Saw these in my favorite used book shop and had to have them. Shabby copies of contemporary criticisms (i.e., old criticism) of Pynchon and Vonnegut. Love the covers.
Month: March 2012
The John Steinbeck Map of America
(Via/about).
“Disposal of Cut Hair and Nails” — Sir James George Frazer (The Golden Bough)
From James Frazer’s The Golden Bough:
8. Disposal of Cut Hair and Nails
But even when the hair and nails have been safely cut, there remains the difficulty of disposing of them, for their owner believes himself liable to suffer from any harm that may befall them. The notion that a man may be bewitched by means of the clippings of his hair, the parings of his nails, or any other severed portion of his person is almost world-wide, and attested by evidence too ample, too familiar, and too tedious in its uniformity to be here analysed at length. The general idea on which the superstition rests is that of the sympathetic connexion supposed to persist between a person and everything that has once been part of his body or in any way closely related to him. A very few examples must suffice. They belong to that branch of sympathetic magic which may be called contagious. Dread of sorcery, we are told, formed one of the most salient characteristics of the Marquesan islanders in the old days. The sorcerer took some of the hair, spittle, or other bodily refuse of the man he wished to injure, wrapped it up in a leaf, and placed the packet in a bag woven of threads or fibres, which were knotted in an intricate way. The whole was then buried with certain rites, and thereupon the victim wasted away of a languishing sickness which lasted twenty days. His life, however, might be saved by discovering and digging up the buried hair, spittle, or what not; for as soon as this was done the power of the charm ceased. A Maori sorcerer intent on bewitching somebody sought to get a tress of his victim’s hair, the parings of his nails, some of his spittle, or a shred of his garment. Having obtained the object, whatever it was, he chanted certain spells and curses over it in a falsetto voice and buried it in the ground. As the thing decayed, the person to whom it had belonged was supposed to waste away. When an Australian blackfellow wishes to get rid of his wife, he cuts off a lock of her hair in her sleep, ties it to his spear-thrower, and goes with it to a neighbouring tribe, where he gives it to a friend. His friend sticks the spear-thrower up every night before the camp fire, and when it falls down it is a sign that the wife is dead. The way in which the charm operates was explained to Dr. Howitt by a Wirajuri man. “You see,” he said, “when blackfellow doctor gets hold of something belonging to a man and roasts it with things, and sings over it, the fire catches hold of the smell of the man, and that settles the poor fellow.” The Huzuls of the Carpathians imagine that if mice get a person’s shorn hair and make a nest of it, the person will suffer from headache or even become idiotic. Similarly in Germany it is a common notion that if birds find a person’s cut hair, and build their nests with it, the person will suffer from headache; sometimes it is thought that he will have an eruption on the head. The same superstition prevails, or used to prevail, in West Sussex. Again it is thought that cut or combed-out hair may disturb the weather by producing rain and hail, thunder and lightning. We have seen that in New Zealand a spell was uttered at hair-cutting to avert thunder and lightning. In the Tyrol, witches are supposed to use cut or combed-out hair to make hailstones or thunderstorms with. Thlinkeet Indians have been known to attribute stormy weather to the rash act of a girl who had combed her hair outside of the house. The Romans seem to have held similar views, for it was a maxim with them that no one on shipboard should cut his hair or nails except in a storm, that is, when the mischief was already done. In the Highlands of Scotland it is said that no sister should comb her hair at night if she have a brother at sea. In West Africa, when the Mani of Chitombe or Jumba died, the people used to run in crowds to the corpse and tear out his hair, teeth, and nails, which they kept as a rain-charm, believing that otherwise no rain would fall. The Makoko of the Anzikos begged the missionaries to give him half their beards as a rain-charm. If cut hair and nails remain in sympathetic connexion with the person from whose body they have been severed, it is clear that they can be used as hostages for his good behaviour by any one who may chance to possess them; for on the principles of contagious magic he has only to injure the hair or nails in order to hurt simultaneously their original owner. Hence when the Nandi have taken a prisoner they shave his head and keep the shorn hair as a surety that he will not attempt to escape; but when the captive is ransomed, they return his shorn hair with him to his own people. To preserve the cut hair and nails from injury and from the dangerous uses to which they may be put by sorcerers, it is necessary to deposit them in some safe place. The shorn locks of a Maori chief were gathered with much care and placed in an adjoining cemetery. The Tahitians buried the cuttings of their hair at the temples. In the streets of Soku a modern traveller observed cairns of large stones piled against walls with tufts of human hair inserted in the crevices. On asking the meaning of this, he was told that when any native of the place polled his hair he carefully gathered up the clippings and deposited them in one of these cairns, all of which were sacred to the fetish and therefore inviolable. These cairns of sacred stones, he further learned, were simply a precaution against witchcraft, for if a man were not thus careful in disposing of his hair, some of it might fall into the hands of his enemies, who would, by means of it, be able to cast spells over him and so compass his destruction. When the top-knot of a Siamese child has been cut with great ceremony, the short hairs are put into a little vessel made of plantain leaves and set adrift on the nearest river or canal. As they float away, all that was wrong or harmful in the child’s disposition is believed to depart with them. The long hairs are kept till the child makes a pilgrimage to the holy Footprint of Buddha on the sacred hill at Prabat. They are then presented to the priests, who are supposed to make them into brushes with which they sweep the Footprint; but in fact so much hair is thus offered every year that the priests cannot use it all, so they quietly burn the superfluity as soon as the pilgrims’ backs are turned. The cut hair and nails of the Flamen Dialis were buried under a lucky tree. The shorn tresses of the Vestal Virgins were hung on an ancient lotus-tree. Often the clipped hair and nails are stowed away in any secret place, not necessarily in a temple or cemetery or at a tree, as in the cases already mentioned. Thus in Swabia you are recommended to deposit your clipped hair in some spot where neither sun nor moon can shine on it, for example in the earth or under a stone. In Danzig it is buried in a bag under the threshold. In Ugi, one of the Solomon Islands, men bury their hair lest it should fall into the hands of an enemy, who would make magic with it and so bring sickness or calamity on them. The same fear seems to be general in Melanesia, and has led to a regular practice of hiding cut hair and nails. The same practice prevails among many tribes of South Africa, from a fear lest wizards should get hold of the severed particles and work evil with them. The Caffres carry still further this dread of allowing any portion of themselves to fall into the hands of an enemy; for not only do they bury their cut hair and nails in a secret spot, but when one of them cleans the head of another he preserves the vermin which he catches, “carefully delivering them to the person to whom they originally appertained, supposing, according to their theory, that as they derived their support from the blood of the man from whom they were taken, should they be killed by another, the blood of his neighbour would be in his possession, thus placing in his hands the power of some superhuman influence.” Sometimes the severed hair and nails are preserved, not to prevent them from falling into the hands of a magician, but that the owner may have them at the resurrection of the body, to which some races look forward. Thus the Incas of Peru “took extreme care to preserve the nail-parings and the hairs that were shorn off or torn out with a comb; placing them in holes or niches in the walls; and if they fell out, any other Indian that saw them picked them up and put them in their places again. I very often asked different Indians, at various times, why they did this, in order to see what they would say, and they all replied in the same words saying, ‘Know that all persons who are born must return to life’ (they have no word to express resurrection), ‘and the souls must rise out of their tombs with all that belonged to their bodies. We, therefore, in order that we may not have to search for our hair and nails at a time when there will be much hurry and confusion, place them in one place, that they may be brought together more conveniently, and, whenever it is possible, we are also careful to spit in one place.’” Similarly the Turks never throw away the parings of their nails, but carefully stow them in cracks of the walls or of the boards, in the belief that they will be needed at the resurrection. The Armenians do not throw away their cut hair and nails and extracted teeth, but hide them in places that are esteemed holy, such as a crack in the church wall, a pillar of the house, or a hollow tree. They think that all these severed portions of themselves will be wanted at the resurrection, and that he who has not stowed them away in a safe place will have to hunt about for them on the great day. In the village of Drumconrath in Ireland there used to be some old women who, having ascertained from Scripture that the hairs of their heads were all numbered by the Almighty, expected to have to account for them at the day of judgment. In order to be able to do so they stuffed the severed hair away in the thatch of their cottages. Some people burn their loose hair to save it from falling into the hands of sorcerers. This is done by the Patagonians and some of the Victorian tribes. In the Upper Vosges they say that you should never leave the clippings of your hair and nails lying about, but burn them to hinder the sorcerers from using them against you. For the same reason Italian women either burn their loose hairs or throw them into a place where no one is likely to look for them. The almost universal dread of witchcraft induces the West African negroes, the Makololo of South Africa, and the Tahitians to burn or bury their shorn hair. In the Tyrol many people burn their hair lest the witches should use it to raise thunderstorms; others burn or bury it to prevent the birds from lining their nests with it, which would cause the heads from which the hair came to ache. This destruction of the hair and nails plainly involves an inconsistency of thought. The object of the destruction is avowedly to prevent these severed portions of the body from being used by sorcerers. But the possibility of their being so used depends upon the supposed sympathetic connexion between them and the man from whom they were severed. And if this sympathetic connexion still exists, clearly these severed portions cannot be destroyed without injury to the man.
Hydra — Albertus Seba
Harry Crews and Earl Scruggs Interviews to Replay on NPR’s Fresh Air
NPR’s Fresh Air will rebroadcast a 1988 interview with Harry Crews and a 2003 interview with Earl Scruggs today. If you can’t listen live, check out the podcasts (Crews podcast; Scruggs podcast), or download the NPR smartphone app.
From the Crews interview:
I wrote four novels and short stories before I even published anything, and the reason I didn’t publish any of those things was because it wasn’t any good, and the reason it wasn’t any good was because I was trying to write about a world I did not know . . . One night it occurred to me that whatever strength I had was all back in there in Bacon County, Ga., with all that sickness and hookworm and rickets and ignorance and beauty and loveliness. But that’s where it was. It wasn’t somewhere else.
(Thanks to the readers who wrote in about these shows).
Topless Hemingway, Part X
“Thought We’d Cook Up Some Snake” — A Recipe from Harry Crews
A passage from Harry Crews’s novel A Feast of Snakes:
When they got to his purple double-wide, Joe Lon skinned snakes in a frenzy. He picked up the snakes by the tails as he dipped them out of the metal drums and swung them around and around his head and then popped them like a cowwhip, which caused their heads to explode. Then he nailed them up on a board in the pen and skinned them out with a pair of wire pliers. Elfie was standing in the door of the trailer behind them with a baby on her hip. Full of beer and fascinated with what Joe Lon could feel—or thought he could—the weight of her gaze on his back while he popped and skinned the snakes. He finally turned and looked at her, pulling his lips back from his teeth in a smile that only shamed him.
He called across the yard to her. “Thought we’d cook up some snake and stuff, darlin, have ourselves a feast.”
Her face brightened in the door and she said: “Course we can, Joe Lon, honey.”
Elfie brought him a pan and Joe Lon cut the snakes into half-inch steaks. Duffy turned to Elfie and said: “My name is Duffy Deeter and this is something fine. Want to tell me how you cook up snakes?”
Elfie smiled, trying not to show her teeth. “It’s lots of ways. Way I do mostly is I soak’m in vinegar about ten minutes, drain’m off good, and sprinkle me a little Looseanner redhot on’m, roll’m in flour, and fry’m is the way I mostly do.”
RIP Harry Crews — A Rambling Riff on a Southern Great
Harry Crews died today at 76 in Gainesville, FL, where he lived and worked for years.
This isn’t an obituary—I’m sure you can find them elsewhere (I haven’t looked yet, but they’ll be out there)—it’s more a riff about me than Crews. Solipsistic, narcissistic, sure. Let’s say I feel a sense of unearned pride for the man, a geographical kinship, as if some of his bloody bravura might splatter on me, anoint me, confer on me a glimpse of his strange powers. (And although I would feel this way in any case, I’ll point out that Crews and I shared the same birthday). Maybe I should wait to write, put together a detailed overview of his work, delineate a chronological progression of his life and work . . . But it’s a warm spring day in Florida, I’m three beers down, a small buzz behind my eyes, the whir of the cheap electric fans on my backporch goading me into dim golden memory . . .
I graduated high school in 1997 and went to the University of Florida in Gainesville that fall—just in time to learn that Crews had retired his position in the Creative Writing department (he was also a graduate of the university) that spring. It was disappointing for me.
I’d read a few of Crews’s blistering, blustering novels, dark comic rants about the dirty malfeasance backwood Cracker folk get into after dark, and he’d come to occupy a fabled place in my impressionable mind—a Southern answer to the Bukowski and Henry Miller books I devoured in kind.
I was 18 and dramatically naïve. I honestly thought that I was going to write a Really Great Novel, and I honestly thought that Crews was going to teach me how. In that first semester of college, the poor underpaid graduate student who led the Creative Writing class I took—a class that all but killed a desire to write creatively for years (I write “all but” because I took a second fiction writing class that was the metaphorical nail in the coffin) informed me that Crews was no longer writer-in-residence (!), that some guy named Padgett Powell had taken up that mantle. This news dispirited me, took some of the wind out of my romantic illusions (without, y’know, properly killing them off). Maybe I’d have stuck it through the program if I thought it might end in a seminar with Crews, it’s hard to say. (I’ll also point out that it took me years to give Padgett Powell a fair read).
I won’t pretend to be sad at the death of Harry Crews: 76 is pretty old if you drank and fought and lived like that man did, and he’s already given more literature to the world than most of us could ever hope to. I was more sad at 18 to learn that I wouldn’t learn from him (not realizing at that age that reading is a way of learning). These statements seem in bad taste as I write them, but I assure you they’re not. You’re being too sensitive. But I do want to connote some reverence for the man, for his work at least, for his tales of rage and poverty, for the truth he sussed out of the swampy south.
Here’s a shift: Barry Hannah, another Southern boy whose work I’ve come to love, was not on my radar until his death in 2010. This isn’t to say I wouldn’t have found his stuff if he hadn’t died then, but I think that we all know what I’m pointing to here, the grand appraisals and reappraisals that we focus on our late writers, whose deaths might entail a second life, a life again in new readers. And Crews deserves readers: His writing is raw and jagged and ugly. It’s hard to imagine someone producing something like A Feast of Snakes or The Gypsy’s Curse today—I mean it would just be too politically incorrect I suppose. Crews is the kind of cult writer whose cult will likely grow a little now, after his death.
Starting places: The anthology Classic Crews collects Crews’s memoir Childhood, the novels Car and The Gypsy’s Curse, as well as some essays. There’s also Florida Frenzy, an essay collection larded with sex and violence and animals. You can’t go wrong with his novel A Feast of Snakes. Well, maybe you can. It’s actually entirely possible that Crews isn’t for your faint heart or delicate sensibilities—and that’s fine. But for those intrigued, come and get the grit.
Harry Crews on Writing (Video)
“Foggy Mountain Breakdown” — Earl Scruggs
RIP Earl Scruggs.
“Are We Still Married?” — His Name Is Alive/Brothers Quay
Book Acquired, 3.26.2012 (The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection)
I’ve never read any of Alexander McCall Smith’s No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books, or any of his books, but I like the cover of this new one, which is called The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection. I was photographing it clumsily with my old iPhone when my daughter decided to get in the pics and help me out. So, thanks honey.
Jacket copy from publisher Random House:
Precious Ramotswe is haunted by a repeated dream: a vision of a tall, strange man who waits for her beneath an acacia tree. Odd as this is, she’s far too busy to worry about it. The best apprentice at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors is in trouble with the law and stuck with the worst lawyer in Gaborone. Grace Makutsi and Phuti Radiphuti are building the house of their dreams, but their builder is not completely on the up and up. And, most shockingly, Mma Potokwane, defender of Botswana’s weak and downtrodden, has been dismissed from her post as matron at the orphan farm. Can the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency help restore the beloved matron to her rightful position?
As wealthy and powerful influences at the orphan farm become allied against their friend, help arrives from an unexpected visitor: the tall stranger from Mma Ramotswe’s dreams, who turns out to be none other than the estimable Clovis Andersen, author of the No. 1 Ladies’ prized manual, The Principles of Private Detection.Together, Mma Ramotswe, Mma Makutsi, and their teacher-turned-colleague help right this injustice and in the process discover something new about being a good detective.
The Fox Hunt — Winslow Homer
“Review of Winslow Homer Show at LA County Art Museum” — Steve Martin
(I read my parents’ copy of Cruel Shoes at least a dozen times. At least. Let’s say it was formative stuff).
“For the Dead” — Adrienne Rich
RIP Adrienne Rich. “For the Dead”:
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answerThe waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourselfI have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stoppedor the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight
Against the Disparagers of Brevity — Nietzsche
127. Against the Disparagers of Brevity. —A brief dictum may be the fruit and harvest of long reflection. The reader, however, who is a novice in this field and has never considered the case in point, sees something embryonic in all brief dicta, not without a reproachful hint to the author, requesting him not to serve up such raw and ill-prepared food.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Part II.
Matt Mullins Talks to Biblioklept About His New Collection, Three Ways of the Saw
The twenty-five short (and short-short and micro) stories that comprise Matt Mullins’s Three Ways of the Saw bristle with gritty, buzzing energy—these are crack-shot tales, simultaneously precise and off-center. Mullins offers a world of stumbling rock bands and day-drinkers, sorry sons and ugly lovers, all fumbling for meaning against the world’s sharp edges. Organized into three novellas-(of sorts)-in-stories, Saw is spiky, stinging, but also deeply moving, probing some of the darker places we’ve all been (or might be headed to).
Matt was kind enough to talk to me about his work over a series of emails, even though I’m sure he was busy—he had just gotten back from this year’s Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Chicago where he helped promote Saw, which is fresh from Atticus Books. Matt teaches creative writing at Ball State University. In addition to his writing, he’s also a musician and filmmaker. Check out his blog.
Biblioklept: How was AWP?
Matt Mullins: I had an excellent time at AWP. Things had come full circle. Three years ago at AWP Chicago, I’d interviewed for the tenure-track job I now have teaching creative writing at Ball State University. Two years ago in Denver, I was part of the hiring committee that brought us our most recent fiction hire, Cathy Day. Last year in DC I found out Three Ways of the Saw had been accepted by Atticus Books. This year I was back in Chicago signing the book for people at the Atticus booth in the book fair, and hustling boxes of wooden matches with a picture of book cover on them. I believe AWP is in Boston next year If I go, I’m planning on buying a lotto ticket and a twelve pack at the first party store I see inside the city limits.
Biblioklept: The twelve pack will come in use if your luck is bold or ill (but I hope your luck remains good).
MM: Truly, the beer shares its love with us whether we’re drowning sorrows or celebrating.
Bibliokept: Could you describe the vibe at AWP for those of us who’ve never been? How important is it for authors?
MM: The vibe at AWP, the book fair specifically, always reminds me that there is a hell of a lot of love for books out there, regardless of what the cyber-world might cause us to think with the rise of e-readers and online literary magazines. Hundreds of tables filled with beautifully crafted books, some of them hand typeset, hand-stitched, custom illustrated, others slicker and more traditional, but all of them filled with an astonishing breadth of literature. More great books than anyone could read in a lifetime. There’s definitely that going on, a serious love for the book as an object.
Then there’s the conference. 8,000 writers descending upon a swanky hotel in City X (Austin, Chicago, New York, Vancouver, D.C., etc. It changes each year.) to attend panels on a wide variety of subjects of concern to writers who teach in university/college creative writing programs. Readings by notable authors in both the literary and indie publishing worlds. Fancy receptions with open bars put on by various sponsors. Serious networking.
Then there’s all the crazy “off site” events. Parties put on by lit magazines and publishers. Readings in bars and clubs. All the things you can imagine happening when you let thousands of writers and artistically inclined people loose on a city en masse for a long weekend. One of the interesting things I’ve noticed with AWP over the last few years is that there are now two strains that intermingle at will. There is what I would call the “indie-lit” community, the more recent community of people running small non-university affiliated presses and online literary magazines, and there is the longer standing community of university affiliated presses and creative writing programs. It’s been great to see how the coming together of these two communities (which have communities within and across their own larger communities) has energized the whole situation. It’s brought more people who love good writing together. This year the conference sold out for the first time in its forty-some year history.
In terms of its importance for authors: Many writers can take it or leave it. It’s a great place to meet editors of literary magazines and otherwise make connections with people who are potentially interested in reading your work. And personally, I’ve always enjoyed wandering through the book fair with a back pack and picking up submission guidelines at each journal’s table that I’ll sort through later as I get ready to send out a round of stories or poems. But it’s not a make or break situation for a writer by any means. I’m sure there are many writers out there to whom this conference would not appeal one bit. More power to them.
Biblioklept: Well, it sounds like you’ve had a lot of success at AWP. I hope that Three Ways of the Saw picked up some traction there. It’s a cool book, somehow simultaneously raw and refined. There’s a gritty energy to your prose, but it’s also precise and even elegant in its economy. Some of my favorite pieces in the book, like “Steam” and “Accepting Inner Change at the Grocery Store,” are these succinct moments that somehow encode epiphanies that aren’t forced, that are, for lack of a better word, naturalistic (this is a long-winded way of me saying: I completely identify with the truth of these moments as a reader, as a human). I’m curious about how you draft and execute them.
MM: For me there’s a certain grace inhabiting those things living at the very edge of our understanding. When, for various reasons, they spill over into some kind of sense we can apprehend we get a feeling of momentary clarity that can resonate forward into a longer lasting epiphany that changes the way we see ourselves and the world. There are those things born of a raw truth that come to us like a slap in the face. And there are those things that slide over us with a gentle sadness or joy. Whatever their type, they’re always there. They surround us. What brings them into focus is life context bumping up against individual consciousness.
When I’m trying to work that mechanism in a story, I don’t really know what that moment might be when I start out. Or if I do think I know what it is when I start out, it usually ends up being something else. What tends to happen, though, is that I end up writing my character into outer circumstances that allow a kind of collision, subtle or raw, with the character’s inner circumstances that result in this third element, this realization (or failed realization) of that new collided inner/outer state.
The language is the delivery mechanism for this idea, so it must be precise if the meaning is to come across. But language is sound and rhythm and even shape as well as meaning so all of those elements need to come together if this “third thing” as I’m calling it is to emerge fully. I think maybe it’s the attention to the language and the fact that these true moments don’t need to be conjured so much as revealed and caused to shine anew through the method of their delivery that makes their arrival feel natural rather than forced. Saying something the reader already intuits to be true in an unexpected way makes the gut say yes even as it makes the head tease out the complexities of the idea.
Biblioklept: There’s a moment in the title story, “Three Ways of the Saw,” when the narrator connects the scientific fact that matter can never be created nor destroyed, only changed, to the philosophical implication that, “if this is true it means the whole universe already contains everything that ever was or will be” — and hence all people are intrinsically connected (the narrator goes on to link himself to Nixon and Hitler and Gandhi and Jesus and rubber bands). Your collection contains a strong, unifying tone, but you also get inside the heads of lots of different kinds of people. Where do your characters come from?
MM: My characters come from within and from without. By within I mean two things. First, every character, no matter where it comes from, has a little part of me in its chemistry, if only by virtue of the fact that it’s being filtered through my consciousness. Secondly, some characters are wholly products of my imagination. That is, they are born in my head and I evolve them from there.
By without, I mean some of my characters are based partly on my experience with others. Some are inspired by people I know well. Others come from people I’ve seen or encountered indirectly. But even these characters that come from without have to be filtered through me to end being in the story, so they invariably take on facets of my perception, intentional or not, which makes them that first type of character I mentioned that comes from within. So, to untangle that, I guess the answer is that all my characters come from within–eventually–regardless of if they were born in my head or were filtered through it.
But more than where they come from is what I want from them. I want them to be compelling, flawed, multi-faceted and someone a reader can attach themselves to, whether it’s by way of sympathy or interest in “what’s going to happen to this person next.”
You make a good point about the collection’s unifying tone across its variety of characters. I believe in the idea of universality through specifics. That is, the more specific you get with a character’s mind, world and situation, the more universal your story becomes. It appears antithetical at first glance and I’ve had many a student tell me they wrote something purposefully vague because they wanted everyone to “Get it.” But what happens with vagueness is detachment and disinterest. So I always tell them to get that vaseline off the camera lens and start showing me the facets of the diamond. Because this much I’ve learned: When things vividly emerge for the reader, they descend into the story and the resulting empathy/interest allows them to attach themselves to the character and their experience. That’s why we could all relate to a well written story about astronauts that might say something universal about loss or isolation or perspective, or whatever, even though 99.99999% will never be in outer space.
Biblioklept: I teach basic college composition, not fiction writing, but I have a similar mantra: get to the abstract through what’s concrete. I’m curious about your teaching: Has it influenced how you write?
MM: Teaching influences my writing in that it keeps the creative process, revision and the idea of reading good examples by writers I admire in the forefront of my mind. Those are the general practices I try to pass along to my students. I’ve been teaching a lot of screenwriting over the last few years, and this has given me certain ideas about plot and character arc and scene and dialogue that have influenced the shape of some things I write as well, the more narrative stories particularly. I also have a clearer understanding of how to book end scenes I want to purposefully withhold so they emerge in the reader’s mind without literally appearing in the story. But screenwriting also pushes me toward more non-narrative forms of storytelling, because sometimes I want to get away from that more traditionally narrative mode. So this makes me more experimental in my approaches at times. But In general, teaching influences my writing by keeping me engaged in the idea of craft, how to talk about it, what I understand it to be. It keeps my mind focused on the practical application of techniques, which is where the true guts of writing are, at least for me, whether it’s in a traditional narrative or experimental mode.
Biblioklept: One of the techniques you use in a few of the stories is second-person perspective. What are the risks and payoffs in writing in this POV?
MM: Second person is much maligned, I think sometimes rightly so, for being presumptuous. Forcing the reader into a story as the protagonist–it’s a leap some readers aren’t willing to make, especially if they can’t connect themselves to the characterization or the outer realities of the character. 2nd person requires that leap of faith on the reader’s part. Especially when the reader gets drug through some shit and those “you’s” aren’t dwelling in very happy places. So there’s a risk in alienating the reader due to the nature of the leap you’re asking of them. Also, it’s a self-conscious device to create “intimacy” between the reader and the story, something that brings attention to what is usually a more subconscious relationship between reader/character that’s different from the objective subjectivity of the first person and the more distant narrative omniscience of 3rd; and that self-consciousness can put people off. This is why I only use 2nd person sparingly, and when I do it’s for very specific reasons. For me, unless 3rd person is essential to some aesthetic element of the story, I won’t use it.
For example, in “Getting Beaten” I’m using it to get the reader in close on a rather lost, though I hope sympathetic, character who undergoes a violent experience. I wanted to put the reader as close to that experience and subsequent catharsis as possible. 2nd person seemed the best way to bring across that character’s inner turmoil while attaching the reader to the outer situation. But that in itself wouldn’t justify its use for me. That story can be told just as well in 1st or 3rd person. 2nd person became integral to that story when I realized its true ending, which involves the projection of a second “you” into the story that pulls up next to the “you” the reader has been associating with the entire time–this effect of one you watching the other you in the context of how the story makes the idea of those two presences interact with each other would be impossible to write in the 1st or 3rd person.
“Accepting Inner Change in the Grocery Story” is a kind of companion piece in that it’s assumed the “you” is the same character if you were to view him objectively. With that story there’s also this idea of the doppelgänger, you confronting you, and this idea of a kind of psychic time travel. Using 2nd person here allowed me to get a character to confront himself literally while also throwing the idea of the reader inside that same mirror while pulling them back and forth in time.
In “The Bachelor’s Last Will and Testament” I shift between the 2nd person and that 1st person legalese of the will. So using 1st person for the beginning of the piece wasn’t working and 3rd felt too distant.
In “How to Time an Engine” I’m using it more in the poetic tradition of direct address, though I’ve angled the address to the character on the receiving end of my marveling over luck and timing versus karma, divine providence and fate and how maybe they’re all just different versions of the same thing. Using second person in that piece allows me to turn the reader into the example itself (the you) as we (reader and narrator) consider the idea together.
So, for me, when I’m trying to bend the whole idea of what “person” means in fiction, I might employ 2nd person. But, knowing its risks, I don’t make that choice too often. I think if a writer takes that kind of considered approach to 2nd person they’ll probably reap the rewards rather than suffer the risks.
Biblioklept: I’m curious what you’re working on now—more short stories? Music? Film? Do you have plans for a novel? Another Mortal Kombat film? (Oh, wait, I think that’s a different Matt Mullins . . .)
MM: Yeah, that other Matt Mullins. He’s something else. You’ve got to check him out on YouTube. He does all that acrobatic flying through the air ass-kicking type stuff. He also looks a little bit like I did when I was younger. When I first stumbled upon him it was almost like seeing an alternate reality version of myself, as if after the last time I had my nose busted in a fist fight I said, “Forget this reading and writing bullshit,” and started studying the martial arts instead. It makes me wonder how many Matt Mullins are out there and what they’re into. Maybe one likes to write. Maybe we can trade books one day or have a beer.
As for what I’m working on now: My interactive literary project in progress currently lives at lit-digital.com. I’ve been working on some videopoems and short, experimental films when I have the time. I have a manuscript of prose-poem type things called The Roaring Engine of Here that I want to finish up and start shopping around. I have a couple feature-length screenplays roughed out that I need to finish, and I have an idea for a novel that blows up my time spent as copywriter in corporate America. Basically, I just need to nail down what I want to focus on and get to it.
Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?
MM: I went to an all-boys Catholic boarding school. We actually had to wear suit jackets with a crest on the breast pocket. But it was not some quasi Ivy League prep school. It was like the knock off version of that–an ignorant, ugly, cruel, violent place, but it taught me something of life’s truths early. You were required to bring your Bible to theology class under threat of “detention” and/or “demerits.” One day, I found I’d lost my Bible . . .
Biblioklept 