Interviews
Schmoozing with Bernard Cooper
Rose Good Meitzen
Bernard Cooper is my favorite uncle. Well, he isn’t really my uncle, but if he were he might come close to rivaling my Uncle Gary, the urologist from New Jersey. Bernard is a very lovable and genuine guy with just enough chutzpah to keep things interesting. His self-deprecating humor has a way of endearing him to anyone who has ever heard him give a reading. I was lucky enough to attend one of these, as well as a packed Q&A session, during his visit to Bellingham in late February of 2005. He read selections from his groundbreaking memoir, Truth Serum, and spoke about themes ranging from the morality of art to the exploration of father-son relationships at the heart of his upcoming memoir, The Bill From My Father. His thoughts on The Bill From My Father, and what went into constructing it, comprise some of this interview. I actually spent most of my time with him laughing at his jokes, and admiring his unabashed appreciation for puns, which I deeply share.
What I found especially charming about Bernard Cooper is that he’s never lost a sense of wonder, or as he calls it, bewilderment, about the world and the people we love. If I ever make it to L.A., he’s at the top of my list. I can think of no better time than to see that city through his eyes. For now, I’ll have to content myself with Maps to Anywhere—a collection of short, whimsical pieces—while I’m waiting for The Bill From My Father to appear in bookstores.
Rose Good Meitzen: I hear you have a new memoir forthcoming titled The Bill from Father. Would you mind sharing your thoughts on this new book? How does it differ from your other two memoir collections, Truth Serum and Maps to Anywhere?
Bernard Cooper: Both Truth Serum and Maps to Anywhere were collections of essays. Truth Serum focused primarily on the subject of family and the repercussions of coming to terms with my being gay and the nature of sexual orientation. And the new book is not so much a collection of different pieces, but was much more conceived as a continuous narrative, a book-length memoir. Because of that I think the scope is broader than it has been in the previous two books. The focus is very specifically on my relationship with my father. But my relationship with my father became, in the process of writing the book, a jumping off point to talk about aging, father/son connections, the way people retain or lose essential parts of their personality as they grow older. It’s kind of amazing to me that, as specific a focus as the book had, it led to lots of tangents about other concerns which were woven into the whole, w-h-o-l-e, not h-o-l-e.
RGM: (laughter) I’m really interested in your relationship with your father in the new book, and am looking forward to reading more about that. Would you talk a little bit about what was at stake in the book?
BC: One thing struck me very strongly at the reading last night: The incident from which the book’s title is taken, The Bill from My Father (I was in my twenties when my father, who is an attorney, sent me a bill for my upbringing) was shocking, absurd, insulting, and funny. I was not sure what had motivated him to do this, because it didn’t necessarily follow a fight or altercation of any kind. I realized from that core experience in the book that I had so much general bewilderment about who my father was, why he did the things he did, how little I knew about him, how little he divulged of himself. This really became a motivation to write. And, I forgot what your question was (laughter).
RGM: Just what was at stake. Did you feel like there was something really at stake in the project of the book?
BC: You know it’s funny, there was nothing at stake in terms of my actual relationship with my father because he had died about four years previous to writing the book. But in a funny kind of way I felt that the four years it took to write this book was like having an extended, intense, and a relationship more consistent than my actual relationship with him. Which was very rocky. He was very loving one minute and then would turn his back, and it happened to everyone, not just me. I really felt that there was something I wanted to… if not understand, and if not come to terms with, at least explore in the process of writing the book. So that was definitely at stake. A kind of exploration, and it entailed certain emotional risks and uncertainties.
RGM: I would imagine so.
BC: The other thing that I think was very far from motivating, and difficult… personally what was at stake for me was, well, I had realized, over the years, that I have become increasingly like my father.
RGM:(laughter) Don’t we all become our parents in sense?
BC: I think we do.
RGM: (laughter) I do.
BC: I think it’s a shock. I think there is a very positive kind of rebellion when everybody goes through a period of trying to establish their autonomy, to become an individual, and that’s extremely important. So it is a surprise when, after you’ve become what you think is a person who will not suffer any of the mistakes, or absurdities that you associate with your parents—in fact you’re them all over again.
In my father’s case this was especially troublesome for me because he’s a very eccentric person. He ended up having geriatric dementia for the last year or two of his life. He went broke suing people, including people in the family, thank goodness not me. Although I thought: any day now a summons would arrive. And he basically was someone who was self-destructive, and part of the personal struggle I went through too, in spending so much time concentrating on him, was trying to accept the ways that all sons become very much like their fathers. And at the same time trying not to feel suffocated by the possibility that I too might end up as abject as he did. Yet, I think that everyone, as they age, especially in old age, experiences a kind of diminishment of their physical strength, and their independence. So it was obviously an extremely complicated set of responses to my memories of my father, and also to my sense of my own fate.
RGM: I absolutely loved the excerpt from The Bill from my Father on “This American Life” on Chicago Public Radio.
BC: Thanks. You know, I never heard that.
RGM: No? You haven’t? You have to. I know it’s not read by you. I understand it was read by an actor.
BC: You know, I didn’t. I was very flattered that it was on. But it happened when I was writing the book. And I was so determined to put blinders on and not let anything make me self-conscious. But I thought to hear it read in somebody else’s voice….
RGM: That must be a very strange sort experience
BC: Well, it’s great. But you know I’ve had things of mine done for example with a Cockney accent (laughter). Oh it’s just kind of strange.
RGM: I see your relationship with your father so present in Maps to Anywhere, Truth Serum, and A Year of Rhymes, all these sorts relationships between fathers and sons. So when I read, or when I was listening to the excerpt from the new book, I was really excited about getting to know your father more, you and your father, and it’s interesting just in talking about aging and the end of his life because in so much of what I read in your earlier work, he is such a dynamic force. He’s always moving, he’s very energetic, he’s changing things all the time. And it would be an interesting progression to see how you go about exploring your changing relationship.
BC: Well, that’s very heartening to hear, because one of the inhibitions I had to overcome in order to write the book was the fact that I had written about him before. On the one hand, you don’t want to reflexively repeat yourself in your writing. You don’t want to fall back too easily on material that’s familiar, or that you’re too comfortable with. On the other hand, I will say that I am more amazed than anyone that my father has become essentially my muse. I even refer to him, sort of joking with my friends, as “the muse in the polyester jumpsuit,” which is what he wore.
I do keep coming back to him again and again. I repeatedly refer to the idea that one’s parents or one’s family become a kind of touchstone that you come back to as you move on through life. Hopefully you grow and, you know, one does leave their family for an independent life. But it will always be this kind of essential reference point. The other thing is that the last ten years of his life were, for me, an interesting and appalling accumulation of what he’d been up to that point. In a funny way, to sort of answer an earlier question, I think that partly the risk of writing this book is that my sense of him is much more tragic. In a sense, I mean this sounds kind of perhaps melodramatic, but my sense of myself and most people’s lives is that they are…tragic might be too strong a word, but everybody has to confront compromises, disappointments. And at the very least, one of the things that’s so remarkable, and disconcerting, and wonderful about life, is that it just does not turn out the way you thought it would be when you were thinking about the life that lay ahead of you. So that felt very much like a risk too, because it was a very complicated sense of what I was aiming for in the book.
RGM: Yes, it reminds me a lot of the idea of maps and charting— charting a course through your life and those sorts of themes that are present in your other works. So it really feels like it’s the next step to me. I was curious if you felt as though this book was a huge departure for you. But in hearing you speak about it, it makes me feel anyway, that it’s very connected to your other works.
BC: It’s funny, because after having just said that I worried that I was going back over material I had already used and was repeating myself, I will also say that many times during the process of writing this book I would think, “Wow, I’ve never written anything like this, I’m really going out on a limb, this is really different.” So I felt both extremes. I do think that the scope of this book is larger, even though the focus is more precise. And there were a lot of emotional tones that I let into this book that I think are not evident in such an extreme in the previous books. I mean there’s anger, but I think there is more humor in this book than I’ve ever let in to anything else.
RGM: That’s something to look forward to.
BC: I didn’t try for it, it just seemed to happen, and I think probably because of the gravity of the material. My rationale was to delve into the gravity, but to counterbalance it with humor. There are things that seem to me slightly experimental. There are italicized parts, after my father dies, where he continues talking. That of course was me kind of adopting his voice. I talk about that at the beginning of the book. How I can, when called upon, do a monologue as him. I mean that’s how deeply his personality has saturated my imagination. So the book made me feel as though I was pushing against certain boundaries, and it felt new in many ways. But a lot of times I have felt, at a certain point, that the work was really going toward the edge, and was really new, and that people would read it and they’d go, “Oh yeah, you know this sounds exactly like you.”
RGM: Well, that’s a good thing.
BC: I guess one would like a balance of both, because you can’t escape your view of the world, and your way of thinking about things and expressing your view of the world. But you also want to try things and grow, and so hopefully if I’m very lucky I reach a balance of those two things.
RGM: I read an article from the L.A.Weekly, where you talk about life after the publication of Truth Serum. You were really anxious about it, and the public reaction to it. Putting yourself and your work right out there, and your experiences. Do you feel like that about The Bill From My Father?
BC: Well, that essay in the L.A. Weekly was actually reprinted from an anthology that the writer, Charles Baxter, edited for Graywolf Press, called The Business of Writing. He asked nonfiction writers to write about the repercussions of writing about themselves and people close to them. When you turn autobiography into a commodity, and that commodity is put in the world, and the selling of that commodity is a business. And one of the things I quoted in the book was a line by Geoffrey Wolff, Tobias Wolff’s brother, who wrote the wonderful memoir The Duke of Deception. He said, in an interview, that no one who writes an autobiographical book can possibly prepare themselves for what happens as a result. There are a lot of autobiographical books—sometimes I think mine among them—that don’t get heaps of attention. I think he’s talking about the fact that in whatever form, or to whatever degree, you get responses for autobiographical writing, it’s strange. Because someone you don’t know will know about your spouse, or your child, or your parent, or what you did in the war, you know. It’s jarring in some sense. What happens when one writes is that you kind of put blinders on. In order to do it I have to pretend that probably no one in the world will ever read it, except the people I hand the manuscript to. I have to kind of cultivate a sense of absolute privacy in order to write the thing, because I don’t want to be self-conscious, or I don’t want to try to second-guess a reader or an audience or a critical response. I want to be as true as possible to the work itself. So you spend years crafting the sentences and almost it’s as if the things that you care most deeply about, and the people you’re writing about, and the incidences that you experience, become raw material. They’re not personal experiences so much as they are kind of raw material you’re crafting.
RGM: Right, constructing.
BC: Yes, in order to represent those experiences. But then when people come up to you and are weeping and grab you, and, you know, it’s sort of “Whoa, what’s going on here, who are you, oh my god” and there is a little bit of a disconnect because you remember it as being years and years of hard work to determine every sentence. And the person who is responding is having an immediate, sometimes emotional or personal, response, and by that time you’ve, to some extent, depersonalized it because it’s your job. And it happens day in and day out.
RGM: I want to ask you something specific about the content of your work. I love how you bring in aspects of Jewish culture, and you point out American perceptions of Jews, and you use a lot of Yiddish words and phrases. I want to know, first of all, if we can expect more of that in your new book, and then what is it about Jewish culture you want your reader to understand, or what is it about Jewish/American identity that helps you show what you want readers to see about your characters?
BC: I think it’s really smart and incisive that you used the word Jewish culture as opposed to Judaism. Because it’s funny, I’m not, at least conventionally, a religious person. But I do feel that I have been deeply, deeply affected by Jewish culture, in ways that run so deep, it’s hard for me to even articulate what they are. There is an incredible essay by Leonard Michaels about how even though he does not remember Yiddish— he grew up in a family that spoke Yiddish—he feels the Yiddish syntax and strange and very subtle aspects of Yiddish humor, affect the way he ended up writing. And in a sense I feel that too. One of the things that’s odd is that my parents spoke some Yiddish—both of their parents spoke a little English, and mostly Yiddish—and I speak almost no Yiddish, except for the phrases that my parents used, which they explained to me. And one of the things that happened I think with a lot of third generation Jewish kids is that their parents used Yiddish as a way to talk about things they didn’t want their child to understand. So if they were talking about someone being ill, or someone getting divorced, or sexual infidelity they would talk about it in Yiddish. And on one hand I picked a lot of it up, sort of by osmosis. On the other hand, I felt it was very much a language I was not meant to understand. But it was a way my parents could communicate when I was in the room, but I wouldn’t know what they were saying. So I do feel that it has filtered down into everything I write.
As for the new book, one of the things that is odd about this book, and it’s definitely one of the themes, is that my father, temperamentally, was a man who felt that he could not reminisce about his past. That as a male, it was kind of unseemly to be nostalgic or to talk about his childhood. He wanted to be seen as a fully adult, Americanized lawyer who was kind of omniscient. There were many ways in which my parents shed their past in order to assimilate into American life. I wanted to write a book about a father whose past I know almost nothing about, and who has remained mysterious to me in every respect. Mysterious not only because he would often do things that seemed to make no logical sense, but also that he mostly refused to really talk about his past. And the family name was changed at some point to Cooper, and so any effort I make to find out about my family, without knowing the original family name, comes to nothing.
RGM: Yes, my family has a similar past.
BC: Because if you type in Cooper to a search engine, you get ten million hits, right. And so you just don’t know where to begin, and because my father had estranged so many people during the course of his life there were no relatives to go to. I was also a late child. I had three much older brothers. All of whom had died by the time my father went into retirement. So they were no longer there as a source for what they might have known. Also I think because my parents had had the experience of child rearing long before me, a lot of the typical things parents do with children like talk about, like: “Oh when I was your age...” You know, they were beyond that, and really tired at that point. And there I was. So through this odd set of circumstances, I know nothing about my past. Except that there are a couple of remaining relatives, a couple of Russian relatives. And the rest is rumor, and conjecture.
RGM: That’s really interesting to me in light of something you said last night about writing from a place of not knowing. Not having everything charted out; instead you’re writing from a place of trying to figure things out, exploration. But then also how so many people, I would say, read your work as containing answers and truths, for themselves. So I just think that’s an interesting sort of paradox. How that gets created, I’m not sure, but?
BC: I guess I’d like to think that was true, that there was some sense of understanding or resolve that people took away from the work. If there is, it’s probably because I think I have had to make do with a lot of provisional answers. And in fact often I’m kind of content with the provisional answers. I’m a little bit suspicious of the “pat” neat answer that answers everything. The other thing very strange about that: it was very counter-intuitive to write a memoir in which the discovery would be that there would be no discovery (laughter).
RGM: I feel like this is related to how you use science, drawing attention to different sorts of hypotheses, and larger abstractions and that sort of thing. How you use these things in your work specifically to bring out the intersection between the literary and the scientific.
BC: Especially in Maps to Anywhere, my first book, which was really a grab-bag of different subjects. I mean one of the things that I love about the essay form is that it’s predicated on the idea that the writer is hopefully open to all kinds of experience, and is moved or stimulated or curious enough about the world to write about lots of different things. An essayist is sometimes a generalist instead of an expert. And one of the things that I still find extremely lyrical and certainly did then are scientific notions about things. Even something like: the universe is expanding. I mean, even just saying that frightens me.
RGM: Well, it’s hard to wrap your mind around something that big.
BC: And then you start to think, “Well does that mean that the table we’re sitting at is actually expanding, since we’re expanding at the same rate we don’t perceive it, or…?” and everything one takes for granted is thrown into doubt, and is up for question. There are scientific facts that lead not only, on some level, to better understanding of the way the physical world operates, but that also lead to very odd, poetic, non-facts about what people are, and the universe they live in. So that was definitely true in Maps to Anywhere. My partner is a psychotherapist, and one of the ways in which the scientific makes itself known in the book about my father, is that I often relied on my partner Brian for insights about my father. We also got into a lot of arguments because I’m very skeptical about the extent to which psychology can explain human behavior. So it was a way of kind of pitting the science of psychology against the mystery of personality. And yet a lot of his assessments were very helpful for me, but in the book, its about kind of playing those two aspects—scientific certainty on one hand, and the child’s (i.e. me) total bewilderment even as an adult, on the other hand—against each other.
RGM: Do you feel a different sense of responsibility writing from the perspective of an adult vs. a child.? Some of your short stories and essays are written from the perspective of a child. Truth Serum, for instance, and in other of your works too. So writing from the adult standpoint do you feel a different sense of responsibility?
BC: Both as a child and as an adult, I’m a little bit ashamed to admit, that things are as strange and baffling to me now as they were when I was three. OK, I’d like to think that I’m taller (laughter). Or that maybe the baby fat is gone or something. Really and truly I am absolutely, and I say this with some pleasure, I just view the world as such a strange, amazing place. And so I think that’s always been a constant for me. I’ve always felt a sense of “wow, what is this, who are these people, why are they doing what they’re doing, and who are we all, and who am I in relation with all these people?” So that remains a constant. But when you write from the point of view of a child of course you don’t have access to as much information or experience. And there is a lot of naïveté that of course would be really unseemly in an adult. (laughter)
RGM: But it would be nice to be able to fall back on that, though! (laughter)
BC: I think from the point of view of a child I have a built in excuse, and it’s accepted that there are certain things that of course a child couldn’t understand. As an adult I feel that I have to kind of take a slightly different position, which is to say “well, you know you’d think I figured this out, or understood this by now but I don’t, and here’s what I thought” So it all is about addressing a sense of wonder at the way things are, and approaching that with a different degree of authority. The child of course less so. The adult, having knowledge and hopefully have accumulating wisdom, but still being mystified.
RGM: I am interested in how you got your start as a writer. Since our writers for the Bellingham Review are often emerging writers, could you talk a little bit about that?
BC:
I got my master’s degree in visual arts from the California Institute of the Arts. I’d always been an avid reader in high school. I had two teachers in particular who absolutely changed my life. Both were English teachers. One had us read All the King’s Men. You read that in high school too?
RGM: Yes.
BC: One had us read a large collection of poetry by Richard Wilbur. Another teacher, who I absolutely adored, brought in an anthology from the late 60’s, edited by the late Donald Hall. I think it was called The American Poets. But it was my first exposure to Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Merwin, Howard Nemerov, Denise Levertov. It was so eye-opening. I’d always been a reader of poetry, even though I went on to study visual arts. And after I graduated I had actually been building up to the decision to become a writer but I didn’t want to go back to school, after going to school for so long, and it seemed to me that there were writers in the world who were able to produce interesting work, who had learned how to do it on their own. The program at Cal Arts is also very much dependent on self-motivation, it’s a very progressive program, and I always pursued what interested me, on my own. And I thought, “well, I’ll do this too.” Years were spent in what I consider my apprenticeship. I would try to write anything. I would try to write a poem, a scene, bits of dialogue. I would restlessly and hungrily and pick up fiction, nonfiction, poetry. It was a very long period of floundering. Years. And I was actually about to give up on it, at some point, and really in a state of resignation—I could write things that were OK, but that never really pleased me. They never really seemed to exceed my expectations.
I’d been reading a lot of poetry. I sat down one day and to try to write a prose poem; one of the pieces in Maps to Anywhere in which my mother tells me she swam to America from Russia when she was two (laughter). I believed it—I’m afraid to admit—at the time. (laughter)
RGM: That’s a great story.
BC: And I wonder why I’m still bewildered by things. I’m a pretty slow writer, I revise a lot, and it takes a long time. But this piece… I had it in about two days and I was really surprised. I didn’t know where it came from. I also had a certain sense of abandon that I hadn’t had before, because I had given up only that week. So who cared if I made mistakes? Suddenly I had enough of a kind of devil-may-care attitude, and I had probably the most productive summer of my entire life. Every few days I tried something else, and wrote prose poems, many of which ended up in that first collection. But that also took years to gather that work. So it was a long, slow start that involved educating myself in the craft of writing and becoming an avid reader.
RGM: Wow, well, it’s good to know. I’d like to talk to you about the cars that appear in your work. Because it seems to me that they keep reappearing. Even that excerpt I heard on “This American Life” involved you almost purchasing a car. There’s a Pontiac that plays a huge role in A Year of Rhymes. Can you talk a little bit about what cars mean for you and your work?
BC: Well, you know, I come from Los Angeles (laughter). Many people there are without a car, including my mother, who was without a car. And when I was a kid we took buses everywhere. But L.A—it’s a cliche at this point that it’s a city built around the car.
RGM: I know the traffic is the worst in the country.
BC: Not only is it unbelievable, but it seems to get exponentially worse by the week at this point. There have been moments where I thought, “OK, I am in gridlock. Nothing will move.” So I spend a lot of time in cars. As a child I spent a tremendous amount of time in cars. Cars are very much in Los Angeles the form of self-expression. People who, when I was growing up, as a kind of sign that you were a cool conservation-savvy hippie, was to drive a VW bug. And now to show how invulnerable you are, people zoom around the streets in Hummers, which are gigantic and terrifying. There’s everything in between. So one’s status, political views, in a funny way even sexual orientation are revealed. I mean there was this huge period when gay guys drove open jeeps. And it was sort of about being seen by the world, and not the not being closed off to the gaze of strangers—that’s g-a-z-e (laughter).
RGM: I love puns!
BC: I can just see the press targeting that—g-a-y-s—is that like some new gay thing I should know about or what? (laughter) The guys with suped-up Camaros, definitely they want to be babe magnets. So there is a tremendous amount of stuff that gets expressed in cars. There are car lots, there are parking lots, it’s this ubiquitous thing. I used to walk a lot when I was a kid. I would just walk down Hollywood Blvd. to look at the stars, go into those awful souvenir shops and magic stores. But with the exception of a few parts of the city, you feel so conspicuous when you walk in Los Angeles. People drive by and just gape, you know.
RGM: Just because you’re walking?
BC: Not in the residential areas. But if I drove from LAX airport home, by major streets, it would be so unusual to see someone walking down those streets, for blocks and blocks, and blocks. There are hotels, parking structures, high rises with underground parking structures, there might be somebody walking from a high-rise to a restaurant, but there is very little street traffic, except for cars. It is this absolutely fundamental aspect of living in Los Angeles.
RGM: Los Angeles plays a big role in a lot of your works. I mean the setting is definitely present.
BC: I’ve liked reading writers who are kind of able to note a place of their own. I tried to at least aim for that. I love Flannery O’Connor’s depictions of productions of Southern life. Annie Proulx is a writer associated with Western States. There are so many people that have geographical claims, and it’s a well-spring for so much of their material. It’s not something I’ve questioned very much. I just always felt I could draw from the city. It’s so huge, and there’s so many different communities. Los Angeles is different for every person and every community. It seems inexhaustible in that sense.
RGM: I liked how you took this big city, but you really focus in on one house. The house, I assume where you grew up. I love the backyard pool, and other indicators of the climate— just how intricate it is to the experiences you are exploring in everything you’re writing. I’m interested in your work with space in general, and I know that might seem like a strange question. There are a lot of references to blueprints, architecture, even the idea of looking at space through telescopes, and that sort of thing. Most of the spaces you write about are smaller than a cosmos but is that something you worked on consciously?
BC: It’s funny, because one of my earliest ambitions was to be an architect and I actually did study architecture at the Pratt Institute of Technology in New York. I only lasted a semester because I’m so bad at math. When I was about thirteen, sounds precocious, but my dream was to run away—not because I was necessarily unhappy at home—but just to run away and join Frank Lloyd Wright’s school in Arizona. And I’ve always been fascinated by architecture and really drawn to architectural models and blueprints because they are a kind of microcosm or miniaturization of the actual world. I mean in a sense they are what writing is. They’re a world within a world. I am a little hesitant to admit this, but I collect something called Plasticville.
RGM: You mean like the little houses and such? I’ve seen those.
BC: They come in two scales. They are O scale which is the larger scale. It’s cities that used to be sold from Bachman Plastics in Philadelphia in the 1950s and early 1960s for train sets. And you know, I’m not interested in trains, or train sets, but I like the buildings. And they’re little suburban ranch homes and hospitals, there’s telephone booths, a shanty town, a three-story apartment house, dime stores, the electric company, trees with foliage of all seasons, street signs. It’s just this sort of iconic little everytown in miniature. And all the businesses say “Plasticville,” like Plasticville Hospital.
RGM: Like you couldn’t tell (laughter).
BC: (laughter) Yeah, right, just in case if you have an emergency, you wouldn’t really go to Plasticville Hospital. I kind of am fascinated with the idea of making another smaller version of the world, somehow. And it definitely came into play in Maps to Anywhere.
RGM: I bet you can tell by my questions that that’s my favorite one. I mean I’ve read the others but I particularly love that one.
BC: A lot of people seem to have a fondness for that book which is great.
RGM: I think it also has something to do with the fact that I am really interested in science, and I am interested in a lot of other things that are going on in that book. I also see it influencing the rest of your work so much. And I know some times it’s hard when you’re writing your own stuff to see that coming out, but I definitely feel like I can see that.
BC: Me too. I feel that book, and the pieces in that book are kind of repository of everything that has continued to interest me. It’s funny, because I’m mulling over projects to work on now that I have finished the book about my father, and I have always been very affected by the human wish to create a utopia. There’s “The House of the Future” in Maps to Anywhere. There are model homes that figure predominantly in the book. I just think it is so miraculous that the world was always imperfect, and yet people are always trying to make ideal cities, urban areas, houses. This idea of the city of the future, or the world of tomorrow has always captured people’s imaginations, mine included. It’s something I’ll probably go back to, though in what form I’m not sure. But as you suggested with the piece about my father, one of the things I guess you realize as you go along is that there is a kind of set of themes or personalities that you keep coming back to, and hopefully that you can continue to draw from. One hopes to expand their range of themes as well, but I think most writers and artists have a kind of essential set of sources.
RGM: I feel your work has certain themes, but I really like how you take social issues of the day and then bring those into those themes in really interesting ways. And I noticed last night when you were reading from “The Uses of the Ghoul” how you brought in class issues in a very real sense. Along with the ideas of utopia, there’s an awareness of the constructedness of those ideal homes. And well, I hate to bring up theory, but issues of social class and marginalization that feed into contemporary issues.
BC: First of all, I think I’ve made a conscious decision not to deal with those issues in a way that’s too didactic. I tend to shy away from work that is about social issues and is somehow preachy, scolding, or putting me straight on these issues.
RGM: Yes, I understand what you mean.
BC: For me the most effective way to do it and the most interesting way to engage in it as a writer is to write about it from the inside out, as opposed from the outside out, or from the theoretical position.
I grew up in an extremely comfortable upper-class middle class family. But I was always aware of the fact that because my parents were second generation Jews that they were trying, sometimes desperately, to change their class and ethnicity by making money and being seen as respectable, and by having the sort of power Jews of their generation just weren’t supposed to have, and that certainly their parents didn’t have.
RGM: Right.
BC: It was very difficult for me growing up as a gay man not to be really aware of how parts of the society function because there’s inequality, because some people are on the outside. I was around during the feminist movement. I knew a lot of women from Cal Arts who got involved with the Woman’s Building in downtown Los Angeles which was a feminist arts organization, extremely vital and important. I consider myself a feminist. I feel it’s all related in some way: racial equality, gender equality. Equality for everyone, including straight white men, is absolutely dependent on giving the most rights to the most people. In a sense that does protect everybody’s rights. That, I am sure, has come into my work in ways I’m probably not even aware of.
RGM: I do want to ask you about one craft aspect. I really like your essay, “The Fine Art of Sighing,” and I feel it’s a really good example of how well you do the last line. I feel like this is one of your trademarks, at least for me. Sometimes, I even skip ahead because I know it’s going to be perfect.
BC: “The End.”
RGM: No, it never says “The End,” that’s the thing (laughter).
BC: Last lines, well, that’s something I really became hyperaware of in reading poetry because poetry comes to an end in a relatively short space usually, unless it’s a book-length poem. Poetry is a good way to see how people bring things to resolution. One of the things I aim for is not a neat wrap-up, like with a big bow. So I hate those sorts of endings that are “and then I woke up and it was all a dream”
RGM: Those sorts of endings make the reader feel cheated.
BC: Because then it’s a set case, and there’s nothing for the reader to still wonder about or mull-over. Or the kind of O-Henryish revelation. Endings: sometimes they arrive quickly, sometimes slowly. But they’re really important because it’s like the end of a meal you make for somebody… it’s the last thing they taste, and you want them to remember it and taste it again.