I met today's guest, Sandra Beasley, back at the start of the year, after a session at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Chicago. Sandra is the author of two poetry collections: I Was the Jukebox, winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize (selected by Joy Harjo, forthcoming from W. W. Norton), and Theories of Falling, which won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. Chance meetings like this make attending the conference worthwhile all by themselves.

In June of this year, Sandra left her job at The American Scholar to focus on writing Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, forthcoming from Crown in 2011. Recently I asked if she'd post something here about the big step, which so many writers dream of taking, of leaving one life and starting another. She graciously agreed.

Sandra lives in Washington, D.C., where she periodically contributes to the Washington Post Magazine and serves on the Board of the Writer's Center. After reading her piece below, come on back and read three of her poems online at Agni: "My God," "I Don't Fear Death," and "Love Poem for Wednesday."

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Let It Rain

By Sandra Beasley

I just snarled at my boyfriend over a piece of fruit. More specifically, my last banana, which he tried to claim for his lunch. “I’ll buy you another one,” he promised, and he would. He’s good that way.

The problem is that I’d wanted to eat that banana within the hour, and he tends to pick under-ripe produce. So I’d end up running to Safeway myself, which means getting dressed and stepping outside. At which point, I’d remember oh! the envelope I need to mail and oh! the birthday card I need to buy for my mother and oh! I need to make photocopies of an essay and oh! I’ve got a 3 p.m. coffee date—might as well head over early with this copy of Real Simple and read until she gets there.…

“Don’t mooch,” I snapped at him, with the ferocity of someone defending no mere piece of fruit, but hours worth of work. That’s right: the act of putting on pants can derail an entire day’s productivity. Welcome to the life of a full-time writer.

You know the drill. When someone asks what you do, you trot out whatever workhorse pays the rent—in my case it was “scholarship coordinator,” then “personal assistant,” then “magazine editor”—before arriving at your true destination. “I’m really a writer.”

This elicits a respectful head nod or, if talking to a fellow writer, a bittersweet shrug. We know the odds. And you swear to yourself Someday, the answer will be, I’m a writer. No hyphenating. No qualifying.

I quit my job. I quit so that for the next year I can live off the combination of an advance on a nonfiction book, periodic freelance gigs, and honoraria attached to two poetry collections. I am a full-time writer with the bathrobe and sparse cupboards to prove it.

Yet the “what do you do?” exchange is no easier than before. The respectful head nod has been replaced by a quizzical tilt. The bittersweet shrug has been replaced by a narrowing of eyes or, worse, a nauseated smile.

“Really?”
“So you, um, you don’t work anywhere?”
“How are you covering health insurance?”
“That’s pretty brave.”

Yes. No. COBRA. Hmm.

It’s not as if I had been deveining shrimp for a living. I worked as an editor at a national magazine of arts and commentary, the kind of venerated place one settles in for a lifetime (literally: two supervising editors had, combined, over 50 years experience on staff). People all around me—including my best friend, including my boyfriend—have been laid off in their professions. Meanwhile, I walked out on a steady income with full benefits and three weeks annual vacation.

Is “brave” codeword for “idiotic”?

But the thing about life’s big decisions is that by the time you make them, you’ve already made them. The day I decided to leave my job was not the day I gave notice to my editor. The day had come months earlier, when I set into motion the events that necessitated my departure. And the roof fell in.

That’s not a metaphor. Passing through the doorway that morning, I had noticed the smell first. I thought I knew all the office odors: the accountant’s gardenia perfume, fake-cherry bathroom spray, fish-and-broccoli lunches. This smell was unfamiliar. Damp.

“Oh, Sandra,” my boss said. “I’m so sorry. We did what we could.”

Wet white chunks of tile covered my workstation. A broken dishwasher line on the floor above had released a torrent that dissolved our pressboard ceiling. Luckily, my computer seemed to be working despite the surrounding wreckage. I swiped the worst of the dust off my chair and did what we all do in moments of crisis—I checked my email.

The life of a modern-day magazine editor is that every morning you have thirty-six unread messages waiting, and not one will be useful. Submissions that began “I know you’re not considering unsolicited poetry, but….” Pitches for books we’d never review. Another query from the Save-the-Manatees people, hoping we’d print their public service announcement in the unsold advertising space of our next issue.

But when I switched to my personal email, there it was: an agreement that would authorize a New York literary agency to sell my proposal for a non-fiction book.

Sign and return, the email requested, as if that was the simplest thing in the world. So why was I shaking? Maybe because I’d said I could complete the book in a year. I’d lied. Or, rather, I’d made a promise while trying to please (pick me! pick me!) without fully processing the consequences. There was no way I could write a book in a year and keep working in this office. Something would have to give.

To distract myself from the looming dotted line, I turned to the water damage. On the table I’d used as my extended desk, towers of paper had melted into one gummy mass. This had been the worst of my job—the repetitive record keeping that haunts any assistant—and now, I’d spend hours regenerating what I had put off filing. But the table held the best of my work as well. Forty books, comp copies I’d collected on everything from political poetry to the Medici Giraffe.

“What better job for a writer, than to be surrounded by books all day?” I could remember telling people over and over throughout the years. Now those books were waterlogged. And as I looked over each handful I dropped into a trashcan, I realized: sure, I’d been surrounded by them. I’d talked about them. I’d assigned some for review. But I’d never had time to actually read them. What I had surrounded myself with was not words and ideas, so much as unkept promises in bright-colored covers.

What better job for a writer? How about the job of…writing?

The contract was waiting for me. Hands and heart moving faster than my head, I printed; I signed; I faxed.

“I’m stepping out,” I said to my officemates. The saxophonist who always hangs out on the corner of Connecticut and Q was playing “Walking On Sunshine.” There were only two-dollar bills in my wallet, but I gave one to him. I bought a Coke with the other and walked the same square block three times, sipping it slowly.

When I returned to my desk, the overly conditioned air raised gooseflesh on my arms. When I am writing at home all day, I thought, I will keep my thermostat at 76 degrees. Then I heard it. A gentle rushing. Maybe the air-conditioner? I pushed back from my desk. “Anybody else hear that?”

Drip. Drip. Drip. I dashed up to the kitchen, where the building manager was twisting valves under the sink. Someone had restarted the broken dishwasher.

“I’ve got a call in,” he said. “But I can’t stop it.”

Downstairs, the staff gathered around my desk. They laid trash bags over my computer and lined up wastebaskets, trying to catch the spray. The spray became a flow, then a flood. The surviving tile swelled and drooped.

An impatient coworker grabbed the nearest prod—my long-handled umbrella—and began jabbing at the tile, trying to coax it down, smearing the pink-and-yellow flowered nylon with white sludge.

“Back off!” I wanted to shout. “Leave it alone!”

But there was no point. Soon this would no longer be my office. Soon this would no longer be my life. In the days ahead, I would come to understand that the free pens and ever-ready coffee had been an impossibly precious gift. I would come to count bananas like a madwoman. And I would be writing. Writing. Writing.

I can’t tell you if I made the right decision, or where I’ll be in a year. Here is what I do know: there’s no such thing as a wise risk. There are only the chances you must take on yourself. No matter the timing. No matter the economy.

Sometimes that means you stand back, and let the ceiling fall where it may.

***

Read more by and about Sandra at her website, SandraBeasley.com, and check out her blog there, called Chicks Dig Poetry.

Upon receiving word Sunday that a brief essay of mine had been listed as notable in the new Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2009, I was so rattled that I let the broom out and swept the floor with my cat.

“Three Graces” first appeared in Brevity, one of my favorite journals. Brevity has published “extremely brief” essays for a decade now, with the indefatigable Dinty W. Moore at the helm. Now it also traffics in craft essays, book reviews, and a saucy blog. It’s one of those publications that anthology and textbook editors seem to trawl consistently, and I’m thankful to Dinty and his crew for the opportunity.

Season of Ash. Jorge Volpi (Translated by Alfred MacAdam.) Open Letter, University of Rochester, October 2009. Paperback, $12.75.

Toward a Coherent Vision of the 20th Century—Or, Why Jorge Volpi Is My New Favorite Novelist

Review by Okla Elliott

Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash is the kind of novel that reminds me why I read novels in the first place, but it’s also the kind that makes me wonder why I bother to write. Before the end of this review, I am going to try to convince you that Volpi is a genius, that you have to buy this book, and that he’ll end up with the Nobel Prize in Literature if there is any justice in the world (which there might not be…)—but before I attempt all that, you should know who Jorge Volpi is, as he is not yet well-known to North American readers.

Jorge Volpi, born in the internationally tumultuous year of 1968 in Mexico City, has written nine novels, including one other, In Search of Klingsor, that has been translated into English and which has won prizes in Spain and France, as well as Volpi’s native Mexico. He is one of the founders (along with Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Ángel Palou, et al) of the “Crack Movement” in Mexican literature, a movement attempting to free itself from what its members perceive as the chains of magical realism, hoping to return to the joys found in the work of, for example, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges. Volpi studied law at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and holds his PhD in Spanish philology from Universidad de Salamanca in Spain. He has worked as a lawyer, a political aide, and as a scholar. The evidence of this political/legal praxis and this scholarly knowledge certainly show up in his work, though never pedantically or gratuitously. In the world of Spanish-language literature, he is known for his wide-ranging intelligence, the ambition of his work, his intricate plots, and a subtly dark humor.

Season of Ash opens with the infamous 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl. (So, okay, here I have an admission: I rather disliked the first few paragraphs of the novel—so much so, in fact, I was disappointed I’d agreed to review the book, since I was worried the rest of it would be equally unpleasant. I mention this for two reasons—to let you know I’m not such a fan of Volpi’s novel that I can’t admit its failings, and to make sure if you pick up a copy of the book, that you force past the first two pages, because after that, it’s pretty much perfect.) Here is Volpi, several pages in, at his lyric finest, personifying the radiation from the reactor’s meltdown as a monster the hopeless Soviet soldiers die trying to fight:

Wind and rain were carrying its humors toward Europe and the Pacific, its dregs were piling up in lakes, and its semen was filtering its way through the geological strata. The monster was in no hurry. It was patiently planning its revenge: Every baby born without legs, without a pancreas, every sterile sheep, dying cow, every rusty lung, every malignant tumor, every eaten-away brain would celebrate its revenge.

That wide narrative view—which takes in so much geography, time, and human suffering—is paradoxically one of the joys throughout the novel. The various plotlines, however, occasionally focus very closely on certain characters, the POV embedding so deeply into the consciousness of a particular character in the ensemble cast that we forget the novel spans four continents, eight decades, and over a dozen important characters (not to mention such historical figures as Joseph Stalin, Ronald Reagan, and Boris Yeltsin). Though, now looking over the above excerpt, I see just how intricately Volpi weaves his narrative lines, how flawlessly he modulates his narrative registers; I say this because while I enjoy the excerpt by itself, it loses much (most?) of its power out of context, where we see Soviet soldiers sent to their deaths, ordered to bury the site of the incident with sand, ordered to axe to death all the animals in the region and incinerate them, all the while dying slowly or quickly of radiation poisoning. We also are worried about the political well-being of the scientists involved as we read all this. And on, and on.

Volpi’s scholarship and knowledge of international law and politics complements his novelistic powers wonderfully. With only a few well-placed and concisely explained historico-political facts, Volpi creates unimpeachable narrative authority on such wide-ranging topics as Hungarian student movements, the Zairian French dialect, the corruption surrounding IMF funds in Africa, computer technology, mathematics, genetics, war strategy, hippie communes in the US during the '60s, abortion procedures, depression, and more. There seems to be nothing he doesn’t know and nothing he can’t find human tragedy and human comedy in.

This wide of a scope and this many movable parts would likely become a mess in a lesser novelist’s hands. Volpi has, however, chosen a structure that organizes his materials without constricting them. The novel is divided into a prelude and three acts, each act containing seven chapters.

The Prelude covers the Chernobyl incident and is set entirely in 1986. Act I, which covers the years 1929-1985, is not chronologically ordered but rather swims around in time and plotlines, which seems unorganized but is not on closer inspection. We learn the DNA, so to speak, of the novel in Act I, and the non-linear narrative lends itself to such a huge vision very well. But had Volpi kept that non-linearity for the entire novel, readers would simply get lost in the wash of time and information. And so Act II, which covers the years 1985-1991, is ordered exactly chronologically, with each of its seven chapters covering a single year. Act III covers 1991-2000 and returns to the non-linear structure, but by this point, we are oriented enough in the world of the novel for this not to be a problem. And, as you can see, the overall structure of the novel takes us, in its roundabout way, from 1929 to 2000, thus giving the novel an overall sense of progression.

The two novels I was most reminded of while reading Season of Ash were Europe Central, by William T. Vollmann, and 2666, by Roberto Bolaño. Most novels would be reduced to, forgive the pun, ash by such a comparison, but Volpi’s novel not only stands up to these two masterpieces, I daresay it surpasses them. It shows all the erudition, all the aesthetic sophistication, all the vision of a Europe Central or a 2666, yet it is considerably more readable. In effect, it accomplishes all they do intellectually and emotionally while also being entertaining. During the time I carried the book around with me, I was always digging it out of my bag on a bus or train, just to get a few pages in; it kept me up past when I should have been asleep; it caused me to ignore invitations to parties (even ones I actually wanted to go to).

The publisher’s synopsis on the back of the book reads:

Jorge Volpi's Season of Ash puts a human face on earth-shaking events of the late twentieth century: the Chernobyl disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Soviet communism and the rise of the Russian oligarchs, the cascading collapsing of developing economies, and the near-miraculous scientific advances of the Human Genome Project. A scientific investigation, a journalistic exposé, a detective novel, and a dark love story, Season of Ash is a thrilling exploration of greed and disillusionment, and a clear-eyed examination of the passions that rule our lives and make history.

So, there you have it.

I can’t go into a complete analysis of the translation here, but suffice to say that Alfred MacAdam, who has translated many of Latin America’s literary giants (Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Cortázar), has made a virtuoso performance here. (I do wonder how the Spanish title, No Será la Tierra, became Season of Ash—but oddities of title changes happen all the time in translation, so we’ll just have to overlook this). Translating genius requires itself a certain genius. MacAdam is already well-lauded for his work as a translator, but someone needs to give this man a medal for his current effort.

I hope Volpi’s international reputation, coupled with MacAdam’s translation and credentials, make this book the last necessary element for Volpi to contend for the Nobel, which would end the Eurocentrism many (Americans) complain about the prize having had in recent years. More importantly, it would celebrate a massive and original talent.

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Okla Elliott's non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in A Public Space, Indiana Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, and New Letters, among others. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks and is co-editor, with Kyle Minor, of The Other Chekhov.

Gaze into the box:

I had some fun yesterday doing a nearly hour-long interview on my novel with the local NPR affiliate. I don’t exactly have my NPR voice perfected, but brew up a cup of chamomile and sip it while you listen, and you’ll get the idea.

Sometimes, even in writing, it’s necessary to lead by negative example. Granted, I’m in one of my moods after several hard days in the teaching mill, but I think this is spot-on, mate (via Philip Graham).

Speaking of Philip Graham, author of The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon and the subject of a recent interview here, he’s taking his book on the road (again). Check here for dates and venues if you live near Iowa City, Champaign, or Chattanooga.

Brian Turner, a poet to watch and another interviewee here, has been blogging for the New York Times as part of the "Home Fires: American Veterans on the Post-War Life" series. He’s currently spending a year traveling around the world, and his posts are getting a lot of attention.

State workers here are required to take and pass an annual, online, ethics refresher course (it takes 30-60 minutes), and state university employees are no exception. The format has varied over time, but the requirement inevitably draws complaints. Since money is always tight, and the state employs many people, the course's design has been one-size-fits-all. Liberal arts faculty were often irritated that they had to read about and be quizzed on the ethics of signing contracts with vendors, with whom they had no contact, and facilities workers were no doubt puzzled about warnings not to take gifts from students’ parents in exchange for grade influence.

ach year's refresher covers oddly selective rules governing everything from taking home leftover departmental-party balloons to sexual harassment. None of the information is particularly weighted, so all infractions sound like equal offenses. A formal test, also taken online, used to follow the instruction. The system knew exactly how long you were taking to read each page, so if you sped through or left it sitting there too long you could be disciplined for not taking the process seriously. The system also reports those who fail to take it at all.

When you do finish, it generates a certificate that must be printed and kept on hand in case an administrator demands to see it. Dire warnings are sent around about failure to comply. All this has come down from on high in a state where the governor himself had a few ethics problems, which really stuck in some people’s craws too.

I’ve just finished this year’s refresher. The website was much slicker, and there was no separate test, just 74 pages(!) of scenarios and multiple-choice questions, with feedback on both right and wrong answers. The material still tried to cover, in a general fashion, oddly specific rules. If you’re invited to a cocktail-dinner party for a company that does business with the university, it turns out, you can eat and drink $75 worth, but at $75.01 you’ve committed an ethics breach. Some other situation sets the cap at $100. Sometimes you have to give perceived gifts or compensation back, or donate an equivalent amount to charity, other times not.

The winning scenario was one in which Administrator Pablo did something that was a minor ethics problem, best I can remember; Sub-Administrator Jill didn’t report it, so her violation was worse; her coworkers tried to give her a hard time about it and were in bigger trouble; and when State Investigator Fred came to ask for documents regarding the case, he overstepped his authority by doing so. The expected answer to the final corresponding test question was that we should immediately contact our “EO”—campus ethics officer—to report the state ethics investigator.

There was a passage in the introduction to this year’s test that read:

The University is committed to building and fostering an ethical workplace culture. Ethics training provides an opportunity to reflect on and reaffirm our obligations as members of the academic community. Though not all elements of the training may be specific to your line of work here at the University, the program in its entirety is important. Ethics training will not, by itself, ensure ethical behavior. Personal responsibility, a culture of high mutual expectations, and the tone set by leaders all play a role in encouraging ethically responsible behavior.

It was signed by all the university presidents in the system, including the one we most recently lost to ethics violations, and I took my test on the day that our chancellor resigned for related reasons.

On a recent collecting trip through the thickets of creative nonfiction, I took note of a form that must have its roots in something ancient that I’m not remembering:

I can remember the bare wooden stairway in my uncle’s house, and the turn to the left above the landing, and the rafters and the slanting roof over my bed, and the squares of moonlight on the floor, and the white cold world of snow outside, seen through the curtainless window. I can remember the howling of the wind and the quaking of the house on stormy nights, and how snug and cozy one felt, under the blankets, listening…. I remember the raging of the rain on that roof, summer nights, and how pleasant it was to lie and listen to it, and enjoy the white splendor of the lightning and the majestic booming and crashing of the thunder.

It’s a litany of things remembered (or known or seen in other texts), hung on a string of conjunctions; it’s sung in a first-person voice unsubmerged in the narrative; it’s in the present tense, where elsewhere the remembering is situated in the past; and it almost boastfully advertises its store of memories. Could the general form be from Shakespeare, epic poetry, the Bible? There is a faint echo in Ecclesiastes (“I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold…”) and in Job (“And I alone am escaped to tell thee…”).

There’s something similar in Ernest Hemingway’s “one true sentence” exercise, which I wrote about a couple of years ago. His sentences also want to be noticed in their observing:

I have seen Peggy Joyce at 2 A.M. in a dancing in the Rue Caumartin quarreling with the shallaced [sic] haired young Chilean who had long pointed finger nails, danced like Rudolph Valentino and shot himself at 3:30 that same morning.

The present-perfect construction “I have seen” intensifies the feeling that something that happened at an indefinite time in the past continues to inhabit the present, and the word “have” is a homonym for possession. (Hemingway’s exercises could have been influenced by the “Epiphanies” recorded by James Joyce in his early notebooks, which include short “memorable phases” of the artist’s mind “as he observes, reminisces, or dreams,” but there appears to be nothing in the Joyce epiphanies this obviously “I”-centric. Joyce liked to leave the artist behind the curtain, paring his fingernails. See Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Northwestern UP, 1965).

The little form I started with is longer than Hemingway’s Imagistic exercises and more lyrical (“That art is lyrical whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to himself,” Joyce writes), and in fact brings narrative to a grinding halt, relying on its sharpness and mood for interest instead. The thing that stands out for me is the claim of ownership or capability:

I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off hammering of woodpeckers and the muffled drumming of wood pheasants in the remoteness of the forest, the snapshot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures scurrying through the grass….

Oddly enough, both examples I’ve provided are Mark Twain, from his Autobiography, a mash-up of unpublished writing, the occasional published piece, and a whole lot of raw dictation that was never finished or published as a book in Twain’s lifetime. The passage, which continues for five pages, doesn’t sound much like Twain to me, and in fact there’s nothing else like it in the book or in the rest of Twain, best I can remember. (I elided telltale words in this example, such as “forgotten sins came flocking out…and wanted a hearing,” which would be like finding his fingerprints on the page). It reminded me of Hemingway in his memoirs, Moveable Feast:

I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves in the woodcutters’ huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his right forefoot raised and then go carefully to stop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge.

In addition to staking claims on Romantic experience—transcendent self in nature—both passages use present-tense verbs and participles in an implied past progressive tense (“I remember [that I was] following…”) to show the past, in the process arguing the power of the minds involved to defy time, in which the writerly ego takes particular pride. The resultant intrusion of the overt first-person could as easily have been submerged in standard exposition or description, as in Hemingway’s memory of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which there’s no announcement of remembering:

He was lightly built and did not look in awfully good shape, his face being faintly puffy. His Brooks Brothers clothes fitted him well and he wore a white shirt with a buttoned-down collar and a Guard’s tie.

But the self in relation to its past is the basis for much nonfiction writing, and elements of what I’m talking about often rise to the surface without breaking, as with Russell Baker in his autobiography Growing Up, on the wake held after the sudden death of his father:

So late in November, the dusk came early. The men seemed unusually quiet. I did not know many of them. They stood in little groups talking quietly, almost in whispers, probably not saying anything very interesting, just feeling self-conscious in their Sunday suits with nothing to do but stand. The men standing and waiting and talking quietly with nothing to do in their good dark suits [my emphasis on the ongoing present] was part of the ritual too.

Or Mencken in Mencken’s America (Ohio UP, 2004): “And she wore, I remember [intrusive “I”], something of very soft dark green, and the spun sable silk that mere prose writers would have called her hair caught in orange chiffon.”

In that most beautifully literary of memoirs, Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov reveals his ongoing construction of memory with various elements of this form—reversion to present tense, use of participles, prideful possession of images, the intrusive “I”—every few pages:

I can visualize her, by proxy, as she stands in the middle of the station platform, where she has just alighted, and vainly my ghostly envoy offers her an arm that she cannot see.

Presently, lessons are over and Mademoiselle is reading to us on the veranda where the mats and plaited chairs develop a spicy, biscuity smell in the heat.

I can easily refeel the exhilarating change from the thickly padded, knee-length polushubock, with the hot beaver collar, to the short navy-blue coat with its anchor-patterned brass buttons….

And now a delightful thing happens. The process of recreating that penholder and the microcosm in its eyelet stimulates my memory to a last effort….

I suddenly see myself in the uniform of an officers’ training school: we are strolling again villageward….

I remember the dreamy flow of punts and canoes on the Cam, the Hawaiian whine of phonographs slowly passing through sunshine and shade and a girl’s hand gently twirling this way and that the handle of her peacock-bright parasol as she reclined on the cushions….

Nabokov of course is writing on memory as much as on his memories:

[T]o try to express one’s position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. [T]he poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought, he taps his knees with his wand-like pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other trifles occur—all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.

That ongoing present of consciousness, with the writer inside like a grain of sand, and the pearl in the oyster, and the oyster in the sloshing sea, and the planet spinning with the inertia of its watery weight, is the basis for this odd little form I’ve noticed, which we might call the litany of self.

While trying to write his failed autobiography Twain searched for a form that would best convey the experience of a life lived.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history. His acts and his words are merely the visible, thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and it vacant wastes of water—and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden—it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. Every day would make a whole book of eighty thousand words—three hundred and sixty-five books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

(Note that Joyce, soon after, writes a “whole book”—Ulysses—that purports to be one day below the thin crust of a man’s life.) Twain’s litany of self, a few intense memories arranged by craft in a much longer text, is but one mode of that search for form.

Pleased with my discovery and wanting to share the beauty of the un-Twainish Twain passage, I went to see my acquaintance Rory, a nonfiction editor, administrator, sometime-teacher, and progenitor of a girl-tribe so large it will one day people the earth. All these stressors sometimes make him Churmish, and the flood of predictable writing about self that he constantly reads—“Look at me, looking at the world”—has jaded him.

“My crew and I would shoot that thing full of holes,” he said, sneering at the Twain. He said anything written in the “I have seen, I can remember” style was notable only for its sentimentality. I pointed out that in writing terms it’s not sentimental—unearned emotion—though it undoubtedly has feeling.

Rory said it must be nostalgic then, longing for an irrecoverable pastorality, like Raymond Williams’ idea of an Edenic past that never existed except in the mind of the writer. Rory pushed me out the door with an essay he’d written about lost Beat-writer sons who yearn for this Eden, which he’d published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction so long ago it was printed on the bark of the tree of knowledge.

Of course there are lost worlds in my examples, since, almost by definition, writing on the past points to difference. Hemingway talks about skiing in Austria between the wars, before ski lifts were common, and how hiking up the mountains made one’s legs capable of the long run down to the valley, so injuries from falls were less common then. Changes do occur in processes and technologies, and to recall old ways is not necessarily nostalgic. (Hemingway is instead making a moral judgment.) Besides, many things this form takes pleasure in—experiences in both nature and human culture—can still be found if you wish to find them for yourself.

Rory would probably better appreciate the litany of Roy Batty, the killer replicant in the film Blade Runner, who wants in his dying hour for his pursuer to understand the fragility of even spectacular memories. “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate,” he soliloquizes in an elegy of self that fails to mention his gouging out the eyes of his Frankenstein-like creator. “All those moments will be lost, in time, like tears in rain.” Now there’s a lost-son narrative.

Here’s the set-up; you have until Friday at 4:00 to answer:

You’re teaching an introductory survey for non-majors to a lecture hall of 200 students. Since the class is only 50 minutes long, three times a week, you handed out a prompt last Monday for a short take-home essay due Friday by 4:00 p.m. The prompt stipulated that no late essays would be accepted. On Wednesday last week you gave an in-class test of matching, fill-in-the blank, and short answers. You drove your TAs (and yourself) to finish grading and recording all the scores by the end of the weekend.

This Monday you go in and discuss the test in class. As you’re leaving a young man asks if he can speak to you. He’s shy, impeccably polite, and mildly embarrassed: He’s “forgotten” to write and turn in a take-home essay, worth 20% of the midterm total.

“Is there any way I can still do it?” he asks. Tears (his) are a real possibility.

He, like 70 of his classmates, is a first-time freshman at a very large state school. He’s Hispanic, and going by what he says, he's probably the first in his family to attend college. His score for the in-class portion of the test was a mere 50 out of a possible 80. (With the 20 additional points of the take-home essay, the test is worth 100.) Only one other student "forgot" to turn in an essay, but at least she remembered to e-mail with extenuating circumstances a few hours after it was due.

What would you do about the young man? Take his essay? For full or reduced points? How reduced? On what basis, given your policy? Or would you refuse the essay as another sort of pedagogy?

Always read your IHE “Quick Takes”; I can vouch for their accuracy. This past week they noted that 92% of campuses being monitored across the country were reporting new cases of H1N1 flu. Indeed, I was one of them.

At least I had the “flu-like symptoms” that short of a specific test are being taken as evidence of the illness formerly know as swine flu. Anything flu-ish, before the seasonal flu has arrived, is being treated like H1N1 here. Our campus is holding a seminar next week on how to handle student and instructor absences, and it’s going to be needed to hash out dropped readings from the syllabus, missed quiz grades, and busted-up attendance policies.

Last Sunday I’d taken the kids to campus in order to pick something up at the office. It was a cool sunny morning and we played soccer on the quad and ate lunch at the Pita Pit. That night I started feeling incredibly tired and congested; Monday, still thinking I just had the start of a bad cold, I was able to conduct my midterm review in the giant lecture hall without getting near students. But after midnight that night I suddenly spiked a 105-degree fever and lay in bed for the next three days, something I haven’t done since I was a child, stoked on ibuprofen and Tamiflu. I missed the whole teaching week. Luckily I have some of the best TAs anywhere, who administered and proctored the midterm I finished writing in bed.

I hate fever and have always been sensitive to it. It still makes me think of being a kid, sick on winter nights in a cold bed, blankets heavy on my feet, and the TV muttering incoherently in a distant room. My synaptical connections scramble like egg proteins at the slightest touch of fever, and things begin to get trippy and brittle very quickly, the world taking on a glassy brilliance, with dew sparkling like crystals in the grass.

Worse, nights are filled with fever dreams: Hammerheads, numerous as sperm, swimming circles around an invisible egg, far up near the surface I must get to before my air runs out; the little wart on my finger sprouts the plant known as Hens-and-Chicks, and when I rub it off, it sprouts back more fiercely each time in succulent rosettes.

And the worst—the very worst? An unending mental loop of the song “Food,” from the musical Oliver, as sung by the vultures in Ice Age 2. (“Magical food!” warbles the bulging-eyed fledgling in this bad copy from some guy’s TV set, which makes it all the more horrible and like my dreams).

When I’m really sick I also have a hard time reading, a genuinely hellish fact that makes me hope that, many years from now when my time really comes, I drop quickly from the top of my elephant, as I’m crossing the Alps to face the Roman Legions, rather than suffer some long, non-reading infirmity.

Wait, what’d I just say?

I was able to read one good book in bed this week—the fact that I could read it when I couldn’t get interested in much else is testament to its interest and quality—and I’ll tell you about it soon. But for now I must force myself to read the midterm exams that have arrived back on my front stoop as if by magic, courtesy of a goateed, Mephistophelean figure in the rain, who says his name is Dave, the TA.

Today I’m pleased to bring you an interview with Philip Graham, author of the novel How to Read an Unwritten Language, the story collections The Art of the Knock and Interior Design, and three other books of memoirs and prose poetry. His latest book, about to be released from The University of Chicago Press, is titled The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon.

This book was written during Philip’s recent sabbatical year from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches creative writing. He is also a co-founder and the current fiction editor of the literary/arts journal Ninth Letter at UIUC, and for full disclosure I should say that he has an office down the hall, and that it’s much, much nicer than mine. The other thing we have in common is that we’ve both written for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, where most of the dispatches in his book first appeared.

Philip’s writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, North American Review, the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and many other venues, and he’s won a bucket of awards, including an NEA Fellowship and an NEH grant. He’s also an awfully nice guy.

***

Hi, Philip, and welcome. Thanks for so generously mentioning me in the acknowledgments for your new book. I see my name comes right after those of your immediate family, and way ahead of Roy Kesey’s.

Actually, you were included in the acknowledgments well before Roy Kesey because your editorial comments were way, way, way better than his. True, the letter G [For Griswold, my real name. –Churm] does come before K, but I believe the universe works in mysterious tandem with the alphabet. I’ve noticed that the best and smartest people all have last names that begin with A.

That accounts for Aaron Aardvark then. Speaking of Roy Kesey, who once wrote his own dispatches from China, there have been several who did excellent work in that form, but only a couple of you have gotten book deals. How’d you make it happen?

I’d never intended to write a book of dispatches. The whole idea started as a sort of experiment. I’m a big admirer of Roy Kesey’s writing—as fiction editor of Ninth Letter I’ve had the pleasure of publishing a couple of his short stories. When I came upon Roy’s dispatches, I flipped at how well he expressed the various strains of his humorous and insightful soul as he traveled through China (though, alphabetically speaking, his dispatches are not nearly as humorous or insightful as yours).

Around that time, I knew I’d be spending a year in Portugal, so I thought why not give it a try myself? I asked John Warner at McSweeney’s if he wouldn’t mind looking at my first attempts and he graciously agreed to do so. (John is gracious about nearly anything he does, have you noticed? I’ll bet he’d be gracious even when jimmying a parking meter.)

I once saw him being gracious at an AWP conference.

After my first few Lisbon dispatches appeared, people started writing to me, wondering in the nicest way if I’d be turning the series into a book. That began to seem like a reasonable idea, and so I found myself working toward this suggested book that didn’t yet exist. And strangely enough, a narrative began to appear, one in which Alma and I, and our then eleven-year-old daughter Hannah were the main characters.

When my family and I returned from Portugal, eventually I continued working on the dispatches and I asked my editor at the University of Chicago Press, David Brent, if he’d be interested in looking at a book proposal. The press had published the paperback edition of a book I and my wife Alma Gottlieb, an anthropologist, had written about our experiences living in small African villages, Parallel Worlds, and has kept it in print for over fifteen years, and David was already working with Alma and me on our sequel to that book, Braided Worlds (which we’re finishing up now). Since David was a fan of my Lisbon dispatches, the whole process was fairly straightforward.

Kevin Dolgin has a book of dispatches out too, The Third Tower Up from the Road. It’s a lovely book detailing his travels around the world and among its oddities, whether that’s a street in Barcelona where all the human statues ply their trade, or the canals in Copenhagen when they’re flush with jellyfish (ugh, jellyfish). I read them one a night to Alma, before we head off to sleep.

How’d you come to be in Portugal for your sabbatical year in the first place?

I’ve long loved the culture of Portugal, for reasons I could never quite pin down, though I suspected some part of it was connected to my own psychological makeup and that country’s pervasive embrace of saudade, a deeply untranslatable emotion that mixes longing and sadness, love and regret and passion in mysterious combinations. So it seemed a decent idea to take advantage of an upcoming year’s release from teaching and live there for a while. Also, I’d just finished a stint as the director of the MFA program at Illinois, and I wanted to drag my exhausted soul far, far away. A thousand miles of the continental United States and the entire Atlantic Ocean seemed like an adequate distance.

I’m not sure that’ll do it.

And if my own needs weren’t reason enough, Alma had come to a crossroads in her career. The people she had long studied, the Beng of Ivory Coast, in West Africa, lived on the border between two main factions of the country’s civil war, and there was no way we’d be able to return to what had become a kind of no-man’s-land for outsiders. Because my wife seemed stuck, unwilling at first to entertain the idea of moving on from a people we’d both grown to love, I suggested (she would say nagged) that she might want to switch her fieldwork interests to Cape Verde, an archipelago of nine African islands that were once a Portuguese colony (and the home of some of the most beautiful music on earth). Scads of Cape Verdeans live in Lisbon, so Alma thought this might be a good place to start, and she hit pay dirt when she discovered how many Cape Verdeans have a Jewish ancestry. The idea of African Jews so intrigued her that we took a trip while in Lisbon to explore a couple of the islands of Cape Verde, and this subject will be Alma’s continuing fieldwork for the next several years.

Yes, you use the previous Africa experience several places in the book on Lisbon. You also mention other adventures, such as crewing on a staysail schooner and driving a New York City taxi for a short time. One of your colleagues, speaking out of turn in the privacy of a public bar, once told me you’d done some daring things as a young man: Hitchhiked across the U.S. and Japan, worked as a trapper, rowed solo across the Pacific in an open boat. Do you need and go looking for material sparked by difference?

I don’t know about trapping, but I did canoe for about 400 miles on the Yukon River in Canada’s Yukon Territory. Almost drowned at a place called Five Finger Rapids. Good times. As for that open boat across the Pacific, never happened—I’m afraid of jellyfish.

I grew up in a family that wasn’t much for venturing past the front lawn, so I was wound up and ready to go by the time I turned eighteen. Besides that traveling, I did try some odd jobs, too: An upholsterer’s apprentice; a Santa Claus for Saks Fifth Avenue, complete with my own throne; a bartender for a dinner theater housed in a remodeled mansion that once belonged to the gangster Dutch Schultz. I felt at the time that the suburban setting of my childhood had left me unmarked by history, so I set out to get me some.

Very little of this has found its way into my fiction. The internal journey matters most, not the geographical scuttling about, though I was too young at the time to understand that. The overwhelming experience of living in small African villages taught me how to take my first steps toward fusing those two types of travel. Strangeness elsewhere can lead you to your own strangeness.

My mom always said, “You can lead a horse to strangeness but you can’t make him think.” But this gets at the heart of your new book. In the press release it speaks of “the allure of a dispatch from a foreign land,” where you were “neither a tourist nor a local…forever between cultures, fascinated and admiring, but at the same time separate and uncertain.”

As you well know, there are a couple of schools of thought on attempting to write other cultures. Many admire the attempt and even feel that being an outsider provides an opportunity for important insights. Others think the dangers of misrepresentation are too high. How do you try to avoid the pitfalls, especially when writing wryly (“the whole country qualifies as the shrimps of Europe—only the island of Malta boasts smaller citizens”) about some aspects of Portuguese life?

I think the dangers of misrepresentation when describing a conversation you had five minutes ago with a family member or friend are high, too. Because the thoughts of others are unavailable to us, humans have to make do with varying skills of interpretation. We’re all fiction writers of a sort, throughout our lives shaping characters out of the selected and often misleading signals we receive from the people we think we know. A spotty business at best, this. But what’s the alternative except deepening isolation?

The same goes for travel, since every country on the globe shares a second, secret name of Pitfall. Yet sometimes where you live doesn’t give you what you need or want or whatever you’re secretly searching for, and when you find a place that does, that becomes the most rewarding travel, the kind where each footstep on the outside is accompanied by an echoing footstep within. These steps are necessarily tentative. In The Moon, Come to Earth, I tried to separate from myself any notion of being an expert. I was and remain simply your run-of-the-mill flawed fellow, awkwardly nosing about another culture, never quite sure what I might come upon, what might resonate inside me, attract or appall me.

So one’s needs or wants may be negative too? There’s always a tug between repulsion and attraction?

There is when you’re paying attention! I think I first traveled to Portugal with an unspoken assumption that our year there would be an uninterrupted idyll, because I wanted it to be. How impolite of the universe not to go along with my expectations. Soon enough, I began to notice aspects of Portuguese life that amused me, as an outsider, or troubled me. As the months passed, I settled into these contradictions, and the fit was more honest, the country became an old friend.

It is the writer’s problem, in a more general sense, this attempt to see into other cultures, historical periods, families, or even those closest to us, isn’t it? What do you tell your students—in fiction or other creative writing classes—about the challenges and responsibilities of sympathetic portrayal?

I tell my students that fiction is the art of imagining others, and through them, oneself. A risky business, to be sure. And I remind them that the word “self” both reveals and conceals. “Self” certainly helps us draw a useful parameter around our confusing impulses, and those of others, but at the dangerous expense of too much ignoring that most interesting multiplicity within.

We are all of us several selves. The great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa recognized this. He created a number of alternate poetic selves, which he called heteronyms, and gave them names and biographies, physical details and distinctive obsessions, and let them write their own different poetic oeuvres. One of the many things I love about the Portuguese is how they deeply understand Pessoa’s entire enterprise, and how their acceptance of his multiplicity enables them to explore their own.

As you say, you also portray in this book the experiences in Lisbon of your immediate family, including those of your daughter, Hannah, who had what the back cover quietly calls a “challenging transition” into adolescence. I believe you asked that local publicity about that be kept to a minimum. But the book looks directly at the stresses for her of a new language, being bullied at a new school, her isolation from home, and more. The cover copy invites us to “ache alongside” your family. How does the physical distance of readers change your feelings about revealing what’s intimate, even when the book is from a major academic press, you’re touring with it, and there will be many more readers outside this town than in it?

So much of my dispatches examined the life of my family in the face of another culture, so when some of that experience turned raw, I didn’t see how I could turn away. Though at first I abandoned the entire project. I’ve tried my best to write with honesty and yet delicacy, honoring privacy when necessary. But so many of the dispatches had already appeared online, and the general impression given off, I think, was what a peachy life one could lead during a year in Europe. I’d already confronted my own fantasy, I didn’t want to encourage someone else’s. Yet this was indeed a tough decision, and one not made without the support of my family.

It’s certainly sobering to read your comments on “academia’s great fantasy” of living abroad with children, and the “assumption that the richness of the experience itself will be a gift to one’s child.”

We are all connected to the world by invisible threads, but these threads are especially delicate for children. When a child is brought along for a year living abroad, so many of those threads are severed, and what remains are the strands connecting them to their parents. A child is very vulnerable at this time, more so than most parents might suspect. Since our year in Lisbon, Alma and I have heard many stories of other families whose own year abroad caused greater or lesser distress in their children. The barrage of change in Hannah’s year in Lisbon was compounded by her entry into adolescence. And this too became part of the travel book I was writing, because a child’s journey out of childhood is some of the toughest travel there is.

That said, I have to say that Hannah also managed brilliantly in Lisbon: She plunged into the language so well she’s now fluent, she earned some of the best grades in her school and made several Portuguese friends, who she keeps up with to this day. Just last week Hannah—now a thriving fourteen—startled me when she said that she felt her true soul was in Lisbon, that the city would always be the place where’d she’d feel most comfortable.

The high point of the book for me is in the chapter titled “Salvage,” which starts in a shipwreck museum on Cape Verde. Working on the motif of what’s priceless, lost, and seldom recovered, you end by seeing Hannah at a distance on the seashore, assuredly sweeping wind-tangled hair from her forehead, suddenly “the young woman she’s about to become.” Your wife sees the change too and catches her breath, “and then—surprise—Hannah skips. She skips, and I count each step.” What are you trying to do, Philip, break my damn heart?

That was a moment I’ll never forget. It was Hannah’s twelfth birthday, and because we celebrated it during our two-week trip to Cape Verde (a time that corresponded with the spring break of her Portuguese middle-school), the moment seemed heightened, especially that setting of the beach’s eerie tidal pools and the cliffs of a nearby island nearly lost in the mist offshore. She wore an African dress we’d picked up for her in the market as a birthday present, a very adult-looking dress that she coveted, and yet she wore it with sneakers. She looked so betwixt and between, this newly-minted twelve-year old, already edging up to the teen years, her gestures half young adult and half child. Alma took a photo of this skipping, this border crossing, and when I look at it I understand why the camera was invented.

You return several times in the book to the idea of being an American abroad in the Bush era. You’re snubbed unfairly by writer Jose Saramago for being a citizen of this country, your daughter is looked at as a “norteamericana object of intense curiosity in her school,” and a Portuguese TV crew even blames you, as an American, for the game show. But you’re even harder on the States. You refer to at one point to the “cultural poison” of U.S. movies and to “the stink of my own country’s shit: the illegal spying on Americans, the knifing of habeas corpus, and the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’—a creepy euphemism that echoes the apple-polished Gestapo term for torture—at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.” When you find yourself walking past the U.S. embassy in Lisbon, having read that the ambassador is “a longtime fundraiser for Bush and a businessman from Florida, of all states,” you briefly fantasize about “standing in front of [him], red-faced, giving voice to the long list of all the curses I’ve ever learned, followed by a longer list of all their variations.” You mention a parade to celebrate the anniversary of the Portuguese democracy revolution and say, “I intend to be there, waving a carnation and wishing I were waving it for my own country.” Do you feel like a stranger in your own land too? Has that changed since the book was written?

This was the fourth reason we lived in Lisbon for a year: We wanted some brief respite from the toxic cloud of Bush & Co. As it turned out, there’s no escape, the United States is simply a pervasive political and cultural presence throughout the world. While abroad, I ended up writing political satire pieces for The Morning News, donating obsessively to Net Roots Democratic candidates, even making get-out-the-vote phone calls on my Skype account from Lisbon on the day of the 2006 mid-term elections. My Portuguese friends, ever-polite and generous, kept reminding me that Bush only had two years before he left office. The whole world, it seems, was holding its breath for that moment. What’s changed since the book was written is that we’ve now begun the necessary digging through the wreckage.

As for that Portuguese TV crew, they felt I was responsible, since they were suffering through working on a Portuguese version of one of the most ridiculous American reality shows ever conceived: Beauty and the Geek. And there I was, a convenient cultural representative, watching from the sidelines as a guest of one of the show’s judges, the writer Rui Zink. Though I put my best Smiley-Button face on, I resented the accusation while at the same time I couldn’t deny it a portion of fairness. The violence and vapidity of too much American popular culture travels abroad easily. At least 90% of the movies released in Portugal are from the United States, as well as a hefty slice of the TV programming (though telenovelas, home-grown or from Brazil, are popular). How ironic, that I’d hoped to dig into the difference of another culture, only to find my own often looking over my shoulder.

The book is full of the most delicious-sounding seafood, sausages, fresh bread, peppers, cabbage, puddings. You also sample many events, such as a soccer match, a fireworks display, a stage play of Moby Dick, a cruise for dolphin-watching, etc., and you get to meet many Portuguese of course.

I was thinking in all this of where you portray the attempt to learn stock phrases in Portuguese but then call the enterprise into question by realizing you would never use similar clichés in English, such as “The grass is always greener….” Since the food, events and the language are where any of us might start, even as tourists, where does authenticity reside for you when you think of your immersive time abroad?

I was happiest when I found myself in places tourists rarely ventured. We lived a few blocks away from one of the minor soccer stadiums in Lisbon, home of Os Azuis—The Blues. Until the team started moving up in the standings late in the season, home games were attended by sometimes only a handful of dedicated locals, and I loved sitting among passionate fans defying the odds. And I highly recommend the crispy pig-ear sandwiches available at the concession stand. Once, I found myself at an agricultural fair in the small town of Santarém, wandering the exhibits among local farm families, making my way to a small arena where a local band belted out fado songs in anticipation of a bullfight, feeling as if I were swimming in waters not meant for me.

For Día do Pai, the Portuguese version of Father’s Day, my family gave me a great gift, an architectural atlas of Lisbon. This marvelous book contains the most detailed maps imaginable of over 50 neighborhoods in Lisbon, and I would study these maps in our apartment and settle on a section of the city that Alma and I could explore while Hannah was at school, some area that was way off any guidebook’s radar. Nothing fancy, just the unexpected gifts of another culture’s ordinary.

One consequence of being a writer abroad, constantly on the lookout for meaning and connections, appears to be a kind of animism that credits life to bad plumbing, faulty wiring, and beat-up cars. “I contemplate the notion that no matter where you are in the world,” you say, “you’ll find objects—so-called mere things—that, just like people, are skittish in the face of newcomers or a novel situation.” Elsewhere you speak of “magic” and say, “…I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being stalked by the invisible seams of the universe.” You feel this at home too, or only when traveling?

Sometimes Alma thinks that instead of traveling to Africa to study the Beng people, she should have simply stayed home and studied me. Certainly I’m an unreconstructed animist who walks through a thicket of shifting symbols with a tribe of fictional characters in tow. By animist, I mean that I believe there’s no such thing as an inanimate object, not because they are indeed alive, but because every object was initially an idea, a human thought that was then put in action to give that object shape. That’s why it’s so easy for people to have a relationship with an object—a favorite pen, some cherished vase or comfy chair or pair of well-worn shoes, any secretly beloved tchotchka—because we recognize the human touch, the human invention within it, as our own memories join with it.

Objects, I think, are outposts of the vast unknown of the human mind. And when traveling abroad, those invisible relations and correspondences are the ones I most look out for. It’s all part of the great quest, our endless imagining of the other.

Many thanks, Philip.

***

Check out Philip Graham’s The Moon, Come to Earth, and look in periodically at his new author’s website and blog, going live today.

As Stanford University reported a couple of days ago and Inside Higher Ed noted, the estate of James Joyce, headed up by James Joyce’s grandson, Stephen James Joyce, has lost a lawsuit with English professor Carol Loeb Shloss and must pay her legal fees and costs of nearly a quarter-million dollars.

This finding appears to end the almost two-decade battle with the estate by Shloss, and to represent relief for other Joyce scholars who’ve felt the estate to be unfair and unreasonable in the number of demands and limitations imposed on them. (An article in 2006 in The New Yorker describes this tension and offers a portrait of the artist’s grandson as gatekeeper: “Stephen is a handsome man of seventy-four, with a gray beard, sloping forehead, and deep-blue eyes—he looks the way Joyce might have looked if he had not smoked and drunk himself to death, at fifty-eight, in 1941.”)

Shloss, the author of Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2003), had been forced to remove supporting research from her revisionist book on James Joyce’s daughter, which led to mixed reviews. (Here’s a tart review from 2003, also in The New Yorker, which says, in part, “The less Shloss knows, the more she tells us.”)

In the intervening years since the original publication of the expurgated biography, Shloss has already won in suit the right to “domestic online publication of the supportive scholarship” and the right to republish the book in the U.S. with the missing material restored. Now she’ll be reimbursed for her expenses too, which will clearly make her lawyers—Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, Keker & Van Nest, and Doerner, Saunders, Daniel & Anderson, as well as the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society's Fair Use Project—yes, rejoice.

All this wrangling over old-fashioned books may one day be a moot point anyway. “Everybody is trying to think about how books and information will best be put together in the 21st century,” says Judith Curr, publisher of Atria Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint that will work with Vook, a multimedia company, to produce hybrid books in which "publishers mash together text, video and Web features in a scramble to keep readers interested in an archaic form of entertainment."

“You can’t just be linear anymore with your text,” Curr says.