Nine Books About Your Life:

Interview by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

In our Nine Books About Your Life series, authors are invited to talk about nine types of books that have had an impact on their lives. Their responses give us a glimpse into their relationships with their books and other people’s books. In the third installment, we speak with Jay Besemer, author of the forthcoming Theories of Performance (The Lettered Street Press).

First Book – I am hyperlexic: I learned to read spontaneously (with no instruction) by age 4. The book was either Leo the Late Bloomer or Milton the Early Riser, both animal picture books by Robert Kraus with illustrations by José Areguo. It’s interesting now to think about those books and their messages, in view of research I’m doing into my own medical and neurological history, a history that was kept hidden from me. Both books were read to me for a short time before I picked them up on my own and discovered that I could recognize and understand the words. That these stories were chosen for me tells something about the kinds of behavioral and developmental realities I was embodying. Leo (who is a tiger, not a lion, in Areguo’s watercolors) exhibited some of the same traits as toddler-me, in some areas. Milton, a panda, was always getting up “too” early. I had a tendency to wake up when it was still dark. I’ve had sleep disturbances my whole life and was not socially very functional. These books were my mother’s way, perhaps, of conditioning me toward more normative behavior. It’s odd that I still associate them not with that kind of control but with the joy of reading for myself, and the reassuring message contained in the books, particularly the illustrations. Leo “blooms” on his own time; his parents are relieved. The less-than-empowering message at the end, that he has earned or redeemed their love once he’s finally “normal,” was beyond me at the time, but I did notice that the parent-tigers did seem to generally accept him and have patience with him throughout the story. Now I find the recuperative/redemptive theme of the book disturbing, but it didn’t hit me like that at the time, as I said.

Most Cherished Book – Classic Indian Cooking by Julie Sahni. It’s not cherished in a “precious” way, but more like an active relationship because I use it very frequently. It is covered with stains inside and out. Most of the pages in the center (where the recipes are) have separated from the spine. The paper is wrinkled from having steam-drenched pot lids placed on the open book during stirring or serving. Whole and ground spices have collected in the page gutters and the spine, which sometimes fall out as the pages are turned. Well, the pages too fall out when they’re turned! Over 25 years of passionate use have imbued the book with faint scents of clove, cumin, turmeric, onion, and ginger. Every once in a while I consider replacing it, but I know that if I did, I’d still use the old beloved copy, leaving the duplicate untouched.

Classic Indian Cooking
Julie Sahni
William Morrow Cookbooks
ISBN: 978-0688037215

The other, older book treasure is a 1966 edition of Bartholomew’s Road Atlas for Great Britain. It has a green paper-leather hardback cover. Inside is a folded clipping from the NY Times from June 21, 1970–roughly six months before my birth–titled “A New Walk in Old Wales.” I imagine that the clipper of this article is the same person who annotated in pencil certain areas with notes like “Seven Sisters” and “The ‘Lanes'” and circlings of various locales without further expansion. I love atlases and gazetteers, and this one has many rich associations for me. I got it at a garage sale when I was maybe 13, and it invariably recalls to me the beginnings of my personal style, which I was exploring cautiously and with much disapproval. The same garage sale furnished an entire ensemble: a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, a two-strand choker of cultured pearls, and a brown felt fedora. Putting these together, on my body, gave me an uneasy yet rewarding sense of selfhood — the unlikely assemblage spoke of and from me, in ways I couldn’t otherwise articulate.

Bartholomew’s Road Atlas for Great Britain
John Bartholomew and Sons

Over the past few years I’ve been obsessed with cultural artifacts from around the time of my birth and toddlerhood, which this book also falls into. But the resonances are more complicated still, because at the time of its purchase I was passionate about England. I thought of it as a second home, a cultural home at least, nurturing (if you can call it that) my musical loves and my television attractions, primarily Dr. Who and Blake’s 7. It wasn’t until later that I gained a more complete understanding of England’s crimes and complications. But the small atlas helped me dream into my own engagement with the landscapes shown on its pages, to imagine my own walks (I’ve always been a wanderer along roadsides and through fields or woods). So in this way it also connects to current artistic/poetic practice, and I still look through it sometimes.

Most Perplexing Book – The Bible. It’s less that I don’t “understand” what the text says, it’s that…well, I’m actually afraid to continue in detail, given the climate now and who we both are. Let’s just say I am continually dismayed by the uses to which it is put. When I encounter it now, I feel like I’m looking at a nuclear weapon up close.

Life-changing Book – Less the book than the circumstances surrounding its entering my life: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The story of this book’s importance involves another important book, one I almost chose for the “surprising book” category because of its conservative author and xian overtones.

Anyway, the story is that in high school I would often talk about dreams and books (and queerness, and depression) with a beloved teacher early in the morning before classes started. I always got to school very early in the morning to write, and this teacher was also there early to teach a Russian class before the homeroom period. He had recommended The Master and Margarita after I had given him a copy of Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, perhaps out of a sense of playful counterpoint to the message in the latter. In my senior year he died very suddenly of a brain aneurism just before my birthday, throwing our small school into shock and grief. As soon as his classroom was reopened I sneaked in one day and stole back the copy of Winter’s Tale I’d given him. I didn’t want that book to be “cleaned out” like the rest of his things. When I found a copy of Master around that time (in a used book shop in Niagara Falls, Ontario), I snapped it up. For decades they sat side by side on my own shelves, and all throughout my life the two novels have been in dialogue. Their own meanings and significance, their resonances, have changed as my experiences and needs have evolved — as has their relationship with one another. I’m a multiple re-reader, and a simultaneous reader, so these volumes have been re-experienced alone and together several times since they were first put in relation. Notably, I’m not a novelist, but the imaginaries and the visual richness (and the humor) of both books have resonance in my poetry.

The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
Vintage
ISBN: 978-0679760801

Winter’s Tale
Mark Helprin
Mariner Books
ISBN: 978-0156031196

Most Underrated Book – I am not sure how to answer this question. My relations with books are so personal that I can’t quite focus this way. I guess there are types and categories of book, and of author, that I want to support and urge others to open themselves to. It won’t be a surprise that I want to have more support for genre titles and poetry in general, but also more specifically for work in translation, for work by trans authors, disabled authors, queer authors, rural-originating or residing authors, working-class authors, poor authors, non-academically-affiliated authors, unagented authors, self-published authors, Black and Brown authors, Indigenous authors, all intersections of the above. I think any single book by anyone in any of these descriptive groups is by definition underrated.

A Surprising Book – A lot of people know that I am a science fiction fan, but I don’t often talk about the franchise tie-in novels I have loved to read throughout my life. It started with the Star Trek original series episode fictionalization collections edited (and written?) by James Blish, which I was handed during a weeks-long bout with the flu in 4th grade. That was followed by the Star Wars novels of my late 1970s childhood (like Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and the Han Solo prequels, from Del Ray paperbacks). I read the first three movie novelizations and, in college/grad school, the novels that recent films are based on. These days I read some of the Star Trek novels, especially anything written by Una McCormack, who is a brilliant writer. I love everything about her handling of beloved (and not-so-beloved!) characters, settings, and universes.

Splinter of the Mind’s Eye
Alan Dean Foster
Del Ray
ISBN: 978-0345320230

Your Most Recent Book – Right now I’m trying to promote my poetry collection Theories of Performance, which is up for pre-order at The Lettered Streets Press. I hesitate to say too much about it, because more detailed backstory can be found at the link, and in the book itself. But in very general terms it engages pretty much all the nuances and definitions of the word “performance” across contexts. I use a great range of poetic structures to play with that word and its conceptual transformations.

I never know what people will get from my books. I am not sure what pulls people to them in the first place, or how they experience them, unless they tell me. I tend to say, when pressed, that a book I write is first meant to be an experience, not a… disposable commodity? I don’t have a good contrasting word–what’s the opposite of “experience”? Opinion? I want my books to not be things people have opinions about? Even that isn’t right… well, anyway, my books are experiences I want to invite readers to have, and I am not fussy about what that experience is for any one person/engagement. I mean, it’s not my business. Also, I hope/intend that readers have multiple experiences with each book, because any single engagement with it is its own experience—it will change next time.

Your Next Book – Right now I’m working on several books at once, or proto-books, which is typical. What isn’t typical is that my pace and focus have slowed down and expanded, and that a good deal more of the writing is prose in each of these projects. One book project isn’t even a book, unless it becomes one, sort of my own franchise tie-in to a movie I’m planning. It’s a nonfiction, non-narrative/nonlinear travelogue, starting from the extreme western end of New York State, moving eastward through the state, to a town in Connecticut just across the New York state line. On the way it will engage with time, also not in a linear fashion. That’s about all I can say about it; the trip is the movie is the book, and I’m not even sure I can do it at all. The movie and book may ultimately center how there can’t be a physical-geographic-spatial trip!

Plug a Book – Keith S. Wilson is putting together a book of nonfiction, which I am very excited about, because I love the essays of his that have been published here and there. If he finds a press for it I’ll be all over it. I think more people should be aware of his work, particularly things he’s less known for, like these essays and his visual poetry. His debut poetry collection Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love is lyrical, but there’s so much more to anyone than what they’re known for, and he’s someone whose work I really want to be more accurately and thoroughly known.

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love
Keith S. Wilson
Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 978-1556595615