Quiet Bubble

Interview: Brian Winter

In his memoir/critique Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien: A Yanqui’s Missteps in Argentina, Brian Winter uses the tango and the gaucho figure, in equal measures, as lenses through which to view Argentine culture. The book offers a compelling and mordantly funny take on Argentina—full of rich characters and vivid, concise clarification about the country’s politics—during the country’s worst economic crisis of the last hundred years.

Brian—an old friend—was gracious enough to grant me an interview by email about the book, travel literature in general, and the current state of Argentina. Enjoy.

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The book is at once a memoir, a breezy historical overview, and a work of cultural criticism about the nature of the tango. Which aspect provided the biggest challenge to you, in terms of writing, research, and recollection?

Most of the book takes place in dark, smoke-filled rooms between the hours of 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., with most of the characters, myself included, immersed in various states of inebriation. There was dancing and flirting; threats and rivalries. Some of the time I had a notebook with me; other times I found myself drunkenly scribbling notes into my journal when I got home at dawn. So, to answer your question: Doing justice to the conversations I had in the tango halls, to the dialogue and characters that form the core of the book, was very difficult. Most of the writing was done in Washington rather than Buenos Aires, so I was often describing places and people with imperfect memory and a certain degree of nostalgia… which, given the themes of the tango, actually had some advantages.

The four-part structure works very well, moving essentially from being initially overwhelmed to becoming a near-native to being disillusioned, and back again. The deeper we get into the book, the more confident and more extensive the forays into Argentine history and politics. Was the structure something that you had in mind before you began writing, or did it come to you as the book rolled along?

It’s worth noting that I originally set out to write a book about Argentina’s epic economic crisis that touched briefly on the tango, rather than the other way around. Twenty-five publisher rejections later I realized that, hmm, maybe the book needed to evolve into something more funny and less… soul-numbingly depressing (though, given what’s happening on Wall Street, the financial meltdown theme might have proven prescient… oh well). I am glad in retrospect that the book turned out the way it did, because the subject is more accessible and a great deal more fun, frankly. As for the structure itself, maybe it was an accident, but thinking about it now I’m reminded of these silly Power Point presentations that my college professors showed us when we arrived somewhere for a “study abroad.” The purpose was to prepare us for the phases of mood that you inevitably go through—euphoria, boredom, disappointment, constipation, equilibrium, I don’t remember exactly what else—when you move to a new country. Each time, I remember marveling over how stupid it all seemed, yet each time the presentation turned out to be absolutely spot-on. People are predictable, like it or not. The book is ultimately about moving to a strange and bizarre place, so I guess in some ways it’s a reflection of that cycle.

Tango provides an efficient, if complicated, lens through which you can view Argentina? Is there a similar sort of cultural trope that you could apply to America, and why? If not, why not?

Maybe country music, which is so optimistic and yet so weirdly depressing that I think it could only be forged in Middle America. That’s a case I briefly make in the book. I do think, though, that tango could be unique among world music in just how comprehensive a guide it provides to the soul of its country of origin. Tango lyrics basically say that yesterday was paradise, today is hell, and tomorrow will be even worse—and that is about as close to the Argentine credo as you can get. I would add, though, that it’s not perfect. A great many of my Argentine friends who are under 40 believe the tango to be utterly old-fashioned as a dance, a music, and a window into their country’s soul. Something I regret not providing at least a glimpse of in the book is the Argentina I knew outside of the milongas; I spent just as much time playing ping-pong and pounding beers with my twenty-something Argentine friends at houses in the suburbs as I did at the tango halls.

The epilogue tells briefly and hilariously how you imported Argentine customs into Mexico City, much to the annoyance of your peers. In the long run, how have your four years in Argentina affected the ways in which you look at America and the rest of the world?

I love this question. I still find myself subject to weird fits of melancholy and irrational distrust of financial and government institutions, traits that could certainly be credited to my experience in Argentina or… aging, I guess. I consume unhealthy amounts of steak and often resist the urge to grow a mullet. My sense of humor is probably darker and more caustic than it was before. I would also like to think that I absorbed some of the Argentines’ more virtuous traits; that living there made me a better conversationalist, allowed me to really see how a society works from top to bottom, and gave me a higher appreciation of the “good life.” My formative years were in Buenos Aires; when I left in 2004, I had actually spent more time in Argentina since graduating from high school than I had in the USA. That’s pretty incredible. It sure didn’t make me popular in Mexico though!

Though the book takes long looks into the past, giving overviews of the career of tango composer Enrique Santos Discépolo and gauchos and Argentina's economic yo-yoing, the memoir section is very much in-the-moment. How important was balancing the history with the memoir?

This may be a cliché, but the truth is that the book is ultimately a reflection of thoughts and experiences that I had to express. To me, the only reason to subject yourself to the absolute hell of writing a book is if the topic obsesses you so deeply and completely that you must put it to paper. That topic for me was Argentina. So I sat down and wrote, and what came out is mostly what you read. I desperately wanted to write about the more troubled aspects of Argentina’s history, and particularly (as I referenced above) the unique moment in time that I lived through from 2000 to 2004, when Argentina had an economic meltdown similar to the Great Depression. That story to me is still the heart of the book, and it also best explains what drew me to the tango.

What shape is Argentina in these days? Do you still keep up with it or with any of the people you befriended while there?

To my utter surprise, Argentina is in the middle of a transcendent economic boom. It fixed a lot of its problems and these days the streets are packed with people at 3 a.m., the steakhouses are bustling, and the protests and political unrest is—mostly—absent now. It has also become, quite deservedly I think, a mecca for Americans and Europeans who want to live the good life on the cheap, drawing comparisons to Paris in the 1920s and Prague in the 1990s. I wonder if the flood of foreigners has ruined the fun a bit, since one of the things I enjoyed most about Argentina was that it was a secret nobody else knew about; but maybe that is just a classic, bitchy complaint among expats who move on. On the other hand, the skeptic in me (let’s call him my inner Argentine) also notes that this is in every sense a manic-depressive country prone to soaring highs and abysmal lows. They’ll need another two decades of growth like this to start reaching the European living standards that Argentina enjoyed just two generations ago. That seems unlikely. It’s also bizarre to see how, even now, the groundwork is being laid for the next crisis (though I don’t think it’ll be anywhere near as bad as the last one). For example, the government is openly, baldly lying about the inflation rate, which is actually double the official number. Everybody in Argentina knows it’s a lie. The government knows it. The people know it. How can you have a stable economy when nobody knows what prices are like? Can you imagine this happening anywhere else? (As you can tell, yes, I still keep up rather obsessively with events and people there)

How did you decide on the tone of the book? It's very, very funny, even as the material gets bleaker and darker; was this an attempt to recreate the ying-yang idea of tango—cynical lyrics vs. bright music—in your prose?

In one sense, the situation—Argentina’s situation—was so inherently absurd that it had to be funny. I mean, how does a country with some of the world’s best farmland a vibrant, educated populace become such a basketcase that it has five different presidents in a period of two weeks? Tell me how that’s not hilarious. Also, Argentines themselves are possessed of infinite, vibrant, sophisticated humor—and it’s Argentine characters, far more than myself, who take center stage in the book. I’d also note that the economic recovery in the years after I left permitted me to address the crisis itself with far more irony and humor than I otherwise would have. If people had continued dying of malnutrition and leaving the country in droves… well, there’s nothing funny about that. But the fact that things bounced back so quickly just served to further highlight how illogical and unnecessary the whole crisis was in the first place, and it allowed me to write the book in a different way.

You clearly read a lot on Argentina's economic and cultural history, and the depth of your research is reflected in the book's many quotes from primary sources. What models did you use in terms of writing the book? Were they contemporary books or articles, or instead literature from the earlier part of the 20th century? What travel writers would you consider as influences?

I am a collector of old travelogues, particularly those on Argentina and South America, and I’ve used many of them as sources in the book. The gold standard in the industry is obviously Bill Bryson. I like Bruce Chatwin, V.S. Naipaul, and Burton Holmes, all of whom wrote about Argentina. Jan Morris is wonderful. I’m not sure how much of a future there is for books like the one I’ve written; it seems the expansion of video and TV franchises like the Discovery Channel and National Geographic might be enough on their own to satisfy people who actively want to learn about other places. Fifty or even thirty years ago, a book was usually the best way to experience a foreign country; now it’s hard to get people to read someone else’s rendering of what a place looks, feels, and smells like… unless you as an author can somehow mix that with your personal account of divorce, redemption, alcoholism, spiritual discovery, whatever. I’m thinking of Elizabeth Gilbert or Frances Mayes, obviously. I guess I could have gone that route in my book, but it wasn’t me; I wanted to make Argentina the main character, rather than myself. Probably sold fewer books as a result. Oh well.

The book mixes history, memoir, journalism, and cultural criticism. How would you classify the book—as travel literature, or something else?

All of the above, I guess.

Finally, do you still tango?

You know, I lead a very different life now. It’s shocking, actually, just how different it is. I’m a senior editor at a national newspaper and I live in the suburbs of Washington D.C. I am married and I have a young daughter and most of my social life takes place on my screened-in front porch, where I like to drink beer and eat steak and play cards with friends. That is a somewhat convoluted way of saying, no, I don’t tango anymore—but I often wish I did.

Speaking in tango: Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien

As much as I love Jorge Luis Borges, a fair criticism of his literature is that, in a career that spanned five decades as a writer and editor, he never wrote a single credible, rounded character. His short stories and essays concern themselves with ideas, metaphysical gambits, and linguistic constructions. His gnarled, cold, mock-academic prose challenges the conventions and usefulness of language to stylize human experience. He’s interested, on a macro scale, in how we use language to construct ourselves. On the micro level, however, individual humans are mostly left on the cutting-room floor.

For Westerners beyond those most dedicated to Argentina’s culture, the country’s other literary touchstone is the epic poem Martin Fierro. Essentially an elegy for the diminishing Argentine frontier, it’s told from the limited perspective of Fierro, a gaucho—Argentina’s version of the cowboy, in both fact and mythical significance—whose way of life is disappearing. The poem ends with Fierro leaving Argentina’s encroaching government and city-fying ways forever, tears streaming down his face.

So, essentially, Argentina’s most widely-known literary exports are a character type that no longer exists and a writer who was never that interested in characters in the first place.

In Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien: A Yanqui’s Missteps in Argentina, Brian Winter fills his memoir/cultural critique with many richly developed characters—those he meets, those he reads about in history books, and one (the tango) that isn’t a person at all but feels as rounded and complicated as one. From dancehall lotharios and tango instructors to taxi drivers and the expatriates they transport, Winter’s people leap off the page. Even the bit parts feel fleshed out.

Towards the beginning, he finds himself wandering the streets of Buenos Aires, and meets the character that will loom largest over the book:

On just my second day in Buenos Aires, I had been wandering, still strangely unaware of my new surroundings, through a street fair outside the Retiro train terminal when I heard a tinny radio playing. I was on a quest to buy an alarm clock, hoping in a rush of blind optimism that one day I might actually need one to wake me up so I could go somewhere important. Retiro was where newly arrived immigrants had once left the port city for a promising new life on the Pampa, but these days, most trains had stopped running; the operator had gone bankrupt, and Retiro was now mostly a place to buy either suspiciously cheap trinkets from China or even more suspiciously cheap super pancho hot dogs from God knows where. The terminal’s ornate façade, which had once been a convincing replica of the station in Milan, was now covered with soot and graffiti. The street merchants let the clock alarms go off all day to show they weren’t pirated fakes (you always had to be careful in Argentina), so that the whole market sounded like a nest of shrill, beeping baby birds. Amid the awful din, someone had thoughtfully turned on this old radio, and the unmistakable sound of tango crackled through the blown-out speakers.

The voice incongruously happy and bright, sang:

The world was and always will be a piece of shit,
This much I know.
In the year 506, and in 2000 also!
There have always been crooks, backstabbers, and suckers,
But that the twentieth century is a spectacle of insolent evil,
No one can deny.

A bespectacled middle-aged woman behind one of the booths watched me pause to listen, and she noticed the expression on my face.

“You like that?” she called out to me in a smoky baritone. “That’s our national anthem, you know.”

Entering into a jovial/sardonic conversation with the woman and a Marxist bookseller across the way, he discovers that this national anthem—“Cambalache,” by Enrique Santos Discépolo—is perhaps an unmatched blend of acidity, sophistication, weariness, and complicated love. Almost no nation’s anthem proclaims “We’re number two! We’re number two!”; this one suggests that Argentina’s not even in the top ten.

Of course, “Cambalache” is the unofficial anthem, just as Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” is the unofficial corrective to Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.” As Winter listens, he discovers lines like “If you don’t steal, you’re a fool/ Nobody cares if you were born honest” and begins to wonder why something so dyspeptic—but so cheery-sounding!—is on pop radio, and why Argentines seem to feel that it’s representative of their country.

Because, after all, Argentines love their country. For all the bitter sighs, emitted by almost every person in the book, Argentines think theirs is the greatest, most sophisticated country in the world. They’ll tell anyone who listens to them, and Winter is a good listener. (His recording—and, I suspect, partial invention—of crisp dialogue is one of Niño Bien’s greatest strengths. More on this in a sec.) As Winter points out, Argentina was among the world’s five richest countries in the 1930s, and a pinnacle of high European civilization transplanted to South America. He also admits, however, that

[t]hose days were gone, and it appeared that they were never coming back… Argentina had been on a hopeless, seemingly irreversible seventy-year losing streak—it was like the Chicago Cubs of countries. It had begun the century with a higher per capita income than Sweden or Spain, and on par with Germany. Perhaps no other nation had fallen so far, so fast. Yet there had been no devastating wars, no epic plagues, floods, or droughts. There had been no one tyrant, no Idi Amin or Josef Stalin who had single-handedly run the place into the ground. A country blessed with some of the earth’s richest farmland was now having problems feeding its people. And while the world is full of countries with abundant natural resources that have failed to reach their potential, perhaps none of them also possess Argentina’s wealth of human capital: a vibrant and skilled population that is nearly 100 percent literate.

Nobody seems to know why things have gone so wrong, and why they continue to do so. Winter—who came to Argentina on a whim after graduating from the University of Texas in 1999—doesn’t quite solve the conundrum, either. In his four years in the country, though, he is an able witness to the general befuddlement—a confusion that’s made most manifest in tango.

Ah, the tango: that shopworn cliché, with its high kicks and exaggerated emotions, has become the de facto symbol of “exotic Latin culture”—much the way Americans loved mambo in the 1950s, and went through a flamenco craze in the 1980s—for clueless Americans. Winter knows, and lets the reader know, early on that he realizes that using the tango as a lens through which to view Argentina is a dicey proposition.

Tango, however, is music and dance suited for lovers, fools, madmen, and anyone who’s felt like any combination of the above—in other words, dicey. In a country that’s gone through more economic fluctuations and presidential changes—at one point in Niño Bien, Argentina goes through five presidents in about as many weeks—than could possibly be imagined, the mix of romantic gesture and engrained cynicism that forms tango must feel especially apt for Argentina.

As Winter discovers, tango songs and taxi drivers are Argentina’s best underground news sources. Both pointedly casting stones (and naming names) at politics and culture and, in an odd quirk, many of the cabdrivers are former government officials, and tango’s most prominent composer was practically a presidential advisor. Though its musical heyday was in the 1940s and 1950s, which are ironically periods of tremendous wealth for the country, it continues to resonate with its controversial lyrics and sophisticated, tangled melodies and rhythms. It seems to operate during periods of both feast and famine. Tango is sleek on the surface, and tumultuous at its core.

To get beyond the surface or, rather, to appreciate both the artifice and the flesh underneath, Niño Bien argues implicitly that one has to look beyond the page. The people Winter meets don’t much trust what’s printed or what the TV anchors read onscreen. Instead, he uses tango as a lens through which he can make some sense of Argentina’s contradictions, charm, and characters.

Winter’s prose is conversational and quick-witted, moving easily from the dance floor to the street to the library stacks. Tracing the roots of tango’s music and choreographies, he dovetails into discussions of Argentina’s yo-yoing wealth, its class dynamics, its odd history of European and African immigration, its historical lack of women during the 19th century, and the evolution/dissolution of the gaucho in reality and myth. He excerpts judiciously from historical diaries, notes, and academic texts, selecting that which emboldens his wary comprehension of the Argentine present.

That present is Winter’s focus, and he seems to spend it mostly in milongas, where the tango is danced, whisky is drunk, and hookups are jelled. As the previous two excerpts revealed, Winter quickly draws compelling people and places. His elderly posse of milongueros—with names like El Tigre (“The Tiger”), El Nene (“The Kid”) Patterson, El Chino (“The Chinaman,” who’s not remotely Oriental), El Chino #2 (again, not Chinese), and Hector El Griego (“Hector the Greek,” who’s Italian)—ring true, with distinct personalities created in quick strokes. Relationships between Winter’s comely dance instructor Mariela and the other men she teaches are rendered with an awareness of how the author is being played for more money, but are nevertheless touching. The aforementioned cabdrivers, sharply opinionated to a man, spurt out memorable one-liners.

If nothing else, Niño Bien is very funny, if grimly so, even outside of the milonga. The dialogue zings, and so do Winter’s descriptions of fashion and gesture. Falling in love with Argentina is “like falling for an alcoholic at the very moment she hits rock bottom, sleeping in a gutter with puke in her hair.” His first tango with a woman would fit in well in an Argentine screwball comedy. Winter’s bitter humor extends to himself as well, but his sentences also mock that very bitterness (and Argentina’s as well).

Throughout the book, his dark wit carries the reader through what are initially considered digressions. Brief histories of slavery and prostitution in Buenos Aires—grim subjects both, with the potential to be portrayed dryly—are engrossing, in part, because Niño Bien brings mordant humor to the discussions. The book’s structure—roughly a chronological progression from 2000 to 2004, with historical side trips—keeps the material focused on how the digressions, in fact, led to modern-day Argentina.

It’s not a thorough view of Argentina, in that Winter mostly sticks to the cities and not to the Pampas. And Niño Bien offers no solutions to, or reasons for, Argentina’s crisis. But the book is Winter’s own, and works on its own terms as a window into a classy, high-strung, and perpetually troubled country.

Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien: Excerpt #2

What follows is another excerpt from Brian Winter’s Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien: A Yanqui’s Missteps in Argentina. (The first excerpt is here.) After weeks of training, he finally thinks that he’s good enough to ask a woman to tango, and discovers that the asking is the easiest part…

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When I saw her a second time, I finally understood the significance of her tattoo.

She was leaning over the bar at the Niño Bien in that same blood-red strapless dress, laughing heartily at something the bartender had said. I realized that the tattoo itself was not particularly remarkable—it was the fact she had one at all. Most Argentine women obsessively avoided such displays; they danced the same way, talked the same way, wore their hair the same way; usually, it should be conceded, to great effect. Nose rings, pink hair, and tattoos were positively unthinkable. But then here was this woman at the bar, drinking without shame, brandishing a tattoo of a scorpion, of all the unapologetically unsubtle things in the world. Her deep laugh echoed off the walls of the grand salon. This, I now realized, was not your typical chica porteña.

God bless the tango, I remember thinking. I actually have a legitimate excuse to invite this woman to dance.

I resolved to do it the right way. I would try out my cabaceo. As casually as I could, I strolled over to the opposite end of the bar and slowly allowed my gaze to settle on her. She continued to flirt with the bartender, looking everywhere but at me. I didn’t stare at her, of course—I did as I had been told, holding my gaze for three seconds and then looking away, waiting a reasonable amount of time, and then starting the cycle over again.

She ordered a drink. She kissed someone hello on the cheek. Soon, I was just staring at her unabashedly. Then, just at the very moment I was starting to feel like a crazy sex offender, we made eye contact. A barely perceptible nod of my head and…

She smiled. Eureka. She set her drink on the bar, winked enigmatically at the bartender, and turned my way.

“¿Bailamos?” she asked good-naturedly.

I grinned so, pleased with myself, and the tango, that I might explode. “Bailamos.”

I took her hand and dragged her, practically sprinting, over to the dance floor. The music struck up, I pulled her as close to me as I possibly could, and off we went.

It was like taking the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz. I was stunned by the ease, the smoothness of dancing with her. She seemed to respond to my every move with perfect, effortless precision. At the slightest shift in my shoulders, she would turn. A bit of pressure on her back, and she’d answer with a giro. Indeed, a few times, she seemed to anticipate my lead before even I knew where I was going. Our bodies lined up with total symmetry; her waist at the same level as mine, her chest resting comfortably on my sternum. All my usual nervousness vanished. I started taking confident, sweeping steps, practically flying around the dance floor. Was I suddenly this good?

Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien: Excerpt #1

Below, the opening pages of Brian Winter’s Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien: A Yanqui’s Missteps in Argentina are available. Winter skillfully introduces the reader to El Tigre—Winter’s initial dance instructor and larger-than-life Argentine gentleman—and the Buenos Aires nightflife, circa 2000. My fuller review of the book will appear on Wednesday. A second excerpt will be posted on Thursday, and an interview with the author will be featured on Friday. Enjoy.

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A few months before the supermarket riots started, I had asked El Tigre to give me my first tango lesson. He looked me up and down, his eyebrows wrinkled with disdain, his eyes halting on my mud-stained tennis shoes. “I don’t traffic in miracles,” he sighed, knocking back the rest of his double-malt whisky, the color slowly returning to his weathered face. “And that’s obviously what’s needed here, so you’d better start praying to whichever god you prefer. I make no promises. But, if you meet me next Thursday at midnight outside the door at the Niño Bien, I’ll give you my best effort.”

The following week, I dutifully did as told, and I even managed to borrow a freshly buffed pair of black dress shoes for the occasion. At a quarter till one, El Tigre finally materialized out of the shadows and into the copper glow of the streetlight, his colossal frame practically floating down the sidewalk. He had a grin on his face, and his fingers were twitching with nervous anticipation. “To war,” he whispered with a nod. We bounded up the marble stairway of the old Leonese cultural center two steps at a time, paid our five-peso admission, and turned the corner into the Niño Bien’s grand salon.

Inside, the girls were swarming like honeybees. El Tigre was already just a bit too drunk to swat them away as we fought through the crowd, struggling to make our way to our table. Waitresses with gold teeth, the bar girl in her wine-speckled blouse, the dancers in their delicate fishnet stockings—they savagely elbowed each other out of the way, kissing him hello on the cheek, hanging from his knotted arms, giggling at his every compliment. It took us half an hour just to sit down.

Nobody there knew his real name; at tango halls around the city, El Tigre was known solely by his nom de guerre. He claimed to know nothing of its origin. “I was just walking down the street one day and this girl from the milonga saw me and said, ‘Hey, Tiger!’ That’s the truth. She said the other girls called me that.” He shrugged, flashed a devious grin, and added, in a rumbling, theatrical growl: “I can’t imagine why.”

“Do you get a lot of girls?” I asked him as we settled into our chairs.

“That’s not important. I come to dance the tango. If I go home with a beautiful woman, then that’s fine. But it’s not why I go out.”

“But do you get a lot of girls?”

“Oh yes,” he said quietly, solemnly. “El Tigre has had many women. But I’ll tell you a secret,” he said, leaning in and whispering into my ear: “If it weren’t for the tango, I wouldn’t have gotten laid since 1985.”

Niño Bien reminder

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Quiet Bubble will be devoting the week of 7 April to Brian Winter’s Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien: A Yanqui’s Missteps in Argentina. It’s a warmhearted but caustically funny addition to travel literature on the South American country, and I’m pleased to feature excerpts from the book as well as an interview with the author. I’ll also post a fuller review—for my initial thoughts, go here. I hope to see you here.

Announcing the Niño Bien Week

Anthony Powell once said some to the effect that it’s not necessarily important that a writer lead a spectacularly interesting life, but that he should rather cultivate interesting friends. I’m certainly working on achieving this, though I’ve so far got little to show for my “efforts.” My friend Brian Winter, who I’ve known since I was four years old, is a writer who has managed to do both things.

He was an odd kid—but, then, so was I. We played Lego with each other over the phone, constructing elaborate spaceships and castles without actually seeing each other’s work because we were, you know, on the phone. Brian’s early childhood hero was local TV meteorologist Troy Duncan. Other kids wanted to grow up to be astronauts; Brian wanted to be a weatherman, and he threw himself into recognizing cloud patterns and changes in barometric pressure. This desire would graduate into a love of journalism by the time he reached sixth grade.

His attention to detail and ability for recall were both uncanny. My mom once drove him home from some Saturday function—birthday party at Penny Whistle Park, a trip to the arcade, who knows?—but forgot the directions to his house. We were heading toward the Dallas Mixmaster’s convergence of four interstates, so we needed to figure out where we were going, and fast. Brian calmly gave us clear directions—which interstate to take, what lane we’d need to be in, what direction we’d be heading after that, what exit we needed to take, what notable landmarks would be visible if we took a wrong turn—across Dallas. Mom initially scoffed at the kid but it became increasingly clear that he was leading us home. Giving crosstown directions in big-city traffic is often hairy for adults. Brian was eight at the time.

Upon graduating from the University of Texas in 1999, he essentially decided to re-invent himself, and moved to Buenos Aires on a whim. He lived in Argentina from 2000 to 2004. These years, unfortunately for him but terrific news for his readers, coincided with the country’s worst economic collapse ever. After months of unemployment and “what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here?” moments, he got a job as a Reuters correspondent, writing the occasional dispatch from Argentina to the rest of the world. He saw riots, a national currency in freefall, citizens climbing over themselves to get out of the country, and the grassy plains of the Pampas. He paid attention. As his Spanish improved, he noticed and memorized different accents, ways of dress and talk, and grew fluent in the ever-present politics that dominated conversation from the nightclub to the cab ride home.

He also learned to tango.

His new book, Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien: A Yanqui’s Missteps in Argentina, captures a country in chaos while also charting the author’s growing pains. Using tango (the dance and its music) as a lens through which to view Argentina, Brian fuses memoir, journalism, history, and cultural commentary to create a compelling, funny work about a beautiful nation in turmoil. His breezy, funny prose belies a sharp bite. He asks hard questions—of Argentina, and of his status as an American tourist—but does so in a hilarious way that shows off a well-tuned ear for dialogue and a clear eye for the telling detail and anecdote.

I’m not sure if it’s travel literature but, as master travel writer Pico Iyer points out, the genre is one that blurs distinctions from the outset:

…[T]ravel writing always dances on the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. I remember Paul Theroux brought out a selection of stories a few years ago and when they appeared in the New Yorker, they were literally characterized as “Fact and Fiction.” Bruce Chatwin’s stories always are flickering on the edge, and it is hard to tell what is invention and what recreation. And I remember V.S. Naipaul brought out a book a few years ago called The Way in the World, and the same text came out on one side of the Atlantic as nonfiction and on the other as fiction. So in some ways I think the distinctions are as arbitrary in travel writing as anywhere else. But clearly the allure of travel writing for many people is that they can throw fiction and nonfiction and everything in between into their narratives.

Long After Midnight is a remarkable addition to contemporary travel literature, and I’m not just saying so because its author is an old friend. Publishers Weekly calls the book an “outrageously funny tale of dance steps and travel,” and Kirkus describes it an “an elegant, caustic travelogue sparkling with insight.” I’m proud enough of him to offer, in the spirit of adventure, an experiment to my faithful readers.

Quiet Bubble is devoting the week of April 7-11 to Brian’s Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien. There will be a full review, a couple of excerpts from the book, and an interview with the author, the latter of which will be a first for this blog. Stay tuned.

Looking backwards, forward, and all around: On Stephen Dixon

“I got a letter from George Plimpton saying, ‘not only are you not a novelist, but you’re probably not a short-story writer, either.’ That’s the exact quote.”

—Stephen Dixon (February 2007)

Stephen Dixon is one of the few American writers whose work feels truly sui generis. Though his prose shares the simple diction and spare physical description of Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver, Dixon is no minimalist. In fact, he achieves
emotional power by using an excess of ideas, structures, reworked phrases, and sentences that seem to be still being revised as they appear on the page. In Salon, Roger Gathman described Dixon’s style as “writing that has come out in its undershirt.”

Dixon’s prose reminds me of no one else’s, it’s surprisingly difficult to emulate (I‘ve tried), and it’s hard to tell how much he has directly influenced the prose of subsequent writers, despite his being a creative writing professor at Johns Hopkins for over three decades. (It’s worth noting that, in spite of his tenure, he’s emphatically not a writer of “campus fiction,” as is David Lodge. Almost none of Dixon’s short stories or novels take place in or have roots in the academy. As a subject, it seems not to interest him.)

In fact, his fiction reminds me less of other writers than of Harvey Pekar’s long-running comic American Splendor. Of course, Pekar doesn’t draw his comics stories—he provides stick figures, layouts, dialogue, and structure to cartoonists, and oversees them as they flesh out his stuff—so he’s closer to Dixon than he might be if he were a draughtsman.

(It’s worth noting that Dixon likes to draw and has a scratchy, rough-hewn sense of graphic design. He often uses self-portraits—charmingly amateurish—in lieu of jacket photos, and provides the illustrations for his own Man on Stage. The arresting covers of his I. (2002) and End of I. (2006) feature cover art by alternative cartoonist Daniel Clowes. The covers are essentially inversions of each other—portraits of a melancholy, alert Dixon—that pair the books more effectively than any other conceivable design.)

Thematically, Dixon and Pekar are similar. Their stories are often thinly veiled autobiography—Dixon recasts his life in fiction; Pekar tells it straight but does so with a multitude of renditions of himself by other artists, so that we get different versions of “Harvey Pekar” in different comics. Which one’s the real one? Both recount the everyday struggles of working-class Jewish intellectual males in the big city. (For Pekar, it’s Cleveland. For Dixon, it’s New York.) Both of them obsess over trivial details, considering them as important in the long run as Big Events, and often privileging the quotidian over the exceptional (a child’s birth, a relative’s death, a marriage, a divorce) in terms of page length and authorial effort. They both began getting published in the mid-1970s, chronicling a country and a sense of masculinity during a period of great social instability.

Formally, they’re also related. Both Pekar and Dixon are stubbornly plainspoken stylists. They also tend to avoid climactic endings, or really endings at all, or even beginnings. Here’s how Dixon begins his latest novel, Meyer:

“So what are you going to do now?” she says. “I don’t know. Maybe bat out a poem. But I want to do something.” He kisses her, gets out of bed and puts on his glasses, picks his clothes off the floor and puts them on, sits at his worktable in the room and takes the cover off the typewriter. She gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom and turns on the shower.

Let’s see, he thinks: maybe something’s in there. He starts typing: “Now is the time, beloved, that I love you the most. Think of it,” and he subtracts eighty-two from a hundred and five, “twenty-three years, plus the three before we got married. Of all the women I’ve known, none has been anything like you. You are this, you are that. You do this to me, you do that. You, you, you.” “Forget it,” he says, and thinks what he’s written is even a bit insulting, and pulls the paper out of the typewriter and puts the cover back on.

We won’t find out “his” name (Meyer) until the next page, we’ll have to glean physical details from conversation that comes much later on, and we won’t even know where the couple lives for half the novel. So much is unclear, and will remain unclear, but we’ve got enough to go on. The processes of thought and writing are one and the same. Dixon tends to end stories—and books—in the same curiously flat way. There’s no closure; I’m not sure Dixon believes in such a thing. Rather, he begins in the middle of things, in the middle of lives, in the middle of conversations, and occasionally in the middle of sentences. We’re always playing catch-up because he rarely describes physical details, people, or the relationships between people except in the immediate context of the story and action going on. It’s nearly impossible to cherry-pick passages from his work for exegesis or as stand-alone quotes. Every word he puts down is integral to that particular piece, and none other. Dixon’s work does not favor the epigrammatic—as with, say, Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw—and it’s self-consciously affectless and unshow-offy.

Book burning has never seemed so benign

A Croatian graphic design firm has taken the phrase “cooking the books” to a whole new level. It prepared an annual report for Podravka, the largest food company in southeast Europe, so that the contents could only be read–stats, recipes, pictures, and all–once the book has been baked in an oven for 25 minutes, at 100 degrees Celsius. Until then, all the reader has are blank pages.

(Via Weekend Stubble.)

Verbatim

In a recent interview, Stephen Dixon mentions something that encapsulates both the rigor of his formal experimentation and the propulsive casualness of the ways in which his experiments appear and read on the page. This snippet of conversation is a little unnerving to me:

You’ve said that you write many versions of the same page. I find this interesting, because a lot of your work has this sprawling and rich, yet effortless quality to it. You allow your sentences and paragraphs to run on and on. A lot of people might think you just knock one thing out and move on to the next.

No, it’s all under control. I work at that effortlessness that you speak about. That’s why I redo a page sometimes forty to fifty times, the same page. By the end of it I’ve memorized it. I once lost a page, and I was able to reproduce it probably word for word.

Verbatim?

I dumped it accidentally and it went out with my papers. I searched and searched and couldn’t find it, so I just said, “Sit down. Maybe it’ll come back,” and it did. I really work at that effortlessness until it just rolls out, until it seems to fit, until it’s clean. You know, to me, every line has to connect with the previous line and the line that follows it, and it has to be done in a way that just seems as natural as possible. Sometimes I have to work out the kinks to get it to do that. I don’t think I’ve ever re-read a page without changing it, but there comes a time when you have to just stop writing that page because it’s as good as it can possibly get—at least it seems so—and you’ve got to go on. Most of my pages take twenty to forty to fifty runs—complete runs—through the typewriter before it feels right and good enough for me to go on to the next page.

I’ve been trying to think of anything that I’ve written so intensely and lived with to such a degree that I could recreate it from scratch, or that I would imagine rewriting, sentence by sentence, any piece I wrote over 40 times. Nope, can’t do it. I don’t think Dixon is bragging—in fact, it’s the offhand nature of his observations that impresses me the most—but it’s staggering all the same.

(By the way, his brand-new novel Meyer is wonderful, and probably the funniest book I've read by him.)

Hopefully not the Last Novel

In The Last Novel, David Markson continues his quest to re-invent the novel. To wit: his last four novels are each basically a series of brief paragraphs and vignettes about the lives, opinions, raging egos, and work of artists, writers, philosophers, thinkers, and athletes (primarily baseball players), told by an unseen narrator called Author or Novelist or Writer. The vignettes aren’t direct quotations—except when they’re unsourced lines from literature—but are instead outlandish, funny, and often desperately sad quips said in the narrator’s ironic, curmudgeonly voice. (As weird as they are, I’ve been able to verify almost every one I’ve checked out. Did Kurt Vonnegut really say, “I never knew a writer’s wife who wasn’t beautiful.” Yep. Did Bobby Fischer really say, “Wonderful news,” upon hearing about the destruction of the World Trade Center? Yes, the bastard did.)

These free-floating little stories—seeming to prove Hemingway’s line that a story can be six words or less—traverse over time and genre, jumping from Greek antiquity to yesterday’s news, with jokes that hang in the air on page 34, only for us to reach the equally hovering punchline on page 150. Periodically, Novelist makes an appearance, almost despite himself. “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke” is a recurring phrase. Somehow, it’s all irresistibly readable, and so many of the notes linger in the mind that it makes a sort of narrative sense. The Last Novel is not random, but moves gradually towards an understanding of the Novelist’s pre-occupations, loves and hates. Then again, this is true of Markson’s previous three outings—Vanishing Point, This Is Not A Novel, and Reader’s Block, and here the law of diminishing returns sets in.

What’s amazing is that the Markson Quartet—that’s what I’m calling it, anyway, with his 1988 Wittgenstein’s Mistress as the mother of them all—is that, despite the unvarying approach, each novel has a different tone, and each reaches a compelling, satisfying narrative drive. Vanishing Point is elegiac, ending with the dates, times, and places of death of famous artists (un-attributed, of course), with the stunning, dawning realization that it’s the Author who’s dying. Reader’s Block carries on two parallel narratives—the Reader can’t decide on which one to follow through—until they coalesce on a sad note, and a brisk, funny joke. This Is Not A Novel’s tone is as belligerent and defiant as the title’s claim—and ironic, too, because it turns out not to be quite true. A narrative thread—the Writer defining and defending whatever it is he’s doing—runs through. It’s a mad quest, and sad, too. Writer can’t break of the novel’s demands, despite obvious attempts, in the same way that his countless vignettes reveal how artists can’t free themselves of their own ties and prejudices.

The Last Novel, I suppose, is terrific if you’ve never read Markson before. Honestly, though, it’s a retread of This Is Not A Novel, only more reticent about the narrator and less emotionally engaging. Markson’s now licked this flavor of ice cream too many times. Markson even realizes the fear:

Nobody comes. Nobody calls—

Which Novelist after a moment realizes may sound like a line of Beckett’s, but is actually something he himself has said in an earlier book.

But then there’s the old defiance:

His last book. All of which also then gives Novelist carte blanche to do anything here he damned well pleases.

Which is to say, writing in his own personal genre, as it were.

He also reminds himself, like a mantra, that the book is to be: “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.” And, of course, it is. The difference here is that, with his previous books, Markson either got along with his business or worked hard to push his limits. Here, the repeated phrases and defenses of himself seem less like an explorer than like an aged prizefighter with more gut than muscle tone.

But then, outliving his usefulness—being outdated—is one of the primary anguishes motivating The Last Novel. “Old enough to have started coming upon likenesses on postage stamps of other writers he had known personally or had at least met in passing” has its ante upped by “When you can see the bandwagon, it’s already gone. Said de Kooning.” More here than any previous novel, Markson (excuse me, Writer) worries about getting old. Again, though, he’s done this better—in the far superior and deeply moving Vanishing Point.

Even though the voice has gotten outdated and tiresome, there’s still life in the loosely connected anecdotes. They still shock, surprise, anger, and make me laugh. More and more, the litany of invective, nuanced history, and misjudgments seems forced. Writer’s finally gotten so stuck in the world of books, operas, baseball games, and paintings that he can’t see (or even wants to see) the world outside his own Greenwich Village apartment.

Markson’s proved that he can strip the novel of characters, settings, and plot—or, conversely, throwing together tiny multitudes of the same, depending on how you see it—and still convey narrative richness and tearjerking depth. But his “own personal genre” is becoming airless. The Last Novel takes the form as far as Markson can go. Now it’s time for him to step back, regroup, and perhaps rediscover the pleasures of old things.

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It’s worth mentioning that Markson is still spry, and that his conversation is as fluid, funny, and erudite as his novels. Here’s a 2004 Bookslut interview, upon the publication of Vanishing Point and the re-issue of Going Down; here’s an even more expansive one, from 1989.