Volume 20 issue 2 fall 2008 by Yale Literary Magazine

P ll

THE

YALE

LITERARY

VOLUME XX

ISSUE II

MAGAZINE FALL MMVIII

CONTENTS PROSE

POETRY 1 1

INTERVIEW - 20 -

GRAPHIC POEM - 25

IMAGES )7

EDITOR-1N -CHIEF Diana Mellon ASSOCIATE EDITOR

PUBLISHER

Andrew Saviano

Lauren Henry

ASSOCIATE PUBLISH ER Melanie Langer

MANAGING EDITORS Robert Barton

PUBLICITY COORDINATORS Janna Avner

Caroline Smith

Anna Moser (Design Liaison) Jeffrey Zuckerman

LITERARY EDITORS Jordan Jacks

EVENTS COORDINATORS Gabriel Zenon Bloomfield Nicolas Niarchos Zeynep Pamuk

Carina del Valle Schorske

SENIOR EDITORS Rebecca Dinerstein

CIRCULATION & DISTRIBUTION

Adam T. Gardner

Christine Kwon Helen Tsykynovska

ARTS EDITORS

WEBMASTER Gabriel Zenon Bloomfield

Page Benkowski Tucker Rae-Grant

GRAPHIC DESIGN David Rudnick

S TA I= I' \lexandra Beautyman Nicky Bernstein Sophia Chen David Curtis Madeleine Haddcn Sam Lee Katherine Maltby Rachel Marcus Susan Morrow Chris Normandin Kate Orazem Maya Seidler Kenneth Reveiz Marco Rodarte Noah Warren Sarah Winsberg

IN,

PROSE

JORDAN

ACK

OTHER PEOPLE

Richard and his friends were talking after work in the parking lot when the sound ofbranches breaking came from the road.Jim,the floor manager,was in the middle of a joke. So this woman with huge tits walks into a barbershop, he was saying, when suddenly he jerked his head to the side, and they all heard it, all at once, and knew exactly what had happened. Someone had crashed a car into the pines that went from the edge of the lot out to the road, driven into the ditch running alongside it. It was the sort of thing that could happen to anyone.They were all smoking except for Richard,and everyone took their hands from their mouths at the same moment. I suppose,Jim said, we should go see about this. The five of them, their cigarettes lighting the way, walked across the new pavement to the lot entrance. There was Richard,Jim, Dwight, Larry, and Robert, all staunchly thirty, all wearing khaki and denim, all making pretty good money loading cardboard boxes into giant stacks, and then onto trucks. Jim tried to finish his joke on the walk to the car—they could see it now, an '83 Volvo, one of the boxy types,headlights off—but no one really listened.All ofthem hoped the driver was a woman. Someone said something about it just getting dark enough to crash,which was true— there were at least five minutes between the sunset and the streetlights turning on,and as winter came closer and closer that window just kept getting bigger. At twilight, it was hard to see the edge of the road, even without headlights. So you could be excused, Richard thought,for missing the entrance to the lot—which housed several other business than the packing company they worked for—on account of the lights. By the time they reached the road,where the car was,it was completely dark,and everyone had finished their cigarettes, thrown them on the ground, and ground them down into the pavement with their tennis shoes. The car looked ok.The front right side was dented and at least one wheel was out of alignment, but the wind-

shield had only cracked. Dwight said something about Volvos being literally made of steel, and then Richard helped Jim open the door, which was jammed pretty bad. Inside, sitting still as if she were being observed through glass, was a very pretty woman whom they helped out ofthe car and to her feet. She didn't say much. She was, evidently, glad they had come along. It's just so hard to see,she said,splaying her fingers in exasperation. The five ofthem nodded in agreement. She was the most beautiful woman they had ever seen. It was getting very dark, and one by one the streetlights on the road came on,blinking on in an advancing line down,down to the vanishing point. Would you like to hear a joke,Jim said. Richard had worked at Hollins Distribution, a little boxy place ten miles away from his house,for about three years. Every day he drove to work and spent upwards of nine hours moving boxes into the grey building, organizing them by type with a machine,and then putting them back on trucks that drove back into Detroit. He told himself that people depended on him to receive the materials they needed, but it was a stupid job. Everyone at Hollins, even Larry, who could barely tie his shoes, knew it. They knew where they had ended up. It was bearable mostly, if only for the conversation after dark in the parking lot,which by the end ofthe day had acquired a warmth Richard always appreciated. Every day the five men would stand around one of their cars, watching the sprinklers come on in the subdivision further from the road. Richard, whose brother was a doctor, always assumed that this was the way most people ended their days— tired, blank, and warm in the early evening. The day had a ritual end. Doctors, he assumed, put their stethoscopes in back seats behind their practices, talked about women to

r•

JORDAN

JACKS

They drove out of the parking lot. There was nothing to do without starting up the entire chain of questions that would lead to actual action—finding where Margaret needed to go, sitting (he hoped) in fluorescent car repairshops reading magazines, waiting for a number, calling her relatives, realizing the distance to Ann Arbor, realizing the time,figuring she should just stay the night. Are you ok? Richard asked. Margaret nodded. How long have you worked here? she said, uninterested. Three years, Richard said. Before that I worked across town. He pointed to his left, where a gas station and a lonely Chinese restaurant waited at an intersection, and beyond that a retirement home and a doctor's office sat with their parking lots. Two cars passed on the road in front of them,headed for Detroit or back into town to pick up children, dinner, or both. A police car drove by, slowed down, then sped up. Stars were coming out,one by one. I figure, Richard said, we can call AAA. How far do you live from here? she asked. He pointed. Richard lived in a brick duplex a block over from the opposite edge of the subdivision that bordered the Hollins parking lot. It was a pretty low-key affair. He had a bed, a kitchen,and a couch his brother had given him.When Jim or Dwight came over they would all sit on his couch and carefully tip ashes into the tops of bottles until Richard's neighbors,who lived on the other side ofa door in Richard's living room and had a three year-old that they protected from the world, complained about the smoke. He'd never seen them, but he could smell them making dinner every night for themselves,and occasionally,hearing the children's television programs blasting through the same door at night, he would lie awake for hours listening to the alphabet, the alphabet backwards,the numbers one through ten.

each other. Everyone stood around,told jokes, maybe had a cigarette before going home. That he never saw anyone at the neighboring businesses in the office park doing these things didn't really affect him much. Other jobs were happening all of the time. He didn't have to see other lives to know they existed. Since Richard was the only one of the five who didn't have a wife or girlfriend to be angry at him,the other four all agreed that he should be the one to drive the woman—her name was Margaret—home, or wherever she needed to go to get her car fixed. After ascertaining that the car could not be fixed by hand in the ditch, the six of them walked back to the parking lot.The other four men got into their cars, each giving Richard lascivious instructions. Come in to work late tomorrow if you have to,Jim told him. Good luck, Larry said, mournfully. Dwight gave Larry rides home every day in his pick-up, and he gave the thumbs-up sign through the windshield while his car sputtered. After they had all driven away, and Richard had unlocked the doors of his car, he turned to Margaret and introduced himself I'm Richard, he said, looking over the hood of the car. Margaret, she said, for the second time. They both got into the car. As always, it was immaculate. There was a coffee cup in the cupholder, leaning to the right because it didn't fit, and an old newspaper in the backseat, but the car was largely empty. Richard started the car and turned. He was afraid to look—she seemed like a woman who did not like to be looked at—but he did anyway. She was sitting next to the window,looking out at the LLINS of the Hollins sign in front of them. Small eyes,strong chin,small breasts. Her hands were folded in her lap,and she had drawn up her coat around her. She looked uncomfortable,but in a familiar way, as if this were the dress for an under-rehearsed play full of lulls.

Richard didn't want to drive her there, but he did, taking the long way through town to avoid the sight of the pricier suburban developments between his house and Hollins. He didn't say much,but Margaret relaxed,leaning back and sighing every few moments as if to confirm her general comfort in a car unfated to crash. As they passed the center of town, she said short, complimentary things about Richard's car, the boarded-up storefronts,the family she was going to see in Detroit. Her aunt was dying—not urgently,she told him—and she had told her mother that she would be in by the end of the night. Now none of that is happening, she said,and didn't seem particularly disappointed,brushing her hands through her hair, looking out the window. She had a nervous tic of scratching the back of her hand when she talked, and she did this constantly. Kids were playing basketball in the streets. A few dogs were running around. The lights were all on. Two stoplights before his house, about ten minutes before he had planned to, and because he knew she'd agree, Richard turned to Margaret and said Hey,let's get a drink.

most of the whiskey.It was a very long call. Well, she said, clapping her hands to the sides of her legs and her wool skirt. He didn't know how to touch her. Her mother was angry and powerless,she said. Richard wanted to say something about his brother, but he didn't know what. He poured another glass and sat down on the couch next to her. It was like she had forgotten they were strangers to each other. That goddamn ditch,she said.I drove right into it. You couldn't see it? he asked. They were lolling about on the fifth round, not really talking much. Margaret scratched her hand. Richard nodded. I got into a wreck once at work,he told her. It was a company van full ofshipments.I skidded offthe highway— he made motions with his hands—and into an empty field, turned the van on its side. Doors busted. All the boxes flew out into the snow,and some of them opened. She nodded. What was in the boxes? she asked. I never thought to look, he said. That's the thing about it. She nodded again. I never even mailed her anything,she said. Cards,or candy—nothing. She's not dead yet, he told her.

They went back to Richard's place and got riotously drunk off of some whiskey Richard's brother had given him for Christmas and that Richard knew had been given to him by a patient. Richard brought out large glasses and poured straight shots while Margaret sat on the couch on the phone with her mother in Detroit. It's broken, she was saying. Mother, your phone is broken.It's hard to hear. Ten minutes in, she was crying, and as Richard transferred glasses from his dishwasher to the cupboards,he watched the back of her head,trying to figure out how this affected him. She was nodding, holding the telephone in one hand and her glass in the other,and speaking very loudly. The garages were all closed. It would have to wait until morning. By the time Margaret got off the phone Richard had done most of his dishes, and they had both finished off

By around nine both of his neighbors were home and cooking dinner for their screaming kid. The smells of macaroni and cheese drifted from under the door,and through it came the sounds of quiet, murmuring voices in angry counterpoint. Richard didn't trust himself to cook,so they ordered Chinese food from a place about two blocks out that delivered. Margaret let him pay. She had given up on calling a friend to pick her up.It was understood she'd stay the night, and she was lying on the couch. Drinking had made them casual with each other. He sat down at the table a few feet away,finishing his dinner.It would not have made much of

JACKS

JORDAN

He trailed off. Suddenly Margaret sat up. When did you know? she asked. Richard knew he had about thirty seconds in which to formulate a plausible lie. So he acted quickly,and changed a girlfriend he had lived with five years earlier into a wife. She had been a part-time student at the local community college but spent most of her days in a dead-end waitressing job at a diner Richard had to avoid once they were sleeping together. Her name was Sarah, and he still sometimes saw her in the supermarket,or the video store—never,of course, the diner—where she always gave him the same helpless, sad look,as if he was an inevitability one tried to avoid anyway. He couldn't hate her for it, though he tried. Richard moved his chair in front ofthe couch,close enough to lean across his knees,so that he was almost touching Margaret's calf with his legs. He stumbled over himself. She half sat up. It was about a year in, he said. We were asleep at her place, in her room, which had big windows on two of the walls.We'd done something normal that night—it was a weeknight—and had gone to sleep pretty early. I kept waking up for no reason,rolling over,and then about 3:30 in the morning Sarah justjumped up,let out a little yell. He paused.The television next door had turned on. Margaret was nodding drunkenly. He continued. I jumped up,asked what's wrong,what's wrong,and she pointed out the window.There was a huge white van in the driveway,about twenty or so yards off, with its lights on, shining right into the room. I couldn't see anybody, but I grabbed my boxers—I don't know,suddenly I felt caught or something... And,Margaret said. Ijumped up,and I asked Sarah what was happening. She didn't know what to do.I was asking her everything—if she had a gun,where she kept her baseball bats,anything,all the things you never actually have to know...and I was panicking at this point,I didn't know what to do.The headlights

a difference had she been gone. Those guys you work with,she started. The same,he said. As you? Yes. This seemed to satisfy her, but it wasn't true. Well..., he started, but didn't finish. Talking about women—really, the only tangible difference between him and his friends he could tell her without explaining things he himself didn't understand—seemed somehow inappropriate. There had been several women he had slept with, stayed up all night with, thrown things at, refused the advances of, and finally edged his way out of, but none of real note. One had kissed his temple, another had, naked and angry,called him "a hateful bastard" and pointed out where he was losing his hair. He had been alone for about a year. No one had died. No, women were not something to talk about. He offered her an egg roll, which she refused, and he ate. He was not hungry anymore, not at all. But there was too much food,and he didn't know what else to tell her, what to do when it was gone,so he continued to pick at his plate slowly, washing down each bit of sesame chicken with a swig of the beer they had moved on to. Hey,she said from the couch. He turned. Have you ever been married? she asked,shyly. Yes,he said, though he hadn't. I've always wanted that, Margaret said. But I've never known when you arrive at that point, when...1 don't know,when... The whiskey was slowing her down. ...When you suddenly turn some corner, she said. When that decision gets made.You know? He did. It's like crashing your car into a ditch, he told her. He gestured with his fork. Something knows,he continued. It's like you're going along and then...behind your eyes...

were right in front of me,and I don't know,suddenly,I just ran to the kitchen and without thinking grabbed the largest knife I could—I mean, a huge, 9-inch blade—it still had steak sauce on it, we had been cooking one of her restaurant's rib recipes—and ran into the hall. By this point Sarah had pulled on some clothes and come out,and ofcourse that van was gone by this point, and we met in the hall, face to face in each other's clothes, me with a huge knife,both of us terrified. And you didn't know what had happened,Margaret said. We did, Richard said. We knew enough. That night Margaret slept in her clothes on Richard's couch, muttering in her sleep. Richard lay alone in his bed one room over and thought about not desiring a woman, not even knowing if he should. At four-thirty, still drunk, he got out of bed, walked to his living room, and bent over the curled figure of Margaret on the couch. Her mouth was open, and her small, pearlish teeth hung on the lip. He felt her breath on his cheek like a received dictation. He could hear the couple next door having vigorous, workman-like sex through his walls while the baby slept,and he didn't envy them any ofit—not their other, unseen half of the building, not their dinner, not their television, still playing Sesame Street tapes for the sleeping child. He watched his ceiling fan spin slowly, heard the counting lessons,and he imagined the next day at Hollins,the next five days,the next year. Five years. His clock clicked the minutes. Outside, the sprinkler system switched on and off, depending on the hour. He was not altogether unsatisfied.

KENNETH

REVEIZ

RAPH AND NICKY WALK (EXCERPT)

chestnut of the 'backy rub like camp sticks; a chimney flag unfurls electric and plunges filthy into filthy air: the inchoate cancer inhalation. "You ever notice how swimmers look like Matisses?" sez Nicky. "I've never noticed," consumed by the treewood's spine. "Like they're all wavy, you know. At least the very good swimmers,"a breath here,wanting a cig but not wanting one, partly afraid to ask,"waggle around like seals on land. Very oily, very blubbery." "Very blueberry?" "Blubbery." "Oh.I love blueberries." "Yeah. No they're—" "Listen, Nicky. Raph likes you and you like Raph I mean Peer—sorry—Slip ofthe Freud I guess.Point is you've got a good thin and you should see it out, you know? Plus, you're a cool girl, nice, honest. It's been a while since he's encountered one of those, you know," dragging and spewing like a power plant,lit up and spyanonymous despite the talking, eyes ailleurs, complex about looking people in the eye—when he's acting it's easy but reallife is hard (thus a spy, afraid of the past). "Follow me to the apart and we'll buy some coffee or drink or Kellehan's or whatever and we'll chill and wait for Peer and it'll be nice and happy family again—except more romanticlike. Got it?" blowing back smoke and hair. Nicky now is a jukebox—whistles blues scale, up, down, in major G pondering. She ponders and illumes, "Kellehan's? Isn't that illegal here?" "Well everything's ileagle here but if we stopt doing ileagle things we'd have nothing to do,eh,Nick?" "I guess that's right in some completely wrong kind of way." "Yeah. Okay let's walk." "Wait—now?"

Context: Raph:actor Nicky: Raph's roommate's (Peer's) one-night standee Raph attempts to assuage panicked Nicky: Raph frequently imagines himself a spy. Spies spy, he figures; black-gray marble rectangle sixteen feet by sixteen, skinny tree planted for its peacock feathers—good to look at, good to hide behind with a silenced M9.The tree creaks with each gelid gust—that's all anyone has to do—wait for the wind (don't need a weatherman) and shoot swift shots through a momentary millimeter tear—thenceforth will the bullets do their werk. His sneakers should be black, not piercing red, and his fingers should be snug and gloved,his fingerprints carved from scarred skin, his retinas restructured, his face mashed into a formless mess—even in picture portraits should his mouth be amorphous, his body androgynous, his name Anonymity; he should be able to play piano, scale rooftops, perform incredible feats of flexibility, hotwire and drive any vehicle,and watch everything and everyone like God,Brahmin who knows exactly what I will I happen I next. Raph is the Most of the moviegoers—he mouths the dialogue with the on-screen black and white Bogarts.He can afford to shovel popcorn fistfuls: his eyes have pre-seen the action! He will know what awards a film will win before it is even realized, he will know and know the disappointments,surprises, analyses, and prizes, the future careers, the throat cancers, the deaths, all in his mind's eye's glint. Like Brando. Raph's case is empty so he digs deeper into his pocket.Pouch unraveled, he sprinkles tobacco rainings onto an earth of paper,consoles the rain with earth's curves,licks, lights the perfect centimeter cylinder bomb from the end of its o'erhanging fuse.The flame-red orange and amberbrovvn

"Yeah now." Cig stamped and mailed into the diatomaceous earth carpet opened before the Tom M. Even Building. He double-takes, eyes glinting in rockglint. There is a cactus on the road. In the middle of the street a cactus, sapphire blue. It is a mirage; Nicky does not see it or pretends not to notice it. She wants a cigarette but is afraid to ask. "Hey,d'you want me to roll you one?" "No.I'm okay." She is not okay. She is twitching, a lie. When they reach Anagram Boulevard she turns left and he turns right: they each think they are going the right way. No: they are both wrong: the way is straight ahead. There is no turn. Turns are unnecessary It is straight ahead past the windowfront seas, past men,women,children, past dogs, past landmarks, lights, scaffoldings, fountains, ferns, trees, railings, rocks, ramps, air conditioners, blue television gleams, hornsound buses, smoky exhausts coughed out by cars, more sick automobiles, faint piano twinklings and dissonances, stonersmells, underwear discarded over nightcourses, yellow pages and even whole books, grocery discounts, pizzaplace fliers,fruits fresh and notsomuch,awnings fammajestic,frenchified storesigns, notsospecial specials, bumcups tinny with change...tin tinning...a horrible situation ofsound...this block ofsex,filth, waste...these are the walking words of the world.... "This is like a dream I had,"says Nicicy. "Oh yeah?" sez Raph, eyebrow raised, stepping in strange shapes, avoiding cracks. "Yeahâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;yesterday,"silence and six steps straight.

POETRY

ERIC

GABLES

Seeking to change my station, I offended both the house I left and the house I entered. I took two names: Absence and Guest. My new house was filled with undivided possibilities like a first ocean. The people there ignored me. I was as unobtrusive as a wall sconce. My old house said Your basketball net is still dripping offits ring. Your mother is still boiling water in the kitchen. Do you want to be youngforever? What shame,stammering beneath the willows of my boyhood swamp forced to remember stammering beneath the willows.

SCULLY

CHIARA

RETROSPECT

Onto the lake â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Our canoe divides the water Under which lily stems move As the thickness of water commands. The mountain also dreams about itself in the water; The scalpy rock resists the wind all day, But we see these rocks Ripple like linen across the lake And the yellow birch and evergreens Quiver in the tug of our canoe. We land at the bank and stand With our ankles submerged in the face Ofthe mountain.We stand Like two staves in the lake, Marking nothing. Who would not prefer this view, Where your path heals almost As quickly as it is made?

REBECCA

DINERSTEIN

IN CARAMORE FIELDS

At the level of wheat and lavender-weed sun over cairn and between every stalk,stalkâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; matrix of halvings and birdheads tipped to the next cloud mass behind the innumerate reeds that separate vision into a quarry of peppercorn and daisy chains; the blue ribbon binding here weedflower,wheatflower no forshortening, although they plant back for miles homogenous and speckled with blossoms of hard-flower. II There is one space,cut into field, cut by stalk. And two white butterflies: the one becomes a stalk and the one crosses my path as I leave it.

CHRISTINE

KWON

NOSTALGIA

Because ofsilver barns that linger, leaning against the night like women who can't sleepâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; I've moved to a city. The streets turn when I turn, buildings throw up their hands when I pass. Strangers sense the cold pastures in me,touch me like an antique. Even then,I do not miss the time with himâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the naked wrist after the wristwatch is taken. Children don't like me.They take one sniff and can see the bodiless, big love I drag behind my green valise. I sleep alone. The man I sleep with sleeps alone. The world is disappointing as a bathroom mirror. But leaving is irreparable: the past a collapsed accordion of camisoles, rooms calving like glaciers, a bedroom filled with birds, the long fingers.That tie.

CARINA

DLL

VALLE

MESSIAH

I spent the desert years in opulence, my tent spread with antique rugs and pillows embroidered with pack animals: gifts from old lovers eager to mark the absence they would leave. Goodbye,goodbye said the Magi,soaking my bedclothes in frankincense. At night I heard dry breathing as they fondled the compass,the needle whose hesitation they always read as ceremonial.In the silence that followed I plucked out melodies meant for an orchestra until the notes became themselves and did not allude to other instruments. Where were you? I did not avoid the questionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; now and then my eye would catch your silhouette on the other side of the curtain as you stole through our settlement. Even like that, your features blackened beyond description, you called out the name we gave you,articulate above the hiss of the oil lamp.The light cut across my face, revealing the rapid changes brought on by pleasure. You loosened your hold on me as if to say,free yoursef,but your voice locked myjaw open and my eyes on the earth; my ears,too, ached for human noise as though still waiting for someone else to come.

SCHORSKE

JORDAN

A LIFE OF PRIVILEGE

You do not choose it: you wake up, there is the blankness between trees, a gaping house,the water so still on the banks of the river,

herons, dead pines.There is the fallow garden,flat rocks on the shore, some wind in low grass. By the boat, animal tracks in reddish mud. On the other shore, men shooting geese. Awakened by a warning shot, they fly up, make brief noises,fall. Everything is soon as it was,silent: a thing floating near the mouth of the hunter's dog.The geese with their deaf vernacular forget it, the origin of it, they fly into a forgotten language above the trees,the silent river. It is possible to love the body that is not there. One must be across the shore, holding a gun. One must have to march to the water; Lifting the thing,the feathers, must become something other than an act of sorrow. If not? The hawk on the telephone pole,seeing the whole argument of loss and reporting it back,circles and dives. There should be some myth, but there isn't.

The morning boats will begin their rounds. The dogs will retrieve the bird.

ADAM

GARDNER

PRAYER

From the bottom of the stairs,I call up to you, sleeping late into the afternoon: it is time, get up,get up, it is time to begin again,I am alone and readyforfood. Behind the house, I smoke on our rotting deck.The dogs sleep at my feet.The neighbors watch me as they will. Mother,I pray for us: we are like the very poor, never seeing far enough into the future to save ourselves. Father will come home. Sister will unlock her door. As in a book for children,everything will be just as simple as it needs to be. Under the empty sky, I assemble myself all night.

1 1

NOAH

WARREN

ABYSSINIA RECONSIDERED

The memory is a sagging cupboard Bowed under lines of vulgar teacups And it is always tea-time, And so I take down another cup, Peer into its weary, brackish depths, Scratch,with a cracking fingernail, at a blackened tea-ring, Remember the hot,sweet drink that burnt your lips, And the idea of iron,or its burnt-out husk, As we sat and talked with Scipio, under the wisteria— Oh how the gunsfell on Barcelona in the spring— And serve it out again,on sordid saucers.

INTERVIEW: ART SPIEGELMAN

into the agony and pain of being strangled by a snake, and the statue—the poem was by Virgil—the statue basically has him with a noble expression on his face,saying that pain is too ugly to be turned into an image,and it's because images try to capture everything in an emblematic way,whether they be sculpture or painting,and words,on the other hand, move you through time, and each of these domains must be kept separate. Fortunately for the Japanese, they never translated that essay, and they've had a clear road of manga from, gee, at least the 1700s until now with no bumps in the road because words and images interact in the brain and in the world quite naturally. So, they are two different sign systems, picture-making and word-making,but clearly they can contradict and reinforce each other and that's a tool that can be very useful in making something.

Now a graphic icon, Art Spiegelman began publishing his work in the underground comix movement of the 1960s. As the movement declined, he and his wife, Franfoise Mouly, collected contemporary graphic work in an influential comics anthology called RAW, which publishedfrom 1980 to 1991. In 1992, Spiegelman received the Pulitzer Prize for Maus, a graphic chronicle of hisfamily's experiences during the Second World War. In 2004, he published In the Shadow of No Towers and in 2008, Breakdowns: A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young %@&*!, an early work (1978) with a new autobiographical introduction. On November 3, 2008—the day before the US.presidential election—Spiegelman gave an interview to the Lit over the telephonefrom his home in New York City. YLM: This is the first issue of the Lit to include graphic fiction. What do you think about publishing graphic narrative—or anything with pictures and words—in an anthology or in a publication with writing?

YLM:Could you tell us something about how you work on a page as a whole—how you lay it out? AS: Up until the introduction for Breakdowns, it's always been my premise that the page is the single unit of thought. A little bit like.., if you folks are word people,then let's think of a page as a paragraph with a row of panels maybe as sentences.It breaks down as an idea,but—or maybe each panel as a sentence,or each row as a sentence in that paragraph.It's something that is kind of basic to how I understand comics, which is that they're physical structures. It goes back to the introduction of the '78 Breakdowns that's embedded inside the new work, where I talk about my dictionary definition of comics as a narrative series of cartoons."A narrative is defined as 'a story.' Most definitions of story leave me cold. Except the one that says:'A complete horizontal division of a building...[From the Medieval Latin historia... a row of windows with pictures on them.]" So the very early comics that were done with stained glass about that superhero who could kind of walk on water... that's where we get the word historia, the building,from that horizontal row of boxes that tell the story. So,it's embedded into the notion ofcomics as a narrative medium to be dealing with these picture windows. And one sees the page,inevitably, before one sees the individual box on the page, so it's all part of a back-and-forth conversation in which that structure is what's holding it together.lhe No Towers book...well,it's a story about tumbling structures. You know, it's about making do. I'd sometimes have to skitter to figure out where to go next, not knowing. And that's something I'd begun poking at in Breakdowns.

AS: Welcome to the 20th and 21st century, finally. This used to be my overwhelming struggle when I was a young blankety-blank making comics and needing grant money,I thought,to get Maus made.Turns out,thank God,I didn't— I managed to get it through. But when I'd apply for grants they wouldn't know what to do with me. They'd say "Oh, well, let's see... we have a word category, we have a picture category... I guess we'll put you in mixed media." So I'd be competing with Nam June Paik for money to do my comics! It never quite worked out that well because mixed media was as rigid a category, finally, as prose or images. In a way, those barriers not only have been broken down in the world around us— I mean,spending three minutes on a computer screen will get you confused if you're not able to simultaneously process— but it's kind of something that goes back to the very earliest moments of the medium I'm interested in.In the early Enlightenment,the 1730s,there's this guy named Gotthold Lessing. This guy was a German playwright and aesthetician and he wrote an essay about an ancient statue of—and now my pronunciation will get me into trouble—Laocoon? Laocoon? And so he wrote this essay that's still part of all basic art historical studies, about Laocoon, talking about the proper province for visual art and for poetry. Like most Germans,he was very categorical about it and decided that you would make a mongrel art if you mixed these things together.The poem "Laocoon"goes

For one thing, you have to remember from one panel to the next. I know from the days I used to smoke too much pot it was really hard to follow even a Marvel comic.You really have to keep that continuity going and not fall into each box for a half-hour. So the way this thing works is you're oscillating between different awarenesses of what came before and what's about to come next and what the whole thing is now, and that's pretty much how I think we think. So the introductory chunk ofBreakdowns functions as an introduction to the 1978 book which is followed by an afterward which helps you understand the introduction. And it's all kind of making one circle. And there are these sequences that function as little wormholes, as a friend put it when writing me a note about the book.That first panel of"Prisoner on the Hell Planet"is used as a circle that precedes an anecdote about making that strip so you then might fall into the 1978 book and find that and then loop back for other things in the introduction. The introduction,in other words,is a collage of different kinds of memories and different time, not chronological but butted up against each other with different visual textures for each of the anecdotes and interrupted on occasion by more theoretical comments, like the one you were just talking about in the "Memory Hole" strip. Well, that's to me a demo of how comics work, but in this particular instance the only way to achieve that for that introduction was to not worry about the page as a single unit. So there's a description of how I did think about it towards the tail end, with something called... Oh,where's my copy of the book... Okay. Near the very end of the introduction, there's a section called "Short Circuit"which talks about the methodology used for the whole introduction in a kind of strangling, painful form of self-awareness of what the hell I'm doing that had to be included in the doing. So that thing explains that basically this was put together like shooting movie footage and then putting it together,ignoring the single page as a unit in order to be able to make sequences that can be rearranged and edited by keeping all the panels the same size and letting them move as long as they needed to.

Probably the clearest example of that is an early 1970s thing I did called "The Circuits"in which it's like a circuit diagram where there are arrows telling you where to read next—that's why they start looping back on each other—and the page ends up ending in the middle with a picture ofthe world. So that was a specific demo ofwhat it means to try to deal with the panels as pieces ofa whole that might be,graphically,the easiest to latch on to. But when I did Maus I was painfully made aware that other people were interested in the other definition of story far more than they were in my structural notion of what a story might be.I was going to be obligated to deliver. So I took a complex narrative,certainly,an expansion of the three-page Maus strip that sort of launched me to finding my own voice as a cartoonist, and tried to take all ofthe lessons I was learning as a result of those more formal thinkings about comics and kind of spin them in reverse so that the reader wouldn't have to worry about the page structure that was always almost foremost in my mind for each page,but one could just enter in. So,for example—see, I'm so articulate because I'm not a cartoonist anymore,I'm just somebody who talks about what work I used to do when I was allowed to be left at home—but one panel I've been using as an example is in the second volume of Maus there's a page where Vladek and Art are talking in the Catskills and there's a kind of descent,literal descent,into Auschwitz from,let's see... I don't know what page it's on...Yeah,okay. So it's volume two, page 25. There's a sequence on Vladek and Art in the Catskills and you read that sequence down not because there are arrows pointing you down,but because it's laid out in a way to make that the most convenient way for you to read that cluster. Like balloons are overlapping the panels and stuff. So one reads it down.Then one climbs up to read the second column, which is the beginnings of the narrative that Vladek is telling. And that's literally a descent into his arrival at Auschwitz. YLM: In the "Memory Hole" strip you write: "Time,' he sighed.'Comics are time, time turned into space!" It seems that as the eye moves across the page,the narrative descends both physically and temporally into the past.

YLM:I have a quotation here:"He is haunted now by the images he didn't witness." What is the difference between being haunted by your own past and being haunted by a history that you didn't experience but that you feel close to?

AS: Right. And of course both of these things exist simultaneously for you to begin following the path around.That's sort ofwhat informs the first section ofthe new Breakdowns that has that"Memory Hole"sequence in it. You know,it's like.., it just seems comics are made to deal with memory.

AS: I mean,one thing is—I'm being haunted by old inter-

AS: Well, it's complicated. I can go in either direction and make a great case for either piece on this one. But of course one's haunted and informed and inhabited by everything that came before. And so I don't think I'd have ever figured out how to make comics if there hadn't been a history of comics to kind of climb up on and work from there. As a result, I find myself leaning towards one previous artist or another to find the vocabulary—visual or sometimes verbal—that helps me articulate what I actually personally am haunted by at a given moment.I think that's where we get that phrase "postmodernism" from, for better or for worse. You know what I mean? This kind ofcollaging ofeverything that came before that helps you make something.I remember reading a book called... Oh,shit, what's the guy's name? British art historian... Let me see if I can find it on my shelf. Oxford don historian of art... b-r-r-r-r-p, crap. I'll never be able to find it in the middle of our conversation without making you wait for the rest ofour half hour... urn,Gombrich! E.M. Gombrich.Talking about how some westerners bring a few Japanese students out to draw a landscape and theyjust can't do it. Because what they draw from is a series of visual conventions rather than from something that includes perspective and things like that. So it became, for him, a way of pointing to the fact that all art is built on other art.That it's a system of thought that has developed over millenia that allows one to make an image.So their way of making pictures just didn't include the kind of standard nineteenth-century watercolor-making that cultivated women would do in their spare hours,going out and drawing the beautiful nature. So, sure—on one level, that. On another level,I sometimes feel not so much haunted but trapped by ways I've done things before because I've habituated to making things in a certain way so that I keep trying to chuck it and as a result, each time I take something on I sort of feel like I'm trying to reinvent the wheel to find another way of making it. And often I come up with something very close to the same solutions I've used before, but they were hard won. I had to go through everything all over again to get there. So, that's as close as I might be able to come to answering a question that has very tangled things in it.

views and essays I've written. I don't remember the context of this. Was that the introduction to the No Towers book? YLM:It's in the No Towers book. You have a frame on the left side of the page where there are people falling... AS: Yeah. Well, I think that what happens is actually, and it's kind of interesting when one reads about cog sci and memory, that one can have memory implants that then become indistinguishable from one's own memories. And I think that's really basic to, again, how we think comics work.Because those kind ofstripped-down cartoon pictures burn their way into your brain as much as something that you're actually able to experience more directly. Many a time people talk about things that happened to them and it's a totally different narrative than what somebody next to them will remember. And sometimes it's something you've actually just read in a book. One of the advantages of literary fiction is it allows you to climb into somebody else's brain,as Sven Birkerts's book—what was that called? The Gutenberg Elegies,I think—puts it, you actually,in a very efficient way, climb into somebody else's brain when reading literary fiction. And at that point,those things can kind ofget tangled up in your wiring so that they're as real to you as anything that actually happened to you. And I think that it's in that blur between the actual and the simulated that we are all living our lives, so that clearly there's a difference. Like when I was in lower Manhattan with Nadja and Francoise and the towers fell right behind us—that was undeniably not a movie,just because it was so large. But other than that it felt like the biggest bluescreen effect I'd ever witnessed. So, the difference, as I said on one of those No Towers pages, was one of scale, and it made me keep trying to take its measure. But after a certain amount of time I was back in the same mediated reality as everybody else in America and most ofthe world,trying to understand what had happened that morning. And soon just being witness to the hijacking of the hijacking, as I think I might have put it, by the Bush gang at a time when it wasn't possible to point at it. YLM:I wonder if there's a way in which you feel haunted by some of the tropes you've worked through before. Is that something out ofwhich art is necessarily made? Do you feel like you're constantly engaged in reimagining and recreating things you've worked through before?

YLM:Do you find it difficult to write about the same topic twice? Does the writing itself become the memory so much that when you write about the same thing you write about what you already wrote?

AS: Well,it's definitely an issue not just for cartoonists, but for my father telling me the narrative I built Maus around.I keep going back over the same bit ofdeposition many times just to try to find a crack in it and find something new, you know. And occasionally we get there. Certain things we hadn't talked about before were much more difficult to articulate. Again,it comes out to be based on,for myself, the need.If something's still sort of really "at me,"I've got to go back in on it. A lot of that introduction to the new version of Breakdowns includes some rethinking of what had been for me the four-page strip about my mother's suicide that was so sealed as a piece ofwork that I couldn't even find another way to deal with it in Maus and had to print that strip way too small as part of that larger, to use the word again, deposition that was Maus as a way of giving what a reader needed to know about my mother's suicideâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;my relation to it and whatever.Then when it was finally getting a chance to be printed in its ideal size in the new book,I found myself agonized yet again and still, of course, by her suicide, whatever,forty years ago as ifit was yesterday. As a result, a lot of the memoryholesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;wormholes and memoriesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;from that introduction somehow reverberate around her suicide again, but in a different way than the strip I had done back in '72.

make film even though it has some relationship to comics. More comics are probably best served as film, which is why so many of the recent comic books that we've seen from the comic book industry seem to be just a storyboard for movies. It has to do with the fact that at a certain point in the history of media, the best way you could see a man fly was somebody would draw it and then you'd see a man flying. Now, thanks to the miracle of computer graphic imaging, it's not that much harder to make it happen on a screen, which has the kind of immediacy that a passive connection towards being seen can offer. Persepolis is a little bit different cause this thing had to be really rethought,and rethought by the original maker rather than just:"Here's a component of this project for a lot of people to enter into."Persepolis really was something where Marjane Satrapi went back and had to rethink everything about her work and make a different but parallel work,and in some ways maybe even a more effective one, working with a group of people. It's a matter of how fully the artist wants to engage in something,to see whether it's worth engaging in. I just shied away from making movies. And it also has to do with poetry. Poetry's really hard to translate. All you can do is make a parallel poem, but so much of what's involved in making a poem is the sound,the length,the texture of a given word,that it just doesn't translate. The more something is involved in its own language, the harder it is to transplant it into another. My obsessions have had to do with the things that have been coming up over the course of this half-hour of conversation.

YLM:I've noticed the recent trend of making graphic narratives into movies. In Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, for example, the evenness of the way the pictures are drawn is conducive to film.Your work takes advantage ofthe medium of being in print. Could you talk about the translation of graphic narrative to film?

YLM: What is the question you wish interviewers asked you more often?

AS: Movies and comics, alright. There's certainly an intertwined history, but comics got there first and then were left behind as the stunted little dwarf brother.A guy named Rudolphe Topffer,a Swiss educator who sort of invented comics and graphic novels, was doing things that involved, say, cross-cutting in the 1830s,well before Griffith had a camera in his hand.The language we have to talk about making our comics often involves"zoom,""close-up,""long shot"... we're now using a vocabulary that comes with a different kind of media scene. Because you can be much more passive watching something on a screen. You're just sort of strapped in and catapulted through the temporal experience. It's very different to reengage and weave with your eyeballs and brain on a page. I've been very interested in the latter and what it means,so I just never wanted to try to figure out how to

AS: Okay...I've censored about five already. Sexual propositions are off the table, right? I'll leave it uncensored to this degree: right now because ofthe amount oftalking I've been doing about a work that is in its own ways not exactly hermetically sealed, but already has its explanations built into it, all I want is the question: "Would you like to skip this interview?"

23 Nam

GRAPHIC POEM Anna Moser - Candyrope - 25 -

IMAGES Breanna Yvonne Jedrzejewslci - Untitled photograph - 27David Muenzer - Carnival Thing and Flesh encaustic, egg tempera, oil, acrylic, latex, &guy on wood - 28 Elizabeth Walden - Stiles aquatint - 29 Jarren Simmons - Untitled photograph - 30Nicolas Niarchos - Untitled photograph -31 Noa Kaplan-Sears - Untitled acrylic on board - 32Page Benkowski - Ice House largeformatprint - 33 Tucker Rae-Grant - Pattern Recognition acrylics on linen on pine - 34 Henry Fuseli - Dido Yale Centerfor British Art - 35-

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