The Forge and the 5:07
by Daniel Johnson
The thing about Franklin is that it’s really a railroad town. Back in the nineteenth century, when Horace Mann was first elected to state office, he stretched a corridor of commuter rail thirty miles southwest of Boston, all the way to a station at the border of his (and my) hometown. The Forge Park platform is the first on the outbound Franklin/Purple Line, so named because each silver train car is laterally halved by a strip of regal violet paint. It sits at the base of a cratered parking lot, the platform does, adjacent the Garelick Farms factory with its dairy-white smokestacks and warehouses and steam that billows milky above Franklin's signature jagged pine. Locals call the station The Forge.
Growing up here, I didn’t think much of the Purple Line, or use it at all until my adolescence, when my friends and I occasionally rode it to Sox games so that none of us had to drive and we could pound booze from wadded paper bags. Sometimes it seemed like the town didn’t think much of it, either. No one moved to Franklin for commuting convenience, and most of the people in my neighborhood who worked in the city carpooled together along the Pike. There weren’t even any of the typical trackside shenanigans you’d expect to hear about: no kids who played chicken and lost feet, no fight clubs in the abandoned mill buildings. It was always just sort of there, and in those earlier years I’d more or less forget about it until I had to wait for a train to pass at the Union Street crossing before I could continue on my way to wherever I was going, which was never far. My curfew was unique from those of my friends in that mine placed boundaries on both time and space. I was my parents’ first child.
Some nights, before I had to employ the dull roar of a box fan for sleep-aid in high school, I’d wake up from my early bedtime to the sad, high-pitched bellow of the 11:30pm—the last train home. It called out somewhere past the acres of sleepy homesteads and orange streetlights beyond my bedroom window. It would occasionally invade the strangest of my dreams, the horn would, and disguise itself as other things. I remember one nightmare where it doubled as the song of some predatory and prehistorically large bird that circled above me at the end of my driveway, while I was for some reason on all fours and vomiting in the storm drain there.
It wasn’t until I moved back from college that I started to really notice the rail’s distinct omnipresence. There were always these brown trails of dry earth that kicked up along the downtown tracks and hung squat in the breezeless New England humidity, long after whatever train had gone by. It was only then that I registered the echoes of locomotive churning audible from most central parts of town as a sort of heartbeat that dwarfed the suburban din of little league tournaments, the distorted chimes of ice cream truck jingles, the groans of faraway landscape machinery. I hadn’t before then acknowledged Franklin as the crossroads it really was. The idea of growing up in a place where there was a means of escape—like, a very reliable and regimented means of escape—meant that I wasn’t the prisoner I liked to imagine myself to be.
I worked as a county paperboy for a while after I moved home. I would spend the midnight hours driving around the bones of the town, smoking bowls and drinking RedBull and listening to live Guster albums at inappropriate volumes. I sped a lot, chucked poorly folded County Gazettes onto the dew-laden baronial grasses of all the residential exurbs. It was the type of lonely, purgatorial job I hoped I’d have been beyond by then, but there was a small part of me that enjoyed haunting Franklin's recesses every night. I tended to finish my route anywhere between 4:45-5:15am, and sometimes I’d grab an iced coffee and banana from the Dunkin on 140 and head down to The Forge to watch the 5:07 leave.
Always, a very particular type of older man with elbow patches on his blazer waited in the predawn twilight for that first train out along the yellow platform. Several of them stood beneath the initial chugs of the Garelick Farms steam, which sort of hovered still along the cratered lot’s rim, like smog. I would watch these men keep to themselves, rock on their toes, look to the paling sky, pull out their phones. The blue light from their screens bled into the icy beams from the station awning’s overheads. Their faces were swollen and droopy from having just woken up and I remember it all looked very cold to me, even in the summer.
There were nights, though, when I’d finish my route late and miss the 5:07’s departure out of The Forge. In these cases I’d often catch it en route to Boston at the Union Street crossing on my way home. The railroad bells would knell empty through the yawning thoroughfare of darkened storefronts and townhouses, the warning lights would blink a tired red. Beyond my headlights, the silver and purple streak of that first train would blur on by.
Sometimes I’d be so sleep-deprived or high or some pleasant mixture of both that I’d imagine I could see my reflection in the moving metal, or that I was on that train, dressed all professorially and important like the men at Forge Park, looking to everyone like I had a place to get to and a purpose when I got there. It was like I was in two places at once, in those moments: headed smoothly towards the diamond haze of the city skyline, but still stuck in the driver’s seat of my old Jeep, watching myself go.
Chinelo Okparanta's UNDER THE UDALA TREES Launch 9/23
SNHU MFA faculty member Chinelo Okparanta's highly anticipated debut novel, UNDER THE UDALA TREES, will launch Wednesday, September 23 at 7:00pm at HousingWorks Bookstore Cafe.
For more information, refer to the event's listing on HousingWork's website here.
We Burned Out
by Daniel Johnson
Whenever Helen and I spent our nights drinking fifths of rum at the marina down the street from campus, I called her Helen of Troy. She was Greek, and there were all those ships, and in that naked moonlight her olive body looked as if some hunchbacked old Athenian sculptor had spent his lifetime casting its mold. Sailboats rocked against the pier and the warped wood of the docks would cry out. I told her they were made restless by her beauty, the boats. She knew it was just the ocean and that I was drunk. She would tell me to stop it, but in that way that meant she wasn’t really sure whether or not she wanted me to.
Helen wore nautical outfits a lot: anchor belt-buckles, lighthouse earrings, navy and white striped blouses. Her family was rich and we went to school on an island. She carried a miniature ceramic Tragic mask on her car keys that dangled out the back pocket of her brass-buttoned sailor shorts. When I was with her, I usually wore an undershirt and an unwashed pair of Levis with one of those mini pockets-within-a-pocket, where I stored two Ativan in case I had an episode during the day.
Most of those nights, we finished our fifths and tossed the empties into the Atlantic. They’d bob there and reflect coins of moonlight on the waves and sails and sometimes on our faces until they sank to the shallows. We would walk back up the hill towards campus and I’d rest one hand against the almost unnoticeable impression of the pills in the denim. I made it look like I was being smooth: just a thumb hooked in a beltloop. In my other hand, I’d hold Helen’s. The streetlights above us were orange and globular, like old diver’s helmets atop stakes of black iron.
She always did this thing where she would walk slightly in front of me and not look back. I didn’t mind. I’d watch the backs of her legs and think about how all I wanted was to feel them against my body every night, the way I could feel the pills. About halfway up the hill, I would know I needed to take them because the walk was steep and the rum made my heart roll.
Part of me thought the reason Helen never came home with me after the marina was because, by the time we reached campus and I asked her to come to bed, my breath smelled rotten and synthetic from the Ativan. Sometimes they scraped against the roof of my mouth for the rest of the walk home before they’d swallow down. I imagined they left trails of residue, like long white cuts, along the back of my throat.
It was always the absence of something that triggered my anxiety. It was the silence that came when my roommate would go home for the weekend and leave me alone in our fluorescent dorm room without the box fan he used for white noise. It was the nights when I wasn’t surrounded by bar lights that blinked arrythmically, or by crowds of people in rave outfits with drinks the color of glow-sticks. It was whenever I wasn’t with Helen, or knew I wasn’t going to be with Helen, which was quite a lot. Helen didn’t like to stay the night.
We almost only saw each other after dark and, other than the nights at the marina, strictly behind the closed doors of my bedroom, which I found sort of sad. In daylight, the single-hung windows of my dorm would catch the sun from all its angles. The few times we spent afternoons together, Helen would wear her thinnest, whitest dresses and dance in the swaths of sunshine about my floor. She would stand over my knee as I sat on the edge of my bed and lift the hems up and hold them with her teeth. She’d have me touch her. Often, she reminded me that her name, in Greek, meant bright light, or flash, or something.
Otherwise, she’d come over after her evening classes and we’d watch Baz Luhrmann films and make love on my twin bed in the underwater lighting, the swimming blue shadows from the tube TV on my hutch. After we were done, I’d roll over into the crook of the wall and listen to my heart palpitate while she checked her phone. I’d fear that I had just voided some essential part of myself. Sometimes I’d be okay. There were others when I’d trip into a regiment of deep breathing exercises I’d learned from a Youtube video of a poorly animated blue butterfly that fluttered its wings in time with my deep breaths against a backdrop of green hills and silvery rays from an invisible sun.
When that happened, Helen would do this other thing where she’d hover her open mouth over mine. It looked like she was trying to kiss me really hard, or swallow me whole and hide me inside her belly. But she always left a space between our lips where the hot air would flatten out and cool. I’d hear these soft clicks against her teeth, like there were little crystals in my breath that sparked cold along the faces of her molars, which were perfectly aligned because she kept them in her retainers whenever she was alone. The breathing exercises only worked, really, when she did that other thing.
Each night, before she got dressed and went home, we’d watch the rusted reflections of the city below us shimmer on the ocean from the concrete slab of my windowsill.
“We could be good together,” I’d tell her.
The sill was cold against our bare thighs, so most times Helen would climb atop my lap and lounge into me. She’d let the back of her hand fall against the glass. It would leave blurred knuckleprints there, streaked along the pane. I’d wipe them clean whenever she didn’t text me back.
“It looks like it’s on fire,” she’d say. “The water—isn’t it something?”
Kingston Days
by Eric Beebe
kingston days 2012
Until I turned eighteen, my hometown of Kingston, New Hampshire seemed like the only place I’d ever want to call home. Its center is branded by a stretch of plains broken only by small byroads. The plains are lined with maples within and Colonial houses without. Bells ring on the hour from down the street at the Kingston Congregational Church, but Kingston’s iconic Church on the Plains has no more denomination than Depot Road’s cruciform telephone poles. My parents married in that church and have since dedicated countless fundraisers and committee meetings to keeping it restored.
The town still asserts itself as a somewhere in the middle of the nowhere. It’s hard to drive a mile without finding a sign harkening back to the time when Kingston was known beyond its trees as “Carriage Towne.” Transportation is no longer the town specialty, but retention could be. Kingston breeds mostly two kinds: those who found it the perfect town in which to grow up and never want to leave, and those less keen on the thought of staying that will never have much choice.
I was one of the former until I experienced Kraków’s market square when I volunteered in Poland the summer before college, and later witnessed the metropolitan rush of Montreal on a weekend with my dad at twenty. Now I’m racing to move somewhere with even a fraction of their sidewalk bustle, with anything to do after ten besides window-shopping at Wal-Mart.
The most exciting thing in Kingston is an annual festival on the plains called “Kingston Days,” where all the townies can gather and act like everyone really does know everyone. When I went as a kid, I’d climb the steps of the town’s old, retired bandstand and sit with the kids who starting smoking cigarettes in middle school and the high school stoners. I’d linger in hopes the kid who’d asked his mom’s permission to swear with friends in fifth grade could be a badass too if he just stayed long enough. Some of the badasses went on to get arrested in opiate rings, some to be parents, some to work, and some to go to college. None of that was far off from the kids at school that didn’t belong on the bandstand. I didn’t know where I belonged, but maybe they did. All I knew was where we were: some worn-out gazebo with chipping white paint and splintered seats, central to a town I thought I’d always call home.
I used to look forward to Kingston Days, they being the only three days of the year I could walk down the street and see anyone the town had to offer for company. We’d all gather at the elementary school on the first night of the event for fireworks. People would bring blankets and claim their own little patch of the field beside the playground, and we’d try to find our friends under the bursts of light overhead. The same faces just aren’t there these days, not even among the ubiquitous daytime market stands and games. The family friend who ran the strongman bell every year died last fall in a plane crash, and I haven’t seen my old rival from the pie-eating contest since I took the title of “Pie King” from him a few years back.
The last couple years, I’ve had to convince myself more and more to be bothered with defending that designation. Each time, I sit down at the competitors’ table with the King’s Crown: a bandana with a paper pie glued to its front. I shove my face into a disposable plate of chocolate pudding and whipped cream and slurp it up like an old vacuum before I stop to look at anyone else. I collect the First Place ribbon. Mom insists on pictures. I clean off and hand her my prize because, frankly, the memento means more to her than to me.
When it’s all over, I trickle out of the Days with the rest, like blood from the jugular of a slaughtered cow—probably Kingston’s spirit animal. I wonder to myself which make me sadder: the people who can’t make it out of this place or the ones who will never want to go anywhere else.
On Improving the Cinque Terre Coastline
by Daniel Johnson
Cinque Terre is a cluster of five Italian seaside villages along the Ligurian Sea, where the air is a spray of salt and citrus. There are lemon orchards and small castles and hillside villages of clay and terracotta and cobblestone. Cacti cling to the sides of cliffs and purple flowers shaped like long bells line the rugged inland trails through each town’s foothills. Each morning, my two traveling companions and I hiked these trails to work off the previous night’s seafood dinner.
The days were dry. We often rested and watered at the summit of the first foothill, where my friend would gulp mineral seltzer and snap pictures of the coastline with her iPhone. It was always hot and the sky was bold and the sun burned everything, even the distant haze of the farthest beaches, to a certain degree of enchanted brightness that seemed worth capturing.
improved
At lunch, in the cool shade of alleyway cafés that smelled of white wine and shellfish, I would watch as she forgot about her food and filtered the shit out of her photos on Instagram. She would spend her entire primo piatto turning the blues of the horizon the color of Rob Lowe’s eyes. She took the lush greens of the hillside and lit them like lights on an Xbox. She grilled the clay of the terracotta roofing to a salmon pastel and blotted out the black specks of osprey because whatever. Her thumbs swiped the color wheel on her screen in mantid twitches between WhatsApp messages to her boyfriend in Boston.
The photos of the village are simultaneously reminiscent of 1970s Miami and modern candy counters. An orange film oversaturates the dwellings, as if they were drenched in Aperol spritzers and are perpetually sticky.
I’m not sure the Cinque Terre I’ll remember is the one that exists. It will be difficult, at least, to recall the skyline as a particular shade of blue. I imagine I'll remember it as all gradations of all colors in infinite pixelated flux.
**
One afternoon, the three of us took a boat southward to the harbor town of Porto Venere. We docked, and I broke off to explore on my own. I walked along the ramparts of an old stone watchtower at the western cliffs and bought a small model ship, made of cork and walnuts and newspaper, from an elderly Italian woman who crafted and sold them there. We exchanged some basic pleasantries and she said, or at least I think she said, I should go check out the statue of Mother Nature at the tower’s base.
This interpretation of Mother Nature cast her as rather homely, and whatever metal in which she was originally molded has faded to a sea-green patina. She sits somewhat hunched, with her hands crossed between her legs on the corner of a stone wall at the edge of the cliff. Her face is directed to the horizon beyond the sea. She’s turned her back on the provincial empire of Porto Venere, with all its trade and tourism, all the fishing boats along the docks and the cranes that still loom above the rooftops.
One gets the sense that it’s something terribly grave that burdens her. She slouches in what looks like defeat. It’s almost impossible, as a passerby, to meet her gaze without climbing over the cliff-side railing and risking the long fall to the jagged rocks below. But, if I had to guess, there’s abandon in those oxidized eyes, and probably some sadness, too.
"I Actually Knew Nothing About These People I Supposedly Hated:" An Interview with Adam Wilson
"Mixing Station" - Catherine Elizabeth
Assignment Issue #1 features the first published excerpt, titled "The Parentheses," from Adam Wilson's novel-in-progress. He is the author of the novel Flatscreen (2012) and the short story collection What's Important is Feeling (2014), the title story of which was featured in the 2012 volume of The Best American Short Stories. A recipient of The Paris Review's Terry Southern Prize, and a National Jewish Book Award finalist, Adam was recently named to Brooklyn Magazine's list of 50 Funniest People in Brooklyn. In this interview, we discussed his method for writing comedy and his use of 9/11 and the Wall Street crash as narrative backdrops.
To read an excerpt from "The Parentheses," click here.
- Daniel Johnson
In your story “Things I Had” from What's Important is Feeling, the protagonist, Sam, says of the two new friends he meets, Squirrel and Deep, that they "had words for things I’d wanted to name.” Has anyone told you that about your writing?
Adam Wilson: Maybe this is a roundabout answer, but I tend to think of writing—and all art really—as a form of communication, an (ultimately futile) attempt to represent and articulate, through narrative and the manipulation of language, things that can’t otherwise be reduced or articulated or summed up. I often think of Raymond Carver’s story “Why Don’t You Dance,” about a couple who have a strange experience, and then find themselves unable to recapture that experience when they try to explain it to others. The story ends with the lines, “She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.” In a sense, I feel like those sentences aptly describe all of my characters, who are trying to find language to explain themselves and their worlds, and in so doing hope to begin to understand those things themselves. I’m not sure any of them ever succeed, but I think for a character like Sam in “Things I Had,” there is something really thrilling in meeting new people who open him up to a whole new language, a whole new way of cataloguing the world.
In Flatscreen, Eli describes himself and a bewintered New England as “ice-fucked.” All those hyphenated descriptions are poignant in the way they capture a generational vernacular.
AW: I got really into the hyphen thing for a while when I was writing Flatscreen and some of the earlier stories, like “Milligrams”, which I wrote while I was working on Flatscreen. The idea was that these characters didn’t have the language to say what they were trying to say, so they had to try to make a new one. But yeah, my hope was that it would somehow represent the way certain kinds of media have altered the way we speak—in Flatscreen I was thinking particularly of television and film, but the Internet is certainly a huge part of it as well.
What do you find is the most effective (and what’s your favorite) vehicle for comedy writing?
For the most part I try not to think too much about it during the writing process. Comic writing comes very naturally to me—I tend to cover some pretty dark material, and my instinct is always to offset the pathos with humor--and the only time I really sit down and think about the jokes themselves is during the editing process, when I ruthlessly vet them for anything that’s not working or simply could be better, funnier. Mostly though, my editing process involves trying to make sure the story’s comedy doesn’t detract or overcompensate for the more serious stuff going on below the surface. I think my drafts tend to be much more joke heavy, and then I’ll have to go back and say, “Well that’s a sort of funny line, but what’s it doing in the story? Does it need to be there?”
Each of the stories in What's Important is Feeling has its own hierarchy wheeling onward in the background, but the protagonists tend to reside outside it. Do you tend to favor writing marginalized characters?
AW: Yes, I tend to be interested in characters who, in whatever local hierarchy they’re part of, they’re somewhere near the bottom. In part, I think it’s because it’s easier to root for an underdog; no one wants to root for the cool guy who’s having great sex all day and is happy with his job and his life. Where’s the conflict? It’s much more fun to root for the loser who means well.
Some of your supporting characters, like Kahn in Flatscreen and Felix from "What's Important is Feeling," tend to be vocal about their views on the hierarchies that marginalized them. How fun was it to write characters like this?
AW: Really fun. It involved a lot of reading aloud to myself.
Stories like “The Long In-Between,” “December Boys” and “Sluts” have real-world tension looming in the background of the narratives. How did you find that deepen the world, the characters?
AW: I think, in all those cases, it came about pretty organically in the sense that they covered topical ground that interested me personally. “The Long In-Between” is set during the 2006 conflict between Israel and Lebanon, but I wrote it during some of the more recent, ongoing drama regarding the IDF and Israel’s foreign policy. I think, more than anything, I wrote the story to try to assemble some of my own feelings about Israel, and my narrator’s mixed feelings on the subject really echo my own. I think I made the character female to differentiate her from me, but of all the characters in the collection I feel like she is, in some way, the most similar to my actual self. I think it’s a very confusing thing right now to be a left-wing American Jew, and my hope was that, rather than push any political agenda, or come to any definitive conclusions about Israel, I could simply capture some of that confusion, and some of the frustration with the situation as a whole. “December Boys” actually came out of the novel I’m currently working on (excerpted here in “The Parentheses”), but then kind of grew into its own thing. I knew I wanted to write about the 2008 Wall Street crash from a number of different perspectives, and I thought it might be fun to try to figure out how a couple of young, laid off bankers might behave. In some ways, the major impetus for the whole project came from attending Occupy protests and proclaiming my hatred of bankers, and then realizing I actually knew nothing about these people I supposedly hated. I imagined what it would be like to be some twenty-three year old, straight out of college, majored in econ, got a job at Lehmann Brothers or wherever, and then suddenly find yourself unemployed and truly despised. What would that feel like? As for “Sluts at Heart,” I’d always wanted to write something about the Elvis stamp. The fact that there was a vote for whether we’d choose good looking, young Elvis, or sad, druggie, fat, old Elvis to be on the stamp seemed so absurd to me, so deeply American.
What was the single most important element that made What's Important is Feeling a cohesive collection?
AW: For a while I was really annoyed with people calling it a collection of "coming of age" stories, but after a while I realized it was true. They are all coming-of-age stories in the sense that, even in the stories that involve adult characters, they’re all stories about someone’s life changing after coming into close proximity with death.
For your excerpt in Assignment, "The Parentheses," the backdrop is New York just after 9/11. The event provides Wendy and Michael, on a second date at a Portuguese restaurant, with fodder for conversation. Do you think that happened for a lot of people, with their interactions with strangers, after the attacks?
AW: 9/11 allowed people, particularly strangers, to become intimate in ways they may not have otherwise. There was a sense of people feeling bound together by the experience, and a very fleeting feeling that there was no longer room for the bullshit of small talk. At the same time, however, I feel like the characters in the story, Michael and Wendy, are kind of nervous to bring it up as well, nervous that they’ll somehow say the wrong thing, or that things will get too heavy for a second date. The fact that they ultimately seem to open up to each other, I think, is a testament to some kind of actual connection.
What was the inspiration for the scene?
AW: The scene with the music in the Portuguese place was partly based on an experience I had much later on, sometime around 2007. I was on a date in a Portuguese restaurant with the woman who is now my long-term partner, but who, at the time, was someone I had only begun seeing. Suddenly, without us noticing, the restaurant closed, and we were the only customers left, and there was sort of a private party/jam session going on that we’d somehow ended up in. We got corralled into dancing and got very drunk.
The whole experience felt at once surreal and familiar; surreal because it was unexpected and dreamlike, yet familiar because it seemed like the kind of thing one heard about in romantic anecdotes about New York, particularly in certain kinds of movies, the kinds of stories that sound fake or unrealistic until they actually happen. And the experience sort of bonded us as a couple, it made us feel like things like that happened because we were together, that the combination of the two of us created some kind of spark that inspired these kinds of adventures. I think that was what I was trying to capture, and also this feeling, after 9/11, when people sort of just let go of formality a little bit. I wasn’t living in New York in 2001, but I remember coming to visit shortly after, and going to a bar downtown, and just getting into such intense and unguarded conversations with strangers I never would have talked to in a million years otherwise.
Can you tell us a little about Michael?
AW: Well, this section is a flashback, but in the present tense of the novel, he and Wendy are married and he’s a Wall St. banker who’s been skipping work to try to write a non-fiction book about Eminem. He’s an anxious, eccentric guy who I think really means well, but who makes a lot of bad decisions.
And Wendy?
AW: Wendy is also a really anxious person, and an over-thinker. These are qualities that she and Michael share and relate to in each other. But they deal with them in different ways, Wendy, by trying to control everything in her life, and Michael by trying to shuck responsibility. In a way this makes them both a good match and a problematic one. In many ways, Wendy is the novel’s anchor. A lot of the story centers around her job as a social media manager for brands.
I like the seamlessness with which you shuttle between Michael and Wendy’s points of view. Can you speak a little bit about writing the scene that way?
AW: My first book, Flatscreen, is told entirely in the first person from the perspective of a character with a very limited worldview, and so I knew that I wanted the next long project I worked on to be less claustrophobically contained to one character’s head. Michael and Wendy are the two main POVs here, but there are many others that pop up as well. It’s been really fun to write this way, a relief.
The Novel is Headed to Boca: An Interview with Joshua Cohen
"A Gym Window" - Catherine Elizabeth
Issue #1 of Assignment features a new short story by Joshua Cohen, “The Gymnics.” Cohen is the author of several books, including the short story collection Four New Messages, which was named one of the Best Books of 2012 by The New Yorker, and the forthcoming novel Book of Numbers, which will be available this June from Random House. He is a New Books critic for Harper’s. In this interview, he talks about the literature that influenced “The Gymnics,” as well as some of the research methods he employed for his new novel.
To read an excerpt from "The Gymnics" click here.
- Daniel Johnson
What does the title, “The Gymnics,” refer to?
Joshua Cohen: Style-and-themewise I was thinking of the Stoics, of course - of Aurelius’ Meditations, Epictetus’ Discourses. But the title comes from poetry, from Virgil in translation: The Georgics, The Eclogues (also called The Bucolics).
Are there any particular Aurelius maxims you like?
JC: The ones I like best I altered, or adapted, for use. Here’s one, though, that didn’t make the cut: “Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them.”
"The Gymnics" is a story about a student who valorizes a writer and educator before acknowledging his humanity. Has this ever happened to you with an author or educator you've admired?
JC: Dickens's affair with Ellen Ternan broke my heart.
What are your thoughts on a reader separating a body of work or art from the body who created it?
JC: I cleave to the New Criticism, which isn't new anymore: author and authored are separate. "Phallacies" grow big and hard between them...
Did you research Silicon Valley for your new novel, Book of Numbers? If so, what were your research methods?
JC: I read, taught myself to code a bit. Lied to people who worked in tech, took them to dinner, went to their parties, and just generally haunted their lives.
A character in David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel The Pale King says that “dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention,” and that the increasingly LED-screened world exploits this notion: “I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.” Given that the Internet is the primary marketplace in the global information society today, what do you, way down, think it’s about?
JC: $$$$. And succedanea for same.
Where do you think the novel, as an art form, is headed?
JC: To Boca.
What are you currently reading?
JC: Jeff Nunokawa’s Note Book. Yoel Hoffmann’s Moods, translated by Peter Cole.