In a new BBC program on California poetry -- Radio Silence editor-in-chief Dan Stone talks about writing and starting a magazine in the not so affordable Bay Area.

Listen to "After the Gold Rush" here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n11f0

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We sat down with New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick to discuss the career and unique genius of one of his favorite artists -- Bob Dylan. Here's the first installment of the Radio Silence podcast series, complete with historical audio and plenty of music.

It's free. Right here: http://maintainradiosilence.com/radio-silence-presents-david-remnick-on-bob-d

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Radio Silence has been included in "The Best of the Bay Area 2012," the July issue of San Francisco Magazine that just hit newsstands. It's not online yet. Read the blurb here.

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Dancing to Sadness

Adam Haslett

The music of New Order helped Adam Haslett through some difficult years.

Adam Haslett

As an adolescent growing up in the suburbs of Boston in the 1980s I had a lot to be cynical about. Ronald Reagan. Nancy Reagan. Conspicuous consumption. The war on drugs. The public self-satisfaction of well-heeled Wellesley, Massachusetts, overlaying scenes like my sister’s boyfriend’s alcoholic mother walking into her son’s bedroom, seeing a mound of coke on his desk, and asking indifferently if he’d be staying for dinner. This jaundiced view of mine was fueled by grief over my father’s suicide. He killed himself when I was fourteen, just as I was beginning to realize I liked boys. I didn’t have much music of my own, at the time. I’d never collected any, largely because my older brother, Timothy, collected and played so much that I took my lead and my cassettes from him. And above all others, what he gave me was New Order.

A few years earlier, my family had been living in Britain. This was just after Thatcher’s rise to power. I was too young to track the specifics, but even a kid can pick out the basic plot: conservative business interests supported by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers were preparing to gut the miners and working people. New Order was formed in this period, following the suicide of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of their first incarnation — Joy Division. Reflecting the cynicism of the times, the title of their second album, released in ’83, was Power, Corruption, and Lies.

The album’s incredibly tight opening track, “Age of Consent,” contained all the threads that would make them one of the most influential bands of the decade — for other musicians in particular: The tune carried on the bass rather than the guitar, giving the song a dark, driven sound; a fast, irresistible drum beat; Bernard Sumner’s cryptic, slightly vengeful lyrics; and floating above it all, interludes of lush, soaring synth. “Do you find this happens all the time?” Sumner asks. “Crucial point one day becomes the crime.” You’re swaying your head, you’re bobbing your knee, you’re rocking fast, back and forth, as he chants the last lines, “I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you....”

What wasn’t there to love and pine for and listen to hundreds of times on my Walkman? Here was emotional woundedness and social disaffection made into kick-ass dance music, all wrapped up in Peter Saville’s gorgeous jacket design, another heady mix of the florid and the minimal. And because of my brother’s avidity, I was listening to it before anyone else in town, lending it that final note of perfect coolness.

The albums that followed — Low-Life, Brotherhood, Technique — refined the band’s marriage of post-punk, dour English affect with the electronics of disco and European industrial music. It was a ravishingly dark vision and for me quite nearly salvific. Listening to the 12” single “Temptation,” I could hear in the lyrics the longing I felt to kiss one of my best friends and the ineffable sadness of my father being gone, all the while dancing out of myself the fear and anger that had nowhere to go.

I’ve never stopped listening to New Order. Months can pass, but I always come back to it. Lately, as an older, happier person, I’ve begun to realize just how powerfully the music reinforced my bleak outlook. It told me, with the all authority of beauty, that the world was a sad and damaged place. Which, of course, it is. And yet what brings me back to their songs isn’t just nostalgia for gloom. Because that same beauty was also the means of transcendence — the chance to dance — an escape as fleeting as the length of an album track, but a permission I still take each time I listen. Transcendence playable over and over.

Adam Haslett is the author of the novel Union Atlantic and the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here. He won the Berlin Prize last year and spent the fall of 2011 in Germany as a fellow at the American Academy working on a new novel, entitled Kindness. He was recently bowled over by Grant Gee’s documentary Joy Division and highly recommends it.

This content is under legal copyright and may not be reproduced without permission. All rights reserved. © Radio Silence, 2012.

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Great review of our first issue in The Rumpus, with lots of love for Zach Rogue, Blake Hazard, and this here website. Thanks, Nancy Smith!

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The folks at Longreads are featuring "The Bottom" today, our essay by Jim White on how Cormac McCarthy saved his life. Read it here on the site.

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The Bottom

Jim White

Musician Jim White on how Cormac McCarthy saved his life.

Jim White

“They was a-fighting and a-fighting. Just right out yonder, rolling in the gutter. And the little one, he snatched that ole butcher knife out from under his shirt and went to jabbing with it, just a-jabbing away around the other’ns neck. And the two of them, they rolled this way and that. Blood everywhere. Then come the law and hauled the both of ’em off. Never did hear if the big one lived or died.”

 Walter is putting the finishing touches on an unsolicited account of a stabbing (apparently one of many) that took place directly in front of his barbershop on Central Avenue in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. This particular incident occurred some sixty years ago. “Saturday nights. Back then, they was like the Wild West.” Walter sighs nostalgically, seated there in his ancient barber chair whittling a small wooden owl.

 It’s 1997. I’m a musician and find myself in Knoxville as the opening act for legendary Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. David and I had been exploring the seedy old downtown area around Gay Street when we came upon Walter’s train wreck of misguided commerce: part barbershop, part thrift store, and, due to the presence of dozens of crudely carved wooden owls of all shape and size that populate the forward area of the shop, part folk-art emporium. The rear of the rundown storefront is crowded with shelves of what appear to be utterly worthless junk.

 It’s just Walter and me now. Poor David fled the premises a few moments into our visit after being accused by Walter of conspiring to commit petty theft. Upon entering the shop, in his inimitably quirky fashion, David politely asked the old man if he minded us looking around the back area where “all those cool piles of stuff” lay.  Walter scowled slightly then calmly suggested we get the hell out of his establishment, announcing we had a shifty, shoplifting look about us. David Byrne, unaccustomed to such rough handling, thereupon nervously excused himself.

 After a round of friendly jawing, Walter has grudgingly allowed me to browse. The forward aisles are crowded with cheap, outdated clothing, ’70s fashion rejects — many items with the original tags still on them. Everything’s covered in a coat of thick dust. Further back among the jumbled shelves of gee-gaws an old Hohner chromatic harmonica catches my eye. I hold it up. “How much for this, sir?” I ask.

 Slumping a little further in his barber chair, pocketknife in hand as he continues to whittle, Walter regards me dimly. “What is it? A harmonica? That ain’t for sale,” he says flatly, then recommences whittling. “Now this other day,” he intones, and there he goes, launching into another gruesome story.  

 This pattern repeats itself a dozen or more times over the next half-hour. Nothing, it turns out, is for sale. As I meander from aisle to aisle, Walter offers up a steady stream of dreamy, horrifying monologues recounting cataclysms transpired thereabouts. Stabbings, shootings, bar fights, kidnappings, patricide — scandals and heartbreak of every imaginable variety. He’s a compendium of true crime stories and has just now finished up that tale about the small man with the butcher knife under his shirt.

 Through it all Walter slowly, methodically whittles. He was whittling when we first peered in the shop window, whittling as he succeeded in running David Byrne off, whittling during his various monologues, whittling in the spaces in-between. By all appearances whittling is an autonomic activity for him, like breathing or digestion. “You whittle all these owls yourself?” I ask, just trying to make friendly conversation. Walter sighs. He did. He whittles to pass the time, he says, complaining that business is slow lately. Last ten, fifteen years.

 We introduce ourselves at this point. When he hears the White in my name his head cocks slightly to the side and says, “White? Oh yes, quite a few Whites hereabouts. You any kin to that Farrel White? Married that Harwell girl? He come downtown that Saturday afternoon with his little daughter, gonna buy her an Easter dress…. ” Walter drifts away into his next reminiscence.

In my left coat pocket is a dog-eared copy of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, which happens to be set here in Knoxville way back in the ’50s. I’m not much of a planner, so to some extent or another (depending on your take on the mechanics of serendipity) it’s sheer coincidence that it ended up in my suitcase as I packed for this tour. Likewise I’m no great bibliophile, certainly not one of those types who might find it exhilarating to locate and use, say, the exact toilet that Jack Kerouac took a shit in while writing On the Road.  That said, I’m happy it ended up with me here in Knoxville, as the city itself is practically a character in the novel. Gay and Central Streets, where Walter’s barbershop is, are mentioned frequently, so it’s interesting to be in the physical locale where the action takes place. I’m about halfway through Suttree this time around. I’ve read it front to back many times, usually when events in my life have gone spiraling out of control and that black cloud of depression that’s dogged me off and on for much of my adult years descends.

“And that poor soul, he died right there, leaning agin’ that light post just out yonder. His little girl by his side. Spoke not a word, did she. Cried not a tear. You any kin to that Farrel White?”

I tell Walter I’m not from Knoxville.

“Well, Knoxville. It’s a good town for leaving, some say. I never left. Suits me fine.”

The tenor of Walter’s tales is so eerily reminiscent of Suttree’s general tone that I can’t help but wave the novel in his direction, asking if he’s ever read it. Walter beckons me over, takes the book with shaking, liver spotted claws, studies the cover through his bifocals with some puzzlement, then replies, “Suttree? Well, look at that. I’ll be. Did Suttree write a book?”

Walter seems to have misunderstood my question. This is reasonable. He’s somewhere in that eighty- to ninety-year-old range, one foot firmly planted in the world beyond. “Old Sut,” he murmurs to himself inexplicably as he returns to whittling. Likely it’s a mild touch of dementia. The joys of becoming unmoored.

“No, Walter,” I say. “This is a novel by a famous author. It’s set here in Knoxville. The main character is called Suttree, but he’s not a real person.”

Walter puzzles over this, slouched down there in his barber chair as he reaches for a stob of white pine from a large plastic bucket next to the cash register. “No? Not real? I believe you’re mistaken, son. Suttree, he sat in this very chair, right here. Many a day. Can’t cut a man’s hair if he ain’t real. It don’t work thataway.” With that he sets to carving another owl.

I’m rendered momentarily speechless by the old man’s claim.

Walter notices my silence. He gouges a chunk out of the latest owl then adds, “Old Sut. Paid me with a catfish one time, he did. Big old thing.” Walter gestures widely with his hands to show the length of the fish. “About yea long. Used to run his trot lines down on the river.”

Trot lines. The two words hover in the air. The world momentarily hums and glows. Trot lines — it’s an obscure fishing term, one I’ve heard referenced nowhere other than McCarthy’s novel. Trot lines. Is Walter exhibiting some kind of second sight here, or could his claim somehow be true?

“You’re telling me you knew a fisherman here in Knoxville named Suttree? Cornelius Suttree.”

“Cornelius? Oh, my. Is that right? Cornelius. Hmmmph. Well, they all called him Suttree, or Sut. Course I knew his head better’n I knew him. Natural part on the left. Brush cut. Lived in a houseboat down to the river. Kept to himself. Folks said he was troubled and I guess he was. But he wasn’t never no trouble to me.”

Walter returns to whittling as I silently process this information. Whittle whittle whittle. Scrape scrape scrape. Just last night I read the passage where Suttree gets his hair cut. Could it have been here? Apparently so. Somehow I’ve stumbled into the pages of my favorite novel. It’s like standing in line at the supermarket and discovering the customer ahead of you is, say, Holden Caulfield or Billy Pilgrim or Yossarian. I stare at the doorway. Suttree walked through that door. I study Walter, stoically whittling away. Suttree sat in that chair — hell, got his hair cut in it. By him — that cantankerous old man. To understand the significance of this revelation you’ll need to hear one of my stories instead of another of Walter’s.

*          *          *

Back to 1994. I was a ruined husk of a human being. My troubles had begun three months before with a badly broken heart, which fate and circumstance parlayed into a conflagration of insomnia, clinical depression, and a raging, untreated infection in my intestines that I would some years later learn was a sometimes fatal condition called peritonitis. I hadn’t slept in weeks. I had no appetite and suffered mysterious, sometimes crippling pains in my gut. I was unwilling to go to the doctor because I had no health insurance and I feared they might put me in some hospital and I’d be bankrupted for life. I guessed there were social services available for people in my situation, but I just didn’t have the wherewithal to run the bureaucratic gauntlet. To make matters worse I was a minimum wage worker who was more than twenty grand in debt. Creditors, having given up any hope of my ever paying my bills, had taken to calling my unsuspecting relatives, harassing them for money. The shame. I lived hand-to-mouth, driving a cab to cover my most immediate bills. Food, lodging.

That was bad enough. But it got worse.

I was increasingly beset by distressing occult signifiers. Every day seemed like a further plunge into some delusional spiral. When my luminously beautiful but deeply troubled girlfriend disappeared without a trace some months back, I frantically searched and searched, but could make no sense of what had become of her. Her apartment appeared abandoned, though the phone line remained connected. I left message after message. No reply. Soon after she vanished, for several days in a row, I found severed chicken feet on my doormat. Black magic of some kind. Then apparitions began to appear on my walls at night — the faces of saints, devils. One day a New York Times crossword puzzle delivered a worrisome message to me about her. The next day there was another. Her name, occasionally in anagram form, sometimes sequentially concise, would appear as answers to clues alongside words like “vanished” and “dissolved.” The crossword messages were infuriatingly abstruse — no real information was communicated — so what was the point, and who, or what, was sending the messages? I felt as though I was losing my mind.

Then a couple months later, I was passing a newsstand and thought I spotted a full-page color photo of her on the cover of the New York Post. Hallucinations occur in extreme cases of sleep deprivation, I knew that much, so was this real? I stopped and stared at her image, then bought the paper. Just to be sure I said to the vendor, “She’s quite a pretty lady, isn’t she?” He winked at me and agreed, “Quite a looker.” He replied.

I read the accompanying article, recounting the story of a small-time, completely unknown theater actress who’d been cast in the starring role of a Disney blockbuster. It was one of those heartwarming rags-to-riches tales. The next day she was on the front page of another paper. Then it was People magazine — they’d named her one of the fifty most beautiful people in the world. After that, wherever I went, whatever I did, I was assaulted by images of her. The Post article reported that she’d recently gotten married.  Must have been pretty damn recent, because a scant few months back she claimed to love me and only me.

I had trouble leaving my apartment because her image was everywhere. I couldn’t turn on the TV because she was there too. I began fantasizing more and more about suicide. It appeared to be the only viable way to extricate myself from this mess. Mental health professionals refer to this as “suicidal ideation” — obsessive thoughts of killing yourself without yet taking substantive action. It’s the first phase in the suicidal arc. And although I spent long hours working out the details in various theoretical death models, apparently I wasn’t ready for phase two yet, because whenever I tried to bring myself to organize the materials to implement one of my plans, I simply couldn’t go through with it. What stopped me was an awareness of the disastrous effects my suicide would have on my family, my friends. The people who love me. Who I love. My sister would never recover. My best friend. My mom.

Then an ingenious plan came to me. It was the height of the crack epidemic, right? Cab drivers were getting murdered weekly, right? So it was simple — I don’t kill myself; I let someone do it for me. I would cruise blighted neighborhoods, seeking out hooded, degenerate criminal types, thugs that other drivers wouldn’t pick up in broad daylight with a police escort, much less alone and well after midnight. I would welcome them into my cab and away we’d go, arrowing into the devastated urban war zones of the outer boroughs — Bed Stuy, East New York, Kingsbridge, Starette City. Eventually one of them would shoot me, and I’d be free. That was the plan.

Three nights later I wasn’t sure if I’d found the right ones, but as I ferried two Hispanic gangbangers to Hunts Point in the Bronx and was greeted by the sickening sweet smell of crack being smoked in the back seat, I felt that my chances for success were pretty good. We arrived at a shadowy destination. Long tense moments. Whispers swirling in the stale interior air of the cab. Then the doors flew open and they fled without paying me. No shots fired. Damn.

When I got robbed the year before the detective told me the Plexiglas partition is worthless. The first shot would shatter the glass barrier; the second would pass through unimpeded. If what he said was true, I wouldn’t hear the second shot, because I’d be dead. Just pop, then silence, peace. A robbery gone bad — that would be an acceptable death, right?

A few nights later I had high hopes when I picked up three particularly dangerous looking drug dealers. We rode in silence again, but they not only paid the fare but threw in a sizable tip — gold teeth shining as they sidled off into the projects. Death continued to elude me.  

 While death eluded me, it didn’t elude my friend Clayton. When the phone rang that morning I’d hoped for a moment it might be my vanished girlfriend. But it wasn’t. It was a fellow cab driver I vaguely knew from my fleet. He broke the news to me — Clayton killed himself yesterday.

The first time Clayton attempted suicide was a few months back. He shot up ten bags of heroin then called his girlfriend to say a tearful goodbye — Clayton always had a flair for the dramatic. She notified the cops, who within moments were charging up three flights of stairs in his Hells Kitchen slum.

“Open up!” they demanded.

Pop-pop-pop, was Clayton’s reply.

Bad idea, Clayton. You don’t shoot at New York’s Finest, even if it was with a starter pistol and you were just firing blanks in the air behind a locked door. The pistol reports sent the cops scattering, shouting oh shit, frantically calling for reinforcements. A SWAT team arrived and rappelled through Clayton’s third-floor window, sending shattered glass everywhere like in some souped-up action movie. Clayton would surely have been delighted by the fiasco — Tenth Avenue, the Lincoln Tunnel, and much of midtown on the West Side shut down for upwards of an hour, and all because of him — but by then he was unconscious and close to death. Somehow the paramedics revived him with a massive dose of Naloxone.

Clayton was locked up for a few days in Bellevue’s mental ward. When he was let out, he headed over to Times Square, took an elevator to the forty-fourth floor of the Marriot Marquis hotel, and executed an elegant swan dive off the balcony railing. Just a week before Christmas. The atrium dining area where he landed was jammed with holiday revelers. He was decapitated, but thankfully no one else was hurt.

A few hours after I got the Clayton news, I was wandering the streets in a daze, crying, simultaneously heartbroken by his death and jealous of his accomplishment. On Second Avenue I passed a woman that I vaguely knew, a secretary in a nearby office. I used to make excuses to pass by there so I could gaze at her simple, uncomplicated beauty. We’d talk from time to time. Small talk. This went on for a few weeks until she realized I was sweet on her, then she got all frosty and distant. Now here she was, strolling along with a clean-cut college boy. They were laughing easily, happy sparks flying between them. She caught sight of me, disheveled, staggering along in tears. She averted her eyes. We passed without a word.

The afternoon was a fever dream. I was briefly in a movie theater, a bar, Penn Station, a novelty shop, a Korean grocery. I stumbled along aimlessly, crying, knowing I had to keep my feet — hell, my entire physical being — moving or some unknown horror would descend. Eventually I found myself in a bookstore on St. Marks Place staring at an artfully arranged wall of au courant novels, none of which I knew thing one about. Camille Paglia? Salman Rushdie? Martin Amis? I wasn’t a big reader. The cover of one book at eye level seemed strangely appealing, so I opened it up.

The first line was an embrace:

Dear friend…

Immediately thereafter a suicide was described in lurid, luminous detail. A plunge from a tall bridge resulting in drowning (one of the methods, in fact, I had considered), rescuers dragging the river bottom, the corpse rising, a grappling hook firmly imbedded in the dead man’s cheek. That could have been me. I followed the small markings on the page, those things called words, and found with each word some deep fundamental contact being made, some thread being offered for me to cling to. I was faintly aware of a surging emanation coming from a lost place within me, the lifting and rising of an immense, nameless burden. I’m not sure how long I stood there reading. Long time. Eventually the clerk took me by the elbow and discreetly suggested that I either buy the book or put it back. So I bought the book. It was called Suttree.

 As I walked home I continued reading. I paid no attention to the images of my ex-girlfriend as I passed newsstand after newsstand. I felt like Moses walking along the floor of the Red Sea. Once inside my tiny studio apartment I continued reading. Sixteen hours later I hit page 471, then immediately started the novel over again.

Dear friend…

The second time through I was more attuned to the nuances of the narrative, the dazzling descriptions of Knoxville’s underbelly, the hypnotic cadences of Southern dialect caught so faithfully by the author, the arc of these troubled, ever so familiar characters. Outsiders like Clayton, like me. If the first pass through was a headlong dive into a beguiling frontier, the second was a comforting, illuminative retreat to a safe haven. I found shelter in those words as the tempest raged all about. I was safe there, ensconced in a treatise on surrogate existential misery.

  As I inhaled one page after another I felt long seized-up knots in my brain shift, then ease slightly. Eventually I drifted off into a light slumber for almost two hours — my first sleep of any duration in many days. I woke up feeling traces of lucidity creeping into my mind. It was time for work, so I headed over to the taxi fleet where Clayton and I first met. The nightshift drivers had all gathered, waiting for dayshift cabs to return. Everyone was torn up by the news. The old-timers showed their moxie, bravely recounting hilarious details of Clayton’s legendary exploits. He’d been a professional card counter in Vegas, a wheel man for a mob boss in Boston, a boxer, a comedian, an up-and-coming playwright in the New York theater scene.

I knew crazy stories about Clayton, too. Lots of them. But circumstances had rendered me aphonic, so I kept my own counsel, sitting off to the side, eavesdropping on their storytelling, wondering what words, if any, they’d say about me when they got the news of my passing. The dispatcher called my name and handed me keys and a trip sheet, and away I went, setting out on another fourteen-hour shift. As I twisted and wove through the urban labyrinth of New York City, fragments of Suttree’s journey echoed through my mind, and again I felt the phantom arms at work, lifting, pulling me upwards. In a very palpable way his story felt like an amplified, glittering transposed version of my own sorry tale.  Later, as the streets emptied out, for fleeting moments New York became Knoxville, a place both real and imaginary. Each time this sensation hit me, I forgot the broad array of infirmities besieging me and felt momentarily blissful and weightless. As the night wound down I was surprised to feel no great impulse to cruise the war zones, to search out accomplices to my own murder. That seemed like yesterday’s story.

Around two in the morning a hipster girl in the back seat leaned forward and said, “Driver, someone has left something here, and I think it’s intended for you.” An odd remark. At the next stoplight I turned to ask what it was, and she handed me five tightly packed baggies of weed. At least a hundred-dollars’ worth of the stuff.

 I asked why she didn’t keep it for herself. She smiled slowly. “They’re not intended for me. I know because I’m a drug addict. I just joined Narcotics Anonymous. I guess this is some kind of test from God. I intend to pass it. Please, take them. Maybe think of it as an early Christmas present.” Her pleading, shaking voice conveyed her desperation. I studied the small, pillow-shaped packets. Since they were not “intended” for her and this had been arranged by higher powers, should I have inferred that God sent me this weed? Strange tidings from the good man upstairs; gold, frankincense, myrrh… weed.

 She settled back in her seat and sighed. “Wow, I can’t believe I just did that,” she muttered. There was a moment of silence, then she began to sing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” I joined in. Communion of lost souls. We shared a laugh (my first in months), arrived at her destination, and away she went, disappearing into the night.

 An hour later I turned in the cab and headed back to my dismal studio apartment on Sixth Street, picking up a pack of rolling papers along the way. I broke open a baggie and attempted to roll my first joint in twenty-plus years, feeling decidedly criminal as I did so. “It’s okay,” I reminded myself. “It’s a Christmas gift from God.” I settled in, fired up, and managed to hold in several hits as I dove back into Suttree. As the words danced before my eyes I felt a pleasant buzz engulf my tortured psyche. It was good weed. Twenty minutes later I was overtaken by a profound weariness and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. I woke up six astonishing hours later. Sleep. The blessing of sleep. The novel was splayed open on my chest.

 I rolled another joint, fired it up, and continued on, devouring several chapters before I drifted off to sleep again. I woke several hours later feeling a strange sensation in my gut — hunger. For the first time in weeks I was actually hungry. I ate, smoked, read, and slept. This cycle repeated itself for several days until the baggies were empty, the food gone, and my circadian rhythms showing signs of some return to normality. During that period I read the novel front to back five times. 

 Along the way, Suttree’s saga carried me down, down, down to the bottom of a heightened surrogate reality, a nadir where the rarest jewels of clarity are found. The fourth time through the novel I arrived at a state of barometric equipoise, a balancing between my mental state and Suttree’s. Then, as he descended again, I began to rise. There was a hypnotic poetry to his fall — his life disintegrated, then the fragments disintegrated, then those fragments followed suit ad infinitum. The suicide at the beginning was the key, the first domino of mortality to fall in a chain reaction of mostly self-induced demises, both active and passive. Eventually it became clear that many of the characters in this story were simply twisted echoes of Suttree himself. This winnowing of false reflections was the lesson of the novel, of Suttree’s trial. The chaff of self was consumed as he threw himself into the conflagration of time, fate, and circumstance. Ultimately what survived was the true kernel of Suttree, and simply by that surviving, Suttree became a transcendent figure.

 It occurred to me during that fifth pass through the novel that if Suttree could transcend, perhaps I could, too.

When you’re drowning, you can’t be picky about life preservers. You cling to whatever is nearby that floats. In my reckoning, Suttree floated, and so I clung to him. The book became my bible, the character my surrogate Christ. Over the following months as I dug my way out of that deep psychological hole, Suttree bore my cross. From time to time I had my doubts — it worried me that my life preserver was something so ephemeral as a fictional being. Deep in my heart I wished Suttree were real, for in being real, the threads that my phantom arms found and clung to there at the bottom would have become all the more validated and empowered.

*          *          *

So now, here in Knoxville, Tennessee, in Walter’s barbershop, I have a clearer understanding of why that novel reached me, why it called out to me from that wall of fancy books. It did so because it was endowed with the power of the real.

There’s a term I learned in college. Simulacrum — the substituting of the signs of the real for the real, the generation of a model of reality with no actual origin in reality. So much of art these days is simulacrum. The vast majority. References to references of other references. A hollow shell that represents a hollow shell. Standing in Walter’s barbershop, squarely where Suttree once stood, once spoke, once existed, I’m reminded of the power that art can possess when the real is fearlessly honored, explored, then magnified. That shit can save your life.

 It’s past three-thirty. Walter, it’s clear, wants me to visit forever, but I need to head back to the venue as it’s getting close to sound-check time. I make noises about having to go, but every time I put my hand on the doorknob and try to leave, Walter beckons me back with a question, then another long story.  It’s a game of some sort. A lonely old man’s game. At a certain point he asks, “So what line of work are you in, Jim?” Whittle whittle whittle.

A musician, I tell him.

This piques his interest. “A musician? Are you on the radio?”

“A little bit. Not much so far,” I say.

“Well, keep at it. My old partner Ike, his two boys, they played songs on the guitars and would sing, with that harmonizing — you know? Many a day the two of them, they’d run around here in the shop singing and banging on them guitars. Playing along with the radio. Got so good at it they got on the radio quite a bit themselves. How about that? Called themselves The Everly Brothers. You ever hear of them boys?”

And away we go. 

Jim White’s résumé is too irreconcilably erratic to briefly describe — before David Byrne signed him to a record deal on Luaka Bop, White worked as a model in Milan, a professional surfer, a construction worker, and he drove a cab in New York City for a decade. On Luaka Bop and independently, he has released several albums, including No Such Place and Where It Hits You. He served as the guide and narrator for the BBC documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, which is loosely based on his first album and his writings about life in the South. He lives in Athens, Georgia. 

This content is under legal copyright and may not be reproduced without permission. All rights reserved. © Radio Silence, 2012.

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David Remnick on Bob Dylan

Written and hosted by Benjamin Hedin
Produced by Adam KampeCover art by Casey Burns

We sat down with New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick to discuss the career and unique genius of one of his favorite artists—Bob Dylan. Here's the first installment of the Radio Silence podcast series, complete with historical audio and plenty of music. Run time, 33:08. Stream above, download an mp3, or get in here in the iTunes store. It's free.

Written and hosted by Benjamin Hedin
Produced by Adam Kampe
Cover Art by Casey Burns

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Get yours: https://www.wepay.com/stores/radio_silence_general_store

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...and it'll be in your mailbox by the end of the month. Get yours here:

https://www.wepay.com/stores/radio_silence_general_store

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We are thrilled for Radio Silence contributor A.E. Stallings, who was just named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.  Ms. Stallings is writing about the Athens, Georgia, music scene in the '80s.

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We just lined up the brilliant UK writer Geoff Dyer for the debut issue of the magazine.  If you haven't read it, I recommend his book of travel essays, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It.  He's going to write for us about his teenage obsession with the '70s psychedelic band Family.

Here's something the Guardian put out last year, 10 rules for writing fiction by several authors.  Geoff's list is about halfway down the page.

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The Rock

Sam Lipsyte

Sam Lipsyte on playing with his former band, Dung Beetle.

Sam Lipsyte

There was one night that we played in Boston when I think we peaked.  It was sonic and biblical, a perfect infernal machine.  Oyster cracked his kick pedal in half on the last note of “Blo-Hole.”  A guy came over and shook my hand and said that was one of the most amazing things he ever heard.

Sound check was over.  We played to three people a few hours later, and I wanted to give them their money back we sucked so much.

In the beginning especially, we practiced constantly.  It was how we progressed from bent, loose, and inept to achieving our own style of loose ineptitude.  Then came the brief moment of true accomplishment, chaos and command interwoven.  Then it fell completely apart.  It got too weird.  The wrongness didn’t feel right anymore.  Always, though, we hoped we were a rock band, as in “the rock.”

Rock.  It’s a dumb word, a meaningless word in all its meanings.  (This is why it must not be allowed to wither.)  The irony of it is a given, but the irony oozes out of you like a toxin over time.  You could always ascertain what rocked and what didn’t.  Things rock in the context of what they promise to do and how they betray that.  A band cannot hold anything back.  It must give everything, and fall short.  It’s really only one moment, maybe two moments in a show, or a record, that seize you.  The rest is procedure.  “That rocked,” you say, and people think you are half-kidding, grasping onto an adolescent, meaning-blasted phrase to express your admiration for a few seconds of electrical noise that vouched for your arrested adolescence.  Bullshit.  “To rock,” as opposed to something as infantile as “rocking out,” is the most severe and adult of enterprises.  Most people are too childish to rock.

There’s the band you are in practice and the one you are at the show.  You’re like some collectively autistic entity.  You are throwing a fit, a tantrum, hurling out shards of thwarted ideas, pieces of your own shit, at the audience, screaming.  Still, only moments before, or hours before, in your practice room, everything was perfectly peaceful: The autist absorbed for hours by a stray piece of lint in the rug.  Your music.  You hope, in playing live, to display that piece of lint in all its imaginable glories of texture and hue, to convince everyone of the genius of it, what an astonishing piece of lint it is — look at it, dammit — but you left it somewhere, lost it, it blew away.

Sam Lipsyte has published four books of fiction — Venus Drive, Home Land, The Subject Steve, and The Ask. His work has appeared in many places, including The New Yorker, Playboy, Harper’s, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Tin House, New York Tyrant, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York and teaches fiction writing at Columbia University.

This content is under legal copyright and may not be reproduced without permission. All rights reserved. © Radio Silence, 2012.

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The Recluse

Jon Mooallem 

Jon recalls his friendship with the hermetic poet Hayden Carruth.

Jon Mooallem

When I knew him, the poet Hayden Carruth was an old man with a tremendous white beard. It spread down past his pectorals, and frothed ahead of him as though he were perpetually stepping out of a bath. 

For most of his life, the beard was cropped and average — it was an unserious beard. But by the time I met him in 2003, it was the broad, white beard of a poet in exile, grown out in his desolate corner of America, a nothing-town near Syracuse called Munnsville. “The kids call it Funs-ville,” he told me. Walking into his rickety red house, I said something like, “What a nice house” — to be polite. “Hayden tried to commit suicide in this house,” his wife, Joe-Anne, shot out reflexively.

“No, I didn’t,” Hayden said, barely turning his head from the picture window. “Yes, you did,” Joe-Anne shouted. She nagged him. They bickered a while. Then he raised his voice, interrupted her and settled it: “The pills were in the house,” Hayden said, “but I did it in the car.”

* * *

About the house: Every August, Joe-Anne would write Hayden a birthday message on their bathroom mirror — elaborately, in fire-red lipstick — so that now, after what looked like nine or ten years of this, her love letters erupted and blotted one another out like poorly planned fireworks. Stuck to the refrigerator was a newspaper story about Hayden’s principled refusal to go to a dinner for poets at the Clinton White House. Next to it was a makeshift obituary for a Chihuahua named Mr. José. Mr. José’s favorite artists were listed. They included several modernist painters and the poet Hayden Carruth. Hayden had just turned eighty. He’d authored more than thirty books of poems and won a National Book Award for the last one, Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey. (It didn’t exactly thrill him: The rumor was, he left the medal in a urinal during the ceremony.)  He and I had been pen pals for about two years.

“Who gives a crooked damn about these pufferies?” he wrote me, in response to poems I’d sent him.

Thankfully, they weren’t poems I’d written. I was working at a literary quarterly called The Hudson Review, drawing contenders from an enormous slush pile of poetry submissions, then mailing them to Hayden, an advisory editor to the magazine, for his input.

Mostly, he didn’t like them. He compared another batch to “aborted embryos.” They were totally predictable, he wrote, and the only surprises came “when they don’t make good sense, as in the first poem, where the narrator leaves his arm sticking out of the car window in spite of the roadside saplings that raise welts on it.  I ask you.”

He discounted another group of poems as “something for the family archives.” On others: “Reading them is like looking into a doll’s house where no one is moving.” And others: “Mere glyphs in stone. The labor of carving them means more than the glyphs themselves.” Another group was: “Fantasized triviality, like light verse that isn’t funny.”  He laid into one poet by writing: “Anyone who doesn’t know what is the color of a Hereford cow has no business writing poems about cows at all.” And, of another very famous older poet, he wrote: “Poor [woman] is coming apart like a large mushy mushroom in the lee of a Thornberry. Rather sad to see it happening so explicitly on paper.” One time, when he despised everything I’d sent, he simply told me: “American poetry cannot survive on this thin gruel.  f there is no passion left out there, let’s fold our tent.”

To say I was drawn to Hayden is an understatement. Although, on the face of it, it made no sense. He was an old man limping toward death. I was a kid, more or less just out of college, who imagined a career in letters spooling out ahead of him — a kid who liked poetry, lucky enough to get one of the handful of paying jobs in America that involved reading poems every day. I felt charmed. But I also felt totally insecure.

This was largely because, before getting the job at the Hudson, I’d been working fifty-hour weeks as a butcher, at a shop called Zayda’s Kosher Meats and Deli in suburban New Jersey. I’d gone from wearing a bloodied white coat, soaking and salting seventy-pound beef necks, to taking dictation at the corner of East 68th and Park — typing up letters for my boss that commenced with lines like, “Thank you for your note of August 1.”

At that point, the Hudson had been around for fifty-five years, edited by the same people, and its office still functioned pretty much as it did in 1948 — with a kind of formality, the high-culture etiquette of post-war literary Manhattan. People wore ties and still periodically used typewriters or read manuscripts with monocles. The office had just gotten computers, and I’d regularly hear the managing editor in the other room chanting, “Control – S,” as he punched the keys. There were lunches at the Cosmopolitan Club, The Knickerbocker Club, The Colony Club. So many clubs! The people I worked with were fantastically kind, but their world mystified me, and I expended a lot of energy trying not to be myself. In retrospect, I realize I clung to Hayden as to someone who didn’t belong in that world any more than I did — even less than I did in many ways — but who had somehow managed to matter in it.

Hayden was born into a Connecticut family with, as he wrote, “a knowledge that we were common folk and that the common values, including those of common suffering, were worth noticing.” He served as a code-breaker in Italy during World War II, came back, went to school on the GI Bill, but then — cowed by anxiety and depression virtually all of his life — he retreated into an upstairs bedroom of his parents’ house and stayed there for two years in near total isolation.

He was institutionalized. He got shock treatment. Eventually, he felt well enough to move to the Vermont countryside where he did farm work by day and, a lifelong insomniac, whatever literary hackwork he could get assigned at night. (For a time, he was the sole staff member of the newsletter of an occult book club on Long Island.) He worked until dawn in a cowshed turned study, feeding the wood stove. And he wrote poems — many books of poems, and the ones that I tend to think are his best.

By the time I visited Munnsville, Hayden was buckled with emphysema, a cataract, palsy in each hand, and still hadn’t fully recovered from a heart attack two years earlier. He watched basketball a lot and slept in a hospital bed in the den.

Since the heart attack, he told me, he couldn’t write. His doctors had explained to him that a lot of times, after such a severe trauma, a person’s creativity just gets extinguished, as though imagination were a nerve that could be accidentally damaged or clipped. Over dinner I asked if he missed it.

“I dream about it,” he told me. “The other night, I had a dream I was writing a long, long, narrative poem about fucking. And I wasn’t leaving anything out of it, either. It was like a fucking manual.” 

* * *

You can imagine how a story like this, about a kid and an old man, is supposed to end. I should have been empowered by Hayden’s example. He was proof, after all, that even the most oustsidery outsider, even this anarchist woodsman in Munnsville, can stand staunchly off to the side for a lifetime but still command the respect of the culture he can’t be shoehorned into — if he knows himself, and if his devotion to what he is doing is real. But instead, getting to know Hayden and seeing that devotion up close taught me that I didn’t actually possess that kind of passion. I didn’t hunger for or even enjoy poetry half as much as I thought I did. It didn’t anchor my life, and being unanchored, it wasn’t worth the discomfort or distress of not fitting in. So I quit the magazine. I left New York and went off to find something I could devote myself to. It turned out to be journalism — going out into the world, to places where I didn’t fit in, and writing about the people I met there. And the first thing I did when I figured that out was to sit down and try to wring out a draft of this little memoir about Hayden Carruth.

Hayden, meanwhile, eventually started writing poems again, slowly. And he kept reading the magazine’s slush pile long after I left the Hudson and even as his terrible health got much worse — not out of duty to the magazine, it seemed to me, but out of duty to poetry: What he once called “this grubbing art.”

He died in 2009. We’d lost touch by then. But a former colleague at the Hudson would send me Xeroxes of Hayden’s poetry critiques from time to time. The last one I got closed like this, with both characteristic purposefulness and despair

“May the saints preserve us; we are up to our necks in poetastry. We all need a drink. I wish I were there.”

Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and writer-at-large at Pop-Up Magazine. He has also contributed to The New Yorker and This American Life and is working on a book for Penguin Press about people and wild animals in America. He lives in San Francisco.

This content is under legal copyright and may not be reproduced without permission. All rights reserved. © Radio Silence, 2012.

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Soundtrack for Hungry Travelers

Tobias Wolff

An essay about unapologetically loving a piece of music before someone tells you what's cool and what isn't.

Tobias Wolff

Thanksgiving, 1990. I was driving my family from upstate New York to my brother’s place in Rhode Island. We had done this many times before, and of all occasions of the year it was the one I looked forward to most, but I was brooding over some professional difficulty. To distract myself I rummaged in the tape box and came up with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It’d been knocking around in there for months, but playing it always seemed more of a project than I was ready for. And even now there was something perverse in my choice. I expected my boys, ten and eleven, to complain in favor of something hipper or at least shorter, and I was resolved to make them listen anyway for their own damned good.

No one said anything for a while. We were driving along the Mohawk River. The day was cold and clear. The light glittered on the water, in the windows of the old brick factories in the towns we passed. The baby slept in the back, my wife dozing between her and my son Michael. My youngest boy, Patrick, was up front with me. He had strong opinions; he would be the first to object. I was ready for him.

We’d gotten through the first movement and were well into the second when he finally turned and said, “What is this? This is really great.”

And Michael said, “Yeah, this is great,” and leaned forward over his brother’s shoulder and hung there, listening.

Now this was pleasure, to watch their pleasure, so true and uncomplicated. Some twenty years earlier a clever girl had needled me about my taste for Beethoven. “He’s so bombastic,” she said. “So grandiose. Do you really like that stuff?”

I did, but she made me wonder why — because it was Beethoven, and I was a hick? I went on listening to Beethoven, but at certain moments some small doubt soured my ears.

But these boys of mine were listening without prejudice or reverence, and the purity of their attention somehow refreshed my own, so that I was hearing the music as it deserved, without that whisper from the corner.

To describe Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is to doom yourself to fatuity. Beauty, great-heartedness, endless surprise — these words don’t get you there. The hardest things to explain are those that move us to praise. There will be trouble, there will be pain, the music knows all this, but knows too that sometimes it is insanity not to sing to the heavens with thanks for friendship and brotherhood and the love of husband and wife; insanity not to be mindful of these things and grateful, as a man surrounded by his family is already grateful, on a cold sunny day, for good food waiting at the end of the road, in his brother’s house.

Tobias Wolff’s short stories, novels, and memoirs have won many awards — among them the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His books include the memoir This Boy’s Life, the novel Old School, and Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. He is a professor of English at Stanford University.

This content is under legal copyright and may not be reproduced without permission. All rights reserved. © Radio Silence, 2012.

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RELEASE the SUNBIRD, Part 1

It's All Around You

...from a Radio Silence party at PhotoBoothSF.

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RELEASE the SUNBIRD, Part 2

I Will Walk Again

...from a Radio Silence party at PhotoBoothSF.

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RELEASE the SUNBIRD, Part 3

Why Can't You Look at Yourself

...from a Radio Silence party at PhotoBoothSF.

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RELEASE the SUNBIRD, Part 4

Keep Running Away from Me

...from a Radio Silence party at PhotoBoothSF.

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Alice in Wonderland, or How I Almost Became Hip in Athens, GA

A. E. Stallings 

Alicia Stallings looks back at her time in Athens during the reign of R.E.M. and the B52s.

A. E. Stallings

As my friend Ashley says, the reason you went to the University of Georgia (in the ’80s and ’90s) was to flunk out of the Art School and found R.E.M.  How else explain the presence of all those pseudo-intellectual slackers at a Playboy Top Ten party school?  Athens, Georgia, was at that time the hippest town on the planet.  It had all the self-referential intensity and self-regard of its namesake in the fifth century B.C. if, say, for philosophy, architecture, and the flowering of democracy, you substituted hipness and college radio.  Downtown was the omphalos of hipness.  (There is a bookstore in Prague called The Globe.  It is not named after the theater of Shakespeare, but after a bar in downtown Athens.)  Radiating out, you would encounter the neo-classicism of North Campus, then the run-down Victorian gingerbread houses cut up into student apartments and the antebellum mansions cum frat-houses, then 1970s housing projects and cement dorms (sans air-conditioning), and somewhere in the infinite distance, South Campus, where Ag. majors bided their time before returning to various Georgia hamlets and family farms.  (“Don’t Go Back to Rockville!”)  Beyond the endless fields of the Ag. School lay Oconee, still a “Dry County” (see the B52s’ song) all these decades after the repeal of Prohibition.

Fresh out of high school, I was a geek of the highest order from Atlanta, that shopping-strip carpet-bagger town to the west.  I played violin in the school orchestra, had written, but not published, a fantasy novel that involved little people who rode battle rabbits, hung out with a group who spoke in Monty Python, and never attended a single high school dance.  When on the bus to driver’s ed. a guy asked me what music I listened to, I knew I didn’t have the right answer.  (“Mahler,” I confessed.) 

I arrived in Athens, Georgia, in September of 1986, a virgin in every possible sense. 

The cult of R.E.M. was in full swing, though there were the rumblings of discontent among the hip.  The exegesis of their lyrics was rendered obsolete by Michael Stipe’s suddenly singing with enough enunciation to be understood.  (Some years later my housemate Ellen had a cat with the moniker S’bigger; see “Losing My Religion.”)  The band members were still seen about town, but it was part of hipness to affect not to notice them, even though part of hipness was also to know where Peter Buck’s house was.  By the end of my tenure in Athens, full-fledged sorority girls were going to see their concerts.  You could not be hip and go to a concert packed with sorority girls in their eveningwear of pressed white t-shirts and khaki shorts and enormous hair bows.  Still, the cult — and cultivation — of hipness also had its endearing earnestness:  late-night arguments in a fog of clove cigarettes over the superiority of Joy Division versus the Smiths, for instance.  (Evidently Joy Division won out because their lead singer actually committed suicide instead of just moping in a minor key.)  They were the sort of impassioned youthful debates that, in Persuasion, are over Byron versus Scott.

It turned out that the golden key to the wonderland garden of hipness was, in fact, my orchestra geekiness.  There was some demand for people who could actually play an instrument.  Downtown was always covered in neon fliers for those seeking their ideal bandmates — the listing of an ingenious amalgam of influences was paramount, often ending with the stern caveat, “No posers” [sic].  The first band I was in, in fact, involved a tortured soul and aspiring songwriter who had just purchased his first guitar.  We practiced in the bassist’s double-wide trailer (he was a real grown-up, and more country than rock-n-roll) down the Atlanta highway past the Pepsi bottling plant and a place that specialized in barbequed goat.  The first half-hour of practice involved Craig’s trying to tune his guitar, until the bassist couldn’t bear it anymore and grabbed it off him.  We never played out or had a gig, but hauling my violin to “band practice” was a lot cooler than going to orchestra.

On Tuesday nights we went to see Widespread Panic at the Uptown Lounge — we enjoyed the music, but the real draw was the seventy-five-cent Rolling Rocks and a lenient carding policy.  When perusing bands that were playing about town, at the 40 Watt or the Uptown Lounge, dorm-mates would circle the names of bands we had never heard of.  Rumors ran wild, for it was known that R.E.M. sometimes did surprise gigs at local clubs under assumed names.  Most of the time, though, if you went out to see an unknown band called Beast Penis, it would end up being Beast Penis.

There were close encounters with near-hipness.  At my first apartment, my roommate Emily and I threw a party that featured a surprise appearance by “The Groove Trolls” (a band made of a singer and several bassists that had their moment in the spotlight with a song called, “The Beav’s on Drugs,” a pharmacopial take on “Leave It to Beaver”).   And once when I got talked into noodling around on a keyboard for a half-hour before a friend’s gig at a hippyish (and hip) vegetarian joint called, with typical Athens ironic Southernness, “The Grit,” Michael Stipe was present and made some positive comment on a tune I had made up.  Or so my friend told me, with bemusement.

Any real claim to hipness I may have had, though, however tenuous and ephemeral, comes through George (Burnley) Vest (the aforementioned friend).  His true hipness was his absolute indifference to hipness and the appearance thereof.  Hipsters painstakingly affected an unstudied look about their dress, but Vest was genuinely indifferent to sartorial matters, his perfectionism laser-focused entirely on music and the crafting of songs.  I ended up playing a gig with Vest and the late, great Vic Chestnutt (at practice, Vic’s pet rabbit hopped and frolicked the length of the room, while Vic himself was confined to a wheelchair).  At one point we (Vest and friends) even played at the Georgia Theater, the biggest venue in town.  It was a charity concert with several local bands.  It’s a cliché, but I ended up dating the drummer.

For our last gig, at the Downstairs (where I also held my first poetry reading), Vest decided to make a rockumentary (“Attack the Downstairs”), or mockumentary, maybe, of our band.  Ashley did the jittery, hand-held filming, occasionally reaching beyond the frame to snag a potato chip.  One of the more telling moments is the back-to-back interviews with the drummer and me, where it is clear to the camera, but unbeknownst to ourselves, that we are at cross purposes and on the verge of breaking up.  Couples break up, bands break up — everything is always hurtling apart in this expanding universe of ours.  Every few years, that much older and wiser and farther away from my zenith of hipness, I sit here in the distant future and take out the tape and watch it.  What shiny, happy people we were!  That is to say, not how hip, but how lovely, how impossibly young.

A. E. Stallings has recently won some major honors, including Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. Her books include the poetry collections Archaic Smile and Hapax. She studied classics at the University of Georgia and at Oxford. Stallings spent many years in Athens, Georgia, and now lives in Athens, Greece. Apparently, if it isn’t called Athens, she won’t live there.

This content is under legal copyright and may not be reproduced without permission. All rights reserved. © Radio Silence, 2012.

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