An Interview with Harry Mathews

by JOHN ASHBERY

read the full interview here

John Ashbery: One is supposed to ask questions about a writer's work, but I thought I would ask you about your life, which I know very little about. As so often with one's nearest and dearests, their biographies have enormous lacunae in them. I don't know, for instance, very much about why you went to Harvard when you did, or why you left it. I don't know why you studied music. I don't know why you went to Majorca. If I knew, I've forgotten all these things.

Harry Mathews: I think it's very kind of you to assume why I did any of these things. I went to Harvard because I disliked Princeton so much - I spent a year and a half there. I didn't leave Harvard early; I actually finished. I think I did two years in a year and a half, or something like that. And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didn't. It was a last gesture to -

mathews

JA: Why did you leave Princeton?

HM: I disliked Princeton for the reasons many people dislike it - its genteel charm, which seemed snobbish and anti-intellectual.

JA: You certainly don't get that at Harvard.

HM: I regret my having been at Harvard at that time, in the sense that if I'd had a different attitude I think I would have learned a lot more there. I felt that I was just going through the motions. Fortunately I did learn a lot about music, because most of the courses I took were practical courses in musical theory - harmony, counterpoint - where you had to hand in assignments once or twice a week or fail. But what seemed to me attractive about Harvard, especially in retrospect, was the intellectual life of the students, "among" the students. I was already married and living off campus so I missed most of that, except for my lunches at the Signet, which I liked very much.

JA: Yes - boiled beef, cold potatoes . . .

HM: I didn't mean the "food"! What was the name of the man who took care of us - Archie?

JA: I think it was, yes . . .

HM: Archie was very kind -

JA: . . . the Mrs. Danvers of the Signet.

HM: I had very little money at the time. He allowed me to simply pay for my lunches without having to pay the dues, or something like that. So I was able to keep up this one link with the -

JA: It must have set you back a good forty-five cents each time you had lunch.

HM: Yes, those were the pre-everything days. Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am. And although that wasn't my intention, I think it was very useful to have studied it. I gather you feel the same way about it.

the chronogram for 1998

JA: Yes, but I haven't studied it.

HM: You do have a very fine - a "nice" ear.

JA: I feel it's too beautiful for me to want to know anything about it.

HM: Just the way I felt about literature.

JA: Exactly.

HM: There's a big difference, though, because no matter how much you learn about music, it doesn't "tell" you anything about it. You study it through words - you approach it through a different medium.

JA: As a youth, you said, you took refuge in poetry. Refuge from what? The gilded life on Beekman Place?

HM: Please cut that! It's true, I had an extremely delicious life, but that was my life at home, and perhaps because I was only a child, or for whatever reasons, I found the company of others, especially other boys, quite terrifying and upsetting. I was poor at athletics. I didn't know how to get along on their terms in any way I knew about. I probably wasn't as bad as I thought, but anyway I felt socially unhappy. I became very nasty, too. And when I started writing - not when I started, but when I was twelve or thirteen or fourteen, something like that - writing poetry was a great inner (I don't mean that in any "significant" way), a secret, a private place to go to, as was reading poetry, and reading in general. My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could get at me - nobody, like the football coach.

JA: Yes. I felt the same way. By the way, when did your parents get this apartment?

HM: I was brought up on East 72nd Street between First and Second Avenues. This place was bought by my maternal grandfather, when my grandmother died. He had a house which he sold in order to move here. My parents already had an apartment here, a smaller one. On the death of my grandfather, my mother inherited this one. My grandfather paid $75,000 for it.

[snip]

how to read john ashbery

HM: I always thought that the principle of my life was to be leaving for someplace else wherever I was and no matter where I was living.

JA: And to arrive at an unspecified date.

HM: Yes.

roussel

JA: When I first met you, you were fascinated by Raymond Roussel, whom I introduced you to, I believe.

HM: That's right.

JA: We must credit Kenneth Koch, however, for the original American discovery.

HM: Yes. I always credit him.

JA: I seldom do. That's why I was doing so now. And since then you've been involved in the Oulipo - and it seems as though the discovery of Roussel's processes and writing must have been one of the things, perhaps the most important one, that occurred at that time since you've evolved more and more towards works that are somehow schematic.

HM: This is something that had appealed to me in poetry; obviously all poets who write in traditional forms are involved in this, and I'd also invented ways of doing it in poetry myself. For instance, I wrote a long poem in sonata form. That seemed to be a thing you could do in poetry or at least try out in poetry. I was dying to write prose, but I didn't know any way of going about doing this in prose. Then Roussel showed me that you can generate prose works with the same kind of arbitrariness that you use in verse. One extraordinary thing about poetry is that, say, if you're writing couplets, every five feet you have to have a word that sounds like another word, whether that makes any sense or not. You have arbitrary, illogical demands that you have to make on yourself. Roussel showed how this can be done in prose and so for me opened up the whole possibility of writing fiction, which I'd tried before without ever getting any place. I'd always thought that to write fiction you had to write more or less autobiographical stories, or stories of things that you'd observed in the world. It's terribly hard to do that; at least it was terribly hard for me - to make it sing and glow. I think that's why Roussel excited me so.

mathews

HM: Who was it that said to Pasternak - was it Scriabin or somebody playing Scriabin?

JA: Yes, that he should simplify -

HM: No, he said that he had finally achieved utter simplicity in his last works, which were of an absolutely mind-boggling complexity.

o'hara and ashbery

JA: I once quoted that passage to somebody interviewing me who wanted some justification for my complexity, somebody not very sympathetic. She said: "Sobering thought."

HM: It's a very hard point to get across to a lot of people, that a work is much harder to get if it's diluted, whereas if you have it exactly the way it should be, it looks very thorny or cranky but in fact it just fits the space it's taking up. I'm obsessed with getting rid of words, too. Sometimes it seems to me that so much scraping takes place that words end up doing rather interesting things. Perec said when he translated me that I was very hard to translate because I used words "juste a cote leur sens" - just alongside their meaning. Since they were very ordinary words one didn't really notice this as it took place.

JA: What's the position of Oulipo in France? How's it regarded by writers in general?

HM: I went to see Michael Leiris, whom you just mentioned a few moments ago. He said, "I'm very interested in what Oulipo does, but don't you think its results are rather mechanical?" You know, he's very sly. And of course he does his whole - the "Glossaries" he makes up are very Oulipian. I think people who know it from a distance look on it with some suspicion, which is a good thing. I mean, it still has a certain ability to provoke. The position that it claims for itself is slightly suspect. We say that we invent forms (or rediscover old forms) that are very hard to use, very demanding, so that these will be available to other writers, a kind of contribution made to the potentiality . . .

JA: Very thoughtful of you.

ashbery

HM: Exactly. It's very thoughtful of us and never really happens. But I think its true activity, which is to experiment in forms rather than in writing, "is" interesting. And if it has to be justified, it's justified by the writing of Calvino and Perec, people like that.

JA: People always ask me what influence my years in France had on my work. Of course I'm capable of answering, but I've often felt that there really wasn't much influence, except that it's very nice to live in a beautiful, cultured city with very good food--surely this played as important part in it. But I never felt that French "poetry," with a few exceptions - Roussel, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, etc. . . .

rimbaud, kind of

HM: Reverdy, no?

JA: Reverdy, yes, of course-were very influential. In fact, I'm not sure how influential any of them were. I admire them; they are very great writers. But except for a few fortuitous resemblances to Reverdy or Roussel, they don't seem to have influenced me directly. It's almost as though French and English don't quite mix in a fruitful way. I heard somewhere that Stravinsky wrote his work for violin and piano - a sonata, I guess - because he always felt that the sounds of the two instruments were absolutely incompatible and wanted to see if he could address this problem.

HM: That's quite true, they go very badly together, despite the literature.

JA: It's as though French were like a violin and English, or American, were like a piano.

ashbery (left)

HM: So what is the question?

JA: Do you feel that your work would have been different, or do you feel that living in France has had a direct forming influence on your work?

HM: I think living away from one's country gives you a difficult privilege. You're not under the pressure of people publicly succeeding better than you at what you're interested in; you're away from that and there's a relief in that sense. And also you have to be conscious of your own language. You're forced to be conscious of your language and your writing and your attitude toward writing. As for the Frenchness of that position, I guess really- that Mallarme as an idea was always very potent for me. It wasn't that Mallarme's present-day disciples seemed like ones to emulate, but I was living in a country-

JA: The six-words-to-a-page school?

HM: Yes, there's that, and the "I'm not saying what I seem to be saying" attitude towards writing poetry. I felt that I was surrounded by language to which Mallarme had a weird relationship. Mallarme wrote like nobody else; even his letters to his friends are very hermetic and hard to read and don't sound like the language of his contemporaries or his successors or his predecessors. So that reading Mallarme or Roussel, for whom these comments are true also, in France is inspiring, and in the fact that he has become the father or grandfather of modern poetry there is something that I could look to for inspiration. I think that would have been harder to do if I'd stayed here. For the personal reasons we talked about earlier - we didn't talk about them so much - those reasons why I didn't want to come back to the United States: since I'd taken refuge in France the way I'd taken refuge in poetry earlier in my life, it seemed appropriate that there was this utterly committed writer, someone who had gone to an extreme that no writer I know in English had ever done-towards formality, a kind of abstraction.

o'hara, larry rivers, some other peeps

JA: I always felt that what you say about Mallarme was true of surrealism - that idea of it was actually more important than the works it resulted in. I don't know whether you were saying that about Mallarme.

HM: No, I love Mallarme's poetry. And I agree with you about surrealism. Maybe you're thinking more of what has been made out of Mallarme than what he actually . . .

JA: No, I was putting words in your mouth. I thought that's what you were saying.

HM: I don't know that I'd ever actually like to write like Mallarme.

JA: No.

HM: But I think it's wonderful that somebody did. He seems to have gone much farther than the surrealists, getting to the bottom of the French verse and the French sentence. I think poems like "Le Don du poeme" are extremely moving and irremediably - if that's the word - mysterious.

renoir & mallarme

HM: Is there any kind of final thing I could tell you about myself that has been mysterious to you through all these years?

JA: Well . . .

HM: It's been a very long friendship.

JA: Don't speak as though it were over, please. One of the minor mysteries of your activities is how you decide how long you're going to spend in one of your three places.

HM: I sort of schedule it knowing that after a certain time, after a few weeks, I'll grow attached to the place, so that I always manage to leave when I'm longing to stay a little more. But I'm never sorry to get to the place that I move on to.

From the "Review of Contemporary Fiction," Fall 1987, Volume 7.3

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ashbery

MEMO

TO: INDUSTRYFLACK@GMAIL.COM

FROM: MESOWELLREAD@THISRECORDING.COM

Herewith a quick top ten list of properties that if adopted by Hollywood, would make whoever holds their rights a million billion dollars. Don't say I never did anything for you.

10. Seasons

Just the first thing on this list by the immortal Joe Haldeman, who wrote a property I'm quite sure you're familiar with in The Forever War:

and that other book I gave you which would make a hell of a TV show, All My Sins Remembered. I normally tell no one about this little-known novella that concerns a research team that interacts with a species of alien, but it may be the most intriguing "alien" story not yet told. From Haldeman's collection Dealing in Futures, Seasons concerns a group of anthropologists who arrive on a planet to research a sentient species that they learn, far too late, has a 'killing season.' Its action sequences are extremely visual, almost made for the movies, while its character work should translate well from the page. A classic before it's even made.

9. The Empty Chair, Jeffrey Deaver

The only problem with this is, whoever made The Bone Collector bought the rights to this character, maybez? Denzel played Deaver's legendary wheelchair bound cop Lincoln Rhyme. While that had New York as a setting, TEC brings the action down to South Carolina (I think, could be North) and the story of a runaway killer searched for in a manhunt. It has a strong female lead, parallel stories, and some downright jaw-dropping moments. The Bone Collector did well, didn't it? I dunno.

He also has another one in this series that has a China angle, and you gotta figure if you turned that into a political point and timed it right, you could rake some dubloons. This stuff is thrill-a-minute awesomeness, with 24-like turns and awesome psychology, along with a whodunit feel that should give it some shelf-life.

8. The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz. If you want somebody to win an Oscar (my suggestion would be an aging Gabriel Byrne) here's your choice. Schulz was a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis. Before that happened he wrote this literary gem, a lightly veiled novel of Schulz's Polish childhood, is basically a David Lynch movie waiting to happen, so I hope you have a deal with Lynch.

This might not make anybody money, but it is a modern classic and you should read things that won't make you money, in theory.

7. This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, Gordan Korman

Going to the extreme other end of the ledger now, this series of books was a cult classic and probably has a bigger adult audience than kids now. The story is a tailor-made feature. The books were so awesome because they are basically the fun of college turned slightly more innocent and set in a boarding school.

For kids, they exaggerate the fantasy of escape as well as the fear of being on your own. Basically Hogwarts if there was no magic. Some of these books are funny like Meatballs. If you cast Jack Black as the headmaster, you'd make a lot more money than they will turning him into an animated panda. I mean, who is that supposed to appeal to...me?

Otherwise, if you animated this motherfucker, it might just surprise you and be twice as popular. It's like they're paying screenwriters to come up with that crap when it was already done, and better.

We also covered this in our classic best children's books of all time.

6. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

I know what you're saying: "Alex, I'm getting Brittany Murphy to basically dress up like the motorcycle guy in the Village People and rub you until you purr like a kitten, and you're telling me Pale Fire? Why don't you tell me to adapt fucking Finnegan's Wake?"

And I know what you're saying, but this could be genius. An insane Johnny Depp - an energetic cast. I should actually write a treatment for this. Plus the book has really good name recognition, and what better way is there to get people to the theater than by implying that they will become smarter if they do? OK, cast no-names, film it for free, and basically buy a palatial estate for $30 million, because that's how much you're going to make.

5. Haldeman Effluvium

I don't want to waste your time by rattling off a bunch of Haldeman novels and then putting my hand out for payment, but the fact of the matter is this. Forever Peace, the sequel to The Forever War, is a totally different kind of ride in a different universe. I am literally dying to adapt this. Plus no aliens means you're set.

I'd worry it's going to turn into Mindhunters meets Vanilla Sky, but it is a solid property. For other good Haldeman, I mean, pick one. The guy is just never bad. The Coming sucks, but I think he just wrote that to finish out one of his contracts. He has this awesome one that almost nobody has ever read that concerns this guy who can read people's thoughts, kind of like The Sentinel meats What Women Want. I loved it, and the thing is all dialogue. I mean, that's just easy money.

4. Books of Blood, Clive Barker.

With the legs of the current horror boom kinda fading out when somebody thought it was a good idea to release "Sliver," Barker actually means to scare people. Just take the marketing campaign from The Ring and you're good here. This would really be best as a horror series, but when have we ever heard of a horror series? I mean, how well did the new Twilight Zone go? We have Paula Abdul, there is no need for more horror than that.

This actually got going in production and I have no doubt they'll fuck it up. Adapting 'Pig Blood Blues' is so wrong.

4a. Roald Dahl still has some properties that I'm sure someone has the rights to, but while Charlie and the Chocolate Factory didn't do very well, somebody should do The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar at least as a TV movie.

3. All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers, Larry McMurtry.

This made our top five books you should read right now back in this blog's infancy. The classic novel of Texas, half-set in California.

We also delivered a classic excerpt here:

“What should I spend it on?” I asked. Jill frowned, considering.

“You could save it for when you grow old,” she said. “I’ve always thought I’d go to India, if I got a sudden windfall. I’ve always wanted to go to Benares.”

I couldn’t think of any place I wanted to go, which surprised her. “You ought to be interested in the world,” she said. I agreed, but I just wasn’t. I was interested in her.

That shit could get an orangutan laid. McMurtry should be hotter than ever, and there's no time like the present to remake this classic story about a writer who has trouble in his life with women. I could see it as the defining role for someone, I could also see it as Winter Passing without Zooey Deschanel's pretty face. Either way, I'd go see it, but if it's a crowd-pleaser you want, look no further than

2. Microserfs, Douglas Coupland.

Our girl Georgia covered Coupland the other day. Going for comedy this time (my command of different genres nearly takes my breath away), Microserfs is a can't miss dissection of the dot-com boom in the middle 90s. It was actually written before that, but nearly all the jokes still apply, I assure you. You can pretty much just change the name of the companies.

The only thing I would do it would be to add more sex to it. It's basically a romantic comedy stretched into an appraisal of a culture and a time period. The question is, is this a period people want to relieve? Give this recession a few more months to sap everyone's will to live, and we will give anything to return to the good ole days.

1. Hyperion, Dan Simmons

I hesitated to include Hyperion on the list for the simple reason that I believe someone owns the rights to it, but this four book cycle is so good it makes the Lord of the Rings look like The Ten Commandments. (I hate The Ten Commandments, also the Ten Commandments.)

Dan Simmons is a genius, and his first smash, Song of Kali, should also be a hot property. Hyperion is the name of the world that this epic quadrilogy takes place on. I'd basically describe it as Lost meets The Canterbury Tales meets Alien.

The book describes the journey of a group of pilgrims to a labyrinthine world know as Hyperion, which they wish to have their greatest sin or problem resolved by an omnipotent being known as the Shrike. A fearsome villain made for the movies, he's on the book's cover (just an artist's representation) and scares the shit out of me. I mean, this guy has killing fields, and probably a desire to run for the highest office in the land. He's frightening.

The stories that surround this awesome journey to the Heart of Darkness are just as captivating, ranging in genre from a detective story to an incredibly powerful tale of a priest who comes to a group of androgynous, retarded creatures he spends the rest of his life trying to understand. This is just waiting for somebody to make a trillion dollars from it. I could shoot it right now in Vancouver for about 5 million if you are interested.

UPDATE: Hyperion is going to happen.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

I COULD LEAVE BUT I WON'T GO THOUGH MY HEART MIGHT TELL ME SO

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All Over The Island

an interview with Junot Diaz

by George Ducker

The votes are in and everyone’s already grumbling about who won the Pulitzers. We’re not grumbling at all. With prizes going to Tracy Letts for August, Osage County and Junot Diaz for The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao, it appears that things do turn out for the best sometimes. Below, enjoy an interview with Diaz. We spoke to him by phone in-between repair calls from the people at the Mac store. A portion of this interview appeared, in slightly different form, on the pages of Metromix Los Angeles.

Although the language in “Oscar Wao” comes of as brief and free-associative, you’re proudly an extensive revisionist. How do you deal with re-writing a novel multiple times?

I find myself doing a tremendous amount of re-writing because I want a text to work—at least for me—in an interesting way on a certain number of levels. Yeah, I guess I enjoy the fact that a book like Oscar Wao should feel rather raw and rough, but what lies beneath ends up as an artifact of tremendous deliberation. How does the language work, how do the sentences work? Do the characters fall into line? You can get characters wrong in your head and not be aware of it by being inattentive. It’s like failing your characters through sheer laziness.

But in the end, there’s a story that you have to tell. And the character has to be folded to fit the story. There’s a relationship between the sort of depth of character and how your narrative unfolds. When I first started writing, I just thought it was just like, putting some language together and throw in some interesting words….

It’s just a short story, right? 5 pages. 10 pages and you’re done…

Yeah. (Laughs) You begin to realize that things are not what they seem.

diaz at cornell

You’ve said that the act of immigrating to a different country is comparable with science fiction stories.

I don’t think that folks collectively have a good grasp of what it means. Living in the US, we don’t really understanding what it means for a child to be able to leave the Third World and be miraculously transported to the First. How does a child’s mind grasp that? How does an adult’s mind grasp that? How do you square these worlds?

How would you define a Third World experience vs. a First World experience?

I don’t know. I think about how many of these kids are coming over. These poor kids who were child soldiers and were somehow brought over to the US. It’s like, “Come to our high school! Think about prom! Want to try out for the football team?!” So I guess my feeling is that, Okay, we’re talking an enormous leap, but how in the world do you describe how enormous that leap is? You can describe the world that you left behind and the world you’ve arrived in, but that still doesn’t get at what the distances are between those two worlds. Juxtaposing one to the other doesn’t really do the job of communicating how a person must make these enormous imaginative leaps.

diaz' interview with newsweek

In A Wrinkle in Time, they show a diagram of how a tesseract works. With the ant and the long piece of string. The ant crawls across much faster when the ends are pushed together. But there's all this extra that's hanging in the middle.

That’s a perfect example. In realistic fiction, I don’t think the tool for describing these kinds of leaps are plentiful. But, in genre fiction, writers are always trying to describe what it’s like to leap worlds. The feeling of leaping time, of leaping bodies. So the narrative tools that one might need to describe such a large shift in experience like, say, being a child solider and then showing up at a Wisconsin High School—I think that for me the analogues are found more clearly in genre fiction than they are in realistic fiction.

In terms of genre fiction, are you getting to do any reading for pleasure?

I’ve have been reading tremendously. I’m sort of recovering from book-novel-whatever… right now, I’m reading this book called THEREFORE REPENT! (Laughs)

bookslut interview

Does it have an exclamation mark at the end?

YES! YES!

What’s it about?

It’s completely nuts. Of course you haven’t heard of it. It’s by a guy named Jim Monroe and it’s put out by a small press. It’s a book about what if the rapture actually happened, and that’s all I’m gonna tell you.

Tell me you’ve got a genre story you’re working on. Something sci-fi or fantasy.

I’m trying to, man. But God knows… That’s the thing. I always think that God knows…I never have any idea whether I can actually write anything. I do want to write something like that, but it’s been harder to get it together than I thought it would be. And by hard, I just mean my own ability to pull everything together.

Genre or not, you’re an extremely slow writer.

That I am.

Does it come from going back to do the revisions, or is it just strapping yourself down to the computer?

It’s all of the above. I’m one of those folks who always thought that like, “Damn, man. I always thought this was gonna be a lot easier.” But it turns out that it certainly isn't going to be a lot easier.

Was there ever any sort of editorial pressure for you to get the book finished? It was ten years between your first collection and Oscar Wao.

Believe me, by the fourth year, Random House basically took my name off the wall. When I told them I had a book, they were like, “What? Who are you again?” It was only when they read the manuscript were they like, “Okay, we’ll re-instate your contract.” If it had sucked, they would have just said, “Sorry you’re fired.” (Laughs) You’ve gotta be honest…By eleven years, if you don’t have something going…

What were you reading while working through it?

There was a lot of fantasy stuff I had to bone up on. Things I hadn’t read since I was a kid. One guy I read tremendously was Alexander Key. He’s the guy that wrote the Witch Mountain Books. See, in the 70s Disney made these movies: Return From Witch Mountain and Escape To Witch Mountain. I was reading those books and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy but I was definitely obsessing over Salman Rushdie the way that he used multiple South Asian languages to strengthen his narrative. I was also obsessed with the Caribbean writer Patrick Chamoiseau, who wrote the novel Texaco. If you look at Texaco. It’s all there. The way he dealt with Caribbean history—his use of footnotes drew me into that method of telling a story.

Was it presented from a factual standpoint?

No no . He’s another one who has all sorts of weird shit going on…(Laughs) It’s one of my favorite books.

I was also thinking about Salvador Plascencia. Did you guys ever run into each other at Syracuse?

I was a faculty member when he was studying there. But I actually was away…We’d never had a class together.

Who is Elizabeth de Leon?

My fiancé.

Where’d you meet?

We’ve known each other since we were kids. From New York State. I say kids, but I mean, like when we were in college?

How did you all meet?

We were doing community work. Typical. (Laughs) We were being community activists together.

Do you get back to Santo Domingo often?

I was just there last week. My family’s all over the island. I’ve got some folks in the capitol, some folks in Santiago. Some folks who travel back and forth from the US to the Dominican Republic.

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With yourself, do you wish to dispel the rarefied nature of being a writer?

Oh my god, yeah. Artists. I thought that being an artist, you could get away from the snobbish hierarchies that you learn in school. Then I became an artist and realized that nobody’s more snobbish or hierarchical than artists. And that’s what the heartbreak was. I was a hopeful nerd. I didn’t think it was going to be just like that.

I love books too much, man. I’m a reader before I’m a writer. A lot of my friends are like, “I would die if I didn’t write.” Well, I don’t know about that, but I’ll tell you what. I know I would die if I couldn’t read. (Sighs) I don’t know, man. “Reading is the greatest,” he said cornily.

diaz in miami

In the book, Oscar says at one point, “If we were Orcs wouldn’t we, at a racial level, imagine ourselves to look like Elves?”

The one thing about fantasy and genre books is that characters tend to be quite clearly defined. The bad guys are all swarthy and dark and monstrous and the good guys are all fair and tall and ethereally pale. Beyond just the white supremacist fantasy, there’s a deeper complexity that gets left out of those stereotypes. If you look at the United States, one side definitely imagines themselves to be the good guys: the Elves. As for the other side, they’re wondering how these people can face themselves in the mirror. All I can tell you is that if Sauron had to pick a country, he would swiftly and happily pick the United States.

Have you gotten any complaints from women about the way females are sometimes treated in your stories? I’m thinking specifically of “Alma,” which came out in the New Yorker over Christmas.

Well, of course there’s been plenty of criticisms. People say that they’re troubled by these representations. That they’re sexist. That they’re perpetuating the very thing that they claim to be criticizing. As a writer, of course, you’re going to immediately react “NO! That is not true!” You know? But in the end you have to wrestle with it. You have to suffer those kinds of criticisms. You’ve gotta cross your fingers and hope that what you’re doing is as feminist-positive as you think it is. I have to believe in my heart that what I write is critical of this kind of mentality, in a productive way.

To succeed in anything, you’ve got to imagine and accept the possibility that you will fail beyond your wildest imagination. Otherwise, if you’re not taking any risks…if people tell me that they’re not sexist, well then I say, “You didn’t take any risk in your books because you were worried about being sexist?” Because if you took some risks then there’s a good chance that, at least to some people, that you fell on your fucking face. That’s the logic in my head. I’m not sure if it applies to anyone else.

diaz & ursula k. leguin

Any tips for up-and-coming writers? Other than to go to college and take your class?

Oh man. I don’t think anyone…especially a dumbass like me…I feel like that one of the things that’s occurring is that we’re developing more writers than readers. It’s interesting because just in the nature of the sort of programmatic nature of MFAs…As writers, if we’re not reading colossally, how do we expect our practice to survive? I know so many writers who don’t read. Yet they expect there to be an audience for them. It seems such an unusual thing. I want to shake people and tell them to read, man. If we’re not doing it, then why would anyone else do it? I always tell students in my class that, Yes, working very hard will help you. But nothing will help you quite like reading.

George Ducker is the senior contributor to This Recording. He lives in Los Angeles.

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buy therefore repent here

The novels of Bret Easton Ellis don't fail to resonate; our generation goes to the bathroom, too, and the spectre of violation by coathanger either titillates or horrifies, depending on who's asking. Some people who shoud know better can probably call up the image of Chanel grosgrain dance shoes as they gaze fondly at their feet.

Maybe a Diet Coke would get you out of this slump

It's not the proper nouns that distinguish Ellis's work; with the two decades worth of historical ambivalence (and the existence of our very own APC flats) comes the nagging awareness of how lazy it is to use proper nouns as adjectives in the first place.

Ellis' 1991 novel American Psycho was adapted by Mary Harron into a film that bears an extremely close resemblance to the book. Since the book is all dialogue and violence, this transition was smooth.

Psycho is Ellis' finest work; a bracing satire of the first order. It goes too far until you realize people actually take Patrick Bateman's bloodlust seriously.

The only problem with Psycho is that it's impossible to imitate--the stylistic licenses especially (italics in the dialogue, excessive description, gore) are rendered impotent in the hands of a lesser writer. But hey, that's why we have Bret.

That's a very fine chardonnay you're not drinking

from American Psycho

by Bret Easton Ellis

There's a click, the door to the stall opens and a young couple—the guy wearing the double-breasted wool cavalry twill suit, cotton shirt and silk tie, all by Givenchy, the girl wearing a silk taffeta dress with ostrich hem by Geoffrey Beene, vermeil earrings by Stephen Dweck Moderne and Chanel grosgrain dance shoes—walks out, discreetly wiping each other's noses, staring at themselves in the mirror before leaving the rest room, and just as Evelyn and I are about to walk into the stall they've vacated, the first couple rushes back in and attempts to overtake it.

"Excuse me," I say, my arm outstretched, blocking the entrance. "You left. It's, uh, our turn, you know?"

"Uh, no, I don't think so," the guy says mildly.

"Patrick," Evelyn whispers behind me. "Let them…you know."

"Wait. No. It's our turn," I say.

"Yeah, but we were waiting first."

"Listen, I don't want to start a fight—"

Q: Would you like to hear today's specials? A: Not if you want to keep your spleen.

"But you are," the girlfriend says, bored yet still managing a sneer.

"Oh my," Evelyn murmurs behind me, looking over my shoulder.

"Listen, we should just do it here," the girl, who I wouldn't mind fucking, spits out.

"What a bitch," I murmur, shaking my head.

"Listen," the guy says, relenting. "While we're arguing about this, one of us could be in there."

"Yeah," I say, "Us."

"Oh Christ," the girl says, hands on hips, then to Evelyn and me, "I can't believe who they're letting in now."

"You are a bitch," I murmur, disbelieving. "Your attitude sucks, you know that?"

Evelyn gasps and squeezes my shoulder. "Patrick."

The guy has already started snorting his coke, spooning the powder out of a brown vial, inhaling then laughing after each hit, leaning against the door.

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Give me a break, I'm a child of divorce

"Your girlfriend's a total bitch," I tell the guy.

"Patrick," Evelyn says, "Stop it."

"She's a bitch," I say, pointing at her.

"Patrick, apologize," Evelyn says.

The guy goes into hysterics, his head thrown back, sniffing in loudly, then he doubles up and tries to catch his breath.

"Oh my god," Evelyn says, appalled. "Why are you laughing? Defend her."

"Why?" the guy asks, then shrugs, both nostrils ringed with white powder. "He's right."

"I'm leaving, Daniel," the girl says, near tears. "I can't handle this. I can't handle you. I can't handle them. I warned you at Bice."

photos by Nikola Tamindzic

"Go ahead," the guy says. "Go. Just do it. Take a hike. I don't care."

"Patrick, what have you started?" Evelyn asks, backing away from me. "This is unacceptable," and then, looking up at the lighting, "And so is this lighting. I'm leaving." But she stands there, waiting.

"I'm leaving, Daniel," the girl says. "Did you hear me?"

"Go ahead. Forget it," Daniel says, staring at his nose in the mirror, waving her away. "I said take a hike."

"I'm using the stall," I tell the room. "Is this okay? Does anybody mind?"

"Aren't you going to defend your girlfriend?" Evelyn asks Daniel.

"Jesus, what do you want me to do?" He looks at her in the mirror, wiping his nose, sniffing again. "I bought her dinner. I introduced her to Richard Marx. Jesus Christ, what else does she want?"

"Beat the shit out of him?" the girl suggests, pointing at me.

"Oh honey," I say, shaking my head, "the things I could do to you with a coat hanger."

A good personality consists of a chick with a little hard body, who will satisfy all sexual demands without being too slutty about things

Buy American Psycho here. It makes a lovely Christmas gift.

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In the Fifties

by LEONARD MICHAELS

In the fifties I learned to drive a car. I was frequently in love. I had more friends than now.

When Khrushchev denounced Stalin my roommate shit blood, turned yellow, and lost most of his hair.

I attended the lectures of the excellent E.B. Burgum until Senator McCarthy ended his tenure. I imagined N.Y.U. would burn. Miserable students, drifting in the halls, looked at one another.

In less than a month, working day and night, I wrote a bad novel.

I went to school—N.Y.U., Michigan, Berkeley—much of the time.

I had witty, giddy conversation, four or five nights a week, in a homosexual bar in Ann Arbor.

I read literary reviews the way people suck candy.

Personal relationships were more important to me than anything else.

I had a fight with a powerful fat man who fell on my face and was immovable.

I had personal relationships with football players, Jazz musicians, ass-bandits, nymphomaniacs, non-specialized degenerates, and numerous Jewish premedical students.

I had personal relationships with thirty-five rhesus monkeys in an experiment on monkey addiction to morphine. Thy knew me as one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose.

With four other students I lived in the home of chiropractor named Leo.

I met a man in Detroit who owned a submachine gun; he claimed to have hit Dutch Schultz. I saw a gangster movie that disproved his claim.

I knew two girls who had brains, talent, health, good looks, plenty to eat, and hanged themselves.

I heard of parties in Ann Arbor where everyone made it with everyone else, including the cat.

I knew card sharks and con men. I liked marginal types because they seemed original and aristocratic, living for an ideal or obliged to live in it. Ordinary types seem fundamentally unserious. These distinctions belong to the romantic fop. I didn't think that way too much.

I worked for an evil vanity publisher in Manhattan.

I worked in a fish packing plant in Massachusetts, on the line with a sincere Jewish poet from Harvard and three lesbians; one was beautiful, one grim; both loved the other, who was intelligent. I loved her, too. I dreamed of violating her purity. They taked among themselves, in creepy whispers, always about Jung. In a dark corner, away from our line, old Portuguese men slit fish into open flaps, flicking out the bones. I could only see their eyes and knives. I'd arrive early every morning to dash in and out until the stench became bearable. After work I'd go to bed and pluck fish scales out of my skin.

I was a teaching assistant in two English departments. I graded thousands of freshman themes. One began like, "Karl Marx, for that was his name…" Another began like this: "In Jonathan Swift's famous letter to the Pope…" I wrote edifying comments in the margins. Later I began to scribble "Awkward" beside everything, even spelling errors.

I got A's and F's as a graduate student. A professor of English said my attitude wasn't professional. He said that he always read a "good book" after dinner.

A girl from Indiana said this of me on a teacher-evaluation form: "It is bad enough to go to English class at eight in the morning, but to be instructed by a shabby man is horrible."

I made enemies on the East Coast, the West Coast, and in the Middle West. All now dead, sick, or out of luck.

I was arrested, photographed, and fingerprinted. In a soundproof room two detectives lectured me on the American way of life, and I was charged with the crime of nothing. A New York cop told me that detectives were called "defectives."

I had an automobile accident. I did the mambo. I had urethritis and mononucleosis.

In Ann Arbor, a few years before the advent of Malcolm X, a lot of my friends were black. After Malcolm X, almost all my friends were white. They admired John F. Kennedy.

In the fifties, I smoked marijuana, hash, and opium. Once I drank absinthe. Once I swallowed twenty glycerine caps of peyote. The social effects of "drugs," unless sexual, always seemed tedious. But I liked people who inclined the drug way. Especially if they didn't proselytize. I listened to long conversations about the phenomenological weirdness of familiar reality and the great spiritual questions this entailed—for example, "Do you think Wallace Stevens is a head?"

I witnessed an abortion.

I was godless, but I thought the fashion of intellectual religiosity more despicable. I wished that I could live in a culture rather than study life among the cultured.

I drove a Chevy Bel Air eighty-five miles per hour on a two-lane blacktop. It was nighttime. Intermittent thick white fog made the headlights feeble and diffuse. Four others in the car sat with the strict silent rectitude of catatonics. If one of them didn't admit to being frightened, we were dead. A Cadillac, doing a hundred miles per hour, passed us and was obliterated in the fog. I slowed down.

I drank Old Fashioneds in the apartment of my friend Julian. We talked about Worringer and Spengler. We gossiped about friends. Then we left to meet our dates. There was more drinking. We all climbed trees, crawled in the street, and went to a church. Julian walked into an elm, smashed his glasses, vomited on a lawn, and returned home to memorize Anglo-Saxon grammatical forms. I ended on my knees, vomiting into a toilet bowl, repeatedly flushing the water to hide my noises. Later I phoned New York so that I could listen to the voices of my parents, their Yiddish, their English, their logics.

I knew a professor of English who wrote impassioned sonnets in honor of Henry Ford.

I played freshman varsity basketball at N.Y.U. and received a dollar an hour for practice sessions and double that for games. It was called "meal money." I played badly, too psychological, too worried about not studying, too short. If pushed or elbowed during a practice game, I was ready to kill. The coach liked my attitude. In his day, he said, practice ended when there was blood on the boards. I ran back and forth, in urgent sneakers, through my freshman year. Near the end I came down with pleurisy, quit basketball, started smoking more.

I took classes in comparative anatomy and chemistry. I took classes in old English, Middle English, and modern literature. I took classes and classes.

I fired a twelve-gauge shotgun down the hallway of a railroad flat into a couch pillow.

My roommate bought the shotgun because of his gambling debts. He expected murderous thugs to come for him. I'd wake in the middle of the night listening for a knock, a cough, a footstep, wondering how to identify myself as not him when they broke through out door.

My roommate was an expensively dressed kid from a Chicago suburb. Though very intelligent, he suffered in school. He suffered with girls though he was handsome and witty. He suffered with boys though he was heterosexual. He slept on three mattresses and used a sun lamp all winter. He bathed, oiled and perfumed his body daily. He wanted soft, sweet joys in every part, but when some whore asked if he'd like to be beaten with a garrison belt, he said yes. He suffered with food, eating from morning to night, loading his pockets with fried pumpkin seeds when he left for class, smearing caviar paste on his filet mignons, eating himself into a monumental face of eating because he was eating. Then he killed himself.

A lot of young, gifted people I knew in the fifties killed themselves. Only a few of them continue walking around.

I wrote literary essays in the turgid, tumescent manner of darkest Blackmur.

NYC from Jersey, 1950.

I used to think that someday I would write a fictional version of my stupid life in the fifties.

I was a waiter at a Catskill hotel. The captain of the waiters ordered us to dance with the female guests who appeared in the casino without escorts and, as much as possible, fuck them. A professional tummler walked the ground. Whenever he saw a group of people merely chatting, he thrust in quickly and created a tumult.

dylan

I heard the Budapest String quartet, Dylan Thomas, Lester Young, and Billie Holiday together, and I saw Pearl Primus dance, in a Village nightclub, in a space two yards square, accompanied by an African drummer about seventy years old. His hands moved in spasms of mathematical complexity at invisible speed. People left their tables to press close to Primus and see the expression in her face, the sweat, the muscles, the way her naked feet seized and released the floor.

Ann Arbor

Eventually I had friends in New York, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Berkeley & Los Angeles.

jack kerouac

I did the cha-cha, wearing a tux, at a New Year's party in Hollywood, and sat at a table with Steve McQueen. He'd become famous in a TV series about a cowboy with a rifle. He said he didn't know which he liked best, acting or driving a racing car. I thought he was a silly person and then realized he thought I was. I met a few other famous people who said something. One night, in a yellow Porsche, I circle Manhattan with Jack Kerouac. He recited passages, perfectly remembered from his book reviews, to the sky. His manner was ironical, sweet, and depressing.

I had a friend named Chicky who drove his chopped, blocked, stripped, dual-exhaust Ford convertible, while vomiting out the fly window, into a telephone pole. He survived, lit a match to see if the engine was all right, and it blew up in his face. I saw him in the hospital. Through his bandages he said that ever since high school he'd been trying to kill himself. Because his girlfriend wasn't good-looking enough. He was crying and laughing while he pleaded with me to believe that he had really been trying to kill himself because his girlfriend wasn't good-looking enough. I told him that I was going out with a certain girl and he told me that had fucked her once but it didn't matter because I could take her away and live somewhere else. He was a Sicilian kid with a face like Caravaggio's angels of debauch. He'd been educated by priests and nuns. When his hair grew back and his face healed, his mind healed. He broke up with his girlfriend. he wasn't nearly as narcissistic as other men I knew in the fifties.

I knew one who, before picking up his dates, ironed his dollar bills and powdered his testicles. And another who referred to women as "cockless wonders" and used only their family names—for example, "I'm going to meet Goldberg, the cockless wonder." Many women thought he was extremely attractive and became his sexual slaves. Men didn't like him.

I had a friend who was dragged down a courthouse stairway, in San Francisco, by her hair. She'd wanted to attend the House Un-American hearings. The next morning I crossed the Bay Bridge to join my first protest demonstration. I felt frightened and embarrassed. I was bitter about what had happened to her and the others she'd been with. I expected to see thirty or forty people lke me, carrying hysterical placards around the courthouse until the cops bludgeoned us into the pavement. About two thousand people were there. I marched beside a little kid who had a bag of marbles to throw under the hoofs of the horse cops. His mother kept saying, "Not yet, not yet." We marched all day. That was the end of the fifties.

Leonard Michaels died in 2003. He was one of the most talented writers of the short story in the form's history. He also wrote novels, including The Men's Club, a brilliant satire, and Sylvia, about his first wife, Sylvia Bloch.

THINGS REALLY WERE BETTER THEN

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On Tennessee Williams

by Karina Wolf

“High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.” Tennessee Williams’ remarks at the death of his sister allude to the difficulty of living with mental illness -- his relationship with his schizophrenic sibling had been fraught.

Rose was a perpetual source of concern, constraint, and provocation for the family, and while the playwright was in rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie, his parents allowed surgeons to lobotomize her. Psychosurgery has often been coercive at best, and the operation is medieval in its imprecision. The doctor severs the brain’s prefrontal lobe by inserting metal spikes through holes in the skull or through the eye sockets. The surgery left Rose permanently compromised and terminated her hopes for recovery.

Williams called Menagerie a memory play. Perhaps this designation was meant to excuse its elliptical narrative; certainly it alluded to the story’s biographical conflict, about a mother’s hope for her daughter’s return to normalcy and the sibling who acts as mediator. “It is sad and embarrassing and unattractive,” Williams admitted, “that those emotions that stir…are nearly all rooted…in the particular and sometimes peculiar concerns of the artist himself…a web of monstrous complexity…from the spider mouth of his own singular perceptions.”

For the Williams family, madness was an impenetrable cloister. The diplomacy of insanity demands anticipation, misdirection, suppression. A spouse or visitor can never comprehend the hidden hurts that bind, the minutely calibrated behaviors and the disappointed hopes in the family of the disturbed. Outside the tempest, one bears witness. It’s arguable that most writers create memory plays in one way or another; that Williams would name his form reflects how intimately these conflicts branded him.

*

I came late to Tennessee Williams. Maybe this is a function of the American paradox. To paraphrase a Yankee poet: we Americans contradict ourselves, we are a multitude. I hope the purpose of literature isn’t just to reify the importance of our own concerns, but the gentility of the South, its norms and mores and modes of expression seem utterly alien to this Northerner.

I recognized Williams, at last, in the works of contemporary film-makers: in the febrile moods of Wong Kar-Wai (an entire section of Blueberry Nights is lifted straight from Streetcar), in David Lynch’s pathological normality and expressionist experiments. When discussing All About My Mother, in which a character plays Blanche Dubois onscreen, Pedro Almodovar acknowledges a debt to Williams but insists that his character performs scenes from Streetcar as preparation to negotiate her own conflicts.

We can all learn from his conceit. The Spanish director dedicates his film to “women who act.” The idea, of course, is that "woman" and "performer" are exchangeable terms – and therefore the film is dedicated to more than biologically-mandated actors. Certainly, to be gay when Tennessee Williams was alive was to perform. And to be insane in the South of Tennessee Williams is a highwire act.

Despite the good breeding and the heavy drawl that earned him the handle “Tennessee,” Williams is not the most Southern of writers. He aspired to Southernness, and he came from a family with a society name (Lanier), but he was also gay, which left him at odds with the culture beyond his gothic family. (When queried about the provenance of her son’s toxic female characters, Williams mother regularly issued the disclaimer: “I have no idea where he comes up with them.”)

*

When you think of Tennessee Williams, what do you think of first? Marlon Brando’s tortured screams and the comfort from the woman he loves, when he shoves his brutish head against her belly. It’s hard to imagine a character of more inchoate passion than Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski.

You have to understand Williams' cultural genealogy. He is the descendant of Artaud, Brecht and Cocteau. He was aiming for a theater of gesture; after all, when it works, writing is more of a sculptural than a logical art. “I think of writing as something more organic than words, something closer to being and action,” he wrote. Suddenly, Last Summer has nothing in common with contemporaneous dramas by Miller or Osborne – its roots are in European Expressionism and the Gothic romance of the Brontës. Williams’ emotional landscapes are elemental and volatile and poisonous. The Southern artifice is just a fractal outgrowth of the characters’ pathologies.

Williams’ success also coincided with the development of method acting, itself an exponent of rawness, not merely of naturalism. I find I can’t really talk about Williams without talking about film because that is how I was introduced to him – through the framings of Elia Kazan and Joseph Mankiewicz – and how I finally understood him – through his filmic imitators.

Even so, it took me a long time to understand the appeal of the plays. At a young age I could discern how Marlon Brando’s performance differed from the mannered banter of other actors. But he was repellent – it’s only later that you can see he’s appealing, how his coarseness is an antidote to the delusions of his wife and her sister.

In Suddenly, Last Summer I found my skeleton key. There are more famous and more revived works, but Suddenly, to me, is the yardstick by which all others can be measured. The play contains Williams’ archetypal characters: the fragile woman-girl “like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf”; the arachnid mother; the depressive young man who must mediate an arena of monsters.

In the drama, brilliant and sensitive Dr. Cukrowicz is charged with eliciting funds from wealthy socialite Mrs. Venable in order to build a new psychosurgical hospital. The price of the new building is clear: Dr. Cukrowicz must perform a lobotomy on Mrs. Venable’s niece, who has been unmanageable since the death of Mrs. Venable’s son. Kathy, the niece, was witness to Sebastian’s violent and mysterious demise while the two were on vacation in Spain.

Before meeting the patient, Dr. Cukrowicz presses Mrs. Venable to specify her niece’s illness. The diagnosis is imprecise, but the affliction is universal: “Memory. She lacerates herself with memory.”

There’s that word again. Caught in memory, the self becomes two mirrors facing one another – an endless feedback loop in which the singular ego, or identity, gets lost. You start searching for yourself. As Kathy does, you start writing your diary in the third person.

A bizarrely un-Southern triad of players enact the filmic version of Suddenly, Last Summer. Katharine Hepburn is the widow Venable, whose name seems to be a conflation of veniality and veneration. Her comportment is loathsome to her niece and subservient to her beloved son. Hepburn struts around in the headgear and outfits of an older version of her screwball character from Bringing Up Baby, but here the gaffes reveal deadly intentions.

Elizabeth Taylor has always been decadent; the instability we associate with her compensates for any thinness in performance. Her beauty is dated but manifest.  She was made for perfume commercials or the affectless formalism of Last Year at Marienbad; she's perfect for the film, where the framing creates the drama as much as anything she says.  Her power is not only her illness but in her knowledge. There’s something about Sebastian that Mrs. Venable wants to contain.

Montgomery Clift’s Dr. Cukrowicz has a welcome detachment. In essence, he’s allowed entry to the family secrets as he tries to determine whether to agree to perform the lobotomy. As he defers his decision, the surgeon develops an odd intimacy with his patient.  He lights her cigarettes like a lover, allows her to wear high heels and Paris-bought fashions.

Clift, like Brando, was an actor of his moment. He embodied a new technique and carried a vulnerable, pansexual mien – a type of male so repellant to John Wayne that the star refused to socialize with Clift when they shot a film together. Clift was tortured by the sensitivities that can go hand in hand with addiction. He was further handicapped by changes to his appearance after a gruesome car accident. Marilyn Monroe once said of Clift that he was the "only person I know who’s in worse shape than I am.” Because the crew indulged his poor behavior, Hepburn reportedly spat in the face of the director at the end of filming.

It’s spot on casting, though, for a character who must serve as a Williams stand-in. As the ethical surgeon, he dithers, asking Mrs. Venable, "I can't guarantee that a lobotomy would stop her—babbling!!!" To which the aunt responds, "That may be, maybe not, but after the operation who would believe her, Doctor?"

Mental illness, particularly hysteria, has often been the affliction of women. Straight men may offer protection, comfort, diagnosis or salvation; but illness is a feminine domain. The pseudo-diagnosis of hysteria is similar to that vague term with which Kathy is classified, “dementia precox.” Even the doctor knows that this is a blanket categorization, empowering the doctor and belittling the diseased.

In many of Williams' plays, the arrival of a man offers hope and redemption – all thwarted by the hysterical behavior of the patient. There’s the sense that madness is consequent to a family imbalance that has no outlet.  At best, the patient can achieve an awareness of the illness as it damages host and those around her. Think about Britney Spears’ helpless dissociation as she markets her bi-polarity versus the adult recognition of Sinead O’Connor, who talks with self-awareness about her disease, even as she periodically erupts into mad behaviors.

All this is to say: madness is viral. The lives of those surrounding the afflicted are irradiated by pathology. As in Grey Gardens, the illnesses must be symbiotic or the unit fails.

*

Something has failed in Williams’ Gothic spook sonata – a character has died and another must be silenced. So what is the need on the part of Mrs. Venable to hide from the strange facts about Sebastian? She can hardly speak the truth about him: his mother, and then his cousin, act as nurse/muse/procurer for the gay poet. As Kathy rightly says: “Sebastian wasn’t a man, he was a vocation.”

Like a good actor, Williams finds himself in his characters. Tennessee was prone to depression and limited by endless sensitivities. Certainly, his suffering must’ve inspired the troubled Doctor as well as the relationship between Kathy and Sebastian, which trespasses into Wuthering Heights’ incestuous taboos.

Williams’ first erotic experiences were closely linked to his sister: his concern for Rose transferred to the student pianist who arrived at the house regularly to practice with his sister. Williams writes: “For the first time, prematurely, I was aware of skin as an attraction. A thing that might be desirable to touch. This awareness entered my mind, my senses, like the sudden streak of flame that follows a comet. And my undoing... was now completed.”

A shocking ambivalence of thought and sensation tortured him, "Yes, Tom, you're a monster!" he told himself. "But that's how it is and there's nothing to be done about it. And so continued to feast my eyes on his beauty."

In Suddenly, Last Summer the self-loathing and the compulsion are both present. As much as Tennessee had to battle with his domineering mother and fragile sister, he himself was also damaged.

Mrs. Venable’s speech about Sebastian suggests something of Tennessee’s delicacy:

A poet’s vocation is something that rests on something as thin and fine as the web of a spider, Doctor. That’s all that holds him over!—out of destruction….Few, very few are able to do it alone! Great help is needed!

And then there are Williams’ letters. When his good friend Carson McCullers considered visiting him in Rome, Tennessee warned her: “You must remember all the bad things about me, my sensuality and license and neurotic moodiness at times – all the irregularities of my life and nature – I cannot put all those things into a letter! – and then ask yourself if you could really endure a close association or would I perhaps add to your worries and your emotional strains.”

Who is the greater monster in Suddenly, Last Summer? Mrs. Venable, who wishes to suppress the truth, or her son, who uses people to perverse ends? Williams imbues a toxicity to all. Kathy is fragile, but the entire family is mad. Ultimately, the doctor elicits the story of Sebastian’s behavior and violent death with a serum – as if the truth will solve the family’s pathology.

Truth, in fact, is Williams' second subject. In Streetcar, Blanche Dubois admits: “I don’t want realism. I want magic. I don’t tell the truth. I tell it as it ought to be….A line can be straight or a road. But the heart of a human being?” And here I find the greatness of Williams: truth and lies coexist – as do love, hatred, and indifference. Sane or mad, the human heart is troubled because it embraces contraries.

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and she tumbles here.

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In Bed

by Joan Didion

Three, four, sometimes five times a month, I spend the day in bed with a migraine headache, insensible to the world around me. Almost every day of every month, between these attacks, I feel the sudden irrational irritation and the flush of blood into the cerebral arteries which tell me that migraine is on its way, and I take certain drugs to avert its arrival. If I did not take the drugs, I would be able to function perhaps one day in four

The physiological error called migraine is, in brief, central to the given of my life. When I was 15, 16, even 25, I used to think that I could rid myself of this error by simply denying it, character over chemistry. "Do you have headaches sometimes? frequently? never?" the application forms would demand. "Check one."

Wary of the trap, wanting whatever it was that the successful circumnavigation of that particular form could bring (a job, a scholarship, the respect of mankind and the grace of God), I would check one. "Sometimes," I would lie. That in fact I spent one or two days a week almost unconscious with pain seemed a shameful secrct, evidence not merely of some chemical inferiority but of all my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrongthink.

For I had no brain tumor, no eyestrain, no high blood pressure, nothing wrong with me at all: I simply had migraine headaches, and migraine headaches were, as everyone who did not have them knew, imaginary. I fought migraine then, ignored the warnings it sent, went to school and later to work in spite of it, sat through lectures in Middle English and presentations to advertisers with involuntary tears running down the right side of my face, threw up in washrooms, stumbled home by instinct, emptied ice trays onto my bed and tried to freeze the pain in my right temple, wished, only for a neurosurgeon who would do a lobotomy on house call, and cursed my imagination.

It was a long time before I began thinking mechanistically enough to accept migraine for what it was: something with which I would be living, the way some people live with diabetes. Migraine is something more than the fancy of a neurotic imagination. It is an essentially hereditary complex of symptoms, the most frequently noted but by no means the most unpleasant of which is a vascular headache of blinding severity, suffered by a surprising number of women, a fair number of men (Thomas Jefferson had a migraine, and so did Ulysses S. Grant, the day he accepted Lee's surrender), and by some unfortunate children as young as two years old.

I had my first when I was eight. It came on during a fire drill at the Columbia School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I was taken first home and then to the infirmary at Peterson Field, where my father was stationed. The Air Corps doctor prescribed an enema.

Almost anything can trigger a specific attack of migraine: stress, allergy, fatigue, an abrupt change in barometric pressure, a contretemps over a parking ticket. A flashing light. A fire drill. One inherits, of course, only the predisposition. In other words I spent yesterday in bed with a headache not merely because of my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers and wrong-think, but because both my grandmothers had migraine, my father has migraine and my mother has migraine.

No one knows precisely what it is that is inherited. The chemistry of migraine, however, seems to have some connection with the nerve hormone named serotonin, which is naturally present in the brain. The amount of serotonin in the blood falls sharply at the onset of migraine, and one migraine drug, methysergide, or Sansert, seems to have some effect on serotonin. Methysergide is a derivative of lysergic acid (in fact Sandoz Pharmaceuticals first synthesized LSD-25 while looking for a migraine cure), and its use is hemmed about with so many contraindications and side effects that most doctors prescribe it only in the most incapacitating cases.

Methysergide, when it is prescribed, is taken daily, as a preventive; another preventive which works for some people is old-fashioned ergotamine tartrate, which helps to constrict the swelling blood vessels during the "aura," the period which in most cases precedes the actual headache.

Once an attack is under way, however, no drug touches it. Migraine gives some people mild hallucinations, temporarily blinds others, shows up not only as a headache but as a gastrointestinal disturbance, a painful sensitivity to all sensory stimuli, an abrupt overpowering fatigue, a strokelike aphasia, and a crippling inability to make even the most routine connections.

When I am in a migraine aura (for some people the aura lasts fifteen minutes, for others several hours), I will drive through red lights, lose the house keys, spill whatever I am holding, lose the ability to focus my eyes or frame coherent sentences, and generally give the appearance of being on drugs, or drunk. The actual headache, when it comes, brings with it chills, sweating, nausea, a debility that seems to stretch the very limits of endurance. That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.

My husband also has migraine, which is unfortunate for him but fortunate for me: perhaps nothing so tends to prolong an attack as the accusing eye of someone who has never had a headache. "Why not take a couple of aspirin," the unafflicted will say from the doorway, or "I'd have a headache, too, spending a beautiful day like this inside with all the shades drawn." All of us who have migraine suffer not only from the attacks themselves but from this common conviction that we are perversely refusing to cure ourselves by taking a couple of aspirin, that we are making ourselves sick, that we "bring it on ourselves.

And in the most immediate sense, the sense of why we have a headache this Tuesday and not last Thursday, of course we often do. There certainly is what doctors call a "migraine personality," and that personality tends to be ambitious, inward, intolerant of error, rather rigidly organized, perfectionist. "You don't look like a migraine personality," a doctor once said to me. "Your hair's messy. But I suppose you're a compulsive housekeeper." Actually my house is kept even more negligently than my hair, but the doctor was right nonetheless: perfectionism can also take the form of spending most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph.

But not all perfectionists have migraine, and not all migrainous people have migraine personalities. We do not escape heredity. I have tried in most of the available ways to escape my own migrainous heredity (at one point I learned to give myself two daily injections of histamine with a hypodermic needle, even though the needle so frightened me that I had to close my eyes when I did it), but I still have migraine.

And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I. It never comes when I am in real trouble.

Tell me that my house is burned down, my husband has left me, that there is gunfighting in the streets and panic in the banks, and I will not respond by getting a headache. It comes instead when I am fighting not an open but a guerrilla war with my own life, during weeks of small household confusions, lost laundry, unhappy help, canceled appointments, on days when the telephone rings too much and I get no work done and the wind is coming up. On days like that my friend comes uninvited.

And once it comes, now that I am wise in its ways, I no longer fight it. I lie down and let it happen.

At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that. Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain.

For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties.

The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. I open the windows and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well. I notice the particular nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing. I count my blessings.

Member of the Club

by LAWRENCE OTIS GRAHAM

I drive up the winding lane past a long stone wall and beneath an archway of 60-feet maples. At one bend of the drive, a freshly clipped lawn and a trail of yellow daffodils slope gently up to the four-pillared portico of a white Georgian colonial. The building's six huge chimneys, the two wings with slate-gray shutters, and the white-brick façade loom over a luxuriant golf course. Before me stands the 100-year-old Greenwich Country Club—the country club—in the affluent, patrician, and very white town of Greenwich, Connecticut, where there are eight clubs for 59,000 people.

I'm a 30-year-old corporate lawyer at a midtown Manhattan firm, and I make $105,000 a year. I'm a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and I've written eleven nonfiction books. Although these might seem like good credentials, they're not the ones that brought me here. Quite frankly, I got into this country club the only way that a black man like me could—as a $7-an-hour busboy.

After seeing dozens of news stories about Dan Quayle, Billy Graham, Ross Perot, and others who either belonged to or frequented white country clubs, I decided to find out what things were really like at a club where I saw no black members.

I remember stepping up to the pool at a country club when I was 10 and setting off a chain reaction: Several irate parents dragged their children out of the water and fled. Back then, in 1972, I saw these clubs only as a place where families socialized. I grew up in an affluent white neighborhood in Westchester, and all my playmates and neighbors belonged somewhere. Across the street, my best friend introduced me to the Westchester Country Club before he left for Groton and Yale. My teenage tennis partner from Scarsdale introduced me to the Beach Point Club on weekends before he left for Harvard. The family next door belonged to the Scarsdale Golf Club. In my crowd, the question wasn't "Do you belong?" It was "Where?"

My grandparents owned a Memphis trucking firm, and as far back as I can remember, our family was well off and we had little trouble fitting in—even though I was the only black kid on the high-school tennis team, the only one in the orchestra, the only one in my Roman Catholic confirmation class.

Today, I'm back where I started—on a street of five- and six-bedroom colonials with expensive cars, and neighbors who all belong somewhere. As a young lawyer, I realize that these clubs are where business people network, where lawyers and investment bankers meet potential clients and arrange deals. How many clients and deals am I going to line up on the asphalt parking lot of my local public tennis courts?

I am not ashamed to admit that I one day want to be a partner and a part of this network. When I talk to my black lawyer or investment-banker friends or my wife, a brilliant black woman who has degrees from Harvard College, law school, and business school, I learn that our white counterparts are being accepted by dozens of these elite institutions. So why shouldn't we—especially when we have the same ambitions, social graces, credentials, and salaries?

My black Ivy League friends and I talk about black company vice-presidents who have to beg white subordinates to invite them out for golf or tennis. We talk about the club in Westchester that rejected black Scarsdale resident and millionaire magazine publisher Earl Graves, who sits on Fortune 500 boards, owns a Pepsi-distribution franchise, raised three bright Ivy League children, and holds prestigious honorary degrees. We talk about all the clubs that face a scandal and then run out to sign up one quiet, deferential black man who will remove the taint and deflect further scrutiny.

I wanted some answers. I knew I could never be treated as an equal at this Greenwich oasis—a place so insular that the word Negro is still used in conversation. But I figured I could get close enough to understand what these people were thinking and why country clubs were so set on excluding people like me.

March 28 to April 7, 1992

I invented a completely new résumé for myself. I erased Harvard, Princeton, and my upper-middle-class suburban childhood from my life. So that I'd have to account for fewer years, I made myself seven years younger—an innocent 23. I used my real name and made myself a graduate of the same high school. Since it was ludicrous to pretend I was from "the streets," I decided to become a sophomore-year dropout from Tufts University, a midsize college in suburban Boston. My years at nearby Harvard had given me enough knowledge about the school to pull it off. I contacted some older friends who owned large companies and restaurants in the Boston and New York areas and asked them to serve as references. I was already on a leave of absence from my law firm to work on a book.

I pieced together a wardrobe with a polyester blazer, ironed blue slacks, black loafers, and a horrendous pink-black-and-silver tie, and I set up interviews at clubs. Over the telephone, five of the eight said that I sounded as if I would make a great waiter. But when I met them, the club managers told me I "would probably make a much better busboy."

"Busboy? Over the phone, you said you needed a waiter," I argued. "Yes, I know I said that, but you seem very alert, and I think you'd make an excellent busboy instead."

The maître d' at one of the clubs refused to accept my application. Only an hour earlier, she had enthusiastically urged me to come right over for an interview. Now, as two white kitchen workers looked on, she would only hold her hands tightly behind her back and shake her head emphatically.

April 8 to 11

After interviewing at five clubs and getting only two offers, I made my final selection in much the way I had decided on a college and a law school: I went for prestige. Not only was the Greenwich Country Club celebrating its hundredth anniversary but its roster boasted former president Gerald Ford (an honorary member), baseball star Tom Seaver, former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman and U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands John Shad, as well as former Timex spokesman John Cameron Swayze. Add to that a few dozen Fortune 500 executives, bankers, Wall Street lawyers, European entrepreneurs, a Presbyterian minister, and cartoonist Mort Walker, who does "Beetle Bailey."

For three days, I worked on my upper-arm muscles by walking around the house with a sterling-silver tray stacked high with heavy dictionaries. I allowed a mustache to grow in, then added a pair of arrestingly ugly Coke-bottle reading glasses.

April 12 (Sunday)

Today was my first day at work. My shift didn't start until 10:30 A.M., so I laid out my clothes at home: a white button-down shirt, freshly ironed cotton khaki pants, white socks, and white leather sneakers. I'd get my official club uniform in two days. Looking in my wallet, I removed my American Express gold card, my Harvard Club membership ID, and all of my business cards.

When I arrived at the club, I entered under the large portico, stepping through the heavy doors and onto the black-and-white checkerboard tiles of the entry hall.

A distracted receptionist pointed me toward Mr. Ryan's office. I walked past glistening silver trophies and a guest book on a pedestal, to a windowless office with three desks. My new boss waved me in and abruptly hung up the phone.

"Good morning, Larry," he said with a sufficiently warm smile. The tight knot in his green tie made him look more fastidious than I had remembered from the interview.

"Hi, Mr. Ryan. How's it going?"

Glancing at his watch to check my punctuality, he shook my hand and handed me some papers.

"Oh, and by the way, where'd you park?"

"In front, near the tennis courts."

Already shaking his head, he tossed his pencil onto the desk. "That's off limits to you. You should always park in the back, enter in the back, and leave from the back. No exceptions."

"I'll do the forms right now," I said. "And then I'll be an official busboy."

Mr. Ryan threw me an ominous nod. "And Larry, let me stop you now. We don't like that term busboy. We find it demeaning. We prefer to call you busmen."

Leading me down the center stairwell to the basement, he added, "And in the future, you will always use the back stairway by the back entrance." He continued to talk as we trotted through a maze of hallways. "I think I'll have you trail with Carlos or Hector—no, Carlos. Unless you speak Spanish?"

"No." I ran to keep up with Mr. Ryan.

"That's the dishwasher room, where Juan works. And over here is where you'll be working." I looked at the brass sign. MEN'S GRILL.

It was a dark room with a mahogany finish, and it looked like a library in a large Victorian home. Dark walls, dark wood-beamed ceilings. Deep-green wool carpeting. Along one side of the room stood a long, highly polished mahogany bar with liquor bottles, wineglasses, and a 2.5 foot high silver trophy. Fifteen heavy round wooden tables, each encircled with four to six broad wooden armchairs padded with green leather on the backs and seats, broke up the room. A big-screen TV was set into the wall along with two shelves of books.

"This is the Men's Grill," Mr. Ryan said. "Ladies are not allowed except on Friday evenings."

Next was the brightly lit connecting kitchen. "Our kitchen serves hot and cold foods. You'll work six days a week here. The club is closed on Mondays. The kitchen serves the Men's Grill and an adjoining room called the Mixed Grill. That's where the ladies and kids can eat."

"And what about men? Can they eat in there, too?"

This elicited a laugh. "Of course they can. Time and place restrictions apply only to women and kids."

He showed me the Mixed Grill, a well-lit, pastel-blue room with glass French doors and white wood trim.

"Guys, say hello to Larry. He's a new busman at the club." I waved.

"And this is Rick, Stephen, Drew, Buddy, and Lee." Five white waiters dressed in white polo shirts with blue "1892" club insignias nodded while busily slicing lemons.

"And this is Hector and Carlos, the other busmen." Hector, Carlos, and I were the only nonwhites on the serving staff. They greeted me in a mix of English and Spanish.

"Nice to meet all of you," I responded.

"Thank God," one of the taller waiters cried out. "Finally—somebody who can speak English."

Mr. Ryan took me and Carlos through a hall lined with old black-and-white portraits of former presidents of the club. "This is our one hundredth year, so you're joining the club at an important time," Mr. Ryan added before walking off. "Carlos, I'm going to leave Larry to trail with you—and no funny stuff."

Standing outside the ice room, Carlos and I talked about our pasts. He was 25, originally from Colombia, and hadn't finished school. I said I had dropped out, too.

As I stood there talking, Carlos suddenly gestured for me to move out of the hallway. I looked behind me and noticed something staring down at us. "A video camera?"

"They're around," Carlos remarked quietly while scooping ice into large white tubs. "Now watch me scoop ice."

After we carried the heavy tubs back to the grill, I saw another video camera pointed down at us. I dropped my head.

"You gonna live in the Monkey House?" Carlos asked.

"What's that?"

We climbed the stairs to take our ten-minute lunch break before work began. "Monkey House is where workers live here," Carlos said.

I followed him through a rather filthy utility room and into a huge white kitchen. We got on line behind about twenty Hispanic men and women—all dressed in varying uniforms. At the head of the line were the white waiters I'd met earlier.

I was soon handed a hot plate with two red lumps of rice and some kind of sausage-shaped meat. There were two string beans, several pieces of zucchini, and a thin, broken slice of dried meat loaf that looked as if it had been cooked, burned, frozen, and then reheated.

I followed Carlos, plate in hand, out of the kitchen. To my surprise, we walked back into the dank and dingy utility room, which turned out to be the workers' dining area.

The white waiters huddled together at one end of the tables, while the Hispanic workers ate quietly at the other end. Before I could decide which end to integrate, Carlos directed me to sit with him on the Hispanic end.

I was soon back downstairs working in the grill. At my first few tables, I tried to avoid making eye contact with members as I removed dirty plates and wiped down tables and chairs. I was sure I'd be recognized.

At around 1:15, four men who looked to be in their mid to late fifties sat down at a six-chair table while pulling off their cotton Windbreakers and golf sweaters.

"It's these damned newspeople that cause all the problems," said Golfer No. 1, shoving his hand deep into a popcorn bowl. "These Negroes wouldn't even be thinking about golf. They can't afford to join a club, anyway."

Golfer No. 2 squirmed out of his navy-blue sweater and nodded in agreement. "My big problem with this Clinton fellow is that he apologized." As I stood watching from the corner of the bar, I realized the men were talking about Governor Bill Clinton's recent apology for playing at an all-white golf club in Little Rock, Arkansas.

"Holt, I couldn't agree with you more," added Golfer No. 3, a hefty man who was biting off the end of a cigar.

"You got any iced tea?" Golfer No. 1 asked as I put the silverware and menus around the table. Popcorn flew out of his mouth as he attempted to speak and chew at the same time.

"Yes, we certainly do."

Golfer No. 3 removed a beat-up Rolex from his wrist. "It just sets a bad precedent. Instead of apologizing, he should try to discredit them—undercut them somehow. What's to apologize for?" I cleared my throat and backed away from the table.

Suddenly, Golfer No. 1 waved me back to his side. "Should we get four iced teas or just a pitcher and four glasses?"

"I'd be happy to bring whatever you'd like, sir."

Throughout the day, I carried "bus buckets" filled with dirty dishes from the grill to the dishwasher room. And each time I returned to the grill, I scanned the room for recognizable faces. After almost four hours of running back and forth, clearing dishes, wiping down tables, and thanking departing members who left spilled coffee, dirty napkins, and unwanted business cards in their wake, I helped out in the coed Mixed Grill.

"Oh, busboy," a voice called out as I made the rounds with two pots of coffee. "Here, busboy. Here, busboy," the woman called out. "Busboy, my coffee is cold. Give me a refill."

"Certainly, I would be happy to." I reached over for her cup.

The fiftyish woman pushed her hand through her straw-blonde hair and turned to look me in the face. "Decaf, thank you."

"You are quite welcome."

Before I turned toward the kitchen, the woman leaned over to her companion. "My goodness. Did you hear that? That busboy has diction like an educated white person."

A curly-haired waiter walked up to me in the kitchen. "Larry, are you living in the Monkey House?"

"No, but why do they call it that?"

"Well, no offense against you, but it got that name since it's the house where the workers have lived at the club. And since the workers used to be Negroes—blacks—it was nicknamed the Monkey House. And the name just stuck—even though Negroes have been replaced by Hispanics."

April 13 (Monday)

I woke up and felt a pain shooting up my calves. As I turned to the clock, I realized I'd slept for eleven hours. I was thankful the club is closed on Mondays.

April 14 (Tuesday)

Rosa, the club seamstress, measured me for a uniform in the basement laundry room, while her barking gray poodle jumped up on my feet and pants. "Down, Margarita, down," Rosa cried with pins in her mouth and marking chalk in her hand. But Margarita ignored her and continued to bark and do tiny pirouettes until I left with all of my new country-club polo shirts and pants.

Today, I worked exclusively with the "veterans," including 65-year-old Sam, the Polish bartender in the Men's Grill. Hazel, an older waitress at the club, is quick, charming, and smart—the kind of waitress who makes any restaurant a success. She has worked for the club nearly twenty years and has become quite territorial with certain older male members.

Members in the Mixed Grill talked about hotel queen and Greenwich resident Leona Helmsley, who was on the clubhouse TV because of her upcoming prison term for tax evasion.

"I'd like to see them haul her off to jail," one irate woman said to the rest of her table. "She's nothing but a garish you-know-what."

"In every sense of the word," nodded her companion as she adjusted a pink headband in her blondish-white hair. "She makes the whole town look bad. The TV keeps showing those aerial shots of Greenwich and that dreadful house of hers."

A third woman shrugged her shoulders and looked into her bowl of salad. "Well, it is a beautiful piece of property."

"Yes, it is," said the first woman. "But why here? She should be in those other places like Beverly Hills or Scarsdale or Long Island, with the rest of them. What's she doing here?"

Woman No. 3 looked up. "Well, you know, he's not Jewish."

"Really?"

"So that explains it," said the first woman with an understanding expression on her tanned forehead. "Because, you know, the name didn't sound Jewish."

The second woman agreed: "I can usually tell."

April 15 (Wednesday)

Today, we introduced a new extended menu in the two grill rooms. We added shrimp quesadillas ($6) to the appetizer list—and neither the members nor Hazel could pronounce the name of the dish or fathom what it was. One man pounded on the table and demanded to know which country the dish had come from. He told Hazel how much he hated "changes like this. I like to know that some things are going to stay the same."

Another addition was the "New Dog in Town" ($3.50). It was billed as knackwurst, but one woman of German descent sent the dish back: "This is not knackwurst—this is just a big hot dog.

As I wiped down the length of the men's bar, I noticed a tall stack of postcards with color photos of nude busty women waving hello from sunny faraway beaches. I saw they had been sent from vacationing members with fond regards to Sam or Hazel. Several had come from married couples. One glossy photo boasted a detailed frontal shot of a red-haired beauty who was naked except for a shoestring around her waist. On the back, the message said, DEAR SAM, PULL STRING IN AN EMERGENCY. LOVE ALWAYS, THE ATKINSON FAMILY.

April 16 (Thursday)

This afternoon, I realized I was doing okay. I was fairly comfortable with my few "serving" responsibilities and the rules that related to them:

When a member is seated, bring out the silverware, cloth napkin, and a menu.

Never take an order for food, but always bring water or iced tea if it is requested by a member or waiter.

When a waiter takes a chili or salad order, bring out a basket of warm rolls and crackers, along with a scoop of butter.

When getting iced tea, fill a tall glass with ice and serve it with a long spoon, a napkin on the bottom, and a lemon on the rim.

When a member wants his alcoholic drink refilled, politely respond, "Certainly, I will have your waiter come right over."

Remember that the member is always right.

Never make offensive eye contact with a member or his guest.

When serving a member fresh popcorn, serve to the left.

When a member is finished with a dish or glass, clear it from the right.

Never tell a member that the kitchen is out of something.

But there were also some "informal" rules that I discovered (but did not follow) while watching the more experienced waiters and kitchen staff in action:

If you drop a hot roll on the floor in front of a member, apologize and throw it out. If you drop a hot roll on the floor in the kitchen, pick it up and put it back in the bread warmer.

If you have cleared a table and are 75 percent sure that the member did not use the fork, put it back in the bin with the other clean forks.

If, after pouring one glass of Coke and one of diet Coke, you get distracted and can't remember which is which, stick your finger in one of them to taste it.

If a member asks for decaffeinated coffee and you have no time to make it, use regular and add water to cut the flavor.

When members complain that the chili is too hot and spicy, instead of making a new batch, take the sting out by adding some chocolate syrup.

If you're making a tuna on toasted wheat and you accidentally burn one side of the bread, don't throw it out. Instead, put the tuna on the burned side and lather on some extra mayo.

April 17 (Friday)

Today, I heard the word nigger four times. And it came from someone on the staff.

In the grill, several members were discussing Arthur Ashe, who had recently announced that he had contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion.

"It's a shame that poor man has to be humiliated like this," one woman golfer remarked to a friend over pasta-and-vegetable salad. "He's been such a good example for his people."

"Well, quite frankly," added a woman in a white sun visor, "I always knew he was gay. There was something about him that just seemed too perfect."

"No, Anne, he's not gay. It came from a blood transfusion."

"Umm," said the woman. "I suppose that's a good reason to stay out of all those big city hospitals. All that bad blood moving around."

Later that afternoon, one of the waiters, who had worked in the Mixed Grill for two years, told me that Tom Seaver and Gerald Ford were members. Of his brush with greatness, he added, "You know, Tom's real first name is George."

"That's something."

"And I've seen O. J. Simpson here, too."

"O. J. belongs here, too?" I asked.

"Oh, no, there aren't any black members here. No way. I actually don't even think there are any Jews here, either."

"Really? Why is that?" I asked.

"I don't know. I guess it's just that the members probably want to have a place where they can go and not have to think about Jews, blacks, and other minorities. It's not really hurting anyone. It's really a Wasp club. . . . But now that I think of it, there is a guy here who some people think is Jewish, but I can't really tell. Upstairs, there's a Jewish secretary too."

"And what about O. J.?"

"Oh, yeah, it was so funny to see him out there playing golf on the eighteenth hole." The waiter paused and pointed outside the window. "It never occurred to me before, but it seemed so odd to see a black man with a golf club here on this course."

April 18 (Saturday)

When I arrived, Stephen, one of the waiters, was hanging a poster and sign-up sheet for a soccer league whose main purpose was to "bridge the ethnic and language gap" between white and Hispanic workers at the country clubs in the Greenwich area. I congratulated Stephen on his idea.

Later, while I was wiping down a table, I heard a member snap his fingers in my direction. I turned to see a group of young men smoking cigars. They seemed to be my age or a couple of years younger. "Hey, do I know you?" the voice asked.

As I turned slowly toward the voice, I could hear my own heartbeat. I was sure it was someone I knew.

"No," I said, approaching the blond cigar smoker. He had on light-green khaki pants and a light-yellow V-neck cotton sweater adorned with a tiny green alligator. As I looked at the other men seated around the table, I noticed that all but one had alligators on their sweaters or shirts.

"I didn't think so. You must be new—what's your name?"

"My name is Larry. I just started a few days ago."

The cigar-smoking host grabbed me by the wrist while looking at his guests. "Well, Larry, welcome to the club. I'm Mr. Billings. And this is Mr. Dennis, a friend and new member."

"Hello, Mr. Dennis," I heard myself saying to a freckle-faced young man who puffed uncomfortably on his fat roll of tobacco.

The first cigar smoker gestured for me to bend over as if he were about to share some important confidence. "Now, Larry, here's what I want you to do. Go get us some of those peanuts and then give my guests and me a fresh ashtray. Can you manage that?"

April 19 (Sunday)

It was Easter Sunday, and the Easter-egg hunt began with dozens of small children scampering around the tulips and daffodils while well-dressed parents watched wistfully from the rear patio of the club. A giant Easter bunny gave out little baskets filled with jelly beans to parents and then hopped over to the bushes, where he hugged the children. As we peered out from the closed blinds in the grill, we saw women in mink, husbands in gray suits, children in Ralph Lauren and Laura Ashley. Hazel let out a sigh. "Aren't they beautiful?" she said. For just a moment, I found myself agreeing.

As I raced around taking out orders of coffee and baskets of hot rolls, I got a chance to see groups of families. Fathers seemed to be uniformly taller than six feet. Most of them were wearing blue blazers, white shirts, and incredibly out-of-style silk ties—the kind with little blue whales or little green ducks floating downward. They were bespectacled and conspicuously clean-shaven.

The "ladies," as the club prefers to call them, almost invariably had straight blonde hair. Whether or not they had brown roots and whether they were 25 or 48, ladies wore their hair blonde, straight, and off the face. No dangling earrings, five-carat diamonds, or designer handbags. Black velvet or pastel headbands were de rigueur.

There were also groups of high-school kids who wore torn jeans, sneakers or unlaced L. L. Bean shoes, and sweatshirts that said things like HOTCHKISS LACROSSE or ANDOVER CREW. At one table, two boys sat talking to two girls.

"No way, J.C.," one of the girls cried in disbelief while playing with the straw in her diet Coke.

The strawberry-blonde girl next to her flashed her unpainted nails in the air. "Way. She said that if she didn't get her grades up by this spring, they were going to take her out altogether."

"And where would they send her?" one of the guys asked.

The strawberry blonde's grin disappeared as she leaned in close. "Public school."

The group, in hysterics, shook the table. The guys stomped their feet.

"Oh, my God, J.C., oh, J.C., J.C.," the diet-Coke girl cried.

Sitting in a tableless corner of the room, beneath the TV, was a young, dark-skinned black woman dressed in a white uniform and a thick wool coat. On her lap was a baby with silky white-blond hair. The woman sat patiently, shifting the baby in her lap while glancing over to where the baby's family ate, two tables away.

I ran to the kitchen, brought back a glass of tea, and offered it to her. The woman looked up at me, shook her head, and then turned back to the gurgling infant.

April 21 (Tuesday)

While Hector and I stood inside a deep walk-in freezer, we scooped balls of butter into separate butter dishes and talked about our plans. "Will you go finish school sometime?" he asked as I dug deep into a vat of frozen butter.

"Maybe. In a couple years, when I save more money, but I'm not sure."

I felt lousy about having to lie.

Just as we were all leaving for the day, Mr. Ryan came down to hand out the new policies for those who were going to live in the Monkey House. Since it had recently been renovated, the club was requiring all new residents to sign the form. The policy included a rule that forbade employees to have overnight guests. Rule 14 stated that the club management had the right to enter an employee's locked bedroom at any time, without permission and without giving notice.

As I was making rounds with my coffeepots, I overheard a raspy-voiced woman talking to a mother and daughter who were thumbing through a catalogue of infants' clothing.

"The problem with au pairs is that they're usually only in the country for a year."

The mother and daughter nodded in agreement.

"But getting one that is a citizen has its own problems. For example, if you ever have to choose between a Negro and one of these Spanish people, always go for the Negro."

One of the women frowned, confused. "Really?"

"Yes," the raspy-voiced woman responded with cold logic. "Even though you can't trust either one, at least Negroes speak English and can follow your directions."

Before I could refill the final cup, the raspy-voiced woman looked up at me and smiled. "Oh, thanks for the refill, Larry."

April 22 (Wednesday)

This is our country, and don't you forget it. They came here and have to live by our rules!" Hazel pounded her fist into the palm of her pale white hand.

I had made the mistake of telling her I had learned a few Spanish phrases to help me communicate better with some of my co-workers. She wasn't impressed.

"I'll be damned if I'm going to learn or speak one word of Spanish. And I'd suggest you do the same," she said. She took a long drag on her cigarette while I loaded the empty shelves with clean glasses.

Today, the TV was tuned to testimony and closing arguments from the Rodney King police-beating trial in California.

"I am so sick of seeing that awful videotape," one woman said to friends at her table. "It shouldn't be on TV."

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROn_9302UHg]

At around two, Lois, the club's official secretary, asked me to help her send out a mailing to 600 members after my shift.

She took me up to her office on the main floor and introduced me to the two women who sat with her.

"Larry, this is Marge, whom you'll talk with in three months, because she's in charge of employee benefits."

I smiled at the brunette.

"And Larry, this is Sandy, whom you'll talk with after you become a member at the club, because she's in charge of members' accounts."

Both Sandy and I looked up at Lois with shocked expressions.

Lois winked, and at the same moment, the three jovial women burst out laughing.

Lois sat me down at a table in the middle of the club's cavernous ballroom and had me stamp ANNUAL MEMBER GUEST on the bottom of small postcards and stuff them into envelopes.

As I sat in the empty ballroom, I looked around at the mirrors and the silver-and-crystal chandeliers that dripped from the high ceiling. I thought about all the beautiful weddings and debutante balls that must have taken place in that room. I could imagine members asking themselves, "Why would anybody who is not like us want to join a club where they're not wanted?"

I stuffed my last envelope, forgot to clock out, and drove back to the Merritt Parkway and into New York.

April 23 (Thursday)

"Wow, that's great," I said to Mr. Ryan as he posted a memo entitled "Employee Relations Policy Statement: Employee Golf Privileges."

After quickly reading the memo, I realized this "policy" was a crock. The memo opened optimistically: "The club provides golf privileges for staff. . . . Current employees will be allowed golf privileges as outlined below." Unfortunately, the only employees that the memo listed "below" were department heads, golf-management personnel, teaching assistants, the general manager, and "key staff that appear on the club's organizational chart."

At the end of the day, Mr. Ryan handed me my first paycheck. The backbreaking work finally seemed worthwhile. When I opened the envelope and saw what I'd earned—$174.04 for five days—I laughed out loud.

Back in the security of a bathroom stall, where I had periodically been taking notes since my arrival, I studied the check and thought about how many hours—and how hard—I'd worked for so little money. It was less than one tenth of what I'd make in the same time at my law firm. I went upstairs and asked Mr. Ryan about my paycheck.

"Well, we decided to give you $7 an hour," he said in a tone overflowing with generosity. I had never actually been told my hourly rate. "But if the check looks especially big, that's because you got some extra pay in there for all of your terrific work on Good Friday. And by the way, Larry, don't tell the others what you're getting, because we're giving you a special deal and it's really nobody else's business."

I nodded and thanked him for his largess. I stuffed some more envelopes, emptied out my locker, and left.

The next morning, I was scheduled to work a double shift. Instead, I called and explained that I had a family emergency and would have to quit immediately. Mr. Ryan was very sympathetic and said I could return when things settled down. I told him, "No, thanks," but asked that he send my last paycheck to my home. I put my uniform and the key to my locker in a brown padded envelope, and I mailed it all to Mr. Ryan.

Somehow it took two months of phone calls for me to get my final paycheck ($123.74, after taxes and a $30 deduction).

I'm back at my law firm now, dressed in one of my dark-gray Paul Stuart suits, sitting in a handsome office 30 floors above midtown. It's a long way from the Monkey House, but we have a long way to go.

From the August 17, 1992 issue of New York Magazine

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George interviews Craig Zobel.

We dueled with our Italian counterparts.

We discussed our childhood.

And The World

by Yvonne Georgina Puig

I began reading The Member of the Wedding in Cambridge, Massachusetts, August of 2006. The experience was up there with hearing Mozart’s Requiem in concert for the first time, or seeing that Van Gogh at the Musee D’Orsay, the church with the brilliant blue sky, or watching Amarcord, a holy occurrence which yields the bewildering question, how have I lived fill-in-the-blank years without having seen this, read this, heard this? There is my life before reading this book, and my life after.

[caption id="attachment_14169" align="alignnone" width="333" caption="McCullers, by Richard Avedon"][/caption]

Frankie is twelve, and it's the end of summer. She, her six-year-old cousin John Henry, and Berenice, the black, glass-eyed housekeeper, mull around the kitchen. Outside, the sidewalks are hot. The moths spread their wings against the summer screens. It’s the dog days. We begin to lose our minds. Everything is amplified.

The failure of little John Henry’s biscuit man to remain a charming and intact biscuit man out of the oven sounds comedic and anecdotal here, but in the story it is significant, because August in the South is menacing, because every event in a late summer kitchen the week before school starts when you’re just a kid is significant. The biscuit man was bound to failure. So there is the kitchen, and the world.

The kitchen was a sad and ugly room, McCullers writes. John Henry had covered the walls with queer, child drawings, as far up as his arm would reach. This gave the kitchen a crazy look, like that of a room in the crazy-house. And now the old kitchen made Frankie sick. The name for what had happened to her Frankie did not know, but she could feel her squeezed heart beating against the table edge.

Frankie is angry because she isn’t a part of the world. She wants to grow up. She is stuck in the kitchen and too tall, and she dreams of seeing snow. She wants to be free: Frankie stood looking up and down the four walls of the room. She thought of the world, and it was fast and loose and turning, faster and looser and bigger than ever it had been before.

The frightening caveat in Frankie's predicament is that the conflict of entering the world, of feeling right in the world, will not end. School starts, Fall brings renewal, and Frankie grows out of her meanness. But the world remains mean, will remain mean, and Frankie, all of us, alienated.

Frankie senses this inevitability in Berenice, without fully understanding the truth of it. She, Berenice, and John Henry sit around criticizing God. The world of the Holy Lord God Berenice Sadie Brown was a different world, and it was round and just and reasonable. First, there would be no separate colored people in the world, but all human beings would be light brown color with blue eyes and black hair. There would be no colored people and no white people to make the colored people feel cheap and sorry all through their lives. No colored people, but all human men and ladies and children as one loving family on the earth. And when Berenice spoke of this first principle her voice was a strong deep song that soared and sang in beautiful dark tones leaving an echo in the corners of the room that trembled for a long time until silence.

McCullers possessed a profound sense of justice, in spite of, or perhaps because of, her own suffering. She died at fifty after a litany of illnesses that began with a battle with rheumatic fever in high school. Her characters suffer, but they are not victims, and they share a sort of hope for redemption from a predictable life. They are ordinary, but aware. And they are never smug or entitled.

Southern writers cannot be smug because they know where they come from, women in particular. They require their histories. In a way, Southern writing ultimately turns its back on the literary cliques which grant its admission. The writer is first, above all, Southern, and the South is too real, too gruesome to care. "I must go home periodically," McCullers said, after moving to New York, "to renew my sense of horror."

The twelve-year-old longing to see snow is the grown-up writer imagining an alternate history. What would it be like to love, and to believe in, your home? John Henry gets meningitis, and dies in October, on the Tuesday after the Fair, "a golden morning of the most beautiful butterflies, the clearest sky."

Yvonne Georgina Puig is the contributing editor to This Recording. She lives in Los Angeles. Her tumblr is here.

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Brenda Cromb on Law of Desire

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Karina Wolf on Purple Rain

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="327" caption="1940"][/caption]

Superhero Comics, The Best Ever

by Alex Carnevale

Not to spoil what's ahead, but there's a notable omission from the list, it starts with "Watch" and ends with "Men." If it was called Watchwomen maybe I could get into it. Whoa, settle.

Everybody loves Watchmen, although to be fair it doesn't exactly get you wanting to read other books about superheroes, it more makes you want to cry your balls off. The movie, directed by 300's Zack Snyder, is about as promising as Frank Miller doing The Spirit (read: not promising at all). League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is Moore's more traditional attempt and it's also fabulous, as was his From Hell that turned into a Johnny Depp movie. From Hell is probably the greatest book of all time, but it's not really a superhero book. Moore's Lost Girls, the erotic trilogy about Dorothy, Alice, and Wendy, is incredible and the only thing I will take with me in a fire, or, god forbid, Galactus.

Once a superhero hooks you, you will be willing to watch him do most anything. Jerry Seinfeld's ability to walk out of a car crash unaffected forced me to illegally download Bee Movie and close my eyes while watching it. Jenna Fischer's superpower is her lack of acting ability. Jennifer Beals' superpower is her love of photography.

My point is that most everyone knows about Watchmen. Here's ten books that are just as good.

10. The Eternals & The New Gods

by Jack Kirby

While Kirby's Eternals was, in fact, a DC comic, he's Marvel through and through, and there is nothing about these books that screams DC.

Kirby was at his best when working with the super characterization and wit of partner Stan Lee. Their Fantastic Four collaboration was one of the most risktaskingly stupendous runs of all time, a period in which they created all sorts of awesome ideas that stood the test of time like The Silver Surfer, the Inhumans, and Galactus himself.

The reason I focus on the Eternals is both because it was a more limited series and because the color artwork is the best things I have ever seen done in the comics medium.

When it came to dialogue and plot, Kirby wasn't terrible, but the visual element is where he really shined, and I'd be psyched to hang any page of The New Gods or The Eternals on my wall. If you want to experience the full brilliance of the Kirby-Lee collaboration, try the Essential Fantastic Four, volume 4.

The last volume of Kirby's collected work at DC just came out, and you can buy it here.

9. Earth X

by Alex Ross and Jim Krueger

The enigmatic Alex Ross established himself as a force in the comics world by his photorealistic work in Marvels, a re-imagining of the Marvel Universe from the perspective of a photojournalist. I don't think that book holds up very well, but Ross' Kirby-esque reimaginings of the Marvel universe have been a huge impact on what followed. His marvelous D.C. Universe all-in-one Kingdom Come is a must read if you're a fan of Superman and the like, but for me his more exciting work came in the Marvel version, Earth X.

Is Earth X for newbies? No. Are its sequels any good? They're largely terrible. Then there is the small matter of Ross basically just contributing the concept of the series and the covers.

Once you get past that, and the everything but the kitchen sink feel of the book, Earth X is a gorgeous rendition of a dark future in the Marvel universe, Jim Krueger's plotting is more than up to par, and from the moment you see a fat-out-of-shape Spiderman, you're appropriately hooked.

The central role given to Machine Man, the Watcher, and Black Bolt are all of interest, and the ancient Reed Richards is one of the best manifestations of Mr. Fantastic. While X isn't a great superhero comic, as something different and the pleasure that comes with reimagining characters familiar to us - as if I Love Lucy was about a crack whore - this book is worth reading. Don't buy the sequels unless you have a wish for the sweet embrace of death, however.

Buy Earth X here.

8. Ultimate Galactus Trilogy

by Warren Ellis

Sometimes it seems like all the giants of comics are either Jews or Brits, and in the case of Warren Ellis, it's the latter.

Ellis has his admirers and detractors. He doesn't care about catering to his fanbase and he's not shy about saying so. His Vertigo series Transmetropolitan, which Patrick Stewart has wanted to star in for awhile, is sublime and his run on Thunderbolts added to his glowing legacy. His new series is Gravel, about British combat magician Mike Gravel who he debuted in the wonderfully weird B & W series Strange Kiss & Strange Killings.

Warren Ellis' version of the Galactus story, which prominently features the Ultimates (a revised take on the Avengers that is the best team in comics after the Fantastic Four) is my favorite thing he has done. Ellis has a tendency towards broad strokes and cutting to the point. For better or worse he's never afraid of his own ideas.

With UGT, it seems like getting boxed in by basically having to write a Galactus movie suited Ellis, and his focus on Hawkeye and Falcon, as well as a more rough and tumble Cap, all benefit from the Ellis take. As a Galactus fanboy, I love this book dearly, and the special bonus is a Millar-Romita Jr. (the amazing Kick Ass is well worth seeking out) collaboration.

You can buy Ultimate Galactus Trilogy here.

7. The Punisher MAX: The Slavers

by Garth Ennis

I never liked The Punisher, née Frank Castle, very much. He always struck me as the worst kind of moralist - someone who thought and acted from a place of rage rather than a place of reason. (Kind of like Eliot Spitzer but he takes his socks off during intercourse.) If you're not familiar with Castle's story, every Punisher restates it. Castle metes out justice to wrongdoers, and is violently indifferent to those who stand in his way.

Turned onto this particular Punisher story by a friend who is a Garth Ennis fanboy, I was more than pleasantly surprised- I was gifted with bloodlust and a desire to avenge prostitutes. They pretty much stole this story for Eastern Promises, but the Punisher's version has different twists. In the wake of the Spitzer scandal, it's also nice to see the men and women of the slave trade get their just deserts. This book shows you don't need glitzy powers or epic storylines to get a character over: you just need a lot of blood.

Buy Vol. 5 of Ennis' run on The Punisher here.

6. Wanted

by Mark Millar

Wanted is Millar's best one-shot, a from-scratch tribute to the supervillains of Marvel and D.C., along with the best of Ellis' and Garth Ennis' evil protagonists. As a story it has its flaws, but as a conceptual re-imagining of the superhero, it hooks you from the very first. Night Watch director Timur Bekmambetov helms the adaptation, which looks a little silly, but should have plenty of enjoyable moments. Enjoy these images of Jolie's tats from the movie:

i believe one of these tattoos is for jon heder

There is the feeling that Angelina probably should have just done this movie while pregnant. It was little strange for her to be going around promoting a movie in which she is a brutal murderer while she was all Heigled, but hey, if she can end the conflict in Iraq, she can do this.

Buy Wanted here.

5. Y: The Last Man

by Brian K. Vaughn

Current Lost scribe Brian K. Vaughn was at his best in this landmark series about the last man on earth. I can totally sympathize.

On July 17, 2002, something simultaneously kills every mammal possessing a Y chromosome - including embryos, fertilized eggs, and even sperm. The only exceptions are Yorick Brown, a young amateur escape artist, and his Capuchin monkey Ampersand.

The world would be so much better without Ampersands, they nearly killed the poetry of Will Hubbard. Y would be great as a series, it's too bad they already did Harsh Realm. This is also a great concept for an Albert Brooks movie. Failing that, there's always the downside of Ryan Gosling's career.

Buy Y: The Last Man here.

4. Sandman

by Neil Gaiman

The mother of all comic books, Neil Gaiman's take on Sandman is the most ambitious, literate, engaging and complex effort in the genre. The original Sandman concept belonged to Jack Kirby. It's pointless to try to summarize Sandman. How many other comic books have a book of academic essays dedicated to them?

Even women enjoy Sandman:

Written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by various people, including the regally named Malcolm Jones III, Sandman was one of the smart-people comics, bought by twenty-one-year-old former art students with good haircuts and cool shoes and by thirty-eight-year-old guys in bands that were actually good. It was common to see Sandman in a stack with back issues of Hate and Love & Rockets. Every Sandman had a zillion references, from Greek mythology to Shakespeare. When you got the obscure ones, it made you feel smart, like you'd just finished the Friday crossword puzzle.

Some of the storylines took place in parts of New York I walked through every day. In one of my favorite mini-stories, Death has a talk with a skateboarder in Washington Square Park, where we bought pot before we realized 1) it was frequently oregano, and 2) we were girls, and girls never had to buy their own drugs.

For most people who have experienced it in its entirety, Sandman ranks as one of the top achievements in any genre. While it's a titanic achievement and a monstrous challenge to tackle as a whole, I'd rather sit down and read either of the titles below. Sorry Neil, it was so real though.

Buy Absolute Sandman here. The whole thing is $162. Neil Gaiman's blog on Amazon is here.

3. X-Men: Age of Apocalypse

Written by many writers, but featuring major contributions from Fabian Nicieza, Brian K. Vaughn and Warren Ellis, among others, the Age of Apocalypse is the greatest long form storyline ever done with traditional characters. Spanning a massive number of issues and a cast of about 300, the series began with a relatively simple premise: Charles Xavier is dead.

Recasting the hero of this world as Magneto worked for so many reasons, and most of all was that he finally had a worthy adversary in the timeless villain Apocalypse. I also dug this incarnation of the Four Horsemen, Holocaust, Abyss, Sinister, and Rasputin. Sinister especially is as enthralling a turncoat as his master is a fearsome beast.

The Age of Apocalypse ran right up against some of the most taboo issues of the time - mass death, government control, independence, democracy - and never blinked. While it can be challenging to keep track of all the characters and their abilities, there are so many interwoven stories that it's easy to pick favorites and enjoy what stands out to you. It's like if Lord of the Rings were a Choose Your Own Adventure. It is really sad to see what the X-Men series on the big screen has become when they have this Godzilla of a storyline waiting for them to use. Also, I still am a little freaked out that Magneto married Rogue and named the baby Charles, that's not cool.

Buy the first volume of the Age of Apocalypse here.

2. The Ultimates 1 & 2

by Mark Millar & Bryan Hitch

Mark Millar is on the verge of becoming an even bigger superstar than he already is. His new book, about a regular kid who wants to be a superhero, is called Kick Ass. His new take on the Fantastic Four, including the spectacular idea of giving Reed Richards an ex-girlfriend, is terrific. Basically he is hot right now, and for good reason. This reason.

The Ultimates came out of an attempt to do a big budget Avengers movie. Hopefully when they do bring Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, Giant Man, Wasp, Nick Fury, Thor, and the Vision together, it will be an adaptation of this mindblowing great superhero comic. For my money, Ultimates 2 is the better book, but I'm not the biggest Bruce Banner fan so perhaps that's understandable. Ultimate Hulk is a smidge too powerful for my taste, but the characterization totally works.

There's so much about these books that other superhero comics can't match: the mindblowingly awesome panel constructions by Bryan Hitch, the badass military aspect combined with the NYC feel of the team headquarters, the Triskelion, the Dashiell Hammett-esque murder mystery plot thrown in for kicks, plus a superb internecine battle versus Thor as faux Al Gore. The Ultimates has it all, and if you prefer the X-Men, Millar did Ultimate X-Men in part as well, and it's nearly as good.

What makes this book so terrific is that in the context of a superb story tying different superheroes together, Millar never loses track of the character moments that make you feel about the people in question.

Buy The Ultimates here and The Ultimates 2 here.

1. Preacher

by Garth Ennis

I was never very into westerns, but one film showed me what a Western could be by having fun with the rules. That film, The Good, The Bad, And the Ugly, thrived on the superficiality and coolness of the genre. I never really got the longer, more ponderously good feeling a story set in the West can give you until I read the finest superhero comic of all time, Preacher. I was never really into the Bible, either, until Preacher. Now I think the Bible is the No. 2 book about the Bible.

herr starr

What to say about Preacher? Garth Ennis may never be able to approach something this genius again. There are very few art works in any medium to engage in storytelling this deep. Lord of the Rings can't touch Preacher, neither can The Prisoner, or Star Trek: TNG, or Babylon 5, or any of these tales of the page. Preacher is more satisfying than them all.

jesse custer

Jesse's power is The Word. That is, when he speaks, and people can hear, they do exactly what he says.

Tulip, Cassidy, Jesse, the Allfather, the Saint of Killers, and Herr Starr, are all deeply ingrained in my memory. Herr Starr in particular is one of the most awesome villains ever and his life story, as told at the beginning of Volume 5, is the best thing Ennis has ever done.

Buy the first volume of Preacher here.

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