NOLA BOOK AND LITERARY NEWS
from Nathan C. Martin and Friends.

OPP ENGLISH, Part III: In the Classroom

posted May 20, 2013
Illustrations by Clark Allen
Illustrations by Clark Allen

Inside Orleans Parish Prison—one of the worst jails in the country—an English class takes place, not to help inmates fulfill GED requirements, but simply to facilitate their study of literature and books. In this three-part series, Room 220‘s Ari Braverman explores the parts of the program that make it work—and make it worthwhile—from the founder of the program, Nik De Dominic, to the many local writers who teach in it, to the inmates who take part in it. The program is currently an all-volunteer effort, though it is looking for funding.

Read OPP English “Part I: The Instigator” and “Part II: When I left, my mind was buzzing.”

By Ari Braverman

“All right! Who’s feeling read-y?”

This is how Nik De Dominic asks for volunteers.

A voice issues from the middle of three students seated in a conference-style arrangement of tables in a windowless classroom inside Orleans Parish Prison: “Me.”

The man clears his throat before reading the first line of Matthias Svalina’s “Creation Myth”: In the beginning, everyone wanted to fight to the death.

We’re all silent as he continues, poring over a handout, including Anne McKinley, grants supervisor at OPP and the prison-side coordinator of De Dominic’s program. The poem ends and De Dominic indulges the room’s resonant silence. All three students are still staring at the poem when he asks them to unpack the text.

“Genesis,” says one student, who will only give his name as D.

Behind D and the other two students, the room is full of bookshelves that are mostly empty. De Dominic’s personal donations fill two rows, and behind where I sit there are a number of volumes for the prison’s high school reading program, but that’s it. Someone has placed a new globe near the door.  Three plastic cabinets dominate the room’s rear wall, each secured with a padlock. It’s unclear whether or not they, too, are empty.

Apart from these and the guard seated in front of them, the white and orange sweat suits, plastic sandals, and shackles, it’s tempting to forget this isn’t a standard poetry class. The students arrive on time, 3 p.m. every Thursday, and stay engaged for the whole two-hour period. Each man has the same easy bearing in this space, the confidence that comes from aptitude and experience. They’ve all been in the class since the beginning of the semester in September, and everyone says he’s learned something.

D says he never watches the clock in the hope that class time is running down—a departure from his experience as an undergraduate. On the contrary, he says he hopes for an extra twenty minutes every week: “I don’t know if it’s the jail environment, the way it offsets class—you have to take that into consideration,” he says, “but I just get caught up. You’re learning something, doing something constructive, positive. You’re learning something about yourself maybe, expressing yourself through writing, and you want to keep going.”

De Dominic guides us through the packet without interruption. There’s none of the side conversation or daydreaming that happens in most classrooms. Everyone at the table takes a turn reading a poem out loud. Each begins with the phrase “In the beginning.”

Jason Romero volunteers to read a piece about a woman who tapes, glues, and paperclips complementary objects together—tears to faces, smiles to happy people, leaves to trees—but isn’t happy with the outcome.

“That woman’s confused, man,” he says after finishing. His classmates and teacher murmur in agreement. Black block letters on his sweatshirt spell out “OPP,” another reminder we’re not at Xavier, Loyola, Tulane, UNO, Dillard, or Delgado. He says the paperclip poem reminds him of the world.

D reads a poem in which the world begins with an old man telling stories to mimeograph machines he thinks are children, and the packet concludes with “Destruction Myth,” the last piece in the eponymous collection. De Dominic prefaces it by asking the students why Svalina might have chosen the name he did, given there’s only one “Destruction Myth” and the rest of the book’s 44 poems are all called “Creation Myth.”

Different timbres fill the classroom as the students read from final piece round-robin. The language is choppy and spare, the images visceral and concrete, yet mysterious. When it’s finished, De Dominic appeals to his students as writers, not just readers, and asks them about how the thing works, what it’s doing and why, and what language they’d love to borrow. It’s easy to see why these men feel so comfortable with De Dominic—he comes to them as a teacher, but never crosses the line between instruction and condescension. He’s encouraging but never saccharine, friendly but not too familiar.

“He’s saying that, in the end, one thing that’s normally with another thing would be without it, which makes you realize what they would be [alone]. What would the salt be without the sea?” Romero muses.

Then De Dominic says it’s time to wax philosophical. “Is creation possible without destroying?” he asks.

D counters the question with one of his own: “The intention is to show us that there’s violence in birth and life?”

“Maybe.”

Unphased by the oblique reply, D continues:“[I’m thinking of] the different ways things are created—anything from an omelet to birth to the mountains. At some point in the process there’s some kind of destruction or violence. I guess you could call [creation] a violent act.”

Romero riffs off this comment and suggests: “I guess we have to break one thing down to make another thing. Like an omelet. If you want use onions, you have to break them down a little bit to make the whole omelet.” This begins a discussion of the necessity of pain when it comes to mastering tricks on a skateboard.

Later, Romero tells me he didn’t participate much in the beginning of the semester: “When I first got to class, I was really shy and nervous. I don’t think I’m dumb or anything, but everyone was so smart!” He laughs. “I was just quiet, just listening. Now I’m doing it all.” He wears a black beanie and has a plastic rosary around his neck, and looks very young. He and D are from the same tier in OPP. I ask if they hang out when they’re not in class and they both laugh.

“We don’t like each other,” D says, pointing at Romero across the table. “We try to kill each other.” He pantomimes a snarl.

Romero grins: “I can’t stand him.”

It turns out that, at least on that particular tier, these students are some of the program’s best ambassadors. Romero shares what he’s learned with a younger friend, who in turn has contacted McKinley, the OPP coordinator, about joining the class next semester.

“We’ve been advertising,” D tells her, and she thanks him with a mix of sweetness and sarcasm and feigned exasperation. She seems more a housemother than authority figure.

Bryan Baker, the third student, spends his time on a different tier. Except for his initial participation and reading out loud when it’s his turn, he remains quiet in spite of his palpable engagement with the text. He appears older than D and Romero and has a powerful build that amplifies his taciturn presence. But his sternness belies a romantic heart. When asked why he signed up for the class, he answers: “I wanted to write poetry. I wanted to write to females.” He pauses. “I’m just being honest.”

Everyone at the table—teacher and student alike—concludes his reason is completely valid.

“That’s why I started writing poetry,” De Dominic offers.

However, as class ends, Baker also describes how important it felt to participate in something like this. He says wanted to do something that would elevate him. “I look forward to coming here every Thursday to get an experience to bring back [to the tier]. We’re around a lot of negative shit all day, so it’s good to get out the door for a little while and learn something. [This class] really works for me.”

Romero echoes the sentiment: “I feel like I’m bettering myself by coming to this class, sitting here, paying attention, working on my writing. Writing and literature is something you can use throughout your whole life, not just in one certain career.” He illustrates his point with a discussion of injury. What happens if someone who’s been taught a physical trade loses a hand or a leg, or becomes paralyzed? “The trade is now useless,” he says, “but if you are strong intellectually, it’s something you always have with you.”

“A class like this,” D says, “can help you communicate between cultures, ages, races, sexes, to better understand where people are coming from and to better express yourself to a broad range of people. There’s a wider range, a bigger net. You can modify [what you’ve learned] to fit certain career requirements.”

To steer the focus back towards Svalina’s poetry, De Dominic gives the class five minutes to make their own creation or destruction myths. He reminds everyone about the brevity of Svalina’s phrasing, as well as the poet’s pop culture references that ground the writing and create a sense of familiarity for his readers. Everybody, including De Dominic, gets right to work, and the room is silent. The guard at the back of the room peruses the screen of her smart phone.  D squints at his paper for a long time, tapping his pen against his bottom lip. The five minutes become seven, then ten. Baker and Romero write quickly, and the latter is still editing his work after De Dominic calls time.

“Where do we begin? I want to hear these.” De Dominic leans back in his plastic chair, laces his fingers behind his head.

D’s effort has rendered something short and opaque but full of possibility: “In the beginning there was time. / Just waiting for it all to start. / Again, in the beginning time was waiting / and it waited till the very end.”

Baker has come up with some of the most resonant lines of the day, including “The sun will come up but never go down / … / Fires will last forever.” He retreats into silence as soon as he finishes reading.

Romero’s piece is the longest of the three. He describes childhood totems: a tricycle and nightlights, coloring books and tantrums. He regards the page with a gentle expression as De Dominic compliments the work.

Then, keeping with seminar format, De Dominic reads his own, a piece about New Orleans that begins with Justin Bieber and Madonna and ends with the collapse of social media.

“That’s got legs, that’s got legs, and that’s got legs, too,” De Dominic says, pointing at D and Baker and Romero in succession. “Go back to them and write them out. What you’re doing now is pretty.”

On that note, class ends. De Dominic has to be across town by 5 p.m. to teach at Delgado’s campus on the West Bank, and the three inmates are due their allotted daily “outside time.” De Dominic says an easy goodbye and disappears through the door. The students line up. The cuffs on their ankles, cumbersome plastic flip-flops, and thick white socks keep their strides very short. The guard opens the door and ushers them through it. I’m next, and McKinley brings up the rear.

We exit into a dark concrete cellblock and take the stairs very slowly until we reach a landing. Instead of a window or guardrail, an iron grate separates us from a three-story fall onto Tulane Avenue, and the air from the outside world presses on our faces.

McKinley looks at her watch. “Starting now,” she says. “Three minutes.” Everyone takes a position looking out. “We used to do it for five,” she tells me, “but some people just couldn’t help hollering at some people.”

Romero laces his fingers into the metal latticework, sets his forehead in the space between his hands. D and Baker just look. The traffic sounds very far away. Tulane Tower rises in a plank of sunlight across the street.

“All right, guys,” McKinley says. “Time to go.”

I’m not sure there is a clear distinction between “to communicate” and to “monologue”: An interview with Rachel Kushner

posted May 8, 2013
Kushner - interview

By Nathan C. Martin

Like any historical novel—even one set in recent history—Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers is a convergence of the past and the present, the time before now rendered with the help of research but intrinsically influenced by the contemporary moment that shapes the author’s daily life. And like many novels, The Flamethrowers is an amalgam of the author’s personal interests strung together by her character’s movements—in this case, the downtown New York art scene in the late 1970s and the Movement of ’77, a leftist revolt that rocked Italy that year. Kushner’s work as an art critic—she’s written for Artforum for more than a decade—helped spawn her interest in the former, and as she researched the latter after learning about the Autonomists and other components of the Movement of ’77, the texts of that era came alive as the Occupy and other movements culled them for instruction and inspiration for their own political actions.

The thread that connects these two elements—New York art and Italian revolt—in The Flamethrowers is Reno, a recent art school graduate from Nevada who moves to New York to cut her teeth as an artist and adult. She wends her way into the world she desires and becomes involved with Sandro Valera, a prominent minimalist who’s also the estranged scion of an Italian motorcycle baron—which is fortuitous, considering Reno’s transfixion with both art and motorcycle racing. The plot unfurls from here, with wild forays that entwine the narrator and others that transport the reader further back in time, to the genesis of the Valera empire, and into the depths of the imaginations of characters Reno encounters, who hold forth with indeterminably fantastical stories and revolutionary theories.

Rachel Kushner is also the author of Telex From Cuba, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. She will present The Flamethrowers at a Happy Hour Salon hosted by Room 220 that will also feature readings by Nathaniel Rich and Zachary Lazar from 6 – 9 p.m. on Thursday, May 9, at the Press Street HQ (3718 St. Claude Ave.). As usual, complimentary libations will be on hand, though we strongly suggest donations. Copies of The Flamethrowers and titles by Rich and Lazar will be on sale courtesy of Maple Street Book Shop. This event is free and open to the public.

Room 220: You wrote a piece for the Paris Review in which you mentioned writing about mass demonstrations in The Flamethrowers while Occupy Wall Street was on the news. While you were writing about riots, they were erupting in London and Greece. In depicting the political elements of the book, how much was your eye turned toward the present and what was going on?

Rachel Kushner: The way I conceive of the novel—my experience of writing one—is of living in a world that is constantly being shaped and filtered by the book I am writing. My eye is always turned toward the present, because the present, the whole extended plane of life, is arranging itself to be lifted up and transported into fiction. I thought a great deal about these past events in the 70s. I had encountered the Autonomist movement through my husband, who writes about French and Italian philosophy and political theory in the 20th century, and through him I met some Italians who knew a great deal about this milieu. I thought it would be a pretty thrilling context for a novel.

As I was writing the book, Autonomia and the Movement of 77 started to seem like something of a cultural zeitgeist. A lot of people were interested in Italy, and that’s partly because of Occupy and other movements that were going on. Even people in the Arab movements were looking to Italy, and people in the anti-austerity movements across Europe. It’s a really interesting time that hasn’t completely been studied and declared defunct in the way that May ’68 has. The Italian 1970s may have more interesting and relevant links to the contemporary era, given that the autonomist actions extended beyond the factory into the cities and were a set of refusals that no longer cohered with the factory and a traditionally Marxist class composition. Beyond the complicated issue of Autonomia, there were these rather simple coherences between what I wrote and what was going on in real life. As I wrote about the blackout in 1977, looting was erupting in London. As I wrote about people being tear-gassed in the streets of Rome that same year, people were being tear-gassed in Oakland. As I wrote about an anarchist street gang engaged in full-on combat with police, I watched live feeds from Greece of these kids fighting the cops in insanely asymmetrical battles, launching molotovs with lacrosse sticks.

Autonomists

I knew a lot of people involved in Occupy—many who are younger than I am, people in their early 20s for whom Occupy will probably have been the essential historical event of their time. My friends in Occupy are and were all interested in Autonomia, and they were reading the same texts I was reading. I did a reading from the novel-in-progress in L.A. and everyone thought that what I was reading was about them, when it was actually about this historical group of anarchists in New York City from ’67 – ’71 who were called the Motherfuckers. People know about that group, but my friends sort of thought I was writing a text that was related to them or inspired by them, and in a way they were correct.

Rm220: Factory workers play a potent role in the political landscape of your novel, as they have in real political movements throughout recent history. In terms of writing as part of a contemporary conversation, how did you view that specific element, especially considering the decline of organized labor in the United States?

RK: The 70s in Italy is a pretty complicated milieu, but it’s something like this: A lot of the theoretical components of Autonomia were born in the factories of the highly industrialized north of Italy—there’s the Pirelli factory where the Red Brigades famously got their start, and there’s these motorcycle factories, and of course there’s Fiat. But none of it, as I understand it, was about “organized labor” in a traditional sense—though I should say I’m no expert on autonomist and workerist history. I think some of the theories about why the Hot Autumn of 1969 at the Fiat factories was so intense and so many workers participated in the strikes is that many of the workers come from the south of Italy, which does not have the culture of work that you find in the north. This difference between the south and the north manifested itself in this total disregard on the part of the workers for their labor bosses when these strikes start to happen. They were primarily strikes that were not organized by union leaders, and instead something more like wildcat strikes. The movement partly happened because workers rejected their unions and the communist party altogether. They organized themselves, which is the origin of the term autonomia.

The component of Autonomia that was Rome-based was much more of a sub-proletarian, lumpen population of people who were not productive, and they certainly didn’t do factory work because it’s not an industrialized part of Italy. That’s a really complicated component of things: How did this mass revolt and mass illegality across multiple sectors of people occur if there’s no factory as a site of principle antagonism? People would try to explain it to me: “Well, people in Rome, they are not interested in work, they wanted to have a different kind of life. It’s a total rejection of bourgeois values.” There was simply a refusal to work, and I think that relates to what people are feeling now. Those in Occupy were not making a specific set of demands. They weren’t asking for health benefits and better minimum wages as barristas or whatever. It was, and I hope remains, a kind of rejection and a refusal, rather than a demand for a specific and better-negotiated position in the service economy—which is to say, the economy. I love that moment in The Wild One when someone asks Marlon Brando what he’s rebelling against and he says, “What do you got?”

“Splitting” by Gordon Matta-Clark

Rm220: And how did you come upon the New York art world of the late 1970s as a context in which to set part of the book?

RK: I’m familiar with that era partly from having written about contemporary art—a significant time and an influential time still for contemporary art—and partly from my childhood, and having been exposed, early, to some of it. That period also coincides with the death of the industrial age in the United States. It seems like an interesting coincidence—or not a coincidence—that the artists in SoHo were moving into these former manufacturing warehouses, and even using the detritus of manufacturing itself to make their work. As I was beginning to write The Flamethrowers, there was a retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark at the Whitney. Later, mid-way through the book, there was a retrospective of the Pictures Generation at the Met. A Jack Goldstein show is opening like next week in New York City, and I just saw it at the Orange County Museum. The 1970s is still an informing era for contemporary artists, who continue to be drawn to it, and to feel a need to contend with the figures and ideas and the discourse of that era. All of this made the era feel worth writing about.

Rm220: The book is filled with people talking over each other, or at least talking not so much to communicate but to simply talk. You have all these monologues—Ronnie’s story at the end, Stanley Kastle’s monolog, which is literally to no one. They’re excellent stories, but their quality doesn’t change their motivation. Relate this to your writing practice. How much of your writing practice is to communicate, to take part in the conversation, and how much is simply to monologue?

RK: I’m not sure there is a clear and clean distinction between “to communicate” and to “monologue.” The person who speaks in a long breathless jag probably feels he is communicating something important or he would not bother. I think a lot of people want to talk more than they want to listen. Meaning some component of their speech is always about the speech itself and their need to perform it and to hear their own voice and to dominate by talking, more than it is about making contact with a listener. But there is some level at which neither monologue nor communication are what matter to the novel, the rules of it, because the author is always communicating to the reader. Nothing is by accident or impulse—it’s all there, ultimately, by some kind of design. The author, ideally, is not a bloviator at the dinner table, but registering the phenomenon of such to have fun or be comic or make some other kind of point, for instance, to introduce textures into the narrative that the narrator can’t, since she is one voice, unmodulated.

For me, this resembles life—sometimes there are these people who are frankly bored when anyone else in the room is talking but them. And I like the sort of self-declared experts that can say a lot more about themselves than they think they’re saying when they want to tell you every detail about a subject of which they have the impression they are an expert—and sometimes they are an expert, but they tell you about their ego’s needs as they inform you.

Reno, the narrator, can’t entirely surf the more sophisticated discourses of the people around her and so she is often more quiet and withdrawn, which lent more space for other people to talk. I was also interested formally in the challenge of letting dialogue take over for very long stretches, letting someone who isn’t the narrator talk for thirty pages. The narrator is there, but she’s simply recording what he’s saying as a listener in the room. While I was working on this book I re-read The Savage Detectives by Bolaño. I love the way he lets people tell stories within stories. He’s obviously not the first person to do that. Conrad does, uses framing mechanisms. I was interested in developing my own manner of doing that.

Rm220: You mentioned Savage Detectives, but I thought several times of 2666 while reading this book—your narrator is perpetually on the outskirts of these things that are going on, which is the same for most of the narrators in 2666. And in 2666, as well, there are lots stories told by characters that go on for pages that, seemingly, have nothing to do with the plot.

RK: I read 2666 when I was just getting the engine of my novel running. For me, that novel and Savage Detectives have somehow become one massive tapestry. I think they are interrelated in a way that Bolaño’s other books are not. His other books relate in certain surface ways or in structural ways, but those two novels seem to be circling around the same questions—of the nature of evil, for instance—one in a more playful way and the other in a more dark and vast but insidious way. I think I’m equally influenced by both of those books. I certainly studied them—as many other writers have—and I’m flattered you thought of 2666.

OPP ENGLISH, Part II: “When I left, my mind was buzzing.”

posted May 2, 2013
Clockwise, from top left: Anne Gisleson, Michael Jeffrey Lee, Mark Yakich, and Lara Naughton
Clockwise, from top left: Anne Gisleson, Michael Jeffrey Lee, Mark Yakich, and Lara Naughton

Inside Orleans Parish Prison—one of the worst jails in the country—an English class takes place, not to help inmates fulfill GED requirements, but simply to facilitate their study of literature and books. In this three-part series, Room 220‘s Ari Braverman explores the parts of the program that make it work—and make it worthwhile—from the founder of the program, Nik De Dominic, to the many local writers who teach in it, to the inmates who take part in it. The program is currently an all-volunteer effort, though it is looking for funding.

Click here to read “OPP English, Part I: The Instigator”

By Ari Braverman

For many writers, teaching provides an opportunity for connection and conversation (not to mention a steady paycheck), and a chance to share ideas with students and like-minded colleagues. But sometimes the academy starts to feel a little closed-in.

The men and women who teach in the Orleans Parish Prison English Program are mostly drawn from a pool of local writers acquainted with the program’s director, Nik De Dominic, who teach at local universities or the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts. Their jobs provide them access to discussions about literature, but systematic conditions, often related to poverty and race, prevent much of the local population from entering their classrooms. Teaching inmates in OPP not only provides these writers the opportunity to engage a severely underserved demographic—it also reveals to them new ways of looking at literature as it relates to life.

De Dominic says he’s reached a point where he no longer has to search for potential instructors. His waiting list is full of talented people like Mark Yakich, a poet and professor at Loyola University, who feel an obligation to use their skills outside the traditional classroom.

“Helping my Loyola students is great,” Yakich said, “but even the ones who are the first in their families to attend college have a leg up, and I’d been thinking about that gap.”

I spoke with four of the many local writers who have entered OPP to talk books and writing with its inmates. Their experiences are varied, but respect and excitement emerged as common themes from one interview to the next, and each conversation culminated in an appreciation of De Dominic’s work and a profound sense of gratitude for having participated.

Anne Gisleson teaches creative writing at NOCCA. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, Oxford American, and many other places. She is also Press Street’s Board President.

Lara Naughton is the chair of NOCCA’s creative writing program. Her documentary plays, including most recently Never Fight A Shark In Water, have been performed on stages across the country.

Mark Yakich is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Loyola University, editor of the New Orleans Review, and author of the novel A Meaning for Wife and several poetry collections.

Michael Jeffrey Lee is a writing teacher at NOCCA whose collection of stories, Something In My Eye, won the 2010 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.

What follows is an arrangement of excerpts from separate conversations with each of the four writers.

I. Just calm down. It’s just like your NOCCA class.

Mark Yakich: I had this desire to do something outside of a university setting. Being a professor is great—I have this nice office with a couch. But you get a little insulated.

Michael Lee: I was involved with one of the earliest classes. Nik and I have been friends for a long time. We both taught for the Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project when we were in graduate school. He’d been kicking around the idea for a few years of getting something going at OPP and I was happy to get involved.

MY: I met Nik because he went to the University of Alabama’s MFA program. I have close friends who teach there. They knew of Nik and said, “You should meet this guy, this interesting, crazy poet.”

Anne Gisleson: I started last year, and I’ve done two classes. I was nervous at first. I remember emailing Nik about it beforehand and he told me, “Just calm down. It’s just like your NOCCA class. They’re just like your NOCCA students.” And I thought, “No, they’re not!”

Lara Naughton: To be honest, I wasn’t sure at first if I wanted to participate. I’ve worked with exonerees for years, so I was already familiar with some of the issues about OPP. But I’d always worked with people who were outside of prison. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into the prison and work because it’s an emotional place to be.

II. There I was, doing my preaching act for them.

ML:  Most recently, I taught Paul Bowles’ “Pastor Dow at Tecate,” which was the best discussion I’ve ever had in one of those classes. They were really, really into the story. They told me, “We don’t know what this is about, but we want to know.” The piece is about a pastor in South America trying to convert Indians and failing miserably. It sends him on this dark night of the soul. All of his armor is slowly pecked away.

I also thought the story, about a missionary—someone going into a different place and attempting to convert—was a nifty, disturbing parallel to what I was doing. We talked about that at length. We were laughing about it, because there I was, doing my preaching act for them.

AG: I agonized over what to choose. That was one of the things I was most nervous about. The stakes are so high. You’ve got such a small amount of time in which to teach. I chose “Shooting an Elephant,” by George Orwell. We were talking about the ways in which Orwell uses language to humanize the elephant, and there was this one guy who hadn’t said anything for the whole class. He was a big guy, with tattoos all over his arms. He just looked up and said, “Grandmotherly air.” And I thought “Oh God!” Because that’s the one point in that essay that kills me every time I read it. Orwell describes the elephant mired in a rice patty, knocking tufts of dried straw against itself with a “preoccupied, grandmotherly air” right before Orwell takes up a rifle to kill it. It’s such a perfect description, and this guy picked up on the exact moment that I always do.

LN: I brought in a story called “The Salamander,” by Merce Rodoreda, in which a woman has had an affair and is being shunned by the whole town and called a witch. She’s thrown onto a pile of sticks to be burned and, as she’s burning, her body slowly morphs into a salamander and she crawls off the fire. She goes to live the rest of her life under rocks and in rivers and under the bed of her former lover. There was a lot of excitement about the story’s weirdness, and real insight about her human nature. We all know what it’s like to be obsessed. We all know what it’s like to hurt so much that we have to transform somehow in order to hold the pain.

MY: The first thing I taught was Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” Whitman is trying to talk about the people who don’t usually get talked about in literature, and here you are with people who have been outside the system, or caught in the system in a very different way. Listening to them talk about the poem was very different than listening to my Loyola students talk about the poem. It obviously meant something to them in a way my other students, or even myself, couldn’t exactly see.

III. I found myself stepping it up as a teacher.

AG: I’ve never, ever taught a class—whether high school level, graduate level, college level—where there was the amount of focus I could feel in that room. You know that you have two hours with these guys, and that’s all you have. And they know that, too. They’re very aware they have this block of time outside the cell block where their minds are going to be engaged in a way they’re almost never engaged otherwise. I could not believe how quickly the time went by. I felt like I had to maximize every moment with them. I was constantly trying to connect what they were saying to each other and build on things, because I had such little time to do it. When I left, my mind was buzzing.

ML: There is something about the time limit, as well as the fact that they’ve been preparing for class all week. People talk about the stories or essays we give them with each other before they come to class. When we get in there, people are absolutely ready. They were so engaged and asked such interesting questions about the material that I found myself stepping it up as a teacher, very naturally asking better questions of them. It felt mutually enriching. My expectations were exceeded completely, in terms of the intensity of the discussion and the degree to which I became emotionally invested in it.

AG: The second time I was at OPP, a guy asked “Why do people read?” It’s a question we don’t often think about because we’ve always been readers. But he basically said he didn’t grow up reading at all except cereal boxes or signs. It was never a priority. I asked him “Well, why did you read this essay?” He read it because he saw one of the guys on his block reading it and that guy was really into it, and he wanted to see what was so interesting about it. Of course, that’s the kind of question you always throw back to everybody else in the room, and they had much better answers than I could come up with. Immediate ones were about educating yourself to get along better in the world, expanding your brain so it’s not so narrow, not confined to just what you’re seeing in the world.

LN: There were a couple of guys who struggled a little more than the others with turning on the imagination for magical realism during that writing exercise. I think imagination is often beaten out of us as adults. I don’t know what brought these men to OPP, but clearly something has gone wrong, and there probably hasn’t always been room to sit and around and daydream and imagine. Sometimes that part gets turned off and it’s not always easy to turn it back on. That’s not just people in prison—that’s adults.

IV. It’s ridiculous how few people have access to this resource.

MY: As a poet, you think: “What good is this stupid little thing I’m writing?” You think, “I can write, but can I do other things in the world?” But then I remember: “I’m a teacher!” I tell my students, “Poetry may make nothing happen, but hopefully what poems can do is give you a slanted take on things.” Teaching liberal arts to inmates is not giving them a trade, but it’s hopefully changing or molding a mindset or mode of thinking, encouraging them to question things, to look at things from multiple perspectives. That’s all critical thinking is, to me—finding something’s patterns and variations and being able to ask questions. That’s what the humanities are really good at if they’re taught right.

ML: Only good things can come out of deep engagement with language and text. It’s a great thing that this program exists. Nik’s is the first of its kind in New Orleans, as far as I know. It’s wonderful to be involved, but at the same time it’s disturbing that something similar hadn’t coalesced before now.

LN: There’s an imperative to have this kind program in every place of incarceration. Anybody who’s locked up for any reason deserves to have his or her creative and intellectual needs met on a daily basis. It should be a given. It is not a given. There are nine students in this class right now. How many people are sitting in OPP? Thousands? It’s ridiculous how few people have access to this resource. It’s unthinkable, frankly. And OPP is not unique.

AG: I do see teaching as an ethical thing. Teaching in OPP reminded me in a very shocking and stark way how seriously I take this profession. I was pouring everything into every minute. Walking back to my car, I felt so gratified, so privileged to be able to do that. There was a lot of conflict within myself afterwards, knowing these guys have to go back to their cell blocks and I get to go back to my car and drive home. But I know that participating helped me reconnect to why I love teaching and why I love literature so much, why I feel so intensely about sharing that experience with other people.

HAPPY HOUR SALON: Rachel Kushner, Nathaniel Rich, and Zachary Lazar Live at the Press Street HQ

EVENT: Thursday May 9, 6:00pm - 9:00pm
@ Press Street HQ (3718 St. Claude Ave.)
Clockwise, from lower left: Zachary Lazar, Rachel Kushner, Nathaniel Rich, and their sexy book covers
Clockwise, from lower left: Zachary Lazar, Rachel Kushner, Nathaniel Rich, and their sexy book covers

Join Room 220 for a Happy Hour Salon featuring readings by three exciting and celebrated novelists—Rachel Kushner, Nathaniel Rich, and Zachary Lazar—from 6 – 9 p.m. on Thursday, May 9, at the Press Street HQ (3718 St. Claude Ave.).

Kushner, who will be visiting from Los Angeles, and New Orleans-based Rich both have new novels out that have been greeted with great critical acclaim. Lazar, a Tulane professor and author, has recently finished a new novel, and we look forward to (hopefully) hearing an excerpt from it at the event. Maple Street Bookshop will be on hand with the authors’ books for sale.

Rachel Kushner’s debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. By all accounts, her follow up, The Flamethrowers, is even better. The Flamethrowers’ young protagonist veers wildly through varied worlds—the late-70s New York art scene, high-speed motorcycle racing in the Utah salt flats, underground Italian radical movements—while stories historical and histrionic of and from the book’s kaleidoscopic cast of characters flesh out what amounts to a considerable literary artwork. Read James Wood’s review of The Flamethrowers in the New Yorker, an interview with Kushner in BOMB by Hari Kunzru, see a selection of images Kushner collected while writing the book at the Paris Review, and stay tuned for the Room 220 interview with Kushner, to be published next week.

Nathaniel Rich’s new novel, Odds Against Tomorrow, is a fast-paced, paranoiac spree through New York City in the near future, after a hurricane has struck the Atlantic seaboard and left the metropolis underwater. Its young genius protagonist—who’s employed as a disaster consultant—both predicted the storm’s disastrous effects and is left to contend with them as he wends his way out of the city. The novel speaks both to the unsettling changes in weather we’re witnessing as a result of global warming and the veritable deluge of (scary) information we have access to in the Internet Age. Read a review of Odds Against Tomorrow in the New York Times and an interview with Rich at Room 220.

Zachary Lazar’s 2008 novel, Sway, earned a chorus of nods for best book of the year from the likes of the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone. Its dark, pulsating fictional consideration of 60s countercultural figures such as Charles Manson and Kenneth Anger prompted a reviewer at the New York Times to write: “With its motifs of homosexuality, Satan worship, drug addiction, promiscuity, nihilism and general decadence, Zachary Lazar’s superb second novel, ‘Sway,’ reads like your parents’ nightmare idea of what would happen to you if you fell under the spell of rock ’n’ roll.” He followed Sway with a  memoir, Evening’s Empires: The Story of My Father’s Murder, and is currently at work on a project about the Passion Play at Angola Prison in collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster. Read an interview with Lazar at BOMB.

As always, this Room 220 Happy Hour Salon is free and open to the public and complimentary libations will be on hand (though we strongly suggest donations).

Contributor Hype: Kristina Robinson in THE BAFFLER

posted Apr 29, 2013
Portrait of Robinson by Aubrey Edwards
Portrait of Robinson by Aubrey Edwards

Pick up the new issue of The Baffler—the quasi-legendary journal of contrarian politics and art co-founded in 1988 by Thomas Frank—to check out a new poem by Room 220 friend and contributor Kristina Robinson. “Diaspora: Breakfast with Mahmoud Darwish,” which Robinson read last summer at a MelaNated Writer’s Literary Jook Joint that featured Baffler poetry editor Thomas Sayers Ellis, is an elliptical travelogue through the Arab Spring, the War on Terror, the Palestinian conflict, and beyond. It recites fragmented moments in history, casting key actors (Sadaam, bin Laden) in ambiguous light, confusing notions hammered home by U.S. politicians and media as to who owns sorrow, struggle, conquest. “I’ll take my imperialism brown/thank you,” Robinson writes. It’s tough to hammer things home for a diaspora.

The Baffler, which was as highly aggravating as it was influential among leftists throughout the 1990s, has gone in and out of print several times in recent years, but seems to have found a steady rhythm lately under the editorship of Jonathan Summers (with help from Frank and Bookforum editor Chris Lehmann) and with publication by MIT Press. It’s consistently smart and mostly makes its mark by pointing out bullshit in bourgeois liberal rhetoric and viewpoints. Frank’s article from a couple issues ago, “Dead End on Shakin’ Street,” is a must-read for anyone living in the increasingly “vibrant” downtown neighborhoods of New Orleans.

Kristina Robinson is currently finishing her MFA in creative writing at the University of New Orleans. She has read at several Room 220 events and written pieces for the site on T. Geronimo Johnson, Cornel West, and the local justice system. She blogs when she feels like it at Life in High Times.

OPP ENGLISH, Part I: The Instigator

posted Apr 23, 2013
OPP English program director Nik De Dominic. Portrait by Aubrey Edwards
OPP English program director Nik De Dominic. Portrait by Aubrey Edwards

Inside Orleans Parish Prison—one of the worst jails in the country—an English class takes place, not to help inmates fulfill GED requirements, but simply to facilitate their study of literature and books. In this three-part series, Room 220‘s Ari Braverman explores the parts of the program that make it work—and make it worthwhile—from the founder of the program, Nik De Dominic, to the many local writers who teach in it, to the inmates who take part in it. The program is currently an all-volunteer effort, though it is looking for funding.

Click here to read “OPP English, Part II: ‘When I left, my mind was buzzing.’”

By Ari Braverman

Nik De Dominic arrived early to our appointment at the CC’s on Esplanade and was already drinking a latte from a paper cup by the time I sat down. We were meeting to discuss the Orleans Parish Prison Project, a humanities-based local prison education initiative that De Dominic runs. When I asked him why he thought his project was important, he gestured emphatically over his left shoulder. “OPP is right there.”

It was easy to forget Orleans Parish Prison was just over a mile from where we sat.

De Dominic’s laid-back charm and talent for projection make it easy to see him enthralling students any classroom—even one in prison. He told me funny, elliptical stories as we talked. He was candid about dropping out of high school and summarized the culture shock of relocation with a pithy “The South is funky, man.”

A native of Los Angeles, De Dominic arrived in New Orleans shortly after graduating with his MFA from the University of Alabama. He was teaching in OPP within the year, having drawn an initial crop of visiting teachers from a local cadre of University of Alabama writing alumni. Now, he says, he’s never at a loss for enthusiastic academics who want to go inside and teach a class or two.

The project draws inspiration from similar—albeit degree-granting—ventures run out of Bard College and Boston University, as well as De Dominic’s experience teaching in Auburn University’s Alabama Prison Arts and Education Program (no such formal, university-based program exists in New Orleans). As we talked, he reminded me more than once that the end goal is to help inmates develop the mental flexibility required for success in a turbulent economy. He contends that exposure to the humanities is an essential component of this process.

Nik De Dominic also teaches full-time at Delgado and is a poetry editor at the New Orleans Review. His poetry and essays have appeared in a number of publications. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for his essay “On Teaching in the Staton Correctional Facility, Elmore, AL.”

I. The big question is really: “Why prison?”

Room 220: Why did you want to start this program in New Orleans?

Nik De Dominic: I was teaching for Bard at its early college program in New Orleans, and Orleans Parish Prison invited us into its high school. I taught for a semester through Bard, and when the Bard program took a different direction I took ownership of the project in OPP. But the philosophical reason is bigger. In OPP there was a group of students who were looking to interact with texts that, as an educator, I find interesting, and there were a group of educators and lecturers in town who were ready to work with this population.

I do it in New Orleans because I’m here. If I were elsewhere I’d be doing it elsewhere. The big question is really: “Why prison?” I’ve taught in a variety of environments. I’ve taught at the university level, I’ve taught in high school, and I’ve taught community college. I find prison to be a perfect environment to teach writing. Michael Martone, a professor at the University of Alabama, used to talk about math prodigies and music prodigies and lead the question: “Why are there no writing prodigies?” Because writing, at its base, is experiential. You can find a seven year old who’s got a mind for systems and who can knock out logarithms or a piece by Chopin, but with writing you need to muck it up a bit. In this environment, this group of guys has such a variety of experience to draw from. My program helps give them the tools necessary to voice that experience.

Rm220: Why Orleans Parish Prison?

ND: As I understand it, if you catch less than five years, you can do all five years in OPP. In other states you would most likely get shipped off to state or federal prison.

OPP is essentially a parish jail. The main difference between a state or federal prison and a county jail comes down to—for lack of a better term—extracurricular activities. Resources. If you spend five years in county jail, you’re spending five years on a tier. If you spend five years in a state facility you have the option to take a woodshop class, to get your GED, learn accounting—though there is a GED program in OPP. All these other things are available to you. It doesn’t make sense in our small community, New Orleans, to be okay with guys going into this little box for five years and then getting out right there on Tulane and Broad.

Rm220: How do you think the freedom of what to teach—because this isn’t in a college or university with a set curriculum—affects the class? What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of your setup?

ND: The class is structured in 16-week increments. Every other week, visiting lecturers come in and teach texts they believe sparked their intellectual interest.  There’s a huge breadth to that. The text in a given class could be three short stories from Borges or something from Foucault or a text on contemporary art. It could really be anything. In the in-between weeks, I run a primer in preparation for the person coming the following week. It’s interesting to me as a teacher because I’m not teaching the same material every time. My role in the classroom is about facilitation—especially of exploration of different texts. It’s really cool for me to be in there, investigating these pieces with my students.

We do have some student population flux, so the program is structured episodically.  Guys get released. They get shipped upstate. There are other programs going on, so it’s difficult for us to maintain exactly the twelve dudes we start with in the beginning of the semester. By the end of the semester, we usually have four of the original twelve, and we’ll let additional people in as we’re moving along, as word of the program spreads on the tier. Doing that lecture-by-lecture allows students to come in and go out.

II. It’s made me question my assumptions about prisoners

Rm220: How’s the quality of student work?

ND: Their thought-making is really fucking good. I don’t want to weigh it against other students because there’s value to teaching in every kind of environment, but their thought-making is often more complex than in early American lit seminars I’ve taught at university. That’s because OPP students tend to be older, because they have more exposure to more things, because their backgrounds aren’t so defined. For them, it wasn’t: “I went to this junior high, I went to that high school, and I took these AP classes, got this score on my SATs, and then I ended up here and now I’m taking American lit with this funny dude.” In classrooms, we draw analogues to our own experience to make sense of the alien. We’re introduced to something new and figure out how we can put it with all the other stuff we know. These students do that differently because of their experiences.

Rm220: Is there a common profile among the people you teach in OPP? Who’s the typical student?

ND: Every time I’ve taught in prison it’s made me question my assumptions about prisoners, because the demographic inside is vast. It’s 18 to 50, all races. There is a socioeconomic variance. They never fit the stereotype as convicts. They’re dudes who happen to be in this place.

I think the prejudices I’ve lost are part of larger cultural clichés of prison and prison systems. I have no idea what it’s really like on the floor, so I don’t want to pretend to know, but these are really smart, fast students. Not having done this here or in Alabama, I would never have realized that. Our system, our society, throws people away. Most people outside the prison system are not exposed to it, and as we are coded through education and work, we get further and further away from its reality. Unless you have a relative who’s been locked up, or if you come from a certain place, you’re not going to be exposed to these men, so you have no way to interact with prison apart from the idea of prison presented through film or pop culture.

Rm220: How does race operate for you in the prison setting? You said the demographic is varied, but how do you think about your own race and privilege in relation to your students?

ND: I think about systemic racial issues that are present in New Orleans. I think about ways in which I’m treated, navigating my day to day, and the ways my students are treated navigating their day to day—and, of course, I see huge inequities.

I think about every day how groups of people benefit from who they are, from being this, from being that, and I think about how they go about receiving those benefits from society while being unaware of them. It’s hard, right? Thinking, for example, “Wow! I made a really good impression on that person,” when I probably made a really good impression on that person because I’m blonde and blue-eyed and over 6 feet tall. All of these things are definitely at play.

That dynamic has always frustrated me. You asked me to describe the student population inside OPP. They’re just students. It’s something I consistently think about—that if things had come down differently in my life, in many of our lives, being in prison would be a very real possibility. For these men, it’s their reality.

III. A phrase or word will suddenly erupt for them

Rm220: You talk about writing as an experiential thing. Has running this program affected your poetics?

ND: The way language is used by different groups of people—and how it presents itself in people we don’t think of as traditionally educated—has always interested me. Nobody in my family finished high school, except my dad, who finished by way of the Navy. But he was a successful art director for many years, and my mom is a very successful businesswoman. One of the things that allowed them to succeed without the pedigree was their ability to talk. My mom’s incredibly savvy and my dad is a storyteller, and these are ways that I grew up watching people use language.

I teach at Delgado, too, and there I have five classes—so I teach 175 students, total. I’m always listening to how my students talk to each other and what they’re saying. That’s the thing about language that interests me, about teaching that interests me, about my students that interests me: the way they use language, that a phrase or word will suddenly erupt for them. The way a phrase weaves itself in and out of vocabulary, how it peaks and troughs, or trends. That’s what I find fascinating, and that’s what interacting with all sorts of students from all sorts of places does for my work.

Rm220: Do you see people’s output develop from the beginning of the course to the end?

ND: The writing changes and develops because they’re asked to engage with it every day, every week. They become more familiar with it, more used to using their tools. While I don’t believe I teach people how to think, their thinking does change because they become more comfortable discussing texts, more comfortable writing. I try not to introduce students to a lot of needless academic speak. I want them to talk about the work in a way that makes sense for them to talk about it. If they ever want to come to the point where they’re saying “You know, David Foster Wallace isn’t post modern, he’s post post modern because of this that,” that’s fucking great, but right now it’s just about reading “Consider the Lobster” and talking about how fucked up it is to boil sentient creatures. It’s less about coding and more about exposure.

IV. A person who can think can have a skill become obsolete and understand how to adapt and change that skill

Rm220: You’ve said before you believe that teaching critical thinking in prison through the humanities is important in a very practical, concrete way. Will you elaborate on that?

ND: In most prison programs, as well as most community colleges and technical schools—and we’re even seeing traditional universities go this way—professionalization is the end goal. And ultimately, I think that’s a flawed model: Say you go to junior college and you learn AutoCAD. You get out with your two-year certificate and you probably make really good money messing around with AutoCAD and cutting shapes out of blocks of aluminum at the boatyard. In prison the programs are also usually trade oriented: “We’re going to show you how to use this type of carpentry tool so you can produce this particular thing.” While I think there are immense benefits to these types of programs, I also think there’s more benefit to being exposed to the liberal arts or humanities. Given the economy in this country and our stigma against convicts, people get out with these skills that don’t necessarily translate into real economic results. Those jobs aren’t available. What happens when we see Avondale, the shipyard, close down? Delgado’s got all these programs funneling students directly into Avondale. Now these programs are toast.

I don’t know who promised it, but I feel that Americans have the attitude of, “I was supposed to get this, I was supposed to get that,” and all that stuff’s not there anymore, especially for the population at OPP. When the system fails, however we’ve coded you to work within that system also fails, because job training is not necessarily flexible. Being able to think about the world dynamically, to think about it in terms of text and language and how we can manipulate those things is immensely beneficial on the market. There are two types of thinking when it comes to education: professionalization, in terms of trade, or in terms of thought. Academe, however fucked up it is, truly values its people based on their capacity to think. A person who can think can have a skill become obsolete and understand how to adapt and change that skill, to evolve as the market evolves. Some of these guys I’m teaching have felony convictions and can’t get a job at a bank, but they can think.

Confounding or Stimulating a Lot of Great Minds: John Glassie on Athanasius Kircher at Loyola April 22

posted Apr 20, 2013
Glassie - cover

By John Sebastian

Athanasius Kircher, a seventeenth-century German Jesuit and self-styled “master of a hundred arts,” is credited with inventing the megaphone, a pre-cursor to the computer, and (perhaps) a cat piano. His intense curiosity about the world around him motivated him to pursue studies in fields as disparate as magnetism and magic, optics and acoustics, Egyptology and volcanology. He and his work have been widely researched by scholars, but until recently have never been the subject of a general-interest book.

This winter saw the publication of A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change, an accessible and entertaining biography of Kircher by former New York Times Magazine contributing editor John Glassie. Glassie will present his book at 7 p.m. on Monday, April 22, in the Audubon Room of the Danna Center on the main campus of Loyola University New Orleans (6363 Saint Charles Avenue). The lecture will be preceded by an exhibition of the 1667 print edition of Kircher’s China illustrata in Special Collections on the third floor of Loyola’s Monroe Library from 5:30 until 6:30 p.m.

Room 220: How did you first come to be interested in Kircher, and what made you want to write about him?

John Glassie: I really became fascinated with him after being asked to write an essay to go with a series of images selected from Kircher’s books. This was in 2005, for a visual-culture annual called the Ganzfeld that’s unfortunately no longer being published. Kircher wrote more than thirty books on almost as many topics: magnetism, music, medicine, optics, acoustics, cosmology, Egyptology, geology, and a lot more. Many of them are a thousand pages long and they’re filled with beautiful engravings as illustrations. I took some academic material about him home with me and I was just blown away by it all. There was no general-interest book that told his story, and I just felt like it had to be done.

Rm220: Kircher lived at a time when many familiar ways of thinking were being edged out by new ideas. As you put it in the book, he was born into a world where most people believed the earth was at the center of the universe, but by the time he died, the earth had been displaced by the sun. We’re also living in age of profound scientific and cultural change. Are there lessons that we can learn from Kircher’s life and his response to change?

JG: I think that many of the things we’re absolutely sure of will turn out to be wrong. I think we can count on looking silly to future generations of humans because every era does. Kircher ended up looking foolish in part because he held onto some conventionally held notions of the day—astral influence, for example, or the idea that small living things such as insects, frogs, and snakes are born spontaneously from decaying matter. He also believed in the hollowness of mountains and something called “universal sperm.” At any rate, I think it’s important to maintain both an open mind and some healthy skepticism, and to try not to fall in love with our own ideas.

Kircher’s “China illustrada” contains elaborate illustrations of social and natural phenomena in the Far East, including the flying turtles of Henan (pictured). An original 1667 edition of this book will be on display in the Special Collections room of Loyola’s Monroe Library preceding Glassie’s talk on April 22.

Rm220: If you had been alive in the 1600s and had met Kircher, do you think you would have like him?

JG: I think so. He was lively, really brilliant, and very charismatic. It was his charisma, along with his willingness to fudge the truth a bit, that landed him in Rome, where he rubbed elbows with popes such as Urban VIII and Alexander VII and great artists like Bernini. As I describe in the book, he told great stories from his youth about surviving stampeding horses, a mill-wheel accident, a bad case of gangrene, and the armies of an insane Bishop before winding up there. And he delighted people who came to visit his museum in the Collegio Romano, the Jesuit college there, with the things he had on display: magic lanterns, speaking statues, the tailbones of a mermaid.

Rm220: Some people—Descartes among them—apparently found him a bit off-putting.

JG: Descartes wrote that Kircher was “quite boastful” and “more of a charlatan than scholar,” but he never met him—that was his reaction after thumbing through Kircher’s great big book on magnetism, first published in 1641. The interesting thing is that Descartes wasn’t actually quite as dismissive as those quotes make him seem. He was very intrigued, if also skeptical, about Kircher’s claims that he could drive a clock with a sunflower seed. The idea was that the seed would turn to follow the sun the way the sunflower itself does—that it was drawn by the magnetic attraction of the sun to do so. Descartes didn’t find the idea to be so ridiculous that he didn’t try it himself. (It didn’t work.)

Meow meow meow MEOW meow meeeooowwww meow meow me me me meow meow meow meow MEOW meow meeeooowwww meow meow me me me meow meeeooow meow meow

Rm220: Kircher is often remembered, when he is remembered at all, for his supposed invention of the infamous cat piano.

JG: Right. Actually there’s a cat-piano i-Phone app now—so you can give a concert on one and no animals will have been harmed. Actually, it’s not clear he thought it up, or that he ever made one, but it has always been attributed to him.

Rm220: So, for what should we remember Kircher?

JG: I’ll pick three things off the top of my head out of a couple dozen: coining the term electromagnetism, inadvertently investing Tarot cards with the occult significance we now associate with them, and confounding or stimulating a lot of great minds of his time.

Rm220: You’re a bit of a Renaissance man yourself. Your previous book was a collection of photographs of mangled bicycles chained to poles. Do you fancy yourself a modern-day Athanasius Kircher?

JG: I’m really more like a dilettante than a Renaissance man, certainly as compared with Kircher and other polymaths of his era. Those guys blow everybody out of the water. Kircher knew perhaps a dozen languages, experimented with an algorithmic approach to music composition, pursued his interest in geological matters by climbing down into the smoking crater of Mount Vesuvius!

Rm220: What’s next for you after neglected bikes and quirky Jesuits?

JG: My standard answer is “something easier.” This was a pretty hard project. It might have to do with an 18th-century raft trip or a beatnik Hollywood photographer.

Christopher Schaberg: Making Meaning at the A=I=R=P=O=R=T

posted Apr 15, 2013
Portrait by Harold Baquet
Portrait by Harold Baquet

New Orleans’ resident airport scholar Christopher Schaberg, author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight and co-editor of Airplane Reading, will present his book at 6 p.m. on Saturday, April 20, at the Bayou St. John branch of Maple Street Books (3122 Ponce de Leon St.).

By Nathan C. Martin

Thanks in large part to layovers and delays during a string of months lousy with travel, I was able to read Christopher Schaberg’s The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight almost entirely inside airports. Just as Under the Volcano might evoke gusty sentiments for a reader venturing through Mexico or reading A Confederacy of Dunces while in New Orleans might make a visitor’s sensibilities more acute, the experience of reading The Textual Life of Airports in airports amplified for me in real time the rich and bizarre tapestry of elements that, as Schaberg points out, are often designed specifically not to be noticed.

The Textual Life of Airports, recently out from Bloomsbury in paperback, results from a confluence of Schaberg’s occupations-turned-preoccupations. The book is adapted from the doctoral dissertation he wrote as a student at the University of California, Davis (he currently teaches English at Loyola University New Orleans). Much of it deals with the ways in which airports are presented in literature, examining texts such as Don Delillo’s Underworld and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. But it also draws deep inspiration from the time Schaberg spent working at the airport in Bozeman, Montana, where he realized that, far from being the generic “non-places” that theorists such as Marc Augé peg them to be, airports are fascinating environments that demand and reward interpretation.

Schaberg illustrates a variety of paradoxes inherent in air travel. For instance, he uses a character from Delillo’s play Valparaiso—a sad bastard who attempts to fly to Valparaiso, Indiana, only to end up in Valparaiso, Chile—to show us the airplane passenger is “at once the free flying liberal subject and the determined body whose life is subject to an elaborate orchestration involving ‘computers and metal detectors and uniformed personnel and bomb-sniffing dogs.’” At another point, Schaberg uses a journal excerpt by the crotchety naturalist Edward Abbey—“Sitting around, two hours, three, in the wretched clamorous rotten and crowded fucking Denver airport. Christ, you have to wait in line for every damn thing here”—to discuss the incongruity that, in airports, we consider ourselves “traveling” but, for the most part, we’re sitting there waiting around.

Along with his examination of airports in texts, Schaberg’s book also looks at airports as texts, asking what we can decode from their symbols and systems. By the end of the book, although it was very clear that airports fascinate Schaberg, it remained ambiguous to me whether he likes them. The places he depicts manipulate their occupants through a series of control systems that at once enervate and dehumanize. The design, jargon, and security apparatus of airports exact a sort of soft brutality upon passengers, encouraging—nay, demanding—they conform to a certain regiment of actions, all within a benevolent décor of muzak, pastels, and instances of regional flare inserted among an aesthetic that’s homogenous from Honolulu to Hamburg.

Airports read us.

Of course, while we can read and read about airports, airports also read us. Schaberg’s chapter “The Airport Screening Complex” begins with the author’s account of receiving the “No Fly List” at the Bozeman airport shortly after the 9/11 attacks and the perverse pleasure the author and his coworkers took in consulting it if “a passenger seemed suspicious; this was a totally subjective exercise, based entirely on the passenger’s appearance or the level of pronunciation difficulty that a passenger’s name posed.” Airports, post 9/11, have become intimately entwined with the Department of Homeland Security and other federal “intelligence” agencies that cull information about our lives—criminal histories, etc.—and determine our suitability for air travel. Airport security agents also “read” our bodies as we pass through body scanners that produce for them a slightly distorted digital version of our nakedness. From the screens on which these images appear to the “screening” we’re subjected to that might land us on the “No Fly List” to the screens in terminals that show news and those in the backs of airplane seats that show movies, Schaberg uses the notion of “screen” to illustrate the complex interplay of looking, examining, entertainment, boredom, and surveillance in airports, and how they at once enhance and pierce the sense of mysteriousness that, he argues, permeates air travel.

Some of the ways in which Google suggests we look at a blackbird

Associations such as those Schaberg creates around the notion of “screens” generate much of The Textual Life of Airports’ intellectual energy—they create links between the innocuous (TV screens) and ominous (body scanner screens), revealing their interconnectedness as parts of larger systems. In the book’s longest and finest chapter, “Bird Citing,” Schaberg employs a similar set of associations revolving around birds to show the continued symbolic dependence of airports on our fine feathered friends and to position airports as environments that transcend human exceptionalism. He notes the design of airplanes, airline logos, airport architecture, and art inside airports all pay heavy homage to birds, but also that birds frequently die in large numbers as flocks and planes collide in the air, and that the open grassy expanses around air strips often serve as birds’ habitats. He includes in the chapter a series of deft moves: from Wallace Stevens’ “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” to a Gary Snyder poem that describes a cargo plane landing at Beale airport, then to a Google satellite image of Beale that shows a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, followed by a Google search of “blackbird” that tells us that, while Stevens found 13 ways to look at a blackbird, Google suggests that there are about 1,630,000 ways of looking at a blackbird. It is in this manner that Schaberg’s examination of airports and their constituent parts and relations as “texts” flowers outward in unexpected and exciting ways.

It seems clear that air travel is becoming increasingly intolerable. Fares are becoming higher each year, with added costs for baggage. There are fewer flights and they’re always full. Amenities such as in-flight snacks are becoming crappier. Security checkpoints are onerous and in about one in every ten or so visits, it seems, passengers get to stand in silent embarrassment as some “Middle Eastern-looking” person is pulled aside. Body scanners shoot us with questionable rays or we’re subjected to groping “pat downs.” Airlines tailor their services more acutely to the super rich. Planes burn an obscene amount of fossil fuels, poisoning the atmosphere and heightening our dependence on oil. Underpaid pilots go on strike, leaving those of us labor-minded travelers to sympathize with them while grumbling curses as we’re delayed for hours or days. Security agents steal our pocketknives and toothpaste. The whole thing seems like a tanking enterprise, and even if it’s not, it’s in unquestionably in flux. Air travel has been a defining characteristic in modern life in the 20th century, but as Internet technologies allow us to symbolically traverse space from our home office and the actual process of transporting our bodies across great distances becomes more onerous, it’s unclear what its role will be in the 21st. For this reason, Schaberg’s study of airports is timely, and his insistence on examining them as “texts” beyond their mere functions provides a platform from which a larger study of airports—and other apparent “non-places”—as environments or objects can and should be built.

The Shallows: Nicholas Carr at Loyola April 17

posted Apr 10, 2013
Carr

Loyola University New Orleans will host Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 17, in Roussel Hall (corner of St. Charles Ave. and Calhoun St.) on the university’s main campus.

The Shallows chronicles the history of intellectual technologies, beginning with maps and continuing into the Internet age, and draws from neurological and psychological research to argue that, while the Internet provides for us incredible possibilities, the way in which we interact with it is transforming our minds, obliterating our ability for deep, contemplative thought.

The event is part of Loyola’s Presidential Centennial Guest Speaker Series, which, throughout the past few months, has presented the archbishop of New Orleans, Wynton Marsalis, Cokie Roberts, and a handful of Catholic scholars. Carr seems at first a bit of an odd choice in this lineup, but because of issues facing U.S. higher education and the preoccupations of Loyola’s president, his selection makes perfect sense.

Kevin Wildes, a Jesuit priest and president of Loyola, has spoken plainly about his concerns regarding the wholesale adoption of online technologies in education. In remarks to the faculty and staff of Loyola last summer, he noted that American culture has a bias toward technology and “the new,” and that we tend to assume that the latest and newest technology is the “best.” In his talk, Wildes conceded that St. Ignatius of Loyola—who founded the Jesuit order 400 years ago and set forth the pedagogical framework that Jesuit schools around the world follow to this day—fervently adopted the latest technology of his time (pens, ink, paper) and that the Jesuit way of proceeding encourages priests to “meet people where they are” (in this case, online all the time). But he went on to express his reservations toward online education that illuminate his selection of Carr as a speaker:

We are not only concerned with the accumulation of courses and information but with the education of the whole person. In our model of a university teaching a course is not simply handing out information. Education, in a Jesuit university, takes place in community and in discussion. As someone who has taught online courses, I am continually struck by the challenge of creating intellectual community. Real time discussion allows students to learn from the professor and one another.

As someone who teaches regularly I know the value to the evolving communications technologies tied to the Internet. They can support, aid, and assist what we do with students and they can open doors for us, particularly with graduate and professional students. But, in a Jesuit model of education I think the formative part of the education we promise, which goes beyond the mere assembling of information, needs to take place face to face.

It might be easy to think of Wildes, a priest-scholar and philosopher, as a sure fit in the category of people who would tend to be suspicious of the Internet (even though his expertise is in bioethics, a field deeply entwined with technology). Another who comes to mind is Lewis Lapham—the long-time Harper’s editor, silverhair, and print devotee—whose current project, Lapham’s Quarterly, collects great thought from throughout the ages in handsome themed issues. In a piece about Lapham in Smithsonian Magazine, Ron Rosenbaum described the paradox Lapham confronts:

Suddenly thanks to Google Books, JSTOR and the like, all the great thinkers of all the civilizations past and present are one or two clicks away. The great library of Alexandria, nexus of all the learning of the ancient world that burned to the ground, has risen from the ashes online. And yet—here is the paradox—the wisdom of the ages is in some ways more distant and difficult to find than ever, buried like lost treasure beneath a fathomless ocean of online ignorance and trivia that makes what is worthy and timeless more inaccessible than ever.

Nicholas Carr, on the other hand, is a less likely Internet skeptic. He is a technology writer whose previous books parse complex questions related to IT management and liken the trend toward universal Internet connection to the emergence of the electricity grid. He was on the steering board of the World Economic Forum’s cloud computing project, frequently contributes to Wired, and his work has appeared in the Best Technology Writing anthology (among many other places).

Carr has said his inspiration to write The Shallows came from his own experience feeling his mind morph as a result of being online. He would be reading a book—an activity that had always come to him naturally—but before long his attention would drift and he would feel compelled to put the book down, check his email, Google something. After dispelling the notion that he was merely succumbing to middle-age brain rot, he began looking into the ways in which his interaction with the Internet was making him unable to concentrate.

Perhaps the finest recent account through a personal lens of the way in which the Internet affects us is “Generation Why?” Zadie Smith’s ostensible review of David Fincher’s The Social Network and Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget. In Smith’s trademark style, the essay cleaves closely to her thoughts and emotions while making its points and even recounts the author’s decision to delete her Facebook account. She ends the piece by concluding The Social Network is not a film damning “any particular real-world person called ‘Mark Zuckerberg.’ It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.”

Because Nicholas Carr’s talk about The Shallows will take place on a university campus, the majority of those in attendance will be students. There could not be a more appropriate audience, though it’s unclear how they will receive Carr’s warnings. In Smith’s essay, she pontificates whether a gulf has emerged between people divided by the ways in which they engage the Internet. She imagines herself on one side while an increasingly large group of young people gathers (or is already on) the other:

How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerberg’s generation—there are only nine years between us—but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvard’s campus in the fall of 2003) that “I was there” at Facebook’s inception … At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. I still feel distant from them now, ever more so, as I increasingly opt out (by choice, by default) of the things they have embraced. We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.

She taught me subtlety, and how to be an actress through voice and harmony

posted Apr 2, 2013
Moshfegh child

Ottessa Moshfegh, winner of the 2013 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction, will read along with Carlus Henderson at a Happy Hour Salon from 6 – 8 p.m. on Friday, April 5, at the Press Street HQ (3718 St. Claude Ave.).

Ottessa Moshfegh is less than forthcoming about her life and practice as a fiction writer. Although this makes writing about her a bit difficult, it’s refreshing in the Facebook era of hyper-disclosure, in which most individuals succumb to the implicit motivation to share with the world the trivial minutiae of his or her pointless plod toward death.

“I guess I feel that the less someone knows about me, the bigger chance they’ll give my work,” Moshfegh said. “Who cares where I went to school?”

The writer bios at the bottom of her stories and in the backs of journals in which she publishes—such as the Paris Review, Unsaid, NOON, Guernica, Vice, and many others—are borderline cryptic, often reading simply “Ottessa Moshfegh lives in Los Angeles.” Until she was recently compelled to produce a standard, current author photo, most of the images of her one could find online showed Moshfegh as a child, blowing out birthday candles or standing shirtless with a towel on her head. She also seems to resist the impulse some writers have of constantly self-consciously scanning their ongoing existences in order to determine what might make good fodder for fiction. A note at the beginning of “Medicine” tells us: “This is a story that started off as a confessional letter. I lived in China during my early 20s and until now haven’t wanted to write anything about it.”

The current author photo we now have—which reveals that Moshfegh is likely somewhere in her 30s, with large, dark eyes and long brown hair that does not quite conceal her ears—does as little as her name to assist one in pinning down her familial origins. Her first name evokes the Ukrainian port city (or the small town in Texas where Friday Night Lights takes place) and her surname reminds one, perhaps, of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the Iranian prime minister who was overthrown in the coup that established the shah. An interviewer recently asked Moshfegh about the sense of “ancient sadness” that her stories evoke, and where that might have come from. Moshfegh simply replied: “I don’t know. It’s in my face, too. You can see it. My family history might have something to do with it.”

This sense of sadness pervades two stories Moshfegh recently published in the Paris Review that earned her this year’s $10,000 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, which she’ll fly to New York to accept after reading in New Orleans at the Press Street HQ on April 5. In those two stories—“Disgust” and “Bettering Myself”—Moshfegh renders decrepitude and isolation in exquisite prose that leaves room for the possibility of beauty—if not by describing it, then by channeling it. She presents her characters’ pitiful hopelessness so artfully a reader can’t help but be filled with gratitude for the small bits of bliss and victory available in a generally demoralizing world.

In “Disgust,” a middle-aged man in suburban China named Mr. Wu pines after a woman who runs the local arcade. His inner monologue is pathetic—and, at times, sadistic—but his outsized sense of triumph makes him remain endearing. Instead of asking the woman for her number, Wu gets it from a flyer advertising a discount at the arcade and, upon receiving this treasure, immediately emails his brother to pronounce that he will likely be married in a year. After pondering what his opening text to her should be—they’ve never spoken beyond stilted pleasantries—he confers with his neighbor, who tells him his wife was made desperate in her search for a mate by her deformed hand, which “reminded Mr. Wu of a large prawn … that twisted, thin, limp and red-skinned tentacle.” Mr. Wu’s pick-up texts to the woman at the arcade begin:  “How does it feel to be a middle aged divorcee living with your retarded nephew and working in a computer café? Is it everything you ever dreamed?” The final scene includes Mr. Wu shooting off fireworks and “pausing now and then to raise his arms in victory.”

“Sometimes my characters insist on winning,” Moshfegh told an interviewer. “That’s all I can say.”

The thing about writer bios and lists of degrees and publications and author photos and interviews about craft and publishing is that they’re often murderously boring, and seem otherwise only to navel-gazing writers awash in the cults of personality and meritocracy we’ve been trained to worship. This, rather than caginess, seems to compel Moshfegh to forego the standard self-promotion template—although, as she mentioned, keeping your public self murky makes your work shine harder. She is open to describing her influences, for instance, such as being upset after reading Ray Bradbury and Alice Walker and Herman Hesse in 6th grade. “I started writing around that time because I couldn’t handle just sitting there after being so blown away,” she said.

It’s unsurprising, given the musicality of her prose, that she cites a musician as her most profound early source of inspiration: “Valentina Lass was my piano teacher for many years, up until I graduated from high school in Boston in the late nineties,” Moshfegh said. “I saw her twice a week. She was a small, Russian woman who lived alone in an apartment down the street from the conservatory, just past the Museum of Fine Arts. She was an avid traveler. She had a huge bookshelf in her living room piled high with mementos and keepsakes and little trinkets from all over the world. She was obviously very passionate, and yet her passion was contained. I loved her. She was the most generous person I’ve ever known. The way she talked about the compositions I was learning, the characters, the innuendos, the ecstasy, all of that, influenced me profoundly. Seeing the divine order of a piece was heartbreaking and magical. That’s what I want to do in my stories. It was rough with the piano. I didn’t practice enough. But she taught me subtlety, and how to be an actress through voice and harmony and how to dramatize my own experiences. I wasn’t technically talented enough to be a professional pianist, thank god.”

Moshfegh’s reading on April 5 is funded in part by a grant from South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as Poets & Writers.

South Arts

Older Entries »