“All these funny expressions” — Melissa James Gibson

Starting with PEN America 8: Making Histories, each issue of PEN America has included at least one excerpt from a play. In the last few issues we’ve published dramatic work by Petr Zelenka, Sarah Ruhl, George Packer, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Nilo Cruz, and most recently, Melissa James Gibson.

I’m surprised more literary magazines don’t publish drama; while scripts are written to be performed, the best ones tend to work beautifully on the page as well. That’s certainly the case with This, the play by Melissa James Gibson that we excerpted in PEN America 12: Correspondences.

Gibson has a wonderful ear for the everyday absurdities of colloquial speech:

ALAN
All these funny expressions
Just Got The Baby Down
It’s like the baby’s depressed or
or like you’ve finally succeeded in oppressing the baby
I Just Got The Baby Down
I Just Got The Baby Down

This is from the opening scene; Alan is at the apartment of two college friends, Tom and Marrell, whose newborn baby never stays asleep for long. Another college friend, Jane, has joined them for a dinner party, along with Jean-Pierre, a French friend of Tom and Marrell’s.

MARRELL
Jean-Pierre’s a doctor
(with emphasis) Without Borders

ALAN
I always think that sounds like the doctor has a messy personal life

JEAN-PIERRE
That’s frequently the case actually

TOM
I’m a cabinet maker without borders

Tom and Marrell are trying to set Jean-Pierre up with Jane, a teacher and poet. When a surprisingly involved discussion of whether a “Brita” water filter should be pronounced with a short ‘i’ sound or a long ‘e’ sound (like “Rita”), Jean-Pierre turns to Jane as the expert on language:

JEAN-PIERRE
You’re the poet

JANE
More of a standardized test proctor these days actually
And I teach a bit

MARRELL
She’s being modest Don’t be modest

JANE
I’m an aMAZing standardized test proctor

The scene is full of funny, awkward, and tense exchanges, especially after the characters begin to play a parlor game—one that brilliantly highlights the way language can carry meanings other than the ones we intend. One person (Jane, as it hapens) must leave the room, while the others allegedly create a story in her absence. Then she must return to the room and piece the story together by asking a series of yes-or-no questions. But, as Tom and Marrell inform Alan and Jean-Pierre after Jane has left the room, the real game is that there is no story, and that Jane will construct one herself through her questions. I’ll simply say that this does not go well.

In Gibson’s work, as Charles Isherwood wrote in The New York Times, “even the drabbest constellations of vowels and consonants—words like ‘this,’ in other words—are made to soar and leap like ballet dancers in full, ecstatic flight, or alternately stand alone in a sea of silence, ominous and resonant, like those pregnant pauses in a Pinter play.”

You can read some of the excerpt we published at PEN.org; for the rest, pick up a copy of PEN America 12. And keep an eye out for Melissa James Gibson’s next play.

The underappreciated Sergei Dovlatov

Like PEN America contributor Amitava Kumar, I knew nothing of Sergei Dovlatov (pictured right, with one-time Vice President of PEN Kurt Vonnegut, who has the lighter of the two mustaches) before I heard this New Yorker fiction podcast with David Bezmozgis (who has a novel excerpt in The New Yorker this week; he’s on their “20 under 40” list). I loved Bezmozgis’s story “Natasha,” published a few years ago in Harper’s, and so was particularly curious to hear what past New Yorker contributor he would choose to read and discuss with Deborah Treisman, the magazine’s fiction editor.

He did not disappoint. Dovlatov’s “The Colonel Says I Love You” is witty and wise; it demonstrates what Joseph Brodsky once said about Dovlatov (as I would later learn, thanks to Amitava): “The decisive thing is his tone, which every member of a democratic society can recognize: the individual who won’t let himself be cast in the role of a victim, who is not obsessed with what makes him different.” Dovlatov writes direct but surprising stories that draw heavily from his life; Bezmozgis aptly compares him to David Sedaris, though Dovlatov’s humor is less broad, and his circumstances—living and writing in communist Russia—give his stories a kind of moral weight, even if he handles it lightly.

So why isn’t he read more in the United States? Soon after the podcast, Sonya Chung pointed out on The Millions how hard it has become to get copies of his books in English, though they were all translated and published once upon a time (he died in 1990). “Why is Dovlatov so little known or read in the West today?" she asked, repeating a question Triesman had asked Bezmozgis. His answer: “I have no idea. It’s hard to understand these things.” As Chung notes, “Dovlatov couldn’t have said it better himself.” (Responding to Chung’s piece, the blogger languagehat, who reads Russian, said: “Dovlatov is one of the funniest and most likable writers I know, and I’m sure Americans would love him if he were properly introduced.”)

So when we were putting together PEN America 12, we decided we would re-publish one of Dovlatov’s stories. Happily, one of his translators, Antonina W. Bouis, is a generous member of PEN; I still have her copy of The Suitcase (though I’ll be returning it soon, promise!), from which we selected “A Poplin Shirt.”

When I was a child, my nanny, Luiza Genrikhovna, did everything distractedly. Once she dressed me in shorts and shoved both legs into one opening. I walked around like that all day. I was four. I knew that I had been dressed wrong, but I kept quiet. I didn’t want to change. I still don’t.

So the narrator tells us near the beginning of the story; he goes on to recount his first outing with his future wife (she speaks first in this bit):

“You can be trusted. I understood that immediately, as soon as I saw Solzhenitsyn’s portrait.”

“That’s Dostoyevsky. But I respect Solzhenitsyn, too.” We had a modest breakfast. Mother gave us a piece of halvah after all.

Then we went outside. The houses were decorated with bunting. Candy wrappers lay in the snow. Our janitor, Grisha, was showing off his ratiné coat.

....We went to the movies to see Ivan’s Childhood. The film was good enough for me to patronize. In that period I liked only detective movies, because they let me relax. But Tarkovsky’s movies I praised, patronizingly—and with a hint that Tarkovsky had been waiting for almost six years for a screenplay from me.

Near the end, the narrator reflects on the life he and his wife have lived:

Are we alike, then? I at least have a stimulus, a goal, an illusion, a hope. What does she have? Only our daughter, and indifference. We have twenty-five years of marriage behind us—twenty-five years of mutual isolation and indifference to real life. In those twenty-five years, our friends fell in love, married, and divorced. They wrote poems and novels about it all. They moved from one republic to another; they changed jobs, convictions, habits, became dissidents and alcoholics, tried to kill others or themselves. Marvelous, mysterious worlds arose and collapsed with a roar all around us. Like taut strings, human relations snapped. Our friends were reborn and died in the search for happiness.

And we? We faced all the temptations and horrors of life with our only gift—indifference. What is more solid than a castle built on sand? What is more durable and dependable in family life than mutual lack of character? What could be stabler than two hostile states each incapable of defending itself?

To read the rest, pick up PEN America 12: Correspondences, or try to find a copy of The Suitcase at your local used bookstore. And then maybe blog about it. Eventually someone will get the point and start publishing Dovlatov’s books in the U.S. again.

Billy Collins on poetry e-books (and in PEN America)

The AP writer Hillel Italie published an interesting piece this week on poetry and e-books that was picked up by a number of outlets.

“Poetry,” Italie writes, “the most precise and precious of literary forms, is also so far the least adaptable to the growing e-book market. A three-line stanza might be expanded to four if a line is too long or a four-line stanza compressed into three if the second and fourth lines have sharp indentations, as with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hymn to the Night.”

Or as happened with some poems by Billy Collins when Collins took a look at his newest book on his Kindle. He found that, as he tells Italie, “if the original line is beyond a certain length, they will take the extra word and have it flush left on the screen, so that instead of a three-line stanza you actually have a four-line stanza. And that screws everything up.”

Collins goes on to say, rather poetically, that “prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break.”

Collins contributed two news poems to the latest issue of PEN America, “Horoscopes for the Dead,” parts I & II, and, as it happens, they begin with the experience of reading that great emblem of print, the newspaper—specifically, the horoscopes of a departed friend. I think I can reproduce their stanzas faithfully on this blog, so here’s how the first one begins:

Every morning since you fell down on the face of the earth,
I read about you in the newspaper
along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.

Sometimes I am reminded that today
will not be a wildly romantic time for you,
nor will you be challenged by educational goals
nor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.

Another day, I learn that you will miss
an opportunity to travel and make new friends
though you never cared much about either.

I can’t imagine you ever facing a new problem
with a positive attitude, but you will definitely not
be doing that or anything like that on this weekday in March.
And the same goes for the fun
you might have gotten from group activities,
a likelihood attributed to everyone under your sign.

In the second, he puts the paper away:

I am better off closing the newspaper,
putting on the clothes I wore yesterday
(when I read that your financial prospects were looking up)
then pushing off on my copper-colored bicycle
and pedaling along the road by the shore of the bay.

To read the rest—along with poems by Paul Muldoon, Anne Carson, and many others—you’ll have to pick up a printed copy of PEN America.

Cuban journalist freed, Burmese poet speaks, Colombian journalist excluded

Journalist Normando Hernández González (pictured right) was freed from prison in Cuba Saturday morning. He was arrested in 2003—one of 75 writers and activists jailed in a major crackdown on dissent—and sentenced to 25 years in prison for criticizing the government’s management of tourism, agriculture, fishing, and cultural affairs. His prison conditions were reportedly deplorable and he was hospitalized repeatedly over the past seven years.

As his health declined, PEN mounted an increasingly urgent campaign on his behalf, awarding him the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award in 2007 and pressing the Cuban government to provide adequate medical care and grant him a humanitarian release. He was finally released as part of an agreement between Cuban authorities and the Catholic Church to free 52 political prisoners, all jailed since the March 2003 crackdown. He will reportedly fly to Spain with his wife and daughter today.

Meanwhile, Saw Wei, whose subversively acrostic poem “February the Fourteenth” we published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, has given an interview to the The Irrawaddy, a magazine that covers Burma and other parts of southeast Asia (it's named for a river in Burma; credit to The Literary Saloon for spotting the interview). As previously noted, Saw Wei was jailed for disturbing public tranquility with a poem; happily, he did more writing while in prison:

I wrote some poems and essays while I was in prison. I have to make some final revisions to an essay called “Modern Art and Modern Images.” Before I was put in jail, I had already written about 50 short stories and planned to publish the stories in one go. But I couldn’t finish that, because I was imprisoned.

For the community work, we have a group called “White Rainbow.” We need more members. I want to go everywhere to help our people. If there are no restrictions, I will continue this work.

Meanwhile, a Colombian journalist, Hollman Morris, who was recently selected to participate in the Nieman fellowship program at Harvard, has been denied a visa by the United States. “We were very surprised. This has never happened before,” the Nieman curator, Bob Giles, is quoted as saying in an AP story about the case. PEN, the ACLU, and the American Association of University Professors have sent a letter to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton protesting Morris’s exclusion.

On a lighter note, if you’re having a hard time letting go of the World Cup, here’s a possible antidote: 32 books to add to your reading list, one from each finalist nation—courtesy of Anderson Tepper. For Brazil, he selects Clarice Lispector, and suggests you join in the discussion of her final work, The Hour of the Star (New Directions), at PEN.org/penreads. That discussion has been quite interesting so far; “Clarice is not mysterious or (worse) obscure,” writes one participant in the conversation, who seems familiar with her work in Portguese, “she is intense.”

Update: The AP has the first photographs (taken by Arturo Rodriguez) of Hernández landing in Madrid.

PEN Reads starts today + other links

PEN Reads has begun with this short essay by Colm Tóibín. Check it out and weigh in with your own thoughts. And if you haven’t already, get a copy of The Hour of the Star and stay tuned to PEN.org/PENReads for more in the weeks ahead. (It’s a short book so you needn’t worry too much about falling behind—or resort to watching the movie... though apparently it’s pretty good?)

The Rumpus also has a book club and until Friday they’re giving away free books.

Also via The Rumpus: Etgar Keret (beloved contributor to PEN America) describes for the online magazine Tablet his practice of writing fake dedications. When “a total stranger” asks you to sign a book, he says, what can you write that doesn't sound smarmy or false? Which leads him to this conclusion: “If the books themselves are pure fiction, why should the dedications be true?” One book he inscribes: “To Avram. I don’t care what the lab tests show. For me, you’ll always be my dad.” And in another, which someone has asked him to sign for his girlfriend, Keret writes: “Bosmat, though you’re with another guy now, we both know you’ll come back to me in the end.”

Keret’s countryman and fellow short-short story writer Alex Epstein has just published in the United States a collection of his really wonderful stories (translated by Becka Mara McKay)—ten of which were featured in PEN America 12: Correspondences. Words Without Borders has both a review of the book and a video interview with Epstein. He participated in the PEN World Voices Festival this year, so you can also watch him converse with Norman Rush, Claire Messud, et al; listen to him discuss the short story with Aleksandar Hemon, Yiyun Li, and others; and hear him participate in the PEN Translation Slam.

And you can read the stories we published in PEN America 12: Correspondences. Here’s the shortest one:

THE MELANCHOLY OF ANTIQUE TELEPHONES

In ’83, the horoscopes are never wrong. After ten years, she moves the rotary telephone from the living room into the bedroom. Every morning, upon waking, she lifts the receiver and listens to whispering and rustling and rattling, as at a window. Maybe this is time, suddenly returning. Maybe this is rain. Maybe this is already her mother tongue.

Read the others here.

New online reading group: PEN Reads

This week PEN American Center announced the creation of PEN Reads, an online reading group that will focus on books connected in some way with PEN’s mission—to protect free expression and promote international literary fellowship. The discussion will be built around short essays by writers, translators, scholars, and others, and participation will be open to anyone.

The short essays will be posted at www.PEN.org/PENReads, and readers will be able to comment on each post, participating in a conversation with the discussion’s contributors and with each other.

The first book chosen for PEN Reads is The Hour of the Star, a short, classic novel by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, who lived from 1920 to 1977 (that’s her above, in Paris in 1947; photograph by Bluma Wainer). The book was translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. Here, in English, is how it begins:

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.

You can read more here. And you can read an excerpt from Benjamin Moser’s biography of Spector (the NBCC Award-nominated Why This World) here.

Moser will be participating in the online discussion, which will be kicked off Tuesday, July 6 at noon with a contribution from the great Irish novelist Colm Tóibín.

Correspondences elsewhere

Our spring issue, Correspondences, has received some kind attention from some great websites—and one of its stories, or part of that story, has taken on a new and fantastic form online.

The blog Like Fire at Open Letters Monthly calls attention to the very smart and very funny short essay by Anya Ulinich (whose very smart and very funny story “The Nurse and the Novelist” was published in PEN America 9). That essay is part of the Correspondences forum, which you can still contribute to yourself.

Also part of that forum: Sam Lipsyte’s letter to Barry Hannah, mentioned here previously and praised by the blog of American Short Fiction, along with the rest of the issue.

The email exchange between Jonathan Lethem and David Gates, also mentioned here before, was highlighted by the Book Bench blog run by The New Yorker and was called “absolutely wonderful” by The Rumpus.

(Update: GQ spotlighted the Lethem/Gates exchange as well.)

Finally, part of the story in the issue by Lily Hoang, “Sonata for a Ragdoll Without Eyes,” which is not available online—and which, appropriately for our Correspondences issue, is based on a letter Lily found—has been beautifully adapted for the web here, here, and here by W5RAn. (That’s the opening to the story above.)