Poetry-
47.1
Anis Shivani, “Garcia Lorca in Houston”
Daniel Borzutzky, “Non-Essential Personnel”
47.2
Nayelly Barrios, “From Magdalen’s Port; 1950s”
Prose-
47.1
Katie Jean Shinkle, “A Labor of Love”
Ken Weaver, “Infinity Juice”
47.2
Peter Trachtenberg, “The Finish of All Things”
Congratulations to our nominees from the PUERTO DEL SOL staff!
This fall, the New Mexico State University MFA program offers a form and technique class devoted solely to “writing from place” taught by fiction professor Rus Bradburd. What constitutes writing done “from place?” How does one approach doing so? Does it require a conscious effort, and if so, is it avoidable? A quick scan of the course’s eclectic reading list finds well known classics like Dubliners, Everything That Rises Must Converge, and Death Come to the Archbishop mixed in with more recent editions to the literary canon, like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. These works come from anywhere and everywhere, from both men and women, old and young, eastern and western. So is that it, then? Just vary the setting and narrators, and you have “place?” It is that simple? Bradburd, a Chicago native, took a few minutes to share his experiences with the subject of his course, how young writers can take advantage of it, and how it impacts his own writing.
What inspired you to focus a form and technique class on the rather broad topic of “place?”
Former NMSU prof Kevin McIlvoy used to say that all great short stories take place somewhere very specific. While there are plenty of exceptions, that comment got me thinking hard about stories I love. And nearly all of them take place in a very exact time and place. “Sonny’s Blues” in Harlem of the 1950s. “Chopin in Winter” on Chicago’s South Side. “Goodbye, My Brother” on the New England coast. The list goes on and on. And many of my favorite writers, their voices seem to come from very precise places. Dagoberto Gilb is working class Latino. Allistair MacLeod is from the farms and mines and islands of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward’s Island. Flannery O’Connor is the 1950s American South. Nelson Algren is from a gritty 1940s Chicago.
What is “place?” Is it different from “setting?” What role does it play or should it play in fiction? Can fiction exist without place?
In my view, “Place” is setting and time. A story from Georgia in the days after Barack Obama was elected would be very different than Flannery O’Connor’s South. And Nelson Algren’s Chicago of the mid 1900s is very different from the magical Chicago of Stuart Dybek.
One of my favorite young writers is Jon Billman. He told me that the most interesting fiction today comes from little pockets of strange worlds that the reader otherwise mightn’t have access to. Billman turned me on to Knockemstiff, the short story collection from Donald Ray Pollock. That is one strange little town in Ohio, at least the town Pollock has portrayed is, anyway. But sometimes Place can be an unusual job. Or a college campus. I think being aware of this is important for young writers — and I’m a young writer, let’s be frank. I had several disadvantages, many of which I’m still working against. But I had one big plus in my favor: I was from Chicago, which is the world’s most interesting city, except for maybe Belfast. And I’d come out of a unique world — major college basketball — that people were very curious about. Not my workshop peers when I was a student, they weren’t so interested, but college hoops is an immensely popular sport.
I made a point of asking questions to our visiting writers each month — just trying to give Robert Boswell and Antonya Nelson a breather from my barrage of questions. One comment that stuck with me was from Thom Jones, who wrote “The Pugilist at Rest.” It’s one of my favorite books, and the title story is a sock in the gut. But Thom Jones told me that readers want to be taken behind the scenes, to the inside –which, in my case, meant past the TV lights and the basketball court — to whatever special Place the writer had access to. He said not to worry about it being too voicy or too complicated for a non-basketball person. I still think about that — both that story and Thom Jones’ comment.
- How can young writers use the concept of place to improve their story-telling?
The great basketball coach Al McGuire used to say that every college student should have to drive a cab in New York City for a year before she/he was awarded a degree. I’d say that ought to be part of an MFA as well. In a book we just discussed in class, a fictional Robert Frost advises a young writer to go live in a remote Russian seaport village. The young kid is perplexed, but as adult readers, we know what this “Frost” meant: go live an interesting a life. And it’s something I look for in our MFA applicants: Peace Corps? Worked on a political campaign? Dropped out of an MBA program? Flunked the Bar Exam? Son of immigrant parents and worked as a painter for a decade? Grew up in Hyderabad? Wrote for NBA.com? Wrote a column for an obscure Ohio newspaper? Grew up on a ranch in the most remote part of Texas? That’s just a partial list of our current MFA students here, and to me it’s no accident.
- What roles have place played in your own writing, or does it play in any projects you’re currently working on?
When I went to a small town in Ireland for two years, I was supposed to be writing fiction. But it was such a strange and alluring place! Such wacky characters in Ireland — well, I got a book out of those two years in a strange place with a weird job. It just wasn’t the book I was supposed to be writing.
My new book, due in January, is set in the world of college basketball, at a fictional university, and it takes place over one season. So I was thinking about how writers use place to inform character. I was at work on the project myself, and thinking about it all the time led to the idea of basing a class on Place.
Rus Bradburd is the author of three books: Paddy on the Hardwood, Forty Minutes of Hell, and a novel-in-stories, Make It, Take It, which comes out in January. He teaches fiction at New Mexico State University.
Just a quick update – we’ve had a short-notice change in online merchants, so if you have a discount code that was originally issued more than a month ago, unfortunately you will not be able to use it in the new store. However, we would still like to honor those codes – please e-mail us at contact@puertodelsol.org with your code and we will work with you on getting the value of your discount.
But even if you don’t have a coupon, Puerto del Sol is still an affordable, delicious literary treat. Why not order the latest issue today?
Over at The New Inquiry, Aaron Bady included the Utopias! Roundtable from Puerto del Sol 47.2 in his Sunday Reading. Every Sunday, Bady and several other folks put together a list of articles, blog posts, videos, and other tidbits worthy of attention.
We think the Utopias! Roundtable is worth looking at, too. Not only the Roundtable: Issue 47.2 also includes Karl Hardy’s Introduction to Utopias! and excellent prose and poetry from Michael Kimball, Steve Kistulentz, Rosebud Ben-Oni, B.J. Hollars, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Roberto Harrison, and so much more.
Have you ordered your copy?
Four-hundred and fifty pounds. That’s how much literary goodness we’ve got shipping out from the printer, soon to be sent to your eager hands, dear reader, assuming the delivery truck stops breaking down.
For comparison, that’s the same weight as:
Four small baby elephants, or one and a half big ones!
The heaviest jumper a parachute can support!
The processor cabinet of the DBC 1012 Data Base Computer (from the 80s)!
The current Mike the Tiger at Louisiana State University!
The model of the planet Saturn at the Virginia Air and Space Center, not including its rings!
The capacity of a freight push cart on the historical Taiwanese push car railways!
The amount of jelly carried by the cruise ship Constellation for a 7-day cruise!
A stack of 8,181 pennies!
Twenty percent of a long ton, which is different from a regular ton!
A big llama!
All of that in fresh, new, surprising words and art!
If you’ve already ordered or subscribed, the issue will be on its way to you soon. If you haven’t, why wait? Orders are available now!
If you haven’t heard, Puerto’s next themed issue (48.2) is going sports. We’re defining it broadly, so if you have sports-related fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, you should head on over to our submission manager and fire away. Our current special-themed issue, Utopias!, is coming soon, so don’t miss your chance to be in the next one.
Below is the official call, so batter up, aim for the goal, lace up your skates, line up your shot, mount up, start your engines, and I’m out of sports metaphors.
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From the Introduction to Utopias!, “Unsettling Hope and Re-Articulating Utopia,” in Puerto del Sol, Vol. 47, No.2:
Translated as “the good/no place” or “the good place that is no place,” the very concept of utopia evoked ambiguity from the start. According to Lyman Tower Sargent, expressions of utopianism ought to be recognized in three distinct forms or “faces”: utopian literature, the communitarian tradition, and utopian social theory. It follows that both informal and academic notions of utopia have evolved divergently to alternately signify ideas of hope, idealism, perfection, totalitarianism, impossibility, frivolity, and so forth. For his part, Sargent has defined utopia rather broadly as “social dreaming,” while Ruth Levitas has proposed “expressions of desire for a better way of being.”
Karl Hardy is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies programme at Queen’s University (Canada).
Below, Karl discusses literary and political utopias, hope and pessimism, and what he is looking forward to in Puerto del Sol, 47.2:
I’ve always been a reader. I was a stereotypical kid-reader, huddled up with a flashlight under a sheet, mumbling my way through the children’s version of David Copperfield. I got in trouble for reading James and the Giant Peach during third grade math. I once read in the car halfway to Six Flags before realizing I’d left my glasses at home, and I spent the entire day at the amusement park in a myopic fog. If you talked to me while I was reading, I didn’t hear you. If you pulled me away from the reading, I was irritated.
And one of the biggest effects reading had on me was that it made me want to write. I wanted to do what these authors were doing. I wanted to bring other people the same absorption and satisfaction that I experienced. So below are a few of the many authors I read growing up, with a particular focus on the ones who made me want to write. When I put down their books I turned to my spiral notebook and my pen and whittled away, even as I whittle now. Some of these pieces have stood the test of time and maturation, while others haven’t, but all of them shaped me as a young reader and writer and may be of interest to a young reader or writer in your own life.
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The octopus is on television. The lights flash. She is electrocuted.
I was going to sew in my life a flavor, on the curtains, of telephones
Sunrise
The ghost crab baby wears green earrings when she comes out of the womb Good Morning she says I fucking can’t believe this
The first place she goes is the 99 cent store I’m collecting everything I need to live with my original approach See her crawl gumdrop fall into a neon bucket fumble with the magnets, scuttle into cake pans baby pinky-nail swimming in a thousand tiny droplets of gasoline You looked you looked at my 99 cent dress one hundred sexual innovations start now! Oh, I like this ghost crab baby whoever she is she is whoever, a dictator?! I’m into it she says I just add more and just add more A poodle topples into a plastic basket she says Oh, la and kicks the ghost crab baby out into the streets, tapes the door shut barking Don’t forget you are the chief, that’s who!
The ghost crab baby crawls through a fuck-fest of popped-off heads Look at this she says They just add more and just add more With the understanding that the river creates the mouth With the understanding that the river shows the moon
When the ghost crab baby is born When she bursts onto the scene she screams
Tender Squid
Step over all of the contents of the body here is a metal fish. Tender squid tender squid, step in the uncovered puddle. Here is the place where the ocean was, Here is the place where the sea, Here is the place where the babies are cold and inedible, the once tender tree now a metal tree. Here we stand, the tree all its contents. Here is a tender squid all its contents taste of metal all its contents taste of the puddle. When the silent squid extends its tongue it vanishes, reappears as a fragment of a marble sieve.
That’s Fatal Too Many Ideas That’s Fatal
The octopus is a fan of too many ideas. Sheer determination, she puts on too many finishing touches, very carefully, very right, and hopes it falls apart, destroyed, and sort of disappears. She would like to emphasize
I only go to the opera, I do not go anywhere else, so I’m at the mercy of what I can find at the opera
Prowling ashore, the mildness of wet feet / She eyes the multiplicity of her likeness
In the cannibalistic world. 
Please save me from delicacy,
Please let me create a clusterfuck
Anything inspired
I want a large amount of
She Looks Like a Bore
The octopus has a friend, her name is baby eel. Baby eel never needs anything, so she never thinks anyone isn’t giving her what she needs. She looks like a bore, but the octopus loves her. She’s a glitterball flashing between drowned elevators.
PALLET
by
Benjamin Robinson
“It is better for you to be free of fear lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble.”
Epicurus (Greek philosopher, 341 BC – 270 BC)
Robert Bingham: Self Portrait in a Disused Milk Churn, 2009, courtesy the artist
As part of the Dublin Fringe Festival artist Robert Bingham spent some time on a pallet. Benjamin Robinson caught up with him and they chatted about bed sores, gold lamé slacks and multani mitti mudpacks. (The images accompanying the interview are taken from Bingham’s 2009 exhibition, Phew!)
Benjamin Robinson: Can you tell me a little about how Pallet came about?
Robert Bingham: I produced a series of images in 2008—in response to the financial crisis—called Neoliberal Fantasies, exploring various forms of fluidity and volatility. The images formed the basis of an exhibition I had in 2009 [Phew!], which was scheduled to tour internationally in 2010 but ended up stuck on a pallet in a customs warehouse.
Robert Bingham: Neoliberal Fantasy No. 4, 2009; courtesy the artist
BR: In terms of containment, of its functioning as an intermediary, were you aware of the pallet’s significance at that stage? As something that might raise you up, hold you foursquare off the ground, a set of wooden boards serving as a rudimentary stage.
RB: In terms of the search for answers the pallet was a concept that demanded to be taken seriously. Not least the fact that a pallet asks nothing, demands nothing of the palleted save that the desire, the imperative to be palleted, that hitherto unrecognised ability to embody a position diagonally pertinent to cognitive release, be the radical functioning of a post-dramatic slant away from compositional determinacy.
BR: The pallet making no intrinsic demands, no artificial representations, yet physically demanding in its function as a form of imposed austerity.
RB: As an agent of governance, directing our disenfranchised gaze towards the borders of exculpation. That we have been at every turn expelled from the necessity to recognise that the system, in no uncertain terms, has rejected our collective advances, has rebuffed our circuitous attempts to utilise it productively.
BR: And in a work like Transmission, with its ruptured reflectiv—
RB: [interrupts] My engagement in Transmission was with the need to render an image as a form of disrupted display, an interruptive force seen through its own defaced means of capture.
Robert Bingham: Transmission, 2009; courtesy the artist
BR: [nods in agreement] With that capture rendered in situ.
RB: As the logical precursor to my being palleted, as a form of covert dramatisation, in recognition of the body’s persistence, in as much as it represented an inclination on my part to be consumed, to eschew individuation, at the same time repositioning that avoidance as a refinement of the creative act, the de facto release of cognitive strictures beyond the sterile machinations of production and distribution, composition and reiteration, the whole panoply of logistical activity to which we have become inured.
BR: Were there any health issues arising from such an extended period of confinement?
RB: I had a nurse on site to make sure I didn’t develop bedsores—spending such a prolonged period in repose necessitated such an administrative compromise. So my departure and return, my leaving the stages—
BR: Stages?
RB: Interregna. [pauses] One of the pieces in Phew! that drew most critical hostility was Industrial Unrest. Its co-terminal contextualisation was interpreted as a form of covert suppression, a splicing of the contingencies of social breakdown into the contingencies of aesthetic relief. Along with the muted chorus of approval Neoliberal Fantasies garnered, the negative reaction to Industrial Unrest was a prime mover in Pallet’s inception.
Robert Bingham: Industrial Unrest, 2009; instillation; courtesy the artist
BR: As with most of Phew! there’s a sense of something beneath the surface trying to break through, of the conflict between process and presentation implied in holding back this release, with Pallet waiting in the wings.
RB: The invisible hand of the artist [smiles], as a series of disposable connotations which my continual leaving and returning to the scene of repose as a way of confronting, of attempting to resolve the crisis of empathetic significance the compromise of having a medical professional on site instigated.
BR: [nods in agreement] Did your deferral to the mandate of physical revolt impinge upon your determination not to posture? Not to connote over-dramatically, to overplay the invisible hand, denoting that which is inconceivably so, the sporadic amalgam of need and desire.
RB: The spasmodic amalgam of need and desire, folded back longitudinal in a quotidian loop, sharpened the sense of futility inherent in my attempts to de-articulate myself. While posture was antithetical to the work’s deployment, posturing was integral to its ad hoc raison d’être.
BR: I understand you didn’t speak while you were on the pallet?
RB: My getting up to relieve myself proved a more effective means of arbitration. Alighting the pallet, I moved centripetally towards a designated point of reprieve. Exposing the pallet’s grid to the decay of relief, my unburdened centrifugal return represented a wholesale indictment of global abundant and its sundry deployments.
BR: Did this tenacious ferrying, this corrosion of the grid from within its formal functionality, foreground the lack of discourse between stagecraft and integrity that in your previous work you have attempted to highlight? In terms of Phew! being the precursor to Pallet, with expiration and exclamation usurped by anticlimactic radicalisation.
RB: As a form of dissident audition Pallet afforded me an opportunity to immerse myself in a state of radical craving. My emptying and filling the pallet, as I emptied and filled myself, grounded this immersion in the dehumanising utility of ulterior prefabrication.
BR: Did that prefabrication impinge upon you eating habits?
RB: Along with various carbonated soft drinks, I restricted my food intake to a selection of snack foods. Arrayed in abundance around the pallet each morning I consumed them voraciously and to the limits of my endurance.
BR: Did you have to struggle to reach them?
RB: I had on occasion to stretch, an act that complemented the growing sense of futility my continual leave-taking aroused.
BR: Was this reaching out, this struggle for material gain, a way of dealing with the negative critical reaction that Consumer Sentiment had garnered, the build up of repetitive gestures leading to an entrenched reiteration?
Robert Bingham: Consumer Sentiment, 2009, instillation; courtesy the artist.
RB: My initial concern with Consumer Sentiment was to track various aspects of concentration as an extension of my desire to produce a given work of art, at the same time realising that part of me didn’t want that process to end, the conflict involved in making these choices, of achieving a balance, creating and eliminating the creases and folds, as a form of unfolding of consumption, a concentration of concentration that defined the finished product as a self-deceptive loss of concentration akin to a visual slip of the tongue.
BR: [nods in agreement] Saying what was on everyone’s mind.
RB: Where Industrial Unrest pinned its colours to the carnival of post-consumption, Consumer Sentiment unwrapped the anxiety underlying such elated verisimilitude.
BR: How did having to repeatedly leave the pallet effect your concentration? And were your hopes of disengagement facilitated through these ruptures? Or was having to visit the convenience at intervals merely an inconvenience?
RB: Such spontaneous acts of dilution served to undermine the conventional formalities of the interval where traditionally it is the audience who seeks relief—in the form of refreshments and bodily ministrations. My sporadic removal from the scene of repose posited the formulation of a mechanism for the production of the retrieval of randomised loss, the void as absence within a liturgy of felt experience.
BR: Do you see your incursion into dramaturgy solely in terms of the manufacturing of depletion, of subverting the expectations inherent in the culture of containerisation?
RB: After I’d been on the pallet for a few days I began to suffer muscle cramps—I was performing a subtext of physical exercises in the evenings to keep muscle wastage to a min—
BR: [interrupts] We should point out that you also slept on the pallet.
RB: And it was within this staving off [pauses], this placating of the dialectics of physical dilation that I realised my body, through its desire to produce pressure sores, was attempting to infiltrate the creative process, drawing attention to itself with a series of dramatic openings. Despite the best medical efforts, these points of rupture managed to impinge upon the prolonged and at times bored fascination with my dissident abeyance. In my struggle against manufacture, wresting myself from significance, I became enmeshed in semi-location, visible yet profoundly unfounded. It was this drift into critical depravity that allowed a verbatim duplicate of myself as lost object to manifest.
BR: There’s a similarity here with some of the objects and locations documented in Phew!. I’m thinking of Clot’s echoing Oldenburg’s oversized epherera, with the object’s function merging into a Neo Povera wasteland, the discarded prophylactic—a by-product of physical desire—recycled as aestetic fulfilment, placing the viewer squarely proximate to the stemming of the reproductive tide.
RB: In terms of Pallet’s dismantling of traditional modes of scrutiny I positioned myself outside of the reproductive cycle.
Robert Bingham: Clot, 2009; courtesy the artist
BR: Did your transition to verbatim duplicate facilitate the dismantling of these traditional modes of scrutiny, the gathering in under the watchful eye of visual recognition of these dissonant elements?
RB: [nods in agreement] Elements that can no longer inoculate themselves so easily against commercial contagion, that can no longer insinuate themselves so easily into modes of market volatility. Along with the atomised oscillations of global productivity, the co-terminal angles of revolt have become the emaciated transports of a simulated brutality. Self-serving duplication, in all its vicarious conjunctions and consumptions, served as the watchword of this manifestation.
BR: You’ve spoken of the dangers inherent in ocular resuscitation, of the need for ‘presbyopic interiorities of illiterate duplicity’—
RB: [interrupts] With Phew! my primary concern was the evacuation of potential. With Pallet it was the expiration of that evacuation, with the ancillary aim of confounding any sense of commodified depletion such expiration created.
BR: You wore a series of outfits whilst on the pallet; can you talk us through them?
RB: My costume changes were synchronized with my toilet breaks, with my upper body clad in a series of string vests that served as a talisman of my pursuit of porosity.
BR: And in terms of your lower body?
RB: In terms of the lower portion of my body—and remember my initial intention was to maximise the angle of repose by extruding the diagonal through the nemesis of doubt—I wore a pair of gold lamé slacks that tarnished progressively until in the dying days of the performance they gave way to bloodstained spectral black. No accommodations were made in terms of undergarments to subordinate insurrection. Instead, I smeared my groin each morning with a multani mitti [fuller’s earth] mudpack, a subtextural decongestant that underscored the deep-seated cleansing I was attempting vis-à-vis my previous reproductive dalliances.
BR: And in terms of footwear?
RB: I began with a pair of tan goatskin babouches that shaded through a series of earth-toned brogues to burnt umber. Towards the end of my time on the pallet the brogues segued into a pair of slip-ons a mud-caked pair of which I made my final exit in.
Robert Bingham: Ousted 1, 2009; courtesy the artist
Robert Bingham: Ousted 2, 2009; courtesy the artist
BR: When did you become aware that the undermining of the work’s feasibility had been accomplished?
RB: The challenges facing those who posit no facades, when they shun productive semblances, and the hierarchies of emulative reflectivity collapse in on themselves, is of finding a form of reticulation upon which to ride out the categorical storm. The exponential accumulation characterised by such material encrustations marks a transitional and transverse movement of the ceding of the logic of ocular rapaciousness to plateaus of immobile validity. As with the repetitions in the Ousted triptychs, where the challenges of disclosure are strategically re-enacted, the compartmentalisation of compacted heel and extruded sole, the area most vulnerable to the densities of dramatic accreditation, stands triangularly opposed in Pallet to progression, requiring the urgent recalibration of the interface of compaction, extrusion and an historical-repressive one dimensionality. Coupled with the bed sores and muscle wastage this physical accretion compounded the process of depletion, a tarnished proscenium arch stretched across a cracked multani mitti mudpack, winding down the tetraplegic interface and insinuating itself in the inner working of a palleted artistic body politic.
BR: How far did your departure from the pallet represent the sorts of contradictions inherent in a work like Cognitive Dissonance?
Robert Bingham: Cognitive Dissonance, 2009; courtesy the artist
RB: The self submerged, aligned against itself, trying to make itself out between the cold wooden cross-hairs, defining itself on a disposable dispensation, the pallet’s ignobility echoing nature’s impoverished inimitability. Pallet and palleted no longer proximately horizontal, no longer cheek by jowl, in residues of insensate inconsequentiality, beating against the lattice’s grain. [pauses] My body, in the apotheosis of rogue hermeneutics, breaking faith with the void was returned to the void, in an unpalatable birth pang, coming full circle on the stroke of midnight, putting the squeeze on the docile palpitations of my dramatic infatuation.
BR: It must have been an exhilarating experience.
RB: [smiles] Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths… [assumes a more serious tone]. Having been in a state of heightened deprivation, of post-dramatic suspension, my senses were revitalised.
BR: And how do you regard such revitalisation?
RB: It is the embodiment of that which I have struggled against, to the mouth of which I have stepped up and will continue to step up, staring valiantly into its perilous jaws to utter my unflinching vacuity.
Robert Bingham: Renewed Expectations, 2009, installation; courtesy the artist
BR: It has been said that the union between consumption and extinction in Renewed Expectations infused Phew! with an elemental sense of hope?
RB: With Renewed Expectations, Ousted as stratagem was roundly rebuffed, opening the way for me to forge a sculptural link between the ephemeral liquidity of Neoliberal Fantasies and Pallet’s abrasive theatrical adversary. [pauses] Of course Consumer Sentiment was never far from the equation.
BR: Which beings me to my final question—and I think it’s a pertinent one—what happened to the pallet?
RB: The pallet went into a skip.
BR: And on that exculpatory note—Robert Bingham, thank you for joining me.
