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from Nightlife, early 1990s (Volume 10, Issue 3): BLACK HISTORY MONTH
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from Nightlife's 08/22/02, 08/29/02, and 09/05/02 issues: The Carbondale Writers’ Colony?by Bryan Miller Anyone who gives even a half-hearted glance around town can see that Carbondale has a lot to offer. Local music has thrived for years, providing a training ground for up-and-coming acts while allowing for major players like Victor Wooten, Hello Dave, and Keller Williams. The art scene, though quiet on the surface, is supported by a host of talented residents and a steady influx of new SIU art students. The theater scene, likewise, benefits from the commingling of students, faculty, and other established writers, directors, and actors from across the region.
But Carbondale as a literary mecca? The town has always had its share of scribes, but during the last decade or two, the town has stealthily become a sort of writers’ colony. Most universities can boast one or two relatively notable staff members in their English department-- but how many universities, much less out-of-the-way Midwestern schools, can lay claim to a Pulitzer Prize winner, a National Book Award finalist, one of the writing world’s hottest literary bestsellers, and a group of other distinguished, decorated staff members? Take a look around local independent booksellers’ racks (or, if you must, Barnes and Noble) and you’re likely to find numerous notable books that have received national attention, all of which came from Carbondale and the surrounding area: The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, Plainsong, Nobody’s Fool, America Noir, Lummox, et cetera. Is Carbondale one of literature’s best-kept secrets? The Prize-Winner"There are four things I don’t miss about Carbondale," says Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former SIU professor Richard Russo. "I don’t miss the heat, the humidity, the bugs, and fundamentalist Christians." Russo is perhaps the most famous writer to have lived in Carbondale since John Gardner, and perhaps the most fondly remembered of the lot. His blue-collar attitude and quick wit are instantly engaging, his genial, laid-back attitude revealing not the slightest bit of pretension and barely suggesting his significant talents as a storyteller and expert wordsmith. Russo spent many years teaching and writing in Carbondale, honing his skills and producing excellent novels. Each of his books are sprawling ensemble pieces filled with lively characters. No one gets the short shrift; each character is created as an entirely believable, three-dimensional being full of complexity and quirks. Russo’s talent for characterization-- as well as a penchant for snappy dialogue-- has made him one of the most popular American literary writers working today, and he shows no signs of slowing down. It was this focus on his writing career that eventually led him out of Carbondale. "At the time, I knew I was at the end of my teaching career," he explains. "When I was offered a part-time teaching job here in Maine where there are fewer bugs and less heat and humidity-- and fewer fundamentalist Christians-- I couldn’t turn it down." Russo has since retired from teaching to write full-time and still lives in Maine with his wife and two daughters. He misses Carbondale, he says, and always looks forward to meeting up with his old Southern Illinois friends for a beer when he gets a chance. "Russo is really great," says another renowned SIU English Department author, Brady Udall. "The fact that he was here... I don’t know if it’s the place itself or what, but Carbondale is a place where you can get serious writing done." "He’s a real man," comments yet another renowned SIU English Department author, Mike Magnuson, who then takes a long pause, a sure sign he’s about to start jerking your chain. "He’s short, though. He writes like a big man, but he’s not. He’s compensating." During the course of two years, Russo has published two books, his prize-winning novel, Empire Falls, and a collection of short stories, The Whore’s Child. He’s preparing to start a new novel-- but not before he returns to the Hollywood screenwriting trade to team up once more with his old friend, Paul Newman. "It’s going to be awhile before I finish a draft of the [Empire Falls] screenplay," he says. "Paul Newman... really wanted to do it as an HBO miniseries or something where we wouldn’t have to eviscerate the novel, but Scott Rudin thought we could do it as a two-hour movie. I think we’ve gone the right way." Empire Falls is currently on track to be an extravaganza movie event on HBO with Newman to play the cantankerous Max Roby and, perhaps, to produce the film as well. The LummoxMike Magnuson, a self-described lummox, doesn’t look much like a writer. He’s a big man all around, the kind of guy who looks like he spends most of his time drinking beer and doing lots of heavy lifting. Listening to him talk might throw you a bit, too. He sounds like a lumberjack, or maybe the world’s best-educated sailor. "You’ll be able to tell when I’m blowing smoke up your ass by the tone of my voice," he says, which is mostly true. If you write Magnuson off as just a crude, lumbering oaf-- as nothing more than a lummox-- then you’ve failed the test. You’ve been caught by his bullshit detector, and then you’re really screwed. "Everywhere I went on the book tour, people just assumed I’m a junkie," Magnuson says, half-lamenting the fact, half-relishing it. "I mean, I was, kinda. But I’m not now." "You know, Magnuson is probably the best-read person I know," says Brady Udall. "It’s amazing. He’s read everything. I’m talking about the classics." Magnuson’s most recent book, a truly unique memoir titled, appropriately enough, Lummox, spends most of its time examining the trajectory of the author’s life from bum to literary man. During the course of 225 pages or so, Magnuson provides all the dirty details of his life as a wild teenager living in an abandoned schoolhouse and sleeping with an underage alcoholic, followed by a few lousy jobs and a spontaneous act that sent him to the county jail where he decided, finally, to become a well-read man. After that comes the lesbians and the suicidal friend and the affairs and the put-upon girlfriend and, of course, the evolution of the lummox. "I got the idea when I was in New York talking to my editor," Magnuson explains. "The idea was that it was funny and that it would raise my sales figures. I said something to him about me being a lummox, and five days later we had the contract." The idea was a good one, leading to a modestly successful and well-received book, although a series of freak circumstances prevented the book from getting the press and the buzz Magnuson expected. His editor was excited about the book and talked of giving it a big push. It could be a bestseller, his editor told him. And then there was a complication. "My editor died last summer," Magnuson says, deadpan. "His funeral in Manhattan, as it turned out, was on September 10. He was the [editor-in-chief] of adult fiction at Harper Collins, and I was probably gonna have a bestseller, and then all that happened. But I’m not bitter. I don’t care. I want to write is all." Magnuson’s memoir is unique not just because of its author’s distinctive voice or even the often outlandish subject matter, but also because Magnuson wrote the entire book in third person. While the novel is, according to Magnuson, an entirely true story, Magnuson chose to write about himself as a character named "Mike" rather than using the traditional first-person narrative. "I wanted to avoid whining," Magnuson explains. "Whether it’s a good book or not, I think I succeeded in that. A lot of memoirs can be like that. ‘Oh, I got beat up. Oh, man, I got raped by a motorcycle gang.’ I don’t want somebody to feel sorry for me. I just want to lay it all out. It’s written in the voice of me in my twenties, which was not my most apologetic period." Magnuson originates from Wisconsin, where most of the exploits in Lummox take place. He has happily adopted Carbondale as his home and Midwestern/southern literature as his preferred style. "Certain kinds of writing really nauseates me. Like the New England fiction... it’s just straight, unrestrained realism," Magnuson says. "I like a lot of the southern gothic things. I’m from Wisconsin, but there’s not a lot of native Wisconsin fiction. Unless you’re a woman. There’s been some women. "But I’m not a woman," he adds. "Carbondale has been the best thing ever for me in my life for [writing]. They’re never gonna get me out of here," he goes on to say. "It’s a nice, quiet place. I like towns about this size. People seem to be real kind to me. I ride bicycles, too, and this is a great area for that. It’s healthy, all around healthy. I feel like I look like I’m from here, like I was. I mean, I got a pickup truck, I wear Camel pants. It’d be great if more people came to the area, but for my purposes, I could live in complete anonymity and... I can just live and I don’t have to worry about being anybody. That’s just my job, what I do. Every time you tell somebody you’re a writer, you get, ‘Well, I’ve been working on something... ’ or ‘I bet you’re remembering everything I’m saying.’ Which, you know, might be true." The Next Big ThingBrady Udall, one of the most recent additions to Carbondale’s literary lineup, like Richard Russo, is a man unchanged by success. He’s certainly had his share of it during the last year or so, seeing his first novel, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, become a bestseller, topping the independent booksellers’ charts, invading chain bookstores, and becoming the kind of novel people talk about at parties and pass along to friends. Speaking about the breakout success of Edgar Mint, Udall says, "It’s surprising and gratifying in every way. You don’t expect to have success with the first books you write. But," he adds, "life for me hasn’t changed at all. I’m the same dork I ever was. It’s nice to have success. I hear from people and get fan letters, but life hasn’t changed. Being a famous writer is kind of a cool thing because nobody still knows who you are. It’s a kind of good famous." Udall’s literary career got off to an auspicious start when he won the first writing contest he ever entered-- with a poem cribbed from Walt Whitman. "The first time I realized I could make money writing, my county fair had a poetry contest. I just swiped a Walt Whitman poem. I figured, ‘Nobody will recognize this.’" He wasn’t immediately taken with the idea of being a professional writer, although the career grew more attractive to him as he got older, for a variety of reasons. "I just knew I didn’t want to do manual labor. When I figured out I could write, I thought, hey, maybe I could make a living at this. I always loved to read. I wasn’t drawn to writing a lot, but I lied a lot. I was an accomplished liar." Udall describes himself as a "closet nerd" throughout high school who went to dances and played football, but quietly indulged in less-popular pursuits. He read science fiction, and eventually decided he could make up sci-fi stories himself. It wasn’t until college that his tastes began to change. "I wrote mostly science-fiction stuff," he says. "I had a teacher who said, ‘Hey, you suck at this. Why don’t you trying writing something real?’" His earliest literary influences were Barry Hannah and Rick Bass who, unlike other authors he read, were telling real stories. "I’d been reading Raymond Carver, real clipped, and I didn’t like it much," he explains. "I liked stuff that was fairly open, fairly verbal. It was the strong voice that I loved. I just like good strong stories about extraordinary events." Udall began writing and teaching after college and had never even been to Carbondale until he was lured into the area by Lummox author Mike Magnuson. "Mike’s a friend from a while back, and he told me there was an opening," says Udall. "Rodney Jones was already a friend of mine. It’s amazing. There are big-name writing schools without half the strength of faculty we have here. We’re allowed to be ourselves here. The rest of the English Department doesn’t expect us to be what we’re not." As happy as he is to be in Carbondale now, however, he wasn’t always so taken with the area. There was no love at first sight between Udall and Southern Illinois. "I have to admit, when I first got to Carbondale, I was like, ‘Oh, crap,’" he says, laughing. "When I went outside town, though, I was really impressed. I like how laid back everybody is, the lack of pretension. I love the outdoors. I love that it takes ten minutes to get across town. I rock climb. I’m gonna take up mountainbiking." Udall’s first book, Letting Loose the Hounds, was a short-story collection that received high praise from critics and colleagues. It sold well for a book of short stories, which tend to be overlooked no matter how good they are. Udall was thusly shocked, for many reasons, when he went from underground favorite to mainstream success in a matter of months-- all with his first novel, which he thought few people would read. "The book that I wrote [Edgar Mint], I thought would be difficult for people to read," he explains. "The material is kind of gritty and difficult. There’s a lot of dark stuff in it. I didn’t think it would appeal to a popular audience. There’s a lot of torture and violence and cussin’ and swearin’, a lot of people don’t like that stuff." The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint kicks off with one of the best opening lines of any novel in recent memory: "If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head." Edgar goes on to describe the accident that nearly killed him, then tells the story of his life after he comes out of the resulting coma. In a little more than four-hundred pages he details his subsequent hospitalization, a tenure at a vicious all-boys boarding school for Native Americans, a stint with a well-meaning Mormon family in the midst of great tragedy, and his quest to find the mailman who ran over his head to tell him just one thing. Udall has created an exceptional protagonist in Edgar, who narrates the novel from the unique perspective of a young child who has been forced to grow up quickly. The blend of childish naï veté and world-weary skepticism makes for one of the most unique and delightful voices of any fictional character in recent memory. Edgar is a child who grows up too quickly, but develops a sense of humor to protect himself from the horrors of the world, allowing Udall to infuse the novel with a kooky sense of humor. Udall manages to pack something new on every page, a great joke or a plot twist. His novel is full of strange happenings, sudden acts of violence and stark tragedy. As the novel progresses, it grows into a long-form Bible story; Edgar is Udall’s Job, tested and tortured to no end, but struggling to keep his good humor all the while. Edgar Mint’s story stems from two real events. Udall’s wife once told him of her ex-boyfriend, who had his head run over, and Udall grew up near a Native American boarding school not unlike the one Edgar eventually attends. "I grew up in a town that’s right between Navajo and Apache reservations," Udall says. "I grew up around Indians all the time. They were my friends and neighbors. I never found anything exotic about it. When I got away from it I realized I had a pretty peculiar upbringing. I had interesting experiences, stuff you don’t read about a lot." Udall says of Native Americans, "They’re probably the most forgotten people in America. It’s just because they don’t... they don’t make a stink about it. It’s not their way." Udall finds all of this perfect fuel for fiction. Although he says he never had any specific plans to write about Native Americans, he is frequently drawn to their history and unique cultural standing. "Native American characters are very interesting to me," he says. "They’re Americans, but they’re not. They live in this Third World country inside of America, but it’s their country, their homeland. And I don’t think that even Native American writers have done it justice. There’s been too much of that hokey spiritualistic crap. That’s just bullshit. Nobody does that. The Native Americans I know are just regular people with regular jobs." Since the publication of Edgar Mint, Udall has drawn favorable comparisons to authors like John Irving and Charles Dickens. He dismisses the Dickens associations as due to the fact that both he and the Great Expectations author wrote about orphans. Udall, however, admits he’s flattered to be mentioned in the same sentence as the author of so many classic novels. The Irving comparison, however, is a little more apt. "That’s fine," Udall says of the critics’ tendency to place him next to the World According to Garp author. "Irving is the kind of writer I admire. It’s good writing, but it appeals to a large audience. I don’t think he’s a great writer in one sense, but he knows how to tell a great story. I like Irving a lot." Udall is currently working on a new novel, although the process has been stalled a little by the summer. He says that he writes much more when he is working a day job, so returning to teaching after the summer break actually has a positive impact on his creative output. "It helps order my life," he says. "My writing time becomes more precious and so I don’t screw around." His new novel hinges on a a plot element only vaguely explored in Edgar Mint: religion, specifically, Mormonism. "My new novel is about polygamy. I come from a very strong Mormon family. I’m still practicing... sort of. My wife keeps me honest." Udall admits that he expects to catch heat from Mormons and the topic that remains none too popular with the Church of the Latter Day Saints, an institution eager to forget about some of its antiquated traditions. Udall says he received some criticism for his treatment of Mormons in Edgar Mint, as well as his depiction of Native Americans. ("Most of that was from other white people, though, so I didn’t give it much credence," he states.) Causing controversy, in or out of the Mormon church, is not his intention, however. He’s just trying to tell good stories about the commonalties among all people-- a fact of which he says he wishes certain groups would take note. "Mormons, Native Americans... we’re all screwed up. We’re all troubled, and we all find joys in the small things," he says. "Mormons just need to grow up a little bit. We need to learn to laugh at ourselves." The ability to laugh and appreciate the similarities among all people are important to Udall, especially as a writer. "I think the central thing in writing is empathy," says Udall. "Being able to understand other people and wanting to understand other people, what their motivations are. If you don’t have that, you can’t be a writer." An Irish Brough and the Southern Drawl
Lordan began her writing career, as nearly all writers do, by reading copiously. Her family moved often, and she says the first places they found in each new town were the school, the church, and the library. While she harbored an interest in language, her real focus was on characters. "I’m curious about why people do the things they do," she says, which partially explains why for some time she planned to be an anthropologist instead of a writer. "I wanted to be Perry Mason, but I found out how long law school took. Then I wanted to be Marcus Welby, but I found out how long med school took," she says with a laugh. "I flunked out of U of Mizzou with a 0.3 [grade-point] average in one semester. My finest academic hour." Lordan worked for a time, then eventually enlisted in grad school. It was there she began to consider being, above all things, a writer. "I took a creative writing class at Cornell for a guaranteed A, but it was really fun and I turned out to be good at it," she says. Eventually she found her way to Carbondale-- less by design than a little aimless wandering, although she says she’s entirely happy with the way the move has worked out for her. Carbondale, and SIU in particular, is a writer’s town, albeit for odd reasons sometimes. "There isn’t an awful lot [in Carbondale] to distract you," Lordan half-jokes. "I think it’s a good town for writers, and I think ours is an extremely good program for writers. Rodney Jones is the guiding sensibility of the whole program." Lordan, an accomplished writer who has published books and placed short stories in numerous major magazines, recently was honored when her story "Digging" was selected for Best American Short Stories of 2002. "I was surprised that it was ‘Digging’ that made it," she says. "It’s a different kind of story than I usually write. I thought it was kind of a stunt, but everybody liked it. "I spent a sabbatical semester in Ireland in 1998, and I had every intention of never writing about Ireland because you can’t learn enough about a place in half a year to write about it," she says. "I was unaware of how foreign I would feel, how homesick and how unexotic. There was a great deal I liked, but it was a troubling and growing experience. But ultimately I knew I wanted to write a story about the way I felt, so I came up with Lyle Sullivan. I’ve now just finished a book; I call it a novel in short stories. I have great hopes for this one." The book of which Lordan speaks includes "Digging" and features several other short stories about the characters from that story, a book she says should be published in the fall 2003 by William Morrow. "Winesburg, Ohio is one of the first [books of this kind]," she says. "I would prefer to be compared to, oh... Eudora Welty has this wonderful novel in short stories, The Golden Apples." In the end, though, it isn’t about the money and the acolytes for Lordan, but the work. She says there’s one important thing writers should know before they start, a piece of advice she always imparts early on to her students. "You have to write literary fiction for love, not money," she says. "There isn’t much money to be had. If you aren’t doing it for love, then go do something else more useful." While Lordan tends to the short stories, another SIU writer, Rodney Jones, keeps the poetry torch burning. "I’m reading Rodney Jones’s new book of poetry, which is terrific," says Richard Russo. "He just gets better and better. Doesn’t have a pretentious bone in his body." "I was always a reader as a kid, that and a sportsbilly," says Jones. "In college at the University of Alabama, I fell in accidentally with a group of writers, including the poet Everette Maddox, who told me what to read, what was excellent. I found out that writing was hard work, and started doing a little of it. It took me ten years to begin working hard enough to write things worth publishing." Why poetry over prose? "I like poetry more," Jones says simply. Jones came to Carbondale in 1984. He says he isn’t exactly sure what makes Carbondale such a good town for writers, because it’s been so long since he’s lived anywhere else. As the author of several books, including Things That Happen Once and The Kingdom of the Instant, he’s certainly done well by this town. In 2000, his Elegy for the Southern Drawl was the runnerup for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. "Certainly, the people at the university have been very supportive," says Jones. "They have given me not just interesting students and colleagues but time to work. "Some folks think that there's not much to do in Carbondale, so it's ideal for writers, but I don't necessarily buy that. Talented writers have congregated here because the university has given them better work than they would have found elsewhere and because we have always tried to hire the best writers available, not our best friends. When we are fortunate enough to be in the position to hire a writer, we read their work, not their curriculum vitae."
The future only looks better for Carbondale’s writing community. Magnuson and company are working to organize the Devil’s Kitchen Literary Festival for the late fall. Last May SIU English professor Allison Joseph won the Georgia State University Review's annual writing contest with a poem called "The Old Man and the Rock Show: New Haven, Connecticut." Meanwhile, another talented writer, Judy Jordan, has moved to Southern Illinois. "Judy’s just joined us [in the English Department]," says Jones. "Her first book, Carolina Ghost Woods, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. "All of us in fiction and poetry are close, nearly as bad as family, but not quite so pushy," Jones continues. "We get along, and we have, I believe, the common ambition to write as well as we possibly can, and to be good company for our students. When one of us, a Rich Russo or Kent Haruf or Lucia Perillo leaves, we're sad that they're no longer here because they are friends, but we're happy for them and thrilled as they continue to thrive." |
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Former SIU Professor Richard Russo Wins the Pulitzer:
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Russo worked construction jobs with his father and got a bachelor degree from the University of Arizona. He was on his way to a doctorate in literature when it suddenly occurred to him that he was more interested in writing books than in merely reading them. He began teaching English and writing at universities, and writing his own fiction on the side. This eventually led him to Carbondale, another of the small towns that would define his worldview.
Russo remembers Carbondale fondly as a place of both personal and professional success.
"The best thing about Carbondale was that my wife and I had both of our two daughters in middle school at the time," says Russo. "We had a number of wonderful friends there, Rodney Jones and his wonderful wife, Greg Johnson and his wife Peggy. We had wonderful, wonderful friends there. I loved my classes. I’m still in contact with lots of students that I taught at Carbondale. A lot of them are in the Chicago area, and when I do a reading there I hook up with them somewhere for a beer."
While living in Carbondale, Russo wrote Nobody’s Fool, the book that would be his breakout novel of sorts. The novel was popular enough, but its profile only got higher when Paul Newman signed on to play the protagonist, Sully, in the film version of the same name. Bruce Willis costarred in the film.
When a glitch in the film’s production threatened to set back the shooting schedule, Russo came to the rescue, thus beginning the small-town boy’s surprising career in-- of all places-- Hollywood.
"I was given a courtesy call by Robert Benton when they were filming Nobody’s Fool to come down to the set," he says. "He had an ulterior motive, though. They were already behind... and he said, well, would you mind taking a shot at revising these scenes we’re shooting next week. He liked what I’d done and we ended up working on the picture for the rest of the shoot, the next three months."
Russo went on to write an original screenplay with Benton that became the basis for the film Twilight. Twilight was a brooding character piece, at the heart of which was a murder mystery. The film starred Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, James Garner, and Gene Hackman. Despite the incredible cast, Twilight received mixed reviews from critics and turned in a mediocre performance at the box office-- nor was it all Russo had hoped for.
"Twilight was a nice movie to make and there are parts of that movie that I love," says Russo. "I thought James Garner was particularly wonderful in that last scene. It was a movie that got changed a lot in the final cut. The cut I saw was about two hours and ten minutes, and when it came out in the theater it was down to an hour and thirty-eight minutes. Much of what they cut was my absolute favorite material. They decided to make it a kind of traditional private- eye movie, but Benton and I had written more of a character study. Gene Hackman’s scenes were cut just drastically. That was a mixed bag. Nobody’s Fool was a delight and a wonderful experience. When people tell me they liked [Twilight], then I say to them, ‘Well, you would have really loved the movie we wrote.’"
Following the success of Nobody’s Fool and his stint working in Hollywood, Russo wrote Straight Man, an academic comedy that climbed the sales charts thanks to its biting humor. Straight Man is a rare feat, a serious literary novel that is laugh-out-loud funny. Imagine Dave Barry and Raymond Carver doing a quick rewrite on Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. The accessible humor of Straight Man helped sell Russo’s book to mainstream audiences while his plots and prose remained as strong as ever.
Russo’s greatest success came this year when he won the Pulitzer Prize for his elegiac novel of a crumbling small town and its quirky townspeople, Empire Falls. The book is vast and expansive, covering several generations and exploring the relationships between a host of characters, from the embittered and wealthy Francine Whiting to the down-and-out construction working Max Roby. Empire Falls is about legacies, secret histories, families and fate; it’s about love between parents and children, young love, old love, dead love, and love gone wrong; it’s about the inherent claustrophobia of growing up in a withering hamlet and the wide world that can exist between the narrow borders of a simple town; there’s very little Empire Falls isn’t about.
"When people ask me what Empire Falls is about, I say, ‘It’s about seven-hundred pages,’" Russo quips.
Russo is an easygoing everyman, quick with a joke and happy to chat. Working in Hollywood and winning one of the greatest prizes in literature hasn’t seemed to affect his good humor and humble demeanor. Aside from upping his sales and notoriety, the Pulitzer appears to have affected Russo in only one notable way.
"I’ve become-- there’s a term for it in the business, it’s called a ‘blurb slut,’" he says.
Blurbs, for those not hip to the literary lingo, are the little two- or three-line recommendations from magazines and prominent authors on the dust jackets of new novels.
"I get probably anywhere from three to six bound galleys and manuscripts per week since winning the Pulitzer," Russo explains. "I’ve always gotten a lot, but boy, the number of books I’ve been getting is so huge. I try to give endorsements to young writers because I got help from writers when I was starting out. John Irving, who doesn’t do blurbs anymore, gave me a blurb for my first book Mohawk, and Pat Conroy, who didn’t know me from Adam, said some really nice things."
Russo’s latest book, just released in hardback, is an anthology of short stories, The Whore’s Child. At less than 350 pages it’s downright short for Russo, who has a penchant for long, sprawling books. The collection consists of six short stories and a novella, "The Mysteries of Linwood Hart."
Some of the stories are older, while "Linwood Hart" was written at the same time as Empire Falls. Initially the baseball story that makes up the center of the novella was intended as a brief chapter in the life of Miles Roby, Empire Falls’ hard-luck protagonist. It was an anecdote related by young Roby to his mother’s secret lover, Charlie Maine, but when Russo saw the story growing in length, he scrapped it and turned it into his nearly sixty-page story.
Other prominent stories in The Whore’s Child include "Joyride," one of the oldest and perhaps the most enjoyable story in the collection, about a young boy who goes on a harrowing road trip with his fed-up mother. Fans of Straight Man will also recognize character Hank Devereaux in "The Farther You Go."
"I had published a couple of them in the big slick magazines," Russo says of the stories that make up The Whore’s Child, "and I’d been thinking for some time about putting them together as a collection of short stories, but there weren’t enough to make even a slender volume. These things have been sitting around for some time, but [after finishing "Linwood Hart"] I finally had enough of them to put together a collection that I was proud of."
Russo, currently busy on a book tour, is looking forward to getting back to the peaceful quiet of Maine after the buzz of the Pulitzer wears off. He has already started a new novel-- he has about seventy-five pages written so far-- and plans to resume work on it once the tour is over.
"I suspect it’ll be another typical Russo novel with lots of characters, lots going on," he says. "It’ll be a mural as opposed to a still life. I tend to paint big sprawling murals instead of smaller pieces."
Laughing, Russo adds, "If I had a plan, the book would be going according to plan."
Literature with SIU Roots:
Two Books by Richard Russo in Review
by Bryan Miller
- The Whore's Child and Other Stories
- by Richard Russo
- Knopf
- 272 pages, hardcover, $24
- Empire Falls
- by Richard Russo
- Vintage Books
- 483 pages, paperback, $14.95
- by Richard Russo
Empire Falls is less a book than a literary time-warp. You pick it up, open the pages, and in a flash hours of your life have vanished. Alcoholics call this a "blackout period" and UFO conspiracy theorists refer to it as "lost time." For longtime fans of author Richard Russo, however, lost hours are par for the course.
Russo’s Empire Falls is his most ambitious novel to date. He finds a happy medium between more specific character studies like his bestselling novel Straight Man and his earlier ensemble novels like Mohawk. Empire Falls is a great, sprawling thing, massive in its scope even though it rarely strays from the city limits of the town (the novel’s namesake), and stays relatively focused on the lifespan of one character.
That character is Miles Roby, the most affable of all the affable townies in Empire Falls. Empire Falls, like most any small town, has that small-town magnetism that seems to repel outsiders just as it keeps its own close. Miles tries to skip town as a teenager and nearly makes it, finishing three and a half years of college before his mother is diagnosed with cancer. He returns to care for her and is given a job running the Empire Grill, the only restaurant in town. The grill is owned by Francine Whiting, heiress of the Whiting family, which owns everything else in town as well. She has a certain fondness for Miles-- and a reason to keep him stuck in Empire Falls.
Russo uses Miles as a cipher through which to examine the rest of the town. There’s Tick, Miles’s bright but lonely daughter; his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Janine; Janine’s cantankerous fiancé e Walt, who runs the local aerobics studio; John Voss, a troubled teenager hired to bus tables at the grill; Father Mark, the well-meaning priest trying to hold the local Catholic church together; and Jimmy Minty, the crooked sheriff who runs the town according to Francine Whiting’s rules.
As in every Russo novel there is an estranged, rowdy father. This time the galavanting dad in question is Max Roby, the wily, drunk, sometime house painter who also works the occasional shifts at his son’s restaurant-- as long as someone is there to keep him from pilfering the register. Max Roby is cut from the same cloth as Sully in Nobody’s Fool and the elder William Henry Devereaux in Straight Man, Russo’s two most popular novels. Russo’s minor obsession with estranged father characters could be called an affectation, a writer’s nervous tick, even a crutch. These wandering wildmen are so entertaining, though, and so well-conceived that one would be hard-pressed to cut any of their scenes, let alone remove them from any of Russo’s books.
Russo’s great skill is using parallels between characters in similar situations to explore his central themes. This allows him to keep his prose unfettered from a lot of philosophical rambling and pontificating. Every character has a foil: Tick and John Voss, Miles Roby and Jimmy Minty, Miles’s mother and Francine Whiting, Janine and Charlene. The contrasts and conflicts between each set of characters reveal smaller ideas and object lessons that, when viewed from the wider perspective of the novel as a whole, tie both the plot and the thematic concerns together in such a way that not one of the tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of words are wasted.
All of this careful character construction is done with immense care and precision. Russo gives each denizen of Empire Falls room to grow and breathe. It seems that every character in the novel could (and, in some cases, should) have his or her own novel, whether it be the lovable Tick or the despicable Jimmy Minty.
Russo is also cautious about casting dispersions. Even as he clearly pits certain characters against his protagonist, he never makes them villains. Each character’s actions are understandable-- even somewhat justifiable-- in context, no matter how wicked they may seem.
Empire Falls is a success on every level. It’s every bit as entertaining as a solid page-turner or potboiler paperback picked up from the airport bookstore, yet it is most decidedly a literary novel-- and a long one at that. It’s a dense, long read likely to take less time to finish than readers think, although any and all commitments readers have outside of the book may wind up in the backseat.
Russo’s most recent book is The Whore’s Child and Other Stories, an anthology that puts new work like "The Mysteries of Linwood Hart" alongside older stories like "Joyride."
Russo’s stories lack the same punch as his novels. He’s an author who seems to need to stretch his legs and explore his characters in more detail. While I can enjoy Michael Chabon’s craft in both the shorter works and the novels, appreciating their differences, many of Russo’s stories mostly feel like pieces of longer, better work and aborted novels.
The greatest offender is "The Farther You Go," a story starring Hank Devereaux from Straight Man. The story is basically thirty or forty pages cut right from the middle of Straight Man and drained of humor and compassion. The scene, an innocuous one at best in which Hank escorts his son-in-law to the airport after the son-in-law punches Hank’s daughter, is far from exciting. Worse, Hank’s wife, previously a delightful character, is turned into a nameless, personality-free character who exists for the sake of plot development. The changes are minimal, but the writing is flatter and more grim and the characters are less likable than in Straight Man. The only emotional investment in the story will likely come from those who already know the rest of the story from reading Straight Man.
The title story is interesting, but also flat. It feels too simple in all the wrong ways. Writing teacher meets nun, nun joins writing workshop, nun tells sad story. It feels perfunctory and hollow, like a writing workshop exercise. Russo’s prose is as always top-notch, but this story lacks the condensed power readers expect from Russo, the kind they find in great short-story writers like Lorrie Moore, Matt Klam, or Alice Munroe.
A few stories work better. "Monhegan Light" is an interesting portrait of marriage, and the novella "The Mysteries of Linwood Hart" evokes the confused world of childhood quite well.
The best of the stories are "Poison" and "Joyride." "Poison" feels more like a traditional Russo story, centering on the conflict between upper-class success and working-class struggle. Two writers from the same crumbling hometown reunite for a weekend, and the disparity between their worldviews (to say nothing of their girlfriends) becomes painfully apparent. "Poison" is powerful stuff, better even than the average New Yorker story, traditionally considered the cream of the short-fiction crop.
"Joyride" feels distinctly unlike a work by Richard Russo, but that doesn’t reduce its potency. A young boy and his mother go on a long roadtrip from Maine to Arizona after they abandon his hapless but well-meaning father. The mother/son relationship is not often explored by Russo in such depth. The story is told from the perspective of the child and thus takes on the attributes of a child’s mind. It’s a heavy tale, but since it’s told from the perspective of a preteen, it maintains an innocent, lighter atmosphere even as a foreboding sense begins to dominate near the end.
The Whore’s Child and Other Stories is a mixed bag. It’s not the all-encompassing experience readers expect from Russo novels, but it’s still better than nearly every book you’ll find in the new-release section of your local bookstore. At worst it’s hit-and-miss, and at best it’s a solid beach read for those more inclined to literary fiction.
from Nightlife's 08/21/03 issue:
Allison Joseph:
Poetry Imitating Life
words by Bryan Miller
picture by Geary Deniston
SIU professor Allison Joseph recently released her fourth volume of poetry, Imitation of Life. Joseph is an accomplished poet who has received an Individual Artists' Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council and fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers conferences, as well as an award from the Illinois Arts Council.
Born in London, England in 1967, Joseph took an interest in writing at an early age. "I have always loved words and language, so poetry was very natural for me," she says. "I started writing around age fourteen or fifteen, but unlike a lot of people, I didn't stop." She went on to graduate from Kenyon College and Indiana University. Now, in addition to working on the poems that fill the volumes What Keeps Us Here, Soul Train, and In Every Seam, she edits Crab Orchard Review and is the director of the Young Writers Workshop.
Nightlife recently caught up with Joseph to talk about her latest book, teaching, and the writing life in Carbondale.
Were you always drawn to poetry or to fiction/nonfiction as well, and did you ever write much of either of the two?
As a kid I wrote poetry, plays, little sketches, stories– the whole gamut. Now I concentrate on poetry and the occasional piece of nonfiction. I write fiction occasionally, but just for fun, much like I did when I was a teenager.
What is important about poetry?
It's an art form where language is honored for its purest elements– image, diction, sound, and rhythm. It can console, instruct, entertain, divert, and in times of national crisis, make us feel somewhat whole again.
How did you decide to teach, and why did you choose SIU?
Well, a lot of poets in this country teach to make a living, and I was fortunate enough to get a job out of graduate school at [the] University of Arkansas at Little Rock. I would have stayed there, too, if it hadn't been for Rodney Jones, who made it possible to join the faculty here.
What kind of creative environment is Carbondale?
Surprisingly effective– the MFA Program in the English Department is cordial and supportive, and Carbondale itself is a very affordable place to live for students and faculty alike. You can get a lot of work done here– think of all the poems, stories, essays, and novels that have been written here– from Rodney Jones to Beth Lordan to Mike Magnuson, Brady Udall and Judy Jordan, to our departed but not forgotten colleagues Kent Haruf and Lucia Perillo. No, C'dale isn't a big city, but folks here do like and are interested in writers.
Are we an unfriendly society towards poetry, or perhaps literature overall?
On the surface, it appears to be true that our society is becoming less interested in poetry and literature. But there's evidence to the contrary– the overwhelming popularity of a poet like Billy Collins, for example. Def Poetry Jam on HBO is another example. There are those who will never be interested in poetry, but for those who seek it out, it's available in formats and styles like never before.
What is the place of poetry in modern America?
Everywhere poets are– in big cities and small towns, in café s and classrooms. I think poetry has more than one single defined place in the world, and it's up to poets to figure about where all those places could be.
What are your principal aims for the Crab Orchard Review as editor, both your hopes for its overall effect as well as its longer-term future?
We aim to continue to publish the best poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that we can find, and to keep investigating the subjects that interest us as writers and as people. Notice I say "we" there, because Crab Orchard Review is the result of the ongoing efforts of many people, of which I am only one (some others responsible for shaping the magazine's vision are [managing editor] Jon Tribble and [prose editor] Carolyn Alessio). We publish two issues each year, one of which is a thematic issue. The thematic issues give us the opportunity to explore issues we like to read about– we published one this spring on food, and the issue we are reading submissions for right now is centered on the topic of "Wander This World: Immigration, Migration, and Exile." Submission guidelines are on the Crab Orchard Review website at <http://www.siu.edu/~crborchd>. We'll be reading for this issue until October 31, 2003.
Many poems in Imitation of Life revolve around or refer to childhood. Why are stories of childhood so compelling?
I'm interested in childhood as a gateway to adolescence– how we morph from nine to nineteen really interests me. My own childhood was one of a lot of storytelling and imagination. Words and books were my escape, my refuge. As I got older, I met other kids who thought words were vitally important, the way some kids get obsessed over sports or certain TV shows. That part of my childhood/adolescence is something I try to replicate each summer with the Young Writers Workshop, the annual conference we have on campus for high-school students interested in creative writing. We had our fifth Young Writers Workshop this past June, and it always amazes and gratifies me to see teenagers who love words the way I did. It's so much fun to see them engage language as if it matters– because they get so many signals that it doesn't. For them, words aren't just words.
Many of the poems deal with being an outsider ("Sleepaway Camp," "Anti-Prom"). Do you feel that writers have some predisposition towards being outsiders or that being an outsider, in one way or another, can make one into a writer?
As an African-American woman, I'm automatically an outsider in this society. But I view it as a position of strength from which to view a society that I don't always feel a part of. I don't cling to any romantic notion of "writer-as-outsider," though. I'm very much involved with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP for short– you can find them on the web at <http://www.AWPWriter.org>). What AWP does is bridge the distances between writers. I serve on the Board of Directors, and I'm co-chair for the next annual conference, which will be in Chicago (SIU will be one of the sponsors). The conference is attended by nearly three-thousand writers each year– it's hard to feel like an outsider in that crowd– it's a meeting of all the "outsiders" in one place!
In "On Being Told I Don't Speak Like a Black Person," the speaker of the poem refers to societal expectations placed on African Americans. As a poet, particularly a black American poet, do you feel that certain expectations or presuppositions are placed on you?
Yes, there are presuppositions put on me as [a] poet because of my race and my gender. But I have the option of playing with those expectations, or of ignoring them, or of actively using them to fuel my writing. But I don't often sit down and write a poem with those expectations in mind, since the drafting of a poem happens for me in an almost trance-like state. I write first, ask questions and discover ramifications later. When I'm writing, I'm thinking first and foremost about the next word I want to have follow the word I've just written.
If you had to encapsulate your hope for your work in a line or two, how would you do it?
I hope that readers, no matter what their background or status, see something of their own lives in my work. I'm interested in seeing where different lives interconnect through language, and I hope that my poems can be part of that dialogue.
from Nightlife's 04/22/04 issue:
Tony Williams
And The Cinema of George A. Romero
interview by Bryan Miller
pictures by Geary Deniston
Tony Williams's new book, The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead, fills a major gap in horror-film criticism. Williams's book is the first in-depth study of the work of Romero, one of the most influential directors of horror films in the last three-and-a-half decades and one of the pioneers of modern independent cinema. Romero's work is often gravely misunderstood and improperly categorized as mindless violence and splatter, but the director, most famous for his Dead trilogy (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead), layered his films with a great deal of social commentary.
Williams is a professor at SIU and has published widely on horror and American independent cinema. Nightlife recently caught up with him to talk about the social subtext of horror, the threat conservatism poses to independent art, and the legacy of one of the greatest and boldest horror film directors in modern American cinema.
How did you first get interested in horror films?
I think it began when I first went to Warwick University in England in 1976 to do an M.A. under Robin Wood. I was searching for a topic and Robin suggested the horror film. This was about two years before he wrote his classic essay, An Introduction to the American Horror Film, and my M.A. thesis was on the family in the American horror film, published in 1996 [in] Fairleigh Dickinson University Press as "Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film."
Did you previously have personal interest in the genre?
I was interested in the genre because of my broad interest in film as such, but when I began to go to higher education in England, there were no film courses whatsoever in any university, and it was only two years after I got my Ph.D. that they began increasing film courses in English universities, though now there are hundreds of them. I went to Warwick University to do a course under Robin Wood, but I have always been interested in film from a very early age.
What attracts you to film in general?
I think it's excitement as an entertainment format competently directed. I would say it is an art movement in its own particular right, and an exciting concept where things can be achieved as long as you don't have the interference of the bureaucracies and corporations which really plague Hollywood cinema now and make your job as a reviewer much more difficult.
People always tell me I don't like anything.
Who can blame you with the amount of rubbish appearing on cinema screens today?
What's the first horror movie you recall seeing and being really excited about?
Oh, that's really going way back. I think my first X film-- my first R-rated film in England-- would be Circus of Horrors starring Anton Diffring, which appeared in 1960. I read the novelization before I went to see the film and Diffring, who appeared in several British war films, usually played Nazi camp guards. Although he was interred during World War II in Canada, he was a very interesting person in terms of playing villains. And he also appeared in The Man Who Could Cheat Death and he continued up to, I think, the 1980s before he died. One of his last performances was in the Dr. Who Cyberman episode "Silver Nemesis." When the Silver Nemesis says, "Take me to your leader," Diffring said in his archetypal German accent, "Ja, we had a fü her once." He's one of those great character actors you see very few and far between now.
Like a Steve Buscemi type?
I would say completely different than Steve Buscemi. I think [Buscemi] does tend to be a bit irritating in terms of his excessiveness, while Diffring always made his characters believable.
So did Circus of Horrors have a big effect on you when you saw it?
I just liked the idea of excess and suspense.
Excess?
Oh, yes, excess.
It seems that horror films are very often used for social commentary. They seem very naturally adapted for it. Why is that?
I think there's a specific frame or movement of horror films which lend themselves to that particular interpretation. I would say the classical American family horror films, such as It's Alive, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, God Told Me To, Romero's films-- especially the Dead trilogy-- and many others in that key period of the 1970s when values were much more critiqued in film than they are now.
Why do you think films have moved away from that now?
I think it's got to do with growing conservatism in this country ever since the elections of Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher in England, and the hold of the corporations on film content. You're not going to get radical films critiquing the system by multimillion-dollar corporations. The era of the low-budget films and accompanying distribution is long gone. Now, there's only direct-to-video distribution, which means that opportunities for wider reception and appropriate budgets are really marginal.
But it seems like even during the days of B-pictures, they were working with low budgets and producing interesting stuff.
Yes, I agree very much. I'm going to teach Orson Welles next semester and I was looking at Mr. Arkadin last night, which he directed in 1955. Welles, I believe, is very much the father of American independent guerilla filmmaking in what he was trying to do, and it is true that once you're away from the big budget and studio control you can make much more interesting and diverse films. It happened in the classic era of Hollywood in film noir, low-budget features in the 1950s, and to a certain extent it might be true today, although opportunities are very limited.
Often, horror films, which are regarded as products of a disreputable genre, are often much more able to make certain relevant social comments than big A-budget movies. To give you an example, the 1950s Universal Studio westerns of Anthony Mann I from Winchester '73 (1950) to The Man from Laramie (1955) were much more powerful than the epics he did, like Cimarron (1960) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). When you have big budgets, studio control becomes much more direct and oppressive. But there are exceptions to every rule.
Whereas someone like Robert Rodriguez can get away with things because-- well, who's going to stop him?
And, of course, in Japan-- Takashi Miike and the "cinema of outrage" and the work of the late Kinji Fukasaku, Battle Royale 1 and 2, which will never be distributed here due to the Columbine syndrome.
I'm recently looking at Fukasaku's 1970s gangster films, done on low budget, which are much more gritty and realistic than the noble Yakuza films starring Takakura Ken. I think that Battle Royale is a very underrated film. I've written on it in a forthcoming collection on Japanese horror cinema edited by Jay McRoy, and I think that is a film that not only speaks to the state of Japanese society, but also to the apocalyptic world we're facing now.
It's a good one. It's bleak.
Yes it is. Deliberately bleak and positively bleak, like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Kinji Fukasaku's seventies Japanese-gangster movies.
Shifting toward Romero-- Romero seems to have done something pretty unique in that he managed to make these very large-looking films. How was he able to pull that off?
The first one-- of the Dead trilogy-- he did independently, shot it over weekends, and that was the time in which you could make independent commercial films on a low budget and get a theatrical release. The other two were the result of his partnership with Laurel Production Company, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. Basically he was lucky in the partnership-- not so lucky when it dissolved. His former partner is preventing the theatrical re-release and film festival screenings of the Laurel films from Martin to Day of the Dead. You may remember when they had the Romero festival in Chicago in the Siskel Center in 2000, they couldn't show any of the Laurel films. Harvard Film Archive were quite ready to lend the Siskel Center their copy and Romero's ex-partner just hit the roof. It's very similar to the copyright problems plaguing the Welles estate thanks to Beatrice Welles. I think at one point they couldn't show Citizen Kane in a Welles festival in the British National Film Theatre.
Romero was clearly trying to make a statement, but how consciously do you think he was trying to go for naturalism?
George is very much an intuitive film director, which means he doesn't really consciously think about, or plan out, such concepts, but the ideas are there because they belong to the time and culture, and everybody soaks up ideas from the culture in which they're existing.
As far as naturalism is concerned, which is where I place a parallel with Romero's films: George has never read any Zola. He's very intuitive, but if you compare Dawn of the Dead to Zola's novel The Ladies Paradise, the scenes of commodity and excess in the fashion arena are very telling. It's one of these lucky accidents which occur.
For example, Larry Cohen says he never saw Jean Luc-Godard's Weekend when he was shooting Bone, and I'm inclined to believe him, even though Michael Weldon of Psychotronic may disagree. Some things happen accidentally, and often people like Romero, who are great intuitive filmmakers, latch onto ideas unconsciously.
But clearly he has an agenda.
There's a very interesting interview he did in Film Criticism called "The McDonaldization of America." He very much knows what he is doing and this is why, in one sense, he's an outsider in the Hollywood system, which will rarely tolerate any direct social criticism.
Obviously, it's much harder now for Romero to get his films made.
Ironically, he was due to appear at the horror film festival in Brussels and he backed out at the last moment because one of his projects might be on the verge of materializing. This is what happened in Philadelphia at the Emile Zola conference in 2001. He was scheduled to appear, but had to back out because a film project looked like it was going to take off, but then it crashed at the last moment. The world of film is all about these misfortunes and, sometimes, happy accidents.
Does the system even want a Romero now?
He put it aptly in Chicago by saying that he and Meryl Streep are both regarded as "yesterday's pizza," which is a great disservice to two people who are both older but yet still very talented. Romero is obviously a director who wants control over his work, and who can blame him? He doesn't want a situation whereby what he does is supervised by many people and the final product ends up as an absolute travesty. He's said several times that he's had opportunities to go to Hollywood and Dario Argento's Studio in Italy, but he didn't want to do it because he wants to maintain his independence. That's why he's still based in Pittsburgh, and that's why he shot Bruiser in Canada.
What's Romero's last great movie? Bruiser?
With George, it's really interesting, because he is a director who is out to change his style. He doesn't want to be associated with the gore-and-splatter horror filmmakers. When I saw Monkey Shines, I found it really difficult, but I'm getting to like it more and more. Both Monkey Shines and Bruiser are the films Romero insisted on personally introducing at the Siskel Center back in 2000. I didn't like Bruiser when I first saw it, but now looking at it in detail I'm getting more and more into it.
These are two films which deserve constant exploration. Most journalistic reviewing is very much done on the one-viewing experience. But certain films are meant to be viewed on more than one occasion. George Romero is becoming one of those exceptional directors whose work is capable of generating interest and excitement at each particular viewing. He is one of American cinema's most neglected talents who deserves to be making more films than he has had the opportunity to do so far.
Do you think his collaborations with Stephen King have been successful?
Not particularly, no.
Do you think that's the fault of King?
The problem with King is the problem of most screen adaptations, where there is often a disjunction between an interesting literary original and the cinematic version. When I began reading Stephen King before I came to America in 1984, I was very impressed with how much he illustrated the plight of normal Americans-- the wife who fears divorce and humiliation at the supermarket counter when she brings out her food stamps, the trauma of alcoholism, losing your job and ending up in an awful motel, as well as the social fears expressed by the main character in The Shining.
These are very important elements in the work of Stephen King, but the adaptations, with the exception of the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining-- which I think is much better than the King novel despite King giving the seal of approval for that awful TV miniseries-- avoid these very relevant social features. People often go to horror films just for the special effects. But King's novels and Romero's films contain relevant parallels between horror and social commentary, and that's why the two of them have collaborated.
Creepshow should be looked at in terms of Romero's reworking of the EC comic tradition. As I've pointed out, the film operates very much according to the "moral tale" of O. Henry short stories, which also influenced William Gaines and many of the animators at EC comics during the 1950s.
Those were great books. You can still find reprints.
I've used the reprints from the Campus Comic Book Store, one of the good things in Carbondale along with Plaza Records, Book World, Rosetta News, and Nightlife, of course.
Was Romero directly influenced by those comics?
He definitely was, and he's on record as saying there is a direct influence on his films. It's very similar to the influence of the proletarian grotesque of the cultural-front theatrical movement in the 1930s in the cinema of Orson Welles. You only have to look at Touch of Evil and Mr. Arkadin to see this.
When Romero uses gore and splatter, it's not his sole aim, but despite that, do you think he's had some negative influence-- incidentally?
The only negative influence of the Romero films are from those people who try to copy the gore and splatter without understanding what they really involve. I've drawn parallels to the excess in naturalism, the literary movement associated with Emile Zola, whose novels were criticized, particularly in England and America, as being in bad taste. But they also had a very positive social purpose. Zola critiqued the consumer society of the second empire of Louis Napoleon. Zola was not a political radical like Marx, but he saw the way in which society was corrupt from the top downwards and depicted this corruption in various novels.
Romero, in a way, is very much a chronicler of the dystopian aspects of American life, using the horror genre to depict these particular malfunctions. Like Hitchcock, he's associated with a particular genre, and if given more opportunities to direct films he'd probably bring in this very subversive level into the generic formulas he's expected to provide. He'll also try to subvert these formulas as much as possible, assuming he's given the possibility to do this.
Do you think Romero will only be remembered for the Dead trilogy?
I hope not. I hope that he's remembered for other films as well, like Knightriders, which is his version of Howard Hawks's Hatari!, a film that deals with the pitfalls of being an independent filmmaker or an independent talent struggling against the system with all the positive and negative consequences involved in that struggle.
Have you seen any good modern horror films lately?
Not that I can remember. Something could come to mind if you jog my memory. I think the interesting work right now is coming out of Hong Kong and other areas of Southeast Asia, such as Japan and Taiwan, such as certain examples of Category III Hong Kong cinema. Films like Doctor Lamb, The Untold Story, and Ebola Syndrome, the last two starring the great Hong Kong character actor Anthony Wong, as well as some of the cinematic outrages of Takashi Miike, are very interesting because they're done on low budgets. They're produced in environments that are beyond the forces of taste and discrimination. In fact, many of these films were brought to my attention by Tom Weisser of Asian Cult Cinema, who is doing a tremendous job in distributing these important works to American audiences on DVD.
Are the social messages of horror films in America gone now, and it's mostly shock?
I think that is mostly true. I have not seen the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You saved me the theatrical price of [the remake of] Dawn of the Dead. I might get around to seeing them sometime on video, but it's just like Life is Beautiful-- I can wait, since it is not high on my list of viewing priorities. So I'm going to take my time to go see it, just like Mel Gibson's "The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre."
Good quote: Robin Wood said once, "Going to a film is now a choice between now a duty and punishment," and I try to save myself punishment as often as possible, so I don't belong in the masochistic category of Mel Gibson's ideal audience, consuming an anti-Semitic, gay - porn movie masquerading as a religious film.
Is the culture now is taking an even harder turn toward that Reaganesque mentality?
I think definitely so. I think it's very much a terrified culture now, being more manipulated from above than ever before. Very few people dare to speak out. Look at the State of the Union address with Democratic politicians applauding the banal platitudes of the Republican president. Or the majority of faculty at SIU who have made spinelessness into a fine art before an appalling higher administration and Board of Trustees!
Doesn't it seem like this would be then an opportune time for horror films?
I think it would, but how many people would dare to make something as radical as Battle Royale in America, and at the same time expect distribution by the system?
Is it more a problem of distribution than production?
I think it's a matter of both, because ever since 9/11 there's been very much a tendency to rally around the flag, be team players, and not rock the boat. Of course, this is a time for rocking the boat, as we both know. But also there's the fact of distribution.
Orson Welles once said that dealing with financial problems exhausts one's creative powers. One reason why John Ford and Howard Hawks's creativity waned in the 1960s was due to the fact that they didn't have the studio system around them any longer to support their efforts, so they tired themselves out in the deal-making process. Larry Cohen's The Ambulance, made in 1990, deserved a theatrical release, and went straight to video. It deserved much better, but that's the way the system is operating here. Some very worthy works end on video and DVD distribution, and some awful things are inflicted on us theatrically.