THE LITBLOG CO-OP

LBC Podcast: Mark Binelli

Nominator: Jessica Stockton

Nominee: Mark Binelli

Subjects Discussed: What's real and what's not real in Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die, anarchism, 20th century film references, the Coen brothers, Upton Sinclair, extemporaneous speeches, on not writing the novel chronologically, the sensation of research, knife-grinding, Buster Keaton, meat metaphors, Out of Bounds, shopping S&V around to publishers, Dalkey Archive Press, the fragmented trial scenes, and experimental fiction.

Excerpt from Show:

Binelli: When I hit on the comedy team idea, I immediately liked that. And then at some point, I can't say when, but at some point the name "Sacco and Vanzetti" just popped into my head and it was such a perfect comedy team name.  Initially, it seemed so ridiculous, which it is obviously.  But then the more I thought about it, the more parallels between anarchism and slapstick started to come out.  And it just kind of weirdly made more and more sense.  So I just decided to embrace it.

Backup Link: (MP3)

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky's Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show.)

Author Interview: Mark Binelli

The following is an interview with Mark Binelli, the author of the novel, Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! (Dalkey Archive, 2006).  He is also a journalist who has written many pieces for Rolling Stone, The Believer, and other outlets.  He lives in New York.

(A quick note of apology for the slacking research as I toss two questions to Mark about his days at the University of Michigan, butchering information on both)

Dan:

Thank you, Mark, for taking some time from your schedule to answer some questions.

Mark:

No problem.

Dan:

You’re listed as a native Detroiter in your biographies.  Actually Detroit, or a suburb?  Or, was your family one of the many, many (as was my own) that started in Detroit proper and moved to the suburbs in the late 60’s or early 70’s?

Mark:

I grew up in St. Clair Shores, a suburb on the east side. (Between 8 and 9 Mile, for non-Detroiters who’ve seen the Eminem movie.) (Trivia: the trailer park depicted in that movie is actually in SCS.) My parents both emigrated from Northern Italy, my mom’s family to SCS and my dad originally to Detroit proper. (6 mile!)

Dan:

You attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate.  Was it the fact that it was the big university in the area that drew you there, or did you go to attend a specific school?

Mark:

The former. Really did sadly little research into schools.

Dan:

It was a journalism degree there, correct?  Did you take any creative writing course while you were there?

Mark:

It was an English degree, with a creative writing sub-concentration. I took a class with Nick Delbanco, who I believe still runs the MFA program, and a really cool woman named Tish Ezekiel. But did lots of journalism as well, at the school newspaper.

Dan:

You went on to receive an MFA at Columbia, right?

Mark:

Yes. People knock MFA programs, often for good reason, but it really worked for me. Coming from a freelance background, I needed deadlines, and the knowledge that people would be reading my work, that fear of public humiliation. I had two workshops with Ben Marcus and a seminar with Lawrence Weschler, who were both fantastic. I found the rest of the program a bit lackluster, at least at the time, though I’ve heard it’s much better now. I also found having a peer group extremely helpful. There’s nothing like being surrounded by other people who are just as excited about books and writing as you. (Incidentally, one of my best friends, Dinaw Mengestu, who was at Columbia at the same time, just published a novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, that’s getting rave reviews. I’d highly recommend it.)

Dan:

You have had a really nice run as a journalist, writing for Rolling Stone, The Believer, and other outlets.  Looking through your Rolling Stone articles, you’ve done features on a wide variance of people – from Britney Spears to Kid Cannabis, to Ali G before he was big on HBO, and the list goes on.  Who did you enjoy meeting and writing about the most?  How about the worst?  Any really big surprises from what you expected vs. what you ended up meeting?

Seeing is believing

We talk about Mark Binelli's slapstick incarnations of Sacco & Vanzetti, and amazingly, several of us in the LBC have seen Laurel and Hardy films. We'll passionately proclaim that Buster Keaton was a far better comedian than Charlie Chaplin and cite the movie scenes to prove it. Maybe it's not just us -- silent films seems to have had a resurgence lately. If you want to see a silent movie with live accompaniment, you can, all across the country (and beyond).  In addition to these venues and festivals, many museums and libraries show silent films, too.

When I lived in LA I loved going to the Silent Movie Theatre -- it shows silent films most every weekend, including this next one. In Seattle, silents play at the grand Paramount Theatre every Monday night (April 30: Harold Lloyd). In Fremont, California (that's in the Bay Area), the Essanay Silent Film Museum regularly shows silent films on Saturday nights. It will also host the 10th annual Broncho Billy Film Festival, June 24-30, 2007.

But you don't have to wait until then to catch a festival.

- From April 21-May 6, the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, NYC screens William S. Hart movies.
- Later this week, April 26-29: the 10th British Silent Cinema Festival in Nottingham, England.
- At the New York Historical Society in Manhattan you can catch the Silent Clown Film Series on intermittent Sundays; next up, May 6
- Cinevent, (Columbus, OH) May 25-28, 2007 - movies + collectibles
- San Francisco Silent Film Festival, July 12-14, 2007
- Cinestation (Massillon, Ohio), September 27-30, 2007
- Giornate del Cinema Muto (Pordenone, Italy) October 6-13, 2007
- Kansas Silent Film Festival (Topeka) February 22-23, 2008
- Cinefest (Liverpool, NY) March 13-16, 2008

Chances are silents can also be found at these places: 3 grand theatres around Chicago (check local listings).  Perhaps the Chataqua Silent Film series in Boulder, Colorado, will be on again in June. The Vickers Theatre in Three Oaks, Michigan will probably be screening silent films again this August. Cinecon 43 might happen this year at its regular time -- Labor Day Weekend -- in Hollywood, CA. But that'll be competing with the Telluride Film Festival, which may have a silent or two, out in Colorado.

A terrific and authoritative resource for all things silent film is SilentEra.com.

And the International Laurel & Hardy Appreciation Society is called Sons of the Desert. Organized not by chapter but by tent; there may already be a tent near you.

Waiting For Sacco And Vanzetti

I knew I was going to like Mark Binelli's "Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die" when I read the quote that precedes the first page, in which a journalist tells his editor:

"There's no story in it -- just a couple of wops in a jam."

Binelli sustains the dark comic pitch through the entire rich story, though it's worth noting that his two protagonists suffer through the dreary routine of their film-clown careers in much the same way as any other hapless working-class strivers suffer through their hard days.  Binelli's decision to render history's doomed anarchists as film clowns made me wonder how many other works of literature present pairs of vaudeville comedians as symbols for long-suffering humanity, and I thought it'd be worth mentioning a few.  Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" comes to mind, of course.  Beyond that, there's Kurt Vonnegut's "Slapstick", which uses Laurel and Hardy as a core motif, and there's also a good Paul Auster novel called "The Music of Chance", in which a poker player becomes the prisoner of two insidious men, Flower and Stone, who strongly resemble a silent-film comedy team.

I'm really not sure what exactly Beckett and Vonnegut and Auster are up to with these symbolic comic duos, but whatever it is I have a feeling Mark Binelli was aiming for something similar with "Sacco and Vanzetti", and I think he hits his mark. 

Despite my affection for this book, I have to mention that at some point I became hopelessly lost in the rich and celebrity-packed narrative, and once I lost the thread of logic I could not find it again.  The book works well as a conceptual piece but it may have tested my patience a little too much -- I wasn't sure whether I should read this book or simply "apprehend it" the way one apprehends a cubist painting. 

I (Don't) Wanna Be Anarchy

It is not unusual for a novel to make me uncomfortable. I am, after all, cursed with a queasy nature and blessed with an overactive imagination. Give me a character with a monster under the bed and I'm all heart-pounding palm-sweating tension with nervous glances to make sure the windows are latched and the door is locked.

Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! did not make me double-check-behind-the-shower-curtain uncomfortable -- I felt an entirely different kind of tension. The kind of tension that comes from facing something I simply don't enjoy. And I don't enjoy physical comedy. I have never found humor in the sight gags and slipping on banana peels and pie throwing that characterize the genre. I don't understand how anyone can find Laurel and Hardy amusing. I don't see how one could actively seek out the antics of Abbott and Costello. I can almost tolerate the Marx Brothers.

Almost.

Yet I was enthralled by the scenes of madness, the pulling the tablecloth from under the dishes, the mayhem, the fact that these characters were deeply connected to one another. If Sacco sneezes, well, Vanzetti must...oh you know. Enter with a newspaper and loaf of bread. Life must, after all, go on.

On the other hand, the book reinforced one foundation of my belief system: I do not believe in anarchy. Often people say they don't believe in things -- say blue nail polish or square dancing, things that quite obviously exist -- but they quite readily believe in things that don't. I am the opposite. I believe that blue nail polish is a fashion statement that could easily be abandoned and that square dancing is not my personal favorite form of exercising.

I do not believe in God and I do not believe in anarchy. I don't think that anarchy is a natural form of nature and what passes for anarchist behavior is really just a sad excuse for misbehavior with a high falutin' sounding excuse. If nature abhors a vacuum, it surely loathes anarchy ten degrees more.

The humor that makes for good physical, good slapstick comedy comes from its seeming anarchist nature. What seems to pure chaos is really an elaborate ballet. The routines work because every player knows his or her part -- even those who are not in on the joke. Such is how it is with real anarchists. They seem to be advocating chaos, but they're really pushing for conformity of a different type. Remember, the marketing scheme came before the Sex Pistols.

[This is, I think, what anarchy has come to mean in popular lore; Mark Binelli notes that some anarchists fell closer to a more that believed society would form its own rules of cooperation. Bombs and distractions are far easier to work with than cooperation, and this, I think, is why the popular culture chose the latter over the former. Also, bombs make better news stories than human cooperation.]

Reading this book made me uncomfortable. I cringed during the story of Carnera, the wrestling giant. The whole escapade with the drugged kangaroo and oversized utensils -- not to mention questionable nutrition value in backstage fare -- spoke of sadness, the kind of sadness that comes when you know that what you have worked your life to achieve is nothing more than fleeting entertainment for a fickle audience. Whatever the next big thing might be, and there is always a next big thing, you are not it.

This is all a weird reaction to a book I liked, I know. In a way, I wanted the characters to grow beyond their roles, and in some ways they did. But like the former child stars you on reality shows that somebody, I don't know who, must watch, I felt like I needed to stick with Sacco and Vanzetti. In real life, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for anarchy -- or rather behaving in a way that our government didn't deem appropriate as I still do not believe in anarchy and I think it's a lousy excuse for killing people -- I didn't want this to happen to Nic and Bart, two guys I know in real life (though they go by different names and follow different stars).

Did I get my wish? Were Nic and Bart more like Peter Brady than Corey Feldman (yeah, I know, but he'll always be Peter Brady to me)? In a way it doesn't really matter. Because Sacco and Vanzetti exist as much in lore as reality. And these fictional characters know it.

Book Contest: Win Swag from SACCO AND VANZETTI MUST DIE!

We're kicking of a week of discussion on Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!, Mark Binelli's serious romp through the terrain of anarchy, slapstick, ethnicity, and the trials of partnership.  Mark will be blogging here on Wednesday, and Thursday and Friday will see a podcast and print interview.  In the meantime, members of the Litblog Co-Op will be blogging with their takes on various aspects of the book -- feel free to chime in in the comments.

But for everyone out there, whether or not  you've read the book, we're continuing our tradition of the book contest.  Winner of this week's challenge will receive not only a signed copy of Sacco & Vanzetti Must Die!, but an original publicity poster with the book's striking cover, signed by Mark himself!. Here, then, is your contest question:

What historical "couple" would make a great slapstick comedy team, a la Sacco & Vanzetti, and why?

The contest will be open all week.  Post your entries as comments on this post, and be sure to link to your homepage or email so we can contact you if you win.  The winner  will be notified by email and then announced here at the end of the week.  Good luck!

Mark Binelli's Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!

I picked up Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! for totally non-content-related reasons: because I'd been invited to the author's book party; because Chad, the (former) sales rep from Dalkey Archive, sent me a galley and is a super nice guy; because I'd been told that Mark Binelli lives in the neighborhood and wrote most of the book in the café of the bookstore where I work.  And the first thing I did was turn to the author interview in the back, figuring I could cheat a little and still look respectably interested in the book while noshing on the publisher's free eats.

But Binelli's explanation of what he was trying to do with this book sucked me right in. I turned back to the beginning and started reading, and I didn't pick up another book for a week (very rare). I bothered my significant other with endless stories and quotations from S&V, missed subway stops, tripped over sidewalks while reading, and found myself thinking about anarchists and stand-up comedians far more often than usual.

Because this turns out to be my favorite kind of book: the genre-bending, pop-culture referencing, intellectually challenging, roller coaster alternate history, with slapstick. The Sacco and Vanzetti of the title are not exactly the Italian anarchists executed after a famously xenophobic trial in the 1920s. They are, rather, an early film comedy team in the style of Abbot and Costello, the Three Stooges, or the Marx Brothers. Sacco is the fat one (of course), given to creating chaos whenever possible, and Vanzetti is the straight man, the serious one, the ideologue.

The story unfolds in slapstick movie scenes, interviews, and historical asides. It's not exactly linear, but then neither is comedy.  As Binelli states in the in-book interview, "I took cartoonish movie characters and tried to make them somewhat 'real,' but neglected to remove them from their cartoonish movie scenarios." It's extremely unclear where S&V's real life ends and their movies begin – and increasingly, as the book goes on, where the fictional S&V end and their historical counterparts begin. Because isn't slapstick obviously akin to anarchy? – all that upsetting fancy dinner parties, hassling cops, blowing things up, victory to the underdog? And as Binelli makes clear, there's also a similarity between the entertainer and the ideologue: those who, in the name of their cause or their art, are willing to live a fairly miserable day-to-day existence because something great is (maybe) going to come out of it.

This book is fun to talk about for its sophisticated themes: art & its sacrifices, racial stereotypes and comedy, the line between being a victim of capitalism and deciding to blow things up.  But it's fun to read for its details: pie fights, knife juggling acts, the funeral of Laurence Olivier with the great comedians of the '20s as pallbearers.

Mark Binelli, as it turns out, is also a really nice guy, and a really promising first-time novelist. I'm really looking forward to hearing more from him as we talk about his book, and engendering some conversation about the ways this experimental novel spins comedy out of politics, fiction out of biography, and serious ideas out of absurdity.  We'll be featuring Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! here on the Litblog Co-Op site the week of April 23 to 27, so feel free to join the conversation.  There will be wild speculations and sober reflections by LBCers who have read the book, and contests and giveaways for you lay readers.

And if someone gets a pie in the face while we're at it, so much the better.