Guest post: Nicole Cooley on Hurricane Katrina, four years later

Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Nicole Cooley, who grew up in New Orleans and whose poem “The Flood Notebooks” appears in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, reflects on the anniversary.


Go on, I’ve had enough.
Dump my blues down in the Gulf.

—Johnny Cash, “Big River”


It is not you who will speak: let the disaster speak in you.

—Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster


In New York, it is raining this weekend—the side effects of Hurricane Danny—and I am wishing I was in New Orleans where I grew up. New Orleans: the easy city to miss—we all know the song, “Do you Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?” The easy city to mythologize—and I have done it—Live Oaks along St Charles Avenue, mint juleps on wrought iron balconies, the French Quarter. I know that it is easier to think about New Orleans if you keep your vision of the city romantic, if you align it with the most popular and resonant clichés.

I am talking about a different New Orleans, the one that four years ago endured the greatest “natural”—or not—disaster in US history: Hurricane Katrina. I am talking about the city that my parents and my friends still live in four years after the storm. I am talking about the New Orleans that former president George Bush and his administration ignored and ruined. The city that people have told me—well meaning people, my friends and neighbors in the Northeast—should not be rebuilt. “Who would live there?” one man said to me. “Everyone knows the city is going to be eventually destroyed. It is only a matter of time.” (“The Status of New Orleans: An Update,” in Friday’s New York Times, shows the stark reality of the conditions in the city. )

For me, the anniversary also marks four years since my parents refused to evacuate New Orleans, despite the first-ever mandate to leave the city. “We are not leaving,” my mother said. “This is our home.” And for several days, my sister, brother and I didn’t know if they were dead or alive. We called FEMA, the Red Cross, the Louisiana State Police, the local hospital, begging for help. All the phones were out, circuits busy. We typed their names in Coast Guard search engines. In that first week after Katrina, none of us knew the scope of the damage or how many people were missing or dead. All we could do is watch the news—the roads in and out of New Orleans shut down, the floodwalls cracking open, the city filling like a bowl. In the end, my parents were safe—and this is less a miracle than random luck—though they remained in the city for three weeks after the storm. But so many other people on the Gulf Cost did not survive.

I am also wishing President Obama was in New Orleans. On Friday, the day before the anniversary, many citizens of New Orleans wrote and signed an open letter to the president, asking him to visit the city for this important fourth anniversary, and published this letter in the Times Picayune newspaper. The opening of the letter reads: “Tomorrow we will mark the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which claimed the lives of more than 1,400 Louisianans and nearly killed a great American city. We will miss having you in our midst.” This year, unlike other years, there are several organic commemorative events to mark the fourth anniversary of the storm. They include a ceremonial bell ringing at the Charity Hospital Cemetery at the time of the levee breaches and a festival celebrating the city with food and “entertainment” in Congo Square in Armstrong Park.

In my mind, I return to my experience on the first anniversary of Katrina, August 29, 2006. My parents did not want to participate in any commemorative events—I understand this, as the aftermath of the storm is their daily reality—but it was important to me to be part of the anniversary in any way I could. I went alone to an informal Second Line Parade downtown: a large group of us walked from the Convention Center to the Superdome. Those two sites were part of the worst of the aftermath of the storm, one the shelter that should have never been a shelter and one a shelter of last resort. The walk was a jazz funeral—familiar to me from my childhood. But the parade also brought together so many disparate communities: The Mardi Gras Indians, The Black Men’s Social Club from Treme, out-of-towners who had come down to New Orleans for the anniversary. It was not an orchestrated, rehearsed memorial. It didn’t follow the conventional narrative of disaster and the aftermath with invocation of heroes. But the parade invoked the spirit of New Orleans.

And it reminds me of the words of poet John Berryman in The Dreamsongs: “We are on each other’s hands/ who care.”


Nicole Cooley is the author of two books of poetry, with a third, Breach, forthcoming. She has received a Discovery/The Nation Award and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY.

Guest post: Joan Downs on teaching “Some Kind of Change”

We’re busy finishing up PEN America 11. In the meantime, here’s another guest post—this one from Joan Downs, a retired magazine editor and writer and member of PEN, “whose second act, teaching adult literacy, is just as involving and perhaps more important than the opener.”


They’ve never heard of Updike or Roth, ditto Hemingway. Shakespeare rings a bell, although no one has read a sonnet or seen a play. The students of Literacy Partners, Inc. (LPI), a nonprofit that provides a free adult literacy program serving low-income New Yorkers, are not PEN America’s usual audience.

When they first come to us, some students can’t recite the alphabet. We teach them to write letters—up the hill, over the bridge, down the hill; up the hill, over the bridge, down the hill. Imagine the desperation confronting such hurdles at age 19, 27, 34, 42, 55.

As a volunteer tutor, I try to find contemporary writing that’s both accessible and relevant to my students’ experience. The students—drop-outs mainly, teenagers and twenty- and thirty-somethings—are bright and motivated despite hardscrabble lives. These are our advanced students, maybe even harboring a success story.

One Saturday morning I’m browsing PEN America for reading to go with my coffee. The issue’s theme is “Fear Itself.” I come across “Some Kind of Change” by James Yeh.

The story, a conversation between a man and a woman, takes place in a coffee shop. Fate! (LGQ, my husband predicts: Low Gunplay Quotient.) I read it once, twice, again. (It’s short.) The writing is spare. Yeh evokes strong visual images in swift, deft strokes. His ear for language is pitch-perfect. This Yeh person’s got talent! (Little stab of excitement.) I have a hunch his story may connect with my passel of diploma-deprived adults who, nevertheless, have an uncanny instinct for honest writing—and zero tolerance for a scintilla of phoniness.

This is the drill: Silent reading, followed by reading aloud, taking turns doing the honors. Then the tutor tries to point out the allure of the vignette, how powerful small forms can be, the underlying layers—stuff teachers like to talk about. Nobody’s buying it. It seems they have their own ideas.

“I think the coffee shop is on the lower East Side.” Someone pulls out a wrinkled Edward Hopper print from an old lesson, “Like this?” “He’s dorky and smart. She’s pretty, not smart. But he’d like to hit on her.” “They’ve had an affair.” “No, she’s a tease. She cheated on her boyfriend, but not with him.” “She had a dream she’s a building, give me a break.” “He explained it’s because she’s moving.” “A building is supposed to be a woman’s privates.” “Shut Up!” “He should have ridden with her on the subway. He wanted to.” “No, he doesn’t want to get involved, he knows she’s nasty.” “He’s telling the story, we just have his side.” “He doesn’t take her home because they’re both moving on. The title says the story is about change.”

Tutor interruption: Where does the fear theme come in? “She tells him to be safe. Be safe in life.” “Probably it’s be safe in this neighborhood. He’s walking home. One block is good, the other is empty buildings, lots, and three guys wearing hoodies coming toward him.” “Guys in hoodies are trouble.” “Maybe they’re just cold.” “Since I got mugged and robbed, I see a man in a hoodie sweatshirt, I cross the street.” “He puts his hands in his pockets, puts his head down and walks faster—that’s just how you guys behave.” “But then he starts thinking how beautiful the city is. He’s happy.” “He’s happy he escaped her.” “He’s just another guy who’s afraid to commit.”

Fifteen minutes go by, and no sign of resolution. The conversation is animated. Judging by noise level alone, “Some Kind of Change” has opened up their nerve endings. Settle down, says the tutor. You have five minutes. Write what you think happens next.

No one here is bashful about expressing an opinion, but these students HATE to write. This time, though, they whip out their notebooks and get to it. When they’re asked to share their thoughts, everyone wants to go first.

On a whim I email the class’s handiwork to the author. Secretly, I hope he might email back. Nothing elaborate. Just thanks; I read the students’ work. Unlikely, however. But it would mean a lot to them.

So it makes the last class of summer session a celebration when I report James Yeh has read their pieces. A “real” writer validates them as bona fide students. He emails that writing is about connection. He says Holden Caulfield’s line in Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye about liking books written by authors whom you felt you could just call on the phone and be friends with has always stuck with him. Of course, readers intuit that from James’s story. You really ought to read it.


Note: Tomorrow we'll post James Yeh’s story, “Some Kind of Change,” from PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

Guest post: Saïd Sayrafiezadeh on Iran, Michael Jackson, and his father

By far the most compelling moment for me during the Michael Jackson memorial service, of which I watched every minute, was when Reverend Al Sharpton, addressing Michael’s three little children directly, declared for all the world to hear, “Wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy.” This, of course, despite all evidence to the contrary. The sustained ovation that followed, however, suggested he was not alone in his judgment.

Frankly, I was appalled. Had I been at the Staples Center I can assure you I would have remained seated. Such an egregious statement by Sharpton, so willfully dismissive of reality, is no doubt a measure of how easy it is for people to succumb to blindness. In the case of the thousands applauding it is collective blindness. I could well argue that this is the necessary first step towards the wholesale rewriting of history. Or perhaps it’s the first step after. Either way, it’s a cause for concern.

But sitting on my couch in New York City, I was also desirous of Sharpton’s pronouncement, and his avuncular concern for those three children in the front row. I could have certainly benefited from similar words when I was a child. (I probably could still benefit.) My father was someone who, like Michael Jackson, was always on the precipice of being considered strange. He was a communist for one thing. He was also Iranian. Moreover, he left my mother and me when I was a baby. So in some ways he managed to be the complete embodiment of the concept of strange: unusual, unfamiliar, foreign.

Since he was my father, though, I chose to believe that he was normal. Or actually beyond normal, i.e., extraordinary. This was not easy for me to do. Especially growing up in Pittsburgh where everything tends toward homogeneity. For obvious reasons I fell into the habit as a child of equating my father with Iran. In fact, the two were interchangeable. This might have proven beneficial for me if my father had been from some other country like, say, Peru or Iceland, or for that matter any other country in the world—with the possible exception of Russia. But since there has been almost nothing but abhorrence towards Iran for the last three decades, with much of that abhorrence informed by xenophobia (see the Iran hostage crisis), I have lived a somewhat antagonized existence where any criticism of Iran has always been perceived as criticism of my father.

This is far from rational, of course. After all, even comments about Ayatollah Khomeini, who imprisoned my father in 1982, have made me bristle. As do comments about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who, more often than not, appears to be saying something wincingly absurd, like there are no homosexuals living in Iran. Despite disagreeing, I feel an obligation to defend him. Which brings me to the recent protests in Iran over the disputed election and how most friends of mine, understandably, thought that I would be enthusiastic. I was enthusiastic for the first day or two. But then American condemnation began to overwhelm all else. And so did the cartoons of Iranian officials with bulbous noses and bushy eyebrows behaving either like sadists or idiots. All of it so simplistic and sanctimonious, and all of it coming to a head for me when Obama issued his delayed but celebrated statement in which he quoted Martin Luther King, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I spent days fuming about how it was an uninformed analogy at best, considering that Dr. King was fighting for civil rights around the same time the United States was overthrowing the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh. In short, I’ve wanted to run through the streets for the last month screaming, “Don’t say anything bad about the clerics! Don’t say anything bad about Iran!” (Herewith an example of my own wish for blindness.)

Just a few days ago, with news of both the election and Michael Jackson thankfully beginning to fade away, I happened to be sitting with a group friends at a restaurant in the West Village. Midway through our meal “Billie Jean” came on the stereo and all of us immediately took up the subject of Michael Jackson once again, reminiscing fondly about Off the Wall and Thriller and how we had all tried and failed at moonwalking… There were six of us at the table on that Saturday afternoon, one of whom was black, and at some point in the conversation I remarked on how Jackson’s life should ultimately be regarded as an obvious and unmitigated tragedy. “Look at his face,” I said, “that tells the story.” Yes, yes, yes, everyone agreed, look at his face!

Everyone, that is, except for the lone black woman sitting with us.

“Michael,” she spoke up, “was a man who knew who he was.”

“Knew who he was?” someone said in disbelief. “He had no idea who he was.”

I could see my black friend’s mouth tense, her posture go rigid. Wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy! How could she ever begin to explain to us what was unexplainable?

So I did for her what I’ve always wanted done for me: I changed the subject.


Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author, most recently, of the critically acclaimed memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free, which Dwight Garner in The New York Times called “exacting and finely made… [written] with extraordinary power and restraint.” Other stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Open City, and elsewhere. “Being Saïd,” an excerpt from his play “Autobiography of a Terrorist,” appears in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

Guest post: Tomasz Rozycki on “Scorched Maps”

Tomasz Rozycki’s poem “Scorched Maps,” reprinted below, appears in PEN America 10: Fear Itself. Both the poem and this guest post were translated by Mira Rosenthal, who received a grant from the PEN Translation Fund to translate Rozycki’s Colonies, a book of seventy-seven sonnets.


Scorched Maps

I took a trip to Ukraine. It was June.
I waded in the fields, all full of dust
and pollen in the air. I searched, but those
I loved had disappeared below the ground,

deeper than decades of ants. I asked
about them everywhere, but grass and leaves
have been growing, bees swarming. So I lay down,
face to the ground, and said this incantation—

you can come out, it’s over. And the ground,
and moles and earthworms in it, shifted, shook,
kingdoms of ants came crawling, bees began
to fly from everywhere. I said come out,

I spoke directly to the ground and felt
the field grow vast and wild around my head.


The poem “Scorched Maps” came out of a trip I took to Ukraine in 2004, when I was invited to a literary festival in Lwów. I took the opportunity to visit the places associated with the history of my family, who were resettled from that area after the Second World War because of the agreement between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, who won the war. At that time the borders of Poland were shifted west, and the Poles who lived in the area that was lost to the Soviet Union were transported by freight train west to Pomerania and Silesia, where I live today. These changes affected several million people, who had to abandon their homes, neighbors, traditions, memories, and God knows what else—everything that had happened on that ground for centuries. The Second World War in particular afflicted those living in this area, Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Armenians—everyone who had helped form the unusual mosaic of cultures and languages there over the centuries. They experienced the terror of Soviet occupation—mass executions and the transportation of millions of victims to the Gulag and forced labor camps deep within Russia—which met with the terror of the Nazis as the Germans, in a systematic way during the extermination of the area’s population, prepared their future “living space.” Inconceivably, at the same time a brutal domestic war continued between Ukrainian nationals, who cooperated with Hitler during the period, and the Polish resistance—a war in which neighbors murdered neighbors and the number of victims and the atrocity of what happened calls to mind ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. My family was one of those that experienced all of the terror and mourned each of the victims.

It is impossible for me to write about this poem without such a lengthy introduction, which is probably unnecessary in the end and obscures more than it illuminates. I went to Ukraine with all of this on my mind in an attempt to free myself from this terrible history. I went to the spot where my grandmother’s house stood before the war. My ninety-year-old grandmother—when she found out I would be going there for the first time so many years after the nightmare of the war—wanted me to tell her if there was any sign of her house left, even though she didn’t have much illusion that there would be. Yet she couldn’t help but hope that there would still be a brick shrine with the figure of Our Lady standing in front of the house, some kind of specific recognizable sign of the house and her entire life there, Our Lady who—as my grandmother believed—saved her and her children’s lives many times.

Despite the fact that I had a small map drawn according to my grandmother’s memory, I wasn’t able to find the house or the shrine. Out of everyone living there, I couldn’t find anyone who remembered her or anyone whatsoever from the neighbors she had mentioned, regardless of whether I used a Polish, Ukrainian, or Jewish surname. So I wandered around the forest, around the meadows and fields. It was already getting dark, and I felt more and more desperate and awful. I even thought that I must have gotten the spot mixed up, that it was all a big misunderstanding. And just when I had to leave for my return train to Lwów, I found someone who helped me, who showed me the way. There wasn’t a house, or a shrine, not even a tree remained in the garden—someone had rubbed out all the signs. But I found one of my grandmother’s neighbors, an old woman who remembered how they used to play together when they were young. She showed me the one thing that remained of the house—a brick cellar, half-buried, next to a dirt road that runs today over the spot where the house once stood. It was the only reminder of all the people whose tracks I was searching for.

When I returned, I found out that my friend, Jacques Burko, the translator of my poetry into French, carried out a similar journey a month later in search of traces of his Jewish family. I then wrote this poem and dedicated it to him.


Tomasz Rozycki has published six books of poetry, including Colonies, The Forgotten Keys, and the book-length poem “Twelve Stations,” winner of the Koscielski Prize. He has been nominated twice for the Nike Prize, Poland’s most important literary award. He lives in his hometown, Opole, with his wife and two children.

Mira Rosenthal has received NEA and Fulbright grants and held fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, Slate, Notre Dame Review, and other journals. She is also the translator of Tomasz Rozycki's The Forgotten Keys.

Guest post: John High on Osip Mandelstam

Over the weekend, Calque posted a translation of Osip Mandelstam’s “Ode to Stalin,” which provided the perfect opening for this guest post by John High, whose translation of Mandelstam’s short poem “Now We Sit at the Kitchen” ran in PEN America 9: Checkpoints. In addition to translating Mandelstam’s work, John has been researching Mandelstam’s life – in particular, his relationship with Stalin.


Exile: Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks

Mounds of human heads travel into the distance,
I diminish there—no one notices anymore,
But in embracing books and children’s play
I’ll arise from this death and again speak the sun’s light.

1936-37?


In 1934 Joseph Stalin sent Osip Mandelstam into exile because of a poem he wrote depicting the dictator’s body with references to “worms” and “cockroaches.” Mandelstam had read the poem only to a small group of close friends -- but one turned informant, and Mandelstam was arrested.

When Stalin learned of the “counter-revolutionary” poem, he called Boris Pasternak. (Mandelstam’s wife Nadezhda describes the now infamous conversation in her memoir, Hope Against Hope.) Stalin told Pasternak that Mandelstam’s case had been reviewed and everything would be fine. Then he reproached Pasternak for not intervening. “If I were a poet and a poet friend of mine were in trouble, I would do anything to help him,” Stalin said. Pasternak explained that the writers’ organizations hadn’t bothered with cases like this since 1927 and that Stalin himself would never have been told of his efforts.

Stalin interrupted: “But he’s a genius, he’s a genius, isn't he?” When Pasternak suggested that they meet to talk, Stalin asked, “About what?” Pasternak replied, “About life and death.” Stalin hung up. For the moment, at least, Pasternak’s response probably saved Mandelstam’s life. The darkest period of the purges was about to commence, but by calling Pasternak Stalin revealed his anxiety over the power poetry still held in the Soviet Union. The poets were not all as frightened as Stalin needed, though they soon would be.

New information from previously confidential NKVD/KGB archives confirms that Pasternak and other friends did much to intervene on Mandelstam’s behalf and that Nadezhda’s account of the phone conversation is accurate. But as Gregory Freidin and others have pointed out, Mandelstam later did all he could to save himself and his wife. He wrote letters and poems (including his infamous “Ode” to Stalin), and made frantic efforts to redeem himself with the regime. He doubted his own certainty and the path of Soviet history. Perhaps Stalin and the Bolsheviks were only doing what was necessary to transform the past? He wanted to save himself and his family, yes—and he wanted his poetry published and accepted by the regime that eventually made him vanish.

After her husband’s death, Nadezhda altered his poetry to create the illusion that he never yielded to Stalin. Who would blame her? They both had struggled to retain a sense of dignity and individuality in an era when neither was tolerated. Yet her changes to Mandelstam's final work in exile about Stalin affected the poet's image in the west and even led to translations that smoothed over the complexities of his politics -- and his atttiudes toward the Soviet state. His infamous “Ode” painfully reflects this. The poetry of Mandelstam’s final years is immensely complicated by his own uncertainty as to what power should achieve in the wake of revolution -- a revolution he embraced in 1917 as a liberating force.

As far as we know, he spoke to no one about the torture he endured after his arrest. He attempted suicide twice, once while in the infamous Lubianka Prison after writing the Stalin epigram, and then in Cherdyn before his relocation to Voronezh. He came to see his own fate bound to the “mounds of human skulls.” To endure the circumstances of his banishment, his fear, and his remorse at having betrayed Anna Akhmatova and others during his interrogation and torture, he immersed himself in the black earth’s vast landscape. His exilic poems are vibrant with the objects around him, the inanimate taking on a breath of its own.

Mandelstam wrote The Voronezh Notebooks from 1935-1937, primarily by composing them in his head while walking; his poetry by then was strictly forbidden and Stalin’s reign of terror was at its height. He never relinquished hope of returning to publication, but, unlike Pasternak, he was never able to navigate his poetry into “acceptable” Soviet culture. He wrote under the constant threat of death, which finally came in a transit camp near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938. Last year, a monument in his memory was erected in Moscow marking its 70th anniversary.

“Regardless of the Cost”: Judith Sollosy on Péter Esterházy’s Revised Edition

Back in August, I mentioned a conversation with Judith Sollosy, who translated Celestial Harmonies, and has begun work on another novel by Péter Esterházy, No Art! Below, she discusses Revised Edition, subtitled “Appendix to Celestial Harmonies,” and centered on the amazing discovery Esterházy made after finishing that book: his father, Mátyás, was an informer for the Communist secret police. (Esterházy discusses this revelation with Wayne Koestenbaum in our latest issue.)


“Regardless of the cost, human or otherwise, we will continue as long as we have raw material.” This is how Péter Esterházy’s Revised Edition begins, a quote from fellow writer Miklós Mészöly. And the raw material of Revised Edition shocked a nation, especially affecting those who had read the author’s previous book, Celestial Harmonies, a prose tribute to his father Mátyás as well as a work conceived in the tradition of the novel as total literature, claiming everything as its field of play. (Once, when Esterházy was asked by a TV reporter what one of his novels was about, he responded that if a novel can be summarized, there’s something very wrong with it.)

The boundaries of Celestial Harmonies are exceptionally broad and kaleidoscopic, just like the boundaries of the main protagonist of the book, “my father” – the generic phrase that the author applies to every male Esterházy of the past few centuries. With reference to his own father, the author closes his 841 page magnum opus with these words: “When we enter the apartment, my father is already sitting by the Hermes Baby which is clattering steadily, like an automatic machine gun, he’s pounding it, striking, it, and the words come pouring out, going pit-a-pat on the white sheet, one in wake of the other, words that are not his own, nor were they ever, nor will they ever be.” – A painful vision of dispossession, but also a magical mirage of a father’s words dancing their way toward the Spheres.

When the manuscript of Esterházy’s Celestial Harmonies was at the typist, he decided to take a break from work (“I had reached the limits of my … capacities. It feels good, reaching your limits, except you’re just a wee bit helpless,”) and have a look at his files in the Historical Archive to see if they had anything on him, and while he was at it, to glance at his father’s dossiers as well to see if they had been wiretapped. (“Around here, everybody thinks that half of the secret police were set on their trail.”) But when a good natured official gently and hesitantly pushed three brown dossiers towards him (“a slight motion, but alarming just the same”) and he opened them, what he saw were not reports on his father, but rather by him. Mátyás Esterházy, who had always shown a refusal to have anything to do with the communist regime that was stifling his country, had been coerced into spying for the notorious “Section III/III” of the secret police. We have that sickening moment of realization on the part of his son to thank for the existence of Revised Edition, which is subtitled “Appendix to Celestial Harmonies”, and about which the author says in his Preface, “If I had my way, I would like only those people to read [it]… who have read Celestial Harmonies. Of course, the reader does whatever he wants, and as for begging, forget it,” – a typical Esterházy attempt to distance himself from his material.

Since Revised Edition is not available in English, there is a misconception that it is a novel. But it is not. It is a happening. (In his Preface, Esterházy simply calls the book “a diary of sorts,” but he clearly doesn’t mean it.) The text proper is set in two colors; the excerpts from the father’s reports are indicated in red ink, the son’s comments and spontaneous reactions as he is reading them are indicated in black. Everything in this book is in the present tense, including the realization that “until [something] is really finished anything can happen, everything is left wide open.”

In retrospect, there is no knowing: the father’s words at the end of Celestial Harmonies, words that were not his own, nor would they ever be, were they part of a translation Mátyás Esterházy was working on (he made a meager living as a translator), or, were they part of an agent’s secret report? In retrospect, there is also no knowing whether the intriguing opening sentence of Celestial Harmonies, “It is deucedly difficult to tell a lie when you don’t know the truth,” was part of the original manuscript and is meant to refer to literature as an elaborate lie, or whether it was added after the fact, and just before the novel was actually printed – in the second page proofs, let’s say? Be that as it may, taken together, Celestial Harmonies and Revised Edition come very close to approximating the everything that total literature claims as its playing field, achieving a closure that leaves us wondering whether we are witnessing art imitating life, or life imitating art? Knowing Péter Esterházy’s mischievous side, I would opt for the latter. Still, be that as it may, to “revise” a beloved father is no small thing.


Judith Sollosy is an editor at Corvina Books in Budapest and the translator of Péter Esterházy, Mihály Kornis, Lajos Parti Nagy, and István Örkény.

“Airport Security,” by Joshua Furst

Joshua Furst has an excellent short story in our new issue. To read it, you’ll have to buy the issue or, even better, subscribe. In the meantime, I asked him to send something we could post here that took the theme of issue 9, “checkpoints,” as a point of departure. Enjoy.


In 1979, I escorted the GI Joe doll that my grandparents had given me for Christmas onto the airplane that was to take my family home to Wisconsin. When we got to security, the doll was detained and frisked. His pistol was confiscated. He wasn’t interrogated or otherwise humiliated, but I, as his representative, was told in slightly scary, slightly condescending terms that, without clearance, carrying guns on planes was prohibited. Confused as to why this was happening to me, and sensing that I’d somehow done something criminal, I promptly started to bawl.

My lawyer, who also happened to be my father, interceded on my behalf and a battle of wills ensued. My father-lawyer explained the obvious to the security guard who’d detained us, that the pistol wasn’t a real gun; it was a toy, made of solid plastic and barely an inch and a half long. If GI Joe and I planned to hijack the plane with it, we surely wouldn’t get very far. “Don’t you think you could let him keep it, sir? You see how upset you’ve made him.” The man wasn’t accustomed to being challenged, at least not here in the lane behind the airport-security metal detector; this was his domain—he was the authority here. He knew every sub-clause of the regulations he was charged with enforcing. He believed in them. Reason was not something that interested him. Logic was an affront to his power. The longer my lawyer tried to argue, the more truculent the guard became, and eventually, he broke off all engagement with us. “Move along now before I have you forcibly removed,” he said. My father couldn’t argue with that.

Once I’d calmed down, I began asking questions—well, one question, the same question I always asked, the question that’s gotten me in trouble throughout my life: Why? But there’s no room for why when confronted by the raw exertion of power. There’s only capitulation or conflict. I can choose to think this man had a goal in mind, that he was trying to show me how safe I was, how scrupulous and unswerving he was in his mission to protect the citizenry as they travel the airways. I can choose to believe he was standing on principle, that he was making his small contribution to a noble cause. What I do believe is that he sensed somehow that my family and I were skeptical of power and those who serve it, and by choosing us to arbitrarily punish, he proved our skepticism to be well founded.

My GI Joe doll abandoned the army soon after this incident. He stripped off his cammies and started wearing the flared trousers and pirate cut shirts that my twelve-inch Star Wars figurines had laying around. As the years went by his disillusion and embitterment grew exponentially with the rightward turn of our country. He’s hiding in some box in a dark basement now, shouting hysterically, but no one is listening.


Joshua Furst is the author of The Sabotage Café, a novel, and Short People, a collection of stories that Jay McInerney called "scary, funny, brilliantly observed." He has received fellowships from the James Michener Foundation and The MacDowell Colony, and was awarded the Nelson Algren Award for his short story "Red Lobster." He lives in New York and teaches fiction and playwriting at The Pratt Institute.

Fady Joudah on Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

Mahmoud Darwish was and is a colossal figure in modern Arabic poetry. He passed away Saturday in Houston, Texas after heart surgery. Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet and doctor who lives in Houston and was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Butterfly's Burden, a collection of three recent books by Darwish. Two of these poems appear in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, along with two new poems by Joudah, who recently won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. (One of these poems provided our new issue with its title.)


Mahmoud Darwish was and will remain a rare phenomenon in the world of letters, a poet whose constant dialogue with place and time (or non place and non time) have thrust him in the hearts and minds of millions of people. He was as extraordinary and private as he was universal and public.

A tender, shy man, with a sense of humor and satire, he was dedicated to the art of poetry and was not concerned with his public image, but never disdainful of it, always respectful of, and indebted to, his readers. His complex language that incessantly bears the illusion of accessibility is laden with paradox and complex metaphor. He was not only the truest and most beautiful expression of Palestine and Palestinians but also of the Arab world. He is dearly loved in Tunis and Morocco as he is in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt and across the Gulf. And he was also celebrated and honored the world over.

Mahmoud Darwish loved life, and loved it in its full adornment and dignity and did not want it compromised. He would not want sorrow to define him. He would rather “We Love Life” and “Remember after (him) only life”…And he would want not necessarily the fixation on the elegiac and the historico-political in his poetry, but a celebration of his eulogy for life and language. He was an innovator of prosody and contemporary rhythms in Arabic, a philosopher of the self and its stranger others, ever the interlocutor. I can only hope that the day will soon come, especially in English, when Darwish’s night and dream, jasmine and almond blossoms are seen for what they are, the private lexicon of a singular and eternal, timeless voice in the history of human literature.


Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American, is a physician. His first poetry collection, The Earth in the Attic, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007. He has been a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001.

"The Noble Beast": Joshua Furst on the courage of Norman Mailer

In the third of our end-of-year tributes to recently departed literary giants, Joshua Furst makes the case for Norman Mailer's importance-- to literature and to the culture at large. Mailer was a major figure in the history of PEN, and you can read other tributes and reminiscences here.

Joshua Furst published his first novel, The Sabotage Café, in August. He is also the author of a short story collection, Short People, which Jay McInerney described as "scary, funny, brilliantly observed."


One of Norman Mailer’s great subjects—as the headline of his New York Times obituary so hostilely noted—was his ego. His ego and its discontents. This led, naturally, to an inconsistency in the work he produced—a sometimes embarrassing grandiosity, a sense that he was in love with his public platform and testing the limits of what it would withstand—that left him open to legions of jeers, scoffs and dismissive chuckles. What people often forget about him, though, is that despite—or maybe because of—his misses, when he did hit his punches landed with great force.

It’s hard to condone some of his more outrageous stances. His homophobia and sexism, the way he fetishized African Americans, so many of his ramblings read even worse, more naïve, less defensible today than they did when he wrote them. And they often came off pretty badly the first time around. He didn’t seem to mind.

At times, he appeared to be courting the ire of, as he would have it, “his public.” He’d say anything, piss anyone off, search out the most scandalous position he could muster and then wait, smirking, for the counterattacks. Or so it seemed. In fact, as frequently as not, he provided his enemies with their arguments against him, chiding and flaying his own persona as ruthlessly as he did everything else. For, what can be said about Norman Mailer that he hasn’t already said himself in copious detail? He published thousands upon thousands of pages, a great many of which were dedicated to the analysis of his own strengths and weaknesses, his appetites, his hatreds, his attempts to outpace the hard fact of his own mortality, his habit of sabotaging the public image he so doggedly groomed. He knew who he was and he neither allowed the threat of repercussions to silence him nor shirked them when they came. This, I believe, took courage.

All of which is exactly why he was such an indispensable voice in American letters and the culture at large. If Mailer often willingly played the buffoon, he did so with the knowledge that this was a sure way for him to slip free of the tyranny of his own fame.

Through the confluence of good writing and impeccable timing, he found fame early and realized soon after that this fame threatened to make him irrelevant, to brand him and box him in and squelch any relevance his future work might contain. So he made an existential choice: knowing full well that the journalists and ad-men, the publicists and politicians and marketeers and everyone else who believed more in sustaining the march of capital than in the freedom of the human spirit, would never forgive him for it, he unleashed his rabid nature, what he called in The Armies of the Night, his “beast.” He liberated himself from the expectations of his fame. This, too, took courage.

By loudly, publicly refusing to be accountable to anyone but himself, Norman Mailer was able to carve out a unique vantage from which to observe—and take part in—the national conversation. With his passing, I fear, a certain important animating spirit has disappeared from our national literature. Who among our younger generation of writers would risk his or her reputation and career as gleefully and frequently as Mailer did in his prime? Who among us is willing to rant and swear, and right or wrong, explode with indignation at the tyranny that surrounds us? And wouldn’t we be more vital if there were more brave sons of bitches like Mailer among us.

-- Joshua Furst

Joshua Furst is the author of The Sabotage Café, a novel, and Short People, a collection of stories. He has received fellowships from the James Michener Foundation and The MacDowell Colony, and was awarded the Nelson Algren Award for his short story "Red Lobster." He lives in New York and teaches fiction and playwriting at The Pratt Institute.

“Every gesture is gloved”: Wayne Koestenbaum on Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick died just over a week ago, at the age of 91. A great critic and essayist, co-founder of The New York Review of Books, Hardwick was also a long-time PEN member, serving on the board throughout the 1970s, including one year as Vice President.

Wayne Koestenbaum—like Hardwick, a critic and essayist, and also a poet—now serves on the PEN board himself. And those who have read his poem “Observations” (from Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films), in which he dreams of Hardwick correcting his choice of verbs, may already suspect his admiration for Hardwick’s writerly craftiness. I asked him to describe for our readers what he loves about her work, and he replied with this wonderful tribute.


I love Elizabeth Hardwick’s sentences. They’re strange and wayward. They veer. They avoid the point. Sometimes they are specific, but often they grow soft-focused and evasive at the crucial moment. They fuzz out by adopting a tone at once magisterial and muffled. When I was writing my biography of Andy Warhol, I told myself, “Imitate Elizabeth Hardwick.” By that advice, I meant: be authoritative, but also odd.

How to explain or summarize the Hardwickian tone? It offers tenderness where another critic might offer trenchancy. Its every gesture is gloved. From her introduction to The Susan Sontag Reader:

Essays lie all over the land, stored up like the unused wheat of a decade ago in the silos of old magazines and modest collections. In the midst of this clumsy abundance, there are rare lovers of the form, the great lovers being some few who practice it as the romance this dedication can be.

Strange syntax that second sentence has. I love, in this opening salvo, her articles, their proffering of a misleading specificity. “Essays lie all over the land...” Which land? Another piquant “the”: “like the unused wheat of a decade ago...” Her use of this (article? adjective?) astounds: “this clumsy abundance”; “the romance this dedication can be.”

From her essay “Wives and Mistresses,” in Bartleby in Manhattan:

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage—the footnotes of their lives. Footnotes worry a lot. They, loved or unloved, seem to feel the winds of the future always at their back. The graves of the greatly known ones are a challenge to private history...

Everything here is tone, sonorous yet gracefully stumbling, a tone cemented by judicious, generous articles (“the famous,” “a great weight,” “the footnotes of their lives”) and by weird, sudden personification, a metaphor coming alive without warning: “Footnotes worry a lot.” I love, too, the insertion of the appositive “loved or unloved” immediately after the “They” of the second sentence: “They, loved or unloved, seem to feel...” Divorcing “they” from “seem,” she inserts “loved or unloved” like a great raw piece of beef soliciting our appetite.

In her later work, her effects grew bolder. The following, from a 1999 review of Andrew Morton’s Monica’s Story:

The shabby history of the United States in the last year can be laid at the door of three unsavory citizens. President Clinton: shallow, reckless, a blushing trimmer; Monica Lewinsky, aggressive, rouge-lipped exhibitionist; Judge Kenneth Starr, pale, obsessive Pharissee.

Her art there lies in the immortal, cruel epithet, the wine-dark sea of precise excoriation.

Final example, from her novel-which-is-not-a-novel, Sleepless Nights: “Every morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread with its pink and blue and gray squares and diamonds.” No verb. She means: “Every morning I wake up to confront the black clock and the crocheted bedspread.” But she omits the seeing, knowing “I,” and she omits the verb. Every morning the blue clock gives forth the bleak yet solacing fragrance that is the Elizabeth Hardwick sentence, worth our careful study.

-- Wayne Koestenbaum

Wayne Koestenbaum, poet and critic, is the author of several books, including the recent Hotel Theory. His biography of Warhol was published in 2001. His tribute to Gertrude Stein appeared in PEN America 5: Silences. He teaches at the CUNY Graduate School.

Guest Post: Amy Bloom on Tillie and Grace

Ever since its first issue, which included tributes to Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges, PEN America has paid homage to the great writers of the 20th century, publishing essays and talks about them by some of the great writers of our own day. Extending that tradition to our blog, we're excited to share this tribute by Amy Bloom, author of the critically-acclaimed and best-selling Away, among other books, to two writers who left us this year: Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley. As Bloom notes, both were not only groundbreaking short story writers, but devoted political activists who embodied the mission of PEN.


Az mir leben, muz mir tuun.

As long as we live, we must do the work.


To lose Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley in one year is a bad year, even if a lot of people didn't know it at the time, Tillie Olsen would have said, and she would have been right. To have had them both for so long was a privilege, even if a lot of people didn't know it, Grace Paley would have said. And she would have been right.

If there were ever two people, and not coincidentally at all, two women, who epitomized PEN's goals: advancing literature, defending free speech and fostering connections betweens writers everywhere, Tillie and Grace were it.

I knew Grace Paley, for about seven short years, but I only knew Tillie Olsen by her work and by her life. I knew Tillie Olsen's husband lost his job for his labor organizing work and I had read that Tillie herself was accused of being a Stalinist working to infiltrate the city's school's through the PTA (and she had been a Young Communist and for all I know she was a Stalinist, but I do like the image of Grace and Tillie together as they never were, Nebraska and the Bronx, happy to be out of jail for civil disobedience, happy to be back with their kids, unpacking sandwiches on the playground benches, chatting up a couple of other young mothers and bringing about the Revolution. They did try.)

They were both revolutionary writers, writers who told the stories not only about people no one had seen on the page, but in language no one had constructed before. And they were both women who lived their lives in accordance with their political principles and built their lives, as best they could, around the people they loved: Grace and her Bob and her son and daughter and her beloved grandchildren, Tillie and her handsome Jack, her four daughters and eight grandchildren. And so, they didn't have quite as much time to write as some other people. And they didn't have such large advances. And you never saw their names in glossy magazines, or in a fashion ad, modeling turtlenecks, or writing fiction to promote a new martini. They wrote about the hard lives of working class women: hotel maids, secretaries, salesgirls; and they wrote about all of the world's outsiders; and they wrote about human rights and the obligations of fairness and decency; and they both wrote with language that came from the mouths of real people who struggled; and they wrote durable, innovative, poetic and celebratory sentences, both of them. And as much as Ray Carver and Norman Mailer shaped American fiction and were known for it, Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley shaped the American short story, as if they were God and it was clay, and however much or little known they were for much of their writing lives, the short story itself is now different than it was, because of them, and we know better how we should live and write, because of them.

-- Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom, a member of PEN American Center, has published two novels, two story collections, and a non-fiction book on gender (Normal). The recipient of a National Magazine Award, she has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications. She is a practicing psychotherapist and teaches at Yale University.