8 February 2010
D. C. Pierson: Touring a Book & a Movie? No Problem!
Categories: interviews |
When I met D.C. Pierson back in December, he was in the middle of visiting New York to promote a short run of his debut motion picture, Mystery Team, at an indie theater; he and other members of the Derrick Comedy troupe were sitting in on screenings and fielding questions from the audience. (They’re going wherever they can get enough people to go online and say they’d come to see it if it were in their town; it just opened in Chicago last week and will be in Minneapolis next month.) We’d gotten together to talk about his debut novel, The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To, but, he admitted cheerfully, he was currently “putting the book tour on top of the movie tour.”
Pierson told me how he came up with the idea for the novel back when he was still living here. “I got on the N train and my friend Eliza was on there,” he recalled; she was the one who suggested he write the book, then agreed to be his “novel sponsor” when he told her he thought he could do it if he had somebody giving him motivational pushes along the way. He kept booking small acting jobs to support himself while working on the manuscript—you might recognize him as the “No problem!” waiter from a Golden Corral spot—and then put the finishing touches on it after shooting Mystery Team in the spring of 2008. The book landed with Gerry Howard at Doubleday, and Pierson said it was his editor’s idea to add the illustrations (meant to reflect the teenage protagonist’s creative ambitions) after reading it. “I didn’t do any art for it as I was writing it,” he said; though he “doodled” as a kid, “I don’t really do it as its own thing.” (Still, his skills are good enough, he conceded, that he was the one who storyboarded Mystery Team before filming began.)
Back before all this, though, he once spent two days temping for Barnes & Noble’s accounting department—now he’s become one of their featured “Discovery” authors. Not a bad progression.
7 February 2010
Nick Lantz, “Lacuna, Triptych of the Battle”
Categories: poetry |
First Panel
A confusion of soldiers—the guide counts
for us ten helmeted heads but twenty-five
boots—cramped below the castle wall.
Are they mustering for a surge or balking
just beyond the archers’ reach?Second Panel
Ripped away, only a skirt of paint hemming
top and bottom, forty-seven boots kissing,
toe-to-toe. At the top, a ribbon of sky, a broken
spearhead hangs loose in the air, like an iron
falcon folded to drop. So rare, says the guide,
for motion to be conveyed this way.Third Panel
An army victorious, but high on the flagpole
its standard has been pried away for its gold
enamel, so who can say which army
it is, invader or defender? The guide smiles,
points to the missing triangle. This theft
too, he says, is hundreds of years
old. This theft too is part of history.
Nick Lantz’s debut collection of poems, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize; the University of Wisconsin Press will be publishing a second collection, The Lightning That Strikes the Nieghbors’ House, in April. You may recognize the title of this first book as the tail end of a famous statement by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about known knowns and unknown unknowns; the collection also includes poems like “Of the Parrat and other birds that can speake.”
Lantz has also won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. And he’s on Twitter, posting a new original poem every day—as he explains, “140 characters… makes for a nice formal restriction.”
3 February 2010
Peter Wortsman & the Box-Sentences of Heinrich von Kleist
Categories: in translation |
I’m looking forward to Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, one of the most recent titles from Archipelago Books, an independent press dedicated to international translation—and my eagerness is stoked even higher by this description by Kleist’s translator, Peter Wortsman, of the effort to render Kleist’s intricate prose style into just the right English.
Unlike the stalwart scribes that comprise the dominant strain of German letters, giants like Goethe, Mann and Brecht, one-man classics factories who spew wisdom in every breath and make library shelves buckle under the sheer weight of their words, Heinrich von Kleist belongs to a parallel literary strain, a trembling class of German writers whose ranks include playwrights Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz and Georg Büchner, enigmatic prose masters Franz Kafka and Robert Walser, and poet Paul Celan, to name a few. Their work—call it imperiled poetry, naked drama, or in Kleist’s case, self-destructing stories—puts its finger on the raw nerves of the real, sabotaging any pretense of certainty. Far from satisfying the reader’s need for assurance, Kleist’s stories still read today, 200 years after his death by suicide at the age of 34, like kamikaze attacks on the status quo.
Attempting to translate his prose is a rarefied, risky business akin to playing Russian roulette with a gold bullet, strolling over a half-frozen lake, or savoring blowfish sushi from which one is not altogether certain the chef has removed the deadly venom. The thrill of that lingering doubt naturally adds to the tingle, making every word all the more vital. Kleist played for keeps in everything he did, and every tempered sentence trembles with that sense of imminence transmuted from life into literature.
Having tackled other daunting stylistic challenges, including an English rendering of Robert Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, now in its third edition (Eridanos, 1988; Penguin 20th-century Classics, 1993; Archipelago Books, 2006)—which, I am proud to note, was cited in the journal Modern Austrian Literature as “a kind of classic in itself”—I took on Kleist with mixed delight and trepidation. In the Musil translation, done more than 20 years ago, I had deemed it expedient to selectively subdivide his interminably long Teutonic sentences to appease an American predilection for syntactical simplicity. The result made Musil accessible to the contemporary English reader, while not, I hope, mutilating the essence. (Although a disgruntled Musil did appear to me in a dream, protesting what he called “schlamperte Arbeit,” a sloppy job.)
I have since come to the conviction that a sentence is a writer’s most intimate signature of self, that its structure follows the fault lines of the psyche that shaped it and should not, except in rare cases in which not to do so would obfuscate meaning, be tampered with in translation. This is particularly true of the Kleistian so-called “Schachtelsatz,” (box-sentence), a painstakingly constructed, airtight narrative nugget with a grain of truth at the core, around which he built his stories, layer upon layer, the way an oyster salivates pearls around a grain of sand. Disinclined to undue haste, the 19th German mindset took its sweet time in the telling, often getting tangled in subordinate clauses and occasionally losing its thread along the way, but Kleist always pulls it off with the surefootedness of a sleepwalker on an internalized tightrope.
Or to bend the metaphor, with his finger on the thread of Ariadne, Kleist took frequent strolls in a psychic labyrinth of his own confection, unafraid to meet, indeed courting the Minotaur within. He can no more be blamed for the convolutions of his narrative thread than can the Grimms’ Märchen hero Hans be blamed for strewing bread crumbs when he ran out of white pebbles. That was the only way out.
2 February 2010
Melanie Benjamin Gets Curiouser and Curiouser About Alice
Categories: guest authors |
Confession time: I’m actually promoting a longtime friend’s novel today; I first met Melanie Benjamin (or, as I know her, Melanie Hauser) at a book fair several years ago, thanks to another writer of our mutual acquaintance, and we’ve crossed paths on the festival circuit several times since then. So when I heard that she’d taken a detour from her usual contemporary fiction into the historical/biographical world ofAlice I Have Been, I couldn’t wait to get a look. But I was interested in what prompted this shift in subject matter, and I thought you might be, too. So here we are…
As I prepared for the publication of Alice I Have Been, I found myself knee deep in guest blog posts, Q&A’s, interviews, etc., for both print and online book sites. It’s a rite of passage these days, and while it can be time consuming, there’s also a very appealing aspect to it all; it requires an author to pause a bit and reflect upon the whys and reasons and the very definition of the creative process.
One of the questions I find I’m asked repeatedly has to do with my muse. Do I have one, what does it look like, what advice can I give other authors about following it? This is the kind of question that can make me feel very inadequate, because I’ve never thought in terms of a muse. I think of myself as a hard working author who just tries to get it done, and if one thing isn’t working out—as has happened to me in the past—then I switch gears and try something else until it does. Where’s the muse in this? I admit I’ve never seen it; I just see a lot of hard work and perseverance.
Yet I suppose there is one thing I do follow, but it’s not exactly my muse. (Honestly, I don’t believe I’d recognize a muse if it perched itself on my laptop and screamed, FOLLOW ME!)
Thanks to all these interviews and Q&A’s, I’ve come to realize that what I follow, what leads me to places I’ve never gone before, is my curiosity.
