The Believer Logger

John Irving and I began our interview in a bathroom. It was a humid afternoon last May at a hotel in London. When I arrived, CNN was making a short documentary in Irving’s hotel room, delaying the interview half an hour. As I made my way into his room, the television crew were lugging their equipment out into the corridor. I stood in the narrow space between the bedroom and the living area, where Irving stood drinking a cup of tea.

“If you want more tea, you’re gonna have to go downstairs and get another cup, I’m afraid. There is none left,” Irving said, matter-of-factly.

He was dressed in a black shell tracksuit, a pair of white sneakers, and appeared as if he was getting ready to partake in an afternoon wrestling match. When I glanced back at him, he was standing directly in front of a mirror, watching himself drink tea, occasionally pausing to grab a cookie. Then he turned to me.

“Ever see the crazy things they have for the showers in these hotel rooms? What do you make of that, eh?” He walked into the bathroom, placing his hand firmly on the panel of white plastic that functioned as the shower door.

“You think they would just put a normal shower curtain in,” I said, uncertain as to whether I should follow him into the bathroom or shout my opinion from outside the door.

“I know, right! That’s exactly what I was thinking,” he replied, laughing.

I first came in contact with the world of John Irving eight years ago. It was a muggy night in an overcrowded train station in Varanasi. The train had been delayed twelve hours, and the only way to distract myself from the ensuing chaos was to leap into the New Hampshire world of baseball, magic, and divine intervention.

I was reading A Prayer for Owen Meany, a novel that is essentially about the loss of childhood. That first time I read it, I had misunderstood, thinking that Irving was a religious man. Then, later, when I realised it was actually about Irving’s lack of faith, the subject matter seemed even more poignant to me. When I boarded the train, I had a forty-four hour journey ahead of me, but with Owen Meany in my backpack, I didn’t care.

Eight years later, in a five-star-hotel bathroom, I suddenly wanted to reveal to Irving all the sentimental crap about what his book had meant to me on my travels around India as a naïve 21-year-old. Instead, I just nodded in agreement about how the standard shower curtain certainly seemed a more appropriate finish for this particular bathtub.

We finally moved into the living area, where Irving produced a copy of his latest novel, In One Person. It’s narrated by Billy Abbot, a bisexual writer who recalls coming of age in a small New England town in the 1950s. A thoughtful, tormented teenager, Billy takes a fancy to various people, including his stepfather, his friend’s mother, the captain of the school wrestling team, and the local librarian. The mood of the latter half of the book darkens when Billy moves to New York in the 1980s and witnesses the tragic fallout of the AIDS epidemic. - JP O’Malley

THE BELIEVER: What interested you about giving voice to a bisexual male in the character of Billy in this novel?

JOHN IRVING: I think there is often a kind of “what if” proposition that gets me thinking about a novel. If one thinks about A Prayer For Owen Meany, the big what if of that novel was what would it take to make a believer out of a non-religious person – out of me, because I’m not – and the answer to that is, a lot. I would need to be a witness to someone like Owen Meany. The premise of that novel is, the guy who is narrating the story is a believer. He believes in God because of his contact with Owen Meany. Honestly, [becoming a religious believer] is a much harder premise to get my imagination around than say, [being] someone is who is comfortable having sex with men and women.

BLVR: I’d like to talk about your own sexual identity as a teenager. Did you ever feel that you might be bisexual yourself?

JI: I think like a lot of boys growing up in the 50s, and 60s, you spent more time imagining having sex, than actually having it. Sex was much more unattainable, therefore more imaginable, than I imagine it is today. There was a period in that time of the old-boys-school-world, where I was frightened of half of my sexual fantasies. I was attracted to my friends’ mothers, sometimes more attracted to my girlfriends’ mothers than I was to my girlfriends. I did have an occasional crush on a boy in the wrestling team, and as it turned out, none of these things happened. I liked girls in my life, and it proceeded in a normal, unchallenged course. But I would assume most people have thought about having sex with people we never come close to having sex with. The idea is there, and the more embarrassing, the more quickly you are to repress it, or, forget that you ever had that thought. But writers don’t do that, writers think, well, what if that really happened? What would that be like?

BLVR: You never met your own father. How did this affect you as a kid growing up? Did it make you turn to inventing things in your life?

JI: I think exactly that, that’s a great way to put it. I mean, I use to tease my mother when I decided that I wanted to be a writer. I used to say, well you know, if you don’t tell me things about who my Dad was, I’m going to just make up things. I would never say that because I didn’t know who my father was, this made me a writer. That’s like a Disney story, or sounds like a cartoon to me. But it didn’t hurt, right? It was kind of terribly useful or constructive as a teenager to be left to my own imagination about who this guy was, because nobody would talk to me about it. In my own life, I have met a couple of half-brothers and sisters I never knew I had, people who had the same father. It turns out there wasn’t anything terrible or undeserving being hidden about him. He sounds like a pretty ordinary good fellow.

BLVR: The first sentence of this novel begins with a line from Dickens. The only other book I can think of that mentions Dickens in the first line, is Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Did this cross your mind at all when you put this line in?

JI: I don’t even remember that there is a Dickens reference in it. Even as a kid I never liked Salinger. I thought that book was disappointing. There was a period of time, when I was a teenager, when it was made difficult for young people to read that book, which of course only made them want to read it. Then, when I did read it, I was totally disappointed.

BLVR: Would it be true in saying that you follow the tradition of the nineteenth century novelist, that you dislike the modernists?

JI: I’ve always just liked the very old stuff. I think it helped that my models have been dead for more than a hundred years. They were safe people to imitate. There was no way I could sound like Dickens or Hardy if I tried. I can’t think in their terms because the language has changed so much. It’s like imitating Shakespeare. You might get close but nobody would know. I liked Sophocles and I liked Shakespeare; the moderns, I didn’t care so much about them.

BLVR: Do you see all of your novels as following in the great tradition of New England writers? I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what writers like Hawthorn, Melville and Emerson bring to your own imagination and intellect?

JI: Well, Emerson isn’t a favourite of mine, but Melville is, he made a huge impact on me, principally Moby Dick, but then the much shorter Billy Bud. Also as a young writer, what Melville said to writers, famously: “Woe to him who seeks to please, rather than appal.” That was so refreshing. That made me feel encouraged in my earliest inclination to write about what I most feared – to write about what you hope never happens to you or anyone you ever love. You don’t so much write about what has happened to you, as what you dread thinking could possibly happen to you or to someone you care deeply about. With In One Person, the AIDS epidemicis sitting there. It’s waiting for these characters. Billy doesn’t know it’s coming, but every reader does. You think, Shit, I’m listening to a guy who is remembering his sexual coming of age, half of his lovers are gay, and somewhere he is going to cross that road. Somewhere he is going to hit that epidemic, and what’s going to happen to half his friends? There is always that element to my books, and that comes from Melville. Everyone who gets on the Pequod knows that Ahab is the disaster waiting to happen. The first time you read that book you think, no don’t go with this crazy guy! You’re going to go with a one legged captain who has it in the for the whale? This is a bad idea!

BLVR: The way you portray the 1980s AIDS epidemic in the book is particularly moving. I wonder could you talk about your own recollection of that period in American society. Was there a distrust of homosexuals, a very conservative, sort of reactionary response to the disease? And what was your impression of how the Reagan Administration responded to the crises? Do you think the government fell short there?

JI: I don’t think short begins to cover it. For seven out of eight years of his presidency, Reagan did not utter the name of the disease. He would not say it. Of course his Administration could have done more. What I think in hindsight is even more incriminating, with Reagan, personally, is that it’s hard to imagine that we ever had a president, or will ever have again, who personally knew as many gay guys as Reagan must have known, because he was in the business. He was in the arts for Christ’s sake. He had to have personally known so many gay guys, and even then, he turns his back. It’s unfathomable. It was a very selective decision not to care. There were people in his Administration, Pat Buchanan etc, who were quick to call this a kind of God-sent judgement, a plague on the evil sinners, that this was a justifiable punishment. That was actually said by people who were in Reagan’s administration, while Reagan maintained a kind of silence. You know, many of my books entail a lot of research. This novel, alas, didn’t require much of that because I knew so much about the early days of the AIDS epidemic in New York. I was living there at the time. It wasn’t hard to remember.

BLVR: Did you have friends close to you who died of AIDS?

JI: I was living in New York in the 80s. Yes, I had friends die, and I also, as a straight guy who had gay friends, had friends that I subsequently found out were gay, because they were dying. I hadn’t known they were gay. Parents found out about their children being gay when they were on deathbeds from AIDS.

BLVR: When you finished The Cider House Rules in 1985, did you feel that you were writing about an issue—abortion—that would be resolved soon?

JI: No, I didn’t feel that way. I thought this is just going to get worse. It’s no surprise to me to find that most people in the US who oppose abortion rights, are the very same people who oppose gay rights issues, too. And it’s coming from the same place. Their attitude is, I don’t like this, therefore it shouldn’t be allowed. I don’t even like thinking about this, therefore it should be stopped. It’s what I call in America “the old Prohibition instinct.” You don’t like drinking, nobody should do it, you don’t like abortion, no one should have one. Prevent and destroy, stop, stop, stop.

BLVR: Of all your novels, the two that are perhaps the most political are A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Cider House Rules. What drove you to write such political novels? And why haven’t you haven’t written returned to writing such a political novel until this one?

JI: Well, you know, I kind of held off on writing this one, too. When I finished The World According to Garp in 1978 I was naïve to think that I would never write about this subject again, that our intolerance of our own sexual differences would surely go away, and that Garp would be seen as a sort of a relic of the-post-sexual-liberation-days, when men and women still literally were killing one another. In The World According To Garp a man is killed by a woman who hates men. His mother is murdered by a man who hates women. It’s a kind of duel sexual assassination story. It’s a pretty cynical way of saying, you think there was a sexual revolution, well how come men and women hate each other? How come that is still happening?

BLVR: But there isn’t anything as extreme in current novel.

JI: True, but it’s still the same damn subject. It’s still about our obstinate intolerance of sexual differences. It’s still about a lingering suspicion, or distrust, or dislike. Billy is a character who thinks, oh, you think you’re tolerant? What about this? Tolerate this. You still think you are tolerant? I remember when I first thought about this book, and thinking, not this again. I was the opposite of elated. I thought, oh, here we go again. This cloud just moved over me again.

When the Believer asked me what could be some good ideas for their Tumblr, I thought, Well, why not ask everyone else for their ideas? Over however long we keep doing this, we will hear from writers, editors, publishers, agents, interns, and PR people, in long and short interviews, usually two at a time. These are all gifted, hard-working folks, and I am happy to ask them for information that you might find useful, helpful, and possibly pleasant. I hope this will provide an interesting resource for writers, though I would be remiss if I did not also direct you to Duotrope, New Pages, Poets and Writers, PEN, and HTMLGiant as sites to check out. Think of this as a kind of conversational space—a safe space, really. It is my honor and you’re welcome.

Love, Nicolle Elizabeth

First up we have friend of the Believer, James Greer. Don’t forget to check out his tour diary, coming in September. You guys know James from Guided By Voices and his new project, Détective, and he is also the retired Senior Editor of Spin magazine and a fiction and screenplay writer (of screenplays such as movies Catherine Zeta Jones stars in). Also, we’re from the same hometown. So I thought: Well, start here.

Nicolle Elizabeth: Hi James, thanks for talking with us. How are you?

James Greer: I’m trying to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and no ice cream and no wine and while I miss ice cream and wine I feel pretty good.

NE: You are a writer as well as a musician and retired editor. Which came first and which one led to which and which and which and which?

JG: I’ve always been a writer. I guess I’ve always been a musician, too, though technically I didn’t start learning music until I was ten or eleven. I learned saxophone first. My dad had a tenor sax from when he was in a Dixieland band in college. I still have it. It was made in 1919 in Elkhart, Indiana. I started editing because Bob Guccione, Jr. hired me to edit Spin magazine after I met him at a party and told him I could edit things. I guess I can be pretty persuasive when I’m drunk since he hired me in the absence of any evidence that I could actually edit anything. 

NE: Would you ever go back to editing?

JG: I’m a terrible editor. I end up just rewriting everything because it’s easier, which is just an awful thing to do to another writer. But sure, if I needed the money and it was the only job I could get. I’m better at editing film than I am at editing writers. You don’t have to talk to film.

NE: How completely different are writing about music and writing fiction? 

JG: Well, both are a form of lying, and with both you have to go to a lot of trouble to say anything new and avoid clichés. So not that different, really. At least the way I do it.

NE: How does one even get into editing?

JG: a) Get drunk. b) Be at a party where Bob Guccione, Jr. is. 

NE: Your recent project, Detective, is putting out a cassette album— is this true? And do you not see how that is completely adorable?

JG: What an adorable question. Also it’s spelled Détective, which is adorable, too. We are putting out a cassette, or rather a label called Burger Records, which specializes in cassette releases, is putting it out. Tapes are cheap to make, so you can sell them for cheap, and a lot of kids have cassette players in their cars because they can only afford old cars. I have a cassette player in my car. For instance. Also in my house, but that’s because I’m old.

NE: What advice do you have for musicians who are thinking about writing?

JG: Only do it if you have to, by which I mean if your drive to write is so strong you think you might die if you don’t. Never do it just because you want to, or for the money. There’s nothing wrong with getting paid for writing (should you be so lucky), but that shouldn’t ever be your goal. Whenever you start thinking about the commercial potential of anything you do, global warming happens. Fact.

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Giancarlo DiTrapano writes for Vice. He is a contributor to the Paris Review and many fine, fine places, and the editor and publisher of Tyrant magazine and Tyrant Books. Tyrant is known as publishing some of the strongest voices in indie lit. Something I really appreciate in Gian is that he always seems to be getting either in trouble or fired from places, and he gets right back up. (@nytyrant)

Nicolle Elizabeth: What is Tyrant Books?

Giancarlo DiTrapano: Tyrant Books is the book arm of my literary magazine, New York Tyrant. First it was a lit mag, and it still is, but I also started publishing whole entire books, by like: Brian Evenson, Eugene Marten, Michael Kimball, Atticus Lish. And will soon publish Blake Butler, Sam Michel, Scott McClanahan, Ken Baumann, and Marie Calloway. 

Tyrant is also what I have put a good share of my time and money into over the past few years. I have made and lost many friends because of Tyrant. I have bent this great country’s laws for Tyrant. I have risked acquiring STDs by volunteering my own body for the good of the lit venture. I have stayed out way too late, way too many nights, head on the bar, with awful, awful people, for the good of the Tyrant. I’ve had way too many conversations standing over a filthy bar toilet for the Tyrant. To what end? Who else does this? No one does this. This is a strange thing to say, but I feel like I am constantly putting my neck out for very little reward. That’s not totally true. I guess there is some reward. But I’m still just going broke over here, spiritually as well as walletably.

At any rate, Tyrant is a deep devotion.

NE: How did Tyrant Books begin?

GDT: Tyrant Books is an extension of New York Tyrant, a tumor on top of a tumor that grew naturally. Through the writers of the stories in the magazine, I was introduced to their novel-length manuscripts, so wanted to publish those as well. There is a small responsibility that comes with publishing a collection of twenty stories by twenty different authors, but when you take on a whole entire book by someone, then the deal gets a little more intense. You begin to lose sleep over doing your best for the book. You’ve been entrusted with something that took someone a serious amount of time and grief to produce and, well, there’s just a lot more riding on all of that person’s time and grief, you know? I’ve worried myself through many sleepless nights. I’ve gotten rashes. Lorin Stein gave me some good advice about how to deal with that, though (the worrying, not the rashes). I am greatly indebted to that man, and in a strange way, kind of in love with him.

NE: How long has Tyrant Books been going?

GDT: Couple of years now. A lot of down time in between all of that, though. 

NE: How did Tyrant magazine begin?

GDT: While interning at FSG, before I got fired, I made a couple of friends and we thought it would be fun. I can remember picking up the lit mags from that period and being really depressed about most of them. I had some money, so we offered a prize, placed some ads, got some help/advice from Lish, and next thing I knew we had an issue. A first issue is tough, though. You’re asking someone to submit to something that doesn’t yet exist. Lish was a big help with that. He told us to tell certain writers we wanted that he had sent us and so the stories were proffered with little to no resistance. Very indebted to that man. Richard Nash has also been an indispensable help to Tyrant. So yeah, looks like Lish, Stein, and Nash are my very own trinity of Delphic oracles.

NE: How long has Tyrant magazine been going?

GDT: A couple of years longer than Tyrant Books, because I started the lit mag and then I started doing whole entire books.

NE: What kind of writing is Tyrant interested in?

GDT: This question is so confounding (learned that word from Lord Jim because Marlow says it). I have never been able to explain why I like what I like. I’m no good with talking about writing, and that’s just what this is. I publish stories and books that I like, even love. They feel good to read. Or feel strong to read. I do appreciate it when something has been worked on. I’m not saying if you spend a lot of time on a story that it will be good, but maybe it helps and is a respectable thing to do before making someone try to read it? Anyway, after a while, you can just tell whether any real attempt at beauty has been made on the page with only a simple glance. Like even from across the room, the very shape of the graphs on the page, from too far away to make any wordsense, but close enough to see the shape of the blacks and whites and to know something good in there is stirring around.

NE: Why?

GDT: Why what? Why do I publish what I like? Because why would I do anything else? Why would I publish something I didn’t like? 

NE: What is Tyrant’s stance on literature, as a whole? It’s an easy and simple question, really.

GDT: Our stance? Buffalo.

Or you could say that Tyrant’s stance on literature as a whole is not unlike the stance of a Puerto Rican hooker-boy who is very far from home, nodding out with his face pressed against a bar’s bathroom toilet divider, his hands on his hips, pinga in a glory hole, just wishing that he had a fresh stick of some kind of minty gum to chew on. He smells awful, but has beautiful teeth. He is not “making plans.”

NE: Are Tyrant books/the mag available in print as well as online, and where can one find both and/or either/or?

GDT: The mag is only in print for now. All of our titles from Tyrant Books (besides Baby Leg by Brian Evenson) will soon be available in ebook format as well. 

NE: What are Tyrant’s plans for the future, aside from taking over the world?

GDT: Hopefully, to keep putting out the magazine, and to keep putting out books. Though I don’t see any room for growth. I don’t want things to ever get too loose, you know, so I have to keep it a certain size. With myself as the only constant element, there have been many incarnations of the Tyrant, and many people have come and gone (as I’m sure many more people will continue to come and go). Luke Goebel is responsible for our tenth issue. He guest-edited and handled all the getting of the stories and did an ace of a job. He shot down many great writers to secure such choice content. That’s never a fun or easy thing to do. Rejecting a good-but-not-great story isn’t something that gets easier over time. It was good to hand the entire issue over to Luke because I think when too many people get involved, even more than one, then the work, or vision, or whatever, always gets watered down. Luke alone can put together a better issue than Luke with me. That’s why journals created by an entire committee of editors can seem so washy. A collection of a single person’s choices is more apt to have character and to be more attractive as like, a thing. We’re not stopping yet, are we?

NE: Why does Tyrant publish anything at all? 

GDT: Not to make the world around me more of a world that I would want to live in. Not to make any kind of change at all, because that’s impossible. Not for the money (ha, obvs). Not because I feel the need to do something. Not because I’m any good at it. Not enough people read the shit for there to ever be any great effect (I remember being dumb enough to think that a book could change the world). I guess that there have always been a few people who do really read the stuff and enjoy it, and maybe I do it for them. Like feeding a small group of insects that might be facing extinction? It’s good to keep a portion of the population a little tweaked on fine lit, what with life being so strange and changeful. That small group of people who read the stuff might actually turn out to be a very important part of your immediate society. Or it might not. It probably won’t. It definitely won’t.

NE: What are the responsibilities involved in being a publisher—as in, do you just publish whatever you want or do you consider the readership, etc.?

GDT: I don’t consider the readership. I’m not dumb. If I considered the readership, then I would publish books that I know more readers would love, so more readers would buy the books and I’d get rich as Nazis. I guess some people really do love it, but way more don’t, either by not knowing about it at all (the obvious majority), or by being repulsed by the writing in some way. It wasn’t until the third or fourth issue that someone pointed out to me how dark Tyrant shit is. Not just on the surface, but underneath too. I hadn’t even noticed. But I think there is more dark stuff being written because it’s easier to do. To write a happy and hopeful story is much harder to pull off without sounding like a simp. 

NE: What even is good writing?

GDT: I feel like saying that what I call good writing is just the writing that I like. Though I have in the past, like a lot, and probably still do occasionally, I can’t say what’s good or bad writing. So much depends upon your age and condition and location and the weather at the time of reading something, I think. That’s for most things. Some books are undeniable in any situation. Those are the ones that stand out. But the extent of me talking about writing is usually, “Hey, you read so-and-so? She’s pretty good.” And that’s about all. When people say, “Oh, he’s a great writer, I just don’t enjoy reading him,” it’s like, what in the hell do they even mean? That the syntax is done good? That the punctuation is done real good? That big words are used good? I like things, and I don’t like things. Some things touch me, where others don’t. I’ll tell you that I don’t like something, but I won’t go any further than that anymore, I don’t think. What I truly enjoy are the times when I’m talking with someone and then you both realize that you’ve read a certain book that you both love the hell out of and you just kind of big-eye each other but then don’t say anything else at all. 

NE: Well it’s just that sometimes I think—okay, no, a lot of the time it seems like commercial publishing can be behind the times in a way, which why even is that, and do you think our generation of writers and publishers can change that?

GDT: I intensely believe that most Americans, our immediate and potential audience, are suffering through some kind of dark ages. I am terrified of middle America, but mostly because I can’t carelessly kiss my boyfriend in public there. And if I do kiss him, then I have to worry about someone wanting to fight me. That can certainly add a thrill and make a kiss all the better, but it’s not something one would want to deal with on a daily basis. 

NE: Will asking that ruin my career when people read this?

GDT: Probably.

NE: Why do mean people win?

GDT: They don’t. It just seems like they do. Everyone can be mean. But I think that because a lot of people (like myself) are just really easy to fuck over, and if doing that (fucking them) doesn’t bother you, then the world can be an easy place and you can get where you want to be by screwing over your friends. But if you’re into screwing friends over, then where you’re trying to get to, like the “winning” position or whatever, is probably not a very chill place to be. In fact it’s probably majorly unchill. The most difficult chore is to try and always be fair and mostly kind to others without letting them step on you. I have yet to learn how to do this. I’ve been betrayed and shit on by so many people, people to whom I’ve given over myself completely, that it got so not funny anymore, that it went full circle and became funny again. I can’t help but trust people, and I feel like this is a mistake that I will continue to repeat until I die.

Nicolle Elizabeth is a first-generation college graduate from the middle of nowhere and is a contributor at the Brooklyn Rail, Bomb, and a whole bunch of fine places. She is the poetry editor at Word Riot, also a bike mechanic, and you should follow her on Twitter because she is a cornball: twitter.com/thismighttank.

Believer subscriptions are on sale through the weekend at the McSweeney’s store! 

(That’s an entire year of horrible advice from people like Aubrey Plaza and Louis C.K., monthly columns from Nick Hornby, Daniel Handler, and Greil Marcus, and original essays and interviews by and about people, animals, and things like Jonathan Lethem, beavers in the 18th century, Maurice Sendak, sexy sax solos, Lucinda Williams, and the ideology of beach-house art. You also get CDs [and, occasionally, cassette tapes] of new music, DVDs of new film, and items too strange to be mentioned.) An entire year of all these things, and much more, for less than you spent on fresh-pressed juice last week ($40, to be absolutely clear).

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British people who own cats usually let them outdoors. Americans in the suburbs or in dense urban neighborhoods often keep our cats inside, and if one reason is rabies (the British have none), another might be the New World animals that compete with cats for curb and can space in our yards. There’s the opossum, our most famous marsupial, and the coyote, enabled by reforestation to show up these days in Northeast American yards; most picturesque, and most rascally, is the raccoon, or rather the array of roaming raccoons, since if you’ve seen one—and she’s seen you—you surely have not seen them all. That mask, children note, makes them look rather like eager bandits, but it also does a pretty bad job of concealing their identities: if you’ve got more than one raccoon prowling your garbage, their size, tails, and distinctive motions may let you strike through the mask and tell them apart.

The most important raccoon in literary history almost certainly died in the early 1970s; she, or he, was the McLean, Virginia critter who explored the garbage of the writer James Tiptree, Jr. (real name Alice Sheldon) thoroughly and charmingly enough to give her name to Sheldon’s second pseudonym, Raccoona Sheldon. Raccoona, not Tiptree, got the byline for some of Sheldon’s finest stories, among them the gruesome fable “The Screwfly Solution” (1977), in which men’s inability to separate sexuality from aggression brings about the end of the world. Raccoona, not Tiptree, also wrote the superbly double-edged story “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” (1976), which either envisions a world in which women roam from city to city, alone and unthreatened by men, or announces that such a world cannot be had in our time: the woman who dreams or hallucinates it gets killed.

Those stories should last, but the raccoon behind them is gone now. Raccoons in the wild tend to live just two or three years; in captivity, they can turn thirteen. It’s hard for any merely contemporary raccoon to measure up to that, and certainly the ones in my neighborhood don’t; they jump in and out of our outdoor cans, and do not stand for anything, least of all for writerly scrutiny, whether from me or from Ted Wilson, whose promise to review a raccoon is the proximate cause for the piece you are reading now.

The raccoons that frequent my parents’ place and sort through their garbage in northwest Washington, D.C., however, tell—or at least imply—a different story. If you go to confront them, they squint back at you for a fierce moment before running away. Cute and threatening at the same time, predictable yet alien, they may represent family itself. These big, furry animals, who look but never act huggable, are like the people who have to take you in, the people you somehow haven’t to deserve, to misappropriate Robert Frost. Like family, the raccoons will come back, and back, assertively, whether you like it or not, yet you may never understand what they are thinking; they may never understand you, and (look at that squint again) you may never know if they do. Perhaps they’ve been looking after you, looking out for you, pacing behind you all this time, and you notice it only when you—and they—turn around and look for something to eat.

Moreover, these prowlers of our nation’s capital are not just any raccoons; they are bigger-than-normal, grayer-than-normal raccoons—it’s a beautiful gray, like stormclouds—and they are some of the many raccoons who frequent tree stands and backyards and recycling bins in Washington, D.C. and suburban Maryland, via Rock Creek Park, which has, according to the National Park Service, the highest density of raccoons per acre in the United States. The park, like its raccoons, crosses the District line, and in so doing demonstrates a couple of useful facts about District life.

Like the raccoon, the District of Columbia is black and white in cartoon versions, but rich with tan and brown in real life, though it does have a black and white face. (The D.C. flag even has wide stripes: like tails from raccoons? Or perhaps like raccoons’ broad claws?)

Like raccoons, the District and its institutions—local and national government, and lobbyists, and lots of lawyers—are in one sense scavengers, since they depend on materials (taxes and fees; garbage) brought in from elsewhere, rather than eating directly off the proceeds of heavy industry or agriculture, or things they kill for themselves. As scavengers, they deserve—but may not get—respect.

Like raccoons, local and national government can sometimes poke their noses where they do not belong; and like raccoons, local and national government can be maligned, or ignored, or attacked, in ways that destroy the systems in which they live. If you kill all the scavengers in a forest, the detritus will pile up, choking off more varied growth; if you treat government as a beast to be starved—if you don’t give it the revenue it requires—then garbage may or may not literally pile up in your streets, but you certainly won’t like what happens to your schools.

Thus are the hefty, uncommonly friendly (as long as you keep your distance) raccoons of northwest Washington lessons for all Americans in these taxing—or perhaps insufficiently taxing—times. And yet at least one other aspect makes them peculiarly Washingtonian: like the six hundred thousand-odd human beings who reside in Washington, D.C., the raccoons can visit the Capitol, but they do not get to decide who works there. The 23rd amendment to the Constitution gave D.C. humans a ballot for President; in the House and Senate, however, Washington, D.C. humans, like their procyonid neighbors, still have no vote.

—Stephen Burt

On Thursday night, on the eve of Pussy Riot’s sentencing, I attended a reading in their honor at New York’s Ace Hotel, a free event organized on short notice by JD Samson, of MEN and Le Tigre, and historian Robert Lieber. Although I’m just a lowly archivist moonlighting for the Believer, I was given a press pass, whisked to the front of the line, and sequestered in a sort of VIP holding pen. This only heightened the contrast between the artisanal-boutique ambience of the Ace and the radical actions of the women whose words we’d come to hear. Once we were escorted to the Ace’s basement performance space and seated in our special section, the journalists seemed to take up half the room. Ironically, this privileged spot cut me off from a lot of the background action, which I heard about only later: the open bar, the confused tourists trying to make it past the event’s doorman, and the apparently hundreds of attendees who couldn’t get in. But I had a great view of the MTV newscaster and her cameraman reporting near the stage as we waited in the stifling heat. 

The event began without preface or introduction with Karen Finley’s reading of “Punk Prayer: Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away,” the very song whose performance at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February landed three members of the Pussy Riot collective in jail. The line “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist, become a feminist, become a feminist” elicited the first mass cheer from a largely young, white, female audience, as did all later references to feminism. While Finley’s readings sometimes verged on the parodic, those by Johanna Fateman, Mx Justin Vivian Bond, Eileen Myles, and Masha Gessen captured the earnest quality of much of the writings by the imprisoned Maria Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich. K8 Hardy conveyed the rage and irony of the more-performative pieces, while the night’s most talked-about guest, Chloe Sevigny, limited herself to a single letter from prison.  Despite the heat and the length of the event, the crowd (many standing) was attentive. The texts, which included lyrics, opening statements, and each woman’s closing statement, were a sophisticated mash-up of ideas and ideologies: the most cited source was the Bible, but there were shout-outs to Debord, Montaigne, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Foucault. 

The event’s power lay in its focus on the texts, which provided a corrective to the spectacular tendencies of the trial’s coverage. “Pussy Riot does not want to focus attention on girl’s appearances, but creates characters who express ideas,” read a line from Alekhina; and yet it has been hard not to be seduced by the Riot Grrrl inspired vintage dress/bright tights/balaclava anti-uniform of Pussy Riot. The texts made clear the extent to which the aesthetic package—the outfits and performances—is an actual threat to the Russian political order, as evidenced in selected court statements from the prosecution, including that of a guard whose exposure to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior performance had left him “traumatized.” But this savvily engineered aesthetic cannot be separated from the women’s complex rhetoric. 

As the founder of the Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University’s Fales Library, I see some of the same contradictory complexities in Pussy Riot that characterized the Riot Grrrl movement in the early ‘90s: the vintage, deconstructed, uber-feminine fashion; the deceptively simple musicality; the audacious and intelligent writing; and a feminism that is part and parcel of a larger call for revolution. Like Riot Grrrl, Pussy Riot invokes the slogan “The personal is political,” but the stakes of self-expression are much higher for them. 

The Ace Hotel event was not perfect. Critics objected to the bourgeois setting, the lack of space, and the all-white cast of readers. Some questioned the point of having such a reading, and of other attempts to “bring attention to” Pussy Riot, especially at the expense of other political prisoners both in America and abroad. But I did not take it as primarily a PR stunt. For me, it was a chance to be attentive, to hear the words. In her closing statement, Tolokonnikova stated, “We are here only as decorations, inanimate elements, mere bodies that have been delivered into the courtroom.” To listen to the texts felt like a small gesture to counteract this objectification.

Immediately after the readings, a woman led the audience in a mic check outlining the plans for protest the following day. It felt like most of the audience was ready to take immediate action; in the words of Tolokonnikova, “Philosophers should not merely describe the world, but change it.”

—Lisa Darms

(Photo by Bil McMillian)