v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Soul Evaporations

Vallejo Nocturno 2015 - the lost account

MeatLovers Break

From Esquire:

So you are the barbecue king, the master of meats and flame, the lord of the grill? I, too, once believed these things about myself. And then I had homemade churrasco.

I refer not to the first time I had what passes for Brazilian-style beef at the Mandalay Bay casino in Vegas, as bikinied women danced in cages above our table. (Dancers, it should be noted, perspire--but I digress.) Rather, I'm recalling a beautiful late afternoon this past January on a patio at the foot of the Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro. As we watched tourist helicopters buzz Christ the Redeemer, as little monkeys swung down merrily from the jungle on power lines, as the sun turned Sugar Loaf peak pink and shimmery in the distance, our friend Marcio demonstrated who really knows of beef and fire: Brazilians. When he's not surfing, Marcio spends most weekends there at his girlfriend's father's poolside barbecue, seasoning, skewering, and charring to medium-rare perfection in the style taught by his forefathers. Home churrascarias are everywhere in Brazil and are not all that different from the masonry meat altars that once dotted the backyards of America, but they do have their special features. If it is true barbecue perfection to which you aspire, this is the pyre you must build.

With churrasco, long, flat skewers of food are cooked directly atop a firebox, or on one of three pairs of horizontal stainless-steel rods above it. The first row of rods is for high-heat searing, the second for gentler cooking, the upper for keeping food warm. Marcio begins by lighting a bagful of natural charcoal, preferably the traditional eucalyptus. When the coals are covered in white ash, he places skewers of pork sausage directly atop the box, where they brown and burst and drip fat onto the coals, which fuels the fire and flavors the smoke. Then, the beef: The Brazilians enjoy most parts of their fine cattle, but the most famous, flavorful, and classic is the cut called picanha, which comes from the sirloin American butchers typically slice into steaks. In Brazil, this glistening slab is cut into three thick pieces with a generous layer of white fat on one side and threaded onto skewers in a C shape with the fat on the outside to baste the meat during cooking. In the gaucho tradition of simplicity, the meat is seasoned with nothing but a good rub of rock salt and then basted with a saltwater solution during cooking; Marcio does this using a handful of fresh cilantro as a brush. And then, at exactly the right time, he takes the swords off the fire and cuts thin, perfect slices onto each diner's plate. To which we aficionados of the good old American barbecue kettle can only say, humbly, ravenously, obrigado.

Transcedental Murder

Another enlightening but difficult true story about the native influence of hallucinogenics in the life of everyday people and their positive and negative influences. Financial Times gets extra points for putting so much effort in this tale from Brasil.

From this Saturday's Financial Times:

So this is what the murder scene looks like. There, on the sun-dappled driveway, is where the shots were fired; here, at the top of the hill with its astonishing view of São Paulo, is the mausoleum where the bodies, currently in a public burial ground, will one day be laid; there, just beyond the children playing football on the lawn, is the murdered artist’s studio, since closed; and here, at the edge of the property, lies his church, still very much open. Beatriz, his widow, shows me all this when I visit her one day, and as we enter her house she stops by a giant poster hung on the patio wall. Two words are stencilled across it: “Glauco Vive!”

Glauco Villas Boas and his son Raoni, a university student, were shot and killed in their house at Osasco, a suburb of São Paulo, on March 12 2010. Glauco, 53, was one of Brazil’s best-known cartoonists. Lesser known, at first, was also his i­ridescent inner life as the leader of the Céu de Maria church, part of the Santo Daime congregation that treats ayahuasca, a psychedelic Amazonian brew, as a sacrament. Charged with the murder was Carlos Eduardo Sundfeld Nunes, known as Cadu. A troubled young man from an upper-class Brazilian family, Cadu, then 24, had joined the religious rituals directed by Glauco in search of relief and healing from his problems of drug abuse.

The story of Glauco’s murder had anchored itself in my mind when I first stumbled across it, and I had not been able to let it go. In part, my interest stemmed from Glauco’s fame. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s then-president, spoke of his great sadness and the “tremendous loss” of this “great chronicler of Brazilian society” when he learnt of Glauco’s death. More than 1,000 people attended the funeral, Beatriz told me.

But in large part my morbid interest in Glauco’s death stemmed from its ambiguous context (why had a friend shot him?), the role of the ayahuasca tea that Glauco administered as part of his faith and, in particular, the tea’s growing popularity outside Brazil. In the US and Europe, interest in ayahuasca has soared of late, creating a subculture of New Age spiritual seekers — and a following among not a few millionaire environmentalists. As a writer for The New York Times style section noted recently, it has become “exceedingly trendy”, a salve for those seeking dream-time in a world increasingly dominated by screen-time.

Among public figures, Isabel Allende, the Chilean novelist, has said ayahuasca helped her conquer writer’s block. Sting, the musician, and Oliver Stone, the film-maker, have made similar claims. Jeffrey Bronfman, a descendent of the family that founded the Seagram brewing empire, leads an ayahuasca church out of Santa Fe, New Mexico. “The tea is really an instrument to help us get in touch with our own spiritual nature,” he told US National Public Radio in 2013. When Kira Salak, a National Geographic reporter, described how an ayahuasca healing session in Peru cured her of a life-long depression, the article became the most read in the magazine’s online history.

There have been many other reports of mental and physical healing following ayahuasca ceremonies, as well as occasional stories of delusion, cultism and worse. Early last year, Henry Miller, a 19-year-old Briton, died after apparently taking part in a shamanic ayahuasca ritual in Colombia — a terrible accident which played in the British press as a cautionary tale of a gap-year adventure that went horribly wrong. And then there is Glauco’s story, largely unreported outside Brazil, although it is one of the most curious cases of them all.

When Glauco was shot, the news spread like wildfire across the Brazilian media. Commentators bewailed the death of a man whose bawdy cartoon characters had become embedded in the Brazilian psyche in much the same way that Charles M Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon strip defined the popular culture of a generation in the US.

“His drawings were very simple, almost 2D, like puppet theatre,” said Laerte Coutinho, a celebrated cartoonist and one of Glauco’s longtime collaborators. “They were also unique. Anyone could imitate his simple style but not his ideas. He was inspired.”

Amid the mourning that immediately followed Glauco’s murder — Folha de São Paulo, the national newspaper that published his work, left only white space where its cartoons normally appeared — news coverage at first maintained a respectful attitude towards ayahuasca and Glauco’s Santo Daime church. That changed abruptly after the police caught Cadu while he was trying to escape to Paraguay. Glauco’s captured murderer told TV reporters that he had wanted to kidnap the cartoonist to prove to his family that his younger brother was, in fact, Jesus Christ. Worse, Cadu’s father and lawyer both claimed that Cadu, whose mother was schizophrenic, had gone “psycho” after joining Glauco’s rituals.

What had been a national tragedy now turned into a heated debate about ayahuasca or daime as it is also known. Although legal in Brazil since 1992, because of its deep roots in indigenous shamanistic practice, ayahuasca is mostly only tolerated in what remains an essentially conservative country. Época, a popular glossy magazine, asked on its front cover: “Did daime provoke the crime?” Veja, another, splashed: “The psychotic and daime: up to what point should a hallucinogenic drug be used in the rituals of a sect?”

Five years later, Glauco’s tragic death can still be seen as just another confirmation of the risks of taking drugs. Yet his murder and its ensnarement with a potent psychedelic is also a story about the perils of first impressions, as became clear when I met Beatriz. She had been reticent to talk to a journalist again after so much heated press coverage, and it had taken me several months of emails before she agreed to see me. But now we were sitting in the tidy living room of the house that she and Glauco had built next to their church almost two decades ago.

“I am not angry with Cadu. How can I be? He was crazy,” Beatriz said, her cheeks flushed with emotion as she described the awful events of that day: how Cadu had burst into her home and pistol-whipped her around the head; how he had screamed that he wanted Glauco to confirm Cadu’s belief that, yes, his fair-haired and blue-eyed younger brother was Jesus, so obviating the need for Cadu to be sent into psychiatric care. Glauco had rushed downstairs when he heard the shouting, had tried to calm Cadu but was then forced to leave after Cadu held a gun to his head. It was the last time Beatriz saw her husband alive.

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Documentary Fantastico about the Santo Daime Religion from DaimeNL on Vimeo.

Rogério Duprat's Sounds

From Americas South & North blog:

Rogério Duprat is the most overlooked vital contributor to the sound of Tropicália, the Brazilian musical genre of the late-1960s that incorporated elements of Brazilian music (such as samba and bossa nova), international rock and roll (especially psychedelic rock), and orchestral arrangements. Though not as famous as Gilberto Gil or Os Mutantes, without Duprat, Tropicália would have sounded fundamentally different. 

Like many other tropicalistas, Duprat had a basic background in music, but his path was unique among the more renowned names of Tropicália. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1932, Duprat’s family soon moved to São Paulo. While a child, Duprat taught himself to play the acoustic guitar, the cavaquinho (a small 4-stringed guitar common in samba and choro, as well as in Hawaiian music), and the harmonica. By the time he was 24, Duprat was one of the founding members of the Orquestra de Câmara in São Paulo. Duprat also traveled to Germany, where he studied with modern avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. This eclectic background formed the basis for Duprat’s broader views on music. In 1963, he was using computers to make music, even while teaching music at the recently-established Universidade de Brasília. There, he advocated tearing down the walls between musical genres, including between classical music and the increasingly-popular rock music coming from the United States and England.

Though the military coup of 1964 brought an end to Duprat’s tenure at the university, he continued advocating for the blurring of genres, a message that ultimately led him into contact with a group of musicians who had recently relocated from the Northeast to São Paulo, including Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. The latter two had already begun exploring the fusion of Brazilian rhythms and the sounds of rock, but with Duprat, they found somebody classically trained in music composition who could help them further explore this mixture, even while Duprat found in Gil and Veloso willing partners who wanted to smash musical barriers. Though Duprat was nearly 15 years older than the young baianos, it was not long before a Duprat had become a vital contributor to the Tropicália sound. His string arrangements can be heard on some of the most important recordings from the period, including Gilberto Gil’s heartbreaking “Domingo no Parque” and the breathtakingly gorgeous opening swells on Gal Costa’s beautiful “Baby,” as well as other lesser-known tracks like Caetano Veloso’s “Acirílico” off his 1969 self-titled album. Indeed, although he rarely got individual song-writing credits, Duprat’s stamp is all over the first two albums by Os Mutantes, Gilbert Gil’s first two self-titled albums from 1968 and 1969, as well as on the classic Tropicalia: Ou Panis et Circenses, which included Duprat on the cover, showing just how deep his involvement with the movement’s sound was.

Nor did Duprat solely contribute to others’ albums. In 1968, the same year that Tropicália came out and that Gil and Veloso released their seminal first self-titled albums, Duprat released his own album, A Banda Tropicalista do Duprat. The album featured his orchestral re-interpretations of a variety of American and English songs that was in part pastiche, in part sincere effort to further blur the lines between classical music and rock and roll. Songs on the album included covers of the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (renamed “Judy in Disguise,”) and “Lady Madonna,” The Cowsills’ “We Can Fly” (changed to “Flying“), and other songs from Brazil and abroad. In the process, in both his own music and in his arrangements for other tropicalistas, Duprat tapped into the cultural ferment of the movement, incorporating foreign musical and cultural elements (like western orchestras or North American rock music) and giving it a particularly Brazilian texture, both sincere yet pastiche, regurgitated yet original. This cultural mixture managed to alienate and anger both the fans of more traditional protest-folk who felt music should directly challenge the military regime in Brazil in the late-1960s, even while the military regime itself saw the music and its playfulness and politically ambiguous lyrics and sounds “subversive” and affiliated the music with drug use.

Although by 1970 the sound of Tropicália had faded away (although Os Mutantes and Tom Zé would continue to push its boundaries into the early-1970s), Duprat continued contributing to music, contributing arrangements to singers like Chico Buarque and Alceu Valença. He also wrote jingles for radio and television ads in Brazil. However, over time, his hearing started to fade, leading to Duprat gradually going into seclusion. His later years were also marred by the onset of Alzheimer’s, so that this master composer could not only no longer listen to music, but could not even recall his role in one of the key cultural moments in Brazilian music and history. Diagnosed with cancer in addition to the Alzheimer’s,  Duprat passed away at the age 74 of  in 2006. However, Duprat’s musical contributions to Tropicália continue to resonate both in the music itself and in the musicians throughout the world that tropicalismo influenced, and his contributions to the music and its aesthetic remain an indispensable part of Tropicália, even while his name remains less known than those of Gil, Veloso, and others.

Personal Writing

Jamison's advice on writing a personal essay:

I’m interested in essays that follow the infinitude of a private life toward the infinitude of public experience. I’m wary of seeking this resonance by extracting some easy moral from the grit and complication of personal particularity: love hurts, time heals, always look on the bright side. Instead, I’m drawn to essays that allow the messy threads of grief or incomprehension to remain ragged, to direct our gazes outward.

In “The White Album,” Joan Didion connects her own nervous breakdown to the cultural disorder around her: the arrest of Huey Newton, the unfolding of the Manson Murder trials, what she calls an “authentically senseless chain of correspondences.” She makes links but she refuses to flatten these links into an easy moral; she wants them to remain provocative but “senseless.” In “No Man’s Land,” Eula Biss positions a personal account of her own Chicago neighborhood inside several larger contexts: the history of the American frontier and the troubled racial politics of urban spaces. In “Upon This Rock,” John Jeremiah Sullivan confesses his own religious background partway through an ostensibly journalistic account of a Christian rock concert.

In my own essay, “The Empathy Exams,” I tell several personal stories—an abortion, a failed heart surgery—inside a broader inquiry into the terms of empathy itself: What does it consist of? Can it be taught? I write about my work as a medical actor—following diagnostic scripts—and I write about falling in love and drinking too much wine and crying on the phone, but I also write about a neuroscientist who is using fMRI scans to figure out which parts of our brains light up when we feel for other people. I quote scientific studies and an eighteenth century moral philosopher; I don’t offer them as intellectual accessories so much as I deploy them as tools: how can these other sources of light illuminate my own story better?

This is one of the central imperatives of combining personal material with history or criticism or reportage: each thread must do some work that isn’t being done by another; that can’t be done by another. Scientific studies show the magnetic signature of empathy; my own life shows the perpetual mess of how it plays out. Sometimes I imagine history and science and memory are puppets, and I’m pushing them onto the stage of inquiry and asking them to have a conversation—to share their knowledge, to argue with each other. It’s a lab experiment: what explosions are uniquely possible in combination?

The flipside of this experimental process isn’t just knowing what to include—being capacious, being brave—it’s knowing what to cut: which connections don’t work, or can’t hold. Once I’ve given myself the freedom to let personal experience throw its filaments everywhere, attach to everything, I need to be prepared for the fact that some combinations won’t work. I can’t fake connections; I know readers can smell it—the faint stink of forced correspondence.

This is the hard part of gathering broadly and summoning the whole world to be part of your story: you can bring everything home, but you can’t use it all at once. I have a purgatory file where I keep every shard I can’t bear to throw away; so that I can resurrect them from the dead if opportunity presents itself—if I see how these old shards can do the work I need them to.

I often think of the subject of an essay as something like a courtyard full of questions—questions about grief, or longing, or memory, or empathy. Writing means walking a furious labyrinthine path in order to peer at them from every possible direction. Every mode of inquiry—history, memoir, criticism—is a doorway that opens onto this courtyard from a different angle. Each glance offers some gift: the pages of a medical acting script, or the humming heart of an fMRI scanner; the grainy resolution of old photographs or the tiny time-machines of old text messages. You can gaze down on the past from the obstructed aerial view of retrospection, or you can gaze up from a hospital table, the folds of a paper gown crinkling underneath the goose bumps on your arms. That’s the thrill of pushing the personal essay beyond itself: the electricity created between erudition and flesh is something fierce. You can move from the rigors of scientific inquiry to the pale vulnerability of an IV piercing a vein. You can travel that distance in a sentence—if curiosity demands it, if the sentiment can hold it.

When you’re lying on a hospital gurney, it can feel like there is nothing else in the world—nothing but your fear, or your chill, or the promise of anesthesia, or the shadows of the surgeons who are about to cut you open. It can feel that way—and that feeling is a truth, but what it believes isn’t true at all: because you’re not the only thing in the world—the only person who has ever hurt, the only person who has ever worn a paper gown. In truth, there is a whole world beyond you, in that moment and always—a whole world of other hurting bodies, of surgeons and their training; there’s a whole world of hearts, heart anatomies and heart myths, hearts transplanted and broken. There is so much outside the false cloister of private experience; and when you write, you do the work of connecting that terrible privacy to everything beyond it.

The Pain Game

Writer Leslie Jamison is interviewed about emotions and film in The Atlantic:

Let’s talk about crying in movie theaters. In a review of the film Short Term 12 for the LA Review of Books, you call out the sort of satisfaction that people experience when they cry at the movies—and you deconstruct that satisfaction.

It’s funny, I was just speaking on a panel a couple weeks ago and that particular piece came up. Someone was asking about the intersection between being a critic and a creative writer, and how we felt about writing criticism about genres that we didn’t make ourselves. That was the first piece of writing that came to mind. I don’t make films, and because I don’t make films, I’m not an expert in the craft of bringing a film into the world, how you put its various pieces together. But where I feel like I’m an expert is my own feelings in response to a film. And so with that review of Short Term 12, I felt like, “Wow, something has happened in this afternoon in which I watched this film and I went through all of these emotions, so, let me just look at that process and those tiers as a kind of artifact in their own right and scrutinize that instead.”

What I’ve seen before is the critic accusing the filmmaker of emotional manipulation—saying, “Well, they did this, that’s how they got me to feel this way.” But instead you took all the responsibility for your own feelings, turning the review into an essay on the ethics of how we respond to art.

I think that’s right. Part of what I’m interested in interrogating is this kind of collective shame that we feel about sentimentality, and I think sometimes that shame manifests as accusation—accusing a film or a piece of art of manipulating our emotions. And sometimes it can show up as self-recrimination. Things we describe as “guilty pleasure” reads [are] things that bring us to these cheap flowings of sentiment that aren’t really “earned” or aren’t rigorous in some way.

I wanted to be analytic about the way feelings are happening in a film but also not entirely dismissive of it. I did think it was a very incredible movie. I didn’t want to just level the statement that I had cried as a fact that would relegate the movie as something lesser or limited.

You mention Oscar Wilde’s definition of sentimentality—“the luxury of having an emotion without paying for it”—here and also in one of your essays in The Empathy Exams, “In Defense of Saccharine.” Though you defend sentimentality, do you agree with Wilde’s definition?

Part of what I’m doing in that essay is trying to define what other people mean when they use that word as an accusation. So in that sense I think the definition that I’m invoking of sentimentality is, when the word sentimentality is used, it is being used as a critique of work that is overly emotional in some kind of cheap way.

But, I think the understanding of how sentimental affect can be working in art that I want to defend or make a case for, is: [When] art makes us feel deeply, often in ways we can’t explain, there can be a sort of second stage to that feeling where we reflect on why those feelings happen and how they might guide us going forth. It’s in that second stage or second layer that I want to offer something to what sentimentality can be or how it can play out.

What if, to quote from your essay again, this “strokes the ego of our sentimental selves”? How do you make sure, when you’re having this second layer of experience after feeling something, that you’re not just patting yourself on the back for having feelings?

Right, right. I quote Milan Kundera in that piece, too: “We cry one tear for the children playing on the grass, and then we cry another tear for our ability to cry at the children playing on the grass!” I think the way we escape the endless cycle of just back-patting ourselves for our own deep feelings is by being willing to be critical of what those feelings are and being willing to question whether those feelings are doing any good.

Some of that gets into the relationship between art and action. So instead of thinking of it as a kind of closed circuit where you’re like, “Okay, I had the feeling; I’m a good person for having that feeling; now I’m done with my work for the day!” To [instead] think about that feeling as kind of an open door. And if you’re going to open that door there’s some responsibility behind it.

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Dominguez & Josele's Sound

Two of the best musicians Spain has to offer, together and navigating through a set of tunes tinged in Iberian jazz radiance. The subtlety of this duo is goes along way oncold, winter afternoons. 

From El Pais:

Finalizó ya julio y con él concluyó la parcela musical del Grec 2014. La última velada, como para llevar la contraria a una programación sin sorpresas en lo musical (buenos conciertos, sí, pero que podrían haber sido presentados por cualquier programador privado), fue una auténtica maravilla. Broche de oro para cerrar el certamen veraniego barcelonés.

Sobre el escenario del anfiteatro de Montjuïc dos pequeñas figuras parecían perdidas en la inmensidad; pero, sin mediar palabra, comenzó a sonar la música y desaparecieron las distancias. Ya no eran dos músicos alejados físicamente del público (el Grec tiene el problema del distanciamiento) sino que parecía que le hablaban al oído a cada uno de los asistentes. Y el anfiteatro se convirtió en un pequeño club cargado de esa intensidad que solo se consigue en los pequeños clubes. La magia que supieron crear Chano Domínguez y Niño Josele va más allá de la unión de dos sensibilidades tan distintas como cercanas. Su concierto fue una clara demostración de que las matemáticas también se equivocan y que uno más uno pueden sumar bastante más que dos.

Esa noche fue un piano y una guitarra sorteando todos los peligros (que son muchos) de intentar acercar el flamenco, el jazz, la bossa nova y esa música a la que todavía llamamos clásica. Chano y Josele han sabido sobreponerse a cualquier etiqueta para crear una música que es esencialmente bella, cargada de una sensualidad que atrapa desde el primer momento.

Juntos recorrieron el camino que va del Django del Modern Jazz Quartet a Paco de Lucía (ambos le deben mucho a Paco de Lucía) pasando por John Lennon, Antonio Carlos Jobim o Michel Legrand. Un aparente batiburrillo estético que no lo fue. Todo sonó cercano, unificado por la sensibilidad de los dos músicos que también incluyeron temas propios de gran enjundia y tuvieron sus momentos en solitario para demostrar su maestría.

Si hablamos de duende, esa noche estaba en el Grec y si hablamos de fronteras, no había ninguna. Chano tocó solo un tema de Josele titulado ¿Es esto una bulería? y podríamos discutir, efectivamente, lo que era, ese tema e, incluso, el resto del concierto, pero ¿qué más da si nos gusta?

Viejo San Juan

Vallejo Nocturno 2015 - at Ponce de Leon's

Harp & Nuevo Tango from Ann Hobson Pilot

Interview with harpist and her new record Ann Hobson Pilot:

Q: Sounds like you’ve been a little busy since your retirement from the Boston Symphony Orchestra! Tell us about your new album release. How did this project come about? 

I retired from the Boston Symphony —not because I did not love it and thought it was the best harp job in the world—but because I thought that 40 years was enough in one place and I wanted to do more things outside of orchestral playing—such as this project.

Q: What drew you to Piazzolla’s music?

I first became acquainted with Piazzolla’s music with the wonderful arrangement of the History of the Tango for flute and harp by Kari Vehmanen that so many harpists were playing back around 2010 or shortly after I retired from the BSO. I became intrigued with his music. I loved the obvious influence of jazz rhythms and harmonies and the dance-like feel of some of his music.

Q: Do you feel that harp is an effective substitute for guitar, which is more commonly associated with this style? 

Of course the guitar is wonderful in Piazzolla’s music and is his original choice of instrument, but substituting the harp adds a different dimension to his music. We just recently got our first review by Jon Sobel of the Seattle Post and his comments were to the point of this question. “I might have imagined a whole album of Piazzolla featuring the harp would be a little too dolce, but while it’s certainly filled with gentle landscapes it’s not at all weak, but solid and firmly stated, a testament to the endless potential of Piazzolla’s music and the sensitivity of these fine musicians.”

Q: Where did you meet the other players on this recording?

I knew Lucia Lin because we had worked together for many years in the BSO and I had long admired her playing. After I became committed to the idea of doing this recording and mentioned it to a friend in NYC, he suggested JP Jofre, the wonderful bandoneon player originally from Argentina. The bandoneon was Piazzolla’s instrument and I thought it would add a true Argentinian flavor to the arrangements and I believe it does.

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There are certain writers I read

Interview by Stephany Aulenback with short story writer Kelly Link:

SA: Do you revisit certain writers for help when you hit a snag in your own work? And what are you reading now? And while we’re speaking of influences, how do other art forms influence you? Laura Miller mentioned both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and David Lynch in her Salon review of Stranger Things Happen. Do you embrace TV shows and movies as influences? How about music? Do you listen to it as you write? How about photography and art?
 

KL: There are certain writers I read when I’m stuck, for comfort as much as anything else. Diana Wynne Jones, Peter Dickinson, Joan Aiken, Grace Paley, Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Dunnett, M. R. James, Joyce Ballou Gregorian, Laurie Colwin, Jeffrey Steingarten. Lots of others. Eudora Welty, science fiction short story writers like James Tiptree, Junior, and Fritz Leiber. Theodore Sturgeon. C. M Kornbluth, lots of others. At the moment, I’m reading John Crowley’s Lord Byron’s Novel and Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl. Just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, which I loved.

I used to go see pulpy science fiction or horror movies as a way to jumpstart stories. Sometimes good movies, too — I’ve been on a zombie movie kick for the last three years, and in the end I wrote a lot of zombie stories. Mostly I watch television when I’m really stuck and can’t manage to get work done. For a long time, I listened to music constantly as I wrote — Magnetic Fields and Gillian Welch and Hem and Rufus Wainwright and Aimee Mann and M. Ward — but at the moment, because I’m sitting at a table with another writer, I listen to whatever music is on the stereo. Fortunately there’s a fair amount of Magnetic Fields.

There are things that music does that I can’t do when I write fiction, and that really frustrates me. A song can convey, in this kind of code, or shorthand, so much emotion, so quickly.

There are visual artists who do things that I wish I could do in fiction. I love Lizbeth Zwerger and Peter Sis. I like narrative art, children’s book art, comic book art. I used to work in a children’s bookstore and I still splurge on picture books sometimes. I love the Joan Aiken books, which Edward Ardizzonne (and Pat Marriott and Edward Gorey) illustrated. A friend introduced me to the photography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and his photographs are just haunting. In the new collection there are a few stories with paintings in them, and I wrote one new story about a television show which is at least partly inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

There’s an idea that science fiction, as a genre, is a conversation, but the conversation is actually much larger than just that one room. One of the coolest things about running Small Beer Press with my partner Gavin and publishing my own books is that I have a lot more say about things like cover art. The writer and artist Shelley Jackson was the cover artist for both Stranger Things Happen and for Magic for Beginners. (For
Magic for Beginners, she also did pen and ink interior illustrations for each story.)

It’s very satisfying to put a book together from the stories up. After the stories were finished, it was extremely enjoyable to go back and think about how they could be illustrated — what image would say something about the story that the story didn’t already say.

We’re publishing a line of reprints and we’ve worked with the artist Kevin Huizenga. I highly recommend the Drawn and Quarterly Showcase anthology which features his work — I actually wrote an introduction for that anthology, but they decided at the last moment not to use it. They didn’t even pay me a kill fee, which means thatI’ve been leery since then of doing nonfiction work for other editors.

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