Press Street | room220

Local author too disgusted by his own stories to read them

posted Feb 9, 2012

Author Michael Lee says he feels "like a disgrace" after canceling his book launch last night. (Photo: Laura Schill)

Local author Michael J. Lee—whose debut collection of short stories, Something In My Eye, was recently released—reportedly became so disgusted while reading his stories prior to a scheduled appearance last night he canceled the event, citing acute stomach pain as the primary cause.

Lee told Room 220 he had been attempting to refresh his memory before the event by going back through the stories in the collection when he began to feel uncomfortable and nauseous.

“I wrote these stories over the span of several years,” Lee said, “and it’s been a while since I’d looked at them. Christ, I was a sick fuck back then. They just made me feel ill.”

The event, which was to take place at Maple Street Books’ Uptown location, would have been the book’s official New Orleans launch. Lee has rescheduled the official launch to take place at 7 p.m. on March 15 as part of the Room 220 Live Prose at the Antenna Gallery reading series (3161 Burgundy St.). He will be accompanied by Dean Paschal, author of By the Light of the Jukebox.

Lee’s debut collection has been met with mixed critical responses. Author Francine Prose selected the book for the 2010 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and acclaimed poet and spiritualist Rikki Ducornet called the book “Relevant, startling, and irresistible … an extraordinary experience.”

The trade periodical Publisher’s Weekly, however, had a different opinion. In a review last month, they said Lee’s “debut collection of short stories is grotesque and absurd: its atmosphere seems calculated to be noxious to human health–moral, spiritual, and psychological.”

These days, Lee seems to agree.

He said he found himself astounded at the behavior and mindsets of many of his characters, such as the two men in the story “Whoring,” who avoid confronting their desire for each other by purchasing prostitutes, or the narrator in “Warning Sign,” who extorts money from the media after his roommate and lover commits an unspeakable “atrocity.” After reading several pieces closely yesterday, and glancing through the rest, Lee realized there was not a single story in the book he could finish “without vomiting.”

“I wasn’t just repulsed by the fictional characters,” he said. “I realized what an awful person I must have been to conjure them. I remember going through some dark days while writing this book, but I had blocked all these sickos out. I never want to return to that time in my life again.”

Still, Lee said he will try to overcome the adverse effects the book had on him last night. His publisher, Kentucky-based Sarabande Books, issued a statement this morning regarding the incident, in which the company said it depends on book events such as the canceled reading last night to generate income.

“While we value the physical and mental well-being of our authors above all else,” the statement said, “the dire state of the publishing industry necessitates that, if humanly possible, they must fulfill their obligations to appear at live book events.”

Lee, who currently works as a teacher and a night club singer, plans to take one step at a time in reacquainting himself with the person and writer he used to be. He said he will begin by having his roommate read him passages from the book aloud before attempting to spend any more time alone with it.

“I wrote the thing, so it’s my beast to deal with,” Lee said. “I don’t want to have to cancel another event. I feel like a disgrace.”

Columbus Street at N. Dorgenois

posted Feb 9, 2012

A commendable effort to promote literacy.

Shameless self-promotion: McSweeney’s

posted Feb 8, 2012

Nothing but dudes in this issue. In the writing world, it pays to be a man. I guess.

Okay, okay, I feel some shame. But I’m posting this anyway.

Pick up a copy of the next issue of McSweeney’s venerable literary quarterly to read a little baby story written by yours truly, along with lots of better writing from people like Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and Rick Bass, and a compendium of writing that inspired the Egyptian Revolution.

Weirdly, I think all the authors in this issue are male, which must have been why I qualified. Because I have a man name.

Writers “Emerge” at the Black Widow Salon

posted Feb 4, 2012

M’Bilia Meekers reads with accompaniment at the Columns Hotel; Room 220 editors refrain from editorializing for fear of seeming creepy; Meekers will perform at the next Black Widow Salon.

The Black Widow Salon continues its monthly literary event series at Crescent City Books in February with a group of “emerging” local writers: Christopher Hellwig, Jenna Mae, M’Bilia Meekers, and Ingrid Norton. The reading takes place on Monday, Feb. 6, from 7 – 9 p.m. (230 Chartres Street).

Presumably an event designed to acquaint the broader reading public with a new set of voices, most of these writers already enjoy a bit of acclaim, either around town or elsewhere.

Christopher Hellwig is former editor of The Black Warrior Review and has published widely in high-brow (if mid-prominence) literary journals. Room 220 featured this selection that appeared in The New Orleans Review. Hellwig read as one part of The Brothers Goat, with Michael J. Lee, last fall at the Antenna Gallery with Michael Martone.

M’Bilia Meekers, a Lusher graduate and current Tulane student, is on the verge of becoming a local poetry sensation, having read as part of the Faulkner Society’s annual festival, the Artfully Aware event last Friday at the New Orleans Museum of Art, as well as at the Columns Hotel and the New Orleans Public Library, along with garnering a not-insignificant hodgepodge of awards. Her range of subjects encompasses her little brother’s penchant for candy (set within the context of Nagin’s “Chocolate City”) as well as—channeling Lucile Clifton—the sexual superiority of black women (see video above).

Jenna Mae is the writer least familiar to Room 220, but she’s published in places like Big Bridge and formerly hosted poetry readings at Fair Grinds Coffee Shop.

Ingrid Norton is relatively new to town, but comes skating in on a series of long-form narrative nonfiction articles published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, including this one based on the year she just spent in Detroit. Her journalism has also been published by Open Letters Monthly (including her review of Ned Sublete’s The Year Before the Flood), the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Dissent. She recently completed a story for Good Magazine about young African-American go-getters in New Orleans, including author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts.

The Black Widow Salon series is a welcome addition to French Quarter literary life. Past events have featured renowned local photographer Josephine Sacabo, whose work is tied tightly to her love of poetry, and Cripple Creek Theater Company playwright Andrew Vaughn. While a couple of its upcoming events feature dusty old and barely remembered poets one would expect to find at the 17 Poets! series at the Goldmine Saloon (no offense to Bill Zavatsky or Ruth Weiss), Room 220 looks forward to hearing UNO professor David Rutledge discuss his work on Nabokov in May.

Michael Zell, the Black Widow Salon’s mastermind, likes to remind people that Monday’s event will start promptly at 7:15 p.m.

For Don Delillo: photographs by Sophie Lvoff

posted Jan 28, 2012

All photographs by Sophie Lvoff, from her series "For Don Delillo"

“Every child ought to have the opportunity to travel thousands of miles alone,” Tweedy said, “for the sake of her self-esteem and independence of mind, with clothes and toiletries of her own choosing. The sooner we get them in the air, the better. Like swimming or ice skating. You have to start them young. It’s one of the things I’m proudest to have accomplished with Bee. I sent her to Boston on Eastern when she was nine. I told Granny Browner not to meet her plane. Getting out of airports is every bit as important as the actual flight. Too many parents ignore this phase of a child’s development. Bee is thoroughly bicoastal now. She flew her first jumbo at ten, changed planes at O’Hare, had a near miss in Los Angeles. Two weeks later she took the Concorde to London. Malcolm was waiting with a split of champagne.”

This passage from Don Delillo’s White Noise reminded New Orleans-based photographer Sophie Lvoff of her childhood spent flying alone. She grew up in Europe and would often travel to visit relatives in the United States and Russia—including Yasnaya Polyana, the home of Leo Tolstoy, of whom Lvoff is a descendant.

Delillo is Lvoff’s favorite author, and with him in mind she took the bus out of Brooklyn one day in 2007 to JFK International Airport to circumnavigate and photograph it. She had always considered airplanes beautiful—Delillo describes them as gleaming silver objects. She has frequently featured large, grey skies in her photographs, which make her think of the “airborne toxic event” in White Noise unleashed by an industrial accident that taints the outdoor light.

In Delillo’s Underworld, he describes a B-52 graveyard. Falling Man is his “9/11 novel,” and as Lvoff circled the airport, capturing pictures of take-offs and landings, she wondered about what it meant to photograph planes in New York after 9/11.

She soon found out, in a way.

A U.N. summit was set to take place the next day in Manhattan, and airport security picked her up on suspicion of terrorism-related activities. She sat in airport jail for the day while the CIA interrogated her, called her roommates to verify her story. Eventually, they let her go with no hassle—and, in fact, an escort! They took her around to see the test-crash airplane where firefighters practice hosing down blazes, but that wasn’t the image that interested Lvoff. She made them drive her to places where she had a good vantage and simply took pictures of airplanes falling from and rising into the great grey sky.

You can see more of Lvoff’s work at sophielvoff.com.

I Can’t Discount the Factor of Helplessness: Andy Young’s New Book on Watching the Egyptian Revolution

posted Jan 23, 2012

Portrait of Andy Young by Andy Cook; book design by Sarah Grainer

By Nathan C. Martin

Just as Room 220 was getting on its feet about a year ago, another breathtaking development of historical significance was taking place—the Egyptian revolution.

One of the very first Room 220 posts was an interview I conducted with Andy Young and Khaled Hegazzi, co-editors of Meena Magazine, a bi-lingual literary journal based in New Orleans and Alexandria, Egypt. Khaled is a native of Alexandria, and he and Andy, his wife, had a number of friends and family involved in the revolution, many in Tahrir Square.

The night I visited them turned out to be among the most harrowing of the revolution, and throughout our conversation both Khaled and Andy’s eyes rarely left the screen of a laptop sitting on the couch between them, which showed a live stream of the events in Tahrir. Police were firing on demonstrators. People were being beaten, killed. It was clear neither of them had slept much that week. I can still picture the bluish light the screen cast on their sullen faces as we talked.

This week, Young will celebrate the launch of her new book, The People Is Singular, which explores the Arab Spring precisely from that position—as an American married to an Egyptian helplessly watching events across the world unfold on a computer screen. The book features Young’s poetry and photographs by Salwa Rashad, an Egyptian friend who participated in the revolution in Tahrir Square.

The book launch for The People Is Singular coincides with the anniversary of the start of the Egyptian revolution. It will consist of a multimedia performance featuring Young reading her poems, installations of Rashad’s photographs, video projections by Kourtney Keller, soundscapes by Preservation Hall sound engineer Earl Scioneaux, and music by Tao Seeger and Alsarah, among others.

The book launch will take place at 7 p.m. on January 25 at Café Istanbul in the New Orleans Healing Center (2372 St. Claude Ave.). Admission is $12, or $20 for admission and a copy of the book, which was published by Press Street. Books will be available for sale for those who do not want to pay to see the event, and Young will sign copies during a reception following the performance.

I spoke with Young on Saturday morning at her studio in the Bywater, while we sipped coffee and an inkjet printer between us emitted what seemed like 20 pages of stage direction for the Jan. 25 performance at a painfully slow pace.

Room 220: Do you remember the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Andy Young: Not terribly clearly. What year was that?

Rm220: It was ’89, I think.

AY: I remember that time, yes.

Rm220: I ask because you and I had talked about the Arab Spring being the political event of our lifetimes. But then I remembered that I was alive when the Berlin Wall fell. In terms of global political consequence, the Arab Spring has yet to surpass that event. I was wondering if you still think of the Arab Spring in that way.

AY: I do. Part of that is probably just the way I think about politics. I’m involved in the Egyptian revolution on a personal level, so I’m thinking of it in that context. I can’t help it. But also, if you think of the narrative of the relationship between “East” and “West,” and the relationship, over the last ten years or so, between the United States and the “Arab World”—all of these are clumsy terms—so much of what we’ve been doing as a power has been to try to enforce our views on the Middle East. Part of what’s so surprising and so impactful is that, for the people of Egypt and Tunisia and elsewhere to rise up and say “enough,” that to me is almost beyond politics—it’s a shift in consciousness, and it kind of flips our whole notion of the West being the democratic arbiters and the Arab World being the group that needs to be taught those principles. The reverberations of that are huge in terms of a paradigm shift.

Photo by Salwa Rashad, from The People Is Singular

Rm220: It’s interesting to read your perspective on these events, because, for me—and most people in the United States—the Arab Spring is a political event that I’m outside of. You have a deeper investment and likely a deeper thought process about it because you have a personal stake—you have in-laws in Egypt, friends in Egypt, you travel there often—but at the same time you’re still not Egyptian, and therefore you’re an outsider. You’re in a position to act as an intermediary for both outsider and Egyptian perspectives.

AY: I have one foot in both worlds, I think. It’s more firm here, partly because of the language barrier, but I have a unique position on this particular topic, and perhaps that can help someone enter it. It’s kind of like the work Khaled and I do with Meena, trying to get people to relate to another culture that seems very “other” through language. Maybe I’m building that bridge on an individual level.

Rm220: Actually, I read the book as having almost the opposite effect as Meena. With Meena, like you said, you’re trying to build a bridge across this gap—that’s cultural, geographic, and linguistic—by using translation and a project that involves people from both places. But so often, in The People Is Singular, you articulate the gap, you show how it staunchly it remains. You have all these images: You’re watching the ball drop in Times Square on television on New Year’s Eve while, on your computer screen, you’re having a Skype conversation with someone in Egypt about a recent bombing. Then you’re in Alexandria just after Khaled Said was killed, and that’s dominating public consciousness there, and meanwhile the BP oil spill is going on here, and no one in either place is connected to the other. The bridge is obliterated. Was the Egyptian Revolution something that made the gap more tangible?

AY: I wouldn’t say the revolution brought the gap out, because in many ways I felt more solidarity with Egyptians than I ever have. But there’s only so far that relationship can go when not only am I still here, I did not grow up in Egypt, and I’m not on the streets. When I’m writing about it I’m trying to understand so many things that I thought I already understood. I have to work out all these layers of reference, because it’s very important to me that I not take it on a surface level. Maybe writing this book made me go deeper into the gap.

Rm220: There was almost an active throwing off of outside influence in the degree to which the Egyptians claimed ownership of the revolution. Did that contribute to your sense of the gap?

AY: I feel very much welcome and included. My solidarity with my Egyptian friends is very much welcome, but on a personal level I can’t discount the factor of helplessness. Because beyond culture, beyond any of these things we’re talking about, is the gap between an observer and someone who’s a participant—especially when you’re talking about witnessing suffering. We live in a unique time, when we can witness in real time other human beings’ suffering. I first noticed that during Katrina, when I was away from my city and yet watching what was happening. But I think the issue, of watching someone else suffer and not being able to do anything about it, is timeless. So the gap includes culture, includes language, but part of that gap is: “Oh my god, I wish I could do something. I wish I was a doctor helping people instead of being here, writing these lines.” And that begs the bigger question of the poet’s role and of helplessness.

Rm220: What are some of the advantages of using poetry—as opposed to, say, narrative prose—to explore these issues?

AY: Part of it is the immediacy of poetry. There’s the possibility for a more immediate or visceral response. There are moments when I want to think about Bouazizi, for instance, and the fact that what really sparked this whole thing was a vegetable seller. I could write a novel or paint a mural, or some sort of larger, more epic process. I could respond to Bouazizi’s life—and I think that would be great, but I also just want to take that moment and say, Wow, what happens when, in my mind, Mr. Okra brings me to Tunisia by reminding me of Bouazizi? There’s something I like about that instantaneous focus on one moment in time.

Photo by Salwa Rashad, from The People Is Singular

Rm220: What you’re talking about with immediacy and capturing moments also applies to photography, and the book includes photos of the revolution, as well. How did you envision the interplay between poetry and photographs?

AY: One thing I love about Salwa Rashad’s photos is that they all feature lots of people, faces, individuals. In the context of the revolution, that is great because it brings you down to the street level: Who is that little girl? Who is that older lady, and why is she holding that picture of a young man? Oh, that must be her son. Oh, that must be her dead son—those kinds of reverberations. She’s focusing on individual people who, for the most part, aren’t the ones we see on major media outlets, which tended to show things from balconies, really high above the square. Salwa’s taking these individual moments and looking at the humanity in them. And that’s what I’m trying to do, too.

Rm220: Let’s talk about the Bouazizi-Mr. Okra connection. The Tunisian vegetable seller was—indeed, in Maoist terms—the single spark that started the prairie fire. He’s a martyr. And to think of Mr. Okra—not as a folk hero, but definitely part of the mythology of New Orleans—seems to me a really surprising but fitting connection.

AY: There is this universality to people who sell their fruits and vegetables in the street. That’s all over the world. In the United States it’s more of an old-school thing, which is part of why we love Mr. Okra. I don’t know Mr. Okra’s history, but with Bouazizi, that is not what he wanted to do. He went to college, he was educated, and part of the slap in the face he got from the government in having his permit revoked—again—was symbolic of people all over trying to make a living and not being treated with dignity. I think we treat Mr. Okra with dignity. I love the fact that the people got him a new truck after Katrina.

What got me thinking of the two of them was going to Egypt and hearing the call to prayer and having my daughter, who was two years old at the time, thinking it was Mr. Okra. She thought Mr. Okra must have followed us to Egypt. So that was always in my mind, and then Bouazizi had been on my mind a lot last winter, and I remember hearing Mr. Okra and thinking of Bouazizi. I don’t know. It just went from there.

Rm220: There’s a picture in the book of someone in Tahrir Square with a chicken bucket on his head with some Arabic script on it, and a KFC sign with Colonel Sanders is in the background. I remember you and I had talked about something related to a conspiracy involving KFC, but that didn’t make it into the book.

AY: You know, it made it into the poem “Protest,” which is on the back of the postcards we printed for the book launch. But yeah, this is one of those places where there’s this gap, where I’m kind of like, “What? What does the Colonel have to do with the revolution?” I never saw this in our press, but in the Arabic press—which is how I get a lot of news about the Middle East, translated by my husband—there are all these references to Kentucky Fried Chicken. KFC ended up becoming a symbol for the regime of imperialism and foreign influence—you know, “There’s a foreign hand behind these young people rising up in the street!” The regime would talk about how the uprising wasn’t from the Egyptian people, but the Kentucky people. Sometimes they referred to the revolutionaries as “Kentucky People,” because they were allegedly being funded by people represented by Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s so strange. But there is a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Tahrir Square that ended up becoming a field hospital. So it’s part of the narrative of the revolution, the surrealism of the whole thing.

Rm220: The book launch on January 25 is a celebration of the one-year anniversary of the revolution. How does the revolution look to you one year out?

AY: I’m sort of revising my thought of it being a celebration. “Commemoration” has become the new word, for me—a commemoration of the revolution’s beginning. As my Egyptian friends really want me to emphasize, the revolution continues. One year out, there are many things that are very worrying. The power structure, in many ways, hasn’t changed, and in some ways is more frightening because it’s new. Before, at least there was some feeling of knowing what to expect. But I am just as inspired today by the bravery and stamina of the Egyptian people. It will be interesting to see, on the 25th, because there’s a huge mobilization of people planning to go out that day.

We don’t get very much news about it anymore. I really search and scrape for information, and sometimes what we want are these soundbytes: Okay, so is this good or bad? For instance, the parliamentary elections were just announced today and Islamist parties won seventy percent. On one hand, that’s not what most people who were fighting for the revolution want, but on the other hand, it’s less than a year out, and if you think of the revolutionary parties and the progressive parties that are trying to organize themselves for the first time in history to go out and campaign, not only did they not have time, did they not have funding—unlike the Brotherhood and the Salafis, who have plenty of money from the Gulf. These progressive parties haven’t had time to really organize themselves, and they’re still learning. On top of that, they’ve been fighting to survive. The fact that they’re still going at all is very hopeful to me, because I don’t think they’re going to give up.

SIFT launches books arts collective with a Happy Hour Salon!

posted Jan 20, 2012

Yuka Petz and Angela Driscoll are the co-founders of SIFT, a new book arts collective (Photo: Andy Cook)

By Tori Bush

While New Orleans has a rich history of literature and art, there are few places where these two media can cross-fertilize. Angela Driscoll, a member of the Antenna Gallery collective, and Yuka Petz have formed a new arts organization called SIFT in order to fill this gap in our community.

SIFT—which stands for “Sequence, Image, Form, Text”—is rooted in the intersection of book arts and fine arts, of image and text. Book arts have traditionally been marginalized in both the publishing and art worlds, and SIFT intends to highlight them as craft. Its co-founders also hope to use art in order to cross boundaries and build a community of artists and residents both in New Orleans and abroad.

SIFT’s official mission is facilitate the exploration and dialogue of interdisciplinary arts through workshops, events, exhibitions, and opportunities. SIFT’s inaugural event, “Bound in Japan,” will take place at the Antenna Gallery on January 26 from 6 – 8 p.m. Part of the Antenna Gallery’s Happy Hour Salon series, “Bound in Japan” is a presentation by artist Thien-Kieu Lam, a Louisiana native who lived in Japan for many years.

In cities throughout Japan, Lam produced book art workshops with both native Japanese and non-Japanese participants in order to encourage community building between immigrant and non-immigrant populations. Generally, Japan is perceived as a homogenous society, but rates of immigration have risen in the last decade. Lam’s workshops attempt to unveil Japan’s multiculturalism and encourage the swapping of experiences and stories.

While Lam will not be replicating the workshop at Antenna, it would be enlightening to explore the affects of this Japan-based workshop in New Orleans, historically famous for our multicultural mix but occasionally unwelcoming to outsiders. Sure, the ethnicities that comprise New Orleans are diverse, but how open is the culture to our large Vietnamese population, and what about the growing—yet frequently marginalized—Latino presence? This workshop was inspired by Lam’s desire to use art to create a social change. New Orleans may yet need more events that cross the boundaries between social change and the arts.

Bound in Japan is a bookmaking salon that encourages community involvement.

Driscoll and Petz, who both attended the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and have been collaborating since 2009, inform SIFT with their own artistic work. Driscoll, a professor of fine arts at Loyola University, creates work that focuses on systems of information and how those systems can be translated into other means of communication.

“In my most recent work I’ve been breaking down things and analyzing them,” Driscoll says. “If you look at the piece that is up at the CAC right now [Score for LOC Call Numbers], it’s analyzing the Library of Congress call numbers and breaking it into its parts, stretching out the sequence and figuring out how to slow it down. By taking information apart and putting it together, it allows me to not just analyze it but to reflect on it.”

Driscoll’s organization and translation of databases of information into visual and audio pieces of art suggests an inherent disposition to cross-fertilization of ideas and genres, which fits nicely with book art.

Petz’s work also crosses boundaries. The Most Important Things are the Hardest to Say Because the Words Diminish Them is a delicate work made from handmade paper and wire. Small boxes act as placeholders for the dimensional space that letters would hold. These small boxes replace traditional symbols with the simple space needed to identify particular letters. The exploration of human means of communication and the seemingly arbitrary symbols we use suggests that Petz, like Driscoll, is concerned with breaking down the boundaries of not only traditional communication systems, but of understanding the deeper meaning held within.

While SIFT is a nascent organization, events such as “Bound in Japan” and its co-founders’ personal work have the potential to explore bookmaking as a form of interdisciplinary arts practice and act as a resource for a diverse community.

New Orleans Literary Audio on the Knox Writers’ House

posted Jan 18, 2012

The Knox Writers’ House documents a literary field-recording road trip of sorts. Three enthusiasts drive across the country, interviewing and recording readings by writers along the way. They’ve made dozens of mp3s and transcripts (along with crude line-drawing portraits) available on a map that plots their route. They’ve mostly stuck to the Midwest thus far, but have ventured to the Northeast, West, and South, and New Orleans is one of the stops with the most content. The Knox folks talked with John Biguenet, Nicole Cooley, Mark Yakich, Andy Young, Michael J. Lee, Anne Giselson, and others, and their website features audio of them reading their own and others’ work. Check it out here.

Happy Holidays from Room 220

posted Dec 19, 2011

Note: I stupidly omitted The Definition of Bounce (see above), a fantastic book by 10th Ward Buck , from the Room 220 holiday gift guide. It was sitting on my filing cabinet, instead of on my bookshelf, from which I pulled the guide’s selections.

Room 220 featured an excerpt of text and photos from The Definition of Bounce earlier this year. As you and this Bourbon Street bar caller would agree, it would make a great gift for any fan of books, New Orleans, and/or bounce.

See you in the New Year.

Best,
Nathan C. Martin

Travel, security, death, the mundane, strangers, boredom, home, geography: A talk about airports and air travel with Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich

posted Dec 13, 2011

Mark Yakich, right, indicates to Christopher Schaberg the angle at which airplanes approach Louis Armstrong Airport.

By Nathan C. Martin

Mutual obsession can make strange bedfellows. For Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich, it made a multimedia publishing project. The two professors of English at Loyola University New Orleans share a common infatuation with flight and its cultural and psychological accoutrements. Yakich, an accomplished poet (and previous Room 220 interviewee), possesses a profound fear of flying that compels him to fixate on airplane crashes wherever he finds them—in the news, in history books, in movies—and to spend hours alone in the airport cell phone lot, drinking bourbon and watching planes land. Schaberg, a former employee of the Bozeman, Montana, airport, wrote his doctoral thesis on the ways in which we “read” airports. He recently published a book of critical theory, The Textual Life of Airports, which is a combined study of airports as they’re presented in literature and of the interpretive demands airports impose upon those who navigate them.

The two writers’ combined neuroses encouraged them to launch a website, Airplane Reading, which collects stories of airports and air travel from amateur and professional writers. The site is a locus for highly readable and utterly relatable stories, as well as a database of narratives that explore our collective experiences with flight. Schaberg and Yakich also published a book, Checking In/Checking Out, an elegant, reversible pocket-sized volume to which each author contributed half about his respective flight-related urgencies.

Yakich will read from Checking In/Checking Out along with several contributors to Airplane Reading at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, December 16, at the New Orleans Museum of Art, as part of the museum’s centennial celebrations. Schaberg, sadly, will be out of town.

The three of us met on an unseasonably brisk yet bright day in October at the Louis Armstrong International Airport’s cell phone lot, where we shared a few swigs of bourbon, befriended the taxi line manager, and talked about the book and the website.

Room 220: How did this project start?

Christopher Schaberg: When I was interviewing for my job at Loyola in 2009, Mark picked me up at the airport and I started telling him about my dissertation, which was about airports in American literature. He was immediately interested in what flying has to do with writing and reading. After I got the job, we started emailing back and forth, and it was this weird time when there were like three different airplane crashes—the water landing; the Buffalo crash where the plane hit the house and the three family members were watching TV in three separate rooms, and two of them crawled out of the rubble and the third one died; and there was a plane that slid off the runway in Denver.

Mark Yakich: And Air France was that June.

CS: Right. And then there was that Montana crash, with all the little skiers. They found all those little plastic ski boots on the ground.

MY: It crashed into a cemetery.

CS: In Butte. We started really tracking coverage of crashes and emailing back and forth about them. We’d pull quotes from the articles and add our own commentary and anecdotes. We noticed they had a particular penchant for having like 200 comments, and the comments for stories about crashes and airports were like, “Oh, this almost happened to me once.” All of these people wanted to tell their own stories about flight. So we flipped it around and made a website entirely devoted to people’s stories of air travel—from big writers to everyday travelers.

MY: It’s very curious. We launched the site about a month ago, and we’ve got about 60 stories already. We’re offering edits, but at the same time there’s no literary bar. It’s not a literary journal and you don’t have to be a writer. If you’ve got a story to tell about flying that’s nonfiction and 1,000 words or less, you’re there. We have a section called “Featured Writer” every week on Monday, and it’s usually a novelist or a professional writer, but then we have daily stories by bartenders, college students, flight attendants. You realize, when people are telling their stories, that airports and flying kind of tap into a real nexus—there’s travel, obviously, but also security, death, the mundane, strangers, boredom, home, geography. It’s a really interesting place for the human condition to play out.

CS: One of the interesting things to me, from a critical theoretical standpoint, is how airports or the culture of flight demands a lot of interpretation or navigating through an airport, but there are also very clear lines where you’re not supposed to think about it—be distracted, don’t think about the fact that you’re up in the air, don’t think about the fact that you’ve been delayed for nine hours, that this person can’t tell you where your bag is. There are demands to turn off your attention and, a moment later, to be really attentive. I like looking at how travelers are supposed to balance that.

MY: We knew we were tapped into something when Chris sent an email to Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine for United Airlines.

CS: I tried to pitch a story. I said, you know, we wrote this book, we’ve got this website, it seems like it could be this great little story in the magazine—two English professors are working on this project about air travel. The editor-in-chief writes back: “Oh, you know, actually, our magazine is just for general readers. We don’t want our readers to think about the fact that they’re traveling.” I was like, Wow. This proves the point! We’re creating a space for these stories you’re not supposed to tell—or, you’re supposed to tell them and then forget about them immediately. You bitch about losing your bag and then you book your next flight.

Checking In/Checking Out is reversible, with two sections that converge in the middle

Rm220: There are a lot of adventure stories about flight, where something going wrong is the story, but the mere weirdness of airports and all these minute oddities that happen there are interesting in and of themselves, without much plot. Chris, it seems like that’s what you were trying to show with your half of the book.

CS: Definitely. I wanted to think about the banalities of working at the airport. But there are also so many tropes of the airline worker in movies—the airline worker behind the counter tapping away. I also wanted to expose a job that already has a lot of exposure in the cultural realm, and a lot of negative connotations, too. The figure of the airline worker is always this kind of indiscernible and annoying figure, but you need them to get on the plane. But then, I was that person.

MY: That’s what this book, Checking In/Checking Out, does that you don’t see in other places. You see flight attendant memoirs, pilot memoirs, and you get these crazy stories—Snakes on a Plane, for instance. You never get the ones that Chris is telling. The banal. The day-to-day. On my side, I talk about my fear of flying, and this never gets air time either. People don’t talk about it. I had one agent say when we sent her our book, “I don’t want to read about that stuff. I don’t want to think about those kinds of things.” Tupelo Press, who published a chapbook of mine, read that manuscript and said, “We enjoy the experience of flying, and we thought that reading your book would make us not enjoy it anymore.” So, on both sides, we’re doing something people haven’t wanted to do.

Rm220: I was trying to think of good descriptors for airports and I kept coming back to the word “surgical.” Everything is presented with precision and efficiency, yet—as you wrote in your side, Chris—”The whole operation seem[s] held together by thin threads of time and tenuously maintained spaces.” You have these planes that are pocked with hail and covered with bird guts, and then you come back with your side, Mark, with this fear of crashing. If something goes wrong, it’s not like you’re washing machine breaks—the airplane falls out of the sky and everyone dies. So it seems to me that the idea of air travel being “surgical” works well, because surgery is this very clean, precise, controlled thing, but if you fuck up in surgery—and, really, it’s a bloody mess to begin with—a person can lose a limb or an organ or something. The ratio between pains taken to present the processes as efficient and controlled and the direness of the consequences of a mistake seems about one-to-one.

MY: That’s interesting. I remember when we first started writing about airports, I wrote a line that was something like, “Part hospital, part Cathedral.” Because I thought about the whiteness and the cleanness. They’re always super clean.

CS: And the technical lingo of before security and after is actually called “the non-sterile zone” and “the sterile zone.”

MY: Pilots seem like surgeons. You trust them with everything. They have to remain cool and calm.

It was such a welcome coincidence that this plane happened to fly over just as I snapped the picture! We didn't even have to stand there for 20 minutes waiting or anything!

Rm220: Mark, you’re a poet, and, Chris, you write critical theory. Why make this a nonfiction book instead of something else? Why is nonfiction an effective form for talking about these kinds of things?

MY: People seem to be interested in memoir these day, “real” things that “really happened,” even though every memoir is a fiction—no matter how close you try to stick to the facts, you’ve got memory to deal with, narrative artifice, and so forth. I guess with nonfiction I wanted to reach an audience that would take it seriously, and I wanted to reach a big audience. Poetry readers are a small little subculture and it gets a little incestuous and boring to always talk to them.

CS: For me, the divergence from critical theory proper is very much in the spirit of the public intellectual. This is a subject with philosophical dimensions, but they need to be written about and talked about in such a way that anyone who’s flying or thinking about the airplane could be like, “Oh yeah, there’s something profoundly weird there,” rather than just taking it for granted.

Rm220: Mark, the first scene in your half of the book is striking. You’re sitting out in the airport cell phone lot in your car, where we are now, watching airplanes through binoculars. Your palms are sweating cold and you have a flask of bourbon you’re drinking, and it all relates to you trying to confront your fear of flying. How often does this happen and how long have you been doing this?

MY: It probably should happen more often than it does. For a time I’d regularly come out here, just because I didn’t know where else to go. If you keep watching all those planes take off, and nothing’s happening, that’s somehow reassuring. Julian Barnes has a book Nothing to be Frightened Of, which is all about his fear of death. He said he got over his fear of flying when he was younger when he got to the airport in Greece a day early by accident. He was young and had no money, so he had to sit there all day and watch the planes, and that just kind of dispelled him of his fear. He watched so many planes take off and there wasn’t one small incident, so he was like, “What the fuck? Why am I upset?” So that was my logic at first, but at a certain point you start to get addicted. It’s solitary. You sit in your car, and watching something that invokes fear in you—you kind of get off on it a little bit. It sounds odd, but no one’s out in the cell phone lot. There are taxis at certain points in the day. Otherwise, there’s like four cars. It’s like being in a bathroom at a baseball stadium with 40 urinals. You can piss anywhere. No one gives a shit. You can park anywhere in the cell phone lot. No one’s going to see you do anything.

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