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Colonel Hellstache — Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality is here! To celebrate, we'll be running sneak-peeks at the book and its author, Bill Peters, over the next couple of weeks. Here's part 1 of the Black Balloon interview, in which Peters sets the record straight on regional piss-beer and generally proves to be the funniest guy we've met in ages.

Your protagonist, Nate, is a wayward teenager whose slang-loaded vocabulary is almost like another language. How did you keep track of all those terms and expressions (check out all 146 of them in the Maverick Jetpants glossary)?

Keeping track of the terminology was somehow never a problem. I never kept a list with definitions. Although I did make a list of maybe 50 different terms for sex. 

In the book, Nate talks about words that he finds inherently funny, like "pants" and "cheese." Is there a flipside? Are there words that you and/or your characters find repugnant?

Most corporate concept-reduction and noun-verbing is a bit like accidentally brushing your teeth with Bengay. The most recent word that has aggravated me is "onpass." As in, "to pass on." As in: “Would you onpass this item to Terrence?” The word is amazing in its total pointless efficiency. As if anyone has so little time that you could begin to tell them “I’m passing this on” and they would cut you off, throw their hands up and say “WHOA! GET TO THE POINT ‘WAR AND PEACE!’” I hope "onpass" represents some endpoint to brevity-worship, but it probably doesn’t.

You grew up in Rochester, which is also the setting of your book. But now you live in Gainesville, FL, where I imagine Genesee is hard to come by. What do you drink down there?

I have no problem whatsoever with cheap beer — I often prefer it. But sadly, and with utmost Whole-Foodsy whiteness, when I moved to Gainesville, I worried: would I get my Saison Dupont? My Reissdorf Kolsch? The answer: Yes, Bill, you will get your Saison Dupont and your Reissdorf Kolsch. Gainesville has lots to drink. There’s been no change. And looking at the country with red state / blue state anxiety? That’s no way to live.

Have you picked up any Gainesville slang?

In terms of local-speak — and I’ve only heard this within my friends — the blocks of bars and restaurants along University that are east of 13th Street have been referred to, half-seriously, as "Downtown." Downtown has more shows, more elven indie-rock beards, more tattoos, more sustainable-type things — Dwight Garner in a New York Times book review last year called these folks “Bleu collar.” Just getting that out there.

The other Gainesville slang I know relates to school spirit. Gainesville’s population is roughly 125,000, and Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, where the Florida Gators play, seats almost 90,000. "Tebowing" is the most obvious slang, although the phrase wasn’t coined, I don’t think, until after Tim Tebow left UF. Another term might be "jorts." That is, jean shorts. The term, according to at least one Gator sports website, is rooted in the Florida / Georgia rivalry, and supposedly became popular after a Georgia fan, desperate for a good insult, yelled to a Gator fan: “Gator fans wear jeans shorts!”

Reading an interview with George Saunders in Blip magazine and a run-down of some of the best notes from Susan Sontag's diary up at Brainpickings makes for some pretty hefty writers-on-writing thoughts. Reading each separately can result in joy, inspiration, and serious reflection. But what happens when we force these two writers' thoughts together in fake conversation?

Imagine, if you will, a set not unlike Between Two Ferns. George Saunders waits patiently with his legs crossed, but instead of Susan Sontag joining him (as she obviously cannot), Zach Galifianakis comes out with a copy of Sontag's dairy. He sits, nervously eyeing the ceiling for wasps.

Zach Galifianakis as Susan Sontag: I think I am ready to learn how to write. Think with words, not with ideas ... The function of writing is to explode one’s subject—transform it into something else.

George Saunders: I think what a reader wants is genuine engagement from a writer: that is, he wants the writer to tell the truth as she sees it, and for the form of the telling to somehow be authentic to that which is being told. The reader wants the writer to be brave enough to step away from pre-digested forms or modes, as necessary, in pursuit of beauty.

ZG/SS [looking at his/her nails]: In "life," I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In "work," I don’t want to be reduced to my life. My work is too austere. My life is a brutal anecdote.

GS [frowning, then opening and closing his mouth twice before beginning to speak.]: I think truth, for artistic purposes, is that set of things that we feel deeply, or have felt deeply, but can’t quite articulate, and can’t quite “prove,” and, the direct statement of which feels deficient. 

ZG/SS: Ordinary language is an accretion of lies. The language of literature must be, therefore, the language of transgression, a rupture of individual systems, a shattering of psychic oppression. The only function of literature lies in the uncovering of the self in history.

[A crow flies low overhead across the stage. Saunders ducks, covering his head with his arms. Zach/Susan simply glares at the bird's flight, makes to leave his/her chair and follow the bird, then sits down again, shaking head.]

GS [clearing his throat]: Art is ... paying hyper-attention to the things that make reality what it is, resisting reduction, trusting that the truest (and most beautiful) thing that can be said has something to do with the accretion of those small instants.

ZG/SS [with a sudden flailing of arms]: What’s wrong with direct experience? Why would one ever want to flee it, by transforming it—into a brick?

GS: So art—I think one reason we value art so highly is because it really is, and has to remain mysterious—in its intentions and procedures, everything. 

ZG/SS: If only I could feel about sex as I do about writing! [ZG/SS stares at GS, breathing noisily through his/her nose. Keeps staring.] That I’m the vehicle, the medium, the instrument of some force beyond myself.

GS [clears throat]: In a larger sense, I think people write better when they’re happy. (Allowing for a broad definition of “happy.”) Maybe “feeling exultant” would be a better way of saying it.

ZG/SS: By refusing to be as unhappy as I truly am, I deprive myself of subjects. I’ve nothing to write about. Every topic burns.

[Saunders coughs and looks anxiously about the room. In doing so, he comes across a beer placed on the table between the chairs. He takes a long pull from it, guzzling, actually, nodding in a certain way while continuing to pull mightily from his beverage. He belches softly. Then swallows hard.]

GS: Writing dictums are the equivalent of replacing the tightwire with a wide plank: a lazy man’s approach. Safer, but less thrilling. There will never be a definition of beauty that helps anybody make some.

[The studio lights start to dim, but not before we catch a scathing look from ZG/SS in George's direction, and George looking about the room in search of a swift exit.]

Image: Caitlin Saunders c/o studio360.org

all quotes ruthlessly stolen from Blip Magazine (George Saunders) and Brainpickings.org

Apologies to Zach Galifianakis

I am not always the best listener and I do not always enjoy readings. Oftentimes there are the agitated shoulders, glancing eyes, and requisite hands-holding-drinks-while-pointing gestures of some sort of edgy literary scene. Authors tend to swallow their words or make too much of a self-conscious mess of themselves to be heard clearly. For some reason, I usually feel a need to urinate and spend the reading vaguely uncomfortable and distracted. Last night's Housing Works reading, with Diane Williams, Ben Marcus, and Deb Olin Unferth, was a distinct and delightful departure.

I have to give some credit to Housing Works, an organization that uses all proceeds to help people living with HIV/AIDS. Its bookstore and café are incredibly inviting: tall shelves, plenty of dark wood moldings, thin windows that stretch above the bookcases beside them. It is utterly unpretentious while maintaining a lot of class.

The most credit, however, has to do with how well our three authors read. My love for each of the night's readers is a matter of public record; cf. my posts about The Flame Alphabet and Vicky Swanky is a Beauty. But it had been a long time since I really felt pleasure from hearing a text rather than simply being alone with it. For the most part, I prefer reading alone and am often jarred when an author’s voice doesn’t align with the voice I’ve conjured in my head. And while none of the three authors read in the voice I had imagined, each brought to the text something I hadn’t heard before.

I don’t know how this happens. Surely, our three authors are not amateurs and experience has to have something to do with it. But there was something in their voices, in their presence while reading, that surpassed a person reciting text. They weren’t mere vehicles for words, but they weren’t actors either; there wasn’t an insincere sense of performance. I think what mattered was a sincere investment in the words themselves. A desire, firstly, to bring the sentences forth.

Maybe it was only that Deb Olin Unferth has an adorably high, authoritative voice and then Ben got up there with a really deep voice and spoke measurably slow but bitingly, and then Diane spoke in unpredictable cadences and with grace and movement. Maybe they used these devious tricks in order to delight me. And it worked. 

So let's get off our computers. Stop texting or tweeting or scanning or browsing. Go listen.

Image: housingworks.org