Back of the Book

San Antonio native (and recent Texas Observer contributor) Laurie Ann Guerrero has just published her second book of poetry, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, on University of Notre Dame Press. The book—her first full-length outing after the 2008 chapbook Babies Under the Skin—won the 2012 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.

Check out A Tongue‘s promo trailer:

Guerrero is an editor at Austin’s Dos Gatos Press and an instructor at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio and the MFA creative writing program at the University of Texas-El Paso.

A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying is available in paperback or as an e-book from the University of Notre Dame Press, fine bookstores, and the usual assortment of online retailers.

 

 

 

Observer books editor David Duhr recently reviewed Houston author Elizabeth Black’s debut The Drowning House for the magazine, and found that the Galveston-set novel, despite flashes of insight and descriptive prowess, suffers from its main character’s “histrionics,” its author’s “awkward” first-person narration, and a color-blind (not in a good way) depiction of life on the island.

The novel, Duhr writes,

…offers the ravages of water, fire and wind, and a portrait of Galveston struggling to disentangle itself from a romanticized past.

But the book falls flat. Black heaps far more gravitas on her characters than they can support; the mysteries fizzle undramatically; and narrator Clare is despicable, an overgrown child—which would be fine, if Black would allow us to freely dislike her. But a growing trend in fiction commands writers to craft characters who are likeable and sympathetic. It’s terrible advice—many of literature’s most memorable characters are neither—but Black gives in. Yes, Clare may be a ragingly selfish malcontent. But! Her child died! And though that child is nothing more than an obvious plot device, how can you dislike a grieving mother?

Read Duhr’s entire review here.

Meanwhile, Joy Tipping at The Dallas Morning News found the book “thrillingly evocative and witty,” even if Black does try to “stuff too much into one book […] leaving a lot of strings either tangled or untied too late.”

Tipping’s review is here.

Farther north, the Minneapolis Star Tribune‘s Meganne Fabrega notes:

Black, a poet, takes great care to construct each paragraph to reflect the complicated physical and emotional landscape of Clare’s hometown. Unfortunately, her writing style often overshadows the plot, sending the reader to and fro between characters and side stories that never satisfactorily come to fruition.

Read Fabrega’s take here.

Have you read The Drowning House? Pitch your two cents into the comments.

 

[The Observer’s periodic round-up of recent and forthcoming books by Texas authors, on Texas presses, or about Texas topics. Compiled by Books Editor David Duhr.]

Dr. Brinkley’s Tower, Robert Hough (1/1/13, Steerforth Press)—A fictionalization of the life of John Brinkley, famed border blaster and oddball doctor who claimed to cure impotence by implanting goat testicles in his patients. (Don’t try that at home. Don’t try that anywhere.) Reviews range from “lackluster” and “colorless” to “ingratiating” and “fictional magic.”

Anonymity, Janna McMahan (1/1/13, Koehler Books)—Based on research on homeless youth in Austin, this novel tells of an unlikely friendship between an Austin bartender and a homeless teen. Blurber Ron Rash calls this one “an insightful and compelling novel of young people adrift on the streets of Austin.” Look for the writer to make an Austin appearance  in the spring.

Make it, Take it, Rus Bradburd (1/8/13, Cinco Puntos)—Steve Pytel, assistant coach at an Arizona college, is having a rough go of things on the court and off: job trouble, girl trouble, car trouble. Through it all, he must somehow manage to keep his team together and his players out of jail. Former college hoops coach Bradburd puts his experience to use in this his third book, and first novel. Blurber Alex Shakar, whose work we’re fans of, writes, “For all the hilarity in these pages, Make It, Take It is a soul-wrenching indictment of how the game behind the game is played.”

The Drowning House, Elizabeth Black (1/15/13, Random House)—This debut out of Houston may appeal to readers enthralled with Galveston, about which Black writes lyrically. The rest—including the story itself—is disappointing. See the full Observer review in the February issue, or check back here soon.

Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale, Lynda Rutledge (2/5/13 paperback, Penguin)—This debut novel has some amusing insights into Texas. And Texans. And God. It’s not a bad story, though it’s unlikely to stay with you. Nobody will say it better than our own Robert Leleux.

Calling Me Home, Julie Kibler (2/12/13, St. Martin’s)—Another big-house debut from a Texas writer, this one covers an East Texas-to-Cincy road trip during which two aging women, one black and one white … well, you know, learn about themselves and each other. Early reviews are encouraging.

Edge of Dark Water, Joe R. Lansdale (2/12/13 paperback, Little, Brown & Co.)—We don’t have to tell you who Joe Lansdale is. His latest offers more “East Texas noir,” with plenty of corpses and chases and swamps, not to mention a Huck Finn-like river journey.

Edie & the Low-Hung Hands, Brian Allen Carr (late February, Small Doggies Press)—Carr, winner of our inaugural Short Story Contest, is back with a new novella. Marlet, the hung-handed protagonist, slices his way through a nightmarish desert. Blurber Percival Everett says  Carr’s “Texas landscape is a mix of country and blues. Larry McMurtry sings Robert Johnson.” Read the opening chapter, see if it’s for you.

The Houston Chronicle has the news of artist Bert Long’s death today, at age 72, of pancreatic cancer.

Working in paint, sculpture, photography, and public space, Long was a Houston fixture whose influence suffused the state, and whose reach was international.

Houston Press‘ Kelly Klaasmeyer had a nice partially biographical piece on Long’s 2006 Museum of Fine Arts Houston show here.

At the time of Long’s death, Houston’s Menil Collection was planning to screen the film A Valentine for Bert Long on Feb. 14 at 7 p.m., and Houston Baptist University was set to open an exhibition of Long’s work on Feb. 28 at HBU’s Contemporary Art Gallery.

There will doubtless be further tributes and homages as word spreads that the state has lost one of its brightest lights.

 

 

 

 

 

“I would like to delete hip-hop and insert country music.” —Don McLeroy, former State Board of Education chair.

In 2010, as the State  Board of Education  revised Texas’ curricula for science and history, an ultra-conservative bloc of board members led by Don McLeroy, a Bryan dentist, drew national attention to Texas—mostly the pointing-and-laughing kind—by casting doubt on evolution and trying to insert politically charged language into the history standards.

Director Scott Thurman and his crew were there to film the proceedings and speak with the folks on both sides of the debate. The result is the brilliant documentary The Revisionaries, which aired last night on PBS. (Skip down for more ways to watch it.)

By my reckoning, the filmmakers spend most of their time with four fascinating guides to the controversy: Texas Freedom Network president Kathy Miller and Southern Methodist University professor Ron Wetherington on the pro-evolution side, and then-SBOE members McLeroy and Cynthia Dunbar—a Houston lawyer and a professor at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University—on the other.

The quote from McLeroy above is a good measure of the film’s tone—it catches the state board at its most divisive moments, with honesty and good humor. You can see the moment in the trailer below: McLeroy is on a roll, proposing tweaks to the state education standards as he sees fit, right down to replacing hip-hop with country music, like he’s changing the radio station in a rented car. There’s laughter in the room when he does it, and McLeroy laughs right along.

And then, more often than not, he gets his way.

McLeroy is a fascinating character, and Thurman paints a rich portrait of the personal life behind his politics. We hear McLeroy expounding  his doubts about evolution to patients stuck open-mouthed in his dentist’s chair and watch him lead his Sunday School class across an open field, pacing off the actual size of Noah’s Ark.

We see participants on both sides of the fight sit down and talk with each other, respectful of the opposition’s  beliefs. They only run aground when it’s time to spin those beliefs into policy about what Texas teaches its children.

The film does the important work of reaching past the point-and-laugh instinct that runs so thick in most national coverage of the school standards fight. McLeroy comes across as earnest, and confident in the mandate he’s been given as an elected member of the board.

Which makes his 2010 Republican primary loss all the more dramatic. In the film’s closing act, McLeroy’s replacement on the board, Thomas Ratliff, appears as the voice of everyone in Texas who followed the SBOE debacle and wondered, what the hell is going on?

Since the film’s release, McLeroy has owned his renewed platform, turning up on “The Colbert Report” and joining in a Reddit chat about the movie.

Tomorrow, the SBOE will hold its first meeting of the year, and while the current balance of power favors moderate voices over those of  2010, it also features a few freshmen—Amarillo’s Marty Rowley chief among them—who sound ready to take up McLeroy’s yoke. Even if doesn’t turn out to be a repeat of 2009-2010, we shouldn’t have to wait long for more SBOE: they’re scheduled to select new textbooks for science later this year, and for social studies in 2014.

Depending on where you live, you can probably catch The Revisionaries again—check your local listings here. You can also watch the doc online for free. Here’s the trailer:

Celebrated short story writer George Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1958, and that’s pretty well the extent of his Texas connection. Saunders grew up in the Chicago area, worked as a mining engineer in Sumatra, and since 1997 has been on the faculty at Syracuse University in upstate New York. His stories have earned Saunders multiple National Magazine Awards and a 2006 MacArthur Fellowship. His sixth book of fiction, Tenth of December, was published Jan. 8. Saunders will read and sign books at 7 pm on Tuesday, Dec. 22, at Book People in Austin.

The Observer‘s Emily DePrang prefaced his visit by phone:

TO: If I were you, after the New York Times hagiography came out, I think I would be completely paralyzed.

GS: Yeah. I have an advantage over you in that I’m 54. You see these things come and go and you take it like, “Well, it could have gone the other way. It’s nice that it didn’t. And before long, it’ll go back to the way it was.” Because, you know, this is the most attention a book of mine has ever gotten. The other ones got some, so it’s just kind of like, if you eat beans, you’re gonna fart. If you get a lot of attention, you’re going to swell up and be full of yourself, or be paralyzed. And it passes. It’s best to just enjoy it while it lasts. It’s an interesting thing, to watch your own brain go through it. This is unexpected, so I consider it an interesting way to learn about how you react to things.

TO: Yeah, like what is the effect on the human psyche—

GS: —of having a shitload of attention? Yeah. If we had talked six months ago, before this happened, one of the things that was really on my mind was this question of readership. I had a small readership and I wasn’t sure why. I had two theories. One of them was, everyone was cretins. The other one, which is more serious, was that there’s something I’m doing in my work that’s keeping people away from it, some kind of reflexive habit that excluded people. Aesthetically, that’s interesting. Now that this book is finding a bigger readership, maybe I’ll recalibrate that and say, well—unless we get a wave of returns next week—maybe what I was doing was actually accessible enough to get this bigger audience that I wanted, but I just didn’t know it yet. It’s only interesting if the reason is aesthetic.

TO: I didn’t read the NYT article in part because I knew that if I read it before I read the book I couldn’t have my own thoughts. Then I read the whole book yesterday and I gotta say, you hurt my feelings.

GS: How so?

TO: I just… I was putting off reading it because the pull quote on the cover said “Emotionally piercing” and I was like, “I don’t want to be emotionally pierced… It’s Sunday… Being emotionally pierced is something that I work actively and take medication to prevent…” By the way, this is going to be a shitty interview because you don’t know me but I closely identify with the way you must experience the world in order to write about it the way you do. Like, you’re my favorite living author in part because all the other authors I like have killed themselves.

GS: I won’t. I promise.

TO: Will you really not? I’m actually asking you, Emily DePrang to George Saunders, please don’t kill yourself.

GS: No. I’ve never had any inclination to do that, for a split second, ever.

TO: Good.

GS: On the contrary, I’ll be 140 years old, clinging to it. I think it’s dispositionary.

TO: Well, it’s partly medical.

GS: For all those reasons, this will be a great interview. We can just be pals.

TO: I’ve often wondered about that as I read and I was like, Oh shit, you experience the absolutely overwhelming, horrible thing your brain does when it notices all the details about the people on the train and extrapolates. Like, looking at somebody’s shoes and you think about what it’s like being them putting on those specific shoes that morning and where they’re going in those shoes and how they feel about those shoes—having that experience all the time is crippling and overwhelming and I gravitate toward people who are writing to deal with that. People used to talk about David Foster Wallace as someone who was constantly trying to bail out a sinking boat and he failed to do that. I read your stuff and I think, “I wonder if that’s how he experiences the world.”

GS: Well, I think actually that’s really interesting the way you put that. Here’s another way to think about it. That kind of high level of noticing that Dave had and I think any good writer has, that’s almost like an objective thing. The data comes in and it makes an imprint and the writer learns a prose style that will allow her to exploit the incoming data in an interesting way. But that doesn’t necessarily have to be anything. It doesn’t have to be crippling, it doesn’t have to be uplifting, it’s just data. And then what happens is … that data gets grafted onto or dropped onto the psychological person.

TO: The narratives you’ve already got set up.

GS: Yeah, and also your disposition. Like, Dickens is a person who had an incredible eye for detail and density of detail and it came in on a fundamentally sunny disposition. Take your favorite suicidal poet of the 19th century and the data comes in and it gets dropped on a depressed disposition. I think that’s really in our control. Well, the disposition is not in our control, but I think part of the job as a writer is to kind of belly up to your actual disposition and say, this is who I am and accept that as a given of your aesthetic.

TO: I did read this Guardian interview about your relationship to darkness, your dark aesthetic and how in this one, there’s the disposition that you’re talking about and there’s a recognition of it and a comfort in it, and then there’s realizing that you can write authentically away from the thing that you’re predisposed to.

GS: Yeah. My experience of it is, I don’t do a lot of pre-thinking about what I’m going to write about.

TO: Yeah. Because then it would suck.

GS: I think what happened was, as you get older and your worldview changes, that gets enacted into the stories incrementally. At certain decision points you go, oh, okay, so it would be pretty easy aesthetically to take this story in this direction, but wow it would be harder to take it in this direction. So just for simple reasons of trying to expand the envelope you take it in the harder direction. So this book, it turns out that the really interesting places in the trajectory of these stories were those moments when—like, in the first one, “Victory Lap.” It becomes an abduction story. Well, you can let the abduction take place or you could interrupt it. And I tried both. The interruption was harder and more interesting. So if the other one had been harder or more interesting, I would have done that, but it just turned out it wasn’t. So then, the whole length of the book, it becomes more light, more light gets in.

TO: I would argue about that.

GS: Well, you might be right. That’s become part of the trope. It is incremental. You look up from a book and you’ve written it, and suddenly you’re talking about it.

TO: Yeah. And you’re supposed to be able to articulate why you did what you did when actually, if you had known why you were doing what you were doing, it would have sucked.

GS: Oh I know. The way our critical discourse has evolved, it’s always talking about the reason and the intentions as if you’re in control. That’s okay, but it’s also sort of um…

TO: Dishonest?

GS: Well, I don’t know if it’s really dishonest but it’s really, um, it would be confusing to young artists. It was confusing to me to see artists talk about the process like they got up in the morning and decided and did it. So it’s one of those nebulous things where to not talk about it is weird, to talk about it gauzily is weird…

TO: Yeah, I got my bachelor’s in English and I remember thinking, how could a writer write a single word if they had to know everything in advance like that? And then I learned, they don’t. Your background brain is doing all kind of stuff your forebrain has no idea about, and then people can go back for the next 50 years and pick it out.

GS: I think it’s valuable to do that. I would even go a step further and say, I think going through the exercise of picking thing out, even in that reductive way, somehow it runs around and front-loads your subconscious. I studied Isaac Babel really deeply and Hemingway, and I can feel that somehow, in some really complicated way, that’s beneficial.

TO: Absolutely. Studying it, yes. But the belief that that’s how it gets made is totally different. If you’re going from analysis that’s great, but if you’re a writer and you’re doing this analysis and you think that that was somehow in the architecture, you’re gonna be lost. I just think of it as sausage, like, well whatever I’m reading or looking at, I don’t know how it’s going to come out but it’s all getting ground together and coming out as something.

GS: But I think, Emily, there’s a secondary problem, which is this. If the culture is talking about art that way, then it’s also implying a kind of lower goal for the whole thing. So in other words, you can read a book review and say, “Oh, okay, it’s about patriarchy, I got it.” And of course we all know that the real effect of a piece of great writing is much more multivalent and magical and crazy. So if you get a culture that’s talking about books in terms of this reductive model, it totally discounts the mystery which is really where all the juice is.

TO: Right. If you can sum it up, it’s probably not that great. Well, if you can do a good job summing it up. Or you can sum it up and ruin it.

GS: It’s funny because this is a trope from when I was a kid in the Seventies. You’d hear these singer-songwriters say, ‘I don’t like to label my work, you gotta hear it…’ So that’s all true, and it’s also part of what you have to do I suppose. But as a reader, I know that feeling. Like you get through something, you read Gogol and go, ‘I really want somebody to get me in the ballpark and validate what I felt!’ I think it’s all good.

TO: Yeah. Okay, I asked for ten minutes, the PR lady gave me 20 and I’ve had 16. When do you need me to let you go?

GS: Well, I gotta jump in the shower at like 3:30. If we can go up to then that would be good for me.

TO: It’s 2:16 now, so you probably mean 3:30 your time.

GS: Yeah. No, we can talk until seven, but that’s my final offer.

TO: Dammit George, you’re so selfish. The New York Times thing really changed you.

GS: [Laughs]

TO: Okay, let me knock some stuff out. I have a bone to pick. “Victory Lap,” I was so stoked at the beginning. I opened a book by a well-known male author and I was like, “Wow, the protagonist is a 15-year-old girl, and it’s such a good 15-year-old girl!” It was me remembering how it felt to be her by reading this, and I’m thinking the story is from her perspective, and then it’s not. She gets set up as a perfect picture of innocence to then be the quarry so this skinny guy can actualize himself by saving her. She just becomes a potential rape victim. And that made me sad.

GS: Why?

TO: Because it made me think of [the Joyce Carol Oates story] “Where Are You Going Where Have You Been” and between those two stories I couldn’t think of another story about a 15-year-old girl. If a 15-year-old girl is attractive and lovable then she’s potentially going to get raped and that makes me sad.

GS: I would just refer you back to our previous conversation because I totally had the same feeling. But the thing is, it really didn’t start off to be an abduction story. It was just, when I got done with that section it wasn’t a story. I noted in her speech that she had said this thing, “All you gotta do to be good is be good,” so that presented this next thing. So I guess technically I couldn’t figure out any way to make it interesting for her, somehow, being taken at knifepoint, freeing herself.

TO: Oh yeah. I was just sad she got taken at knifepoint. I just wanted her to have other things to do.

GS: Well, that’s what I wanted too. In fact I based that story on, I started an imitation of this Chekov story called ‘After the Opera,’ which is just what you’re talking about. It’s a girl comes home from the opera and she’s just moving around her room thinking about her night and it’s gorgeous. Perfect. And so I thought, this was kind of in the spirit of, ‘Let me see if I can do something without any violence or death.’ But I actually couldn’t. I couldn’t get the story to cohere. So at that point, I think the part of yourself that knows it can’t afford an agenda, says, at any cost necessary let me get this story. So part of me says, ‘I know this is a thing.’

TO: I knew you’d know it was a thing!

GS: Right. So then I think in stories, you say, ‘Note to self, this is a thing.’ And you inevitably think of the Joyce Carol Oates story. So then part of it is, can we wriggle out of this so the most horrible thing doesn’t happen? Maybe, but I don’t know how. And then it’s this dude. So then, I’ll tell you this. Toward the end of this, I think The New Yorker already had it, and we were working through the edits, and the thing I really didn’t like about it was just what you’re saying, that she is this three-dimensional nice girl, and she gets rescued by this boy, and structurally she vanishes.

TO: Exactly.

GS: Again, it wasn’t so much a politicized thing, but just aesthetically, it was fucked-up that she vanished. So then at the very end there’s that moment where he lifts the rock over, he’s going to kill the abductor, and that’s when she gets to come back in and stop him. So that’s the best I could do.

TO: Damn, I do love that you thought about that.

GS: For story world, that’s what’s interesting, is when for reasons of balance or politics you don’t want to do Thing A, but the story says you have to.

TO: Just like you were saying earlier, you don’t really make the decision, because if you do, it sucks.

GS: Right. But to keep it on the table and say, Okay, a reasonable reader of this story is going to feel this is somewhat cliché. That a girl is being victimized. And not only cliché, but a little bit obnoxious, a little bit exploitative. So you go, yeah, it’s true, I would feel that way, if I was on page six, I’d feel like, ‘Oh no, you didn’t.’ So that’s the fun part is to go, ‘Well, but I did.’

TO: So now what?

GS: Now I gotta somehow pull this shit out of the fire the best I can. But I enjoyed that conversation because for me a lot of these stories, there is a high level of—almost as soon as you’ve started a story you’ve fucked it up. As soon as you start it you go, ‘Oh no…’

TO: Well no, anything you do is—that’s what kills me about fiction. There’s only like four things that can happen. You can only write so many stories about a New England couple getting a divorce. I wanted to tell you real quick that today, I was driving along, I saw a Lexus billboard, and it had a black background, it had a picture of a gorgeous silver Lexus and it said in huge letters, “Don’t Go Quietly.” And I thought that was hysterical. I thought, you know who would think that was funny? George.

GS: That is funny. I would love to hear the discussion around that.

TO: Right? Okay, when I said you hurt my feelings, let me explain. I get up at 8:30 in the morning yesterday and I go sit down and read the first story and I’m like, “Ugh, so good it hurts.” And then I read the second one and I’m like, “I’m okay I’m okay.” And I got to the end of your third story where Callie leaves the puppy in the cornfield and you know she’s going to lose her son even though she’s doing the best she can, and I sat back and thought, God, I don’t do a lot of drugs but I want to be high, I want to be drunk right now, I need immediately now not to be in my head, being me, experiencing this right now.

GS: You better go find a different writer, dear! That sounds painful!

TO: It’s excruciating! And I woke up my husband and got under his arm and sobbed face down, like “And the puppy’s going to starve and the medications—

GS: Oh, I’m so sorry! But that may not be the case! The puppy could crawl out of the woods. And I don’t, I’ll tell you the truth, I really don’t think that woman’s going to call CPS.

TO: You don’t?

GS: Well, it’s impossible to say one way or the other. The story doesn’t say. The story says she probably is. But personally, given the mayhem of the world—and I’m just making this up for you, Emily—

TO: I know that, and I appreciate that.

GS: [Laughs]

TO: No, seriously. My husband will be driving by and I’ll see something that’s ambiguous and Jeffery will tell me, “No, that’s not the way it looks, it’s this more positive way,” and I’m like, “Okay, thanks.”

GS: But you know, I’ll give you a serious answer to that, because I’m kind of moved that you’re moved but also not so happy that you’re moved to feel pain. But on the other hand, the thing that that says about you is that you’re really susceptible to fiction and you’re feeling the character’s pain really intensely, which is wonderful, so then maybe what’s actually going on is, I mean it certainly is pain but it also is that you’re opening up. I remember reading Wallace and feeling that way, like, Aw man, I’m tingling, you know? So I don’t know.

TO: It’s fantastic. It’s what you do that other people can’t. Throughout the book I feel like you identified the two most excruciating things, which is disappointing your children or being a disappointment to your children, and the pain of animals.

GS: Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know.

TO: Do you have kids?

GS: I do, yeah.

TO: How old?

GS: Ah, 24 and 22.

TO: Boy, girl?

GS: Both girls. And a lot of the book was—I mean a lot of my life was, you know, my wife and I, trying to raise them, and loving them so much, and so I think that gets in there for sure, especially if there’s any kind of financial strain….

TO: Oh yeah. The whole, moving money to the Discover to try to buy the figurines, that’s close to home.

GS: Yeah. That was definitely our experience and I’m getting the sense that it wasn’t just ours. That sort of 1930s ethic that if you don’t have, you do without, has fallen by the wayside a little bit. So yeah. Especially during the period of that book, there was a lot of that.

TO: During the period of that book there was a lot of that?

GS: Well, that story. That story goes back 13 or 14 years.

TO: Really!

GS: Yeah, I started it in 1998. Like that credit card thing is totally real for us, moving everything around. But the thing that isn’t in that story, or maybe it is, is just the warmth that we had. It wasn’t like a panic. We were just like, ‘Oh. God, well, that’s embarrassing.’ Like in that piece, we got somewhere and all our cards were full. That was just kind of how we rolled then.

TO: I remember being left at the restaurant while my dad left to go get a different card. That was so real…

GS: Yeah, I did that just recently, to my daughter. They didn’t take cards or something. I just feel like there’s a lot of comic potential in this stuff we all do and we all try not to fess up to. But for some reason I don’t have a problem with it.

TO: But I love it. That’s your job is not to have a problem with the things nobody else fesses up to. Okay I have to spit out the phrase I wrote down: “The profound moral weight of the mundane.”

GS: Yeah. One of the things, when you get older you look back. Now I’m 54. And I’ve been through all the major things except grandkids. I’ve had my youth, I’ve fallen in love and got married and had kids and they’re in college and all that. So you think, at this point, I kind of have got the lay of the land, I kind of understand what American life or what just life in general is. And mostly when I look back at important moral moments in my life, they weren’t major. They weren’t charging a fort. They were small and at the time you might not even have felt them as moral moments. But in retrospect you go, ‘Oh God, that was a big one.’ I think most of the things in my life at least have been kind of low-contour, but still important. Still, people were on the other side of these decisions for good or ill.

TO: And what does it mean about literature that you keep getting called humane? That’s a distinguishing attribute?

GS: I don’t know! I like that but I think there are a lot of humane writers. I don’t know, really. I feel pretty humane. Working on it, anyway.

TO: Now I can see that I have probably 30 seconds left so this is the perfect time for this question: Do short stories fight injustice?

GS: Oy. I think they probably do. But I think when you’re writing, you better not think about that.

TO: Yes yes yes!

GS: I think what they do, and here I’m probably, I use this phrase a lot so if I’m copping from myself, forgive me. But they make the boundaries permeable. So if you’re watching TV for example, you’re going to get this feeling that you’re distinctly different and separate from other people. And they’re mostly your enemies. But reading fiction, you feel like, ‘Actually, you know, Tolstoy in the delivery room in 1829 or whatever, was a fuck of a lot like me in 1990 or 1988. He’s describing things that actually happened in my mind.’ Or whoever the writer is. So I think that’s a hopeful thing, and it does fight injustice, in the sense that it just reminds you that you’re not without agency and you’re not above or below the fray. But again, if you went into it with that, and I have in my life, the story that comes out doesn’t fight injustice. It’s just boring.

Empire’s Workshop, the superb new book by historian Greg Grandin, begins with a reference to one of the 20th century’s master storytellers. “The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that the lack of camels in the Koran proves its Middle Eastern provenance: only a native author, he explained, could have so taken the animal for granted as not to mention it.” Perhaps, suggests Grandin, “a similar familiarity explains the absence of Latin America in recent discussions about the United States and its empire.”

A professor of history at New York University, Grandin’s earlier book, The Last Colonial Massacre, examined the legacy of U.S. intervention in Latin America during the Cold War. The net result, he argues, was the elimination of homegrown versions of social democracy.

Before finishing his doctorate, Grandin worked for a year with the United Nations Truth Commission investigating political violence in Guatemala. “Working as something of a house historian to an institution largely staffed by lawyers made me appreciate the value of historical analysis,” he later wrote. “[L]awyers get nervous with any attempt to move beyond the immediate mechanics of an act to get at the larger ‘why.'” For those trying to get at the larger “why” of U.S. involvement in Iraq, Grandin’s latest book is indispensable.

The following interview is excerpted from a series of e-mail exchanges with the Observer.

Texas Observer: Latin America and the Middle East would seem to have very little in common. In Empire’s Workshop you make the case that we can only understand the War on Terror if we examine the history of U.S. engagement with Latin America during the 20th century. Why?

Greg Grandin: Because it was in Latin America where the modern New Right—the coalition of religious fundamentalists, neoconservative militarists and nationalists, and free-marketeers that then stood behind Reagan and today behind Bush—first moved U.S. diplomacy away from a policy of “containment” to “rollback,” paving the way for what neocons today like to call a “global democratic revolution.” All of the debates we are hearing today about the ability of the executive branch to wage an unaccountable war, along with all of Bush’s abuses of power—the wiretaps, manipulation of the media, torture in the name of freedom, the creation of an interagency war party designed to undercut the foreign policy establishment—can be traced back to Ronald Reagan’s Central American policy, which in retrospect has to be understood as the New Right’s first attempt to restore the imperial presidency.

TO: A watershed event was the U.S.-supported coup that toppled the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954.

GG: The CIA’s 1954 coup was significant in a number of ways. First, it was the agency’s first serious Latin American Cold War covert operation. It was much more ambitious than anything it had done in, say, Iran the year before, drawing more extensively on psychological and disinformation tactics to destabilize the government of democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz. Second, it signaled that the United States had definitively sacrificed democracy at the altar of Cold War security concerns. Actually, as early as 1948 the State Department had indicated that its tolerance for political openness in Latin America was contingent on political stability, but this coup marked a point of no return. It opened the door to Washington’s wholesale support of military dictators and, eventually, death squads. In Latin America, the coup radicalized a generation of reformers who would no longer point to the United States as a democratic model to follow, but an obstacle to democracy. A perfect example of this would be Che Guevara, who was in Guatemala at the time of the coup working as a young, socially conscious medical doctor attending to the poor. He was forced to flee into Mexico, where he met Fidel Castro. Che would eventually adopt as one of his mottos “Cuba will not be Guatemala” to explain the militancy of the Cuban Revolution.

TO: You suggest that Reagan’s policy toward Central America, especially Nicaragua, facilitated the emergence of the New Right around an ideology of what you call “punitive idealism.” Would you explain what this concept means, and how it became a central part of U.S. policy in Latin America?

GG: In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, neoconservatives boldly announced a revolution in American diplomacy. The old divisions between realism and idealism, we were told, no longer held. Bush himself put it succinctly in his second inaugural address when he proclaimed that “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” Some neocons called this “hard Wilsonianism,” claiming that the best way to ensure America’s security is to spread democracy throughout the world. There was much discussion about how the Republican Party came to embrace such a vision of security, for that kind of soaring rhetoric had previously been the property of the Democrats, from Wilson to Kennedy. Some make mention of Ronald Reagan’s championing of the human rights of Soviet and Eastern European dissidents, while others focused on the rise of the neoconservatives and their recasting of the Cold War as a struggle between the forces of good and evil, exemplified by Paul Wolfowitz’s celebrated role in convincing Reagan to force Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to step down and make way for free elections, a remarkable about-face for an administration that had long embraced the dictator. But they all ignore Reagan’s Central American policy, perhaps because of the high body count. After all, hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans killed as a result of U.S. policy left a blot—as even some of his defenders admitted—on Reagan’s embrace of the language of human rights.

But it was exactly in such carnage that the neoconservative ideology was born. The New Right came to power in the 1980s as a response to the crisis of the 1970s. That crisis had three essential dimensions. Militarily, the U.S. had been kicked out of Southeast Asia and discredited by a poorly armed peasant insurgency. Politically, Watergate had cracked opened the establishment, exposing a government that ruled not by consent and transparency, but by manipulation, surveillance, and coercion. And economically, competition from the developing world and Europe, along with the costs of Vietnam, eroded America’s privileged position in the global economy since the end of World War II. The Reagan Revolution responded to this crisis by pledging to pacify the Third World, and Central America, then in the midst of a revolutionary upheaval, was the logical place to start. But this crisis also had a forth dimension, a moral one. To re-establish American power in the world, that power had to be justified in ethical terms. It was in Central America where the Republican Party first fully embraced human rights, nation-building, and democratization as diplomatic objectives, even as it was patronizing ruthless thugs. It was not enough to simply finance and train rapists, murderers, and torturers. They had to be hailed, said Reagan, as the “moral equivalents of our founding fathers.” The “Salvador Option,” in other words, is less a specific reference to a reliance on paramilitary killers to keep order than the essence of the Bush Doctrine. Call it death-squad nation-building.

TO: Empire’s Workshop distinguishes itself from other recent works on the new American empire because it explains how Washington politicians use engagements in foreign countries to shape domestic political culture. In other words, we can’t just point at politicians or multinational corporations to explain the new American empire. Would you argue that the American public is part of this process? If so, would you identify the type of domestic coalition the New Right managed to bring together as they asserted Washington’s power over Central America in the 1980s?

GG: Yes, over the last year or so there have been a number of books that have sought to take the measure of this or that group within the Bush coalition to explain how we wound up believing we could telegraph democracy to Iraq through the barrel of a gun. There was Francis Fukuyama on the neocons, for instance, along with Kevin Phillips on the theocons. Other scholars have looked at nationalists and militarists. Empire’s Workshop can be read as a missing link connecting these works, examining how the coalition that gave rise to the Bush administration’s pre-emptive warfare doctrine was itself forged in the crucible of war. Now most accounts of the rise of the New Right focus on its domestic dimensions, linking it to a backlash against the crisis of authority and social liberalization of the 1960s, situating it within economic and demographic shifts such as post-1973 industrialization and the transfer of the nation’s economic and political center of gravity from the Northeast to the Southwest and West. But few studies have explicitly understood the New Right not only to be an internationalist movement, but that its energy and success can be found in that internationalism. The Reagan Revolution could only sustain itself by continually marshaling its base in the name of an expansive foreign policy, pulling into its gravitational field a diverse constellation of nationalists, militarists, religionists, idealists, and economic elites.

TO: Can you say more about the religious dimension of this revolution?

GG: There’s been much discussion about how evangelicals and secular neocons come together over Israel. Likewise, during the 2004 presidential campaign, many seemed to believe that if you scratch a conservative evangelical, if you could neutralize “cultural” issues like abortion, a la Thomas Frank, you would find a New Deal populist.

But Christian evangelicals were deeply involved in the process of “remoralizing” not just American power but the free-market capitalist base of that power. Again, Central America is key. In order to bypass congressional and public opposition to its Central American policy, the White House mobilized its fundamentalist base, in effect outsourcing the hearts-and-minds component of low intensity warfare to religious conservatives. This mobilization, in turn, both increased evangelical involvement in foreign policy and helped fuse the religious and secular branches of the New Right.

Evangelicals shared with neocon militarists a sense that America had grown dangerously weak, and that only a rebirth of political will, or spiritual renewal, would save it. Their understanding of themselves as a persecuted people engaged in an end-time struggle between good and evil mapped easily onto the absolutism of anti-communist militarists. This happened in the case of the Central American Cold Warriors, many of whom, such as CIA director William Casey and Oliver North, were themselves members of ultraconservative Christian sects like Opus Dei or the Knights of Malta—the Da Vinci Code has nothing on what happened in Central America.

One aspect of the Central American wars largely overlooked is the importance of Liberation Theology, along with the Christian humanism of the domestic solidarity movement, in uniting the New Right. Well before radical Islam, Liberation Theology was the “political religion” that secular anti-communists, mainstream conservative theologians, and pulpit–thumping fundamentalists squared off against. So when Jeane Kirkpatrick remarked that the U.S. nuns who were raped, mutilated, and murdered by Salvadoran security forces in 1980 were “not just nuns, they were political activists,” she was being more than cruel. She was signaling her disapproval of a particular kind of peace Christianity, or Christian humanism.

TO: Has the so-called War on Terror facilitated the resurgence of that coalition?

GG: Yes. After Reagan left office and the Central American crises wound down, the alliance between evangelicals and secular idealists would begin to fracture. Prominent fundamentalists, such as Pat Robertson, distrusted George Herbert Walker Bush. And obviously they had little sympathy for the Clinton administration. Yet many fundamentalists extended their increasingly confident engagement in world affairs well beyond Central America. In some ways, some of the most committed congressional “internationalists” are Christian conservatives like Virginian Representative Frank Wolf and Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, who have consistently pushed Washington to deal with global humanitarian issues such as AIDS, sex trafficking, slavery, religious freedom, malaria, and genocide prevention. After 9/11, evangelical internationalists once again joined with a now fully empowered cohort of neocons to push George W. Bush—who if we remember promised a “humble” foreign policy during his first campaign—to embrace so-called “hard Wilsonianism” and to “remoralize” America’s role in the world.

In the run-up to Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the neoconservative punditry spent energy rehabilitating the concept “empire,” insisting that the world needed an imperial power to impose stability, and the only candidate available for the job was the United States. And while they evoked the Roman and British empires to make their case, they consistently ignored the one place where the U.S. had its most prolonged and intimate imperial experience: Latin America. So if you really wanted to know what the world would look like under a Pax Americana, you shouldn’t look at Roman Gaul or Australia, but violence-ridden, impoverished Central America. This of course is exactly what Dick Cheney, of all people, did in the 2004 vice-presidential debate when he held up El Salvador—not post-WWII Germany or Japan—as a model for what he hoped to achieve in Iraq. But this comparison struck too close to the bone, for shortly after Cheney made his remarks, the press started comparing the rise of death squads in Iraq to what took place in El Salvador. Too close a look at Latin America, it turns out, would raise some inconvenient questions, one of which should be: If Washington can’t bring stability and meaningful democracy to Latin America, a region that falls squarely within its own sphere of influence and whose population shares many of the values of the United States, then what are the chances that it will do so for the world?

TO: Why is raising awareness of the historical roots of the War on Terror your chosen strategy?

GG: “History” is abused
n all sorts of w
ys by those who want to reduce every issue or conflict to its barest emotional simplicity in order to justify American power in the world. Hugo Chávez stands in a long line of Third World nationalists whom U.S. officials inevitably compare to Hitler. So I suppose it is a bit naïve, but hopefully raising awareness can draw the poison out of disingenuous metaphors.

Obviously the use of history to rally the nation to a cause is not in any way new, but as I try to show in my book, it did reach a new stage of public manipulation with the domestic propaganda—

psychological warfare, really—associated with Iran-Contra. Public relations firms contracted by the White House polled the American people for lists of emotive keywords, which were then transformed into talking points and distributed to government officials, scholars, media outlets, and NGOs. Yet it was Ronald Reagan, listed by the PR boys as an “asset” due to his communication skills, who best embodied the triumph of emotion over substance. With little respect for history or fact, Reagan played on popular fears and self-perceptions, presenting support for the Contras as keeping faith with America’s “revolutionary heritage.” After all, polling data revealed that the White House’s two most “exploitable themes” were the idea that the Contras were “Freedom Fighters” fighting for “freedom in the American tradition” and the idea that American “history requires support to freedom fighters.” Who could argue with that?

Patrick Timmons is an assistant professor of Justice Studies at San José State University in California.