BEATING HER TINY FISTS

“BEATING OUR TINY FISTS ON THE BIG HAIRY CHEST OF THE CORPORATE LITERARY WORLD”

BEATING HER TINY FISTS is the David Herrle (SubtleTea) Interview with Cantara Christopher, the publisher of Cantarabooks. The interview is here republished with the courtesy of the author.

David: “Beating Our Tiny Fists on the Big Hairy Chest of the Corporate Literary World.” This is Cantarabooks’ kickass motto. You’re the wiz behind the literary small press, Cantarabooks, and the (PDF-exclusive) literary magazine, Cantaraville, so please introduce unfamiliar readers to your mission and work.

Cantara: Well, when there’s only time for the elevator pitch, I tell people that our company is a cross between Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and Roger Corman Productions. The Woolfs, you’ll recall, started their imprint in England over ninety years ago with a second-hand letterpress on their dining room table, as a way to make certain that they and their friends and protégées could always be published. The comparison to the efficient and prolific B-movie maker Roger Corman is partly whimsical. Like Corman, we make good-looking product on a slim budget, we’re always working to tighten our operations yet utilize all our resources to the maximum, and we’re always on the lookout for new talent and undervalued seasoned talent to give wide exposure to.

As for our motto (which came to me one evening over drinks with my partner Michael upstairs at Sardi’s), it puts one in mind of a voluptuous but virtuous art maiden on the brink of being seduced/raped by the testosterone-driven commercial establishment. I like the eroticism of that fantasy. It gives me the juice to keep plugging away. Eros is the main component of my artistic makeup and philosophy, and by Eros I mean the creative, generative spirit at its primal.

D: Could you address key points from your “Writing in the New Publishing Paradigm”?

C: Along with a couple of other pieces of mine, “How to Save Literature” and “The Road to Cantaraville”, “The New Paradigm” chronicles the story of how Michael and I came to organize and support, then at last publish, talented but under-read writers. We’d both had experience in traditional publishing – Michael, before he was drafted for Vietnam in the 1960s, edited a college-based poetry magazine, while I spent the early 80s freelance copywriting for houses like Macmillan, Doubleday and Ballantine. When we took a year off to live in Paris in 1999, we founded an English-language writers group which met every other week in the tiny flat we sublet in the 20th Arrondissement (by tradition the “Rouge” or Communist part of the city). After we returned to the States, we started up the group again in San Francisco, calling it PariSalon4665 after its website’s old Geocities address. Then a year or so after 9/11 we moved back to New York (our son had been born there during our sojourn in the early 80s) where, through a couple of strange turns of luck, we launched Cantarabooks and then Cantaraville.

From the outset we decided not to operate like the more established small presses. Recent innovations in technology had created a New Paradigm, a new book world where it was possible for anyone at all to be published by Lulu.com for less than ten dollars; where an enterprising author could self-publish her novel, aggressively market it and make the New York Times bestseller list, like M.J. Rose with Lip Service; where a farsighted publishing company could make its fortune selling instantly downloadable ebooks of erotic fiction to women in the Midwest, like Ellora’s Cave. If anyone can write and publish a book, why publish under someone else’s imprint?

The missing element has been editorial presence: the opportunity to collaborate with disinterested professionals possessing the skills to help shape and clarify a work; to gain prestige by being published by professionals with high standards of excellence. To participate in the eons-old Literary Dialogue, in other words. Until about twenty years ago, before the age of bottom-line gatekeepers, an author could submit directly to St. Martin’s or other independent press in the certainty that someone there would at least seriously read and consider his work. When the foreign conglomerates started buying up our country’s largest publishing houses and mandating them to concentrate foremost on profits, we were robbed of the aesthetic guidance those houses had traditionally provided.

But let me get back to that New Paradigm essay. There was a long quiet stretch in the late 80s and early 90s when I was chiefly a housewife and mother, but even then I wrote, published and distributed zines (handmade magazines with small print runs). This sort of activity was encouraged by the times, the heyday of the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) movement in musical, cartoon and textual expression which was able to take root only because of two immense technological leaps in dissemination/distribution: cassette recorder-players and public copying machines. I maintain in my essay that our current wave of small-press publishing takes its cues not from traditional business (that is, as an attempt to supplant a failing institution with a new institution) but from the even older tradition of DIY. I say older because in this country it goes as far back as Tom Paine, the Revolution’s pamphleteer and maverick.

Only a little further on, the rise of the internet in the mid-90s promised to make the publishing game a game that anyone could play regardless of age, race, class, gender, economic or physical limitation. I have to say that being fiftyish, female and Filipino-American (an ethnic group which hasn’t yet been generally assimilated into American letters), I’ve all too easily slipped into feelings of exclusion. But the ease, cheapness and instantaneity of the new technology – of print-on-demand, blogs, PDF downloads, online zines and so forth – have enabled me and other writers on the fringes to communicate with each other, to write to and for each other. For all the potshots they’ve taken, the internet and other technologies of the New Paradigm actually encourage talent. Yes, there’s been an immense output of crap, but in that crap there are one or two diamonds. Regulation isn’t the answer. Exercising critical choice is.

I might also add that the New Paradigm has its own unique crowd of boosters who generally might not be considered prophets of the coming golden age of publishing, but I’ll pay more attention to the observations and predictions of Stephen King, Cory Doctorow, Chris Anderson, Stewart Brand, and even actor-author-blogger Wil Wheaton, than to the pronouncements of Simon & Schuster’s CEO. The one publishing giant I do listen to is Jason Epstein, former senior editor at Random House for forty years, who watched in horror as this fine and daring imprint (in the 30s they defended their newly-acquired title Ulysses against obscenity charges) was transformed into the faceless, gutless money machine it is today. Epstein is calling for radical innovations in print distribution and sales; his “book jukebox” is being unveiled this summer and I’m eager to see how it goes over.

As I said at the beginning, although we’re always exploring new and more efficient ways to publish, market and deliver our titles, we’re pretty much operating on a shoestring, and what we can’t buy with cash we buy with our time and labor. Still, there are some things that can’t be bought, like cool. If it ever becomes cool for an author to place with Cantaraville/Cantarabooks and a reader to download Cantaraville or buy a Cantarabooks paperback, it will be because in our very modest way we’ve helped to establish the Zeitgeist where such attention is cool.

D: You are professionally connected with director/author Stephen Gyllenhaal through his debut poetry collection, Claptrap: Notes From Hollywood. How did the collaboration on Claptrap originate?

C: Several of Stephen’s poems came across our desk in an unsolicited manuscript three years ago, when Michael and I were working for a literary annual not our own. Although we’d been taken on as senior editors with the specific instruction to select pieces, the publisher, a volatile and unstable man according to many, vetoed all of our choices – and one of our choices was Stephen’s poetry. Well, rather than give up the cause of trying to get him published, we decided to publish him ourselves. We had just started a small book press which, like the Woolfs, we’d originally intended to use to publish just our own work and the work of friends. But Michael was very impressed with Stephen’s poetry and not a little incensed that he hadn’t already gotten more recognition for his literary talent. So we asked him, very tentatively, if he might let us have some more poetry to publish, perhaps as a limited short-run chapbook. Instead he sent us forty-six poems of remarkably high overall quality and thus it became our holy mission to deliver Claptrap to the wide world.

D: You show a deeply personal admiration for the man. Is “fascination” an appropriate term? Regardless, this is lovely evidence of your multidimensional approach to art and artists.

Stephen has many admirable qualities; he’s loyal, trustworthy and generous, a devoted family man and, incredibly for someone whose livelihood has been at the mercy of the Hollywood system for nearly thirty years, free of cynicism. He’s also stimulating to be around – young people are inspired by him, men are intrigued and women tend to go all gooey. I think this is because he exudes that spirit of Eros I mentioned earlier, that generative, creative force an artist is especially steeped in when he’s at the beginning of a project. In this case Stephen’s project is his own life. When his son Jake declares in an interview, “I know a man in his fifties who’s just starting to discover himself,” he’s talking about Stephen. As I say this can be very stimulating to be around but, on the down side, my dear author’s creative cauldron is almost always overflowing and, like other immensely creative people, he has trouble focusing on a single project and seeing it through to completion. A lot of this can be attributed to the business he’s in. Although he’s a mesmerizing pitcher, Hollywood hasn’t always been persuaded to let him deliver his own brand of product. To stay in the game he’s had to, as they say, keep his options open. However, this past year or so Stephen has spoken publicly about his desire to spend his creative capital elsewhere rather than in the Hollywood system. And, in fact, quite recently he’s made some daring moves to simplify his life, to clear the decks and fully commit to work he believes in. He has not, however, completely rid himself of the influence of the business – in order to maximize its commercial potential he’ll readily simplify a wonderfully intricate, individualistic, heartfelt, well-written piece of prose – even if it’s his own. This frustrates me to no end. It’s like watching a Chippendale being whittled down into an Ikea chair. We’ve already had quite a few heated discussions (with the heat coming from me) on this subject. But I admire Stephen greatly because the artists’ dialectic, the age-old argument of material satisfaction versus the spiritual satisfaction gained from creating your art, is very much on the surface with him.

Sometimes his struggle ascends to a cosmic performance piece and that’s where it gets fascinating. Here, for example, is the real story behind that mostly improvised anecdote Jake told on Letterman: In a devastating freak fire at a vacation lodge not too long ago, Stephen had to make a split-second decision on which to rescue, his twenty thousand-dollar Rolex or the laptop containing the only copy of the manuscript of his first novel. He chose the laptop. When he does things like that I forget that I ever wanted to strangle the big lug, and fall in love with him all over again.

D: Stephen is a fine director and writer. Please share your thoughts on Stephen and his work.

C: At the very bottom rung of Stephen’s work are the television gigs that pay the bills, that paid for his daughter Maggie’s four years at Columbia, so let’s talk about them first. In an industry that eats up feature film directors left and right, Stephen is a well-known and sought-after journeyman. (Lately he seems to have found a home with the interesting puzzle-crime drama Numb3rs.) He may chafe at the limitations of the medium, but I’ve never seen a show he’s directed where there isn’t at least one “Stephen Gyllenhaal” moment, a bit of kinetic inspiration or expressive revelation. (Okay, I lie. Felicity.) Even in those Lifetime weepers with their inane scripts, Stephen displays an idiosyncratic tenderness. He even wrote a poem about his TV work called “Night Job” (written on the set of an especially inane TV movie called Time Bomb) that ends: “Negotiate. I know my job, for everything’s / negotiable and what remains is that small / moment in the hay / where I must always / give my heart away.” When I finally recognized Stephen’s name on that very first manuscript it was because of Twin Peaks, my favorite television series of all time. He’d directed the last sequential episode, and I remembered seeing his name in shocking green, wondering how to pronounce it. (It’s JILL-en-hall.)

As for his pictures, there are three theatrically-released films and one TV movie Steve himself considers his best work, A Killing in a Small Town (1990), Paris Trout (1991), Waterland (1992), and Homegrown (1998). Killing, which scandalized the execs at CBS when it was first aired, is something of a network groundbreaker, a deliciously lurid gripper involving a love triangle, hypnosis, repressed memory and a bloody ax murder. Homegrown is a low-budget black comedy about the marijuana business (enough reason for it to become a cult classic) with a screenplay co-written by Stephen, and if you ever get a chance one day, ask him about how he cast Billy Bob Thornton in the lead. Not on this list is a guilty pleasure of mine, his first film, an original screenplay B-picture called Certain Fury (1985) which has some over-the-top thrills, including a lesbian courtroom shootout scene, a drug lair lit like a fairytale cave, and the lovely shower-nude Irene Cara fighting off a hulking rapist.

Also not on this list: A Dangerous Woman (1993) which was, I suppose you’d say, loosely based on Mary McGinnis’s masterful story, but transformed into a schizophrenic piece that couldn’t tell whether it was a turgid family drama or a perverse little sex-and-violence flick; and Losing Isaiah (1995), a butchery of Seth Margolis’s fine social novel, Steve’s one and only studio project (Paramount) and the one he considers his worst artistic failure. I don’t want to go into a treatise here about film adaptations of good books, but let me point out that what made Paris Trout work – aside from Dennis Hopper’s intense performance as an unredeemable monster who guns down a mother and child – was Pete Dexter’s skilled adaptation of his own novel; what made Waterland a minor classic was the screenwriter’s sensitive rendering of the major points of narrative and emotion in this magically poignant story in a way that enabled Stephen to bring out the magic. One reviewer raved, calling it a cross between John Irving and Terry Gilliam, and in my opinion the movie is as good as the book. As with most of Stephen’s films, though, there is something rapturously alluring yet surreal, almost nightmarish, in his depictions of sex-related violence. In fact, although I’d already seen Waterland during its first run, when I saw it again last year with Steve during Cinestudio’s retrospective of his work, I had to hide my face in his arm during the abortion scene.

D: G.K. Chesterton wrote: “I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.” Especially during these days of presidential nomination debates, one-liners pass as treatises. My increasing iconoclasm has me wincing at both agreeable and disagreeable crowd approval and anything smacking of consensus. Promises and fluff turn me off, and I’m disgusted by both parties in the shammy duopoly. Particularly, the popcorn term “change” has been repeated left and right. Easy calls for “change” worry more than enthuse me. (I’m Burke one day, Paine the next.) Change for change’s sake is not a value; change can be a means to values. It can also lead to wreckage – or worse than the status quo, at least.

D: Your thoughts on “change” as a political/social/emotional selling point currently and in yesteryear? On preferring Thursdays over Wednesdays? On political pretense and enthusiasm in general?

C: “Change” is simply the current buzzword for “making things better in some vague way” and so has become the language of pessimism, not optimism. When this year’s political candidates say change, they’re saying things are so bad that anything, anything we do has got to be better. As yesteryear’s selling point? Well, in recent years there’s been the trend to generalize the term, change. Thirty, forty years ago politicians were much more specific about the what and the how. Nowadays it’s just another soundbite inserted to inspire general love and support. Preferring Thursdays to Wednesdays? You’re talking about fashion, and there’s no arguing with fashion. To be fashionable, to be Thursday when it’s Thursday and Wednesday when it’s Wednesday, a politician must do two things: keep his/her name out there and address Thursday’s or Wednesday’s respective concerns in the vaguest way possible.

Political pretense? What particularly strikes me in this campaign is Obama’s neglect of the fact that in order to actually effect change, a president needs the support not only of the people but of Congress – and for that he first has to have specific plans to communicate to the House and Senate as well as the electorate. It’s never going to happen, but I wish that our government would follow the simplest maxim of business, as set down by Britain’s Round Table Club: Adopt, Adapt and Improve. Adopt methods that have proved sound in the past, adapt them to the changing needs of the times and, wherever possible, improve them.

D: Your favorite books, films, music?

C: Oh, a MySpace question! But you didn’t ask about theater and art. Favorite play, The Seagull. I’d like to direct a production somewhere, someday. Art: favorite painter Stanley Spencer, favorite sculptor Rodin, favorite architect Gaudi. Favorite books, films, music: many many many. Music: show tunes and the musical canon known as The Great American Songbook – standards from composers like Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, Ellington & Strayhorn, Ann Ronell, Carolyn Leigh, Rodgers & Hart, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Alec Wilder, Hoagy Carmichael et al. I’m just old enough to remember radio music from the late 50s, and what I listened to then was what my parents listened to, which was mostly standards and light classics by Dvorak and Hugo Alfven, whose “Swedish Rhapsody” seemed to permeate my infancy and childhood in Minneapolis. While the rock revolution passed me by I studied at the university to be an operatic soprano. Then in the Watergate summer of ‘73 with only two years of training, I decided with all the arrogance of youth that I belonged at Juilliard. So I packed my bag and at the age of eighteen traveled alone to New York to audition. Here we will draw the curtain on the worst day of my life. To be in the same room with singers and musicians who’d been trained from the age of four, who, although still only students, were already approaching world-class levels of excellence… Well, the plump little Filipino girl from Minnesota did her piece (“Chacun le sait” from Daughter of the Regiment – could she have been even more of a hick?) then made her exit and staggered across the plaza to the Lincoln Center fountain, where she promptly threw up. No, not in the fountain. The only thing I knew at that point was that I was never going back to Minneapolis and my nutty mother. I was determined to stay in New York, and six weeks later I was working right across the street from Lincoln Center, at ASCAP (the American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers), identifying show tunes and standard songs played on the radio so that their members, the song’s composers, could be paid royalties. By an insane coincidence I was working in the same building as the Children’s Television Workshop – ASCAP being on the seventh floor, CTW being on the fourteenth – and CTW was the producer of “Sesame Street”, where Steve Gyllenhaal used to edit short films, so it’s quite possible that he and I shared an elevator at some point thirty-five years ago.

But to get back to your question. Books and films are where my mind goes home. Books: The works of Shakespeare, James Joyce, Dickens, Nabokov, Jean Rhys, the Bronte sisters Emily, Anne and Charlotte. Wuthering Heights might well be the most perfectly constructed novel in the English language. All of the Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled. Graham Swift’s Waterland and Last Orders. The Last of Her Kind, written by a lovely acquaintance, Sigrid Nuñez. We both remember the 70s pretty much the same way and lament the passing of that era’s values; there was a generosity and fearlessness then that’s sorely missed today. And then of course there are Michael’s novels – I love to live in them, not to mention that in almost all of them he’s portrayed one or other aspect of me in a representative character: Simona Wing in Tales from the Last Resort, Terry Ramos in Descending Into Heaven and Cookie Madeira in A Hole in the Fog. Guilty reading pleasures: Category romances, and some selected authors of the notorious erotic imprint Blue Moon Books, back when its legendary founder Barney Rosset (of Grove Press and Evergreen Review) still owned it.

Films: Anything with Garbo, that magnificent Swede. The Passenger by Antonioni. I was tramping around Europe at that time, I could have been that girl. Anything by Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game – a perfect film). Nouvelle Vague, particularly Truffaut (Stolen Kisses is a riot) and Chabrol. Watching Chabrol can be perversely erotic. There are some Chabrol-like moments in Stephen’s films. I also love discovering gems by contemporary indie filmmakers – Edward Burns, Gary Walkow, Richard Wong, Nancy Savoca for example. Guilty viewing pleasures: Hammer films with Christopher Lee, and overwhelmingly charming musicals like Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight, Renoir’s French Can-Can, Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort and, of course, The Sound of Music.

D: Are you actually an ex-porn star?

C: That is an exaggeration. I only played featured roles in full-lengths. I did dozens of loops (short films), though, in which a cast of two was sufficient. Actually I did make several Swedish Eroticas in which I was the draw, so I guess yes, I was a porn star back in the late 1970s. My screen name was Simona Wing.

In those days acting in porn films was literally my day job, a job I needed to go to only a few times a month in order to make just enough to live simply and treat friends to dinner. My evening occupation, which paid bupkes, was as a staff and freelance lighting technician/operator in the five or six semi-professional theaters in San Francisco – a city to which, like other misfits, I’d eventually gravitated. It was in this circle I met Michael Matheny, who eventually became my lifemate, publishing partner and father of our splendid son Robert. Michael was first electrics at the Eureka Theatre, I was second. We spent long afternoons and nights together in the lighting booth that overlooked the stage, running shows, eating sandwiches, and spying on the actors in the co-ed communal dressing room next door through a hole in the wall that some previous technician had made. Actually I’m the one who did the spying. We worked with some brilliant people at the Eureka, playwrights like Joe Chaikin, Michael McClure, Sam Shepard. Did people know I worked in porn? Many did, most didn’t care. It fit in with the time and place.

So, you wonder, what was it like to work in a porn movie? Like any other performer in films, I had to follow the routine of the set – getting up and going to 6 AM calls, having to sit in a chair getting makeup done, having to sit around waiting for shots to be set up, hitting the marks, trying to get it right in one take so as not to waste film. And it was 16mm film in those days, not tape and certainly not digital. Paul Thomas Anderson got the scene pretty much down in Boogie Nights, although the one thing I remember spending big money on wasn’t drugs, but on the luscious lingerie the girls used to make and bring to the shoot, draping them all over the couches like an Arabian bazaar. The other main attraction of a shoot was craft services, especially when they brought in catering from Marin. Of course I never considered myself a real actress. The difference being that when a real actress performs, her head is in the moment – and in my performances, even in the middle of some fairly complex contortions, I never had to be in the moment. I could be lying in velvet on a big round waterbed in a fabulous mansion bedroom surrounded by three well-endowed hunks and one sweetly scented pink-nippled honey, and still be lost in my own erotic fantasies. Also, because my head could go anywhere it wanted, more often than not I also ended up observing the crew and the directors, taking mental notes of their techniques. It’s crazy given my literary proclivities, but three of the film directors I’ve known personally have had more influence on my taste and sensibilities than any literary figure: Gerard Damiano (of Deep Throat fame), who counseled me that if I continued to work well and stay disciplined, I’d soon get starring parts; Rouben Mamoulian, who, one afternoon near the sunlit French doors of his house in Beverly Hills, took my chin in his hand and gently turned my face this way and that, studying it as he’d studied the face of Garbo, Dietrich and Hayworth; and then there’s Stephen.

But I digress. I suppose there will be some readers out there who wonder if being in porn means I went all the way. Well yes. Yes I did.

D: Several years ago in “Murder in the Genre” (an Underground Literary Alliance gig), you wrote about “authorial distance”: “[I]t would be better to admit, with humility, the debt that all of us writers, whether of escapist fiction or so-called serious fiction, owe to reality: To let reality inform not only what we write, but how we write, and the choices we’re compelled to make in order to keep on writing. The alternative is to build on sand, ignoring the fact that the concrete truck is about to pull up any minute. And that’s not authorial distance. That is insanity.” Though this sharp observation seems to stand on its own, do you have further thoughts on this, especially for those unfamiliar with the subject you referred to?

C: It’s not a pleasant subject so I’ll be brief. Back in 2005, the estranged son of a popular, prolific writer of category romances was arrested in Cape Coral, Florida for the kidnapping, rape and murder-for-kicks of a well-loved highschooler. At the time I’d been following this writer’s career, so when she posted a vague, unemotional item on her blog about her son’s arrest, I was intrigued enough to investigate the case a little deeper. I did the most superficial checking online, but even online the grief of this girl’s family and classmates was unbearable to witness. Comparing their genuine reactions to the reactions of this woman and her fans, who within minutes of her posting came across with clucks of cheap sympathy – as if the object of their admiration had, say, only burned a roast – I was drawn to the conclusion that it wasn’t necessarily any particular type or genre of literature that trivialized its writers and readers. I take it for granted that every writer is following a higher calling, even if her writing awards her fame and money. It’s what the writer brings or doesn’t bring into the process of writing that can leave her – and her readers – unprepared when confronted with real evil.

300 cyber hugs for the murderer’s mother but not one mention of the murdered girl’s name. Well, her name was Annamarie Randazzo and she was just 17 years old.

D: Please riff off of these related clips’ collective theme:

Karl Jaspers, speaking of the mass-man: “The mind has ceased to believe in itself, as self-arising, and becomes a means to an end…it can serve any master.”

Alberto Moravia: “Respect for man has disappeared.  [S]ince man no longer sets man as the end…it is both moving and disconcerting to see how much closer to the animal man has grown…”

Rubashov in Koestler’s Darkness At Noon: “I am confronted by absolute nothingness…I bend my knees to the country, to the masses and to the whole people…Woe to the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.”

Sergeant Hartman in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket: “Here you are all equally worthless.”

Maurice in Kubrick’s The Killing: “You have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else: the perfect mediocrity, no better, no worse.”

HAL in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: “I am constantly occupied. I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all, I think, any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”

C: I think what all this is getting at is the much-ballyhooed Death of the Individual and the Rise of the Totalitarian State, which has been gone over ever since Kafka (who, by many accounts, in actuality considered himself something of a comic satirist). Although it might appear from my comments to the question above that I see evil lurking all around, I’m really an optimist – I believe in the perfectibility of the human race and I believe that things are improving for humanity in general. Compared to what our ancestors, what our parents (like my mother, who survived the brutal Japanese occupation of Manila), have had to endure, I don’t think we have any cause to complain about our lot. Yes, we’re in the middle of an insane, morally indefensible war conducted by a shallow frat boy and his goons, but America is not – repeat, not – the entire world. If it is the case that our country is in its twilight because we’ve strayed far from the principles of our foundation, the causes of democracy, freedom and social justice will be taken up – are even now being taken up – in pockets of growth or resistance around the globe, from the Muslim feminists of Europe to the economy of India. It does appear to be the case that our own society is being deliberately overfed, consumerized, infantilized, dumbed down. People are being kept from self-knowledge by being urged to perform “useful” tasks and are generally being made to feel distrustful of their own mental abilities.

This is where small presses and maverick filmmaking must fill the void – by raising questions rather than providing answers. We don’t even have to hit people over the head. We can be charming. We can pretend to be mere diversions. We only ask for the opportunity to let you choose. Because in each tiny little culture choice – whether you decide to take your date to Once instead of the latest Friedberg-Seltzer trash, or read the magazine N+1 instead of E! – are the seeds of individuality. And individuality is not a means to an end, but part of the great symbiosis: the gains of the individual must always return to the collective; in turn, the gains of the collective help enable each individual to realize his/her potential.

D: Discuss any projects of your own that are underway.

C: Since the most complex project in my life right now is the running of Cantarabooks/Cantaraville, my own writing has to be kept fairly simple. So I’m writing a romantic mystery. It’s called Cold Open and is set in the world of Hollywood fandom, a world that at its best can be harmless stimulating fun but at its worst can turn bizarre, dark and even murderous.

D: Cantara, I’m pleased with our acquaintance and your importance to the art world. I wish you blessings on your path. Continue to beat your fists against those hairy corporate pectorals! Have you any closing words for readers/fans?

C: Shameless plug: I invite you all to visit www.cantaraville.com and www.cantarabooks.com. Check out the submission guidelines for our press, download some of our PDF freebies, and leave your comments in the Star-Tribune. The essays mentioned above are also available there under Book World.

As for free advice: Be brave and generous, try to do no harm, and be prepared to make a public fool of yourself. Live the answer.

Dave, thanks for this opportunity to talk about what I love most. May you and SubtleTea live long and well!

© 2008 SubtleTea Productions   All Rights Reserved

People Are Nearly Getting Hit by Beer Bottles Every Day

This Interview with The New Yorker’s Deborah Treisman was conducted by Christopher Frizzelle the editor of The Stranger. Published in Nov 17-Nov 24, 2005 issue of The Stranger. The interview is republished unabridged on Under the Midnight Sun blog with the permission of the author.

When did you start reading the New Yorker?

Well I did read it a bit as a kid. My parents subscribed. And I remember sending a story when I was 11 and getting a nice rejection letter back. When you’re 11, the whole world’s your oyster and everything seems within the realm of possibility. But I kept that for a long time.

What was the story about?

I don’t remember. I just remember having a nice little form rejection slip and I’d never heard of form rejection slips—it was all a mystery to me. But it was kind of touching that I got something back in the mail. So every time I send out a rejection now I hope people are touched. [Laughs.]

I used to collect them when I was a kid.

So you were writing?

Yeah. I still am but I don’t send out fiction right now because it’s not good enough. I have this horrible thing where I get paid to think about what works and doesn’t work in other peoples’ writing.

I have that same horrible thing. [Laughs.]

It really messes with you when you’re trying to do your own writing.

I don’t do my own writing.

You don’t?

No.

Not at all?

No. I don’t think there’s any way—for me, anyway—to do both.

How come?

Because it uses the same muscles. And you spend your day in a hypercritical editorial mode where you’re looking at every sentence to see what’s wrong with it. And then if you try to write one there’s a lot of things wrong with it. And you never get past it. It’s pretty tough to do both. Some people do it. And there are a lot of journalist-editors. Not a whole lot of fiction writers-fiction editors.

There’s William Maxwell.

Yeah. I mean, you have to go back a few years. And probably fiction editing and the lifestyle was a little different then. A little less concentrated.

I felt a little intimidated meeting you.

Because I’m really scary.

No. I mean, it’s not even related to you. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. I carry the weight of this 80 years on my shoulders. Everyone puts the magazine on a pedestal and they spend all their time staring up at you adoringly or trying to knock you off that pedestal. There’s such an engaged relationship with the magazine because it’s been around for so long. Even though I’ve only been there for 8 or 9 years, I’m accountable for 70 years before that, somehow.

Do you feel intimidated by the history?

Probably I did when I started. But then ultimately you go into your office every day and you do your job and you don’t think a whole lot about that. Except to the extent that it’s—except for the “wow” factor, where you say, Wow, I work with Roger Angell whose mother was the first fiction editor of the magazine and whose stepfather was E. B. White, and he comes to the fiction meetings and argues with me about stories every day. So you have that factor. Or, Wow, I grew up reading Don DeLillo and now I’m arguing with him over a comma. To that extent, the history is fun, it’s not intimidating.

I love the profile Nancy Franklin wrote of Katharine White. It’s so good.

I edit her [Nancy Franklin]. She’s great.

What’s the difference between editing fiction and nonfiction?

It’s quite different. I like doing both. I think I would get a little stale just doing one or the other. At the New Yorker both fiction and nonfiction are very much about voice, but with fiction it’s really about voice and about trying to bring that voice to the surface in the most effective way possible. Nonfiction, you’re focusing a lot more on information, and what’s missing and what needs to be there, in what order, to get it across. Fiction is a little more fluid and you’re focusing on the emotional context and subtext.

But it seems like with the nonfiction at the New Yorker—isn’t there kind of an institutional tone?

I think people think that, or say that. That’s kind of the perception of the magazine, and it’s even a perception of the magazine on the fiction side, but I think that when you actually read through it, if it was once true it’s probably not so true anymore. I mean, I understand historically there was a very universal tone for Talk of the Town, it was all “we” and it was unsigned and there was kind of a New Yorker voice, but I’m not sure that that’s there so much anymore. There seem to be some pretty distinct writers who are quite different from each other.

It seems like there are certain writers who get to get away with it.

With having their own voice or having a New Yorker voice? [Laughs.]

I know I borrow the New Yorker voice a lot. For example do so many writers naturally use the phrase “as it happens”? That phrase appears again and again and again in the magazine.

Maybe the copyeditors are inserting that. I mean there are certain things which are house style. You know, we have to use “owing” instead of “due”—“owing to the fact that” instead of “due to the fact that.” There’s a very complicated rule about that. Or you can’t say, “He raised a child,” you have to say, “He reared a child.” There are certain vocabulary things that are house style, so maybe those pop up a lot. I don’t know. But they’re not the all-encompassing, defining quality of the writing.

What would you say the stories that you select do have in common?

Not a lot. I feel as though we’re looking for stories that are successful on their own terms—you know, they set out to do something and they achieve it. If someone’s trying to write a very traditional story and nails it and does it perfectly, great. If they’re trying to do a sort of linguistically experimental story and they can do it and they carry it off and they still make you care, great. But if they’re trying to do either one and they just don’t quite get it right, that’s where I draw the line. So it’s not a question of genre or style, it’s a question of living up to the story’s own aspirations.

Do you have your own preferences, in terms of style or point of view or tone or subject matter?

I think it’s really pretty varied. I mean there are writers who I feel I brought into the magazine and some who have been publishing there for 50 years and so on. I edit Alice Munro, I edit Haruki Murakami, I edit George Saunders—you couldn’t really be more different than those three, and I think they’re all great. And also you have a responsibility when you’re publishing for a million people to give as much range and depth and variety as you can. No story is going to please everybody. We’re always going to get somebody saying, I hated that story and why would you think of publishing it? So you can’t worry about that, you just have to worry about pleasing somebody.

I’m sure you get asked this every time you do an interview, but how does it work? How do you choose the stories you choose?

There are six people in the fiction department. Most of us do nonfiction as well, so we don’t have as much time as it sounds. But basically stories come in, whether they come in through slush or to one of the editors or to me, and they get read and whatever we’re taking seriously gets circulated to all of the editors and we have a meeting once a week where we sit around and argue. Everyone writes a short opinion of the story and those get attached to the manuscript as it makes its way around. And sometimes it happens that all six of us think a story is great—that’s maybe one in 10 of the stories that get to this level. What most often happens is three people like something and three people don’t, or four people versus two. It’s a funny mix and there’s lots of argument—you know, arguments that can be very frustrating because you’re never going to convince the other person, but that is probably what the response is among the readership as well. You just hope that, in general, the majority is going to be affected by what you publish.

Are there certain arguments you always have?

Well, it’s kind of different from story to story. What we do a lot is ask for revisions. So often we’ll sit around with a story and say, This is just not working, the ending is falling flat, or, This character is not coming out, or, The writing is very much on the surface and we haven’t gotten to the subtext. And we’ll talk about how and whether the writer could possibly fix those problems and whether it’s worth going back and saying, Would you want to rewrite this way or that way? And so those arguments can get repetitive because people tend to make the same mistakes. But we often do ask for revisions and get revisions that work. And sometimes the writer does exactly what you suggest and the story comes back and it’s much worse. [Laughs.]

Then where are you?

Then you say sorry. Then you’re very apologetic. It’s a little hit or miss because sometimes it’s a very thin thread that holds something together and if you mess with it it’s going to fall apart. But it may not quite have been working beforehand.

Sometimes I get to the very end of a story that I’ve been enjoying all along and the ending really disappoints me.

Someone actually just said exactly the same thing in David Shields’s class about the story this week—I don’t know if you’ve read it yet, a Haruki Murakami story, where it’s very vague and then the very last line refers to loneliness. And the student said he just hated that it was made so explicit, that he’d like this guy being lonely without calling it lonely. And I can see the point. It wasn’t something that bothered me when I was reading the story, but I can see that response.

It’s also easy to criticize the end of a story.

There’s so much weighing on it. It’s quite hard to pull out of a story too. That’s often why people write novels, because they can’t pull out. And it’s very hard—there’s so much pressure on the ending either to sum everything up or to culminate in some final image that’s going to say it all, and sometimes you just want to come to a stop, to let something that happened earlier in the story be the central thing.

You recently published a story by Tom Drury about a guy who nearly gets hit on the head by a beer bottle, but doesn’t. I was wondering what your thoughts are on publishing a story about a guy who nearly gets hit by a beer bottle but doesn’t in a time when the country is in a bloody, horrible, intractable war.

Well, there are bloody, horrible, intractable things going on every day and also people are nearly getting hit by beer bottles every day. There’s no reason to write one level of experience out because of the other. You still get up in the morning and take a shower and brush your teeth, and you still go and eat your lunch and talk to a friend, and there’s no reason why that can’t be fictional material as well as what’s happening overseas. I mean, if you’re talking about journalism, I don’t think you would want to write a newspaper story about a guy who almost got hit on the head by a bottle. But if in fact you’re writing a piece of fiction about a guy looking for answers in a landscape and trying to pin down the forces of chance and to take control over the forces of chance? This random thing, someone throws a bottle out of a car, it almost hits him. This guy goes on a mission, finds out who it was. He goes to see this person. He has a conversation with her about this randomness. At the same time as his girlfriend is sending a space mission to Mars, casting some force out into the unknown, he has the unknown come to him, he tracks it down and makes it known. There’s something much more complicated going on in the story.

I thought it was a great story.

And then, look at the other side. Yes, factual things, horrible things, are happening all around the world. Those things tend to take a little while to be distilled into fiction. No one really wants to write a fictional story about a disaster right after it’s happened. The emotions are very raw. You can’t be rational or psychologically astute about them. There was very little 9/11 fiction for a long time; it’s kind of just starting now. Vietnam War? I don’t know how long it was before the first fiction came out, probably a decade. The first World War stuff took decades, again. Those kinds of things come into fiction once you have some distance on them. The best fiction requires a certain kind of distance. I would hold that standard up to nonfiction—don’t bother writing about beer bottles being thrown in your journalism, when you could be reporting in Baghdad—but fiction, I think, takes a slightly different tack.

What do you think the position of the fiction writer is in tense political times?

It depends on the fiction writer. Some writers have absolutely no need or desire to address political issues, and some feel compelled to do it, so there’s really a big range of responses. I don’t think any fiction writer has a responsibility to deal with political things. Some of the ones who do are incredibly good writers. The 2004 New Yorker festival was politics-themed because it was right around the election, and I hosted a panel on politics and fiction in which Cynthia Ozick and Orhan Pamuk had an amicable but quite aggressive discussion about whether one had a right or whether it was ever praiseworthy to imagine yourself into the mind of someone who is evil, and Cynthia felt very strongly that one absolutely could not and should not try to write a story from Hitler’s point of view or the point of view of a suicide bomber, and Orhan felt that one should and could and that these were parts of human experience that deserved a literary dissection.

That seems pretty loaded.

Yeah, it is very loaded. You’re going to get unique responses. And ultimately you have to look at the readership—some people want to read it, and some people would be horrified.

What were the questions you asked of the panel?

It was a while ago now. That [disagreement between Ozick and Pamuk] was what caused the uproar. It was an uproar that went on and on and on.

When you were promoted to your current job I remember there was a lot of talk about your desire to bring more female writers into the magazine, and experimental writers. It recently occurred to me that there aren’t a lot of queer voices in the fiction section. I was wondering if that’s something you think is true or that you’ve noticed or that you care about.

Well, we’re never trying to get quotas. And it’s something that you stay aware of and that you think about, and you want to make sure that nothing is ever being discriminated against, but you also have to go with the material that’s being written that comes to you. And the one thing that I’ve always felt with women writers is that fewer women submit, of the manuscripts we get.

Why is that?

I’ve never done a statistical outlay but I would guess that two-thirds to three-quarters are by men, so in order to have a 50-50 breakdown in the magazine you have to kind of bend over backwards. We don’t have a 50-50 breakdown, sometimes it’s 45-55 and sometimes it’s 60-40, you know, it varies. Why is it? I think there’re a lot of things at play. I think there’s obviously the issue of who’s raising the kids, who has time to write, who’s focused on what at what stage of their lives. I think it’s changing. I think if you look at writers under 30 probably it’s pretty close to even. But among older writers there’s still a big breakdown. I think there’s also the question of confidence, that fewer women believe that they should be published in the New Yorker or are willing to put themselves on the line and take a rejection. And male writers seem to have an easier time both with rejection and with believing that they’re justified in wanting to be published. Again, I think that these are trends that are changing. And particularly when I look at MFA students and writing students I think the breakdown is pretty much even, so I think that over the years that going to shift. In terms of gay writers, I haven’t actually ever thought about that. I know there are certain male and female writers we publish who are gay, but no one’s ever brought up whether we publish enough or who they are. I haven’t thought about it in those terms, actually.

It’s probably just because I write fiction and my protagonists tend to be gay and I read the New Yorker all the time and think about the choices you make.

I have to say in terms of what I read, I also don’t see a lot of fiction with gay characters.

In terms of the international writers that you’ve talked about being interested in—

[Laughs.] I’m not sure I talked about it or everyone else talked about it for me. It was kind of funny, when the changed happened and [former New Yorker fiction editor] Bill Buford went to being a staff writer and I took this job, well, first of all I’d already been there for five years as the deputy editor of the department. Bill and I had our disagreements over some stories but the vast majority of what had been published I had also pushed forward and a lot of it I had edited. So the change wasn’t as drastic as anyone made out. People wanted news. So they sort of said, Oh, he only published men having mid-life crises, or whatever, or hunting, and she’s going to publish, you know, it’s all going to be Vietnamese lesbians. [Laughs.] People did their research and found that I had once translated something by a Vietnamese French woman. Or I’d translated something by Patrick Chamoiseau. So it was all going to be this [kind of writing]. It was never actually something I ever said. On the other hand I do think we should publish more writers from other countries. We’re doing, in December, a fiction issue which is all fiction in translation, so there will be a big issue of that, and I’m behind that.

Why are you doing that?

Because I think there are very different voices in the world, and I don’t think we publish enough of them in this country. It’s a big challenge for us to do this, for two reasons, one being that the short story is not a tradition in a lot of countries. There are a lot of countries around the world that don’t have magazines that publish short fiction, and people really, really write novels, and the story is rare. So those countries are at a little bit of a loss. The other challenge is, obviously, reading these things. I read French. That’s the only other language I read. Luckily, the French translate almost everything, so I’ve been able to read Albanian writers, Japanese writers, Chinese writers, South American writers, Spanish writers, Italian writers, all in French. And then I can say, Well, here’s a really great story, let’s go and translate it from the original language. I read slowly in French. [Laughs.] My last six months have been in this burden of reading in French. And you know obviously there have been some things that have come in that haven’t been that way, and there are some writers who have been translated and published already in English, but it’s kind of a triumph to say, This person is going to appear in English for the first time, right here, now, and to be behind that.

You frequently publish stories by Charles D’Ambrosio, a sometime Stranger contributor and one of my favorite writers. What do you like about his stories?

Both the density and the craziness, and the unexpectedness of his subjects. He can really write, sentence to sentence. He’s doing something very fun with the language. And at the same time he’s writing about types of people that you don’t see a lot of fiction about. You know, it’s always different, but they’re not your average middle-class New Yorker going about his business. They’re in different parts of the country and they’re doing different things. But most of all, he knows how to write. And every story is sort of a discovery. We have another one [by him] coming.

Plus his amazing vocabulary.

Yeah.

Are there writers you’ve been wrong about before?

Wrong about in terms of turning them down and then regretting it?

Yeah.

There have been stories that I’ve thought we should publish that the magazine didn’t publish, for whatever reason. Sometimes everyone else disagreed with me. But, no, there’s not a lot that I regret. Often we might turn down stories by someone who then has good stories later. We’re not wrong to have turned those stories down if they weren’t ready. And often we have a debate about writers whom we publish frequently who are top of their game, when you get a story from one of them that is not their best work, whether that story belongs in the magazine. You know, you look at a grade-A writer giving you his B story, and it’s still better than the best story by a lot of other writers that you will publish. And yet you turn it down even though it’s better than those other stories because it’s not showing that writer at his best. And we have these heated discussions sometimes—sometimes we take them and sometimes we turn them down—over whether we have a responsibility to only publish someone’s best work. Although we do 50 stories a year, which is 38 stories more than most other magazines because they’re monthly, you still want to feel that you’re getting the top, the best stuff out there.

People are always saying, The short story’s dead, the short story’s back… What do you think?

People like to have something to say. [Laughs.] I think there are two things that are happening. One is that the magazine world has really cut down on short story publishing. The Atlantic is doing a yearly fiction issue instead of every month. Esquire and GQ seem to occasionally run fiction, but for the most part they don’t anymore, whereas it used to be more frequent. But at the same time I feel as though the book-publishing world is desperate for new writers and desperate for new, big books to make a big splash about, especially by young writers. So what you’re losing on the magazine side you’re making back on the book side. Everything fluctuates and goes in waves but I don’t think there’s any grave danger.

The Atlantic not publishing fiction monthly anymore is a big deal, considering its history. Is the New Yorker ever going to go the way of The Atlantic?

I should certainly hope not. No sign of that now, no. And I also think, you know, some people say, Oh, that’s great, all the more for you. But it doesn’t work that way. You know people don’t bother writing things they have no hope of publishing. And if the market for short stories shrinks and shrinks, people are not going to write short stories. As I was saying, in other countries where there is no market, people only write novels. So, actually, the more magazines out there publishing short stories, the better it is for us, because more people will write them.

A. S. Byatt’s Quarrel with Biography

A.S Byatt, the famous British author of Possession: A Romance, visited Stockholm University in May 2007 to deliver an annual Adam Helm’s lecture, organized by the society of authors and Stockholm University.. I met her once over dinner and once when she addressed a mixed group of undergraduates and the English Department staff. The following is not an exact transcript of an interview, but a summary of Byatt’s thoughts on different topics brought up by teachers and students.

“I’m going to speak against biography,” A.S. Byatt says, and chuckles, when we meet over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Stockholm. She’s accompanied by two teacher representatives from Stockholm University and a few creative writing students. Byatt is spry, generous, and most entertaining.

One of the first questions is, “How do you wish to be addressed?”

“Just don’t call me Dame,” Byatt says and goes on to tell the amusing anecdote about registering on the Internet. There were all kinds of titles: Mr, Miss, Mrs, Prof, Dr, Sir, the lot, but not Dame. It’s as if Dames do not surf and shop on the net. “Only my local store sends me bills addressed to Dame Duffy, which is my husband’s surname.” Byatt insists that we call her by her first name, Antonia.

Byatt talks a great deal about her friendship with Iris Murdock, her disappointment at the biography by Murdock’s husband, which she means Murdock would hate. She tells about the autobiographical story about H.C. Andersen, which explained but also ruined her reading of her favourite Anderson passage. Some things should remain buried, like the letters of George Eliot, which are literally buried with her corpse. “Some academics believe it is their obligation to retrieve those letter, even if it means to excavate Eliot. I’d hate to see that happen.” Byatt used this as a marker against biography in Possession. She herself has arranged that her autobiography never hit any bookstores.

A cheeky comment comes from one of the teachers, “Maybe in a few years such meetings as this might engender a couple of unauthorized biographies.” Byatt winces, but then laughs.

I ask Byatt about her experience with the editors and she bridles, saying, “The American editors wanted to cut Possession. They said I was ruining a perfectly fine plot with an excess of text, especially poetry. They wanted to cut it even after it has won the Booker. They said it’d never sell.” Byatt tells us she was determined to publish the novel overseas with a small print rather than cut it.

I asked, “What about prizes, how did the Booker affect you? Are you going to flirt with the Nobel committee now that you’re here? Hemingway said it destroyed him.”

One of the teachers throws in a comment. “You can buy a lot of booze for that kind of money.”

Byatt laughs and says, “Nobel is a lottery. A great many good writers are overlooked. We used to nominate Graham Green every year, but he never got it. We went on advocating for Green anyway. I was so pleased to see my great friend Tony Morrison receive this award. Some people said she was not well known, but I was so pleased with the decision. Tony is such as wonderful writer.” She tells us an anecdote about Orhan Pamuk, whom she recommended for a prize in Spain. The trouble was, people did not want to hear about “obscure” Turkish writers, she says.

“What about postcolonial literature?” I asked.

Byatt says she likes some, specifically the writers she can “hear” as she puts it. She likes Zadie Smith because Smith loves Faulkner, which seems to shape her language. Abdulrazak Gurnah is a favourite too. Ben Okri, on the other hand, she says she has trouble hearing, because he is all about language, and he can talk for hours.

Later we speak about her writing process. Someone says, “What I appreciate in your fiction is the way you merge characters and settings. You don’t describe places and then put in characters but they flow beautifully into each other.”

“I never begin with a plot, or characters’ descriptions and then create a story.” She says she does not visualize immediately, instead beginning with the sound of a phrase for instance, and then moves from there, following the characters, trying to see where they are taking her. Only after the entire story is finished does she rewrite.

“What are you working on now?”

“It’s not good to talk about new projects,” Byatt says but she cannot refrain from telling us some bits and pieces from her new novel. Without revealing much of any kind of plot or conflict, she shares one detail a problem she encountered writing a story about five people whose lives started at the end of the 19th century. They would all become of age by the First World War. This brought about a dilemma. She asked her husband how many would realistically come out alive? He unequivocally replied, “Three.” “This means I have to kill two by the end. And what if I start to like those I decided should die?” Then Byatt points out a kind of necessity that writers can feel to conform to some form of reality. To her, fiction indeed tells the truth, not historical facts, but a form of truth about life. When one constructs a story there are numerous things one wants to check, especially if one is writing about a historical person. One feels constrained to conform to those pieces of information that are recorded, even though these hardly say anything of real importance, or truth about these people. She maintains she feels much more comfortable and truthful with made-up characters and worlds.

In the end, I ask about Sweden, and the two cities she is visiting, Stockholm and Uppsala. She has seen Linneaus gardens. Since it is the anniversary of his death, there is plenty exhibitions about his research. Byatt has written about Carl von Linné in The Biographer’s Tale. She laughs and says, “I finally got a chance to see the Linneaus gardens. I’ve written about them and now could see them for the first time.”

Here is a web site with more interviews with Byatt.