing and being different, and motivating people. I think a good piece of art should rip your mind to shreds and then force 50

you to piece it back together again in a new configuration, and you’ll be forever changed by it. That’s what a singular movie would do. That’s what a singular book would do.

Isaac: What books have done that for you?

Chris: I think J.G. Ballard’s Crash is significant. It’s from 1973 and it’s about people who are sexually-aroused by car crashes and it’s a very disturbing and controversial book, but I think that really got down to something dark about technology and modern life, and this obsession with technology that he takes to this very extreme place. And it’s written in this very beautiful but still very pornographic prose. It’s a very singular book. And when you read it you won’t want to get into a car again for a couple of months.

Isaac: How did you come across that one?

Chris: That was in my dystopia class that I took with Gary Indiana at the New School. He taught one of those weekend workshops. We read that. We read a few Thomas Bernhard novels.

We read Beckett, William S. Burroughs, and it was all about dystopia, and that was when Occupy Wall Street was occurring too.

Isaac: That was a great time.

Chris: Yeah, and it just felt right to be doing that dystopia class with that guy. He was one of the best teachers that I ever had. He’s quite a character, and he’s a great writer as well. He was able to put the Ballard novel into the context of this modern society that had grown increasingly perverse

and corrupt. And anything by Lászlo Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance is one of the greatest books that I’ve ever read. I’m very excited that more of his work is coming out in translation. There are no paragraph breaks. I think one critic or poet called it a vast lava flow of text. The sentences kind of go on manically and repeat themselves and just keep going, and you just get absorbed in the work.

Isaac: It’s great to encounter paragraphs like those. They sort of read in the same way that the films that you describe grab you, in that you have to pay attention the whole time, and you want to pay attention the whole time, you’re gripped by it.

Chris: You can’t look away. It’s a hallucination. I think when you’re having a full-blown hallucination; a great book or a great movie can be a drug experi-

ence. You lose yourself in it and it changes you. And I think that can be very significant for a viewer, or for a reader. And I think it’s politically important. I don’t think a book or a movie has to be outwardly political in its aims, but I think the very fact that it causes you to reflect, or think, or to emphasize with other viewpoints, I think that inherently makes it almost a revolutionary project. Especially in world that’s so dominated by formula, by codes, by algorithms, by these repetitive structures that force you to automate your thinking. I think a lot of the world right now seems to be suffering from this pandemic of automated thinking, and art is something that should scramble those codes ––– you hack into the automation, and I think that works with philosophy and criticism I think can do that too ––– you’re screwing around with the source code, and I think that’s politically valid, and very necessary. I think it’s hard to be

51

a writer now, especially with fiction, because the reality is so clearly out-stripping the fiction that people are writing.

Isaac: How so?

Chris: If I would have pitched a book to you with the premise that Donald Trump would be president and that there would possibly be an investigation into whether he colluded with a foreign power to hack into the American mind essentially, which is what they did, it was propaganda campaign, they didn’t really hack into the votes as much as they hacked into people’s perception of things, with the fake news push. That would seem preposterous to you, in 2015.

Isaac: Why does that make it more difficult to be a writer?

Chris: Because I think you have to go beyond how crazy it is now. You almost have to out crazy the crazy. Even if you write a realist novel now, you’re essentially writing a cyber-punk novel, with the sort of technology that we have now, and the way that it’s affecting human life –– things are changing so rapidly. It’s accelerated at such a pace that the 19th Century realism that still predominates a lot of literary fiction just feels very outdated to me. There’s still certain mores that are depicted ––– people will be conducting affairs, but it’ll be through the smartphone, or something like that. I feel like that doesn’t’ really get to the bottom of it. In a way though, Ballard’s Crash gets to the bottom of it in the ‘70s. Ballard said something very important though, he says that reality is now is so comprised of fictions: mass-media, advertisements, billboards all over the place, the way that politics is conducted as a branch of entertainment, that since we already have 52

some much fiction in reality, the task of fiction now is to invent the reality. I like that term a lot, “invent the reality,” and I think that’s what you have to do, when you’re a writer. You have to find the reality underneath all of the fiction, and create that, essentially.

Isaac: How do you go about doing that?

Chris: I feel like it’s very difficult. But I feel like Philip K. Dick said something too where it’s like, fiction is kind of a double negative, it produces the truth. In a world that’s so hallucinatory already, and is already so comprised of fiction, when you add another fiction that tries to encapsulate that, fictionalize that, and then the truth emerges.

So I would say the kind of book that I would want to write, and the kind of stories that I would want to write are more in the vein of the experimental traditional, they’re more Burroughs, in that line and path. Things that have been linked more to other media as well, being able to bring in film, to bring in history, architecture, painting.

I don’t believe that fiction should be isolated. I don’t believe in the fiction of sad people in rooms thinking things to themselves and then having affairs.

That can be good, but I feel like in grad school there was a lot of push for that, and it took me a while to get out of that myself.

––––––––––––––– [We venture downstairs, to the Revolutionary Bunker.]

––––––––––––––– Isaac: Do you remember your first cup of coffee?

Chris: My grandfather used to drink coffee all the time. And I always loved the aroma. And so I maybe tried a sip, and it was probably a little too much for me as a kid, but then eventually I started drinking it at home. I drink it a lot on vacation, I always felt that it made me look very sophisticated, or something, just by drinking coffee. I’ve always associated it with comfort, and that’s why I’m a coffee addict now. It just feels right. I just love the taste of it.

Alex: You mean you associate it with vacation, during what point of your life?

Chris: I used to go to Disney World a lot. I probably had an espresso when I went to the Italy section of Epcot.

That probably got me hooked forever.

I kind of groove with the most, and then I kind of fulfill that.

Alex: What is your stance on starting a book and not finishing it?

Chris: I think it’s okay. I do it all the time.

Right now I’m reading The History of Anarchism, which I think is very interesting, very important. Because anarchism has so many different factions, it’s all over the place. Which is appropriate too, for that body of thought, to be in and of itself, it has to be anarchistic.

Alex: It rejects itself.

Chris: It rejects itself. That’s the whole thing about it. It’s just all over the place.

Isaac: So who wrote The History of Anarchism?

Isaac: So what are you reading now?

Chris: Peter Marshall.

Chris: Too many books. I always read a lot of books at once and see which one

Isaac: When did you buy that one, and decide that it’s time to read it?

53

Chris: I bought it at Quimby’s bookstore, which is this new bookstore in Williamsburg, or maybe it’s been there for about a year, I’m not sure, but it’s right on the Lorimer stop. I just thought that it was time to read it, because of all of the anti-fascist stuff that was going on in Charlottesville. I realized that I knew more about Marxism, I knew about communism, and socialism, but the other part of the Left that the anti-fascists groups are comprised of are tied to anarchism, and I liked anarchism in general, as a kind of stance. I don’t think it’s workable as an organizational entity, right now at least.

But I think as artists, anarchism is actually a healthier mode to find yourself in. The anarchy of the imagination should be cultivated more than this acquiescence to these top-down political structures that are entailed by socialism and communism.

So I like anarchism more as kind of a spiritual position. I think Tolstoy kind of had that. He was kind of an anarchist, a pacifist anarchist. So the guy who assassinated President McKinley, Leon Czolgosz, he was an anarchist, but Leo Tolstoy, who had just retired from being an aristocratic aid, sold all of his possessions and just became a long-bearded farmer in the woods, also an anarchistic. How do you reconcile those two? It’s all over the place.

Alex: I think it’s even more important nowadays to keep anarchism in your mind when you’re thinking about being a creative person in a capitalistic system.

Chris: Yes, definitely.

Alex: Because you can so easily get ––– without even knowing it ––– romantically sucked in to some of these ideas, but keeping in the back of your mind this idea that we shouldn’t be ruled by any outside force, but that each individual has 54

the right and the capability to decide for themselves what’s best for themselves, and their community.

Chris: I would agree.

Isaac: “And their community,” is very important.

Chris: Anarchism tried to do something that socialism didn’t quite try for, which was that the right of the individual and the imperatives of the individual are preserved in a way while still within a context of collective cooperation and organization. So there’s a mutual assistance between groups, there are affinity groups, and it’s supposed to be a non-hierarchical horizontal way of organizing things.

Isaac: That’s what Occupy had in mind.

Chris: Yes, very much so. And it was a real anarchist movement in that regard. And then you have someone like Bernie come out of that movement, which would be a much more organized way of taking those ideas and creating a much more top-down structure; if Bernie were president and would have implemented some of the more socialist programs, but in a much more organized way. I talked to a bunch of people on the Left who reject the horizontalism of Occupy, and who are in favor of organizing a more militant strategy, in that we need a command structure, we need hierarchy, but I still like the spirit of anarchy. The Occupy movement changed my life.

I saw what was wrong, and I thought that for a long time there would be no political movement on the Left besides people protesting wars and things like that, walking in circles with signs. And

Occupy was dangerous. It was illegal.

They resisted the state and the corporations by doing something symbolic and illegal. They would just occupy these public places.

Isaac: It’s great because it wasn’t exactly illegal.

Chris: Well, sort of. But even with Black Lives Matter, whenever you have people who are blocking the roads and stuff like that . . . but once it’s a collective movement you need to show that you’re willing to break the rules.

Isaac: I guess I mean specifically with Occupy in Zuccotti Park, in terms of when you’re allowed to be there, and when you’re actually allowed to be in the park, there’s nothing that says only a certain number of people can be in this park.

Chris: Right.

Isaac: I think the trick is in inviting and allowing people to ask the question of, if this is illegal, just gathering in a park, then why is it illegal, and who says it’s illegal? And that really addresses the power structures.

Chris: Right. And Occupy also had this really interesting thing where Zuccotti Park was both private and public. So Zuccotti Park was owned by a private corporation. I think Zuccotti was a guy who actually was a financier during the fiscal crisis, but for tax reasons they didn’t operate it like a private park, but they didn’t quite operate it like a public park either, so the city government wanted them evicted immediately, but there was this loophole, because the park was sponsored by a private entity for tax exempt status, and they actu-

ally couldn’t kick them out. Whereas if they went to Washington Square Park or Tompkins Square Park, the police would have had cause to evict them immediately because the park is supposed to close at midnight, and this other place didn’t. It wasn’t quite a park. It was a plaza.

Alex: I’m curious to pick your brain more about Occupy. It was something that I found really inspirational. I just wonder, do you think any of it will be resurrected?

Chris: I think it already was, through Black Lives Matter. I think Black Lives Matter was essentially Occupy in motion.

They realized that the mistake was to have any sort of camp that could be easily raided by the cops, so what they did was created this non-hierarchical horizontal movement that went through the streets that played a game of cat and mouse with the cops that was in constant motion, so you’re still disrupting and you’re still in people’s faces, but it’s not a place where you set-up shop, and then celebrities like Kanye can come and visit and do a photo shoot. You don’t want that. You want unpredictability, and movement. And even the Trump protests were spontaneous when they broke out. For instance when they shut down the airport during the travel ban. It all had a basis in that sort of strategy. So I think it already has been.

And whether or not it will be resurrected in a more traceable fashion, I think so, I think things are so bad right now that as things go along, and the culture war is so intense, that I can’t see this all kind of calming down anytime soon. Now we’re dealing with a situation with actual civil strife. And Charlottesville wasn’t really an isolated incident, if you look at how much violence there’s been at Trump protests, there’s been a phenomenal shift in the American body politic. And

55

it’s really since 2008 that this happened.

First you get the Tea Party, then you get Occupy, then you get Black Lives Matter and the Fight for 15, the move to unionize fast food workers. There’s a real gilded age progressive era sort of thing going on. Everything is very hyperpolitcal, so I could see Occupy forming again, but maybe in some form that we can’t predict.

It will be organic. One thing will happen and there will be a reaction to it, in the way that Occupy was a reaction to the financial crisis, and the fact that nobody was really prosecuted for fraud. But it was also a way to show that you could think about things and organize society in a different way.

that’s what happens in poetry, which I don’t really understand as much as would like to, the operations of poetry.

I would like to write poetry, but I feel like mine would be of the very amateurish variety to begin with, it would just be a lot of images and sounds.

Isaac: What makes a good sentence?

Isaac: How so?

Chris: That’s a good question. I guess I don’t really think about it that way, I guess I think of it more subconsciously, in that I know when it’s right. It’s more of a feeling. I know when it does what I want it to do. And when the sentences create realities in people’s heads, when I feel like the connotations are there, or when I feel like there’s a layering to it that works. Maybe that’s kind of a part of the young writer thing, where you want each sentence to be masterpiece. The sort of thing that I’m talking about, where it’s a singular masterpiece, maybe each sentence in the book, for it to be a masterpiece, should themselves be sort of singular in that way as well.

Chris: I have a knowledge of fiction and the different movements, and its history, but a lot of the poetry, a lot of times I just dive into it without any research whatsoever, and it’s just like, “I’m reading poetry,” and it’s this mode that I go into where it’s like, “This is poetry,” so I’m still working on assembling the idiom for that, and the understanding of it.

Alex: You were talking earlier about a work of art, or a movie being a hallucination, or an all-encompassing experience, I was wondering if you think a sentence, in and of itself, can be an all-encompassing experience.

Chris: I think a sentence can be. I think 56

Isaac: That’s where everyone starts.

Chris: That’s true. I guess I shouldn’t really look at it in such a programmatic way, but I was always intimidated by the poets at the New School, because they had this vernacular that I didn’t have. I’ve purchased a lot of poetry books, but when I read, it’s always a little decontextualized.

Alex: How often do you re-read books?

Chris: It depends, sometimes I like to go back and transcribe things that I’ve underlined, that’s why I put little stars next to things that I think are important, and I put them together. I feel like I should be more organized in the way that I do that. I feel like I should have one huge pile or document of the transcriptions and things like that.

––––––––––––––– [We leave the Revolutionary Bunker, and head outside, toward the garden.]

––––––––––––––– Isaac: I wanted to make sure we had a chance to talk, at least briefly, about The Stooges.

Chris: Oh yeah, they’re my favorite band.

Isaac: When did you discover them?

Chris: I discovered them in college, but I didn’t get into them until a little later. It didn’t click with me at first, but then Raw Power became my favorite album. Because they’re just wild, all over the place, raucous energy. Iggy Pop said that in Raw Power he wanted the music to leap out of the speakers and grab you by the head and bash your head against the wall, and just basically kill you.

Isaac: And it almost did that for you?

Chris: It kind of did, yeah. I had a chance to see him play, his solo material. It was pretty great. He’s pretty old.

Isaac: When?

Chris: It was about a year or two ago.

Alex: He’s still doing stage stuff ?

Chris: Yeah, his solo career is great too, but the Stooges stuff is just out of control. The first album I find a little disappointing. Some of the songs are really good, some of the songs they made up on the spot, because I guess they didn’t have enough songs for an album, and so they thought, well I guess we can just come up with one. So I think “Real Cool Time,” I think they just made that up; it was made in a day.

Isaac: What are the lyrics of that one?

Chris: It’s like, “We’re going to have a real cool time today,” or something. It’s just over and over, that’s it.

Alex: It’s kind of shocking that the building over there is able to just hang out, and no one from the city has come in an said, “This isn’t safe.”

Chris: It’s so amazing. Yeah, it looks like Germany in 1945, the allied bombing.

And I’m down there, ranting. Ranting about the Reich.

Isaac: When it’s warm enough, do you write out here?

Chris: Yeah, especially at night, because with the lights near the buildings that light our courtyard, it feels nice. It’s a bit like being on vacation and staying at a hotel, and being out on the balcony, and writing.

I’m very excited to have a balcony, and a yard. It’s just the best.

Chris: Yeah, it was uptown somewhere, in this old movie palace. I forget exactly where. He had the guitarist from Queens of the Stone Age. It was just a great show.

Isaac: Sometimes when I’m biking around the city, I’ll think of “The city’s ripped backsides.”

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

HOW INSTINCTS EXPLAIN THE WORLD. Friko Starc believes we are animals, and makes a living from it.

Profile: Isaac Myers III Photography: Emily Fishman

66

67

Friko Starc walks with the precision and focus of a man on a mission. He moves with an excitement and confidence which gives off the vibe that the party may commence (or keep going) whenever he walks into a room. He speaks five different languages, and grew up in Argentina, but has lived in five different countries: Russia, Belgium, Italy, India, and the United States, which he moved to in 2000, and as he tells it, planned on staying for only two years, but has stayed for seventeen.

He has a way of capturing the energy of a group of people, but also passing the light, and letting it shine on someone else. In March of 2016, he was listening to an audio-book version of Brian Tracey’s The Psychology of Selling (1985), and as he and I were at our office space on Jay Street in Dumbo, and sitting in the lounge area, he on a beanbag chair, and me on one of the sofas, he showed me the notes from the book that he had taken on his phone. From the first line on the first page, he read, “A sale is the transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another.”

Given this definition, it makes sense that Starc would head a company that helps individuals and companies create emotional and meaningful connections with their customers, or potential customers. He’s a strategist; a position within advertising agencies that you won’t see portrayed within any one of the ninety-two episodes of Mad Men, which covers the fictitious 1960’s advertising agency, Sterling Cooper, as the position wasn’t around until the 1980’s, and was originally pioneered by the British.

One afternoon in April, as we were sitting across from each other on a picnic table in Brooklyn Bridge Park, with the Manhattan Bridge sailing above us and the N & Q and the B &D trains being pulled across them from Manhattan into Brooklyn, and from Brooklyn into Manhattan, Starc set out his definition of brand strategy. “In advertising, traditionally there were three branches: the guys who make the commercials, those are called the creatives; the guys who talk to the clients and sign contracts, they’re called the account people, and the guys who buy the space on magazines or TV channels or networks, those are called media. The Brits invented a discipline whose mission is to understand consumer behavior and motivations, and use that understanding to advance the brand’s needs, or objectives,” he explained, “It’s also known as account planning.”

By almost all accounts the person most responsible for bringing strategy over from Great Britain to the United States is Jane Newman. In 2014 the American Advertising Federation inducted Newman into their Hall of Fame. “It took a woman with Jane’s restless spirit and sheer British fearlessness to move to New York in 1982.

Not only was Jane a woman in an industry just-slightly-evolved-post-Mad-Men, but she was a planner when account planning was unheard of in the US.” 68

Of the three areas, the account management, the creative, and the media, Starc initially thought that he’d find his way within the account management branch. He remembers growing up in Argentina in the eighties, and making decisions about his career. “It was a time when a lot of the things that people were looking up to were very materialistic,” he said. “It was all about money, and the movie Wall Street, and successful bankers, the idea that money never sleeps, and greed is good, and business is good, and Lee Iacoccca. I guess my roll models outside of my dad were business guys. So I figured that I should go to business school, although I was a bit wishy-washy about it, but frankly, in my country those days, you either went to architecture school, law school, business school, or medical school. There was no being a designer, or a creative person, or a writer or a poet, or anything like that. So of all of those, business sounded the best.”

He attended Universidad de Belgrano, in Buenos Aires, Argentina and graduated in 1993. He majored in business. After graduating he was living in Brussels, and thought he would apply what he had learned as a business major to the marketing field. He started looking for work with marketing firms within Europe. “I was living in Brussels and I was looking for jobs in marketing because I went to business school, but I didn’t want to be a banker. So I applied for marketing jobs everywhere, all of the big companies: P&G, Unilever, all of the big ones, all over Europe, and when they would interview me, they would look at my resume, and they would say, ‘Oh, school here, school there, then nothing until last year, what happened up until last year?’ And I would say, ‘Oh, I went traveling all around the world.’ They would say, ‘Okay, thank you Mr. Starc we’ll call you.’ And then would never call me. If they would call me ‘Mr. Starc’ then they would never call me.”

I asked him how he was able to make the transition away from marketing, and toward the advertising industry. He offered that one afternoon he was walking through the rain in Brussels, when he met a man who was working in accounts in advertising.

He explained that those in the account management branch served as a liaison between the clients, and the agencies’ creatives, who are working within the agency. The idea interested him. “I thought, oh, that’s great. I went to business school and I’m a creative person. That’s perfect.”

Starc’s curiosity and creativity are innate. He was born on an Air Force Base in Córdoba, Argentina. His mother is a Congolese of Belgian descent, and his father was trained as a test pilot in Northern Argentina. They met in 1962 when his mother was living in Congo and his dad was sent there by the U.N., as a pilot to help prevent Katanga from breaking away from the newly-formed Republic of Congo. “Since I was 69

a kid, we travelled a lot. We lived in Argentina, and then in Russia, and Belgium. We lived everywhere, and I’ve always been very curious about almost everything.”

He asks questions, and often wants to know the background story of people who he meets, whether it’s a colleague, a friend, or anyone who he may meet in passing, while traveling toward and around any one of the cities that he has lived in, or repeatedly visits. “I’m usually the guy who, if we take a cab together, I’m chatting with the driver just as much as I am with you, just to find out where he’s from. Maybe he’ll be playing music from where he grew up, and maybe he’ll give me a CD after the ride.”

Though he prefers biking around New York, rather then the subway, he enjoys the sociological and ethnographic insights that can be gleamed from riding with the MTA, and lets his imagination run free. “I like to look at everybody around me and try to guess where their grandparents were born. I imagine them being born in little villages in the middle of Mongolia. I can imagine the confluence of stories, as if you put up a map, and then dots that represent where everyone’s grandparents were from, a hundred years ago or so. And then having them all on the same subway car as you.

I find that incredible.” He told me about a trip from Harlem, on the 6 Train, toward Union Square in his early days in New York. “There was a kid across from me who lost his ball. He kicked it a little too hard. And it came close to me. And so instead of giving it to him, I passed it to another person on the train, and then they passed it around, and the whole train started playing, and everyone was spontaneously taking part in this, and happy.” _________________________

Starc’s first job within the advertising industry was in Milan, where he was working with Jonathan Daily at J. Walter Thompson Milan (JWT), an international advertising agency that was incorporated in 1896, and presently has offices in Amsterdam, Tokyo, Sydney, Riyadh, New York, Atlanta, London, and São Paulo. Daily, who Starc considers to be his first mentor, would ultimately help him connect the dots that would lead him to the work that he’s doing today, as a strategist.

When he moved to Milan, though he didn’t know any Italian, he picked up the language quickly. I asked him how he had learned so many languages, and so quickly.

“I think immersion and motivation, and curiosity. But immersion is key, because you have to be in that culture. And in my case, a lot of it had to do with people that I met, particularly girls who were interesting to me.” He spoke of his four years in Milan, traveling with Daily around Europe, learning the advertising industry, and perhaps subconsciously, forming ideas for the days when he would work for himself as a 70

strategist. “Jonathan and I got a long really well. He liked me a lot. So he would take me with him as he traveled around Europe to work on new projects.” Eventually Daily moved to JWT’s London office. And although Starc stayed behind in Milan, after having been at the company for four years, his curiosity told him that he needed to keep moving.

He went to India. He opened a seafood restaurant on the beach in Goa. “I would go for a run in the morning, I would come back, buy the fish from the fishermen, make them into soups, and then people would come over and eat.” Strac was living in India through the summer and fall of 1999. Around New Year’s eve, he received an e-mail from Daily, “It said ‘Happy zero-zero,’ because it was the new millennium.

And he said he had a big job in New York, and that he’d like for me to come work with him.” _________________________

Starc likes southern exposure buildings. As he was preparing to move to New York, he thought back on the American movies that he had seen growing up, which featured giant lofts in Soho with hammocks and plants and light that fell in through floor-to-ceiling windows and across the apartments. Daily had invited Starc to work with him at Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB). Although FCB has over eight thousand employees and members, and has over one-hundred and twenty offices in more than eighty countries, as of 2000, despite the fact that it was one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, it didn’t have an account planning department.

Starc found a place to live in East Harlem. “It was my dream apartment. It’s like dating, where you know very quickly where you want to live or not, or who you want to date or not. And it was in Spanish Harlem, at First Avenue and 116th Street in an abandoned building that was built around 1905.” The space was large enough for him to play tennis. “It was a very sexy place to live, first of all because it had an edge.

Nobody who I worked with had ever been to Harlem, or even less to Spanish Harlem.

And no girls that I would date had ever been there. People would say things like, ‘Oh, Harlem, that’s kind of dangerous.’ And looking back I realized that it played into my persona, I realize that people saw me as this guy with an accent who had come from abroad. People might have thought, oh, that’s another exotic thing that he’s doing.”

In the mornings of the early Aughts he would take the 4 or 5 train down from Harlem, toward FCB’s offices. The millennium had turned and Compaq had introduced the world’s first MP3 Player, for which the computer company had licensed the technology and the design to HanGo, who then named the device “The Personal Jukebox – PJB-100.” Along with Daily, Starc was helping Americans as well as individuals 71

from all around the world, make sense of an MP3 Player. In 2002, Compaq would be acquired by Hewlett Packard, and while Starc was working within the earliest stages FCB’s account planning department, the agency helped Compaq reposition itself in preparation for the merger.

When Starc wasn’t in FCB’s offices and working on the Compaq business, or going over pitches for new business with Daily, he was walking around Midtown Manhattan. “I was coming from India, and I had spent time in a monastery there, and I had a very different life. I needed about a hundred bucks a week to live on in India, including everything. It was a very different life in every respect. And so of course I saw New York as tall, and rich, and opulent, and I saw abundance. But what shocked me the most was that when I would walk in the street and look people in the eye, everybody would look down, and look away. So it felt like these people who had so much more than me, at least materially, yet in some other aspect they felt uncomfortable with that. And I remember that being the first thing that I noticed.”

Starc’s building included a warehouse space on the second floor, which the tenants had turned into an event space. “There were no permits or anything, but Calvin Klein would throw parties there and people would walk around naked. It was like a Studio 54 but Uptown.” His landlord’s name was Mick. “The coolest guy. He looked like Lenny Kravitz, with cowboy boots and bell-bottom pants, tailored top. I think he was from Memphis. The whole thing was like a dream for me, living there.” Whenever Starc’s parents came to visit from Buenos Aires, they would be terrified. “I couldn’t understand how they couldn’t see what I could see.” There wasn’t a Certificate of Occupancy for the building, and eventually a developer bought the place, but still had to pay everyone off who was already living there. “One day I came home and there was a notice to John Doe on my door about vacating,” I asked him who “John Doe,” was, “That’s great! That’s what I thought!” _________________________

Starc has two bicycles, as well as access to CitiBike, just in case he gets stranded. One of them is around forty years old. “It’s a city bicycle, like one that you’d see in the Dutch or English movies. It costs less than the chain, but it’s very sturdy and wonderful. It’s an old bike, but I know that it won’t get stolen when I lock it up outside.”

The other one is a silver Bianchi Pista, which he describes by comparing it with a nervous horse. “It’s very fast. Some horses are nervous, which means that if you move they sense it right away. They react to any touch of yours. This bike is like that. If you move, it knows.”

Although he enjoys making a sociology project of a ride on the subway, he 72

prefers biking around the city, stopping at coffee shops, trying new routes, and the adventure that each ride presents. “I like that biking is very open to improvisation ––– things can happen to you, like oh, wow, look at that, let’s stop right here, let’s have a coffee right here. And on the train, until you get from A to B, you’re stuck in the middle. I like that you can take a different turn if you want to. You can stop and look at something. I like the wind in my face.”

I asked him how long he had been biking, and he stressed the importance of being with someone who cycled as well. “I’ve been biking for at least twenty years, in the cities, and it’s always been a deal-breaker for me. They have to bike, otherwise, I wouldn’t have really hung out with them for too long.” He illustrated the trouble that he came across, whenever he would try to date a woman who didn’t often find herself biking around the city. “Let’s say that we were dating, and we had to go from a place in Brooklyn to a place in Manhattan. And I get on my bike and you have to get a cab.

It takes you forever to get there because of the traffic. And I’m like, ‘Where are you now?’ And I have to find you. It’s a pain in the ass. And somebody who I’ll spend my whole life with, if she bikes, we can do this together.”

In 2005, Starc was standing with a friend outside of a restaurant in the Lower East Side. His friend was having a smoke, and started talking with a regular at the restaurant, who was standing outside with two women. One of the women was the actress Karen Goberman, who Starc noticed and was attracted to right away, then ignored completely. “Hot girls are so used to being hit on, so I just talked to the guy.

And I think Karen was bothered by that.” Not too long thereafter, Starc was invited to a karaoke party that was hosted by a mutual friend. And when he met Karen there again, he asked for her number.

He called this the short story of how they met. The long story, he explained, involved James Brown, and a year’s wait. “I had no doubt that I wanted to marry her.”

One morning after they had spent an evening together, they were walking around Soho and the Lower East Side. He recalled what it felt like to still be untangling himself away from a bad relationship, and knowing that he wasn’t ready, and didn’t want to promise anything that he couldn’t deliver.

When James Brown passed away on Christmas Day in 2006, Strac was on the beach in Brazil when he heard the news. “I e-mailed a few friends of mine, and family, saying that ‘I’ve heard that James Brown died, and I’m very sad about this, and I know you feel the same way. Either because we’ve listened to his music together, or because we shared a dance to some of his songs.’ It was hot. I was at the beach, but it was Christmas up here, and Karen was on my mind, so I sent the e-mail to her.” When he 73

74

75

made it back to New York, they met again. They were married in 2010. “It was about a year after we had first met when I sent the e-mail, and she was touched because I had thought of her. We were both single at the time, and our heads were in a better place. It was a very short list of people who I thought of that day. It was my brother, a friend, and Karen, so I think she was meant to be on that e-mail.” _________________________

Starc started working with Havas in 2002, which was known as Euro RSCG at the time. His work for Compaq at FCB caught the attention of George Gallate, who was Havas’ Global Chairman. Havas had recently landed Intel as a client. Intel was producing and promoting its Pentium processors, the first of which was launched and shipped in March of 1993, and tagged as the P5. Earlier this year, in September, Gallate gave a presentation at our office that dealt with how to effectively and strategically use social media to grow a business. A few weeks after the presentation, he retuned to our office, to catch up with Starc for a bit. Before he left, I had a chance to ask him about what it was like, working with Starc at Havas, and on the Intel business.

“Friko is one of the smartest strategist that I’ve worked with in thirty-two years in the communication industry, and that smart is based on gaining a very deep understanding of the client and brand, as well as the targets and who we’re talking to,” Gallate said. “He brings a depth in that original thinking which drives insights that allowed us to produce truly outstanding advertising and communications.” Gallate emphasized Starc’s ability to bring a sense of wonder and curiosity to a highly demanding job. “We had people in over twenty countries, and everybody knew Friko. He was a high-impact team member because of the sheer contagious nature of his enthusiasm for work and for strategy.”

Starc was brought into Havas by Don Hogle, who was the lead strategist for the agency’s Intel account. Hogle was first introduced to the world of advertising agencies and account planning from the client’s side, when he was head of retail advertising for Chemical Bank. He identified two of the most important character-traits that any successful strategist must have. “When people ask me what it takes to be a good strategist, one of the first things I’ll say is that you have to be curious about things and about people. And secondly, you have to have a huge amount of empathy for people.”

To illustrate the importance of empathy, he spoke about his work with the French bottled-water company, Evian. “Evian’s target at one point was teenage girls.

Now, if I’m coming up with a strategy, I have to understand how fifteen-year-old girls feel. In order to do that, I have to step into their shoes and find my inner fifteen-year76

old girl. I have to try to find out what’s going to excite them, and turn them on. And what they’re going to respond to,” he said. “So you have to have empathy. You can’t judge them. You can’t look at them detached and from a distance, and say, oh, this is what these people are like. You have to go -- this is what we’re like. And as a strategist, I have to be able to communicate that to creative people, and give them a sense of that, and make them feel exactly what this person is going to feel with the target audience.”

He recalled seeing Starc’s resume for the first time. “I remember his resume very clearly, because he had an exceptionally good and unique resume. And I don’t mean the content of the work that he had done. I mean the way that he laid out his resume, the way he organized his experience, and what he said about it.” He compared Starc’s resume to the others that he had seen for the position. “So most people would go in chronological order, for instance, this is the job that I was in, and before that I was here, and before that I was here, and before that I was here. And they kind of try and make it sound as important as possible, and as big as possible, for instance, ‘I managed twenty-three accounts,’ and you kind of read in between the lines. But Friko’s was very concise. One page. Very clean. And he talked about the strategies that he had developed for different clients. So I actually got to see some of his strategic thinking in his resume before I even met him.”

After Hogle interviewed Starc, he had no doubt that he had found the right person to hire. “Friko is devastatingly charming, so he did very well in the interview.

He’s just a very engaging person. It’s hard not to like Friko. He seemed smart and he had all of the qualities that I was looking for, particularly, the creative strategic thinking I could see was there, and the international experience, and just the kind of curiosity that you look for in a a strategist.”

By the early Aughts, the observation of Intel’s CEO, Gordon Moore, that “The number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every twenty-four months,” on balance, had proven to be true, and had long been socially-codified as Moore’s Law. Hogle explained how the more he and Starc worked on the Intel business, the more clear their goal became. “So there was a time when we all first started getting personal computers, that when you would do something, and you would get the spinning wheel of death on a Mac, and you’d get this thing that says, processing, and you would sit there and wait while it processed your request. So Intel every year would come up with a new Pentium -- and everyone would go, I have to get a Pentium 4 because it’s faster!” Hogle explained how they not only had to find out how to make people want the next Pentium processer, but also, who their target 77

market was. Although it was a business to business company, they had to find a way to stimulate consumer demand, so that people would want a Hewlett Packard or a Dell laptop if they knew that those computers had the newest Pentium processor in them.

He imagined the conversations between people in information technology and the managers of the companies who employed them. “People in a company would pressure the IT guy in their company and go, no, I need to have the Pentium 5, I need to have the 5, I’m doing all of this crunching of spreadsheets, and it’s slow, and if I had a five I’d be able to do it quicker.”

In 2005 laptop computers outsold desktops for the first time. As the desire for working efficiently while away from one’s desk grew, Intel knew that it had to keep up and stay relevant, and that introducing another Pentium processor wouldn’t necessarily feed the bear that was this increased demand for powerful and quick and enjoyable laptop computing experiences. Intel’s “Centrino,” was designed to allow laptop computers to access the internet without being plugged into a modem, an ability which, of course, is commonly referred to today as Wi-Fi. Whereas the Pentium processers were designed make the internal computing systems faster, the Centrino was designed to make internet connectivity at first, possible, and eventually, faster and more reliable.

An Intel Centrino add from 2005 features a woman seated on a pristine white couch before a glass coffee table, both of which are set in a space that appears to be a hotel lobby. The singer, Henry Olusegun Adeola Samuel, more commonly known as Seal, is sitting on her lap, strumming an acoustic guitar and singing out, “Unless we get a little crazy!” He stops suddenly then looks down at the woman, who is smiling up at him. He asks, “Again?” and then continues playing. Lucy Liu and the English footballer Michael Owen also make appearances upon the laps of ordinary citizens, who presumably desire to access the internet from their laptops, and the add closes with a voiceover, who speaks, “Want incredible entertainment experiences in your lap? Get Intel Centrino mobile technology in your laptop.”

Together with Hogle, Starc helped Intel find a way to introduce the Centrino to the world. As Starc continued gaining more experience as a strategist, and helping Havas build and strengthen its relationship with Intel, Hogle’s grew certain that the work that Starc was doing at Havas would be best served as a developmental step.

“One of the things as a manager that you have to do is to keep someone motivated, and to keep learning. So Friko got to a point where he kind of needed to get out from under my shadow,” he said. “I was the head of strategy at the agency, and he really needed stuff that he didn’t report to me on, and that he could manage on his own.

And I’m sure we had a conversation at some point where I said, this really needs to be 78

your development step, and I don’t have anything more to offer you.” _________________________

In June of 2010 South Africa was set to host the World Cup. It would be the first time that the tournament took place in Africa. Adidas had already claimed its place as the tournament’s official sponsor. The official match-ball that the twenty-two players would kick about and around and over the pitches of ten different venues would be the Adidas Jubulani. Adidas banners would line the pitch. And Adidas spots would air during half-times, and throughout pre-match and post-match coverage. And as the official sponsor, Adidas would make sure that when the world thought of Fútbol, the world also thought of Adidas.

Although the German brand’s classic “three stripes” logo would be the tournament’s official sponsor, it wouldn’t be without competition, as Nike’s swoosh would more than make an appearance. While the game jerseys of the Germans as well as eleven other nations featured the three-stripes logo, the Americans as well as eight other nations donned the Nike Swoosh.

By 2009 Starc was working on his own as a strategist and had recently won a pitch for the business of Puma, a German company that was founded in 1924 and had been making sports jerseys and equipment, along with more casual and stylish non-active wear since its beginning. In the months leading up to 2010 World Cup, in comparison with the giants of Nike and Adidas, Puma was a small player, and was in need of a strategy for how to compete for viewer’s attention during the tournament. “It was a very important project for me because it was the first time that I did this completely on my own, and the first time that I had an epiphany that changed my career, or at least the way that I do my job,” he said. “I started by asking why do people get into fist-fights over a soccer game, or why do we play table foosball with a national jersey on.”

With this question in mind, Starc also began looking into the messages Puma’s competitors were putting forth. Where Adidas takes advantages of its classic threestripes, and Nike catches people’s eye with its swoosh, Puma’s logo doesn’t necessarily allow people to draw the same immediate associations and connections. The brand owes some of its notoriety to hip-hop acts of the 1980s and 1990s who wore Puma sneakers; an idea which was celebrated by Chris Rock in his 1999 sample and parody of Baz Luhrmann’s “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen),” “No Sex (In the Champagne Room),” wherein Rock advises his listeners, “Young black men: if you go to a movie theater, and someone steps on your foot, let it slide! Why spend the next twenty years in jail because someone smudged your Puma?”

79

The brand’s most notable athlete was Pele, the Brazilian striker who appeared in the World Cup in 1958, 1962, 1966 and 1970 World Cup (Brazil won the tournament each of these years except for 1966), and played with a swiftness, beauty, and lightness of being that was matched in its ability to bring spectators to their feet only by his smile. He’s considered by many to be the greatest fútbol player of all time. And although Walter “Clyde” Frasier wore Puma sneakers as he helped the Knicks to their only two NBA titles (1970, 1973); the brand was most immortalized on a July evening in 1968, during the Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

That evening, two college athletes from the University of San Jose, Tommie Smith and John Carlos won first and third place in the 200m. Smith set a world record. And as they stood on the medal podium, Smith raised his left fist, which was wrapped in a black glove, and Carlos raised his right, which also was covered by a black leather glove. While both Smith and Carlos stood in black socks, in some photos of the moment, just beside Smith, and just behind Carlos, you’ll see a black shoe with a white Puma stripe. Smith as well as Carlos wore the shoe during the race. And at the statute of this historical moment, which has been named the Black Power Salute, and is on display at San Jose State University, the Puma shoes, in bronze, are set casually beside Smith and Carlos, just as they were that evening in 1968.

Starc explained where he started, with the Puma World Cup 2010 campaign, citing that he examined what drives us to follow and remain interested in sports.

“What I found is that sports give you an avenue to express a very primal and repressed need of belonging. Us against them. We all have that ingrained in us,” he said.

“We are hard-wired to respond to certain instincts, and sports in particular is one of those that allows you to act on belonging, but also on competition. With this project I learned that actually you can see every human behavior through the lens of instincts, and that instincts explain a lot of our behaviors.”

Keeping these ideas in mind, he looked at the messages that Adidas and Nike were putting forth. “So, what you do when you work with positioning for brands is that you try to find a couple of axis that make sense between the competing brands, and you position the players in the market at the time. So the biggest ones were Nike and Adidas. And people think they’re very different brands, but if you look at their communications, they borrow a lot from the Navy, the Marines, the Army, and the Air Force. The basic example is that the language that they use is like boot camp. Adidas boot camp.”

As I played soccer throughout my youth, and through college, I thought back on what messages and mental connections I had associated with Nike, and with Adi80

das. Although I’ve long known the Nike slogan “Just do it,” and can recall that for a while Adidas had been pushing the idea that “Impossible is nothing,” I hadn’t thought much about these brands’ similarities. Starc went through his strategy for diving deeper into what these two brands represented, and for a few moments, I wished that I was sixteen again, and playing soccer, and being asked these same questions.

“We asked a lot of kids, and players, pros, semi-pros, and amateurs as they were entering the pitch, if their coach was one of these brands, then what would the coach tell them?” And when we’d ask them what would Coach Nike tell them before they entered the pitch ––– first they would laugh like you’re laughing now ––– and then they would start thinking about it . . . and they would tell me, ‘Oh, just do it.’”

He mentioned how the players he had interviewed emphasized that Coach Nike would insist that they win, and that the game is all about winning. He said they often referred to Nike as the American coach, with biceps, and loads of muscles, who would be wearing a hoodie and blowing a whistle and repeatedly emphasizing that second place is for losers. He asked the same questions to the same players about Coach Adidas. “And for Adidas it was ‘Impossible is nothing,’ so when we asked kids what would Adidas say if it was a coach, they would say, ‘it’s like the German version of the American coach. It’s the German Coach. It’s about perfection, and you have to work very hard, and then you have to commit to training.’”

And from there, he made the important connection between the two brands, and began deciphering how to position Puma apart from both Nike and Adidas. “So what both talk about is done subconsciously. They paint a picture in your brain for you; of you, the sixteen-year-old loser that has fallen teeth and pimples, and doesn’t know if he’s gay or straight, and they change that to you the hero of your team, and of your country. ‘Just do it’ is about waking up in the morning, and whether it raining or not, put the trainers on and go for a run. Every day. And eventually if you do this every day, you’ll succeed.”

He painted a more exact picture of how this idea corresponds with the messages that the adds for the Marines set forth. “And it’s the same thing that the Army of One, or the Few the Proud the Marines offer you. It’s the same target. Fifteen and sixteen-year-old kids who are full of insecurities,” he said. “There are kids everywhere who have no way to get out of anywhere, and these adds offer them a pathway to becoming the few, the proud, the Marines, so that the whole country will love them. So the promise of becoming admired by all, through your fulfillment of the duty is what makes these brands attractive. You become David Beckham or Ronaldo.”

He described how the manner in which the Nike and Adidas video spots are 81

shot emphasizes this “if you do the training, then you can become a hero” message.

“When you look at the archetypes that they use, you’ll notice that typically they have a camera that’s low to the ground and pointing up at the player, who will be above you with his arms crossed and his biceps looking huge. There will be a storm in the sky behind them, and they will never smile, because they’re heroes.”

Given the similarities between Nike and Adidas, Starc determined that it wouldn’t serve Puma any good to try to compete within the same emotional space.

He offered that following the basic tenets of duty and commitment to training only provided athletes, whether youth, minor, or professional, with a spot on a team and a place on the pitch. What separated those who had made the team, and were on the field from their competitors wasn’t how much or how hard they had trained, but instead, how much they enjoyed what they did, and how much fun they had while they were playing.

In 2006 Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere album debuted at number one on the United Kingdom’s album charts, and was number twenty on the U.S. Billboard top 200. In 2007 the album won the Grammy Award for the Best Alternative Music Album, and was as also nominated for Album of the Year, while its lead single, “Crazy,” was nominated for Record of the Year. No other artists at the time sounded quite like the combination that CeeLo Green and Danger Mouse (Brian Joseph Burton) put together. It wasn’t rap. It wasn’t R&B. It wasn’t rock. It wasn’t electronic. But it was also all four of those genres, with beats and riffs and rhythms that were usually intertwined and intermixed in a way that forced listeners to nod their head, tap their feat, or perhaps after long enough, jump up and dance around and across the room. It’s an energetic sound; one of celebration and enjoyment, but not one without introspection and depth. It’s easy to feel drawn in by Green’s lyrics and voice. His introspection and struggles become yours as well, and he shares them with you, without hesitation, or restraint.

While Nike’s 2010 World Cup adds centered around the idea of “Writing the Future,” and Adidas had gone with the idea of “The Quest,” Starc knew that Puma’s campaign would need a less dramatic and more comforting and collective feel. Gnarls Barkley’s second studio album, The Odd Couple (2008) features the hit single “Going on.” It starts out slowly, with a refrain that spans a mere five to seven seconds until a beat with a funky and contagious rhythm drops, and an energy overtakes the track as Green sings, “I’ve seen it with my own eyes / How we’re gettin’ otherwise / without the luxury of leavin’ (leavin),” until eventually the chorus comes in, “And you can stand right there if you want / but I’m going on.”

82

With this song in the background, Puma’s add “Journey of Futbol” pans between African villages where children are dribbling through the streets and passing back and forward to each other, to shots of professional teams standing for national anthems and sprinting around the pitch and celebrating goals; which are split with shots of their fans celebrating on top of moving cars, in and around the cities, and in the stadiums. Everyone’s together, sharing in the fun and excitement and joy. Where the Nike and Adidas adds allow a space for deep consideration about the importance of fútbol, and the impact that one match can have on an entire nation, the Puma add occupies an entirely different space: when I watch it, I do not brood or feel tense, as though I’m about to embark on a battle of epic and legendary proportions, but instead, I just want to play soccer.

“When we asked the youth players what Coach Puma would say, we got answers like, ‘have fun, enjoy yourself, and look great.’ But the most important question after that was, ‘and how do you play’ And they would say, ‘Well, actually, I play much better, because I’m having fun. It’s a game that I’m playing.” The Puma add ends with text that reads “love = football,” and when you watch it, and see the joy on the faces of the fans, and hear and feel the energy of “Going On,” almost right away, you get it.

“If you train hard, what makes the difference is how much you love what you do. And it made a lot of sense because Puma was sponsoring half of the African teams, which seemed to be playing with flair and a certain insouciance. They would care, yes, but they would know that it’s a game.” Starc’s work with Puma helped the brand earn more online views during the months leading up to the World Cup than Adidas. It changed the course of his career, and helped give him the confidence to move forward with working on his own as a strategist.

Starc named his company Chaco, which is the name of the Argentine province where his father was born. He likes that it’s a short name, and that his entire URL is comprised of seven letters: Chaco.cc. It’s a brand that has run with the idea that we are animals, and that in order to help other brands make emotional connections with their customers, rather than focusing on trends and fads, a strategist should pay close attention to human instincts. Starc’s work on the Puma campaign, and the questions that he asked to discover why individuals follow sports so fervently to the point where they’ll spit on fans of the opposite team lead him to this idea. “I believe the subconscious is one of the expressions of DNA and instincts. So that gave me a framework to solve business problems, and this was when I realized that I wanted to work for myself, always.” _________________________ 83

84

85

A few years after Starc launched Chaco, he was doing work with the firm Lucky, who had an office in Suite 503 of 68 Jay Street. “They hired me to help them pitch some business. And after a while, one of the guy’s wife got pregnant, so he went back to Minnesota,” he said. “I didn’t want to leave the space because I thought it was the best place that I had ever worked. I had worked out of great places in the city, but this felt more like my place at heart. And so I looked for other people who wanted to share it with me.” He named the space Kongo, and went with the tag, “Co-working for grown-ups.” He began placing adds for desks within the space, and steadily people started showing up. “I love having colleagues in the office. We’re friends and it feels like family,” he said. “I like being with everyone and it makes my day coming to an office like that.”

I moved in in September of 2015, and can’t imagine what it would be like to have worked anywhere else for the last two years. When I want to put in quality hours and lose myself in my work, I can dive in and do what needs to be done. When I want to take a more relaxed and open approach, I have colleagues and friends to connect or collaborate with in a relaxed and friendly environment.

Karl Schmieder, who heads the strategy and marketing communication company, messagingLAB, helps science leaders within the bio-tech industry develop clear and targeted communications, and has worked out of the office since March of 2015.

“I went and looked at other co-working spaces and I never felt the warmth that I have here. I’ve been in places with cubicles, with glass walls, or where everyone is at the same table. This place isn’t cubicles. It’s not everyone at the same table or anyone behind glass walls. It’s open and somehow it all works out.”

He recalled the first time that he walked into the space. “I saw the space and as soon as I walked in I thought, if this guy’s cool, this is it. I just felt like this was the right place for me. The vibe was right,” he said. What clenched the deal was that Starc happened to be drinking yerba mate that day, and Schmieder had just re-started drinking the same. “We got into this whole thing ––– Friko said, ‘I’m from Argentina, you’re from Panama, how do you drink mate?’ It became this whole thing, and I thought, I’m in.” Schmieder not only built and grew his life sciences consultancy, but he also credits the workspace and its occupants for encouraging the writing of the recently published What’s Your Bio Strategy? _________________________

When I asked Starc whether he had any regrets, or what he’s struggled with most as he’s made his way to this point in his life, he was candid. “I had girlfriends that left me, where things didn’t work out. And I applied for jobs in Italy and Argenti86

na and they wouldn’t hire me, so I went traveling around the world.” He thought back to his earliest days, when he was in middle school. “It’s weird to say regrets. In my life I’ve hit a wall multiple times,” he said. “Every middle school I went to kicked me out, every one, either we moved, or they kicked me out.” One summer afternoon in 2001, after he had attended a party in the Hamptons, he was standing on the train without shoes and talking with a friend. “I lost my shoes at the party, and I was talking to a girl, and I realized that had I been offered a job in Argentina, I wouldn’t have been in New York now, I wouldn’t have spent six months in India, or wouldn’t have lived in Italy and Belgium; without all of the things that went wrong, I wouldn’t have been where I am now.”

One afternoon in November Hogle stopped by our office. As he and Starc have remained good friends, he comes by from time to time. He was reflecting on working with Starc a few years after the turn of the millennium, and mentioned that while they were both at Havas, each year the company would work with the Japanese ad agency, Dentsu, who would send an employee over to work out of Havas’ New York offices.

“Dentsu is one of the biggest ad agencies in the world, and every year there would be a Japanese guy sitting at one of our desks, and nobody knew what he would be doing, or who he would be reporting to,” he explained. “So Friko felt bad for the guy since no one really made an effort to welcome him to New York. So Friko decided to take it upon himself to talk to the guy, and eventually he started to introduce the guy to New York. He would take him around places and invite him to things, and Friko became this guy’s American friend in New York. Maybe there was some kind of connection because ultimately they were both foreigners in New York. But Dentsu would send one person over for a year, and then they would leave, and then somebody else would replace them. And the funny thing that ended up happening was that when the first intern went back to Japan, he told his replacement, when you get to New York, look up this guy Friko Starc in the agency, and he’ll show you around New York.

So I think they went through three or four people, and Friko was their welcome-wagon to New York. And when one of them got married, he and Karen went to their wedding in Japan. So Friko became the unofficial official handler of the Japanese intern in New York. So that’s just classic Friko.”

87

Friko Starc walks with the precision and focus of a man on a mission. He moves with an excitement and confidence which gives off the vibe that the party may commence (or keep going) whenever he walks into a room. He speaks five different languages, and grew up in Argentina, but has lived in five different countries: Russia, Belgium, Italy, India, and the United States, which he moved to in 2000, and has he tells it, planned on staying for only two years, and has stayed for seventeen.

He has a way of capturing the energy of a group of people, but also passing the light, and letting it shine on someone else. In March of 2016, he was listening to an audio-book version of Brian Tracey’s The Psychology of Selling (1985), and as he and I were at our office space on Jay Street in Dumbo, and sitting in the lounge area, he on a beanbag chair, and me on one of the sofas, he showed me the notes on the book that he had taken on his phone.

From the first line on the first page, he read, “A sale is the transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another.”

Given this definition, it makes sense that Starc would head a company that helps individuals and companies create emotional and meaningful connections with their customers, or potential customers. He’s a strategist; a position within advertising agencies that you won’t see portrayed within any one of the ninety-two episodes of Mad Men, which covers the fictitious 1960’s advertising agency, Sterling Cooper, as the position wasn’t around until the 1980’s, and was originally pioneered by the British.

One afternoon in April, as we were sitting across from each other on a picnic bench in Brooklyn Bridge Park, with the Manhattan Bridge sailing above us and the N & Q and the B &D trains being pulled across them from Manhattan into Brooklyn, and from Brooklyn into Manhattan, Starc set his definition of brand strategy. “In advertising traditionally there were three branches: the guys who make the commercials, those are called the creatives; the guys who talk to the clients and sign contracts, they’re called the account people, and the guys who buy the space on magazines or TV channels or networks, those are called media. The Brits invented a discipline whose mission is to understand consumer behavior and motivations, and use that understanding to advance the brands needs, or objectives,” he explained, “It’s also known as account planning.”

By almost all accounts the person most responsible for bringing strategy over from Great Brittan to the United States is Jane Newman. In 2014 the American Advertising Federation inducted Newman into their Hall of Fame. “It took a woman with Jane’s restless spirit and sheer British fearlessness to move to New York in 1982. Not only was Jane a woman in an industry just-slightly-evolved-post-Mad-Men but she was a Planner when account planning was unheard of in the US.”

Of the three areas, the account management, the creative, and the media, Starc initially thought that he’d find his way within the accounting branch. He remembers growing up in Argentina in the eighties, and making decisions about his career. “It was a time when a lot of the things that people were looking up to were very materialistic,” he said. “It was all about 88

money, and the movie Wall Street, and successful bankers, the idea that money never sleeps, and greed is good, and business is good, and Lee Iacoccca. I guess my roll models outside of my dad were business guys. So I figured that I should go to business school, although I was a bit wishy-washy about it, but frankly, in my country those days, you either went to architecture school, or law school, or business school, or medical school. There was no being a designer, or a creative person, or a writer or a poet, or anything like that. So of all of those, business sounded the best.”

He attended Universidad de Belgrano, in Buenos Aires, Argentina and graduated in 1993. He majored in business. After graduating he was living in Brussels, and thought he would apply what he had learned as a business major to the marketing field. He started looking for work with marketing firms within Europe. “I was living in Brussels and I was looking for jobs in marketing because I went to business school, but I didn’t want to be a banker. So I applied for marketing jobs everywhere, all of the big companies: P&G, Unilever, all of the big ones, all over Europe, and when they would interview me, they would look at my resume, and you know: a kid out of school, he doesn’t have much to say, so they went, ‘Oh, school here, school there, then nothing and nothing until last year, what happened up until last year?’ ‘Oh, I went travelling all around the world and stuff like that.’ They would, ‘Okay, thank you Mr. Starc we’ll call you.’ And then would never call me. If they would call me ‘Mr. Starc’ then they would never call me.”

I asked him how he was able to make the transition away from marketing, and toward the advertising industry. He offered that one afternoon he was walking through the rain in Brussels, when he met a man who was working in accounts in advertising. He explained that those in accounting served as a liaison between the agencies’ clients, and the creatives, who are working within the agency. The idea interested Starc. “I thought, oh, that’s great. I went to business school and I’m a creative person. That’s perfect.”

His curiosity and creativity are innate. He was born on an Air Force Base in Córdoba, Argentina. His mother is a Congolese of Belgian descent, and his father was trained as a test pilot in Northern Argentina. They met in 1962 when his mother was living in Congo and his dad was sent there by the U.N. as a pilot to help prevent Katanga from breaking away from the newly-formed Republic of Congo. “Since I was a kid, we travelled a lot. We lived in Argentina, and then in Russia, and Belgium. We lived everywhere, and I’ve always been very curious about almost everything.”

He asks questions, and often wants to know the background story of people who he meets, whether it’s a colleague, a friend, or anyone who he may meet in passing, while traveling toward and around any one of the cities that he’s lived in, or repeatedly visits. “I’m usually the guy who, if we take a cab together, I’m chatting with the driver just as much as with you. Just to find out where he’s from. Maybe he’ll be playing music from where he grew up in the car, and maybe he’ll give me a CD after the ride.”

Though he prefers biking around New York, rather then the subway, he enjoys the 89

90

91

92

93

FATHERS & MOTHERS, SISTERS & BROTHERS. Megan Cossey

94Illustration: Alexandra Bildsoe

My mom called me today to ask me whether I thought my brother was depressed.

“I don’t know, I’m not a therapist. Why, did something happen? Is he okay?”

The only reason I took her call was because I was aboveground on the subway and I knew we only had three stops until we dropped below and I would lose the signal. I spoke in a normal voice since, as far as I could tell, no one near me looked like they understood English, or not enough to listen closely to what I was saying.

“He hasn’t had a girlfriend in forever, he isn’t even speaking to Liz anymore. Where are you? What’s that noise? Are you going somewhere?”

I knew she knew I was on my way to therapy, but I let it pass.

“I’m on the train, I’m going to lose you in a few minutes. Not having a girlfriend doesn’t make you depressed, it just makes you single. And not talking to your ex-girlfriend makes you normal.”

“I’m worried, I’m a mother, I can’t help it. What’s that noise?”

“It’s a stop, we’re at a stop, the doors are opening and closing. I think I’m losing—” “Will you call him and talk to him? You know about this kind of thing.”

“Mom, just because I go to therapy doesn’t mean I am a therapist. I can’t go around diagnosing people.” The old Russian lady sitting across from me was openly staring at me so I brought my voice down a few notches. I hate it when old people act like they can eavesdrop on whoever they want, whenever they feel like it. Especially because you know the old bitches are judging you, whatever it is you are talking about, judging you for it.

“Call him though, will you? For me?”

“What does dad think? Does he think Bryan’s depressed?”

“What? What did you say? Why are you whispering now?”

“I’m not whispering!” The old Russian lady leaned forward now, the better to overhear a conversation that was none of her business. I bet she ratted out more than a few of her neighbors back in the day, some of them still serving out their life sentences in a Siberian gulag. She looked like a mean little potato in a babushka.

95

“Jessie, I think your brother might be gay. I’m worried. Why wouldn’t he tell us he was gay, why does he think he has to hide something like that from Dad and I? Did he tell you?”

“What? Mom, he isn’t gay! He’s thirty-five! And I call him all the time anyway, so yes I will call him, but not because you think he is depressed. Or gay.”

I clicked off the phone then, because it was either that or throw it at the old Russian lady’s face. I flagged her a big, fat bird and stormed into the next car, slamming the sliding metal doors open and closed between the cars as hard as I could. I smirked to see an old Dominican lady jump in fear at my surprise entrance, but then I saw the two cops standing and smirking back at me at the opposite end of the car, and then they gave me a freaking ticket and told me I was going to die someday doing that. _________________________ Thanksgiving dinner was at my grandmother’s this year, at her house in Mamaroneck, the one my dad grew up in. It’s always at my grandmother’s but every year we pretend it might be at someone else’s house, my parents’ place or my aunt and uncle’s apartment in Brooklyn, but nothing ever comes of it, so at the last minute we all succumb to inertia and agree to have it at her house, for the last time though, for real this time.

This year my aunt attached wireless mics to everyone’s shirts so she could record our evening conversation. She said it was for a project she is pitching to NPR about the different ways families in the United States celebrate Thanksgiving. She sat at the head of the table fiddling with the receiver and adjusting levels during most of the first course; it used to be my grandfather’s place at the table, before he died, but she sits there now because she says she gets claustrophobic otherwise, sitting alongside us.

“How many families are you recording today?” my dad asked her. She’s his brother’s wife, and he is unfailingly polite to her.

“Only ours to start.”

“What do you mean to start?” my mom asked. My mother thinks my aunt is full of sh-t, and she doesn’t make any bones about it. “Thanksgiving doesn’t happen again for another year. How long is this project going to take you?”

“Well, it’s experimental at this point. I’m experimenting, I want to see what kind of tape I get out of tonight and what I can do with it.”

96

“If Barry were here you would get such great stories, such fantastic, funny stories like you wouldn’t believe,” my grandmother said. She motioned to my father to carve the turkey; that’s one of many reasons we like to scheme about hosting Thanksgiving elsewhere, literally no one in my family likes turkey, least of all my grandmother who I am pretty sure cooks the shit out of it just to make sure anyone who might change their mind about liking it is reminded of how dry and tasteless turkey is.

“You should hear the story of how Barry’s mom taught me to roast a turkey,” she continued, watching my father vigorously saw through the lump of bird carcass she prepares every year, because, she would explain to my mother, it’s what Barry and his parents liked. She much preferred her own family’s tradition of serving Cornish hens, but Barry’s family had won that one.

“Why don’t you tell the story mom? You were there after all!” My uncle is embarrassed by his wife’s antics, but he still manages to support her in his own sheepish way.

You don’t notice old family dynamics like that until you’ve done some therapy. I like to amuse my therapist with stories like this. God knows she needs the break from the rest of the crap I dump into her lap every week. I am incredibly lucky she takes my insurance and doesn’t suck. Everyone will tell you how rare that is. So I do my part.

“Your father told it better, I barely remember it, he really made it quite funny. I only knew Cornish hens, my family didn’t care for turkey. In return I got to keep their family sweet potato recipe off the table. Covered in marshmallows, can you imagine?

Barry’s family was Irish Catholic you see. My family was not. We were Jewish, culturally only of course. We raised the boys Catholic at first and then switched to the Universalist Unitarian church until they finished high school and moved out. Then we didn’t go anywhere after that. That was the deal.”

I was worried she was having a slip into dementia and then I realized she was explaining our family to the invisible listeners of NPR, currently tucked away in the folds of her fluffy pink sweater set. My father waited until she was done with her speech before he returned to slicing thick slabs of white meat we would all douse in gravy and cranberry sauce and then throw away into the kitchen garbage thirty minutes later.

“What does turkey have to do with being Catholic?” asked my brother, the depressed, closeted gay one per our mother. He looked at our grandmother like she was insane.

Bryan was her favorite no matter how rude he was to her. He had put on weight since I’d last seen him, but he carried it well, and it filled out the hollows in his cheeks. He had the beginnings of a beard, which was a relief since it would downplay the thick moustache he cultivated for reasons known only to himself.

97

“Oh Bryan,” my grandmother giggled. “You are so like your grandfather.”

I stood up.

“Where are you going honey?” my mom asked.

“Where do you think? I’m going to the restroom.”

She was more nervous and fluttery than usual. Probably being mic’d didn’t help matters. My aunt had even hung an omnidirectional from the ceiling, and it dangled over the middle of the dining table like a silver fishing lure. My grandfather had taken me fishing exactly once, along with my brother, who he took every Sunday afternoon after family lunch, but then it had been way too hot and I had puked orange Kool-Aid all over him and that was the end of that. Which was fine with me, since I preferred to spend my Sunday afternoons watching TV in my grandparents’ sitting room without my older brother there to fight with me over the remote control. For the rest of my grandfather’s life I associated him with orange Kool-Aid spurting out my nose and mouth, which seems about right.

I locked myself in the upstairs bathroom, which my grandmother kept scrubbed a clean, relentless white. White tiled walls, white floors, a bath mat bleached white as a bone, a silky white shower curtain splattered evenly with pale translucent dots. The better to peer through in case of invasion, you might say. Even the air smells white in there, like bleach and old milk. I settled onto the lid of the toilet to check my phone, a thin cotton curtain reaching to tickle my cheek with the aid of a chill breeze. The unopened text that had taunted me throughout the first part of Thanksgiving with its promises and rewards ended up being only a reminder from my cell phone company of a past due bill. Not what I expected, you might say. Not what I was owed.

I started to tap out a text to the cop who had given me her number along with my summons for jaywalking on the 4 train, but luckily I stopped myself just in time. It was her ball, not mine. If she didn’t text me back by midnight I would block her number on my phone and update my Excel spreadsheet accordingly.

Then I heard the lonesome, distant cry of the express commuter train as it shot through the Mamaroneck village station without stopping. By this point any passengers on it were either late for Thanksgiving dinner, leaving their dinner early—perhaps abruptly, in violence or with shouting—or else taking it to the end of the line and back, a way to fill the space of a day when there was no dinner waiting for you.

98

How, I wondered, could something so close to me, a powerful speeding train passing by four blocks away, how could it sound so far away? Maybe the bathroom’s thick, heavy air distorted the train’s wail into something distant and muffled. Maybe my grandmother needed to chill the fuck out with the cleaning; she would have made a really efficient serial killer.

But the aural tricks had done their damage to my head, and there was a disturbance in the atmosphere that gripped my chest and entered me, and then I felt the world’s heartbeat stutter and stall and that was the end of Thanksgiving afternoon for me. _________________________ When I came back the world was full and alive once again and I was saying goodnight to my brother and unbuckling myself from the passenger seat of his car; he had given me a ride home. I turned to him, my seatbelt half unslung from across my chest.

Outside it was night but in the city the electric light will flush away the shadows until morning, which is one really good reason I will never go back to the suburbs, no matter how many idiotic tickets I get from dyke cops.

“How are you doing these days?” I asked. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, why, is mom bothering you about me again?”

“She thinks you’re depressed or gay or both.”

I didn’t add that to be honest, maybe she had some good reason for worrying; after all, he was a barely employed painter—“the artsy kind” we are always quick to qualify, so no one could think for a single second that he did anything useful or blue collar for a living—who made rent on his lower east side one bedroom by subletting the couch in his living room to the young and dumb. He had inherited the apartment at the tender age of nineteen after living there for three years with a much older man who may or may not have been his boyfriend and who had died from a bad case of pneumonia, but not before adding Bryan to the lease.

“What do you think?” he said.

“I think we’re both single and it’s driving her insane.”

“Well, I’m not single, I’m just not ready to bring her around to things like today.”

Well fuck, I thought, but all I said out loud was “Why didn’t you tell me? Who is she?”

99

“Because I knew you’d be weird about it. You don’t like it when I have someone and you don’t.”

Maybe he was right, but I didn’t think there was a real need to say it. This was a first, and I didn’t care for it. So instead of answering I shrugged and got out of the car, slamming the door behind me.

“Come on Jessie, don’t be like that,” I heard him call after me through the rolled down window.

“Don’t tell mom, okay?” he shouted as the door to my building’s lobby clicked shut behind me, locking him out. If there was a reason he didn’t want me to tell her I didn’t hear it.

When I got upstairs I was pleased to see my roommate’s bedroom door was closed, which meant she was either out or she was holed up for the night. I had thought about asking her to my family’s Thanksgiving dinner but, like my brother, I didn’t think it necessary to inflict that kind of thing on people when it wasn’t necessary. The apartment smelled like cooked food, so maybe she had had friends over or something.

I couldn’t tell, she was too neat and clean to leave a trace.

I had my laptop set up on my crappy black Ikea desk we had crammed into a corner when she had moved in with her own furniture the previous month. I was a bad combo of sleepy and agitated, but I needed to deal with the cop, so I yanked a folding chair over and opened up Excel on my computer.

I pulled up my “CALLS/TEXTS.xls” spreadsheet, and clicked on the worksheet tab labeled “Women.”

Then, without further ado, I deleted the cop’s row on the spreadsheet, erased her number from my phone along with my two texts to her, and then added her number to my block list for good measure.

I sighed in relief, my itch from earlier finally scratched, and then headed straight to bed before anything could disturb the feeling. _________________________

100

I woke up the next morning to the chime of a text message. Since I wasn’t expecting anything worth getting out of bed to read I turned over onto my other side and went back to sleep and into another Thanksgiving dream. This next one was only a crazier version of the one I had been hauled out of, as though my unconscious had to

reassemble its scattered parts in a panic upon my unexpected return. My family was gone, there was too much sunlight spilling across the table, and nothing else happened except whenever I tried to drink my cup of milk there were bright orange goldfish crackers floating in it, one more reason not to have Thanksgiving at our grandmother’s house ever again, I whispered into the tiny mic clutching at my shirt collar.

Three hours later my roommate was knocking on my door and telling me I had a phone call on the landline.

“What?” I said, the dried cake of old saliva in my throat and mouth making it hard to speak and adding to my confusion. “We have a landline?”

“I got us one when I moved in, it was free with the cable anyway. Should I take a message?” I could hear her beautiful long blonde hair through the door, her full pink lips, the perfect skin that glowed like a pearl. For a paranoid second I knew she must be Bryan’s new girlfriend, then I remembered they didn’t even know each other.

“It’s a cop,” she added. I got out of bed, though the news brought with it an understandable sense of foreboding.

“Hello?” I said, trying and failing to sound alert and awake. After taking the cordless phone from my roommate—where the hell had it been this whole time?—I sat back down in front of my laptop and my Excel spreadsheet.

“Jessie?” the cop said. “Jessie this is Officer Ramirez from the other day. Melanie Ramirez. I gave you the ticket.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“I figured I might have heard from you by now.”

Ah, I thought.

“I sent you a text the day before yesterday.”

Two actually. I checked my Excel spreadsheet. One at 10:35 a.m. and the second at 3:53 in the afternoon. Didn’t add that out loud, natch.

I smelled bacon and that’s when I realized my roommate was still hanging around, cooking in the kitchen. She’s as quiet as a cat, that one. I hoped she wasn’t planning on setting me a plate as well, like last time. I hadn’t gone grocery shopping in way too

101

long, and had nothing to provide in return.

“Well damn, you know I didn’t get it or you would have heard back from me by now.

That’s why I called you.” The rolling edges of her accent gave me a pleasant chill, even in my half awake state.

“Oh yeah? Make sure I pay my ticket?” I’d never flirted with a cop before, not like this. It was kind of fun, but in a thrilling way. Like shop lifting.

“Wait, how’d you get my phone number?” Didn’t add the fact I didn’t even know I had a phone number. I struggled mightily not to glance back at my beautiful blonde roommate, procured God knows where by my mother when the last roommate decamped in the middle of the night after not paying his rent for three months.

“I have my ways. Who was that who answered by the way? Your girlfriend?”

“Maybe. What’s it to you?” Was I laying it on too thick? I could be a real bitch when I wasn’t careful. Though Officer Melanie Ramirez sure seemed like someone who could take it. Enjoy it even. Do something really fun with it.

“You’re a feisty one,” she said.

“My mom says that too.”

She laughed. I thought of her big fat Puerto Rican lips and how they would look with my thumb shoved between them while I did things to her body, those swollen hips and big D-cups I had zeroed in on immediately under that ugly uniform. It had made it hard to focus on her lecture about not taking unnecessary risks by car hopping, never mind it was illegal. Her partner, Officer Chen, ignored us both and wrote out my ticket; I tried telling them that I had been getting looks from a creepy guy, which got me a phone number from her and a ticket anyway from him. Fuck you Officer Chen.

Her holstered gun had only added to the width of her hips, and even now, on the phone, I longed to pull the gun out and press it against one of her nipples. I bet they are huge and dark brown, like burnt chocolate chip cookies. _________________________

102

Later, after I made my date with the cop, updated my Excel file, and ate bacon and scrambled eggs with my roommate, I remembered to check my cell phone. A missed call and text from Bryan telling me he had called (yeah no shit) and a text from my

aunt telling me what a great time she had at Thanksgiving with us (yeah right) and asking me to give her a call because she needed help with some of the audio she had gathered.

I called Bryan first, from my landline, hoping he wouldn’t pick up since the number wouldn’t be familiar to him.

“Jessie?” he answered.

“How did you know it was me?”

“It said so on the caller I.D. First and last name.”

Motherfucker, she had put the line under my name. Was that even legal? Did she have my social security number or something? I flipped a bird at the closed door to her bedroom, even though I knew she wasn’t home.

“Jessie, does mom really think I am depressed?”

Ha, I knew he wouldn’t be able to help himself.

“Who knows what she thinks, she’s just a worry wart. You’ve been single too long for her I guess.”

“I’m not mom, I don’t need to be married to be of value to this world.”

“Don’t tell me that, tell her.”

“Anyway,” I continued when he didn’t say anything, “No one else thinks it. Dad doesn’t.”

“He’s not my dad,” he said flatly.

“Okay, the man who married our—” “He’s not your dad either.”

“Save it for your therapist, Bryan. Oh, wait, what’s that you say? You don’t have a therapist?”

“Those aren’t our grandparents. That’s not our uncle, that’s not our aunt. Stop calling

103

those people something they’re not. Stop pretending they are something they aren’t.”

“Okay Bryan,” I said, a layer of rage curdling inside me. “This has been fun but I’m hanging up now.”

“Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers.”

“What?” What the hell was he talking about now? I thought about the cop’s lips again, how soft and juicy they looked, how I wanted to bite them and suck all the blood and fat from them. I thought of how the bacon grease had gleamed on my roommate’s lips and left a smear on her smooth white cheek.

“Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers. That’s what you said to me the last time we talked, don’t you remember? At Easter.”

“No,” I lied. “I don’t hold on to shit for years like you do. I let it go because I have better things to do with my time and energy.”

“You’ve always kept your head in the sand. It was okay when we were kids, but now we aren’t anymore. Do you really want to be the same as mom? Because that’s who you are right now, you’re mom.”

I hung up on him and sat cross-legged on the living room sofa trying to recall whether we really hadn’t spoken on the phone since Easter. I knew we hardly ever saw each other in person anymore, but that was an easy thing to let happen in New York City in your thirties. I stared at my laptop’s blank screensaver from across the room and thought about certain updates I needed to make to my spreadsheet. My roommate had pulled opened the kitchen window before she left to release the smells of bacon fat and burnt butter from our apartment, which was nice of her except now it was so cold I found I couldn’t move from the sofa, not even to pull over the thick blanket piled up at its other end. I heard the hollow echo of cars hurtling down the expressway and, somewhere in the living room, the ticking of a hidden clock. Something else my new roommate had smuggled into my apartment. If I wasn’t so frozen, and if she didn’t lock her bedroom door, I would use this opportunity to pick through her drawers and closet to see what else she thought she could hide from me.

But I was now too paralyzed by the cold to act on my annoyance, and besides, the traffic sounds were taking on a tone of menace that meant my time here was done for the foreseeable future.

104

The landline rang, yanking me back to this world, and I cursed like a sailor as I jumped

up to answer it. I figured it was my brother, intent on driving home whatever point he wanted to make about my mental and emotional deficiencies, but the name of my aunt popped up on caller i.d. My aunt? Then I remembered Bryan wouldn’t have known this phone number. I mean, I didn’t even know it myself.

“Aunt Karen?”

“Hi Jessica, I hope it’s okay I’m calling you, your mom gave me this number, she said it might be easier to reach you on it.”

“My mother gave you this number?” How the hell did she have my landline number?

A familiar sense of paranoia scrabbled to take hold of my insides, which were thawing now, especially since I had grabbed the blanket and wrapped it securely around me. I sat down at my computer and punched a button to make it wake up.

She started going on about how great it had been to see me at Thanksgiving etcetera etcetera but I was too busy examining Bryan’s row in my spreadsheet to pay attention.

It was true, we hadn’t spoken since Easter, though I had called him twice, left one voicemail, and sent three texts since then.

“Would that be okay with you?” my aunt asked.

“Sorry, what?” I had no idea what she was talking about. I had accidentally highlighted Bryan’s entire row and deleted it while trying to update his call and text tally.

“I said would it be okay if I asked you some follow up questions to the conversation I recorded last night at dinner?” My aunt spoke slowly now, hesitantly; she was a little scared of me because of my mother’s own attitude toward her.

“Sure, what’s up?” I should leave Bryan’s row deleted, I thought, and I almost did, but that wouldn’t have been right.

“Well you were so quiet for most of it, you really said almost nothing, so I hope it wasn’t because I was recording us.”

I wasn’t going to tell my aunt the truth so I said it was okay, I hadn’t minded. She said she had never met my grandfather of course since he had died some years before she met my uncle, but that in some ways she felt like she knew him through all the stories we liked to swap about him, and from everything my uncle had told her. I was too warm now, even with the window open; the radiator had kicked into gear and the blanket was making me sweat. I snapped shut my laptop and stood next to the open

105

window in the kitchen. Outside a few flakes of weak, wet snow melted in the air, leaving undisturbed my glorious third floor view of a U-Haul warehouse and parking lot.

The burnt skeleton of an unlucky moving van that had showed up a week before was still parked out front. People in New York City didn’t really worry about hiding stuff away, mostly because there wasn’t the room, mostly because no one cared.

“I noticed that several times Bryan referred to your grandfather as ‘your father’ to your dad last night.”

Now I was listening.

“Yeah, well Bryan likes to be an asshole sometimes, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“But what did he mean by it?”

“Our dad’s our stepdad. My mom married him after we were born. For some reason lately Bryan thinks this is something that needs to be brought up and rubbed in people’s faces and to cause as much drama as possible with it.” I knew I probably sounded angry, but oh well. She had asked. Though it was weird she hadn’t already known all that.

She said she knew that already, but why would he say that kind of thing now she asked, and I saw she was trying to get at something else, and the kind of help she was hoping to get from me wasn’t the kind I was about to provide her with.

“Why don’t you call Bryan and ask him yourself, he’ll give you an earful I’m sure.”

I made a mental note to add a row in my spreadsheet for my aunt now that she was texting and calling me.

She tried a different tact.

“What about you? Were you close to your grandfather?”

“Not really, but I was a girl. He didn’t have any interest in girls. Our family is very stereotypical that way, or at least it used to be.” I remembered the hot bile taste of orange Kool-Aid as it surged up my esophagus and through my throat and nostrils.

Even with an entire ocean at my feet I had missed and puked all over my grandfather’s brown loafer and the battered gray wood of the dock where we had set up our rods.

106

My aunt said she had noticed that about my family, and started going on about how different it had been for her growing up than what it was for my uncle, her husband,

and probably for my dad as well. You’d think she was from another country the way she was talking but she was from southern Jersey, near Philly, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud at her. I think mostly she was trying to get me to relax and dish my own dirt on the family, two outsiders against the rest.

“Jessie, listen, I don’t want to bullshit you,” she said. “Danny—your Uncle Danny, he seems to think that maybe . . . ” I heard the sound of a key turning in a lock, and then a second and a third lock. Wait, when did we get a third lock on the door? Jesus H. Christ, this new roommate had a lot of fucking nerve. I swept into my room, taking the blanket with me, and closed and locked my bedroom door behind me.

My aunt was still fumbling around with whatever she was trying to say to me. I laid down on my bed, which had somehow neatly made itself when I wasn’t looking. The crazy quilt my mother had made for me with old concert t-shirts of my dad’s—the dad I’d never known—lay neatly folded at the foot of the bed.

“I really think you ought to call my brother about this. Like I said, I am sure he will have plenty to say on the subject of our grandfather and our parents and everything else that’s wrong about our family.”

My brother once told me the only reason I still had that baby quilt was because he had rescued it from the dumpster when we moved houses to live with our new dad. Since he would have been all of six when that happened, I highly doubted his story, but was glad to have it anyway, though sometimes I swore I could detect the smell of ancient garbage on it, curdled milk, coffee grinds, and old, rotten things that needed to be buried or burned. That’s why I never let it touch my bed, and I kicked it off onto the floor in irritation.

My aunt was hemming and hawing again and then I recognized a beeping sound that must have been call waiting.

“I think someone else is calling, I should probably go.”

But she acted like she hadn’t heard me.

“Jessie, I’m sorry I know how hard this is to talk about, but after what Danny has told me, and sitting through dinner last night, I wanted to reach out.”

“Yes, you sent me a text and you called me before I had a chance to reply to the text,

107

I’m sorry.” And now I couldn’t get her off the phone. The call waiting beep stopped.

I could hear the sounds of rustling bags and groceries being put away on the other side of my door. It was getting dark again outside, the light in my window turning a leaden, milky grey, and now my entire day had been wasted. I had been putting it off for awhile but I needed to figure out some way to weight the significance of the calls I received and those I returned so the sums of each row were more reflective of the truth. And maybe, just maybe, if I got it right, everything would finally even out, a column of repeating zeros, no one owing anyone anything, no one owed in return.

“Bryan shared with us what happened with your grandfather, what he did with him, and it’s similar to what your Uncle went through. I know how much it has helped your brother to be heard and believe by us, to know— ” Oh for fuck’s sake. So that’s where this story is going.

“No Aunt Karen, my grandfather never did anything to me, not even close. I’m sorry if you find that disappointing, or can’t use it for your NPR story.”

For some reason I could never remember my grandfather’s reaction when I threw up on his shoe and everywhere else, but I do remember my brother’s. He was disgusted by me, by my weakness, a sneer of revulsion crumpling his pale, freckled face, flushed with heat rash. I can’t say who hated who more at that moment, as the mid-afternoon sun beat down mercilessly on the two of us, still swaddled tight in the thick, formal clothes we had to wear every Sunday for our grandparents’ sake. Not for church, but for our mother to show our father and our grandparents that she recognized the significance of the day for our grandfather, that she was as ready to please him as his wife was. So everyone was pleased, except for my brother and I, but that’s the way it’s supposed to be. In return my father provided us with a family of four once again and made sure we had a seat at a Thanksgiving dinner table every year.

“No, of course not, I didn’t mean to—” My aunt was stuttering now, backing away quickly from the flame. At least my therapist would enjoy this conversation when I related it back to her; it would give her plenty to dig around in and get dirty with.

My roommate was knocking on the door and softly breathing my name through the cracks in its wood.

“Family is family,” I said to my aunt. Family has six letters, three vowels and three consonants, two odd numbers creating an even one. Every consonant alternated by a vowel.

108

She tried again.

“It’s just that Jessie, I know you’ve had your struggles, your time in the hospital, Bryan told me about the bouts of disassociation, and then last night—” “Family is family,” I repeated, then laughed in spite of myself. “You thought I was in the hospital because my grandfather messed with me? I told you, my grandfather didn’t like girls.”

Then I had to repeat it, to bookend my question and statement, to even it out: “Family is family.”

“Jessica,” my beautiful roommate murmured. “Jessica, I made some dinner, why don’t you come out and eat it with me.”

“Aunt Karen,” I said, hopping up from my bed so I could join my roommate. Maybe it was Thanksgiving leftovers from her own dinner. Hopefully she knew how to cook turkey better than my grandmother. “There’s something you need to know about Bryan—he lies. Did Uncle Danny tell you the part about how our real dad was a junkie who o.d.’d? And how our grandfather bailed Bryan out of jail when he finally got busted following in his footsteps? Maybe he’s clean, maybe he’s jabbing a needle in his arm right this second, who knows. But you know what junkies do? They lie. They make up sob stories, they get on your good side, and then they ask you for money. Has he asked you for money yet?”

When she didn’t say anything I knew he had. That little shit.

“If anyone’s hurt anyone, it’s been Bryan hurting our family. If anyone’s taken anything, it’s him. Way more than his fair share, way more.”

And then I told her I was sorry, and welcomed her to the family, and then I hung up and when I went to sit down at the table, set with plates of hot, wet turkey legs and piles of stuffing and mashed potatoes, my roommate suggested I might want to update my Excel spreadsheet before I forgot and drank too much wine, so I did, and I added a new row for my aunt.

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

If you go to a karaoke bar with Megan Cossey, respect the unwritten rules of karaoke decorum. No “Stairway to Heaven,” and don’t even think about “Dust in the Wind.” And if she’s singing “La Isla Bonita,” don’t ask the bartender for a second microphone, and don’t jump on stage to join her. She’s a novelist with a Masters in Journalism from Columbia. And although she’s moved away from working as a journalist, she’s always game for a deadline, and appreciates the magic of how they almost always, at last, help you find something to say.

She lives in a sweeping one bedroom apartment in Marble Hill that she shares with two cats and her nine-year-old son, Leo. The apartment includes two sets of large casement windows, both of which allow you take a long look toward the island of Manhattan, which rests just across the Harlem River.

At one point as the three of us were standing near the windows in her living room, and looking out at the view, she filled me and Alex in on the history of Marble Hill. “It used to be attached to Manhattan and the Harlem River, which connects the Hudson and the East River. It used to go across at 230th Street, and then about one-hundred years ago, the Army Corps of Engineers dug this channel so that it would be easier for ships to pass through. So this was an island for about fifty years.

And then they filled it up again, so now we’re physically a part of the Bronx, but we do jury duty in Manhattan, it’s really bizarre.”

According to the flap copy of her first novel, The Seventh Book, the story begins when “The literary world comes to a standstill with the shocking announcement that a seventh undiscovered novel by Jane Austen has been found.” Her main character is a journalist, Mounif Howard, who hasn’t read any of Jane Austen’s books, and mostly disregards the news. “That is, until new evidence begins to question not only the authenticity of the unearthed manuscript but also the provenance of Austen’s entire body of work.” In its present state, the novel traverses over one-hundred-thousand words; but even so, it reads quickly, and moves at a pace that encourages and entices you to keep turning the page.

Cossey’s wit is sharp. And when she gets a new idea for a story, the entire arc of the plot seems to come to her all at once, as if in one sudden strikes of inspiration.

So when you’re speaking with her, it’s easy to feel as though you’re also on the brink of solving something, or answering a question that you’ve been asking yourself for years, but just haven’t been able to answer. All you have to do is give yourself a deadline, she might say, and then the answer will appear.

PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEXANDRA BILDSOE - 110-145.

116

Alex: I have a question. Do you mind me asking about the story a little bit?

narrator to be totally out of it. She knows what’s going on in her family.

Megan: No, of course.

Alex: Right, of course.

Alex: Because I was really intrigued. On the first read, by the time I got to the end, I thought, okay, there’s something really off about the character, maybe she has some sort of serious mental condition, and then on the second read I started thinking, maybe she’s living in an apartment that her mom set up for her, and her roommate is her caretaker, and she actually can’t really take care of herself and she’s actually half-living in a world that she’s making up. That was on my second read through, which I thought might be a little extreme, but I felt like there was something with the roommate.

Megan: But she’s a mess. And it’s the day after Thanksgiving, so you can’t tell, but yeah, she’s definitely unemployed and on disability.

Megan: Yeah. I’m suggesting that she’s a caretaker that her mom set up.

Alex: Got it. Okay. I’m glad that was what you intended.

Megan: But it’s funny because as I write, never in my life have I been able to plan ahead, but because I’m currently writing a novel, and I’ve had to write an ending, it’s helped me for the first time to plot out the rest of my book, which goes against everything that I’ve ever done. But as I was writing the story, it was almost as though the roommate was impinging on my consciousness more and more. And I was thinking, why is she always around, and why is she always re-arranging the apartment and making her bed.

Alex: Yeah! I thought that was so bizarre. Just crazy.

Megan: But I also didn’t want the

Alex: Yeah, because she doesn’t talk about a job or anything like that.

Megan: It’s funny, because sometimes the characters give you the information.

Because as I was writing, I was thinking, wait, what about her job? And I thought . . . I don’t think she has one.

Isaac: I didn’t really consider those things.

It’s really interesting.

Megan: Well you don’t have to as the reader.

Alex: It reads well without it.

Isaac: I guess she didn’t describe her job, but not everyone wants to talk about it in that way. But then once I started connecting the dots more, I thought, well, maybe ...

Megan: Well, and I learned again, through writing my novel, because I write so much stuff that didn’t go into it, that ended up just being background material for my characters. I realized that, at least for me, you have to figure that stuff out for yourself, whether or not it ever ends up in the book, or the story. You always hear about actors who have these elaborate back stories for their bit characters. And you think, that’s really weird, why did they do that? But you have to make these decisions, like where was she born, where did she grow up, how old was she when this happened, does she have a job, is she

117

not going to work on Friday because it’s the day after Thanksgiving or is it because she just doesn’t have work? And if she does have a job, maybe I need to mention that, or something . . . that she has some kind of outside life. And then I thought . . . no, she doesn’t have a job.

Isaac: It’s good, because she doesn’t have to say, “Oh, and I don’t have a job, either,” it would be heavy-handed.

Megan: Yeah, because I don’t think it would occur to her.

Alex: Do you write down all of those details for the characters, or do you just have them in your head?

Megan: For my novel I have to. I always tell people that I do productive and healthy things because I’m forced to, and I’ve reached this point where I was getting so confused by the characters, especially with one of my main characters, Saul, that I ended up plotting the entire time-line of his life, his parents, his grandparents, year-by-year, because I was just losing my mind trying to figure out years, and ages, and when this would have happened compared to that, and compared to this historical event; but I ended up just doing all of these back stories about the main characters in my novel because I would suddenly get an inspiration to start writing it down. I hand-wrote most of it, and then afterwards I thought, this doesn’t belong anywhere, this doesn’t fit anywhere, but it’s actually really helpful to know. One of the main characters has a sister, but she doesn’t have a huge role, but I ended up writing all about their family life, and just all of this background stuff that ended up helping me keep it clear in my head. And it’s weird that only a fraction of it actually ends up in the 118

novel. And my novel needs cutting, which I’m hoping you’ll suggest, no pressure.

Isaac: I’m excited to get through the whole thing. Overwrite first. And I think “deleted scenes” are sort of neat too, because sometimes you finish a book, and it’s very enjoyable and rewarding and you start thinking, I wonder if there’s anything else here, and it would be great if the author could say, “Oh yeah, I’ve got more for you!”

Megan: Well, in the old days ––– one of my favorite writers was Henry James, and back then, you could just write and write and write and write and write. And he would do pages of background and character descriptions. And based on what I’m reading now, that stuff would have all been cut. It’s all about brevity now, unless you’re a really established writer. It’s just something that I’ve noticed. I don’t know people in the publishing industry, but something like Moby Dick, which I do think really should have been edited, would never in a million years been published the way that it is now!

Alex: No. That’s so true.

Megan: Could you imagine?

Isaac: Herman, we have to move this along, come on.

Megan: And let me tell you I would have been right at the front of the line, we need to cut all of this.

Alex: Cut to the chase!

Megan: We get it, there are a lot of different kinds of whales, and you’ve done really good research about those

119

whales, but let’s keep that for the website.

But George R.R. Martin, I don’t read his stuff, but I’m obsessed with the show, and I heard that he has all of this deleted stuff ––– I can’t even imagine because the books are a lot already, but he has even more, because of all of the world building that he does, so you can go online and read all of the extra stuff.

Alex: Do you feel like we’re in the age of the short story?

Megan: I don’t know. That’s a good question. In terms of attention span, I guess. I think in terms of making money, no.

Alex: I’ll only write short stories and make a million!

Megan: I know! Yeah, no. But in terms of attention span, maybe. I used to read a ton of short stories, and then . . . one day I just kind of lost interest.

Isaac: Books of short stories can be interesting, because you have sort of the same characters with different names permeating throughout the entire book, but sometimes they just leave you wanting more, which can get frustrating.

Megan: Not a lot can happen in a short story, so whenever a short story starts I know that there’s not going to be any zigzags for the character, because the author is forced to show an arc that has already been predestined. I don’t want to say that nothing surprising is going to happen, but with short stories, it’s giving you a snapshot of something, whereas with a novel, it’s reinventing the world, within the novel. And maybe that’s true more for modern short stories, or the kind of short stories that get published, but I always feel that a lot of times they’re written in a very similar tone of voice, especially ones 120

that you see in The New Yorker. Not all of them, like Karen Russell. She wrote Swamplandia, but she also wrote “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” which was a short story.

Alex: Oh, yeah!

Megan: I like that one a lot.

Alex: That’s amazing. I’ve been reading Sherman Alexie recently. Do you know him?

Megan: I don’t.

Alex: He’s such an amazing contemporary author. He does a lot of the The New Yorker short stories, but he also does memoirs, and he also has a few novels as well. He’s a Native American writer, but he often talks about the idea that even though his stories are fiction, they’re autobiographical in a way, and he gives this look into Native American society and culture that we only see from the outside, in a way. But his stories are just very easy to be in, and really exciting. I would highly recommend them.

Megan: What’s his name again?

Alex: Sherman Alexie.

Megan: Okay, I’ll look it up.

Alex: Yeah, he’s great.

Megan: I’ll do it.

Alex: But they still are very snapshot-esque, although there’s one that I just listened to that was very shocking, where you think you know what’s going on, and then you’re like . . . whoa.

Megan: Yeah, I think it’s more that with novels, the hero is going to change her

circumstance, but with the short story ––– I think of “The Lottery.” It’s a surprise ending, but it was predestined from the beginning . . . I guess this is just where I am right now, personally, with short stories.

Isaac: Well there’s only so much that you can do. Even with short stories that span over an entire lifetime, you’ll be introduced to the character when he is in his teens, and then it ends when he’s in his eighties or nineties, but even so, you can’t really dive into what’s changed. And usually when you have short stories that have spanned that great of a time, the idea is usually, this is how little has changed, despite the fact that all of these years have passed.

Megan: Yeah, as though it was all coming to some conclusion from the beginning.

Isaac: Yeah, and even though you’re jumping over a large span of time, you’re really not doing that much with the character, because you can’t. But just thinking about your story again, I think you’re excellent at writing dialogue, and not having it interrupt the story, but having it go with the flow of things. Do you remember learning specifically how to do that?

Megan: That’s actually the first compliment that I remember getting in a college writing course. It was one of my first experiences of being workshopped. That was what the professor said, that I had a really good ear for dialogue. And it reminded him of David Mamet ––– I had no idea who that was when I was nineteen ––– so I had to look it up, but I don’t know why.

It’s just one of those things that came

naturally, compared to other aspects of writing.

Isaac: I think dialogue is incredibly difficult to write well.

Megan: I think for me the biggest challenge is making sure that the voices are distinct. But that’s actually fun too. It’s fun to go back through conversations and adjust them to match the characters. But thank you.

Isaac: You’re welcome.

Megan: You and my first writing professor. I wrote a play once.

Isaac: Oh, what’s it called, what’s it about?

Megan: It was called “Get Some,” me and my best friend wrote it and produced it at The Zipper Factory. We also turned it into a web series. We only did a few episodes, so we didn’t finish it.

Isaac: Is it still up?

Megan: Yeah, the episodes are on Vimeo. It was a while ago. We didn’t finish filming the web series because it’s a lot of money, for not a lot of payoff.

Isaac: Is it written though, so people could pick it up and finish making it, if they wanted?

Megan: Yeah, we wrote the whole script for the play, and then we turned it into a web series. It was a lot of fun. Definitely a light comedy. It was so exciting to watch your work get picked up by actors, and changed in a good way, having it turn into something completely different, almost.

So that was an opportunity to write only dialogue.

Isaac: Do you remember the first story 121

122

123

that you ever wrote?

Megan: I was in second grade. Do you want that far back?

Isaac: Sure.

Megan: I don’t know if that’s what you mean.

Isaac: If that’s what comes to mind.

Megan: Well, we had to write . . . I forget what the assignment was, but I just went with it, and I wrote about a family going out west in a covered wagon, and it was posted up in the classroom because it was so good. And a friend of my mom’s is Gay Courter, who was really huge in the eighties, and who wrote this book called The Midwife that was on the New York Times Bestseller List. But she read the story, and she told my mom, “She’s going to be a writer one day,” and my mom told me this, years later, but it always stuck with me.

Isaac: Why’d she wait?

Megan: I don’t know. I don’t think she waited that long to tell me.

Isaac: Twenty-five years later!

Megan: I know! But when I went to college, in my sophomore year, I took a creative writing course, and that’s when I started writing stories for the first time, for people to read. And it was just based on random characters and scenarios from home. And I love Flannery O’Connor, like I’ve told you, so a lot of it was me trying to imitate her style.

Isaac: I think that’s where it starts though, right?

Megan: Yeah. I’m glad I wrote that stuff.

124

I could never write like that now. Because it was just so over the top. Now I would just edit the hell out of it. But I think you just write differently when you’re younger. You have less inhibitions, for better or worse. I was still learning what good writing was, so I didn’t have a lot of self-control. But it was also just my id taking over.

Isaac: You didn’t know what you were expressing, you just knew that you had to express something?

Megan: Yeah, I didn’t understand what I was expressing. What was going on exactly, and why I needed to get this stuff out. And as you get older, it becomes more coherent. But the stories are fun to look back at.

Isaac: How often do you do that?

Megan: Not often. When I move, or do a thorough cleaning. And I used to print them out for workshopping in the most obnoxious colors. I would go to Kinkos and ask for bright magenta paper. And it would all be single space, because I was cheap. And now, if anyone ever gave me that, I would be like, “Fuck you, I’m not reading this. Put it on white paper, double-spaced, twelvepoint font.” I should send you one of them. They’re pretty weird.

Isaac: Please, yes.

[Musa the Cat jumps into Isaac’s lap.]

Isaac: Who is this?

Megan: This is Musa. Leo named her when he was three. He still can’t tell me why he named her Musa, he doesn’t really remember. It means muse in Spanish.

Isaac: Is that right?

Alex: Oh my gosh, alright.

Megan: Yeah, I looked it up.

Megan: So Leo was like, “I like it!” And I was thinking, oh, I want the Martini.

Alex: So beautiful.

Megan: You’re supposed to ask me what happened to her tail, which is what everyone asks me.

Isaac: What? Oh my gosh! What happened to Musa’s tail?

Alex: I was thinking that it might have been Phil Collins.

Megan: That would have been cool too, actually. I love Phil Collins.

Isaac: Very talented.

Megan: She pissed me off! Badda-bing.

Apparently no one in the world has ever heard of a Manx cat before, and literally everybody asks me what happened to her tail, so I say I chopped it off.

Alex: Phil Collins the cat.

Isaac: Really?

Isaac: Maybe he’ll come out eventually.

Do you play the piano?

Megan: No, she was born that way! Oh my god.

Alex: Hardcore.

Isaac: And you guys are still tight, after that?

Alex: It’s cute. I like the little pom-pom.

Megan: Especially when she wags it, it’s so cute. She doesn’t know that she doesn’t have a tail.

Alex: She doesn’t need to know.

Isaac: Musa and, who?

Megan: The other one is Collins.

Isaac: Collins, nice, with an S. Megan: Well he came with the name, Tom Collins, and so my son wanted to keep the name. Because he came from this rescue place, and they name each litter of kittens by a different theme, and that one was alcoholic drinks.

Megan: Nope, Tom Collins. He always hides. He’s actually the nicer one, but he hides whenever new people come around.

Megan: I’ve taken lessons. I got fired by my teacher.

Alex: What? That happened?

Megan: I know! He made me cry. He used to be my neighbor on the other side of the building. When I lived on the other side of the building, I lived beneath a concert pianist and next door to a piano teacher. And so I finally started taking lessons, and he was really intense. And I just wanted to learn how to play Christmas songs.

Alex: Just for amusement.

Megan: But he was like, no! You have to be in a recital and everything. And it was fine, but I reminded him of his ex-wife.

And I get that a lot from men, I remind them of their sisters, or their mothers, or their ex-girlfriend, or their ex-wife. And so I reminded him of his ex-wife, and I was like, okay, but he had this cancellation policy, and I was at a point in my life where Leo was a baby and I had a

125

lot going on in my life, and I was cancelling, and I would say, “Let me pay you a cancellation fee,” and he would say, “No, you’re my neighbor,” and then one day I told him that I’d be out of town for most of December, and he flipped out and fired me.

Isaac: Is it firing, or terminating the . . .

Megan: I guess terminating, and I cried and left.

Isaac: Well, it has to be a bit tough to sit back at the piano after that.

Megan: Well, the concert pianist above us teaches kids as well, so she’s going to start teaching Leo, he’s very excited to start.

Our neighbor gave us the piano, another neighbor. It’s a really nice building, which is one of the reasons why I keep living here.

Isaac: How long had you been living in the other apartment, before this one?

Megan: We lived there for a year and a half. We moved in when Leo was almost one. He had his first birthday in this building. So eight years I guess.

Isaac: How did you find the building?

Megan: Well I was working at the U.N., and I was with Nancy then, and we lived off of the last stop on the 1 Train, and I would take the 1 Train to Metro North, and then take the Metro North to Grand Central, and then walk to the U.N., and it was just killing me, because if I missed the train then I would have to wait, and then I was getting home right before Leo’s bedtime, so we thought we should look around the Metro North station, and then we found this building. And I just fell in love with the neighborhood; it’s just 126

a really great neighborhood. It’s weird, but it’s great.

Isaac: I was wondering ––– maybe I’ve asked you this before ––– whether you have a go-to karaoke song.

Megan: Yes. I actually just updated my Ok Cupid profile with that, because everyone asks me. “La Isla Bonita,” by Madonna. That’s my signature karaoke song, and I don’t like it when other people try to sing it before me.

Isaac: Does that happen a lot?

Megan: No, what people usually do is that when it comes on, people will get excited, and they’ll try to sing it with me.

Isaac: No, no. This is my moment.

Megan: I actually have a good story for it. I grew up listening to Madonna, but if I had heard the song, it didn’t register with me, and then one day . . . I grew up in the Bible Belt . . . I was flipping through the channels of the TV, I think I was in early high school, and there was a Christian channel and I stopped, and there was a guy, this weird man who was sitting on a stool, and playing records backwards to show how different songs had the Devil’s messages in them. So he was playing “La Isla Bonita,” and I thought, oh my God, what a beautiful song!

Isaac: You heard it backwards?

Megan: No, first he was playing it forward, which was why I stopped. And then he played it backwards, and he said it was some Devil message, and I thought, this is even better. So I always liked it, and then I went to China right

127

after college. And my first year there I was out in the countryside, and there was nothing to do ––– we were hours away from anything, outside of civilization, but at the college I was at, there was a little restaurant, and right outside there was a karaoke machine. And so we would all just sing karaoke. We would just eat and sing, then eat and sing. It was just part of your day. There were very few English songs available, but one of them was “La Isla Bonita.”

Isaac: Was that when you were first starting to get interested in karaoke, or was that way back?

Megan: No, it was when I was living in China, and especially my first year there, that was all there was to do ––– karaoke or Mahjong. And I didn’t play Mahjong.

They played Mahjong there for real, like for money.

Isaac: For keeps.

Megan: Yeah, for keeps. So it was just how you socialized and hungout ––– drinking cheap beer and doing karaoke.

And if you went into the city, you could find an actual karaoke place where you could rent a room and everything. My students had a curfew. They were college students, but they had to be back by 10 p.m. So we did all night karaoke once, where they literally rented this room, all night ––– I fell asleep.

Isaac: You said you were teaching English over there?

Megan: Yeah, my first year I taught English.

Isaac: That was right after college?

Megan: Yeah, it was right after college. I 128

was there for three years, but the first year was out in B.F.E. It was definitely fun.

Isaac: Do you have any songs that you’re intimidated by, ones that you’d like to step up into singing?

Megan: Karaoke?

Isaac: Yes, ones that you just haven’t touched yet.

Megan: I’m not a real singer. I can’t sing. I’m a terrible singer, so I don’t care. They’re all the same to me because I don’t have any actual skills.

Isaac: So what do you enjoy about it?

Megan: I just love it. It’s fun, but it’s also very therapeutic. And there was a really dark period in my life where I would sometimes go sing karaoke by myself. Also, there’s certain songs that you don’t do at a karaoke party.

Isaac: Like what?

Megan: Like “Stairway to Heaven,” or “Dust in the Wind.”

Isaac: Why not?

Megan: Because they’re kind of a mood killer!

Isaac: It’s inappropriate.

Alex: And it’s long.

Megan: And it’s freakin’ long! If you’re going to do a really long song, it can’t be “Stairway to Heaven,” and everyone starts thinking about angst.

Alex: It’s got to be “Bohemian Rhapsody” or something.

Megan: Yes! Exactly! That’s just basic

karaoke etiquette. And a lot of people don’t get karaoke etiquette. I’m thinking of putting together a guide to put online.

Megan: Isn’t it?

Isaac: I was thinking, that should be a book.

Megan: Yeah, so it’s really funny sometimes when someone does that because you think, oh, my kindred spirit.

Megan: I do karaoke birthday parties every once and a while. And this past birthday I had sort of a new crew with me, and there were some basic karaoke etiquette rules that were being flouted, and I was the host, so I didn’t want to be a bitch, but I was thinking, excuse me, you do not get to do three songs in a row.

Isaac: That’s a lot, right?

Megan: It’s rude. But you know, it’s actors. Whenever you get an actor in a group, you have to keep them in line.

First of all, they’ll do all of these songs from musicals, which get really annoying after a while.

Alex: Especially if you don’t know the song.

Megan: There’s so many songs that I don’t know from musicals! They’ll say, “Oh my god, this is my favorite song from Aladdin!” but it won’t be a song from Aladdin that you’ll know, it’ll be some other cheesy duet that I’ve never heard of.

Isaac: “Just one more.”

Megan: Yes! And so you have to watch them. I actually have friends though who have karaoke song lists that they’ll keep on their phone.

Isaac: Just in case?

Alex: That’s genius.

Alex: Because you kind of forget sometimes.

Isaac: What’s the difference between content and prose, when did people start saying “content”?

Megan: Oh, yeah, the internet. It’s one of those little jargon words that rub me the wrong way.

Isaac: When did it start, do you remember?

Megan: In my world, I started noticing that people were saying that instead of “writing,” or “text” . . . probably within the last ten years. A lot of times, the word content does include things like photography or video, so I get it when it’s used in that way, but when it’s used to talk about actual writing . . . it irritates me a lot. But I do these online blog posts about writing and editing and fact-checking, so sometimes I just refer to it as content because that’s what my reading audience knows, but a lot of times I put it in quotes.

Isaac: “Content?”

Megan: Yes! I can’t help it.

Isaac: Why do you think it annoys you so much?

Megan: Because it’s degrading the written word, and I think it’s part of the cause of how little writing is valued now. I was a freelance journalist starting in 2002, and I made more per word back then than I would now. Back then you were doing okay if you were getting fifty cents

129

per word, and your goal was a dollar per word. And now people will literally ask you to just write for free, or they’ll offer five cents per word. You can’t make a living doing it anymore. There’s no respect for it. And I think it’s because anyone can go online and hit publish. So people farm stuff out to places in the Philippines and India, where people will literally write stuff for a cent per word. It’s just not valued at all. And definitely not editing, both copy editing and editing. Whenever you hear about newspapers laying off people it’s always the copy editors who get chopped first. Copy editors and fact checkers.

Isaac: What is a fact?

Megan: Don’t ask me questions like that!

Alex: What is a fact?

Megan: What is a fact?!

Isaac: What is a fact?

Megan: Well, in terms of being a fact checker, a fact is something that your primary source, or at least two secondary sources, check out.

Isaac: That’s a fact.

Megan: Yes. Isaac: Cool.

Megan: In a practical sense. If you’re talking in a philosophical sense then I don’t know.

Isaac: Fair enough. Are you allowed to speak about what you’ve done with the U.N., or is that top secret?

130

Megan: No, it’s not top secret. We’ve been hacked. We were hacked twice by WikiLeaks while I worked there.

Isaac: Yeah, was that an honor?

Megan: All I could think was that their punishment was having to go through all of our e-mails. Because they’re so hideous and boring. But I really didn’t do anything top secret. I worked for UNICEF first, and then I worked for another development agency within the U.N., in communications.

Isaac: Communications?

Megan: Writing, editing. I did everything. I did a little bit of everything because it was a very small staff, but it was a huge organization, and was literally in every country all over the world.

So we provided a lot of support to the country offices. So I did really random things, like producing a radio ad for a photo contests in Botswana.

Isaac: I guess you start by researching a few things about Botswana?

Megan: So we had this global photo contest, it was my idea, and it sort of became institutionalized, and we were trying to get as many people to submit as possible. And still to this day, in Sub-Saharan Africa, people get most of their news via radio, so there were a few countries where our country offices would request radio ads for the contest, because that was how they would be able to get the word out about it. It was Botswana and a couple of other countries.

Isaac: That sounds cool.

Megan: So I thought, add that to my CV. I was a radio journalist when I was in Thailand, so I had some experience with it. I was mostly a print journalist, but I dabbled.

Isaac: What attracted you to journalism? Because that was after college, right?

Megan: Well, when I was in college I was part of our daily newspaper, at Cornell. So I got sucked into that world, and I did that instead of going to class, so it was a lot like a full-time job.

Isaac: What did you like about it?

Megan: I liked being a part of something, and it was exciting to put a paper to bed every night at 4 a.m., and there was just a lot of energy in the newsroom, and I realized that I wasn’t a big fan of academia ––– you just sit around stewing over a paper for a month. I liked that you did your interviews, you wrote it up, and then you were done.

And your name was in it the next day.

And I just felt very involved and connected. And I was raised with the idea that you have to do something very practical with your skills, and I liked writing, so I thought that was a way to be practical about it. But it’s not really for me.

Isaac: How did you decide that?

Megan: First of all, it’s poorly paid, and there’s not a lot of job security, so when Nancy was pregnant with Leo, I needed to get a job with benefits, but also, it just was too much stress, especially when I was on a daily deadline. I would wake up in the morning and not know what my story would be, or who I had to talk to, and all I knew was that I had to file something within the next eight hours, and it stopped being fun for me, I just hated it.

Isaac: How would you find stories,

under that sort of pressure?

Megan: I would call up regular sources. I usually would have a beat. So I’d call up sources within my beat and find out what was going on. Or I did a search of headlines. I was a health reporter, so I would look for new announcements, or new studies, and would try to find an angle that would fit with the audience for the paper, or I had stuff in the back of my head. That’s the other thing. When you’re a journalist, whether you’re on staff or a freelancer, you’re never off work. When something happens on the street, you’re thinking, oh, there’s a cool thing, oh, can I get a story out of it? And I just couldn’t live like that anymore. Vacations were never vacations, it was like how can I turn this into a story? And I’m just not enough of an extrovert for it. I like the payoff of seeing my name, or hearing my name on the radio, but I didn’t like the actual process.

Isaac: There’s this idea of living like a writer that gets tossed around, and with journalism, it seems like you’re thinking, okay, there’s something real from the world that I need to extract, and turn into a story, whereas with fiction, you’re absorbing things constantly, but it’s not necessarily going to have to come out in a certain way.

Megan: Yes. You don’t have to make sure it adheres to reality. You get to use it how you want to use it. And with journalism, you always have an angle and an agenda.

Don’t let anyone ever tell you that it’s objective, because it’s not. And I like that I have the experience. I think it was good for me, and forced me to have a lot of intense experiences that other people, other writers never had. I don’t regret it at all. I don’t know what else I would have done.

131

132

133

Isaac: I think it must help, when you know that you have to turn something out, then when it comes time to work on fiction, or your novel, then you only have to say, okay let’s go, because you’ve already trained your brain to get ready to produce, I think that’s probably great training.

Megan: Yeah, definitely. I think I got more out of being trained to write for a newspaper, in journalism, then I ever did out of being an English major, or learning how to write academic papers. The academia part of things helped me to think critically. But it was just too much wallowing.

Isaac: Wallowing? How so?

Megan: Were you an English major? I forget what you majored in.

Isaac: English, yes.

Megan: You’d be given a story to read and you had to write five or ten pages on it, and then you had to choose a theme, and you would just hammer home on that one theme. The color yellow!

Isaac: I like to think of it as riffing, rather than wallowing. It’s a fine line.

Megan: Being an English major also taught me to read more critically, but then it changed what I would read. I used to be like a garbage dump with what I could read, I could read anything, and then after being an English major, I became aware of how much writing isn’t any good. And so I couldn’t just pick up a lot of the science fiction stuff that I used to love, because I would think, this just isn’t very well written.

Isaac: These were things that you were 134

reading before college?

Megan: Yeah, I would read anything.

Literally, anything. My grandmother worked at a bookstore, and she would send home boxes of books ––– remainders, that would have the covers torn off, books which were supposed to be destroyed. And it would be kids books and grown-up books, and I would go through the whole thing, and I was eight. And I probably read a lot of things that I shouldn’t have read.

Isaac: It’s done now.

Megan: But it didn’t matter! It would be Judy Blume and then John Hersey’s Hiroshima. I think now I’m more tolerant again of not-great writing. If it’s genre writing, like science fiction.

Isaac: How do you know when you’ve enjoyed a book, or a story?

Alex: The earmarkers of enjoyment?

Megan: It’s getting harder and harder, because my attention span isn’t what it used to be. But it’s when I can’t put a book down, I want to keep reading it, and going back to that world, and I forget about Netflix or the internet.

Isaac: It was easier to forget about Netflix and the internet before there was Netflix or the internet. Do you get trapped in books, or can you put them down, before you’ve finished them?

Megan: I used to always read them to the end, when I was younger. I remember when I put down my first book without finishing it. I think I was twenty-six. I actually skipped the middle and read the end, and I thought, oh my God.

Isaac: Did anyone see that?

curiosity never goes away, but it changes.

Megan: Oh my God, I can’t believe that I’m doing this. Don’t tell anyone! But I definitely put books down all the time now. Even literary gems, things that I’m supposed to like.

Megan: Yeah. And my attention span is shit. It really is. I read War and Peace in eighth grade. Which, by the way, is not a super deep book, it’s a very long Russian soap opera, but I can’t even imagine reading it now.

Isaac: Have you ever put something down, and then come back to it later, and actually enjoyed it?

Megan: I’m sure I have, but I can’t think of anything. I read so much when I was younger. The bulk of my fiction reading probably happened before I was eighteen.

Isaac: Wow. Megan: Or maybe before I was twenty-five. And so sometimes, I re-read things that I haven’t read since I was a lot younger. Like The Handmaid’s Tale. I read that when it came out, I was around eleven, and then I re-read it before I watched the show on Hulu last year. It was a very different experience, almost like reading two different books, which makes sense. Mostly I try to re-read stuff that I loved when I was a kid, but often I just can’t get through it anymore.

Isaac: Things you read as an adolescent, in your teens, early twenties?

Megan: I started reading grown-up books when I was in third grade, so anything from third grade onwards.

And I’ve read really long and involved books that I’ll try to read now, and I’ll think, I can’t believe I read that! What the hell?

Isaac: Maybe when you’re that young there’s a curiosity about things, and the

Isaac: How many books would you say you’re reading right now?

Megan: You mean at the same time?

Isaac: Yes. Megan: I’m reading one novel now. I just dip into books a lot now. I have all of the research books for my novel on that shelf by the window. So I go in and out of those a lot, to re-read, or to look up sections. I have a bunch of poetry that I’ll pull out. Different books of philosophy.

I’m very much scattered, whereas when I was younger it was one book after another, after another, after another. But now it’s . . . if the book is out and around my apartment, then it’s for a reason, because I feel the need to have it at arms length right now.

Isaac: It’s comforting in that way. I find myself looking into books that I’ve already read before, rather than exploring new books. And it’s tough because there’s so many books out there to read, and you know that you don’t want to rely to heavily on your go-tos.

Megan: Yeah. That’s how I’ve been trying to curate my library. Except I thought that I’ve got to get rid of a lot of these.

I’ve been getting rid of books that I know I’m never going to read again, and ones to which I don’t have an emotional pull.

But I still have Kavalier & Clay, for example, which I’m never going to read again,

135

probably, but it affected me so deeply when I read it years ago, and so I thought, I can’t get rid of this.

––––––––––––––– [Coffee break.]

––––––––––––––– Alex: This is such an amazing view.

Megan: I know. I love it.

Alex: It’s so cool that you get to look down at Manhattan.

Megan: And you get to hear the football games. Columbia’s Baker Field is right over there. And in the bedroom, my son has a bunk bed, so he sleeps on the top, and he likes to look right out of the casement window.

Alex: This is so lovely.

Megan: Yeah, that’s one of the reasons why I stay here . . . this building keeps going up in rent, but I love the neighborhood, and I just like the windows.

Alex: Yeah, this is so rare, to find windows like this.

Megan: Yeah, casement windows. They’re a pain in the ass, with air-conditioning and everything else.

Alex: And I’m sure with heat . . .

Megan: But you know, New York apartments with heat . . . it’s hot. They changed the heating system a couple of years ago, so it’s not as hot as it used to be . . .

Alex: But it was crazy.

136

Megan: Yeah. Now you actually have to get under the covers at night, which is okay. It’s normal. In the middle of win-

ter. So Marble Hill used to be attached to Manhattan and the Harlem River, which connects the Hudson and the East River. It used to go across at 230th Street, and then about one-hundred years ago, the Army Corps of Engineers dug this channel so that it would be easier for ships to pass through. So this was an island for about fifty years. And then they filled it up again, so now we’re physically a part of the Bronx, but we do jury duty in Manhattan, it’s really bizarre..

Alex: So it’s kind of a middle ground.

Megan: It’s totally a middle ground.

Which is one of the reasons why when people ask me, why do I like living here, I say, it feels so liminal. You’re on the edge, you’re not committed to either thing.

Alex: So true.

Megan: And you’re on the water. And honestly, as a photographer, if you go over the Broadway Bridge, then you see the Hudson as you’re crossing the river, and it’s just amazing.

Alex: Yeah, we walked across it. It was so cool.

Megan: Yeah, it’s very dramatic. I just love how I definitely feel like I’m in New York City here. This is the Bronx, and also how there’s just something really old and strange about it.

Alex: Yeah, definitely.

Megan: And I’ve met people who grew up in this neighborhood. It used to be this old Irish neighborhood ––– well, not just Irish, but there are huge houses in it. And if you go through it

there’s all of these weird old houses, where people used to have ten kids. I own a house, around the corner from here, but there’s these tunnels beneath the ground. Because this used to be a fort, during the revolutionary war, and so there’s all of these tunnels cutting through the neighborhood. And one of our neighbors who has a house here, he found an entrance in his basement.

It has a big rock stuck in it, so you can’t enter it, but there really are tunnels. It’s a funny neighborhood.

Alex: Whoa.

Isaac: That would be good when the trains are down.

Megan: Yeah, just tunnel through.

Isaac: Alternate route.

Megan: And Inwood Hill Park is right over there, and it has the only original old growth forest left in Manhattan. I used to tell Leo ghost stories that were set here in Marble Hill, before bed, about old revolutionary ghosts, and stuff like that.

Isaac: You made them up, or in a book?

Megan: I made them up. Because it was so easy. Inwood and Marble Hill are so weird.

––––––––––––––– Isaac: We were talking about your novel earlier, The Seventh Book, do you remember how you met one of the main protagonists, Mounif ?

Megan: You mean as a character?

Isaac: Sure.

Megan: He just popped up in my head one day, he opened with the first lines of the novel and it was his point of view.

It was this voice in my head so I started writing it down. To me it was crazy. Crazy in good way.

Isaac: When was that?

Megan: It was a while ago. Probably four years ago.

Isaac: Had you been thinking about Jane Austen and a seventh book?

Megan: No. I read Pride and Prejudice every year, since I was nine. And I read all of her stuff, and when I need to veg out I’ll watch the movies. I had read a book called Jane’s Fame, which was about her reception, she was barely known back then, all the way back in time to the present culture around her. So obviously that had affected me in some way, but it just popped into my head one day.

And I wrote down the first chapter, by hand, and then I was at this retreat, and there was a talent night. And so I read the opening chapter, and people were asking me, “What happens next, is it real or not?” And I started telling people that I had just had this idea for a novel, and anyone who knew Jane Austen would ask me, “But is it real or not?” To the point where they needed to know. And I would explain, that even in a novel, if it is real, it’s not real. There’s not actually a seventh novel by her. But it was really startling to see that this idea that I had, about the world being super excited about a seventh book by her, and then seeing it play out in real life, when I would tell people about it.

Isaac: I think that means you’re onto something.

137

Megan: Yeah, it was really fascinating.

And then I took a writing course at Gotham, and my teacher really liked it, so that helped a lot. And now here I am, one-hundred-and-ten-thousand words in.

been reading, up until recently, for the last six months.

Isaac: When do you think it will be out?

Megan: Yeah. Because I realized that I don’t know anything about what it’s like to have been in a war. And a lot of the novel is going to be about fighting in a war.

Megan: What, published?

Isaac: Yes. Megan: I really hope in the next year. I really need to move on. At least within the next year, even if it hasn’t been published and I’m still sending it out to be published, it needs to at least be done in my head. As in, developmentally edited, and I’m just done with it, so that I can get into this other novel that I started writing.

Isaac: What can you tell us about Nathalie H. Jane?

Isaac: What’s that one again?

Megan: Do you mean, where am I in the process, or . . .

Megan: She’s good. I have nineteen chapters up, but I haven’t written anything new yet. Now I’m getting all of these e-mails from people, “You have to put the next one up!” And I’m thinking, okay already, I’m doing this for free.

Isaac: What’s the story?

Isaac: Do you write them back?

Megan: It’s first person, so it’s different.

And it’s just going to be one point of view. But basically, an Iraq war veteran who is down and out gets a job doing communications and PR for what she thought was the government of Bermuda, but it ended up being the government of Bermuda East, an island that she’s never heard of before, but she doesn’t have any choice. She needs to get out of town because of gambling debt, so she geos to Bermuda East, and she quickly realizes that there’s a lot more going on than she thought. So I binge read a bunch of war memoirs from war vets, and from soldiers. That’s pretty much what I’ve

Megan: Yeah, sometimes. But she has her own twitter account.

Megan: Bermuda East.

Isaac: And what’s going on there?

138

Isaac: And you were reading those after you had the idea for Bermuda East?

Megan: Do you mean my nom de plume?

Isaac: Yes, on WattPad. How’s she doing?

Isaac: How often does she tweet?

Megan: She tweets a lot. She tweets all of the stuff that I can’t tweet on the Megan Cossey account. She’s definitely my alter ego I guess.

Isaac: Nineteen chapters of which one?

Megan: “The Teacher.” So I guess I should finish it. I don’t even know if there’s an end. It just kind of goes on and on.

Isaac: What’s a good ending to you?

Megan: Maybe a satisfying one. Emotionally or plot wise. I remember I had to read all of this post-modern fiction when I was in college and I would think, this stuff sucks! There’s no ending! It just ends, and you don’t even know what happened. So with my novel, I know what an ending is with an novel, and so god-damnit, I’m going to have a satisfying ending.

Isaac: What’s on the flap copy of “The Teacher,” if it’s ever printed?

Alex: That’s good. Yeah, why torture each other?

Isaac: I’m sure that must be out there.

Megan: I know. I’m not going to tie all of the strings together, but there’s going to be an ending. We’re going to decide whether or not this is the seventh book, and whether it’s real or not.

You’re going to have an answer by the end.

Isaac: How many?

Isaac: Is it going to be an answer that’s . . . not really an answer?

Megan: Probably, yeah, of course.

Isaac: But on WattPad, a book without an ending, that’s what they want, right, just more and more.

Megan: Yeah, I don’t know that there’s an arc for the characters in there.

Isaac: Would you describe that as practice at all, or training?

Megan: Just fun. It’s good for my writing too. But it’s also fun because I write it, then I do one edit, and then I post it, and I get immediate satisfaction.

Isaac: What sort of edits do you make, copy?

Megan: Yeah, copy edits. It pretty much writes itself, once I sit down. It’s not hard, which is nice.

Megan: I think I have flap copy on it actually. Do you want me to read that?

Isaac: Only if you want to.

Megan: I want to figure out how to make money doing this stuff though, if people had to subscribe, for example.

Megan: I’m all about monetizing, as much as possible. Alright, let’s see. Oh my god, I have so many unread messages.

Megan: Four-hundred-and-thirty-four.

Isaac: Four-hundred-and-thirty-four!?

When was the last time you checked?

Megan: Last week. Yeah, oops. Okay, let’s see. “After a grueling year of teaching bored farm kids in middle-of-nowhere Texas, a high school teacher looks forward to the silence and the loneliness of her summer break. But first she needs to get her air-conditioner fixed . . . and boy does she ever get it fixed.”

Isaac: Does she?

Megan: She gets it fixed! I wrote, “This is an erotic romance. Please be over eighteen to read and know that all characters are over eighteen as well.”

Isaac: It’s good to have that in there.

Megan: Yeah, although I totally have people who are not eighteen in there. Which kind of sucks, because then I end up censoring myself a little. I don’t know why, because when I listen to teenagers on the subway . . . they know more than I do.

139

Isaac: Yeah. It’s a bit awkward, because they know that they’re talking loud enough that you can hear them.

Isaac: Out of the one-hundred-andfifty students, do you keep up with anyone?

Megan: And then Leo is there, and I’m thinking, how much of this is he hearing?

And he’s pretty oblivious, thankfully, but sometimes I know, he has to be hearing this, he has to be hearing some of this.

Who knows.

Megan: Yeah! I had my twentieth high school reunion a few years ago, and then because of Facebook, I’m in touch with a ton of people now. It’s been interesting. It’s been nice. Before that I was only in touch with a few close friends who I grew up with. I’m in touch with a lot of people now.

It’s fun to keep tabs on people who you thought you’d never see again.

It’s been good, because I’ve gotten to know people in a way that I’ve never known them before, or people who I lost touch with while in high school, because of social groups or whatever.

It’s just nice to reconnect with them, and learn about their families and what they’re up to.

Isaac: What was your high school mascot in Crystal River, Florida?

Megan: The Pirates!

Isaac: What were the colors?

Megan: Blue and gold.

Isaac: How many students?

Megan: I think our graduating class was one-fifty.

Isaac: One-hundred-and-fifty students?

Megan: Why, is that a lot or a little?

Isaac: Very few.

Isaac: Who were your rivals?

Megan: Our rivals were Lecanto High school, the Panthers, but we called them the Dirt Farmers.

Megan: No, I don’t like to go back. I don’t like to look back.

Isaac: But you have been back, right, your parents live there?

Megan: Yeah, I go back twice a year.

Isaac: Why?

Isaac: So what do you do?

Megan: Because they made Crystal River look like a metropolis. Lecanto was literally a post office.

Megan: I don’t know. What does anyone do when they go home? There’s not much to do. It’s a very small place.

Well, Leo is older now, so I take him swimming. I think he swam with the manatees once. I think when he’s ten I can take him diving. It’s a big diving area, around where I grew up, so I’d like to get him certified.

Isaac: You said Dirt Farmers?

Megan: Yeah, it’s what we called them.

And then Citrus High School . . . I can’t remember what they were. I wasn’t that into sports.

140

Isaac: Have you gone back to campus at all, and done donuts in the parking lot?

Isaac: What do you think drew you to New York, and what’s keeping you here?

Megan: It’s the best city in the world. I don’t know. I can’t say I can’t imagine living anywhere else, because as I get older, I think about where I’m going to retire. And I love the Smoky Mountains. I always say, unless you’re from New York originally, and you have family here, you have to love New York more than you hate it, to stay here.

Because there’s so much about it that’s not easy, or that’s really annoying. It’s very intense. The negative aspects are in your face in a very intense way. And if that takes over the positive parts you have to leave, because you’re just going to be miserable.

Alex: It’s totally doable.

Megan: Yeah, I have a friend who is an architect. There’s so many people who could help me do it. So I’d rather just do that. Because I love the windows. I just love New York I guess. If I was going to leave New York, I would go to the country. I wouldn’t go to a suburb. My whole thing is, if I’m not going to live in New York, then I want to go someplace where I can have a horse, and where it’s not cold.

Alex: Or get super bitter.

Megan: Yeah, so I’m just really thankful that I’m in a place that ––– well, when my parents visit, they’re not impressed by this place at all. I know they think that I’ve made a terrible decision, but I still think that it’s an amazing apartment.

Alex: It is an amazing apartment, objectively.

Megan: New Yorkers get it! And they’re like, “Oh my god, this is amazing,” which is nice, but my parents are coming next weekend, and it’s hard to see it through their eyes, especially my father’s. They’ll say that Leo really needs his own room. And he will need his own room, or I’ll need him to have his own room. I also refuse to pay more than two grand per month for an apartment in the Bronx. So it might be that I turn this into a two bedroom.

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

148

149

THE WEAK CALLIGRAPHY OF SONGBIRDS’ CAGES. Jamie O’Hara Laurens

Starved for trees they find the empty lot and climb the fence. No—

They peer through the links, intent, and pour their bodies through, land at eye level with hay in the shape of a bell— skyscrapers, eschalons of grasses striving for height.

Here they are floricultured, pioneered-they lurk over nests of spiders & liken to fire & folktalk.

Shoppingcart wheels rattle on by.

They sing O, and Over the day.

Your hair is the color of the wheat fields, little one.

This is the finite garden.

Three walls and one fence— finite. But a garden.

A burlesque monarch surveys street awnings.

A cage becomes calligraphy.

Hope is a guitar string unrolled on the sidewalk.

Fear nothing, even undoing.

Undo us, undo, O garden.

Unstrung us, undone.

150

THE RETURN OF MARINE LIFE TO THE GOWANUS CANAL. Jamie O’Hara Laurens

In a lukewarm plume of clear two overgrown fish find each other & gape. Courage. And three, two, one: there goes the hook from inside each mouth.

No current just blunt fin piercing the surface.

This depth, and this you can only access if something has cut into you has pulled you open so that some inward facet becomes water, another other hook & blade & you concede.

Breathe in the ecological transgressions like Tonglen.

These fish are plump-cheeked & won’t last.

One turns to flash a silver side. Sound of gulls. Sound of soundlessness. Beneath the muck there is muteness, sweetsilence. Sound of skip, beat and fearless. Sound of sluicing surface.

Sound inside sound.

Courage: three, two one: a form of purity. & We are all damp from it, swimming. Damp from swimming scared. The water hides our sweat, a secret.

Bodies pulled by courage through the transgressions: the superfund waters the revisionisms the debts we pay.

Courage.

And three, two, one: face it. Flash a silver side.

151

152

Jamie O’Hara Laurens breaks the lines of her poems with intention. She likes digging into poems that challenge her, as well as any work that shines a light on the musical quality of poetry.

When we talked with her while sitting on a sectional sofa in the living room of her place in Park Slope, she offered that “the common denominator, the ultimate unit of which the poem is composed, is the line.”

Last August, Ping-Pong Press chose her book, Medaeum, as the winner of its 2016 poetry competition. And at one point during the afternoon we spent with O’Hara Laurens, Emily asked her how she came up with the idea for the book. “If you re-read Medea as if it were an episode of Desperate Housewives, it’s a total modern story,” she said. “If the murder is just metaphor, then it’s just a story of anger and range.”

She has an eye for detail and precision, which is easy to see when you read her poetry, and easy to appreciate when you glance around her apartment. There’s an order to the place, which must help whenever she decides to sink into the emotional and mental space that allows her to create. But even with her detail-focused mind, she’s always been comfortable with the nuances and ambiguities that the study of poetry invites.

O’Hara Laurens and her son, Theo, speak French, and she teaches English at a Lycée Français de New York, a bilingual French school located on the Upper East Side, which has students from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade. As part of her MFA at New England College, she studied translation, which she credits for allowing her to become more aware of how the English language is evolving.

Whether making meaning out of a wonderfully-dense and intricate line of poetry; or determining the precise angles at which three brownies should be placed upon a small circular plate that she’s set out for her guests, she’s paying attention to the details, and enjoying every bit of that within the line, or within the moment, which cannot be explained.

PHOTOGRAPHY: EMILY FISHMAN - 146-173 153

–––––––––––––––

Emily: He’s very pretty.

translation makes us uncomfortable or comfortable. For instance if you look at Elliot and at Pound, they were some of the first people to practice foreignizing translations: I’m going to bring this language to you, either translated in a way that puts more pressure on the reader than it does on the text, or in some cases . . . a lot of Elliot epigraphs were in Greek or Latin, and where he would just say to the reader -–– you do the work, look it up. And then Pound even more so, where he would just drop a Chinese character in the middle of a poem as if to say, suffer - you figure it out.

Isaac: Rhyme the cat.

Isaac: You had mentioned that.

Emily: So I heard you spent some time in France.

Jamie: Yeah, he would be suggesting, how is this not a legitimate experience of language, just because it’s foreign to you? Compared with domesticating translation, or even more loosely, the artistic interpretation of translation, this idea that the translator needs to be a practitioner, him or herself, because no matter how faithful you try to be to the original, it’s always coming through your mind, and what you’re producing will always be yours. You can’t take your hands off of it; you’re not a neutral party. And though I don’t practice must translation, I did do a little bit of Malena’s work into French. And I’ve done a little bit of interpreting for people and for my community, which is a really fun exercise.

[Emily pulls out a seat at the dining room table. Rhyme the cat is seated in the chair.]

––––––––––––––– Emily: Oh, who is this?

Jamie: Surprise!

Emily: Is he friendly?

Jamie: Yes. That’s Rhyme. Theo named him.

Jamie: I spent my senior year abroad, including France. I speak French and some Spanish.

Isaac: Didn’t you mention that you studied translation as a part of your MFA? Jamie: Yes. Isaac: And where was that again?

Jamie: New England College. And what drew me there was that the faculty was largely international. Ilya Kaminsky who is Russian, Eleni Sikelianos, Malena Mörling who is a translator for Tomas Transtömer, and Brian Henry, who translates Tomas Salamun. Between Slovenian, Swedish, Russian, French, and Spanish, there was cohort of people who were intimately connected with languages around the world, and that was important to me. Translation is a kind of service; a handshake with the world. I focused one semester on different degrees to which 154

Emily: It sounds very challenging.

Jamie: It is and it isn’t. Your brain goes into a different mode when you’re doing interpretations.

Emily: You kind of dial into it?

Jamie: It’s sort of a gymnastic exercise for sure. Page translating is demanding, it requires a sustained commitment, and a sustained focus, and I don’t always have the patience for it. It is, however, one of the best things that you can do to get unstuck. And you don’t have to know a language intimately in order to be a good translator into your arrival language. I think we’re going to start to see more translanguaging in writing, and in poetry in the future, as multilingualism starts to become more of the norm.

Isaac: Translanguaging is when you see the two languages side-by-side?

Jamie: Yes. It allows for active transitions and alternation between languages. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz will start a sentence in English and finish it in Spanish. I think that’s going to become more of the norm. It almost feels like languages used to be buildings, and now they’re starting to turn into rivers.

Isaac: I’m going to have to hear more about that. How so?

Jamie: When I think about the English language establishment that I grew up in, I see it as this multi-story brick and mortar structure, where there’s a notion of what belongs and what doesn’t, and what’s proper and what isn’t, and what’s acceptable and what’s valued, and what the agreed-upon notion of excellence is. And being more confronted with, and reckoning with the multiple cultures and the multiple languages that we co-inhabit and that we live side-byside with, having that come into our literature, has forced us to open the doors and the windows and to start

to see things a little bit differently, and now there’s more fluidity than there was before.

Isaac: I hear that. And then there’s thing about, you can only step into the same river once, is that right?

Jamie: Oh yes, exactly! I’ve always been fascinated by the notions of English, how it is involving.

Isaac: You mentioned that you lived out west for a while, right?

Jamie: Yes. Isaac: Can you take me through the chronology again?

Jamie: I chose education as a vocation.

I started teaching at an arts academy in the mountains in California, Idlyllwild Arts Academy, when I was twenty-two.

I moved to Los Angeles because my partner at the time was involved in the film industry, and we really had to choose New York or L.A. I grew up in the Rockies, so I was sort of allergic to L.A., I had an aversion to it.

Isaac: An aversion to cities, or to Los Angeles in particular?

Jamie: Cities, but Los Angeles in particular.

Isaac: How so?

Jamie: It’s known as being polluted and superficial and it’s one of the hungriest places in terms of ambition, but it’s not the liveliest in terms of intellectual activity.

Isaac: This is just what it’s known as . . .

Jamie: Yeah. We spent six years there, and I taught there was well. But it was really

155

exciting to be living downtown during the great re-imagining of downtown L.A. I was there when that happened, and we saw it change around us.

but coming down it’s still very much a work in progress, and Second Avenue just doesn’t feel safe with a child. I have a friend who does it every day though.

Isaac: I don’t know much about that.

Isaac: So when you first moved to Brooklyn, were you in Park Slope?

Jamie: Most of downtown L.A. used to be downtrodden, there were a couple of important spots, like the Flower Market that remained vibrant, but a lot of it was rundown. A lot of factories were just abandoned, and then developers started to buy up factories and to change them into apartment buildings. We lived in a hat factory. We met with a really wonderful diverse circle of friends who were from all over the world: Canadian and Filipino painters, Tanzanian filmmakers. We all gathered around the same table. Some of my favorite memories come from being there. L.A. is a great place to go when you’ve done what you’ve needed to do and you’re ready to take a break. But you don’t feel time pass. And I knew there were things that I wanted and needed to do, in terms of my education and career, and we knew that that this would be a better place to do it. I knew we would find more of a bridge to our values in New York, and in Brooklyn specifically.

So this was a very intentional move. I also cut my carbon footprint down to one fourth of what it was from when I lived in L.A., where I had a car ––– just switching to bicycling, and on foot, and with smaller spaces.

Isaac: I can’t remember, did you say you biked to the Upper East Side every day?

Jamie: Oh, wouldn’t that be cool? We have this Dutch tandem. We rode that around for three years. We love that thing, but I only took it uptown once. Just because the bike paths going up are great, 156

Jamie: When we first moved to Brooklyn we were in Brooklyn Heights. In a converted insurance building. I must have a thing for converted spaces. In New York, finding a way to be outside has always been a challenge. It was a long-term dream as I was living in New York to move into a garden level apartment and to be able to grow some things. It’s been really nice to be able to do that.

Isaac: Some people don’t prefer them because they don’t like to be so close to the street level.

Jamie: I can understand that, but there are ways to work with that. We keep the front windows closed and the back always wide open, and then it’s also really quiet. And then you can grow your own kale.

Isaac: Where did your relationship with poetry begin, do you remember?

Jamie: There’s a musical ear in my family. I think that’s really where it started.

When I look through the children’s books that I kept from my childhood, the ones that I love the most were in meter and rhyme. There was an incantation and a singsonginess. I owe a lot of it to both of my parents. My father taught literature for a while when I was little. My mom was a librarian, and she was an anglophile, and she has an ear for accents, and so there was always wordplay. And there was always access

157

158

to a wide-variety of books. When I was in middle school, I started to play with poetry a little bit. It started with weepy odes to childhood objects.

Isaac: You started with the odes?

Jamie: Yeah, and poems about being deeply concerned about the future for marine animals –– very sentimental, surely, but I always believed that when we are teenagers we become these cruel editors of our childhood selves who were actually on to something. At one point one of my teachers picked up a piece of mine, and said that she’d put it in a contest. And I was like, “Oh, okay, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Isaac: Yeah, whatever.

Jamie: It mystified me because I didn’t know what the poem was about. It was an object poem. And it was about a candle. And I thought it was about a candle because I like candles, and because I like to watch candles, but she, of course, more than I, knew that it was a self-portrait. And so she submitted it to a contest and it won something and a real radio person with a real voice read it on the radio. And I remember being at a friend’s house . . . and hearing my own words read by somebody else’s voice . . . when I try to piece that feeling together, it wasn’t vanity, it was just a surprise. And I think it was more than anything, this notion that language that you can create can have a life beyond your four walls, or beyond you. It was that it was in someone’s house, and in someone else’s hand’s, and in someone else’s voice. And then later, things between poetry and me were really slow . . . I have really major crushes for

different poets, I’ll read one and I’ll be think, wow! And of course, when I was in high school it was Elliot, and I would think, “Oh my god!” And I wouldn’t always necessarily know how to say why, because I was too young and didn’t have the maturity, but I knew that something in it worked, and that there was a beauty and an alchemy to it. I was always comfortable with ambiguity, and nuance, and with grey space. I enjoy the ways in which language can confound you. And then, when I was in college at Carnegie Melon, I didn’t study poetry, but I did start collecting poetry books. I would think, I’m really busy doing all of this other stuff, but there’s only one book like this. And so I started to amass a collection. I was going to write fiction. And I wrote a lot of really bad fiction for about five years, and then people kept saying things like, “I’m confused by this story, but it’s really descriptive.”

Isaac: It’s like, “I’m giving you a hint,” right?

Jamie: Yeah, like, “Wow, your language is really poetic, but I don’t understand why your character is doing this.” And it was just that plotting out story is not for me. I love losing the forest for the trees, all the time. I want to look at the leaf, and I want to look at the pine needle.

Isaac: That’s a great analogy.

Jamie:. It took a while. I was really reluctant to come around to it.

Isaac: Where was college for you?

Jamie: I went to Carnegie Mellon. I loved that there was a conglomerate of specialists, individual satellite institutions, and colleges that work separately to form and train musicians, architects, and computer scientists, and writers. And I loved being

159

able to learn from people who are experts in their fields.

Emily: How did you get the ideal for Medaeum?

Jamie: I experimented with establishing a landscape before trying to populate it. As I did this I came across a sort of “mad woman in the attic” character who was in a different space, almost exiled. She was dangerous. She was threatening. And I knew that in this landscape, if she wanted to, she could set fire to all the fields, and burn the entire place down.

Emily: That’s darkness.

Jamie: It was scary. And I would write about her, and I would think, I don’t know who this character is, or what she wants. I was tinkering and struggling with a manuscript, when I read Medea, and I understood that the voice of the madwoman in the attic was Medea’s voice.

I needed to explore her story from the point of view of someone who is not murderous at all, but who has had to confront her reproductive rights, and relationship issues, and notions of success, and men and women using each other for success. If you re-read Medea as if it were an episode of Desperate Housewives, it’s a total modern story. If the murder is just metaphor, then it’s just a story of anger and range.

Emily: What are you working on now, or next?

Jamie: The next two projects, I guess you would call time travel and . . . a love story, but more so in terms of falling in love with an idea, or a mind, across time.

One of my great poetry loves is Hopkins, because of what he was able to do with language. He was so far ahead of his time.

160

I found a little collection of his notes.

He did a lot of soul-searching in his terrible sonnets, but nature has a very profound presence in a lot of his work as well, and I’m curious to see what we find when we look at his observations of nature ––– if there’s evidence of the inner-torment that he lived, or if he felt more beauty or harmony from what was around him. I’m curious about his relationship with landscape.

The other project relates to my adopted grandfather, André Devaux, a philosopher who studied Simone Weil, a philosopher and a Marxist, who was very sympathetic to the labor cause, and impersonated a man in order to participate in different social movements. Later in her life, she became kind of a mystic. André established a society around the study of her work.

He left behind two whole rooms filled, floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall, with bookshelves of files, notes, papers he’s written, things that he’s studied, and articles that he’s clipped. My aunt just found one that’s called “Notules” – little private notes he wrote to himself.

I’ll go over to Paris to pick that up. I’m going to let his voice through, and see what happens.

Emily: That’s so cool. It’s just magical to have access to that sort of depth to things that would have been nearly impossible to extract from somebody otherwise.

Jamie: Yes, that’s true. He performed propriety a lot. I tried interviewing him a few times, and I ended up hiding the mic. He was a student of Gaston Bachelard, who wrote The Psychoanalysis of Fire and the Poetics of Space.

Bachelard bridges the gap between philosophy, non-fiction, architecture,

design, and poetry, and André was a student of his, and I wanted to ask him about that, but I knew that if he saw that I was recording, that he would turn on the ceremonial professorial voice.

He taught at the Sorbonne University, and he’s someone who had a very established public life, but who probably hid a lot of the beauty and the wisdom he knew, out of modesty.

for different purposes. I was considering how to make the study of the line visually palpable, and so I thought, well, if I look for lines in space, visually, and then write about lines in text, then that could be a way to merge the two. So it’s an assembly line of lines.

Isaac: And you’re working on those two at the same time?

Jamie: No. I consider my poetry practice to be more of a private one . . . and so I shield some of my poetry from the public eye a little bit.

Jamie: I’ll work on those two through the winter.

Emily: I’m intrigued.

Jamie: Well, okay. I’ll keep hacking away.

––––––––––––––– [We pause, green tea.]

––––––––––––––– Isaac: So your Instagram handle is Lineassemblie, how did you come up with the name?

Jamie: The common denominator, the ultimate unit of which the poem is composed, is the line. Poet and scholar Carol Frost always says that each line should have its own weight and value, and its own construction; be intentionally composed, so that it can stand by itself. And so if a line in poetry is a unit of measurement for poems, and a unit by which you can measure the quality of a poem in some cases, then how do you extrapolate that into the world of visual communication, through a medium like Instagram, which speaks more to people who I think consider their practice to be an artistic practice, than other platforms, which are more so

Isaac: Did do you ever think about “Jamie O’Hara Laurens” as an Instagram handle?

Isaac: That makes sense. I suppose it’s a new question. Ten years ago there wasn’t a question of, “What’s your Instagram handle supposed to be as a poet?”

Jamie: It brings up all kinds of questions about representation versus substance, which is really of concern as we move forward. I think the speed at which we read means that poetry is due for a renaissance, because it’s a short form. It’s a meaningful form. It gives us an opportunity to pause and into have a window into a moment, or be with a moment, or be with an image, or with a feeling or thought, and let it kind of bloom in front of us, and take a break from everything else, and sort of be, instead of doing all the time. But we’re also moving at such a speed that I think the fact of presence is more important than the presence itself, or the quality of the presence, the idea being that there are these rules around how present you’re supposed to be. I’ve seen places where the temptation to dress the digital windows is high, and so I think it could be a slippery slope. But the thing is, with text, it’s always going to be about the text.

161

162

Isaac: How so?

Jamie: Your voice on the page can only stand for itself. It has to hold up. That’s something that’s incredible about the poetry community, that it’s not about who you know, or I’ll introduce you to so and so ––– it’s more like, well, does your work hold water, or does it not?

Does it draw the reader into the page, or does it not? And it has to have its own life and worth and value. And I guess in that way, I think we can still have faith in language to maintain its integrity, even if it’s moving faster and faster.

Isaac: How do you know when one of your poems is ready to go?

Jamie: I think a polished poem is an answer to a question.

Isaac: Does the poem that’s an answer to a question also contain a question?

Jamie: Yes, of course. That’s a great technique, to incorporate questions into your poetry. It’s a great way to get your reader involved, and to also bring other dimensions in. But it’s a reflection that’s . . . even if it’s not final, it has had an opportunity to ripen and mature. And that’s had its moment, and has passed through your hands, and you’ve been able to make it into something.

Isaac: So how do you sink into a poem?

Do you start with a question?

Jamie: I guess I have three main ways in. One is more of an emotional space, where there’s something that’s a question that can only be answered by writing about it. I’d say that it’s more like an emotional enigma that puzzles one. For instance, how do we go about

our day-to-day lives and continue to have and share a sense of joy, celebration and festivity when the airport is being guarded by military, and all of the monuments are being guarded by military personnel who are armed to the teeth? How do you continue being joyful and spontaneous and fearless when the atmosphere is lockdown and fearful? So the poem becomes the exploration of that question.

Isaac: Okay, so there’s three ways, right?

The first is the emotional space.

Jamie: Yes, so one is an emotional enigma. It could also just be what happened, or what is going on, or why do I feel this way, or what do I feel. But that doesn’t happen very often, so the other one is a bit more like a patchwork process, where I work with lines, and I often work with lines as a basic unit, kind of as if they’re Jenga blocks. I’ll have lines that start to stack up, and then overtime there’s a fragment that comes from here or there, or an image that comes from here or there, or there’s a line that’s inspired by another poet, and then little by little, when I have a few months of lines, I’ll go back through, and start to quilt them together.

Isaac: Months of lines?

James: Yes. I’ll go through and I’ll find threads and themes that work well together, lines that look like they’d be friendly neighbors, and I’ll piece them together.

I guess a third way would be a song. I love to play with language and sound. I love how Alice Notley describes how she wakes up from a dream hearing strings of music and voice. That often happens to me, I’ll wake up to a sound of music that’s not a part of the outside world.

And often throughout the day, whatever is said, or spoken, or thought, there will 163

be lots of vestiges of it that will just rattle around in my head. Language is constantly present. And so I enjoy just riffing, and seeing where the sound goes, and how it evolves. Another way would be story, narrative arc. There’s something about the concept album that I find very alluring.

Isaac: Forgive me, what do you mean by concept album?

Jamie: From start to finish you have an arc that binds all of the pieces together.

Some poets think it’s dangerous because you risk the integrity of the individual pieces for the sake of the overarching concept, but I also think we crave narrative, we crave storyline. I find it satisfying to follow someone’s breadcrumbs throughout a collection of work. And so I can’t force them to be, but I enjoy working with them when they happen.

Isaac: What do you make of a poem that incorporates all of those ways of sinking into a poem? Are there any poems that come to mind, or anything that you’ve written?

Jamie: I think a lot of the collective work in Medaeum. I’d say that the book was a combination of those techniques. I I wouldn’t say that there’s one particular poem that uses each of those techniques, because then it would just become a monster. It would be six pages long, and nobody would take it. And they definitely come out in different tones, and in different lengths. It’s always interesting too how sometimes a piece will come out and it’s sort of sprawling, and it has to really be trimmed. And then there are others that come out and they’re so dense, that I have to go back in and almost tease a confession out of them. I have to extrapolate from them, and pull 164

more from them. It can be hard to see clearly which is which until you’ve had some time, and some distance. Another person I trained with Ilya Kaminsky, loves to sing his poetry. He says he’s intentionally developing a reputation for being slow in composition, because taking his time to compose is really important to him. To create something, and then come back, to create, and then come back. There’s a lot to be said for taking time with things.

Isaac: Definitely, yes. Does Rhyme ever help you with your poetry?

Jamie: No, not at all. He’ll jump up on my lap the second that he sees me on the computer, and he galumphs across the keyboard. He’s no nimble sprite, and so he’ll just take over the whole desk if he can.

Isaac: “Looking into the shadows sometimes requires not a shield, but a telescope,” which is from a Lineassemblie Instagram post. We’re just supposed to sit within the ambiguity there, right? That’s the grey space.

Jamie: One of the artist that I admire the most is a great contemplative thinker: Chati Coronel. She’s based in the Philippines. She’s willing to bring anyone who is interested in the work along for the ride of her journey and contemplation of the meaning of all kinds of things: meditation, parenthood, the making of art. And I too, in many ways, am comfortable with being a publicly visible work in progress, as a role model to my son, and to my students. As a young writer, I shot myself in the foot a lot by trying to attain perfection. I became very performative in my work. It became more about the

165

sound of the thing, rather than the thing itself. And there wasn’t enough experience or substance there. And I think my intention with a thread like that is to just share what I’m thinking about, to share what’s on my mind. Robert Johnson does a lot of work on how Greek mythology is allegorical for the evolution of human psychology throughout our lives. Each myth can be an allegory for the journey into the shadow nature, mining the shadow, and owning what’s there.

we’re in a bit of lost generation. I’m an Xennial, but Millennials have the great work, but also the great opportunity, to redefine a partnership in the way that they intend it to be, or the way that it could be, in a post-structuralist world.

Where my generation . . . we were brought up on all of the John Hughes romantic comedies.

Isaac: It was pretty recently that I came across the term, Shadow Work.

Isaac: What was some of his work?

Jamie: It’s really important!

Isaac: But what is it? I sort of have an idea of how important it can be, and the importance of meditation, but if you were to ––– well, it’s probably not a good idea to sum-up shadow work, or to fit it into a box, but how would you define it?

Jamie: As a rookie myself, and a fellow explorer on this journey, I would say it means seeing clearly. It means ceasing the denial of, confronting, and ultimately embracing the unwanted side of your nature, or the side that you’ve been hiding from public view, in order to fully be who you are, to fully accept who you are, and to ultimately give yourself permission.

Isaac: So where does poetry factor in there, for you?

Jamie: Well, this persona who came into my life last year was . . . I don’t know what it was. But maybe it was a muse, in the way that Elizabeth Gilbert describes something coming along and speaking to you that doesn’t seem to be of you, but it was also about confronting and recognizing the fraughtness and the difficulty of living the female archetype today. How 166

Isaac: Remind us, who is John Hughes?

Jamie: Case in point!

Jamie: Breakfast Club. Sixteen Candles.

Isaac: Okay, those are great films.

Jamie: Those people didn’t all get married and have 2.3 children, but certainly the heteronormative stories linger in the distance in all of those films, right? And so when you walk into that you recognize how recent true gender equality is, as real work in the domestic experience, not just as a concept, and not just in the workplace. And it wasn’t until I became a mother that I could look back, and see how the generations before me had struggled with the same issues of self-identification and of choice that I was facing, between which side of my nature I allowed to see the light of day, and to take up the majority of my time and energy, because I don’t have time for all of the ones that society has set out for me to fulfill. And something that’s more in discussion now is that it’s really challenging, if not impossible, to do, be, and have it all.

It’s not impossible, but it can become very conflictual if your co-conspirators, if the people who you’re on your life journey with have a different view of what your role is than you.

Isaac: So maybe coming across that persona helped you identify what’s authentic, and what’s inauthentic within you, would that be accurate?

Jamie: I think so. One of the theories that I was playing around with in graduate school was the idea that, while there are poets of all genders who see their lineage as being traced back to masters and voices of all kinds, in sort of a genderless way ––– for instance, you could say “I’ve inherited the voice and the legacy of Berryman, and H.D. and Ezra Pound, and going back and back and back, Christina Rossetti, etc…”

One thing that started to emerge, particularly when I was focusing on women writers who are tackling the male dominated cannon, by either re-writing historical works, or re-imagining them, was that I do believe there is a distinct feminine poetry canonical lineage that can be looked at separately from the male canonical lineage. You can also decide not to look at gender, but if you look at it, you can see it. And one of the things that happens is that in a time like the Nineteenth Century, there are a lot of women writing in persona. A lot.

And a lot more than men. Whereas a male poet will re-create the description of something like Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” a female poet will embody one of those characters, and speak from the view of that character, as a way of masking a confession. It’s a way of describing a personal experience. In that way taking on a persona is a way of exploring something that you wouldn’t ever admit that you were actually thinking about. I found that to be particularly fascinating. I didn’t set out to write in a persona. Medaeum was more of an exploration of what she would say

if she were interviewed now. And so I found that in the female poetic lineage there was a lot of exploration of persona as a way of talking about things that were unsavory, or too sexy, or too scandalous to see, or to say, or to be attributed to the letter “I.” And even the moderns, for instance, H.D., was ambitious. She wanted to recreate the spiritual tradition of her culture, which had been raised by World War I. And her ambition was, well, we need to start over. That’s what Trilogy was about. It’s about, how do we go back to the Greeks, and how do we go back to the ancient religions in order to rebuild our society anew? The notion of more confessional poetry is still relatively new.

Isaac: Poetry is fascinating because it is more accessible because it’s only a few lines, and it’s usually written with the idea in mind that you can read an entire poem in one sitting very easily, but if you really start looking into it and thinking about it, and considering where it’s coming from and what it’s trying to do ––– if it’s good, then there will just be so much buried within it that you can suss out. And then if you want, you can start asking questions about the actual poet who is behind the poems, then it gets even more interesting.

Jamie: Yes. That’s what I was going to say, then it gets really juicy. I always say that you have to respect the work of art as being separate from the biography of the artist, because it does stand on its own as a work of art. It deserves to be interpreted. We look at Pollack and we think, oh, he’s an alcoholic, that explains everything.

But you have to let it have its say, and to let it have its place.

Isaac: Do you have to let it stand on its own?

167

Jamie: I think you have to do both. Because then you learn so much from being nosy about someone’s experience in life.

And you can piece together clues about their work, but also about their life, and the things that they may have left out of their work.

Isaac: As you were talking about the canonical lineage of poetry, I was thinking about the idea that there are things that we don’t necessarily align ourselves with, but we’re just born and already aligned with, and we can’t necessarily, no matter what, we can’t change that because we can’t change the course of history that was proceeding before we were born.

And I think actually spending time with one’s shadow, and spending time with poetry, helps you get to a place of acceptance, and once you get to the acceptance, you can actually start to feel.

Jamie: I think poetry has powerful healing properties in that way. I was just reading Robert Lowell’s “The Neoclassical Urn.” It’s ultimately a denunciation of his own privilege, and it comes from a really dark place, but the light of truth is the light of truth, no matter what form it comes in.

Isaac: It’s just so difficult to get into a poem, I guess it makes sense that the rewards would be as rich as they are, because you have to have a lot of patience.

Not just patience, but you also actually have to want to go there. And a lot of people just aren’t that interested.

Jamie: Yes. It can be a very private journey. It can be a moment of reckoning, or a way to be your own audience to your intuition, and with your history, and with your ghosts. Margaret Atwood has a great book about writing called Negotiating with the Dead. But I absolutely believe 168

that there’s so much value in listening deeply, and that it’s so hard to choose to do it. It takes so much discipline; to say, I’m going to isolate myself, I’m going to sit in this room, and not go on Instagram, or Etsy, or whatever, but I’m going wait for the truth to appear.

But I think when we’re younger and when we lack experience, is there a navel-gazing element to it? Of course there is, but it’s a practice, and I think it becomes essential as we go on.

Isaac: I think so. I think once you realize that it’s a way of being that can be accessed and felt, then at that point, I guess you can stop the practice, but you always know that it’s there, and if you’re not doing it then you’re aware of the fact that you’re sort of hiding from something.

Jamie: Yes. That’s so true.

Isaac: And that can only go on for so long, right?

Jamie: That’s so true. We can spin around and chase our tails, but once you drop back into the writing practice . . .

Isaac: Are you ever intimidated, or afraid of creating?

Jamie: Of dropping in? All the time. I think everybody has their ways of convincing themselves to practice. I once had a piano teacher who said that he would lure himself to the piano with a fresh pot of coffee, and a fresh pack of cigarettes, and that was the only way for him to convince himself to practice. And he was a great pianist.

Isaac: So what about you?

Jamie: What’s my ritual? I had a really good thing going for several years.

It was a pot of tea and a little bit of chocolate, a few chocolate chips or something, nothing too unreasonable, something that you could pick at that would last for a while. And recently I’m trying to do more on the fly and have less time specifically set aside for it. I write at very weird times. I literally keep a notebook under my pillow because a lot of ideas or lines come to me in the middle of the night. I’m open to suggestions, if you have any good tricks for keeping yourself chained to the computer.

Isaac: Is that the way you’ve always written, or is part of that connected with the rhythms of your schedule and life in the city, or maybe a better question would be: what’s it like for you, to be a poet in the city?

Jamie: It’s just the right balance between isolation and companionship.

This is the best place to be a writer. I feel so nourished and flanked by people who care about words, and who know that language counts, and who are interested in education, and in informing themselves, and that’s what I moved here for. I moved here for access to dialogue, and access to education, and access to literature. It’s incredibly enriching - overwhelming even, when you look at all of the events that are happening in a given week. But almost anywhere you go, you know that you’ll find something interesting to read. The most recent place where I did some unexpected reading was on a sidewalk in Prospect Heights, as the sidewalk offered up to me a couple pages from an introduction of a book of Herman Hesse’s work.

Isaac: The book was on the sidewalk?

Jamie: The page. It was a really good page! Someone with great taste. This old and rare book, someone had been schlepping it somewhere.

Isaac: Just one page?

Jamie: Yeah, this leaf of paper must have just fallen out of the book.

Isaac: Do you still have it?

Jamie: Yeah, I Instagramed it! It didn’t happen if it’s not on Instagram. But yes, as for New York, I’m here for the literature.

Isaac: But you mentioned isolation as well.

Jamie: Yes. You can choose to be alone if you want to be alone. You can choose to create if you want to create. I spend time upstate too, which is a way to recharge and get the silence back in my ears, because I feel like the noise can kind of rattle my brain around. I do need to take refuge and literally build silence back into myself. Then I can come back and have a lot more resilience with the noise. I need breaks, but I love it here.

169

170

171

172

173

174

175

176

177

NOSTRAND AVENUE Mervyn Taylor

1.

Nostrand runs all the way from one end of Brooklyn to the other, where going with a girl into the Windjammer, my friend met his wife coming out.

Round midnight the Kings County crew gets off at Clarkson, speaking of being so tired, of early retirement and which handsome doctor they’d like to take home, once the house in Toco’s finished, and the old bones hold up. They know every scar, every bullet that goes off in East New York.

Nobody knows why the young man who got on at Eastern Parkway cried and cried until he got off at Empire.

Mother dead, father dead, who dead?

2.

Now where Nostrand intersects with Fulton, down from where the crowd crossed between Terrace and Fightback on Saturday nights, the hipsters sit, eating roti and drinking lattes. Upstairs on Franklin, Evelyn’s mural has faded, the bald proprietor gone, his parts scattered all over the island. Preacher closed his barbershop, where once you could get anything, from suits to shoes, and went back to Marabella, moving into the old house his mother left him, declaring war on the squatters.

He hardly recognized Suzy, who vanished the night they danced in Frontrunners, and he ran out on the avenue, looking.

178

THINGS I CAN’T THROW AWAY Mervyn Taylor

Like the garlanded Buddha, a gift from a fortune-telling mom who came to class on parents’ night.

The key my daughter made with my initials her first stay at sleepaway camp.

The red shoes with elastic across the instep that pained like the dickens after a few hours’ wearing.

A diseased plant that refuses to die, or get well. It sits in a quarantined corner of the kitchen.

Cards from a mysterious ‘Fifi,’ signed with puckered lips, whose husband has since passed away.

A Jet centerfold, featuring an old girlfriend on board a yacht, somewhere in the Bahamas. And a simultaneous painting, ripped across a cloudy moon, done by four stoned artists around a table.

Twice a year, I declare these things dead, junk, clutter. I line them up by the door. Then they beg, and I put them back, the house squaring itself and sighing, my new loves finding space among the old.

179

180

181

Mervyn Taylor divides his time between Trinidad and Tobago and New York City. He received his BA from Howard University and his MFA from Columbia, and has taught poetry courses at the New School, as well as high school English in New York City public schools. He’s written six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Voices Carry (2017), and the first of which is titled An Island of His Own, which was published in 1992. The book’s title poem begins:

In his new kingdom he conquered the conditions of exile. He scaled the high cliffs to prolong the sunsets, he learned to relish the reward of a desolate day when he’d sit on the rocks and write to no one in particular that the gulls were unfaltering in the patterns of their flight . . .

Taylor moved into his apartment on Ocean Avenue in 1981, the summer after he graduated from Columbia. The apartment looks out on Prospect Park, as well as the point where Ocean Avenue and Parkside Avenue meet. It’s a sprawling intersection on the Southeast corner of the park, and features a pavilion with tables and chairs and umbrellas, which hosts Brooklynites who are coming and going toward and away from the Parkside Avenue stop along the Q train. From his apartment, Taylor has written many poems, including the three-hundred and sixty-two that appear in his six books.

When I asked him what he enjoys about teaching poetry, he spoke of the lines that poets cannot think or plan their way towards; but those that find them, in the middle of a thought, or in the middle of composing, when their minds are quiet, and their hearts are ready, and their egos are no longer standing in the way.

He laughs often. And when he welcomed me and Adrian into his place on the last Sunday of November, he was cooking pelau, a one-off cookup of rice, pigeon peas and meat. A radio was playing jazz from the 1950s. Whenever a new song would start, he’d ask us whether we knew who was singing. Usually we’d look at each other, and then look at Mervyn, who would be standing and smiling. Most often we didn’t know, and so we would ask Mervyn, “Who?” “That’s Sarah Vaughn!” he would say, and we would all laugh.

Next September will mark his Thirty-seventh year in the apartment. At one point in the ‘90s, he thought of moving into a place on Carlton Avenue, in Fort Greene, where he would have had a view of the Empire State Building. He thought it might help his work, to live in a neighborhood with more bookstores, and more poets 182

and writers. Ultimately he said he decided to stay on Ocean Avenue because the rent on Carlton would have been two-hundred-and-fifty dollars a month, which he thought was too steep at the time.

Maybe it was the two-hundred-and-fifty dollars per month that kept him away.

But maybe it was his intuition calling forth a line for his life in Brooklyn that he hadn’t thought of, or planned for. His building’s supers have changed; and he’s seen three come and go through the years. Old neighbors have moved out and new neighbors have moved in, but Taylor’s place on Ocean Avenue doesn’t just feel like a home.

If you spend any time there, you’ll feel welcome and comforted, and after just long enough, you’ll begin to see and feel, how the apartment is an island all of his own.

PHOTOGRAPHY: ADRIAN MOENS - 174-END.

183

Mervyn: I remember when I first moved in here. The heating situation was terrible.

And the woman that I took over the apartment from, she warned me. She said, “I’m getting too old for this.” And I was a lot younger then, and she said if you can stand the cold, you’ll be okay, because, she said, they don’t send up the heat like they should. I figured she was just saying that but winter came, and I’m telling you . . . that poem about “The Center of the World,” the last section says, “My guest and I sleeping in gloves,” and it’s the truth, it was that cold. There was no heat, and the bedroom was the worst, it was like an icebox in there. I have a pullout couch here in the living room, and my girlfriend and I were sleeping on the couch here, and some nights, man, we’d be padded up to the point of wearing gloves.

Isaac: So what did the landlord say about it?

Mervyn: The landlord didn’t say anything, man! The super was a Guyanese guy. He would make an excuse. He would say, “You know, man, I’ve been trying to turn it up for years.” He acted like he had no control over it. But it was really, really bad. And it was those days when a lot of things were bad. The hey-day of crack and stuff. And I came back from Trinidad and the lobby down there, it’s in a poem too. It’s a small lobby, there would be ten or twelve crack heads in that space.

Isaac: Twelve people?

Mervyn: Yeah, in that space, and you would open the door and the crack smoke would just hit you. And I’d come in, but they were very polite, they didn’t want trouble. And I’d come in, and they’d say, “Oh, good evening, sir. Let me help you 184

with that.” I’ve got my luggage, and I’d be stepping over bodies. It was rough.

Isaac: What year did you move in here?

Mervyn: Oh man . . . 1981. That was the year I graduated from Columbia. I used to live in, you know Vanderveer, down on Foster between Brooklyn Avenue and Nostrand. It’s a very popular spot. It’s a huge complex with ten or more blocks of apartments, not projects but just apartments. It became known as “Trin City” because there were so many Trinidadians living there at the time. You know who used to live there? That actor who is incredible . . .

Williams, Michael Williams! You have to know Michael Williams.

Isaac: What’s he in?

Mervyn: He’s in The Wire.

Isaac: I haven’t seen that yet.

Mervyn: He plays Omar! I mention him because they did a story on him recently and he is actually from “Trin City,” Vanderveer, where I used to live. And now he plays his parts in Hollywood, and they asked him why he always comes back here. He said, “Life for a black man in Hollywood ain’t no bowl of cherries, man.” He said, “Yeah, I got money, I got a house and all of that, but what kind of lifestyle do you think there is out in Hollywood?”

So he said from time to time to keep it real, he comes back here. And when he was getting the part in The Wire or Boardwalk Empire, he had to learn how to shoot. He’s a gangster, right?

He came right back to Vanderveer and the gangster boys who used to bully him welcomed him back, and those very same guys took him up on the

roof and showed him to handle a gun and look natural with it.

Isaac: I’ll have to check out The Wire then, and see if I can pick up on the “Trin City” influence in his character.

So you moved in in 1981? Do you remember the month?

Mervyn: It might have been September.

It could’ve been September, I think.

Isaac: Do you remember your impressions of the apartment when you first saw it?

Mervyn: Oh yeah. First of all, the fact that it’s right on the park! And the kitchen was beautiful. The kitchen started with three beautiful windows like I have in the living room here. But later they came to change the windows, and make it a little more modern. And I was upset because the old windows were like these country windows. And the guy who was changing the windows kept reassuring me that I would like the new windows just as well. And I said, “No, man.” And he said, “Well, I can’t leave it, you know what I’m saying?” So I liked the apartment. I didn’t like the warning that it was going to be cold.

Oh, and the other thing, some of my buddies they had a vegetarian place up on Flatbush, and one guy kept saying, “Listen man, you’re moving in over there? It’s rough. The neighborhood’s rough.” It was largely Hispanic at that time, and like I said, the drugs were rolling in at the time. It was interesting because of the Spanish element. Like across the street here, in front of the park, in the pavilion right there, they’d be playing that Spanish music all the time, which was beautiful. It was a nice mix. So my friend was saying, “You

know, man, I don’t know if you want to move around there. It’s kind of hectic.”

And for the first ten years I would say while I was here, it got increasingly worse.

So much so that I had a buddy who lived across the hall, and he said, “Are you going to stay here, man? I’m getting out.”

He was one of the few black guys here in the building. He moved someplace down on Atlantic Avenue, a nice apartment down there. He said, “You have to get out of here.” And I remember, I went to look for a place down in Fort Greene. It was a nice place, a two room place. And from the window you could look over and see Manhattan and see the Empire State Building. And I said, “Whoa, this is nice.”

And the woman there said I could have it.

I think the rent was something like twofifty.

Isaac: Two-hundred-and-fifty dollars?

Mervyn: Yeah! And I said, “Whoa, that’s too steep man.” That was too much money! I think in Vanderveer I was paying one-something. So I said, “Nah, I can’t do that.” But it’s interesting. I lived through that crazy period. I got mugged well, somebody tried to rob me one time.

I was coming from the bank and I came in, I was also doing my laundry the same day - the laundromat is right across the street there. So I got the clothes and I’m coming into the lobby and I’m checking my mail, and there’s a guy at the front door who looked like he was trying to get in and he looks okay, you know? I went and let him in. And this guy came in and he’s standing at the elevator, but I notice he’s not getting into the elevator. So I get on the elevator, and then he gets on. And we’re riding up, and when we get to my floor, I knew something was wrong, and as I went to push the cart off, he grabs me around my neck. So, first of all, I can’t

185

186

stay in the elevator with this dude. He could literally kill me. So I force my way through the door, and he comes out with me. I’m not a tough guy by any stretch - I’m tough in the poems, but . . . so, I guess your wits work, man - I weighed even less at that time - I dropped myself down. So I’m on the floor and he’s over me, grabbing at my pockets trying to get the money. Meanwhile, I’m kicking like crazy. He can’t get to me. But then he grabs me by my ankles and drags me down the first flight of stairs, down to the land. Meanwhile, I’m making noise like crazy.

pushing on the door.” So when he saw her come out, he turned around and tried to act like he was surprised no one was home or something. She kept looking at him and then he just grabbed her chain and ran down the stairs. I was working nights then, proofreading. I remember coming home and seeing from my kitchen window a kid, slumped on one of those park benches. He’s in the poem too.

Isaac: What time of day is it, night?

Mervyn: I thought about moving several times, but the rents started to go up and the neighborhood started to feel safer. And I also got used to the view and the park being right there.

It just felt good, you know? I said, “I ain’t going no place, man.” One of the reasons I kept thinking about moving was I kept thinking I had to live in a neighborhood where people were more literary-minded, like if I moved to Fort Greene or Park Slope where maybe there were more people who were into literature and theatre and stuff liked that, which might encourage your growth, right, as a writer. If you’re a writer you should be living in a neighborhood of writers where they have readings and stuff.

Mervyn: No, this is like morning, man.

It’s like eleven o’clock in the morning or something. And I’m screaming and then the doors start opening all over the place.

And in the meantime, I’m trying. I’m trying. And then I think when he heard people coming out, he just took off down the steps. So the only that happened is my glasses got messed up. He messed up my glasses. So that was like my main experience with the neighborhood being rough. But he wasn’t even a rough guy, he was just some guy who saw me in the street and followed me home. The other one is that someone tried to break in one night. I wasn’t here; I had stayed out some place. And in those days, they had the police lock, which is a metal pole that comes up from the floor to right under the lock. So it slides on, so if somebody pushes, the metal rod jams on the handle.

So they can open the door but only so much. All the apartments in the hood had a police lock. So when I came home in the morning, my neighbor - well, she didn’t even have to tell me; the door was a little ajar - but she told me, “When I came out of my apartment, he was there

Isaac: And you never thought about moving?

Isaac: Maybe.

Mervyn: Maybe, maybe. I found out that’s not necessarily true. People tell me, “No, man, some of those places you’re talking about, sometimes people are not all that friendly either, you know.” So you could move to a neighborhood and not know anybody.

But we can talk poetry. What do you

187

want to ask me?

Isaac: Well, I have a question about whether you prefer the bachata, which was in the poem “Marie, and Juan” or the jump up?

Mervyn: The jump up is really the musical of Carnival in Trinidad. When you go out in the street in the costume and you’re doing what they call “playing mas,” somebody would say, “You gonna jump up!” The whole idea of the street dance is called the jump up. That’s Trinidad.

The bachata is really Dominican music, from Santa Domingo. So the point of the poem, “Marie, and Juan,” is the opportunity that Brooklyn provides for two people to get together who in their own country back home probably don’t get along. You know the whole island of Hispaniola is divided into Haiti and Santa Domingo, right? With a border between them. And if you read Edwidge Danticat, you know that border. Matter of fact, there was a guy doing a presentation at the Miami Book Fair about that border.

Because if you remember Trujillo, who was the president of Santo Domingo in this days, he was responsible for the slaughter of a lot of Haitians. Haitians would cross the border between Haiti and Santa Domingo to work in the cane fields because there wasn’t enough work in Haiti. But Trujillo was a racist; he didn’t like the Haitians, and his whole thing was to exterminate them. And they slaughtered hundreds, thousands you could say, of these Haitians who came over. But there were also Santo Domingo people who were dark-skinned, so how do you tell the Haitian from the Dominican?

Isaac: How? 188

Mervyn: Well, it’s an interesting story.

There’s a word in Spanish that is difficult for Haitians to pronounce. It’s the Spanish word for celery, perejil. But to say it properly in Spanish, you have to roll your r’s. So, this guy, Trujillo, who was racist and also a person who went by class, because the poor people really didn’t know how to roll their r’s like that, it’s the upper class people who had this thing of rolling their r’s because some of them were very proper and very Spanish. There’s a poem by Rita Dove that you must read.

Rita Dove has a poem called “Perejil” which is about that and about the dictator boasting of how his mother, nobody could roll their r’s like his mother. But the challenge was also to these Haitians. You go up and tell these Haitians, “Say perejil.” And the ones who couldn’t roll their r’s, you would know they were Haitian, and they literally chopped them to death, man.

They killed these people. Earlier this month, there was a guy at the Miami Book Fair, he did this study - he wasn’t even born in the Dominican Republic, he was born on the Lower East Side - but he says as he was traveling back and forth all the time, he heard these stories, and he felt compelled to do a study on this thing. So right now they have all these things that they’re doing to solve that conflict between the Haitians and the Dominicans. He said once a year on the anniversary of the slaughter, people would go to the border and light candles and have a candlelight vigil for the people who died on that spot. Edwidge Danticat also has a book called The Farming of Bones, which is about a Haitian couple trying to escape from the persecution in the Dominican Republic.

Isaac: And you had read that before you wrote “Marie, and Juan?”

Mervyn: Yes. But “Marie, and Juan” is interesting, right? I was thinking about it because after I taught at the New School, I starting working in a public high school in Williamsburg on Grand Street. It’s called Grand Street Campus High School. And that has an interesting history too, right?

Because they say that Grand Street Campus High School is actually built on the plot of an old Indian burial site. So they claim that that’s why that school never had any peace. It takes up a whole block. When I went there, they had shut down the old Grand Street High School. There was so much violence there, they shut it down. And what did they do? They reopened, and rather than have a school that was so unmanageable, they put a new school on each floor, so each floor in the building had a different high school.

We were on the top floor - the High School of Enterprise, Business, and Technology.

Isaac: What year was that?

Mervyn: It might have been ‘93.

Somewhere around there. The second floor was the High School for Legal Studies. The third floor was Progress High School, and I believe the first floor may have just been the general reception area, and the auditorium, which was for everything and for everybody. So I got a job there. And that’s an interesting story too. I was teaching at the time at a school called the Young Adult Learning Academy, which was a school, actually, for drop-outs, young people between sixteen and twenty-two. And it was a

great school. It wasn’t a traditional high school, it was a school set up by the Department of Employment for these young people to get rehabilitated and get their GED and so on. But the guy who ran it was a guy named Peter Kleinbard who had an amazing vision, so he hired all these people from the arts. They were playwrights and poets; he even had some people who were left over from the hippy days, radicals, all about the revolution and so on. So quite a mix there. But then I think funds were running out, just like these programs always get cut.

And the Department of Employment was going to shut down the school. And my principal, having this great sense of vision, told me that I should apply to this school in Williamsburg, he says, “. . .

Because I don’t want you to be here and then they shut it down and then there’s nothing. I want you to go over there and get a job over there.” He said his plan was to come and open a school on the second floor. He says so when he gets that school set up, I’ll already be over there and I can just quit and move down to his school and we’ll be back in business. It never happened. He never got to open a school there, but that’s how I came to work over there. There was a Haitian woman working at the school. Her name wasn’t Marie, her name was Joyelle. In my book, there’s a poem about the conflict between the black kids and the Hispanic kids and how they would threaten each other and how there was kind of a war going on between them all the time. And it made me think because, as you know, Williamsburg is not just largely Hispanic but largely Dominican. And I thought about the conflict between these Haitians and these Dominicans. These kids, who if they grew up back home or if they knew their parents’ story that there was

189

a constant fight there . . . but here they are in America having to go to school together and having to live side by side.

And I thought about Brooklyn as a kind of melting pot, a place where people who normally wouldn’t be friends would end up dancing together. So the bachata is really the dance of the Dominicans.

That’s their dance. So there’s the bachata.

Isaac: Do you want to read the whole poem?

Mervyn: Yeah, so Juan then being Spanish, which is the hint that you’re supposed to get when you look at it. Juan is Spanish and Marie is French, she’s Haitian. So, “Marie, and Juan”: Marie, and Juan If he had remained in his country and you in yours, you’d never have danced like this He would never have crossed the border between the cane nor known your name.

Your memory of Trujillo would have focused your eyes on the sharp edge of a machete and your cries in patois would have brought your father running, the old Boukman record skipping on the gramophone. But here you are, dancing a bachata in Brooklyn.

The step is fast, the Zombie from the past trying to keep up.

-- -190

Mervyn: So you know the story about zombies, right? In Haiti they talk about voodoo and so on, right?

And a zombie would be like a living dead. Well you know it has become popular on TV now, but in Haiti this is not just some fictional thing.

In Haiti, the zombie is supposed to be a very real thing. The living dead, they call them. And you can become possessed. There’s a movie, it’s called The Serpent and the Rainbow, if you get a chance, see that. And there are things that people do to you. They talk about sprinkling stuff into your food that turns you into a lost soul. And it goes way back before Haiti. It goes back to Africa and stories like that.

There’s a book called Credo Mutwa: Writings of a Zulu Witch-Doctor.

It’s just incredible, and it’s incredible because the person who gave it to me was a woman named Fatisha. When I first got into the whole poetry thing in New York, we had a group called the Bud Jones Poets. And Bud Jones being as nondescript as possible. In other words, if the police asked you your name, and you told them “Bud Jones,” they’d think you were making it up. Like an anonymous kind of name. One of the members of our group was a guy named Wesley Brown, who writes novels and plays now, and Wesley Brown had a story at the time called “Would the Real Bud Jones Please Stand Up?” In other words, Bud Jones is just a kind of fictitious black man. And Wesley’s whole argument was always, “Who’s the brother on the corner?”

Isaac: Bud Jones wasn’t a real person?

Mervyn: Bud Jones wasn’t a real person.

Isaac: Okay. I recently watched Taxi Driver for the first time . . .

Mervyn: Okay.

Isaac: And in the credits at the end of the film, it reads “characters listed in alphabetical order,” and one of the characters is “Angry Black Man.” Mervyn: There you go! Very good, very good.

Isaac: So “Would the Real Bud Jones Please Stand Up.” Mervyn: Yeah. So Wesley had this anonymous kind of name. He says man, they keep referring to the brother on the corner, man, but they don’t look at black people individually. It’s a bad thing when you just lump people and say, “Yeah, those brothers in the hood, man,” and everybody is different.

Every single person is different in a way. So, we formed this poetry group and named it ‘Bud Jones.” And we were killing, man. Fatisha came from California. Let me tell you how we met Fatisha at the beginning. We went to a reading up in Harlem at a place called Liberty House Bookstore. All those businesses are closed down now. There was Liberty House Bookstore, and on Seventh Avenue there was Liberation Bookstore. So we went to this reading specifically to hear a woman named Carolyn Rodgers. She was real good, and she had a poem called “How I Got Ovah,” and it’s a poem about a dialogue between a mother and daughter, and the mother is telling the daughter: “You don’t believe in Jesus no more, do you?” and questioning the daughter’s sort of radicalism, and she’s telling her, “You have to believe in Jesus, man,

it’s important.” And so we went there, and Wes and I were anxious to hear Carolyn because we liked her poems and she was coming out of Chicago. And in those days the whole movement of black poetry, a lot of it had come out of Chicago, Gwendolyn Brooks and Don L. Lee, for instance. There was a whole Chicago school of poetry.

Isaac: Yes. Mervyn: And they were kind of on the front of this whole black culture movement. Here in New York was Amiri Baraka who was then Le Roi Jones back in the early days. He was leading that movement. But Chicago was important.

So anyway, we go up there to hear Rodgers, and it’s a Sunday afternoon, and it’s real nice man and the poetry and everything is slamming and we’re enjoying ourselves, and so after we heard Carolyn we got up and said, “Okay, that’s it.” And as we were about to leave, the woman who was hosting the event said, “Would you all please mind, just stick around a little bit, we have a poet here from California and she wants to read a few poems.” But we had already heard what we had wanted to hear. So we headed out the door. We didn’t want to hear anybody else, but as we were going out the door, she started reading . . . and that voice just followed us out the door, and I looked at Wes and said, “We can’t leave now, man.” We went right back in and sat down and that woman read for like half an hour, and nobody moved and nobody applauded. Everybody just . . . mouths hanging open, like oh my God. It reminded me of a story by William Melvin Kelley, who wrote a story about a blues club in the Village, and this young boy was up there with a guitar, trying out something and there was an older blues

191

192

193

man who would always come back. So after the boy played, they called the older guy up on stage and they said that old man started playing that blues guitar, and they said there was no applause, nothing – and that’s when it’s good. There’s no clapping or nothing. Everybody sits still. And this man just played. And it reminded me of that when Fatisha started reading those poems, man. She’s just great. So we head out after that. And I remember that she had a line in one of the poems, and we’d never heard it before. And she was questioning the black man all the time. She’s a powerful woman.

So she’s questioning the black man, and she says “What if you were bullet proof, would you make the revolution then?”

In other words, if they couldn’t kill you, would you make the revolution then? She was all about losing your fear. Don’t be afraid. What if you were bullet proof ?

All she’s saying is, suppose you could be bulletproof, would you stand up and fight then? If that’s all that’s keeping you from the struggle, would you stand and up and fight? But this is the story.

So I’m working on Seventeenth Street, off Seventh Avenue, at a company called Plenum Publishing. And it’s a real kind of informal company, and back in those days you didn’t have computers yet. But what they were publishing was strange.

They were publishing Russian math and science journals, translated into English. I remember Paul Robertson’s son, Paul Jr., was one of the translators.

Isaac: Okay.

Mervyn: So I get this job there, but before that, I was working in the Garment District. If you notice in Voices Carry, there are three poems from the Garment District.

194

Isaac: Those are great.

Mervyn: So I was working in the Garment District, and then the guy who ran the floor where I was working, Murray was his name, he was a short white guy, and I came to work late one morning and he said something to me like, “Just remember you wish you were like me.” I was twenty-seven years old, at the prime of my whatever, and this guy was like sixty-five, man, and telling me I wish I was like him. I said, “In what world do I wish I was like you, man, what are you talking about!?”

Isaac: Did you ask him that?

Mervyn: I didn’t ask him that because it was evident that he was in some other world. He thought because he was white that I would be willing to trade places with him! Sixty-five-yearold white man? I’m twenty-seven! I’m sharp, man, I got girls, man! So that statement from him made me realize I have to get another job. See, when I came from Howard I thought I was just going to go right into this writing world in New York. I thought I was going to just fall in and everything was going to be alright. Redbook Magazine had sent some people down to the campus to interview and all of that. And they told me, come up here, they were going to interview me, and they were going to reimburse me for my expenses, and most likely I would get a job. I went through a week of interviews at Redbook. And first of all they never gave me any expense money. They never called me back, nothing, nothing at all. So anyway, so after that, not getting that job, I was here and kind of jobless for a while, for months and I said, you know, this

195

isn’t going to work. So finally I looked at a newspaper and I found this job in the Garment District. I think they were paying something like ninety dollars a week. And I talked to my brother at that time and said, “What do you think?” And he said, “Well you have nothing right now, so ninety a week is pretty good.”

So I took the job, and it was okay. Town Talk Coat Company was the name of the place.

Isaac: What were you doing in the Garment District.

196

Mervyn: I was a charge clerk, and they had these big machines and reams of paper. And so as the guys would pull out the coats that were ordered, like thirty coats to go to Macy’s, fifty coats going to Saks or somewhere, I had to write up the bills, because we would be charging all day long. And the boss was a guy named Mr. Becker. Gangsters ran them places, and Mr. Becker would say, “Don’t worry about nobody, just keep charging, keep charging Merwin!” Merwin, he couldn’t say Mervyn. “You just keep charging, you keep charging.” So when that guy told me that I wish I was like him, I said, I’m not going back to that job. So I went home and I started to look in the paper and I saw this job at the publishing company, which I didn’t know what kind of business they were doing. I just saw publishing and I knew it had something to do with writing. So I went in and I had an interview and I got the job. So that’s how I came to work there. So at Plenum, they didn’t have any computers, but they had what they called a “typing pool” which is about twenty young women, I think there were a couple of guys too, in a big office, all typing on word processors.

And there was an art department, and the art department, what they would do is cut

and paste. In other words, somebody would type all the stuff up, we would proofread it, and then it would go over to the art department for them to set it in pages. You have to cut each line, strip it in ––– tedious and hard stuff.

Isaac: But there wasn’t an easier way to do it, right?

Mervyn: At that time, no. It was how it had to be done, right? So I’m working there, and so the reading with Fatisha was a Sunday, and then Tuesday morning I was in my little cubby there, proofreading and stuff, it was me and another guy, and I heard this voice come over the partition. And I say, I know that voice, man. And when I looked, it was Fatisha, who had come to apply for a job. And she was in there talking to our boss, and I made him a sign, to come over, and he did, and he said “What?” And I said, “You have to hire that woman, man!” I said, “I was at a reading . . .” And he was writing poetry too, my boss. And I said, “Man, she’s incredible, man.” He said, “Yeah, I looked at her resume, she looked pretty smart.” I said, “Hire her, man!

What are you talking about? Just hire her!” So he hired her.

Isaac: Nice.

Mervyn: And it was a great arrangement then because what we would do - well, I don’t know how great it was for the company, but at lunchtime, we would leave there, go down to a playground right down the street with a big stone turtle in the middle of the play area, and we would hang out at that stone turtle man, smoke a joint, and just be reading poems and talking poetry. We were

supposed to go back to work at one o’clock, man, but it would be like two or two-thirty, and we’d say, “Oh shit, we have to get back to work.” And the thing is, when the elevator opened up on the floor where we worked, the vice president – his name was Mark, I forget his last name, Mark something with a “Z.” His office was right opposite the elevator, and we would come off the elevator stoned man and we would be like, “Oh Jesus Christ.” So Fatisha, she was kind of a tough cookie, boy, she’d sit there, she type real fast and – so after she got her work out of the way she’d start typing poems like crazy, and the woman, Sylvia, who was in charge of our department, she came to me one day and she said, “Mervyn, I want you to have a talk with your friend because she can’t be sitting here typing poems all day, man. She has to do the work.” So I went to Fatisha and I said, “You know, they’re complaining about you not doing the work,” and she said, “Oh fuck ‘em,” and she just kept doing what she was doing. And they let her go eventually. She was a girl like that.

I’ll tell you more about her later.

Isaac: But that was where the Bud Jones group started?

Mervyn: Yeah.

Isaac: Just between you two, right?

Mervyn: Yeah, between us two, and me and Wesley. And I met Wesley actually at Sonia Sanchez’s workshop up at Countee Cullen Library. You know Sonia Sanchez?

Isaac: I don’t.

Mervyn: She’s very popular now, she has actually come more into her

own now more than ever. She’s a very interesting-looking woman with some dreads, she’s got gray dreads. They actually honored here at Medgar Evers this year. But she’s an amazing poet. And it’s funny how sometimes . . . there are great poets but more than great poets there are great poems. You may not like all the poets, but you can like a lot of poems. You can like individual poems. So when I first started getting into the New York City poetry scene, she had a poem that just stayed in your head. She was married to or together with a man named Etheridge Knight, and they had two kids.

And he had written a book called Poems from Prison. He had been locked up a lot, and was on drugs, Heroin and stuff. And she had a poem that she wrote to him with the longest title: “In Answer to Your Question, Would I Still Be Your Woman Even if You Went on Shit Again.” That’s the title. And the first line of the poem says, “And I say to you, no.” So Sonia had this workshop at Countee Cullen Library.

And she also had a poem called “Poem at Thirty,” and I guess she was writing about lost love and so on, and in the poem she says, “At thirty, I wrap myself in my brown blanket and refused to move,” something like that. So like a poem of depression or something, because of a breakup. So Wesley and I were in her workshop at Countee Cullen Library, which met on Tuesday nights, I think.

It was the biggest workshop you can imagine. It was more like just a gathering because I don’t know how much you could get out of that. There were like sixty people in this workshop.

Isaac: Wow. Mervyn: Because it was popular, right?

And a lot of people got married out of that workshop, guys met their future

197

198

199

wives there, and so on. So Wesley and I, we were doing that, but we agreed that there wasn’t much you could really get out of a workshop like that, it was too big.

Isaac: I’m sorry, did you mention how you met Wesley again, Wesley Brown?

200

Mervyn: Yes, Wesley Brown. How I met Wes was at Sonia Sanchez’s workshop at Countee Cullen Library. So the thing is, Wes and I agreed that it’s hard to get anything much out of a workshop like that. It’s just too big, although we enjoyed it. So at the time I was going to John Killens’ workshop at Columbia. He was doing a workshop in fiction, poetry, everything. So when I first got to New York from Howard, I called a friend and I said “I need to get into some kind of writing group or something,” and my friend said, “Call Nikki Giovanni. She’ll steer you right.” And Nikki was famous at the time, she’d already gotten her name out there. So I said, “How am I going to call Nikki Giovanni?” She said, “I’ll give you her number, just call her up, man.”

So I did, and Nikki said, “Go on up to Columbia. John Killens has a workshop, it’s open to people from the outside and so on,” and that’s what I did. And so I told Wesley about it too and Wesley and I started attending John Killens’ workshop.

So the group Bud Jones was made up of Fatisha, Wesley, myself, a young woman named Verano and then Fatisha brought in a young guy, she said, “Mervyn, I met this kid man he’s a boy wonder.” He was eighteen years old at the time, Dennis Reed. And he was amazing. He had a poem called “Definitions.” He said, “Definitions are found not given.” He says something about the way this room moves after a reefer. He was an amazing young guy. And we’re still friends to this day. He’s in Washington and sometimes

he’ll send me a few poems. He was out of poetry for a while, and he kind of lost that magical thing he had when he was eighteen. And I said, “You have to climb back into that boat, man.” So he’s been working and every now and then he’ll come up here and we’ll sit down and look over some stuff.

Isaac: Around what year, or years, was this happening?

Mervyn: You mean with Bud Jones?

Isaac: Yes. Mervyn: We started out in the seventies. That was when all the readings were going on and the whole black poetry scene was alive and strong and everything. But Fatisha – I’m jumping forward – Wesley ended up having to go to prison because he got drafted and he refused to go to Vietnam. That was during the time of the Vietnam War, and he said “No, I’m not going.” So they arrested him and then he went on trial and he said to the judge, which I guess was the wrong thing to say at that time, he said “I don’t believe in violence. I don’t believe in fighting.” And he said, “If I did, it wouldn’t be in some country like Vietnam. I’d be fighting in the black man’s army.” So the judge heard that and probably just went ballistic, and so they gave him four years at Lewisburg Penitentiary. So Bud Jones, it made us closer. We spent a lot of time doing readings, raising funds to buy him records and books and stuff like that.

Every month or so we’d take a trip up to Lewisburg, and check him out and so on. And we’re still good friends, and, well his story is a long story. But he’s written quite a few books. He’s got

a book called Tragic Magic. He’s got another called Darktown Strutters. He always was interested in the minstrel thing, with the black man. And he could give you the whole history.

Well, actually, Darktown Strutters is really the whole history of minstrels among blacks and how it came to be and how they survived and so on. And he eventually adopted a kid, a black kid, which turned out to be kind of a tough move because the kid turned out to be a handful. But he stuck with it, and he moved a lot, trying to find a comfortable place to raise this kid. And Wesley ended up buying a house way upstate in the woods, which I guess was some dream of his. He built a house way up there. He’s had kind of a rough streak. He went out to dinner one evening with an African writer friend, and when he was coming back home, he heard all these sirens and it was his house, his house had burned down.

Some kind of electrical fire.

So I may have put that reference in. But we were a very underground group. There were certain people who knew of us and certain people who felt – first of all, there were people who felt that Fatisha was . . . she took no prisoners. She was that kind of person, and poet. She didn’t book people who she thought didn’t have skills. We had a series, she ran a series of readings up at a restaurant up on the west side of Eighty-sixth Street called “The Only Child.” You know I read with Toni Morrison one evening, man? Can you believe that?

Isaac: Wow.

Mervyn: And one Sunday she had me and Toni Morrison. And Toni had just put out that book called Song of Solomon. She had just written that and I was just in awe, you know, so by the time she finished reading, I asked her about a character in her book, a character named Milk Man, a kid who was breast feeding up to nineyears-old. So I was asking her about her characters, but then I said “Well, I know, people must come up to you and tell you this kind of stuff all the time.” And she said, “No, not in the way that you’re telling me, nobody goes into that kind of detail.” And she was really sweet, man!

And then, afterwards I was telling Wesley, I said “I got Toni’s number, man.” And he said, “Good luck with that,” because she was known to be kind of tough. And

Mervyn: He had a hard time. But he has a strong heart. And he said, “Well, like Shakespeare said, first time tragedy, second time farce.” That was his way of just dealing with things.

Adrian: So I was going to ask, I feel like I read somewhere, that the Bud Jones poets were sometimes divisive or controversial. Was that your experience with that? Was there some backlash to what you were doing? I don’t know where I read that.

Mervyn: You know, it might have been from something I wrote myself, because I said – I always refer to the group as “The infamous Bud Jones.”

Isaac: Yeah, when?

Mervyn: Well, this was back in those days.

I wish I could find one of those flyers for you. That would be a gem. I know I kept some of them. But Toni Morrison, because Fatisha would team up two people, a fiction writer and a poet, every Sunday.

Isaac: That’s a very cool idea.

201

so they messed me up, man, because I got kind of cold feet and I never called her.

Isaac: You never called her?

Mervyn: No, I got cold feet. Because people would tell me, “Oh, Toni Morrison, man. She’s going to chew you up.” But I should have called. Of course.

Even to this day . . .

Isaac: Maybe the number hasn’t changed.

Adrian: I was going to say, you still have her number? Call her right now.

Mervyn: No, her house burned down, so I know she has a new number. But there’s a poem in The Waving Gallery that speaks to her.

the uncorking of a bottle and realizing it’s not water, drunk before we know the patter-roller’s still dogging our step.

Write another, honey, how your boys get through disguised as tumbleweed, anything dead, that can’t be killed twice.

The end of the novel is not your ending.

Just breath you draw to begin again.

In a country full of dead ends, you tell of the need to turn around and find some other way, the house in the distance, a woman fetching firewood, building a fire.

Isaac: Do you want to read it?

-- --

Mervyn: Yeah, I’ll read it. It’s called “In the Act.”

- So I’m saying, “Write another one.

Never mind what they say.”

In the Act

Isaac: What’s the line about, something like “When you get to the end, it’s not an end, just a chance to catch your breath”?

“After nearly half a century, denouncing brutality becomes a fairly circular enterprise.” – From a review of Toni Morrison’s Home, by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian, April 2012.

- And in the review, Churchwell was kind of criticizing Toni for staying on the same subject all the time. And Toni’s novel, Home, is about a veteran who was coming back to live in America, a black man. And Churchwell was kind of saying that Toni had stayed on the same topic for too long. And so my response is really to this woman, and in the poem, “In the Act,” I say: Maybe so, but I’m not ready to give up on this lady, not ready to interfere with mothers who won’t let anyone near 202

their children, rather raise the rock and smash them if they must, Her road to Paradise is the long way,

Mervyn: Draw breath again. In other words when you get to the end of a novel or a piece of work, it’s not the end, it’s just a chance to breathe.

Isaac: But it is really important to have that ending, right? To have that chance?

Mervyn: Yeah, to breathe again. It makes me think of something that Derek Walcott said when I was in graduate school. And it’s an interesting concept and it’s something I have to remind myself of all the time. He said, “If you’re using an axe, if you’re chopping, then there are three things that happen. It’s not just ––– boom!

Because there’s got to be the reflex then, where you draw back, to come again. So there’s a pause and then a coming in. It’s not just one motion.” So that’s actually the breath that’s drawn in between there all the time. It’s a bit like . . . my grandson is a baseball player, he’s fanatic about it, and I remember going, I remember one of the kids, you know how they raise and sway the bat before they swing, but there are kids who are natural hitters, and there’s something in their play with the bat that, even though the pitch is a fast ball, the hitter still takes the time . . . there’s a slight back movement before he comes down. It’s almost like that back movement gives him the impetus.

In other words, you can’t start from too close to your body, because if you do you won’t get all of your power.

There has to be a back movement, and it gives the hit a beauty in the spin.

Darryl Strawberry had it before he got into drugs and went crazy. My son’s grandmother was crazy about him. So I was talking about that breath, right?

And I can’t remember how Derek Walcott put it, but it was something about how in the act of writing, that there’s the silent recoil almost, right?

That has to be in there, so that you get ready to do the next line. In other words, you can’t just keep going forward. You go forward a line, and then you have to back up a bit to get to the next line. So there’s a breath in between those lines that makes all the difference to your music. So that’s the intake I’m talking about; that when you reach the end it’s not really the end, it’s just the end needed in order to begin again, that allows you to take a breath.

Isaac: I love that. You mentioned

earlier, that you wanted to say something else about Fatisha?

Mervyn: So yeah, she was really instrumental in forming the Bud Jones group. And she was a real general. And sometimes she would insist on things that I wouldn’t agree with. She’s a Sagittarius, so she’s tough like me but she’s actually late November, which are the tougher Sagittarius.

Isaac: So her birthday must be right around now then?

Mervyn: Yeah, right around now. But she passed away. But she would say, “I’ve got access to a basement in the Village, let’s do some readings there.” And I would say, “Okay.” And she would say, “Well we could do three nights,” and I’d say “Three nights!? No one’s going to read for three nights.” And she’d say, “Why not?” So I would say, “You’re not going to get people coming for three nights of Bud Jones.” I would say, “Let’s do one night, and make it a big night,” but she insisted, so we would do two nights, like Saturday and Sunday. And usually I was right about these things. The people who were there were mostly the people I’d invited from Brooklyn. And not only that. It was fall, and it was getting chilly, and there was no heat in that basement. So it wasn’t comfortable. But we’d end up fighting all the time about these things. “C’mon man, why don’t you want to do it? People got to hear you,” she would say. And I would say, “Yeah, they have to hear me, but they have to be comfortable! You can’t invite people to a cold basement.” So we used to fight a lot. All the time. And then eventually what happened is that she got sick and things kind of went down hill from there, and also Wesley went off to prison, and the group didn’t break up, but

203

204

it wasn’t the same, and then gradually you know I think everybody began going in their own direction.

Isaac: Do you remember the last time you spoke with her?

Mervyn: With Fatisha? Last time I saw Fatisha was when she was living on Forty-second Street. Way west on Forty-second street there’s housing for artists over there. There was one called Westbeth in the Village. And she managed to get one of those apartments over there on the west side. And the last time I saw her was when I went to visit her over there.

She’d been sick for a while, but she wasn’t bedridden, she was still moving around, but she was sick. And I’ll tell you what she was doing. She was doing something incredible. She was doing watercolors. I guess as therapy, she started going to museums and looking at watercolors and so on and she started doing that, and she had hundreds of them already in her hallway. And she said take whatever you want, take whatever you want. I actually have a poem called “Fatisha’s Paintings,” I think it’s in No Back Door, one second: Fatisha’s Paintings 1.

She painted them when the cancer was out of its cage, snarling like a feral cat: women with a cure for men’s ills, and none for themselves.

2.

The women stand and sip their cups, the men drain theirs and sip them on the arm of the couch.

The woman’s breasts are two odd sizes, the cancer seeming to prefer one over the other.

3.

The woman’s eyes are sad.

They seem to see the world from the beginning, before any of the stars went out.

The men, you could tell they flinched when she sketched them, when she asked them to pose naked.

-- -Mervyn: Yeah, a scary woman. Take your clothes off! I’m going to draw you!

Adrian: This was the woman who said, if you were bulletproof . . .

Mervyn: Yeah, yeah. Would you start a revolution then? Yeah. It fits with the character, right? Yeah. The men flinch when she says pose naked, man. Big guys I know were scared of that girl.

Isaac: Did she have a chance to see that poem?

Mervyn: No, she died long before this.

So anyway, after that time when I saw her and she showed me the painting, soon after that she moved back to California and was in a hospice out there. And Wesley managed to go out and see her.

He’s the person who saw her last. She had a son named Tabala. And it’s interesting, her son’s name means “war drum.”

Isaac: Wow. Mervyn: I’ll tell you the kind of person she was. One time her son was playing – they lived on the eighth floor up on a street in the seventies, or eighties, and

205

206

207

her son knocked a pot or a vase out, and it fell and almost hit a guy down on the street. And he looked up, and I don’t know if he found the apartment or what happened, and he went up to Fatisha and started complaining, and she said “Fuck you, I wish it had hit you in the head.”

Yeah. She was not easy, boy. She was not easy, but she was a helluva poet. She didn’t write any full collections but she wrote two chapbooks.

Adrian: I often think this about musicians too, but I’m sure it’s true with any art, people who have written incredible things that have never been published, that nobody has ever seen. Bands that have played in garages that nobody ever listened to, and the best in the world was never recorded, was never written down . . .

Mervyn: But it’s only alive in the memory of one person or two people who still have it in ther minds.

Adrian: And slowly it’s threading through, and it’s made its impact so lightly, but nobody really knows the source, right?

Mervyn: Right. And it just takes one person, “You should have heard this.”

Adrian: You should have heard this.

Mervyn: She wrote two books, and this is one of them: Sapphire Longing in the Blue Dust.

Isaac: Wow. Mervyn: Yeah. And that’s her. You see it, right? You see it? Fatisha.

Adrian: It’s just the one copy in existence here?

Mervyn: Well, that’s the one I got.

208

She wrote that and then there’s one other book she put out. I can’t even remember the title of it, but that’s the girl. ______________________ [Mervyn shows us one of Fatisha’s water color paintings, which is hanging in his bedroom.

We gather in his living room again.] ______________________ Isaac: So what do you enjoy about teaching poetry?

Mervyn: The language of poetry is sometimes difficult to express, and I think I like the challenge of it, how do you talk about the poem? How do you find a way to say what makes the poem work? Because there are all the technical things you can talk about. You can talk about measure and meter and you can talk about form, you can list all the forms and so on. But how do you find a way to have a conversation about a poem? It’s not easy, right? Because sometimes, and a lot of times, you as the person who wrote the poem, can’t even say how you came by that line. That line arrives to you, with you, fully clothed right? And it’s amazing to you, and it doesn’t happen all the time. But when it does happen, it’s like you keep going back to it to try to find out how those moments happened. I can point out a few of those moments to you.

Isaac: Yeah?

Mervyn: Yeah. I can point it out. When they came and what they did. And I think it’s funny, you get them and

sometimes you just don’t. But this is a poem called “The Outing,” and it was in Bomb Magazine. And I don’t know if they use that word a lot here, but in the British West Indies we used to say, oh, we’re going on an outing. It’s like an excursion. Like a day out, a day at the beach. And in this poem, it’s the voice of a man, and my later books have more of a kind of a personal voice. I think these earlier poems, there are a lot of speakers, lot of different speakers, not necessarily me. So that you could read through the book and not say, oh, well that’s about me or it’s an experience that I had. Because very often it sounds like somebody, just people. So this one talks about a man, a man is talking and he’s winding up a day when he’s been out with his family.

And I think I can remember the times when I wrote this. I wrote this at a time when I was feeling like myself and my son and his mom should have been more like a family, and not through any undoing of hers. It’s my own hesitation, right, because . . . somebody was talking the other day about women and all these men now who are coming, not coming forward but being found out for their wrong treatment of women.

And one of the questions that a writer, a woman was asking was, how do you feel about a man whose work you admire, but who you are disgusted with for his behavior. She was specifically talking about someone like Woody Allen, right? Because his work is genius but he himself may be obnoxious. So how do you as a woman reconcile the love you have for what he can do, with film or writing or whatever it is, and at the same time be horrified at his conduct. And so I think, for example, of one of Walcott’s poem, “Another

Life,” where he talks about how this woman that he was attracted to, and he says something like, “How could she know that I have left her before I left her?” In other words, that even while I was falling in love with her, I was already moving away from her. In other words, it’s more the idea of being in love than the actual thing itself. Do you get where I’m coming from?

Isaac: I do, but I’m trying to figure how that links with . . . You’re saying it’s more the idea of falling in love than actually being in love and you’re comparing those two, between writing a piece of work and the writer himself ?

Mervyn: No, I think what I’m thinking about is the writer who puts the idea of love in his work, which he’s not going to find in the real world. He’s always going to be disappointed, because it doesn’t measure up to what he’s writing about.

And so he ends up moving on all the time. A lot of broken hearts on account of love being sacrificed in the name of art. So that the man, rather than spending time with his family, might get up and go off and spend months trying to do some piece of work.

Adrian: Instead of spending time with his family, he’s trying to idealize the action of spending time with his family.

Mervyn: Exactly.

Adrian: Thus removing himself from his family to be able to romanticize it and bring this sort of idea into existence.

Mervyn: There you go.

Adrian: Thus, but sacrificing the actuality and the reality of it. Or giving all of that away.

209

210

211

Mervyn: Well sometimes, or sometimes he might just be a dog. But the poem, “The Outing/” I think at this time I was feeling like why can’t I just settle down now, with this family I have here. I think this kind of came out of this, even though it doesn’t talk about me at all: The Outing And when there is no more ice in the cooler, and the kids hang their heads out the car, I turn to her and say drive.

We don’t honey each other, we sit silent in the sunset.

Out over the hood the tail-lights swarm, I’m in the mood for darkness, and jazz.

Sitting, we travel like a drawing-room that moves, one kid holds a shell, he eased out of the sand, it’s all the money we have save for cosiness and sex, and sidelong looks at the sea.

The sea? Yes, I make a science of everything, The orange rind drying in the kitchen, the doggish way the moon herds the stars. Were it not for the road under us, we’d slip into the fields. Faster, I say.

212

-Mervyn: So the lines that came to me, as if by magic, in that way, are where the poem says, “I make a science of everything / the orange rind / drying in the kitchen,” –– the rhythm and the balance of those words is just . . . you can’t try to make that up. That just comes.

Isaac: “I make a science of everything,” Mervyn: Yes, that’s just to lead up to it, but the real thing is “The orange rind,” listen to the music, it’s just happening, “the orange rind drying in the kitchen.”

“The orange rind / drying in the kitchen.”

Isaac: Maybe the poem is doing the work, and you no longer have to.

Mervyn: Well, something like that. And then the lines that follows it, changes that sort of soft easy thing – “The orange rind / drying in the kitchen, / the doggish way the moon / herds the stars . . .” Now, I’m not a cowboy.

I don’t know anything about herding, right? But the image of how a dog herds the animals ––– put that up there, “The doggish way that the moon / herds the stars . . .” So the moon is like a sheepdog, herding those stars around. That takes the poem out of the ordinary and puts it somewhere else.

Isaac: It’s really special to be able to show people how to access that space, in their own mind.

Mervyn: If you’re lucky and if you work hard enough as a poet, it will come to you more often than not, but it doesn’t happen on its own. One question that came up on a panel at the Miami Book Fair was how do

Caribbean writers make their poems accessible to the world? In other words, if you’re making local references, there are people who are not from Trinidad who may not get what that’s about, right? So that’s another challenge. How do I write about things that I love or things that remain precious to me, but have you share in that enjoyment and love, even without explaining it? So for me, these are the kind of things that you reach for, that you don’t get it too much, and if you don’t get them, what you end up doing is creating things that sound kind of clever, but they’re not quite there. These things happen on their own.

Adrian: I hear that. I experience that sometimes, when I’m writing.

Mervyn: And you have to move yourself out of the way, kind of right?

Adrian: Yeah, I get in my own way a lot.

Mervyn: Because the ego steps up.

Isaac: Watch this.

Mervyn: Yeah, watch this.

Isaac: Did I misread that you never learned to swim?

Mervyn: No, you’re right. I never did.

The thing is, there’s a lot of people from the islands who can’t swim.

They have a really healthy respect for the ocean. I remember going to St. Maarten one time, and we were on the beach and these women were selling little curios and so on, and one said, “Are you all going swimming?” And we said, “No, people from the island don’t swim.” And growing up I remember

how some of the oceans in Trinidad are not those wonderful, peaceful-looking placid bays and so on, with blue waters and so on. There are some rough beaches in Trinidad. And some of them are known for terrible currents. So you’re asking me how come I’m not a swimmer.

I don’t know, maybe it was passed down from my father; my father never once went to the ocean. The neighbors would be taking us to the beach and we would say, “Come on, Dad,” but he just wouldn’t. And this is where the title comes from, right? No Back Door. He would say “The sea has no back door.”

Isaac: What do you think that means, in terms of the sea not having a back door?

Mervyn: Oh, it just means that there’s no exit, that kind of thing. That if you go in and you get into trouble that there’s no exit, there’s no way out. There are other ways of saying it now. I think people from Barbados say, “The sea has no branch . . . nothing to hold onto.” So the sea has no back door, it means in a weird way that you go in and that there’s no exit, there’s no place to come out. And I thought that, you know, as a title for the book it works, because it’s a lot like the situations that we find ourselves in, with ambitions and so on, that there’s really no escape route.

That you simply have to make out of your difficulties what you can. You just have to take your difficulties.

Isaac: Right. And there’s all sorts of things that we can do to try to sort of escape, right?

Mervyn: Yeah, but it doesn’t work. So you better learn how to sort of turn it into something else.

Isaac: Maybe poetry helps?

213

Mervyn: Yeah, poetry helps, but poetry can also sometimes lead to other things . . . which makes me wonder, I’m thinking about Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar, someone who writes powerful verse like her, why would she kill herself ? But it’s more than the poems, right? But Walcott said something in a poem, he said “The classics can console, but not enough.” So she wrote all these poems but it wasn’t enough, the pain I think of relationship with Ted Hughes, and all of that. And the other one that makes me wonder too is Anne Sexton, who was a beautiful woman, who wrote these just incredible poems, right? And then she commits suicide. And she’s got one of the best titles ever, right?

Isaac: Which one?

Mervyn: To Bedlam and Part Way Back. She has some fantastic poems in that book.

Isaac: I think one of the theories that you hear is that, well poets are actually looking closely at what’s difficult in life, and sometimes looking too closely and for too long becomes unbearable.

Mervyn: Too much.

Isaac:: Yeah. I don’t know if I buy it, but at least it’s one theory, right?

Mervyn: Yeah. It’s one theory. I have a painter friend, Leroy Clarke, who when I talk about poets being mad and all of that, Leroy always say, “Don’t let them convince you of having to be a mad artist and all that.” He says, “You can be an artist without being crazy.” He says, “It’s possible. Don’t let them lump you into that whole thing, so you’ll feel that in order to be great or to belong, you have to be crazy,” he said, “Don’t ever let them 214

persuade you of that shit.”

Isaac: Yes. Mervyn: So which is why I think I’m not the kind cloistered poet, who sort of shuts out from other things. For a long time, I just partied my ass off.

And even now, if somebody calls me, hey, I’m ready to go. Because otherwise you can get yourself swamped into stuff. And there’s a lot going on that’s still wonderful, right? There’s a lot to discover still. Life is what you make it.

It’s a cliché, but it’s true, because you can allow yourself to get swept under by all kinds of stuff, but you can also, in the middle of the most horrible thing, look up and see something absolutely wonderful.

Isaac: I think it’s important to decide to seek those experiences out, right?

Mervyn: Yeah, but there’s also those experiences that happen when you’re not looking, right? Or then there’s also the accidents that wake you up. I remember I was teaching at Bronx Community College, I remember coming down the hill when it was starting to turn dark.

And it’s a long walk in the Bronx, and I was coming down that hill to catch the train at 183rd Street, and I was thinking about the class and about something that I could have said differently. And I was just full of all of that, and as I turned the corner, something hit me ––– BAM! ––– and it shook me out of my reverie, for sure! And I thought I was getting stuck up or something. And all it was, the wind had picked up a paper cup and slapped me behind the ear. But it got my attention! I said, “Don’t be day-dreaming! That was always a tough neighborhood. And also, I thought, that

class is over. When you get home, you can think about, alright, maybe I’ll do the lesson like this, right?

Adrian: It brings you into conscious contact with the moment.

Mervyn: Yeah.

Adrian: It takes being slapped in the face by a paper cup.

Mervyn: It gets you up, yeah. There’s a lot of stuff, a lot narrow escapes. I remember once on Franklin Avenue, something had happened with the train and they made us switch at Franklin, so I was at Franklin waiting for the train. So I was standing there, close to the edge.

And in those days they didn’t have the yellow lines saying, don’t stand too close to the edge. And I was thinking, this damn train, man? And I was standing there, and I was looking one way because the train was supposed to be taking me into the city, right? So I was leaning near the edge, and looking. And as soon as I leaned over a little bit more, the train went ––––– schuuuuuuuuuuum!

Isaac: Oh my God! In the other direction?

Mervyn: I mean the breeze was on my cheek! One more second and it would have just pulled my head, whatever would have happened, it would’ve knocked me right into the path or something. The train wasn’t supposed to be coming this way but because of whatever was wrong with the line it was reversing on the track. That got my attention, too. So there are good surprises, and there’s also horrible shit, so it all tells you, you have to be awake. You can have reverie and all that stuff, but you also have to be awake.

You have to pay attention.

Adrian: Is there anything that you would say, you miss about your first few years in New York, when you were still trying to find your way?

Mervyn: When I first moved here I had just graduated from college, and didn’t have my green card, so there were about twelve years where I couldn’t go home, and those were painful years. I remember going to work one Carnival Tuesday morning, and teaching class in the Bronx, when the snow was coming down, and I would just think, Jesus, I shouldn’t be here. But now when I go back, it’s not the same country as it was back then.

And you can tell, by reading some of the poems in Voices Carry, where a lot of those poems talk about the violence.

The murder rate for this year is already four-hundred and something. There used to be a time, when I was growing up, when the murder rate in Trinidad . . . if there were two murders in the year, people were shocked. And that would be something you would talk about. There would be four murders for the year, tops, back in those days; now they have fourhundred, and it’s just been increasing and increasing and increasing. So I’m saying that to say yeah, I don’t miss the years when I couldn’t go back home whenever I wanted to, but the impulse to just get up and go wherever I feel like going now, well, is tainted with the idea that where I’m going is not always safe. So I don’t know anybody who is too comfortable in these times, even if you have money. Or when you come through the airport, man, and you can feel the tension, right? You know that you don’t have any drugs; and you don’t have any weapons or anything, but people are still nervous. People are scared.

215

Adrian: I hear that.

Mervyn: And sometimes the hungry years are okay if all the things are equal, right?

If there’s something to aspire to, when you can say, “Okay, I don’t have it but I’m going to work hard—I’m going to get it.”

And it seems like there’s a clear path to whatever the goal is. But when you get to the kind of years like these, when it’s not so clear anymore, which way is the way to go. Then you get befuddled because now . . . you don’t mind the pain, and you don’t mind the suffering, or what I call “the empty belly.” You don’t mind the hunger, because you know, “Okay . . . this is what it’s going to take to get me to where I can at least feed my kids tomorrow,” Right?

Isaac: Right.

Mervyn: But it’s not so clear anymore!

It’s not so clear how I’m going make it to the factory to the job because between here and the factory, a lot can happen, right? Some fool can drive a truck down into the crowd, right? One of the things I remember talking about when they gave Walcott the Langston Hughes Award years ago up at City College, and I was introducing him and talking about him and so on. And one of the things I remember, it was soon after 9/11, and one of the things I was thinking about was how the poet at one time could have been the prophet; he could’ve talked about things to come because he had vision and he could see things, right? What happens when reality begins to outstrip the vision? What happens when reality begins to happen faster than the poet can keep up with?

So that he can make all these incredible lines about magical things happening and possible mythical things happening, but yet we have no answer for standing 216

and watching bodies coming down like paper. We didn’t realize for a long time that there were actually people jumping! It looked like somebody had thrown files out of an office and it looked like paper was floating down until, “Say, wait a minute! That’s a man!” So, part of my introduction with Derek was talking about how the entire journey of being a poet must have changed somehow, when things begin to happen, which even in our wildest imagination, we didn’t have a picture for. Somehow, reality has caught up because everything that we kind of thought, the Dick Tracy watch and all that stuff, right? It has happened! It has already happened. So, you have to be real good. How far can you stretch things now? What can you come up with that’s beyond? Or maybe you go back to something quieter.

Isaac: It’s a good question, maybe the answer somehow ties in with who the poet feels he’s writing for, or why he writes poems at all. Who would you say you write for? When we went to lunch a few weeks back, I think you mentioned that you want to write poems that people who may not usually be all that interested in poetry, can still enjoy. Can you say more about that?

Mervyn: I think I want to pull back a little on that, in terms of writing for the people. I think I write for poetry’s sake, to see the possibility of poetry, where it can take you, what it can do.

And if I can get that to work, then it will be for the people. I can’t have writing for the people as my main thing. I don’t see myself as a savior for people. I think I’m kind of too selfish for that. I’m not a savior. But I

think, if I can get poetry to work in the way that it’s supposed to work, then it will serve a bigger purpose. And that bigger purpose is the purpose of the people. But I can’t start off with the people in mind. Because if you start off with the people in mind, then the poems won’t go but so far. And then also, what I keep in mind, more than the readers, are the people that I put in the poems. I want to be just to those people. So there’s a poem in Voices Carry called “Only Son,” which is about the death of a friend of mine’s son. Colors is his name, he lost his son.

And that was one of my best buddies when I go home now. So when I go home I miss all these guys. But his son looked just like him. But he died very tragically. His son, from a very early age, got involved with some wrong stuff. And this is what gangsters do. They recruit young kids to do the dirty work. Because if they get caught, then they’ll just serve time as delinquents, right, as teenagers. So they hire these little boys to do their job. And this is what happened with Colors’ son. And Colors’ son looked just like him. So I’m saying, when I write a poem like that, I write it, not to make Colors happy about the situation, but to explain something to myself and to Colors about what happened. You know? I don’t know how to justify what happened, to say, he was a good boy. That’s not what I’m trying to say. And I’m not saying that I write in an academic way, because there are people who explore poetry to try to match Yeats or who try to explore some very intellectual notion of what poetry is. I’m not trying to explore the intellectual as much, as much as the intuitive, the thing that happens

almost without you, in that magical kind of way. The poem, for example, in Voices Carry “A Kind of Valentine,” about the Japanese woman who came to Trinidad, and who was murdered, I try to talk about that. Almost like speaking to her spirit. To say, I wish I could have held your hand or something. I wish I could have not let that happen. It’s almost like a kind of voodoo, right, you’re powerless, but the only power you have then is this thing -- to utter something. And maybe by uttering that thing, you can make the bad things go away. There’s a poem in Voices Carry called “Bad Dream.” And I remember my mom, I used to have terrible, frightening dreams when I was a kid. And I remember my mom’s only consolation, when I would get up in the middle of the night and talk to her she would say, “It’s a bad dream, it’s just a bad dream.” Just to call it a bad dream would put it in context and help me go back to sleep. So this is “Only Son” for Colors: Only Son

for Colors You showed me the boy, when he was three, red and skinny, your spitting image. Years later, when he was only thirteen, you worried that he had done his first job, some dirty work that left him, the gun heavy in his pocket, to get back however he could from down by the sea. Now a grandfather, you describe how the police found him out on the highway, head one way, leg another, how they wouldn’t let you near the folded wreckage, the bodies of

217

those who called him, Come go, spread like the fingers of so many arms, his face no longer the spitting image of anything.

-- -Mervyn: So I think I write to come to terms with things that I have no control over, to find a way . . . not to package it, but to say that I spoke on it, to say that I didn’t just completely ignore, what happened.

218

219

220

221

222

223

224

Issue No. 2 - $19.95.

225