The money always goes somewhere.

With the massive influx to the coffers of State Assemblyman Micah Lasher’s campaign from Michael Bloomberg and to State Assemblyman Alex Bores’s campaign from major Trump donor and AI-booster Chris Larsen, it figured to be only a matter of time until the candidate with the polling lead for the House NY-12 seat, Jack Schlossberg, started to feel some heat.

Schlossberg’s signature issue is that, unlike the other leading contenders in the race, his campaign is running super PAC-free, on top of which he has announced several snappily framed initiatives, like making Donald Trump responsible for security costs to Trump-branded buildings paid for by the city of New York, with recovered funds going to “cops, teachers, and transit”; allowing renters to deduct their rent from taxes; and a Monthly Moms Bonus, aka restoration of the Child Tax Credit. Each of these initiatives’ passage into law under the current administration would be, at best, an uphill battle. All are worthy goals though, whose future hangs most of all on messaging and platform, which happen to be Schlossberg’s strength.

In what reads almost as a coordinated multi-front attack—having as much to do, no doubt, with the timing of when in an election cycle it’s most opportune to go after a frontrunner—Schlossberg has been hit in the past few weeks with an ungenerous NY Times article seeking to paint him as a frivolous dilettante unable to field a functional campaign (even as he, unexpectedly in the view of New York insiders, has held the polling lead in the race for months); weird “horseshoe” cross-branding exercises from rightwing chum-tosser Megyn Kelly and ostensibly leftwing performance artist Ana Kasparian; and finally, a concerted froth on social media accusing Schlossberg of being a Zionist when he has been the most critical of Israel of any of the leading candidates for the House seat within a heavily pro-Israel district.

“How is he rose to the top? This is just an embarrassment.” Absolutely riveting commentary from Sam Seder (off-screen) followed by a broken attempt at cogency and backhanded plug for AIPAC’s preferred candidate Micah Lasher by a seemingly stoned Emma Vigeland. This is like a clip from an episode of Teletubbies: sense-wise, they’re just sort of bouncing off the walls and each other, falling backwards, kicking their legs in the air. None of them know anything about embarrassment, apparently. They must not be frequent viewers of their own show.

It’s enough to make the head spin. Taken in toto, the attacks are incoherent. According to these critics, Schlossberg’s a total idiot and a canny, deceptive plant; he’s too incompetent to win but also the frontrunner who must be reined in; he’s too independent of his campaign staff and at the same time, taking his marching orders from the establishment. The attacks aren’t really meant to make sense when folded together: they’re meant to find voters who are paying only selective attention and turn them off to his candidacy, without any sense of perspective as to outcomes—like, for example, enabling victory by AIPAC’s preferred NY-12 candidates, Micah Lasher or George Conway, or Silicon Valley and Trump-donor boosted Alex Bores, who has reiterated publicly his support for the continued funding of Israel’s military.

Social media, as most of us well know, tends to create cocoons of affinity around dedicated users; social media also happens to be Schlossberg’s strength in the race and potentially as a member of the House—he has a major audience and the devotion of voters inside and outside the district that he is running to represent.

Live by the ‘like’, die by the ‘like’ seems to be the gambit. The Free Palestine/anti-Zionist social media hive is a particularly active one at this moment in time, and understandably so. Despite good news from Hungary, fascism has gained ground globally over the past decade, and in particular, following decades of accusations that the State of Israel has enacted apartheid (hard to deny) and genocide (even as the Palestinian population grew year after year), Benjamin Netanyahu and his frothing rightwing government apparently decided, following October 7th, that the same tactics Vladimir Putin employed in Chechnya would be appropriate in Gaza, with the added bonus of AI-enabled drone surveillance and attacks.

‘War,’ Netanyahu called it, even as the death toll mounted in what, at best, could be called a slaughter whose casualty count is many orders of magnitude beyond the brutal terror inflicted on Israeli citizens on Oct. 7th, and a number that is still rising. If there ever was proportionality to the Israeli response, that has long-since been lost: What is being asserted, in Old Testament fashion by Netanyahu’s government, is supremacy, a tragically hammer-headed belief in Israeli supremacy, one that seems bound to complete the Jewish state’s transition from one-time darling of the American left to Book of Revelation-thumping zealot obsession to international pariah. Like Donald Trump, Netanyahu occupies the seat of power at a nation’s helm while attempting to evade accountability for alleged crimes. Netanyahu is also trying to escape his own complicity in the horrors of Oct. 7th, both his having steered funding to Hamas, in order to prop up his preferred election campaign boogeyman and by concentrating so much on the prospect of war with Hezbollah in Lebanon as to leave the border with Gaza vulnerable to incursion.

What in the world could this possibly have to do with the race for NY-12? Is one house seat in a closely contested and gerrymandered-to-hell US Congress under Donald Trump or J.D. Vance going to make or break outcomes for the Palestinian people?

No, probably not.

That’s the simple answer. In the offing, though, if you can get an active hive of selectively informed young people to stigmatize a competing candidate while remaining off-camera yourself, in the shadows, then, Hey, the theory must go, You’re more than halfway to winning this thing, and serving the establishment interests you are pledged to serve.

Because, in contrast to Schlossberg’s proposed plans and refusal of dark money, it will be much easier for Micah Lasher or George Conway to legislate support for Israel under the current administration; much easier, as well, for Alex Bores to legislate his preferred winner in the AI-race whose losers seem bound to be workers worldwide. Jack Schlossberg’s plans are bigger swings, and what’s more, by refusing PAC money, he is walking the walk on perhaps the defining issue of our time.

In recent election cycles, we have already seen ripe examples of AIPAC’s sophistication in obscuring their involvement in various races, by going under deceptive names such as Chicago Progressive Partnership, Voters for Responsive Government, and Mainstream Democrats PAC. These guys aren’t chumps; they understand that their support is publicly stigmatized in the current Democratic political environment, and candidates such as would-be Senator of Michigan Mallory McMorrow have sought to hide their receipt of AIPAC donations, or to conceal the source by shell-game sleight of hand.

It is not such a wild conjecture, then, to imagine that beyond the realm of campaign-giving or super PAC support, dark money would be channeled to internet trolls who do what they do primarily for clicks and for donations, or straight-up into generating AI-slop accounts to drive a certain style of messaging.

Following Jack Schlossberg’s No Kings-day encounter with one such social media personality by the moniker of “@Crackheadbarneynfriends,” during which the all-out there questioner tried bullying him into saying “Fuck Israel” on a day dedicated to protesting Donald Trump’s corruption and would-be American Caesar status—the command to donate by Venmo to CrackheadBarney is superimposed right there on the screen—a downright deluge of Instagram performativity came a-crashing down.

Does CrackheadBarney have any integrity as far as where the money is coming from? (LOL.) Does CrackheadBarney even have to know that the money is coming from, say, Mike Bloomberg’s massive donation to Micah Lasher, or Chris Larsen’s to Alex Bores, in order to continue driving anti-Schlossberg messaging? (Again, definitely not.)

As with most social media smear campaigns that now have the power to decide elections at the margins, engagement is driven by a combination of calculation and naïvety: the calculating actors drive the messaging and the naive act as multipliers in buying what the original poster is selling. Our current president, for one, is like a pig in a mud-bath in this sense (and probably several others, too… and yes, sorry, I know that’s an insult to pigs.)

In the quoted IG post, davidsaysstuff plays what seems to be a habituated part of snapping fingers on social media to say, Fuck Israel, for likes. An exercise in personal branding and audience-boosting on an ultra-capitalistic platform with the perhaps naive belief that what’s being served is the goal of a Free Palestine.

So, the Schlossberg pile-ons which go much to the effect of ‘Your campaign is over, Zionist’ and ‘Schlossberg, ew, thought he was great but now blah, so done with him’ are driven by the original posters, by brand-builders, but also, apparently, AI bots or zombie messaging accounts, as in the following exchange I had on Instagram.

The account I was interacting with here had about fifteen followers and a private setting so that no ‘hi I’m actually a person’ photographs could be viewed. Most tellingly, the profile picture, which I’ve blacked out to abide by the general ethic of not putting unknowns on potential blast, appeared to be AI-generated, but in the style of a fake person (and not, like, manga or a cartoon or another sort of pop culture avatar).

The money always goes somewhere.

Whether AIPAC money, Bloomberg money, or Chris Larsen money, the advantage of this brand of astroturfing is that it’s completely deniable: what weak public campaign donation reporting we have in the U.S. does not apply as far as dollars sent to Instagram personalities or profiles generated to troll. The dead giveaway, though, is how the argument being driven against Schlossberg makes no sense insofar as the real world outcome of dragging down his campaign would mean victory for Lasher, or Conway, or Bores, all of whom support military aid to Israel.

I’m sympathetic to criticism set on pulling a candidate toward a more progressive position, and have seen at least one of the instigating accounts, trishetalks, pause from a finger-waving academic key-term style speech (e.g. “intersectionality”)—the kind that voters tend to hate because the not-so-implicit message reads as You Are Stoopid Let Me Educate You—to note that Schlossberg voiced support for Bernie Sanders’ proposed ban of offensive weapons to Israel.

Have any of the other leading candidates in NY-12 voiced such support? No. Has there been a subsequent froth of online posters praising Schlossberg’s statement? Take a guess. (A: Not yet!)

Given the district, among the wealthiest in the country, and with one of the greatest concentrations of Jewish-Americans in the country, it takes no genius to discern that there are many voters who are unabashedly pro-Israel. At the same time, there are many Jewish-Americans (including, perhaps, the one-third in New York City who voted Zohran Mamdani for mayor) who are critical of Israel or outright done with it in the fashion of davidsaysstuff, or what’s probably better and more practically applicable to positive outcomes, Jewish Voice for Peace, whose slogan, righteously, is “Not in Our Name.”

The intention of a troll campaign smearing Schlossberg as a “Zionist” would be to get him into a double-bind, where he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.

Imagine, for a moment, if during the No Kings Day march, Schlossberg had turned to CrackheadBarney and cheerfully declared, ‘Fuck Israel! Free Palestine!’

I mean, really, stop and imagine that for a moment.

What would have happened, as a result, for the Palestinians?

And would saying that have helped Schlossberg win the seat in NY-12 in order to guide policy?

Or would it have won a froth of posters in his comments akin to Beto O’Rourke’s 2019 declaration that he was coming for Texans’ guns?

This little soapbox moment of Ana Kasparian’s during her crossbranding exercise with Megyn Kelly as they gloat over the tough New York Times coverage of Schlossberg (Megyn Kelly now loves the NYT, OK? That’s totally a real thing she sincerely believes, like really, really) is kind of telling in that regard.

Please, take it away, Ana. Give us a performance for the ages.

And for the kicker, here’s Kelly showing off her best shit-eating grin (those are her pained laughs you’ll hear during the replay clip of Schlossberg from an NY-12 candidate forum giving a fair answer to the moderator’s patronizing question about his work experiences):

Now.

There may be no name more synonymous in the history of this country with ‘public service’ than Kennedy. USAID, which the current administration sought to destroy on taking office, was a legislated accomplishment of President John F. Kennedy. The entire notion of an international order—for better or for worse—and the USA’s responsibility for maintaining it on a nuclear-armed planet, took root during the Kennedy administration through such pioneering global public service programs as the Peace Corps.

As the two content-creators, Kelly and Kasparian, on their exciting cross-branding expedition, ask each other “serious” questions, and despair of how the country became so idiotic, while staring straight-faced into their ring lights (incredible commitment to the bit!), I’ve really got to scratch my head.

Yeah……………… home economics. Back to the kitchen, OK? 😉 👍

This stuff, which is contingent on cult-like audience capture, and has Americans turning to it again and again as to a lunch-hour interlocutor who isn’t there—that sensible, engaged American glad to discuss the issues with us in the public square—is just, viewed objectively, as from a great distance, so, so incredibly vacuous. Kelly and Kasparian have trained their voices into rhythms to fill the space inside the hour of their listeners’ time, but they’re saying nothing save for playing on feelings of disgust and attempting to direct such feelings away from themselves (Stuck Here in the Middle…. with You? I mean, with YOU?) and toward a candidate running for office in NY-12 who happens to be descended from a former president whom, in fact, he never got the opportunity to know. Because of? Yes. A life given to public service.

Although it would be rude of him to say, I’m going to hazard that Jack Schlossberg knows more about public service, the history thereof and the ghosts of such better angels, than Megyn Kelly will even begin to understand until the day (or night?) that she dies and reunites with the collective unconscious.

The Kennedy family, the one that first broke into American consciousness during the first half of the 20th century (parents Joseph and Rose, children Joseph Jr., John, Rose, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Robert, Jean, and Edward) were, per Michael O’ Brien’s biography of JFK, one of the first in the United States to have a home theater. Growing up with the movies close at hand gave Jack Kennedy a charming, witty self-awareness about public image that was ahead its time, of the sort that the Beatles then perfected, and The Simpsons eventually consecrated in comedy as a hallmark of American consciousness, the sine qua non of modern being.

An apt student, Jack Schlossberg grew up with social media, and is a native practitioner in a disarmingly self-aware, winking style.

Schlossberg risks clowning.

Schlossberg risks cringe.

Schlossberg risks vulnerability.

All to draw people from their silos. To stir feeling. Behind the antics is a guy who, given his rarified upbringing, is more humble and with a greater sense of integrity than anyone has reason to expect—someone who does well in one-on-one conversation. Against the charge of entitlement with respect to the House seat—as if Schlossberg weren’t actively running for the seat but instead sitting in a five-star restaurant with a silk napkin tucked into his shirt waiting for it to be served to him—all that needs be said is, for someone as privileged as he is, there are surely much easier rows to hoe than seeking public approval to be his home district’s rep in DC. Has anyone looked lately at the condition of the House of Representatives, and the likes of who is repping us, countrywide? Embarrassment, generally speaking, doesn’t begin to describe it, and integrity is in scarce supply.

As a member of the House, Jack Schlossberg would carry potential to champion progressive reform to the finish-line and into law. Considering the district he seeks to represent, electing him is the clear choice, and any progressive organization that wants to build bridges has the opportunity, while his campaign’s outcome is not certain, to forge a relationship with a future ally.

We live in an era when entertainment and politics are all tangled up together, and the results for the American people, of course, (much less the world) have been mainly disastrous. Per NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, “Ronald Reagan famously said, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ I disagree. Nine more terrifying words are actually, ‘I worked all day, and can’t feed my family.’”

Schlossberg represents a fusion of the entertainment and buttoned-down political threads, someone with a born and bred political savvy, who cares passionately about the future of Democratic politics, meeting people where they are, and redeeming a party that has seemingly lost its bearings. His sense of decorum is innate, qualities he does not have to aspire to; when he goes on social media he pushes boundaries to capture attention through dramatic irony toward an intrinsic set of values.

The goal is not, contra the New York Times article, to restore some backward-looking “Camelot” but to take first steps toward something new: a marriage of yesterday and tomorrow, more equitable outcomes, more progressive understanding, fulfilled promise.

In that he refuses super PAC money, a common retort to Schlossberg’s stance is something to the effect of ‘C’mon, he doesn’t need it cuz he’s rich!’

But Schlossberg’s campaign isn’t funded by his own money. It’s funded by donors, inside and outside the NY-12 district, who believe in him. It’s funded by Americans for whom the Kennedy name retains positive meaning. And it’s funded with the cross-party intent of getting money out of politics, which, along with a Voters Rights Act abolishing gerrymandering, ought to be the overriding goal for those who believe in democracy.

A world in which Israel and the Netanyahu government will be held accountable for war crimes, or even genocide as decreed by international governing bodies, only stands a chance once the tides of fascism have receded, especially in the United States. So long as Trump and his inheritors are in power, despairing about Gaza will be contained to social media, and marshaled by those willing to exploit such feelings to dubious ends that perpetuate, not alleviate, the suffering of the people.

On midnight, Sunday, May, 24th, Big Score will open for both poetry and narrative prose submissions. For more about our guidelines and ‘how to,’ read here (scroll down the page) aka bigscorelit.net/about/


Freshly back in Brooklyn, I had a nice time kicking off the Crown Inn Reading Series (first reader on a strong slate). Reading new work to the people: that’s what it’s all about, right? Well, unless what it’s all about is reading. Let a writer out the writing cage every once in a while, OK? Better that way for all involved, I think.

Highlights from my time in the audience included Sasha Fletcher’s dramatic reading of a story about illicit lovers working at an inhumanely capitalistic hospital (total fiction, right?) on a hand-taped scroll, which expertly headed off the problem of how to flip through printed pages when one hand is holding the mic and the other holding the pages. Then, Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Katharine Hepburn voice in the story she read about a young woman whose body hair is magically transfused into a tail. The mic during my opening reading was cutting in and out, as must be my deserved punishment for hubris before the literary gods, or do I mean, just the gods?—the kind of thing where I gave up on the mic, put it down, then one of the emcees did her best to repair it, put it back in my hand only for it immediately to crap out again. Kind of fitting given what I was reading: “‘Sometimes I think that I’m bigger than the sound,’ Karen O sang at the Beacon in late July of 2025, escalating in tone and urgency toward crescendo…”’ Maybe I’m the only person who noticed that, although could swear I caught an audience laugh or two at the concordance.

Then, at the end of the reading—if I really had felt like the mic thing mattered, which maybe you’d think I did since I’m making hay of it here (although I swear I didn’t, I’m well-adjusted, so well-adjusted, look, you’d never believe how well!)—during Melissa’s animated story, someone in the audience just flat out collapsed. Dropped to the ground. Which was pretty scary. I’ve been to probably, oh, don’t know, five or six hundred readings in my life, and that was the first time I’d ever seen that happen.

Crazy thing was? Same thing had occurred toward the end of the night during a piano performance at Black Spring Books two nights earlier, and I’m pretty sure I was the only common thread between the two events. Both of those who fainted were party to a couple, and both apparently are (let’s hope) fine. A writer from among the Crown Inn audience speculated afterwards that there has been a statistical uptick in fainting episodes among younger people following repeat covid infections; someone else commented that circulation to the legs gets cut off when people are too stationary for too long.

So… Well! Sunny times all around.

Wait, what’s that? You want to see more photos from Santa Monica art galleries before I sign off here?

OK, you got it.

I live to please.

Tomorrow—or, well, today?—I’m going to see the Roald Dahl bio-fic “Giant” starring John Lithgow. Imagine, you know, taking a real historical figure and things that that figure actually said and lacing it all into an encompassing fiction.


Question: Who’d do such a thing?


(Answers: Joyce Carol Oates. Stewart O’Nan. Paula McLain. Ron Hansen. Zachary Lazar. Kevin Barry. Michael Imperioli. Colm Tóibín. Michael Cunningham. David Foster Wallace. Curtis Sittenfeld. Me ah the hubris the hubris)

The landscape in Utah looks unforgiving, not so welcoming, yet rapturous, the bed of some ancient sea, all crags and rock hands reaching up from the depths of the earth. I stopped at the Devil’s Canyon rest. No running water, a few picnic tables, a lot of space between the parked cars, wind alternately carrying and dropping the conversations happening there.

At some point, I started to think about writing, the novel I’m working on, the ending I have yet to write, then about writing this essay. Approaching Colorado, I decided I’d develop a list of my tried-and-true methods for staying alert when alone and on the road without anyone else to take the wheel:

1. Changing the music selection to something more uptempo (e.g. Aimee Mann Bachelor No. 2 to LCD Soundsystem’s eponymous debut, or Beck’s Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime to Wolfmother’s own eponymous debut… What’s helpful about a band like, say, Geese, is that their music kind of spans the gap of the pretty and staid to the emphatically urgent). Singing along also often helps.

2. Rolling down the window for a spell to let the rushing air in, and even, when necessitated, putting your forehead out the window, dog-style, to feel it directly.

3. Letting out Nic Cage-style “Yeeee-hah!”s, eyes wide, as a gleefully monomaniacal particle shooting across space/time, and enjoying the ride. This is a variation on the stage actor’s traditional ‘psych-up’ lion face (eyes wide, tongue out, neck tendons stretched) to get the blood flowing before curtain up, which is also effective.

4. Lightly slapping yourself on the cheek with an insistent rhythm, or pounding out the rhythm of the song that’s playing on your thigh. Just feeling a sense of movement helps, even as you are undoubtedly moving, and at such speeds, while sitting still in that carseat.

5. Exiting at a rest stop and walking around for a few minutes.

6. When all else fails, stop and nap. Usually just dozing off, then bouncing back, a fifteen minute thing, is enough to come back more alert.

More than halfway through the Rockies, night did fall, at which point I was on a narrow winding highway, without benefit of much in the way of a view, even if the occasional brightly lit tunnel into a mountainside did provide some variety. It didn’t look as if I’d reach Denver until after 10 p.m., which made the goal of reaching St. Louis by 6 p.m. the next day (a nearly 12-hour drive) appear vanishingly small. I thought that maybe I’d stop shortly before Denver, and set out as early as possible the next morning. But I wasn’t going to stop in Vail, and the options were few and far between, then like a glittering submerged city, Denver materialized, and down the Terrain glided into that basin, and I resolved to stop on the far side of the city, so as to beat traffic the next morning, but then on the far side, near the airport, there was improbably—it was approaching midnight somehow, I wasn’t sure how because I’d stopped paying attention to the numbers—a massive traffic jam that took probably forty minutes to emerge from at which point, always inclined to be a night owl, I was wide awake and ready to go on forever.

The cause of that traffic jam, though (Enterprise coming into play again here, if they ever weren’t), was a really brutal-looking accident, as I glimpsed at the juncture where the traffic dissolved: a compact car with its front mashed in and turned the wrong way, and less readily apparent, a small car that had flipped over and lodged itself against the concrete retaining wall. So, you’re reminded at such moments—or I was—that it’s a mortal endeavor with harsh consequences when mistakes compound. My song-infused midnight reverie passing through Denver was likely to figure as one of the most traumatic nights of those survivors’ lives. If they did.

Which is where incentives of driving come into play: the best way to drive long distances is at your own pace, and reserving the option to pull over and rest whenever needed. To attempt maniacally to meet some kind of outwardly imposed deadline (capitalism kind of runs on this sort of maniacally imposed system) is where the dangerous ante gets upped, as drivers are incentivized to push beyond their comfort levels, or keep going when they definitely should not.

Call Enterprise. Do it right now, and get on their customer service hold, and you’ll hear a voice tell you how much Enterprise cares about their customers. They really truly value you and your experience, they claim, and yeah, I mean, why would anyone take such claims at face value, I know, but cynicism gets old, and it’s nice to be able to believe in things, sometimes.

I had reached a point beyond exhaustion, my blood at that hour probably close to 50% caffeine, and besides, I often feel most alert at night since it is the quietest hour to edit or to write. I could just push on until morning, I thought to myself. I could just keep going until I couldn’t anymore—and nevermind the question of when or how I would sleep in daylight.

However, I was just about out of gas and in rural Colorado. The new-spangled digital dashboard readout ‘Mile Range’ was ticking down, 40 miles to 30 miles to a worrying LOW, and aside from churches in darkness and halogen-lit but dead empty gas stations with strange, solitary Jeep Wranglers parked at the edge of the shadows, there just wasn’t much going. So I did the sensible thing and sought out the next motel I could find, the Travelodge in Stratton, CO.

It was 1:30 a.m., and a sign in the reception window said that they closed for the night at 1. There was a number to call, though, and I called it, clearly waking the manager, and after about thirty seconds of hesitation, he said he’d be right out. Then he emerged from one of the motel’s rooms and trudged over to the office, beckoning for me to follow. He looked like, possibly in another lifetime, or at a different hour, he might have been a biker: ponytail, a couple of tattoos. “You’re lucky I was feeling nice,” he said as I signed for the room. I offered him a $20 bill for the inconvenience, but he declined it.

The room itself, No. 5, was actually enormous, as was the bed. I settled back, my head still buzzing along as if I hadn’t stopped driving, and checked the headlines. I looked at the ceiling, the pattern on the window drapes, took some deep breaths. There was a gas station a stone’s throw from the motel where I’d get started in the morning. When to start, though? If I set my alarm for 6 a.m., that would give me a 20-minute cushion to arrive at Enterprise in Creve Coeur before 6 p.m. Any traffic at all through Kansas and across Missouri… It just didn’t seem very likely that I’d be able to make it on time, and so why push myself. They’d gotten me with their devil’s bargain: I was going to be on the hook, in all likelihood, for another rental day, even if I ended up dropping the car at 8 p.m., or only two hours after their deadline, which seemed much more feasible. Downright humane even.

Anyway, I gave up my monomaniacal quest.

I set my alarm for 8 a.m. and, without meaning to, nodded off.

At 6:05 a.m. on the dot, for whatever reason, I snapped awake. Not a drowsy, blinky kind of wake-up. My eyes shot open, and I was ready to go. I really don’t know why, but there it was, all spread out ahead of me, with morning light coming in through the drapes. I mapped the route and saw that, if I left immediately, and treated the three gas refills I’d have to make like speedway racestops, I might make it at right around 6 p.m.

Once on the road, I called Enterprise. I roundabout explained my situation, seeing if there might be leeway of a few hours. The St. Louis clerk’s answer was evasive. He said they wouldn’t be able to check the car in after closing, and so it would be my responsibility until the next morning, which meant, yes, that I’d likely be charged for another full day.

”I know it isn’t you,” I said to him, sailing along Kansas’s often wide segments of mainly empty highway, “but the company. You guys say that you care about your customers. Look, if I drop the keys in the dropbox at 7 p.m., and you can see with what I’m sure is store surveillance that the car is in the lot, it seems pretty dubious to charge for a full day more, doesn’t it? I’m sure Enterprise must make a lot of money that way, so maybe it’s a hard habit to break, but the humane thing would obviously be to extend to your customers some kind of buffer space so that the company—again, I know it isn’t you, personally—isn’t incentivizing dangerous driving to meet some artificially imposed deadline.”

There’s a kind of silence you’ll encounter when talking smart to corporate functionaries who are painfully aware that saying the wrong thing could cost them a job, and in this economy no less, and that is the kind of silence I heard in response. A ‘please don’t make me speak’ variety, ‘and if you do, I’ll say something cagey and evasive.’

“I’m a writer,” I said, “and I don’t know, this might make an interesting story.” What I didn’t say is that the only fitting method for responding to so-called corporate personhood is to call out that “person” when they (correct pronoun here, no?) fail to live up to their professed values. Like, I don’t know, caring about people.

Anyway, it turns out to be fairly easy to make up time on Kansas highways where the speed limit is rarely less than 75 mph, and so, by keeping at a steady 80, and with Tom Petty and Woody Guthrie and jfc Geese again at my back, I started to gain a minute in arrival time for every 10 driving.

Enterprise, of course, is based in St. Louis, MO. It started there, and so it was as if, in returning to the house where I grew up, I was also driving into the belly of a whale inside of which I was doing my best to stay alive.

I concocted a plan of calling a friend to request that he show up at the Enterprise branch location at around 5:55 p.m. to inquire about a month-long car rental for which he would really have to review, with tremendous care, every available rental option, possibly including taking little test-drives around the parking lot to just really be sure about his choice.

I concocted that plan, but in the end, didn’t need it, because I lucked into encountering next to no traffic along the way (the one heavy jam I saw was fully an hour ahead of me on the phone map, and had thinned out by the time I made it past), and pulled into the strip mall parking lot on Olive Boulevard shortly after 5:30 p.m.

My father arrived to scoop me up.

“You must be tired,” he said.

I didn’t pass out until after midnight.

Then, following a day’s recuperation, it was onward to Brooklyn over a leisurely two days, with no ironclad arrival time, and a ripe opportunity just to enjoy the trip.

On Monday afternoon, in my cluttered Brooklyn kitchen (overdue for some spring cleaning), I received a call from the Enterprise office in Beverlywood, where the agent breezily explained that they were going to charge me for three days of rental. Like it was no big deal and all just a formality, awaiting my ‘cool cool cool.’

“I’m going to have to say no to that. Because look, I returned that car at 5:30 p.m. on Friday,” and ran myself fairly ragged doing so, OK?

She said something about the receiving agents having inventoried the car’s return but not checking it in before 6 p.m.

“I don’t really care what you call it,” I said, “because I returned the car half an hour before it was due, and took a time-stamped photograph, and really if there’s any question, shouldn’t you be having this conversation with them and not me?” (She agreed to reverse the charge.)

Enterprise really, really—like, really, you know—cares about their customers. Get on hold and listen, they’ll tell you all about it.

Penina and her co-organizers are launching the Crown Inn Reading Series with a specific focus on “emerging writers,” which is I guess, if we counted, most of us, short of Jonathan Franzen, Colson Whitehead, and Patricia Lockwood (who must have already emerged at some point, maybe you saw it happen).

So, turn on out? If you’re a writer yourself, and interested in reading at one of these, a not so-secret secret is that attendance, and showing support, is a good way to manifest such potentialities.

And if you can’t make next Mon., because you live in Vermont or will be in Vermont in early June for any reason at all, well, hey, guess what? I’ll be reading there too, as a part of a lineup that hasn’t been announced yet, so I’m really giving a scoop here. Mark your calendar, though: the New England Review will be hosting us on Saturday, June 6, 1:00-2:30 pm, in Axinn 229 on Middlebury College’s campus.

I am just back in Brooklyn (ConEd digging up the street right outside my window, hey, alright) following a cross-country drive from Los Angeles, about which more to say (read: write) soon.

Big Score No. 2 will launch in Brooklyn on Saturday, March 21st, at Gallery 198 (198 24th Street), from 6 - 9 p.m. Feat. readings by Matilda Lin Berke, Moises Ramirez, Bo Lewis, Michael Chang, Felicia A. Rivers, and Joshua Furst. With musical performances by Noah K & Giacomo Merega.

The issue will be on sale at the launch, or can be purchased via our website.

Baltimore was good to us. So many of the writers, editors, and readers gathered at the convention center showed us some love, & we are grateful.

Our statement of principles is as follows:

1) We believe writers deserve to be paid decently for their work.

2) Issue selections are best made without knowledge of platform or relationship or anything except the work itself.

3) Print, like vinyl, has a way of coming back, which is why we put emphasis on curation, the reading experience, with each issue a numbered edition of around 75 pages that can be conceivably read in one sitting, and featuring a contemporary painter’s work on the cover.

And that struck a chord, apparently.

It was great, too, to see in person some of the writers whose work features between Big Score’s covers, including Katherine Cart (above), Michael Chang (below), and Damon Pham (not pictured, but who was the first to drop by).

We were situated directly across from CLASH Books and Cream City Review, and not far from Whiskey Tit, A Common Well Journal, and REVEL.

Given how much of issue production is spent as time in front of a screen, it’s a great and good thing to be reminded that we aren’t endeavoring alone to foster literary culture and community among writers.

A Common Well’s table was doing this kind of legendary thing where they invited any writer who stopped by with an unpublished manuscript to turn over pages to them, right there on the spot, so that the editors could respond with a red pen in the moment and eye contact. And, wow, yeah. I don’t know how many writers took them up on that offer, but it is a cool thing.

In general, a convention like AWP is vital for bringing passion for words and published writing out from behind a screen and into direct contact; I probably had upwards of three hundred conversations under that lofty convention center ceiling. For all the hugging of shadows a writer is bound to do it’s welcome too, every once in a while at least, to step into the light.

The head spins, but the experience gained is invaluable.

And then there were all the readings. I did my best not to run around like the proverbial headless chicken, but did manage to make a few, like the one put on at a pizzeria by Green Writers Press, where grad school pal Molly Johnsen read from poetry debut, Everything Alive. Molly, now a Vermonter, is about as vivid and hilarious a mind as I know, and it ain’t no small thing to see a familiar face, as if in transit from wherever it is a writer begins to those destinations awaiting us (like books on a shelf).

For my final day (well, afternoon) in Baltimore, I went on the recommendation of friends to the American Visionary Art Museum. The museum is located down a steep descent from what’s called Federal Hill, which apparently served in colonial times as a look-out for merchant ships or ships of war. In times of peace, like those probably most of us collectively cherish, it’s a park reached via a whole slew of stairs with a few stone monuments and a few historical placards and a pretty nifty view of Baltimore harbor. The sort of place to return to, next time in Baltimore and in love.

The Stanford Research Institute of Remote Viewing came up last summer in my conversation with Zach Williams, and so that was of course the first thing to spring to mind when I encountered the paintings of Ingo Swann. Or, well, that, and Erik Davis’ High Weirdness, which I reviewed when it came out what’s starting to feel like a lifetime ago, and whose cover looks pretty damn Swann-like.

The American Visionary Art Museum is teeming with art by self-taught outsiders: those creating work beyond the purview of a particular school or ordained system of approval. There are works by artists steeped in personal passion, sorting through pain, through obsession, through “unsound” frames of mind.

Not unlike Substack, in other words?

I jest, but seriously too: notwithstanding the fact that the museum’s founder was inspired by the Collection de l’art brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, there’s something quintessentially American about the entire project, this being a country (the country?) of impassioned outsiders attempting to will a thing into existence that nobody in a position of authority really thinks stands a chance of ever being a thing.

Or, once upon a time, that is how this country could be understood. Whereas now? In our late-chapter madness, we are dominating the world stage while at the controls there sits a broken, emotionally starved man (whose fans love him, apparently, in equal parts for both his unashamed cruelty and transparent need for adulation): as well-deserved a fate as any?

It’s enough to drive anyone to the margins, to scratch at the corners, to poke and to dig for a tunnel in which to disappear for a while. (The American Visionary Art Museum is one great such tunnel.)

Do our better angels have a trick up their sleeves yet?

Or should we know better by now than to hope for a reprieve?

I was born in Marin County, then almost immediately left Marin County. In the suburbs of St. Louis for the first several years that I lived there, my skin was olive-hued, and while the belief probably has little basis in science, I imagined as a child that that was because of how much time I’d spent in the sun as a toddler. My earliest sense of self was as a self displaced; I built Marin County, and San Francisco, all up in my mind as a kind of prelapsarian paradise. Of course, I know better now, but it was still nice to cross paths with the work of Marin County outsider artist Dickens 44. Some vague wistful possibility of home. It cannot be the only criteria that matters, but whether I’m looking at insider or outsider artwork, one of the first questions I ask myself is, Would I want to live under a roof with this piece on the wall?

For me, “Stargazer” is a yes.

This one, by the guy on whom the Robert Redford-directed film Quiz Show was based, registers as a Rubens by way of Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” At a distance, the painting looks to be of a buxom reclining female nude as seen through distorting glass. Get closer and see that her complexion is made up of amassed figures, each unique. The painting is said to have taken years and years to complete, during which time its creator, James Franklin Snodgrass, withdrew from society in the aftermath of his Quiz Show moment. Like the sculpture of the wooden figure, Snodgrass’s painting stands as a singular work, a grand undertaking, pursued for private or obscure reasons.

It is interesting to contemplate what distinction there ultimately is between insider and outsider art, and those rare instances (think van Gogh, think Bukowski) when outsider art effectively crosses over to become celebrated and a subject of future study—kind of giving the lie to there existing any true distinction in the first place. (Van Gogh’s brother Theo was, yes, a successful patron of the arts, and without his interventions, no doubt Vincent’s work would have remained in obscurity for all time… but that does not change the fact that Vincent pursued his craft obsessively and alone, and without much in the way of recognition in his lifetime.)

Not exactly a new observation, but identifying as an outsider has gotten to be a fashionable thing, perhaps, in part, because of the collapse of old guard values whereby gatekeepers(/insiders) were believed to give fair evaluation to any submission that came their way. The chance of discovery by savvy evaluators of talent: it’s a myth that, as a practicing artist, it’s hard to let go of, even while most of the evidence of our time appears stacked to show how hustle and drive are rewarded above all else in our tribal and fractured landscape.

Think of Alexander Calder, and his circus, then of Paul Spooner, whose sculptural work in so many ways is evocative of Calder, while being its own thing entirely, and of how Calder became celebrated, synonymous with those dangling mobiles, while longing to return to the authenticity and purity of imagination embodied in his original circuses—or in other words, to a state like that lived by Paul Spooner.

But we’re all of us on our personal journeys, eh? And no matter how someone else’s life may seem to offer us a template, a sense of security and proof of concept (which is how so much writing is taught these days, for better or worse: look to the model and mimic, mimic away), our own lives always seem to get in the way, and through them, we cannot help but express the selves we are never not in the process of becoming.

Anyway. Come to the Big Score launch? If you’re free.

There are a few things I know for sure. One is that when I stepped into that recording booth all those years ago and sang “Beautiful,” I wasn’t just making a song — I was carving a piece of my heart out and setting it loose in the world. I was twenty-one, barely out of being a kid myself, and I was singing to the only person who really needed to hear it: me.


I didn’t need a Prince Charming to tell me I was worth something. I didn’t need the approval of some cold executive boardroom full of men in suits. I didn’t need a shiny mirror to tell me I had value. I already knew — or at least, I wanted to know — and singing it made it real. “You are beautiful / No matter what they say.”
Simple. Clear. Revolutionary, at the time.


And it caught fire. Teen girls heard it. Broken-hearted people heard it. Outsiders and dreamers and anyone who ever got laughed at or told they were “less-than” — they heard it. And it healed people. Honestly, it healed me a little too.


I don’t regret it. Not a note, not a word. I stand by that song forever.
It’s a great song — let’s just say it — a classic hook, honest lyrics, an anthem people needed.


But if I’m honest — and you know by now that I try to be — I look around at the world today, and sometimes I wonder.


When the first girls took up that philosophy — I am beautiful, no matter what — it was a shield. A way to push back against the cruelty of a world that wanted to tell them they were ugly, unworthy, invisible. Good. They needed that. They still do.


But as the years went on, and everyone else — boys, girls, women, men, everybody — started singing that song in their heads too, something happened.


The shield became a wall.


Instead of protection, it became isolation.
Instead of a celebration, it became a siren song of solipsism.


Everyone became their own main character, their own lover, their own mirror. The sweet idea of needing no outside validation twisted into needing no outside connection. Romantic love — the messy, selfless kind that asks you to risk being hurt, to risk changing for someone else — started to seem, well, unnecessary. Why need anyone when you already have everything inside yourself?


I’m not saying people shouldn’t love themselves. God, no. That’s still the first love you need to know.
But if you never leave yourself — if you never risk seeing yourself through someone else’s vulnerable, forgiving eyes — then you never grow beyond what you already are.


And now? We’re marooned, all of us, in silos of our own beauty.
Selfies, self-praise, self-love — all day, every day.
Swipe left. Swipe right. Swipe away anything that doesn’t make you feel immediately seen and beautiful and affirmed.


It’s not just teenagers now. It’s everybody. And maybe I helped start that, just a little.
Maybe “Beautiful” planted a seed.
Maybe the garden grew wild.


I’m still proud of that little seed.
But if I could whisper in the ear of every person singing “Beautiful” in their own head today, I’d add a few more lines:


You are beautiful — but you are also breakable.
You are beautiful — but you are also responsible for loving others, not just yourself.
You are beautiful — and real beauty risks. Real beauty reaches out.

Sing your own song, always.
But don’t forget to listen to someone else’s once in a while too.

— Christina

explanatory note:

And so, now, we know.

Now, we have seen clear and true how it is that America has gone wrong, and there can never be anything else to say on the matter, because all of it is here.

Or no? You’re saying, ‘No’?

What passes for discourse nowadays, what perhaps always has driven the chattering classes, is the dog race of competing nostalgias in contraposition to the parade of headlines?

Anyway, though, I don’t need your affirmation, see, because there is no editorial gatekeeper for what goes on Substack. (I mean, have you noticed?) We are all of us, terribly, oh so terribly, beautiful here.

I wrote recently about a rock ’n roll star who covered Christina Aguilera’s song. And that guy has continued to make headlines, for better and for worse, that illustrate the dilemma, the longings and dangers, of what it can feel like to live in our overly atomized world. Rebel against the sterile containerized social media interface and wind up a headline. Fight against it, and against yourself, and see who wins. (Hint: the platform owners win.) Notice that the power it grants its owners may be greater, even, than the power of nations; one strand of supporters for the current occupant of the White House appear to be those who feel, given how deeply tech has penetrated our lives, that it may be time to tear down the sustaining structures and build inequality into ever greater inequality. To insist, as a grotesque before the camera eye, that great glots of wealth—more than the wealthy of yesteryear may ever have even imagined—are somehow intrinsic to one’s being. (“I think, therefore, I seek always greater profits”: a trillion wouldn’t be enough, no, no, no.)

My winter in Vermont ends tomorrow, when it’ll be back to Brooklyn, and what snow remains there, then onwards, after a short cat-sitting stint (I’m low-grade allergic, but seem to be able to tolerate this one cat, for some reason), to AWP in Baltimore to table Big Score.

It’s been a good winter for writing, and I made some hay of it, at least so far as accumulating pages. Around half of a new novel manuscript born out of my time away from Brooklyn.

Writing requires, or usually does, concentration, or else concentration materializes via the act of writing. In the halfway out the door mode in which I presently find myself, measuring driving distances in my mind, things to do, people to see, it’s sort of counterintuitive to be sitting down to write the end of this strange project bent on interrogating what the LLMs can do, and how to present what’s genuine of myself in juxtaposition (I still have more packing to do, the rearrangement of physical objects in a physical room as opposed to figurative ones in headspace).

Henceforth, with these explorations at end, I can rest easy that LLMs will never again affect my life, right?

In November I was in the back of a car on the way back to Brooklyn in conversation with a pal who said in politics, these days, there’s talk of Earth 1, and the other, future earths. Earth 1, in his telling, is the one we’ll never go back to.

As students of the humanities have sought publicly to make the case for their passion in light of diminished enrollment, shrinking departments, bleeding subscriber rolls, there have been many arguments for why reading and writing—and now, in light of “A.I.”, reading and writing on one’s own—matters.

Because it’s said to heighten empathy?

Or the opposite—because it reinforces us in what we already think we know (I’d argue that this is usually evidence of bad reading!)?

Because it challenges us to step outside what we already think we know?

Because it offers a road to experiencing more lives in our one life than we’d ever otherwise be able to access?

One more sustaining reason, though: in reading literature, you will inevitably see that what’s old is new, what’s new is old, and that when the thing that is never coming back seems most definitively to be gone, a return may already be in the offing.

Longing for return: it’s a very old story that always seems to be providing grist for very new stories. Which, in turn, become old, and well… I don’t have to tell you, do I?

Anyhow. It’s nice to be seen every once in a while.

☮️

“And….. scene! Good job, everybody. We did it.”

Obviously there was never really any excuse for this. Except that it struck me, and some friends, as funny, or it did at first, then as they watched me go deeper and deeper into it, they were like, ‘bro, you ok, bro, oh no, bro.’ Everything we took granted. Everything we didn’t know to expect. Any publication, especially in dark times, ought to balance the serious with the humorous, and as I am just one writer here at Beyond the Frame, I figured I could use the help of an occasional guest columnist, even one formulated as pure satire. No offense to Christina A. My 20-something self would never believe I’m telling you this, but go, yes, go, and listen to her music. She just might be Patient Zero for our times.

See part 1 of America Gone Wrong
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5
part 6
part 7
part 8
part 9
part 10
part 11

Big Score No. 2 is going to the presses… with cover painting, “Star Crossed Hearts,” by Sophie Rae.

We will be bringing this one into the world in Baltimore. Specifically, at the AWP conference where Big Score is set to share a table (T338) with our friends at Excerpt Magazine.

Launch party in Brooklyn details TBD — likely in mid-to-late March.

You can su…

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New interview up at venerable book culture hub Vol. 1 Brooklyn, which must now be going strong on its third (?) decade. I gave it my best over about an hour late one night maybe two weeks ago…

With thanks to them for staying afloat and giving writers a boos…

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To Whomever Finds This,


First off: congratulations. You really have excellent taste. You must, if you were drawn to a golden urn like a moth to a very expensive flame. I know exactly how you must have felt.


I suppose you’re wondering why a woman would leave a letter …

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note: all lyrics quoted below were either written or covered by the Lemonheads
note 2: The Lemonheads are playing a free show tonight, 1.22, at Lucinda’s in the East Village, doors 6:30 pm.
note 3: David Ryan will appear at Newtonville Books in conversation with Rick Moody for the continuing launch of Alligator on 2.22.

Evan Dando says that he’s no longer famous.

Or not, ‘says’—writes.

But not writes either: his memoir, Rumors of My Demise, is an ‘as told to’ author Jim Ruland, who assembled the text based on correspondence with the singer and frontman of veteran musical act the Lemonheads. The book published in October of 2025 with a New York City launch in the Rare Books Room of the Strand where Dando, after a fashionable delay, sat to answer questions from Professor of Classics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick T. Corey Brennan. In another lifetime, Brennan played guitar for one of the earlier incarnations of Dando’s band.

The professor’s approach to channeling conversation with Dando was a show ’n’ tell method: he’d go to a tote bag and break out what might as well have been ancient Roman artifacts: concert posters, magazine covers, record sleeves, and the like. Most all were from the ’80s and early ’90s, an era when everything felt lacquered, deceptively shiny, and like all the important events had already happened; all we had to do was prevail over “the Evil Empire.” And then we did? The Lemonheads, for their part, set out to be the opposite of shiny, but time has done its trick and made what might once have looked like trash precious.

Dando gave a good impersonation of exact recall for each prompt. Shown a magazine cover with his likeness on it he said that at a certain point in his “alternahunk” era (he found the label ridiculous but went along with it) people tended not to take him seriously and to treat him like a hunk of beef. The vibe in the room was warm: I got the impression that in attendance were not only old friends but possibly family members too. What he was recalling, as if it had happened only a few minutes earlier, were the band’s early days in and around Cambridge: their relationship with a local college radio station; the Lemonheads’ sold out first show; not being very good, but versatile and well-liked enough as would-be punk rockers before the band—or well, Dando and a rotating cast—transitioned into something pop rockier, more country, more melodic. (One description that Dando says in his memoir he could do without is ‘bubblegum grunge.’)

When he alluded to the Lemonheads’ first major label album Lovey, which didn’t sell well at the time of its release (and never on par with the band’s two hits, It’s a Shame About Ray and Come On Feel the Lemonheads) an audience member called out with tremulous earnestness that it was the band’s very best. Dando acknowledged the remark with a nod; at the least no one could deny that for that audience member this was the indisputable truth.

On making his entrance Dando had appeared in a sport coat over a rumpled button-down with his weathered acoustic guitar in tow, skate shop sticker slapped on the front, and it was at the juncture in the interview when Brennan sought to discuss the Lemonheads’ transition from indie outfit to major label band—Atlantic signed them on the early side of the Nirvana-sparked grunge wave—that Dando abruptly stood from his chair and started to play songs in front of the rare books from a hundred years ago or more lining the wall behind him.

His tall frame shambled one way, then back the other, head tilted downward as he sang, in strange dialogue with the title of his memoir, “Life is short and unforgiving/ I only fear the living.”

The songs after that tended towards the more upbeat. He took at least one request. He playfully chastised a mother whom he seemed to know in the first row after she interrupted his performance with commentary of some kind: “Who is playing a song for who?” The audience laughed.

People wanted to engage. They were not cowed. His mere presence felt meaningful, the love in the room reflecting back at him. Nobody seemed to want his help in redefining the universe or discovering a new framework of understanding, a new language. There was nothing ponderous about him save the prospect of his age, which has definitely started to show. His lifelong defiance of the expectations placed on him by others has taken the form of, well, yeah—forgive the pun—a sort of grizzled evanescence. Even on the occasion of the publication of his memoir about his remaining among the living despite unfavorable odds placed on him by heavy drug use and a life more scattered to the wind than really anybody can imagine, one that he might be hard-pressed to remember in exacting detail himself. Living’s meant to be felt, after all, and not bottled up in Bell jars for safekeeping. The still expanding catalog of Lemonheads songs all carry that feeling, even when the feeling is broken, or bottoming out, or deadpan villainous. ‘Evan,’ his legion of better angels might want to sing back at him, ‘Stop playing that dark role! Remember yourself.’

Living out the role of walking contradiction for so long tends to take a toll, apparently.

During the audience Q&A, with reference to Brennan and the others who have gone on to distinguished careers in music, film, academia, advertising, law, and letters, somebody asked, “How do you account for how many former Lemonheads have gone on to do amazing things after leaving the band?”

Dando didn’t really hesitate, even as he smiled. I didn’t write down his answer, and don’t have video—maybe someday, the Strand will release it from the vault—but my paraphrase goes something like, ‘Well, we were in and around Cambridge, and so the answer is easy: it’s social class and schooling and motivated people.’

The first time I heard the Lemonheads was as a thirteen year old spending the night at a friend’s house. Maybe in a sleeping bag on the floor? Or in a twin bed side-by-side? Dark room, approaching midnight, with ambient light from the lamps outside on a quiet suburban street. We were talking, my friend and I, as I tended to do whenever I spent the night anywhere. Voices in darkness. An older, cooler cousin of his had turned him on to new music. There was something just so immediately relatable about the voice in the songs on the cassette he played. I’d grown up in a bubble of oldies, the music favored by my parents, which I felt viscerally to be all that was worthwhile, but right away, the sound of It’s a Shame About Ray got me. Dando’s voice reached the words, “As the cars fly up King Street/ it’s enough to startle us/ It’s enough to startle us,” and a car did, in fact, go by outside, headlights throwing blue shadows in a search party across the ceiling, and although I didn’t have the language then, the feeling, I guess, was, Whoa, synchronicity.

I was fairly tightly wound as a kid—driven to excel academically, to impress teachers at the private school I attended—and there I was on what felt like the cusp of adulthood, in the pivotal year between elementary and middle/high school, and here, word from an advance scout in the adult world had come back to me with the apparent news that it was acceptable to be a big kid out there beyond the horizon? He sang about drugs more than I would have liked, but the songs sounded so alternately exuberant and chill that the effect couldn’t not be infectious.

The release a few years later of Come On Feel the Lemonheads corresponded with my first stereo, which was placed in a small, almost perfectly dimensioned wooden cupboard with the door removed next to my bed. The album felt more erratic to me, less tonally consistent, kind of jagged, and some of the songs straight up confused me then, even while others, like “Into Your Arms,” “It’s About Time,” and “Being Around” felt like dispatches from the continuing adventures of Big Lost Kid Dando. As locked up inside myself as I was starting to feel as an adolescent, Dando’s yearning presence in the songs struck me with awe: all of what I was learning to hide away, he was outright leading with. It felt, I guess I already knew, dangerous somehow, to be a guy who sounded as emotionally available as he did. Even if, sure, it may not have been clear whom exactly the singer loved—given that so many of the songs are about relationships dropped on the turn of a dime. In a way, maybe it was always apparent that, years before Christina Aguilera released “Beautiful” (which Dando would go on to sing himself in much later cover album Varshons II), one of the primary subjects he was singing his love for was himself marveling at the freedom to make himself the primary subject of his songs: youthful ebullient narcissism given epic flight by a then-booming record industry. But maybe that’s too clinical, and doesn’t accurately capture the phenomenon of the Lemonheads at the height of their global fame? What was cool about him, what subversive: the ride Dando was on was that of everybody who saw themselves in him, or conversely, those, in a gender reversal, who experienced his persona as Squire-in-Distress in need of rescue by some brave, conscientious maiden.

Things eventually got pretty dire—for me, I mean, by senior year of high school, I’d gone from being a popular kid at the outset to almost totally alienated at the end and obsessed with popularity as some kind of inescapable but still bullshit metric. If only, you know, we could just get each other, just go outside the bounds prescribed by our suffocating cliques, and just be individuals open to the lived reality of one another; if only empathy were king, or queen rather, and we could just do away with all the pretense and tear down the walls and see each other instead of obsessing over celebrities and our desire to be like celebrities, with everything seemingly a quotation of a quotation, and nothing in our own lives worthwhile with our lingo and terminology and shorthand appropriated from the lives of others, of what we perceived as “popular” and “cool.” My final spring in St. Louis, I have this distinct memory of the girl I was crushing on entering the senior lounge at the end of a school day and lying down on the couch opposite the one I was lying down on, such that the two of us were the only two people there, on opposite sides of a fairly tight, windowed room looking out on the quad. She wasn’t someone without tragedy in her life, beautiful in part because of how she projected sweetness and good cheer despite that fact, and she’d wear this iridescent blue shirt that complemented her translucent blue eyes, and was both cheerful and sad, and it wrenched at me, I wanted so badly to speak to her but felt dislocated, so not-what-I-ought-to-be, sick and not wanting to talk about being sick, slated for surgery the summer following our graduation at which time this awkward holding period in my life would surely end. And there she was, right across from me (on her senior page, revealed not long afterward, she would share a quotation popularly attributed to Goethe, “What you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it”), and my feelings went out to her, and it hurt because as much as I was drained from what was medically awry with my body, I was also conscious of what serendipity it was that she and I would end up at the end of a day opposite one another, and how fitting, a fateful moment of connection, but ironic, too, because I couldn’t bring myself to speak the first word to her. But maybe not speaking was exactly the correct thing. Maybe we were just two people marooned in our respective sadnesses and better to let that be. And yet as much as I might have appeared completely contained by a lack of outward speech, I at the same time felt myself to be completely with her. Like an impacted tooth, my personality felt buried beneath a surface whose threshold I couldn’t manage to cross. Rather than therapy, I gave my attentions at home to the Lemonheads’ Car Button Cloth: “If I could talk, I’d tell you/ When I can smile, I’ll let you know/ You are far and away/ my most imaginary friend”; “There’s a disease going around the hos-pit-al/ Green, green leaves/ Falling from the trees”; “What a comfort to find out you’re losing your mind/ When you re-realize it’s not the first time”; “This is the place/ where I save face/ This is the spot/ where I jump off/ I’m over the pain/ and I’m past the bleeding/ It’s not the tracks/ It’s where they’re leading.” I wasn’t in the habit then of memorizing poetry—who would I have recited it for?—but without trying I committed those lyrics to heart so deeply that I have them at the ready today, almost thirty years later. Dando’s words arrived as a way out from the dead end of my alienation, while at the same time, it felt readily apparent that Dando himself had hit some pretty dire straits.

So much so that a year later, in college, I made a deliberate choice to stop listening to Car Button Cloth for all the mirroring in darkness it had once offered. The circling emotions I’d felt toward the tail end of high school became bottled up with that album, archived in some recess of my mind. Many of those lyrics read as so discursive, with meaning so willfully cryptic after the lambency of It’s a Shame…, that just about any listener would have to wonder whether Dando’d ever find a way to surface again. (At the same time, the album is interlaced with a song as warmly humorous as “The Outdoor Type”—albeit one that Dando performs brilliantly but did not write himself—and as bleakly deranged as “Knoxville Girl” and “6lk” aka one fan’s response to David Fincher’s harrowing Se7en.) Still, though, It’s a Shame… never left the rotation, and soon enough I was reclining on a futon with a redhead from Nebraska smoking a joint and talking about our mutual love for the Lemonheads. The drug buddy I’d projected into the future on long-ago sleepovers had become real, sitting and laughing alongside me. If I’d ever felt “too much with myself,” maybe it really was possible to “be someone else”? I took my first fiction workshop sophomore year of college. ‘Writer’ had been my notional identity since senior year of high school.

Two decades later I was standing on the porch of Merrill House during the summertime Colgate Writers Conference when my attention turned to the wild-eyed author who had appeared before us as a guest reader earlier that night. He was speaking with another author who also led a double life as a musician about having been a part of some band, and I thought someone had just said that the band was the Lemonheads? A young woman interlocutor who’d never heard of them and was only repeating the name because she thought it sounded funny. I couldn’t believe it. My surprise and genuine awe must have shown. This was David Ryan, the Lemonheads drummer for albums Lovey, It’s a Shame…, and Come On Feel.... We had a beer that night with the rest of the motley crew at a bar in Hamilton and rattled back and forth about Denis Johnson and near-death experiences and I really had to try hard not to ask, And what about…? And what about…? with respect to everything I hungered to know from my side of Lemonheads fandom, an obsession long buried. I was old enough then to think I knew it was a good thing not to look too impressed by anybody. Dando, meanwhile, had returned to performing under the banner of the Lemonheads after a hiatus that ran through 9/11 and his getting married, before releasing a new album with new performers in accompaniment. But that album hadn’t commanded much attention, and I only encountered it years after its release: a few good songs on which Dando sounds genuinely better-adjusted than he had in years prior (“Let’s just laugh”), plus the same humor so dark it almost defies calling it humor (a tongue-in-cheek crooner about murdering a cheating lover) but overall, J Mascis’ guitar parts notwithstanding, there’s a kind of flatness of affect. Dando sounded as if he’d become, through friends’ and lovers’ care, maybe a degree more cognizant of his good luck, but also as if the long-standing heroin jags had taken something from him.

Eventually, David Ryan published a story of mine (in truth, an excerpt from a novel manuscript I’ve never completed) in Post Road Magazine, which he edits to this day. I attended the Greenlight Books launch of Ryan’s pretty amazing little book of memoir/celebration of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a midcentury novel about being under the influence. Ryan relates Lowry’s magnum opus to his own experiences on tour at the peak of the Lemonheads’ global fame. I took a train up to Connecticut near the ocean for lunch where Ryan lives, and he spoke about the crazy old days, starting out working in a late-night donut shop in Cambridge, then toting around the brick of Joyce’s Ulysses on tour, the transfiguration of his post-fame life, living close to uptight neighbors, and the experience of bringing his daughter to a nearby town where she chanced to encounter both a poster announcing an upcoming author reading of his and at a record shop, another poster featuring the cover image for Come On Feel the Lemonheads across which a fractal of Ryan’s youthful face appears. Seeing those through her eyes made him really feel like somebody, he said. At that point, Ryan hadn’t spoken with Dando in years. I’d asked enough about it, with whatever degree of restraint, to pick up on some underlying tension. It gets to be interesting in thinking about influence and the kind of wake a performer leaves through all the madcap wheel-spinning, the self-destructive swoons.

“I’ll never forget hearing the songs played back to us when we were done,” says Dando of his first recordings with original bandmates Jesse Peretz and Ben Diely. A watershed for a wild, rebellious teen from an affluent family grappling with his parents’ divorce, his father’s absence.

I don’t know exactly what I imagined Dando’s upbringing was when I first heard his voice, but I’d never have guessed that he was a private school kid too: Commonwealth in Boston, where he met Peretz and Diely. I’d never have guessed either, although I suppose the truth must have always been out there, or even a matter of public knowledge, that Dando’s two original bandmates matriculated at Harvard while he went off to give Skidmore a try, before swiftly dropping out and moving back to the spacious family apartment in central Boston, then into a narrow closet space in Diely’s pad, which he lined with photographs of Charlie Manson, and every night communed with those photos before flicking out the light, or hosting a girl through whose mind god only knows what thoughts must have run. Dando possessed just enough abiding sweetness to pull that off without seeming a total creep, or maybe it was a measure of self-protection, intentionally seeking out the edgy and frightening—the monster under the bed, as it were—in order to internalize and overcome it. Or perhaps he wanted on some level to get at the heart of a cultic mindset on which a band’s success depends? But what it never could have been was so conscious-minded as the attempt to make sense of behaviors after the fact. As the dropout in the group, he had as a sure prospect only the hope for the band’s success, or at least it’s becoming something real enough to sustain him. I’d never have guessed any of that, but I suppose the signs were always peeking through, had I dug in deep on the Lemonheads’ early records, which sound like two or maybe three different bands trying to be one.

In Rumors of My Demise, Dando details his obsession with Manson, how that influenced his lyrical stylings, which you can hear as recently as the first track (“58 Second Song”) on newly released Love Chant: “Never forever is a long time to live without / Never I don’t suppose / I wouldn’t think it anyway/ …Nobody knows the truth from the truth.” The evasive wordplay, the negations on negations that convey a twisty sense of meaning, one a listener could feel is somehow always a little bit out of reach.

The band’s earliest lyrics tended more towards directness, as in Diely-authored “Buried Alive”: “Said the wrong word at the wrong time/ Buried alive!” They made allusions to Emily Dickinson and screamed out their fears of social opprobrium. Harvard punk rockers—it’s an inherently funny concept on its face, and maybe good reason for the band not to have advertised that. But then again they weren’t just Harvard punk rockers, because they had Dando, and the story of the Lemonheads taking shape, or never really taking shape but continuing to evolve in candor and self-contradiction, is one of the inherent tensions there, of Famous Rock Star Dando born from the fluctuating inner dynamics between three friends who, at first, strove to be entirely egalitarian in their punk confrontations from the stage. They went so far as to trade off instruments between songs. Depending on whose number it was, that individual would take up the frontman position while someone else went to the bass and drums.

Jesse Peretz came from a family so monied as to have a Rembrandt painting occasionally passing through their apartment, “which,” reports Dando, leaning hard again on candor, “is so over the top that Jesse asked me not to write about it in this book.” For his part, “Jesse thought going punk in 1985 was the lamest thing you could possibly do, so he was all for it.” “Going punk”: that’s the vantage from a jumping off point of privilege where someone “goes” something rather than inherently being that thing—of entertaining possibilities, awash in pleasure and alternate, contradictory selves, and electing to become something rather than having that something forced by difficult circumstances. Dando ran with it, like a goofy, elastic cartoon, but the broken endings did start to accrue, the tendency to avoid rather than confront, and get on top of, what was troubling from ‘inside the house’ of his mind.

Insofar as it might read as funny—or for those of a certain vantage-point scorn-worthy—that Harvard guys from wealthy families wanted to be punk-rockers, it helps to remember that this was around the same time when rockers of middle-class origin Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Keith Richards, and in the longer run, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen were all on their way to becoming ultra-wealthy. The challenges to Dando that he wasn’t from the right background to become a rock star had started coming directly from his older sister practically as soon as he began as a kid to sing along to the radio: “Evan, I’ll tell you one thing for sure: you’ll never write a song and you’ll never be in a band… because you’re not the kind of person who can do those things.” As long as we don’t live in a society where only the well-to-do can become remunerated artists, it’s a liberating thing that he did.

Before the Lemonheads were the Lemonheads, they were “the Whelps,” and then, because Dando and Peretz hated that name, they started to shop around for a new one while Diehl, whom Dando credits as the driving force behind their group in the earliest days, was away on vacation. Among those possibilities discarded as unsuitable along the way: Yipes Stripes!, Ill Willy and the Tendershoots, and The Piggy Popcorn Queers (another sorta Manson echo). Who knows if these were ever truly in play, or if Dando was just having fun with Ruland, but the goofy names are still a laugh. Finally, though, they landed on the one, and “when Ben came back from Brazil, he was so pissed off that we’d tossed the name the Whelps and adopted Lemonheads without any input from him [that] he threatened to quit… Ben’s family supposedly had something to do with the Tootsie Roll empire, which maybe explains why he didn’t like our candy-themed name.” “Sour on the outside, sweet on the inside” is a line that Dando has used in interviews over the years. Another possible meaning emerges over the course of the memoir: a fear that something was inherently wrong with his brain, the “lemon,” in the used car sense, on a lot of pedigreed futures.

Dando had to renunciate his place in the band before he effectively became the band, or “the collective,” as he half-jokingly calls it, in which he remains the sole constant. After a few albums, tensions between him and Diehl had reached the point where Dando left for the Blake Babies, Juliana Hatfield’s early art band, which he refers to in Rumors… as akin to graduate school. But then the Lemonheads’ previously recorded cover of Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” became a hit, and the guys coaxed Dando back, only for Diehl, whom Dando says resented the idea of signing with a major label, to leave the band to pursue studies in Irish literature (specifically, a conference on William Butler Yeats). Or rather, the band had the opportunity of a European tour that summer, and it conflicted with the Yeats, and so, as Dando writes, “[Ben] followed his heart.”

With a rotating cast of band-mates over the years the Lemonheads are something like a real-life version of the Spinal Tap joke about a trio whose drummer keeps disappearing (calamitously dying, in the mockumentary, which fortunately no drummer of the Lemonheads ever has). But at the height of their touring days, as portrayed by Ryan, things were pretty far off-the-wall. Dando’s memoir, which provides a lot in the direction of comprehensibility for someone whose life has largely been about defying expectation—when interviewed by the New York Times about the published book, Dando told the reporter that so far he’d only read, and offered edits on, the first four chapters—brings the reader along for memories of how Dando feels world catastrophe seems to shadow him (the LA riots, 9/11); of Winona Ryder having turned young Johnny Depp onto It’s a Shame About Ray before Depp approached Dando cold at a Hollywood diner and introduced himself such that the two became close enough to hold endless conversations paired horizontally across Depp’s bed after Depp’s relationship with Ryder had ended; of finding refuge and creative ferment in Australia before eventually getting so lost there that he was tripping out of his mind and crawling on a sidewalk, crying and placing coins between the cracks, until managing to get his sister in New York City on the phone so that she could talk her brother who-was-never-going-to-be-a-rock-star back from the other side of the planet; of rehab; of missing a show-time in Glastonbury because he was holed up in a faraway hotel bed with two famous closeted lesbians and a bag of heroin; of more rehab; of playing the part of amicable rock star at the bar, on so, so many nights in New York City, picking up the tab for friends, old and new and never-seen-again, and eventually nesting in a Soho all-hours scene revolving around smoking crack with up-and-coming models; of dealings with reporters toward whom he was initially honest to a fault, then more inclined to tell tall tales; of a lasting friendship with Marlon Richards, the guitarist Keith’s son, and entering onto the Connecticut orbit of the Rolling Stones legend; of having his first wife walk out on him; of taking refuge in Martha’s Vineyard where his father had long maintained a house that was a summer refuge and locus of pleasurable abandon in his youth until Martha’s Vineyard, too, got colored perhaps too much by the damage of addiction (heroin, lost teeth); and eventually, in culmination, marriage to Antônia Teixeira, the daughter of a famous Brazilian singer-songwriter and the center of the circle of love from which he is telling his story.

In the deepest throes of addiction, the jadedness engendered there, Dando must have doubted whether a full memoir could ever take root. Or maybe that’s a little too neat of me to imagine: a skilled ghostwriter can work miracles, no doubt. Maybe as a student of American letters, I’m a little too inclined to find some happy resonance with Willa Cather’s My Antonia (definitely a sad and not a happy novel about lost youthful possibility and seeing beyond the foreordained borders of our lives) whereby Dando, who, for whatever his many colorful faults might be, has never hesitated to champion women, or to point out double-standards in how the media treated female contemporaries, or to put his own identity on the line as a kind of shield against antigay prejudice, would, in the end—if it’s an ending (just writing that because I can almost feel the rebel impulse to overturn it all)—find solace with a woman named Antônia, while it is Dando who lives as the shadow of the pretty boy he once was, and, like Antonia at the end of Cather’s novel (spoiler alert), is missing a few teeth out of the passage of time.

I wonder about influence. Wonder about wakes. How the beacon of someone’s presence in the arts affects the generation that follows, and on what level, and how widely, and how deeply. Does influence happen mainly through breadth and duration of popularity? Through longevity regardless of how popular? Through the brilliance of specific works that cut across time as if not a single day has ever passed?

David Ryan’s brand new story collection Alligator begins with the title story, a metafictional reflection on the precarity of our lives, the foundations we build that, in dreams, may crack asunder, and the relationships we hold that, given a few different turns, might have been lost. Ryan writes short fiction with the drive of an avid practitioner; no piece feels final; it’s about the succession, the reverberations, the furious ongoing experiment—like the globe-hopping drummer he once was, doing his thing before all those watching eyes and ears and bodies, varying up the tempo to stay fresh, a performed fervor as underlying proof of life. A heartbeat. In “Alligator,” the story, the central symbol of an alligator takes on layers, slowly altering in valence from cute ’n’ cuddly on a child’s t-shirt to something more ominous and with an appetite all its own. The effect is as of a dreamer attempting to wake up from a disorienting nightmare in which the warmth and steady comfort might have been the dream, and the nightmare, reality:

This is the story of the alligator. About when I woke thinking the boy was awake and crying in the next room… and that this boy, my son, no longer trusted me—but there isn’t a little boy, there aren’t any kids, there isn’t a next room or a co-sleeper or crib or bed. There isn’t the blanket-tangled body of my wife in the bed beside me when I reached out and grazed her missing arm, her nightshirt not gathered up, her warm skin nothing but the cold flat sheet, my faith like a hallucination dispelled, replaced with the snap, like a shape, of terror in the stone indifference of the bed. I had been waking in the middle of the night with this kind of terror. Of your absence from my life…

In Rumors… Dando makes a remark to the effect that [my paraphrase] ‘modern rock stars have basked in the warm attentions of the immediate college and post-college circuit,’ the institutional cauldron where kids go to explore their identities and embark on sexual relationships of whatever variety en route to an adult understanding of the world and their tenuous place in it. In a way, the role of famous rock star has always been the perpetuation of that state of being beyond a standard allotment in a kind of never-ending adolescence. When rock ’n roll broke out in the 1950s and early ’60s across a widely repressed America, no allotment was standard: kids met, dated, got married, because it was expected of them, not because it was what they felt they wanted at heart. Whereas for Ryan, in his fiction, the horror would be the loss of those intimates who anchor us in ourselves, for Dando for so, so long, his work has been largely about the escape from those intimates who constrict us, the feedback loops that bring us down, and against whom we rebel to become who we feel we need to be. And yet at the far end of that tendency is the fear, perhaps, that no home will ever really be home again, that nobody can ever know us as once we were known, and what we are fit for is dissolution and an early grave.

Dando has always had an inclination toward a diverse array of cover songs, of acting out identities borrowed from others, which might also read as an expression of the privilege of his origins. “Amazing Grace,” “Luka,” “Frank Mills,” “Mrs. Robinson,” “Into Your Arms,” “The Outdoor Type,” “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness,” the full albums Varshons and Varshons II, to name only a few from that continuing proliferation. Nowadays, Lemonheads performances tend to close with Dando alone before the audience with his guitar, just as he was in the Rare Books Room at the Strand, and cycling through cover songs on a free-associative, seemingly spur-of-the-moment frequency, embodying his hard-earned freedom from the “sparkling lie”: his voice may be, now and again, pretty damn frayed, but the tone bends toward sweetness and off-the-cuff candor, no matter that the song he sings might well be a dark one. Behind that darkness there remains Dando peeking out, as if to say, ‘Hey, I’m just playing!’ There is, too, an inherent generosity to that instinct, of giving voice (and alternahunk?) to the work of others, like an actor proving his chops by reciting Shakespeare.

“It’s about time”: At long last, after decades performing as more or less a monument to the teenage heart that set out in pursuit of punk rock (how many tribute tours for It’s a Shame… and Come On Feel… can a guy be expected to do until it gets to be like fully realized ouroboros, a performer in a permanent cover act of his own younger self?), Dando has surfaced again.

Insofar as a forthright memoir is a demystification, an accounting for the origin of every song which has provided emotional scaffolding for fans over several decades—we learn, for example, that King Street from “Drug Buddy” was in Australia, and that Dando, no matter how chill he sounds in the song, was strung out on meth in writing the lyrics, but detoxed when he recorded it and with the great and good artistic sense to recognize that maybe it would be cool to dial the clamor of the sound down, do the opposite of the thing that was cresting a wave of popularity then—a new album is an opportunity to invite new associations, even if, for “no longer famous” Dando, that’s from a diminished number of fans. Hell, maybe that even makes it cooler. The punkier-sounding Love Chant carries echoes of all that came before while being very much its own thing, a culmination of the long, lost years. Song “Roky,” a tribute to troubled rocker Roky Erikson, begins with a deep, ever so mildly countrified, electric guitar lick, “I don’t know any more than I did/ All those years before/ Can it get any worse than it was/ When the fever first took hold/ And it led me on to the world/ Where I don’t belong?/ But right now/ Well, I almost think I do.”

And he goes out there on stage at stop after stop, and sings it, in voice or out of voice, on tempo or a little bit off, soaking up the love or ready to split on a dime, with seeming recognition that the stage, no matter how inclined toward it any performer might feel, is somewhere nobody can ever exactly belong. Except, perhaps, in moments. From Love Chant’s “Togetherness Is All I’m After” (a song first composed by Blake Baby and sometime Lemonhead John Strohm): “The strategy of life/ Is that it’s gone before you know it/ And when you laid it on that line/ Baby don’t blow it.”

The Evan Dando of Love Chant isn’t any longer the globe-hopping rock star—even if he is, still, a globe-hopping rock star—but one among the number of “avid hobbyists” whose hobby is music, and whose plea is that he be transported from bad associations and whirlpools of negative feeling: “I needed a new world to be in/ That was you/ This world is you.”

And like some kind of living dialectic of a pun, he sings in “The Key of Victory”: “Livin’ anarchy, I’m livin’ in the key/ I’m livin’ in the key of victory.”

At the Strand, in approaching the table where Dando was signing books, I knew from Ryan that they had reconnected at some point over a video call during more recent years, maybe even around the time that Dando was recounting memories to Ruland. Dando had walked Ryan through the forest-fringed open air home where he lives in Brazil with Antônia, and Ryan, in turn, shared about the family life he has made for himself. And it was good. Both the call they shared after a long time not speaking—and the feelings for their respective lives. “Individuation” is what Ryan, once awash in mass spectacle himself, and now working on a more personal scale, calls it. (Books, really, no matter the prominence of the author, always function on a more personal scale.)

And so it came to be that I was waiting on line for the signing table behind which Dando hovered. Everyone there, of course, wanted a signature, or our modern equivalent, the dual selfie, or both, some token of intersection: See, here (“mark my path”) is where I stood before an idol.

Dando, in the conversation with Brennan, had referred to the memoir in typically self-deprecating fashion as like an album with a cool cover and a few good songs that doesn’t quite live up to the billing.

On the cover there he is, in black-and-white gravitas, no more the empty vessel, the passed-around beefcake, but fully bearded and meeting the gaze of his onlooker.

The final lines on the final page, a signature a la Joyce at the conclusion of Ulysses:

—Evan Griffith Dando
São Paulo, Brazil
May 2025

But lighter in spirit.

And funnier.

Although impossibly serious, too, because of what that sign-off portends: the day beyond which Evan Griffith Dando will exist only as a memory.

These private high schools, they encourage you at a young age to take the project of yourself seriously, to look around you and see the select peer group you are in, and to plot out a future worthy of your belonging. They make you feel watched over, as if a cloud of concerned and conscientious adults are looking over your development and hoping for the best. These institutions are, for all their flaws, vessels of pure potential for channeling pure potential.

Dando lived—lives—with his emotions out in front, which is, for our particular moment of hyper-repressed rage-filled young men getting their rocks off by lashing out at those with different colored skin, or at the women who won’t submit to them, all in pursuit of some deluded claim to white heredity, no small thing.

Concurrently, so often unspoken and unnamed except for political exploitation of that genuine hurt and rage, there’s the opioid crisis that has swept through America, hitting rural areas hardest. West Virginia, for example, where my father grew up. Vermont, for example, where I’ve had the good fortune to spend plenty of time over the years. The hopelessness addiction engenders. The sense of self circling a drain. The great glotted profits for a few tech oligarchs and a few drug lords, the harrowing chasms into which it’s possible to fall and fall and fall.

It cannot be crazy at this juncture in history to wish for a more egalitarian country, post-the long tail of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, but then it’s another thing entirely to leave behind abstracted political projects and theorizing to live directly as a focal point for the people. George Orwell, née Eric Blair, was the British equivalent of a private school kid, too, who wandered far off the rails in pursuit of some idiosyncratic critique of the class system that turned into, well, the stuff of legend.

The Orwellian-ness of Evan Dando is a sentence fragment I am fairly confident nobody has ever spoken before. After all there’s no great critique of class structure in the Lemonheads’ music, is there? Or, is there? More at the topsy-turviness of gender roles, more at the buoyancy of spirit, and challenges of staying above the surface, more at the empowerment of narrating your own story as opposed to having that story narrated for you, right? He’s been the young prince; he’s been the wayward bum: he’s lived the social mobility, up or down, that used to be the hallmark of the story the USA wanted to tell about itself. Dando isn’t serious—he can’t be! look! the drugs and broken rock star debris in his wake—yet is, too, as a Shakespearean jester, the player of songs.

I got closer and closer to the table, the line snaking forward, and couldn’t help but think of the weight of it all, our collective tide of expectation, on Dando, the demand that he iterate a signature over and over again.

Laugh to think of the Lemonheads putting out a final album from Dando in a retirement home, and somebody like myself plopping over on a walker to put earpods in and listen: eyes rheumy, hair thin to non-existent, sunspots on the skin like a stick figure Icarus painted on the wall of a cave. Hearing aid from having listened for too long, too loudly, to too many Lemonheads albums, turned all the way up.

It’s a joke—Dando, for one, I suspect, would put himself far out to sea before a day like that could ever come to pass—but says something about how the mass culture of youth all but inevitably diverges into individual stories. Nobody can keep being the persona that everyone else wants to see themselves in for very long without withdrawing from the public stage and allowing that created persona to take on a life of its own.

“Why can’t you look after yourself/ and not down on me?”: The band scene at my small Vermont college was mine my senior year, or at least the scene I shambled after: I drank more and smoked more bud than I had during any year prior, and periodically, in my adult life, as free, as shambolic, as it may feel sometimes, I’ve touched down again in that mode of being. For about fifteen years, my health has been mainly there, but it’s always a performance, the old wounds never quite healed. As for opiates, I’ve awakened in a surgical bed enough times [do not recommend] to know how intoxicating that can feel—freed at last from a body, the mind lifted up, like a balloon above it all—and the aftermath of skittering paranoia as pain returns en force, to recognize what withdrawal is too.

I’ve never approached Dando’s degree of addiction, not in the blaze through which he’s chased it. Then again, I get to experience the Lemonheads music in an addictive way that Dando never will. Because he is the one inside of the songs, his experience and sensibility the leading prow.

On the desk in front of him rested a stack of his book and in a jar, an assortment of markers of all colors: green, red, black, pink, silver, orange, onward. He’d pause briefly to take in each petitioner, then grab a color, and go to work writing that person’s name, with a short message (“Thanks!”), before signing his own.

For me, it was purple.

He leaned down, grinning goofily as I was probably grinning goofily back. A few of his teeth now, beyond those immediately front and center, are made of metal—silver—as if chosen on a dare.

I spoke the name ‘David Ryan,’ said he and I were friendly, and that I’d visited him in Connecticut where he lives with his family.

Without missing a beat, Dando said to say hello, and that they’d recently caught up, and sort of wolf-howled the name of Ryan’s wife, tilting back his head for a second as if to direct the name at the moon (which we could not see from inside the Rare Books Room at the Strand). But the way in which Dando did that was as if he were channeling the way Ryan himself speaks his wife’s name: I knew Ryan just well enough to recognize Dando slipping into an impersonation of his former band-mate.

“He has a new story collection coming out soon,” I said.

Now, Dando was busying himself with the signature on the open book in front of him, one more personal variation on the mold that convention was attempting to force on him.

He looked up at me, hunched forward, and spoke intensely, even as he slid the book across to me, “He has the prestige. He’s at the pinnacle.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, smiling.

Then took my copy of the celebrity memoir named for famous words attributed to Mark Twain and walked down the stairs and out into the night. With author signings, I hold to a superstition as with fortune cookies not to reveal the message until the cookie is consumed, or I am well clear of the table. On the subway I opened the book to the title page and what he’d written was my name, “JT” and his, “Evan,” side by side, with no further elaboration. Floating there in white space between title and author name. Like a question, for all the years of yearning promise, of what he or I would ever become.

It’s no light-hearted quip, but one of those cinematic lines that seems to harken back almost to the Bible: “If history has taught us anything,” says Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, “it is that you can kill anyb…

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Darkness isn’t the enemy.
Ignorance is.
And worse than ignorance—adherence to simplicity. To myths. To cartoons.

For decades, I’ve been a myth America believed in.
A billionaire. A warrior. A man in the shadows who made the world safer by beating back the night.

But here’s the truth no o…

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The Rogue Loon is set to return in Brooklyn next Friday at Gallery 198.

Xmas edition, I guess, aka bring yr holidays if you got ’em?

I’m keen to hear all of these folks read. Keen to hear how what they read will play off one another and/or jibe together. Keen to listen for the synchronicities, the interweaving valences. As of this week, David Ryan’s new …

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So here I am. Typing a prompt into a box.

The act …

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I met Zach Williams at the Bread Loaf School of English in, well, if I named a year I would be guessing. Perhaps 2012? He struck me as a bright guy with a winning sense of humor. There was a valence, a vibe, in which I saw some kind of likeness to myself, but it wasn’t a valence I ever sought to define exactly. I didn’t know, for example, until years later when he and I were living a few blocks apart in Park Slope, that Zach had ambitions to write fiction of his own. At the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont, where most of the graduate students are employed as teachers, I was something of an oddball: a writer and freelance editor and tutor and substitute teacher who placed a premium on the freedom to make my own schedule (following on years of assorted office, or office-adjacent, jobs, in law, book publishing, Hollywood, elsewhere). Insofar as the School of English is essentially “summer camp for book nerds” (I’m not the first to use that phrase), I belonged there, or at least found plenty of pleasure in being there. I didn’t attend to network, nor did I arrive toting the banner of one academic institution or another, as so many of the full-time teachers there did; I just wanted to enjoy a summer reading in the company of other readers. Following on years floundering through New York City writing circles, some published stories, and work for a lit mag, I was after a sense of where the rubber met the road with respect to contemporary literary endeavor (or whatever we want to call it) and what teachers were teaching in their classrooms.

Where I ended up after receiving my degree was the Browning School just off the southeastern corner of Central Park, and I worked as their in-house substitute teacher during the ’15-’16 school year, which, more importantly insofar as this piece is concerned, happened to be Zach’s first leading an English classroom at the same school. We shared several lunches that year—of that much I am certain. The boys there took to calling me “Odysseus,” because of the bushy beard and long hair I was sporting at the time. Within a year, in Odyssean fashion, I’d moved on to the next thing, but Zach remained at Browning for several more, and I’d periodically run into him on 7^th Avenue in Park Slope in the early evening. I was usually on my way out, it seemed, as he was on his way home. He attended at least one of my summer afternoon birthday gatherings at the Park Slope Ale House. Then, as happens in Virginia Woolf’s fiction but apparently everywhere else too, time passed, and the last I’d heard was that he’d applied to NYU’s MFA program in fiction; later, I got the sense, without ever inquiring directly, that he and his family had moved away.

Then… “Wood Sorrel House” in the pages of the New Yorker. I was surprised and felt compelled to look up an author photo to confirm it was, in fact, my old cafeteria mate; his own beard disappeared, and his hair grown long, but yes, definitely him. Zach had successfully completed what I suppose I’d call—based on my own experience as a young writer arriving to the city and immediately sending my fiction to both the New Yorker and the Paris Review—the extremely rare Idiot Exacta: hitting up, as an unpublished writer, the two most highly regarded venues for fiction in New York City, a rite of passage that I suppose many young writers must make. Except…? Zach actually accomplished it, publishing his first two stories in those two venerable mags in rapid succession. Which maybe takes it out of the realm of idiocy and into that of, what should we call it?, authorial wherewithal? (I imagine that I can hear him shaking his head and laughing ruefully as I write these words, but then again, that might just be my own particular brand of astral projection.)

In any event, this past July, Zach Williams—passing through town on an East Coast return trip—accepted my invitation to read at the Rogue Loon reading series, which instantiation thereof I hosted on friends’ Upper West Side roof-deck overlooking Central Park. After that event ended, a small group of us, including our host, myself, Zach, and Zach’s friend Anthony made our way to a part of Central Park that was new to me, where we watched fireflies do a little sparkling dance before a modest waterfall under cover of darkness. Then, the next afternoon, as previously agreed upon, Zach and I met in front of Park Slope’s Cafe Regular to start our walking interview.

I could say more about Beautiful Days and my experience of reading it—and hey, I recommend the book, genuinely—but much of my response emerges over the two-part conversation that follows. (Unmentioned over the course of our two-plus-hour walk is the story “Golf Cart,” which strikes me both as quintessentially Zach and an underrated gem secreted away within the collection, probably my favorite of the batch.)


Zach Williams: Anthony, who we were hanging out with last night, that was his place, right there. I don’t know if you saw me walking from [that direction].

JT Price: Right, I was wondering.

ZW: 140 Berkeley Place. He was there for a few years starting in 2008. We spent a lot of time there. I was working at this little boarding school for severely dyslexic kids up north, in Dutchess County. I would take Metro North down on the weekends, and take the Q train here to 140 Berkeley Place. And everybody that had landed in New York City from college would be there. I have such wonderful, fond memories of that place.

JTP: That was your first Park Slope meet-up point?

ZW: Yeah, yeah, yeah… And whenever I come back, I hang out [with Anthony, in his new place in Gowanus], and it always feels crazy to me how different that ‘Upper 5^th Avenue’ stretch has become… They’ve got the nuts store? The nuts and candy store? It’s got a Midtown kind of feel, you know what I mean? But it’s just so pretty here. It’s nice to come back here and walk around. Maybe we’ll live here again someday.

JTP: You guys… moved here when you came back to teach in Midtown. And you were here pretty much the whole time?

ZW: Yeah, when I was teaching on 62^nd St., we lived here on 6^th Avenue—we lived there for seven years.

JTP: And is that the longest you’ve lived in any one place in your adult life?

ZW: Yeah… yeah. You know the funny thing is this is our fourth year in California, our fifth year coming up. I don’t think we understood that we were going to be there for that long.

JTP: It felt temporary when you moved out there.

ZW: Yeah, and this, here [in Park Slope], did not have that [temporary] feel because we had a lot of friends who lived around here… I was always coming here to hang out with friends, then leaving and going elsewhere. So I really wanted to move here for a long time. Not to diverge, or go off-the-record, but have you been back to Browning at all for any reason?

JTP: Not really. I’ve barely walked by it. And I was going to bring up Browning. I’ve just walked a little bit around the area, that’s about it. Going to the Paris Theater or something like that. Walking along the park there.

ZW: I went to the Paris Theater one time. Working at Browning, over the course of that time, I developed really severe—or I don’t know, what felt like severe for me—insomnia. I hardly ever slept well. Mostly what that meant is I would wake up at 3 or 4, and then, because it takes me so long to fall back asleep, I just knew it wouldn’t happen before 6, when I had to get up. And so the nights when I woke up even earlier, like one-thirty or two, you know. That was like, Aw, fuck. And there were a couple of times, not many, when I didn’t sleep at all.

JTP: All night.

ZW: Awake in bed all night. The only time that’s ever happened to me-

JTP: I’ve experienced that too.

ZW: [nodding] That only time that’s ever happened to me was when I was working there.

JTP: That’s interesting. Because you were teaching for years before that, so you were accustomed to the early wake-up… but something about-

ZW: I don’t know what it was. Maybe it had something to do with getting older.

JTP: And you were a father at that point?

ZW: Good question.

JTP: Because having kids will disrupt sleep cycles, right?

ZW: No, this started before my son was born. After he was born, we slept in the same room with him for three years. So, everything was different after that. But this was before. So one time I left school—I had my planning periods in the middle of the day [at Browning]—and I saw like a matinee movie at the Paris Theater so that I could sleep in the theater before teaching my afternoon classes.

JTP: No memory of what the movie was?

ZW: It was a foreign film about World War I. I slept through the whole thing. But I was aware of it. I think maybe that was the same year I was teaching On the Road. And there’s a passage in that book where he writes about spending the night in a movie theater in Times Square, like a series of westerns—there’s a line about suspecting that in subtle but profound ways every decision he’d made since that night was the result of a kind of hypnotic programming he’d received by sleeping in that theater. You know, hearing the films in his dreams, waking up briefly and then falling back asleep, over and over.

JTP: You were teaching the book, you’d read that passage, and you were like, I will live this, I will do this?

ZW: I think it was after it happened that I read it.

JTP: Gotcha, so when you had the insomnia nights, did you use that time at all?

ZW: No, I never could. Eventually I felt like I needed to try, so I’d get up and read on the couch. But I don’t know. My natural internal rhythms move glacially, I do things slowly. And it takes me a long time to, for example, fall asleep. Or shift any pattern or trajectory like that. So I just didn’t have a sense—it just is not how I’m aware of my body or brain working, that I’m going to go and read a book on the couch and get drowsy and fall asleep. [Instead] I’d just wake myself up more so. So, no…

JTP: I definitely experienced, when substitute teaching—you don’t even know if you’re going in one morning, maybe you get the call, maybe at 5, 5:30 [am], you get habituated to it for three or four days. And then [the job ends]… I’m naturally a night owl. I would find making those dramatic shifts was… I’d often be at Browning, and not have slept, or have barely slept. And I relate it—since I’m talking to you—to reading [short story] “Trial Run,” that sense of We’re here in a workplace, and we’re official people, but we’re all quietly sort of insane.

ZW: Yeah [laughter].

JTP: And this very thin veneer of politeness, or whatever. You capture that very well.

ZW: I wrote that while I was working there, you know.

JTP: The manners behind the manners, like, What is happening?

ZW: I always felt like I had a propensity for getting trapped in weird conversations. I wanted to write about that. “Trial Run” was the first story I started working on in the collection. Although there were other things that I was working on at the time that were more haphazard, and which I never finished. One of them we talked about at Browning one day: I was writing this longish short story—was kind of funny, actually…

JTP: I remember you saying something about the experience of a video game, a Choose-Your-Own Adventure of some kind… When reading “Wood Sorrel House” I found myself thinking about it in those terms. Seem to recall you were going to some conference or something…

ZW: I don’t remember, I wish I could remember that. It sounds interesting. [laughter]

JTP: Well, yeah, as I said, I was often very sleepless.

ZW: The one I was thinking about… I found this book on a stoop here called Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. I didn’t really read it. I read part of it.

JTP: You put it to your head to see if anything osmotically moved across the blood-brain barrier?

ZW: Yeah, there was kind of a vibe to it, it was a big fat thing from the ’70s with a yellow hardcover and it had the jacket on it.

JTP: An incredible find?

ZW: I don’t think they’re very—you can go on AbeBooks, there are tons of them.

JTP: But something you would not have sought out on your own if it hadn’t just crossed your path…?

ZW: Exactly. It was written by these American psychologists I guess, who… I don’t know how much of this actually happened. But they claimed to have been invited by the Soviet Union in the 1970s to tour various facilities where the Soviets were doing work on ESP, remote viewing, telekinesis… and the premise of the book was, This is a national security emergency. The Soviets are 50 years ahead of us on this research. And they’re learning to weaponize it. And it’s real. And the fact that we don’t even think it’s possible…

JTP: Kind of connects to The Men Who Stare At Goats [2009]?

ZW: It does! It does, in fact. My understanding is that the book was part of the impetus for the ESP and remote viewing program at Stanford Research Institute that began in the ’70s led by these guys Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. Russell Targ was—oh, this was our old place here.

JTP: Next to the Mexican place?

ZW: The next one… or no, two doors down. Russell Targ was Dan Aykroyd’s inspiration for the character of Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters [1984]. Did you know that Dan Aykroyd wrote that script—that he’s highly steeped in occult literature?

JTP: I did not, but not surprised. Do you want to snap a photo here in front of the building?

ZW: Sure, yeah.

JTP: So, Aykroyd—have you consulted him at all?

ZW: No, but that would be cool. I’d reach out to Dan Aykroyd. Seems like an interesting guy. Anyway, Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ were working on, I think, primarily, remote viewing. They placed an ad, and local people would come in and they would evaluate their abilities…

JTP: That’s the beginning of Ghostbusters, where Bill Murray’s character…

ZW: Exactly, exactly. He’s using the Zener cards, and that’s all a real thing. But this program was funded by the CIA for 20 years. Puthoff and Targ are both still alive and they claim that these effects are real, even though they don’t have hard conclusions about what they are or how to manipulate them, exactly. And they admit that it’s not easy to replicate in a laboratory setting, but that the 20 years of work they did, in aggregate, demonstrates-

JTP: What is the effect that we’re talking about?

ZW: What they refer to as Psi. So, ESP, remote viewing… psychic powers, essentially. So anyway as a result of this book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, I started writing a story set at Stanford Research Institute. But a fictional version, because I’d never been there or anything like that.

JTP: And so that story is not in the collection.

ZW: No, I abandoned it. I did workshop it at NYU.

JTP: How’d that go?

ZW: Fine. But it wasn’t a hard story for me to jettison either. I never felt bad about jettisoning a story.

JTP: Well, yeah, filtering, but are they jettisoned for good, or do you think you might take any of those back up at some point?

ZW: Not that one, no. But there are certain elements of abandoned stories that make their way into newer things. They were just, like, preparatory. You asked me about “Trial Run” and I was talking about that propensity for getting stuck in weird conversations that I didn’t really know how to get out of. And I watched this Errol Morris film, Vernon, Florida [1981]. I haven’t watched it since the one time, ten years ago. He interviews people in this town, and lets them talk for a very long time. So they’re free to ramble. And the conversations, some of them get stranger and stranger and stranger as they go. That was my idea: I want a story that’s like that, only dialogue, and where one character is just responding over and over again, Uh-huh. Yeah. Sure.

JTP: [laughter]

ZW: That was my idea for that story, and it kind of went from there.

JTP: Yeah, and what he says versus what he’s thinking. The radical disjunction between those two things. A psychodrama of sorts.

ZW: Yeah, exactly.

JTP: How much rewriting did you do on that? The original draft versus where it ended up? Through workshops, through…

ZW: I did a lot. A lot of rewriting. On all of them. With the exception of—the only story in the book that I didn’t rewrite or reconsider in any fundamental way-

JTP: [pointing to the bar/restaurant on the corner] That’s a favorite of Bill de Blasio’s, you probably know that.

ZW: Oh, really? I didn’t, but I used to go to the Y here, and he’d always be at the Y. He’d oftentimes be on the stationary bike right in front of me. [laughter]

JTP: Once, was having lunch and he rolled in here with his security detail while he was still mayor. Dylan had just won the Nobel Prize. So I asked him how his wife at the time, who I understood to be a Dylan fan, felt about it. And he said, you know, it was cool. I was talking to him, standing from the table, and my friend who I was having lunch with snapped a picture of me standing alongside him. I was in full Lebowski mode: knit cap, long beard, sunglasses, ridiculous. Anyway… memories.

ZW: Have you read that story that’s in the New Yorker about an upstate college professor’s reaction to Dylan winning the Nobel Prize?

JTP: No [laughing]. I should track that down.

ZW: It’s so good. It came out shortly after he had won the prize. By Joseph O’Neill.

JTP: Right, Netherlands. It’s this version of Gatsby that revolves around international cricket players in Brooklyn.

ZW: The story is the only thing I’ve read by him, but I need to read more. That story is really great. The only story I never rewrote really, substantially, was “Red Light.” That was one where—you asked me about using insomnia time? I’ve had three stories— well, one of them was just the other night before I came up here; I don’t know what will happen with it, but—three stories that appeared more or less all at once during a sleepless night. I can’t sleep, and I’m lying in bed, and then something is just palpably there all of a sudden. It’s just a rush. That’s just the absolute greatest—those are the things that keep you going.

JTP: You have a vision! A gnostic experience?

ZW: Yeah [laugh], I suppose you could call it that.

JTP: Time isn’t real, and you’re going to pull back the veil?

ZW: [laughter] Yeah, something like that. The two cases in the collection were “Red Light” and the story “Neighbors,” I couldn’t sleep, I had insomnia, and then, the story was just right there. And I had to get up and write it. In both cases, I got up at five in the morning after not really sleeping and having these kind of weird, liminal visions, and banged out full drafts. I work really slowly—so this is highly, highly unusual.

JTP: One sitting?

ZW: Yes. In “Red Light” there really was very, very little that changed.

JTP: Did you workshop that story?

ZW: No, I never did.

JTP: Cuz I was curious [laughing] how a workshop would react to it. It’s delightfully deranged.

ZW: I thought about reading it yesterday. I’ve never read it. A couple of times I’ve thought about reading it, then I’m like, Um, maybe not. Where are we? (I mean, I know where we are.) But do you think we should turn up into the park?

JTP: Sure. My idea… maybe we ramble, then come back and wrap it up in front of the building where you used to live? A circle of sorts.

ZW: Yeah! In “Red Light” very little changed, but there were tonal tweaks. But still, I worked on it for—there’s nothing in the collection that I didn’t work on for years. Including “Red Light.” Over and over again I would open the document and tweak it.

JTP: When did you start writing fiction of your own? Before workshops at Bread Loaf, or…?

ZW: Yeah, and well, I never took workshops at Bread Loaf. Because I always—I wrote for pleasure as a kid. But not in some sort of…

JTP: I saw your Masters Review interview where you allude to alien abduction or alien visitation-type stories…

ZW: I did. I liked getting writing assignments in school. [A strong wind comes on] When I was older, like, in high school, we would get a few creative assignments per year, and by senior year I remember really relishing those. I wrote some things I felt proud of afterwards. I remember thinking it was fun to get the assignment, because I knew it meant that something would happen, but I didn’t yet know what it was… This opportunity to make something out of nothing.

JTP: An opportunity to surprise yourself.

ZW: Exactly. The deadline aspect of it made me certain that it would happen at some point, you know?

JTP: And I’ve heard you, if you want to embark on this half-tangent, but not really, in regard to what you just said, I’ve heard you describe the process for this musical—I don’t know whether to call it a band or a project…?

ZW: Legends of Neglect.

JTP: It sounds somewhat analogous in ways? Making the music all at once as opposed to having the production be over a long period of time.

ZW: I’ll just quickly before that—I majored in Creative Writing in college. I was at Johns Hopkins, so I took classes with Stephen Dixon.

JTP: A legend. Writer’s writer. Quintessentially so.

ZW: He was the first writer that I ever saw in person. I would sit in his workshop absolutely fascinated and enthralled by him. And I was reading his fiction—it was the first time I had the experience of connecting the person, and his personality, to the work on the page. And I loved his work. So that was hugely influential. And I wrote a lot in college. I don’t think there was much in the way of craft instruction. Not that there was none… Well, probably the problem was more me than anything else. But I never revised anything. I didn’t understand that I wasn’t revising anything. I just didn’t really know…

JTP: You’d receive an assignment, you’d fulfill the assignment, then move on.

ZW: Yeah, exactly. Then when I got out of school, I had very little success writing short stories on my own.

JTP: In the sense of not feeling inspired to do so? Or in the sense of trying and being like, This isn’t working?

ZW: Like, This is bad. And yeah.

JTP: Do you think that that was true? Or just a feeling you had [at the time]? Were you showing these to people and getting responses?

ZW: No, I think it was true. I don’t know what it was… But I wasn’t showing them to anyone, and maybe that was it. In the undergraduate writing seminars program, there was a really lovely community. Really good writers. It was the people in the year below me who were sort of more movers-and-shakers. And they started an undergraduate reading series, which there hadn’t been previously. So we had these big, well-attended, fun readings.

JTP: Did any folks emerge from that as published authors that you know of?

ZW: There’s a guy named James Zwernemann who I just saw is publishing his first novel this year. And a guy named William Camponovo who’s a great poet. Another guy wound up writing for the Wall Street Journal.

JTP: Writing that pays. No problem with that.

ZW: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Being that John Hopkins is a research institution, we had this little kind of enclave, the writers. And it was great. So maybe it was the loss of that, the sense that writing was a thing happening in the context of these particular people—and after I graduated I had a really lonely year. I moved to LA. First year after college I moved to LA just kind of on a whim. Did I ever tell you about this?

JTP: No, this is good.

ZW: This is all good stuff.

JTP: [doing a voice] Content for the mill, baby!

ZW: [laughter] I had an internship at Beacon Pictures.

JTP: I also did a year in LA. Or, well, half of one.

ZW: Did you?

JTP: For Valhalla Pictures.

ZW: Oh, man! I didn’t know that. I wonder if we talked about this like ten years ago?

JTP: No, no, I don’t think so.

ZW: I have a bad memory, so. I had this internship, I got fired from the internship: there was a guy who was the intern coordinator… Rich was his name. I wonder where he is now. He was 28 or something, which seemed old to me. And he brought on a number of interns, a number that was then judged to be too high. There were all these kids walking around the offices. The more senior people started to get pissed about it. Then one day, the interns all—there was a cocktail party at the office, in the evening. And the interns all stayed and went to the cocktail party, but weren’t really supposed to. So then they were like, You have to fire all these interns.

JTP: For going to a party uninvited, my god.

ZW: So after that I got a really good job: I worked as an assistant to the post-production coordinator on this movie called El Cantante [2006], which is Jennifer Lopez and Marc Antony. It’s a biopic of the salsa singer Hector Lavoe who was not somebody I knew about before working on the film.

JTP: I was there in 2003, so not far off. Working on Ang Lee’s Hulk [2003]. I was just a gofer, running around. It was a huge bomb. He brought this majestic, contemplative approach to comic book material. And they also used a screen technique where they made comic book panels on the screen. Which, you know, interesting idea, but in the offing it was sort of awkward.

ZW: I hate superhero movies, but I want to take my son to see Superman [2025].1 It looks fun.

JTP: Of that movie type, I think James Gunn—he did Guardians of the Galaxy [2014]—is one of the best doing it.

ZW: I did go see Guardians of the Galaxy, I went to see it here, by myself one day. I used to go to a lot of movies by myself after work or whatever. Whatever year that was—I was a different, more innocent person back then. Because now essentially I don’t want anything to do with anything that’s in the popular sphere. [laughs] I want to be as far away from it as I possibly can be.

JTP: Describe that feeling: Is that to preserve a creative integrity of your own, and not be polluted by whatever’s in the mainstream?

ZW: I don’t think it’s about my own creativity. I think it’s a sense of being surrounded and inundated to a point of poisoning by just… shit, everywhere, constantly. Everything I’m scrolling past on my phone. That’s the main culprit.

JTP: You hear references now to ‘AI slop’ or whatever. But even like Netflix content, which somebody is actually paying to make, is-

ZW: Slop is a great word. But also part of it for me is because I’m fairly weak-willed and lazy. And I don’t do a great job of guarding my own time. I have a pretty compulsive relationship with my phone, and-

JTP: These are the great David Foster Wallace themes…

ZW: Exactly, exactly. A lot of it is anger at myself out of a sense that if I don’t get a little pissed off about this then I’ll never right the ship. [Anyway] I’ll just say quickly that I worked on this Jennifer Lopez film. And it was a really good job because it was outside the studio system? And that was the only reason I got hired—a studio wouldn’t have hired me, I didn’t have any experience.

[A municipal garbage truck pulls out onto the inner circle of the park where we are walking, loud and beeping]

JTP: Let’s cross over.

ZW: [referring to the truck] That’s aggressive, man.

JTP: [joking] Look out, it’s the government. They’re on to us. Trying to shut us down!

ZW: I had the classic experience that maybe you had too of working 24/7. My boss would call my cellphone at 7 o’clock on Saturday morning with a question, then again with another question. Then, at 7:30, she’d call again and be like, Alright, get up, get your coffee, let’s rendezvous at the office at 9. And I’d be like, Ah, fuck. I did that for several months, and after that, I got hired thru a temp agency to be the fifth assistant to Jerry Bruckheimer.

JTP: [laughter]

ZW: And I worked in Jerry Bruckheimer’s office for several months. I got fired from there eventually. It was a temp-to-hire position. Apparently, I stuck around longer than most.

JTP: Oh, so they were really churning through people?

ZW: They were churning through people, but I did—I want to avoid sounding self-congratulatory or something—but I got fired for reading at my desk. Because Bruckheimer would go—they were doing Pirates of the Caribbean 3 [2007] in London on that big soundstage. And my job was to run his errands for him when he was around. Like, he’s famous for his fountain pen collection. He has a massive collection. I’d always have to go to the Mont Blanc store on Rodeo Drive.

JTP: [laughter] He was always adding to it? Or special orders?

ZW: Everybody would give him pens. Everybody knew that he loved these pens. So he received them frequently as gifts. But the pen collection was worth an incredible amount of money. As I recall, he had jewel-encrusted pens. He had another that was gold that had a bust of Shakespeare at the top. There were all in a big display case in his office that I was not allowed to go into.

JTP: The office or the case? Or both?

ZW: The office. I mean, once or twice I did. But I wasn’t supposed to go in there. So when he was gone, filming, which he’d be for weeks at a time, there was nothing for me to do. And I did a bad job of making myself look busy. I would sit at my desk and read books. And somebody warned me that I shouldn’t do that. That it looked bad. But I still did it. And they fired me.

JTP: Good choice. Good choice by you.

ZW: And I wrote fiction. At the desktop computer there. When I got fired from that job I decided to apply for English teaching jobs back East. I always thought I wanted to be a teacher anyway. Then I got busy with being a teacher, and for years I didn’t do any writing. That was kind of a dark…

JTP: And you felt that? A creative frustration? A desire, like, I still want to write but I’m overloaded with… whatever. Structuring things and running the school year. And enjoying the summers. And Bread Loaf.

ZW: Exactly. I just got totally waylaid. Teaching was hard. I had to learn a lot about how to do it. It took me years to learn how to do it. And I don’t know—I was young, too.

JTP: You taught in high school for ten years?

ZW: Twelve years. The last one I was concurrently in the NYU MFA program. And our son had just been born the year before that.

JTP: I remember I would run into you on 7^th Avenue… and yeah, you were parenting, you were busy in all sorts of ways, and you’d have this sort of rueful tone, like, Well, back to the salt mines… in regard to teaching.

ZW: I started to feel… When I got into… What I said earlier, about how when I wrote in college, I didn’t even really understand that I wasn’t revising my work? It wasn’t until my 30s that I realized how hard it is to actually finish something. To bring it to a state of completion. That goofy psychic spy story that I referred to, I think that that was the first thing where it just sort of clicked, like, Oh, if I actually want to finish this, if I actually want this to be good, that’s kind of a whole different… I saw how much I needed to learn in order to be able to finish something. And that’s when I started to feel that time was a problem.

JTP: Did you teach some of that to yourself by taking on revisions? Or was that the MFA program? Or some combination of both?

ZW: Maybe it was a combination of both? But I really think it was the MFA program, though. ’Cause I know that I went into the MFA program thinking… I wasn’t sure what to do… Part of what I was going to say earlier is that I didn’t take workshop classes at Bread Loaf because I had done that all through undergrad, and so I wanted to take English classes.

JTP: Ha, same. Filling in the reading gaps.

ZW: Is that how you wound up at Bread Loaf?

JTP: Specifically I wound up there because I already had an MFA in fiction but I was tutoring and substitute teaching, and so my income dramatically dropped during the summer. And with the campus job [at Bread Loaf], and the funding, I could sublet my apartment… so I ended making a few hundred dollars during the summer instead of scrambling around being like, What am I going to do? So that was the impetus. But yeah, also, it was just purely enjoyable for me.

ZW: It was great, wasn’t it?

JTP: I loved it.

ZW: Did you have a standout class?

JTP: Michael Wood, clearly amazing.

ZW: Which one was that?

JTP: I took two classes with him: one was “Modern Poetry.” And the other was “Theory and Criticism.” And he was just incredible. As a teacher. Such a gifted conversationalist, and just very gently steering things. And also keeping it at a very high level. And there were other great courses. I mean, Jonathan Freedman…

ZW: I never took a course with him.

JTP: His health obviously suffered, eventually. Very young for that, and a tough situation. But one of my summers was taking one class with him and one with Sara Blair [his partner].

ZW: I never took her either.

JTP: And I loved the syllabus of his course. It was mainly film-based, called “Jews and Film.” And yeah, at the time, I was frustrated because as far as the teaching it felt like he was phoning it in a bit, like, This is summer camp for you guys. And I was like, Be more rigorous! Now I feel bad about that, in retrospect. I guess he had the right idea to live it up in the moment. But those were both great classes—Sara Blair’s, too, which was on new media. We read, for example, Henry James’ In the Cage, a novella revolving around the advent of that cutting-edge tech, the telegraph. How about yourself?

ZW: My first summer I took “Thinking Theory” with Michael Wood. And he had us read Benjamin and Derrida and Adorno and Freud. And I had absolutely no exposure to anything like that. And everybody in the class was very sharp. I felt extremely out of my league. I remember feeling, Maybe I can’t really do this, or maybe I’m in the wrong place or something. I had a sense of, This is a different sort of academic experience than I’ve had before. And I retained very little of any of the individual readings…

JTP: That’s often the nature of survey courses, right, where you’re just sort of flying through things? But being exposed to them [is what matters] and seeing what lights up.

ZW: There was a Benjamin essay that I always remembered. It has one of my favorite descriptions of a nightmare. He had a nightmare as a kid about walking to the top of a staircase that was haunted by this invisible presence. And he walks up and up, and at the top of the staircase, on the final steps, this presence holds him spellbound. That’s what he wrote: on these last stairs it held me spellbound. That’s what a nightmare feels like to me too. And that’s something that I’ve aped or quoted a couple of different times in different stories. That line stuck with me. I understood very little of what I was reading, but it was very energizing for me to be in the room with Michael Wood talking about those texts. And that same summer I signed up for a Shakespeare course taught by Susanne Wofford. I can’t remember what happened, but for some reason she couldn’t do it. So her husband, Jacques Lezra, taught it. And he was amazing.

JTP: An NYU prof.

ZW: I guess so, right? That course was called “Shakespeare and the Mediterranean.” It was Merchant of Venice and The Winter’s Tale and things like that, in the context of the 16^th century Mediterranean trade economy. We read Turkish pirate captivity narratives. That was a great class. And if there was one that was the one, though? I did a summer in Oxford and Jeri Johnson’s “The Modernist Novel” was… totally mind-blowing. And it was one of the scariest academic experiences that I’ve ever had. It was very demanding. There were five of us in the room. And she would cold-call people?

JTP: So rare these days, it seems.

ZW: She called on me to define “pastoral romance” or something like that. And whatever I said didn’t cut it. She’d let you know when that was the case. We read a novel a week, and in order to be prepared for the three-hour meeting you really had to have written your own paper on the book ahead of time. Early 20^th century and late 19^th. We read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, we read The Good Soldier. It was building up to, the end of the course was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and To the Lighthouse.

JTP: That was a good class too: Jenny Green-Lewis teaching Virginia Woolf.

ZW: We were in that one together. But the [Johnson] class was so demanding, I worked so hard for that class… it makes me feel guilty that I can’t be that kind of teacher? I don’t have the right personality for it.

JTP: It’s also very much against the grain of, I want to say, fashion… but just practices these days. What’s acceptable or considered acceptable.

ZW: Absolutely. And she scared the shit out of me. In the best way. She was stern and demanding. But when you did a good job she let you know.

JTP: And you feel there’s some—a term like ‘use value’ is kind of gross, but you feel like you got something from that?

ZW: Yes. I loved that class. I think it changed my life, really. Every time I’ve had an experience with a teacher like that, who won’t bullshit you…

[We turn into view of a boathouse in the northern section of Prospect Park where there appears to be a wedding in progress.]

JTP: Apparently when Scorsese adapted The Age of Innocence [1993], I think they used this boathouse in one of the scenes. The film with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder.

ZW: Yeah, I used to show that film to my students. I love that book.

JTP: Yeah, it’s great, great, love it too. And the adaptation, it’s good enough.

ZW: We used to walk with our son here all the time. After we had our son, we spent way more time in the park. Just to get out of the apartment.

JTP: Sort of the backyard to the entire borough, right?

ZW: Exactly. Before we had him, we might wake up on a Saturday and lounge around with coffee.

JTP: We’re seeing a wedding here. A middle-aged wedding? A second wedding? Just to speculate about what we’re seeing. I’m going to take a picture. [the wedding breaks into cheers. A Brooklyn writer familiar to me walks by from the opposite direction—a writer who, for one reason or another, has asked to remain nameless here.] Hey, how you doing?

BW: What’s happening?

JTP: Conducting a writer interview here with Zach Williams. Zach, [Brooklyn writer]. [Brooklyn writer], Zach Williams.

[Exchange of pleasantries.]

BW: How’s the interview going?

ZW: I think it’s going great. [to JTP] What do you think?

JTP: Ah… pretty good, pretty good. You’ll be in it now. Do you want to add anything? We were just talking about how this boathouse was used in The Age of Innocence, Scorsese’s adaptation of that important novel.

BW: [looking at the wedding ceremony and the harpist playing there] The harp is nice.

JTP: Well, it’s sort of gossip, but thought maybe it would be fun to share... [repeats a story that happened at a recent reading series where a writer went on and on and on way past the allotted time.]

BW: I was there. I’ve been to a reading or two in my life… but that was wild.

[BW and JTP discuss what happened in more detail.]

JTP: Trying to give Zach ideas for his next reading. Do something really memorable?

ZW: Yeah, right, right, right.

JTP: I went to a reading two nights ago. It was for the novelist Lee Cole. Fulfillment. He read for thirty-five minutes. But I thought… I dug it. Good excerpt. He definitely hadn’t lost the room.

BW: Dangerous game, though. Maybe the most dangerous game.

JTP: Hunting humans, yes. But above that?

BW: Reading a little bit too long? That… well, I’ll let y’all continue. Nice to meet you.

ZW: Thank you. [BW exits stage right.] What were we talking about? Bread Loaf. Probably OK that we get off of that.

JTP: One thing to add is Stephen Donadio. Stephen Donadio’s courses were some of the best.

ZW: Oh, yeah! I took him in North Carolina. I took Faulkner with him. I know that for some of my friends his approach didn’t work—it seemed like he’d been teaching that class the same way for years. It was the only English class I’ve ever had where all the questions were posed with like a really hyper-specific answer in mind? You’d raise your hand to answer a question, and he’d be like no. No. And the correct answer was “Luster’s quarter,” or whatever. But he was teaching us how to read meticulously. He taught us how to read Faulkner. I always liked the professors who are a little quirky. Anthony and I took a comparative government class in undergraduate that was taught by this guy Gottfried Dietze who was 82 when we took the course? And he would just get way off topic and tell these rambling stories. Then he’d give these exams that were typewritten exams? That he’d clearly had in his desk forever. And the exams sometimes connected to what he’d talked about? But often didn’t. His stories, though, were so good. We loved the class. It didn’t make any sense. We got Bs—I think everyone did. Some people really didn’t like that because it screwed them up. But it felt kind of worth it because—like, he told this story about going to Tiffany’s by himself as a young man, to look at the wedding rings, after this romance he’d been in had collapsed. So he would go look at the wedding rings by himself.

JTP: Hey, that’s literary material.

ZW: And so he talked about being in there one time and bumping into Picasso’s daughter, Paola Picasso? He said, ‘I approached this young woman and said, Pardon me, but I believe I know your father. Are you Paola Picasso? I can tell from your eyes.’ He would tell these stories like that. And then he died. He died the next year.

JTP: The precarity of life and experience: that’s in your fiction too. The unlikeliness of given moments, you capture that well. In a story like, say, “Lucca Castle.”

ZW: Yeah… that sparks a thought in me that I don’t quite have at my fingertips, but I’ll keep thinking about it.

JTP: Well, in that story, the question seems to be, Is this just a coincidence or meaning that’s guiding me to something? And the randomness and piling up, these occurrences building toward some absurdist culmination that also says something about where the culture is at and such. Have you ever read Lethem’s Chronic City?

ZW: Yeah, loved that book!

JTP: Because I was going to say that “Lucca Castle” definitely felt in that spirit.

ZW: I’ve been meaning to re-read it. You know how I read it? They had a copy in the Browning library. Which is kind of funny, right? I haven’t read tons of Lethem, but I really loved that one. What year did that novel come out?

JTP: 2006, -7, something like that?

ZW: See that feels pretty—I know he’s a huge Philip K. Dick guy.

JTP: One hundred percent, yeah.

ZW: But the way that that novel dealt with those sort of gnostic reality themes in terms of the internet and the question of sitting around on the computer and not being quite sure what’s true outside the four walls?

JTP: The chaldron.

ZW: Exactly. And the Marlon Brando thing. That strikes me as pretty prescient for the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t read Philip K. Dick until later… As a kid I was always interested—not in an academic or intellectual way, but in a sort of more intuitive way or something?—in questions about the nature of reality. I think I’ve always had something like mild dissociative tendencies. Barbara Ehrenreich has a book, Living with a Wild God. She writes about having what she terms mystical experiences that were very powerful… and shaped the outcome of her life, she says. In the book, she uses her journal from when she was a kid to re-interrogate those experiences. When she was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, she wrote in this journal that she viewed herself as on a mission to figure out what this is. Because it, life, did not intuitively make sense to her. I was reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries recently? And she has—she writes about similar things in a couple of different places. Although I’m not, you know, a comprehensive reader of this stuff. But in two places that I counted, once in her diary and once in “Moments of Being”—she writes about an extraordinarily profound moment in her life… when she stepped over a puddle. And looked down. And saw the puddle. And saw her foot. And just for one second didn’t know what anything was. A moment of full dissociation. My sort of puddle moment was—I had this one semester in college when I was really depressed and anxious. And I was sitting in a seminar with Stephen Dixon. And I had the exact same kind of moment—I looked up from the desk and didn’t know what anything was. Like, anything. What separated things. Or how to understand what the separation was between the people and the furniture and stuff like that. It was for probably far less than a second. But it had a big impact on me. And I’ve since had any number of experiences like that. I think as a writer you cultivate them. Now I find it interesting, but as a kid, in college, it was scary. I was always—when someone on campus would get a bunch of acid, well, I never touched that stuff because I was always…

JTP: Even as a devoted Phish guy with all the stereotypes that would bring to mind?

ZW: I always struck people as a kind of druggy person. But I’m not. And I always had a sense that it would be a little dangerous for me to take hallucinogens. So I never did it. In terms of the “Lucca Castle” stuff and unreality or coincidences, or questions about the way things connect? I think that’s always been a sticking point for me. Ben Okri said something like, “My short stories are always investigations into the nature of reality, which must be the most contested thing in existence.”

JTP: You’re talking about influences like Virginia Woolf’s diaries, or Barbara Ehrenreich reflecting on her own lived experience, and what people might consider less credible extraterrestrial phenomena and these sort of edge cases of professed consciousness, like Whitley Strieber, that kind of thing. And what links them: What is reality, and how do we make sense of these things?

ZW: I was always fascinated with that sort of question. And yeah, occult subjects that might seem silly or less credible, as you say, like UFOs, do have a way of pointing toward these larger, more perennial concerns. There’s a guy, John Keel, who was a sort of interesting fringe personality, a fairly eccentric character—he wrote the book The Mothman Prophecies?

JTP: Oh, right. Cited in High Weirdness by Erik Davis.

ZW: Keel’s a strange guy, and reading him is weird. He wrote about UFOs in the ’60s as a self-styled investigator. And he said that the thing about UFOs, as a topic, is that you start off thinking prosaically about it—Oh, someone saw something in the sky, what could it be? Looked like a ship? It was metallic? Let’s try and figure it out… You start with that, but it’s slippery, and before you know it you’re into the nature of perception, and the nature of reality, and Hermes Trismegistus and Hermetic alchemy and gnosticism and that kind of thing. It’s this question about the nature of anomalous experience—momentary punctures in the fabric of reality? Why do people see weird things in the sky? There’s this broader human context…

JTP: As a subject treated in your published stories, or maybe in relation to what you’re working on now, interested in now—well, even the final story in the collection, right? “Return to Crashaw” has… almost the absurdity of trying to put this sort of stuff in an academic context… and the tide going out on interest in this site of knowledge [a historical site in the story], and it’s all been arranged as a museum to be made comprehensible for a tourist audience. Just to build that around this mystery, a culture around that… yeah.

ZW: One big influence on that one in particular was Solaris by Stanislaw Lem? I haven’t read that in a long time, but I thought it was so funny—and so distinct from the film. But the novel as a critique, or parody, of academic culture, right? Generations of “Solaricists” working on this problem of figuring out whether the ocean on this planet might be conscious, and whether they might be able to communicate with it… Definitely a lot of that went straight into that story. That was a fun one to write. It almost didn’t make it into the collection because… I started that one fairly early. Then I just couldn’t get the language right, or what felt right to me? I set it aside for a really long time. It sat for a few years. I came back to it and figured out this second-person mode of address that really felt good. Then I was able to finish it. That was a hard one.

JTP: It does speak to the direct experience of teaching in ways.

ZW: Yes! Yes. In my initial—it’s funny you say that. For each of my stories I have a notes documents that sits next to the drafts in my files. And the notes documents are a kind of a running dialogue/conversation with myself. And in many cases the notes document is far, far longer than the story. Maybe 70 pages longer…

JTP: It’s a resource, a place to mine what will become the story.

ZW: “Return to Crashaw,” the very first inkling of it, the first thing I put in the notes document, was this recurring dream I had about teaching a class that gets progressively more out of control until there’s not even a center to anything anymore. It’s like your throat is hoarse and people are laughing and…

JTP: It’s sort of built into the story, isn’t it?, the almost Plato’s Cave allegory where they have the staged version of the monuments versus some of the characters’ desire to go right to “the real thing”… but of course the caretaker is there notionally to keep people away from that? For reasons of sanity, or whatever?

ZW: Right, right, and that makes me think of that one Ben Okri story in the New Yorker—did you read that one?—about the search for “real” water in a world where all water is synthetic. About young people searching for real water.

JTP: So when did you—you said you were teaching for one year at NYU—what precipitated being like, OK, I’m going to pull up stakes from the teaching game? This high school where you had a job for some number of years and could have kept going in theory… What was the moment where you were like, I’m going to try and take a real run at this and see what happens?

ZW: I—and I apologize because I keep catching myself going back to threads from earlier-

JTP: All good, do it! We’ll fix it ‘in post.’

ZW: Edited and condensed for clarity. Before we started talking about Bread Loaf I was on the track for that… working on the psychic spy story and a couple of other things. And I sent them to a friend of mine, a guy named Douglas Watson. He’s a brilliant writer. And he’s in Legends of Neglect, the first couple of records.

JTP: Speaking of going back to prior threads, do you want to take a moment and explain what Legends of Neglect is?

ZW: Oh, sure. Because when you asked me to do a walking interview, I liked that concept because all these threads feel very linked to—so this is when we were over on 15^th Street and you asked me if I was showing my writing to people after college or not, and I said I wasn’t really in a community then and I didn’t know how to do it on my own… Then I became a teacher, and it was a year or two after that, I was here, in New York, at Anthony’s old place on Berkeley, and this guy Dave who had gone to school with us, who Anthony knew better than I did, called up Anthony. And he said, I’ve got a four-track at my place, do you guys want to come by and we’ll make a nonsense record today? I think that’s how he termed it. So we went, along with my friend Richie, my closest friend from Delaware growing up, going back to elementary school, who also was at Anthony’s place that weekend. We were very hungover. Let’s see this is 3^rd… Do you want to…?

JTP: I was thinking we could walk back to the building where you lived and wrap it there?

ZW: I’m happy to keep talking too. I’m not in a hurry.

JTP: OK, we’ll see, let’s not force it either.

ZW: So Richie didn’t know this guy Dave. And I didn’t know Dave that well either. But for some reason we agreed to do it. We went to Dave’s old place. And Dave is such a brilliant creative person. He’s got this kind of frenetic energy. He’d always been in bands. And been creative in a way that I wasn’t, really. What they did for fun, he and his friends, growing up, was they made short films, they made music, they were in bands—it was all they ever did.

JTP: Inspiring each other to participate in this kind of thing.

ZW: Yes [birds chirping loudly], and they had this punk ethos of ‘first thought, best thought.’ No revisions. So we got over to Dave’s place and there were a bunch of people there. Eight or ten maybe. And Dave was like, OK, let’s do it, let’s get started. My concept for the first song is ‘Blast Off for Kicksville.’ It’s this old movie reference, “Blast Off for Kicksville.” He was like OK, I’m going to play the sample from the movie, and then everybody start shouting, ‘Blast Off!’ And we’re gonna do it like this.

JTP: [laughing]

ZW: You got to bear in mind this was like 2009 or something. We were in our twenties. So… he had an electric bass and some pots and pans and a banjo. And he had an omnichord, and stuff like that.

JTP: People were playing instruments that they knew, and some that they didn’t know?

ZW: People were not musicians. I played the drums, but at that point I don’t think I knew how to play guitar. Or maybe I did, I don’t remember. I was hungover. And I was really, really miserable. And it felt like this was the weirdest, most awkward, embarrassing thing.

JTP: Forced.

ZW: Forced! I was like, I don’t want to do this, this is so weird. And lame.

JTP: You felt that in the moment of having arrived? You got there, willing to do it, then you were like, Oh god.

ZW: Yeah… yeah. Yes. Richie and I were probably looking at each other like, Let’s get out of here. Then…

JTP: You were ready to neglect the Legends of Neglect?

ZW: Ha, exactly. So we did it. We did this first song. And then Dave was like, Who’s next? Who has the next song? And somehow suddenly it was like we all had ideas for songs. He sort of just made us do it.

JTP: So it sparked. Did you go very quickly from being like I want to get out of here to OK!

ZW: Yeah, it was like a switch flipping. And I don’t know if this will sound corny or look corny in print, but it was like a kind of—hey, look at that [we see crossing the street toward us, Jerry, Diane Mehta’s partner, a poet who read the night before with Zach at the Rogue Loon reading series].

JTP: Hey, Jerry! We’re doing an interview. You’re in the interview. Do you have anything to say for the interview?

J: Hey! Good to see you! Great reading! And good to see you!

ZW: That’s funny.

JTP: Maybe we’ll run into the ghost of Paul Auster next. All these coincidences.

ZW: Did you ever bump into him in the neighborhood?

JTP: I did. And I interviewed him. At his house, yeah, for 4 3 2 1. The conversation was very much about mortality.

ZW: Aw, man. Jeez. Glad you did that.

JTP: One cool moment [of having run into or seen Paul in the neighborhood]: being in the middle of the pandemic, and I know he and Siri would spend significant parts of the year in Europe and all that… and I remember being like, it was the pandemic and seemingly half the population of Park Slope had gone to their vacation homes or otherwise moved out and I remember thinking, Yeah, well, they’re probably—because I would see him regularly walking up and down 7^th Avenue—so I was like, they’re probably in Europe or something, or at least they’ve probably gone somewhere to get away from all this. And then… maybe in month two or three, looking out the window—I was working on a novel and really kind of cloistered and shut-in—and looking out and seeing Auster in all black walking down the street in front of Key Foods. And being like, Ah! He’s here. He abides.

ZW: Did it give you some resolve?

JTP: Yeah, totally.

ZW: That’s cool. I felt that way one time. It was a Friday, I think. I had kind of a bad week teaching and I was walking around—sometimes on Fridays after school I’d walk from 62^nd St all the way down to East Broadway and take the F. And I saw… I saw Deerhoof. I don’t know if I saw all of the band—I saw Greg and Satomi. And they were walking into a restaurant, getting dinner. I felt—that gave me strength. That’s Deerhoof, man. I want to be like them.

JTP: Ha, so, you were describing the Legends of Neglect experience?

ZW: We wound up working on this recording late into the night and I think we came back the next day. It really sparked, it was so fun.

JTP: And it’s all out there?

ZW: Yeah, it’s all there. I’m not necessarily suggesting that anybody go listen to it.

JTP: [laughter]

ZW: Although we wound up making three records over six or seven years, in this same configuration—we kept coming back. And we got better at it over time. I think we’ve made some good songs over the years. The way it happened is that, after that first session, we were like, We should try to fill up the tape. However many minutes that is, and it will be a record. And we had to plan another weekend because we didn’t all live in New York. We put another weekend on the calendar, then another and another. And eventually, once we’d finished it, we had a little party and invited our friends and gave out cassettes. Then we were like, Let’s do it again! Then we made a second album. Then a third. And we played a couple of shows. And now people have kids and are far-flung, so we’ve slowed down, but we’re currently working on the fourth record. It’s been a real joy. And one of the big things I learned from it… for me it was a real creative unblocking in a sense, like, OK, anyone can do this. I had a strong ingrained sense somehow of, Other people can do this, but not me—you have to really know what you’re doing before you get started or something? So it was a really liberating experience for me.

JTP: That kind of creative approach it’s a little antithetical to writing—or maybe it could resonate with first drafts, with getting something down on the page no matter what. But I think your work—you can feel a sort of improvisatory vibe that the substance of your writing evokes. Not that it’s created in that manner, but what your stories describe often seems to approach that kind of ‘let’s just try this’ creative experience.

ZW: What I like about writing short stories is that it contains both of those worlds [the spur-of-the-moment improvisation and the practiced revision], those aspects. It is really fascinating to me, like, those story ideas that come out of the blue during insomnia—I’m really fascinated by ideas in that way. The moment you’re struck by an idea, when you suddenly have something that wasn’t there just a second ago. It’s just strange. You’re not in control of that. There are so many things that you can’t plan: you just have to kind of wait for it, or be around when it’s there. Or put yourself in a position where it’s going to be there. And the whole process is like that. It’s like that Donald Barthelme thing, that essay he wrote, “Not Knowing,” where he says the writer is one who does not know what he’s doing. That not knowing is crucial to fiction-writing. Not knowing permits what he calls the scanning process; you’re always casting about for something without knowing what it is until you find it and put it in the draft. So the draft kind of grows in that way? There’s the idea that sparks the story. Then there’s a succession of other ideas as you’re drafting. And even revision is not that different in some ways. Because you carry a story with you for a long time and so you’re always dependent on new ideas, even at the line-level.

—> Part II (shorter, much shorter), where Zach Williams talks about the experience of breaking through, is here.

Look, I ain't sayin’ I invented anything, alright? I’m not some genius sittin’ around drawin’ up plans for how TV should work, how Americans should see themselves, or how every other guy with a receding hairline and a chip on his shoulder should act. I’m just sayin’—and I say …

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Big Score No. 1 cometh…

Our launch party is set for next Sunday, October 12th, at Gallery 198 in Sunset Park, from 5 - 8 pm. Readings by Cleo Qian, K.P. Taylor, Justin Kamp, and Andres Cordoba. With music from Will Chang. The current Gallery 198 exhibition features work by AJ Springer. It will be a good time.

You can subscribe to or make a single issue purchase of Big Score here, which naturally is the best way to support what we’re doing.

A preview of what No. 1 contains:

• Dilettantes, a short story by Adora Svitak

  
  When we met in college, he was a poet who studied politics. It had been a long time since he had written a poem. While he worked at a public-interest law firm, I pulled novels from my backpack in cafes where disdainful baristas whisked $9 matcha lattes. Reading novels was not my job; I was supposed to be turning my dissertation into a book about modern heterosexuality. I made little progress most days, sitting in noisy cafes and texting friends who had day jobs to ask if they had evening plans.
  

• Calf, a poem by Loisa Fenichell
  

• Dumpster Fries v. the Monster, a short story by Douglas W. Milliken

  
  

  It was one of those late summer mornings where the air itself was gray and lifeless as old burger meat yet nevertheless steamy with oppression (think of the moist breath of a dog who won’t get its panting stink-mouth out of your face) even while the dirt-colored birds were still in the process of waking up to announce their useless wakefulness. You know the kind of day I’m talking about. It sucked before it’d even begun. We were in that old wreck of a house we’d found standing all alone in the brownfields out by the airport, just Jaylee and me packed into a corner of one downstairs room in a matted pile of sleeping bags and grungy clothes and girl. It somehow was and wasn’t exactly as bad as it sounds. Jaylee’d gotten her cast off a few days before but still had some nasty Frankenstein shit stitched up and down her thigh from knee to hip, and she was supposed to be doing physical therapy, too, but that obviously was not going to happen as long as she had to get through each miserable day as a wounded member of the world outside (as opposed to inside) the hospital: since it’d been her asshole stepdad who’d spelled her leg’s ruin with the front end of his Crown Vic, going home was not an option, and since I lost the gamble of revealing to my god-fearing folks that Jaylee was my girl and she needed a place to stay, we were the both of us now unhoused and too focused on surviving one day to the next to worry much about PT sessions or exercises or the dosage and frequency of Jaylee’s cache of fentanyl patches. We were teenagers without homes is all I’m trying to say. Would you be keeping appointments if you’d been us and we’d been you?

• Barbarians at the Gates?, a poem by Brad Rose

• An Anatomical Dissection of Depression in a Bo[d]y Offering Itself As Curriculum, a poem by Ismail Yusuf Olumoh

• Shells, a short story by Wilhemina Austin

  
  Ralston turned the wheelchair to the right, reached for a cockle shell, pink-streaked. Then he grabbed another with bands of yellow. He was full of the setting sun’s fire. He halted to swoop up one shell after another. He sorted and dismissed, the same as he sorted through the people walking over the sand past us, his voice never low enough. He took the strain of the wheelchair with ease, broad-shouldered as he was, not all that tall, his back well-muscled.

• The Swimmer in the City: Civics and Semiotics at the Public Pool, a critical essay by Justin Kamp
  
  Some of my most treasured hours in New York have been spent on the concrete deck of a public pool. My favorite time is just after 5 pm, in the part of midsummer when the afternoon seems impossibly extended, when the daylight idles and eddies before night even begins to take shape. My routine is as follows: I come to the pool directly from work, towel and trunk in bag, sweat usually still sheened over my forehead from the crush of the commute. I shower, stroll out, spread my towel in an opportune stretch of sunlight and sprawl, letting the city’s sub-tropics warm me until I’m kiln-brick hot. Then I don my cap and goggles and ease into the water for a half hour of freestyle. After that, it’s an hour of uninterrupted reading as I dry off in the full late sun before the pool closes at 7.

• Chicago Sonnet #42, a poem by D. A. Hosek
  

• Dead Week, a short story by K.P. Taylor

  
  

  NIGHT ONE

  Even Rusty, who usually took no small pleasure in barking orders, had grown almost silent.

  “Lenny,” he huffed, “you work all the live freight?”

  “Weren’t nothin’ to work,” Lenny replied.

  “How ’bout the backstock?”

  “None of that neither.”

  It was the beginning of Dead Week, that seemingly endless stretch of dull nights between Christmas and New Year’s Eve with nothing to do and too many hours to fill doing it. Rusty scanned the backroom, searching desperately for something, anything, for Lenny to do. Every last bag of stuffing had already found its way to the discount rack, and all the bottles of cheap champagne had claimed their places on the endcaps.

  “Ya know what?” Lenny offered, preferring to jump rather than be pushed. “I could head over to Aisle 7. There’s some cans of Friskies and Fancy Feast I could front.”

  “Why don’t you go on over to Aisle 7, Lenny,” Rusty said, as if it had been his idea.

  Lenny made a big show of wheeling an empty U-boat out with him.

• Oh the Passion, a poem by T.A.R. Wallace

• When You Become a Witch in a Nigerian Home, a poem by CP Nwankwo

• When Love Speaks Yoruba and English, a short story by Solape Adetutu Adeyemi

  I.

  I remember the first time I fell in love. It was with a boy who didn’t know how to say I love you in Yoruba. That should have been my first clue that things would break.

  His name was Tobi. We met at a poetry open mic at Terra Kulture in Lagos. I was twenty-two, fresh out of university, clutching my brown leather notebook like it contained my entire worth. I hadn’t written anything good in months, but I needed to be surrounded by people who still believed words could save us.

• The Things We Hang Onto, a poem by Oladosu Michael Emerald

• Waiting, a poem by Cleo Xian
  
  
  

  
  
  

It is one of the more painful paradoxes of the forever after, that in gaining the perspective one lacked on Earth, one also forfeits the means to act upon it. I see clearly now, and I see you, Bobby, my son, my namesake—and I see the distance between who you are and who I hoped you might become…

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read Part 1 of the interview here. Or visit Ann Nocenti’s website.

AN: So, like, Gregory Corso: he used to have a blast embarrassing me in public. Because I was one of these people who was trained to keep a certain amount of decorum in all situations. And Gregory was the opposite. He would blow social conv…

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