Aesthetic Drift #1: A Voice Frozen

30 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift

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Kseniya Melnik, Magadan, Snow in May, Vadim Kozin

Aesthetic Drift #1 by Kseniya Melnik

A Voice Frozen

My hometown, Magadan, in the northeast of Russia is a port city isolated from the rest of the continent and it is the emotional heart of my first collection of stories, the center of gravity toward which each of the characters is pulled.

Kseniya and Maria Melnik, 1993, Magadan.

As I was writing and thinking about the place where I spent my first fifteen years, I knew the book wouldn’t be complete without a story about one of Magadan’s most legendary residents, Vadim Kozin.

Once a sensationally famous Soviet tenor who performed private concerts at the Kremlin, Kozin served two terms in the Gulag camps near Magadan and remained in the city, first exiled there and then by choice, until his death in 1994, at age 91. I fell in love with his songs when I discovered them in my twenties, already in America, and was touched every time by the disarming sincerity of his renditions. I was shocked and heartbroken to realize that such a man—a national treasure—had lived not far from my childhood home.

I thought that through my fictional resurrection, not only would Kozin—once-silenced in Russia and now increasingly forgotten—regain his voice, he would add historical gravity and real-life pathos to my book. His tragic life story is a vivid dramatization of Russia’s bumpy progress through the twentieth century. I figured I could lightly fictionalize his life and be done.

Yet, in my “Kozin story,” called “Our Upstairs Neighbor,” there isn’t a character named Vadim Kozin. I realized early into the writing that I would have to make things up in order not to lie.

Before leaving Magadan for Alaska in 1998, I knew little about Kozin. I have vague memories of a very long concert in honor of his 90th birthday. I was ten, and I don’t recall anything about it except an empty red throne that had been set up for him on stage. He never showed up.

I also knew that my grandfather was once Kozin’s downstairs neighbor; they had a polite neighborly relationship, but they were not friends. This was after Kozin had served his first term in the Gulag. My grandfather told me that whenever he passed him on the staircase, Kozin was elegantly dressed in a checkered European-style coat, a chic hat, a beautiful bright scarf—and always in a cloud of sophisticated cologne.

When Kozin was arrested for the second time, my grandmother was asked to be a witness while the KGB inventoried his apartment. Some time later, my grandfather saw Kozin at a construction site, where he was working as part of his sentence.

Hearing these stories as a child didn’t mean much to me. I didn’t understand the tragic trajectory of Kozin’s life. Now that I was writing the collection and studying Russian history in more depth than I had ever learned in school back in Magadan—particularly the bloody roots of my hometown as the administrative center of one of the harshest networks of forced labor camps—I began talking to my grandfather and researching Kozin’s life with new eyes.

The thinnest outline of Vadim Kozin’s biography is the following. Born in St. Petersburg in 1903, he was the only son, the oldest brother of a gaggle of sisters, of a well-to-do merchant and a Gypsy mother, a singer. Their house was always full of prominent musicians. After the revolution of 1917, young Kozin was expelled from the naval institute because of his non-proletarian background.

He started performing Gypsy songs and Russian romances at the workers’ clubs; he was soon invited to sing at the best theaters of Leningrad and eventually to tour the country and perform for Stalin and his cronies. He recorded a hundred and twenty songs before the Second World War, and each new record was a national event. During the war, Kozin performed for soldiers in the front lines and at the blockaded Leningrad.

He was first arrested in 1944, at the height of his career, and served four years in one of Magadan’s camps. While a prisoner, he often performed with the other imprisoned musicians for the camp administration. In the fifties, after his release, Kozin began touring again. He served a short sentence after his second arrest in 1956 and lived the rest of his life in poverty in a small studio apartment dominated by a piano with his two beloved cats, surrounded by hundreds of books and his old records.

I don’t know whether Kozin was still a household name throughout the country in his later years; I’d read that some of his fans wrote him letters and sent him gifts. He was popular in Magadan, though, and often gave solo concerts. With glastnost in the late 80s and early 90s, there was a renewed interest in the old victims of political repressions, and journalists and cultural personalities traveled to Magadan to meet with Kozin.

In 1991, Magadan’s city council considered naming Kozin “Citizen of Honor,” but ultimately decided not to do so. Kozin received a nice apartment from the city near the theater, which, after his death in 1994, was converted into a museum. As far as I know, he was never officially rehabilitated.

Why was Kozin arrested in 1944? One article I read stated that the charge came under the infamous Article 58—counter-revolutionary activity—and recapped the following legends regarding Kozin’s so-called offenses:

1) During World War II, Kozin was supposedly planning to defect to the enemy’s side after a concert for the Polish legionnaires;

2) Kozin got too close to the famous pilot, Marina Raskova, whom Lavrentiy Beria, the notorious chief of the secret police, was interested in romantically;

3) Kozin cursed Stalin and the entire Soviet government when his mother and one of his sisters perished in the blockaded Leningrad on the same day that he was promised assistance with their evacuation; and

4) Kozin refused to write a song about Stalin. This same article quoted Magadan’s First Secretary of Regional Party Committee as saying that the charge for Kozin’s 1956 arrest was under Article 121—homosexuality.

My grandfather, too, had heard the rumor about Kozin refusing to write a song about Stalin, that Stalin was jealous of the people’s love for Kozin, and that Kozin’s supposed homosexuality was the excuse to repress him both times. I certainly could not make any independent conclusions.

As much as I felt pulled to tell Kozin’s story, I was even more hesitant to put thoughts into his head and words into his mouth. I also realized that the chronology of Kozin’s life, including the dates of his birth and death, would not fit into the chronology of my book and would have to be shifted. I knew that changing the timeline was generally accepted in historical fiction. When it came to Kozin, though, I felt that if I used his name but altered even one detail about his known biography, I would be lying.

The voice I had meant to return to Kozin wasn’t his voice at all; it was my voice and it was adding to the cacophony of rumors about his life and past—tinged by propaganda, ignorance, and simply lack of information—that has sounded for more than half a century.

I had two options. I could commit fully to recreating Vadim Kozin’s biography. I would have to get all my other characters out of the way. I would have to stick strictly to the information available, to find and read every surviving scrap of Kozin’s writing, every letter to him and from him, and listen to every interview with him. I would have to travel to Russia to talk with anyone who had personally known him when he was alive. I would have to gain access to the NKVD and KGB archives and study Kozin’s file.

After I gathered all that material, I would have to analyze it through the lens of history and of the biases of the sources. (And I hardly have the expertise for such analysis.)

Many suspected that Kozin was gay, but I’ve read an interview where he denied it. What does that mean? Even if he had been officially convicted under the homosexuality charges, that wouldn’t make the charges true. People were convicted under a plethora of absurd charges: foreign espionage for a peasant who had never left his native village, Soviet property theft for a worker who was twenty minutes late to his shift. “If there is a person, an article will be found for him,” was the famous postulate from those times.

But even if I did manage to collect all that information—enough for a separate book, really—such a book would still not constitute Kozin’s story. The truth was in the depth of his heart and soul; only he knew it.

As for my story, I kept my first allegiance to art. While inspired by and largely based on Kozin, my character—named Vadim Makin—is ultimately a fictional creation, free to interact with other fictional characters and free to retain some degree of mystery. I will be happy if Makin points readers to Kozin, to discovering more about him and seeking out his recordings. And while the character Makin is very important to my tale, he is like the decrepit angel in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s, “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.” The other characters true motivations are revealed through their interactions with the old Soviet tenor.

If Kozin was still alive today, how would he tell his life story, given the passage of years, the frailty of memory, the human’s proclivity to revise, explain, conceal, especially considering the current political climate in Russia with regard to the LGBT community? For us, in the twenty-first century, Kozin’s Truth, if such a thing even exists in any kind of constancy, will be forever unknown.

History is such a rich field to mine for fiction. But fiction is not the proper place for a memorial. Just the opposite: like any act of creation, fiction gives life, and I hope that my story and its characters have taken on a life of their own, independent of Vadim Kozin. And if one wants to honor Vadim Kozin’s memory, there is no better way than listening to his songs—a monument composed of melody and lyrics—the only true voice of his that survives.

_______

Kseniya Melnik (Episode 99) is the author of the linked story collection Snow in May, which was short-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Born in Magadan, Russia, she moved to Alaska in 1998, at the age of 15. She received her MFA from New York University. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Epoch, Esquire (Russia), VQR, Prospect (UK), and was selected for Granta‘s New Voices series.

Heroes Never Rust #91: Sentimentality

29 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust

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Alan Moore, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Heroes Never Rust, sean ironman, This Side of Paradise, Watchmen

Heroes Never Rust #91 by Sean Ironman

Watchmen: Sentimentality

Watchmen presents a bleak world. Superheroes are no the superheroes many people are familiar with. The world, or at least a great deal of the world, seems to hate the vigilantes. But, there is one real moment of, not happiness, but positivity. At the end of the ninth issue, Silk Spectre convinces Doctor Manhattan to return to Earth. He feels that humanity is no different than anything else in the universe—a collection of atoms. By the end, though, he sees that life is special:

In each human coupling, a thousand mission sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter…until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold…that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.

In my Forms of Illustrated Narrative course a few weeks ago, as we discussed the second half of Watchmen, one student remarked that the ending to the ninth issue is a bit sentimental. I don’t view it that way, but I can see the student’s point, especially because it seems that when a work presents a bleak view, emotion is okay, but when there is some happiness or positivity involved, the work becomes sentimental. Sentimentality is looked down upon in literary writing. Many writers, especially those at the beginning of their careers, are so afraid of their work being labeled sentimental that the emotion is stripped from the story. The stories become bland and do not affect the reader. The stories die on the page. But, what is sentimentality, and how can a writer produce a work that feels alive that has emotion in it without the work being labeled sentimental?

First, sentimentality does not just relate to positive emotions. Sentimentality, at least in its current use, appeals to shallow, unsophisticated emotions with no regard for reason or logic. In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “I’m not sentimental—I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.” Sentimentality takes the reality out of the story and presents a simplistic view in an effort to get the reader to feel what the writer wants the reader to feel.

That’s a problem for a number of reasons. Instead of focusing on the characters and the story, the writer is trying to manipulate the reader into feeling a certain way. No one likes to be sold something. Present the story and let the reader feel what they will feel. Another problem is with the simplistic view. James Baldwin once remarked, “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty…the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mark of cruelty.” In sentimental work, emotion is contrived, dishonest. We, literary writers, are out to explore humanity. Honestly. We search for the Truth, for meaning. But, sentimental work is about controlling the reader, not exploring the story and the subject matter. Life is complicated. Situations are complicated. Emotions are complicated. That complication needs to be shown in the work.

In a work, like Watchmen, a writer must balance emotions. Watchmen is dark, not overly so, but it is about a world on the brink of nuclear war and deals with many superheroes who do nothing about the situation. Until recently, sentiment used to be the standard word for feelings. Now, it has been twisted to mean describe empty, meaningless emotion. That’s the issue with sentiment, really. It affects adult readers in the opposite way, making the reader not feel. Sentimental work is broad and deals with unearned emotion. Emotions are sloppy. Highly emotional situations are not overly sad, or overly happy, but a combination of emotions that leave a person not knowing how to feel. It’s not so much emotion that should be avoided, but expected emotion. In Watchmen, the end of issue nine works because it is one ray of positivity in the twelve-issue comic. The positivity interacts and counterbalances with the negativity, creating a story that the reader has to think about. The work becomes intellectual, not just emotional.

There are such things as simple emotions and complex emotions. This is supported by psychologists, by the way, not just my own rambling. Simple emotions are fear, happiness, anger, sadness, etc. Complex emotions, such as shame, pride, guilt, require us to know about the character’s situation and values. Simple emotions are basically like an animal reflex, according to Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto. In order to understand complex emotions, one must think, analyze, and interpret events—events that are complicated because there are multiple contradictory emotional triggers. Sentimental works try to get the reader swept up in emotion, controlling the heart instead of the head, but this doesn’t work well with adult readers. I do not mean to look down on YA works or younger readers, but biologically speaking, younger people have more difficulty regulating emotions, causing them to be more impulse and driven by emotions rather than logic and reason. Emotional reactivity grabs younger readers easier than adult readers, which is why there are many YA books that are sentimental, and that work even though they are sentimental. It’s all about audience.

But, adult readers need messier, more complex situations. Adult readers need to be challenged emotionally. At the end of the day, avoiding sentimentality in one’s writing is the same solution as just writing in an age that so much narrative is competing for readers—give the reader something new.

Make your writing as emotional as you want. But, make your writing complex. Don’t give the reader something that he or she already knows. Aim for an emotional ambiguity. It allows you as a literary fiction (or nonfiction) writer to explore the subject matter fully and create complex characters, and it avoids the sentimental.

I have told this my undergraduate nonfiction workshop many times—If you write an essay about a dead grandparent, don’t write about how sad you are that the grandparent is dead. That would be writing into readers’ expectations. Give readers something new. Write about how happy you are that the old hag is dead. Or don’t write about death at all. Remember, sentiment is socialized. Sentiment is expected, simplistic emotion. Sentiment is pre-conceived. Sentiment is controlling your reader and treating them like an animal, only allowing the reader instinctive, reflexive emotional responses. Allow the reader to think. Send your readers into the deep end and see if they can figure their way out. Emotion and sentiment are separate from one another. Emotion can be present in your work (positive or negative), but just make it complex enough that you are not telling the reader how to feel.

Ambiguity is a good thing.

_______

Photo by John King

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) earned his MFA at the University of Central Florida. Currently, he teaches creative nonfiction and digital media at the University of Central Arkansas as a visiting professor. His work can be read in The Writer’s Chronicle, Redivider, and Breakers: A Comics Anthology, among others.

Buzzed Books #26: Attempting Normal

28 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books

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Attempting Normal, Book Review, Marc Maron

Buzzed Books #26 by John King

Attempting Normal

I am an obsessive fan of things.

Most culture feels blank to me, irrelevant, whether high-, low-, or middle-browed. But when I engage, some lifelong fixation is usually triggered.

To be a fan of Tom Waits, for example, is not merely to have a preference, but rather to be compelled on an odyssey of completion, to track down every maddening recording, every loose song on a compilation, every collaboration, every bootleg I can get my hands on, because the joy of his mind, the instruments of his creativity, are priceless to me, not (to be honest) in every moment, but in enough moments to make such obsession seem viable, and valid, and totally sane, presuming the world is insane, which seems like a safe assumption.

When Tom Waits released Orphans, a three disk compilation of the miscellaneous studio music he’d made that did not already appear on his own albums, I already had about half those songs collected on my own.

The downside of obsessively following an artist is not that they will casually and belatedly release an obscure lode of their work I’ve already tracked down.

The downside of obsessively following artists is the risk of noticing that they are not as fertile and creative as your romanticized image of them.

When you note that Dean Martin’s alcoholic banter uses the same exact hiccups and malapropisms in a 1977 set in The Sabre Room in Chicago as in a 1964 set at The Sands in Las Vegas, the drunkenness not only seems less real (a minor distinction), but less impressive as an acting performance, less funny because less original. If only the gaffes were more spontaneously delivered, you would love the later show no matter how closely it clings to the template of the earlier show. Instead, you have to choose which performance you are willing to listen to, because listening to both in your regular listening habits is painful to your sense of art, and let’s face it, your sense of art is connected to your sense of self, your sense of existential meaning. Dean Martin is diminished, and as a fan I have to contain the damage not to be diminished in turn.

1964 at The Sands it is.

Stand up comedy runs into this problem often, in that a comedian’s witty aphorism is likely to be recycled in spontaneous moments or when approaching new, but similar material, which can feel like watching a brilliant artist being plagiarized, and such acts of self-plagiarism make fans feel like they are in a semiotic feedback loop. When a comedian reuses a joke, there is a pang of disappointment, even when the joke is funny and memorable and insightful. I trust artists to be explorers, and staying on safe ground, even for a sentence, can sometimes disappoint me.

So when a comedian who is operating at the top of his craft, as Marc Maron certainly is, and who has a weekly podcast (WTF with Marc Maron) in which he over-shares his personal life with his listeners, and who has an IFC Channel sit-com based on his life, which he has previously mined and revealed in said stand-up and podcast work, the sense of creative overlap is a gigantic risk to precisely those fans that perhaps matter most to Marc Maron, since he himself is an obsessive fan of things. Maron isn’t among the uppermost elite comedians in the country, in terms of sheer popularity, as his comedy is too dark and too idiosyncratically personal, but his following is considerable, and the devotion of his fans is even more considerable precisely because his comedy is so revelatory in its often dark and personal vision of the world.

For the most part, in these various media, Maron manages to present the same narratives of his life with such variations and nuances in each telling that he averts the wearying déjà vu of postmodern exhaustion of significance.

Full disclosure: I am a fan of Marc Maron’s, which means that in 2013, when he released a non-fiction collection of personal essays, Attempting Normal, I was reluctant to read it, out of concern that this fourth creative outlet for his self-narratives would finally sabotage the sense of integrity of his output. At this point, do I have anything left to learn about Marc Maron from Marc Maron that requires a book from him?

Actually, yes.

One thing I learned: Marc Maron is a superb writer.

On the page, he is more ambitious than he is on stage or on the podcast or on television, since his sentences can get longer, and the diction can get more poetic and original, without losing the semblance of a conversational voice, and his thought-process often persists until insights get far more interesting than in his stand-up, podcasting, and television work:

Everyone is a little bitter. We’re born bitter. The personality itself is really just a very complex defense mechanism. A reaction to the first time someone said, “No, you can’t.” That’s the big challenge of life—to chisel disappointment into wisdom so people respect you and you don’t annoy your friends with your whining. You don’t want to be the bitter guy in the group. It’s the difference between “I’ve bee through that and this is what I’ve learned” and “I’m fucked. Everything sucks.” That said, be careful not to medicate bitterness because you’ve mistaken it for depression, because the truth is you’re right: Everything does such most of the time and there’s a fine line between bitterness and astute cultural observation.

As a self-involved, anxiety-ridden, acerbic person, such self-awareness is refreshing, and allows his self-involved, anxiety-ridden acerbic readers to identify with what he is saying rather than tune out what could, with a lazier writer and thinker, be boring narcissism. But this passage reminds me that what Maron has done in writing Attempting Normal was to fit his needs to the form of a book rather than dashing off stand-up, adding some filler, and calling it a book. The turns of his thoughts, and the after-turns of thought are wonderful, and sometimes manifest themselves in the titles of chapters; chapter 22 is called “Xenophobia, Autoerotic Asphyxiation, and the History of Irish Poetry.” And the content of that chapter lives up to that title.

Besides his self-awareness of his acute self-involvement, Marc Maron’s total willingness to throw himself under the bus also endears the reader, especially since that bus seems to be entering some tunnel of the psychic underworld, as the tragic purchase of a mid-century chair from a second hand furniture vendor reveals:

It seemed he really wanted his artifacts to be with the right people. I might have underestimated him at the time. He might have had a deeper understanding of the relationship between people and objects than the rest of us to. An odd pairing between a chair and a couple might disrupt the trajectory of the lives of the people and the chair. Of course, anything can be backloaded with meaning. That’s how we explain things away when we don’t want to take full responsibility for actions that are frightening and disastrous. It’s the core of mysticism.

Of course, he has self-awareness when he throws himself (and mysticism) under the bus, too. It’s almost a semiotic feedback loop, except it returns us to his narratives with additional, manic thrust, like a streamlined Proust.

I think of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech for Kenyon’s graduating class of 2003, which (the speech, not the class) has been named “This is Water,” in which Wallace argues that the great thing about a liberal arts education is that it encourages people not just how to think, but how to create meaning by considering the larger question of choosing what to think about. As someone who is self-obsessed, Marc Maron is wonderful in the way he expresses the act of choosing, and how in retrospect he can choose perhaps better remembering back on the experiences in which he looked at things in only one way:

I read a short story in high school once about a hot-pepper-eating contest. I remember liking it. I don’t remember much of what I was assigned to read in high school. I did a lot of sleeping in English class and my teacher was a mean old drunk woman who looked like she was balancing a pile of hair on her shaking head.

It was the descriptions of the peppers and the experience of eating them that sticks in my mind all these years later. I couldn’t remember the name of the story so I googled it. It was actually hard to find. I found someone had scanned the story and put it on their personal Flickr page. Obviously, someone else at some point thought, “What was that pepper story I read in high school?”

So I reread “The Grains of Paradise,” by James Street. The story turns out to be about an American man on an agricultural research mission to Mexico to learn about corn. The story culminates in a pepper-eating challenge with a local landowner and grower of peppers. The story is really about class, caste, honor, country, competition, business, and politics. I assume that’s why they put the story in the book: so we could learn the power of literature to elevate and integrate layered themes into a narrative. I got none of that and I’m sure the shaking wig at the front of the class didn’t illuminate any of that, but to be fair I don’t remember either way. The point is, I thought it was a story about eating really hot peppers. As you get older and wiser everything becomes a bit more loaded with meaning and/or completely drained of it. It sort of happens simultaneously.

A lot of heartfelt care went into this book. I’ve emphasized Maron’s self-absorption, but as writers, aren’t we all self-absorbed, and isn’t that self-absorption what we are trying to escape—to escape from our personality, as Eliot says in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”?

We are trying to escape ourselves in order to enlarge ourselves. That is why we write, and that is why we read. Or maybe it’s just me.

Attempting Normal gives you a large dose of the essence of Marc Maron’s sensibilities. Considering all of the levels of difficulty for this book to be any serious addition to his output, and how masterfully it succeeds, this book might be the best thing he has done in a long, and by this point accomplished, career.

Pair with: Just Coffee Co-op, WTF Blend (natch)

_______

John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

The Global Barfly’s Companion #5: Sea Witch Tavern

27 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in The Global Barfly's Companion

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Kristin Maffei

The Global Barfly’s Companion #5 by Kristin Maffei

Bar: Sea Witch Tavern

Location: 703 Fifth Avenue; Brooklyn, NY

Book to Bring: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

There are no sea witches in Wide Sargasso Sea, but the book itself is magical in is lush language and post-colonial discussion of power. The red and gold that comes up repeatedly throughout the book is the perfect companion to the blue and grey of the Sea Witch’s mural.

Why Writers Love It: This South Slope tavern might just be the thing to bring you out of your writer’s block as you gaze longingly into their giant oval aquarium.

A giant sea mural adorns one wall, while a shark’s jawbone and alligator skull adorn another. The cocktails are reasonably priced, especially during happy hour when everything is $2 off, and the adjacent kitchen makes a mean stack of fries for just $2.75, so you can get a meal and a drink for under $10, something even freelancers could afford.

They show different themed movies most nights at 9 PM, and if the weather is warm, you can pull up a chair on their patio and watch the fish in the few small ponds they have. Plenty of people stop by with work in the early weekday evenings, so if you’re looking for a place to grab a beer, listen to some great music, and get your write on, this could be it.

Caveat Emptor: Just watch yourself on those $6 beer and a shot specials, friends.

_______

Kristin Maffei is a poet and copywriter living in New York City. Her work has been featured in Works & Days, Mount Hope Journal, and Underwater New York. For more information, visit www.kristinmaffei.com.

Shakespearing #32.2: Even More Thoughts About Coriolanus

26 Sunday Apr 2015

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Shakespearing #32.2 by John King

Even More Thoughts About Coriolanus

Last week, I discussed how Coriolanus eludes me because I don’t feel any empathy for its characters, the minor character Menenius excepted.

Considering that my chief axiom about Shakespeare is that he is best known in performance rather than on the page, I thought it best to carry over how I experience this lack of empathy in performance. I have seen Coriolanus twice, once with the Ralph Fiennes film of 2011, and once with the 2013 stage production mounted by the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival.

Now I have seen Hamlets I felt nothing for, due to bad acting, but even a modest success at Hamlet lets the humanity of his character surprise me, despite having too many Hamlets in my life.

Can a superior performance make me feel empathy for characters whose chief attributes seems to be they have their heads up their asses? Can I think of Coriolanus as being other than the -anus play?

The 2011 film is deeply impressive on numerous levels.

The cinephile in me likes noticing that Fiennes, who played Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon, is acting with Bryan Cox, who was the first Hannibal Lecter in the first film version of Red Dragon, Manhunter.

CORIOLANUS

Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain and Gerard Butler look intelligently cinematic, yet appropriate to this twentieth-first century adaptation of Shakespeare.

And to hear Fiennes deliver Shakespeare’s lines so majestically and ferociously is exquisite, like hearing a Stradivarius go at something that might have been composed by Paganini.

Fiennes does not persuade me that Coriolanus’s pride (which rips apart both Rome and his sense of identity) is tragic, tragic precisely because it is morally necessary to give his very life meaning—although the delivery is compelling to hear, even if I don’t quite care.

What Coriolanus does for me in such a performance is to dramatize how politics and rhetoric form a public mask that bears no true resemblance to the experiences as a soldier that has made Coriolanus a public figure to begin with. His relationship with his enemy, Tullus Aufidius, is more real to him that his relationship to his people, or to his wife. These experiences, these triumphs, are not translatable to those without such experiences. Hemingway wrote about this in “Soldiers Home,” from his story collection In Our Time.

I am not sure if it is a mark of boredom, or merely a different aesthetic experience, that my mind watches the tragic dramaturgy of Coriolanus from a vast emotional distance.

If I keep watching, it must be good, even if I cannot articulate why or how.

When my friend, Kevin Crawford, performed this play in the summer of 2013, he made the spectacle even more abstract, a Rome sort of set in outer space. He and the other actors pantomimed the use of weapons, and when Coriolanus and his fellow soldiers lay siege Aufidius in Corioli—the conquest of which city the hero is granted the name of honor, Coriolanus—they banged the air, and the foleys boomed with their fury.

Kevin was beardless, and totally bald, thus removing one more mark of personality from the hero who was wrestling more with eternity than with Rome, its citizens, or Aufidius, for his sublime sensation of immaculate pride.

The poster showed Kevin clutching his face, as if he were going insane.

Kevin was roughly my age, but had been acting since he was a teenager, and there were no huge challenges left for him in the great bard’s work. He wanted to mount a production of Cyrano, that dramedy about the distance between our public and private selves, about how complicated our need for companionship in essence is.

Sweating in a field in Jupiter, Florida, as Coriolanus raged to create a public self he could recognize, I felt more on his strange journey than ever before.

Most of the cast of the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival was now young, and had missed the twenty-two years of shows Kevin had experienced.

Coriolanus is a late Shakespeare play. Like The Tempest, it is weird. Perhaps this was Shakespeare sensing the end of his dramatic career. No one’s imagination in the history of letters had come close to his work—he was in an aesthetic isolation. He was trying to exist fully.

Kevin would churl at this psycho-biographic pass at Coriolanus, most likely, although he would have humored me.

That summer run of shows were Kevin’s last. He died quite suddenly on December 2^nd, 2013.

I miss him more than I can say.

_______

John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

Episode 149: Chelsey Clammer!

24 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Memoir, Poetry

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Chelsey Clammer, Chromoluminarism, Susan Brennan

Episode 149 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to the memoirist, Chelsey Clammer,

plus Susan Brennan shares her poetry sequence, Chromoluminarism, based on the last days of the pointillist, George Seraut.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

“The Circus” by George Seraut, 1891.

NOTES

If you live in the city beautiful (Orlando, in case you don’t know), come out to see a great show and support a great cause on May 1st.

Check out Jennifer Hoppe-House’s Bad Dog, playing at Orlando Shakespeare Theater through May 3rd.

Ginger Lee McDermott as Molly in Jennifer Hoppe-House’s Bad Dog (Photo by Tony Firriolo).

On May 8th, experience Poetry-O-Rama on the historic Wonder Wheel in Coney Island. Be sure to buy tickets in advance.

_______

Episode 149 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #85: Blade

24 Friday Apr 2015

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The Curator of Schlock #85 by Jeff Shuster

Blade

All vampires must die!

Batman & Robin killed the superhero movie. No one really mourned. We had all given up hope that Hollywood would ever get the genre right. I didn’t care. I still had the new Superman: The Animated Series to keep me entertained. Warner Bros. had even commissioned new Batman cartoons in the wake of Batman & Robin, no doubt in an effort keep the property from completely fading from public view. I was happy, but I knew that superhero movies would forever remain, as Roger Ebert said, “a disreputable genre.”

I think it was about a year later when one of my friends mentioned that they saw the trailer for Blade. I had never heard of Blade. I guess he was another one of these unknown Marvel characters that all of the Marvel fans knew intimately. I knew that Marvel movie adaptations of the past made Batman & Robin look like a cinematic masterpiece. I read horror stories about adaptations of The Fantastic Four and Captain America. I’ll have to get to those someday, if Marvel hasn’t sent mercenaries out to destroy every last VHS copy.

I didn’t have high hopes for Blade, but it had been getting enough buzz that I figured I’d give it a look. Sometimes you see a movie that’s a reminder of why they built movie theaters in the first place. Blade from director Stephen Norrington is one of those movies.

The movie starts out with Traci Lords luring some dork to a secret nightclub inside a meat packing plant.

She’s all hands on with him until they enter this secret dance hall complete with DJ and techno beats. The place is filled with club kids that look like Calvin Kline models and they’re fist pumping and grinding. Only problem is everyone is ignoring the dork. Tracy Lords shoves him away. He’s like the nerd who was invited to the cool kids party only to be made fun of later. Then blood rains from the sprinkler system, the club kids bare their fangs, and the dude realizes he’s in a club full of vampires.

I used to read those old Tales from the Crypt comics from the 1950s. I remember this one story where this guy arrives in his hometown and his sister warns him not go out into town after dark, but the guy ignores her because he’s hungry. He finds a restaurant where he partakes in a strange 7-course meal that includes tomato juice that’s too salty in addition to other dishes roast clots and blood sherbet. His sister shows up and reveals that she’s a vampire and that everyone in the restaurant are vampires and that he’s been eating blood based dishes the whole time. The last panel of the comic shows the guy strung upside down while vampires are filling their glasses with blood from a tap screwed into his neck. “Nothing like the real stuff,” says one.

Like in that Tales from the Crypt story, the vampires take glee in tormenting the poor human that was lured into their club. They don’t take notice of the tough looking hombre with the black trench coat and sunglasses who grinning at them. A wave of fear and anger washes over the vampires. They whisper “It’s the Daywalker.” and I surmise that Blade(Wesley Snipes) has arrived on the scene. They all decide to charge him and that’s they’re first mistake. A shotgun blast turns vampire after vampire into fiery ash. Blade even has a katana blade and some ninja star boomerang thing that makes short work of every vampire that’s stupid enough not to run away.

The movie grabbed me at that point and wouldn’t let go. It managed to flip a classic Tales from the Crypt ending on its head, making the vampires the hunted instead of the hunters. One of the reasons I loved reading Tales from the Crypt comics when I was a kid is because I always found monsters more interesting than heroes, and Blade is a monster. He’s a half-vampire due to fact that his mom was bitten when she was pregnant. He needs to take a special serum to keep his vampire side at bay lest he become what he hates.

And there’s no reason not to hate the vampires in this movie. They’re an array of pompous jerks, scumbags, and psychopaths. There’s no grey area here. Blade sees vampires as all evil and they all need to die because vampires are all evil and they all need to die! None of this True Blood, vampires deserve equal rights crap!

Blade even has his own Alfred in the form of a cantankerous hillbilly named Whistler (Kris Kristofferson).

Blade’s arch nemesis is Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff) a megalomaniac who wants to fulfill some dark prophecy about resurrecting the “Blood God.” Frost can only be described as a perfect asshole, but he is genuinely funny like when he sees one hears one of his vampire minions pleading for help after Blade catches him and Frost says, “Pearl, you’re history. Have the good grace to die with some fuckin’ dignity.”

These days the superhero genre is as reputable as the western or gangster film. When you go to see Avengers: Age of Ultron keep in mind that the movie wouldn’t be possible if not for a little movie featuring Wesley Snipes slaying bloodsuckers with his trusty Katana.

Five Things I Learned from Blade

Don’t go to raves in meat packing plants.
Who needs the Batmobile when you’ve got a 1968 Dodge Charger?
Morbidly obese vampires are very unpleasant.
Actors can be very expressive while wearing sunglasses.
Some movies actually live up to their trailers.

_______

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

Heroes Never Rust #90: Skip the Door

22 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust

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Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Heroes Never Rust, sean ironman, Watchmen

Heroes Never Rust #90 by Sean Ironman

Watchmen: When Not to Show

Watchmen, for the most part, is devoid of action. There are blips on the radar, but the comic is very much a bunch of talking heads.

But the eighth issue is the most action packed. We get Rorschach taking on Big Figure and his henchmen, Night Owl and Silk Spectre breaking Rorschach from prison, and the murder of Hollis Mason, the original Night Owl. The issue is bloody and violent, but upon re-reading it, I was in awe of how little Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons show the violence. Many beginner writers go overboard with action scenes, and they could do worse than studying the eighth issue in finding a way to be violent without showing too much. This goes for every aspect of a story, really. When does a writer cut away? What does a writer show to the reader?

In the first action scene of the issue, Big Figure, a crime boss from the 1960s that Night Owl and Rorschach put in jail, uses the prison riot distracting guards to his benefit and goes to Rorchach’s cell with two henchmen. Rorschach pisses off one of the henchmen, who tries to grab Rorschach through the bars. Rorschach ties his hands so that Big Figure can’t open the cell. Wanting revenge, Big Figure has the second henchman cut the first henchman’s throat so they can get to the lock. In one panel, we see the second henchman with a shiv to the first henchman’s throat. But, we don’t see the throat cut. We get a shot of Rorschach with a stone cold look on his face as blood splashes onto his stomach.

Why change perspective there? Does it have something to do with the reader not being able to handle the grisly scene? Some might say so, but I wouldn’t. If someone didn’t want to read a comic with violence like this, they would not have advanced to the eighth issue. And if they miraculously did and still did not want to see violence, they still get a scene where a person’s throat is cut. They might not see the knife cut through skin, but they know what’s going on. The slitting of the throat is not shown because it does not matter. It’s unimportant. Skip the door and all that.

The henchman is barely a character. Readers are shown Rorschach’s response. He’s one of the main characters of the comic. And his response is that he has none. He doesn’t even acknowledge the man dying. The moment is used to support Rorschach’s characterization, not to give the audience a violent encounter. That’s the difference between violence being used gratuitously and violence serving the story.

Later, violence is used in a similar fashion when Night Owl and Silk Spectre proceed to rescue Rorschach from prison. At first, Rorschach refuses to leave until he settles the score with Big Figure, who has run into a bathroom. Big Figure’s death is not shown. Instead, readers stay with Night Owl and Silk Spectre as they wait in the hall. Again, Big Figure is not important. It might be “cool” to get a death scene, but the story does not require it. The story needs to keep the main characters front and center. So, while the reader can understand what is going on in the bathroom, the reader would not understand what Silk Spectre and Night Owl discuss while waiting. It’s more important for the reader to stay with those two and their conversation than to follow Rorschach. There is nothing surprising about what happens to Big Figure. Skip the door.

Now, the final action scene of the issue—the death of Hollis Mason, the original Night Owl, is a bit different. No main character is present. One could argue that the scene does not affect the main plot of Watchmen, and one would be right in that assumption. Yet, it still is an important scene. It deals with the aftereffects of the main plot. It gives the story weight.

In Watchmen, much of the public dislikes superheroes. A gang blames Doctor Manhattan and the other vigilantes for the troubles of the world, for the world being on the verge of nuclear Armageddon. Hollis Mason released a book years earlier revealing he was Night Owl. The gang, not understanding there is a new Night Owl, go to kill Hollis because they think they are stopping a superhero. They break into his house and beat him to death.

Instead of seeing him die, the scene is cut up. Readers are given one panel of the fight, and then one of Hollis in the past as Night Owl fighting criminals. Due to the break in the scene, the sequence becomes about more than just the death of Hollis Mason. It becomes about consequences.

About the aftermath. Doctor Manhattan, Rorschach, Night Owl, and Silk Spectre can’t save everyone. Their existence, in itself, is capable of bringing pain to others. And what happens years later to these superheroes, when they’re old and forgotten?

Watchmen, at its very heart, is a study about superheroes in the real world. The consequences of their existence. The effect they have on the world. That’s what makes Watchmen so interesting. But, superheroes can’t just affect the world in a good way. That’s not interesting. That’s not real. Bad things will happen, like they do with Hollis Mason. No one can save the entire world.

_______

Photo by John King

Buzzed Books #25: Across a Green Ocean

21 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books

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Across a Green Sea, Wendy Lee

Buzzed Books #25 by Leslie Salas

Across a Green Ocean

Across a Green Ocean, by Wendy Lee, presents the intertwined stories of an immigrant mother and her two children living in the suburbs of New York City. When Ling can’t get a hold of her son, Michael, she sends his older sister, Emily, to check up on him.

Ling’s concern for her children resonates as authentically as her self-conscious speech patterns, offering a nuanced glimpse into her worries about her place in a society so different from the one she grew up in. Her daughter Emily struggles as a woman so dedicated to her work at a law firm representing immigrants like her parents that she neglects her husband’s eagerness to build a family. The son Michael, known for his quiet artistic talents and friendship with the girl next door, harbors a secret identity from his family and a curiosity that takes him half the world away to find answers.

The lives of this aging mother and her grown children unfurl–Michael is missing, Emily’s relationship with her husband is on the brink, and Ling must come to terms with moving nearly a year after the death of her spouse. This masterfully crafted novel weaves three simultaneous perspectives–of the mother, daughter, and son–with engaging and believable narrates in the unique voices of each character, reflecting their background, education, and temperament. Through the course of these pages, Lee’s brushstrokes paint a compelling portrait of an immigrant family’s struggles culminating in the unveiling of a horrible family secret, leaving hope for a solid foundation to rebuild their familial relationships, come to peace with their identities, and find their places in the world across the green ocean.

Pair with: Snow Beer, the most popular beer in the world, which you have to travel to China to try.

_______

Leslie Salas (episode 75, Gutter Space) writes fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and comics. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute. In addition to being an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Leslie also serves as an assistant editor for The Florida Review, a graphic nonfiction editorial assistant for Sweet: A Literary Confection, and a regular contributing artist for SmokeLong Quarterly.

The Global Barfly’s Companion #4: The Sea Vista Tiki Bar

20 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in The Global Barfly's Companion

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The Global Barfly’s Companion #4 by Sam Slaughter

Bar: The Sea Vista Tiki Bar

Location: 1701 S Atlantic Ave, New Smyrna Beach, FL

I’m going to go ahead and say that the Sea Vista Tiki Bar is the best place to people watch in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. The bar, one of many beachside bars in the “Shark Attack Capital of the World,” features dirt-cheap drinks, a beachside pool, and more local color than seems possible.

There has never been a beachside bar (that I’ve been to) that has epitomized the phrase “One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor” more than Sea Vista. The moment you walk up to the bar—which is an outdoor deck with beach access—you’ll see why. There will be an abundance of “tramp stamps” that have long started to fade and sag, at least three bikers wearing only leather vests and shorts, and a gaggle of small children running to and from the pool as their parents get hammered. Your job as a patron is to order the strongest drink you can think of, sit back, and relax to late 90s ska/punk/beach jams by bands like 311 and No Doubt.

You don’t go there expecting style or class. You go there for drinks like the Tiki Tea or the 386 Motherf*cker that, within minutes, start your buzz. Within a drink or two (and at Sea Vista’s prices, why not two?), you begin to forget that you may end up playing giant Jenga with an ex-con.

This type of beachside perfection is only heightened by the fact that you can walk down onto the beach, dig a hole for your plastic cup, and pass out whenever you’re ready. A bloody Mary buzz under the Florida sun is a beautiful thing as the ocean breeze tickles your back and you slowly sweat out pure vodka.

_______

Photo by Oxley Photography 2014

Sam Slaughter (Episodes 119, 126, and 129) is a writer, English professor, and beer brewer based in DeLand, Florida. He’s had fiction, book reviews, and other nonfiction published in a variety of places, including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, South85, Drafthorse, The Southern Literary Review, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. He can be found on twitter @slaughterwrites and on his website.