Month / August 2012

by Edward Champion

Julie Delpy (The Bat Segundo Show)

In this 20 minute radio interview, filmmaker Julie Delpy discusses eccentric behavior, Franco-American perceptions, what French people do with thermometers, being an obsessive, finding the right toothbrush sound, Belvedere Castle, and romantic fairy tales.

Julie Delpy is most recently the writer, director, and star of 2 Days in New York.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Searching for a castle that doesn’t require too much physical exertion.

Guest: Julie Delpy

Subjects Discussed: Patriarchs who key cars, countesses who murder women for their virgin blood, aberrant and eccentric behavior in Delpy’s films, the advantages of flawed characters, The King of Comedy‘s Rupert Pupkin, domestic carapaces for odd people, mental institutions, emotionless people, arguing with people you live with, comic tension, loud family arguments in quiet cafes, characters who accuse others of raping children, anger issues, struggles to get quirky independent films made, why Chris Rock was cast, 2 Days vs. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, German film financing, David Hasselhoff, Chris Rock in a straightlaced role, how romantic comedy becomes more alive when women are uncontrollable, leveling the gender playing field in narrative by offering complex women, romantic projection, thematic resonances between 2 Days in Paris and 2 Days in New York, toothbrushes that are confused with sex toys, how blue jeans woo men, how French people take their temperature, Delpy’s obsession with finding the right toothbrush sound, Stanley Kubrick, being a hands on filmmaker, color correction, the humor contained within The Countess, how to position an actor to stand appropriately on a throne of heads, Belvedere Castle, Merchant Ivory films, creating a fairy tale narrative, how boys like “feminine” aspects of fairy tales, the scarcity of women directors, how gender has affected Delpy’s reputation, being taken more seriously, the business aspects of cinema, nerds and cinema without emotion, why Hollywood is avoiding emotional directors, cold businessmen, Delpy’s indomitable work ethic, Delpy finishing The Countess while her mother was dying, and the financial repercussions of cinema.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: What of the interesting resonances between the two films [2 Days in New York and 2 Days in Paris]? The two that struck me: the thermometer becomes the toothbrush in New York. You have the thermometer joke. And then now it’s the toothbrush joke where…

Delpy: Toothbrush. Oh yeah. Like objects being put in the wrong spot. (laughs)

Correspondent: Exactly. Or blue jeans being used to woo a man. In the first film, we have mom ironing the blue jeans.

Delpy: The blue jeans.

Correspondent: In the second film, we have the blue jeans offer on air.

Delpy: The blue jeans are where?

Correspondent: The blue jeans, when Mingus is on the air. There’s that woman who offers them.

Delpy: Oh, the jeans! I see. That’s funny.

Correspondent: So I’m wondering. I’m guessing these were accidental. But I’m wondering if there were any conscious efforts on your part to mimic the resonances from the first film. To see if they would play a little differently in New York. Or older.

Delpy: Well, that’s something. For example, I think it’s something to do with — like I’ve always been amused that Americans — I mean, in France, if you take your temperature, everyone puts it in their butt. Just…I have to tell you. Just like if you’re a toddler. You just put it there.

Correspondent: It is a French thing.

Delpy: And I’ve always been having American boyfriends find this repulsive. That French people are perverts.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Delpy: Because we take our temperature in the butt. So we are perverts because of that. I always thought that was a funny idea. I mean, the thing about the toothbrush, I have the idea that, actually, they might have done really nothing with that toothbrush and that it’s all in his mind. That they might have used the toothbrush.

Correspondent: While they were having…

Delpy: Or it’s an object that wasn’t a toothbrush. But he’s convinced that they’re perverts using his toothbrush for sex toys. But I actually believe personally…

Correspondent: The toothbrush is your Pulp Fiction suitcase.

Delpy: (laughs) It is to me.

Correspondent: It could be used for naughty purposes. It could be used for rather eccentric purposes. They could be brushing their teeth as they’re doing it. We don’t know.

Delpy: Yeah. Who knows? They might have been brushing their teeth while doing it. But he’s convinced. Or they might have used another object that sounds like that toothbrush. But he’s convinced it’s his toothbrush. It’s this projection of this idea that, you know, once you have this idea that someone is perverted, you can imagine everything. And I like to use that. That is a kind of playful thing.

Correspondent: I don’t know. The sound sounded pretty similar to my ears. I’m wondering. Did you work with the sound guy to have it close?

Delpy: Actually, that was one of the hardest things to do. To find the right sound. And the banging on the wall. So it didn’t sound too trashy. To always find the right limit between really too crass and not too cute either.

Correspondent: Well, I’m wondering how you researched toothbrush sounds vs. dildo sounds. That would be a very interesting project for a sound man.

Delpy: I didn’t turn on dildos. I only turned on toothbrushes.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Delpy: I kept it to a toothbrush. But actually I did spend a lot of time listening to many different sounds of toothbrushes. And some toothbrushes, I just didn’t like the sound. So I kind of drove everyone crazy. I’m very…when I get into post-production, with all the mixing and the sound and all that stuff, I get really super duper duper duper…kind of precise on what I want. And that toothbrush, I drove everyone nuts over.

Correspondent: Well, like, how so? How precise can you get? Is there any sort of limit that you will reach before people are driven nuts or something? How anal are you here?

Delpy: No. I will work until I get what I want. I’m not like crazy, like going like a power trip. Like it’s too show that I have the power.

Correspondent: No Kubrick, 172 takes…(laughs)

Delpy: Even though they call me Stanley all the time. (laughs)

Correspondent: And not just because you grew a beard.

Delpy: Yeah, it’s because of my beard. Not because of my talent. I’ll tell you that. Because I get a little bit obsessed. Sometimes in details and stuff like that. But then when I have what I want, I’m fine. Then I’m done. Boom. And then I never talk about it again.

Correspondent: Well, like, how many takes did you do? Just to deflate the Stanley rumors here.

Delpy: Well, I ended up recording the toothbrush myself. Because I didn’t like any of the sounds. So I ended up taking a mike and going to record my toothbrush and the toothbrush I wanted to use in the film.

Correspondent: Are you hands on like that for cinematography? Or for other matters?

Delpy: Cinematography, no. Because I am not a very good — I don’t have the best visual ideas, you know? I’m not hands on cinematography. I’m very hands on sound. Music. Sound effects. Everything that has to do with sound, I’m very good. You know, I’m very obsessed also when we do the period of color correction. I get very — if I don’t get what I want, I will not stop.

Correspondent: What about placement of actors?

Delpy: Which is normal. I think it’s normal. I mean, if you’re a filmmaker, you want to get — it’s so much work to write. It’s so much work to shoot. And then you edit for three months and you work like a maniac. And then you end up in post-production. And you don’t want to suddenly have skin tones that are wrong. I mean, you can very quickly — now there’s such a scale of things you can do. It’s so large. You can go from a skin that looks sort of creamy to a skin that looks all greenish. I mean, you can do so much that you have to be really careful in color correction nowadays.

Correspondent: What about positioning an actor? Like, I think of the image in The Countess of the guy standing on top of the heads. I mean, how particular are you on something like that?

Delpy: Oh that, I’m very particular.

Correspondent: The angle of the head. Is the head just right at that particular angle? I’m just trying to get a sense of how precise you are really with these things.

Delpy: Yeah. I get very precise in scenes like that. Because, to me, I wanted it to look like a painting. Like a lot of 17th century painting I’ve looked at, based for this film. Like a lot and lot of Nordic painters. So I was really inspired by that. And I wanted it to look like that. Like something almost ridiculous, but kind of funny. I mean, the film, The Countess is not devoid of humor. I see the film as something a little bit funny at times. So it’s meant to be that way. Like even the craziness of wanting to stay young forever. I mean, she’s obviously such a pathetic character. Which makes me laugh. She makes me laugh actually. And so anyway, even this guy is kind of crazy. I mean, he’s sitting on a throne of beheaded Turks. So it’s kind of funny. If you’re dark. (laughs)

Correspondent: I thought a lot of it was funny, personally. But I’m a sick human being. But Belvedere Castle…

Delpy: But it’s meant to be funny.

Correspondent: Yes. Belvedere Castle, I wanted to ask you about this. You shot the end of 2 Days in New York at Belvedere Castle. And what happened with me when I saw the film — and this may be a terribly wonkish and pedantic question, but I feel the need to ask it nonetheless. I immediately thought, “Oh! The Bostonians. Merchant Ivory.” And the reason that I thought about that was because in 2 Days in Paris, you have this early moment where the American tourists come in and they have the red Da Vinci Code, which is almost serving as the red Baedeker tour guides that you see in A Room with a View. And so…

Delpy: Oh my god. That’s complicated.

Correspondent: And they are tourists, much in that mode, going through a city. And, of course, they come from Venice by train. So I think to myself, “Oh, there was maybe a Merchant Ivory nod there.” But I’m wondering, based off of these two things, whether emulating that sort of Merchant Ivory look and subverting it with wild behavior or astonishing developments was ever an interest of yours. And also: why you choose Belevedere Castle?

Delpy: Well, you know, I didn’t really think at all of Merchant Ivory. You looked into it like…oh my god. That’s pretty..

Correspondent: This is a problem of mine. I apologize. (laughs)

Delpy: That’s really cool. That’s really cool to read so much into something. No, I basically picked the Belvedere Castle because I wanted something high that made sense, that it was dangerous but not Empire State Building dangerous. Because Empire State Building — anyway, you can’t jump off the Empire State Building. Because it’s all blocked out. So it had to be realistic. And the Belvedere Castle is quite dangerous. Actually, if you jump, you can kill yourself. But I wanted it to be almost like a fairy tale. The film is a little bit like a fairy tale. It’s told to a child really. Because it’s told with these puppets. So I wanted this end to be in a castle. Like a fairy tale. And the princess, which is me, is saved by the prince, which is Chris Rock. But obviously the film is so not a fairy tale in its tone and everything. But I wanted it to be like a fairy tale. It ends in a castle like a fairy tale.

The Bat Segundo Show #475: Julie Delpy (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Megan Abbott (The Bat Segundo Show)

In this 45 minute radio interview, novelist Megan Abbott returns to our program to discuss the niceties of cheerleading culture, using Richard III as a loose narrative structure, serial killers, and tennis espionage.

Megan Abbot is most recently the author of Dare Me. She previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #404.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Preparing to shake the appropriate pom-poms.

Author: Megan Abbott

Subjects Discussed: Secret conversations, how cheerleaders are depicted in American culture, Bring It On, cheerleaders and postmodernism, parallels between cheerleaders and soldiers, doing research almost exclusively online, how fonts and italics reinforced text message culture in Dare Me, the text message as a noir voice, theories that Dare Me started off as a recession novel, teenagers and technology, creating a sad and bleak adult world, logical reasons for why teenagers have no desire to have grown-up jobs, empty apartment buildings, people who die in luxury condos, balancing literary and mystery elements to create a transitional novel, stretching genre, crime as a tool for power relations, using Richard III as a narrative framework, obsession with Shakespeare, the Ian McKellen version of Richard III, Looking for Richard, Richard III as an innocent, the ugliness of ambition, desperation, Deadwood, how political theory and Henry IV and Henry V share much in common, Robert Caro, parallels between mean girl rhetoric and LBJ’s profanity, being afraid of individuals who open their mouths, carryover from The End of Everything of a teenage world as an adult one, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, when parents are irrelevant, what Facebook reveals about teenagers, powerful coaches, how tired men can be manipulated, similarities between Dare Me‘s Coach and Queenpin‘s Gloria Denton, how belief encourages people to commit crimes, true crime, the Aurora shootings, the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre, the difficulties of relating to a sociopath, the short story that Dare Me sprang from, writing with a manageable evil, the smartphone as a person, how smartphones plague society (and how much we can resist them), teenagers who aren’t aware of the off button, Facebook trash talk, teenagers who crave for attention, writing about cheerleaders who have no interest in boys, relationships between football players and cheerleaders, cheerleaders as a roving gang, teens excited by the National Guard, smoking and drinking in the classroom, cheerleading coaches who are former cheerleaders, physical brutality, the difficulties of writing physical action, finding a new set of words to describe cheerleaders, using multiple verbs in a sentence, eccentric verbs, how any type of sport creates a new language, contending with copy editors, hockey subculture, The Mighty Ducks, Slap Shot, and tennis espionage.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Now we are sort of doing this secretly. We’ve tried to flag down a waitress to be polite. So it’s very possible we may have to order during this conversation. However, we will talk. Let’s see what we can do.

Abbott: That sounds good. I’m ready.

Correspondent: So let’s start off. I saw that you wrote a New York Times piece about Bring It On. But you use this piece to point out to certain realities of how cheerleaders are depicted in our culture. You point to the portrayal of cheerleaders in two modes: Ironic and Ideal. I’m wondering if some fulfillment of these two criteria is actually necessary to have a plausible narrative these days. What are your thoughts on this? And maybe this is a good way of describing how you zeroed the needle for Dare Me.

Abbott: Right. And I admit. I’m completely vulnerable to both. I love both the Ideal and the Ironic. Every cultural reference I had in there are things I kind of love. You know, Twin Peaks and all the doomed beautiful perfect cheerleaders who become corrupted? I love. And I love all the ironic ones. Some more than others. But it just seems — I mean, the word I didn’t use in the piece, that I avoided using, is “postmodernism.” But that’s essentially what has overtaken the cheerleader. She doesn’t exist as a person and probably never did. So when I actually started to look at actual cheerleaders, the divide fell even greater then in my day in the 1980s, when they were still somewhat enmeshed. Cheerleaders themselves were responding to the idea that they were cheerleaders and they should act as cheerleaders in popular culture did.

Correspondent: Cheerleaders cheerleading about themselves.

Abbott: Exactly! Exactly. But I don’t think that’s true at all today. And I think that “serious” cheerleaders — and I shouldn’t air quote that, but I did. Because they are serious.

Correspondent: Real cheerleaders. Bona-fide cheerleaders.

Abbott: I think they’d line themselves up much more to gymnasts, to serious athletes. And then that’s the parallel. And I would even take it further. When I look at them, I see them as more closely associated with Marines, boxers, the great risks like pilots ready to go down.

Correspondent: That’s very good. (laughs)

Abbott: Kamikazes. I think that there’s even more interesting aspects to them than being hard-core athletes.

Correspondent: So we should be making World War II movies with cheerleaders in place of the soldiers.

Abbott: Seriously. I actually thought about it writing the piece. Because you know how those old movies, they’d always have the guy from Brooklyn and the Oakie. Etcetera.

Correspondent: The Longest Day with cheerleaders.

Abbott: Yes! Exactly! Oh my gosh. That’s such a great pitch. (laughs)

Correspondent: We could make a million dollars on that.

Abbott: Seriously. Right here.

Correspondent: Well, the ironic mode, however, I would say that given the fact you have cheerleaders who are purging, who are regurgitating — in fact, one common motif that you repeat, I think three times in the book, is the hair behind the head as they puke into the toilet. To a certain degree, that is ironic in light of the physical robustness of these cheerleaders. Also the lemon tea diets and all that. So I would argue that perhaps you are working in some ironic mode in the sense that you’re taking a very feminine ideal and hardening it up to some degree to that same level that we generally put football players or, as you point out here, military people and so forth.

Abbott: Right. And I think that the eating disorders — the various bad eating habits, let’s say — of the girls has to do more with making weight like wrestlers than with girls wanting to have perfect bodies. And that sort of extremism is what really interested me. But it also became interesting because I was not a cheerleader.

Correspondent: You weren’t?

Abbott: No. I couldn’t imagine. (laughs)

Correspondent: But you came in with your pom poms and everything.

Abbott: I know. A skirt on.

Correspondent: You’ve been deceiving me the entire time!

Abbott: I know. Afterward I’ll show you that I…

Correspondent: Oh, I see. I brought my little barrette to twirl.

Abbott: Oh! Good, good, good! I will be dandling. It just strikes me that it’s almost like cheerleaders are a metaphor for being a girl. Because usually they do things girls do. But the cheerleader is the heightened form of it. Girls suffer mightily in high school. They do bad things to themselves and others. They torture each other. There was always this great Seinfeld joke that stuck into my head about how terrible boys are in high school, and Elaine says, “Oh, we never treated each other like that. We would just tease each other until we gave each other eating disorders.” And that always struck me as really true. So that the cheerleader — in my case, I am sort of metaphorizing it or ironizing it in some way. Because it’s a stand-in for how hard it is being a girl.

Correspondent: Well, let’s talk about the research that you did. I know that you have said that you have observed various cheerleaders practice. Was this actually in person? Was this on YouTube?

Abbott: It was all online.

Correspondent: It was all online!

Abbott: Yeah. All YouTube.

Correspondent: Did you talk to any cheerleaders at all?

Abbott: I did.

Correspondent: Okay.

Abbott: Via email only.

Correspondent: Oh really?

Abbott: Well, you know, I’m not a journalist, nor do I pretend to be.

Correspondent:> But you play one on TV.

Abbott: I do! Exactly. (laughs) And I guess part of me — I felt, even in my email interviews, that they were performing for me in a way. I wasn’t really seeing them as they were. I would be an intruder. So online, or watching them online or watching them on message boards, where they didn’t know anyone was listening, seemed to be the purest and most authentic view I could get. When they didn’t care. Because they’ll post their practices. They’re performing. So they will always be performers. But I just felt like I was getting a more authentic view of it. And then, at a certain point, I didn’t want to talk to any of them. Because it might change things. My version of it is very heightened. And once I decide how I wanted the world in the book to be, I didn’t want any…

Correspondent: Realism to get in the way.

Abbott: The hyperreality of the book.

Correspondent: So that’s interesting. It seems to me that you were almost collecting textual snippets through these email interviews. Because the book is very heavy on text messages and, in fact, there’s one interesting thing. You have the iPhone font and the italicized font of something from a previous statement. And I’m wondering what this did to get this hyperreal mode that you devised, after soaking yourself so much in cheerleading culture from before.

Abbott: Right. From the beginning, I was so worried about the texting. Because I thought, “How am I going to? Nobody wants to read texts in a novel.”

Correspondent: Nobody’s going to text you. (laughs)

Abbott: Exactly.

Correspondent: You can’t pretend to be a cheerleader.

Abbott: No. And there’s nothing more depressing than reading texts. Because they’re so meant for some kind of quick communication. But once I realized it as a mechanism for the way that girls could torture each other, the way that they could be present, when people can be present when they’re not present. You know, there’s a scene where one of the cheerleaders keeps sending texts to the main girl, Addy. So it’s almost like she’s there. But she’s not there. So the text and the snippets became this opportunity to be the voices in the head. Or the classic noir voiceover. Or the voice over the shoulder. The tap on the shoulder. So once I found a way to turn it into something else, I felt that it had become mine somehow.

(Photo: John Bartlett)

The Bat Segundo Show #474: Megan Abbott (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Why Being Nice Means Nothing

In the last week, there’s been a lot of talk about being nice in the literary world. This essay outlines the misleading qualities of the word and articulates why honesty, tolerance of other viewpoints, and an open mind are the real qualities to advocate.

In all the hot and bothered blather over niceness as an epidemic on par with the bubonic plague, Internet bitchery as a sin which may or may not be equivalent to molesting a small child, and the midlist demolition job compared to a lonely book reviewer belting Eric Carmen’s Rachmaninoff knockoff into the mirror, nobody has paused to consider how tenuous the word “nice” is in the first place.

Believe it or not, there was a time when being called “a nice person” was an insult. “Nice” was originally Old French for “silly” or “foolish.” Here’s Chaucer using “nice” in Troilus and Criseyde:

Quod Pandarus, “Thou hast a full great care
Lest that the churl may fall out of the moon
Why, Lord! I hate of thee the nice fare;

So if you were the type who was overly cautious and taken with needless particularities, you were often condemned for being “nice.” The word originated from the Latin nescius for “ignorant.” By the late 14th century, nice people were fussy or fastidious types: snobs who deliberated over a restaurant menu for twenty minutes. By the turn of the century, a nice person was someone with delicate sensibilities. In the 16th century, a nice person was someone who was very careful or precise. The proverb “more nice than wise” preserves some of these original meanings.

Then in 1769, “nice” altered into something that was agreeable or delightful. In 1830, “nice” involved being kind and thoughtful. And this etymological shift rightly pissed off Fowler, who had this to say in A Dictionary of Modern Usage:

N. has been spoilt, like CLEVER, by its bonnes femmes; it has been too great a favorite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all of its individuality & converted it into a mere diffuser of vague & mild agreeableness. Everyone who uses it in its more proper senses, which fill most of the space given to it in any dictionary, & avoids the modern one that tends to oust them all, does a real if small service to the language.

In other words, contrary to Michelle Dean’s critical conspiracy theories, “nice,” in the manner that we use it today, originated from the ladies.

“Nice” is a problematic, amorphous, and impermanent word. It could mean something altogether different in a decade. And it certainly doesn’t mean anything now. Rosie O’Donnell was once called “The Queen of Nice” before developing a decidedly belligerent reputation for speaking her mind. In 1962, Lowell Lee Andrews, “the nicest boy in Wolcott,” killed his family. (And why is it that “nice,” more than “kind” or “respectful,” is the default modifier when the next door neighbor is revealed to be a serial killer?)

“God damn it, you’ve got to be nice” sounds porous and gutless next to Kurt Vonnegut’s “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” And it reveals the inherent deceit of nice. If you’re “being nice” to someone, you’re not being honest. You’re humoring a person you don’t want to be with and I don’t think I can trust you. Especially when you’re flattering a person one minute and talking shit about that same person when they leave the room. But if you’re “being kind” to someone, you are legitimately trying to understand where another person is coming from and you are willing to change your mind. You are also willing to persuade the person who is so determined to hate.

I’m not interested in being nice. I’m interested in being kind. I’m interested in having conversations with people who have the confidence to walk down a two-way street built on respect. I’m interested in Emma Straub not because she is nice (although she once patiently listened to one of my five minute soliloquies on the BEA floor), but because she is kind and respectful. She can be trusted because she isn’t as resolutely sanguine as Jacob Silverman has suggested. This is someone who openly condemned Christmas in The New York Times. I didn’t care for Emma Straub’s short story collection and I suppose I’m guilty of “being nice” for not saying anything about it. But I truly had better things to get worked up about. I also disagree with much of Straub’s response to Jacob Silverman’s essay. But I’m pretty sure I could have an adult conversation with her, where we could agree on some points and disagree on others.

I don’t care for the majority of what Lev Grossman writes, but he has been respectful enough to respond to my criticisms in public and in private. Even Sam Tanenhaus had the stones to approach Levi Asher and me on a cold wintry night and enter into a heated but civil face-to-face exchange about The New York Times Book Review. A few years ago, John Freeman and I realized that we were not mortal enemies on the National Book Awards dance floor when I brazenly walked up to him and asked how he was doing. None of this was a matter of “being nice.” It was about being human. It was about keeping an open mind and remaining curious. Is it possible that I will get worked up enough over something that these three people write in the future? Yeah. Probably. I’m hardly a saint and I’m known to speak my mind, but I don’t hate any of these guys. It’s the work that I have had problems with.

I wish I could say munificent things about people like literary blogger Mark Athitakis, who called the cops on me rather than settling our differences over a phone call, or Los Angeles Times writer Carolyn Kellogg, who sent me a remarkably patronizing email when I pointed to flaws in her journalism and has given me the cold shoulder since (I have since learned that this remarkably oversensitive person has behaved with such petty childishness with a number of other people). But I can’t, although if either Athitakis or Kellogg were to write an essay that deeply moved me or were to break a significant news story, I would be the first to sing their hosannas. The idea of not linking or acknowledging good work because you detest the person is antithetical to first-rate intelligence. As the wise Maria Bustillos points out, it’s the immature writer who declares his critic his nemesis for life, but the mature writer who wants to understand why someone would feel that way. Athitakis and Kellogg prefer condemnation rather than consideration. I think it’s a dishonest and craven approach. But you know what? I don’t hate these two either.

People like Athitakis and Kellogg act this way, even engaging in the puerile “you don’t exist in my universe” game, because they want people to “be nice” to them. They seem to believe that any person being “mean” is incapable of being kind. They wish to live in a universe that involves other people proffering lips, prostrating themselves, and smooching posteriors. I think we can all accept that, in an age of Goodreads and Amazon reviews, this is an unreasonable and uninteresting way to live. It is also incompatible with the critic’s present value in American culture, which is far removed from the days of Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, or Mary McCarthy.

Enthusiasm isn’t the problem. I don’t think any one type of writing should be prohibited (although strenuously argued oppositions are always interesting). On the other hand, the mainstream critical landscape has become so polluted with sterile viewpoints because people are so touchy about offending other people. And this means that honest enthusiasm, predicated upon a clear set of virtues and standards even when responding to bad books, is now considered suspect. On the other hand, Jacob Silverman’s hope for “a better literary culture…that’s not so dependent on personal esteem and mutual reinforcement” is remarkably conservative. Why can’t we live in a world that offers respect to Emma Straub’s flowery crowns and a James Wood hit piece? If we weren’t so busy being nice or being liked, we wouldn’t need to worry so much about honest criticism.

by Edward Champion

Uzodinma Iweala (The Bat Segundo Show)

In this 30 minute radio interview, author Uzodinma Iweala discusses the importance of oral storytelling, how cultural stereotypes continue to impact AIDS awareness in Africa, needless fear and hysteria, and unexpected parallels between the United States and Nigeria.

Uzodinma Iweala is most recently the author of Our Kind of People.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Looking beyond.

Subjects Discussed: The advantages of hearing stories told to understand issues, the rhythms and tones of language, how to track down people to talk with in Nigeria, China Keiteski, the advantages of bus depots, the Nigerian Civil War, Nigeria’s reticence to discuss AIDS and HIV, physical deterioration and moral stigma, the parallels between how HIV/AIDS is perceived in Nigeria and how it is perceived in the United States, prejudicial language (“dropping like flies”) and stereotypes in Western coverage of AIDS in Africa (as recent as 2006), hysterical headlines from The New York Times, the Joseph Conrad disease-ridden racist stereotype of AFrica, the difficulties of getting rid of stereotypical language in relation to minorities, how pushback in Africa has helped to improve language, why it’s important to remain unafraid of being corrected and correcting other people, regrettable posters equating Africa with AIDS, voices that have not been allowed to speak on the international stage, why AIDS needs to expand beyond the “woe is me” narrative, the “giving thanks” narrative, and the exotic narrative, journalism vs. creative nonfiction vs. personal crusading, issues pertaining to the journalist as outsider, illusory journalistic objectivity, responding to criticisms leveled by The Observer‘s David Smith, AIDS denialism in South Africa, the sheer number of books about AIDS, Philip Alcabes’s “The Ordinariness of AIDS,” needless fear and hysteria, AIDS and the Nigerian identity issue, the new normal, trying to sell people on normal, epidemic fatigue and fundraising, how the process of transformation relates to support and empathy, and the importance of nuanced understanding.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I know that with the novel you wrote, Beasts of No Nation, you started off to some degree not just with news articles, but you actually met a soldier for that particular work. And with this, of course, there’s a good deal of interviews you did with people who have HIV and who are living in Nigeria. Support activists and so forth. So my question to you is: Why do you need to hear stories in oral form before you work out how you’re going to tell the story? Whether it be fiction or, in this case, nonfiction?

Iweala: Well, for me, I’m very interested in the way that people speak. Both in the creative fiction that I do. And also the creative nonfiction. I mean, I like the rhythm of language. I like the sounds of voices. And I like how rhythm and tone really are so much a part of the storytelling itself as the words that you put down on the page. I mean, I think it’s both a result of having this oral tradition and listening to stories from the culture that I come from. And also I think there are a number of other writers that I think in the more Western literary tradition who pay a lot of attention to rhythm and flow. You can think of people like Beckett, who I love listening to when read because of that reason.

Correspondent: Did you transcribe the conversations and did you actually read them aloud to try and figure out…

Iweala: (nods head)

Correspondent: You did.

Iweala: It was a process. It was first doing interviews. Then I transcribed all the interviews — almost all of them — myself. Because I wanted to be in it. To hear the way that people spoke again. To really pick up where there were emotional stresses essentially in people’s voices. And I would take those interviews, sit down, and try to rejig them a little bit to make them flow better as stories. But I would read them aloud to myself over and over again. Just trying to get the right inflection or trying to get the right tone and trying to make sure that the language and the emotional state really coalesced.

Correspondent: So the finer details of these stories are there in the intonations of the sentences more than the actual biographical details and so forth?

Iweala: It’s nonfiction. So those details are also very on point. But there was a lot of attention paid to, yeah, just what it sounded like. And what it sounded like reflected who was speaking. So your health official of the government is going to sound and speak differently, and stress different things and have different emotional stresses, than, say, a woman living in a rural area. Each intonation, each way of speaking, is equally important and equally relevant to the larger picture of the epidemic, but definitely very different.

Correspondent: How do you track a child soldier down? Or many of the interesting people in this book? You can’t just hold up a sign while you’re walking around Lagos.

Iweala: Right. So for the first book, for Beasts of No Nation, I just got fortunate in the sense that the first person I spoke to — China Keiteski actually gave a talk at Harvard when I was an undergrad. And she just had a lot to say. And we had a very brief conversation. I didn’t really interview her. I just listened to her talk and her experiences, read her book, and it was a chat I had that really brought out what it was that I wanted to write about. And then, in Nigeria, there are a lot of people who lived through the Civil War that we had in the ’60s. A long time ago. But they still had many, many soldiers to tell and were very open with me about that. And then also we had Liberian refugees living in Nigeria at the time. Most have returned home now, I think. And where my family lives, they were doing a lot of construction. And these folks would be working on the construction crews. And so, during breaks, I would just take the time to chat with them. And that’s how I got a lot of those stories. Now for Our Kind of People, I really kind of did just do what you said. I just started walking around and asking questions. I mean, obviously a little bit more structured than that, right? You go to a health official and then they lead you to a treatment center. You speak with someone there. And then they lead you to a support group. Also walking down the street. I walked into bus depots. Just found who I could speak to. And we sat down. You buy a person a beer.

Correspondent: What else are they doing while they’re waiting for a bus, right?

Iweala: You’re either waiting for a bus you’re driving to leave or you’re waiting for the bus you’re going to take to leave. What do you have to do but sit and talk and drink? And so that’s what we would do. And then they would be like, “Well, you should contact this person,” and you’d get a phone number and go from there.

Correspondent: So you built up a network based off of these peregrinations and you finally tracked down the appropriate people. You mentioned the Civil War, which I wanted to talk with you about. Because the Civil War doesn’t really come up in this book so much. And in light of what you have to say about Nigeria’s reticence to discuss HIV and AIDS, I was wondering if you could get into why they’re reluctant to talk about it. Aside from the AIDS support groups, the efforts to spread safe sex messages among the young, and so forth.

Iweala: I think for a number of reasons. And for the same reasons that people are reluctant to discuss it here. It has been a taboo subject. It’s much less so now. But HIV, AIDS, the epidemic — especially the way that it spreads, mostly through sex — is something that I think makes people profoundly uncomfortable. And we tend to avoid speaking about it. If you can think about how many tough conversations that you put off and put off and put off, we tend to avoid speaking about those things we find really uncomfortable. That’s changing — in large part because people have decided — the federal government and also activist groups and people living with HIV have decided to make a lot of noise and make sure that we have those uncomfortable conversations and really try to bring this thing out so that we can deal with it. I mean, I think in general Nigeria is a relatively, at least outwardly, conservative country. And we’re loud people for a number of different things. But there are certain things that I think, it would be safe to say, are considered more private: sex being one of them. It’s not a place where you see sex sold on billboards or used to sell products as much as you do here or in other countries in Europe or whatever. So that definitely has impacted the way that we talk about the epidemic.

Correspondent: In the Stigma section, you describe how physical deterioration is, of course, a major part of AIDS. And there is, of course, this moral idea attached to it. That people are being punished for their sins. What’s some of the crossover? The book goes into a lot of dichotomies where there are intersections and where there are not. But in terms of grasping the idea of people who are physically deteriorating and who are suffering, why does this have to be so sinful among certain moralists in Nigeria? I was very curious about that.

Iweala: Again, I think we should also say that that also happened here as well. It’s mainly a question of absolutes, I think, in a situation where you don’t have access to treatment and being diagnosed with this disease is, in essence, an absolute thing. Like “you will die” is what people message. And I think it’s complex in some senses because its message is “you will die,” but you can still be healthy for some years before you start to deteriorate without treatment. But that absolute, it seems like a final judgment. And so people then map all kinds of anxieties, religious beliefs, cultural whatever onto that. And then you get this idea of this being judgment for something. That definitely came up a number of times. Of how initially people would say “If you get HIV, then you’re being judged for some kind of practice.” Whether that practice is some kind of immoral sex. Whether, in this country, homosexuality was considered an immoral thing and HIV was punishment for that. IV drug use was considered an immoral thing and it was punishment for that. Now in Nigeria, it’s more heterosexual sex. Much less in terms of IV drug use or anything like that. And we’re very outwardly strongly religious societies, where the prohibitions on sex before marriage are at least spoken about all over the place. And so it becomes very easy for people to make that leap. You have sex before marriage or you have some kind of immoral, by whoever’s standards, sex. And punishment comes through this disease. I found that to be a very interesting connection. I mean, it’s ages old. There are other sexually transmitted diseases, which have always been considered judgement in some way for immoral sexual practice. But I think the stories around HIV/AIDS, and then also the way that people generate stories about their relationships and their sexual encounters to moralize them in the face of this epidemic, so that you can say, “Well, I might be having sex before marriage. But my relationship, my sexual practice, is somehow not like this.” This being sinful sex. People construct all kinds of things. And I find that to be really interesting. It’s something that we should look at and spend more time with.

Correspondent: So what I’m getting is that Nigeria is essentially applying the same moral codex to HIV and AIDS that America is, but that they’re really just only a few years behind where we are. Is that safe to say? What distinguishes Nigeria from the States along a similar sort of trajectory?

Iweala: I think one of the things the book is trying to say is that, while the nature of the HIV epidemic differs depending on the society it appears in, I think there are many similarities in that what people did originally was suggest that there was something very different about the Africa AIDS epidemic than in other countries. And there is a difference. But the difference isn’t necessarily some cultural whatever or some moral feeling on the part of Africans. And I hate using the term “Africans.” So I’ll go with “specifically in Nigeria.” The issue in a lot of senses is resources. And in the United States, the difference was people recognizing a problem and then also having the resources to apply to dealing with the problem very quickly. In Nigeria, the problem was recognized at a certain point in time. But the resources weren’t necessarily as forthcoming. And that creates a huge difference. It’s just very apparent.

The Bat Segundo Show #473: Uzodinma Iweala (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

A Room with a View (Modern Library #79)

In this latest Modern Library essay, we offer our hostile thoughts on Merchant Ivory films, contemplate how many Cecil Vyse types were killed off during the war, and investigate E.M. Forster’s humanity.

(This is the twenty-second entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: Brideshead Revisited)

Merchant Ivory Productions has been one of the greatest threats to literature during the past three decades. Known for producing well photographed films that put most sane people to sleep, the Merchant Ivory team has demonstrated a remarkable knack for divesting zest from the literary classics. They have ordered esteemed actors across sweeping vistas as if they are unbudgeable bovine who require vast encouragement to produce milk. They have bored more often than seems reasonable. Where Orson Welles’s Shakespeare adaptations or Iain Softley’s The Wings of the Dove or Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon or Sally Potter’s Orlando or William Wyler’s The Heiress or Corman’s Poe pictures or The Royal Shakespeare Company’s nine hour version of Nicholas Nickleby bristle with life and visual excitement, demanding that you get your hands on the source material at once, the Merchant Ivory movies are the cinematic equivalent to visiting the in-laws or steeling yourself up for a dreadful Thanksgiving or attending a funeral for someone you didn’t really know that well.

I have been dragged to too many of these goddam films over the years, often by friends who had nobody else to go with or by women who I have dated, and I have been polite. Because being polite often results in perversity. But the one thing I didn’t do, thanks to Merchant Ivory’s vacation slideshow approach to literary adaptation, was read E.M. Forster. Until now.

* * *

It all began with a bundle of notes Forster scribbled during the winter of 1901. It was his first trip to Italy, and he was forming some ideas about a novel set in Florence. There was a list of characters, a fund-raising concert as part of the narrative (later dropped), and a young woman named Lucy, who changed surnames swifter than a serial matrimonialist. There were more character lists and more drafts and more notes. Then in December 1903, Forster began referencing something called “The New Lucy Novel,” reconstructed from the Italian bones of “Old Lucy” with a new English section to match. Forster then wrote Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Longest Journey, flitting between these projects and various incarnations of the Lucy novels, before completing A Room with a View. (If you can get your hands on the edition of Room edited by Oliver Stallybrass, I recommend it. Stallybrass is more thorough about these matters than a querulous tax auditor. But while he can be humorless and overreaching, his notes provide helpful connection points.)

Forster wanted to write a romantic novel because he was interested in subverting formula. Biographer Nicola Beauman has suggested that Forster’s own fears of marriage (he was a lifelong bachelor who maintained a long-term relationship with a married policeman) undermined his self-confidence as a novelist around the summer of 1906. Perhaps this internal tension accounts for the subtle manner in which Forster’s heroine, Lucy, responds to the men who woo her.

Lucy Honeychurch — a name, I am sorry to say, which implied some pornographic starlet in my dirty mind until I remembered that I was reading a book published more than a century before — is on vacation with her cousin Charlotte Bartlett, an older chaperone who is about as much fun to be around as Pat Boone. (There is a juicy moment late in the novel, where Lucy tells Charlotte to remove a certain word from her envelopes, which is especially satisfying.) The two women arrive at a lodging house called the Pension Bertolini. They are disappointed with the room, which does not have a view of the Arno. Employing the finest passive-aggressive moves that prewar chivalry is willing to put up with, the two women finagle rooms with views from a certain Mr. Emerson and his son George.

People on vacation sometimes have to deal with louts. But in the first decade of the twentieth century, you could be ostracized for your perceived class or for displaying any modest idiosyncrasy. Thus, we see the poor Emersons, despite their potential philosophical namesake (which Forster is good enough to note in the book) and their early grand gesture, shunned for being “peculiar.”

Forster has some fun with the travel culture of the time. Everybody comes to Italy clutching a bright red Baedeker travel guide. To stray from the course is nothing short of mortifying. One day, Lucy is on her own with by an aspiring novelist named Miss Lavish, who unwittingly abandons her and takes the Baedeker with her. Lucy runs into the Emersons and, without any Baedeker, the three enter Peruzzi Chapel, where Mr. Emerson earned my instant respect by shouting “No!” when told how to interpret the frescoes by a patronizing lecturer.

“Pull out from the depths those thoughts you do not understand,” says Mr. Emerson to Lucy not long after this, “and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.” This is actually pretty good advice for people walking in concentrated metropolitan areas looking down at their smartphones. The technology may change, but conformity remains the same.

Needless to say, this casual iconoclasm has the other tourists searching for other reasons to sneer at the Emersons. George gets pegged as some working-class interloper because he says that he works on “the railway.” But this doesn’t stop him from romancing Lucy.

The first kiss Lucy receives from George comes after she falls into an open terrace in the woods, with Forster very keen to describe how “the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves.” Nature, it seems, is doomed to ensnare you into a smooch, especially if you wantonly wander on your own. But isn’t life an adventure? It’s propriety, that troubling need to maintain a certain impression or to participate in bunk etiquette, that kills the mood.

So how does a young woman like Lucy summon her passions? It comes through the freedom to play the piano, albeit badly:

She was no dazzling executante; her runs were not at all like strings of pearls, and she struck no more right notes than was suitable for one of her age and situation. Nor was she the passionate young lady, who performs so tragically on a summer’s evening with the window open. Passion was there, but it could not be easily labelled; it slipped between love and hatred and jealousy, and all the furniture of the pictorial style. And she was tragical only in the sense that she was great, for she loved to play on the side of Victory. Victory of what and over what — that is more than the words of daily life can tell us.

Yet when Forster moves the action back to England, the words of daily life tell us everything. Cecil Vyse, a young man whose surname rightfully connotes the personality of a clamp, is as far from legitimate life as one can get. How many women were forced into marrying Cecil Vyse types around 1908? And how many unhappy marriages were saved with Cecil Vyse types getting killed off during the Great War? Our first glimpse of Lucy in the second part could almost happen on a stage. The window curtains part, and we encounter a terrace differing from the one in Florence, one “transfigured by the view beyond,” with Lucy in a rustic seat that “seemed on the edge of a green magic carpet which hovered in the air above the tremulous world.” The reader’s view of Lucy changes, but her passion remains. Yet Cecil’s own view of Lucy is “only as a commonplace girl who happened to be musical,” with Italy working some unspecified marvel in her. Forster, ever skeptical, manages to get in a few digs at this problematic practice:

An engagement is so potent a thing that sooner or later it reduces all who speak of it to this state of cheerful awe. Away from it, in the solitude of their rooms, Mr Beebe, and even Freddy, might again be critical. But in its presence and in the presence of each other they were sincerely hilarious. It has a strange power, for it compels not only the lips, but the very heart. The chief parallel -to compare one great thing with another- is the power over us of a temple of some alien creed. Standing outside, we deride or oppose it, or at the most feel sentimental. Inside, though the saints and gods are not ours, we become true believers, in case any true believer should be present.

Cecil’s belief comes from material things, from playing tricks on people, and from standing against the sanctity of life. As one character suggests near the end of the book, “He’s the type who’s kept Europe back a thousand years.” The word “medieval” pops up quite a bit in Room. Cecil is described as medieval. Churches are “built by faith in the full fervour of medievalism.” It’s even the name of a chapter. Forster expressly states that “Lucy does not stand for the medieval lady, who was rather an ideal to which she was bidden to lift her eyes when feeling serious.” So how does religion, as reflected through the clergyman Mr. Beebe, fit into all this? It’s surprisingly compatible. There is a bathing scene in which the Emersons and Mr. Beebe frolic in the splendor of The Sacred Lake, a pool that forms “when a good deal of water comes down after heavy rains” (a Flood perhaps from which to build a new Ark?). They run so free and naked, tossing their clothes with mirthful abandon, that one is heartened to find a loophole for flopping chorizos within Forster’s proper world.

Room is a paean for youthful ardor no matter what one’s age, a plea for humanity to bask in Phaethon’s shining possibilities. One wonders if Forster could have finished the novel had he still been at work when the guns of August boomed. If the novel can sometimes be too light for its own good, it’s nowhere nearly as dead as the soporific cinematic adaptations which wilt in its shadow.

Next Up: Rudyard Kipling’s Kim!