This month I had the pleasure of talking with author Spencer Dew about his new collection of short stories entitled “Songs of Insurgency” which was released earlier this year by Vagabond Press. It expands over many issues about how post-9/11 mania has effected the common man. The stories move around to several parts of the country and to war torn areas as well. Please join me in discovering more about Spencer Dew and how this book came to be.
AD: On your journey to the University of Chicago Divinity School, I notice that you have spent some time abroad in India and Jerusalem. What was this time like for you, and how did your experiences there change your view of the world?
SD: I was very young when I lived in India. It was in many ways my first exposure to the world, and, certainly, when I came back to the states, I saw everything here in a new light. I have a great appreciation for the distances between things, for certain wet green days, for supermarkets shiny with absolute excess. And this, of course, is hardly answering your question at all. It’s been an immeasurable value, travel. To use an old saw, the strange becomes familiar and the familiar becomes strange, which, really, allows you to see and learn so much about being human.
AD: You are writing your dissertation on the pedagogical function of Kathy Acker's novels. She had a propensity to put her own take on classic novels and insert topics ranging from politics to sexual orientation to abortion to philosophy. Without revealing too much of your paper, could you tell me how you think her novels would elevate a teaching curriculum?
SD: Kathy Acker was a woman who took reading and writing very, very seriously. She was omnivorous, as a reader, and relentlessly experimental as a writer, and, yes, her books are also about reading, examples, even, of reading. I’m interested in how she saw her novels as teaching, specifically teaching her readers how to read, which, of course, was presented as a functional component in a larger, revolutionary struggle. This works in different ways, of course: while one text will be read in such a way as to reveal the otherwise covert patriarchal or capitalistic content in it, the ways its supporting the oppressive status quo, another text can be celebrated as the work of a “friend.” I find Acker’s ideas about the relationship one enters into with previous writers, with texts, and the utopian vision of “community” that emerges from these relationships, to be intriguing, really worth examining. As for your specific question, she’s certainly a writer that needs to be read, now more than ever.
AD: Last year we spoke around the time Norman Mailer died, and I remember you were reviewing an enormous book of his. We spoke of trains and the differences between riding the El and riding Amtrak. Do you find any inspiration for stories with all the time you spend on the El, and do you ever ride it just to watch the people?
SD: Certainly you see and hear things on public transit that feed into fiction and poetry, without a doubt. I don’t think I’ve just ridden the El in order to watch people, though.
AD: I know you hold a position at The Chicago Review. What do you do there and how did you get this job?
SD: I’m a member of the fiction staff, which mainly means I read stories from the slush pile. I knew one of the editors there from school. It’s a very good experience, mainly because I’ve learned so much from hearing how my colleagues
discuss stories. My academic training has been in religious studies mainly, and I haven’t taken so many literature classes per se, so, yes, it’s interesting and very useful to hear folks who are very good at analysis and critique, hear them at their
prime. It’s an impressive crowd, the Chicago Review folks, and friendly, which is nice.
AD: In many of your stories, I find that your main male characters keep a fractured distance from the other characters they appear with and they seem to be especially distant from the women. These men seem to be able to see the women for what they really are. Is this an intentional stance, the portrayal of the stark reality of feminine qualities and making the men attempt to be invisible?
SD: That’s a very good question. Many of my stories play with a certain tone, a kind of, as you say, distance on the part of the narrator or main character, who is almost always male. I don’t know if these guys can see the women in their lives with any sort of clarity, necessarily, but certainly in the book at least I’m interested in dislocation and folks who are alienated from each other, so there is that rationale behind the distance. There are lots of wounded folks in this book, folks in a sort of state of shock. Bad relationships and a kind of insular, bruised ways of existing are all, here, ways of talking about that “post 9/11” moment… At a reading the other night someone asked, specifically in reference to the character of Kim in “The Heart of it All,” how her paranoia (or maybe her self-obsession, her intoxication with her own stream-of-conscious thoughts) fit in with this larger theme, the 9/11 stuff, and this made me remember how many of the stories in this book were written or being designed or being polished up and remade in that period around and just after the second Bush election. I was in Chicago and in Denver, and I felt that when the pundits talked about the “terror vote” and how ordinary citizens were afraid, were voting out of that fear, that this was something I was seeing, that I knew people like that. It’s interesting, I think, because my experience with intellectuals around the time was dismissive of this or just didn’t understand it, but I remember being in bars and whatnot in Denver, at people’s homes, with the sick dog in the back yard, etc., and conversation would switch from sports or job-hatred to “politics,” and politics really meant this sense of impending attack, this sense of fear, and that horrible phrase “don’t switch horses mid-stream” got used too much. So, to go back to your question, I’ve tried to probe that psychology some. And some of this – “The Disaster Addict,” for instance – is even related to my own responses, right in the wake of the attacks. I would wake up in the middle of the night and flip on the radio, sure. We became, many of us, addicted to the news.
The following story is from Spencer Dew’s new book called “Songs of Insurgency”. It is called “Binge Drinking in Jihad Culture” and appeared in Otium in March of 2005 under the title “Six Views of Jerusalem”. I asked Spencer what inspired him to write this story and many of the other stories in this book and this is what he had to say:
"I'd been in Israel first in 1996, months after Rabin's assassination. I returned in 2002 specifically to see what life was like during the Second Intifada. This piece emerged from that. Artistically, I had some real concerns about the use of violence in literature, how violence in writing related to violence in the world, and on a larger level I wanted to know what life felt like there, under a sense of constant threat, by which I mean both for Palestinians and Israelis, though the threats, obviously, are different, of different sorts. This was in the wake of 9/11, of course, before all of that initial shock had faded, the new barricades and checkpoints, etc."
Binge Drinking in Jihad Culture
By Spencer Dew
1
Navigation is possible by franchise restaurant alone. At the sidewalk bar known for selling pork, the table of Americans orders three club sandwiches, two of ham and cheese, feeds bills into the internet jukebox, dated dance numbers. The game played involves prom themes. Someone scans the English language paper for movie times, flipping past the photos of what happened to the bus. “I feel a real jouissance for the sequel,” says the girl with the nearly linguistic loop and curve of the Ebola virus tattooed on her upper arm. They laugh the way they laugh in their own country, a self-contained chain.
2
The weather mirrors the jihad. On top of everything else, the city has been struck with a tree disease. Bark sloughs off in chunks. Past midnight, walking the still streets of the Russian compound, downhill from the throb of the clubs, you listen to it fall.
Kids creep through the fences of construction sites, establishing punk communes in the pits. Everybody wants to bum a cigarette; everyone has a trinket to sell. “It’s a good watch, no?” asks the blue-haired boy from Pasadena. He’s trying to save up, to surprise his girlfriend with a new piercing. She says she’s fifteen, which means she’s somewhere nearer to twelve, and speaks in a language learned from billboards along the Jersey coast.
Soldiers shoo off feral cats, lecture the gutter punks about the dangers of smoking. One woman, in fatigues, tries to seal the gap in the chain link, but gives up, cursing, sucking a cut finger. While above, on the crane mast, a blank flag flaps in the night wind.
Moonlight and metal clouds. You take a taxi to the British military cemetery, walk uphill from there, back to the dormitories, a slow stroll, listening to the couples that have come to the graveyard for privacy, to the basic menagerie of moans, waves of sound, those rooted in liquid, those rooted in ether, those rooted in flesh.
3
You attempt to memorize the more nuanced rules of soccer and the names of a dozen girls. Some people translate, some keep quiet. The Danish guy with hopes of commando work tells you all languages can be comprehended with a mind open to the play of inflection.
A constellation of sidewalk cafés, patio bars; everyone is always peeling oranges. After a rough time with the Parisian, the Spaniard, and the Brit who lives in Belgium, you put some effort into the plump thing from Oslo, studying the angle of her thigh in relation to your hand, or, when walking, the full Scandinavian circumference of her hips.
She seems happy you’re pretending to be a writer, amused with your pronunciation of the name Knut Hamsun, skeptical of your claim that there is no longer a professional porn industry, it’s all gone amateur, underground. You tell her that nothing fits worse, in verse, than cheap sentimentality, and, as she can only understand a third of your words, she finds you fairly charming — in her terms, sweet.
The bus driver was sweet, too, and the security man outside the grocery store. Certain celebrities share this status, and the cartoon hippos of her home country, always on canoe trips into dangerously inhabited lands.
In the elevator you tell her, “I can’t hug you without getting a hard on, but that doesn’t mean we should fuck.” She smiles and says, “You are a new vocabulary.”
4
Here is a stack of cow heads, from the freshly butchered. They are placed brow down, tongue out, draping.
And here is the man who hoses down the cobbles, his thumb directing the spray, his wrist shivering it back and forth. He curses the cats, spits at them. Their retreat is only temporary, backs arched, bony with thirst.
These are the old stone streets of Sunday School felt boards: Jerusalem, riddled with alleyways, thick with patriarchs, smelling of hot bread, fresh sweets of pistachios and goat cheese, syrupy, laid out on metal trays.
Here is graffiti, the square and the looped. Even the pictograph of the dripping penis has politics behind it. From the international papers, you know some of the mottos. Ten fingers on the trigger. The meaning is the use.
After a wrong turn, past the rack of True Cross splinters and the Pokemon 2000 posters, a black guard turns you away at the entrance to the Temple Mount, its palm trees in sight behind. His is a thankless job, yet he is the nicest man you have met thus far, even offers you a cigarette. “They sell very well,” the guard explains, working a kink out of his neck with his non-rifle hand. “All the kids like the Pokemon. Even teenagers, they like the Pikachu, they like the Squirtle.”
5
In a bombing, to generalize, what hits first is the suddenness, a register of event, even before the nearly silent, breaking-light-bulb sound, before the burn, before the numbing salve of shock.
After that, an awareness of others, of their shock in realizing the cliché, that one fraction of a second previous everything was entirely different. Because it’s less a cliché when trying to stand on shredded limbs, spitting shards of teeth, etc.
Next comes the naked human sound, not yet a wail but a staccato moan, an extension of breathing, breathing in the panicked absence of breath.
You get to the girl from Tennessee as she begins fingering her scalp. You keep her hands in her lap, tell her not to worry about the taste, it’s only her lips, a superficial injury. A trick learned from television: turning to technical jargon in times like these.
You stay with her by the curb, waiting for the medics to finish with those worse off, trying not to look at what they carry away, making sounds, on stretchers, or what they line by the wall, quiet, and cover with plastic bags.
The girl says she can see the finger of Jesus in all this, something about parted clouds, never mind that this is the desert, the sky clean as a razor. Her cell phone burps out part of a hymn. A text message scrolls some piece of Knoxville gospel.
Someone else comes out of the interior, two of them, staggering, supported by each other, both coated in plaster ash. The air is hot, full of charring.
6
Blintzes for breakfast, sometime before dawn. The only other customers are soldiers sharing an absurdly wide dish of ice creams, their rifles modified with large amounts of duct tape. School children’s construction paper well-wishes line the patio: Peace in the Middle East. Good luck on your war. The Norwegian has recently learned the word exhausted, and now she uses it too much, giggling over her sack of hard-bartered amulets and pirate cds. The café guard does baton flips with his metal-sensing wand, waiting for his shift to end.
Expansive in their emptiness, chilled, the streets hold an illusion of dew. One of the more fashionable, glitter-lined boutiques has their manikins arranged in gas masks and snakeskin skirts. Outside the surplus store, an automated knife unfolds its various tools. There is a sale on parachutes.
Back at the campus, morning emerges on sprinkler heads, spinning, a liquid patter. A military blood drive and a balloon sale jostle for space in the student commons. The Norwegian is still exhausted, her teeth chattering. In three languages she threatens to vomit. Later, she will excuse herself, moist and slightly green, during a late morning lecture on security, partition.
AD: You have a heavy reading schedule this year. Where are some of the places you will be touring to?
SD: I’ve done quite a few readings here in Chicago, and went down to Saint Louis, where the Post-Dispatch reviewed the book (quite nicely, I thought). I’ll be in Louisville in mid-May, as part of a larger trip, but I haven’t lined up any other readings for sure yet. I enjoy it, performing, and I very much write my pieces with the oral in mind, writing them out loud, to some extent, reciting them as I go, keyed to those issues of sound, etc. So, yes, I’d like to do more readings.
AD: What do you do when you aren't elbow deep in writing, teaching and more writing??
SD: I review for Rain Taxi, regularly, and I do some freelance writing for Chicago Artists’ News, plus, yes, I adjunct, and there’s this dissertation, and I contribute every few months to a publication called “Sightings,” which focuses on religion in the public sphere. I just published something there on Upton Sinclair (tied loosely to the movie based on his book Oil!), and I’m working on something about Voodoo, the role of racism and political history in its (very maligned) reception. It’s one of the most misunderstood and disrespected religions, and the reasons for that are worth talking about, from its entanglement in Haiti’s tumultuous history to issues of race hatred and race-based fear and, well, the whole Hollywood angle, the “black magic” label. If you read Zora Neale Hurston’s work, her anthropological work, on Voodoo (“Tell My Horse”), it’s fascinating how she, too, indulges in this “exotic” view, on the one hand treating Voodoo as a proud black tradition and on the other playing up another angle to it, the mysterious, dangerous nature. But, of course, it’s complicated, and the dynamic of power within the religion is such that practitioners have always feared aspects of the belief system as well. There’s a real confluence of factors there, as to why Voodoo is so maligned.
AD: Do you have any major projects slated for the remainder of 2008?
SD: Just more of the same. I’m finishing the dissertation and starting work on another book-length project (which will include my work on Norman Mailer, as well as others). Then, well, more of the same, more of the same.
Spencer Dew’s book “Songs of Insurgency” can be found Here
or at Target.
You can keep up with Spencer at his website www.spencerdew.com
“Binge Drinking in Jihad Culture” was reposted with the author’s permission.
Spencer Dew’s photograph is by Jeremy Biles.
“Songs of Insurgency” cover design by James Retherford
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