About the Artist, Marlowe Dobbe:

I am a Portland, Oregon native currently attending The Pacific Northwest College of Art, majoring in illustration. My work is stylized, greatly considered, and often times humorous. I work mainly in digital, but I frequently include elements of my physical work in my finished pieces. I love making art that is aesthetically pleasing, fresh, accessible, and enjoyable – and in my opinion – that is the best kind of art. My topics range from direct observations, to imaginings, to graphic imagery, and all of my pieces are professionally approached as part of my process. Components of my personality are also a big part of my art, and I am always trying to reflect the wit, gentle humor, and creative viewing that I so greatly appreciate.

No. 16, July 1970

I am in Tunis. It is a vertically sprawling city. I’m on a very long walk: winding roads, lines of trees, fences, panoramas. It’s as if the whole landscape turned out to be the background of an Italian painting.

The next day, the police come to arrest me. Long ago I committed a minor infraction. I no longer have any memory of it, but I know that today it could cost me twenty years.

I flee, armed with a revolver. The places I pass through are unfamiliar. There is no immediate danger, but I know already that my flight won’t solve anything. I go back to places I know, where I had been walking the previous night. Three sailors ask me for directions. Behind a line of trees, women in veils wash laundry.

I return to town on a winding road. There are cops everywhere, hundreds of them. They’re stopping everyone and searching vehicles.

I pass between the cops. As long as I don’t make eye contact, I have a chance of making it out.

I go into a café, where I find Marcel B. I sit down near him.

Three men enter the café (cops, obviously!); they make a halfhearted search of the room. Maybe they haven’t seen me? I almost breathe a sigh of relief, but one of them comes and sits down at my table.

“I don’t have my papers on me,” I say.

He is about to stand and leave (which would mean I’m saved), but he says to me in a low voice:

“Copulate!”

I don’t understand.

He writes the word in the margin of a newspaper, in huge bubble letters:

then he goes back over the first three letters, filling them in:

Eventually I get his drift. It’s extremely complicated: I am to go home and “have marital relations with my wife” so that, when the police come for me, the fact of “copulating” on a Sunday will constitute for me, being Jewish, an aggravating circumstance.

My being Jewish is, of course, at the root of this whole affair and complicates it considerably. My arrest is a consequence of the Judeo-Arab conflict and affirming my pro-Palestinian sentiments will do me no good.

I return to my villa (which might be just a single room). Most of all I want to know whether I will be a Tunisian prisoner in France or a French prisoner in Tunisia. Either way, I anticipate an amnesty during a visit from a head of state.

I feel innocent. What bothers me most is having to go for several years without being able to change my dirty socks.

GEORGES PEREC (1936-1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentary maker and essayist. In death he remains a member of Oulipo, the workshop of potential literature. He is most famous for the novels Life: A User’s Manual and A Void.

Translator DANIEL LEVIN BECKER (b. 1984) is the youngest member of Oulipo, and only the second American to ever be so honored. He is a writer, translator and music critic, and reviews editor of The Believer. He is the author Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Harvard 2012).

“I wrote that story in college. I had a sort of fondness for it because it seemed to me to anticipate Housekeeping, though I had written it more than a decade earlier.  So when The Paris Review asked me for something, I sent it off.  I am actually interested by the fact that I never feel any impulse to write a short story. It is such an attractive form. “Connie Bronson” has for me now the interest and charm of anyone’s juvenilia—that is, almost none at all.

On first reading, it’s easy to see why Robinson dismisses the “juvenilia” of “Connie Bronson”. The story shows Robinson’s loping, associative prose starting to blossom, but it’s a moody number that, compared with the uneasy ambiguities that characterize the author’s fully matured work, stays in the shallows.

The story follows its grade school protagonist and her neighbor, the titular Connie, social misfit with “brain fever” who meets the sundry cruelties of the world with a “hatred as intense” as any a jeering classmate might show her. The two girls spend their days playing by the river that runs near their homes, and Connie develops the troubling habit of catching small critters and roasting them alive over a fire she builds. The narrator’s growing unease with Connie’s budding sadism comes to a head when, in pursuit of a perch or trout to roast, Connie holds her over the railing of the bridge, fearfully peering into the river in which careless children die every year.

‪Though the story bears traces of its collegiate inception, “Connie Bronson” is no standard undergrad composition. The characters are sharply drawn and memorable, the sentences tumble downhill with uncommon clarity. And of course there are similarities between the narrator of “Connie Bronson” and Ruth in Housekeeping; both are staid, reflective women relying on a sort of floating retrospective. But what makes “Connie Bronson” significant, the way in which it truly “anticipates” Robinson’s masterpiece, is the emergence of a symbol that appears again and again in the author’s most significant scenes.

Housekeeping finds the narrator Ruth and her sister Lucille in the fictional Fingerbone, Idaho being transferred from the care of one relative after another after their mothers’ suicide. Readers may remember the novel as beginning with Ruth and Lucille’s mother depositing them with their grandmother shortly before her suicide—this reader did—but it actually begins with an extended family backstory that introduces us to the most important figure in the family’s life—Fingerbone’s lake:

“It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below.  When the ground is plowed in the spring, cut and laid open, what exhales from the furrows but the same, sharp, watery smell. The wind is watery, and all the pumps and creeks and ditches smell of water unalloyed by any other element….And above that the water suspended in sunlight, sharp as an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains.”

It is into this lake that the train carrying Ruth’s grandfather slides, widowing her grandmother, and into this lake that Ruth’s mother drives, orphaning Ruth and her sister. This is why one is always aware of the lake, or the deeps of the lake in Fingerbone. Whereas in Robinson’s later novel Gilead water will be treated with the more traditional set of spiritual connotations—baptism, formlessness, mutability—here water becomes a mysterious depth of loss that permeates the very air of Fingerbone.

“Connie Bronson” gives a similar, but less specific, power to the water coursing through its narrative. Before being forced out over the river by Connie, the narrator is intrigued by the river: “…the river often suggested dreams to me. But my dreams and imaginings always ended at the same place, with my having come to the river but only standing beside it or looking down on it from the bridge.” This narrator is a sheltered one, fascinated by the lethal river but a stranger to the depth Ruth knows so intimately. When, in the story’s climax, Connie pins the narrator to the railing of the bridge and forces her to stare into the water, she forces the speaker to see herself in the water.

For the speaker of “Connie Bronson,” water represents the danger of losing herself in the current; for Ruth of Housekeeping, losing oneself to the depths seems a biographical inevitability. For both young women, bridges loom large. The bridge in “Connie Bronson” though significant, operates on a fairly direct level. But in Housekeeping, the railroad bridge out of Fingerbone is both part of and above the lake, and the climactic, dangerous crossing Ruth undertakes marks the novel’s uneasy catharsis.

By the end of Housekeeping, Ruth’s younger sister Lucille has become estranged from Ruth and Sylvie, the wayfaring aunt who comes to care for the girls. In a decisive moment, Ruth and Sylvie attempt to set fire to their family home and cross the railroad bridge over the lake, away from the prying residents and atmospheric grief of Fingerbone. The journey is dangerous, the two walking precariously over the lake that has already claimed two of their loved ones.

As Ruth becomes aware of the lake through the gaps in the bridge, she is filled first with dread, then a sort of ecstasy: “to be suddenly above the water was a giddy thing, an elation,” as she risks plunging into the lake even as she makes her escape from its atmospheric presence. As she continues across the bridge, she begins to feel the lake’s currents under her feet, and thinks of her mother’s erratic moods: “It was as if she righted herself continually against some current that never ceased to pull. She swayed continuously, like a thing in the water, and it was graceful, a slow dance, a sad and heady dance.” Walking across the bridge, Ruth feels the lake, and in the lake, her mother.

In walking across the bridge in the lake, Ruth feels her mother—and the loss of her mother—as clearly as she does at any point in the novel. In escaping Fingerbone and its lake she has her deepest communion with it, and joins her mother in the realm of the departed. She leaves Fingerbone, and simultaneously ascends into its ethereal mourning.

Perhaps, then, when Robinson said that “Connie Bronson” anticipates Housekeeping, she was alluding to having stumbled into a voice—that wry, detached female retrospective that becomes so powerful in the novel. But perhaps she understood that “Connie Bronson,” though just a small foreshadowing of the symbolic mastery the author would later show, gestures toward the most devastating and illuminating moment of the later work: a young girl, confronting the water from the uneasy safety of a bridge, terrified and remade by the current beneath.

Danny Nowell is a blogger and writer living in Portland. His writing about the NBA appears at ESPN TrueHoop Network blogs, Portland Roundball Society, and HoopSpeak, and he reviews books for The Oxford American online. What he lacks in finesse he makes up for in zeal. 

Calling all undergrad and graduate writers (no matter your major) —we want you!

THE RULES:

Every Wednesday we post a prompt from William Wallace Cook’s classic how to manual Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots. Use the prompt below to write your own original 500 word (or fewer) story.

In the book, {A}= a male protagonist. {B}= a female protagonist but for our purposes, feel free to write from the point of view of any gender.

Mini-Plottos, 500 words or fewer, must be submitted by the following Monday at 5:00pm PST. Send to: theopenbar@tinhouse.com. Please include a brief author bio (including where you go to school) with your entry (which should be pasted into the body of the email).

The Week’s Prompt:

{A}, unable to explain events of a seemingly supernatural nature, has a
feeling that a ghostly visitor is at work

THE RICHES:

Winners will be announced each Wednesday and will receive a hardcover copy of Plotto, online publication on the Tin House Blog, and be entered in the Final Master Plot Challenge.

*Tin House is now accepting flash fiction (under 1,000 words) for FLASH FRIDAYS. Please send to theopenbar@tinhouse.com with FLASH FRIDAY as your subject line.

Late Night Library is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting talented writers early in their careers. Their programs include a series of podcasts about debut titles, podcast conversations with cultural innovators, events that connect diverse literary communities, and a virtual network of writers and readers. Tonight they host Leni Zumas, author of The Listeners at the Angry Pigeon, with a special guest introduction from (another great Tin House debut novelist) Alexis Smith, author of Glaciers.

Here Paul Martone, Executive Director of Late Night Library, talks with Tin House intern (and Professional Mixologist and Master Johnnycake Maker) Jack Mahaffy about bicoastal recordings, upcoming writers, local bookstores, and finding time to write.

Jack Mahaffy: Portland and Brooklyn are both home to vibrant literary scenes, each playing host to multiple readings and book-related events every week, and are so like-minded in terms of music and tacos and falafel and bourbon and bikes that regular writerly house-swaps are all but inevitable. How does a connection like this translate in an online space?

Paul Martone: Erin Hoover and I founded Late Night Library in Brooklyn and Portland, because that’s where we lived in 2010 (Erin was in Brooklyn, and I was here in Portland). We had no intention of capitalizing on the Portland/Brooklyn hype when we began to record podcasts, but the online connection between Brooklyn and Portland has been inspiring. We’ve facilitated conversations between writers in each city by connecting them through Skype and recording their conversations on two tracks. We’ve also hosted interactive bi-coastal events for book-loving Brooklynites and Portlanders. During our anniversary event last April, the Brooklyn audience asked the Portland authors questions, and the Portland audience asked the Brooklyn authors questions—we all felt connected. Late Night Library is now broadening its focus to serve every community, big and small. We don’t care how “hip” the location is; Late Night Library was founded for everyone interested in books.

JM: I was hoping you could recommend books by people living in each community—four writers as yet unheralded on the show or the site, and deserving of a wider audience.

PM: Three writers in Portland we intend to contact soon: Vanessa Veselka, James Bernard Frost, and Natalie Serber. Three writers in Brooklyn: Cathy Che, Greg Gerke, and Laren McClung. All six of these poets and writers have recently published debut books, with the exception of Cathy Che, whose debut poetry collection Split is forthcoming from Alice James Books.

JM: Late Night Library’s focus is rooted in promoting debut fiction and poetry by way of discussions based on attentive, careful reading: eschewing rehashes of plot in the former or obtuse generalities in the latter. Why the decision to focus on elements of the craft itself—individual sentences, images, and so on—effectively using a focus that is both passionate and academic, when showcasing debut works?

PM: The discussions result from our excitement as readers. Every co-host is a writer, but not every co-host has studied writing formerly. Some episodes sound more academic than others. Our format is designed for inclusion. Every month, our listeners hear a new pair of writers discuss a debut book; as a result, no two episodes sound the same.

JM: You’re so dedicated to the cultivation of a supportive community to showcase and analyze the work of other writers that your own work is only mentioned, if at all, in passing, and even then only in monologues that bookend an episode, and even then intimating that it might only be found, Xeroxed and hand-bound, in the trunk of a car in Mississippi. How has the Late Night Library project impacted your own writing?

PM: I started writing a novel in November, 2010 and completed a revised, full-length manuscript a few weeks ago. If anyone in Mississippi is interested in reading it, or storing a copy in the trunk of a car, please let me know! I’ve also been writing non-fiction. One article appeared at The Skanner in March, another will appear at Propeller later this month. I’d write more, but I’m employed as the English/Humanities Department Chair at Northwest Academy, a performing arts school (6-12) in downtown Portland. Northwest Academy demands more time than Late Night Library, but I love our community and cherish our mission—everyone involved is deeply engaged in arts education. Writers often worry about protecting their time, which is natural and to some extent necessary, but many of us make time for multiple projects and work full-time jobs. The most essential factor for me is my wife, Karma. She tolerates my Type A personality, consistently cares for our dog, Ingrid, and reads even more books than I do.

JM: Pre-Internet models of book recommendation, from long form literary reviews to bookseller suggestions, seems to have been replaced largely by the more flickering, keep-clicking approach of the five star user review and whatever titles an algorithm spits out following the fragment You might also like. Sites like The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown offer book club subscriptions while Late Night Library links directly to WORD, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn. Is the hope to intertwine independent bookstores with online literary communities? How would you like to see that relationship evolve?

PM: Late Night Library partners with indie and “Big Six” publishers by promoting authors and distributing books. We love independent bookstores, and we refuse to support large corporate retailers like Amazon.com, which engage in predatory pricing (i.e. selling books, e-books, and e-book devices at a loss to eliminate competition). As a nonprofit organization, Late Night Library’s revenue is chiefly devoted to program services, and as the Executive Director, I report to a Board of Directors. It’s a high level of accountability that fosters a civic-minded approach to literary arts. It also enables us to promote independent bookstores without requesting much in return. Here’s what’s intertwined: our mission to promote early career writers and our desire to help independent publishers and bookstores thrive in the twenty-first century.

JM: You’ve referred to the work you do as “literary activism” and seem very interested in bringing something vibrant and new to the traditional format of an author reading event, as seen at the Skype + MacBooks + actively engaged audience bi-coastal reading earlier this year, as well as during the Late Night Conversation with Robyn Tenenbaum and Courtenay Hameister of Portland’s (fantastic) radio variety show, Live Wire!. Are there plans for further explorations of what an author reading can be?

PM: Absolutely. We recently initiated a new series called “In and Out of Town.” We pair one local author with a visiting author for a live event. In addition to the readings, each event features live music, improv, and other performing arts. The series is free to the public with a five-dollar suggested donation. I’d also like to clarify that Late Night Library doesn’t aspire to become a radio variety show! We have enormous respect for Robyn and Courtenay, and I encourage your listeners to listen to their podcasts and attend a live show.

JM: A recent debut series podcast featured Dorianne Laux reading her poem Kissing. And recent episodes of Late Night Conversation feature the two leading mayoral candidates in Portland. As a subscriber to the show, I appreciated these deviations from the expected format, its expansiveness and inclusion, much in the way I did when the first Late Night Conversation with Brad Listi of the Other People podcast showed up. Such natural outgrowths of the show’s principals seem to make it more library-like than ever. What, if any, future such extensions does Late Night Library have in store?

PM: First of all, thanks for listening, Jack! Late Night Conversation is released on the 15^th of every month. It’s a podcast that features writers, editors, publishers, activists, educators, and other innovators who influence art culture. Essentially, we record an unscripted conversation with someone who is changing the way we think about the arts. Late Night Conversation furthers our mission by attracting casual book readers as listeners, demystifying the book publishing process, and providing Late Night Library with a platform for encouraging literary activism through its monologues. In the coming months, we’ll be discussing U.S. v. Apple and the future of book publishing. Guests include Joseph Regal (CEO of Zola Books), Mark Coker (founder of Smashwords), and Lorin Stein (editor of the Paris Review). We’ll be initiating a six-month campaign to support indie books and indie authors, and we’ll be asking readers, writers, and publishers to get involved—not with dollars and cents, but advocacy and activism. It all begins on October 15^th when I speak with Tin House’s very own Rob Spillman. In the meantime, I encourage your readers to join the Indie Bound community, purchase books online directly from independent publishers and bookstores.

Thanks for this opportunity to talk about Late Night Library. I’m excited to hear Leni Zumas read at the Angry Pigeon tonight, with a special guest introduction from Alexis Smith, author of Glaciers!

Paul Martone is a fiction writer and the Executive Director of Late Night Library. His writing appears in The Saranac Review, The Stickman Review, Fiddlehead, Water~Stone Review, Reed Magazine (2010 John Steinbeck Award Finalist), and The Skanner. An excerpt from Martone’s novel-in-progress was selected as a finalist for Glimmer Train’s June, 2011 short story award.

Jack Mahaffy grew up in the place that you did and lives in the place that you do with the sort of people and animals that you love.

In a dizzying array of possible plot suggestions, hundreds of situations and scenarios, Cook inspires Plottoists and their as-of-yet unwritten imagination. We look forward to reading your stories!

We are launching Glaciers Bookclub in a box! Grab your best pals, cozy up with a cup of Earl Grey (Isabel’s favorite), and chat with Glaciers author, Alexis Smith, on Skype.

Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska.

Glaciers unfolds internally, the action shaped by Isabel’s sense of history, memory, and place, recalling the work of writers such as Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf. For Isabel, the fleeting moments of one day can reveal an entire life. While she contemplates loss and the intricate fissures it creates in our lives, she accumulates the stories—the remnants—of those around her and she begins to tell her own story.

My life intersected with J. P. Jacobsen’s in a McDonald’s parking lot.  I hate many things about Ronald McDonald but his famous potatoes have had me in their MSG-soaked thrall since childhood.  Which is why I found myself off to the side of the drive-through, waiting on an order of large fries one late July.  Naturally, I pulled out a book and flipped it open.

Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is not what I’m writing about here.  But it was what I was consuming outside McDonald’s.  In it, Rilke doles out advice like this: “Of all my books just a few are indispensable to me, and two even are always among my things, wherever I am: the Bible, and the books of the great Danish writer, Jens Peter Jacobsen.”  I read on, intensely curious (the Bible and —who?).  Read Jacobsen, continues Rilke, and “a world will come over you, the happiness, the abundance, the incomprehensible immensity of a world.” One letter later, I was sold, ready to track down the books of this Jacobsen—specifically a collection called Mogens and Other Stories.  And just as I committed myself to finding it there came a knock at my window.  A man with a white paper bag stood outside.  “Sorry ’bout the wait, sir.”  I blinked as he handed over my precious fries.

Two weeks later, it was Mogens I was devouring.

I must have made an odd sight to that McDonald’s attendant, hunched over the steering wheel as I was, furiously underlining. Quivering, maybe.  Perhaps I even resembled a Jacobsen character: “Quite obviously he had just been reading a book,” writes the author in Mogens, “one could tell that from the expression in his eyes, from his hair, from the abstracted way in which he managed his hands.” Jacobsen, a man familiar with a diverse array of books and knowledge sets himself, would know:  he was a scientist first (biology, botany) and a fiction writer only later in his short life.  Born in Jutland in 1847 and educated in the 1860s at the University of Copenhagen, Jacobsen took top honors for his dissertation on seaweeds.  A few years later, he’d translated Darwin into Danish.  In 1872 he got tuberculosis and, bedridden, started writing for a living.  His strikingly small oeuvre—he published one novel and just seven stories—influenced, among others, Rilke, Lawrence, Freud, Hesse, Ibsen, and Schoenberg.  Working my way through Mogens, it wasn’t hard to see why.

The novella-length title story opens quietly as a door with well-oiled hinges: “Summer it was; in the middle of the day; in a corner of the enclosure.  Immediately in front of it stood an old oaktree.”  From here Jacobsen leads us into the lives of the dreamy-minded Mogens and his love, carefree Camilla, whom he meets in a rainstorm.  All seems well.  Then, just after they marry, Camilla perishes in a fire. Mogens, trapped nearby beneath a fallen beam, watches her banish into flames before being rescued himself.  The sight leaves him hysterical.  He slides into depression, renounces all love in an effort to stave off the pain of loss, and falls into a nomadic, vice-filled life. After abruptly dumping his latest fling one morning, Mogens says coldly:  “It means that I am tired of your beauty, that I know your voice and your gestures by heart, and that neither your whims nor your stupidity nor your craftiness can any longer entertain me.  Can you tell me then why I should stay?”

Mogens eventually falls for another, Thora, who draws out his better self.  He hears her voice first from afar, singing a refrain that could be his:  “In longing, in longing, I live.”  It’s this wanting, Jacobsen seems to believe, that drives a human mad—no matter how pure desire’s fluttering at first seems.  Even as Mogens and Thora wed, Jacobsen writes, “Passion spoiled everything, and it was very ugly and unhuman…He had been subjugated, weighed down, tormented, by this ugly and powerful force; it had lain in his eyes and ears, it had poisoned all his thoughts.”  Throughout the collection, Jacobsen drives to the heart of passion’s blinding sway over reason and, ultimately, its costs.  For the author, it’s this fever—fueled by distances and desires—that repels and melds us to one another again and again.

And Jacobsen probes passion outside the context of romantic love too.  In his allegorical, pre-Camus “The Plague at Bergamo,” the author conjures a death-infested landscape of fear and desperation.  The dying Bergamians vent a crazy-eyed lust for salvation; they want “to be His, not in gentle piety, not in the inactivity of silent prayer, but madly.”  Jacobsen’s riskiest venture—the skeletal plot and hyberbolic characters make the piece feel less like a short story and more like a dramatic skit—follows, called “There Should Have Been Roses,” an ethereal conversation between two swooning pages.  The collection finishes with what’s arguably the easiest, most formally conservative piece, “Mrs. Fonss,” in which a widow’s newfound passion for a long-lost lover forces a wedge between her and her children.  She dies leaving her estranged children a final letter:  “I knew very well that it was your great love, that caused your great anger; had you loved me less, you would have let me go more easily.”

Like Mrs. Fonss, Jacobsen had the temerity to perish early: he died of tuberculosis at thirty-seven.  And as with Keats or Basquiat, one wonders what still greater works would have come had be been around longer.  But the zestful, keenly observed vision, the vision that drew in Rilke, thrives still.  Rilke too wrote about passion and how it plays us.  So when the poet suggests Jacobsen to his letter-writing admirer, he’s saying what Chuck Palahniuk says of Amy Hempel’s short stories:  “If you don’t love this, we have nothing in common.”  Adds Rilke, somewhat more gently, of Mogens:  “Live a while” in these stories, “learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them.”

Jesse Nathan‘s poetry, fiction, criticism, and essays have appeared in Adbusters, Geez, the Believer, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere.