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Cover 34.4 (WInter 2011)
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Author Archives: robertlongforeman
Notes from an Interview: David Naimon on China Mieville
China Mieville - photo by Chris Close
David Naimon interviews China Mieville in our Winter issue. He sent us these comments on the experience:
I felt nervous before meeting China Miéville. He cut an imposing figure on the internet.–shaved head, multiple piercings, a prominent brow over eyes that I imagined didn’t blink. He often sported a tight black t-shirt shaped by the contours of his muscles, a shirt that only partially hid the huge skull tattoo spilling tentacles across his bicep. He did not look like any geek I knew, nor how I imagined a science fiction and fantasy writer. A mixed martial arts fighter, a bodyguard, a bouncer—yes—or like someone who would have beaten me up in Junior High School, the last time I was rolling ten-sided die, crushing out on Princess Leia chained to Jabba in her gold bikini, and regularly reading science fiction and fantasy.
We met in the studio of KBOO 90.7 FM, on an unseasonably cold spring day in Portland, Oregon, and to my relief, his in-person persona was much softer. Personable and polite he immediately put me at ease. When he spoke, he considered his words with a measured, gracious, almost formal tone, much as one might expect from an academic. And indeed Miéville studied social anthropology at Cambridge, received a PhD in Marxism and international law at the London School of Economics, was a fellow at Harvard, and even ran for the British House of Commons as the Socialist Alliance candidate in 2001. This dissonance, this defiance of categorization carries over into Miéville’s career in a big way. At the forefront of the New Weird movement, China Miéville is a self-professed geek, a lover of cephalopods, and someone who cites Dungeons and Dragons and comics (along with Jane Eyre) as influences. Miéville has risen to the top of the genre having won nearly every prestigious award in the field—some two or an unprecedented three times—along the way. Yet due to the depth of his imagination and the height of his erudition, his prose has caught the attention of non-genre publications from the New York Times to the Guardian, heralding him as a writer who has transcended the genre from which he arose. But unabashedly proud of his field, Miéville doesn’t what to transcend. He believes Weird Fiction holds distinct advantages over literary fiction, which to Miéville, is merely a genre like any other. He prefers to see himself as a conduit to a world of writing that, in his mind, is best equipped to address the issues of the day.
If China Miéville were to pick one of his books for someone who doesn’t read sci-fi he would choose his Hugo Award winning novel, The City and The City. And by chance, my first exposure to China Miéville’s work was this very book. I was hooked by the spare noirish prose, a style the Los Angeles Times described so wonderfully as if written by a love child of Philip K .Dick and Raymond Chandler who was raised by Franz Kafka. Just as Miéville would have hoped, The City & The City led me deeper into the genre, to his latest book Embassytown, a work both more fantastical and more philosophical, one that grapples with the nature of language, the power of stories, and starring a species who literally become addicted to words. Just like these creatures, I have become hooked on this Miévillian cocktail of philosophical insight and intergalactic adventure, as insightful and thought provoking as any literary fiction.
David Naimon
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NBCC Award Nominees
No doubt by now you have seen the nominees for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Awards. If not, they’re listed at Critical Mass, the NBCC blog.
What you may not have known is that three of the nominees have had work or interviews appear in our pages.
Jeffrey Eugenides, a fiction nominee, was interviewed by James Schiff in our Fall 2006 issue (29.3). You can hear an audio clip from his nominated novel, The Marriage Plot, via our tumblr page.
Jonathan Lethem, a nominee in criticism, was interviewed in our Spring 2006 issue (29.1), also by James Schiff.
Laura Kasischke‘s poems have appeared in our pages twice, in 1993 and 2007. She is, suitably, a nominee in poetry.
If you’d like to read these poems and interviews, backissues are available.
Congratulations to these writers, and to all nominees.
In fact, congratulations to everyone everywhere – you’re doing a great job!
Our 48-Hour Poem Non-Contest: The Winner
When we learned that Terry W. Thompson, of Zanesville, Ohio, released his menagerie of animals and committed suicide last month, we asked for poems written, in 48 hours, in response to the tragedy. It was our first-ever 48-Hour Poem Non-Contest.
We received many entries, but could choose only one winner. He is Joshua Polk, and you can read his winning poem at our tumblr page.
In days to come, we will post to tumblr other entrants to our Non-Contest, authors of which include Roxane Gay, C Wallace Walker, Divya Rajan, Murray Dunlap, and Kate McIntyre and Joe Aguilar. Together their poems make for a fine menagerie of verse, and we hope you’ll come and see it.
In Praise of Goodreads.com
I have surprised myself, recently, by liking a web site – not in the Facebook sense of “liking” it that doesn’t mean anything, but in the sense that I’ve spent time with it and haven’t felt like that time could have been better spent trimming my nails, which is how I feel about most of the web sites I spend time with.
The site I mean is Goodreads, which I’ve been returning to often in the last week or so, because I’ve just recently finished – temporarily – writing a big project, and I have time for such things as reading books and clicking on the Internet. I have been keeping close track of the books I’ve been reading, as Goodreads permits me to do. When I start one, I tell Goodreads that I’ve done this. When I’m through, I make sure that Goodreads knows about it. This is despite my wariness toward volunteering such information about myself for the potential use of just anybody.
I have been asking myself why I do this – why it is that it’s not enough anymore to simply read a book, and apparently I also have to check in with the Internet. I think I do this thing in part because reading is lonely – even lonelier than writing – and while I don’t need a web site to help me get motivated to read, it’s nice to know that I’m not the only person in the world who’s currently reading Colin Dickey’s Cranioklepty, or who intends to read the recently published journals of Spalding Gray.
It’s something like how helpful I hear it is, when writing 50,000 words in a single month, to know that lots of other people are doing the same thing in that same month; you could do this on your own without them, but it helps to know those other people are out there.
Similarly, I will never forget what a thrill it was, when I was twenty, to visit a friend of my then-girlfriend in Charleston, West Virginia, and feel lost, as the two of them spoke with each other about people they both knew but I’d never met, until I finally began talking with this young man’s mother and learned that she had read Plato’s Republic, which I was then reading. We had a really nice conversation about it, and while I can’t say exactly why this was, it made me feel better to know that there was someone nearby who had read this thing I was reading. Goodreads comes close to hitting the same nerves as that conversation did.
The site, of course, has plenty of drawbacks. It has ads on it. It’s ugly. I would add to this list my opinion that the discussions had on its discussion boards could be smarter, but I would risk sounding like a snob and I wouldn’t really mean it; I love those conversations. Last month, somebody asked why there was a big, blue eye on the cover of his edition of 1984. Someone suggested it was supposed to be Big Brother’s eye. Someone else countered by pointing out that nowhere in the book does it say that Big Brother had blue eyes. So who’s eye was it supposed to be? It was suggested that perhaps it belonged to no one in particular; perhaps the jacket designer chose blue because it’s the most common eye color. But then, as yet another person argued, that isn’t true at all.
Soon after I saw that conversation, a discussion of Into the Wild caught my giant blue eye. In it, someone stated she was worried about this book by Jon Krakauer, because it presented Christopher McCandless as a Thoreauvian hero, when in fact his story is a tragedy and the example he sets is a dangerous one. I thought this person must be crazy; Krakauer spends as much time in his book upbraiding McCandless for his reckless foray into dangerous Alaska as he does demonstrating his fascination with the young man, and the book is as interesting as it is, I think, because of the complicated relationship its author has with the story he’s telling.
Two thoughts came out of this reaction I had. One is that I rarely resort to my brain like this, in order to respond to something I see on the Internet. The other is that this person making the observation concerning Into the Wild might very well have not finished reading the book; it would be easy to come away from it thinking Krakauer makes a hero of his subject if you stopped reading after page 100 or so, if I remember the book right.
I wonder, then, if having “read” something on Goodreads is, or will soon be, equivalent to “liking” something on Facebook, in that it doesn’t necessarily have to mean a whole lot. I don’t “know.”
I’m no social media theorist, and if I considered myself to be one it’s the kind of information I wouldn’t volunteer for the potential use of just anybody, but my hope is that a site like Goodreads is the next phase of social media sites. I started with Friendster, then moved to Myspace, and have been spinning my wheels in Facebook for years. Twitter is just something else altogether, so perhaps the shiny thing that will finally draw my attention from the other shiny thing that is Facebook will be Goodreads, or something like it – a site that has a very specific focus, one that I have a real interest in. Most of the things I learn about my friends on Facebook – many of whom I don’t even know – don’t really interest me. The information they offer usually doesn’t really tell me anything about them. I always, though, want to know what people are reading.
Since I’m “listening” to Pete Seeger, I’ll close by referring to him. I heard him on the radio once, years ago, talking about how, when he was growing up, great importance was place not only on reading books but on talking about them once he was finished with them. He considered both activities equally important, and immediately I agreed with him. You have to do something with all the stuff you’ve drawn from that book you’ve just read; you have to take what you’ve gained in solitude and share it. At the time, I didn’t have a lot of people in my life to talk about books with; this is where something like Goodreads could be very useful.
Our First-ever 48-Hour-Poem Non-Contest
When I learned about the amateur zookeeper in Zanesville who released his exotic animals and committed suicide, I immediately thought this is exactly the kind of event that should be written about in a poem. When I came down from the wave of enthusiasm that accompanied this thought, I had a depressive moment, as I often do, and worried that perhaps not many poems would be written about the animals in Zanesville after all. I don’t write poetry, so I can’t remedy this situation singlehandedly.
I need your help, so, as TMR’s Social Media Editor, I’d like to announce our first-ever 48-Hour-Poem Non-Contest.
You have 48 hours, after the posting of this blog post, to write a poem about the animal release in Zanesville and send it to themissourireview [at] gmail [dot] com The poem we decide is best will be featured on our tumblr page.
That makes the deadline about noon on Wednesday, October 26th. Because this is a Non-Contest, submissions will not be blind and anyone can enter, except for me. No money will be awarded to anyone.
I call it a Non-Contest because I don’t want this to be in any way confused with our actual contest, the deadline of which came and went a few weeks ago – and because this Non-Contest is not directly affiliated with our magazine, only with our blog and tumblr page.
This is strictly for fun; if you end up writing a really good poem, you’ll probably want to submit it to our magazine as a regular submission – or, better yet, to the Unleashed Exotic Creature Review.
Also, in no way is this an effort to make light of what happened in Zanesville, which was awful and tragic for man and beast alike.
Happy writing.
Why Do So Many Comedians Write Books?
I learned recently, via Twitter, that comedian Dave Hill is publishing a book. I know Dave Hill only from his Twitter account, where, after the acquittal of Casey Anthony, he produced a series of tweets speculating what it would be like to date her, implying that he hoped she was still single and that he would have the opportunity to take her out in the near future. It was the volume of these tweets – he wrote them continually for hours – that made them as funny as they were. I laughed myself sick.
Soon after I learned of Hill’s forthcoming book, I heard news – also on Twitter – that comedian Michael Ian Black’s newest book will be released at the end of this month. From his Twitter feed I wheeled over to comedian Michael Showalter’s, and learned that his memoir, Mister Funny Pants, is doing well in Amazon sales.
I find none of this surprising or disturbing – a rare turn for me, because usually when I mention something vocally or in writing it’s because I find it disturbing and/or surprising. As proof of my lack of frustration, were I dismayed at the apparent proliferation of books by comedians, I wouldn’t mention any of these authors by name. To do so serves as a kind of free, offhand promotion on their behalf, which they don’t need because they have substantial, if not enormous, followings.
Books by comedians are nothing new – see Lenny Bruce’s 1965 autobiography How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. W. C. Fields wrote books, and so did Groucho Marx. This Christmas I was given a book by Patton Oswalt, and I know that another generous handful of comedians are planning to write books or have written them; they say so on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, on which Maron himself has mentioned several times (I think) that he’s working on a book, which will not be his first.
There are times when I find this trend frustrating and it makes me angry. Why, I ask myself, do so many comedians write books?
For the same reasons, I answer myself, that so many other people write books.
Why, I then ask, do they seem to get published so readily? Why are there so many of them?
Self-answer: It probably isn’t so easy for them to find publishers, and if they do it’s because they have built-in audiences, as is indicated by the numbers of their Twitter followers.
But as easily answered as those questions are, I am interested in the fact that they come up, and that they take the shapes that they do; it’s the kind of thing I generally describe as “telling.” They are, in short, the same questions that frustrate me when they’re raised with respect to the genre that I tend to work in, which is the memoir. People harass me constantly with the same questions I have asked of the comedians; it happens at least a few times a year.
Not coincidentally, a number of these comedian books are memoirs; from the Amazon description of Michael Ian Black’s book:
They call it an essay collection, but it sounds like a memoir to me, and it’s subtitled Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death and Other Humiliations. Michael Showalter’s book, Funny Pants, is subtitled A Memoir of False Starts.
When I started writing this post, I thought I was headed in a profound direction, but really this is a post about how easily certain anxieties can be put to rest, with the aid of genre knowledge. What kinds of memoirs have an intrinsic advantage, in terms of their chances of getting published and sold and given as gifts, because of how easily their authors are recognized? Celebrity memoirs, of course, and while I’m loath to put anything by Michaels Showalter and Ian Black, and Patton Oswalt (and surely female and non-white comedians write books, too – somebody name some please) into the same category as more overt and probably less memorable celebrity memoirs like Dennis Rodman’s long-forgotten Bad As I Wanna Be, I’m tempted to think of the comedian memoir as a kind of offshoot of the celebrity memoir.
Perhaps it is the celebrity memoir at its best – self-conscious and funny, not self-absorbed and probably boring. I don’t know, I haven’t gotten to read them yet, and Bad As I Wanna Be has been at the bottom of my reading list since it came out. It will always be at the very bottom of my reading list.
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Meanwhile, I recently interviewed Marc McKee, poet and former poetry editor of The Missouri Review. You can hear audio from it here.
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Also, don’t forget our Audio Contest. Deadline in less than a month! You choose the entry fee! Amateurs welcome!