Answerless Interview with Elena Passarello

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Wild, larynx-ripping congratulations to the stunning Elena Passarello whose killer book, Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande), recently took the gold in the Essay/Creative Nonfiction category of the 2013 Independent Publisher Book Awards.  Here is my interview with her holographic version, wherein each asterisk is meant to represent some sputtering static in all of its ethereal hiss and endearing hiccup. 

One of my favorite things about your essays is that they struggle.  They grapple toward connection, toward some nebulous demand for answers.  I’m not sure if this demand comes from inside the essays themselves, or in the suppositions of an audience.  Can you speak to such demands and how you view the essay’s obligations to them?

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Your work, while brilliantly written, remains endlessly curious.  These essays never presume certainty—in spite of the ultra-confident voice—never assume the posture of “teaching us something,” which, of course, they do by default, via the very specific and odd ways in which you grapple.  Can you talk a bit about the importance of grappling vs. the assumption of certainty in the essay?

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These essays seem to try to situate some of our weirder cultural inheritances into a series of larger contexts.  Do you think that your work wants to make these inheritances more easily digestible, or would you rather (entertainingly) complicate said inheritances?

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One time, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to open a reading series named Cherry Bomb, you and I dueted on Seger’s Night Moves and The White Stripes’ The Big 3 Killed My Baby—you on autoharp in an evening gown sitting on a downturned milk crate, and me on vocals, in my sexy pants and Peruvian luchador mask.  Afterwards, a few people clapped.  Did you enjoy that as much as I did?

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In an interview with Harper’s, you state that the short pieces you include between your essays—the briefly glimpsed voices of auctioneers, zealots, singers, psychics, Elvis impersonators, et. al.—are meant to be palate cleansers, a break from your own voice.  Is there more to it than this?  These did not seem randomly chosen or randomly ordered (not that there’s anything random about grapefruit sorbet).  I’m guessing that you interviewed many other folks who did not make the cut.  Who were they, and why did you choose to leave them out, when compared to the voices of those you chose to include?

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In “How to Spell the Rebel Yell,” you aim for an odd connection: the sound of the famed yell itself to its (im)possible spelling—our need to spell a sound in order to encapsulate and domesticate, and possess, and digest it.  And then you go further, trying to connect the sound of the Rebel Yell to its own wonderful name—Rebel Yell—and to its appearance in film and pop music, to its redefinition by David Bowie and James Dean and Billy Idol and that “bottom shelf gutter bourbon.”  You’ve said that, in writing, you sometimes allow for the digressions the mind takes while writing—and I love those moments!—but, in a piece like “How to Spell...” your focus is intense and lapidary, and you never really stray from your source inspiration—the Yell itself.  Can you speak to both the difficulties, and the exhilaration, of staying so singularly focused in this essay, especially for someone who loves to honor the mind’s digressions? 

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In “Communication Breakdown,” you mention that the pitch of Howard Dean’s infamous BYAH! (at least the BY portion of it) is a flat F in the 5^th octave—the same note that Robert Plant hits at a very specific point in the song ‘Communication Breakdown.’  The book is filled with odd, wonderful, secret-seeming facts like this.  How did you uncover such facts?  Did you trust your ear?  Did these require further outside research? 

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In a related question, in “JUDY! JUDY! JUDY!” you affect a wonderfully precise voyeuristic tone.  As she takes the stage at Carnegie Hall, you mention that she’s “Tiny in flats, despite five inches of coif...”  With the “five inches” you establish yourself as quite an authority.  How do you choose when to affect precision like this, and when to affect uncertainty (which you do throughout as well).  What’s the essential balance of each in order to cater to your ideal audience—one who wants you to know this much, and to grapple this much?

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A Least Flycatcher just flew under my feet and flapped its wings and said che-bek, che-bek, whit-whit-whit, che-bek, che-bek, whit-whit-whit.  Is it okay that I’m a little scared?

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Some of your endings reach for the profound (like “...Rebel Yell”).  Others reach for a quick, precise humor (like “Communication Breakdown”).  During the writing process, do you often know where these pieces are going?  Or I should ask: at what point in the writing process do you know where these pieces are going? 

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You often like to try on other folks’ clothes in your work—inter-historically, sometimes even inter-specially [Passarello has an essay, not included in this collection, in which she speaks in the voice of Harriet, the third oldest tortoise who ever lived, and who did time with both Charles Darwin and Steve Irwin].  Your essays lend voices to Confederate soldiers, Whitman, Judy Garland, et. al.  In doing this, is there a line you create beforehand that you vow not to cross, or does that line arise during the process of writing the essay?  To clarify: how much research is required in order to fortify your speculation with enough “fact?” 

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What essential lessons did you learn in the world of theater that have proven essential to your writing of this book?

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In “Harpy,” you shirk the soapbox that often attends the I-voice in nonfiction by, from the get-go, doing something very interesting: you provide an incredibly—almost uncomfortably—intimate litany of your physiological and anatomical attributes, yet you foster an odd distance in talking writing about your body as an it, as a separate thing from the I.  (Yet at the same time, you engage your own birth, for Pete’s sake!  And pull it off!).  Can you talk about your decision to do this, how you view this choice in retrospect, why this intimate essay is placed where it is within the context of the collection, and how you view the obligations of the I-voice in the contemporary essay?

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At various intervals, while reading the book, I kept thinking about inheritance.  In “Harpy,” for instance, you discuss your mother’s loud voice, and how you “loved trying to yell back at a matching volume.”  You discuss both your and her time in the theater.  And, of course, you open the book with a Montaigne quote.  So:  a few sub-questions here:

a)     To what degree did you think of inheritance as an implicit theme when writing the book?

b)     To what degree do you think your fascination with the subject of the human voice is “inherited?”

c)      To what degree is the voice and its abilities an inherited trait? (In a way, you write of the rock ‘n’ roll scream, for instance, as something we’ve inherited and interpreted as a mode of expression, a shorthand—a gauge of coolness, release, exhilaration, sexual frustration...)

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What was the nickname you gave to that really good charcuterie plate at Reserve [a Grand Rapids, MI. restaurant] that included the country ham for Georgia again?  Motherfucking Hambone, or something?  Hamsilk?

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You have been vocal (he-he) on various online engines about the nature of the essay—its parameters, freedoms, duties, etc.  And, as I mentioned, you open with Montaigne.  To what degree do you see yourself, in this book, conversing with such inherited tenets of the essay—lyric or otherwise.  And to what degree do you see yourself breaking from these tenets?

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You have this uncanny ability to empathize with your subjects without forcing it, oftentimes without even inserting the I-voice—from Howard Dean to the Confederate soldiers, to Enrico Caruso, to the character of Stanley Kowalski.  But you seem to reserve a special place for Judy Garland.  (In “Judy! Judy! Judy!” you imagine, in italics, her thoughts; you engage her voice as shaped by countless orgasms...). Is there any truth to this, or is this only my sense?  And, if there is truth to this, well, then, why?  And if it’s only my sense, well, then why is that? 

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“Hey Big Spender” is so knowledgeable about music, notes, voices, tones, the history of recording, and the history of recording the voices of castrated Italian men, that it seems to assume a knowledge on the part of the reader.  This essay is rife with jargon and in-jokes, yet, at the same time is able to seduce (like a hissing C-note) the reader.  In what ways do you decide to trust that the reader will get it?  How do you walk this line of spouting niche knowledge and making such knowledge accessible to the reader without sacrificing the obsessed, twitchy niche-ness of it all? 

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“Hey Big Spender.”  OK: Knocko the Monkey.  You imagine a swooning woman speaking of watching Caruso sing, spreading rumors about how he pinched “a woman’s bottom at the Bronx Zoo monkey house.”  I’m interested in your research process.  How the hell did you find Knocko?  Were you looking for him?  Why were you looking for him?  Or: what were you looking for when you stumbled across him, and how did you choose to use him in this essay as part of some imagined and frantic gossip? 

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Which brings me to this italicized gossip in “Hey Big Spender.”  Is this entirely made-up?  Sourced?  A fusion of both?  How did you go about crafting these segments and why?  How would you respond to detractors who would like to tell us that these sections aren’t “nonfiction?” 

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Another “Hey Big Spender” question (Can you tell that I adored this essay?):  The ending is frankly, and disarmingly, gorgeous.  How did you uncover the seemingly private logistics regarding Caruso’s demise?  His final “holler” in the bathtub?  The fact that he lived on the 18^th floor?  The fluid that leapt from Caruso’s body that slapped “the doctor like a glove before a duel?”

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One time, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, over (I think) neat Knob Creeks, you and I cracked each other up making jokes about the town of Pooler, Georgia.  What would you say to those who’d accuse us of being juvenile?

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The book engages the voice as both ultra-permanent and ultra-impermanent.  We have “Johnny B. Goode” etched onto a record and blown off into outer space as a communicative engine, or zero-gravity posterity.  We have Howard Dean’s BYAH! immortalized on YouTube, Stella! on celluloid, but we also have Caruso spitting blood, and birdsong dying with the seasons.  How do you see this relationship: are we trying to shoehorn song—something inherently impermanent—into a context of permanence as a culture, or is it exactly the opposite? 

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As Harper’s Magazine recently pointed out, many of these essays walk the line between the individual and the universal, attempting to connect the two, but these essays also seem to walk another line: between ridicule and reverence, similarly trying to find an overlap.  I’m thinking not only of “Teach Me Tonight,” which gently skewers Sinatra’s Tips on Popular Singing pamphlet, but also of “Communication Breakdown” and Dean’s crazed BYAH!  These essays seem to begin with a gentle ridicule of their subjects, underlining their cultural absurdity, but them seem to grow toward a reverence for said absurdity, oftentimes revising “absurd” or re-casting the absurd as holy.  Can you speak to this? 

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Was it really that inappropriate for me to wear that sweat suit to the bar?

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In “Please Hold” you engage the ways in which the telephone, and other machinery, have altered the relationship between voice and body and truth.  In “Double Joy,” you engage the ways in which region affects the voice and vocal preferences, quirks, truths.  Discuss how your opinion evolved, as the book took shape, regarding the relationship between voice and truth.  Can “voice” be seen, in this context, as an allegory for other expressive forms, like, say, the essay?

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In “Playing Sick,” you write, “I often see punch lines as music rather than language.”  To what other elements of expression would you apply this, and how so?

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In “Playing Sick,” you write of your obsession with, as an actor, saying the word Ew exactly right in a production of An Empty Plate in the Café du Grand Boeuf.  To what degree do you see fixation as part of your writing process?

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In “Playing Sick,” you engage the visual signs we’ve come up with to warn folks, non-verbally, that a substance may be poisonous—from the skull-and-crossbones to Mr. Yuk.  Since, in your acknowledgements, you offer “vociferous thanks” to essayist John D’Agata, I couldn’t help but think of a parallel here between Mr. Yuk, and that section in D’Agata’s “About a Mountain” wherein this think-tank was put together to create the perfect sign meant to warn future generations from wandering too close to the (proposed) dumped nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.  To what degree do you see vocalization being turned into inadequate signage in our culture?  What are the implications of this?

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Did you know that the mall in Pooler is called The Shops at Godly Station, and includes a Genealogy Boutique?  I’ll bet you did. 

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Besides D’Agata, who are some other writers or non-writers who have influenced your work?

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You studied with both John D’Agata and Lee Gutkind—two giants in the world of literary nonfiction with two very different ideas regarding the genre’s parameters.  Can you discuss what you learned from each of these guys, and where along their continuum you feel your ideas about the genre fit?  How do the essays in Let Me Clear My Throat embody your proposed position on said continuum?

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How did you react to Gutkind’s indictment of D’Agata in the pages of Creative Nonfiction magazine? 

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A goofy question: you have such an affinity for Yiddish words, and words bound to the Catskill Mountain vaudevillian era—schtupping and yutz, et. al.  What are the origins of such an affinity?

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The final essay in the book, “A Monstrous Little Voice,” you employ the form of a questionnaire given by an imagined company that deals in lending “real” voices to a ventriloquist dummy.  Throughout, the “dummy answers the questions (which were really answered by actual ventriloquist T. Foley, engaging the “personality” of her actual dummy).   First of all, that’s awesome.  Secondly, given its placement in the book, while I laughed throughout, and, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its formal ecstasy, I felt that this was perhaps the saddest essay of them all.  Why did you put this one last? 

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This is not a question, but a comment.  But feel free to answer the comment.  Based on the previous essays, when we get to “A Monstrous Little Voice,” we are give permission it seems to remove ourselves from our “revolting” selves, to examine ourselves as if we’re our own handlers.  We can be the dummies, and we can answer the questions in the questionnaire differently than Hector.  Then, rereading the essay, we can answer them differently again.  This essay can be read and reread in countless ways, like some crazy Choose Your Own Adventure story.  Um.  There’s my comment.

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Discuss the collaboration with Foley.  Did this worry you?  Were you hoping she’d answer the questions in specific ways?  Was this a sort of assignment you imposed on yourself—Okay, if she answers the questions this way, then I’ll write this kind of essay.  If she answers the questions that way...well, then...?

In the Multiple Choice section of the questionnaire, you ask:

            10) Which of the following speeches most intrigues you?

                        * Richard Milhaus Nixon’s “Checkers” address

                        * Sally Field’s 1985 Oscar acceptance speech

                        * The list of the possible side effects of Cialis

                        * “Friends Romans, Countrymen”

                        * Vincent Price’s rap at the end of “Thriller”

How much of this technique was a fun excuse for you to wander through, via veiled litany, your own pop cultural obsessions that you didn’t have the time or room to flesh-out as individual essays?

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If not ice cream, then what am I screaming, you screaming, we all screaming for?

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and the Man Who First Photographed It (forthcoming 2014 from W.W. Norton: Liveright), Pot Farm, and Barolo, the poetry books, The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and the chapbooks, Four Hours to Mpumalanga and Aardvark.  He teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North.  This winter, he prepared his first batch of whitefish liver ice cream.  It paired well with onion bagels.