If ever there was someone whom I’d be happy to see at my own funeral—meaning I guess that I wouldn’t really mind that it was my funeral—it would be Karen Russell, or Karen’s prose.
Karen Russell was born and raised in a state with sinkholes, where the ground can give way unannounced for a mile on account of something that has something or other to do with water tables, or God. Her empathy extends to crocodiles and the cruel, and if ever there was someone whom I’d be happy to see at my own funeral—meaning I guess that I wouldn’t really mind that it was my funeral—it would be Karen, or Karen’s prose. Her prose, which is disciplined in the way that the wild particles in an accelerator are disciplined.
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Karen is the author of a book of stories—St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves—and a novel—Swamplandia!—forthcoming next March. I thought she’d be the perfect person with whom to talk over catastrophes, maybe because for months we’ve been discussing minor-league catastrophes nearly every day.Rivka Galchen: Karen, one of the things we learned about each other this year was that as kids we both liked to sit in an empty bathtub—the quietest place in the house, and a storm shelter to boot—and we both turned away from reading books about girls and their horses in order to read tales of alien invasions or battles with evil. What might have been the draw, do you think, of, say, Day of the Triffids, which I know was an early find for you?Karen Russell:The novel’s narrator, Bill Masen, is a botanist who survives the end of the civilized world. Anarchy is first loosed by a comet that blinds 99.9 percent of the globe’s population, leaving our species vulnerable to attack by the Triffids—fearsome carnivorous plants who can move.It’s a classic of British science fiction, but I didn’t know that at the time. What I knew was that I must never, ever let my sixth-grade peers catch me reading this book. John Wyndham’s tale forced me to reckon with certain uncomfortable truths about myself: I was a weird kid with no interest in sanitized tales of blond sisters and babysitters; I was excited by the spill of evil through the dying world. I wanted apocalypse, now!
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In reality, I was just a very awkward sixth-grader, and each day of middle school felt like treading a dark suck of water. After enduring my first boy-girl dance, the apocalypse didn’t seem half bad. In the post-apocalypse, who cared what jeans you were wearing? Triffids were attacking (thank God!). And there is no guiltier pleasure for a reader, I don’t think, than the dark, vertiginous thrill of a title like chapter 1’s: “The End Begins.”Yeah, the fear of end times is somehow always also a titillation, right? It seems evil to want to be present at the suffering from which we’ve been spared—seems wrong to think of other peoples’ suffering like it was Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland—but all that said, are there catastrophes you wish you’d been present for? And why?Missed Tragedy 1: Well, assuming the friendly Disney ride operator is going to let me survive the blast, I would have loved to see the sky over Pompeii and Herculaneum on the day of the Mount Vesuvius explosion. Like you, I’m a little weather-obsessed, and I would love to see whatever the sky became over the village in the hours before the thing blew. (The event itself I think I could pretty easily skip—charring, screaming: for these, why not go to the beach?)A few years ago I went to Pompeii with my tiny family, and we were all really moved by the faces of the plaster casts in the Garden of the Fugitives. Remember that old TV show,
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Candid Camera? In Pompeii you get the sense that Catastrophe herself took a candid photograph of these poor villagers’ terror. On the one hand, it’s pretty stiff and formal—everyone ossified in ash. But if you stare at their faces, I swear there’s something uncanny and moving in there still, like a liquid. All the tiny muscles are doing familiar, terrible things. You start to feel like the range of expressions that we’ve inherited from our monkey forebears is too limited for our experience: Why should the Pompeiians get stuck with the same goggle-eyed look as some Alabama dude riding Space Mountain?What my family agreed felt genuinely haunting about the plaster casts of the victims and also somehow wonderful was the way they worked, collectively, as a museum of a sky. The paste-colored faces preserved a feeling of radiant, immense magma reds—so you could work backward from the horror on a baker’s face frozen in AD 79 to the live coal of that day. Age had fallen away from him. Many of the faces in the Garden of the Fugitives looked like that to me: wonderstruck, childlike in surprise.And the faces aren’t statues, either, that was so hard for me to remember! They’re the real living dead. I got scared imagining this blind photographer—the volcano—pouring its polishing red gaze over everyone. J.M.W. Turner has a painting that I think my own imagination is plagiarizing calledVesuvius in Eruption
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. His sky is oily orange and scar-tissue red, just spectacularly hellish. Many painters have tried to reweather that sky over erupting Vesuvius, which seems to me like a weird and glorious effort, like paleontologists imagining the feathers on a dinosaur’s bones. It’s exciting to me that the mountain is still erupting daily on Turner’s canvas and in so many tourists’ minds and on the faces in the Garden of the Fugitives.Though I don’t think the animals of Pompeii and Herculaneum were so razzle-dazzled by it all. One of the dogs that’s preserved is frozen with this sort of jaded-Denny’s-waitress snarl, like, “Oh, crap, here we go again, just what we needed, freaking lava…”Missed Tragedy 2: TheTitanic, maybe? I know—I don’t want to give James Cameron that satisfaction, either. But I’d like to hear Wallace Hartley’s quintet. I really loved that scene where this tiny, tuxedo-tailed band plays a final concert as the world’s largest ocean liner slowly cracks in two and sinks. The scene has a mythic feel to it: the violinist rowing his bow on deck, a sort of dreamy, boatless oaring. And meanwhile all of the life rafts are getting lowered. And everybody is ant-scrambling around the rising water, and the whole ship is sliding up. And then, in the middle of the nightmare, a mournful, self-aware song starts threading around the deck…Nobody can agree on the title of the last song that Wallace Hartley’s quintet played; survivors reported that the concert included “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and “In the Shadows.”
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In the house of a childhood friend there was this amazing painting of the moment of rapture; it was sort of a Hieronymus Bosch’s latter-day and left-handed country cousin in acrylics—and you just thought, seeing these car crashes and stricken dinner parties—that the rapture did at least look interesting. Any hopes for future catastrophes? What about something clean in which no one really gets hurt, just everything ceases to exist? Like all those articles they were running a while back about the possible universe-ending black hole to be caused by the Large Hadron Collider?I don’t know enough or really anything about physics, but I just read this on the Hadron Collider’s Wikipedia entry: “This synchrotron is designed to collide opposing particle beams of either protons at an energy of 7 teraelectronvolts (1.12 microjoules) per particle.”“Microjoules” makes me picture a bunch of microscopic Frenchmen in berets! Smug little Frenchmen who are bloodstream-small. At least one is a furrier. The synchrotron I imagine as a Casio keyboard set to “Bossa Nova.”Sometimes I think that my secret yearnings for an epic, movie-huge omega of an ending must be directly connected to how boring it can feel to ride the elevator down to my basement laundry room with a dryer sheet and a bunch of boatneck sweaters from the Gap. Like: Swallow us, Hadron! Save us from the hideous exigencies of “Tuesday”!But it sounds maybe a little
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tooneat? Like the ultimate anticlimax? Like the universe gets drawn into a syringe by a competent male nurse named Dennis.We’d be skipping all the chaos and the fires, the gushing seas, the opportunities for old-fashioned human goodness to grow stem-green out of the rubble and/or to defend our family members and downstairs neighbors with an ax from zombie attacks…
That’s true, it seems like the lure of catastrophe is its promise of revelation—like finally the world might need my special skills with paper folding. Or my inappropriate rage has found an objective correlative in the onslaught of an army of androids. That feeling of dread and terror is a complicated one, all stitched through with fluorescent joy, right? Like all those strange and new feelings we’ve been cataloguing this year?I think the Old and New Disaster Feelings are especially hard to write about. When I was a kid in Miami, my friends and I had no language for the huge and contradictory emotions with which our city “celebrated” hurricane season. Hurricane season was better—or scarier, or more exciting—than the Christmas season. August in particular I remember as a month of terror and gleeful sky-vigilance and anticipated loss and real loss and adrenaline and release and relief and, sometimes, a secret inadmissible disappointment if a storm passed over us, or, often, a surprising “fluorescent joy” in a storm’s wake.
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Rebecca Solnit has this excellent book out now,A Paradise Built in Hell, where she argues that we need a new emotional vocabulary to talk about the joy as well as the despair generated by large-scale catastrophes. She interviews many people who cite a disaster, natural or personal, as one of the great moments of their lives. She says, which I love, that everyday life is “already a disaster of sorts, from which actual disaster liberates us.”Here are a few Old Feelings Related to Disaster. Dry bathtubs are involved again, I’m afraid.Old Feeling 346: Sitting in a dry tub with your entire family, happy. Seven of my blood relations had piled into my grandparents’ bathroom to ride out Hurricane Andrew together. (Part of Old Feeling 346 is connected to the even more ancient and uncanny emotions provoked by a visit to a grandparent’s house—the way your grandparents’ world is both alien and familiar. Well, this is awesome but pretty weird, I used to think—it smells like cinnamon toast and papery age, we play a Depression-era game with colorful pegs that Grandma kicks my butt at, my mom is a child here, a smiling brunette in all the picture frames…)Hours earlier, it had been suggested to us by the big TV face of Rick Sanchez that we move into a room without windows: hence the hide-and-go-seek feel of everybody barricaded in one dark bathroom. I was ten and we weren’t even in that bathroom for very long, maybe 40 minutes during the worst part of the storm, but I remember that little bubble as one of my most keenly happy moments.
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Old Feeling 347: Listening to the adults confessing their bright fears to us kids in the family syntax: “Don’t worry becausethisis not going to happen, and neither isthis: We are not going to drown inside our houses! Haha! We are not going to wake up tomorrowhomeless. That would be unspeakably bad, so do not worry, instead your dad is going to don a floral shower cap and tell some jokes and we are definitely not going to speak about anything likethat…”Old Feeling 348: Seeing Father in floral shower cap, and hearing your mom’s laughter inside the storm, and very dimly understanding that this goofiness you are witnessing is real courage, and real love.Old Feeling 349: The wind rising. Somebody standing up to go check on the doors. Somebody else making noise about “going outside.” The sound of a tremendous cracking behind the wall. A kid’s submerged and hiccupy understanding, beneath layers and layers of a laughter, of: EMERGENCY.In New York, the Old Disaster Feelings get reactivated and updated all the time—most recently when the MTA conductor informed us in her Monday voice, “We are being delayed. Fire on the tracks,” when our subway car was, alarmingly and confusingly, on those same tracks.Or remember last January, when that big blizzard was predicted to hit New York City and we all gleefully canceled our plans and prepared to miss work and revealed some bizarre preconceptions about what a “whiteout” might require—I bought that weird Jekyll-and-Hyde-looking Smucker’s product, Goober, the peanut butter and jam that comes in the same jar, and also candles and toilet paper—and then nothing changed. The power stayed on, there were no service interruptions, we got to watch reality TV and take the subways to our friends’ baby showers and our jobs. And like that Smucker’s product, Goober, I bet many people in New York had a 50/50 ratio of relief/disappointment. Mine was more like 20/80, I think. Disappointment always teaches me what I am actually, subliminally hoping for—the dream of mass cancellations. The dream of a blanketing blackout, and many visible stars, and mysterious service interruptions. Also the dream of eating weird and expensive peanut butter by candlelight, without the shame of “choosing” to do this. While firemen discover their inner nobility, my experience with disaster has taught me how much I crave a reason to hide out in bathrooms or my dark apartment.
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Absolutely. It’s such a persistent, and persistently embarrassing, realization: that there might be a heaven that looked like ramen noodles and the downing of all radio, internet, and phone communications. I guess it’s the underneath-it-all-shy person’s dream. I remember there being a related happiness I used to get when I was working in a hospital, especially at night, especially in the ER, when, say, there was a car-accident victim to attend to, this alongside some drunk who keeps getting up from his gurney and wandering around naked, dragging an IV fluid machine along behind him… I used to love that feeling of everyone basically in pajamas, doctors and patients alike, padding around, and knowing what their job was: look up lab results, report pain symptoms, whatever.So what would belong on the playlist for the apocalypse?Well, I think almost anything recorded by Johnny Cash would work, but maybe the apocalypse anthem could be “When the Man Comes Around.” He should man the last radio station in the world, the one that plays only his songs. When Johnny informs everybody that “the whirlwind is in the thorn tree”—I mean, who’s going to argue withthattraffic alert, on the AM radio station for the end of time? I felt vindicated when it was used in the remake ofDawn of the Dead.I tried to learn more about it and found out: It was probably the last song Cash ever recorded, the lyrics are from Revelations, and Cash died just before the album that included it was released. Maybe we should also add “Folsom Prison”—because it’s unclear whether that’s where we’re coming from or going to—either way is arguably the preferred.Yes! Both ways have their own special terrifying appeal! Do you know that song “Made” by Greg Weeks? I think that’s an appropriately chilling pick, too. I could be mishearing these lyrics, but I think he’s saying “So much for today/So much for the days of men.” Also: “They made us this way/For what they can never say.” Then he summons this flautist straight out of whatever Julliard exists in Dante’sInferno, and winter coasts out of this one organ chord, and all the leaves fall off the trees. Don’t invite Greg Weeks to any spring weddings in a botanical garden or children’s birthday parties.Hey, speaking of children, I know we both devoted a fair amount of adolescent time to Stephen King. I remember loving how in The Shining, when the caretaker looks into his handkerchief to see his own snot, it was sort of as scary as any of the other scenes. All this horror and disgust in the ordinary setting of, you know, a young lovely family, a romantic old hotel, the miracle of snow!Oh my gosh, that snot moment stuck with me, too! There’s a scene in It where one of the boys turns the faucet on and I remember wanting to crawl out of my skin—Stephen King can make a kid’s interactions with indoor plumbing terrifying. I think one thing that really appealed to me about his stuff was the way his characters, far from being stereotypes, feel like far-too-real ventriloquies of actual parts of ourselves, you know? The heroes and the villains always read like excised and exaggerated parts of our basic nature, the cutout parts of our hearts. The lost kid, the failure, the wife-mourning dude, the father, and everybody in the valley of the shadow trying to sort things out and rebuild a coherent moral world (i.e., defeat a child-eating clown named Pennywise). On a much smaller, hidden, mental scale, which of us does not have to battle that evil clown sometimes? What I like about his style of humongous, Manichaean epics is that they resize you—King writes an evil so cosmically huge and inhuman that it redeems us, shrinks us back into innocents. We get to magnetically inhabit our best selves. Just a bunch of fools and dorks, pitting our meagerness against the Darkness.Maybe we can end on a more straightforwardly happy note? The catastrophes that prove not to be? Maybe like those animals you used to tell me about from your time working in the vet hospital? The ones dropped off early in the AM for their surgical procedures?Yeah. When I worked at the vet, dogs would get dropped off in the morning unfed and unwatered and totally groggy and pissed. Then their owners, the humans charged with their care, abandoned them in a place that smelled like death and Lysol. They underwent terrible operations, woke up in a fog of puppy anesthesia, in a cage, next to an incontinent cat we called Stinky. Surely this seemed like hell. But! Actually, Dr. Campbell had fixed something crucial within them, some organ or unpronounceable leaky-valve thing, and now their life spans were doubled, and, hey, the fog of the amnesia juice was wearing off, and at 7:00—this was the BEST part—all of the owners came back and there were the most raucous and joyful and straight LOUD reunions ever witnessed in a paisley, paw-print-themed waiting room.
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