5 Questions with Matthew Specktor, Author of Always Crashing in the Same Car
Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound; a nonfiction book, The Sting; and the forthcoming memoir The Golden Hour (Ecco/HarperCollins). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Vogue, GQ, Black Clock, and Open City. He has been a MacDowell fellow, and is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He resides in Los Angeles. His newest book is Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, published by Tin House. Matthew Specktor will be in conversation with Adam Pfahler (of Jawbreaker!) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Wednesday, July 28th, 2021!
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Where are you writing to us from?
Los Angeles, which I often think is a condition of the spirit as much as it is a geography. I know people in the Bay Area have, erm, mixed feelings about LA (who threw that tomato that just whistled by my ear?), but, alas, here I am.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
Nobody told me I was supposed to remain sane! Perhaps I should have planned it differently. But—my wife, our dog (an incredibly neurotic Schnauzer/Wheaten mix whose sanity is questionable, herself), our subscription to the Criterion Channel, and very carefully measured amounts of tequila-with-lime have all helped.
What books are you reading right now? Which books to you return to?
Right now I’m on an absolute bender with the books published by a collective called Deluge. One of their founders, Emily Segal, wrote a novel called Mercury Retrograde that came out in late 2020 and just knocked me flat. It combines a DeLillo-grade intelligence—a way of slicing experience very, very fine—with a kind of wild humor and a sharp, feminist perspective. It’s amazing.
As for books I return to, well, there are far too many of those to keep count, but I’ll mention Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, and James Baldwin’s Another Country as touchstones for me. But there are so many!
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
Leaving aside that this book is, in some sense, a catalogue of its own influences—Thomas McGuane, Renata Adler, Hal Ashby, Carole Eastman: I mean, the book is explicitly about a number of people who’ve influenced me—I would say again that there are far too many to count.
Some recent-ish books that influenced the writing of this one include Hilton Als’s The Women, Heidi Julavits’s The Folded Clock: A Diary, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, and Leslie Jameson’s The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath. These are all books that combine memoir with criticism or with other forms of observation.
Some writers, both contemporary and otherwise, who’ve influenced me include Jonathan Lethem, James Salter, Michael Ondaatje, Rachel Cusk, Yiyun Li, Elizabeth Hardwick, Philip Roth, Ivan Turgenev, and Paul Beatty. I mean, some of those people are friends; others I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting as a Vintage paperback or an NYRB classic; some are in vogue, others slightly less so, and I don’t think, alas, I sound like any of them. But I’m a big tent person when it comes to influence. You read as much and as widely as you can and you invite it all in.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
Ah. Now we get to the serious question. It would be in West LA. I would build it over the bones of what used to be Dutton’s Books, in Brentwood, because that was the bookstore I grew up with and every time I drive past the location—it used to be a coffee shop before the pandemic; right now it’s just a boarded-up storefront—I get sad. I’d name it after The Transit of Venus (“Transit Books?” I dunno), because that book changed my life about as forcefully as any book can: it launched my career as a screenwriter, led me to my first literary agent, and to a friendship with Shirley; above all, it changed my life as a reader, and my sense of what fiction could do.
But my bestseller would inevitably be something I feel has been overlooked or ill-served by the marketplace in recent years. Maybe Jarett Kobek’s The Future Won’t Be Long, a knockout of a novel that sold (if Jarett’s own tabulation in his subsequent book is correct) fewer than five hundred copies, or a great, great book by Sam Sweet called Hadley Lee Lightcap, which is a wonderful, melancholy poem about Southern California geography masquerading as a book about a band most people have never heard of. Or—maybe it would be Don Carpenter’s Fridays at Enrico’s! That’s one of my favorite novels, by one of my favorite Bay Area writers. With apologies to both Balzac’s Lost Illusions and George Gissing’s New Grub Street, it’s also the single greatest book about the writing life I’ve ever encountered. Because it pays homage to a now vanished North Beach institution that was almost as venerable as City Lights, I’m gonna say that one.
Writing from Fierce Love: Mira Sethi in Conversation
This is an excerpt of a free event for our virtual events series, City Lights LIVE. This event features Mira Sethi in conversation with Miranda Popkey, celebrating Sethi’s new short fiction collection Are You Enjoying? published by Knopf. This event was originally broadcast live via Zoom and hosted by our events coordinator Peter Maravelis. You can listen to the entire event on our podcast. You can watch it in full as well on our YouTube channel.
Miranda Popkey: I wanted to ask you about your protagonist at the end of that story ["Tomboy"]. And I won't spoil the twists and turns that the story takes, but she has a moment with her husband, where she's remarking on a mutual friend. And [the protagonist] describes her as “brave.” And I think that “brave” is a word that's overused when describing works of literature, but I'm curious what it means for her, for your character, but also for you, to be publishing work that is quite daring and that is really trying to paint a picture of different pockets, different communities, in Pakistan that we ignorant Americans may not be familiar with.
Mira Sethi: Miranda, thank you so much for asking that. And I'm not just saying this because I'm in conversation with you, but this has to the most thoughtful question I've been asked about my book, because a lot of the questions I've been asked so far have been about Pakistan and politics, and we’ll get to that. That's also very important. But thank you for asking that.
As far as my protagonist--without giving too much away--she calls the other lady “brave,” because that other lady is living life on her own terms. And it's not easy to live life on your own terms in a country like Pakistan, even if you have a lot of privilege, because of issues around sexuality and the often burdensome imperatives of family and your clan or your tribe and your parents. And then the larger superstructure above that, which is the state and the things that trickle down from the state. So my character says [the other woman] is brave because she, herself, is living this dual life and she hasn't yet been able to come to terms with what it is that she wants. Although this, I imagine, is a turning point for her.
And for me, yes, I did think a lot about what the repercussions might be for writing about queer lives in Pakistan. But, you know, I'm in my thirties now, and I believe very strongly in a certain set of principles. I'm an outspoken feminist in Pakistan. That sometimes gets me into trouble. And I am going to write the things that I know and I love deeply. This book actually comes from a place of fierce love, and trauma and heartache and comedy, but mostly it comes from a place of love. And buttressing my fear is my love for people who are struggling to live life on their own terms. And so I wrote this hoping that if there are--I know I have so many queer friends in and out of Pakistan--I'm hoping that maybe if they read this, they can glimpse their lives and feel seen, because fiction is ultimately the desire to write, the desire to be seen fully.
Miranda Popkey: Absolutely. I completely agree that it's hard to imagine a life that you have not seen represented. And I think that's the experience that your protagonist is having. In that moment, she's seeing the life that she wishes she could live. Instead, as you say, she's living sort of a double life where she's married, but she does have queer desires.
Mira Sethi: Absolutely. And I didn't just struggle with this. I was kind of petrified while writing some of these, and not just "Tomboy" but also the title story, "Are You Enjoying?" because it's about infidelity, a love affair, an illicit relationship, a taboo relationship.
So I'm writing about sex, you know? Yes, I worried a lot about that. I'm worried about if somebody screenshots a really vivid passage and then says, “Look at her. She's spreading vulgarity.” I mean, this is something I deal with in my life as an actress as well. But yes, at the level of the sentence, it's definitely something I think about, but I didn't ever let that stop me from saying what I wanted. And in many ways, Miranda, I think it actually makes you more creative. I am not wishing censorship upon anyone. God knows, when there was censorship in Russia, people still wrote. There is a ton of censorship in Pakistan, and we still manage to tell stories. And it's not great, but it does force your most creative instincts out of you in a way that when you can say things very openly and very clearly, the mind isn't concentrated. It leads to a certain concentration of the mind when you're forced to say things in code. And I did for "Tomboy" a little bit.
Miranda Popkey: I think just from the craft perspective, it's also interesting that the story that is most explicit in its treatment of queer themes, and most affirming and its treatment of queer themes, is also the only first-person story. I think that's an exciting, exceptional choice.
Mira Sethi: May I tell you a cute little story? So I wrote this story, which had a very different shape and form, literally three weeks before I submitted it to my editor. And I showed it to a friend who was queer. And she said to me, very politely, she said, “You know, Mira, I love you, and you're a great writer, but you're not queer. And you're writing this queer story from the point of view of queer desire.” My protagonist in the early drafts would look at women in a certain way. And she said to me, “You’re great, but this is not working. You don't know what queer desire is like, so don't try and enter that consciousness. But you do know about patriarchy. So why don't you reframe this story from the point of view of patriarchy.”
And man, that was such a hallelujah moment, because I was really struggling with the story in the early drafts. And then as soon as she said that, I was like, “Oh my god, yes.” This was actually reading as comic writing, because I don't know about queer desire. And then I reframed the whole story. And it was a real breakthrough moment for me, because then the story just ran when I started reframing it from the point of view of patriarchy.
Miranda Popkey: Well, I'm glad that your friend gave you this wonderful piece of advice.
Can you talk about your editing and revision process?
Mira Sethi: Oh my god. The most false thing about becoming a writer is that you have a book and you get to show off your book, and nobody talks about how much real writing went into it. I mean, I'm practically tripping over my words right now because I rewrote the shit out of all of these stories. And the writing takes you to places that you hadn't anticipated.
I often say that I think in order to write. The writing is what tells me what it is that I think. So after I’ve written the thing, I know what it is that I think. So the editing process works like this: I write something. It's very raw. I'm actually not self-conscious when I start writing, because I know it's vomit. And I know there's nothing to be done with the vomit, you just do it. And then later on, you can go and clean it, but it gives you something to work with. And so I write, and then I clean it up, and then I think around draft fifteen, I show it to my editor. It takes at least fifteen drafts. And then they say “Okay, you've got a scaffolding, but where is this going?” So I've worked on these seven stories for five years. That's a long time for seven stories. It's almost a story a year. Writing is really quite grueling.
Miranda Popkey: I agree. My joke about my first novel, my only novel, is that I had to think about it for twenty years before I could write any of it.
Mira Sethi: And you said that in your acknowledgments as well, which I actually really appreciate.
Miranda Popkey: Are you the kind of writer who plans it all in advance or are you one of those who need to surprise themselves and somehow, through the writing itself, the ideas emerge?
Mira Sethi: It's the latter. It's exactly what you said. I don't think, in order to write, I write so that I may know what it is that I'm thinking. And I don't plan in advance. And honestly, this is not a critique of writers who plan in advance. I can't relate to it at all, because so much of the beauty of me writing fiction is discovering things that I didn't know. For instance, my take on identity politics. Yes, of course, I'm progressive, and I have a take. But it was only after writing this book that I really understood what I felt about the world. And I think that is one of the most beautiful things about writing fiction. There is a kind of slow dredging up of your subconscious. And then you're like, “Oh, this is what I think about this issue.” It's really quite amazing.
Miranda Popkey: I completely agree. I write in large part to figure out what it is that I think and when I get the words on the page, I know if they're right, and I know if they're wrong, and if it's just a thought it's much vaguer.
What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
Mira Sethi: If it consumes you, you'll probably end up doing it. Because I find that is the case with most writers.
And have a community around you! Something that I don't have in Karachi is a community of writers. And I miss it. I have a community of actors, but I don't have a community of writers.
And workshop your work with people you respect and admire and keep going. And, you're not going to get it right the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time, but you might get it right the fiftieth time, and you'll have to be in it for the long haul. It's actually quite painful.
Because you don't get it right. And then one day you get it right.
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Purchase Are You Enjoying? from City Lights Bookstore.
Dana Spiotta is the author of Innocents and Others, which won the St. Francis College Literary Prize and was short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Stone Arabia, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Eat the Document, which was a National Book Award finalist; and Lightning Field. Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and she won the 2008-9 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the John Updike Prize in Literature. Spiotta lives in Syracuse and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program. Her latest book is Wayward, a novel published by Knopf.
Dana Spiotta will be in conversation with Mona Awad, discussing Wayward, in our City Lights LIVE! virtual event series on July 8th!
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Where are you writing to us from?
Syracuse, NY.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
We have been watching movies based on themes, such as 70s New York, Neo Noir, or everything Paul Newman. Very diverting! Also watching some great series, like Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You.
What books are you reading right now?
I am rereading a collection of stories by Anthony Veasna So, called Afterparties. It comes out in a few weeks. It will knock your socks off. I am about to start Mona Awad's All's Well, which also comes out soon. Her last book, Bunny, was so smart, funny, dark.
Which books do you return to?
I love Moby-Dick. It is a monument to a certain kind of authorial madness, so it gives me inspiration.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
So many, but I will give you one very direct example. While writing Wayward, I watched the film My Happy Family. It's about a middle-aged woman who leaves her family for no apparent reason. One scene in which she eats a piece of cake by herself really struck me, and so I put a similar cake moment in the book.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
That would be my dream job, truly. It would be in downtown Syracuse, which does not have an independent bookstore (although it has two excellent used bookstores). I have no idea about the name (City Lights is such a great name) or what the bestseller would be, but I think I would be good at handselling the books I love. And at making the case for them in capsule reviews. I would love to work in a well-curated bookstore.
Listening as an act of love: Marie Mutsuki Mockett in conversation
This is an excerpt of a free event for our virtual events series, City Lights LIVE. This event features Marie Mutsuki Mockett in conversation with Garnette Cadogan discussing her new book American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland, published by Graywolf Press. This event was originally broadcast live via Zoom and hosted by our events coordinator Peter Maravelis. You can listen to the entire event on our podcast. You can watch it in full as well on our YouTube channel.
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Marie Mutsuki Mockett: You don't see me talking about love or the importance of love very much. Maybe I would have a larger Instagram account if I constantly put up memes about love. I should probably do that.
I consider [American Harvest] to be an investigation of something that I didn't understand and that I thought was important. So I asked questions and wanted to try to answer those questions by talking to people who were very different than I am. To sit with them and find out what their genuine experience in the world is, and then see if I could answer some of the questions that I have.
I did not tell myself, "This is a book about love," or "You must employ love." I also didn't spend a lot of time saying to myself, "This is a book that's going to require you to be brave." I just really was trying to focus on the questions that I had and on my curiosity. I was trying to pinpoint, when I'm in a church, when I'm in a farm, when I'm around a situation that I don't understand, what's actually happening. And that was really what I was trying to do and how I was trying to direct my attention.
Garnette Cadogan: But love comes up a lot in the book. And for you, a lot of it has to do with listening. In many ways, this book is a game of active listening, and listening--as you've shown time and again--is fundamentally an act of love.
You decided to go and follow wheat farmers and move along in their regimens and cycles and rituals, and not only the rituals of labor, but rituals of worship, rituals of companionship, and issues of community. When did you begin to understand what is the real task of listening? Because in the book, time and again, you remind us that there are so many places in which there is this huge gap, or this huge chasm, in our effort to understand each other.
Marie Mutsuki Mockett: Well, that is where love comes in. Because that is the only reason why you would spend time listening to people or talking to people. What would be the motivation for trying to be open to others? Why should you be open to others? We don't have to be. So why should one be?
And you're right that things do get reduced down to this question of love. I had always heard that Christianity was the religion of love. And that love was one of the things that was unique about Christ's message. I didn't really grow up with any one religion. Also, my mother was from Japan, so I also grew up always hearing about how for a long time, the word love didn't really exist in Japanese. There really is no way to say “I love you.” Linguists still debate whether or not you can say "I love you" in Japanese and there are ways in which people say it, but it doesn't have the same history, and it doesn't have the same loaded meaning that it does in Western English.
So I was aware from a really early age, because I heard my parents and other people talk about this, that this question of love was very much a part of Western culture and that it originated from Christianity. And I really wondered what does that mean? And if it means anything, is there anything to it? And if there is, what is it? And there's a scene in the book where I talk about my feeling of disappointment that no one had ever purchased me anything from Tiffany, the jewelry store, because if you live in New York City, you're constantly surrounded by Tiffany ads. When you get engaged, you can get a Tiffany box. And then on your birthday, you can get a Tiffany box. And then in the advertisements, the graying husband gives the wife another Tiffany box to appreciate her for all the years that she's been a wife and on and on. I know that that has nothing to do with love. I know that that that's like some advertiser who's taken this notion of love and then turned it into some sort of message with a bunch of images, and it's supposed to make me feel like I want my Tiffany ring (which I've never gotten). That's not love. But is there anything there? And that was definitely something that I wanted to investigate.
I think I started to notice a pattern where I was going to all of these churches in the United States, and I'm not a church going person. And the joke that I tell is that I decided to write American Harvest partly because I wasn't going to have to speak Japanese. I could speak English, which is the language with which I'm most comfortable. But I ended up going to all these churches, and I couldn't understand what anybody was saying. I would leave the church and Eric, who is the lead character, would say, "What do you think?" And I would say, "I have no idea what just happened." And so it took time for me to tune in to what the pastors were saying, and what I came to understand is that there were these Christian churches that emphasized fear, and churches that didn't emphasize fear. And then I started to meet people who believe that God wants them to be afraid and people who are motivated by fear or whose allegiance to the church comes from a place of fear, in contrast to those who said, "You're not supposed to be afraid. That's not the point." That was a huge shift in my ability to understand where I was, who I was talking to, and the kinds of people that I was talking to, and why the history of Christianity mattered in this country.
Garnette Cadogan: So you started this book, because you said, "Oh, I only need one language." And then you ended up going to language training.
Marie Mutsuki Mockett: I needed so many different languages! I mean, even this question of land ownership that we're talking about: I feel like that's a whole other language. There are places in the world and moments in history where people didn't own land. It didn't occur to them that they had to own the land themselves. So what's happening when we think we have to? Like with timeshares. I'm really serious. What need is that fulfilling? And you don't need to have a timeshare in Hawaii, where you visit like one week out of the entire year, right? So what need is that fulfilling?
Garnette Cadogan: Rest? Recreation? I’m wondering . . . has the process of living, researching, and writing this book changed you in any way? And if so, how?
Marie Mutsuki Mockett: I mean, absolutely, but it's so hard to talk about. I think that I have a much better and deeper understanding of the history of our country, and a much greater understanding of the role that race plays in our country. A deeper understanding of the tension between rural and urban, and also of our interdependence, which is something I sort of knew, but didn't completely know. And why just kicking out a bunch of states or getting rid of a bunch of people isn't actually an answer to the tension that we've faced. And it's because there's this great interdependence between people. So understanding all of that and realizing how intractable the problem is, oddly, has made me feel calmer about it. Because I realize it isn't as simple as if I just do "X" everything will be fine. I think, when you feel like, "If I just master the steps, if I can just learn this incantation, then everything will be fine," I think when you live that way, it's very frustrating. And I realized the problems are deeper than that. And some of the problems the United States is facing are problems that exist all around the world. I mean the urban rural problems: it's a piece of modernization. It doesn't just affect our country, it affects many countries.
Garnette Cadogan: You know, we've been speaking about land, God, country, Christianity, urbanity, and in this book, a lot of it is packed in through this absolutely wonderful man, Eric, and his family. Part of what makes it compelling and illuminating is we get a chance to understand so much through this wonderful, generous, and beautiful man, Eric. For those who haven't read it yet, tell us about Eric, and why Eric was so crucial to understanding in so much of what you understood, and also some of the changes that you went through.
Marie Mutsuki Mockett: He's a Christian from Pennsylvania. He’s a white man who’s never been to college, but has a genuine intellectual curiosity, although not immediately apparent in a way that would register to us. Because we're at an event that's hosted by bookstore. So when we think of intellectual curiosity, probably the first thing that any of us would do would be to reach for a book, right? That's not what he would do. He wouldn't reach for a book, he would find someone to talk to. He's a person who is very much about the lived experience. But he was very open to asking questions and trying to understand other people's experiences and how the world works, and he was very concerned.
He was the person who told me in early 2016 that he thought that Trump would probably win, when none of us thought that this was possible. And he said this is because we don't understand each other at all. And he's a very open-hearted, very generous person. And you see him change over the course of the book.
He called me the other day. He said, "I've been hearing a lot about violence against Asian Americans." He's met a couple of my friends. He wanted to know, "Are they all right?" And then he said, "I just want you to know that we talk about racial justice all the time in church," because of course, that's the way that he processes life's difficult questions: through church. And I was kind of moved by that, because one of the points that American Harvest makes is that these difficult questions don't get talked about in church. And he said, "I just want you to know this is something that we talk about." So you see him really develop and change as a result of his exposure to me and to seeing how I move through space versus how he moves through space. And it's a big leap of imagination for people to understand that other people have other experiences that are legitimate and real. It seems to be one of the most difficult things for people to understand, but he really made a great effort to do that. And I think that’s kind of extraordinary.
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Purchase American Harvest from City Lights Bookstore.
5 Questions with Kate Zambreno, Author of To Write As If Already Dead
Kate Zambreno is the author of many acclaimed books, including Drifts (2020), Appendix Project (2019), Screen Tests (2019), Book of Mutter (2017), and Heroines (2012). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Her newest book is To Write As If Already Dead, published by Columbia University Press.
Kate Zambreno will be in conversation with T Fleischmann about her new book in our City Lights LIVE! virtual event series on Wednesday, June 30th, 2021.
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Where are you writing to us from?
I’m writing to you from the first floor of the Victorian house we have rented in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, for nearly a decade. We haven’t left this entire year. I am on the couch at the end of a long day. There’s an early evening light coming in through the front window, my dog Genet is vigilantly expecting dinner, my four-year-old is tearing around outback, while her baby sister and her father watch.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
Going to Prospect Park regularly this year—even in January and February—and watching my daughter run around, and make mudpies, and make forts and strange tree sculptures by dragging around fallen branches, sticks, rocks, and logs.
What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?
I am writing the introduction to the Portuguese writer Maria Judite de Carvalho’s novel, Empty Wardrobes, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, and published by Two Lines Press, so I’m thinking through that work of interiority and domestic spaces and oppression and grief.
I just finished being in conversation with Cristina Rivera Garza at Sarah Lawrence College, where I teach, and a work that Rivera Garza kept mentioning in conversation with her newest essay collection Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (translated by Sarah Booker and published by Feminist Press) is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press), so that’s up next.
I’m reading everything I can get my hands on about Eva Hesse, including the diaries, for a novel I’m writing, Foam, that thinks through different traumas and textures, including soft sculpture.
Speaking of Two Lines Press, I’ve been loving the work of Marie NDiaye in translation, specifically Self-Portrait in Green. I’ve also been returning frequently to works by Japanese women in translation, specifically, Yuko Tsushima, not only Territory of Light but also her stories, and Hiroko Oyamada’s novels, all published in translation by New Directions.
For a class I teach at Sarah Lawrence, on writing and elegy and the anthropocene, I’m reading Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press). Hedi El-Kholti, my editor at Semiotext(e) is sending me Peter Sloterdijik’s Spheres trilogy in the mail, because I need to read a book called Foams! And so I’m looking forward to that. I also am looking forward to reading Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door, and Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Borealis.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
The diptych structure of the book was inspired by reading Enrique Vila-Matas’s Because She Never Asked (published in translation by New Directions), which begins with the story written for the conceptual artist Sophie Calle to live out—the second half involves the Vila-Matas narrator writing the story. Vila-Matas is so ludic and conceptual and in love with literature and probably one of the writers that inspires me the most for the past two books (Drifts and the Guibert study). And Sophie Calle as well—the concept of a noirish or speculative essay like The Address Book—and in To Write As If Already Dead I think through Calle’s relationship with Hervé Guibert and how they fictionalized each other in their works. The photobooks of Moyra Davey, the relationship of her essays and diaristic works to her images, are incredibly important to me, like Burn the Diaries and Les Goddesses. Anne Carson, especially her talks and pieces collected in Float and her Short Talks. Bernhard and Sebald.
Of course, I should say the writing of Hervé Guibert, and that’s the right answer—the book in general was catalyzed by him, thinking through his whole project, the diary, the later illness works, his relationship to speed, to tone, to writing friendships. There’s also really interesting writing that’s channeling Guibert now—from Moyra Davey’s work, to Andrew Durbin’s novel Skyland, that Nightboat published.
So much of the first half of To Write As If Already Dead is a love letter to the community I formed online now a decade ago and whose writing I always feel in conversation with—my friends who are writers are often my favorite writers, and doing such tender and vital work, especially T. Fleischmann, who I’m delighted to be in conversation with at City Lights. I love them and their work and we have spoken to each other about Guibert for a while. Others like Sofia Samatar, and Danielle Dutton, who also runs Dorothy, a publishing project.
The book is dedicated to Bhanu Kapil, who I first met online a decade ago as we each wrote these unruly notebook projects on our blogs, and so much of the study feels like continuing the conversation we’ve been having the past few years, about how to write and survive under capitalism, on caretaking vs art. I think Bhanu is one of the most important and thrillingly playful and exciting writers alive.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
I think it would be on Cortelyou Road in Ditmas Park, as we don’t have a bookstore here. It would be called Finger and Thumb – when my partner John Vincler and I always spoke about having a bookstore that’s what we wanted to call it, it’s from Beckett and seems to gesture to the eroticism of actual print. I’m imagining we would sell artists’ books and chapbooks (like Sarah McCarry’s Guillotine series), art presses, presses like Semiotext(e) and Dorothy and Two Lines and Fitzcarraldo and Nightboat and New Directions and Transit Books. I think that our bestseller would be Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals, because it’s the book we often refer to amongst each other and urge on others to read, especially those interested in taking care in writing from research and archives, of what the archives have neglected, and the imaginative possibility of resurrecting the lives of others.
The Motor of the Essay: Rachel Kushner in Conversation
This is an excerpt of a free event we held in conjunction with Litquake for our virtual events series, City Lights LIVE. This event features Rachel Kushner in conversation with Dana Spiotta celebrating the launch of The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020, published by Scribner. This event was originally broadcast live via Zoom and hosted by our events coordinator Peter Maravelis. You can listen to the entire event on our podcast. You can watch it in full as well on our Youtube channel.
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Dana Spiotta: I know that everyone's going to ask you these questions about writing fiction versus nonfiction. And I read somewhere that you said, with your novels, you begin with imagery more than an idea or a character. With the nonfiction, there is a range of pieces about writers and specific books to journalism--like the prison story and Palestine--and then there’s the ones that are personal essays, right, like the girl in a motorcycle. So I guess they might all have different origins. But where do you begin with that? And how is that different as a process from what you write in fiction?
Rachel Kushner: Yeah, so it is kind of a different process for me, although I sometimes feel guilty to try to make declarations about which is harder, or how one does one thing, because you know, for some people, the essay is what literature is.
For me, fiction is more difficult. And so in a certain way it's what I've signed on to do with my life, because the process can be so mysterious and fickle and unreliable. And I'm waiting to catch a wave, or get the drift and then try to figure out how to sustain it, and then how to change it in order to sustain it. Managing so many different things at once is a very curious hermeneutic, because you need to know where you're going.
But then you also need to let happenstance inform you. I think some of the ways that we are challenged, and how we learn in our lives and also as writers, are by having encounters that we did not anticipate or predict, and that happens in fiction. And then you're kind of in a "taking mode" and you know exactly what's for you and you go with it and you run.
Essays are a little different for me. I mean, obviously. Time is shorter. But usually the motor of the essay is a sprung sentence. I come up with one sentence that is doing something in the syntax and it's making something sort of declarative. And it's kind of a gambit. And it needs to be followed by another. And sometimes I'll have a whole paragraph like that. And those paragraphs will just be floating in the void of the potentiality of the essay that I haven't written yet. And I don't sweat, like, "How am I going to link this to that?" yet. Because I just know by instinct that they're both going in. And if I put them in the essay, then they are interrelated by virtue merely of their proximity to each other. Then I start to build links.
Some journalism is a very different process. Like you mentioned, for the piece that I wrote, originally for the New York Times Magazine, about prison abolition and the carceral geographer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, they said it can be any length and made it long. So you know, it was like 20,000 words. And it was my version of that essay, and it probably was a pretty good essay. But I think the weakness in it was that I was not speaking to their audience. And they really--you have written for the New York Times Magazine--they want to be able to countenance everything you say, sentence by sentence. It's not like writing an op-ed, where you just say your thing and then people can fight it out in the comments. They want to be fully on board. And I wouldn't want to have to do that all the time.
It's extremely difficult, because you have to keep remembering how to bring in somebody who may have wildly different ideas about how society should be organized, and not seem polemical, not seem pushy. It's a kind of seduction I think that really benefits from collaboration with an editor. It's arduous, it takes time. That essay took two years to write, but because the subject matter was important to me, ultimately, I decided it was worth it.
Dana Spiotta: Yeah, it's such a great essay. And I learned so much from it.
Peter Maravelis: When you're writing about events and feelings from decades ago, how do you return to the experience? What takes you back?
Rachel Kushner: That's a really great question. So, you know, with some of these essays, like the first essay in the book called “Girl on a Motorcycle,” which is about the Cabo 1000--a no longer existent, illegal motorcycle road race where you span the Baja in the course of a day--was the first thing that I ever published and I wrote it 20 years ago. And after looking back over it, in order to put it in this book and to improve upon it, I opened it up; I wrote a new beginning and a new ending. There are so many details and scenes in that essay that I never, ever would have remembered had I not written them down when I was much closer to the meat of that experience.
But there are other essays like the title essay which I just wrote quite recently. I'd put the book together, and I knew it was going to be called “The Hard Crowd.” And then I just basically sat down and wrote this essay. And I think, you know, as maybe you're telling a story, or going through your life, sometimes things really do sort of trigger the release of a memory. And Proust has this conception of two different kinds of memory that he calls voluntary memory and involuntary memory. And voluntary memory is the kind of fixed story that you tell, you know, "Oh, he's telling that story again," meaning it's a kind of sclerotic, hardened account that, for Proust, doesn't really have any real artistic or intrinsic wealth to it. Whereas involuntary memory is maybe when you would smell a perfume that you haven't smelled in 30 years and it reminds you of this or that. And I think that writing itself can activate involuntary memory, because you start to see into spaces you haven't seen in a really long time.
Like when I was writing this essay, I somehow ended up talking about Terence McKenna, and remembered that I'd seen Terence McKenna give this lecture at the Palace of Fine Arts. And then I saw the Palace of Fine Arts and him on the stage and where I was sitting, and who was in the audience. And so then I mentioned in the essay that this noise musician who I don't know, but I knew who he was, was sitting right in front of me. And that was a funny thing because the New Yorker called him and asked, "Were you at a Terence McKenna lecture in 1991." “Yeah, I was.” I mean he probably thought like the FBI is after him or something. I can start to see things and details in pretty haunting detail, particularity once I'm starting to build the framework that will allow those kind of involuntary memories to come up to present themselves.
Peter Maravelis: Do you feel that maybe kids who grew up in a certain era share communal memories, like growing up in San Francisco in the 70s is full of shared moments and scenes?
Rachel Kushner: Yes, I do feel that, but I would maybe even particularize it to not just an era, but to kids who grew up in a certain world within San Francisco. And I'm going to just be blunt: it's the kids who went to public school in San Francisco in the 70s and 80s. We all traversed a world together, and the particularity of that world. I'm not saying that it's special or different. Everybody has a world that they traversed, and that stays inside of them as memory. And ours is ours. And those who experienced it do feel bonded, I think, for life, in a way. And it's something I've thought about a lot since that essay was published in the New Yorker because of the number of people who reached out to me and wanted to talk about their own memories of this same world that we shared.
Peter Maravelis: In the New York Times review, Dwight Garner mentioned the phrase: “At the party, she was kindness in the hard crowd," from the Cream song "White Room." Is that in fact where your title came from?
Rachel Kushner: It is. I mentioned that in the title essay, it all becomes clear, or at least somewhat clear where I heard that song, and why I made it the title of this book. It's a good line.
To see upcoming events at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, check out our complete calendar.
5 Questions for Laura Raicovich, Author of Culture Strike
Laura Raicovich was President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum. During her tenure, she was a champion of socially engaged art practices that address the most pressing social, political, and ecological issues of our times. She has defined her career with artist-driven projects and programs. She is the author of At the Lightning Field and A Diary of Mysterious Difficulties. Her newest book is Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest published by Verso Books
Laura Raicovich will be discussing Culture Strike with special guest Malkia Devich-Cyril in our City Lights LIVE! virtual event series on June 17th, 2021.
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Where are you writing to us from?
I'm writing from Chelsea in New York City, my bedroom which is also my writing zone, and library. My windows overlooks the back of the former Chelsea YMCA, with its patterned brick and copper mansard roof, copper cornice, and eccentric histories. It's a beauty to look at, and while I face mostly south, I get just enough western sky to see the weather coming in.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
I love to cook, so taking a break from the screen and planning and preparing lunches and dinners really kept me from going bonkers. Amidst the fear, it was comforting to cook for my husband and son, to make dishes from whatever was in the supermarket, especially in those early days when supplies were unpredictable, and to invent new ways to bring out the leftovers in salads and frittatas for lunch.
What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?
Right now I'm reading Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, and A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet, which are both outstanding in very different ways; and I recently finished Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening, which I am recommending to everyone. I'm also reading Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene Carruthers which is essential reading right now.
I always go back to Rebecca Solnit's writings as well as Saidiya Hartman's books. Their ways of storytelling are very compelling to me, particularly as feminists and fighters. I guess I'd say they have an outsized influence on this book, as well as other of my writings. I admire them both immensely.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
See Above.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
I'd open a bookshop in a small town in Sicily called Modica. A great friend of mine named Corrado, who runs a small contemporary art gallery, lives there. I'd collaborate with him on making exhibitions and set up an anti-imperialist bookshop that has an A to Z arrangement of books from around the world. Art books would be unseparated from literature and philosophy, setting up wanderers to make connections that might not otherwise be stumbled upon between books. I love the chance encounter with a set of ideas that resonates through another, completely separate experience. It would be extraordinary to make a bookshop, and cultural space, that does the same.
5 Questions with Carol Anderson, Author of The Second
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation's Divide, a New York Times Bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. She is also the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955; Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, which was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in non-fiction.
Carol Anderson will be in conversation with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz discussing her newest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (published by Bloomsbury) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on June 9th, 2021!
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Where are you writing to us from?
A home office that has been my cocoon, my idea pod, and archeological dig given the mounds of paper. Afraid I’ll hit the magma if I dig down too deeply.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
You think I stayed sane? That’s cute. If there’s any semblance of sanity after the consistent killing of Black folks by police, the callousness and incompetence of governmental officials who’d rather score cultural warrior points over a mask and vaccine than save the lives of their citizens while a deadly disease stalks the globe, it was an odd combination of the pedantic and the urgent. Pedantic: the NYT Spelling Bee and crossword puzzles, Blue Bunny Double Fudge ice cream, and then, of course, followed by the absolute necessity of Nutrisystem. The urgent: answering the fierce urgency of now by weighing in on voting rights every chance I got.
What books are you reading right now?
Right now, I’m grading papers. I have stacked up some books that are beckoning me, Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir, Rachel Maddow's Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House, and Eddie Glaude Jr.'s Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.
Which books do you return to? Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest; Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles White, Robert Redbird, James Baldwin, David Levering Lewis, Elizabeth Hinton, John Dower, Adam Hochschild, Brenda Gayle Plummer.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
In a part of town where folks love to read and enjoy good music; Rhythm and Books (R&B); anything that Jesmyn Ward or Kiese Laymon wrote.
5 Questions with Chet'la Sebree, Author of Field Study
Chet'la Sebree is the director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts at Bucknell University and the author of Mistress, winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image Award. Her poetry has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Guernica, Pleiades, and elsewhere.
Chet'la will be in conversation with Dantiel W. Moniz, discussing her new book Field Study (published by FSG) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on June 5th!
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Where are you writing to us from?
From my birth month of May.
From the left side of a rented duplex in central PA.
From the third floor in a patterned, blue-velvet armchair across from my teal-painted desk.
And, because I didn’t finish this all at once, from the first floor enjoying the afternoon sun.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
I want to be the kind of person who says exercise. I certainly spent some time on my mat and pounding the pavement, but it has really been food, wine, and fellowship that have held me together. These have always been the things that kept me sane. In grad school, I loved having people over for potluck dinners. But this sort of fellowship surrounding food took on new meaning in the pandemic. It wasn’t just that I learned how to make gluten-free pasta from scratch or placed orders for specialty wine shipments, but it was the sturdy calendar of happy hours and dinner dates kept me going. I did everything from virtual wine tastings to learning how to make injera with poet Diana Khoi Nguyen with home-ground teff to have boozy brunches and movie nights with friends from high school and college.
Right before the pandemic, I transitioned into a new job as a tenure-track professor and director of a university literary arts center and was traveling for my first book, Mistress, which meant sometimes I was in two different cities in one week, while also teaching classes and hosting events. This meant that I spent little time with my friends. Moving around less meant that I could not only reconnect but deepen relationships. Nearly every week since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been meeting with prose writers Dantiel W. Moniz and María Isabel Álvarez—both of whom I’d met at a writing residency in 2017. Our first Zoom was an attempt to heal the wound of not seeing each other at a March 2020 conference. What started as a conversation, led to salons, led to work sessions, led to us planning for our own future residencies. We’ve cried; we’ve rooted each other on; we’ve held each other accountable. They kept me going through the last rounds of writing and editing Field Study, and I can’t wait to talk to Dantiel about it on June 5th!
What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?
Right now, I’m primarily reading emails and my students’ final portfolios, but I’m so excited for the pleasure reading this summer will bring. When I can sneak a moment, though, I am toggling between three books: Felicia Zamora’s newest collection I Always Carry My Bones; Nana Nkweti’s brand neew Walking on Cowrie Shells; and Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife. That last one is a reread; I first read the His Dark Materials series in high school. I often return to books I read in those pre-college years—fantasy and sci-fi novels like Ender’s Game but also Toni Morison’s The Bluest Eye, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I like thinking about who I’ve become since first reading them.
The book I would say I return to the most, however, is probably Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, or maybe even just specific essays in it: “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” and “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
I’m such a sponge, which is part of what made writing Field Study so fun. The patchwork style of quotes interwoven with my own language gave me a space to name names of those that influenced me. It gave me the chance to be in conversation with literary legends and thinkers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Maya Angelou, while also calling on my brother, best friend, and cousin for insight.
I’m inspired by visual artists like Georgia O’Keefe, Nekisha Durrett, Alison Saar, Carrie Mae Weems, Stephanie J. Williams, and Deborah Willis, but I’m also inspired by theatre, films, dance, television. Who knows what Field Study would be if it weren’t for the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People that came out in April 2020. I am an early-to-bed person, but I finished watching the series at around 11:45pm, got out of bed, and worked on Field Study until 7am. Then, I slept for four hours, got up, and worked for the rest of the day. In watching that well-orchestrated chaos and intimacy, I was taken back to my early twenties, on which Field Study is loosely based. That’s how I work—something gets me in my guts, as poet E.G. Asher would say, and I find my way into the work. It could be a good show, Max Richter’s recomposed Vivaldi, or a nice food and wine paring that gets me going.
I also wrote to an erratic playlist that’s also representative of the diversity of conversations in Field Study. The music included everything from Foo Fighters and Paramore to Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill to Henryk Górecki and Sol Rising.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
My bookstore, URGE, would double as an integrative wellness center with a mind / body / spirit focus. We’re talking incenses and essential oils along with your book of the month picks. There’d be two locations: one on Whidbey Island, where I finished my first book Mistress, and laid the groundwork for Field Study; and the other in DC, which still calls to me even though I moved from the city seven years ago.
My bestsellers would be a tie between anything Audre Lorde (probably not surprising) and anything Bob’s Burgers-related, since my inner circle would know I got the name of the bookstore from the show’s Season 11’s Valentine’s episode: “Romancing the Beef.”
5 Questions with Cynthia Kaufman, Author of The Sea Is Rising and So Are We
Cynthia Kaufman is the director of the Vasconcellos Institute for Democracy in Action, where she also teaches community organizing and philosophy. The author of Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope (Lexington Books, 2012), she is a lifelong social change activist, having worked on issues such as tenants' rights, police abuse, union organizing, international politics, and most recently climate change.
Cynthia Kaufman is in conversation with Francesca Caparas discussing her new book The Sea Is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook (PM Press) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Tuesday, May 25, 2021.
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Where are you writing to us from?
I am writing from Pacifica, California; a 30-minute drive South of City Light Books.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
I've been doing a lot of hiking and writing.
What are 3 books you always recommend to people?
Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed; Tony Morrison's Beloved; James Baldwin's Collected Essays.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
This book has been influenced by the climate justice movement, especially the youth wing of the movement. This book draws on Robert Bullard, J.K. Gibson-Graham, adrienne maree brown, Kate Raworth, and Bill McKibben. I have been very influenced in general by Freire, Baldwin, Gramsci, Marx, and Nietzsche.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
All the places I love already have great bookstores!
Pages for Picket Lines: A Labor History Reading List
By James Tracy
Since 2013, the labor movement has been coming off the ropes and landing punches. The Economic Policy Institute reported that over 900,000 workers participated in strikes or work stoppages from 2018-2019. The upsurge of the past seven years have included workers at microbreweries, telecommunications firms, big-box stores, schools, and fast food restaurants. Labor’s story is one of the most inspiring, terrifying and dynamic histories to be told. The ways that we understand the history of working-class resistance ultimately shapes what we think of as possible today.
The foundation of Labor History was built by groundbreaking historians grappling ways to tell a history from below. The upsurge of worker rebellions has been accompanied by an upsurge of powerful books! City Lights asked me to put together a reading list that shows the dynamic books out there, a starting point to come to terms with this history.
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Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America by Joe William Trotter, Jr. (University of California Press)
Trotter illustrates how Black workers have always been central to the story of labor in the United States.
Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe (Bold Type Books)
Jaffe proves that the quest to emancipate labor is bigger than any collective bargaining contract. This may be the future of labor scholarship!
Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide by Lane Windham (University of North Carolina Press)
Fantastic read challenging the notion that labor’s decline was due to lack of organizing in the 1970s. Written by a labor organizer turned academic, and notable for its attention to gender and race.
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G. Kelley (University of North Carolina Press)
Kelley, possibly the finest historian in the game today, will make you forget everything you think you know about sharecroppers, the Great Depression, Black organizing, and communists!
Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America by Miriam Frank (Temple University Press)
This book is a needed corrective to labor history often presented through a heterosexual lens.
A History of America in Ten Strikes by Erik Loomis (The New Press)
Loomis’ strength is the way he tells labor’s story in an accessible way. Ideal for readers new to labor history and politics.
Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya (Pluto Press)
Possibly one of the most important recent labor anthologies. By updating Social Reproduction Theory, invisible labor is made visible therefore opening up new possibilities for change.
Intersectional Class Struggle: Theory and Practice by Michael Beyea Reagan (AK Press)
Reagan puts to bed the myth that class politics must ignore race and gender in this extremely accessible book.
An African-American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz (Beacon Press)
Everyone contemplating what a “Green New Deal” might look like should read Ortiz’s treatment of the Forgotten Workers of America to build a real deal that leaves no worker behind.
Silk Stockings and Socialism: Philadelphia's Radical Hosiery Workers from the Jazz Age to the New Deal by Sharon McConnell-Sidorick (University of North Carolina Press)
Remarkable book on many levels, McConnell-Sidorick shines when exploring working class culture role in organizing.
Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century by Daniel Sidorick (ILR Press)
A go-to book to help understand capital’s project to find cheap and controllable labor.
"They're Bankrupting Us!": And 20 Other Myths about Unions by Bill Fletcher, Jr. (Beacon Press)
Concise defense of unions that applies a wrecking ball to anti-labor talking points.
Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream by Jamie K. McCallum (Basic Books)
McCallum’s near-perfect defense of the need for workers to have “more time” as well as more money.
Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly by Peter Cole (PM Press)
Cole has unearthed the history of Ben Fletcher, a radical black wobbly whose story echoes many of today’s controversies.
Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power, edited by Keri Leigh Merritt and Matthew Hild (University Press of Florida)
Anyone who dismisses the South as permanently conservative needs to read this powerful corrective to the historical record.
From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement by Fred Glass (University of California Press)
This book could alternatively be called “A People’s History of California,” made all the more relevant today as the Golden State becomes the 5th largest economy in the world.
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James Tracy is the Chair of Labor and Community Studies at City College of San Francisco. He is the co-founder of the Howard Zinn Book Fair and the Books to the Barricades podcast. Tracy co-authored No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements with Hilary Moore.
5 Questions with Aminatta Forna, author of The Window Seat
Aminatta Forna is the author of the novels Ancestor Stones, The Memory of Love, and The Hired Man, as well as the memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water. Forna's books have been translated into twenty-two languages. Her essays have appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and Vogue. She is currently the Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University.
Aminatta Forna will be in conversation with Eula Biss about her new book, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion (published by Grove), in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Wednesday, May 19th, 2021!
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Where are you writing to us from?
I'm in Arlington, Virginia.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
A childhood spent in developing countries where things were often not as you would have wished: power cuts, curfews, coups. Dogs have always kept me sane and we had adopted a Blue Heeler a few months before the pandemic began. I have been running a good deal over the last twelve months and encouraged a friend to begin. Now she can run a 5K. I also go sculling on the Potomac. The outdoors, basically.
What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?
I’m reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I am loving for Kimmerer’s intimate and yet authoritative voice. Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History by Paul Farmer, which is about the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone and also blends history, memoir, and science. Also The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim, which I saw recommended by Rabih Alameddine on Twitter in a discussion about joyful novels. I found I was in the mood for a restorative Italian holiday.
I don’t return much to books, my natural curiosity tends to lead me to new books. Books I love and own in every form from E-book to signed first edition are A Heart So White by Javier Marías and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
This book: Pico Iyer, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Eula Biss. My wider influences: everything I have ever read.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
It would be in Freetown, Sierra Leone where we don’t have enough bookshops--the result of poverty and war. People in Sierra Leone love poetry. There are lots of good local poets and also excellent musicians who have won a national and regional following, such as Khady Black and Emmerson. Their hard hitting, political lyrics have propelled their very successful careers. Sierra Leone has a long history of political pamphleteering. I’d bet if someone ran off a few thousand copies of their song lyrics they’d sell in a day.
Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist. Her books of poetry include E! Entertainment, The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA, which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize. Durbin was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia in 2015. Her art and writing have been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, The Believer, BOMB, poets.org, the American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has shown her artwork nationally and internationally at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, The PULSE Art Fair in Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in Los Angeles, peer to space in Berlin, and more.
Kate Durbin will be reading from her newest poetry book, Hoarders (published by Wave Books) with special guest Alex Dimitrov, also reading from new work, in our City Lights LIVE! virtual events series on Thursday, May 6th!
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Where are you writing to us from?
Los Angeles, California. I’m sitting at my writing desk with a bowl of Lucky Charms.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
I recently bought a View-Master from eBay, and I’ve been looking at all these beautiful old reels, of places like Yellowstone in the 60s, and miniatures of old Disney movies like Pinocchio. There’s something comforting about a little 3-D world inside a View-Master. It gives this feeling of a world continuing on, outside the frame, beyond your vision.
What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?
Right now I’m reading Carribean Fragoza’s Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead, Sam Cohen’s Sarahland, Henry Hoke’s The Groundhog Forever, Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979, Divya Victor’s Curb, and Ted Dodson’s An Orange.
I return to more books than I can list here! I’m a big re-reader. The most recent is Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms, which are beautiful, short, strange meditations on everyday objects and spaces. I have been thinking a lot about objects, how mysterious they really are. And their complicated relationships to people. This object-person question is a thread through my books E! Entertainment, Hoarders, and a novel I’m working on now about my childhood.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons was a big influence for my most recent book, Hoarders. Stein’s book is filled with slippery little objects with a language all their own. In Hoarders, the objects also have a kind of animism, or life to them, and a sense of humor too. For example, there’s a poem filled with surreal Barbies, that are real Barbies that have actually been made and marketed! Walk and Potty Pup Barbie, who comes with a tiny dog with nuggets of fake poop, Claude Monet Water Color Barbie, Tippi Hedren in The Birds Barbie, and many more.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
My bookstore would be located inside the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas, somewhere near the shark slide. It would be called McDonald's Chicken Nuggets, and our bestseller would be Jean Baudrillard’s America.
5 Questions with Michael Palmer, author of Little Elegies for Sister Satan
Michael Palmer is an American born in New York City in 1943 and long resident in San Francisco, nearly all of Palmer's poetry is published by New Directions: At Passages (1995); The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972–1995 (1998); The Promises of Glass (2000); Codes Appearing: Poems 1979–1988 (2001); Company of Moths (2005); and most recently, Thread (2011). He is the translator of works by Emmanuel Hocquard, Vicente Huidobro, and Alexei Parshchikov, among others, and the editor of Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics. For over thirty years he has collaborated with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.
His newest book of poems is Little Elegies for Sister Satan (also published by New Directions). Michael Palmer is reading from his new book, along with Erica Hunt (who is celebrating her new book of poems, Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems, published by Nightboat) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Tuesday, May 4th!
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Where are you writing to us from?
I am writing to you from a secret location not all that far from City Lights as the Dream Drone flies. In 1963, before I lived anywhere, Allen Ginsberg brought me to City Lights for the first time, where I purchased a copy of Michael McClure’s Dark Brown (Auerhahn Press), shelved then in the locked room among the works subject to possible criminal prosecution.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
I’d like to know who’s accusing me of being sane? I will be taking names.
What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?
As an act of self-abnegation, throughout the lockdown I have limited my reading (and rereading) to bestsellers. It seems that every day, I read at random from Wisława Szymborska’s collected and last poems, Map (translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak), as well as Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden (tr. Fady Joudah). I am finding my way back through Nate Mackey’s various prose and verse sequences, written across an illuminated lifetime. Of the several hundred other books of fiction, philosophy, writings on art, interviews, poetry, and social and political theory that I’ve begun, perused or read through during the lockdown, I have mostly fond if fading memories, like loves from an earlier life. Oh yes, and one day a week I’ve been reading aloud from The Decameron to friends in my pod. Yesterday we reached Day 8, Story 4.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
I am a magpie in this regard, stealing from my betters, living and gone, as I try in vain to listen to the Book of the World and record its echoes. And when I confront the artificial barriers, the walls, erected between nations by the corrupt and corrupting forces of power, I do my best to fly over them. From Szymborska’s “Psalm”:
Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand shifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!
Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
Poets should never open bookstores, only patronize them as often as possible, while neglecting what others erroneously consider to be real life. It was in 1953 (I was ten) that Ferlinghetti came to me in a vision and asked whether he should invest in a bookstore with Peter Martin. I warned him in the most strenuous terms not to become involved, that it would be the ruin of him, and that nobody reads good books. And so it came to pass.
5 Questions with Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI
Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor at USC Annenberg, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and the inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Katie Crawford will be discussing her new book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (published by Yale University Press) with Trevor Paglen in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Friday April 30th, presented with Gray Area!
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Where are you writing to us from?
Sydney, Australia. I normally live in New York, so visiting here is like being in a parallel universe where COVID-19 was taken seriously from the beginning and history played out differently.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
Cooking through every cookbook I own, talking to good friends, listening to records, and trying to improve my sub-par surfing skills.
What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?
Right now I’m reading Jer Thorp’s Living in Data: Citizen's Guide to a Better Information Future, the excellent collection Your Computer is On Fire from the MIT Press, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, and The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Yes, I have a problem - I never just read one book at a time.
In terms of books that I return to, there's a long list. Here’s just a few:
- Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star's Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences
- Ursula M. Franklin's The Real World of Technology
- Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
- James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
- Gray Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin
- Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower
- Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's Objectivity
- Oscar H. Gandy’s The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information. Critical Studies in Communication and in the Cultural Industries - such a prescient book about classification, discrimination and technology, published back in 1993!
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
Atlas of AI was influenced by so many writers and artists, across different centuries - from Georgius Agricola to Jorge Luis Borges to Margaret Mead. More recently, there’s been an extraordinary set of books published on the politics of technology in just the last five years. For example:
- Meredith Broussard’s Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
- Ruha Benjmain’s Race After Technology
- Julie E. Cohen’s Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism
- Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s Data Feminism
- Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
- Tarleton Gillespie’s Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media
- Sarah T Roberts’ Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media
- Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
- Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud
And that’s just for starters - it’s an incredible time for books that make us contend with the consequences of the technologies we use every day.
I’m also influenced by the artists I’ve had the privilege of working with over the years, including Trevor Paglen, Vladan Joler, and Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Vladan and I collaborated on Anatomy of an AI System a few years ago, and he designed the cover and illustrations in Atlas of AI, which I love.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
This may not be the most practical choice, but I’d open a library for rare and antiquarian books near Mono Lake. I’d call it Labyrinths, after Borges’ infinite library of volumes. One of its treasures would be a copy of John Wilkins’ An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), where Wilkins tries to create a classification scheme for every possible thing and notion in the universe. It would be a cryptic joke for the occasional passer-by.
5 Questions with Sesshu Foster, Co-Author of ELADATL
Sesshu Foster taught composition and literature in East L.A. for over 20 years, and at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work is published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. His most book recent is ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines, co-authored with Arturo Ernesto Romo and published by City Lights. His other books include City of the Future, World Ball Notebook, and Atomik Aztex.
Sesshu and Arturo are in conversation with Carribean Fragoza celebrating the book launch of ELADATL in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Tuesday, April 27
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Where are you writing to us from?
I’m writing you from Tongva land, facing east over the San Gabriel Valley, east of the L.A. River.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
Same things as always—my family, friends, and people. Poetry and books. I’m grateful for all you folks doing what you do best. I only do good if other people are doing well. And we’re always walking and hiking. Yesterday we hiked to Owen Brown’s gravesite on a hilltop in the San Gabriel Mountains. Owen Brown, son of John Brown, was one of the only survivors of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. He and his brother Jason kept a low profile after the Civil War as sheepherders, living in a mountain cabin. When he died in Pasadena in 1889, two thousand people attended his funeral. His tombstone was stolen once, recovered and is temporarily replaced by peeling plywood signs. But his bones are there.
What are 3 books you always recommend to people?
One size doesn’t fit all. For four year olds and their parents, I might recommend Niño Wrestles the World by Yuyi Morales. For hungry intellectuals and young writers, I could recommend Compression & Purity by Will Alexander. For people who don’t know them, what about America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan, or the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman?
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
I like the University of California edition of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. The nautical illustrations by Barry Moser (page 74 includes a diagram of sections of a whaling ship, page 106 presents a “windlass turned by handspikes” for the reader who lacks a mental image of a windlass, page 147 depicts porpoises referred to in the text, etc.) which are helpful to the 21st century landlocked reader. Some features of ELADATL are analogous to these. Of course, airships are analogous to sailing ships, which are themselves also metaphorical.
Of course, the main influence on ELADATL is the work of my collaborator, artist Arturo Ernesto Romo, whose ideas of folding (prismatic or origami-like), resistance or interruption, and the active participation of the viewer (or, in this case the reader) format the structure of this narrative. Also present, folded into and prismatically reflecting the narrative are images and art work by Arturo Romo. Arturo told me that his illustrations that grace each chapter were influenced by Hugo Gellert, and I know the collaborative practice of public performances Arturo and I did—-and our community-based aesthetics, which is refracted in ELADATL—-have been influenced by the Chicano collective Asco (Harry Gamboa, Gronk Nicandro, Patssi Valdez, Willie Herrón and others). As well as by the muralists of East L.A. and other artists of the Chicano movement.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
You know, I don’t want to touch this question. I’m already found mostly inside books I’ve written. I’d be frightened of having my own bookstore, I might wander into the stacks of my own bookstore and never be seen again. Even though Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Larry McMurtry did it! Recently I was in Bellingham, Washington state, and found the Alternative Library, co-founded 14 years ago as a free anarchist lending library, by “Future” (he told me his name was, as he welcomed a new volunteer starting her first day). Santa Ana writer Sarah Rafael Garcia stocks several “Libromobile” book carts around Orange County in Southern California, which gives me the desire to take that idea on the road, with a step van full of books I’d drive to places like the Coachella Valley, or anywhere where people—especially kids—need books. There’s a lot of book deserts. I don’t know what I’d call it. I’d call it all kinds of names if it broke down and didn’t make it to the next place. The best seller? Everyone Poops by Taro Gomi? Niño Wrestles the World by Yuyi Morales? Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown? Make them readers and let the kids decide.
5 Questions with Mira Sethi, Author of Are You Enjoying?
Mira Sethi is an actor and a writer. She grew up in Lahore and attended Wellesley College, after which Sethi worked as a books editor at The Wall Street Journal. She has written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. Sethi regularly appears in mainstream Pakistani drama series on television. She lives in Lahore, Karachi, and San Francisco.
Mira is celebrating her new book published Knopf, Are You Enjoying?, with special guest Miranda Popkey in our City Lights LIVE virtual event series on Thursday, April 22, at 6PM PT.
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Where are you writing to us from?
San Francisco.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
Tennis, my two pugs, lots of chai.
What are 3 books you always recommend to people?
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
I love the work of British novelist Alan Hollinghurst. He’s a superb noticer: of moods, faces, quivers, secret anticipations, the thwarting of said secret anticipations, the unspooling of a thought, things left unsaid, trees, skies, class dynamics. He’s also insanely funny.
I love the poetry of Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Faiz’s subjects were love, justice, revolution, and I read him to be rejuvenated.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
It would be in Lahore, it would be called Turn the Page, and our bestseller would be Faiz’s collected poetry.
