This piece is ostensibly about the transactional nature of literary friendships, but I suspect it holds true for many other kinds of friendships as well.

Here is another way you are killing your sperm: “Working on a laptop wirelessly may hamper a man’s chances of fatherhood. In a study, sperm placed under a laptop connected to the internet through wi-fi suffered more damage than that kept at the same temperature but away from the wireless signal. The finding is important because previous worries about laptops causing infertility have focused on the heat generated by the machines.”

Previously: Are You Killing Your Sperm With Food?

Do you know the six variables that predict happiness? According to this, they are: positive self-esteem, sense of perceived control, extroversion, optimism, positive social relationships and a sense of meaning and purpose to life. Or, to put it more succinctly, a remarkable talent for self-delusion.

Talking To Karen Russell, Author Of ‘Swamplandia!’

by Daniel Crown

To open with a bit of an understatement, author Karen Russell has had a very good year. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, has received widespread praise since its publication in February (including a spot on the just-announced New York Times list of the 10 Best Books Of 2011). Then last month, the news broke that HBO has optioned the novel — a bildungsroman of sorts about a teenage alligator wrestler and her search for her missing sister — for what they describe as a “half hour comedy series.” The adaptation will coincide with producer Scott Rudin’s other in-the-works literary projects, including Noah Baumbach’s take on Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, as well as an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot.

A quick note for fans of the book: details in terms of casting and potential writers for the HBO show remain hush-hush — though, before we hung up, Russell did relent and say that she secretly wants Bill Murray to play Chief Bigtree. Here we discuss her history with short stories, HBO, and the pleasures of the kind of news stories that can originate only in Miami (spoiler alert: there may be talk of unlicensed butt injections).

Daniel Crown: Swamplandia!, obviously, was based on the short story, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator.” Considering that you broke on to the literary scene as a short fiction writer, do you see this becoming your MO of sorts? It certainly worked for Flannery O’Connor. Both of her novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away, were based upon previously published short stories. In her case this seemed a rather efficient way to work.

Karen Russell: Swamplandia! is such an odd book in some ways because the short story that wound up getting published is kind of this ice-cream scoop of a much longer, sprawling story. At that point it was the longest thing I had ever written. Maybe 40 or 50 pages. It’s never quite been the right length.

What’s so exciting about this new novel that I’m working on is that there was no real template. It’s scary in some ways, but I’m finding it kind of liberating to not have a short story as the basis. There are pros and cons. A good pro when I was writing Swamplandia! was that I really felt that I knew these characters and had a sense of the setting, but so much ended up changing over the course of drafting the book and one of the main obstacles was that I was resistant to changing my original view of the island.

I do really love going back to the acorn to the tree [of O’Connor’s Wise Blood] to some of the Enoch Emory stories. It’s fun to see how much is already there in terms of [O Connor’s] center of gravity and of her preoccupations in those early stories. It’s interesting when you go back and read them because these characters already exist and their personalities are full clothed and already formed.

I realize that this is the sort of horrid, pigeonholing language that critics tend to use to fill their word counts, but when I was first reading Swamplandia! I remember turning to my girlfriend on the train and saying, “This books reads exactly like what would happen if Flannery O’Connor wrote a Stephen King novel.” After doing a little research and reading a prior interview that observation doesn’t seem entirely off base…

(Laughing) No. I think that’s an amazing compliment. I love it when [reviewers] do that… “If Cormac McCarthy and June Cleaver got into a car that crashed into another car carrying so and so,” or “If Don DeLillo and Mary Higgins Clark went on a balloon ride”… I’m always so beyond humbled by this. It’s wonderful when it’s people that you have actually read and really did influence you. Flannery is someone that I always return to, her humor and her darkness. And one of my favorite Stephen King books, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to write Swamplandia! if that wasn’t percolating in the back of my mind. It’s basically just like the ancient horror stories — a little girl lost in the woods. There is some supernatural menace but beyond that it’s just a primordial horror story.

It’s easy to see how your work is particularly prime for that sort of language in that you manage to toe the difficult line separating literary writing from popular fiction. You seem to have been able to please the elite literary critics, but somebody who picks up Swamplandia! doesn’t necessarily have to hold a graduate degree in creative writing to enjoy it.

Oh, I hope so. I really hope that’s true. I’m reading Cloud Atlas right now, and I’m kind of amazed by David Mitchell. His sentences are gorgeous — he’s some kind of imagination Olympian or something — but the book is still readable. There’s such a great story there. That’s the highest bar, too high really. I think that Flannery and Stephen King also share the incredible ability to take on serious darkness in a kind of unsentimental way, and to use humor to leaven. I think that [O’ Connor] writes so beautifully about violence and she’s not unduly kind to any of her characters. I think that she and Stephen King are really good at winding the clock that way, letting a character spiral.

So, Swamplandia! on HBO, you’ve got to be really excited, right?

I am psyched. Really, really excited. I guess everyone has the voice of Eeyore inside them, the pessimist that says, “It might not happen”, but it’s in development right now and I’m really hopeful. I got to meet with [producer] Scott Rudin and his friends and I think that they are just so smart about these kinds of adaptations. I’m relieved that there’s going to be a real TV writer involved. I feel like everything I don’t do as a writer is what is required to write a good screenplay. You know what I mean? I prefer to write a three-paragraph extended metaphor about foliage, and that probably wouldn’t film well. We obviously can’t just hold the camera steady on a hibiscus while the actors talk (laughs).

I don’t even watch all that much TV, but most of the shows I have watched are from HBO. I wept like a baby when “Six Feet Under” ended. And “The Wire.” Everybody says that show feels like watching a novel, but it’s really true. They’re so good at giving you this universe that has dimensions.

Right now, obviously it’s still in the early stages. In my mind I have everything already cast, like my brother and I will be playing gators (laughs). I want to do all these Hitchcock cameos where I’m selling Gator Tots in the background or something.

How did this whole thing come together? Did you pitch it to them, or did they come to you?

They came to me. At the time I was still shocked that the book even had an ISBN number and was going to actually appear in the world. Then I hear that Scott Rudin had read it and enjoyed it and it kind of made my dome explode. It was a Pinocchio moment a little bit, where I was like… It’s a real book. We talked a little bit about what would have to change, because right now the focus is so much on this grief-struck little girl and we were talking about maybe giving her father more of a role, or how some of the ancillary characters get to become potentially more of a part of the series. We agreed that the book would have to transform in a major way. There’s been talk of using the setting of contemporary South Florida and the Everglades. We want to maintain the darkness and the kind of wacky humor, so we talked about Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation a lot. That’s a great example of something that is extremely dark and kind of Gonzo and insane, yet it maintains this very realistic story inside of it.

Again, I’m not really sure though. We’re still at a really early point. A lot of this is fantasy and speculation on my part.

You know, when I read the initial news release the way they described the show was as a “half hour comedy project”. It’s not that the book is totally bereft of humor, because it’s certainly funny, but it’s definitely not sitcom-y either.

(Laughs). That’s kind of the meta-joke here, because the book couldn’t be fatter to me. Even when I talk about the book it’s always like “if you had an aerial picture of what grief looks like in the body,” this swamp landscape. It’s not exactly “The King of Queens,” right? This widower and his weird kids twirling around in a swamp. But I definitely think that there is the potential for some lightness there. I was really excited that HBO would want to set something in a kind of fictionalized Miami. It’s truly hilarious. There’s a lot of potential there for all kinds of cultural mishaps.

The funniest part to me is how matter-of-factly people talk about crazy things that happen [in Miami]. My mom just sent me an article about this 30-year-old woman who was receiving injections of like cement and Fix-A-Flat, the stuff they used to fix flat tires, into her buttocks. Did you see that?

I did! It literally looked like she had two tires attached to her thighs.

It was horrifying. I was like, “What is wrong with you?” It was terrifying, and you feel so horrible, yet if that had happened in a novel it would work as some sort of dystopian comedy about vanity gone insane. But no. That’s actually just a Wednesday in Miami. They closed the wounds with Super Glue…

What a crazy place. A guy I grew up with is the managing editor at the Miami New Times now and some of their features are mind-boggling. I’ve been keeping up on Facebook, one crazy story after another. They range from wide-scale police corruption to the mass killing of prized pet birds… it’s all out of Chandler, or I guess more appropriately Elmore Leonard, but it really does reinforce the stranger than fiction adage.

Exactly. They do all of this long-form journalism about really serious stuff, and then all of this insane, wacky stuff about celebrity culture. When I was writing my novel, my dad would send me all kinds of crazy headlines saying, “Maybe you could put this in the novel,” and I never could because the stories were so outrageous. I’ve said this before, but my favorite one was about this archaeological field trip where a bunch of middle school students went on a pretend dig in Broward and in the process of digging they found a real body.

Wait, they what?!

They found an actual corpse that someone had buried in a pit. They were going to do a fake dig and they found a real body. I swear, somehow that story contains it all for me — that’s so Florida.

But I think at this point, [for the show] we’ve just been talking about how the troubles that afflict the family will probably be the same, where there is this rivalry with a dark Disney kind of theme park. But we’ve also spoken about expanding the world of Swamplandia! to include some of these outlaws and weirdos that are living in the swamp.

So it sounds like you are getting a fair amount of input. I was going to ask you what being a “consultant” actually means? Is it for serious, or is this some sort of long-established placation for authors?

I’ll have to let you know. I don’t know if I just get to wear a little Burger King Crown and don’t have any real power or what (laughs). They’ve been amazing about asking me about these characters and how I see the world. That’s very encouraging. Some of this was even before HBO optioned it. I was just talking to Scott [Rudin] about how his people want to maintain the voice of the novel and keep the same tone and how that was really important to them. And again, I’m glad that I don’t have to write the series myself because every episode would be four hours long and packed with figurative language. I don’t know how that would work on HBO.

I think one of the main changes would be to fill out some of the adult characters, because right now Ava and Kiwi get all of the airtime.

What about the supernatural aspects, like, say, the main arc of Ava and the Bird Man searching for Ossie?

Well, as I said, we are still “in development,” and I haven’t even sat down to talk with a writer yet or anything, so I guess we’re in the sci-fi speculative zone about what the show might be — but while I think the Bigtree family will remain at the heart of the show, and characters like the Bird Man will definitely feature, I think that particular storyline might not be the dominant one, at least at first. I do think that everybody is excited about keeping the supernatural elements, and having a show that is expansive enough (like South Florida itself) to encompass many, many registers: funny and dark, mythic and contemporary, the sprawl of the strip malls and the manufactured insanity of the theme parks and casinos and then the genuinely wild island.

I’m curious what it feels like to go at least partially hands off on something you’ve invested so much time and energy in? Inevitably, if/when the show makes it to air, people will know the Swamplandia! story more from HBO than they will from your book. Does this scare you in any way?

The reach of what they do is astonishing to me. I’ll have a story published in a journal and it will be read by my siblings and maybe 12 others, but the idea of the show being watched by millions of people, that’s an impossible shift for me to make.

I feel like I’m kind of in the dream position right now. Not to sound too naive, but I just feel like based on the HBO shows I’ve seen and Rudin’s track record, they will do a great job. And in a way I’m happy to turn it over because I’m glad for it to become something new in a new medium. I’m not the sort of person that would become outraged if they don’t use the right fabric on Grandma’s wedding dress. I don’t think that I have that neurotic of an attachment to my own work.

Daniel Crown is a freelance writer based out of Brooklyn.

So we’ve all scanned Google Earth for the Indian ship-breaking beaches, or the rows of planes in aircraft boneyards, or the abandoned and overgrown town of Chernobyl. But toxic, garbage-y sites aren’t always limited to exotic, remote locales — sometimes they’re right past our backyards. Sometimes they’re even under our backyards.

Osborne Reef

In 1972, two million tires, clustered into groups with metal clips, were dumped into the ocean in a two birds/one stone attempt to clean up the landscape encourage natural reef growth. Instead, the well-intentioned ecologists created a 50-foot diameter dead zone a mile off the coast of Fort Lauderdale. Area marine life was forced away by the completely inhospitable environment. Additionally, the cheap metal of the clips soon corroded away in the salt water. The tires broke free from the bundles and, tires being tires, they became mobile. Soon tires were washing up after every tropical storm and hurricane on shores from North Carolina to the Florida Panhandle. There have been removal projects on and off since 2001, but at a cost of $17/per tire it’s a slow process. By the way, the last tire in was a ceremonial gold-colored beaut dropped by the Goodyear Blimp. I wonder if they’ve dredged that one up yet?

Fresno Sanitary Landfill

Congratulations, Fresno! You’re the home of the first modern landfill, the only one to be declared a National Historic Landmark. Opened in 1937, the Fresno Sanitary Landfill accepted an average of 16,500 tons of municipal trash per month until it closed in 1987. Today it’s a Superfund site — but the human exposure levels are low enough for baseball fields to sit on the same block. Though I’d steer clear of that pond.

Puente Hills

The largest landfill in the United States is sandwiched between two of the most stereotypically Calfornia-sounding towns in existence: Avocado Heights and the City of Industry. It is located, as you could reasonably conclude from those names, just outside of Los Angeles. Puente Hills, aside from being a giant mountain of garbage and accepting your dirt for free between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. (where else are you going to put your dirt, huh? On the ground?), channels the gas produced decomposing trash into power for the equivalent of 70,000 homes/yr. The Center for Land Use Interpretation, an LA-based research organization, organized archeologically minded tours of the dump as a way of showing the public what happens to their garbage once it leaves their curb. CLUI summarized the trip in a 2009 edition of their newsletter, Lay of the Land — trust me, it’s a must-read.

Munisport

Munisport. That sounds fun, right? Like a rec center or something. Nope! This is a column about trash heaps, not foosball. Located in North Miami, Munisport actually had a short life as a landfill, 1974 to ’80, but that was enough time for a a massive underground ammonia plume to form, threatening Biscayne Bay. Poison in the groundwater could only keep the developers away for so long. Twenty years later, a 6000-unit condo project went up under the name Biscayne Landing. Being a known contaminated area, few units were sold, and when you add in the recession, well… The project was declared a 100% loss earlier this year. A pair of near-empty towers sit on the waterfront, most potential residents scared away by features like the horrific odor that emanates from the ground after a rainstorm. Does anyone know if “CSI:Miami” has done a show on this? If yes, please tell us the Caruso quip in the comments?

Valley of the Drums

And you thought this little tour was going to be all California and Florida. Oh scenic Bullitt County, Kentucky! Home of bucolic rolling hills, bluegrass music, UPS’ big sort, and up until recently 23 acres of the finest leaking industrial waste drums this side of a Sierra Club scare ad. Seriously. Look at this place. It was an uncontrolled dumping ground for all kinds of industrial waste for years before the authorities paid it any mind (which they did in the late ’60s, when it caught fire). Though the site once held more than 15,000 leaky drums, careful cleanup efforts have reduced it to only a few dozen today (they’re still finding more in neighboring Jefferson Memorial Forest, which, oof!). Many of the drums contained (and thus, leaked) latex paint, which over time has dried to form curious modern fossils. View those and a variety of other terrifying photos in this retrospective slideshow, published by the Courier-Journal in 2008.

Point Comfort

This is not an infrared image. It’s not a scene from the Mars rover. It’s not the Crayola harvesting ground. It’s not the Hungarian sludge, either — although that’s not a bad guess. It’s the Arcoa aluminum plant just outside of Point Comfort, Texas, and the dull red hue comes from the waste product created by extracting aluminum from bauxite ore. That massive slide in Hungary was caused in part by that plant’s practice of storing the waste as mud. Here in the United States, the waste is intentionally dried out, which means that dust storms in that area of Texas are rust colored. Which sounds almost picturesque, until you notice that it’s eating away the paint on your car and then wonder what it’s doing to your lungs.

Agriculture Street Landfill

For every waste site that tries to camouflage themselves under an innocuous name — Love Canal, Rolling Knolls, uh, Wilmington International Airport — you have a place like Agriculture Street Landfill, a forgettable name for a briefly forgotten place. Since the early twentieth century, the New Orleans open-pit-style dump (not a controlled landfill, such as the aforementioned Fresno site) was colloquially called ‘Dante’s Inferno’ because of its frequent uncontrollable fires. It closed in the mid-’60s and was out of the public mind just long enough — a decade later when some bright folks covered it in sandy soil and built up a residential neighborhood including an elementary school. The EPA initially declined to get involved, but was forced to declare it a contaminated area in the wake of abnormally high cancer rates among residents. In some cases, trash was buried so shallowly that it was uncovered by citizens trying to construct pools and fences. Talk about Not In My Backyard!

Beltsville Agricultural Research Center

Here’s a question that probably won’t get a yes from many of you: Have you ever taken the B30 Metrobus from Greenbelt to BWI? If you have, you’ve passed right through a prominent Superfund site without even realizing it (okay, fine, maybe you realized it, overachiever). If you haven’t had the pleasure, let me share that the Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center is a 6600 acre US Department of Agriculture testing ground. Composed of farmland and crisscrossed with streets with names like “Animal Husbandry Rd and “North Dairy Rd,” here is where the USDA grows test crops and researches plant genetics ad food animal production along with a variety of other practices. What has qualified it a Superfund site, however, is the chemical testing that goes on here, which contaminates the groundwater. Many of those chemicals originate on, you guessed it, Pesticide Road.

* I mean that in the nicest way, of course. I’m a member of the Sierra Club, John Muir is a national hero, and their scare ads on the metro are hi-larious.

Victoria Johnson would love to visit the Center for Land Use Interpretation someday.

Osborne Reef photo by Navy Combat Camera Dive Ex-East; Valley of Drums photo courtesy of EPA. Other aerial images courtesy of Google Maps.

If you fly a lot, you’ll either be caught up on your fine literature reading or more likely on the comedies that are available in the iTunes store, home of DRM and overpriced rentals. (Also home to movies that are difficult to watch on planes, because suddenly there’s boobies on your bright portable device and you’re like “Oh my God, there’s an eight-year-old about 20 inches behind me.”) After the comedies that launched a thousand post-”Are Women Funny” magazine pieces, then in the iterated form of “Are Women Box Office” magazine pieces — those would be about Bridesmaids and then about Anna Faris, because of course we’re all so very concerned about box office, since we’re all Hollywood executives — there’s a weird moment now when it’s not really clear what comedy is and what comedy is okay and what’s a boy comedy and what’s a girl comedy, which all ends up meaning that dudes can’t really have sex in movies anymore.

This current weirdness might end up helpful for us real people; the gendering of box office is totally a question for marketers and studios and trade paper journalists, not the vast majority of us who actually just like to go see movies that we like. Why should I care if women have to “coerce” their boyfriends to attend a movie that stars a lady? Why should I care if something is a “bro” movie!

For the “spate” of lady comedies, Bridesmaids was back in May and Bad Teacher came in June and What’s Your Number? was in late September, all being followed up by the artsy pedigreed version of the foul-mouthed lady genre, Young Adult, arriving in a week.

For the boy movies, well, August brought The Change-Up, which borrows the conceit of a magic fountain (I knowwww) from When in Rome (garbage) to create wonder and mishap! Hoo boy! In which: a dumb skeevy dude and his married overachiever best friend change bodies and the loser guy learns about how to succeed and the overachiever dude learns to mix things up and amazingly, they both totally avoid having sex with people because the screenwriters would find it un-overcomeable. It’s ridiculous; it’s like, one minute the skeevy dude in the married dude’s body is like “I’M GOING TO BANG YOUR WIFE” and then he’s overcome by feelings and can’t and the uptight dude in the player-dude’s body is like “I’M GOING TO BANG THIS HOT WONDERFUL CHICK” and then he just can’t because of also his feelings.

So… somehow, no one ends up having sex.

Lots of everyone criticized the (actually rather delightful!) Anna Faris vehicle What’s Your Number? for being sex-negative and slut-shaming and whatever (I mean, sure, the point of the movie was that she was kind of a whore for having slept with 19 people, which, haaaaaa, uh oh am I in trouble) but in the end at least she could have sex. (To be fair, her romantic attachment object in the film also has the sex with people, or at least we see ladies regularly leaving his apartment, but that’s evened out by her having “been around.”) And in Bad Teacher, our striving lady hero totally does her financial-romantic target but it’s only because she seduced him and she gets to have sex with him because he wasn’t The One For Her Anyway and meanwhile the whole movie the Right Guy For Her remains chaste to get her attention. She can do dudes, or at least Timberlakes, and actually does, but The Right Guy can’t.

Weirdly, when you start to look at it, it starts to seem like men cannot have penis-in-vagina sex in pop movies pretty much! For instance, the only real sex that happens in either Hangover movie, as far as I can recall, and admittedly it’s a bit of a blur, is in the sequel, directed by Ang Lee’s son (oy!), when the groom of that movie’s bachelor party has sex with a prostitute. A male prostitute, as it turns out! Penis-in-vagina for men is a dealbreaker: somehow, test screenings or something have convinced Hollywood that the audience (either the men in it or the women in it or both) will totally reject men actually having sex. Even (especially?) in the rom-coms; the formula there of sleazy dude plus lady prevents Josh “Snacky” Duhamel from having sex in Life As We Know It, whereas uptight K. Heigl (blurgh, crazy eyes!) shacks up with some dude while she’s on hiatus from her Unexpected One True Snacky Love — despite that he’s supposed to be the one that’s “been around.” (This is pretty much exactly what happens in The Ugly Truth, too! AKA, the last movie in which Gerard Butler will ever be hot.)

I’m sure there’s a thousand exceptions that I’m totally forgetting. But somehow there’s become this thing where it’s a total betrayal that no one can write their screenplay out of if dudes have sex. Good news though: now Gerard Butler will solve all that with 2012’s Playing the Field, sure to be nominated for zero awards. Here is the studio summary: “A former professional athlete with a weak past tries to redeem himself by coaching his son’s soccer team, only to find himself unable to resist when in scoring position with his players’ restless and gorgeous moms.” Wow, it sounds like he’ll actually maybe have sex in it, before he gets reformed. Likely however no plane ride is boring enough to make me watch that.

by Awl Sponsors

The Whitney Museum has unearthed some bizarre gems from its collection for Real/Surreal, a new exhibition that focuses on the tension and overlap between realism and surrealism in twentieth century art. Featuring big-name artists like Man Ray, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, and Joseph Cornell alongside equally remarkable lesser-known artists, Real/Surreal is “like visiting your grandmother’s attic and finding it loaded with forgotten treasures.” (The New York Times.)

Learn more about Real/Surreal and view installation photos on the Whitney’s website.

“Appert’s gets the fibulas from a plant in Sioux City, Iowa, that separates them from the rest of the shank and cuts some of them into two-ounce portions, using a saw developed by Mr. File. Appert’s workers tumble 2,000-pound batches in a paddle mixer that helps force a marinade of water, salt and ‘natural pork flavorings’ into the meat.”
 — Articles about the production processes behind our proud nation’s suicidal dietary habits are always fascinating and disgusting. And oftentimes, also, confusingly appetizing. Barbecued “pig wings” sound delicious to me. (Especially the kind with blue cheese in Chicago. Yum! Wait, no, yuck! No, yum!) But the most confounding thing about John T. Edge’s reporting about them in today’s Dining section is that he somehow got through it without making a “when pigs fly” joke.

by Eric Spiegelman

Late last night, the LAPD raided Occupy Los Angeles. More than 1400 police officers — about 15% of the city’s officers — were used to arrest more than 200 people, leaving the encampment in a shambles. Teams of police wore hazmat suits and K-9 units swept the camp, looking for incendiary devices, which they did not find. The tactical approach, guided by LAPD Chief Charlie Beck on-site, involved eventually cordoning off City Hall Park and arresting everyone trapped inside. The operation was concluded by 3:30 a.m.

Previously: Photographs from Occupy LA

Eric Spiegelman is a web producer in Los Angeles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aINmJ5ieM6Y

We are going to draw the generational line right down the middle here between those of you who are all, “Who?” and those of you who will be cursing my name for the rest of the day as you try to get this song out of your heads. So: Stacey Lynn Swain, you turn 53 today! Remember that time you were on “The Facts Of Life?” I do! You played an aspiring musician! I think you wore spandex leggings at some point! I spent four years learning the Spanish language and can barely remember one word today, let alone any kind of conjunction or idiomatic expression, but I remember that episode! The human brain is truly and mysterious and ultimately comical thing. Anyway, happy birthday! I hope you put on this dress and go celebrate.