Ben Dolnick was born in 1982 and grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He graduated from Columbia University, where he studied English and writing. He has worked as a zookeeper at the Central Park Zoo, a bookseller, a research assistant in an immunology lab, and a tutor. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. His first novel, Zoology, was published by Vintage in May.
You’ve had some work experiences that sound pretty interesting, like being a zookeeper at the Central Park Zoo and a research assistant in an immunology lab. What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
Well, zookeeping was probably the least pleasant job I’ve had – the one that had me most looking forward to five o’clock – but I’ve now spent so much time reflecting on it (to write my novel) that I’ve come to look back on it sort of lovingly. So even the worst jobs aren’t beyond redemption.
What was your favorite animal when you worked at the Central Park Zoo?
There was one goat, Newman, who I liked so much that I decided to make him a character in my book. He’s tall, and all white, and he has ears so long you can make them touch under his chin. It seems odd to say about an animal who spends a good 50% of his time slobbering on little kid’s hands, but he seems to have real wisdom.
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
I was obsessed with anything by Kurt Vonnegut – in fact I would happily have dropped out of high school and devoted my life to rereading his books.
And my favorite band was probably Weezer, who only fell in my affection – and fell hard – when I first heard the Green album.
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
My friends and I were bookish, maybe a little lazy. We ate at Subway a lot. We played instruments poorly and every now and then held a dispiriting “band practice” in one of our basements.
Favorite book now?
Anything by Alice Munro. It’s hard for me to pick a single book by her — I think embarrassingly often about how great it’s going to be when they put out a giant, complete Alice Munro – but The Beggar Maid is probably my favorite. It’s just a topographic miracle: a whole life crammed into a book no thicker than a finger.
What's new on you iPod or CD player?
I’ve been listening for months more or less perpetually to Joanna Newsom’s Ys. I got to see her in concert not too long ago, and it was just incredible. Everyone in the audience seemed kind of quietly panicked, actually, as if we weren’t sure how you’re supposed to respond to something that beautiful and unusual.
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
We’ve been watching this British TV series called Foyle’s War – it’s a detective show, but set in England during World War II, so you learn, almost incidentally, a lot of interesting little bits of history. I’m a sucker for almost any TV show with a detective.
How long did it take you to write Zoology?
About two years, start to finish. But it was fitful work – some weeks I’d be writing tens of thousands of words or editing until I felt queasy, and then other weeks I’d work on other stuff or go wander around the zoo or fail to do the crossword puzzle.
What are you working on these days?
A second book, but it’s early enough in the process that I’m wary of talking about it too much. If it were a house I were building, I’d still be in the foundation-digging part of things. And I fear I may still discover that I’m digging up a swamp.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
I’m very vulnerable to advice — every time a writer I like says that he or she does headstands or drinks a glass of cucumber juice or whatever, I’m flipped over and juicing cucumbers before I’ve even finished reading the sentence. But the best and most durable piece of advice I’ve received was probably from my dad, which was just: Read a lot, write a lot.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
It’s weird, but I totally love watching The O’Reilly Factor. I loathe Bill O’Reilly, disagree vehemently with just about everything he says – and yet I find it completely fascinating and hilarious, all his catchphrases and the face he makes after he’s read one of his own fan letters.
Favorite recipe? (the more specificity the better, so someone could make it if they wanted)
I make this pasta as often as my girlfriend will let me:
(1) Boil some water
(2) While you wait for the water to boil, chop up a bunch of basil and a bunch of mint. A good handful of each. Also, chop up some almonds, and toast them in a little skillet over low-ish heat.
(3) Add rigatoni, or whatever noodle you like, to the boiling water.
(4) Thaw some frozen peas by running them under them the warm tap (they thaw very quickly, and turn immediately bright green and delicious).
(5) Drain pasta, put the noodles back in the pot, toss in basil, mint, peas, and toasted almonds.
(6) Add some ricotta, which should immediately melt and make everything a little creamy.
(7) Grate some parmesan on top, sprinkle salt and pepper.
(8) Eat entire pot and resolve to do some pushups just as soon as you can stand up.
What's on your desk at the moment?
A cereal bowl, a digital camera, a shopping list, an emu egg, a jar full of pens that always go dry when I need to write down someone’s phone number.
Stones or Beatles?
Beatles! I’ve never really gotten what it is people love about the Stones.
Hemingway or Fitzgerald?
Hemingway! I have gotten what it is people love about Fitzgerald, but I still like Hemingway way better. In Our Time is one of my very favorites.
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Maggie Cumberland. Which actually sounds like a fusty old British woman, but oh well.
June 28, 2007
Quickie Interview # 20: Ben Dolnick
June 26, 2007
And yes, I’m also a member
Social networks just keep on iterating. The hive mind has now contrived to extrovert your reading predilections via Good Reads (which seems to be a clear MySpace-type of knock-off of Library Thing, which one actually has to pay for, unless you have less than 200 books). See what your friends are reading! Engage in a tacit critical arms race! Regress to your crib reading habits! Continue the digital process of systematically eliminating every topic one might conceivably converse pleasurably about with your companions! In the future, only our footnotes will have sex!
New York School of Quietude?
Ron Silliman takes a look at Chris Tonelli's Kitchen Press chapbook Wide Tree today. It's less a review, really, than an extended musing about Chris's (real) influences. The Blogger profile school of criticism. A la:
“I see this Cambridge poet dedicate a poem to Bill Knott, the crown prince of bad judgment wedded to an otherwise razor mind, and I begin to wonder if Chris Tonelli isn’t, or wasn’t once, one of Knott’s students. [...] It’s almost impossible for me to imagine the poet who could write ‘Think Outside the Box’ reading & liking the inordinately grim, but ethically impeccable, Bronk.”
Buy the book to read the poems behind (or in front of) the profile.
June 25, 2007
Did I mention the world is new?
The verdict is in: JT LeRoy is a fraud. Laura Albert was ordered to pay over $100K to the film company that signed a contract with her (or rather, her pseudonym) for her novel Sarah in 2003. Albert claimed on the stand that JT LeRoy was much more than a pseudonym -- more like an alternate personality that acted as a “respirator” for her inner life. As the Guardian quotes her, “This goes beyond me. […] This is a new, dangerous brave new world we are in.” Indeed.
June 20, 2007
Who’s influencing whom?
Johannes Goransson posts some interesting thoughts on the pervasive influence of James Tate on contemporary poets, citing Zach Schomburg and Christian Hawkey as prime examples. He writes:
A large part of this poetics is a slackening of effect, an undoing of the conventional poetic need to “put pressure on language.” So you have these vague kinds of colloquial markers: “some irritant,” “for some reason,” “this monster,” “totally better,” etc.
This brand of slackening is so run-of-the-mill these days I hardly associate it with a single forefather. Among certain buddies in my own writing circle, loose, colloquial language is employed as a sort of rejection of the “poemy” -- supposedly elevated/elegant words and tropes that are so overused in poems as to feel unbearably clichéd and overwrought. Like, for a long time, a chunk of sedimentary material in a poem was always a “stone,” never a rock. The backlash of too many poems about blackberries is more about nachos.
I’m sure I’ve got a healthy splotch of Tate in my poetic-genetic makeup. Lately, I feel Vallejo seeping through lots of my poems. Who’s influencing you these days?
June 18, 2007
Literary blogs are a dead end...
...or so suggets Adam Kirsch in the NY Sun:
"In fact, despite what the bloggers themselves believe, the future of literary culture does not lie with blogs — or at least, it shouldn't. The blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature, and it is no coincidence that there is no literary blogger with the audience and influence of the top political bloggers[...] The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals."
Is he right, or just whining/refusing to change with the times? Are there any blogs(not sites like Contemporary Poetry Review, which he mentions, but blogs) that do thoughtful, extended literary criticism and book reviews of the type he advocates?
June 15, 2007
Your Magazine's Name Here Quarterly
Over at {LIME TREE}, K. Silem Mohammad has been asking the question: can there be criteria for poetic competence? It is an excellent series of posts. But the part that I want to discuss here is how this relates to journals. Mohammad writes:
For example, what are the elements that make a Poetry Chicago poem appear normative, or a Fence poem, or a Quid poem? Can some of these magazines be analyzed in terms of a criterion for normativity and others not? And if so, are the ones that cannot be analyzed in such terms a) obviously more deserving of being taken seriously, or b) obviously lacking standards?
I've been wondering this myself for years. Most journals, in their submission guidelines, will ask you to get familiar with previous issues before submitting. You know, to make sure you're right for their journal. However, I could never (or rarely anyway) figure out what the criteria for each journal was. And then I started seeing journals that took pride in having no criteria at all...that their only requirement was *good* poetry.
This got me thinking about "what if I started a magazine...what would its criteria be?" So, like Julia Cohen over at $650 APARTMENT FOR $650 where she starts every post off with a sweet fictitious name for a new press, I wanted to hear A. what people would name their journal if they were starting a new one and B. what would their criteria for competence be.
June 12, 2007
Aspic and Antidote
Okay, so it is known in some circles that I am all about the high and the low. Hard to quantify the obscure pleasure that is to be gotten from the fact that on my bookshelf I have Peter S. Beagle’s The Folk of the Air next to William Peter Blatty’s Legion and Borges’s Collected Non-Fictions. As the fabulous Alan Bennett writes in The History Boys, all that stuff--the melodramatic movie scenes and show tunes he makes his students perform in between Aeschylus and Adorno--is an antidote. It’s what prevents intellectuals from wandering into their bellybuttons like Theseus trudging onward as the Minotaur recedes around the next corner of the labyrinth.
As a case in point, I have resisted reading Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones for three years now. Because it’s literary and sounded dire (in that independent-film-go-on-and-eat-your-turnips-Nikolai sort of way). Frankly, I couldn’t imagine how the author could have pulled off the concept of a murdered girl narrating her family’s lives from heaven. And I disdained what I imagined to be the typical narrative soft-shoe that covers up such a large structural problem (image... image... conjecture... image... bitterly elucidated poignancy... image). I’m halfway through the book, and I freely admit that I was utterly wrong. If she pulls it off, in my opinion, it’ll be one of the cleverest narrative moves since The Virgin Suicides. (And not for nothing, but Marc Cherry, you should cut Sebold a big fat check. Desperate Housewives’s deceased play-by-play announcer reaches for the same sangfroid.)
But as an antidote (now happily unnecessary) to what I had anticipated as a forced march through the textual cranberry bog of literary fiction, I have been reading Brian K. Vaughan’s graphic novel series, Y: The Last Man, which is not unlike what would emerge if you threw Douglas Adams, Ian Fleming, Eve Ensler, and George Orwell into a supercollider. And inverted the plot of Frank Herbert’s The White Plague (where all the woman in the world are killed by a designer disease). And for good measure, I found this, online, not 24 hours after I mentioned that the AP’s it-looks-like-news-but-tastes-like-chicken press release on their pitiful week-long blackout on Paris Hilton hurt my heart. This is what comes of making any edicts about one’s appetites in the world of ideas.
June 11, 2007
Money Can't Buy Love?
The Guardian’s Tania Kindersley wants writers to take the super wealthy more seriously: "upper classes are considered no more than cardboard cut-outs: one-dimensional, braying inbreds sitting grandly on their green acres….when an entire section of society is reduced to a cipher, there is a danger that the landscape of fiction is impoverished.” I can kind of see her point, since reducing any group to a cliché seems likely to produce some less than interesting writing, but it also seems inevitable, given the dissatisfaction with the highest sectors of society, whether it be the UK monarchy or those nice folks over at Enron, that the disillusionment will be reflected in the fiction coming out these days, or that people will turn away from those highest sectors altogether.
I can’t really think of any contemporary novels I’ve recently read that deal specifically with the upper class, save for The Emperor’s Children, but on the other hand, there’s not a lot of fiction that I’ve recently read that really deals with poverty, either. For American fiction (or what I've been reading, anyway), the standard seems to be characters that aren’t very rich or very poor, people who are gainfully employed and in possession of the essentials, so the issue of class is often kind of side-stepped, which makes me wonder if both ends of the economic spectrum are underrepresented, and not just the upper class.
June 8, 2007
Canon ball!
New York Magazine asked faculty at university English departments who will be taught in 50 years -- among authors publishing now. Answers included Jonathan Lethem, Zadie Smith, and Colson Whitehead. Who did they leave out (or get totally wrong)? I want to put a bid in for Alan Hollinghurst.
And can I just say that I hate when books I like get made into movies or land on Oprah's bedside table.
June 7, 2007
Stephen Colbert & the Metaphor Deathmatch
While I’ve always found Stephen Colbert hilarious, I’ve somehow never managed to watch much of The Colbert Report, and was pleased to recently learn that it’s surprisingly literary. Salman Rushdie was on not long ago, talking about the need for literary critics, although that semi-serious (for Colbert, anyway) episode pales in comparison to the Sean Penn/Stephen Colbert Metaphor-Off, judged by Boston’s own Robert Pinsky, who kind of stole the show for me. Maybe if that poetry thing doesn’t pan out, he could look into comedy.
In other random literary celeb sightings, Jay McInerney was just on Gawker for breaking his foot, allegedly done while chivalrously trying to hail a cab for some female companions. Hmmm.....
June 4, 2007
Quickie Interview #19: Sam Wharton
Samuel Wharton has had poems published in various journals, including, most recently, The Concher, foam:e , Otoliths , & Death Metal Poetry, & his work will appear in Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets. He is the editor of the online poetry journal, Sawbuck. His chapbook, Welcome Home, was released by NeOPepper Press in May, 2007.
Congratulations on your publication by NeO Pepper Press! What made you choose them as a home for your work?
thanks! i think what caught my attention first was that the folks that run NeOPepper, natalija grgorinic & ognjen raden, have very interesting & intelligent ideas about how poetry might be presented & shared, like their portable chapbook exchange. They’re very open & honest about their process & i like their fierce “against all odds” mentality. they also edit an online journal, admit2 which is wholly dedicated to collaborative work & they express a preference for collabs in their call for submissions on the NeOPepper page, so i sent them the manuscript on a whim, without expecting much to happen with it. the poems in welcome home are fairly multivocal, though, so i figured it might be worth the chance; & it was.
In addition to poems, you also write music criticism for the website Urban Pollution—how does your approach to critical writing differ from your approach to poetry?
i don’t think about them all that differently really. superficially, they take different forms & i suppose most people would argue that they have differing goals. to me they’re both just things i do. the process is the same. the main difference is that i have deadline for the criticism, so i can’t tinker with it endlessly.
Also, Dave Hickey says criticism is really just so much air guitar—what, to you, is the use of criticism?
you can tell a whole lot about a band by how their fans play air guitar. thousands of people read & write criticism everyday, so it must fulfill some “function,” right? i don’t think I’m the person to say what that might be.
You live in Chicago now—how, if at all, does living in that city influence your writing?
living in a city in general is essential. i think you can see that in the poems in welcome home -- most of them have a sense of place that is very urban & they take energy from the many competing forces that you only find in such close proximity in an urban setting. there is something very vital to me about masses of people in such concentration. There’s all the “glory” of commerce & capitalism (in the skyline, say) but then at street level there are people begging for change out of alleyways. that kind of tension is everywhere in a city.
there are certain things about chicago specifically that have found their way into my poems, but i can’t say for certain that the poems would have been drastically different had i been living in a different urban environment.
Do you ever have writer’s block, and if so, how do you deal with it?
I’m suffering through a rather protracted case of writer’s block right now, actually. i think part of it is that i have the odds & ends of lots of old projects floating around in my head -- projects that are either finished or that didn't work out -- or scraps of poems that i haven’t been able to find a use for yet & that are kind of growing stale: the slag-heap. i need to let these burn off, i think, before moving on to something fresh.
What made you decide to start sawbuck, and how would you characterize the journal’s aesthetic?
there were lots of reasons to start sawbuck. i had been thinking about doing an online journal for a long time. i didn’t really know anybody in chicago when i first moved here, so the journal was partly a way to make my way into the community. also it’s a great way to keep up with what people are writing. mostly i just wanted to create a space that focused more simply & directly on the actual poems than some of the other journals out there.
i like to think sawbuck is largely aesthetic-free. of course that's not true, but it’s featured a pretty wide array of voices so far, ranging from what people would call experimental to more traditional lyric writing. the people I’ve invited to submit are all people whose poetry i enjoy, & that's the only real editorial benchmark for unsolicited submissions, too -- if a poem compels me to keep reading, then they're good enough for the journal.
First Car?
1994 plymouth voyager: maroon plush seats. i made those tires squeal though.
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
book is hard to say; there were lots. probably heart of darkness. music was equal parts public enemy, uncle tupelo, & lemonheads.
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
no crowd really. some orchestra/jazz band geeks. some baseball players. i was closest to the AP english clique i guess.
First job?
bag boy at tom thumb grocery store.
Car now?
nope.
Favorite book now?
please.
What's new on you iPod or CD player?
i've been listening to return to cookie mountain repeatedly.
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
samurai 7. anime series based on kurosawa's 7 samurai. the departed was pretty good, despite matt damon & leo dicaprio. all of the wire & the shield.
What are you working on these days?
reading submissions.
Anything coming out soon?
just the OV anthology in january 08
What are you reading that's fun?
elisa gabbert's combatives rocked my world the other night. hamlet's mill by giorgio de santillana & hertha von dechend, about the transmission of knowledge through myth.
What's your favorite a) writing exercise, and b) physical exercise?
a) writing is its own exercise
b) biking to the lake
What's your favorite piece of clothing?
my very old ratty red sox cap
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
i read frank herbert’s dune series like once a year. I’m really sorry. really.
Favorite recipe (please be specific, like so we can cook it if we want)?
the moscow mule:
equal parts lime juice & vodka, 3 parts ginger beer, chill, serve in a copper mug
you can make it with ginger ale, but it doesn't have the “kick” that gives it its name
What’s on your desk?
computer, lamp, bills, picture of my niece & nephew at cape cod, one shiner bock
Stones or Beatles?
god i hate the beatles.
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
benson morrow.
