In this issue some news and a feature interview with Robert S Stickley, author of A Bended Circuitry. If you have news or a book you want to tell us about or a review feel free to get on touch though social media or via beyondthezeropod@gmail.com
A huge thank you for everyone who has signed up for the Patreon if you sign up you will get some exclusive content and I am planning some exciting things in 2023.
Our next newsletter will be a preview of books in 2023 and planning to have it out in early January. I wish all of you a Happy holidays, a Merry Christmas, Happy Chanuka, and wonderful new year full of great books, reading and creative endeavours.
Thanks to everyone for listening to the podcast, reading the newsletter and being part of this wonderful little community of book lovers.
News
Who can believe it is December already? I am madly piecing together the end of year wrap up which may end up being split up into a couple, three episodes due to length but trust me, it will be something special. Thanks again to Seth at W.A.S.T.E Mailing List for co-hosting. Speaking of Seth - his latest video on Solenoid is out now and if you liked the BTZ episode with Sean Cotter you will love this. Here are the links to the video and the episode
In other book news - December releases include Antagony by Luis Goytisolo from Dalkey Whiskey Tit have Tell Me What You See by Terena Elizabeth Bell and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy.
Megan McDowell has won the National Book award for translation for her work on Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin She is on the show this week discussing her new translation - Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez out now from Granta.
Interview with Robert S Skickley
BTZ; Could you tell us a bit about your background, where you grew up, studied, what you do for a day job and where you are currently living?
RSS: I grew up in Northern Virginia, went to high school in Southwestern Virginia, and I now live in Richmond, Virginia. Although I didn’t do much studying while enrolled, I attended West Virginia University. So, I could answer most of the question by saying “The Virginias”.I currently teach high school while running a couple of businesses. I intend to move into those entrepreneurial endeavors of mine fulltime in the near future.
BTZ: How did you get into writing?
RSS; This is actually a really hard thing to pin down. In some ways, I don’t know. While I had collegiate experience in journalism, that was more like a tryst than anything else. I’d had fictive leanings stretching back into my childhood, and I always sort of knew that one day I would try my hand at writing a novel.
I can, however, definitively say that boredom is what made me take that first step of putting pen to paper, so to speak. You see, I was working a desk job where I had everything I needed to do in an eight hour shift totally done within the first fifteen minutes of work. With all that downtime, I had to find something to do on the computer so as to make it look like I was working. I could read the New York Times, play some variant of online Tetris, or otherwise write. At some point in time, when I’d exhausted those other menial activities, I decided to use the time writing. In that way, I almost forced myself into it. I have managed to write, whether prose or poetry, in every job I’ve had since. In fact, writing on A Bended Circuity all but got me fired from the job I had in NYC.
BTZ: ABC is your first published book but I feel like you must have written a lot before it - Do you have a lot of projects in a drawer somewhere?
RSS; Believe it or not, ABC was my first attempt at writing any real fiction. I sat down and pretty much said, “If I’m going to do it, I’m going to try to do it right.” However, having gone about it this way, I did spend innumerable hours revising and fixing portions of the manuscript (particularly in the beginning chapters) that were not composed correctly because I had only just started this type of writing. Such issues were: naïve writing techniques, problems with continuity of tense, and even changing characters/plotlines, to name a few. I cut my teeth on this novel and, even though I made things hard on myself as I tried to figure out how to write prose, the journey was fun. In retrospect, I wouldn’t have done it any differently.
BTZ: ABC is very hard to describe. The writing has touches of Faulkner and the humour/pastiche of Mason and Dixon. Thematically you explore a lot of the notions the South and the American love for rebellion. Can you tell us a bit about the set up the novel, the time period and your main characters?
RSS: The book runs one calendar year, August of 1969 to August of 1970. The first half of the book is set primarily in Charleston, SC. It expands from there a bit, but it does end up back in Charleston. There are a good many characters to speak of, but I would cite four important ones that drive the story forward. They are: Bradley Pinçnit, his wife Gabuirdine, Maksim Dyxov (a Russian spy), and then Stafford Notering.
As for the most ostensible elements of the plot, Bradley becomes incensed when a secretive group of agitators makes it their business to disrupt the Southern aristocracy’s genteel version of reality. Forming his own secessionist government, Bradley then moves into an authoritarian role and musters an army. The second half of the book has his men marching off into a rather ridiculous war. Meanwhile, the Russian, an adherent of Freud and in the states for clandestine KGB business, is conducting a curious pet project on the side, a sort of pseudo-psychological experiment which spirals out of control. Gabuirdine, left to her own devices in Charleston, begins to come to terms with her life while her husband is away.
I don’t think that description does it justice, but I don’t really know what else to say about it! It’s a very strange book.
BTZ; What were some of your influences writing the book and was it written within the Trump years?
RSS: Great question and, regarding Trump, the answer is no. I finished up writing on the book in 2015, and I had the idea for the book totally outlined by 2007 (Bush still slithering around his public offices at that point). While the protagonist of the story, and much of the shenanigans he seems to set into motion, do seem indicative of a Trump, or post-Trump era, they were not influenced by him. In fact, I tended to look at the warmongering moves George Bush or Barak Obama were making more than anything else, simply because they were the acting presidents at the time I was writing.
But, living in Charleston was the biggest influence on the book. It’s an interesting city; the South really seems to show off its dark sides in a place that topically appears to be sort of mindless and sunny. Also of note, one side of my family history runs through Charleston, and I felt indebted to some ghost or the other to write about it. One of the things that occurred to me while living there in or around 2007 (as I’m sure it occurred to countless others long before) was that there were a bunch of statues hanging overhead that glorified racists. When I invoked the Renegados to tear these ignominious bastions down in ABC, it was no more than imagination at play, and a denouement that I believed deserving of them.
BTZ; In terms of style, the writing in this book is extraordinary. Did have particular writers who have influenced the way you write?
RSS; Sure. I’d start with Pynchon. Having read Gravity’s Rainbow in my early twenties (a wonderful age to fall head over heels for some singular idea or the other) I became an adherent of his works. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I decided I had to write a novel while reading, and rereading, Gravity’s Rainbow.
Though Pynchon served as an early inspiration, I don’t believe my writing style has very much in common with his. I prefer more traditional phrasing and structure in my prose than he typically incorporates. Ultimately, I think a good reader would be better equipped to say what other authors my writing draws comparison with. Ideally, it has its own redeeming qualities and stands apart from others. That would be my hope.
The final thing I’ll say regarding inspiration is that, anymore, the idea of art informs my writing more than other authors do. Whether that art is visual, dramatic, cinematic, philosophical, scientific, etc., I try to write art for the sake of art. Unconventional art inspires me; I’m reminded of what Marcel Duchamp said about the motion of chess pieces constituting art. The way Maria Martinez shaped a pot is actually more interesting to me, nowadays, than how Faulkner shaped a sentence. The way Georgia O’Keefe formed line seems more important than all of the bluster found in Finnegan’s Wake. Universal, timeless ideas are what I look (strive) to incorporate into my writing. Don’t get me wrong, the books are important, but so are a lot of other sources of art, and science.
BTZ; How long did ABC take you to write and can you tell us a bit about its publishing journey?
RSS; That’s a question I’ve been asked a number of times, which doesn’t have a definitive answer, so I’ll try to explain.
I started writing the book toward the end of 2008, while I was living in Charleston, SC. I won’t go into specifics regarding the six or seven moves I made between 2008 and 2015, but I never lived any one place for longer than eighteen months. There were times, like when I lived in Denver, or Istanbul, that I didn’t do any substantive work on the novel for over a year at a time. When I did finally finish the writing, it sat on a shelf for about five years. After Covid hit in 2020, I found the time to start going back through the manuscript.
So, at its absolute longest, you could say it was a fourteen year span from when I began writing it until it was finally published by Corona\Samizdat. At the shortest, you could say that I actually wrote on it, whenever I found time, for five years or so. I think the best answer is about eight years; that’s the duration it took from putting the first words down to actually finishing up the final sentences of the epilogue.
BTZ; And what did you hope to accomplish with ABC?
First of all, I always had satire in mind when writing the book and, while ABC is not purely satirical, I hope it can be viewed through that lens. I also wanted readers to be left with a bad taste in their mouth once they’d finished, because that notion feels indicative of the times we’re living in. But, perhaps the biggest thing I set out to do was write a book where everybody loses and I think I succeeded in that regard, mostly.
Another topic to broach here is the treatment of women in the book. I know that the way the lead female character, Gabuirdine, is handled will not sit right with some readers; what she goes through is hard to deal with. It was hard to write. I also know that minorities and marginalized populations are dealt with brusquely. All of this was purposeful. Writing the book from a white supremacist’s standpoint was not an easy thing to do; I had to walk a tightrope while trying to get the story I wanted to tell out there. But I really hope that a larger point can be made out of the violent situations in the book, situations that are true to the human experience, and seem to be occurring just as regularly now as they were in 1969/70, when the book was set.
BTZ;What are you working on at the moment? I do have a novel I’m working on. It’s about halfway complete, but I think it’ll be a few years before it’s finished. I am always writing poetry. I may take a break from the novel and finish up some short stories that I can feel staring me down like undernourished parasites.
BTZ; What were some of your gateway books?
RSS; My dad read my siblings and me Tolkien, Twain, and a few other seminal Southern authors when we were quite young. I remember him, at times, laughing so hard he couldn’t read to us anymore. I’d say that started the whole damned thing.
BTZ;What books are you currently reading or have you recently enjoyed or are you looking forward to reading?
RSS; I typically have a lot of books open at the same time, interleaved with each other as they are so that they appear to be engaging in various forms of copulation around the house. The reading I’ve been doing of late goes like so:
I read War and Peace last year; Tolstoy knew more about the human condition than a person rightly should. I try to fit a Faulkner novel in here or there. Kant’s Critique of Reason and Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde are both currently open. All of the periodicals I read are science based. Right now, quantum physics is what I’m trying to (slowly) wrap my head around. It’s fascinating stuff.
Certain books never seem to leave my bedside, as I consult them regularly. They are: The Golden Bough, various of Freud’s works, Virgil’s Aeneid, Milton’s Paradise Lost, T.S. Eliot’s poems, Robert Frost, Dickinson, Yeats, Lermontov.
The next work of fiction I really want to read is Life of Samuel Johnson, based on Vladimir Nabokov’s recommendation, then perhaps the memoirs of Casanova. Mme. de Sévigné’s memoirs as well. But I’m a slow reader, so those are lined up for the years to come.
BTZ; What are your top 10 desert island books?
RSS;
10. Anna Karenina
9. A book containing all of Emily Dickinson’s poems
8. A book containing all of T.S. Eliot’s poems
7. The Lord of the Rings trilogy
6. Moby Dick
5. The Satyricon
4. Paradise Lost
3. Shakespeare’s works
2. In Search of Lost Time
1. The Dictionary
A Bended Circuity Is available through Corona/Samizdat