Guests
by Bryan Charles, December 10, 2010 10:27 AM
On my last night in Michigan, I checked my e-mail. There was a message from my boss at the marketing agency saying she hoped I had a good trip to the Midwest, and they were all set for my return on Monday. I was relieved for a moment, then overcome with dread — the same reaction I've had to gainful employment since the moment at age 13 when I was hired to mow a neighbor's lawn. It was a big lawn, a two-day job with a push-mower. At the end of the day the woman gave me some water and asked what time I'd be returning tomorrow. I said I couldn't come back right away, I had my own lawn to mow and, you know, other things to do, and that was that, she never called back. Two years later I got my first dishwashing job, at the Gull Lake Country Club. A few weeks into it, I went to my boss and told him I quit. When? he said. Right now, I said. All right, he said, nodding toward the door. Ninety seconds later I had a change of heart. I said I wanted to stay. My boss kept me on, then fired me a short time later for instigating a water fight. Since then I've quit a number of jobs — leaf-raking jobs, dishwashing jobs, toilet-scrubbing jobs, factory jobs, office jobs. Early on, I would quit at whim, either walking out or never going back, giving no thought to where my next paycheck would come from. In later years — the post-9/11 years — I would take a longer view, saving money for a while before quitting and living off it until it was gone, more than gone (at which point, as I mentioned, I would hit up my parents). Work was something I did only to buy time to write — my real life's work. But those ups and downs have taken a toll, and I'm 36 years old now and in a long-term relationship, and I can't see myself living like that anymore. If you add up what I've been paid for all my books, it comes to less than what I made in a year at my first financial writing job back in 1999 (which I quickly realized, in the context of the industry, paid peanuts). I'm not complaining — I didn't get into this for the money — but as a practical, wage-earning matter where does that leave me? What are the options? Teaching? Book reviews? Pitching trend pieces to men's magazines? Handing out flyers for Ranch 1 outside the subway on Fifty-third Street? I honestly have no idea how I'm going to make a living in the future, which means next month. In his essay "The Crack-Up," Fitzgerald writes of shedding the various distractions and self-delusions that had him stretched so mind-shatteringly thin, becoming, at last, a "writer only." My problem — the thing that has me perpetually half-cracked — is that that's what I've wanted all along. Not only that, I wanted to be great, as great as my heroes, one of the best. I still want that. I don't know any writer who would tell you otherwise ("Yeah, my new book seems pretty okay, and that'll do for now"). But it's like Bukowski said (I'm paraphrasing here): You're never really a writer, you have to keep proving it every time you sit at the desk. In the meantime I'll do whatever dumb thing it takes to keep going (last week one of my tasks was to cut and paste text from a series of PDFs into a sprawling Word document), with the hope that one day it'll get better — maybe I'll win a big-money prize, or my books will start to sell in Stieg Larsson-like numbers, or they'll make a movie of one of them and it'll become a classic, guaranteeing steady sales into the future — or, more realistically, I'll figure out a way to make a living that doesn't make me feel subhuman ("Keep the customer on the line." "Have a good answer to every objection." "Close the sale."), or necessitate giving up days at a time to the most wretched boredom, falling down Internet rabbit holes that fill my head with useless "content." My attitude about this was shaped by 9/11. Without that experience, the stakes (most likely) wouldn't seem quite as high. But after that offices looked different to me. They became sinister in their banality — seemingly innocuous places that could at any dull moment be visited by utter horror possibly resulting in death. After that the act of writing itself — doing it or not doing it — became life or death. Would I have continued in this vein if my novel — the writing of which inaugurated this phase of my life — had never been published? I believe I would have. And it's likely I would have found myself exactly where I am now (12/9/10, 2:37 p.m.): sitting in a cubicle, scheming, planning, taking notes, thinking, always, of what I want to write next and how to get it
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Guests
by Bryan Charles, December 9, 2010 2:11 PM
My assignment at the marketing agency was a three-week test phase, after which they would let me know if they wanted me back. When the three weeks were over I flew to Michigan for a reading at the Kalamazoo Public Library. I was happy to be back in the Midwest and feeling like a writer again. The reading was a blast — turnout was great, and there was a great Q&A. My friend Fran Dwight was on hand to take photos. She had also arranged an after-party of sorts at the Old Dog Tavern. Dave Grant came to both. Dave and I are friends now, but I met him initially as his fan. In the '90s, Dave played guitar and sang in a band called Rollinghead. I saw them for the first time on 3/28/92, when they opened for the Pixies at the State Theater. I was an avid Pixies fan, primed to ignore their opening act. But I watched Rollinghead with growing interest. This one song stuck out. I couldn't decipher any words beyond the brutal chorus: "I still blame you." A couple months later I was at a party, and a guy I knew sang a bit of one of their songs. "Saw my friend last night with a killer, a perfect screaming machine, he said her eyes could save him, her faith could raise him, if he could only get her to believe." I went out and bought their CD Daddyhorse. It hit me as hard as other great records of the era, the ones that meant the most to me: Doolittle, Nevermind, anything R.E.M. did in the '80s. Within days Rollinghead was my favorite band. Daddyhorse remains one of my favorite albums of all time. Kalamazoo's early-'90s music scene was a special thing. There was an astonishing number of bands playing in a range of genres: post-punk, neo-hardcore, neo-emo (more Rites of Spring than the Promise Ring), scum rock, math rock, college rock, indie pop, shoegazer, avant-garde improv, art metal, metal metal. With the possible exception of college rock (in the mid- to late-'80s sense of the term), Rollinghead didn't belong to any of these scenes. They had more of a classic feel. Their music was singer-songwriter in origin: Dave Grant writing on an acoustic guitar. On record and live, it derived its tension from the interplay of three guitars layered over counterpoint bass lines and strong, simple drumming. A fair comparison is Sweet Oblivion-era Screaming Trees, partly because of Dave's voice, which calls to mind Mark Lanegan's. But Dave's voice is more agile, and he has greater melodic gifts. Lyrically, he's essentially in a league of his own. I've loved a number of bands with inferior lyricists. Scott Weiland wrote bad lyrics, though I maintain that Stone Temple Pilots are the most underrated mainstream rock band of the last 20 years. Still, for me to really love a band, they have to have sharp lyrics. And when I heard the lyrics on Daddyhorse, I knew they were going to stay with me. It can be a gamble separating lyrics from their context. Nevertheless, here are a few favorite lines, picked almost at random: "I don't mean to correct you/I don't need to be right/but that isn't a star, it's a satellite/and I'm waiting to be wrong about this too," from "60 Seasons"; "What's the matter, man?/It's a terrifying sideshow/Caught between the dust and the what are you here for?" from "Favorite Killer"; "I'm a sweet, sucking teenage memory," from "Na Na." I was 17 when I got into Rollinghead. I went to every show that I could. Twenty-one-and-over shows required a certain amount of scheming. When they played at Harvey's, a classic, old-school Kalamazoo venue, my friend Paul (also underage) and I would arrive hours early and nurse a plate of nachos. Eventually a bouncer would pull up a stool to check IDs, not thinking to check ours since we were already sitting there. Paul and I would then drink pitchers of beer until we were half-blind, staggering. Harvey's would be packed and sweaty, and the crowd would sing along with every song, as if we were all in some alternate universe, watching the biggest band in the world play a surprise gig at a bar. Eventually, just from my being around constantly, I made friends with the band, which in addition to Dave consisted of Dean Van Dyke and Bill Fergusson on guitar, Dave Van Dyke on bass, and Willi Axe on drums. Sometimes they let me tag along with them to out-of-town shows. I was excited to go on those trips, but also hugely self-conscious, afraid to say something dumb. The fact that a band that great not only lived in my town but also let me hang out with them never stopped blowing my mind. Rollinghead released two other records, Long Black Feeling and Volume 3 Live, before breaking up in 1994. Since then they've played a handful of reunion shows, only one of which I made it to, back in 2001. After the KPL reading, Bill Fergusson joined Dave and me at the Old Dog. We got each other up to speed on what's going on in our lives now. Part of me was still awestruck. Time collapsed. The Bell's Two-Hearted Ale I was drinking had a Proustian effect. I looked over at my friend, this guy that I've known for half my life, who also happens to have written a handful of my favorite songs, and I thought, Jesus, I can't believe I'm hanging out with Dave Grant. ÷ ÷ ÷ To listen to Rollinghead, click here. Daddyhorse actually begins with Track 3, and the songs are as follows: "Terrifying," Strangle You," "Pain Under My Skin," "60 Seasons," "Favorite Killer," "Take My Place," "Skinny Vein," "No Time," "Movies," "Krik
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Guests
by Bryan Charles, December 8, 2010 10:17 AM
Three weeks before There's a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From was published, I started a temp job at an "experiential marketing" agency in Midtown. I was hired as a copy editor, though actually there wasn't much copy involved. Instead, my job was to proofread the pages of a large binder used by a wireless-communications carrier at its call centers nationwide. The binder contained information on products and offer bundles and methods of selling and was updated several times a year. I was told in the interview that the pace would be hectic — how did that sound? Could I do a high volume of work on tight deadlines, maybe work the odd late night or two? I considered my checking account — under a hundred dollars. Oh yes, I said, I can do that. It was funny, in a way — not ha-ha funny, the other kind. There's a Road chronicles my decision, in the horror-stricken aftermath of 9/11, to quit my day job as a financial writer and focus solely on writing my first novel. Since then (January, 2002) — with two yearlong exceptions — I've lived in a state of constant, crushing financial desperation, heightened at times by massive guilt. I swore when I left my cubicle (or rather, the place they sent me after my cubicle was destroyed) that I would never go back to one, never work in an office again, that I would find a way to make it as a writer somehow. And for a brief, unreal period it seemed feasible. I had just started grad school at Brooklyn College, and rather than pay the relatively cheap tuition along the way, I maxed out my student loans, adding to a pile of undergraduate debt. I currently owe the federal government thirty-seven grand and counting. If that seems manageable to you, consider that I've been paying on a $1,100 credit card bill for two years. In Michiko Kakutani's recent review of Saul Bellow: Letters, she writes that "he 'learned to organize' his daily life for the 'single purpose' of writing." I have no affinity for Bellow's work, but for nine years I emulated this sense of purpose, with occasionally embarrassing or shameful consequences. Several times during the writing of Grab on to Me Tightly as If I Knew the Way, I ran my bank account — never robust — down to nothing, then asked my parents, who could scarcely afford it, for help. These requests were pitched as "loans," but as with my student loans I'm still — still! — in no position to begin paying them back. More recently, my girlfriend supported me while I worked on There's a Road and Wowee Zowee, my book about the band Pavement, published earlier this year. Now and then I would take a day off to look for jobs, a process I viewed as mildly irritating at best and at worst as an indicator that my life was over. That sounds dramatic, sure. But consider the two yearlong periods of solvency mentioned above. Both involved capitulating to full-time office jobs at financial companies. During those years — 2005 and 2007 — I struggled to maintain a writing schedule before giving up entirely and falling into black depressions. I was reminded of my pre-9/11 life, wasting days, weeks, months in a cubicle, waiting for some elusive time in the future when I would really, finally, get down to business and write. The 2007 stint was made worse by the fact that I'd already published a novel. And for an artist with an ego and some level of achievement, there is nothing more dire than immersion in a world where not only are you kept from pursuing your vocation, but — aside from a few names high on the bestseller lists — your vocation may as well not exist at all. Which brings me to my temp job at the marketing agency. As often happens when a blizzard of work is prophesied, I was given little to do. I sat in my cubicle, numb with boredom, waiting for work that rarely arrived and could be dispatched within minutes when it did. All around me people stared at screens, aiding the wireless company in its quest to upsell customers on Internet and TV bundles, generating another $20 to add to its billions. ("Keep customers on the line." "Have a good answer to every objection." "Close the sale.") In idle moments they discussed lunch possibilities, gentrification, Dancing with the Stars. A few days before There's a Road came out I was eating lunch alone in a café area that doubled as a ping-pong room. A woman came in to make some tea. A week earlier she'd brought me a holiday kit to proofread, in which it was suggested that seasonal — indeed, familial — happiness could be achieved through the pausing of live television in one room and the resumption of viewing the same program in another. "I heard through the grapevine that you're a publisher," she said. "A publisher?" "Yeah, didn't you self-publish some books?" "No. I mean I have a few books out, but I didn't publish them. Other people — the publishers published them." "That's cool," she said. "You should bring in a bunch and give them out to the team." "Well. Maybe the team could buy them." "Yeah. You should send an e-mail around to the team." "I don't think I know the team well enough for that." "Well, then just to our group." "I don't think I know our group well enough either." Five minutes later I was at my desk, cutting and pasting links to information about my books into an email addressed to this woman, with whom I'd previously exchanged maybe a dozen words. I knew I was overdoing it. I didn't care. I wanted her to see that I was more than just another temp with a dream. And I was trying in no small measure to convince myself of that,
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Guests
by Bryan Charles, December 7, 2010 9:24 AM
Yesterday I copped to some early stylistic theft. I wish I could say my life of crime was over, but I remain a committed, enthusiastic thief. One writer from whom I've "borrowed" liberally is Barry Hannah. My novel Grab on to Me Tightly as If I Knew the Way was written at the height of my Hannah fixation. On a sentence level, I wanted my book to burn with the wild poetry of even his routine, transitional passages, and I modeled its fractured form on his short novel Ray. In 2002, after finishing his story collection Bats Out of Hell, one the best books of stories ever published (also on the list are his books Airships and Captain Maximus), I wrote him a long, drooling fan letter and sent it to him care of the English Department at the University of Mississippi, where he was teaching. A week and a half later I received a reply. "Lord, pal," it began, "yours is the only letter I've got wherein the writer didn't want something." He told me I should be studying with him at Ole Miss and not in New York. "I feel, with humility, mind, that I could teach you better than the jerking around you're getting. New York is a staggeringly great place, but instruction in the Northeast has been shit... beginning with the Ivy League, which is laughable." He thanked me for my "careful and happy" reading of his work and signed the letter, Uncle Barry. We wrote to each other on and off for the next several years. I told him I was writing a novel on which he'd had a profound influence, and that I was incredibly eager to read his future work. "Your encouragement is hugely merciful — I need it," he wrote. "May your own book prosper and may my humble influence cause it nothing but strength and joy." When I sold the book in May of 2005, he was among the first people I told. He wrote back at once: "You the man!...Congrats. I'm the amateur, as always, trying to finish a book dear to me, clobbering away like a monster assistant — Igor in the lab." In December of that year I dropped him a line from the MacDowell Colony. I must have described the strangeness — after having left another dreary day job — of suddenly being surrounded by writers and painters and of having lunch delivered to my studio in a basket. He responded with a hilarious description of a colony he'd attended — an experience redeemed for him only by a reading by Grace Paley — and again knocked the Northeast for being "more provincial than the sodomists in Deliverance...Don't get coddled to death by room service and kick a wretched New York artist for me. Christ be with thee, lad, in this crawling art we have as page men." Trouble came two months later. I had received the galleys of my novel and was scrounging for blurbs. I had already asked two of my writer friends, and the people at HarperCollins were throwing out other names. They mentioned writers whose books I either hadn't read or didn't care about. I felt strongly that only writers whose work I liked should endorse my book. My editor knew of my correspondence with Barry and floated the notion of asking him for a quote. I had qualms, to say the least. I recalled the first line of his first letter to me, saying I was the only writer he'd heard from who wasn't asking for something. My editor said we should ask. I could have said no. But I was proud of the book, proud to call Barry an influence, and in the end the thought that my favorite writer might like my book enough to blurb it was too much to resist. Still, I sent the galley off to Oxford with an apologetic note and a sense of unease. "You've put me in an awful spot, lad," he replied. "After our letters I can never tell if actual friendship is offered or just another setup. Thousands will warm to your book, I believe. This geezer just can't connect...Now I feel like a rat, elderly and ungracious. Please understand this no-win proposition." I wrote back that very afternoon. I said that my letters were in no way a setup, that I'd only just started my book when I first wrote to him, that I didn't have a publisher then or even an agent, that I'd written to him purely out of love of his work, that I did indeed consider us friends, that I had included him in my book's acknowledgments — calling him Uncle Barry and not by his full name so I wouldn't look like a name dropper — to thank him for his good influence and for writing me back and urging me on. Barry replied promptly, as he always had. "Thanks for writing. I believe you entirely and the air is clear for our continued friendship." He said that in the past month he'd received seven manuscripts or galleys, including two from friends, and he wanted out of "this blurbing business." He said he'd never begged or even asked for a blurb, but "was blessed with publishers and agents who asked for me. I understand you all the way. Also, please, recall the mood I was in when I read your work, which I hope brings the world to you." I may have sent one more letter after that. I know I started and discarded a few, but can't remember if I finished and sent one. If so, he didn't write back. His last letter to me was dated March 2, 2006. Four years later a friend sent me a message: "I just heard about Barry Hannah and thought of you." My friend didn't say what he'd heard, but I knew it couldn't be good news, and it wasn't. Barry died on March 1, 2010. ÷ ÷ ÷ Selections from Barry Hannah's four short-fiction collections can be found in the new Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories — though I wish Grove (or New York Review Books) would reissue Captain Maximus as a stand-alone. It's too good not to be widely
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Guests
by Bryan Charles, December 6, 2010 10:25 AM
I'm writing this on Thursday, 11/18/10. I'm back at the writers' space in Brooklyn where I work, after several weeks away. In that time I've done pleasant and unpleasant things. On the pleasurable end of the spectrum was a series of readings I did to promote my new memoir There's a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From. The book is partly about my moving from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to New York City in 1998 and the strangeness of being a Midwesterner here, struggling to adapt. I had just turned 24 when I left Michigan. I burned with the desire to start publishing my work and become a great writer. I had only the most basic sense of how to achieve these things — write short stories and submit them to literary magazines — but was sure that with hard work and perseverance they would happen as planned. By the time I was 30, I imagined, I would be publishing in the New Yorker, firmly ensconced in the scene. I was confident, even arrogant. At the same time I lacked total faith in my abilities and was insecure about my Midwestern background. This toxic combination of hubris and self-loathing nearly led to my undoing as a writer. Two things saved me, neither of which I could have predicted. The first was a terrorist attack that killed nearly 3,000 people. The second was returning — in the form of a novel I wrote afterward — to Kalamazoo. Three years after moving to the city, my dream of being a writer seemed more remote than ever. I was working as a marketing copywriter at Morgan Stanley. I had a cubicle on the 70th floor of Two World Trade Center, the south tower, where I happened to be sitting on September 11. After making it out of the building, I walked six miles uptown, got a ride to New Jersey, and stayed with friends. A week later I took the bus to Michigan. The night I arrived, delirious with trauma and lack of sleep, I wrote down everything I could remember about the attack, starting from the moment I opened my eyes that day. A few nights later I read the piece at Western Michigan University, my alma mater, at a benefit to raise money for the Red Cross. I read with several of my former teachers in the creative writing program — Arnie Johnston, Bill Olsen, Nancy Eimers, and Jaimy Gordon, who last night won the National Book Award for her novel Lord of Misrule. Southwest Michigan has been well represented at the National Book Awards recently. Last year two people from the area were nominated — David Small, for his graphic memoir Stitches, and Bonnie Jo Campbell for her remarkable story collection American Salvage. I'm happy for Kalamazoo, for WMU, and of course for Jaimy. She's a great teacher. She was tough on me, in a good way. One time I brought a story to class, a Denis Johnson rip-off called "Tell Me What Happened" (the prose style may have been on loan from Johnson, but the title was pure Raymond Carver). As the workshop began, Jaimy addressed the group: "So, does the writing here sound like anyone you can think of? Do you detect an... influence here?" My classmates hesitated. Then one of them said: "It kind of sounds like Denis Johnson." And with that the seal was broken. Jaimy took me to task for stealing so shamelessly and trying to sneak it by her and the class. I felt pretty low, mostly because I knew she was right. Fortunately, I was probably also on Vicodin. Early in the semester I had broken my ankle, a gnarly break requiring three surgeries and many weeks on crutches. I went through a few prescriptions for painkillers and would occasionally take them until my stomach hurt. I remember trying to milk this for sympathy, as a way to excuse being late to class or handing a story in late or something, but Jaimy would have none of it. What happened next was somewhat surprising: Jaimy commended me on the skill with which I had aped Johnson and told me that borrowing was a crucial part of forging one's own style. I had the mimicry part down, she said, it just hadn't cohered into anything recognizably mine. I was pissed afterward, but my anger and embarrassment faded, and her remarks stayed with me. I'm happy that Jaimy won the National Book Award and remain grateful that she called me out all those years
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