February 2012
Red Lemon Frozen Concentrate #3.0 : Crimes of The Lemon-Heart : Pen-Sexuals
by Jon Reiss
When I was first contacted to write something for the Red Lemonade Blog I immediately began dreaming up dissertations and evaluations on the current state of literary fiction, what has or hasn’t gone out of fashion in recent years and exactly what it means to fall into this rather small but coveted genre or label. Then, two months later when I was reminded that my deadline was in a couple of days, I decided to fall back on a more instantly gratifying subject, alas, my specialty as a writer if I have one, would most definitely be the world instant gratification. So, while I’d like write about the current state of fiction, or perhaps the modern novel’s reliance on mythological structure, or even genre crossing and it’s importance in modern fiction, I’ve opted to write a short mediation on what Burgess called, “the old In/out.” Fucking in Fiction if you will, but more specifically, the sexuality of our characters and the importance, or lack of importance of who they fancy.
At work on my first novel about a heroin addicted aspiring actor who subsists off the money he earns stripping for gay men in internet webacam chatrooms, I was immediately forced to deal with and almost galvanize my protagonist’s sexuality in order to explain to my readers what his sexual “deal” was, to the point where I ultimately became more aware of the idiosyncrasies of my characters sexuality than of my own. Nonetheless, when readers first encounter my work full of questions about my character’s sexual orientation and how it relates to my own, I tend to believe that it doesn’t matter. On the other hand I’d like to think that I understand, or rather and fascinated with people’s tendency to link the two.
Something about sexually ambiguous characters in fiction drives people crazy. Yet, two of my favorite authors are known for writing sexually ambiguous protagonists, and in some cases, that aspect of their work seems inextricable from the whole. Every time we open a new novel by Bret Easton Ellis we wonder what the sexuality of the main character will be. Will it be total right-brained controlling Wall Street Yuppie like in American Psycho or a liberal arts studying, liberated sexual tourist like most of the characters in Rules of Attraction? In Ellis’s most recent novel Imperial Bedrooms the lead character is ostensibly entirely straight, yet in Lunar Park, a faux biography turned horror homage, the protagonist is a married family man who after surviving a major ordeal ends up living in Chelsea with his male life partner in a heroin induced haze. Wherever Ellis’s protagonists wind up on the Kinsey scale, readers have reacted with a undying fascination over Elis’s own sexuality.
When Leonardo DiCaprio portrayed Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries, he clearly saw bathroom stall blowjob scene as an opportunity to show his chops for acting via facial expression. Looking at DiCaprio’s face during that scene you might think that penis was being severed ala Greg Araki’s The Doom Generation rather than what was actually taking place. Readers who found their way to Carroll’s books through the film were probably surprised to read his follow-up journal collection Forced Entries where Carroll steps outside a club after a night of drinking and happily receives oral sex from a man for lack of anything better to do. From reading Legs McNeil’s oral history on New York City PunkPlease Kill Me, one is apt to make the argument that bi sexuality was merely fixture of New York City’s downtown rock scene in the ‘70’s, but either way, a motion picture version of Carrol’s Forced Entries if made today, would likely omit this scene from it’s script, why, because most audiences are simply irked sexual ambiguity.
The question becomes whether audiences react this way merely because people in general are expected to choose a side, and fictional characters, being archetypes of actual people are especially expected to more so, or, or is it more a function of the modern obsession with truth and reality in this country? Perhaps what we’re dealing with here is it the same kind of impetus behind the cases of James Frey and JT Leroy? I don’t claim to know the answer to this, but wonder whether the readers of this blog have an opinion on the subject. Do, perhaps authors shy away from experimenting with the sexuality of their protagonists in fear of limiting their audiences or having their work pigeon-holed as “gay fiction?” Is there perhaps something alluring about reading characters that are more sexually open than we as readers may be? If fiction is meant to serve the purpose of bringing the reader to new experiences, then my next book would be best written about a red headed pan-sexual plushie porn star with both male and female genitalia. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a red head.
Jon Reiss is the arts editor for Jewcy, and a contributor for Vol.1 Brooklyn, Brooklyn Based, The Rumpus, Impose, NY Press, WG News and Spin Magazine. He's currently putting the final touches on his debut novel. Find him athttp://jonreiss.tumblr.com . Check out his work here on Red Lemonade :
Red Lemon Frozen Concentrate #2.75 : Crime Fiction/Chat Interview of The Lemon-Heart
by: Mikita Brottman
This essay on crime fiction does a good job on capturing some of the essences of what is, admittedly, the somewhat vague nomenclature 'alternative fiction.' Since Mikita interest are in a particular subject matter and style, her writing is alternative as it approaches crime fiction from a different perspective. Her incorporating different narrative styles and formats, she also touches on our most recent calls for hybrid submissions. The first few chapters of Mikita Brottman's "Bel Air" and "Thirteen Girls" are uploaded on Red Lemonade : http://redlemona.de/mikita-brottman/thirteen-girls and http://redlemona.de/mikita-brottman/bel-air . Thirteen Girls is coming out this summer from Nine Banded Books : http://www.ninebandedbooks.
People often say we’re living in a uniquely voyeuristic and amoral society galvanized by a dreadful predilection for human suffering, but our interest in grisly details is nothing new. As every crime fan knows, there’s always been a huge public appetite for details of real criminal cases. In his book Illuminations, author and critic Walter Benjamin claims, “what draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” Benjamin’s suggestion hits home: I’ve always been compelled by crime stories, both true and fictional, though what I’m really looking for (and what I’m trying to write myself) is something in between.
Today’s crime fiction tends to be either hard-boiled or too plot-driven for my tastes. Writers like James Elroy and David Peace are overly stylized and staccato, and I find the mystery / detective novel too confined to genre restrictions. I don’t need a strong protagonist or any protagonist at all, in fact. Personally, I’m not looking for formal daring or stylistic innovation, nor do I necessarily need the story to end with resolution, comfort or consolation.
The “true crime” genre is equally bound by rigorous (if implicit) boundaries and restrictions. As authors working in this field know well, cases must be chosen wisely. “True crime” writers seem to assume that the kinds of crimes people want to read about are those they’re already familiar with (or think they are). Interestingly, this is one of the few literary genres dominated by women. Top authors like Ann Rule and Kathryn Casey are phenomenally popular and prolific, yet their work tends to be formulaic, and framed precisely to suit the way we’ve been preconditioned to receive it. There’s always a victim (usually young and female) and a perpetrator (often an older male). The story begins with a tragedy, proceeds through clues and signs, and ends with arrests and penalties. In other words, the “true” in “true crime” is descriptive, not all-embracing; not everything that “really happened” makes good “true crime.” To appeal, a story must lend itself to a certain formula, and it must have entrance points for moralizing voyeurism and righteous indignation. It should also lend itself to certain trite phrases: disappearances must be “mysterious,” evidence must be “crucial,” crime is “brutal,” details “graphic,” dead girls must be “laid to rest.”
Like much crime fiction, true crime has a linear, progressive trajectory. A horrible event occurs, the perpetrator is arrested by police and tried in the courtroom, and the victim’s family finds healing and closure. On either side of this, there’s an enormous amount of filler—family histories of victim and perpetrator, a discussion of geographic economy and culture, and a blow-by-blow account of the trial. Whenever I pick up one of these mass-market “true crime” paperbacks, I usually start a few chapters in, and give up half way through, when the trial begins.
There’s an assumption that crime writing is edgy because it deals with transgression and violence, but this is seldom the case. Strict plot formulas and genre rules often lead to staid and static writing. Complex cases are reduced to simple tales of good and evil, stories of the quest for “truth” and “justice,” and there’s never any question about who the victim is in each case. In Thirteen Girls and Bel Air, I’m trying to break out of these limitations by exploring an alternative form of crime writing where the distinction between “true crime” and “crime fiction” isn’t so clear-cut. I’m not really interested in plot trajectory or in tying everything up in tidy little knots, but in showing how these cases become narratives only in retrospect. As things unfold, there’s no continuity. Instead, there are distractions, diversions, instability, flawed guesses, accidents and all kinds of variables. Crimes that are not solved immediately often remain unsolved.
There are some models for this kind of writing. Hybrid crime fiction—the kind that’s “based on a true story”—can sometimes contain the best of both worlds, as with John Berendt’s slightly fictionalized Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, in which Berendt “rounds the corners of the truth,” as he puts it. In some ways, this is part of a tradition started by Truman Capote and continued by writers like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Calvin Trillin in his book Killings, a series of portraits of violent crimes that reveal more about the communities in which the murders took place than they do the killers. Wisconsin Death Trip is another great example of this. I also love the shrewd and quirky first person crime “analysis” that Janet Malcolm does in The Journalist and the Murderer and her latest book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills.
Most of all, what I look for are crime stories that pay attention to the kind of detail that other kinds of writing often overlook. Every murder has its little nooks and crannies, and these are the spaces I want to explore. The stories in my book Thirteen Girls are a series of repressed, parallel texts to those that customarily take precedent in mainstream “true crime” narratives. These stories, whether personal, forensic, accidental or contingent, are the forgotten, peripheral tales occasionally glimpsed in the spaces left by the “true crime” narratives we’re used to, which is not to say they are not also true, in their way. Each of the girls is a real person, and so are most of the secondary characters (such as their parents and families); others are composites, and some names have been changed to protect the living.
Bel Air, which I’ve been uploading to Red Lemonade, is another hybrid crime book. It’s not about violent crime so much its fallout: the afterlife of murder through the eyes of the people it has affected, to a lesser or greater degree. As with most real crime cases, there are multiple points of entry, and the big questions are never really cleared up. In this book, I’m trying to keep a narrative voice at bay, letting individuals speak through trial transcripts and recorded witness interviews, which allow the case to be examined and re-examined from various different perspectives. I’m interested in what crime reveals about the ordinariness of people’s everyday lives, how it takes ordinary events and magnifies them until they become unrecognizable.
In praising Diana Trilling’s Mrs. Harris, a carefully discerning account of a trial that made a celebrity of a woman who murdered her lover (Herman Tarnower, the Scarsdale Diet doctor), New York Times critic Anatole Broyard wrote how impressed he was by the author’s curiosity, “by her quality of close and sustained attention in our abstracted and inattentive age.”. It’s precisely this quality I love in crime writing. I always want to know everything there is to know about the victim. I want to know what she had for breakfast, the name of her dog, the size of her shoes. Part of the appeal of these narratives lies in their concrete descriptions of everyday life; detail is piled upon detail as irrefutable evidence of the victim’s “ordinariness”.
In my view, the best crime writing is the kind that pays attention to the odd little details that more “highbrow” writing often overlooks. Read enough true crime, and ordinary, banal events start to look interesting. With enough precise details, the implications can be left open. Without glamorizing or mystifying their subjects, and without neglecting the importance of mood, authors like Malcolm and Berendt combine careful research with nervy speculation, turning ordinary, everyday events into deep, layered mysteries. There’s a lesson to be learned here, I think. Focus intensely enough on the commonplace, you can go all the way in and come out the other side, where everything is more complex and sinister than it seems.
Chat Interview:
Mikita Brottman :
My crime novel Bel Air takes the form of news, police, therapy and court transcripts, so it seems appropriate that this interview conducted by Brian McFarland in Gmail Chat, should take the same form. I’m interested in the transcript as hybrid form, especially in relation to what leaks out around the edges, the extra bits of information at the beginning and end that don’t form part of the interview proper. To me, these leakages are not peripheral but central—they’re little clues and signs, full of revealing detail. For this reason, the full transcript is kept intact here, including original spelling and punctuation.
Mikita: OK, all set!!
Sent at 3:08 PM on Tuesday
Brian: Yay!
Oh, I hit the arrow and it popped out.
can you reply?
Mikita: I guess we aren't so good with postmodern technology...
Brian: we suck!
we are Old School
Mikita: keep trying?
Brian: this seems to be working now
( we can edit this part out)
Mikita: OK - try not to let it pop out again!
Sent at 3:10 PM on Tuesday
Brian: yes...and in that regard...follow me here... the idea that we can take are written words and remove them, change them, edit them.. ( I am trying to formulate the connection here)....
it references how writing has this 'criminal element' to it
it allows one to transgress the normal bounds...
Sent at 3:12 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: I think that's true. And we can convey a very deliberate impression of ourselves in words, when our bodies tend to betray us much more easily. Words are a kind of mask.
Sent at 3:13 PM on Tuesday
Brian: yes, but also this idea of 'editing' and forgive me this is a trite stretch into the realm of the horrific.....but - in regards to physical murder-- this idea of just taking something out of the equation....
Sent at 3:14 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: I think murder is often made into something much more exciting and exotic in conventional true crime writing, though. In "real life," I think it is sometimes as simple and commonplace as editing, just deleting someone from your life. It's often a very banal act, like with those nurses who euthanize old people just for the fun of it.
Brian: Yes and your stories about the women and girls touch on this, this ordinariness.....
Sent at 3:17 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: So in a way, there's something very untruthful about "true crime." As I suggest in the blog post, it's highly formulaic. And rarely do you see anything from the perspective of the transgressor, so the pleasure in vicariously taking part in the crime isn't really a part of it.
I'm not sure of the etiquette of Gchat - I hope it's not rude for me to type while you're typing, or before you've replied....
Sent at 3:20 PM on Tuesday
Brian: Well, that was something I was also gonna touch upon- there is that excitement of being part of something that is out of bounds, individuals who don't follow etiquette- we live in a world of social constrictions and technological hoops to be jumped, parking spaces, time clocks, signs, rules...
(when reading crime fiction I mean)
Sent at 3:21 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: Right. But most conventional crime fiction follows pretty strict rules - and it's those that I'm trying to get around in my work. So much of it seems just "filler" - the trial, the mandatory courtroom scenes, the police procedures, the family history, blah blah blah... I want to cut out all that stuff and get to what matters. To me, that's not the crime necessarily, but the impact of the death on those left behind. Sent at 3:24 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: I love reading interview transcripts, police documents and that kind of thing. That's what I'm trying to do with "Bel Air" - get rid of all the extra, unnecessary stuff, including the narrative voice.
Brian: The narrative voice which weaves a story built upon our expectations of just words on the page, structured stories, but also this mythic kind of sense that there is chaos/disruption and then a return to order.....
Sent at 3:27 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: Yes. It's sort of like the voice of god, or a "deus ex machina" that comes down to sort everything out at the end. I think independent publishing allows for the possibility of hybrid forms that give voice to others involved - the victims, the perpetrator, relatives, individual police - who can then speak in their own words, even if those words are fictionalized.
Mikita: which allows "true crime" to be really "true" - ambiguous, open-ended, confusing, unclear, difficult to understand - unsolved, in a lot of cases.
Sent at 3:30 PM on Tuesday
Brian: bringing in the police interview, the detective report, the comment from the neighbor, this unclearness is melded with this day to day banality, the regularity of the dayclock...but the ordinariness blends it all together too much maybe...there is a bled out human there somewhere....maybe lost in all that levelness, that reportage...
Sent at 3:33 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: right, but that's what's so interesting about it, to me. An annoying disruption in one person's day is, to someone else, a cataclysm, a nightmare. It's interesting to hold both perspectives at the same time, instead of being sucked in by one narrow way of seeing things, which is the Nancy Grace approach. And I like to remind people (and myself) that the trivial is also spectacular and horrifying.
Sent at 3:36 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: Plus, in "Thirteen Girls," I hoped to pile trivial detail upon detail so they stack up into something overwhelming, really emphasising the impact of the loss.
Mikita: Are you still there?
Brian: the heavy weight of the trivial beating of our hearts...its so tempting to move this discussion into the realm of tv, film, sociology, American legal system....but let's stick with words, and how the language you are using here is going against the genre and bringing that humble narration to the center, and in that regard how language itself locks in so much...I think Burroughs said summarizing something about Wittgenstein ' the imprisonment of words' and that is a sense of what we are touching upon- but I like how the prison is associated with language...
trying to make thought come out clear using wordy words
Sent at 3:41 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: Right. Words can be a prison. They can trap you into certain modes of thought - like the word "victim." If there's a "victim," there has to be a "perpetrator". In some respects, images are more freeing. But words can also be liberating.
Mikita: Liberating in that they allow different voices to speak, in that they let various perspectives be heard. Images can't do this. Words are subtle and complex. They contain so much. They can compel, convict, imprison, release.
Brian: and be used in different forms/formats their structure telling part of the tale...
Mikita: Yes, and this is true of the spoken, as well as the written word... but there's something especially compelling about spoken words that are written down.
Unlike the kind of chat we're doing now, which is written (not spoken), a transcript of spoken words has a kind of haunting resonance - everything takes on a new tone.
Brian: and in a very big book of words- the killing starts of very early, like the first page...Cain and Abel....
and even from the very first take on the story, there is a vagueness as to how the murder should be interpreted sheep herder versus farmer? or proper offering to God? or sibling rivalry......
to say nothing of the centuries of re-telling....
Mikita: that's why it's so strange that people take it literally... who knows what was originally meant? Whereas court transcripts give us the "official" version of "what was said" in a particular situation.
Sent at 3:50 PM on Tuesday
Brian: but dont you think some of that is just the disruptive power and the emotional shock of the act itself ? do we really lose that much in the sensationalism of it? doesnt it reveal the undercurrents and structure of the world which resulted in the killing
Mikita: In "sensationalized" true crime, by focusing too much on the act itself and the victim, I think we lose the complexity, the way in which social and cultural forces have their own part to play. Very, very few murders are actually "random."
Brian - I need to leave in 10 mins..
Sorry I don't have longer - this is fun.
Brian: yes, Cain and Abel was my closing comments...I was trying to wrap the story around by starting at the Beginning
but I think we really touched on what the alternative reveals
Mikita: Thanks for setting this up - I will send you a revised version of the blog post early next week.
Brian: and then we can post this chat and the blog post- it will be cool!
but do me a favor--leave your chat window open, I need to make sure I can get this all saved/copied
Mikita: OK, Roger. Over & out!
Brian: and we can even go through and maybe edit/tighten this up in transcript form! Thanks!!!!
Red Lemon Frozen Concentrate #2.5 : Crime Fiction of The Lemon-Heart
by Mikita Brottman
This essay on crime fiction does a good job on capturing some of the essences of what is, admittedly, the somewhat vague nomenclature 'alternative fiction.' Since Mikita interest are in a particular subject matter and style, her writing is alternative as it approaches crime fiction from a different perspective. Her incorporating different narrative styles and formats, she also touches on our most recent calls for hybrid submissions. The first few chapters of Mikita Brottman's "Bel Air" and "Thirteen Girls" are uploaded on Red Lemonade : http://redlemona.de/mikita-brottman/thirteen-girls and http://redlemona.de/mikita-brottman/bel-air . Thirteen Girls is coming out this summer from Nine Banded Books : http://www.ninebandedbooks.
People often say we’re living in a uniquely voyeuristic and amoral society galvanized by a dreadful predilection for human suffering, but our interest in grisly details is nothing new. As every crime fan knows, there’s always been a huge public appetite for details of real criminal cases. In his book Illuminations, author and critic Walter Benjamin claims, “what draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” Benjamin’s suggestion hits home: I’ve always been compelled by crime stories, both true and fictional, though what I’m really looking for (and what I’m trying to write myself) is something in between.
Today’s crime fiction tends to be either hard-boiled or too plot-driven for my tastes. Writers like James Elroy and David Peace are overly stylized and staccato, and I find the mystery / detective novel too confined to genre restrictions. I don’t need a strong protagonist or any protagonist at all, in fact. Personally, I’m not looking for formal daring or stylistic innovation, nor do I necessarily need the story to end with resolution, comfort or consolation.
The “true crime” genre is equally bound by rigorous (if implicit) boundaries and restrictions. As authors working in this field know well, cases must be chosen wisely. “True crime” writers seem to assume that the kinds of crimes people want to read about are those they’re already familiar with (or think they are). Interestingly, this is one of the few literary genres dominated by women. Top authors like Ann Rule and Kathryn Casey are phenomenally popular and prolific, yet their work tends to be formulaic, and framed precisely to suit the way we’ve been preconditioned to receive it. There’s always a victim (usually young and female) and a perpetrator (often an older male). The story begins with a tragedy, proceeds through clues and signs, and ends with arrests and penalties. In other words, the “true” in “true crime” is descriptive, not all-embracing; not everything that “really happened” makes good “true crime.” To appeal, a story must lend itself to a certain formula, and it must have entrance points for moralizing voyeurism and righteous indignation. It should also lend itself to certain trite phrases: disappearances must be “mysterious,” evidence must be “crucial,” crime is “brutal,” details “graphic,” dead girls must be “laid to rest.”
Like much crime fiction, true crime has a linear, progressive trajectory. A horrible event occurs, the perpetrator is arrested by police and tried in the courtroom, and the victim’s family finds healing and closure. On either side of this, there’s an enormous amount of filler—family histories of victim and perpetrator, a discussion of geographic economy and culture, and a blow-by-blow account of the trial. Whenever I pick up one of these mass-market “true crime” paperbacks, I usually start a few chapters in, and give up half way through, when the trial begins.
There’s an assumption that crime writing is edgy because it deals with transgression and violence, but this is seldom the case. Strict plot formulas and genre rules often lead to staid and static writing. Complex cases are reduced to simple tales of good and evil, stories of the quest for “truth” and “justice,” and there’s never any question about who the victim is in each case. In Thirteen Girls and Bel Air, I’m trying to break out of these limitations by exploring an alternative form of crime writing where the distinction between “true crime” and “crime fiction” isn’t so clear-cut. I’m not really interested in plot trajectory or in tying everything up in tidy little knots, but in showing how these cases become narratives only in retrospect. As things unfold, there’s no continuity. Instead, there are distractions, diversions, instability, flawed guesses, accidents and all kinds of variables. Crimes that are not solved immediately often remain unsolved.
There are some models for this kind of writing. Hybrid crime fiction—the kind that’s “based on a true story”—can sometimes contain the best of both worlds, as with John Berendt’s slightly fictionalized Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, in which Berendt “rounds the corners of the truth,” as he puts it. In some ways, this is part of a tradition started by Truman Capote and continued by writers like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Calvin Trillin in his book Killings, a series of portraits of violent crimes that reveal more about the communities in which the murders took place than they do the killers. Wisconsin Death Trip is another great example of this. I also love the shrewd and quirky first person crime “analysis” that Janet Malcolm does in The Journalist and the Murderer and her latest book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills.
Most of all, what I look for are crime stories that pay attention to the kind of detail that other kinds of writing often overlook. Every murder has its little nooks and crannies, and these are the spaces I want to explore. The stories in my book Thirteen Girls are a series of repressed, parallel texts to those that customarily take precedent in mainstream “true crime” narratives. These stories, whether personal, forensic, accidental or contingent, are the forgotten, peripheral tales occasionally glimpsed in the spaces left by the “true crime” narratives we’re used to, which is not to say they are not also true, in their way. Each of the girls is a real person, and so are most of the secondary characters (such as their parents and families); others are composites, and some names have been changed to protect the living.
Bel Air, which I’ve been uploading to Red Lemonade, is another hybrid crime book. It’s not about violent crime so much its fallout: the afterlife of murder through the eyes of the people it has affected, to a lesser or greater degree. As with most real crime cases, there are multiple points of entry, and the big questions are never really cleared up. In this book, I’m trying to keep a narrative voice at bay, letting individuals speak through trial transcripts and recorded witness interviews, which allow the case to be examined and re-examined from various different perspectives. I’m interested in what crime reveals about the ordinariness of people’s everyday lives, how it takes ordinary events and magnifies them until they become unrecognizable.
In praising Diana Trilling’s Mrs. Harris, a carefully discerning account of a trial that made a celebrity of a woman who murdered her lover (Herman Tarnower, the Scarsdale Diet doctor), New York Times critic Anatole Broyard wrote how impressed he was by the author’s curiosity, “by her quality of close and sustained attention in our abstracted and inattentive age.”
In my view, the best crime writing is the kind that pays attention to the odd little details that more “highbrow” writing often overlooks. Read enough true crime, and ordinary, banal events start to look interesting. With enough precise details, the implications can be left open. Without glamorizing or mystifying their subjects, and without neglecting the importance of mood, authors like Malcolm and Berendt combine careful research with nervy speculation, turning ordinary, everyday events into deep, layered mysteries. There’s a lesson to be learned here, I think. Focus intensely enough on the commonplace, you can go all the way in and come out the other side, where everything is more complex and sinister than it seems.
Chat Interview:
Mikita Brottman :
My crime novel Bel Air takes the form of news, police, therapy and court transcripts, so it seems appropriate that this interview conducted by Brian McFarland in Gmail Chat, should take the same form. I’m interested in the transcript as hybrid form, especially in relation to what leaks out around the edges, the extra bits of information at the beginning and end that don’t form part of the interview proper. To me, these leakages are not peripheral but central—they’re little clues and signs, full of revealing detail. For this reason, the full transcript is kept intact here, including original spelling and punctuation.
Mikita: OK, all set!!
Sent at 3:08 PM on Tuesday
Brian: Yay!
Oh, I hit the arrow and it popped out.
can you reply?
Mikita: I guess we aren't so good with postmodern technology...
Brian: we suck!
we are Old School
Mikita: keep trying?
Brian: this seems to be working now
( we can edit this part out)
Mikita: OK - try not to let it pop out again!
Sent at 3:10 PM on Tuesday
Brian: yes...and in that regard...follow me here... the idea that we can take are written words and remove them, change them, edit them.. ( I am trying to formulate the connection here)....
it references how writing has this 'criminal element' to it
it allows one to transgress the normal bounds...
Sent at 3:12 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: I think that's true. And we can convey a very deliberate impression of ourselves in words, when our bodies tend to betray us much more easily. Words are a kind of mask.
Sent at 3:13 PM on Tuesday
Brian: yes, but also this idea of 'editing' and forgive me this is a trite stretch into the realm of the horrific.....but - in regards to physical murder-- this idea of just taking something out of the equation....
Sent at 3:14 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: I think murder is often made into something much more exciting and exotic in conventional true crime writing, though. In "real life," I think it is sometimes as simple and commonplace as editing, just deleting someone from your life. It's often a very banal act, like with those nurses who euthanize old people just for the fun of it.
Brian: Yes and your stories about the women and girls touch on this, this ordinariness.....
Sent at 3:17 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: So in a way, there's something very untruthful about "true crime." As I suggest in the blog post, it's highly formulaic. And rarely do you see anything from the perspective of the transgressor, so the pleasure in vicariously taking part in the crime isn't really a part of it.
I'm not sure of the etiquette of Gchat - I hope it's not rude for me to type while you're typing, or before you've replied....
Sent at 3:20 PM on Tuesday
Brian: Well, that was something I was also gonna touch upon- there is that excitement of being part of something that is out of bounds, individuals who don't follow etiquette- we live in a world of social constrictions and technological hoops to be jumped, parking spaces, time clocks, signs, rules...
(when reading crime fiction I mean)
Sent at 3:21 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: Right. But most conventional crime fiction follows pretty strict rules - and it's those that I'm trying to get around in my work. So much of it seems just "filler" - the trial, the mandatory courtroom scenes, the police procedures, the family history, blah blah blah... I want to cut out all that stuff and get to what matters. To me, that's not the crime necessarily, but the impact of the death on those left behind. Sent at 3:24 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: I love reading interview transcripts, police documents and that kind of thing. That's what I'm trying to do with "Bel Air" - get rid of all the extra, unnecessary stuff, including the narrative voice.
Brian: The narrative voice which weaves a story built upon our expectations of just words on the page, structured stories, but also this mythic kind of sense that there is chaos/disruption and then a return to order.....
Sent at 3:27 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: Yes. It's sort of like the voice of god, or a "deus ex machina" that comes down to sort everything out at the end. I think independent publishing allows for the possibility of hybrid forms that give voice to others involved - the victims, the perpetrator, relatives, individual police - who can then speak in their own words, even if those words are fictionalized.
Mikita: which allows "true crime" to be really "true" - ambiguous, open-ended, confusing, unclear, difficult to understand - unsolved, in a lot of cases.
Sent at 3:30 PM on Tuesday
Brian: bringing in the police interview, the detective report, the comment from the neighbor, this unclearness is melded with this day to day banality, the regularity of the dayclock...but the ordinariness blends it all together too much maybe...there is a bled out human there somewhere....maybe lost in all that levelness, that reportage...
Sent at 3:33 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: right, but that's what's so interesting about it, to me. An annoying disruption in one person's day is, to someone else, a cataclysm, a nightmare. It's interesting to hold both perspectives at the same time, instead of being sucked in by one narrow way of seeing things, which is the Nancy Grace approach. And I like to remind people (and myself) that the trivial is also spectacular and horrifying.
Sent at 3:36 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: Plus, in "Thirteen Girls," I hoped to pile trivial detail upon detail so they stack up into something overwhelming, really emphasising the impact of the loss.
Mikita: Are you still there?
Brian: the heavy weight of the trivial beating of our hearts...its so tempting to move this discussion into the realm of tv, film, sociology, American legal system....but let's stick with words, and how the language you are using here is going against the genre and bringing that humble narration to the center, and in that regard how language itself locks in so much...I think Burroughs said summarizing something about Wittgenstein ' the imprisonment of words' and that is a sense of what we are touching upon- but I like how the prison is associated with language...
trying to make thought come out clear using wordy words
Sent at 3:41 PM on Tuesday
Mikita: Right. Words can be a prison. They can trap you into certain modes of thought - like the word "victim." If there's a "victim," there has to be a "perpetrator". In some respects, images are more freeing. But words can also be liberating.
Mikita: Liberating in that they allow different voices to speak, in that they let various perspectives be heard. Images can't do this. Words are subtle and complex. They contain so much. They can compel, convict, imprison, release.
Brian: and be used in different forms/formats their structure telling part of the tale...
Mikita: Yes, and this is true of the spoken, as well as the written word... but there's something especially compelling about spoken words that are written down.
Unlike the kind of chat we're doing now, which is written (not spoken), a transcript of spoken words has a kind of haunting resonance - everything takes on a new tone.
Brian: and in a very big book of words- the killing starts of very early, like the first page...Cain and Abel....
and even from the very first take on the story, there is a vagueness as to how the murder should be interpreted sheep herder versus farmer? or proper offering to God? or sibling rivalry......
to say nothing of the centuries of re-telling....
Mikita: that's why it's so strange that people take it literally... who knows what was originally meant? Whereas court transcripts give us the "official" version of "what was said" in a particular situation.
Sent at 3:50 PM on Tuesday
Brian: but dont you think some of that is just the disruptive power and the emotional shock of the act itself ? do we really lose that much in the sensationalism of it? doesnt it reveal the undercurrents and structure of the world which resulted in the killing
Mikita: In "sensationalized" true crime, by focusing too much on the act itself and the victim, I think we lose the complexity, the way in which social and cultural forces have their own part to play. Very, very few murders are actually "random."
Brian - I need to leave in 10 mins..
Sorry I don't have longer - this is fun.
Brian: yes, Cain and Abel was my closing comments...I was trying to wrap the story around by starting at the Beginning
but I think we really touched on what the alternative reveals
Mikita: Thanks for setting this up - I will send you a revised version of the blog post early next week.
Brian: and then we can post this chat and the blog post- it will be cool!
but do me a favor--leave your chat window open, I need to make sure I can get this all saved/copied
Mikita: OK, Roger. Over & out!
Brian: and we can even go through and maybe edit/tighten this up in transcript form! Thanks!!!!
. It’s precisely this quality I love in crime writing. I always want to know everything there is to know about the victim. I want to know what she had for breakfast, the name of her dog, the size of her shoes. Part of the appeal of these narratives lies in their concrete descriptions of everyday life; detail is piled upon detail as irrefutable evidence of the victim’s “ordinariness”.
Red Lemon Frozen Concentrate #1 : Crimes of The Lemon-Heart
By: Jessica Dylan Miele
The day of lovers approaches and you find yourself alone. Yes, alone, admit it. No matter if you are “with someone” or at the very least have a warm body to rub yourself against underneath the astringent moonlight, you are alone. We can only hope to be each other’s “guardian of solitude,” as Rilke would say. And yet everyone else around you is in love, madly and deeply, happily coupled, renewing their vows, deliriously pregnant and their lips swollen from drinking in the lurve (except the neighbors across the street—count on them any day of the week, holiday or not, to be fighting and fucking and showering each other with hate.) And why are you alone? You are alone because you choose to be alone. Just keep telling yourself that. You choose to be free, just the same as Jack Kerouac chose to get high and sweaty off of Sal Paradise, and Mary Gaitskill reserved her raw, wicked tricks for the pleasure of her readers. Free to create inamoratos on the page that say exactly what you should never say to a person face to face, unless you want to place your creative headspace on hold as your lover’s suitcase unzips and stuffs dirty underthings in the beautiful dark holes of which you have yet to explore. “Solitude is an achievement,” elucidates Alice Koller, author of an Unknown Woman. “Being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others.” If you are alone and have scrounged up enough self-discipline to keep yourself from the salacious act of self-love to seduce the hairy words you are so capable of weaving, you have won. Maybe you haven’t won fairly, you who had to scare away not only the beautiful lips of which your lips have kissed, but also the memory of that all-too powerful embrace that holds you and holds you until you surrender your will and your time. “We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of passions of which we are much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.” The cold hearts are the ones that can save themselves from becoming the puppets as they rise to the challenge of puppet masters, creating their world and using (and abusing) their beloveds to capture the madness of the word. And if you’re feeling guilty for not only taking the time to write, but for what you write, good. Because writers don’t steal hearts, they steal souls.
But it’s best not to think too much on the terrible crimes of what we are capable of spelling out on our keyboards. As Rumi asks, “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?” Unleash your criminal minds and create what you will in such a way that you can escape even from yourself, as your body disappears and your words become everything you always knew you were capable of. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez says, “The more transparentthe writing, the more visible the poetry.” There is no better way to be transparent than to give in to your loneliness. No one to judge you, no one to nag you, no one to gently remind you of your limitations, no one to remind you how seriously self-indulgent it is to sit by yourself for hours upon hours and do horrible things to your imaginary friends. At Red Lemonade, we know of your loneliness, the sweetness of it, so sweet your mouth aches. No use hiding your scent. Relax and let us get you a drink. Let’s be alone all together now.
Everyone:
Welcome to the inaugural Red Lemonade Frozen Concentrate. For this month, Crimes of The Lemon-Heart, an exploration of the blood that spills when alternative selections are chosen on the ol' JukeBox in your inner Waffle Houses. Right out of the gates, Jessica explores that first felony, going apart, being alone and having the audacity to write it all down, with some lit-quotes to throw the bloodhounds of the track. Up next : an essay from Mikita Brottman about crime fiction with a chat interview as well. The syntax and melodramas around murder often blind us to the everyday humanity of the parties involved. Finally, Jon Reiss taps into the language and authors dealing with that most essential and most naughty proclivities of nakedness, before your creator, lords and trusted accomplices. Pull the white tab from the canister and fill it the pitcher up three times. Stir firmly. Drink deeply.
In March: Iterations of Identity. Investigational prose about the language that we snuggle ourselves into, the stories our culture reads to us at bedtime, and the tales we tell each other after light's out. To piece together the pieces and stich the white matter. The very fizz is bubbling up in several reader-writers already committed to scribbling out reactions from within the loops.
In April, Matthew Battles Sovereignties of Invention will be released into the wilds. Writer-readers are researching his uncanny tales and sussing out the liturgies, hot fires and atonements. A wide selection of reader's experiences are planned. Reading books fun, talking about reading books funner, writing about the readers and the writers: funnest. Only connect. There is no alternative.
In May, we set up the poles and conduct Tesla experiments with our gold watches and missed appointments. (Don't tell anybody but there is a rumor floating around about a multiple outpost surprise birthday party- but its a secret-shhhh!). Put garlands in your hair, grab some cookies and diverge your histories and explore how Time May Be.
Why not open the freezer door and get some pure concentrate to begin the word processing? Email the factory plant manager at brian AT redlemona.de and make an offering of your connection to the written word, the apparatuses of your culture and the books and authors which quench your thirst. Select a theme and with a keen writerly focus, discusss books, authors, novels, stories, quotes and your own feelings and experiences from the text that shakes you. We here are not like the other boys and girls, so feel free to join the hobo camp on the other side of the railroad yard. The freezer cars are filled with fresh heart-lemons ready to be squeezed. Meet at the corner, by the old hotel, work crews selected at Sunrise.
- The Red Lemonade Orchard Picking Team
Submission Request : Hybrid Beasts
Red Lemonade, an imprint of Cursor, is proud to announce a crowdsourced, mongrel, interagency, multi-editorial, recombinant publishing excursion for 2012.The working title of the publication shall be Hybrid Beasts. Publication of the hybrid collection is scheduled for Summer 2012.The process itself is designed to be collaborative and driven by readers and writers interacting within the parameters of the guest editor’s editorial vision, assisted by the staff. The website features and Red Threads of the Red Lemonade site will be mixed into the process.
Hybridists shall submit: visit www.redlemona.de and click Write Now, request Author Access and then upload your manuscript. Submissions open until May 31, 2012.
The Guest Editor shall be: Molly Gaudry. She is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil. She is the founder of The Lit Pub. http://thelitpub.com/
It was so declared by the Guest Editor:
I am most interested in hybridity -- crossover between fiction, poetry, non-fiction. I love prose poems, fragmented narratives, and lyric essays. Great examples of books I love are Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Eula Biss's The Balloonists, Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Anne Carson's The Autobiography of Red, Sarah Goldstein's Fables. I'm also a sucker for fairy tales. http://www.mollygaudry.com/
Red Lemonade publishes alternative literature. Our focus is on edgier, adult literary fiction, the Hybrid Beasts submissions should be of a similar vein. Hybrid manuscripts can take advantage of various forms, but short stories are encouraged, excerpts from novels are welcomed. A rough estimate upper limit of the word count would be around 4,000 words. Submissions will be publicly available for review, commenting and editing to the community members. We suggest taking advantage of the Chapter feature while uploading and including a description to enlighten your fellow creatures.
To submit your hybridia : visit www.redlemona.de and click Write Now, request Author Access and then upload your manuscript. Submissions open until May 31, 2012. Tales which are most pirated appropriately may be further appropriated.
The collaborative technical partner will be: Press Books for the creation of an online collection of hybrid tales. The web-books and epubs will be produced using PressBooks.com - a simple and powerful online tool for making ebooks, print books, and web-books. Book: A Futurist Manifesto http://book.pressbooks.com/ contains essays from the edge of publishing and dovetails nicely with the vision of this project. Red Lemonade is proud to be working with PressBooks.com, find out more and build your own book here : http://pressbooks.com/about
The online writer-reader community, along with editorial interns and assistants will comment, edit and make suggestions on the uploaded manuscripts, with high interaction being part of the selection process. Final selections will be determined by Molly Gaudry. The initial publication will include web-based books and epubs of selected stories that mix genres, approaches, odd creatures, folklore, fairy tales, mythology, strange beasts, etc. We are not seeking children or youth literature, to be clear.
We tend to fluff our nests, stake our tents and erect our altars on the alternative side of the tracks, but compelling tales containing hybridism are the primary focus. Red Lemonade continues to seek submissions of alternative fiction in line with our past publications and such as Matthew Battles Sovereignties of Invention to be published this March and the upcoming publication in June of Richard Melo's Happy Talk. We look forward to your submissions and are eager to explore this new ‘hybrid’ publishing venture with you.
What I Learned from Being a Serialist : Conclusion
by Joshua Malbin
At the outset I thought of serialization as an opportunity to grow an audience through repeated contact. The logic went that if you made the whole book available all at once, you only got to announce it once, and since the Web only remembers things for about half a day it would quickly be forgotten.
I think I was right about that. I am pretty sure that the repeated, sustained self-promotion drew new readers I wouldn't otherwise have reached.
But what I didn't anticipate was the need to balance that growth against an inevitable dropoff in attention. After a few weeks of installments, readers started to fall behind. If they didn't have time to read 2000 words right when I posted them, they might remember to go back and read that chapter the next week when the new one was posted, or maybe the week after that.
See, not everyone likes to read in installments. Once they're hooked, lots of readers want to read straight through to the end, and the longer you put them off, the more likely you are to lose them. Even with the best of intentions, readers are busy and have other things competing for their time, and may lose contact with what you're doing. Ideally, you should aim for a sweet spot where the audience primed to receive the full work is larger than it would have been had you posted it all at once, but still mostly engaged and eager to read on.
I had started off posting shortish installments twice a week, but as people fell behind I thought perhaps that was too much, so I took a couple of weeks off to let readers catch up. In retrospect, I think that was a mistake. I don't think I gained any additional advantage from months four and five of the serialization process that weren't already locked in by month three, and may have hurt myself a little by drawing it out. If I were to advise someone now thinking about starting to serialize, I would say that that moment when you feel yourself losing steam with readers is probably the time to stop serializing altogether and put up all the remainder of your work in one last big publicity push.
One final lesson: the current world of social media may make it more possible than ever before for a lone writer or artist to make at least small self-promotional ripples, but that can only happen with a lot of help from friends and other supporters. So be sure to thank those people early, often, and if possible, personally. In my case, over these months I have gotten help and boosts of support from Rachel Spector, Tamara Sussman, Joshua Hudelson, Joshua Kamensky, Ian Blecher, Chris Thomas, Jessica Winter, Ryan O'Connor, Richard Fulco, Kiwa Iyobe, Jon Zerolnick, Richard Melo, David Malbin, Dina Ivanova, Liz Hamilton, Abby Coleman, Sara Nichols, Huma Mody, Jynne Martin, and of course Brian McFarland and Richard Nash themselves, along with others I am sure I am forgetting. So one last time to them and everyone else who has taken the time to read, comment, or share: Thank you. This has been an enormously rewarding experience, and I owe it to you.
