Luke B. Goebel is a writer of fictions, living in Texas. He teaches at a Texas university and his work has appeared in journals including: the New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Pank, Elimae, Wigleaf, Gigantic, Everyday Genius and one soon to print with Kitty Snacks. He works as a Co-Editor with The New York Tyrant and Tyrant Books.
Luke's story "Chula Chula, My Heart My Heart, Chula Chula" appears in Issue Thirty-Three of The Collagist.
Here, he speaks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about speaking, singing, and flying.
1. Where did “Chula Chula, My Heart My Heart, Chula Chula” begin for you, and how did it get to here?
It started as one clean mental picture—the whole story—in one quanta shot. The beginning middle and end peeled right off from out—and into word. It was a straight shot to paper. I think I recorded it, actually, into a microphone. Then it was a story on paper. On screen, next. Dictaphone to typewriter to computer to space. I sent it to S. Garson at Wigleaf. He took it. I almost let it go up. Then I pulled it. I hated the story, suddenly. I didn’t want it out anymore. It reminded me of someone’s work I don’t adore—a guy in specific. Then it sat around in nowhere. It aged. It got irritable. It hated being nowhere. It wanted a new life. The story wanted to be told a story and/or to conduct a motorcycle, carry a pistol, contain a new line about a cucumber out at the edge of the trees. Stories also want to get some action—some touching.. It wanted a girl. It slept too long and had a headache. It got constipated. Dreamed of a life that was made up from its former life, but that life didn’t need it to be part of that life anymore.
A guy named Johnny came over for two weeks and drank wine and we fiddled with it a bit. Then I started cranking. It changed and lengthened and grew out of its shape into a less clear shape. From there, I sent it over to you. Matt Bell took it—I hear big things about Cataclysm Baby—YUKNAVITCH loves it. I love YUKNAVITCH. She’s terrific in her memoir at talking, structuring, carving up the steaks. I mean that’s it! Stakes. It wanted to interact a bit. It needed to see there were people—women in the place, again, even if it didn’t have what it took. Like that old dancehall from In A Shallow Grave by the great Jimmy Purdy. It needed some of that. It had some of the same desires, to mate with anything, even male to male, anything at all, just to be in the dancehall with people. So, Matt said yes.
Then I started scalpel work and pencil work. I still had misgivings. It wasn’t honest enough. It was about something ugly and I felt ugly. I tried to make the story tolerable, but only got it more ugly. There are a few lines now that have succeeded. Maybe I should have let it die out there in nowhere time. Still, there was a truth to the feeling of it. But, I got a few lines in there that are pretty wild, such as ending that one line with marijuana that ends with marijuana. Marijuana is a tough sell these days. Real hard to place that word on the board. And I think it stands strong where it is now, at the end of that line with the cucumber and the girls, at the edge of the unencumbered rough. So I’m happy with that.I can’t tell you how many guys I know who can’t get rid of all the marijuana they got. Hundreds of pounds of the stuff, and the prices all cut to hell. The gold rush is over. Makes me glad I’m in a different game. All that dope and nowhere to go with it. They put it in storage facilities. What a nightmare.
2. I find the narrator in this piece compelling—his sentences, taken on their own, are quite a read, and they also provide the reader with the pleasure of keeping up with his train of thought. It seems to me that he describes himself well when he says, “I had certain affects mastered. Not so much charm, but a wild determinacy and animatedness. A madness that would serve me from time to time.” As a writer, do you try to evoke these qualities in your narrators? To what extent do you think that all fictional narrators must be charming, determined, animated, or serviceably mad?
I only write like that to get your attention. The low brow and high brow. That’s the gimmick—the try for humor. And I’m not funny. I don’t think I am that.
The train of thought, it’s something I can’t extricate myself from. If there’s anything that stays consistent, all the way back to my first awareness moments, it’s that trainwreck mind of mine I got. It’s the buzz of the engine, like those twin prop old planes with the thrusters overhead, buzzing away like the engine is coming from the luggage and the seats and the whole plane trembling and droning forever.
As for narrators. I’m in… in for narrators who aren’t narrators. I am mostly interested in how speech and writing work together. The speaker, the one talking, that’s what you’re calling the narrator, right? Well, he’s got to speak, but it’s the writer who’s got to give testament. Still, somebody has to speak. As Beckett wrote, “What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking?” Maybe this all seems too obvious or too unclear. Let me bring things down to daily life. I live down here in East Texas … You should hear these people talk. These—whatever they are that are abounding here. The other day a man said, “I never went for Mom and Pop, but Federal Money was all I was after.” This guy robbed banks. He ran whores. He cut people. Our man is so many years old, his white hair still gelled like a greaser with stiff comb lines in the white swept back glory of hair, his lips clean shaved, a little half turned grin comes over up one side, and the place lights on fire when he tells his life. I wish I could have lived as he has, and speak as he speaks. But my life has been half way toward this old friend of mine’s life, and half way in the door of respectability. Like a naked professor being chased by police and Indians on television news, disappointing the hell out of everyone, and then getting off with a good lawyer. Actually nothing like that. Pretty lonely. But I have the writing game—trying to warrant my existence by writing. Trying to steal it back, what’s been taken away or will disappear—and through these things get to what is all of ours—anyhow, the other day at lunch, this news-reporter woman says to me, at the bar, with me in it, in person, me talking to her to see where we can get to, referring to her grandmother, a Choctaw Indian, them both: “Her name was Tennessee and she was meaner than hell and she still had her brain,” I mean that’s an opening! That woman was a narrator. Right there at the lunch bar, and me squinting, trying to look like something up against this reporter, who goes on television, her effervescent hair and black little Choctaw eyes. A looker, for a late lunch, just she and I in the bar, besides the bartender, “She punched my grandfather in the face six hours before she died because he called hospice,” she delivered her second line of narration. “She was just pissed off to be dying. And she was Christian!”
Those are the types I am competing against down and out here. There’s so much more where that came from. They can talk down here in the South. We are less than 80 miles from the Louisiana border, in the pines, so I can call it the South:Even though it’s Texas. We have Confederate Street here. We have Robert E. Lee High. But of course she wasn’t a narrator, except she was performing as we all do. She was the speaker. That newscaster started to get invested in speech. More than just the usual crap. She suddenly wanted to tell me about her grandmother. In that moment, she wanted me to know and to see her. She told me stories about both her grandmothers, one a white, one the Choctaw named Tennessee, and them fighting over who had the best rack at 92 and/or 93, 94 years old. The kind one likening Tennessee’s particular rack to a pair of socks with sand in the bottoms hanging off her old chest. When it gets right down to it, it’s about speech. Or it’s about writing. But I think you have to pick or it has to pick you. I tend more toward speech, though I beat the hell out of myself trying to not rest on that. There are speakers on paper and there are writers. Noy Holland is a writer. Pamela Ryder is a writer. Rick Bass is a writer, though he does it by pretend-speaking—at least his early stuff, but his moves and word selection is that of writer. Nabokov is a writer, but does it with narrators. Those narrators aren’t who we are listening to, but who we are listening through. We are listening to the writer speak, or write, or both. But it all still depends on being able to speak; some can take it further than speech and get the narrator going and then get them out of the way, so as to let the writer have their discursive creation. What a joke, discursive creation. Their heart, their vigor, their ability to see the world and seduce us with their love. The “narrator” is speaker, first and foregrounding. But then that narrator has to get out of the way. I don’t want to hear someone out talk me. Sure, to listen in the South makes you proud of people. Of their ability to tell all. But in real life, I say all kinds of solid things, all sorts of doddling shit, too, or I say the right stuff but it’s all overly acted and feels false. In real life, if I’m not with tears in my eyes when I’m talking, then I’m not getting after it. On the page, it’s not just a voice of a narrator. It’s the ride of the sentence. It’s not speech, alone, but someone singing—the writer. It gets you someplace you didn’t know you’re going, and no one needs a narrator anyhow, not for long. Was Humbert Humbert the narrator in Lolita, or was it Nabokov singing in character? That’s something you got to wonder. That wasn’t H.H. talking to us, was it? That was opera. What about Rick Bass? What about Hannah? What about Faulkner. I’m not comparing myself to these boys, No, or Noy Holland, or Grace, Virginia, or whoever whatever sex gender race politic body, etc, you want to dig up or pull over, living or dead meat, so long as they sing. The point being, here, “general reader” as Hannah wrote in a blurb for Ricky Bass, the point I am hoping to make here is it’s the writer talking through a guise or singing—which is obvious—but it’s got to be more than that. You have to throw the narrator off of you. It has to be singing, and singing has to have feeling. It has to be the feeling in the syntax, the words, the sounds, and the gunning it, or caressing it, or touching. I hope to keep charging at it all my life.
Growing up in Ohio, it was all about talking, out there in the hickory. And it still is. It’s all talk. Then there’s singers. I sometimes just want to shut up, and that’s death, or maybe it’s something better. But of course, I don’t want either: I want my brother back who left us this year. I want our shared secret of being boys in bodies back, of being only brothers. Everyone is going to die before you do, or you aren’t reading this. It’s a tough hook to handle. But you have to handle it, while it’s there in your throat, and you have to find some manner to love, to sing, and to care more than just that anchorwoman cared, but to make something that sings forever. Speaking is not enough. It has to be ready to lift off into the sky anytime someone gets to that page you fashioned. Like a ribbon on your chest that means more than participation. Or second place. That page has to offer a flight out of town at any moment, and to the best place anyone’s offering, and it has to sing. That’s why the birds get to us so immediately. They can do both: Sing and Fly.
3. The “narrator” zips from “high brow” to “low brow,” mixing registers, and the effect is as profound as it is comedic: “It was all what I deserved for trying, I suppose, as life is meant to be suffered, constantly, insubstantial as it is, and alone, with great flashes of brilliance coming less and less likely—meaning you look at the walls more and think of what you've done, so why not grab ass?” Can you talk a little about this effect—its role in your work and in the work you admire?
I was just trying to be honest in that line up there. I think to transgress you must employ both the traditional/accepted registers, as well as the “low brow” or “gut” or “groin” or “devil’s hammer” or whatever else you might call it. One guy called it the devil’s heel. You’ve also got to reach for the holy ride of something better than what is available or felt prior to taking that ride. It’s just the honest to God truth. Like Noy Holland said, somewhere, in “Absolution” I think, something such as: “God didn’t give me two mouths. One for the clean and one for the rest.”* That isn’t what she wrote at all. I don’t have the book in front of me. It’s at the office. I’m just saying, we are stuck in the mud down here, and we have to pull ourselves up with words. If you don’t mention the mud, you’re just lying to everyone. If you only mention the mud, then you’re cheating the reader.
4. How has being an editor at The New York Tyrant and Tyrant Books affected your approach to your own writing?
I get to walk around and tell myself my farts stink less appreciably than the farts of others who are not editors for the THE NEW YORK TYRANT and TYRANT BOOKS. I’ve seen some great writing come through my hands, and have put the edits on some people to see what they’d let me make better. Being an editor has probably done things to me that I don’t recognize.
5. What writing projects are you working on right now?
I have a collection a story away from being finished, and the response has been positive, among the few readers I’ve had take the whole thing on. I don’t shop things, hardly. I hardly ever send to anyone to see if they want to put out my book, or stories. Usually, if I send something to two or three parties and it doesn’t get taken, I put it into nowhere land. Come back to it later. It feels good to be finishing this first collection. And I’ve learned from doing it such. I don’t know if I’ll put it out. It’s been worked. It’s got a good span of my life in it. I am starting to think it’s all about getting as close to flight, or really flying it, as you are able at the time, and then saying, look at that! Look at her go! She’s flying, or she’s getting so close. This little machine of mine. And all this self puncturing and nailing ego to the beam, it’s counterproductive to the ride. I don’t think the geniuses do much of it. I’m a fighter. I have to work like hell just to not drool in public or have my fly down.
6. What knockout writing have you been reading recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?
Padgett Powell’s Aliens of Affection (“Scarliotti and the Sinkhole”).
Rick Bass’s The Watch.
Atticus Lish’s Life is With People.
Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water.
Brian Kubarycz had a story about a grown female cousin peeing in the yard, and all the other cousins peeing on the pee later that night, everyone digging chuffs to bury their underpants in together with hers, and that was really great to hear in NYC at UNSAID’S reading in Brooklyn, where I read as well, but did not a guy read who failed to show who’s named after a houseplant, and in his place, Robert Lopez read.
I am excited to see Sam Michel’s, my old teacher, first novel he ever wrote, Lincoln Dahl Turns Five or Strange Cowboy, appear in print with Tyrant Books. Also, Noy Holland, married to Sam Michel, another teacher of mine, has a HELL of a story coming out in the next issue of Tyrant—Tyrant 10. I’m curious to see GL is publishing new stories. Looking forward to seeing where that takes us.
Honestly, I read terribly slowly. I read terrifically slow. I am sometimes, I feel, a much better reader than a writer, so long as I am reading one who has beaten me thus far, and it’s out loud I am reading, etc. I’m a really solid reader. I can read and read. But I’m slow. I like to take it all apart in my head. I want to see how the bird works. But you can’t take it apart. Not with the really great ones. Not with Holland. Not with Purdy, no, or Hannah. You can only sit, transfixed, while it sings and lifts from its guts off the patch.
*I went back to find the quote, and could not locate it—I now believe the sentiment is from her unparalleled story, “Orbit”.