It’s official! Two poems published in our pages during 2015 have been selected to appear in next year’s Best American Poetry, guest edited by Edward Hirsch. The winners are Patrick Rosal’s “At the Tribunals” (35.4) and Cate Marvin’s “High School in Suzhou” (36.1).
We’re also pleased to note that our poetry editor Rick Barot will also have a poem in that anthology: “Whitman, 1841,” originally published in Waxwing.
Wayne Michael Winfield will read from his story “One of These Days,” recently published in NER 36.3, at the Briar Cliff Manor Public Library, on Sunday, January 24, 2 p.m.
Free and open to the public! If you plan to go, please e-mail Shelley Glick at sglick@wlsmail.org.
Read an interview with Wayne in our “Behind the Byline” feature.
If you enjoyed Wayne’s story, please consider purchasing a copy of the issue, or better yet, subscribe for four issues of NER at a great price!
Our new issue has just shipped from the printer, and a preview is available here on our website. Order your copy today!
FICTION by Penelope Cray, Emma Duffy-Comparone, David Ebenbach, Mateal Lovaas Ishihara, Rav Grewal-Kök, Vincent Poturica, Antonio Tabucchi (trans. Elizabeth Harris)
POETRY by J. Camp Brown, Lauren Camp, Edgar Kunz, Lisa Lewis, Tod Marshall, Owen McLeod, Giovanni Pascoli (trans. Taije Silverman & Marina Della Putta Johnston), Hai-Dang Phan, Sasha Pimentel, Diane Seuss, Brenda Shaughnessy
NONFICTION by Laurence de Looze, Michael Fallon, Emily Geminder, Philip F. Gura, Kate Lebo, Lisa Mullenneaux, John Addington Symonds
The NER Vermont Reading Series and Vermont Book Shop present three writers in three genres: Castle Freeman Jr., Kathryn Kramer, and Rebecca Starks will read from their fiction, memoir, and poetry, respectively, at 51 Main at the Bridge in Middlebury, VT, on Monday, November 9, 7 p.m. This event is free. Light refreshments will be served. Books, cocktails, and other beverages will be available to purchase.
Castle Freeman Jr. is a longtime contributor of short fiction to NER, most recently with “Squirrel Trouble at Uplands” (2015). His new novel, The Devil in the Valley, was just released from Overlook Press. He’s the author of four other novels, including All That I Have and Go With Me (coming as a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Julia Stiles), two collections of short stories, and many essays and other nonfiction. His stories have been mentioned or included in The Best American Short Stories and other major collections. He lives in southeastern Vermont.
Kathryn Kramer is the author of the recently published memoir Missing History: The Covert Education of a Child of the Great Books. She has also published the novels A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space, Rattlesnake Farming, and Sweet Water, and is co-author of a language textbook, Welcome to Vermont: English for Working and Living. Her recent essays have appeared in New England Review and she teaches at Middlebury College.
Rebecca Starks’s poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Slice Magazine, Carolina Quarterly, Raintown Review, and elsewhere. Her fiction has appeared in Crab Orchard Review. She edits Mud Season Review, a literary journal run by members of the Burlington Writers Workshop, and teaches literature courses for the Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning program at the University of Vermont. She has a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University and a B.A. in English from Yale University, and has sought out writing communities wherever she has lived.
Excerpts from Wei An’s “Life on Earth” appear in NER 36.2 in translation by Thomas Moran. For this “Behind the Byline,” we turn to the introduction Tom wrote for Cerise Press, which describes his visit to Wei An’s apartment in Changping and the author’s interest in Walden, the book that “changed his life.” Wei An died in 1999 at the age of thirty-nine.
I visited Wei An’s apartment in the Beijing suburb of Changping with his sister, brother, and three friends. His basketball, camera, and canvas traveling bag are hanging inside the front door. Wei An’s study is as he left it; on the bookshelves are Chinese translations of the writers Wei An admired. They were almost all foreign. His handwritten manuscripts are kept in a box in a shuttered bottom shelf.
Between 1988 and 1995, Wei An wrote seventy-five short meditations on the things that fell within his observation and concern . . . Wei An’s final draft of “Life on Earth” is neatly written in blue ink; the penultimate draft is carefully corrected in red. Wei An wrote little, and he wrote slowly. His meticulous self-editing was one of the qualities that puzzled and charmed his friends. He had each of his visitors write a note on a postcard, and the day Wei An’s sister [Ma Jianxiu] opened Wei An’s apartment to us, the poet Shu Cai flipped through the postcards. Together with Wei An’s college classmate Zhou Xinjing, and the novelist Ning Ken, they reminisced. Wei An was sincere and naïve, the three agreed. Zhou said that when Wei An had visitors who did not know each other, he conducted solemn, formal introductions. The thoughtfully articulate Zhou, who has published a novel, imitated Wei An and chuckled. Shu Cai is an ex-diplomat and knows French; in the 1990s he got phone calls from Wei An at all hours pressing him for immediate translations of more work by Francis Jammes, Wei An’s favorite poet. The exuberant, energetic Ning Ken brought a basket of flowers and put on the table in front of Wei An’s photograph in the front hallway. He remembered going swimming with Wei An at a nearby reservoir they called with great satisfaction their own Walden Pond.
Wei An read Walden in Xu Chi’s translation in the winter of 1986-1987, and the book changed his life; he discovered he preferred what he called Thoreau’s “free, unrestrained, simple and open . . . organic” style to any form of writing he had previously encountered. Wei An wrote that his poetry, which he stopped writing when he read Walden, was “prose-like” and Thoreau’s prose was poetic. He said the form of writing that occupies the middle ground fit him. “Life on Earth” is somewhat like Walden with nine out of every ten sentences removed.
Welcome to “Behind the Byline,” the column in which we share conversations with our current NER writers in all genres. NER interns Leah Sarbib and Alyssa Taylor speak with Michael Wang, author of “Further News of Defeat,” which appears in NER 36.2.
LS/AT: You were born in China and moved to the US when you were six years old. How are you influenced by your early years in China and what memories do you have of living there?
MW: I remember being in Beijing in 1990 when the city was making a bid for the Olympics. I was sitting on a bench in front of a newly built stadium with my mother and grandfather, and on my lap was a laminated poster of the flags of every country in the world. Staring at all the strange designs, I was picking and choosing which of those places I’d like to travel to. I didn’t know it then, but my adolescent and adult life—along with my writing—have been sort of a reversal of that search. I think my fascination with Chinese history lies in having my birth nation taken away from me through immigration (though, of course, done so with the best of intentions in giving me a better life in America).
I think of myself less as an Asian American writer—although I am that, too—than as a writer who enjoys investigating the historical periods of my birth country.
LS/AT: When did you first become interested in Chinese history, specifically the Japanese massacres of Chinese towns? How historically accurate is “Further News of Defeat?”
MW: A skeleton of the story had been told to me again and again as I was growing up. My father belonged to a family of farmers, and my grandmother had married into his family during the 1950s, riding from her village on a donkey with a band marching behind. The historical incident that “Further News of Defeat” is loosely based on occurred in my grandmother’s village, and San, the protagonist, was supposed to be my great grandmother.
Of course, like all stories passed down in this way, there are a number of discrepancies in the versions my father had told me. The story changed from all of the villagers having been thrown into the well to a half and then to a third. Sometimes my great grandmother escaped before the Japanese came and had only heard about it through hearsay. Sometimes she was there, like in the story.
My version of the story tried to make sense of all the different narratives as logically as I could. I did go back to China the summer after I finished the first draft and asked people living in the village next to my father’s whether something like this had happened, and I can confirm that an event like the one depicted did occur in a village outside of Yuncheng City—but with so many atrocities having been committed at the time, it can be difficult for people who still remember that period to differentiate one from the other.
LS/AT: The story has touching moments but focuses on a deeply unsettling historical moment. How did you navigate this delicate balance?
MW: To me, the most difficult thing that a writer needs to do when his material includes scenes that are shocking to the point of being sensational—and the one that tends to be forgotten the most—is to balance the deeply unsettling with the quietly intimate. All stories need to be grounded in moments of character-revealing quietude, but especially those that eventually depict violence and bedlam. The contrast will only make those moments even more powerful.
LS/AT: The Japanese soldier who takes an interest in San is morally ambiguous. Can you elaborate on the creation of this character?
MW: Right now, the mainstream Chinese media has many TV shows and movies that depict the Japanese as the root of all evil (much in the same way that Western media portrays Nazi Germany). I wanted a more nuanced approach to my depiction of the Japanese—at least in one character—and I thought it was powerful to have a Japanese soldier save San while a Chinese soldier—the returning runner—just walks by and does nothing. War, as we all know, often degenerates into a type of chaos in which there is no clear sense of hero or villain, good or evil. Defeat is imminent for all who are involved, and that was what I wanted to depict in this story.
♦♦♦
Michael X. Wang was born in Fenyang, China. He received his MFA from Purdue, has a PhD in creative writing from Florida State University, and won a 2010 AWP Intro Award in fiction. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Prick of the Spindle, Day One, Driftwood Press, and Juked, among others. His chapbook, A Minor Revolution (StoryFront, 2013), is available from Amazon. He began teaching at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, this fall.
Welcome to “Behind the Byline,” the column in which we share conversations with our current NER writers in all genres. NER fiction editor Janice Obuchowski speaks with Steve De Jarnatt, author of “Wraiths in Swelter,” which appears in NER 36.2.
JO: Steve, it’s quite fun to read a contemporary take on the gothic short story. Did you have any writers in mind as you were writing “Wraiths in Swelter”?
The ghost element bushwhacked me late. It was probably the last aspect of the story that materialized. I wasn’t consciously channeling any fiction author (except perhaps Stuart Dybek a bit for his extensive paean to the City of the Big Shoulders). I think it was more an attempt to emulate all the great creative nonfiction going on these days. None of the subject matter is from my life, but I was trying to convey a fictional character’s confessional memoir. Some cohorts from my Antioch Los Angeles MFA program—Antonia Crane, Patrick O’Neill, Jillian Lauren, and others—have published brave personal sagas of their lost years and redemptions. They lived through it—I just make things up.
JO: I was quite taken with the sophistication of the imagery—not just of death and destruction but of a kind of limbo between life and death. At the outset the young girl walks on the heads of the dying to escape a theater gone up in flames. Later a junkie is revived after falling into a near-death state. Buddy, of course, is between states too, having fallen out of the life he was leading and now casting about aimlessly. Does the notion of purgatory hold particular resonance for you?
There were a few main touchstones that sparked the story and perhaps the limbo of the characters. Foremost was remembering the mass burials of hundreds of very old people who had perished during the Chicago heat wave of 1995. I didn’t research much until a draft was written but tried to vet things later from various sources. A great book by Eric Klinenberg—Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago—is a must read on the subject of civic failure.
Writing this tale was also probably an attempt to find empathy for a few friends I thought I knew well, with great lives set out before them, who opted to disappear down rabbit holes instead, leaving me in limbo trying to understand.
The lingering image/anecdote of a child walking on heads to save herself in a theater fire remains a phantom. I used to pour through yellowing newspapers in library stacks decades ago, looking for film ideas, and thought I remembered this happening somewhere, though not the Iroquois Theater fire. All I had was a bad sketch and a few notes in an old folder but was unable to find mention of it anywhere on the net. Perhaps it was a dream or that ghost trying to get some ink.
Purgatory to me has always been just the images of Dore engravings in Dante’s Inferno I would leaf through as a kid. I was raised Unitarian (though I still have no idea what we are supposed to believe), and religions fascinate me. It’s been pointed out that I often have some spiritual element in my short stories, and characters seeking grace through ordeal are a recurring theme. Music and faith seem to me among the most magical of human creations, though I find most beliefs too insular and just too minuscule in their scope. If they weren’t prescient about the 10,000 galaxies the Hubble just found in a supposedly starless hole in the sky, then what could they possibly really know about the big picture?
JO: You’re a film and television director, along with being a writer. Notably you directed Miracle Mile (1989), an apocalyptic film. Does your experience with directing influence your writing? Or perhaps vice versa?
I think there is some comparison in the crafts in that you start with your inspiration or vision, you write a lot of words (or shoot a lot of footage), but the story or film is often found in the revision process or the editing room. I did get to witness genius in its prime while working as a projectionist and trim filer for Terry Malick in the Days of Heaven editing room. Observing him willing his vision into being was a huge inspiration for my filmmaking, and also for fiction, and anything else in life for that matter.
For this story I wrote blind a lot more than I usually do, though coming from film I can’t help but to feel plot a few curves ahead even if I try not to—imbedded in the muscle memory by now, I guess. But this one was written in a very inefficient, mosaic fashion—out of sequence, then stitched together and distilled from more than twice the word count. Cannot seem to keep a short story under 9K words these days. I almost always write in third person, and before I settled on first person for this one there was that sad attempt at the near impossible second person. After the umpteenth “You….” readers begin to scream unless the author is a true word master.
JO: Do you have any connections to Chicago, the setting of “Wraiths in Swelter”? You seem to have a good grasp of the city.
My father was born in a log cabin in southern Illinois and our family use to visit Chicago on cross-country trips out from the state of Washington where I grew up. I am told I saw a no-hitter at Wrigley—though to a young child that’s of course a total bore fest, I still have the program. I did direct some television there, a few scenes for ER and also the ’90s syndicated show The Untouchables, but mainly I just did enough research to feign verisimilitude.
JO: Your stories in general have violence at their centers and are richly textured—the prose being ornate, rococo, thickly detailed. Do you see a connection between your prose style and the topics you choose to write about?
I do seem to inflict a lot of misery on my characters, and I guess I view storytelling as a crucible or arena that often has severe consequences involved. Maybe that’s a fear of boring an audience, I’m not sure.
I am still very wet behind the ears when it comes to literary fiction and I am aware of my excess. Stephen Donadio had said of my other NER story, “Her Great Blue,” that it was a display of “unfettered imagination,” and I just might want that for the title of my story collection.
I love how you termed it—ornate/rococo—and I have to cop to that. Some of that might be due to mild dyslexia. My syntax arrives strange at first and I probably work too hard avoiding normal sentences. It can be exhausting for me (and perhaps readers), but that’s what’s fun about writing fiction—going a bit over the top. To make a cinematic analogy, at this point my prose is using a crane shot or circular dolly track much of the time, abusing the Vertigo shot (zooming in/tracking back) instead of employing the elegant, Bresson-style naturalistic coverage that more subtle and seasoned writers might use.
I am trying to keep things a little more fettered with a leaner, cleaner page-turning style in the two novels I’m working on at present. I think if/when I do go back and write a script, I will have made a quantum craft leap for having abandoned it for this apprenticeship in the art of fiction. Particularly when it comes to voluntary revision. I don’t think you ever really finish a story, and I could scribble eternally, whereas most screenwriters get self-satisfied with their gems too early in the game. Part of that is a protective instinct, since producer and studio notes often tear the heart out of everything you were trying to do. I am still astonished at how reasonable and universally helpful notes in the literary world are.
Steve De Jarnatt splits his time between Port Townsend, Washington, and Venice, California. His writing has appeared in Santa Monica Review, Meridian, Joyland, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, New Stories from the Midwest 2013, and Best American Short Stories 2009, among others. He was a fiction scholar at the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences in 2012 and 2013, respectively. He is also the director of two cult feature films, Miracle Mile and Cherry 2000, just released on Blu-ray. His story “Her Great Blue” appeared in NER 34.1.
Welcome to “Behind the Byline,” the column in which we share conversations with current NER writers in all genres.
NER editor Carolyn Kuebler speaks with Carolyn Page, author of the story “Marksberry Road” which appears in NER 36.1.
CK: This story first struck me by its perfectly matter-of-fact tone and then later by a haunting sense of pain and loss. It’s as if the narrator recognizes that her losses are so ordinary that she hardly seems entitled to express her own pain. Where did this narrator and her story come from?
CP: All I know is that when my mother died in 1997 it threw me back onto Marksberry Road where my father had died 45 years before. The story, which had had one or more unsuccessful incarnations over the years, came to life then and pretty much wrote itself.
The child in the story may be the key to the attitude you mention. Children are innocent. They see things simply. You can trust them. A child isn’t questioned or second-guessed by the reader the way an adult might be, so a reader would be more willing to listen to the story unfold and trust in the accuracy and believability of it from a child’s point of view.
CK: You mentioned in conversation that you enjoy listening to voices, in particular speaking voices, from books on tape and even just people on the phone. Could you tell us about this, and about how it might inform your writing?
CP: A voice can tell us an awful lot if we just listen, especially if we hear it out of view of the speaker, disembodied, and also when what is being said is not for our ears and the speaker doesn’t know we are there, listening. Voices have value in other ways, too. Lying in the dark listening to an audio production of Hamlet did more for my migraines years ago than the dangerous barbiturates prescribed by my doctor.
CK: The changes on Marksberry Road reflect the loss of a mundane but very particular (and beloved) way of life, and help remind us that so many “nowhere” places are as deeply loved as the world’s spectacular places. Does the place you live in now allow you to more clearly see the place you once lived?
CP: Actually, if any place does that for me it’s Colonial Williamsburg, a day trip from where I live now. The quiet, simple way of life depicted there, with vegetable gardens in the back and side yards of clapboard houses, is very like where I grew up. Even the horses contribute; after all, I grew up in Kentucky.
CK: I was particularly taken by the descriptions of the church picnic. Do picnics like this still exist?
CP: I’ll say! Just go to Stanley, Kentucky, in August and you will find plenty of barbecued mutton and burgoo at the St. Peter of Alcantara church picnic. There are others down there, I’m sure. I just don’t know where.
CK: What writers have you been most drawn to over your life as a reader, and who are you reading these days?
CP: Shakespeare and Faulkner, then everyone else. These days, I mostly reread the greats and near greats for fiction and also for nonfiction, such as Hemingway’s relatively overlooked and wonderful Green Hills of Africa and books on writing and writers for other nonfiction, mostly the older, long out-of-print works; looking for them and finding them is like a treasure hunt. One such treasure is The Essential Shakespeare by John Dover Wilson, one of the giants of Shakespeare critique, long gone now but unparalleled. His humble little brown book got me excited about Shakespeare’s comedies when before I had not had much interest. I keep up with all contemporary fiction and nonfiction, and always give it a try, but I end up returning to the classics, after all.
♦♦♦
Carolyn Page was born in Kentucky and has lived in Arlington, Virginia, most of her adult life. She is a mother of four, grandmother of nine, and a great grandmother. She won the PEN/Nelson Algren Fiction Award in 1989 along with a month-long writing residency at The Barn, Montauk, New York. The prologue to the PEN Award–winning novel, a standalone story, “Bucky,” was published in the Potomac Review and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has taught creative writing in the Washington, DC, area for twenty-five years.
New England Review is pleased to present a gathering of alumni and faculty authors during Middlebury’s reunion weekend on Saturday, June 6, at 2:30 p.m. Writers who will read from their work are Professor Emeritus John Elder, Lucas Gonzalez, Sydney Landon Plum, India Hixon Radfar, and Sue Ellen Thompson, in the Middlebury College Axinn Center, Room 229. Free and open to the public!
John Elder (Professor Emeritus) taught English and environmental studies at Middlebury College from 1973 until his retirement in 2010. His books Reading the Mountains of Home, The Frog Run, and Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa explore the meaning of Vermont’s landscape and environmental history for him as a teacher, writer, and householder. Recently he has also completed a memoir called Picking up the Flute that chronicles his obsession since retirement with learning about and playing traditional Irish music.
Lucas Gonzalez (2010) was born and raised in New York City and works as an English teacher in Palo Alto, California. He first attended Middlebury as a high school student at the New England Young Writers’ Conference. He published his first young adult novel, The Maple Machine, in 2006. During his time as an undergraduate, Lucas served as a co-creator of Blackbird, a student-led undergraduate publication still in print today. He was also NER’s first summer intern. Since graduating from Midd, Lucas has gone on to pursue his MA at the Bread Loaf School of English, attending each of the four campuses and organizing the graduate student reading series. He is thrilled to be back in the company of NER, Middlebury, and his beloved Green Mountains.
Sydney
Landon Plum (1970) teaches online for the University of Connecticut. Solitary Goose, her book of essays about life on a small pond in Connecticut, was published by University of Georgia Press in 2007. She also contributed a chapter to the anthology Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming, edited by Steven Pavlos Holmes. Plum has worked for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Environmental Writers’ Conference in Honor of Rachel Carson, and served on the committee establishing a new major in Environmental Studies at UConn. She is currently working on essays exploring ordinary encounters—with a Benedictine monk in Vietnam, a rug salesman in Istanbul, and an eel fisherman and a snapping turtle in Maine.
India Hixon Radfar (1990) has published four books of poetry: India Poem (2002), the desire to meet with the beautiful (2003), Breathe (2004), and Position & Relation (2009), in addition to a chapbook, 12 Poems That Were Never Written (2006). She teaches poetry for California Poets-in-the-Schools and expressive writing (for Writegirl and The Creative Minds Project at UCLA) with populations of the homeless, the mentally ill, the imprisoned, and those doing early parenting. She is a Certified Applied Poetry Facilitator for the International Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy and just received an A.I.R. grant from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs to do a large writing project with the homeless youth of Los Angeles.
Sue Ellen Thompson (1970) published her fifth book of poetry, They, in 2014. Her work has been included in the Best American Poetry series and read on National Public Radio by Garrison Keillor. In addition to a Winter Term course at Middlebury, she has taught at Wesleyan University, Binghamton University, Central Connecticut State University, and the University of Delaware. With her husband, Stuart Parnes ’70, she lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where she mentors adult poets and teaches workshops at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda and Annapolis. She was awarded the 2010 Maryland Author Prize from the Maryland Library Association.
Welcome to “Behind the Byline,” the column in which we share conversations with current NER writers in all genres.
This month, NER associate editor J. M. Tyree speaks with writer Chris Nelson,
author of “Speaking of Neil Young”
(NER 35.4).
JMT: I read your essay on Neil Young just before seeing him perform in Hyde Park in London. Listening to him play live, with your essay fresh in my mind, raised the hairs on my arms. I felt connected to his music in a way I never had before, and I wanted to thank you for that. You’re really able express how it’s not technical expertise but…something else…out of which Young makes his musical magic. How would you describe that “something else,” as a sort of introduction to your NER essay?
CN: There’s at least some magic in pretty much all the different kinds of Young’s music: the California psychedelia of his contributions to Buffalo Springfield and of his eponymous solo debut; the country-tinged sound of Harvest, Harvest Moon, and many other albums; even—God help me—the synthesized and overdubbed tracks on clunkers like Trans. But to me it’s his electric guitar-heavy work where that “something else” is most distinct. You hear his solos and stop and think, “What is this?” It’s clearly rock and roll, but unlike most of his contemporaries, Young didn’t emerge from that blues tradition. The word most often tied to his style is “grunge,” but it’s worth noting that Young had been playing in that way long before the term even existed in the music world, which, come to think of it, is the perfect metaphor for that “something else” of his electric guitar-playing: it’s “pre-language.” Young’s anti-technique both resists definition and actually sounds like somebody struggling to speak. It’s the sound of emotion before you can make sense of it.
JMT: Our student interns had a really interesting question for you after reading your essay. They asked, “How do you experience the act of writing in relation to your experience of the spoken word, given that these modes of communication are simultaneously completely different and yet also very similar?”
CN: Speaking and especially writing are both distilled forms of thinking. Much of what goes on in our heads is so messy, noisy, and recursive that it’s often only when we speak or write that we’re able to order or confer meaning on it all. This similarity between the two modes of communication doesn’t really apply to those like me who do not speak fluently, however. For people who stutter, what comes out of our mouths is just more incoherence, and we ironically end up even more beholden to the very confusion, indecisiveness, and ambivalence that may have prompted us to speak in the first place. If you accept my essay’s governing metaphor of guitar-playing-as-speech, Neil Young doubled-down on his disfluency by turning it into an aesthetic.
I’m sure part of the reason I like to write has to do with the refuge afforded by my authorial absence. There’s nobody watching me as I write, and I’m not there to watch them read, assuming I’m lucky enough to even have readers. Of course, I also write simply because my hands can do what my mouth cannot.
JMT: You relate a conversation about how you think Young’s guitar-playing sometimes “sucks” and yet how much you love it as a personal expression. I could see this idea applied to some paintings and possibly to some novels as well, where certain weaknesses or imperfections can be turned to the artist’s advantage. But that would be considered unusual in most cases, I think. So, do you think this effect—the imperfect sublime—is best suited to rock music, especially live performances? Why do you suppose that is?
CN: Young’s electric guitar-playing very often sucks, I’m afraid, at least when judged from any traditional standard. He won’t bother retuning his guitar mid-performance or even mid-recording, he’ll go minutes without producing a coherent musical phrase, and sometimes his playing is so loud and screechy it literally hurts your ears. And yet here I am, blasting “Goin’ Home” at the gym or popping in Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere for my August drives at dusk. In some ways, it is simply the nature of music that allows Young to achieve this effect of the imperfect sublime. The quicker and easier it is to receive an art form through the senses—a painting with our eyes, a song with our ears—the more readily and intensely we react to it on an emotional level. Think about the way hearing merely the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth can stop you dead in your tracks. There’s really no equivalent to that sense of emotional immediacy in literature, at least not in prose and especially not in narrative prose.
There are plenty of anti-musicians like Young in all genres—I think rockers are just louder about it. Though there is something singularly visceral about that electric guitar. Especially at live performances, when musicians like Young enter into a symbiotic relationship with the crowd, and you feel their bends and vibrato and feedback deep in your chest, and if they play the wrong note or the same one over and over you can’t skip past the song and they can’t pause the recording and say, “let me try again,” because it’s just the two of you, bare.
JMT: I guess Neil Young’s difficulties and imperfections make his songs like life, don’t they?
CN: I definitely hear the range of human experience in Young’s songs, especially his electric work, in which his imperfections as a guitarist allow him to capture and evoke the urgency and unpredictability of life. This realness is a far cry from guitarists who seem virtually incapable of missing a note. Young’s playing strikes me as mimicking not just life, but modern life in all its tensions, anxieties, and paradoxes. Mimesis, however, isn’t enough. If what you feel is confused, confined, and helpless, what’s more confusion, confinement, and helplessness going to do? The antidote to noise cannot be simply more noise. Art has to offer a way out. Fortunately, Young’s songs and specifically his guitar-playing often do offer that way out. After soloing for almost the entirety of a song like “Slip Away” and producing nothing but incoherence—albeit very raw and affecting incoherence—he’ll suddenly arrive at a climax where every note is not just loud, but clear, and you know whatever connection he’s making is true because he had to go through the muck to get there, much like how happiness means nothing if you haven’t first experienced despair. So, Young’s songs are like life, especially modern life, but they’re also something else, and thank God for that.
[read the essay] Chris Nelson is a writer living in New York City.