Locus Amoenus
As you drive northeast through Dutchess County in upstate New York, farm scenes strike calendar poses: leaning barns, well-tended white Victorians, winding roads tunneling through overhanging maples. Then, round a bend, a vista breaks open upon hilly patchwork fields and cow-dotted pastures, with many layered hills growing progressively mistier in the farther distance. This stretch of the Harlem Valley is none other than the very locus amoenus of pastoral paradise, where nothing bad can ever happen.
My mother and I moved here from Brooklyn at the end of 2002. We didn't feel safe in the city anymore, and we could no longer bear the fact that every time we heard an uneven tread in the stairway, we thought it might be he finally coming in the door. We supposed removing ourselves from the familiar physical triggers would help extinguish that cruel hope reflex.
This morning, instead of taking the bike path past the train station, I decided to run up DeLaVergne Hill to look down upon the hamlet Amenia, whose name means "pleasing. to the eye." From up here I can soliloquize to the greatest advantage about the larger perspectives necessary to frame my story. We may take Amenia for what it is: a miniature in enamel, hung from a gold chain. around a virgin's neck, an abstract of the times.
The last stop on the train from the city, it lies as far as one might retreat into rural country without losing that connection to urbanity, In this valley an abandoned length of rail bed, which used to route the train on up into Massachusetts, is now a bike path. It cuts through shale cliffs—hungover with fern and dripping moss—and then snakes languidly through swamps, woods, and sheep pasture. Sometimes opening wide and scenic, sometimes growing close and shady, the "rail trail" is nevertheless boycotted by the locals, who, years before, fought bitterly against the intrusive charity that would convert and maintain it. They feared youth would be drawn to the asphalt surface late at night for Colt 45 drinking parties. But they have been proven wrong, and the rail trail is used mostly by the bottled-water crowd, human-billboard cyclists and new moms chasing three-wheeled strollers who come up from the city to their weekend homes. The locals despise these people whom they call "citiots," exhibiting an otherwise unprecedented stroke of cleverness.
A sign at the entrance to the rail trail promises that "no motorized vehicles" are allowed, but local forces lobbied and affixed a second sign further announcing that the trail is "patrolled by sheriffs on ATVs." We can say that the signs agree to disagree for now. One idea of respect is to avoid making a choice. The smaller guy is moved by tolerance, the other by pride.
Here it comes now—following its own deep, pulsating sonic wave — a pimped-out, camo-painted, all-terrain vehicle, complete with a custom stereo system louder than the engine. The funds for its requisition, I hear, came from some unusual interpretation of a line in the sheriff department's Homeland Security budget. Atop this fantastic vehicle, a large-faced deputy reigns, swooshing past startled cyclists and waking babies with his thunder. He heads down the rail trail toward a parking area where four men stand talking around the bed of a pickup, the redneck conference table. The deputy pulls up and dismounts speaking to the men. Simultaneously, all heads turn to look up the hill to where I stand looking down at them.
I start back toward our farm, where my mom and I have lived happily enough for almost seven years, sporadically, between trips abroad and cross-country. With the insurance settlement, we bought our farm from a vegan woman whose unrealistic wool business had failed. We are among numerous other well-heeled former urbanites, "living off the land" within convenient reach of the train to New York City and equidistant from five tolerably decent airports.
But things are not quite as peaceful at home as they could be. Of late, sorry to say, an "uncle Claudius" has interloped, got in between my fortune and me. He executed the move just last month when I was away at school. Not really an uncle, but "stepdad" won't do. Today is the wedding. Our lawn is crawling with caterers, and the musicians are setting up even now. Will I still sit at the head of the table tomorrow? He has been eyeing my seat these last couple of days since I have been home but I make a point to get to the table early to claim it. I think he even may have occupied it while I was gone. I found my seat unpleasantly warm. But my name, alongside my mother's, was still on the parcel map last time I looked, and I mean to keep it that way. Our home was dearly bought.
Our cottage is very old, circa 1750. It first appears in the records in 1763 when it acquired a new porch. How long it had stood porchless we can only guess a decade or two. It has been added to and upon in every direction over the years and currently has the structure of a human hive of some soit, mostly done up in Quaker-gone-Tudorish, crumbling here and there, sagging a little now and again. But it's lovely and storybook; a stranger can get lost in passageways and cupboards. In our old house, we know none of the mean evenness of imported fruits and machine weather. We eat in season and hang the laundry. All these years we have followed Voltaire's advice, my mother and I. We have twenty-two horned, long-haired wild-looking sheep of small size—in various colors from dirty white, to chestnut, to shoe black—the ewes about that of a big retriever and the rams and wethers not much larger. With slender legs and two-pronged toes, they step lightly over the rock outcroppings in our hilly pasture. In the spring before shearing season, the ewes' overgrown coats make them look like tiny Jewish grandmothers who got their furs four sizes too big at a thrift shop. They roam around the cottage lawn and occasionally, if the door has been left open, step inside, clattering over the floorboards, sounding as if a crowd of high-heeled ladies has just arrived.
On a quiet morning when sheep shake off the frosty dew, the wool rumbles like distant thunder. I can distinguish the tenor of their bleats. Some ewes are plaintive or begging, some are rude and angry. Pluto, the lead ram, a sturdy black animal, is mostly silent, but when he does speak, it is like a kitten mewing. There is a worn. and polished fence post he scratches his woolly face against for hours, and when I come to the barn in the morning with my shovel, he greets me, putting his head down so that I can get that spot behind his horns. He was good enough to give old Claudius a swift butt once, sending him face forward into a manure pile. Good Pluto.
At the age of twelve I became a full-time shepherd—who,true, has read more than roamed. I am an experiment. Some may claim "gone awry," My mother, after trying hard to do otherwise, educated me at home, where I read and read and read. Too many books and not enough interaction, says Claudius. My life has become one long self-conscious narration. My hours and days are pages turning, and I cannot wait to get to the end.
For the greater part of seven years, we have been more or less holed up from the thumb-communicating world. There are no malls in Amenia. One buys one's clothes at Tractor Supply, or else at the drugstore. There are no billboards, and if one does not have cable TV, an aptly named Yahoo account, or newspaper subscriptions—and we do not—a lot of celebrity news can go on without one ever knowing about it. Sure, things come up in conversation, and, as we go through the grocery line we receive our inoculating dose of tabloid, but that is the extent of our exposure to the flotsam and jetsam that people take for information. As a child, I read the classics and liked math and science. I got very good at finding geeky things online and somehow missed everything else. You really can tunnel your way through the Internet using Scholar Google. Besides my flock, I had plenty of playmates, young and old, all over the world, but I completely slept through American popular culture, knowledge of which, it appears to me, could be as important as knowing last year's weather predictions.
Our house is one of several very old homes in the area, but most in town are much younger Victorians or prewar farmhouses that rose up in the boom of the Jewish resort beside the lost Amenia lake, whose dam broke and flooded the poor goys in Wassaic below. A hundred years of no development ensued, and then, slowly a grave state psychiatric prison hospital was erected on the hill, calling forth thousands of low-paid workers from the north and spawning trailer parks and split-ranch tragedies, spreading sprawl even here, where Lewis Mumford lived, where for the longest time, town and farm refused to produce the monstrous progeny suburb. Now every Sunday the automaton locals, on stinky noisy mowers, go meticulously back and forth. across their great tartan plains.
Happily, suburban expansion was limited. The state facility closed after sixty or so years of operation; atrophy replaced growth; the grand old hotel. and other treasures were burned to the ground by a few local delinquents. Then, post 9/11, as small dairy farmers' suicides were being subsidized by various federal farm bills, citiot migration really began in earnest. The former pederast house was converted into eco-condominiums with equestrian amenities. Failed farms were bought up by the uber wealthy who built stately manors, installed waterfalls, and imported gazelles and camels for their lawns.
In the meantime, however, the wave of workers from the north grew to far outnumber the settled farmers. These later folks became "the locals" but are themselves Adirondackian diaspora, whose weekend hunting plots, for reasons hidden to me, are there not here. Now that the state facility has closed down, released its residents into the population, the locals work hard at two, and sometimes three, part-time service jobs so that they can drive an hour to a Walmart to buy lots of plastic crap they don't need, get themselves deeper into debt, and pay their taxes—often with high interest credit cards—to support undeclared wars and to bail out banksters. They actually vote, right and left, to remain enslaved, instead of throwing off their partisan shackles, waving crowbars with half-articulate shouts of fury. When these NeoUncleToms die, I expect they will go straight to Terrordise, a celestial gated community where cavity searches are the routine safety procedure for all ages, all foodstuffs are engineered and radiated, and all information carefully filtered of meaningful content.
The locals don't hike the gorgeous hills that surround the valley; and they fought my mother to keep the trucked-in junk food for the school. cafeteria instead of switching to locally grown vegetables. They actually encourage their girls to watch banal Disney romances, in which everyone seems to scream at each other at first and then many at the end. They train their boys with video games to see slaughter as a form of entertainment,
Second- and third-homeowners now employ a good percentage of the locals—landscapers, carpenters, lawn mowers, snow plowers, pool cleaners, pest controllers, window washers, housekeepers, horse trainers, septic tank drainers, caterers, and tutors—whose own homes and families are left unattended. The grand estates wait in pristine readiness for their owners to visit while the landscaper’s own vegetable garden is choked by weeds. There isn't a local in town who can afford to hire himself. The carpenter's own doors are sagging; the housekeeper's windows are opaque with dirt.
Polonius, my mother's friend, a short former military man with a large fortune and florid signature unfurling a full four inches, goes on about how the locals hate weekenders like himself. "If it weren't for us, whose homes would they take care of?”
Their own? Each other's? Maybe they would grow chard and raise chickens; maybe they would run little repair shops or make things to sell to one another; maybe they would not watch so many TV reality shows about grand estates whose lawns are mown by people like them.
Something is rotten in the United States of America.
© V.N. Alexander 2015
This story is an excerpt of the novel Locus Amoenus by V.N. Alexander, The Permanent Press 2015
As you drive northeast through Dutchess County in upstate New York, farm scenes strike calendar poses: leaning barns, well-tended white Victorians, winding roads tunneling through overhanging maples. Then, round a bend, a vista breaks open upon hilly patchwork fields and cow-dotted pastures, with many layered hills growing progressively mistier in the farther distance. This stretch of the Harlem Valley is none other than the very locus amoenus of pastoral paradise, where nothing bad can ever happen.
My mother and I moved here from Brooklyn at the end of 2002. We didn't feel safe in the city anymore, and we could no longer bear the fact that every time we heard an uneven tread in the stairway, we thought it might be he finally coming in the door. We supposed removing ourselves from the familiar physical triggers would help extinguish that cruel hope reflex.
This morning, instead of taking the bike path past the train station, I decided to run up DeLaVergne Hill to look down upon the hamlet Amenia, whose name means "pleasing. to the eye." From up here I can soliloquize to the greatest advantage about the larger perspectives necessary to frame my story. We may take Amenia for what it is: a miniature in enamel, hung from a gold chain. around a virgin's neck, an abstract of the times.
The last stop on the train from the city, it lies as far as one might retreat into rural country without losing that connection to urbanity, In this valley an abandoned length of rail bed, which used to route the train on up into Massachusetts, is now a bike path. It cuts through shale cliffs—hungover with fern and dripping moss—and then snakes languidly through swamps, woods, and sheep pasture. Sometimes opening wide and scenic, sometimes growing close and shady, the "rail trail" is nevertheless boycotted by the locals, who, years before, fought bitterly against the intrusive charity that would convert and maintain it. They feared youth would be drawn to the asphalt surface late at night for Colt 45 drinking parties. But they have been proven wrong, and the rail trail is used mostly by the bottled-water crowd, human-billboard cyclists and new moms chasing three-wheeled strollers who come up from the city to their weekend homes. The locals despise these people whom they call "citiots," exhibiting an otherwise unprecedented stroke of cleverness.
A sign at the entrance to the rail trail promises that "no motorized vehicles" are allowed, but local forces lobbied and affixed a second sign further announcing that the trail is "patrolled by sheriffs on ATVs." We can say that the signs agree to disagree for now. One idea of respect is to avoid making a choice. The smaller guy is moved by tolerance, the other by pride.
Here it comes now—following its own deep, pulsating sonic wave — a pimped-out, camo-painted, all-terrain vehicle, complete with a custom stereo system louder than the engine. The funds for its requisition, I hear, came from some unusual interpretation of a line in the sheriff department's Homeland Security budget. Atop this fantastic vehicle, a large-faced deputy reigns, swooshing past startled cyclists and waking babies with his thunder. He heads down the rail trail toward a parking area where four men stand talking around the bed of a pickup, the redneck conference table. The deputy pulls up and dismounts speaking to the men. Simultaneously, all heads turn to look up the hill to where I stand looking down at them.
I start back toward our farm, where my mom and I have lived happily enough for almost seven years, sporadically, between trips abroad and cross-country. With the insurance settlement, we bought our farm from a vegan woman whose unrealistic wool business had failed. We are among numerous other well-heeled former urbanites, "living off the land" within convenient reach of the train to New York City and equidistant from five tolerably decent airports.
But things are not quite as peaceful at home as they could be. Of late, sorry to say, an "uncle Claudius" has interloped, got in between my fortune and me. He executed the move just last month when I was away at school. Not really an uncle, but "stepdad" won't do. Today is the wedding. Our lawn is crawling with caterers, and the musicians are setting up even now. Will I still sit at the head of the table tomorrow? He has been eyeing my seat these last couple of days since I have been home but I make a point to get to the table early to claim it. I think he even may have occupied it while I was gone. I found my seat unpleasantly warm. But my name, alongside my mother's, was still on the parcel map last time I looked, and I mean to keep it that way. Our home was dearly bought.
Our cottage is very old, circa 1750. It first appears in the records in 1763 when it acquired a new porch. How long it had stood porchless we can only guess a decade or two. It has been added to and upon in every direction over the years and currently has the structure of a human hive of some soit, mostly done up in Quaker-gone-Tudorish, crumbling here and there, sagging a little now and again. But it's lovely and storybook; a stranger can get lost in passageways and cupboards. In our old house, we know none of the mean evenness of imported fruits and machine weather. We eat in season and hang the laundry. All these years we have followed Voltaire's advice, my mother and I. We have twenty-two horned, long-haired wild-looking sheep of small size—in various colors from dirty white, to chestnut, to shoe black—the ewes about that of a big retriever and the rams and wethers not much larger. With slender legs and two-pronged toes, they step lightly over the rock outcroppings in our hilly pasture. In the spring before shearing season, the ewes' overgrown coats make them look like tiny Jewish grandmothers who got their furs four sizes too big at a thrift shop. They roam around the cottage lawn and occasionally, if the door has been left open, step inside, clattering over the floorboards, sounding as if a crowd of high-heeled ladies has just arrived.
On a quiet morning when sheep shake off the frosty dew, the wool rumbles like distant thunder. I can distinguish the tenor of their bleats. Some ewes are plaintive or begging, some are rude and angry. Pluto, the lead ram, a sturdy black animal, is mostly silent, but when he does speak, it is like a kitten mewing. There is a worn. and polished fence post he scratches his woolly face against for hours, and when I come to the barn in the morning with my shovel, he greets me, putting his head down so that I can get that spot behind his horns. He was good enough to give old Claudius a swift butt once, sending him face forward into a manure pile. Good Pluto.
At the age of twelve I became a full-time shepherd—who,true, has read more than roamed. I am an experiment. Some may claim "gone awry," My mother, after trying hard to do otherwise, educated me at home, where I read and read and read. Too many books and not enough interaction, says Claudius. My life has become one long self-conscious narration. My hours and days are pages turning, and I cannot wait to get to the end.
For the greater part of seven years, we have been more or less holed up from the thumb-communicating world. There are no malls in Amenia. One buys one's clothes at Tractor Supply, or else at the drugstore. There are no billboards, and if one does not have cable TV, an aptly named Yahoo account, or newspaper subscriptions—and we do not—a lot of celebrity news can go on without one ever knowing about it. Sure, things come up in conversation, and, as we go through the grocery line we receive our inoculating dose of tabloid, but that is the extent of our exposure to the flotsam and jetsam that people take for information. As a child, I read the classics and liked math and science. I got very good at finding geeky things online and somehow missed everything else. You really can tunnel your way through the Internet using Scholar Google. Besides my flock, I had plenty of playmates, young and old, all over the world, but I completely slept through American popular culture, knowledge of which, it appears to me, could be as important as knowing last year's weather predictions.
Our house is one of several very old homes in the area, but most in town are much younger Victorians or prewar farmhouses that rose up in the boom of the Jewish resort beside the lost Amenia lake, whose dam broke and flooded the poor goys in Wassaic below. A hundred years of no development ensued, and then, slowly a grave state psychiatric prison hospital was erected on the hill, calling forth thousands of low-paid workers from the north and spawning trailer parks and split-ranch tragedies, spreading sprawl even here, where Lewis Mumford lived, where for the longest time, town and farm refused to produce the monstrous progeny suburb. Now every Sunday the automaton locals, on stinky noisy mowers, go meticulously back and forth. across their great tartan plains.
Happily, suburban expansion was limited. The state facility closed after sixty or so years of operation; atrophy replaced growth; the grand old hotel. and other treasures were burned to the ground by a few local delinquents. Then, post 9/11, as small dairy farmers' suicides were being subsidized by various federal farm bills, citiot migration really began in earnest. The former pederast house was converted into eco-condominiums with equestrian amenities. Failed farms were bought up by the uber wealthy who built stately manors, installed waterfalls, and imported gazelles and camels for their lawns.
In the meantime, however, the wave of workers from the north grew to far outnumber the settled farmers. These later folks became "the locals" but are themselves Adirondackian diaspora, whose weekend hunting plots, for reasons hidden to me, are there not here. Now that the state facility has closed down, released its residents into the population, the locals work hard at two, and sometimes three, part-time service jobs so that they can drive an hour to a Walmart to buy lots of plastic crap they don't need, get themselves deeper into debt, and pay their taxes—often with high interest credit cards—to support undeclared wars and to bail out banksters. They actually vote, right and left, to remain enslaved, instead of throwing off their partisan shackles, waving crowbars with half-articulate shouts of fury. When these NeoUncleToms die, I expect they will go straight to Terrordise, a celestial gated community where cavity searches are the routine safety procedure for all ages, all foodstuffs are engineered and radiated, and all information carefully filtered of meaningful content.
The locals don't hike the gorgeous hills that surround the valley; and they fought my mother to keep the trucked-in junk food for the school. cafeteria instead of switching to locally grown vegetables. They actually encourage their girls to watch banal Disney romances, in which everyone seems to scream at each other at first and then many at the end. They train their boys with video games to see slaughter as a form of entertainment,
Second- and third-homeowners now employ a good percentage of the locals—landscapers, carpenters, lawn mowers, snow plowers, pool cleaners, pest controllers, window washers, housekeepers, horse trainers, septic tank drainers, caterers, and tutors—whose own homes and families are left unattended. The grand estates wait in pristine readiness for their owners to visit while the landscaper’s own vegetable garden is choked by weeds. There isn't a local in town who can afford to hire himself. The carpenter's own doors are sagging; the housekeeper's windows are opaque with dirt.
Polonius, my mother's friend, a short former military man with a large fortune and florid signature unfurling a full four inches, goes on about how the locals hate weekenders like himself. "If it weren't for us, whose homes would they take care of?”
Their own? Each other's? Maybe they would grow chard and raise chickens; maybe they would run little repair shops or make things to sell to one another; maybe they would not watch so many TV reality shows about grand estates whose lawns are mown by people like them.
Something is rotten in the United States of America.
© V.N. Alexander 2015
This story is an excerpt of the novel Locus Amoenus by V.N. Alexander, The Permanent Press 2015
Narrated by Ben Jorgensen
Narrated by Ben Jorgensen
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Tori, here we are at the end of this strange year. You were last with us near the beginning of the year, when everything seemed fairly normal. Welcome back!
VA: Thank you. I was in St Petersburg, Russia before and during the lockdown, which wasn’t too bad there, comparatively speaking. I have to say, life in the US now feels like a Black Mirror episode.
BR: Yes it does.
VA: It’s very surreal.
TN: Yeah, a lot has happened this year. And you even ran for Congress. Did you have any time to continue your collection of Meno’s Stories?
VA: You know politics takes me away from what I enjoy doing most, which is reading, writing and listening to fiction. By the way, I wrote the first few Meno stories in 2012 or so. And I felt compelled to put that project aside to write about the disturbing post-911 consumerism, political situation that was going on then. That became the novel we’re talking about today. Luckily, I did get most of the Meno collection finished in St Pete’s before Covid-911—I mean Covid-19—hit.
BR: Well your novel, Locus Amoenus, is a dark comedy that is also an updated re-telling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, set in upstate New York. Just across the Hudson River from us, actually. Tell us what led you to write this particular book.
VA: Well, I fell in love with David Tennant’s portrayal of Hamlet in the 2009 Royal Shakespeare Production. Tennant is probably better known as the tenth doctor in the Doctor Who series, which is kind of the same character, actually. Tennant really got the part of Hamlet right. He’s not all mopey or low energy. He’s ironic and manic. Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s many court jester figures, like Mercutio, Falstaff, or Lear’s Fool. The jester is able to say things everyone else is afraid to say. I want to be the court jester. So I was watching this Hamlet over and over, you know, like the way a three-year-old rewatches a Disney movie a hundred times. And the language infected my thinking and I found myself merging whatever else was going on in my mind at the time.
TN: Well, we just heard the first chapter, which I should mention is taken from the audiobook version of the novel. I understand the actor who narrated it was a friend of yours.
VA: Yes, yes. Ben Jorgensen. His performance exceeded my expectations when I imagined Tennant in that role. He was wonderful. Ben joked about the increased risk of suicide for actors who play the part of Hamlet. He killed himself in London during the lockdown. A lot of people just can’t bear it, you know. I always planned on resurrecting my Hamlet for a part 2. Now I may have to. I may have to write about Covid. It will be a very black comedy, and I somehow want it to make it end happily.
BR: Hmm, well I liked his reading a lot. I’m interested in your writing process, the experience you went through in making Hamlet current. It seems you would need to be living in parallel universes, two time-streams in your head.
VA: Yes, realities fold in upon each other in a novelist’s head, like they’re doing now in my head with this variation on the theme. Because I was thinking in Shakespeare 24/7, I was able to notice parallels between the rotten state of Denmark and our state. Hamlet is the original conspiracy theorist, as well as one of the first empiricists in fiction trying to solve a murder by conducting an experiment on his uncle. Unfortunately for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, his chief eye-witness is a ghost. That’s a problem.
TN: Yeah, you know the thing that always stuck in my mind about Hamlet was how his father was killed by having poison poured in his ear. Anyway, if you can do this without it being a plot spoiler, tell us in what ways you departed from Shakespeare's story line.
VA: In spirit not at all. My basic plot is like a punch line, a 911 widow remarries, and her son— Hamlet—becomes depressed.
TN: Okay.
VA: I loved using Shakespeare because readers instantly understood what the book was about. They are conditioned to accept the premises. They already know the characters. It was great. It’s cheating. I loved it.
BR: Yeah. Well what I felt comes through in this excerpt is that, beyond a simple retelling of Hamlet, this book is a socio-cultural analysis. It vividly captures a time, post 9-11, and a place, rural New York, that my own observation tells me is very authentic—in both its visuals and its, you might say, political relationships. Clearly it comes from personal experience.
VA: Ah yes, some of it was stolen straight from real life and real people, particularly the bits that seem most unbelievable. A small rural town can be peopled with some real literary caricatures. I was in the post office the other day and a woman introduced herself to me as one of the characters in my book. She obviously felt that I had had her in mind. I said, “Oh it’s so nice to finally meet you in person.”
TN: Yeah, well… Now your book has an interesting title—Locus Amoenus, Latin for “pleasant place”. It’s a literary trope, used since classical times, including by Shakespeare. Is that why you chose it? Or was it because of its liminal sense— something between the rural and the urban?
VA: In the pastoral tradition the urbane poet becomes a shepherd and he lives among the simple rural folk. That’s a recipe for conflict and comedy, right? That’s pretty much the formula for this novel too. When I first moved upstate from SoHo, I had lunch with two Hudson residents, the very urbane poet John Ashbery and his husband, David Kermani. When I told David I had just bought a sheep farm in Amenia, he said, “Ah, locus amoenus, the pastoral paradise where nothing bad can ever happen… until it does.” That was the first germ that was planted. It took about ten years to bloom.
BR: So this novel is some years old now, even though it did feel quite current to me. That last line we just heard in the reading still applies: something is rotten in the USA. But I suspect your cultural critique has evolved quite a bit since you wrote it, especially with what we’ve all been going through this year. Care to give us some thoughts on the subject?
VA: Locus Amoenus is a dark comedy about 9/11. That was very hard to pull off without being flippant. But I did it. Gallows humor is powerful because, when you are in the midst of tragedy, like we are now, you are in such a state of emotional exhaustion that a switch can flip; you run out of the chemicals that trigger depression and anxiety and you’re left with nothing but endorphins and a deep sense of the absurdity of the crisis you are in. If only Ben had gotten there, to the end of Act II, where my Hamlet decides, “You know what? I think I’ll just go mad, Horatio…. When the world is crazy then it is the sane ones who appear to have lost their wits.” And then you don’t hesitate to act.
TN: You run the Dactyl Foundation and the Dactyl Review, giving support to literary fiction, which seems rather neglected in our commercialized age. We appreciate your efforts there. Anything new on that front?
VA: Thank you. I appreciate what you both are doing here too.
TN: Thank you.
VA: On that front, one of my political agendas is to work on getting publicly-funded, open software for platform cooperatives for artists of all kinds to use to create, publish, promote and get paid for their work.
TN: That sounds great.
VA: I’m coordinating with a few different groups on plans to move away from the mega corporations that control search engines, publishing, marketing, and sales and distribution of creative work. Anyone interested in that kind of effort, please contact me through Dactyl Review.
BR: Well I’d also like to mention that your website, vnalexander.com, shows three other published novels and a non-fiction book about biology, plus a screenplay and other work. And you’re a parent, and a farmer. Whew, how do you do it all?
VA: I don’t do it all. I’ve let some things go. I’ve got to work harder.
TN: Well, be that as it may, we’ve reached the end—but not the end of the world—despite what it may seem. Thanks again, Tori.
BR: Yes, really great talking to you.
VA: And also with you.
TN: What if the end of this episode actually is the end of the world?
BR: Wait, don’t stop the recording! Let’s keep it going as long as we can! Sing a song or something, I’ll snap my fingers.
TN: Yeah, you’re right. We can’t let it end this way. I tell you what, whistle for a minute while I think of something.
BR: Okay.
SFX—Whistling
TN: Oh yeah, that’s a great idea! Let’s see if I can do that. Hang on a minute. Okay. Here goes…
Quand il me prend dans ses bras
Il me parle tout bas
Je vois la vie en rose
Il me dit des mots d'amour
Des mots de tous les jours
Et ça me fait quelque chose*
* From La Vie en Rose by Edith Piaf.
BR: Tori, here we are at the end of this strange year. You were last with us near the beginning of the year, when everything seemed fairly normal. Welcome back!
VA: Thank you. I was in St Petersburg, Russia before and during the lockdown, which wasn’t too bad there, comparatively speaking. I have to say, life in the US now feels like a Black Mirror episode.
BR: Yes it does.
VA: It’s very surreal.
TN: Yeah, a lot has happened this year. And you even ran for Congress. Did you have any time to continue your collection of Meno’s Stories?
VA: You know politics takes me away from what I enjoy doing most, which is reading, writing and listening to fiction. By the way, I wrote the first few Meno stories in 2012 or so. And I felt compelled to put that project aside to write about the disturbing post-911 consumerism, political situation that was going on then. That became the novel we’re talking about today. Luckily, I did get most of the Meno collection finished in St Pete’s before Covid-911—I mean Covid-19—hit.
BR: Well your novel, Locus Amoenus, is a dark comedy that is also an updated re-telling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, set in upstate New York. Just across the Hudson River from us, actually. Tell us what led you to write this particular book.
VA: Well, I fell in love with David Tennant’s portrayal of Hamlet in the 2009 Royal Shakespeare Production. Tennant is probably better known as the tenth doctor in the Doctor Who series, which is kind of the same character, actually. Tennant really got the part of Hamlet right. He’s not all mopey or low energy. He’s ironic and manic. Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s many court jester figures, like Mercutio, Falstaff, or Lear’s Fool. The jester is able to say things everyone else is afraid to say. I want to be the court jester. So I was watching this Hamlet over and over, you know, like the way a three-year-old rewatches a Disney movie a hundred times. And the language infected my thinking and I found myself merging whatever else was going on in my mind at the time.
TN: Well, we just heard the first chapter, which I should mention is taken from the audiobook version of the novel. I understand the actor who narrated it was a friend of yours.
VA: Yes, yes. Ben Jorgensen. His performance exceeded my expectations when I imagined Tennant in that role. He was wonderful. Ben joked about the increased risk of suicide for actors who play the part of Hamlet. He killed himself in London during the lockdown. A lot of people just can’t bear it, you know. I always planned on resurrecting my Hamlet for a part 2. Now I may have to. I may have to write about Covid. It will be a very black comedy, and I somehow want it to make it end happily.
BR: Hmm, well I liked his reading a lot. I’m interested in your writing process, the experience you went through in making Hamlet current. It seems you would need to be living in parallel universes, two time-streams in your head.
VA: Yes, realities fold in upon each other in a novelist’s head, like they’re doing now in my head with this variation on the theme. Because I was thinking in Shakespeare 24/7, I was able to notice parallels between the rotten state of Denmark and our state. Hamlet is the original conspiracy theorist, as well as one of the first empiricists in fiction trying to solve a murder by conducting an experiment on his uncle. Unfortunately for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, his chief eye-witness is a ghost. That’s a problem.
TN: Yeah, you know the thing that always stuck in my mind about Hamlet was how his father was killed by having poison poured in his ear. Anyway, if you can do this without it being a plot spoiler, tell us in what ways you departed from Shakespeare's story line.
VA: In spirit not at all. My basic plot is like a punch line, a 911 widow remarries, and her son— Hamlet—becomes depressed.
TN: Okay.
VA: I loved using Shakespeare because readers instantly understood what the book was about. They are conditioned to accept the premises. They already know the characters. It was great. It’s cheating. I loved it.
BR: Yeah. Well what I felt comes through in this excerpt is that, beyond a simple retelling of Hamlet, this book is a socio-cultural analysis. It vividly captures a time, post 9-11, and a place, rural New York, that my own observation tells me is very authentic—in both its visuals and its, you might say, political relationships. Clearly it comes from personal experience.
VA: Ah yes, some of it was stolen straight from real life and real people, particularly the bits that seem most unbelievable. A small rural town can be peopled with some real literary caricatures. I was in the post office the other day and a woman introduced herself to me as one of the characters in my book. She obviously felt that I had had her in mind. I said, “Oh it’s so nice to finally meet you in person.”
TN: Yeah, well… Now your book has an interesting title—Locus Amoenus, Latin for “pleasant place”. It’s a literary trope, used since classical times, including by Shakespeare. Is that why you chose it? Or was it because of its liminal sense— something between the rural and the urban?
VA: In the pastoral tradition the urbane poet becomes a shepherd and he lives among the simple rural folk. That’s a recipe for conflict and comedy, right? That’s pretty much the formula for this novel too. When I first moved upstate from SoHo, I had lunch with two Hudson residents, the very urbane poet John Ashbery and his husband, David Kermani. When I told David I had just bought a sheep farm in Amenia, he said, “Ah, locus amoenus, the pastoral paradise where nothing bad can ever happen… until it does.” That was the first germ that was planted. It took about ten years to bloom.
BR: So this novel is some years old now, even though it did feel quite current to me. That last line we just heard in the reading still applies: something is rotten in the USA. But I suspect your cultural critique has evolved quite a bit since you wrote it, especially with what we’ve all been going through this year. Care to give us some thoughts on the subject?
VA: Locus Amoenus is a dark comedy about 9/11. That was very hard to pull off without being flippant. But I did it. Gallows humor is powerful because, when you are in the midst of tragedy, like we are now, you are in such a state of emotional exhaustion that a switch can flip; you run out of the chemicals that trigger depression and anxiety and you’re left with nothing but endorphins and a deep sense of the absurdity of the crisis you are in. If only Ben had gotten there, to the end of Act II, where my Hamlet decides, “You know what? I think I’ll just go mad, Horatio…. When the world is crazy then it is the sane ones who appear to have lost their wits.” And then you don’t hesitate to act.
TN: You run the Dactyl Foundation and the Dactyl Review, giving support to literary fiction, which seems rather neglected in our commercialized age. We appreciate your efforts there. Anything new on that front?
VA: Thank you. I appreciate what you both are doing here too.
TN: Thank you.
VA: On that front, one of my political agendas is to work on getting publicly-funded, open software for platform cooperatives for artists of all kinds to use to create, publish, promote and get paid for their work.
TN: That sounds great.
VA: I’m coordinating with a few different groups on plans to move away from the mega corporations that control search engines, publishing, marketing, and sales and distribution of creative work. Anyone interested in that kind of effort, please contact me through Dactyl Review.
BR: Well I’d also like to mention that your website, vnalexander.com, shows three other published novels and a non-fiction book about biology, plus a screenplay and other work. And you’re a parent, and a farmer. Whew, how do you do it all?
VA: I don’t do it all. I’ve let some things go. I’ve got to work harder.
TN: Well, be that as it may, we’ve reached the end—but not the end of the world—despite what it may seem. Thanks again, Tori.
BR: Yes, really great talking to you.
VA: And also with you.
TN: What if the end of this episode actually is the end of the world?
BR: Wait, don’t stop the recording! Let’s keep it going as long as we can! Sing a song or something, I’ll snap my fingers.
TN: Yeah, you’re right. We can’t let it end this way. I tell you what, whistle for a minute while I think of something.
BR: Okay.
SFX—Whistling
TN: Oh yeah, that’s a great idea! Let’s see if I can do that. Hang on a minute. Okay. Here goes…
Quand il me prend dans ses bras
Il me parle tout bas
Je vois la vie en rose
Il me dit des mots d'amour
Des mots de tous les jours
Et ça me fait quelque chose*
* From La Vie en Rose by Edith Piaf.
Music on this episode:
Harp Concerto in B flat Major, Opus 4 No.6 by Friedrich Händel
License Public Domain Mark 1.0
Sound Effects used under license:
Rock music "Checks for Free" by Audionautix
License CC Attribution 4.0 International
Finger snaps Snap_2wav by Snapper 4298
License CC BY 3.0
