Busboys and Bistros

My favorite thing about this essay by Jackie Kruszewski is the way it embraces, and revels in the delights of, a job that most of us would consider stressful and exhausting. It’s true: Jackie loves waitressing. She does it for fun.

Last year (or maybe it was the year before?), Jackie asked me to recommend a book by a Russian author. She was canvassing friends for travel-appropriate literatary recommendations in advance of a trip to Moscow. I insisted she borrow my copy of Master and Margarita.

Some friends remember to return books but many don’t, and I never keep track of the books I loan out. When I loan a book, I assume I might never see it again, which is perfectly fine by me.

But not only did Jackie make a point of returning my Penguin paperback edition of Master and Margarita, she returned it with a bookmark from a cafe in Moscow based on the novel. In return for loaning her an ordinary paperback, I got back a literary keepsake to slip between the covers of one of my all-time favorite novels.

All of which is to say: Jackie Kruszewski: Great writer, class act.

Enjoy more of Jackie’s writing here and here.

Photo of the Latin Quarter in Paris taken from This Recording.

Big Time

Here is the story I told at the Story League contest “Odd Jobs: Things We’ve Done for Money,” at Busboys and Poets on Sunday.

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Big Time

By Sean Carman

For six months I lived in a hotel, in Boise, Idaho, working on a trial in federal court.

It was like being chained to the wheel of suffering.

For one thing, every day was the same. We had breakfast, then went to court, or to the rented office where we organized our exhibits and prepared our witnesses. After lunch it was back to court, or to the office. You had an hour to yourself before dinner, and then we’d work until 10 or 11 at night, sometimes later.

Trials concern important things, but daily courtroom practice can be tedious. You might spend 15 minutes laying the foundation for a motion to put a chart into evidence, and another 15 arguing about whether the chart should be admitted into evidence.

At the end of this the lawyers for the other side say, “We’ve been going at this a long time, Your Honor. How about we take a break?”

During the break, everyone talks about the chart. Is it going to be admitted into evidence? Why wasn’t it admitted into evidence more quickly? What if it’s not admitted?

After the break, the other side has a new argument about the chart. Finally, after what seems like two hours, but has really been 40 minutes, the chart is admitted into evidence.

And you think to yourself, “Thank God! The chart is now in evidence.” Because now you can ask your witness your first question about the chart.

Every night I went back to my hotel room, with its queen-sized bed, adjoining bathroom, and tiny writing desk. In my mind, it came to resemble a minimum security prison.

But like all prisoners, I had a dream. A dream of escape.

My dream was to become a writer.

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We Want it To Be True: My Interview with Elif Batuman on the Rumpus

Elif Batuman was kind enough to let me interview her on the Rumpus. We talked about Mike Daisey’s narrative transgressions, his public treatment, and Tolstoy’s background research for War and Peace.

The five people who read this blog will know that these are issues I can’t stop thinking about — well, except for the part about War and Peace, that was news to me. Mike Daisey is a fascinating character, and his rise and fall illustrate some interesting things about the roles and perceived relative power of different kinds of storytelling. Thanks to Elif for taking the time, and for her brilliant (but fair!) critique of the This American Life retraction episode.

Oh, I should also mention that, not surprisingly, Elif Batuman is a delightful interview subject and correspondent. This was a really fun thing to do.

Here’s the link: http://therumpus.net/2012/04/the-rumpus-interview-with-elif-batuman/

A Memoir Writing Tip from Darin Strauss

Last night, in exchange for a modest contribution to a cause I love, I got to stand in author Susan Shreve’s living room and listen to Darin Strauss talk about his memoir, Half a Life.

Strauss’ memoir is about the life-long secret he kept about the girl who darted in front of his car on her bicycle when she was 18, killing herself and leaving Strauss to face a lifetime of grief and second guesses about how he might have saved her.

“I even did physics calculations,” Strauss said. “I drew diagrams on paper. But, you know, if someone swerves 20 feet in front of a car going 40 miles an hour, it’s impossible to avoid hitting her.” Ron Charles, the fiction critic for the Washington Post, put into words how all of us felt about Darin’s impromptu talk. “I don’t know what I was expecting,” he said to Shreve, “but that was so deep, and moving.”

The most surprising thing about his memoir, Strauss said, was the confessional e-mails he receives from readers, who have shared stories with him that they haven’t even told their spouses or their families. He’s thinking of compiling them into a book. When I asked him to sign my copy, he wrote “Let me know what you think of the book!” next to his e-mail address.

Strauss also had a brilliant tip for memoir writing.

“Be really hard on yourself,” he said. “The problem with almost every memoir is that the writer wants to forgive herself. You can see them doing it, in almost every paragraph, seeking to forgive themselves. But I think you should do the opposite. Be almost ruthless with yourself as a character. That’s what the reader wants.”

How Steve Saved Civilization

I wrote this story for Steve Souryal on the third anniversary of his reading series, the lowercase, at the Big Bear Coffee House in Washington’s Bloomington neighborhood.

How Steve Saved Civilization.

Or a Small Piece of it, Anyway.

By Sean Carman

In late December of 1993, a dying Charles Bukowski, the poet laureate of skid row, was using the last of his strength to finish the manuscript for his novel Pulp, the last work he would publish before his death in March of the following year.

Pulp is, according to Wikipedia, a “violent, cynical, sarcastic, and shocking work.” It is a convoluted and ultimately unsatisfying detective novel that redeems itself through a strain of heavy-handed symbolism about death and a running commentary on how convoluted, unsatisfying, and heavy-handed it is. It is a pulp novel that is also a commentary on pulp novels, a meta-pulp fiction, if you will.

Bukowski’s form of redemption was cleverly suited to the cheap genre to which his novel belonged. There was also the irony that, by redeeming a work of low-brow genre fiction by calling attention to its impoverished sensibility — an impoverished sensibility that was, by the way, essential to its identity — Bukowski lifted the work above that impoverishment, thereby creating a work of art through the denigration of that same work.

Whatever. We are less concerned here with a critique of Bukowski’s last work than with the unlikely events that rescued his manuscript from almost certain oblivion. For it was a drama in which our own Steve Souryal played a central role.

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A Biography for Steve Souryal

Wednesday was the third anniversary of the lowercase, a reading series at the Big Bear Cafe featuring the work of 826DC volunteers.

For some time now, Steve Souryal, the series founder and host, has been introducing his readers with fictional reader bios.  

For the series’ third anniversary, DC writer William Bert arranged to have regular lowercase readers offer fake biographies of Steve. Here is William’s hilarious entry, which he read on Wednesday and has reprinted on his blog:

Steve Souryal is a group of 15 small islets and rocks in the central equatorial Atlantic Ocean. He lies in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a region of severe storms. Steve exposes serpentinized abyssal mantle peridotite and kaersutite-bearing ultramafic mylonite on the top of the second-largest megamullion in the world (after the Parece Vela megamullion under Okinotoshima in the Pacific). He is the only location in the Atlantic Ocean where the abyssal mantle is exposed above sea level! In 1986, Steve was designated an environmentally protected area, and since 1998, the Danish Navy has maintained a permanently manned research facility in him. His main economic activity is tuna fishing, and we are incredibly lucky to have him with us tonight.

Click here to see a  picture of the celebratory balloons.

A Note on Kayden Kross

But that got me out of bed and onto the Spanish tile of the floor, slow and barefoot, cold soaking through to the bone. It felt like home back when home was my grandma’s. I washed my face in cold water and dried off with what smelled like a line-dried towel, like it was scented by the same fruit tree that hangs above my grandma’s with the sun bleached wooden clothes pins and the sagging rope. The difference is she wasn’t stirring real cocoa in the pot on the woodstove when I walked downstairs and I found myself wandering around the hotel with a skeleton key to my room hanging from my fingertips looking through the keyholes of other rooms to see if any lights were on. Nothing stirred and no one stopped me. The security guard was too busy facing the street.

This is from the blog of porn star Kayden Kross, who is one talented writer. Who knew? On McSweeney’s she talks to Adam Levin, author of The Instructions, and it’s a really smart conversation. Here’s Part One. Part Two is here. It’s more interesting when she’s asking the questions because, well, she asks better questions.

Roadside Assistance

I had to call my insurance company to arrange to have my car towed, because it wouldn’t start. Here is a partial transcript of the conversation:

Insurance Representative:  Emergency roadside assistance. Are you in your car and are you safe?

Me:  I’m not in my car. I’m calling from my office.

Insurance Representative:  But are you safe?

Me: I think so.

The Edge of Heaven

 Fatih Akin’s 2007 film is a masterpiece. On the surface, it is a complicated story about a Turkish prostitute working in Hamburg, whose murder prompts her killler’s son to locate and help her daughter, a Kurdish political activist in love with a Hamburg student. On a deeper level, it is about blindness, and the peace that comes from seeing others with compassion.

The movie circles back on itself, and carefully layers its story, giving every line and scene an immeasurable weight. When the Hamburg student, Yeter, flees to Istanbul to help her lover, Ayten, she overturns her mother’s house, convinced her mother has hidden her passport. Her mother finds it in plain sight and holds it up to her. “Look how blind you are,” she says. The film, naturally, will spend the rest of its time turning that accusataion back on the mother, and on its other characters as well.

Akin, a Turkish film-maker living in Hamburg, explained the movie this way: “What I’m always trying to say is, this Turkish-German gap, you know, or this connecting element of the two nations, or systems, or worlds — you can change that and put other things instead.”

The Lies of Mike Daisey (Cont’d.)

I keep hoping each Mike Daisey post will be my last, but the guy is just a gold mine of material.

On Tuesday of last week he appeared at D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theater, ostensibly as part of a forum to discuss the theater’s decision to bring Daisey’s show back for a limited run this summer, but in fact it wasn’t clear what Daisey was trying to do. He offered an apology but didn’t explain what, exactly, he thought he had done wrong, beyond a vague statement that he had failed to live up to his standards (whatever they are). What was billed as a discussion of the issues never confronted the issue at the heart of Mike Daisey’s work, namely, what responsibility does documentary theater owe to its audience and the truth? When someone says they are using theatrical tools to express a larger truth, what does that mean exactly? How is it different from propaganda?

Two days later, the New York Times reported Foxconn’s announcement that it would sharply curtain working hours and significantly increase wages in its factories.

If you look at the time line, it does seem that Daisey’s work drew a great deal of public and media attention to working conditions in China’s Apple factories. His fabricated stories of his own experience, that he fraudulently presented to audiences as a true account, and that he used to push them to activism, may end up being the most influential cause of progressive reform.

The uses of propaganda. A charlatan’s last laugh. Mike Daisey’s story would make an excellent subject for a novel.

On Mike Daisy and This American Life

I just finished listening to the This American Life episode recounting the lies in Mike Daisy’s monologue about working conditions at Apple factories in China. This American Life broadcast parts of Daisy’s monologue in an earlier show. Having learned that many of the scenes depicted in Daisy’s monologue never took place, and that many of his claims in the monologue aren’t true, the show was basically compelled to address the monologue in some fashion.

If you haven’t listened to the show yet, you really should. It’s really impossible to summarize its content without doing some sort of small injustice to the work Glass and his team have done to explain the fictional aspects of Daisy’s monologue, how they came about, and, most importantly, how they contrast with and are consistent with the truth about working conditions at Apple factories in China.

I think it’s fair to say that, in general, the working conditions Daisy describes in his monologue approach a basic truth about conditions in Apple factories. But he gets the details wrong, and the dramatic scenes through which Daisy conveys that information in his monologue seem to be entirely fabricated. He talks of meeting underage workers that he never met and, most dramatically, of showing an Ipad to a worker whose hand had been mangled in an industrial press used to fabricate the electronic device. When the man moves the icons on the Ipad’s screen he says, “It’s magic.” Powerful stuff, but it never actually happened. The man and incident are fiction.

I had some loosely connected reactions to the show, presented after the jump.

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Let Franzen Be Franzen

“Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose…it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters.”

With those words, Jonathan Franzen set off a small internet firestorm.

He said them in in New Orleans, where author Jami Attenberg wrote them down, and then put them on her blog, saying she was “sort of infuriated.” Her post was quoted, and retweeted, gaining wider and wider circulation, annoying more and more readers, or maybe just making them curious, until it all culminated, as it seems all small internet firestorms must these days, in an essay by Roxane Gay.

Roxane made a good point — that everyone should just relax and let Franzen be Franzen — but I thought it was interesting that the gist of what Franzen said, quoted above, came in at just under 140 characters — 137, to be exact.

It would have made the perfect tweet. It was concise and provocative. Presented in the form of a tweet, it would have had a nice irony to it — a criticism of a form as the perfect expression of that form. Who says modernism is dead!

My response to Jonathan Franzen’s criticism of twitter is that maybe he should try it. He might be better at it, and have more to say, than he realizes.

This was pretty funny …

An Essayist’s Lament

One of my favorite passages from What We Should Have Known, N + 1’s pocket discussion book of literary regrets:

Keith Gessen:  I want to move us into life choices. Does anybody regret the profession they have chosen?

Mark Greif:  I have no profession. Whatever profession I do, I regret it.

Benjamin Kunkel:  What do you  … mean? What are you talking about?

Mark Greif:  I regret it!

Benjamin Kunkel:  What?

Mark Greif:  Whatever it is that I’ve become.

Keith Gessen:  You’ve become a philosopher.

Mark Greif:  No philosopher would think so.

Keith Gessen:  You’ve become an editor.

Mark Greif:  But that’s something to be ashamed of.

Benjamin Kunkel:  An essayist? A critic?

Mark Greif:  Essayist! That’s interesting. You know, you go through life not really knowing who you are, and one day, someone calls you an essayist. Out of all the pathetic categories that I read growing up, I knew there was no bigger joke than an essayist. Someone who couldn’t write something long enough to actually grab hold of anyone, someone without the imagination to write fiction, someone without the romantic inspiration to write poetry, and someone who would never make any money or be published. I’m an essayist!

Kate Bolick:  Sure, I regret, but I also have no idea what I would be other than what I am, so it’s useless.

Mark Greif:  That’s the problem, that you’re doomed. After a certain point. Unless you’re taken firmly in hand when you’re a small child. And even then, you might be ruined, from what you’re reading.

My Favorite Rockabilly Band

I ventured out to Arlington with my notebook and my camera and wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about my good friends The Highallers. The story is here.