What He's Poised to Do: Stories (19 page)

BEN: It probably started as a pun, but then it turned into something much richer—thanks in large part to the design. Alex and Aaron designed a box with four foldout panels; each panel held a little accordion book, and each little accordion book contained two stories. Those were the pairs of stories that I saw as corresponding with each other, just as the characters in the stories advanced their lives by corresponding with each other. And then we came up with the Postcard Project to complete the package.

CAL: Tell us more about that.

ALEX: When we designed the case, it was meant to hold eight stories in four accordion books. Then one afternoon we started talking about the fact that the box was a very exclusive form. It folded up. There was a bellyband around it. It kept people out, in some way. As a remedy, Ben suggested writing a story that was intentionally incomplete and inviting readers to contribute to it. We printed that story, “What He’s Poised to Do,” on the actual casing, and then we put a postcard in the fourth pocket, where the fourth booklet would have gone. The reader got to write back to us, the publisher, to complete the story. We posted some of the responses to the Mail Room of the Hotel St. George Web site.

BEN: People loved that Postcard Project.

ALEX: I think it brought in a different kind of appreciation. Because the box was a high-end, limited-edition object, I thought we’d get attention from design magazines and book blogs. We did. But then there were all the people who seized on the idea of the Postcard Project as an interactive fiction experiment. Which was cool, but also a little frightening. When something sounds “high concept,” people sometimes assume it’s not superior to a description of itself—that it doesn’t transcend its own novelty.

CAL: Funny you should say that, because that’s how I encountered it. I was out in Los Angeles on business with Carrie Kania, our publisher, and we went into Book Soup, the wonderful bookstore on Sunset, and both of us were exploring the store, looking for hidden treasures. At one moment or another, each of us separately stumbled across an elaborate endcap display the store had devoted to
Correspondences
. I was astonished by the innovative approach to the form and the intricacy of the package. But I didn’t buy it then, in part because I was worried about crushing it in my luggage, but also because I was feeling protective of it. I knew Carrie would love it the way I did—this is the kind of thing we’re always driving each other crazy with—but I felt such a sense of discovery, and I wanted to be able to order it when we got back and present it to her as if out of nowhere. Back in New York, I walked into Carrie’s office, and there was a copy on her desk. She’d bought it at Book Soup and hadn’t mentioned it to me.

BEN: It’s like an O. Henry story.

CAL: It gets stranger. A few months later, I was judging a live fiction event in New York for
The L Magazine
, and Ben and Aaron Petrovich were two of the other judges. We were all introduced, but it was only after we’d been there a while that I realized that these were two of the people responsible for
Correspondences
: the author and the publisher. At that point, I hadn’t yet read beyond the cover story: I think I was so taken with the box as an object that I was reluctant to read further into the collection. Then I went home and read the stories, and they were exquisite. I was entranced by the elegance of Ben’s writing, and by the fact that his characters were flesh-and-blood people, even the ones he found odd. I called Aaron, and we started talking about developing a more traditional paperback edition.

ALEX: Did you think right away that you’d need to add stories?

CAL: I thought it would be important, yes. Luckily, Ben had written more.

BEN: I wrote more pieces as a direct result of that original box. I did lots of interviews about the HSG edition, and often the interviewers’ questions actually sparked new stories. In the spring and summer of 2009, I went on tour for
Please Step Back
, and that strange journey—cities I didn’t know very well, people I met on the road—also helped with new material.

CAL: My sense of Ben’s vision for this new version came into focus after he sent me his first version of the full collection; a number of the added stories were longer, more complex pieces that extended what he’d done in the earlier stories.

BEN: In a strange way, the second phase worked like a correspondence between me and the original box.

ALEX: I notice that you decided to keep “What He’s Poised to Do,” which was the interactive story connected to the Postcard Project.

BEN: We did keep it, after some discussion.

CAL: It might be an understatement to say we kept it. It became the title story.

BEN: But it’s no longer interactive. For this edition, we decided to do without the participatory element of the story and let it stand on its own, as a kind of establishing vignette.

CAL: For me, that story was always the keystone of the collection. So many of the ideas that define your stories—alienation and intimacy, communication and miscommunication, honesty and dishonesty—are traced in those few pages.

ALEX: Ben, do you think of this new collection as an extension of the original edition? As an evolution?

BEN: I’d say it’s a complement. There’s overlap in the stories, of course, but there are enough differences, in both content and design, that they feel like separate things.

CAL: Though there was one bit of continuity that was important to us when we offered to take the project over, which was to ask Hotel St. George to design our edition as well. We loved the original box so much, and felt that it had such power, that we wanted to bring at least some of that into the traditional book form.

ALEX: I thought it would be interesting to have a subtle design element that reminded people that these are stories about (and around) letters, as well as stories that span the globe, and so I came up with this postmark idea.

BEN: I’d say that the book-box,
Correspondences
, has its own pleasures, and that the book that’s not a box,
What He’s Poised to Do
, has its own. In terms of the stories themselves, this version feels a touch less tricky in conception and execution, a touch more straightforward.

CAL: But there are still a few little tricks throughout.

ALEX: Like what?

CAL: Like the way the stories interact with each other. They don’t all correspond in exactly the way they did in the box, but there are tiny echoes throughout. In “A Bunch of Blips,” a woman gets involved with a series of men, and one of those men seems to be a character from another story. The woman in “Her Hand” might be the woman who’s married to the man in “What He’s Poised to Do,” but later. Blood in one story seems to flow into another story. A bird from one story might fly into another one.

BEN: Some of those echoes are intentional, and some are just possible, as you say. I’m always suspicious when the characters in a story collection seem to have
nothing
to do with one another: to me, that seems artificial. At the same time, I didn’t want to link them together too mechanically. I just wanted the stories all to take place in the same universe, and to address the same set of concerns: men, women, love, lust, loss, comedy, tragedy, pleasure, pain, and lunar settlement. So that little tissue that connects all the stories is a fictional version of the real-life tissue that connects us.

Further Explorations

Read on

If you’ve just read
What He’s Poised to Do
and enjoyed it, you might enjoy the following as well. If you haven’t, but you’ve enjoyed any of the following, you might enjoy
What He’s Poised to Do
.

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1843).
The philosopher Kierkegaard’s work is often used to cudgel undergraduates into submission, which is a shame, because he’s also one of the most playful and inventive writers of his or any time.
Either/Or
is one of the best examples of how to build an argument using multiple perspectives, layered narrative, fragmentation, and pseudonymity.

Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (1886).
James is the author I return to more than any other, in part because I’m constantly trying to untangle him—at the level of sentences, at the level of thought—and in part because I find the books immensely pleasurable. No one has done a better job at observing the way light plays on the surface of human consciousness. This novel is considered something of an oddity for James because it deals with politics more explicitly than most of his work, but for me that helps bring the vexed inner life of its protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, into sharper relief.

Duke Ellington, The Blanton-Webster Band (1940–1942).
There are three names in the title: the composer and pianist Duke Ellington, a leviathan of American jazz, and two members of his band of the early forties, the bassist Jimmy Blanton and the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster. The title leaves out so many more who made this music, including the arranger Billy Strayhorn, the alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, and more. But you’ll find them soon enough when you immerse yourself in this music, which ranges from near-novelty up-tempo songs to the saddest dirges.

Groucho Marx, You Bet Your Life (1950).
Groucho was long past his prime as a vaudevillian and movie star when he agreed to host this not-very-interesting game show. What made it good, and then great, was his willingness to engage with the contestants, to lead them into genuine conversation and/or put them at the spear-end of his wit. Groucho to young actress: “Now suppose you became a famous actress, and then you met somebody you liked and got married. Would you be willing to quit acting and be a housewife and a mother?” Young actress to Groucho: “Well, I think if you keep your feet on the ground you can combine both. That’s what I’d like to do.” Groucho to actress: “Well, if you keep your feet on the ground, you’ll never be a mother.”

Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter (1955).
The great actor Charles Laughton directed only one movie, this Southern Gothic tale of crime, punishment, innocence, and (especially) evil. Robert Mitchum personifies the last, as a preacher who roams around the countryside marrying vulnerable women and then snuffing them out. Shelley Winters is also superb as one of those women. But the real star is the direction—particularly the art direction, which results in several moments that are almost Goya-like in the way they combine terror and profound morality.

Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971).
Elkin struggled with multiple sclerosis for most of his adult life, yet regardless of how his illness limited his physical energy, he was one hell of a dervish on the page, turning out a series of genuinely unhinged but impeccably written comic epics.
The Dick Gibson Show
follows the picaresque adventures of a radio host in the broad midcentury of America. William Gass has said that Elkin was like a jazz player, and William Gass should know.

Swamp Dogg, Cuffed, Collared & Tagged (1972).
There are very few genuine moralists/ironists in soul and funk music. Swamp Dogg is one. He’s been doing it for forty years, and he’s not done yet. The fact that he recorded a song for my novel
Please Step Back
isn’t a factor in my recommending him without reservations. People like to point to the first Swamp Dogg record,
Total Destruction to Your Mind
. I like to point to this one, which has his peerless cover of John Prine’s “Sam Stone” and a great tribute to Sly Stone, without pointing away from the other.

Joy Williams, State of Grace (1973).
The world can be a terrifying place where certainties wither and die and what’s left behind are either husks or seeds. This novel, by Joy Williams, goes straight into the middle of the strangeness of people—particularly her conflicted, half-lidded heroine—and it’s one of the most poetic books of the last half century.

Mary Margaret O’Hara, Miss America (1988).
There are eccentrics in pop music, and then there are Eccentrics: artists who put every last bit of their elusive, misshapen, but still beautiful personality into their work. Mary Margaret O’Hara’s one of the archetypal Eccentrics, and her sole solo album,
Miss America
, is one of the strangest pop records that also makes perfect sense.

Paul Beatty, Joker Joker Deuce (1994).
I read lots of poetry, but I don’t understand it. Or rather: I love watching words play, but not all of them are my kids. Or rather: I like it when I see someone walking around, shining like a high-watt bulb, phrases and fragments spilling out of his pockets. Or rather: Sooner or later, someone was going to fuse the verbal energy of hip-hop with the formal rigor of poetry with the confusion of modern life.