Neil Serven

I always thought it was ironic that so many Americans learned about the death of John Lennon from Howard Cosell, one of the most notorious scene-stealers in broadcast history, late on a Monday night during the fourth quarter of a sleepy football game in Miami.

Almost Famous Women, Megan Mayhew Bergman. I bought this book at a local bookshop after enjoying Bergman’s first collection of stories, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, a couple of years ago. The “almost famous women” here are real people noted for their daring and adventuresome spirit whose stories exist (certainly unfairly) on a step below most popular, male-dominated historical narratives. These fictional stories place each of these women in a dynamic new frame.

I hadn’t heard of most of them, such as motorcycle daredevil Hazel Eaton (1895-1970), featured in the story “Hazel Eaton and the Wall of Death,” or British power boat racer Marion ‘Joe’ Carstairs (1900-1993), who bought the island of Whale Cay in the Bahamas after her retirement to host celebrities such as Marlene Dietrich (“The Siege at Whale Cay”). I had heard of African-American film actress ‘Butterfly’ McQueen (1911-1995), who played the maid Prissy in Gone With the Wind but wasn’t allowed in the all-white theater to watch the premiere, but not of her decision, as an atheist, to donate her organs to science, which she did after she burned to death following the explosion of a kerosene lamp (“Saving Butterfly McQueen”).

These real, capsuled lives essentially work as prompts for Bergman, and as with many prompt-written stories they take liberties of projection, extrapolating the minutiae of a life from what biographical information is known:

It’s only when she’s afraid that she second-guesses her decision, and it’s only when she second-guesses her decisions that she thinks of her daughter, Beverly, who lives in Vermont with Hazel’s mother.

Am I a terrible person for giving her up?

“I’m cold,” she says, but her face is bandaged and she can only moan. She tries to rub her arms, but maybe one of them is broken, and then she’s out again, riding a morphine high into nothingness.

Girl in a Band, Kim Gordon. All of my favorite rock bands flourished in the nineties, and now all of them (and I mean pretty much all of them) are having twenty-year reunions. Sonic Youth was an eighties band, and as such they were the band that was already doing the kinds of things your favorite band didn’t have the adventure spirit to do. They had a grown-up, seen-it-all-before vibe going on. They played long songs with wild guitar riffs. They ripped out surf instrumentals. They created moods and ruled scenes.

Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore were the power couple that was doing it right when Kurt and Courtney were doing it tragically. For a while I rented an apartment only a few blocks from Gordon and Moore’s home in Northampton, Mass., and though I never saw them myself, I heard about people spotting Moore walking their dog on the bike trail. People’s kids knew their daughter. I could remember when she was born because I had read about it in Spin magazine.

Gordon and Moore separated in 2011, and while that event is not meant to be the culmination of her memoir of a life of New York and rock ‘n roll, Gordon gets the explanations out of the way early: their marriage ended in about the most banal, un-rock ‘n roll way possible, with Moore seeing another woman—essentially a groupie—and Gordon confronting him after discovering a revealing text message.

She writes with a wise edge, with six decades of life behind her, cooler things to worry about than being cool. She touches just enough upon her family life, in particular her schizophrenic older brother, but the juice oozes out of the apple when she and Moore move to New York City. It was there, in Greenwich Village, that they formed Sonic Youth, and Gordon quite organically surrounded herself with a coterie of urban artists each with their own unique cachet: Cindy Sherman, Larry Gagosian, Jenny Holzer, Gerhard Richter.

The middle of the book has a perfunctory feel as Gordon devotes a chapter to each of Sonic Youth’s albums, giving her recollection of the obsessions and ambitions that went behind the writing. The best parts come when she digresses. There is a gradual understanding, given away by the title, that Gordon’s role as a girl in a band puts her in a rare position of not only embracing but recreating her own ambitions out of the sexuality that her chosen genre is designed and marketed to sell.

I remember staring endlessly at the books lining the walls of my dad’s study as a little girl. I didn’t know what a sociologist did, but the books had titles like Men and Their Work. What did that even mean? Obviously, men—and boys—spent time, most of it, in fact, engaged in an activity known as work. Keller [Gordon’s brother], for example, had his rock collection, Erector set, and assorted other boy-passions. Where whatever I made up or imagined in my own head lacked that builder’s significance or invention, and the train set I presumed would someday magically appear must have died on the tracks on its way to me. Looking back, I was clearly devaluing what women did. …

Guys playing music. I loved music. I wanted to push up close to whatever it was men felt when they were together onstage–to try to link to that invisible thing. It wasn’t sexual. But it wasn’t unsexual either. Distance mattered in male friendships. One on one, men often had little to say to one another. They found some closeness by focusing on a third thing that wasn’t them: music, video games, golf, women. Male friendships were triangular in shape, and that allowed two men some version of intimacy. In retrospect, that’s why I joined a band, so I could be inside that male dynamic, not staring in through a closed window but looking out.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer. This is the first book by Dyer that I’ve ever read, though I’ve read enough of his essays to know he’s a bit of a wag. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is divided into two parts that refer to each other only glancingly; in fact, it’s not fully established that the main character in each half is the same person, though there’s enough to reason to believe so. The separate narratives seem to have little to say to each other; they sit on polar ends, drunk and sober, giddy and somber, blithe and reverent.

In part one, we meet Jeff, a veteran British journalist traveling to Venice to report on the Biennale. Dyer’s playful self-effacement starts off with a pun: when Jeff colors his hair, it doesn’t seem worth carrying on about, until you notice that it’s a wordplay invoking the author’s name: Geoff Dyer has created Jeff, who is a dyer. What kind of meta-moral math puzzle have we gotten ourselves into here?

In part two, we are treated to a first-person narration of an unnamed journalist who has traveled on assignment to the Indian city of Varanasi, on the Ganges, where Hindu pilgrims have amassed—not for a festival, but as a holy destination. Dyer’s first-person narrator offers some wry amusements, but sets back without the dance to score the superficial rush that fills Jeff’s time in Venice.

From what I know of his nonfiction, my impression is that these bipolar narratives span the range of Dyer’s comfort as a writer: He likes to go places, be both amused and confounded by them and then be amused at his own confoundedness.

British journalist Jeff meets an American journalist, Laura, and lands in an easy, almost too casual, affair with her, one with minimal complications other than the obvious adult awareness that it will have to end. Along the way, there are grand allusions, or at least one would have to assume having not read it, to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. And the debauchery of the first story is blackened and diminished in shame by the sanctity of the second.

So: two waterfront cities, with English names starting with the same letter, in countries whose English names start with the same letter. The invitation to draw comparisons does not end there. Jeff downs bellinis in Venice while the hero of the second story drinks bhang lassis. There are allusions to each city in the other’s story, plopped in unlikely moments, suggesting a telegraphing of code:

What was wrong with him? Minutes after contemplating moving to L.A. he was ready, now, to go backpacking through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Lacking any larger ambition or purpose meant that you clutched at whatever straws came your way. If she’d said she was thinking of moving to Romania, he’d have signed up for that too. Or Mars, even.

He said, “Have you been to India before?”

“Once. Top Goa and Kerala. This time I want to go to Rajasthan and Varanasi, Benares.”

“They’re the same place, right?”

“Exactly.”

“From the Sanskrit, isn’t it? Nasi, place. Vara, many. Place of many names.”

She laughed. She has perfect teeth, quite large: American teeth. “I have absolutely no idea whether that is extremely impressive or complete Ben as in bull, Ares as in shit. Which means it’s probably both.”

In a way, the Varanasi story, told in the first person, has less of a filter; there are allusions to the contamination of humans and animals as the narrator takes a piss in the Ganges and observes a cow’s “shit-caked tail was as drenched in shit as an artist’s brush in paint.” And then he goes to the other side of the river:

The bank at the other side was quite steep. Walking over it was like cresting a low sand dune. As I did so, a dark bird flapped noisily into the air. To my right, in a small bay, two dogs were eating something at the river’s edge.

A dead man.

Was being chewed by two dogs. One was eating his left forearm, the other his right wrist. The dead man was intact. He was lying face down. I could see his hair and one ear. He was wearing a filthy pale blue t-shirt, torn in several places, and shorts. The dogs looked up, looked at me, then resumed their meal. It seemed a strange place to start, the arms. Maybe they started there because it was easy to get their jaws around limbs.

I could not see the dead man properly, but I recognized one of the dogs.

The Iowa Review, Vol. 42 No. 2, Fall 2012. Food is the theme for this issue, and perhaps it’s an indication that the subject is better suited for nonfiction, because I found more satisfaction in the essays in this issue than in the stories. Naomi Kimbell’s “Bounty” is a spare and honest piece about doing good in a cynical world, and I loved the opening:

The food bank is busy this morning, and the deaf man sitting next to me is a motor-mouth. A moment ago, he hit me with one of his words. I jumped and scooted away. My chair screeched across the beige vinyl floor, and people looked at me. His ASL interpreter said the man was sorry, and I smiled at her, which I realized immediately was bad form, like the waitress who stares at the parents when it’s the child ordering the food.

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn’s “A Gift from the American People” is an honest look at the inefficacies of humanitarian aid from afar in a time of war. The place is Tsmindasqali, a settlement in the Republic of Georgia to which many South Ossetians were displaced after their homes were bombed by Russian planes. A man named Temo bemoans the contents of the food aid package he has received. “What people got to eat,” Dunn writes, “was what the World Food Program distributed: 1.5 kilograms of macaroni in a food package, along with other staples like beans, salt, and cooking oil, delivered every two weeks.”

The pasta is deplored not just for its uselessness in the kitchens of Georgian families (“in the context of Georgian cuisine, which is full of spices, walnuts, pomegranates, fresh vegetables, and meats, macaroni is hardly food at all,” Dunn writes. “It is not a staple starch, as bread or corn is … Macaroni is just calories, something that only the poorest of the poor eat.”) but for what it represents: as a meager government subsidy, it is a patchwork fix offering no real solutions to the refugees’ plight, only a distancing element from their home and identity.

The Revolution of Every Day, Cari Luna. The description of this book seemed to promise a narrative of heft: set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the early years of the Giuliani administration, it follows the trials and tribulations of a group of squatters in a gutted-out building abandoned by its landlord. As they fix it up and make the place their own, they battle with city officials who want to seize and develop the property (and gentrify the neighborhood) while dealing with drama within their own circle.

The structure would seem to suit a television series better than it might a novel. Luna hops around to each character with a third-person limited POV: Dutch immigrant Gerrit, older Steve and his wife Anne, and Gerrit’s girlfriend Amelia, whom we learn early on is pregnant from an affair with Steve. Amelia, a former drug addict, provides the book’s moral and emotional core, a believer who up to this point has been too easily persuaded by others. Now a new target of persuasion lingers: living in another squat is Cat, a veteran of the squatter scene who is lured back into addiction and with whom Amelia is smitten.

There are a lot of angles at play, and while the book does well enough to document its breakdown of a mini-society that pits itself against the outside and commits to its own rules of survival, few of those angles feel serious. That one of the squatters is a Dutch immigrant invites a clumsy analogy to New York’s 18^th-century settlers, who sought to make a home in a place they cultivated for themselves before ceding it over to the English.

The free indirect style approach doesn’t suit well here since it does little to distinguish the graces of each character, so instead the narrative is a flat language of frustration, clumsy with pejoratives and swears. Clothes in a laundromat dryer tumble like “dumb pieces of cotton”; Cat wonders “whatever happened to Sailor and Slim, those goddamn cokehead twins from Milwaukee with the violet eyes?” Perhaps because it deals with what seems a forgotten era of New York, the narration is at times distrustful, explaining situations and stakes for the reader, especially through the kind of overarching dialogue that real people who live in intimate quarters and have come to know each other’s quirks wouldn’t say. For example, when Amelia and her friend, Suzie, walk past a couple of homeless drunks, they treat the audience to a summary of their existence, as though they wouldn’t be part of the wallpaper:

“Those guys, man,” Suzie says. “I can’t remember them ever not being there.”

Amelia thinks of the deep creases in the short one’s face, his eyes small and shrouded in folds of loose skin, and the weakness of the hand that saluted her, and she thinks, not without sadness, He’ll die soon.

“The tall one was gone for a while this spring,” Amelia says. “Rehab.”

“Yeah, that’s right. I thought he’d died, but then he turned up again in the summer.”

“I saw him come back. It was something—all cleaned up. I kind of thought he’d make it.”

I don’t know if I’ll get around to seeing The End of the Tour before it leaves theaters, but after reading Rebecca Mead’s article on the The New Yorker’s web site, “How ‘The End of the Tour’ Nails an Entire Profession,” I really want to.

The film is not a standard biopic, but a look at the evolving relationship between a journalist and his subject:

What “The End of the Tour” dramatizes—why it will be added to journalism professors’ curricula—is the seduction phase of the profile-writing process. It shows what a complicated encounter that can be, when the reporter’s effort to get inside the mind and heart of his subject is professionally motivated but also personally charged. We see the skill with which Lipsky engineers Wallace’s revelations: he waits until they are strapped into adjacent airplane seats before bringing up the fact that, as a graduate student at Harvard, Wallace was committed to McLean, the psychiatric hospital—a nice cinematic representation of journalistic cunning. But he is also seen singing along to the car radio in what is represented as a genuine sense of joy in Wallace’s company. Of course, you end up becoming yourself, even when you’re a journalist.

Wallace is not my favorite writer; he is witty and entertaining, but his outsized projects seem to fall just beyond my purview. That he was chosen for the subject of a movie (not based on David Lipsky’s biography, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, but about the making of that book) shows how he is sadly lumped into the category of writers admired for their personas as much as if not more than their opera. I read Infinite Jest a number of years ago, and what I remember of its tripartite narrative is caring more about the tennis academy thread than the psychologist thread or the Quebecois separatist thread. His essays fascinate me more, particularly those in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, though in their quests to view Middle American traditions like state fairs and luxury cruises through the lens of irony, they feel like very old jokes.

Chris Gorman played the drums for one of my favorite bands, Belly, in the 1990s behind lead singer Tanya Donelly. (His brother, Tom, played guitar.) Belly produced only two albums, Star (1993) and King (1995), and Gorman’s photographs were used for the album art on both.

Now, with the help of his daughter Indi, he has written and illustrated a children’s book, Indi Surfs, reviewed enthusiastically by Maria Russo in the New York Times Book Review:

The splattery, scratchy black-and-white art looks like digitally remastered photography with a touch of 1950s-style pen-and-ink illustration, rolling over the pages with a few areas of turquoise or rose washes. Gorman’s spare words, in a large, shadowy font, and the images of girl, surfboard and ocean feel united organically, as simultaneously exhilarating and meditative as surfing itself.

The Gorman brothers operate a photography studio in New York, and some of their work provides an evocative look at surfing and skateboard culture.

Although the members of Belly grew up in Newport, Rhode Island, the band was based out of Boston, so Gorman is a perfect fit for my anthology of Boston drummer literature.

I had made the mistake of telling Jim Shepard that I was a writer.

He had just given a reading in South Hadley, Massachusetts, following the publication of his novel, Project X. This would have been in 2004. Only a handful of people had showed up, including my now-wife and myself.

We bought Project X and H. got her copy signed. I brought along my (used) copy of Love and Hydrogen. Authors must love it when you give them a used book to sign, with the price still penciled on the title page.

Project X was a novel about teenagers planning a Columbine-style attack on their high school. He read sections of it to us as we sat around him in a circle, storytime-style. A lot of the questions had to do with Columbine and the cottage industry of school-shooting literature that followed, such as Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin.

The conversation was slowing down and I hadn’t asked anything, so I raised my hand and asked what advice he would give to someone who aspired to be a writer.

Then, almost immediately, I apologized, admitting it was a stupid (read: hackneyed, empty) question, one he must have been tired of answering.

“It’s not a stupid question,” he said. “It’s a sweet question.”

Then he asked why I was asking it. “Are you a writer?” I think he said then that I looked like a writer, I don’t remember.

And I collapsed into a pathetic show of apology, primarily to the six or so other people who had showed up; they had not come to hear about me. I said yes, I was a writer, only I hadn’t published anything. I hadn’t really written anything, either, unless you counted the four paragraphs I nursed like a lukewarm beer because I was afraid of moving forward.

(It was an exaggeration. I had written more than four paragraphs. I merely was conveying that I was far from prolific or even remotely advanced in my venture.)

And I don’t remember any of what he said after that, what advice he gave to dreamers like me. Why do we ask writers such things, if we aren’t going to remember what they say?

But he used it as he signed my book. “Best of luck with those 4 paragraphs,” he wrote.

I picked up Love and Hydrogen again recently because I remembered a story I had loved about football players, and thinking how the voice, layered in sarcasm and ruthlessness and defeat, was similar to what I tried to achieve in my Little League stories.

There’s a football story in Love and Hydrogen (“Messiah”), but it turns out that the one I had been thinking of was “Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak,” which was included in Shepard’s later collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway and which I must have read in Harper’s back when I subscribed.

Last year I wrote about David Ryan, onetime drummer for the Lemonheads, who went on to pursue a fiction-writing career and publish a collection of stories, Animals in Motion.

Lately I’ve been listening to another Boston band, the Blake Babies, after finding one of their discs in a used record shop. Their lead singer was Juliana HatfieId, whose albums as both a solo artist and with the Juliana Hatfield Three were pretty well known on Boston radio. It turns out that the Blake Babies’ drummer, Freda Love Smith, is a writer in her own right, having earned a creative writing MA from Nottingham Trent University. She has a story, “After the Thaw,” in SmokeLong Quarterly (Issue 41, 2013):

We were well stocked with cans of soup, packs of batteries, jugs of distilled water, boxes of matches, rolls of wool socks, stacks of blankets. Flashlights. Candles. Powdered milk.

In fact, the days leading up to the storm had been busy and bright. The run to the store, the teasing arguments.

“Snowpocalypse,” he said.

“Snow way,” I said.

“Snowmaggedon,” he said.

“I don’t think snow,” I said.

And we laughed, my husband and I, despite the depth of our disagreement. His sad way of believing whatever people say; my way of believing nothing.

Love Smith works as a lecturer and an advisor for undergraduates in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern, and writes a food blog, Lovesmiths.

I expect a Boston drummers’ anthology to make its way into print soon. In the meantime, here’s “Out There,” a song I can’t get out of my head, from the album Sunburn (1990):

Found in the corner lending library of our favorite local breakfast hangout.

Apple Paperbacks were a staple of my late elementary-school reading, though I honestly can’t say I remember them hewing so closely to assigned gender targets as Boys Are Yucko! obviously tries. Certainly there were books tailored for girls that I avoided: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (a Dell Yearling paperback) was practically radioactive in both cover and title. But there was other books with female protagonists that were less pinpointed in their themes. I do remember reading Freaky Friday, which had a girl protagonist who was into a boy. And I might have read Katie’s Baby-Sitting Job—the cover looks familiar—but I don’t remember for sure.

From this fan’s collection I remember reading Just Tell Me When We’re Dead! and the original Upchuck Summer (mentioned in this post), neither of which got much into coming-of-age subject matter, as I recall. Also, of the titles mentioned here, I believe Aldo Applesauce was, appropriately, an Apple Paperback.

According to Anna Grossnickle Hines’ website, Boys Are Yucko! is the sequel to an earlier protofeminist treatise, Cassie Bowen Takes Witch Lessons (Dutton, 1985).

Reading Karl Knausgaard’s New York Times Magazine piece about his trek from New Brunswick from Minnesota:

One of my favorite books about the U.S. is Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” which among many other things is also a kind of road novel. It describes a journey through the small-town world of post-World War II America, where the protagonist, Humbert Humbert, is constantly on the lookout for distractions for his child mistress, and therefore stops at an endless series of attractions, which every single little town seemed to be in possession of. The world’s largest stalagmite, obelisks commemorating battles, a reconstruction of the log cabin where Lincoln was born, the world’s longest cave, the homemade sculptures of a local woman. Humbert’s gaze is European, deeply sophisticated, cultivated and ancient, but also perverted and sick, while the things he observes on the journey across America are superficial, childishly un-self-conscious, ignorant of history, but also innocent and possessed of the freshness of the new.

There’s an opportunity to read a criminally reduced book in a whole new light–one that finds echoes in real-life crimes purported perpetrated out of immigrant disaffectation. I am thinking of the Boston Marathon bombing, among other things.

What are we to make of the sudden news that Harper Lee will publish a pre-sequel, for lack of a better term, of To Kill a Mockingbird? The literary community appears to be responding to the news that Go Set a Watchman, a novel set in Maycomb, Alabama twenty years after the events of Mockingbird with Scout Finch as its protagonist, is due to be published this summer with a mixture of hopeful enthusiasm and understandable apprehension.

At Jezebel, Madeleine Davies offers fair warning that we should be suspicious:

Sadly, this news is not without controversy or complications. Harper Lee’s sister Alice Lee, who ferociously protected Harper Lee’s estate (and person) from unwanted outside attention as a lawyer and advocate for decades, passed away late last year, leaving the intensely private author (who herself is reportedly in ill health) vulnerable to people who may not have her best interests at heart.

Harper Lee is 88 years old. When I saw her name pop up on my phone via a New York Times Breaking News alert, I feared that she had died. Her vision and hearing were both severely impaired by a stroke eight years ago, and Davies writes that Lee “often doesn’t understand the contracts that she signs.”

Mockingbird was supposedly written at the suggestion of an editor who read Go Set a Watchman and wanted to know what Scout and Jem Finch were like as children. Did Alice Lee know something about the contents of Watchman that made her wish to shelter it (but not Mockingbird) from the light of day? Did she fear it would harm the universality of the first book, or did she think that the second book just wasn’t any good? And can we trust that all aspects of authorial intent will continue to be respected if the book’s author is no longer of sound mind?

My hope is that, if Watchman is ultimately published, its editors leave the text alone. Let its assumed flaws as a young writer’s first novel remain in place, if only for the historical value. We might be surprised: the fact that Watchman was written before Mockingbird could suggest that there won’t be much of an emotional “distance” from the first book (Scout, you’ll recall, is already an adult when she narrates Mockingbird); the characters had not taken hold in the public consciousness as they have over the past six decades, and since Lee did not write the book with any kind of pressure, perhaps she would not have had the impulse to do anything contrived, loud, or forced to the narrative. At best, the two books could be part of a larger, more expansive twentieth-century portrait of a young woman growing up in the Deep South during the civil rights era. It will be strange to behold these characters sprung from the frame through which we have long regarded them, but I suspect that, even if Go Set a Watchman turns out to be awful, Atticus and Scout and Jem and Boo Radley will retain their cultural import, as humans seeking to live moral lives free of prejudice and pressure and fear.