What He's Poised to Do

It’s probably narcissistic, and certainly solipsistic, to try to prove a broader point about mankind by quoting from my own work, but that paragraph goes to the heart of the sadness I assume is in most human interaction, even (especially?) when it is in pursuit of happiness. Another friend of mine, who is a young adult writer—I mean that she writes for young adults, not that she herself is a teenager—once told me that I was good at “funny sad you know,” which I initially took as an insult but came to wear as a badge. I learned to wear it as a badge because I shined it up and saw what she meant. By “you know,” she didn’t mean to be dismissive, but rather to isolate a certain dedication in my work to expressing both what is funny and what is sad—and, at the same time, to acknowledging the limits of expression. I have a third friend who once asked me why I write mostly about human relationships. “There’s more,” she said. She’s wrong. There’s not more, or at least not a more important job for fiction. You can (and should) stretch that theme around whatever frame you want, and put whatever frame you want around that theme. Stories can take place, as they do in this collection, in the distant past in wartime, in the recent past on the moon, on the imaginary border between two noncontiguous countries. No matter where they’re set, and no matter when, they explore the way men and women delight and infuriate each other, and in doing so illuminate my sense that this is still, after all these centuries, humanity’s proper central preoccupation.

I have recently started a few new projects. I won’t say too much about them, because I’m superstitious, but they have to do with some or all of the following topics: shaving, sweatshops, safety inspection, magicians, evolutionary biology, squids, football, the Great Mosque of Damascus. In every case, though, those topics are masks that fit over the faces beneath, and the faces beneath are the faces of men and women, trying their best to seek out the most satisfying companionship and fellowship. Scientists can make science meaningful. Clergymen can make God meaningful. Architects can make space meaningful. Musicians can make sound meaningful. I can only try to make language make life meaningful, and only for a little while. Funny sad you know: we do what we can with the tools we have.

“I can only try to make language make life meaningful, and only for a little while.”

About the book A Conversation with Ben Greenman

Ben Greenmanis the author of What He’s Poised to Do, which was first published in 2008 as a limited-edition boxed set called Correspondences.

Alex Roseis a writer and designer and the publisher of Hotel St. George Press, which published Correspondences.

Cal Morganis Ben’s editor and the editorial director of Harper Perennial. They discussed the project in a midtown Greek restaurant in October 2009.

CAL: Let’s start at the beginning. Ben, what inspired these stories in the first place?

BEN: For years, I’ve been writing about what happens between men and women. In earlier collections of mine, like Superbad, my interest in those themes might not have been as apparent, because the treatment was more experimental and often heavily comic. It was with A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both, in 2007, that I began to explore them more deliberately. I wondered: We have put people on the moon. We have split the atom. So why have we made so little progress in understanding how men and women deal with each other: the want, the wait, the hope, the hurt, and so forth?

CAL: And did you know from the start that you wanted to use letters to tell these stories?

BEN: Well, all words are made of letters.

CAL: Hilarious. I mean the other kind of letters: the ones people write to each other. The first version of this collection was published in a limited-edition box called Correspondences. Was it designed explicitly as a set of stories about letters and letter-writing?

BEN: I started from the idea that I was writing stories about the disconnections between people—about romantic frustration, about misunderstanding. And then I noticed that many of them were set in the recent past, at a time when people communicated (or miscommunicated) through letters. That’s where Alex came in.

CAL: Alex, you run an innovative, small publishing house in Brooklyn called Hotel St. George Press. How did you connect with Ben for this project?