Justin Nobel’s autobiographical psycho-geography of New York is at turns disciplined and whimsical, insightful and playful. Structured around eleven site-specific observations or reflections, the book sketches an impressionistic map of the boroughs, taking account of archetypal characters and anomalous visions alike.

Standing Still in a Concrete Jungle reads almost like an outsider art project, secretive and deeply personal—but then, it’s also just a book that anyone can buy on Amazon for $12. And this realm of contradiction is what Nobel seems to revel in, stumbling upon everyday juxtapositions of the mystical and the mundane, deep history and fleeting energies.

Nobel’s writing is lucid and fresh, a sort of alchemy of sustained attention and free-association speculation. So a stakeout at a hipster Brooklyn coffee shop swerves suddenly into “the sudden urge to be knee-deep in a clear creek.” A slow vertical adventure in a Chelsea elevator turns up a question and an epiphany: “When did we begin bubble wrapping art? Art is free, it is all around.” Hanging out in an ER waiting room in Manhattan prompts a query: “Might waiting itself be the cause of the disease? Perhaps, it is the cure.”

While some of Nobel’s musings may smack readers as pompous or naïve, the careful reader will notice something else going on: a kind of sincerity and humility that resonates with the works of canonized American authors such as Henry David Thoreau and Willa Cather. It’s startling to see this kind of directness, particularly when not embedded in the consciousness of a fictional character, or located outside the context of a pre-approved text. But it is no less poignant when it occurs, and it occurs often through Nobel’s project, such as when, “in the food court, skylights rain sunlight, creating the feel of a cathedral and illuminating an elderly couple eating a Burger King lunch.” Is the fast food lampooning the sacred ambience, or weirdly accentuating it? Nobel invites us to linger in the uncertainty.

Standing Still in a Concrete Jungle is not really about standing still at all: it’s about going for a ride, and being up for all the unexpected encounters along the way. It’s about a place, and within that place, a bunch of non-places. It’s a place-based study that lends itself to endless translations and adaptations—it’s like a philosophy for anywhere.

every rib written in silt.
Every year the huge lake froze,

ice figures clawed
and covered the pier.

Even in summer we shivered with cold,
my two brothers and I,

the lake growing inside us,
farther from your shore.

The Dark Sky

The sky has no memory
for phone numbers,
not the jingle
nor those dim, papered rooms.

So many stars,
so many oars dipping down,
it’s impossible to compare
the universe to oneself.

I have avoided the name of God
as if I were an instrument
that chilled, calibrating
murmur and sound of water.

Bravura threads itself between
my teeth. I love the yearning,
and what is love
hurrying us to a house of clouds?

Air full of salt—
I guess we’ve evaporated.
We lie down on a palette made from decades.
I shouldn’t touch and fear

you—a knife that pierces
the frost with breath.

Unfastened

Father, no matter where I lived you sent flowers
to mark the day I was born.

In Munich they arrived without a card.
The man who rented me a room took them,

hoping they were from his father
who’d abandoned him long ago.

I knew they were for me.
It was cold and gray and I needed

the red and blue anemones.
Those years irony meant nothing to me

as I traveled from one country to another,
searching for a pear tree—

glimpsed from a train—
supported by ladders.

Abigail Wender’s articles and poems have been published in Guernica Magazine, Mead Magazine, Epiphany Literary Journal, and other reviews. A finalist at the Frost Place 2013 Chapbook Contest, she holds an MFA degree from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and lives in New York City.

Like any historical novel—even one set in recent history—Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers is a convergence of the past and the present, the time before now rendered with the help of research but intrinsically influenced by the contemporary moment that shapes the author’s daily life. And like many novels, The Flamethrowers is an amalgam of the author’s personal interests strung together by her character’s movements—in this case, the downtown New York art scene in the late 1970s and the Movement of ’77, a leftist revolt that rocked Italy that year. Kushner’s work as an art critic—she’s written for Artforum for more than a decade—helped spawn her interest in the former, and as she researched the latter after learning about the Autonomists and other components of the Movement of ’77, the texts of that era came alive as the Occupy and other movements culled them for instruction and inspiration for their own political actions.

The thread that connects these two elements—New York art and Italian revolt—in The Flamethrowers is Reno, a recent art school graduate from Nevada who moves to New York to cut her teeth as an artist and adult. She wends her way into the world she desires and becomes involved with Sandro Valera, a prominent minimalist who’s also the estranged scion of an Italian motorcycle baron—which is fortuitous, considering Reno’s transfixion with both art and motorcycle racing. The plot unfurls from here, with wild forays that entwine the narrator and others that transport the reader further back in time, to the genesis of the Valera empire, and into the depths of the imaginations of characters Reno encounters, who hold forth with indeterminably fantastical stories and revolutionary theories.

Rachel Kushner is also the author of Telex From Cuba, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. She will present The Flamethrowers at a Happy Hour Salon hosted byRoom 220 that will also feature readings by Nathaniel Rich and Zachary Lazar from 6 – 9 p.m. on Thursday, May 9, at the Press Street HQ (3718 St. Claude Ave.). As usual, complimentary libations will be on hand, though we strongly suggest donations. Copies ofThe Flamethrowers and titles by Rich and Lazar will be on sale courtesy of Maple Street Book Shop. This event is free and open to the public.

Room 220: You wrote a piece for the Paris Review in which you mentioned writing about mass demonstrations in The Flamethrowers while Occupy Wall Street was on the news. While you were writing about riots, they were erupting in London and Greece. In depicting the political elements of the book, how much was your eye turned toward the present and what was going on?

Rachel Kushner: The way I conceive of the novel—my experience of writing one—is of living in a world that is constantly being shaped and filtered by the book I am writing. My eye is always turned toward the present, because the present, the whole extended plane of life, is arranging itself to be lifted up and transported into fiction. I thought a great deal about these past events in the 70s. I had encountered the Autonomist movement through my husband, who writes about French and Italian philosophy and political theory in the 20th century, and through him I met some Italians who knew a great deal about this milieu. I thought it would be a pretty thrilling context for a novel.

As I was writing the book, Autonomia and the Movement of 77 started to seem like something of a cultural zeitgeist. A lot of people were interested in Italy, and that’s partly because of Occupy and other movements that were going on. Even people in the Arab movements were looking to Italy, and people in the anti-austerity movements across Europe. It’s a really interesting time that hasn’t completely been studied and declared defunct in the way that May ’68 has. The Italian 1970s may have more interesting and relevant links to the contemporary era, given that the autonomist actions extended beyond the factory into the cities and were a set of refusals that no longer cohered with the factory and a traditionally Marxist class composition. Beyond the complicated issue of Autonomia, there were these rather simple coherences between what I wrote and what was going on in real life. As I wrote about the blackout in 1977, looting was erupting in London. As I wrote about people being tear-gassed in the streets of Rome that same year, people were being tear-gassed in Oakland. As I wrote about an anarchist street gang engaged in full-on combat with police, I watched live feeds from Greece of these kids fighting the cops in insanely asymmetrical battles, launching molotovs with lacrosse sticks.

I knew a lot of people involved in Occupy—many who are younger than I am, people in their early 20s for whom Occupy will probably have been the essential historical event of their time. My friends in Occupy are and were all interested in Autonomia, and they were reading the same texts I was reading. I did a reading from the novel-in-progress in L.A. and everyone thought that what I was reading was about them, when it was actually about this historical group of anarchists in New York City from ’67 – ’71 who were called the Motherfuckers. People know about that group, but my friends sort of thought I was writing a text that was related to them or inspired by them, and in a way they were correct.

Rm220: Factory workers play a potent role in the political landscape of your novel, as they have in real political movements throughout recent history. In terms of writing as part of a contemporary conversation, how did you view that specific element, especially considering the decline of organized labor in the United States?

RK: The 70s in Italy is a pretty complicated milieu, but it’s something like this: A lot of the theoretical components of Autonomia were born in the factories of the highly industrialized north of Italy—there’s the Pirelli factory where the Red Brigades famously got their start, and there’s these motorcycle factories, and of course there’s Fiat. But none of it, as I understand it, was about “organized labor” in a traditional sense—though I should say I’m no expert on autonomist and workerist history. I think some of the theories about why the Hot Autumn of 1969 at the Fiat factories was so intense and so many workers participated in the strikes is that many of the workers come from the south of Italy, which does not have the culture of work that you find in the north. This difference between the south and the north manifested itself in this total disregard on the part of the workers for their labor bosses when these strikes start to happen. They were primarily strikes that were not organized by union leaders, and instead something more like wildcat strikes. The movement partly happened because workers rejected their unions and the communist party altogether. They organized themselves, which is the origin of the term autonomia.

The component of Autonomia that was Rome-based was much more of a sub-proletarian, lumpen population of people who were not productive, and they certainly didn’t do factory work because it’s not an industrialized part of Italy. That’s a really complicated component of things: How did this mass revolt and mass illegality across multiple sectors of people occur if there’s no factory as a site of principle antagonism? People would try to explain it to me: “Well, people in Rome, they are not interested in work, they wanted to have a different kind of life. It’s a total rejection of bourgeois values.” There was simply a refusal to work, and I think that relates to what people are feeling now. Those in Occupy were not making a specific set of demands. They weren’t asking for health benefits and better minimum wages as barristas or whatever. It was, and I hope remains, a kind of rejection and a refusal, rather than a demand for a specific and better-negotiated position in the service economy—which is to say, the economy. I love that moment in  when someone asks Marlon Brando what he’s rebelling against and he says, “What do you got?”

Rm220: And how did you come upon the New York art world of the late 1970s as a context in which to set part of the book?

RK: I’m familiar with that era partly from having written about contemporary art—a significant time and an influential time still for contemporary art—and partly from my childhood, and having been exposed, early, to some of it. That period also coincides with the death of the industrial age in the United States. It seems like an interesting coincidence—or not a coincidence—that the artists in SoHo were moving into these former manufacturing warehouses, and even using the detritus of manufacturing itself to make their work. As I was beginning to write The Flamethrowers, there was a retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark at the Whitney. Later, mid-way through the book, there was a retrospective of the Pictures Generation at the Met. A Jack Goldstein show is opening like next week in New York City, and I just saw it at the Orange County Museum. The 1970s is still an informing era for contemporary artists, who continue to be drawn to it, and to feel a need to contend with the figures and ideas and the discourse of that era. All of this made the era feel worth writing about.

Rm220: The book is filled with people talking over each other, or at least talking not so much to communicate but to simply talk. You have all these monologues—Ronnie’s story at the end, Stanley Kastle’s monolog, which is literally to no one. They’re excellent stories, but their quality doesn’t change their motivation. Relate this to your writing practice. How much of your writing practice is to communicate, to take part in the conversation, and how much is simply to monologue?

RK: I’m not sure there is a clear and clean distinction between “to communicate” and to “monologue.” The person who speaks in a long breathless jag probably feels he is communicating something important or he would not bother. I think a lot of people want to talk more than they want to listen. Meaning some component of their speech is always about the speech itself and their need to perform it and to hear their own voice and to dominate by talking, more than it is about making contact with a listener. But there is some level at which neither monologue nor communication are what matter to the novel, the rules of it, because the author is always communicating to the reader. Nothing is by accident or impulse—it’s all there, ultimately, by some kind of design. The author, ideally, is not a bloviator at the dinner table, but registering the phenomenon of such to have fun or be comic or make some other kind of point, for instance, to introduce textures into the narrative that the narrator can’t, since she is one voice, unmodulated.

For me, this resembles life—sometimes there are these people who are frankly bored when anyone else in the room is talking but them. And I like the sort of self-declared experts that can say a lot more about themselves than they think they’re saying when they want to tell you every detail about a subject of which they have the impression they are an expert—and sometimes they are an expert, but they tell you about their ego’s needs as they inform you.

Reno, the narrator, can’t entirely surf the more sophisticated discourses of the people around her and so she is often more quiet and withdrawn, which lent more space for other people to talk. I was also interested formally in the challenge of letting dialogue take over for very long stretches, letting someone who isn’t the narrator talk for thirty pages. The narrator is there, but she’s simply recording what he’s saying as a listener in the room. While I was working on this book I re-read The Savage Detectives by Bolaño. I love the way he lets people tell stories within stories. He’s obviously not the first person to do that. Conrad does, uses framing mechanisms. I was interested in developing my own manner of doing that.

Rm220: You mentioned Savage Detectives, but I thought several times of 2666 while reading this book—your narrator is perpetually on the outskirts of these things that are going on, which is the same for most of the narrators in 2666. And in 2666, as well, there are lots stories told by characters that go on for pages that, seemingly, have nothing to do with the plot.

RK: I read 2666 when I was just getting the engine of my novel running. For me, that novel and Savage Detectives have somehow become one massive tapestry. I think they are interrelated in a way that Bolaño’s other books are not. His other books relate in certain surface ways or in structural ways, but those two novels seem to be circling around the same questions—of the nature of evil, for instance—one in a more playful way and the other in a more dark and vast but insidious way. I think I’m equally influenced by both of those books. I certainly studied them—as many other writers have—and I’m flattered you thought of 2666.

When the neighbors looked out their windows and saw the robot, it reminded them that the meat-packing plant in town was cutting jobs for the first time in its history. They thought of how their medication was getting more expensive, and how summer was starting and there were no holidays to look forward to for a long time, not good ones at least. The neighbors called and left messages on the Wang family’s answering machine, asking them to take the robot inside. “Please,” they begged. “It’s breaking our hearts.”

The robot had been built by their son, Henry Wang. But the girl Henry loved had been abducted by aliens. He’d watched her pulled up into a sphere of heat and light in the sky, throwing her arms wide to meet it, and then vanish into the stars. He was too broken up over losing her to take care of the things he should. So the robot sat out on the porch for weeks, until finally Henry’s sister, Music Girl, dragged it inside and lay it against the side of the stairs.

Henry walked past the robot every day without looking at it. The whole bottom floor of the house, converted into a workshop to support his genius, sat quiet and dust covered. He did his schoolwork mechanically—that had never taken any effort from him—and spent all his time watching his computer screen. Ever since the alien had taken Bethany away, he spent hours analyzing satellite data and scanning the night sky, searching for some sign of her.

Music Girl tried to help her brother the only way she knew how. From the open door of her room came a blast of love-sick rock music. Now she was playing Nancy Sinatra’s “My Baby Cried All Night Long.” She wandered into Henry’s room wearing a puffy set of headphones over her green beanie. Henry slumped over his computer, staring at lines of code. “You have to move on,” she told him. “You got dumped.”

“I did not get dumped.” Henry kept his eyes on the screen. “We just need to talk.”

“She’s in love with the alien,” Music Girl said. “You’ll never be able to compete with an inhuman entity of magnetism and light.” The robot was slumped pitifully against the stairs, its open hands making her think of all the times she’d been in a restaurant or department store and heard a new song she loved, but then was never able to find it again. “You need to fix your robot.”

*

They had a three day weekend for some reason—the Wang children didn’t question why—and since Henry was determined to spend it pining over Bethany, Music Girl decided to fix the robot herself. Her parents had company coming over that night, and they were worried that the sight of the dead machine would ruin the evening. Music Girl dragged it into her room where no one would have to see it and promised her parents that she’d get it fixed. A few weeks ago, the robot had wandered into the middle of town and gotten tangled up in a swing set. A roving band of children had found it stuck there and beat it with pieces of metal pipe, ramped off it with their skateboards and ran over it with their bikes, stoned it until they ran out of stones. Finally they grew bored, built a fire on top of it, and left. That was how Henry found it.

Music Girl went over the damage that evening, working on the robot and listening to strange science-themed classic rock: Thomas Dolby, The Buggles, David Bowie. She opened the robot’s front panel and scraped out mud, corrosion, and damaged pieces of circuit board. She turned the chest into one giant speaker, put a combo CD player and tape deck in the robot’s mouth, an audio-in jack in the side of its head where its ear would be. She ran speaker wires through its limbs and fitted an amp into its neck. Next, she wired it up with an accent lighting kit that would flash in time to the music. Song was the only way she knew to bring the dead back to life, and she had absolute faith in it.

Across the house, Henry had detected Bethany making slow orbits of the earth. Her body, athletic and muscular, careened through the upper atmosphere and left a tail of flame. Henry plotted her exact trajectory so that he could beam radio waves at the girl, trying to make contact. Hi, Bethany! he wrote. Just wondering what you were up to….

While the children worked in their rooms, the Wang parents showed the other couple around their home. They talked about jobs being cut at the pork-processing plant. The manager was having the pigs do the work themselves. Much cheaper that way. The Wangs worked there as accountants, and they laughed it off. “Pigs are notoriously bad at accounting,” they said. “We don’t have anything to worry about.” The Wangs showed their guests the armored bunker where they took shelter when their children quarreled, the PA system Music Girl used to create a daily soundtrack for their lives, the phone-lines that existed just for Henry’s industrial contacts, long silent since he’d begun mourning the loss of Bethany. They went downstairs to tour the remnants of Henry’s workshop. Music Girl met them at the foot of the stairwell with the robot. “I fixed it,” she said.

Still dirty and dented, it leaned against one wall and sizzled with lights. It played classical music, the strings echoing eerie from inside its metal body. Looking at them with its dead camera-eyes, the robot’s tape deck malfunctioned and it frothed at the mouth with brown ribbons of ruined cassette.

The Wang’s guests looked at the Frankenstein DJ machine and remembered Christmas toys that didn’t come with batteries, IKEA furniture accidentally assembled backwards, TVs without the right ports, a whole lifetime of things missing pieces or not fitting together the way they should. “We should go,” the couple said.

After their company left, Mr. and Mrs. Wang looked at the robot and tried to find something to feel happy about. They couldn’t hold hands with it right there in front of them, didn’t want to look at each other, felt like they were standing too close together. Her mother kissed Music Girl on the forehead and asked her to take the robot back to her room.

She found her brother typing fast on his keyboard. He’d made contact with Bethany as she streaked through the night sky. He was arranging a meeting with her. He would try to talk her into giving up the alien and staying on earth with him.

“You have to fix your robot,” Music Girl told him. “I made it play music, but it sounds wrong. I feel bad about everything. Not even surf rock helps.”

Henry’s hair was greasy and hung in his face. He hadn’t showered in days, had barely slept. To make sure enough satellites were trained on the girl, he was committing crimes international and domestic, illicitly borrowing resources from space programs. “Bethany says she’s not the same person she was,” Henry said. “She’s getting ready for war. What does that mean?”

Music Girl gave up on her brother and went back to her room. She loaded the wreckage of the robot into a wagon and pushed it up the hill, toward the meat-packing plant rising over the trees in the distance. In the top of the plant’s highest tower, a blue light glowed. It felt dangerous to her, like everything about the plant, all clots of bloody ice and the jagged teeth of saws, the grinding of machines and flutter of paperwork. She knew that the plant had maintenance people who took care of machines. She left the robot on their doorstep and hoped that someone would have pity on it.

When the next shift of workers came, they found the robot lying against the wall, as sad and broken as any of them. Mistaking it for one of their own, the workers lifted the robot and carried it into the depths of the factory. It spent the day being carried from one part of the plant to the other, each department doing what it could before sending the machine down the line. When the robot would emerge three days later, its body would be completely transformed, its loneliness left intact.

*

Music Girl didn’t mention to anyone that she’d taken the robot away. Satisfied that she’d done all she could, she returned to her work creating a score for the high school, organizing a daily soundtrack to lead her family into spring and happiness, finding songs that would dissolve like vitamins into her brother’s troubled heart.

The Wang family was relieved to have the robot gone, but a feeling of sadness lingered in the house. In their memory, it was dented and wrecked still, and they could not forget. Worried that someone had thrown it away, that the robot would lie pitifully in a dumpster or find its way into the dump, Mr. and Mrs. Wang got into their car and drove all over town, trying to find what had become of it.

Though the house vibrated with music, Henry wasn’t there to hear it. He was meeting Bethany in a field at the edge of town. He ran down the sidewalk, knowing that somewhere above, she was falling towards him.

*

Mr. and Mrs. Wang were driving past the factory in the afternoon when they saw the robot walk out with the workers leaving after first shift. It was smaller now, and its third arm and leg had been removed so that it looked more like a person. It wore jeans and a coarse blue work shirt. The Wangs watched it stop on the sidewalk and stare up at the sky for a long time. They took deep breaths, held each other’s hands, and felt that their lives could begin again.

The robot, linked up with Henry Wang’s computers, was tracking the girl falling through the stratosphere. Her skin white hot and hair streaming behind her, she plummeted down without heat shield or parachute. The robot calculated the location of impact and started walking.

Miles away, Henry Wang stood in a field and looked up at the same sky. Bethany was nothing but fire and light, an orange ribbon spiraling down. When she hit the ground, a wave of flame charred the fields. Henry fell and covered his mouth with his shirt, his clothes hot and smelling of smoke. The fire coalesced back into the shape of a teenage girl. She looked no less beautiful than he remembered. Her skin was covered in alien script, her eyes flickering with electricity, and she floated over the ground completely free from the burden of gravity. She and the alien had become one thing. She looked happier than he’d ever seen her.

Her eyes settled on the boy cringing in the dirt, and she spoke. “I’m leaving soon, Henry.”

He looked up at her with naked want. “You shouldn’t go. Everyone will miss you.”

“There’s nothing left for me here. I beat all the school track records, I beat the alien, and now I’ve beaten my own humanity.”

She reached out her hand, and when Henry touched it, the supple-looking skin was searing hot and had the texture of steel.

“I have to keep pushing myself,” she said. “In a few days, my body will be ready to make the trip through space. We’re going to the alien’s home world to meet his people and conquer them.” She gave a track star’s confident smile. “I’ll have to put in a lot of work in the light years between here and there, but I think I’ll be ready for it.”

Henry tried to remember her hands before the alien had taken her, but he couldn’t. It hurt him to know that he’d lost something so precious. “I’ve been telling everyone that you were my girlfriend. But you never were.”

“No.” Bethany shrugged. “I never was.”

“I wish you had been. I wish there was something I could do.”

“You’re my friend. And when I’m done conquering the galaxy, I’ll come back to visit.”

“I’ll send you messages,” Henry said. “My laser transmission system is getting better. I’ll stay in touch.”

Bethany shook her head. “I’ll be out of your reach. We’re going far and fast. But we can hang out when I come back.”

Henry nodded, knowing that what she said was true. “I’ll send messages anyway. I don’t care if you don’t get them.”

She had already started rising away from him, and before Henry could catch her hand in his, she was gone. Bethany dissolved into a sphere of light and heat, rising back into the sky. As Henry watched her go, he realized that he wasn’t alone. His robot, small and oddly repaired, still bearing some of the music equipment installed by his sister, stood watching with him.

“Somebody fixed you up. Sorry I didn’t get around to it.” He didn’t know what to make of the robot wearing clothes. It had never occurred to him to dress it. “You’re different now. So is Bethany. Everything is different.”

“Yeah,” the robot said, its voice crackling through old speakers and set against a backdrop of symphonic music. “Everything is different these days.”

“Are you coming home with me?” he asked.

“Later tonight,” the robot said. “I want to take a walk in the sun.”

“Well, maybe I can tune you up every once in a while. Maybe we can be friends again.”

Henry walked back alone, thinking of the robot breathing music and looking at the sky, of Bethany careening through the stars. Everything he’d been obsessed with for weeks, his every thought and dream, was done now. Bethany wasn’t his, and she never would be. School would start back tomorrow. There were projects in his workshop that still needed a lot of work. When Henry got home, he entered music, the sound coming from speakers all through the house, and he started picking over old tools and machines. Bethany had already cleared the reach of his satellites, flying out of his thoughts. He threw himself into something new.

Downtown, the robot walked past a local bar where Christmas lights hung from the eaves. Intrigued by their rhythmic flashing, the robot went inside. He wandered into a speed-dating event, and someone pushed him into a seat. They gave him a stick-on name tag which he covered in manufacturer names and serial numbers. The daters were entranced by the robot, its sturdy and well-formed head, the strength in its mechanical arms. Someone asked the robot what it most wanted to be, and it thought of the flashing bulbs outside, Bethany rising in a ball of fire, the electrical signals flashing deep within the dark of its chest. “I want to be moving light,” the robot said. Everyone nodded, happy to find that the robot’s dreams were as unattainable as their own.

Micah Dean Hicks’s work is published or forthcoming in New Letters, Indiana Review, and Cream City Review. His short story collection, Electricity and Other Dreams, will be published by New American Press in summer 2013. He attends the creative writing PhD program in fiction at Florida State University.

During Carnival in Port of Spain, with loud Mama look a boo-boo tin pan, rum in everyone, close friends throw answers back and forth to the question: Where does the name “calypso” come from? They discuss its Caribbean, French, Spanish/Venezuelan, and West African origins. There is no easy answer. It is shaped out of cultural congress, it has come together from across diverse sounds and styles into an artistic interpretation that here resonates profoundly with the human experience of these Trinidadians. In this scene from Oonya Kempadoo’s third novel, All Decent Animals, the friends could just as well be talking about the very story world in which they exist because a similar pattern of coming together underpins this book, a weaving of peoples, cultures, and old and new worlds.

In an interview during her University of Iowa’s International Writing Program’s 2011 fall residency, Kempadoo addressed the question of what is the best thing about being a writer in Grenada: “The scale of the country and the interconnection between social issues, different classes. The ability to interact on many different levels in such a small society, for me is one of the best things. Because you’re able to observe many things that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise in a big society.”

Kempadoo’s character Ata is such an observer. At its core this is the story of Ata’s journey to become a writer. Ata evolves, emerging as both an artist from her work in Carnival costume production and freelance graphic design, and as a writer from life experiences among close-knit friends. But much like a sexual revolution, the roads and signposts of the journey are not always clear to oneself; it is not until late in the book that Ata realizes the artistic transformation that has been underway inside of her.

The story pivots on Trinidad’s Carnival, the lavish colorful festival of excess to celebrate final indulgences before Lent. In Kempadoo’s style of writing, the text is a sensory experience: textures, fabrics, costumes, drum rhythms, colors of all vibrancies, tastes, heat, samba, sweat, sex. Often the text has an electric dialect of Trinidad, along with mesmerizing comparative language pulled from the locale. The “hustle and knivery” of the town. A “water drum beat in her belly.” A close friend dying from AIDS talks to a doctor about his ending, and words like departure and euthanasia “slide around on the floor like wet slugs.”

The first two chapters cover eight years, opening with Ata’s arrival in Port of Spain to work in a costume factory, “in the cussing, roughing, gnarly hell of carnival production,” under a gay man named Francisco. Very soon there is a big time shift of four years, and the story checks in with her progress: a job in an office, a place of her own, and a super close friendship with Francisco. Francisco has been the victim of gay bashing – “a bunch of fellas had stoned him as he walked home”–and, in fear for his life, he leaves for England to live with an aunt. In the wake of his sad departure, Ata goes to a party where she meets Fraser and a French man Pierre. Both of these men are central to Ata’s creative journey for the remainder of the book. Fraser is a “returnee” (has returned to Trinidad), “a big creative lump of an architect, from good Trinidadian middle-class stock, properly educated in England.” Before long Ata has sex with Pierre, and chapter three opens with another big time shift, four years later, Ata and Pierre living in a house up on a hill overlooking Port of Spain and the Gulf of Paria.

From here, the narrator sets in motion a more paced telling of the story.  It feels that we have arrived in the story’s present time. Right away there is a flash forward to a scene in which Fraser is suffering dialysis treatments. Some flashbacks, flash forwards, and shifts in point of view are confusing at times and disrupt the reading experience—perhaps simply because these are not marked as such—but each puts the camera on a subject important to the story, and so Kempadoo has clearly not set out to keep the reader off balance. The point of view shifts occasionally to a taxi driver, which is engaging and meaningful because it opens a window to perspectives from a native Trini, someone just beyond her circle of friends. Ultimately this is a linear story of Ata’s artistic rising. But the narrator at times seems to struggle with form given the ambitious breadth of complex topics.

For Kempadoo, there is much emphasis on place in her characters. Kempadoo, who now lives in Grenada, was brought up in Guyana, and lived in Europe and various islands in the Caribbean. Kempadoo has created a similar background for Ata: Ata defines herself as “a nonbelonger” of either Europe or the Caribbean, while “unretractably entwined” in all of these places. Ata writes of herself: “Growing up hearing about Caricom ideals and global citizenship, Ata felt ‘Caribbean,’ not Dominican, not Guyanese, not Trinidadian—a true no-nation.”

A sexual revolution is underway for Ata, too, like a ribbon in the helix of her artistic journey. The tug of this ribbon occurs at times that seem just right in the story, well-placed signals of change.

In a poignant moment between Ata and Fraser, who is too ill to rise from bed, Ata asks, “When in life do we know the full meaning or reason—as the thing unfolds?” Like the question of calypso’s origin, there is no easy answer. For Kempadoo’s characters, the place to look is where things connect; where there is the weaving of people, the coming together of them, the falling apart, the inevitable loss, the assemblage of so many unique threads of experience.

In this small, short, and entirely arresting book, the reader gets a brief yet curiously sustained peek into the daring and relentless thought processes of the philosopher Michel Foucault.

Here is a book that is titled after speech, yet discusses writing. And discusses is really the right word here, for it’s an interview, a “conversation” (conducted in 1968) between Foucault and Claude Bonnefoy. So the book takes place as a kind of transcript of speech, and throughout the conversation Bonnefoy pursues Foucault’s relationship to writing, and specifically how Foucault arrived at writing in the first place.

This pursuit becomes almost a game that doubles back on itself at every turn, and writing and speech take on the form of a weird chiasmus. Of course this might not sound all that strange in our after-theory moment (cf. Jacques Derrida et al.), but nevertheless there is something so sincere and striking about Foucault’s formulations and reflections, such as this one:

We write so that the life around us, alongside us, outside, far from the sheet of paper, this life that’s not very funny but tiresome and filled with worry, exposed to others, is absorbed in that small rectangle of paper before our eyes. (66)

This inner-subjective probing is simply gripping, and it’s also a pleasure to read.

Bonnefoy is adamant at the outset that he does not want Foucault to simply retread the thematic material or claims of his books (by that point, The History of Madness and The Birth of the Clinic). And while this goal is largely achieved, it is also fascinating to see how matters of madness, medicine, and surgery slip into the conversation and become metaphors for how Foucault takes up writing as a form of expression.

I began by suggesting that this book is really about thinking, which is finally what one sees on display on every page. For this reason, I plan to teach Speech Begins after Death in a future class, as it wonderfully captures and distills the patterns and ruptures of thought that characterize the best of what gets called critical theory, and it takes place right around that pivotal time when theory really started to migrate, settling and unsettling across a range of disciplines and academic departments.

But I hardly want to play up the “theory” aspects of this book; its appeal is so direct and plain as a general meditation on writing, on thinking about one’s own writing, and how such a meditation can be communicated. It’s a book about self-awareness, and the wide vistas and depthless tunnels that open up therein. But it’s also a book about speaking frankly, off the cuff, so that we get gems like, “I get the impression of velvet when I write” (38). This book belongs on the shelves of any reader with interests in Foucault, theory, or writing. It’s also a book that won’t stay on the shelves, because it is actually a delight to read, and read again.

  INTERVIEWER

I am enjoying your collection of poems The Prayers of Others, especially the line: “There is no devil as we’ve come to think.” What is the devil then, do you think?

KEPLINGER

When I wrote that line I was thinking about the one devil, the one image which was the embodiment of evil, chewing on Judas in the basement of hell, who comes to rain terror over the lives of the good and who comes to bear out punishment on the lives of the not so good. I was thinking of the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other. In contrast to that is the image of Dionysus, one of chaos, drunkenness, comedy, change. The Greeks embraced unpredictability; they equally embraced the illusion of a separate self who served in the world, embodied in the image of Apollo. They saw no need to put these forces at odds, necessarily. Keats sees equal beauty in autumn’s decay (“thou hast thy music, too”) as in the songs of spring. Yet I grew up Catholic; I have a little vestige of the Old World in my thinking, too. Long story short, I don’t know what the devil is, and I don’t want to know.

 INTERVIEWER

“It is not a given,” the poem goes on, “that the heart is lonely and so must live forever.” What is a given?

KEPLINGER

Nothing is given. Nothing is certain; even Newton’s physics break down at the subatomic level. Nothing is promised from my human perspective. From my animal perspective, I think everything is given – everything is still here, right now, good for the taking, given, a gift.

INTERVIEWER

In “There is the Woman,” you write that she “was a beauty once, but now has lost her beauty.” Time’s ravage is often marked for women by the loss of beauty. Is there an equivalent time-marking mourning by men?

KEPLINGER

I prefer not to gender loss, so as to say, men experience aging in this way; women in this way. I’m 44, and I feel a general mournfulness at the loss of power in my body, how my body is slowing gradually towards a stop. I’m not kidding, though, when I say that the closer I get to silence the more I hear the source of something huge of which I’m a part. We have bodies; our bodies are supposed to keep our brain functioning and keep our personalities alive. The function of the body is to keep foreign bodies out. There’s so much violence going on in my body right now, in order to keep my personality alive. And, somehow, I suspect, there’s violence going on in the realm of the mind, trying to focus, narrow the personality, identify me as a poet, a teacher, a man, a human, etc. To keep it safe. Our bodies are like acrobats on the high wire doing this amazing thing while simultaneously digesting food and pumping the heart and producing new cells. The body is so engaged in the work I might even believe that that’s all I am. The closer I get to the loss of that beauty, the closer I get to real beauty, which is the source of all that energy and intelligence, whatever that is. But I believe it’s what Whitman was describing in “Song of Myself.” In that poem he invites everything in, so there’s no distinction any more between his little self and his bigness, the whole world. He wrote that on the cusp of middle age.

INTERVIEWER

Is there a particular poem in which you invite “everything in,” like Whitman, or at least more so than in others? If so, can you describe that process?

KEPLINGER

In terms of inviting the outside world in, or, rather, in terms of there being no distinction between the interior landscape and the outside, I’d say I’m trying to capture some of that in my new collection The Most Natural Thing. It applies what I know about Tantrism, which speaks of the whole universe as a body, of which the individual is only a part. The image of the body, its apparently separate parts working in and out of accord with each other but contained within the whole, becomes metaphor for the entirety of existence. In Tantrism (and, thematically, the poems, I’d hope) we undergo an erotic union with everything else, all the time. I found that the more I wrote about the parts of my own body (in the book it’s a man’s body, mine, that’s being mapped), the more I encountered a myth world; I couldn’t merely focus on the anatomy of the object, though I often began there. I could start by writing about my big toe and end with the image of a carnival mask. Or I could write about the pancreas and come upon the image of a curative leech, curled in a preserves jar. I was continuously reminded of the work my body is doing, right now, without my being aware, and yet all of this communication is supposedly originating from a consciousness in me that was not limited to (and is probably separate from) the personality. While my liver and my kidneys seem to hear from this consciousness all the time, I am privy to its wisdom mostly in dreams. I’ve always been drawn to poets of the symbolist order like Max Jacob or Rimbaud or in the shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell. While surrealism seems to want to connect the chaos of dreams with some kind of hidden agenda which gets linked to the personality, the symbolist stuff isn’t interested in meanings at all. They’re just generally wowed by what is, by the correspondences that begin to inspire in the observer a weird, mythic awareness about reality, how strange and impossible and profoundly bigger than imaginable (literally) the is is.

INTERVIEWER

Mary Rose O’Reilley says, “To grow in compassion for one’s own life is the great task of the middle years.” What would you consider the task of the middle years to be, and how does it enter into your current project?

KEPLINGER

I consider the task of the middle years to be the same task as at any other time: to learn to serve others while serving, somehow, yourself, your own calling. That can be complicated for a poet whose work runs the risk of self-centeredness. The task of the middle years is still compassion, but it’s got to begin to turn outward so that the self we begin to see is something larger than our poems, our reputation, our job, or our relationships. It’s absolutely necessary. A great poet, and a brother to me, the late Jake Adam York, taught me that to fully engage with the work I can’t spend all of my time contemplating Being. As Milosz puts it, sometimes you’re cornered by History. The work must grow to fit this larger sense of self. Or the fire will go out.

INTERVIEWER

What definition would you hazard for the prose poem?

KEPLINGER

It starts in the middle and ends in the middle. It’s simultaneously vertical and horizontal, narrative and lyrical. You could also say that a prose poem takes itself less seriously; it knows how inconspicuous it seems—no lines, no insinuation of form. So it’s got to be smarter, wittier, cleverer. The nutty professor in chucks and jeans. Forget the form; I’m not anything; I’m not a poem, the prose poem says. And then it gets under your skin.

INTERVIEWER

The image of yours I consider most affecting is that of hunting mushrooms under a yellow sky in “Enormous Yellow Sky,” from your most recent collection, The Most Natural Thing. In it, the speaker springs not like Athena from the forehead of Zeus but from his own toenail. Are poets a self-propagating species, as capable of reseeding themselves as the Egyptian walking onion?

KEPLINGER

That’s a lovely reading of the image which I’d never considered. The image comes from an old Czech saying told to children. One of my students in Ostrava once shared this with me. When children ask where they lived before birth, their parents answer, “hunting for mushrooms.” Decent poets, even great poets, need everyone else, like children need their parents to be born. The story is nice, too, though.

INTERVIEWER

Whose life or what life would you live if you could/had to choose another’s?

KEPLINGER

As I mull over this question, I realize there’s no one. If I chose someone above my station, I’m afraid I’d not be evolved enough to appreciate what I’ve got. I’d end up being myself all over again.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a fallback joke you tell in certain situations?

KEPLINGER

I am a terrible joke teller and most of the times when I try to be funny, I’ll make people sad. And vice versa.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever use humor as a tool or mechanism?

KEPLINGER

The well-delivered punch line is a noble teacher for poets. I have a friend who does stand up and has been very successful. When I watch him I see this magical thing take place: the joke brings us to this precipice, this strange, surprising place, but at the same time we find ourselves in the most intimate, familiar of realms. We laugh because what seems so strange is simultaneously so familiar. Once more, that’s the function of the Dionysian power. To write something hilarious is to bring the reader to the edge of oblivion, but not quite over. We come back from oblivion whole again. We live a resurrection story. Comedy teaches that no matter how you try to fuck things up, the world has a way of aligning itself, and gets well, ends well.

INTERVIEWER

I love that idea that “We live a resurrection story.” It’s especially interesting to me considering what might have implied a crucifixion or phoenix-rising in earlier centuries is as likely in the 21^st to conjure zombies.  How will your next project reflect your ongoing transformation?

KEPLINGER

My next project, which is a book of poetry in lines, is still figuring out what it wants to say. I’ve also produced an album and begun a lecture tour in which I sing the poetry of my great-great grandfather, a collaboration with the dead, if you will. He was a soldier falsely accused of desertion and taken to Forest Hall Military Prison and then Stone General Hospital over an eight month period in 1863-1864. I can’t help imagining he was nursed by Whitman, who visited the hospital at that time.  With the album I am finishing a book of poems that explores those crucial months. This, too, is a kind of resurrection. He would have been forgotten; but over a period of years I have put together a day-to-day account of some of the most horrific and some of the most beautiful moments of his life. Whether we remember him or not, I’ve come to learn, he existed. So much exists right before our eyes and yet we fail to notice it, my poetry continues to teach me. My work has been my way of trying to open my eyes.

Interview conducted by Amy Wright, Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press and Zone 3 journal, as well as the author of three chapbooks—Farm, There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man, and The Garden Will Give You A Fat Lip.

William Fargason received a BA in English from Auburn University, where he served as poetry editor of the literary magazine The Circle. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eclectica Magazine, Sakura Review, and HOW Journal. He lives with himself in Hyattsville, Maryland, where he is currently a poetry MFA candidate at the University of Maryland.

1.

Belief in story is a belief
in travel or trouble—
a newborn becoming
unmoved by his conscience,
a vocabulary collecting

2.

reason by slow degrees.
Suppose it’s not fear
but how we spend our lives
which should be a matter
for contrast. Say Christopher

3.

Columbus went out constantly
at five o’clock and seized geraniums
from the windows. Say Mallarmé

resolved solitude
with a superficial room
in which birds filled empty moments

with sneezes. First
there would be strange joy
and then the calculations
of shortcomings,
which we call a history.

4.

The mind is interested with permission.

The brain is a room
in which the mind is
an unstable, human notion:

“an oval table opposite the sofa,”

a little yellow color on the walls.

5.

So story thinks, and story

sleeps, and the author who designs our brains
by their more general natures
does not align strangeness with joy.

Analysis develops

vocabulary,
victorious with fancy
light, and thus dream—

6.

a sort of superficial sleep.

7.

So a dream—

from beginning
to end, Columbus
remains asleep

as a spider appears
to lift him
across Paris… 

8.

We plot our outlines.

A painter proposing
he decline to display

seasons; ghosts

on the back of
a woman’s eye;

your head glued

back like a charm
to the beautiful.

9.

When Christopher
Columbus asked the Lord
for three wishes
he began simply
tracing in pencil the axis
of his body. The Lord said,

I wished my death
a parenthesis
to the shapes
of trees and automobiles,
though I have instead
left two realities:

either the world goes back into a sack
or the day flows like a song in the brook.

10.

The Lord said,
you must believe in a room
of marvelous couches.

The bodies of birds
are ghosts,
the Lord
said, marvelous
above water—

and so the purest
way the mind
leaves
the earth.

11.

Saying,

“Existence is
a Suitor’s Ball”

is fine if
you say it

across some
distance,

like a radio—

12.

so the woods
Columbus dreamt
became lost
like several lives
imagined
at once; or,

a tiny number
of birds judge
an evening
in its decay—

no matter what happens,
the result is nothing
and is thus
distinguished
from storytellers
or dreams.

13.

Storytellers or dreams—

which is a matter of gathering?

14.

Christopher Columbus said to the Lord,

Even dark,
the world remains
possible.

Light may begin
at the first touch
of summer,

or else widespread
and daily
across the sea,

and then suddenly
and closely
we see “the world is not

merely a question of distance.”

15.

Or,
the Lord said,

a nude body
parading

beneath the shade
of trees like

an eclipse—
“how travelers endure.”

David Welch has published poems in AGNI, Ninth Letter, and West Branch. He lives in Chicago, where he is Poetry Editor of ACM and teaches at DePaul University.

Athanasius Kircher, a seventeenth-century German Jesuit and self-styled “master of a hundred arts,” is credited with inventing the megaphone, a pre-cursor to the computer, and (perhaps) a cat piano. His intense curiosity about the world around him motivated him to pursue studies in fields as disparate as magnetism and magic, optics and acoustics, Egyptology and volcanology. He and his work have been widely researched by scholars, but until recently have never been the subject of a general-interest book.

This winter saw the publication of A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change, an accessible and entertaining biography of Kircher by former New York Times Magazine contributing editor John Glassie. Glassie will present his book at 7 p.m. on Monday, April 22, in the Audubon Room of the Danna Center on the main campus of Loyola University New Orleans (6363 Saint Charles Avenue). The lecture will be preceded by an exhibition of the 1667 print edition of Kircher’s China illustrata in Special Collections on the third floor of Loyola’s Monroe Library from 5:30 until 6:30 p.m.

Room 220: How did you first come to be interested in Kircher, and what made you want to write about him?

John Glassie: I really became fascinated with him after being asked to write an essay to go with a series of images selected from Kircher’s books. This was in 2005, for a visual-culture annual called the Ganzfeld that’s unfortunately no longer being published. Kircher wrote more than thirty books on almost as many topics: magnetism, music, medicine, optics, acoustics, cosmology, Egyptology, geology, and a lot more. Many of them are a thousand pages long and they’re filled with beautiful engravings as illustrations. I took some academic material about him home with me and I was just blown away by it all. There was no general-interest book that told his story, and I just felt like it had to be done.

Rm220: Kircher lived at a time when many familiar ways of thinking were being edged out by new ideas. As you put it in the book, he was born into a world where most people believed the earth was at the center of the universe, but by the time he died, the earth had been displaced by the sun. We’re also living in age of profound scientific and cultural change. Are there lessons that we can learn from Kircher’s life and his response to change?

JG: I think that many of the things we’re absolutely sure of will turn out to be wrong. I think we can count on looking silly to future generations of humans because every era does. Kircher ended up looking foolish in part because he held onto some conventionally held notions of the day—astral influence, for example, or the idea that small living things such as insects, frogs, and snakes are born spontaneously from decaying matter. He also believed in the hollowness of mountains and something called “universal sperm.” At any rate, I think it’s important to maintain both an open mind and some healthy skepticism, and to try not to fall in love with our own ideas.

Rm220: If you had been alive in the 1600s and had met Kircher, do you think you would have like him?

JG: I think so. He was lively, really brilliant, and very charismatic. It was his charisma, along with his willingness to fudge the truth a bit, that landed him in Rome, where he rubbed elbows with popes such as Urban VIII and Alexander VII and great artists like Bernini. As I describe in the book, he told great stories from his youth about surviving stampeding horses, a mill-wheel accident, a bad case of gangrene, and the armies of an insane Bishop before winding up there. And he delighted people who came to visit his museum in the Collegio Romano, the Jesuit college there, with the things he had on display: magic lanterns, speaking statues, the tailbones of a mermaid.

Rm220: Some people—Descartes among them—apparently found him a bit off-putting.

JG: Descartes wrote that Kircher was “quite boastful” and “more of a charlatan than scholar,” but he never met him—that was his reaction after thumbing through Kircher’s great big book on magnetism, first published in 1641. The interesting thing is that Descartes wasn’t actually quite as dismissive as those quotes make him seem. He was very intrigued, if also skeptical, about Kircher’s claims that he could drive a clock with a sunflower seed. The idea was that the seed would turn to follow the sun the way the sunflower itself does—that it was drawn by the magnetic attraction of the sun to do so. Descartes didn’t find the idea to be so ridiculous that he didn’t try it himself. (It didn’t work.)

Rm220: Kircher is often remembered, when he is remembered at all, for his supposed invention of the infamous cat piano.

JG: Right. Actually there’s a cat-piano i-Phone app now—so you can give a concert on one and no animals will have been harmed. Actually, it’s not clear he thought it up, or that he ever made one, but it has always been attributed to him.

Rm220: So, for what should we remember Kircher?

JG: I’ll pick three things off the top of my head out of a couple dozen: coining the term electromagnetism, inadvertently investing Tarot cards with the occult significance we now associate with them, and confounding or stimulating a lot of great minds of his time.

Rm220: You’re a bit of a Renaissance man yourself. Your previous book was a collection of photographs of mangled bicycles chained to poles. Do you fancy yourself a modern-day Athanasius Kircher?

JG: I’m really more like a dilettante than a Renaissance man, certainly as compared with Kircher and other polymaths of his era. Those guys blow everybody out of the water. Kircher knew perhaps a dozen languages, experimented with an algorithmic approach to music composition, pursued his interest in geological matters by climbing down into the smoking crater of Mount Vesuvius!

Rm220: What’s next for you after neglected bikes and quirky Jesuits?

JG: My standard answer is “something easier.” This was a pretty hard project. It might have to do with an 18th-century raft trip or a beatnik Hollywood photographer.

Interview conducted by Dr. John Sebastian, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Medieval Studies Program at Loyola University New Orleans.