John Phillips
Sardines Press ($10)

by Richard Owens

British poet John Phillips's latest collection, Language Is, is evidence of the consanguinity his work shares with American poets, particularly Cid Corman and Lorine Niedecker. His tight, highly condensed verse calls attention to language as a thing always already removed from that which it points toward. Language, as a vehicle of transmission, only points back to itself as a means of transmission:

The act of using words would
make it seem there was
a particular thing I had to say.
It is not so. Words being more
the thing itself I want to see
sound how it means to be—
whatever another might hear
say themselves to for the same.

The poem for Phillips is a machine capable of examining the ambiguities within its own constituent parts. Just as the Language Poets vigorously interrogated the hidden structures of language through poetry, Phillips explores the luggage concealed in names and the act of naming. The nominal for Phillips does not point toward a thing but merely suggests a metonymical nearness. Names only point toward other names which can only ever suggest:

Lately
I notice each
word I say
leans to
meaning elsewise
beyond what
simply
it is to—is
said to—name.

The nominal carries us close to a thing, brings us within shouting distance of the thing, but cannot deliver us to the thing itself. That which is named brings us only to other names, just as Fenollosa indicated in his exploration of the poetic nature of the Chinese ideogram. Language is a matrix of metaphor and metonymy which often serves to confuse rather than clarify:

What help is there
for what you're after
when you're up with
what nothing
has been found for

It is this which Phillips most rigorously explores in these tightly wound poems—the elusive and inherently negative otherness concealed in every act of linguistic indication. And in using the short poem to explore the ambiguities and tensions woven deeply into the foundational structures of language, Phillips synthesizes Eastern and Western traditions. Like Corman, Phillips packages issues specific to continental philosophy in a rhetorical poetic form specific to East Asian literatures. In doing so, he reveals a transnational otherness which lies at the heart of both his own poetic project and the very structure of language:

The problem
appears to be
you cannot
confess
to being
who you are
without being
at the same time
another
and that
is the one
you speak of
in failing
to speak
of yourself.

The value of these poems lies primarily in their ability to delicately couch monumental philosophical issues in short verse. Rather than truncating these issues, as the short form he has selected might suggest, Phillips cunningly leads us toward and into these issues using a form employed more by American writers than British. Perhaps with time he may come to enjoy a readership in his native England comparable to the one he already has in the US.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2005/2006 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005/2006

Kevin Stein
University of Illinois Press ($16.95)

by Jean-Paul Pecqueur

In a world where life is transitory and contingent, loss is inevitable. This is one lesson we quickly learn in American Ghost Roses, Kevin Stein's new collection of poems. That the inevitability of loss need not lead to melancholy or to despair is another such lesson. Loss can, in fact, generate its own beauty. Stein calls this beauty "skewed"; "What I mean," he writes, "is I love skewed beauty," a love that has led him to craft an exceptional volume of poems.

The first thing to know about Stein's skewed beauty is that it is neither natural nor transparent. Stein pointedly calls attention to this fact in the volume's first poem, "Wishful Rhetoric." "Finis," the speaker begins, "I love the oh-so-postmodern opening." The italics, the roll of the long o, the irony itself—this is postmodernism at its finest, as in a celebration of textuality, of that which has been written.

In other words, Stein's is not a plain style. Arguably, the most remarkable quality in American Ghost Roses is the poems' overt craft. Notice the syntactic, sonic, and imagistic movements in the following stanza:

So Finis. There now, the daisies' clean faces
need never wrinkle, their eyes never shut,
and the plump clump swaying in May breeze
need never dismantle June's skeletal erector set.

Unlike some exercises in the higher styles, Stein's "wishful rhetoric" is not displayed to hide a lack of substantial content. Stein employs it for more immediate reasons, to discover and to demonstrate the uses to which beauty can be put.

In the poem's final stanza the speaker pauses—"Breathe in and forget / the out"—before deploying his last rhetorical gesture, a brief talismanic incantation: "I am the bank, the root, the fat honeycomb. / I am the aphid milking an everlasting tit." Having gathered all his poetic resources, the speaker now possesses the drive to complete his difficult task: "There now," the poem concludes; "I'll make the twenty calls from home, // each beginning, 'My father died last night.'"

The poems in American Ghost Roses seem intended to compensate for real, existential loss. And the losses Stein recounts in these poems are many. The volume begins with the immediate and personal loss of a father. After this we encounter a loss of humanity in poems about a boy who drank Drano, a girl who fell on a spike, and a friend's mother who was decorated with bruises. Finally, the tone of the whole is conditioned by the poet's lost youth refigured as the loss of an era.

Loss isn't the only subject matter Stein explores in this volume. On the contrary, Stein writes just as many poems to celebrate the things he loves, be these Bob Marley's toes or Sappho's fragments, cantaloupes or wheelbarrows. It remains uncertain whether Stein learned to see the beauty of a cantaloupe by recognizing the skewed beauty in the memory of a fight, or whether he learned to see the skewed beauty in a bruise by learning to recognize the beauty of a wheelbarrow. In either case, Kevin Stein clearly recognizes beauty in American Ghost Roses. For fans of beauty, this volume is sure to prove gratifying.

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Brian Turner
Alice James Books ($14.95)

by Joel Turnipseed

Several hundred books have now been published on the Iraq War—some quite good, e.g. Generation Kill, One Bullet Away, and a few others—but none have felt necessary until now. There's something in the lumbering of prose that cannot capture what poetry, done right, can make immanent with its insistent beat—as the power of the cadences soldiers sing cannot truly be understood apart from the accompanying beat of boots beneath them. With Brian Turner's Here, Bullet, we have the first war poetry since Yusef Komunyaaka's Dien Cai Dau that matters.

Turner's poems earn their attention by acknowledging, at the start, the nature of war songs, as in "The Hurt Locker":

Open the hurt locker
and see what there is of knives
and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn
how rough men come hunting for souls.

Turner is, of course, no ordinary soldier (and there are no ordinary soldiers—each is unique with his own degree of hopelessness, valor, malice, pride, and terror), but each poem of this collection acknowledges that, however they carry their packs, there's a jaunt in every warrior's step, a punch wound up in their fist, a coarseness that is its own weight.

To see from within this experience and bring that vision to us is difficult to say the least. Turner's "Dreams from the Malaria Pills" sequences go some way toward exploring the surreal possibilities—but he also acknowledges here, as in "Easel," that there's an element of impossibility in painting the life of those caught up in war:

There are no shadows to hold them down,
No slant and fall of shadow,
light's counterpoint, the dark processing
of thought. All burns in light here,
all rises in heat as colored tongues
lift in flame, brushstroke by brushstroke,
an erasure the sky washes out in blue.

Where Turner does succeed in making us see, he also succeeds in making us feel—in bringing the weight of war upon us. You can only wish that his words had come before he or any other Americans had raised their rifles in Iraq when you come upon the eponymous truth of his poem "Sadiq":

It is a condition of wisdom in the archer to be patient
because when the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more.
—Sa'di

It should make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you in a desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequences
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists, my friend,
it should break your heart to kill.

Then again, as Turner knows from learning "A Soldier's Arabic," this is a "language made of blood . . . To be spoken, it must be earned." Such an unsparing truth can only have come from a soldier willing to take in his experience and to remake himself with it. And he will have to learn again how to speak, as Turner has, from a new distance. How that gap is measured is its own song, as Turner describes in "Cole's Guitar":

Palm-mute the strings, Doc,
strum that song until I can see
the breath on a bus window, the faces
of strangers in the rain, my own hands
tracing the features of every one of them,
the way ghosts might visit the ones they love,
as I am now, listening to America,
touching the cold glass.

Turner's poems of war carry with them both lyrical desire and the inexplicable horror and surreality of the unmentionable—mentioned beautifully. Here, Bullet is, in this sense, a kind of obscenity hurled against us, full of love and intelligence and all the other things that aren't supposed to survive war. And yet, there's a anticipation even in this, as the soldier shares in the anticipation of his bullet, knowing that his world may be made or broken at any moment. That is the final victory, if it can be called that, of Turner's collection: it preserves the shock of this experience while maintaining its humanity, collapsing the headlines and battle plans to the brilliant felt life of the individual, "because Here, Bullet, here is where the world ends, every time."

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Kenneth Koch
Alfred A. Knopf ($40)

by Tim Keane

If Kenneth Koch had an artistic credo it was play hard at poetry. Play hard he did, producing 30-plus poetry books over 52 years. This body of work has been posthumously collected into a nearly 800-page tome that the publisher has made only a little less forbidding by use of a pop-art style cover portrait of young Koch done by his longtime friend and frequent collaborator, the painter Alex Katz.

After serving in the Pacific during World War II, Koch was transplanted from Cleveland to Columbia University and the downtown Manhattan art scene of the 1950s. He hung out with the expressionists at The Cedar Bar and summered in the Hamptons with Frank O'Hara and company. Over the years he collaborated with John Cage, John Ashbery, and many others in the world of avant-garde theater and art. Through several generations of one kind of academic formalism or another, Koch's poetry was consistently experimental. But he identified with a more sweeping national sensibility than did his fellow New York School poets. And Koch was culturally ambidextrous—he became an influential Columbia University literature professor who wrote top-selling guidebooks about teaching poetry in nursing homes and in primary schools. He was also an incisive, thinking poet who invented the genre of the urban pastoral.

Koch's comedic mission was not merely to trade on whimsy and everydayness in order to dumb poetry down. He was so remarkably self-assured about fulfillment, as much in life as in language play, that he could afford to be philosophical about his pleasures. He was an ethical hedonist. He strove for perceptual, experiential juxtapositions, as if to linger within a poem on a single object or one distinct emotion would create a falsifying isolation that is inherently unequal to the open fields of experience.

Often criticized or even dismissed by critics for being obscure or artsy, Koch's poetry is neither. He wrote poetry in the spirit of what it essentially is, the freest of all expressions. Through an expansive free-verse style that takes in traditional forms like ottava rima and heroic couplets, Koch's playfulness translates into multiform experiences on the page, almost always, as he writes in "Seasons on Earth," "ecstatically in the present tense." His poetry is play even in its most cerebral effects.

The influence of the French surrealists is everywhere in this collection, but it is surrealism written in Walt Whitman's register. In fact, Europe is a cultural force Koch's speakers both take in and leave behind. And Koch insists that the pleasure principle is responsible for poetry, not universities. He lampoons the careerism of the poetry biz and any poetry, "Written by men with their eyes on the myth / And the Missuses and the midterms" ("Fresh Air"). One of his most famous poems, "The Art of Poetry," is a parody of how-to-write-poetry manuals that at the same time arrives at the sublime so subtly that even tactful Horace might ruefully approve; it speaks of the "exigent poet" as

careful, wanting each poem to be a conclusion.
Of everything he senses, feels, and knows.
The exigent poet has his satisfactions, which are relatively special
But that is not the only kind of poet you can be. There is a pleasure in being Venus,
In sending love to everyone, in being Zeus,
In sending thunder to everyone, in being Apollo
And every day sending out light.

Constantly strolling in the outdoors, Koch's speakers pay attention to the outside in order to better see the inside, studying "Alaskan toucans" ("The Duplications") "the dogwoods of the Carolinas" ("Seasons on Earth"), "the McCarthy trial / hot sun on lunches" ("To Marina") and even "The man at the match factory, the mood of / The public, the sand covering the barn" ("The Boiling Water"). And, always, love and sex are on his mind, for "There is no substitute for or parallel to love, which gives to the body / What religion gives to the soul, and philosophy to the brain." ("The Art of Love").

Comic books and Italian operas were equally influential. So were Italy and France. The poem's frenzied travelogues read like extended metaphors for a blind American innocence, innocence here being a form of unquestioning love fortified by curiosity and attentiveness. The results are joyful, and an effortlessness that is not synonymous with lightness. Often tensions arise in Koch's poems from the incompatibility between over-heated enthusiasm and sober reason. But despite these tensions, maintaining a robust youthfulness matters more than any other prerogative, providing drama and substance in even the most satirical poems. In fact, read from almost any point, The Collected Poems unfolds like an autobiographical confession of American naivety, one that opens somewhat helplessly toward "fundamental questions...The excitement / And the illusion of living at the beginning of thought" ("In Africa").

Though the self-conscious puns, anagrams, riddles, and rhyming couplets sometimes eclipse the poetry itself, Koch is grounded by the bravura of that frank American language which Whitman invented. So he writes about inspiration not as the poem's source but as its constant quest. His Muses include that fictional Japanese pitcher of his massive poem "Ko, or A Season on Earth" (not included in this volume, as it will be part of a forthcoming companion book of Koch's Collected Long Poems). Ko's unmanageable, deadly fastball is really a metaphor for emotion itself. In other poems, Hollywood heroes and the English Romantics, Stendhal's The Life of Henry Brulard and the jazz of Ornette Coleman are described among countless other forces which provide an education in the poetry of life. And lovers create a beautiful counterpoint to the backbeat of other daily activities, especially in "Sleeping with Women," a poem so atavistic and rhythmic it must be the most propulsive American song-poem since "Howl."

Koch's poetry stayed fresh into his later years; throughout his celebrations, thought remains a form of feeling. The later poems in this Collected tend to be more spare in form but no less generous in feeling, the strongest of which are the very long series of odes, written in praise of subjects as various as marijuana, World War II, the Italian language, the orgasm ("restless, roving and not funny / in any way") and even psychoanalysis ("an ideal of conversation—entirely about me / But including almost everything else in the world").

Wisdom should always be rendered in such vibrant and comic colors, like when Koch boils Plato's philosophy down to, "There has to be something better. / Than what we see. / Otherwise, we'd see it." ("On Aesthetics"). Or in "To Marina" in which Aristotle's "Every detail is everything in its place" supports the cheeky conclusion that, "Literature is a cup / And we are the malted. The time is a glass."

What else is, poetry—or culture—but created spaces into which we pour our lives? We laugh reading Koch, because he's funny, but we also laugh to think and finally to re-think. It's all in that trinity of "wishes, lies and dreams," the phrase Koch used to describe poetry-writing in the title of his famous teaching book. The best evidence is vastly here, celebrating a life lived with one mad ambition, nicely summed up in "Ko, or A Season on Earth": to "actualize / In everyday life the poem's unreality."

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by Robert J. Nebel

Al Franken is a powerhouse. This prolific 54-year-old satirist never seems to tire. Author of some of the most well-known political books of humor, including Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and his latest, The Truth (with jokes), Franken seems to be a comedy factory that will run forever. Currently on the New York Times bestseller list, The Truth focuses more on policy issues, including the Iraq war, Social Security and gay marriage. Could this be the first sign of Franken's intentions to run for the U.S. Senate is his home state of Minnesota? He admits that he is thinking about it, but nothing is set in stone as of this writing.

Even though he strikes a more serious tone with The Truth (with jokes), Franken does not depart from the classic humor that made him such a success during his many years on the late-night comedy variety program Saturday Night Live, and that serves him well on his popular Air America radio show. Robert J. Nebel caught up with Franken in New York.

Robert J. Nebel: Do you think that your radio show and book can have an effect on the 2006 elections?

Al Franken: I don't know what will happen next year. The president and the Republican Party are in the crapper right now because of a million different things. It's things like corruption with Abramoff, Scanlon, Ralph Reed and the Iraq War. I think people know we were misled. If you mislead people you should do it effectively; they did a terrible job of it. They didn't send in enough troops to secure the country. The Iraqi Army disbanded and then a lot of looting took place. There was a lot of corrupt contracting.

RJN: You take Sean Hannity of FOX News' Hannity and Colmes to task in your book.

AF: He's one of the worst (laughs). Colmes does a good job sometimes. They have certain rules on that show that I learned since talking with Colmes; essentially they are not allowed to confront each other. Since one of those guys (Hannity) has no compunction at all about spreading the same lie over and over, and Colmes really has no way of confronting that or chooses not to, I consider that show a set-up. Colmes does the best he can, but it is a set-up. You have one guy who is a doctrinaire Republican who plays by no rules of truth and another guy who is a mild-mannered moderate who kind of plays by actual standards (laughs). You have an uneven playing field there.

I stopped calling Colmes the milquetoast host—he got a little bit angry at my characterization of him in the new book. Hannity said to me a couple of times, "What did you say about me in this book?"

RJN: Ann Coulter and many other pundits, excluding Hannity, do not make it into the new book—you are talking more about the issues. It sounds like you are getting serious about a U.S. Senate run.

AF: I'm considering it. The book, like the previous one, is about low-hanging fruit—O'Reilly, Coulter and stuff that was easy to attack. The book says that there isn't a mainstream media, but a right-wing media. Hannity made it in the new book because of his litany of smears on John Kerry that I went through and analyzed. The guy will lie and lie every day and say the same thing. Colmes said, "If I corrected him, it would get boring." And I said, "So? That would stop it."

The truth is decided by who has the most power.

RJN: Former Education Secretary Bill Bennett is another one of the targets in The Truth.

AF: The problem I have with Bill is that he has not been truthful, like the thing with Joycelyn Elders. He said that she suggested legalizing drugs. She never said such a thing. She was asked at a National Press Club event if legalizing drugs would lower crime. Elders said that it would be interesting if this idea were to be studied. Ralph Reed also used to say that Clinton had a surgeon general that advocated legalizing drugs. He flat-out lied.

RJN: Dick Cheney said that those who criticize the Iraq War efforts are undermining the efforts.

AF: It's ridiculous. They are the ones changing history. He said that there is no doubt they had reconstituted their nuclear program. By the way, they didn't. Proof is in the pudding and they are wrong about everything.

RJN: Rep. Jean Schmidt complained about Rep. John Murtha's comments.

AF: Yeah, and Murtha is one of the most respected members in the House. Jean Schmidt's first comments when she joined the House were that she was going to take the high road. She made a lofty speech about that. Then she calls Jack Murtha a coward. She's an idiot.

RJN: Were you involved in the "Earth to America Special" earlier this year?

AF: I got cut: I did some anti-Bush stuff. I did a thing about global warming. A lot of other comics just did their act. I said, "What's this about?" I did a thing about Bush finally admitting that we went to war over energy—but, it wasn't for oil, it was for solar. I wrote that Iraq has 360 sunny days a year and the other five are partly sunny. He's excited about this new region called the "Sunny Triangle."

RJN: Who are the other stars in the Democratic Party you see rising?

AF: New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, Hillary Clinton, Henry Waxman, Byron Dorgan, Jane Schakowsky. I like Hillary a lot. The last time we had a Clinton running the country we were doing well.

RJN: You get along with Gary Bauer and G. Gordon Liddy on the Right. Is there anybody on the Left who you do not get along with?

AF: I do, but I won't say who they are.

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by Mary Kite

I'm in Los Angeles riding around downtown with poet Lewis MacAdams, who is also chairman and founder of Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR). We pass by numerous buildings, barbed-wired hemmed chain-linked fences, narrow sidewalks outlined by exposed wooden telephone poles and a car that has recently caught on fire. I spot the outline of a palm tree but no river. The famous Los Angeles River is hidden somewhere underneath a heavily engineered concrete trench. As MacAdams writes in his book, The River: Books One, Two & Three (Blue Press, $15):

The river
is a rigorous mistress,
but when you tickle her
with your deeds, you can hear laughter
from beneath her concrete corset.

In the car, I sit quietly and wonder to myself why Los Angeles has so few parks compared to other major cities in the U.S. Why didn't Los Angeles embrace the ideas of Frederick Law Olmsted, who figured so prominently in creating New York City's Central Park? Fortunately, L.A. is becoming a little more self-conscious in providing green space. Through MacAdam's efforts with FoLAR and other civic groups, California recently halted the building of an industrial park by purchasing 72 acres of land—34 acres between Chinatown and the L.A. River and a big chunk of the Taylor railroad yard about a mile upstream. These acres will supply much needed parkland and hopefully allow the Los Angeles River a chance to orchestrate its own resuscitation. Finally, I break my silence and ask Lewis MacAdams a question.

Mary Kite: What do you think about the role of poet as activist? How does poetry bring someone into action within the community?

Lewis MacAdams: I've never really understood the relationship between poetry and activism. You can read all the poems against the war in Iraq. What I do is not against stuff. It's for stuff. There's a vision of a restored L.A. River and what it would mean to the city. That vision is what I've been acting out over the last twenty years. It's an evolving principle that has become a central part of my life—just as poetry is. The role of poetry is to articulate the vision.

As a poet, poetry allows me a certain kind of freedom, but it's not as if I write poetry and people rally around them to create parks. I support the bond issues. As a matter of fact, for many years I never wrote poems about the river at all—I wrote op-ed page articles, letters to the editor, screenplays and newsletters. All of these writings were inspired by the L.A. River but I wasn't writing poems about it. Then about six years ago, I was re-reading Paterson by Williams Carlos Williams, and it gave me permission to work on The River.

Poetry drives everything that I do and allows me to think in a free way.
My poetry doesn't intend to be political.
It's personal.
I don't use poetry.
I let poetry use me.
It's just a better arrangement.

MK: How does poetry provide you with the ability to recognize the extraordinary within ordinary situations?

LM: Poets can see what's not there. The role of language in public life is something I take very seriously. For better or worse, I'm a symbol of this particular thing. As a token of identity, there's a responsibility to being optimistic, positive, forward thinking, cheerful and forceful. Sometimes I call myself "Riverboy"—a character who is always merry and bright. I don't always feel like that necessarily. It's only one aspect of a personal quality. People want to be inspired. They don't expect it's going to happen very often. When they are, they love it!

MK: When you write, do you ever feel as if someone is watching you—your poetic forebears?

LM: I don't think so, but I'm definitely affected by other poets' writings. I wouldn't be the writer/poet that I am if I hadn't read millions of poems or gone to thousands of poetry readings. I'll find myself saying a line of Ted Berrigan's. I know I'm not the only one—Ted is addictive. No poet has affected me more than Frank O'Hara, but O'Hara had little to do with political issues. Obviously, there isn't any one way for someone to be a poet. And L.A. has affected my poetry in the sense that it has affected my life. There's nothing that I can identify as being a particular L.A. sound or aesthetic.

MK: What's the scene in L.A.?

LM: There are millions of scenes here. Beyond Baroque is one of the best known outside of L.A. I hang out a lot of the time with this young guy called Mike the Poet and his partner, Phil Harmonic. There are worlds within worlds of poetry here; Beyond Baroque is central but there's more happening. I wrote screenplays, directed, wrote and produced documentaries. I was knockin' on that door for seven or eight years. I wasn't interested in it ultimately because I didn't dig being told what to write. Wealthy screenwriters are, to me, mental slaves. I couldn't aspire to that. I'm a poet. My heroes are poets.

MK: Screenwriting is "made to order" writing?

LM: For me it sure is. There are people who enjoy that sort of thing. You can make a living doing that and I was able to sell my work, but it ultimately felt belittling.

MK: You mentioned that you had made documentaries. Were they about poets?

LM: John Dorr and I produced and directed twenty-six of the Lannan Literary Series' one hour shows about great poets from around the world. I also found that journalism was a way to provide for myself while I wrote movie scripts. I'm still doing a lot of journalism, yet also trying to be true to being a poet. In the earlier days with the Friends of the Los Angeles River, I had to spend a great deal of time going to meetings. Now I focus more on what I love. In challenging myself for twenty years I've developed ways to avoid burn out.

MK: Sustainability within change is not an easy trick to perform nowadays.

LM: Yeah, I gave the commencement address at Cal-Poly Pomona last weekend and that's exactly what I was talking about. Work for me is very much like taking Bodhisattva vows. In terms of being a poet, it's just following the news. One of the things Ted Berrigan excelled at was the concept of using poetic form. He analyzed and thoroughly researched poetic form.

MK: Poetic forms are important to you?

LM: Yes, form is important! Frank O'Hara said, "You want your pants to fit so that people want to go to bed with you." For poets to understand poetic form in a stylish fashion is nothing more than common sense. I've never trained myself in the ways that somebody like Anne Waldman has, however, we're both theatrical. The written page is my stage. That's my aesthetic position. Jumping back to the question about poetry and activism, it's more about the vision that poetry supplies. The rest is just work. Poetry offers me a way of being positive and encouraging. I'm not a scold and have calmed down since my twenties.

I'm pretty blessed as far as Friends of the Los Angeles River goes. I've had some trouble, but not much. Most people initially dismissed it as absurd. Then, when it actually happened, people began to see how cool it was. It's amazing how many people have said nice things to me. However, I did have some rough times in making it come together. I experienced a great deal of anger.

MK: Anger can be a great motivator.

LM: I agree. Ed Sanders said that anger puts you in touch with the earth.

MK: That reminds me: what were you thinking about when you ate dirt?

LM: I wanted to be a vulture and transmute something that was dead into something that was alive.

MK: Were you really eating dirt?

LM: Yeah! I was out there in those days. I was just about to move from L.A. to Bolinas and had mutated into a desperate character. Have you seen the cover of the book, Africa and the Marriage of Walt Whitman and Marilyn Monroe? Well, there's a photo of me in there of doing a performance. I'm no longer like that, most fortunately.

MK: Were there many people there to witness this?

LM: You mean the dirt thing? Yes. There were quite a few. It was a pretty big event. In downtown, next to the grocery store, there was a vacant lot. Next to that, there was an Italian seafood restaurant that the owner burned down with himself and his wife in it. The structure stayed vacant for a long time. Everybody called it burnt park. We decided to do a ceremony called birth park. In order to get from burnt park to birth park, I had to eat the poison.

MK: What people often overlook with poetry performance and readings is that the audience has a definite effect over how and what is being said.

LM: One time I forgot to turn off my cell phone during a performance, and my ex called while I was behind the microphone. So, I just included it. She wanted to know what we needed to bring over to our friend's house. I just carried on a regular conversation with her while onstage. People were stunned. It was as if I had done it on purpose. The situation opened people up! I want my poetry to be exciting and surprising. I want people to gain true insights into whatever is being offered to them. I want to get people off. I don't think you can teach people to be good poets. You have to learn on your own. It's an incredibly rigorous lifetime act with complete self sacrifice. It often leads to madness, poverty and suicide.

MK: Do you often feel mad and suicidal?

LM: Yeah, I guess so.

MK: I always thought that taking a bullet for someone was such a gracious notion when I was young and in love. Poetry sometimes feels that way. Ouch, I'm hit!

LM: Many of the articulate inklings I have about poetry are based on Frank O'Hara's essays. I barely have ideas about poetry, let alone lofty ones. Gregory Corso once said to me, "Lewis, I know everything there is to know. I said, "How's that Gregory?" He said, "Because there's not that much to know!"

MK: Great to confirm there's so little to understand in life.

LM: I've never been around people who were as emotionally engaged as poets. Having seen what poets have to do to survive . . . it's so hard.

I spot you coming at me as bright as a million gold tulips
wrapped in your tattooed arms.
Hopelessness is good.
Homelessness is better.
Helplessness is best of all, but
I'm not some Ken-L-Ration
pissing in the doorway,
with my brains in a
Styrofoam cup.
I'm a poet, and when we suffer,
we sing.

—Lewis MacAdams, The River: Books One, Two & Three

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2005/2006 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005/2006

by Astrid Jaida

Kane Faucher was born in Ottawa in 1977. The author of two novels, Urdoxa (2004) and Codex Obscura (2005), which contains an introduction by Raymond Federman), he writes for both academic and literary markets. He is currently in the PhD program at the University of Western Ontario's Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism.

Astrid Jaida: One element of your prose that struck me was its polemical tone. Could you say a few words about why you chose polemical prose as an expressive vehicle in your last two tomes?

Kane X. Faucher: For me, literatures of excess must produce cancerous multiplicities, and I found that reviving the notion of polemic as a literary concept was keeping in line with some of my most treasured writers: Francois Rabelais, Louis-Ferdinand Celine (my biggest influence, especially his final trilogy), H. L. Mencken, and more contemporaneously, Hunter S. Thompson and P. J. O' Rourke. The benefit of polemical writing, and not in the archaic scholastic sense of the term (to which it owes its roots), is the ability to place in the mouth of a character what I call a combinatory streaming; that is, I combine vitriolic terms from a varied lexicon: 17th century nautical slang, Victorian rebuffs, 1920s flapperspeak, contemporary political punditry, and good ol' 20th century expletives. These I shuffle together with a dash of various pop culture references, a flurry of neologisms, and an unapologetic usage of heavy theory terminology. This produces a kind of mosaic effect, or glyptolaliac mŽlange. I started the Urdoxa series with a more plot-based narrative, and it wasn't until penning Codex Obscura that I came into my stride and style, forsaking plot in favor of disjointed rants and elliptical statements knitted together in a weave of character-based diegesis—and occasionally violating that diegesis with intentional inconsistencies and contradictions. Really, Urdoxa and Codex Obscura are character studies of one impossible figure named Jonkil Calembour, who—like a Deleuzian assemblage—is never one, but many, in a state of perpetual becomings. One of his firm polemical principles is that of Ekel, or, the poetic will to vomit. Polemic is a lot like that—vomiting, that is—since it is the last form of viable resistance left to us when the other two forms constantly run aground (either academic critique which no one in power reads in our climate of hostile anti-intellectualism, or physical resistance in the form of storming barricades, which only justifies bigger police budgets and the dialectic between State and small-s subject). Polemicizing is a purging, and one can do it literarily.

AJ: The format of the books seems to conform to a fictional appropriation of critical academic texts. Your use of endnotes and laudatory—or bloated—introductions by fictional appraisers of the main character's life and works appears to poke humor at that market niche of reprintings of famous scribes and thinkers preceded by academic encomiums. How does this fit into your own textual matrix?

KF: I pulled that trick from Jorge Luis Borges and his (or his characters') self-effacing footnotes. Blurring the line between fiction and life, fiction and theory, would have to be one of my main focuses in producing books like Urdoxa. I find it patently ridiculous when academicians attempt to reduce a writer's life to the simple metrics of a chronology, not to mention that grievous assault when, posthumously, writings are pigeonholed into an illusory strata of unity, forcibly tied like a caboose to the tradition in order to grant validity to that writer. To me, an introduction of that stripe is a rhetorical attempt to bargain with the reader, to demonstrate relevance in capsule form as to why we should honor dead writer so-and-so. Imagine trying to make Artaud tidy or to give Nietzsche a bowtie—such attempts at "damage control" by "established critics" of a dead writer seem to detract from the writer's oeuvre. My satirical counterpunch was to illustrate the inherent and imminent failure of enshrining the dead and tidying up the empirical messiness of their lives. The main character of both of my books, Jonkil Calembour (whose last name means "nonsense"), is impossible to define by a mere cluster of criticisms and persona-determinations. Moreover, he is painfully aware of his future posthumous fame (as was Celine), and so endeavors to make it as difficult as possible for future scholars to assess the truth behind his works, life events, etc. Calembour goes out of his way to muddy up the clues and create a barrel of red herrings—one such instance is his tearing up of all his unpublished manuscripts, inserting them at random into his vast library, only for future assessors to question whether there was a poignant reason or not for his including manuscript page 455 in page 128 of Hegel's Logic. In sum, Calembour is a polymath who "harlequinizes" the academic industry, forever violating that dictate of the honest narrator. What I am hoping to achieve is that blurred line that causes one to question whether or not Calembour really exists, or at the very least, exists as a type.

AJ: In the first book, Urdoxa, you have Calembour building and destroying empires, owing to his rather arrogant claim that he has no worthy adversary in this world. Does this seem rather nihilistic or does it have a more Nietzschean nuance to it?

KF: For Calembour, arrogance is a symptom of genius. Calembour fancies himself an overman, of sorts, since he has affirmed his return as a type in the eternal return. The long bits on the metaphysics of pop culture came from an old side project of mine, and I must say that many of my incomplete and aborted theoretical projects have found their likely vessel in Calembour. Writing "calembourese" grants me a freedom I do not have in academic contexts; namely, to juggle salient ideas on the page without fear that it would jeopardize that other world of mine, the struggle toward professorship. It's a convenient ruse to hide ideas behind fiction, so much so that one could label a great deal of science fiction in the 1950s and '60s a thinly veiled political science fiction. Calembour's motivation in erecting and dissolving empires—be it the dance club empire, the Voynich manuscript translation fiasco, the Codex Obscura snafu, the gynecological art surgeon blitz in Berlin, and so on, was my way of exceeding the general tendency to reduce an individual to a handful of manageable defining facets. If Calembour can succeed at all these things, then he is definitely a creature of constant becoming, in league with the will to power in the affirmative sense, even if he seems stuck in that active nihilist stage of destruction. Calembour is a self-professed cultural physician, so the texts themselves are studded with constant rabid social critique, even on the notion of terrorism. Controversy doesn't touch a man who is already a pariah, dying of emphysema in a rundown shack, hounded by college newspapers and creditors.

AJ: Your second book, Codex Obscura, is prefaced by Raymond Federman. I would have thought that so much content devoted to one of Calembour's apparently favorite subject, Nazism, would have caused a stir.

KF: I couldn't see why. Calembour does quite loosely and reflexively make links between the current U.S. administration and the Roman empire in its decline, or to make hasty linkages to Nazi Germany...but those who understand Calembour's tone instinctively know when not to take him seriously. I think it goes without saying that Calembour never makes reference to Nazism as something positive, and usually reserves those references to his long streaming polemic. An "Archie comic Nazi republic of shame and failure governed by President Babel-Goebbelstein," to quote Calembour, does not wax dismissively on the Holocaust whatsoever . . . Even he has dignified limits. As for Federman furnishing that introduction, I was absolutely floored. That a giant of laughterature and surfictionalist ecriture would even deign to grant this was nothing short of miraculous. However, he bears his greatness well, with a kind of friendly modesty that makes him very approachable. His care for the small press and emergent writers operating in the experimental milieu demonstrates further that he is in a class all his own, deserving of more honors than we currently have at our disposal.

AJ: Do you think your books are a bit hard to follow without first being well-immersed in the particulars of philosophy, literary theory, and the like?

KF: Perhaps. I have a somewhat unapologetic relationship to readership. That is, I see no reason to pander and condescend when it is just easier to assume my audience has much more elasticity than a homogeneous conception would grant it. If I have an audience at all, that is. By weaving in various pop culture and "low brow" references, I blur the lines, and hopefully don't come off as drawling jargon and skeuomorphs in tow like some browbeaten collegiate at the altar of research experiencing something like pleasure.

AJ: What do you mean by skeuomorphs?

KF: I seem to be violating a tenuous principle of mine in even discussing my work, its metrics, its methods, and so forth. As Foucault might say, I am periodizing myself (which is impossible), and so therefore I am finished. But what I mean here is this: I would be aghast and dumbspoken to actually grant myself some bloated label in the history of literature. Let's face it: as producers of the virtual and the new, the tendency is that we like to tie ourselves to the caboose of the canon at the same time as distance ourselves as something radically different. The conflict "resolves" itself by the construction of an appellation that we can brandish for easy, mnemonic reference among literati aesthetes. Terms like "New Poetics" or "Neo-Victorian Prose" or "Post-Beat Poetry" have a false ring to them in my ears, a jangle that suggests to my rather cynical self little more than posture and the re-creation of prior movements that cannot truly be called "dead" (since we still speak of and study them). There is a hint of largesse—okay, a heaping dose—in aligning oneself with a New York movement that says "art is dead," or a recrudescent hokiness and futility in signing up with neoists planning art strikes that only reify some false religious character to the production of art. One of the major problems in art, if I may make a broad swipe, is the tendency to compensate for lack of creativity or the malaise of "everything's been done before" by trotting out a series of new prefixes to modify the existing lump-categories of artistic movements. This process of skeuomorphization is like a rash on the perennial fruits of artistic labor, and we ought to have done with it. The tight emotional encasement of an artistic production that is insecure about its own identity too often becomes the source of violence as a response—I find neo-anything a form of that violence.

AJ: And, yet, you resort to the creation of several neologisms, about a thousand or so in each of your books.

KF: Indeed I do, although they are mostly portmanteaus. There are two reasons for this: first—and the most obvious reason—is that some terms are limited in their capacity to denote a particular idea or object since it seems that often enough (for me) linguistic referentiality fails to capture what I seek to express. Second, I am poking fun at Theory's tendency to manically overproduce new terms, so much so that I have heard in the select corridors of academe that one may be judged on the profusion of new theoretical neologisms one introduces to the discourse. Neologisms in that vein seem to embrace many functions: as a drug for theory-mad producers, as a private encoded language for those who desire to belong, and as an exclusionary practice to somehow fortify the theory-environs against critical outsiders looking to pick a fight. I prefer the responsible play of language rather than the literary or academic cockfights that try to determine who can produce the most neologisms.

AJ: Okay, I have to ask: why the big books?

KF: I just have that lust for the big book. In that category I place Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Gass's The Tunnel, Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, Joyce's Ulysses, and Cervantes's Don Quixote. I like the feel of the dauntingly overpowering text, the impossible nature of it being read, the engulfing by prose. I won't arrogantly claim myself in the ranks of those just mentioned, but it is something I aspire to, almost as a reaction to the economic realities of production costs and shorter attention spans. Why generalize, though? A big book is a brick, and a brick keeps one's shelves from flying away, I suppose. I have to be honest: not many people like my books. They are large, cumbersome, and studded with dense verbiage—and even the intentional character of it as a form of satire does not win many readers. Others are offended by what they deem a radical liberal punditry, while others take offense to the flippant remarks on Christianity. The polarized nature of readership is fine, just so long as some substantial emotional response is elicited. A tired cliché, but I don't write to be popular, I write what I feel and think I ought to write.

AJ: Many of your recent pieces were published on the Internet rather than in traditional hard text. Do you find the market more appealing? Dangerous? Convenient? Dynamic?

KF: Maybe I'm lazy and poor. It's easier to send a submission over the dosh and lumber-sparing Internet than through conventional means. Sure, this means that my work will not be in the next Atlantic Monthly—not that I think it would appear there anyhow. I think web writing does present new and dynamic possibilities, and several cavalier and brazen webzines have emerged with daring mandates, unfettered by the production costs of producing paper journals. There is much more freedom and selection, but with that freedom comes, sadly, more dross. And then there are those webzines that are possessed by their own flummery to the point that they act as yardbullies of what they deem to be "good writing." It is harder to attract the interests of big publishers with a long grocery list of webzines on one's publication vitae, but that does not matter much to me. The community aspect of sharing and reading is what ought to take pole position in writing. I would like to say much more, especially about the emergence of blogging, but nothing I have to say on the matter would be altogether novel. The Internet is a big white space of potentiality that has quickly succumbed to being compartmentalized and hyper-corporatized by opportunist digicrats.

AJ: What is next in the Urdoxa "Decalogue"?

KF: Perhaps the book, Fort & Da, will be next, or Ratio Fragnoscendi. I will continue this ten book-long character study right up until the end when, in Beckett flourish, I write "Jonkil Dies." I have enough material to fill twenty large volumes, so I cannot say if I'll stop at ten. Fort & Da will trace Calembour's brief stint as the horrific art surgeon, but I can't say more than that. Right now I am working on the unwritten works of Nietzsche, the trilogy of transvaluation that his illness prevented him from completing. In that vein, I am postulating from his theoretical trajectory, absorbing his stylistic nuance, and taking a bold run at picking up where he left off—albeit as though he had popped into our contemporary world. My next literary plateau will be more of a return to the first novels I wrote, or at least to the spirit—and viscera—of those days insofar as I wish to construct a work that leaves and indelible mark—the experience of writing that leaves me bearing a scar, something perhaps personally psychologically damaging rather than something so surface as reputation-as-writer. I think in the last five years I've been carrying the narrative at arm's length, sinking into characters like so many masks when the masks ought to be wearing and driving me.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2005/2006 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005/2006

by Allan Vorda

There has always been an interest in society's "oldest profession," yet despite our fascination with prostitution, for most people it's a life only visible from the periphery. Tracy Quan offers an inside look at this mysterious world in her Nancy Chan novels: Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and Diary of a Married Call Girl. The author spent at least fifteen years as a call girl in New York, but completely transforms her experience on the page: readers can't figure out what is real and what is fiction.

Quan was raised in Canada but ran away from her mother during a trip through Europe. At fourteen, while living in London with a boyfriend, she decided to become a prostitute and turned her first trick—an American salesman—in a West End hotel known for its bar scene. Eventually, she moved back to New York where she connected with a group of Upper East Side madams and their wealthy clientele.

Readers in search of titillation might find more of this on the book covers than between the pages. There's definitely a lot of sex, but the main ingredient in Quan's novels is humor. Nancy Chan's daily life is a roller coaster of emotional events and challenges: trying to satisfy a variety of "johns" on a tight schedule; trying to handle two neurotic relationships with her best friends, Allison and Jasmine; weighing the merits of participating in a hooker's movement; meeting with Wendy, her psychotherapist; and juggling her career during her engagement (and subsequent marriage) to an investment banker.

With her novels finding a devoted readership, it appears Quan's second career as a writer will be just as rewarding as her first.

Allan Vorda: For those who don't know anything about you, perhaps you can give a brief history of your background. What is your ethnicity, where did you grow up, and what was your childhood like?

Tracy Quan: As for ethnicity, I feel connected to Derek Walcott's Shabine: "Either I'm nobody or I'm a nation." I am a product of Trinidad, but not born there. It seems almost pretentious for a middle-class call girl who can pass for Chinese to identify with Walcott's mulatto sailor, but this is where I am right now, on the question of ethnic identity.

I see myself as post-ethnic—my family is so multi-ethnic, there is nothing to be but post-ethnic. To some extent, my mother could be described as Chinese, but really my parents are just Trinidadians, and this doesn't indicate ethnicity. Whatever one has guessed from my books is slightly wrong—my mother isn't Indian—and I'm not sure it's even necessary for me to have an ethnicity. Like Nancy Chan, I look Chinese because I have some Chinese ancestors, and I have passed for Chinese in a country (the U.S.) where everybody wants to categorize you ethnically. But here is my issue with this question and with American culture in general: my identity has nothing to do with ethnicity it's regional.

I still see myself as a small-town chick romancing the big city. My parents moved to Canada when I was three—they're Caribbean and I think they felt more comfortable in Canada than in the U.S. They spent some time here, my mother went to college in Massachusetts, but they never felt able to put down roots in the U.S.

I grew up in Ottawa, the unnamed "quiet city" in the Nancy Chan novels. I wanted to describe it without naming it because there are preconceptions about Ottawa, just as there are about prostitutes. However, a Canadian war reporter recently told me that Ottawa produces people with tremendous ambition—he's from Toronto where they tend to deride Ottawa, so he wasn't just shilling for Ottawa reflexively. His theory: it's the center of Canadian reality; no matter how small it is, you have a sense of owning something quite large and you can develop ambitions that are out of proportion to "reality." My theory: There's nothing to do there but think. And think. About what you are going to do when you get out of Ottawa. And so you have this driving ambition to create your own reality.

I grew up in the centre of town—a safe, short bus ride away from Parliament. My friends from the Ottawa 'burbs don't share this view but I feel very lucky to have spent my childhood years there. I was surrounded by the values of bilingualism—I received my first kiss, on the cheek, from a French-Canadian boy of eight (I was seven). He was amazingly chaste and he lived next door. There was a strong awareness of human rights. Homophobia was taboo. Everybody I knew was politically aware, and many were politically committed. It was provincial and international at the same time.

It could be very frustrating growing up in this backwater where everything seemed to shut down at 10:00 p.m. Our parents felt safe raising kids in such a small, easy city but you could still see a Shaw play or Marcel Marceau at the National Arts Centre, which happens to be located right across from Byward Market. The Market was Ottawa's red-light district when I was a kid and, as far as I know, still is. It's conveniently located—right near Parliament Hill. At some point, in the '80s, wicked yuppies tried to eliminate streetwalkers and they didn't really succeed. As kids, we all knew that something racy went down in the Market, and we also knew that our parents thought it was a normal fact of life.

AV: You became a prostitute, or sex worker as you prefer to be called, at the age of fourteen. Your protagonist, Nancy Chan, says she made her decision at the age of ten. When and how did you arrive at this decision? What do you recall from your experiences in London when you first started turning tricks?

TQ: In Diary of a Married Call Girl, I delved into those London years a lot more. Nancy has an experience that closely mirrors my own: Trying to make it as a prostitute, not being taken seriously, trying to warn the agency about the police. The downfall of a more experienced person helps her to come into her own, her growth as a prostitute is a bittersweet thing.

I was a runaway, living with my boyfriend, very eager to have some financial independence. I had always daydreamed about being a prostitute, and London is a city where you can certainly explore that. There are people from all over the world buying and selling sex. It's invigorating.

I found out from the internet that one of the nightclubs where I hustled champagne is still in business, operating with a more cleaned-up identity—not as a hostess club but as a normal cocktail lounge. That freaked me out! I recently went back to London for a book launch, and I wandered around Soho one night just to see what was going on. There you have the sex trade sharing the street with restaurants and grocery shops and other businesses. I saw a girl on Wardour Street standing in a doorway brushing her hair, wearing something black and sexy. She was talking into a speaker system, perhaps to the club manager. I had this urge to go up to her and say, "I used to be a part of all this!"; I didn't, of course. I was wearing jeans and black sneakers and probably looked like a total tourist—but what else do you wear when you want to walk around and take in the city? It was a strange feeling. I almost felt sad to be cut off from whatever she was experiencing.

In London, I mostly worked in Mayfair and other parts of town. I never actually worked in the Soho clubs, but I did apply for jobs there when I was trying to break into prostitution. And I did one shift at a Soho sex shop, where I was really not good enough at pushing the product. So I feel a certain connection to the area. And that neighborhood gives you an immediate sense of a pure, distilled, undisguised sex trade.

AV: When you arrived in New York, how did you become associated with the escort agencies that provided the inspiration for your work?

TQ: I'm glad you asked this. Yes, I worked for escort agencies and I worked for madams, but I invented Liane, Jeannie's Dream Dates, and all the characters who appear in the Nancy Chan novels. (Needless to say, I also invented Nancy.) While my characters are sociologically accurate, they are creatures of my imagination.

I have friends who feel they can recognize Liane, but that's why fiction exists: we can get lost in it and lose our own sense of what's "real"—back to that question, perhaps, of people from small but significant cities thinking they can re-invent reality.

Liane's enterprise may resemble an agency, but a person like Liane, a private madam in New York, wouldn't call her business an agency. She might not call it anything at all, out of some desire to remain vague and unknowable. So that's one of the first differences. You learn to stop calling things a name, so explicitly. And you learn to conduct your business in a more nuanced way.

Another big difference is that we didn't ask for the money upfront. It's humanizing for everybody concerned—customer, prostitute, madam—to know that there's some trust and self-respect; the madam who "owns" these customers will pay you from her own pocket if something goes wrong. That's how I learned to appreciate the meaning of ownership. It's a two-way street. Escort services cannot afford to make those guarantees. They deal with strangers and you must share the risk with the agency.

AV: Your first novel portrays a hectic lifestyle of exercising, shopping, meeting your clients, conversing with your fellow workers, and meeting friends for drinks. Describe a typical day as a prostitute in New York.

TQ: In the Nancy Chan novels, I want to describe a prostitute's "typical" day without being too linear. I hope I've succeeded. My days were not always filled with adventure—on a good day, your customers are predictable, they show up on time and you can change out of your black femme-fatale stockings into your schoolgirl outfit without being forced to rush any of your clients. Adventurous days might also be catastrophic!

AV: Give an example of your best and worst experience with a john.

TQ: This may sound like a Pollyanna position, but I don't see anyone as the Best or Worst. I look at this patchwork of tricks that I turned and feel that my understanding of men and business, of life in general, has benefited from every one of them. Even the more unappealing or dangerous customers who did not merit a repeat visit.

AV: In a superb interview with Laura Buchwald, you state: "The irony is that people talk about the exploitation of women in prostitution, but there is far more emotional exploitation going on in that grey realm of casual sex." Can you expound on this?

TQ: Have you read Amy Sohn? When she published her second novel, we had a lively conversation about sexual mores. She told me, "Women should be having orgasms when they have casual sex." I disagreed. If a woman has a really intense orgasm the first time she's with a man, she'll want to hear from him the next day. And, if he's feeling casual, she might not hear from him for three weeks! Casual sex should be like a handshake—most people do not have an orgasm each time they shake someone's hand, and therefore they don't agonize about the outcome of this handshake.

Men seem to feel that "getting off" means they "got some." How many women really see an orgasm as an adequate reward for sex? Sometimes, an orgasm makes us want MORE from the man: he owes us a phone call or a love letter of some sort—whether it's a text message extolling your beauty or email asking for another date. I really think that sex without love—without any hint of love—is unfulfilling unless there's money changing hands. And that's my particular bias.

Some people want to look at orgasms as a form of currency, but this isn't like striving for equal pay. It's more complicated. If orgasms ARE a form of currency, men and women are coming in different currencies. The exchange rate isn't always fair.

AV: What would happen when someone would ask you out for a date and didn't know what you did for a living? Did you ever tell anyone you were dating about your background?

TQ: The real problem isn't what to say to guys when they ask you out. The deeper problem is this: whatever turns a john into a regular—qualities that make you successful as a call girl—will also attract boyfriends. But this creates enormous tension between love and work. I was a relationship-magnet throughout my career because I loved being a love object. I did well during the months of pseudo-celibacy—no boyfriends, lots of business—and I wanted to be a sexually active spinster. Desperately but not, perhaps, sincerely, because I ended up juggling love and business for most of my career. I look back and realize I was thriving on that tension; my personal life was filled with sizzle and drama. Oh, and some of these partners knew I was still working. But that's almost incidental. Prostitutes have to be incredibly self-centered in order to survive and succeed. I sometimes think we barely notice how our boyfriends are feeling—it's all about us and how WE feel about their feelings. I was the worst kind of drama queen, a real brat in my dealings with men. Prostitutes are sometimes very spoiled, taking for granted the adulation, attention, desire from others, that many human beings long for but don't have. I think I've learned to be more appreciative of this.

AV: Have you ever had an embarrassing moment when you ran into a client in public?

TQ: Why would I be embarrassed? Most men who pay for sex are compartmentalized—a bit like prostitutes. They're old-fashioned. The world isn't some giant hot tub for these guys; it's more like a government office building with distinct floors and departments. If they run into you when you're with another man, they will look the other way.

But sure, I was always spotting my customers around town. In fact, some clients are titillated by the fact that your worlds might collide. It is just second nature not to say anything to each other.

AV: Why don t prostitutes kiss their clients?

TQ: As Gypsy Rose Lee might say, "You've gotta have a gimmick." For Nancy Chan, it's a professional challenge to be warm and affectionate without being sloppy.

If you take pride in that, you want to avoid kissing. Many prostitutes feel that kissing on the job shows a lack of imagination or character. There's something undisciplined and lazy about letting all those clients have a kiss. It's far more interesting to keep them coming back in the hopes that they might, one day, pierce the professional veil and steal the prostitute's forbidden fruit.

AV: There are scenes in your books that discuss some of Nancy's clients having unprotected oral sex with her. Isn't this dangerous, and stressful, considering the possibility of contracting an STD?

TQ: In my experience, women are more likely to see men as vectors of disease than the reverse. So there's this heterosexual double standard: You can put a condom on your customer for oral sex, but he wants to reciprocate without a barrier. Men love to perform oral sex with prostitutes because they sense that we're always, you know, prepared for it—we like to shower a lot. Anyway, not all direct contact is equally unsafe.

The biggest problem for many isn't STDs or HIV, which can be easily avoided, but cold viruses. There's a lot more stress from worrying about whether you are coming down with the common cold—which condoms won't protect you from. If you have a cold, you might not work for a week. You can fall behind financially. That's a realistic and constant fear.

AV: I've heard you say that once a prostitute starts getting older, her choices are to become a madam or quit. You said you weren't cut out to be a madam and so you became a writer. What happens to those prostitutes who don't become madams?

TQ: There's a character in my first novel who wants to become a social worker, and her sugar-daddy wants her to be an interior decorator; those are both viable careers for an ex-hooker. But an arrest record's an asset in social work, whereas it could be an embarrassment for a decorator.

Prostitutes talk about "getting older" when they hit 26! But many are still working in their 40s, and have what it takes to stay at the party long after others have left. Age is an issue, just as it is for athletes and singers. But prostitutes over 30 are often earning more than they did in their 20s—it's not just inflation, it's about getting better at your game.

Only a small number become madams. Many get married to some lucky breadwinner and have a few kids. Quite a few go into another service profession. There are ex-prostitutes in every walk of life, doing all kinds of things. Computer programmers, dog-walkers, doctors, beauticians, domestic workers, brokers, you name it. An alarming number have turned to writing. I'm not sure that's the sanest option, but I really couldn't think of anything else to do.

AV: Are you still turning tricks? If not, did you just stop cold-turkey or gradually? It seems it would be hard to completely stop something you have been doing for at least fifteen years, especially when you have a clientele you have been meeting regularly for a long time.

TQ: Oh, I just drifted away from it, I never told myself I was stopping. That would be much too decisive!

In the sex workers' movement, we argue about whether prostitution is a job or an identity. And my second novel is one prostitute's response to this. Nancy sees it as a job; her best friend Allison sees it as a cause. How can you give up your job if it's your identity? Diary of a Married Call Girl has a double meaning. It's about Nancy's marriage to Matt, but it's also about Nancy being married to her job.

At 17, I found that being in love made me unfaithful to my job and I felt very torn. But I decided that I was married to my work and nothing was going to come between us. I'm still married to my work, but my second marriage is my writing career. I had an amicable no-fault divorce from my first career when I moved out of prostitution into writing. And finally, I can have a love life that doesn't make me feel unfaithful to my job. That's a wonderful new romantic ball game for me. While some of my peers are settling down, having kids, and feeling less romantic about life, I'm enjoying some of the emotional vistas I turned away from as a teenager. I'm glad I waited this long to feel like a teenager and I have no regrets about the past. But I also have no desire to turn back.

AV: How did you become a writer? Did you contact a publisher with the concept for your novel or had you been working on a manuscript for a long time?

TQ: Nancy Chan first appeared on Salon.com, where I was writing two episodes a week, and her story unfolded like a Victorian serial. She had just started dating Matt, the banker she eventually marries. But these were early days for that relationship. When the column took off, editors and agents started emailing me. I had spent a few years trying to publish other kinds of books. Basically, the net made it possible for me to break into an older medium—book publishing. People take this for granted now—think of all the bloggers who are getting book deals. But this was pre-blog, 1999.

AV: Have you ever read Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa"? The short story has a female graduate student getting paid by men to discuss the deep meaning of literature when they are unable to have intelligent conversations with their wives.

TQ: I'm a huge Woody Allen fan. I recall that "The Whore of Mensa" was a cute piece of writing but perhaps a little dated. My favorite prostitute in a Woody Allen vehicle is Shawn, the call girl in Husbands and Wives—one of his best movies, I think. Shawn isn't central like the prostitute in Mighty Aphrodite, but she left a strong impression on me. In Husbands and Wives, a man is caught between two archetypes—his castrating, intellectual wife and a nurturing, soft-hearted bimbo who doesn't read Simone de Beauvoir. He wants to love this sweet young girl, but he just can't. He mistreats her, is profoundly cruel to her, and returns to the coldness of his marriage. In order to respect his partner, he needs that castration element which his young girlfriend cannot provide. There's all this peer pressure from his friends to reject the bimbo because they barely understand that she's actually human. It's almost like a form of racism and it's tragic to see him coming to terms with how stunted he is. The woman who stands outside this dichotomy is the prostitute—she's insightful and realistic, so she's not a bimbo, but she's capable of kindness, and she's not about castration. In theory, this kind of woman could be the solution because she contains elements of both archetypes, but she's The Outsider. It's a really sharp commentary on what's going on between men and women in certain circles. I think that's more relevant to us now than "The Whore of Mensa."

AV: What writers do you like and what is a typical writing day for you?

TQ: I seem to get a lot of work done at two in the morning. On the rare occasions when I can get to my desk by 8:00 a.m., I feel quite virtuous, and I aspire to the bourgeois life that Flaubert famously recommends for writers, but I have some issues with the hours. (That said, I can rise with the lark, no problem, when I'm on a media tour.)

I'm a big admirer of A. A. Milne and of Colette, though I'm not very interested in Colette's animal stories. I much prefer Milne's approach to animals—his characters were based on stuffed toys, but they grow on you and become quite complex as you get older. I first read him as a child, of course. Milne also wrote about London actresses and party girls; his other work has been eclipsed by the children's books, but these novels and essays are delightful. He was always playful, but Chloe Marr (a novel about the 1930s) was also racy. Manhattan is my Hundred Acre Wood. Nancy Chan has a lot of Piglet in her and Allison's as naive as Winnie the Pooh. Jasmine is Rabbit, always having a "captainish" day.

While writing my second novel, I discovered Mary Stewart Cutting, an American author who died in 1924 after producing a ton of domestic fiction. When I found Some of Us Are Married at the New York Society Library, I expected just turn-of-the-century treacle. But her stories feel so modern and immediate. In More Stories of Married Life, she writes about New York suburbia circa 1900. A happily married couple reads a magazine serial together, analogous to snuggling on the couch with a video. But the relationship is dissected in excruciating detail by this dishy, insinuating narrator. In one dark tale, a traveling salesman is totally stressed out by his wife's letters. Today, these would be e-mails.

AV: Can you compare the differences of being a sexual artist with that of a literary artist? Which of the two is more satisfying?

TQ: Well, the satisfactions of physical work are more obvious—you know very soon whether you've been successful. For a writer, success is harder to define and it takes longer to find out.

AV: What percentage of your writing is fictional?

TQ: How do we measure something like this? I'm flattered when my characters and situations seem "realistic," but I invented them. And sometimes they invent themselves. Some readers try to separate the fictional from the real, but there are things which will always be unknowable. Uncertain. Up for grabs. I create characters and then I see them walking around the streets of New York.

AV: In both Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and Diary of a Married Call Girl, there is the ongoing neurotic relationship Nancy has with her friends Jasmine and Allison. Nancy states that Jasmine sees herself "as a referee for two warring states of mind: paranoia (mine) and irrational exuberance (Allison's)." This often shows the comic-tragic lifestyle of three women in "The Life." How did you develop these fascinating characters?

TQ: In my second novel, whenever Nancy and Allison are at odds, marriage is competing with public life and social change. That's something I struggled with at one point, when I was engaged. I almost became a corporate wife, but it wasn't meant to be. And Allison is going through something akin to what I experienced when my first book was published. Suddenly I was more public than I had ever planned to be. I was also starting a new relationship and I just felt like I was in over my head.

I'm a huge fan of Bridget Jones's Diary. I'm also an activist and I subscribe to countless list-serves for prostitutes' rights. In 2001, a Dutch bank was refusing to open business accounts for sex workers, even though brothels were finally legal in the Netherlands. The Dutch prostitutes took on the bank and they got this big Dutch bank to turn their policy around! When they won their victory—a very proud moment for all—I saw the email coming in. But I had been away from my computer for three hours and I hadn't heard from my boyfriend that morning. I saw the subject header, it was huge, I cared a lot about the outcome—but the first thing I did was race to my inbox to see if a boyfriend had emailed me! Only when I saw that the new boyfriend was paying attention to me did I feel able to go and read about this historic victory for prostitutes' rights. Nancy and Allison are pretty obsessed, in a Bridget Jones manner, with boyfriends and handbags and their body mass index.

Jasmine is more than a smart-alecky sidekick—she's also the conscience of the sex industry. She can handle being alone, but she's hiding from the world and she doesn't take big emotional risks. I'm fond of Jasmine, so I suppose she has traits I admire in others. And I'm very protective of Jasmine—I've had to defend her a few times.

Whenever I meet a guy, I ask myself, would he be Nancy's boyfriend? Or Allison's? The guys who would go for Jasmine are quite special.

AV: One of the great strengths of your writing is the humor, such as when Nancy thinks to herself while making love to Matt: "You're not exactly violating a sacred temple. My body is more like a boutique with flexible hours." This sounds like something Mae West might have said. How do you come up with such delicious tidbits?

TQ: Wow, well, I do admire Mae West. I'm flattered that you enjoy the humor—I'm just writing what I know.

AV: At another point Nancy is making love to Matt and thinks: "It's hard to have an orgasm when shop and temple are competing for mindshare, but I forced myself to come, by concentrating on something I'd rather not discuss." Can you reveal this secret?

TQ: I don't think Nancy is ready to reveal this. Thanks for asking though!

AV: It's also ironic at one point that Nancy is concerned that Matt might be having an affair and cheating on her. Explain the dynamics of this from a sex worker's perspective—it seems incongruous that someone like Nancy should feel betrayed, but surely that must enter into it.

TQ: When it comes to her emotional wants and needs, Nancy is as selfish as the next person. She wants Matt for herself, she wants him to treat her a certain way, and she wants him in her corner, not catting around with other women who might distract him emotionally. What's so strange about that? If Nancy were a man who sees prostitutes on the outside and wants his wife not to have an affair, it wouldn't seem strange at all. Don't forget—Matt is essentially a sweet susceptible guy. She doesn't trust him to be as calculating as she is, or as compartmentalized.

AV: What are your thoughts about morality? Furthermore, if you are married or get married, do you want to have a faithful husband, and is it logical to expect a former sex worker to be faithful?

TQ: Faithful compared to what? A person who is cheating on a partner can be highly aware of that partner, spend a lot of time thinking about him/her, partly to avoid getting caught. The so-called faithful type might be too lazy to look elsewhere, and might not think about his partner enough. Who's faithful? The spouse who takes marriage for granted and doesn't play around? The person who strays and stays highly attractive, while remaining an object of desire for the spouse? I think we should measure relationships not in moral terms but in terms of desire. If your partner actively wants you in his life, in her life, maybe you've been faithful after all.

I am very happily unmarried, but I'm also the jealous type. It is appalling and cruel and very wrong to disregard your partner's vanity. Especially if your partner happens to be me. A man should be as protective of a woman's ego as he can be. It goes without saying that women should do that for men, but men sometimes need to be reminded to do this for women, especially when they are tempted to confess their infidelities.

AV: How have you been received in the literary community, such as when you do a talk show or a book reading?

TQ: I haven't been heckled too much in real life. Most of the hecklers go online where it's safe.

AV: What will your next novel be about and what can your readers expect from Tracy Quan in the future?

TQ: Something enjoyable, of course. They deserve that.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2005/2006 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005/2006