In Which We Put You On The Right Literary Track

Summer Reading

by ANDREW ZORNOZA

I'm a habitual self-interlocutor.

Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has been photographing seemingly random swaths of oceanscape since 1972.

In the summer we think more about the sea. What else is there to say? Sugimoto divides the landscape right at the vertical midpoint of his photographs, he provides no focal point—these are compositionally crude, a child's drawing without a boat. The photographs are titled simply: Ligurian Sea. Boden Sea, Ionian Sea, North Atlantic Ocean, etc. . . .

Naming things has something to do with human awareness, with the separation of the entire world from you. So with the Seascapes I was thinking about the most ancient of human impressions. The time when man first named the world around him, the Sea…[the Seascapes] all look alike, but they are located at different places in different countries, and the oceans have different names.

But the seas do not all look alike. There is no need for a focal point because none exists. Any part of the sea is as good another to lose yourself in. All that remains the same is Sugimoto's perspective, the viewing angle, the perceived height of the vantage point.

Sugimoto uses an 19^th century large-format cabinet camera. The 8 x 10 negatives are easily scarred by static electricity; the ASA speed of the film is tortuously slow.

...but personally I was also concerned with the quality of the photography, traditional professional photography. I didn't want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art - I still see this.

The shutter opens, the sea enters: despite their detail, each image has compressed time, each incorporates a spool of motion into its present tense. Buy it here.

If you are not indoors for the summer, here are some more seas in motion—appropriately pondered from a beach towel:

Self-Portrait with Beach, Frederic Tuten

The beach, the sea, the blue umbrellas. A sail. Then another, like a long arm climbing the horizon. She stretched out on a blanket beside me in the dreadful hot sand.

Tuten, a generous boulevardier and elder statesman of the avant-garde has quietly been assembling a series of self-portraits. Tuten's stories are tender, with an oddly refreshing touch of narcissism thrown in. And always beautifully written. The author's Self-Portrait with Icebergs also makes excellent summer reading, despite the title.

Goodbye My Brother, John Cheever

A must read for anyone trapped on a family vacation — especially those take the extra minute to make sure they have Vampire Weekend on their iPod before they leave for the Cape. First time readers generally sympathize with the narrator and loathe the dour brother, Lawrence. Those who re-read start to see holes in the narrator's story and begin to loathe the unnamed narrator. Those who reread over and over say fuck it and hate Lawrence anyway. Similar to Sam Shepard's True West, and arguably like any brother narrative, this one flirts with schizophrenia. Neither character is real, only Cheever says Thallasa, thallasa and gets away with it. When the women walk naked and unshy out of the sea — all this is playing out inside one bifurcated mind.

The Man Who Lost the Sea, Theodore Sturgeon

The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a combination time-piece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, 'Don't move, boy. You've got the bends. Don't even try to move.' He had tried anyway.

Thomas Sturgeon is undoubtedly an acquired taste, but so is life. Too pulpy for the literati, too silly for those who thought they knew better (with titles like The [Widget] The [Wadget] and Boff; and "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" who can blame them), Sturgeon is perfect for the beach. If you like the above which you can read here , find “Slow Sculpture.” The latter story contains one of the most imaginative most heartbreaking leaps in all literature with the words: "Come up to the house and I'll fix it."

The Terminal Beach, JG Ballard

Above him, along the crests of the dunes, the tall palms leaned into the dim air like the symbols of a cryptic alphabet. The landscape of the island was covered by strange ciphers.

It is sad that so many young experimentalists of today have fallen under the spell of Barthelme. Ten years ago, it seemed there were many other paths to follow. Calvino, Acker, Ballard.... Now that he is dead, people will miss him.

Some Clouds, Paco Ignacio Taibo II

He was sitting in the last chair under the last lonely palm tree, drinking beer out of a bottle and cleaning the sand off a pile of small shells..."

So opens this Taibo novel, with one-eyed Hector Belascoaran Shayne downing Coronas and waiting for his sister to arrive and shake him out of his torpor.

Belascoaran is one of the great characters in all modern fiction. Too bad, the author, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, is woefully unappreciated here in the United States. Taibo's Belascoaran novels have the proper blend of sex, drama and hijinks to make the hours disappear and spin the mind into a blissfully woozy state of vicarious carpet riding. The gimpy, one-eyed Belascoaran is an aficianodo of carbonated beverages, has an urban geographer's love for "The Monster" (Mexico City) and — pre-craigslist — practically lives in his "office": a rented desk in a room shared with a plumber, an upholster and a sewage engineer. Highly recommended.

Also:

To The Lighthouse, Virgina Woolf

The Tempest, William Shakespeare

The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares

Andrew Zornoza is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find his website here. You can purchase his new book, Where I Stay, here.

"Stopover Bombay" - Alice Coltrane (mp3)

"Shiva-Loka" - Alice Coltrane (mp3)

"Journey in Satchidanada" - Alice Coltrane (mp3) highly recommended

In Which We Enter The Zone

"One More Thing"

by ANDREW ZORNOZA

Last weekend, Zack Kushner climbed the mountain of life and stood at the top. His crossword puzzle, "One More Thing," appeared in the NYT: the Sunday edition. How did he get there? What follows is an interview with Mr. Kushner. . . .

Really a fun puzzle Zack. Are you a cruciverbalist, constructor or other?

Thanks. I'm going to go with cruciverbalist, but they're really the same thing. Cruciverbalist just sounds better at parties. According to the definition, anyone who "enjoys crosswords" is a cruciverbalist, but in its normal usage (as if anyone uses the word normally) it means a constructor of crossword puzzles, or more literally, a "crosser of words."

How does it feel knowing that thousands of people all across the globe are poring over your work?

Odd. To be honest, it hasn't really sunk in yet. It was such a long journey to get this puzzle published that having it actually sitting in front of me in the Sunday Magazine is just, well, odd. Also, being in Australia, most of the reactions are coming from far away. I don't have much chance of seeing someone at the next table working on it. I started constructing with the goal of publishing a Sunday Times crossword, and now I've done it. I suppose I'll have to find a new goal, now...

Many writers feel the pull of their profession at a young age. Of course, we all start as readers. How did the transformation from solver to creator happen to you?

With love, of course! I'd been solving puzzles for a long time, but the first puzzle I ever constructed was for my then-girlfriend, now-wife. It was an interesting experience sitting on the other side of the desk, but not one I immediately found addictive. My favorite clue/answer was: "The worst kind of souvenir? / EBOLA". It wasn't until Wordplay came out in '06 that I got it into my head to create a puzzle I could sell. It took me a year of hacking around until I really got the basics of cruciverbalism and another year until I put together a puzzle that met the NY Times standards.

Can you give us some idea of your journey to the New York Times?

Outside of the puzzle I just mentioned, my next attempt was pretty ghastly. I tried to do a rebus puzzle using Greek letters. I wasn't quite clear on all the rules of puzzle making and ended up with something that was unprofessional at best. Too many black squares, bad "fill" (the words in the puzzle that aren't theme answers), etc. It was only after I finished it that I saw how unacceptable it was and so I shelved it and started again. My next attempt wasn't as shoddy, a puzzle that included the names of the Rat Pack in the theme answers (i.e. SITS IN A TRANCE). This one I actually sent in, waited a few months, then got the rejection email. In retrospect, my theme answers weren't quality; while SITS IN A TRANCE makes sense, it's not really "in the language." If it's not a recognizable phrase, it won't please editors. FALLS IN A TRANCE, for example, would be better, but still not as good as FALLS INTO A TRANCE. Try doing a Google search of all three terms in quotes and you'll see what I mean. The more hits returned, the more common the phrase, the more "in the language."

Sometime around this point, I realized I was an idiot for not using the specialized software available to cruciverbalists. Software that helps you create a grid, keep symmetry, clue, and most importantly, fill. I use Crossword Compiler but there are others. I also joined the cruciverb.com mailing list and started to soak up the knowledge.

Two years after first having a real go, I met with success. I've sold three puzzles so far: one to the LA Times, one to Simon & Schuster for Mega Crosswords 8, and this one to the NY Times.I'm securely in the novice-professional category. All are Sunday puzzles, which means they're 21x21 instead of the weekday normal 15x15.

You've mentioned your Grandfather as an early influence. He would certainly be proud.

I used to watch him do the Times puzzles in ink, and that always impressed me. It's hard to imagine how he would have reacted to seeing my puzzle in the Sunday Times. He was a quiet man, not overly affectionate. He probably would have made a few jokes about it, hugged me, and told everyone he met on the street.

How much of a personal expression is a single puzzle? Can you bend the clues to express more than a simple theme? Or does the puzzle have a mind of its own?

The way that a puzzle shows its personality is in the theme answers/clues and in the words you choose for the fill. For example, I liked the word CARJACK and worked to keep that in the fill. Someone else might have liked the name of an opera star or a baseball player. While the clues you choose do reflect your personality, it's important to remember that the editor will change a mess of them. In my Times puzzle, the editor changed about half my clues including a bunch of theme clues.

Can you take me through some of these? How about 23 Across: Rachael Ray activity eliciting oohs and aahs?

I got some grief in the crossword puzzle blogs for this clue, even though it wasn't one I wrote. My original clue was "Thrilling grilling?" Apparently people aren't too fond of Rachael Ray, but I've no idea who she is...

30 Across: Pantywaist

WUSS just sort of fit the bill in this corner. My original clue was "97-pound weakling."

45 Across: Spacesuit worry

I liked this one too. Finally one of my original clues! TEAR can mean so many things and cluing a word like that is sometimes dull. You end up choosing between one of 100 standard clues (there's a database of clues that have been published which you can pull from). In this case, I had a bit of brainstorm and found an original way to clue a standard word.

38 Down: "I don't get no respect" to Rodney Dangerfield

A fun answer. A nice Yiddish word to get in the puzzle!

above, the novice-professional Cruciverbalist soaking up the knowledge

Will Shortz has said his favorite crossword clue of all-time is "it might turn into a different story." The answer being "SPIRALSTAIRCASE.” Your favorite all-time clue?

Well, I certainly haven't seen all of them, but one I recall is "Pole vault units" / ZLOTYS. I like the fun wordplay there. It's the same kind of thing I was trying to do with "Ones concealing their aims" / SNIPERS.

You live in Australia. I was told that Aussie children wear ice-cream containers on their heads to protect themselves from the attacks of magpies. True?

Hah! I haven't seen that, but I'd believe it. My wife says as a child she used to have to carry an umbrella to protect herself from dive-bombing birds.

Any taboos in your puzzle making?

Nope. I try to avoid crappy fill, like all cruciverbalists, but constructing a puzzle is very difficult and I've always been stuck with one or two words I wish I could have avoided (like REGRAB, ugh).

Last question. Scrabble. Are you formidable?

It's all relative, I guess. I play a bunch and I'm good, but I'm not competitive and haven't memorized all those weird words one needs to be a true Scrabble ninja.

I prefer to have fun with it.

Zack Kushner is a transplanted American in Oz. When he is not creating puzzles for the enjoyment of thousands, he pilots the helm of xZackly Copywriting.

Andrew Zornoza is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is the author of the photo-novel "Where I Stay," (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2009). His stories have been published in Confrontation, Porcupine Literary Arts, Capgun, SleepingFish and elsewhere, with work forthcoming in Gastronomica and H.O.W. His latest story is available here. You can e-mail him at azornoza at gmail.com. He lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

"At The Door" — Chromatics (mp3)

"Hands in the Dark" — Chromatics (mp3)

"Date With A Vocoder (demo)" — Chromatics (mp3)

"Birds of Paradise (demo)" — Chromatics (mp3)

Download their tour-only CD-Rs here as one file

In Which We Hope You Enjoy Your Stay

"The Theatre of All of My Struggles And Ideas. . . ."

by ANDREW ZORNOZA

Hotel Theory
by Wayne Koestenbaum
Soft Skull Press

—A communication from a hotel comes from nowhere. The letterhead deceives. . . .

The record for most stolen bases in a season by a pitcher is nine, accomplished by Winifred Mercer in 1900.

Win's popularity with female fans convinced the Washington Senators' general manager to pitch him on Tuesdays and Fridays, stadium designated “Ladies' Nights.” After the umpire ejected Win from one such game, women stormed the field, attacked the umpire, and broke windows and seats in frustration. Three years later, Win checked into the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco, California. And wrote the following on the hotel's stationary: “A word to friends: beware of women and a game of chance." He then killed himself.

About the Occidental Hotel: it is where the first Martini (then called a Martinez) was poured. And, also, coincidentally, where Mark Twain sat alone, on his hotel room bed in 1866. Contemplating suicide. “Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed, but I was never ashamed of having tried,” wrote Twain.

Wayne Koestenbaum's latest book is about hotels.

“I masticate literature that values smallness—a world quashing retreat to the infantile—and that stops short of suicide on a ledge called hotel.”

Told in columns of text, Hotel Theory has two narratives competing for your attention (for fontophiles, one in Pica, the other in Times New Roman).

Column one is a meditation on books, writers, philosophy, and movies, all filtered through an obsession with hotels and Heidegger. Column two concerns a largely naked Liberace and an infinitesimally more prudish Lana Turner.

The non-fiction oriented column one takes on a host of luminaries: Henry James, Joan Didion, Hemingway, Tanizaki, Sebald, Jean Rhys, Edward Hopper, Denis Johnson, Charles Simic, the Marx Brothers, William Hazlitt, John Malkovich, Richard Strauss, Paul Auster, Greta Garbo, Edith Wharton, and James Baldwin.

Lana Turner has collapsed

All analysis is bent through the prism of “hotel theory.” Here, Apollinaire:

The hotel resident—Guillaume, male—spins like a dreidl going nowhere manically in the room's mourning embrace (“Je tourne en route / Comme un toton”). A sour smell of British Tobacco from the next room carries into Guillaume's chamber. The hotel fosters a chaotic plurality of languages, all babbling together (“Et tout” ensemble / Dans cet hotel / Savone is langue / Comme a Babel”). The hotel room plays host to ostracized masturbators, each resident affixed to a grindstone of solitary love (“Chacun apporte / Son seul amor”). The hotel absorbs street noise (“Le Bruit des fiacres”) and ugly neighbors (“Mon voison laid”): no escaping the filth. Apollinaire's hotel, legs spread open, typifies a sordid, familiar condition.

Almost all of Koestenbaum's passages on Chopin are startling in their clarity and insight:

TOWARD A HOTEL-ANALYSIS OF CHOPIN NOCTURNE #3 AND SCHERZO #1

A hotel analysis will notice that in the nocturne (Opus 9, No. 3), a melancholy and nostalgic (but not quiet) passage plays host to a tempestuous (minor-key) passage, and that in the scherzo (Opus 20), an angry frame (oft-repeated) extends welcome to a sweet-tempered (major-key) interior. Chopin tampers with host/guest relations. Nostalgia hosts (or buries) a tempest; anger (virtuosity, puissance) hosts a backward-looking guest, improperly curious about the past.

Hotels raise but cannot settle the question of anterior.

Although this prose may sound painfully intellectual . . . play the Chopin concurrently and you will be amazed.

Chopin

Column one makes the book. Kostenbaum deftly moves between high and low brow—and it's amazing how astute and far-ranging his observations can be. His monomaniacal obsessions with hotels seem to bring more to the table in the discussion of Elizabeth Bishop and Tennessee Williams than an entire heap of critical journals. The same with obscure contemporary artists like Martin Kippenberger and Stephen Lapthisophon: you don't even have to see the art to be engaged by his analysis.

The thread of thoughts on hotels gives us a line to hold on to when following Koestenbaum's tricky path. And because of their brevity and wit, these bits of skewed criticism move quickly despite their density. There are some missteps: a long section on Jean Rhys strains to justify its inclusion and a section on murdered NY Times reporter Stephen Vincent is wrenchingly sad, but out of place.

Out of place. . . .Despite the difference in content, column "two" manages to keep the similarly stilted language of its non-fiction neighbor (the book is written in Hotel Language—it's never quite at home), but it has some distinctive handicaps.

First, its major mouthpieces are Liberace and Lana Turner; second, Kostenbaum has managed to write the entire sequence without any indefinite or definite articles. All 'a's,' 'an's,' and 'the's,' are missing from the text. This stinks of gimmickry, but the effect is almost unnoticeable—and does nothing but speed up what can sometimes be a slow read.

Not slow here however:

Talk of schizophrenia made Liberace hard. He turned over on his stomach and rubbed tanning lotion on his buttocks. He reminded himself to shave them tonight. Hotel Languor was no excuse to let personal grooming slide.

Nor here—Lana and Liberace (wearing Jams) sunbathing on the roof of Hotel Women:

“I'm going to move my armchair to face you,” said Lana.
She groaned as she shifted its green bulk. Liberace inconspicuously fingered his nipples.

“You're cute,” said Lana.
“Thanks,” said Liberace. “So are you.”
“Why aren't you naked?”
“To exercise self-control.”
“Are you stoned?”
“Yes,” said Liberace.
“I like you stoned.”

The little bits of slapstick and witty repartee between Liberace and Lana are good for a healthy smattering of chuckles. Liberace is hilariously bifurcated, one minute he is calm and implacable, the next he seems ready to thrash about in his own skin. Lana is a transparent headcase much of the time--but can be as impenetrable as a stone. A small roster of minor characters occasionally break the focus away from these two stars. Whitehead, the hotel manager, and Lana's mother, Mildred, provide some comic relief and are timely, autonomous, and unpredictable in their minor roles.

Unfortunately, some later sections sag, when Liberace's family (determinedly uninteresting) arrive and Koestenbaum takes us through some tired bouts of cold war paranoia (Lana and Liberace almost consummate in the hotel's bunker).

Koestenbaum

Koestenbaum smartly steers us away from delving too far into Liberace's homosexuality (he always denied it - oh no you didn't!) or the real-life crime case of Lana Turner and her lover Johnny Stompanato. Echoes of these events beat underneath the narrative, but Koestenbaum never makes them the focus. Just as he displaces a multitude of cultural elements by taking them out of their context, he de-glitters Lana and Liberace in the most discomfiting way — he turns them into hotel intellectuals.

A genre is a hotel in which other hotels stay for the night.

Context is a lot of what Hotel Theory is about. The neatest trick of the book is its almanac-like assemblage of material. Walter Benjamin, the German cultural critic, is mentioned several times. Although the author sets Heidegger's “In Being” as a cornerstone for Hotel Theory, it is Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project that is Koestenbaum's most direct antecedent.

These notes devoted to the Paris Arcades were begun under an open sky of cloudless blue that arched above the foliage; and yet—owing to the millions of leaves that were visited by the breeze of diligence, the stentorous breath of the researcher, the storm of youthful zeal, and the idle wind of curiosity—they've been covered with the dust of centuries. For the painted sky of summer that looks down from the arcades in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris has spread out over them its dreamy, unlit ceiling.

Reading room of the Bibliotheque NationaleMore Benjamin, sounding stuck in Hotel Malaise:

"the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets" in an anamnestic intoxication . . . feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge—indeed, of dead facts—as something experienced and lived through."

Walt Benjamin

Walter's beautiful sprawling work of more than 1000 pages has been recreated by historians who have unearthed earlier versions (the last known draft was destroyed by the author).

Ostensibly its only subject is the outdoor malls of Paris. Yet Benjamin blends in hundreds of precariously tangential and extensive quotations from other writers, as well as his own notes, criticism and observations. All assembled into a mosaic that he called: “The theater of all of my struggles and ideas.”

Benjamin found a way to sublimate himself into the world surrounding him by pulling himself through the needle of one question: Why did he love the arcades?

David Markson does the same, in his recent books, bombarding us with facts about artists. Buried in all that collaged text lurks a shape. A shadow struggling out from under an emotion.

Kostenbaum's narrator goes one step further, sublimating himself not into things, but into a state, into a mode of consciousness that is never fully at home.

Every item checking into Hotel Theory goes through the wringer of Koestenbaum, everything is rendered transitory, uncomfortable, strangely familiar, anonymous, spoiled, confused, discomfited. It's not a pleasant place to be, really. There is a whisper of a plot near the book's end, but it's just a small joke.

Neither theory (column 1) or narrative (column 2) are able to answer the riddle of Hotel-being. It's a well-earned victory that there is no overt overlap between the two sections. Convergence would be too neat. What lies between the columns is up to you.

Note that Walter Benjamin was found dead in a hotel: Room No. 4 of the Hotel de Francia, just across the Spanish border into Catalonia.

This was in 1940, and he was certain of being captured by the Gestapo.

He swallowed a massive dose of morphine.

Andrew Zornoza is the senior contributor to This Recording. He lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. His photo-novel "Where I Stay," is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press. You can e-mail him at azornoza at gmail.com.

"Actress" - Muller and Patton (mp3)

"Taking Care" - Muller and Patton (mp3)

"American Daughter" - Muller and Patton (mp3)

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