Hypertext Magazine asked Stuart Ross, author of Jenny in Corona, “How can you publish Jenny in Corona when the world is burning?”

By Stuart Ross

Good question. Adding yet another artistic product to the burning world? What gives? Well, oil gives. I think about a song off of Father John Misty’s 2012 album Fear Fun. “Now I’m Learning to Love the War” challenges its listener to “try not to think too much about the truly staggering amount of oil it takes to make a record.” If you pause and think about the amount of oil it takes to do anything, the mind staggers. The dictionary keeps an obsolete entry for stagger—“characterized by staggering.” That doesn’t sound so obsolete to me anymore. We are a staggering disease of a species.

Try not to think about the oil it takes to spin a record or stream an album. Try not to think about the amount of oil it takes to put Norman Rockwell pictures out on international tours. Try not to think of the amount of oil it took for Lana Del Rey to sing the ornamented title track off her latest album, Norman Fucking Rockwell. It’s a song that should have one hundred harps in it, but there aren’t one hundred harps. Think about the amount of oil it will take to transport future harps to her Grammy Awards performance.

We are making people, making things, making books, making records. This be the oil we do. Fuels, not the blues, run this game. I shall in this moment slide over into my spitting voice. I wish to thank oil. For this opportunity of a lifetime of nattering. Thank you to the cinnamon-flavored fossil fuels and derrick-fortified B12 in my breakfast cereal. Thank you to the microplastics in my son’s purified drinking water. Thank you to the palm oil in my Earth Balance. Sorry about that Mr. Orangutan, but you’re a pretty smart monkey, you know our eternal Treblinka with the lower creatures. Lennon’s dream came true, the Brexiters have no country, but they had their staggering bob: a calf that can’t even stand up before it gets whacked. In Ulysses, Joyce describes this delight as the “cookable and eatable flesh of a calf newly dropped from its mother.” Softly falling, that calf who never said yes. Foodies intimately unacquainted with the minutiae of the municipal “food processing plants” where we ice our food workers will know just what I’m talking about. Shout out to the oil that pumps out character complaints about white veganism. Amazon, in a metaphorical sense. “We’re cashless” doesn’t mean we’re oil-less. Shout out to the BTUs cooling the server farms packed with free-range “cloud computers” that allow our glitch-free scrolling through soy feeds refreshing evergreen. Hey, Houston? Thnxs bra. Thanks to all you majors. Big ups to all you frackers. Keep on rocking the Permian Basin of your free world. My poetry’s dope and I blame the news.

These days artists—and any normal adult who might get filmed wearing a v-neck wherever fine coffees are served—are accused of being snowflakes. We all know “snowflake” means the F-word. My mind drifts to those early November snows at Leo Point on Foster Beach. But then I see those big wet snowflakes blanketing the windshields of America’s infinity SUV. Now just over two years old, a few months older than my child, I still see that photo of those retiring golfers at the Beacon Rock Golf Course in North Bonneville, Washington, playing while the Eagle Creek wildfire burns a mile away on the other side of the Columbia River in Oregon (oil knows no state line.) And I still see the caption author Elissa Washuta gave to this photo on Twitter: “the fire is new, but golfing on land we were forced from is not.” Snowflake haters are the storm. Because they need to be those parents in Rockwell’s “Freedom from Fear,” tucking kiddos in at night with their hemlock newspaper full of good news about bombs killing staggering bobs somewhere else.

Is Jenny in Corona political? Of course it is. It’s a novel. “To exercise literacy has become a political act in and of itself,” author Joshua Cohen wrote. “The politics of the novel are now just the novel.” When my book came out, and my friends and family got their copies, I thanked them so much, but in my mind I saw, somewhat like what the novel’s protagonist feels when he thinks about the elephants who made his piano keys, the black gold that shipped their Prime member copies, I heard the screaming trees eating the ink. In her song, Lana nudges her delivery of the word love into the territory of life. As writers, we have no alternative to the life wish, to change lives through love. Amiri Baraka wrote in his poem “Short Speech to my Friends” from 1964’s The Dead Lecturer:

A compromise
would be silence. To shut up, even such risk
as the proper placement
of verbs and nouns. To freeze the spit
in mid-air, as it aims itself
At some valiant intellectual’s face.

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Stuart Ross  is a writer living in Chicago. His novel Jenny in Corona is available from Tortoise Books.