Nick Greer  
February 19, 2016 
CART Provided by A La CARTe Connection  
This rough edit transcript, which may contain missing, misspelled or paraphrased words, is only provided for your immediate review and is not certified as verbatim and is not to be cited in any way. 
>> KIKI PETROSINO:  Good Morning and welcome to this year’s Calvino Prize Reading, part of the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900.
I’m Professor Kiki Petrosino, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program here at the University of Louisville.
Before we begin, I’d like to inform guests that captioning is being provided for this event.  If you would like to borrow a handheld device to follow the proceedings today, please see Jana in the front row.
This year, the Calvino Prize celebrates a full decade of supporting the best works of fabulist fiction in the style of Italo Calvino.
The Prize was founded by our supporting donor, Mr. Rick Simmons.  And I'm not sure exactly if he's here in the room today, but let's give him a warm round of applause for supporting this prize.
[Applause] 
>> KIKI PETROSINO:  In addition to Mr. Simmons’ support, 100% of the submission fees for the Calvino Prize go towards running the contest each year.  The Prize winner receives a cash award of $1,500, travel and lodging to Louisville to read right here at the Louisville Conference, and his or her winning piece is published in Salt Hill Journal of Syracuse University.
Today it’s my honor to introduce the author of this year’s winning piece: Nick Greer.  Now based in San Francisco, Nick holds an MFA degree in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona and he is a founding editor of Territory, a literary project about maps and other strange objects.  Recent writing has appeared in Phantom, PLINTH, and the Tin House Open Bar blog.
This year’s final judge for the Calvino Prize was Martin McLaughlin, a major translator of Calvino and others, and the Agnelli‑Serena Professor of Italian Studies at Oxford University in England.  Of Glass City, McLaughlin writes:  This work took up the major demanding  Calvinian theme of the modern fantasy city, but it makes the reader think about the problems of the real cities we live in and does so with humor and an often poetic style and rhythm just like Calvino's own "Invisible Cities," echoing his fondness for poetic triads of nouns and verbs, but all done in a new way for the 21st century.
Before we get to Nick’s reading, and time permitting, a Q&A with all of you in the audience, there’s a very special task to complete. You see, Glass City is not just a story, a chapbook, or a collection of words on a page.  Nick has produced the piece as an art object, which you see right here, with each page of his prose printed on clear transparencies and contained within two panes of glass. Nick has generously made a gift of this book to the University of Louisville’s Bridwell Art Library. I’ve invited Professor Sarah Carter, Director of the Art Library, to accept the book into the collection. This is the first time a Calvino Prize winner has made such a gift and we’re delighted that Glass City will join the Art Library’s important holdings.
A word about the artist book collection at the art library, in addition to being displayed in exhibits on campus and indexed online for discovery, the artist's books at the Bridwell Art Library are first and foremost part of a teaching collection. This means that every year the librarian shows artist's books to hundreds of students upon request from faculty. Students are invariably excited to handle the books and discover their secrets. It is very important for students to interact with physical book objects in order to understand how they are conceived and constructed by the authors, as well as how they function for readers. 
The artist's books collection is a perfect source of creative inspiration for students enrolled in studio arts classes, as well as those engaged in other disciplines that require creative problem solving. Glass City now joins over 240 artist's books in the art library's collection, to be preserved and studied for generations to come.
At this time, I’d like to invite Nick and Sarah up to the front to have a moment.
>> NICK GREER:  Yes. 
>> SARAH CARTER:  Thank you very much.
>> NICK GREER:  Thank you.
>> KIKI PETROSINO:  And Nick, don't get too comfortable yet.  We're going to go right into you're reading.  Everyone please welcome Nick Greer.
[Applause] 
>> NICK GREER:  Can everyone hear me all right?  Is this good?  Okay, wonderful.  So first of all, I want to say thank you to Kiki and everyone else at the University of Louisville who brought me here, and I'm just going to dive right in because we have the Q&A to go to if you guys have any questions.  I'll read kind of ‑‑ I mean, this book is purposely unbound so that people can read in any order they see fit, so I'll kind of dabble, time permitting, I'll read for about 25 minutes.  This one is called Foundations. 
The city was founded six years after the Mission burned down. Men from all over the country caravaned west on the promise of work, both in the sugar trade and the other industries whose mills and refineries made an informal boardwalk along the bay. No one meant to build a metropolis, but it arose nonetheless, and it was only a matter of time before the city sent its charter to the capital, along with its seal (a juniper tree), its flag (a gryphon clasping a stalk of cane and a mace), and motto (“Providentia!”).  As the story goes, the founders of the Mission made this declaration upon first tasting sugar, a gift from the natives.
This is all well‑documented in the City Heritage Museum, which I pass each day on my commute to and from work.  Public transport is notoriously unreliable, so when my bus breaks down I like to hurry past the sign that directs visitors to the ticket booth, past the guard dozing in the foldout chair, to the galleries where I find stillness among so much obsolescence. I inspect the mildewed contracts and their illegible cursive, early maps of the continent that draw the peninsula as an island, the indigenous sculpture and the abstract paintings of the artists‑in‑residence, all behind bulletproof glass milky with fingerprints.
They built the museum on the foundation of the old Mission, which explains the worn stone columns that grid the gift shop.  Push aside the coffee table books and you might find a cross, indentations where steel brackets once studded the masonry, or maybe etchings tally marks, glyphs of animals, though nothing in your familiar Latin letters. In a later time sailors traded scrolls of these marks, maps that led to underground bordellos and opium dens, but before that, before the Mission, before the surprise of great wooden snakes sitting on the bay, the glyphs were carved into clay, as all unheard prayers to end suffering once were. If I close my eyes and let the treacly jazz of the gift shop dissolve, I can almost hear them.  Please, they say. Just leave.  You’re not supposed to be here.
I open my eyes and there is the custodian, twirling his mop like a lacrosse stick. His breath is sticky with white lightning, that chief application of cane.  His face is so weathered I can barely make out the glyphs branded on his face.  I'm so sorry, I tell him, but he is already gone, encrypted within these foundations that grant me so much quietude, so much peace. 
Galaxies
On the corner of Brouillard and Masonic there is a man who smells like cleaning solvent and piss and never removes his sunglasses. He is the sole human keeper of the ancient knowledge of the architects. He grabs me each morning as I transfer buses and whispers that the twelve galaxies will rise again, that the tetrahedron orbiting the dog star is almost out of time, that the great pyramid tower is a beacon. The next morning there are forty‑nine galaxies and the next too many to count. When he realizes I am the emperor he falls to his knees, ecstatic to know that when they return to destroy their old creations, I will show him mercy. Give me your starshades, I command, and his eyes are greener than I could’ve ever imagined because they are made of glass. I like to think he made a deal. Throw away your most precious possession and the truths of the universe will be yours. I give him my shell jacket and half of my caprese sandwich. So moved by my generosity he tells me the greatest secret of all. We are all mindslaves, man, we just don’t know it.
 Creatures
The Strip is my favorite district because it is the city’s zoo; there you can see the strange creatures of our world. Sunburned tourists attempting to point their maps into being. Locals enjoying the show over a table of empty glasses. Double‑breasted suits revolving. Single‑breasted women leaving the outpatient facility. At a café, the insincerely moustached sit next to the sincerely tattooed, both tearing through a pack of cigarettes, but for opposite reasons. But, like a zoo, it isn’t always easy to catch a glimpse of that perfect creature you hope to see. Some are nocturnal, hard to spot until their frightened eyes catch the light. Others only appear for an instant: a homeless man escorted from the park, the scuffed eyes of a mink stole, a boy in a sailor’s cap chasing his ball into the street. You can see the beautiful and the ugly, though not the plain caught between. You will never see the mole people, no matter how hard you look. No one has ever seen them, nor they us; blindness precludes this, but this doesn’t stop the locals from arguing about their whereabouts. This part of the city was built over a crypt, they say. The mole people sleep in sarcophagi. Have any of you ever been down there, I ask from the next table over. The girl with the shaved head revealing a barcode put it best, who the fuck are you?  No one, I say, just like you.
Firmaments
The dome was built with the sky in mind, its particular celeste blue, the apophenia of clouds, the implication of something beyond yet no one seemed to be satisfied with the results. The dome was made from a tensile polymer with a near lossless luminosity, but people complained the light was weaker somehow, that the surface glinted in undesirable ways. Some benefited: artists now able to paint the colors of the sun; hydrology companies promising stratus, cirrus, and the rare lenticular; astrologers still in communion with the great ellipsis. Even the moon reclaimed some of the mystery it lost after the terraform failed. But mostly people suffered to be without their firmament.
The fresco was meant to change that. The problem, its painter realized, was that we assumed the old sky. Here was a blank canvas upon which we might make a new kind of heaven, just as the city had been conceived. The dome would now be a viscous solid held in place by flying buttresses and the currents of electromagnetism they carried. This new material could refract light from the outside to generate holograms within. Now each cloud had its own angel, each night a new fireworks display. But of course, the visual alone was not enough. The buttresses had speakers that synced up with the harp or explosion, depending. Vents too, for the vanilla and thermite, each offering scent and taste. Only touch could not be simulated, which is why no one dared to take an airship too high. You’d simply pass through.
And this became the greatest worry of the painter, that his work would be incomplete. He programmed an entire cosmos, wormholes and nebulae and gas giants that came together in new, grander constellations. But these too were incomplete, so he invented a mythos of heroes and beasts for which they could be named. He stood on a milk crate and delivered hoarse sermons, distributed pamphlets covered in an obtuse symbology, all so someone might believe the mirage above. We’d stand and listen for a minute or maybe leaf through a pamphlet before tossing it on the sidewalk. We laughed at him and pitied him. The firmament had been lost, everyone knew that.
All except the homeless. They had been living in the steam chambers for decades and so this new sky was a revelation. They collected the discarded pamphlets and disappeared, nothing but a rattling sewer grate, the smell of stolen perfume. Their cult grew faster than anyone could’ve known. The night they scaled the buttresses was mostly clear, a cumulus or two dampening the light of the cathedral nebula just so. The painter was the first to fall, though he would be the only among us who chose to.
What the fuck, the woman with the barcode tattoo says, propping herself higher on the pillow, that’s not this city. Don’t worry, I say, this is only my first brushstroke.
 Versions
I often wonder, why it is that when surrounded by so many people, I only notice those my age or younger, though it’s more specific than that, when I really think about it.  I see whatever age I wish I still was.  It is too easy to imagine these perfectly young people in various states of undress, especially during those rare November heatwaves when their clothing approximates just that. They sit on their stoops in tank tops drinking Mexican beers with lime wedges trapped inside like little ships. That night a woman will fall in with a man, a woman, then a man again. The next day she will blame the heat while at the same time praising it, carrying it with her like a charm so unseasonal. But really, when I think about it, they are all falling in with different versions of themselves. A woman discovers crocheting, discovers she hates crocheting, but more than that she hates being alone. A man becomes a woman and thinks this will save me. A man falls in with the right type of denim, which is already a type of something else if you think about it.  Please do.  I have been many things, except what I always wanted to be.  We wear this necklace of adjectives so long it has no noun, just an infinite choiceness.  Buildings now all have reflective glass, which is just melted sand if you really think about it.
 Manifolds
I dedicated much of my time to determining what lies outside the city. The locals are not particularly helpful. They’re always talking about weekend road trips to the lost beaches up the coast, or maybe catching a monorail to the vineyards for a day trip, but when I ask how it was they tell me you had to be there.
Maps are deceptive. Go far enough in any one direction and you’ll discover the same streets you’ve already passed: Klein, August, Roman, Tonnetz names of cartographers who once drew our peninsula as an island, but this is not a mistake. The natives grow restless with themselves. No matter how a gecko thrashes about, there’s always another to mimic it, so that they might tile this bathroom floor.
I board the monorail only to find it is actually a centrifuge, separating ourselves from ourselves. The boy sitting next to me is taking his ant farm to school for show and tell, and suddenly it’s obvious why humans can lift so many times their own weight. The monorail keeps accelerating and the ants are now proving the existence of exotic particles that appear to them as wobbling discs. The city’s most prominent writer, a poet who once quit god and found drinking, learns of this discovery and renounces all renouncements. The ants build and raze statues in likeness of the boy who has since become a manifold.
Even if we did exist in higher dimensions, we wouldn’t.  Instead we all share the same memory of a tired woman, crying quietly into her teacup.  Her papers stacked under a paperweight everything in its place, but therein lies the problem.  Snow comes to rest on a palm frond, until it doesn’t anymore.
Give me a second.
Is this necessary?  You guys can hear me?  It's good?  Okay, thanks. 
 Glyphs
I work in the city’s tallest building, so tall its penthouse is completely ensconced in clouds. The man who lives there is a famous recluse, an engineer or a stockbroker who worked his way to the top, but in doing so drove himself mad. He communicates by sending messages through the tubes that connect the city. The messages are innumerable, arriving one after another, written in a language whose words are unknown because the glyphs that might indicate them change with each message. My job is to decipher these glyphs. Some are lazy scribbles, others complex pointillism, but if you analyze them closely enough, a pattern does emerge.  It turns out the man is not crazy, nor a recluse.  He’s not even rich, he’s just lonely.  He says the food up here is bland, the water too minerally.  He says he’s disappointed that clouds are just vapor and not the sputum of fat‑cheeked angels, as he had once been promised.  He says things were better before.
I took pity on him, how could I not?  I wrote him consoling messages, constructing special glyphs for the new thoughts and emotions he inspired in me.  I told him that things aren’t much better down here, that everything is upside down, that the steam system has been broken for months now, years maybe.  I told him about the protests and the complacency that followed.  I told him about the dogs, how they all go to the cane fields to die and how no one can explain it.  How we too are so very lonely.  I told him everything.  For a time his messages stopped, and I worried that maybe I had pushed him over the edge.  That I had revealed the grass is not greener, but grayer.  But then the messages started again, in familiar glyphs more perfect than I could’ve imagined: I work in the city’s tallest building, so tall its penthouse is completely ensconced in clouds.
 Missions
The Mission wasn’t always the Mission. Before it was a neighborhood it was a building, and before that an idea, a dangerous one, which is why those who first protected it sacrificed what they did.
They arrived on twin caravels, carried by tropical winds from the South. The captain’s log notes the many pintados that flocked to them upon arrival, how surprised his crew were to see a creature of the old world here in the new. They'd endured so many harsh months at sea by truly believing the stories they had heard.  Boulevards paved in gold, men taller than cathedrals, poultices that could cure any illness.  But what they found was their own past, before the good book made many into one, that great pilgrimage of druids and nymphs returned to ash.  It was their job, then, to build those streets, those men.  When the native chief offered them cane, not without a double smile, they knew they were tasting the panacea that would save this land.  Providentia!
Today the Mission is still a place for zealots. The main street is lined with restaurants whose mission statements are longer than their menus. They serve amaranth popped on heated salt blocks, candy cured with MSG, lamb slaughtered with the same torch that cooks it, before the adrenaline can sour the meat. The chefs surprise us just enough. They revive the traditions of old for the discoverers of the new, these young vanguards of the city’s chief industries: copper, silica, vapor, decryption, refinement.  They believe it is their duty to bring the future to the present.  After dinner they parade past murals that have been relocated to galleries so the paint might be observed under more generous light.  While considering an exhibit that collects art of the apocalypse, a man, younger than I am, offers an opinion as I refill his wine glass.  I find it curious, he says, that they render the fires of hell in such a primitive style. He does not smoke and ash his cigarette because it has been transmuted, its elements dissolved into a tincture and released as steam. The young man is right in his way the overlapping red and yellow blocks are the buildings of the city capturing the sunrise. Have you ever noticed, I ask, but he has already moved onto the next century, the one in which magic is invented and sold in graphite cylinders.
The final entry in the captain’s log notes how the empty quarries might double as stables for the pintados that couldn’t be broken, those still blinded by their outdated dogma. Protected in a space they built with our knowledge, he writes, they might finally come to appreciate all that we have to offer.  He would die of consumption before he could see his prophecy come true, but years later, during the golden wars, infidels would be detained in the lacrosse stadia. They lived on the condiments that hadn’t spoiled and what had, they turned into paint, something to do to pass the time. They painted while reports of their homeland’s destruction broadcasted through the loudspeakers. Whole cities sublimated into something so light they might rise to heaven.
 Memories
There's a shop in Central that sells memories, though there are never any customers.  You might see a group of teenagers giggling among the aisles or a homeless woman searching for a bathroom key, but no ever purchases anything. The owner is an old man who spends his day hunched and studious, cataloging and preserving. he wears glasses, the type that has recently come back into style, though he wouldn’t know this, and his shoulders are broad but sloped, an old flightless bird. He looks like a man I once knew, or will come to know, it’s hard to say where things fit sometimes. He says he can help me with that, he has just the thing.
He leads me to a particular aisle and extracts one of the memories from the top row. He handles it as if it were the ash of an incense stick, a miraculous brown cylinder barely keeping its form.  We take it back to his desk and he lays it open. A memory is an old technology, encoded in primitive symbols and a limited grammar, but it works, better than anything we’ve built since. Symbol by symbol, line by line, the owner interprets the code and soon the memory has flooded my consciousness.
It begins where it ends.  Soon you will move to a new city, an endless grid of garbage and petroglyphs.  You will fall in with a woman, lonely and inconsolable as a foreign novel, one set in some gleaming, northern landscape.  And then you will fall out, just as ice melts in that northern land over many lifetimes. To forget her, you return to your old city, its pain familiar and safe, but of course you can never forget, no matter how you try, so you do the next best thing, you build a new memory.
By the time he is done, I feel as if I have lived an entirely new life. The world suddenly glittering with possibility, but also regret.  To think of all those half‑empty nights I’d lost accidently on purpose.  The owner knows this too well.  He looks at me like he has forgotten how to cry.  They’re only simulations, he admits.  Then why can I still smell the mesquite, I ask.  That tree has been extinct for decades, he says.  Some people claim it never existed, that it was a myth to explain all the asphalt.  Then I will go there to prove you wrong, I say.  I know, I know, he says. That’s why I went there. That’s why I still go there, whenever I fear I don’t exist.
We’re in another aisle now.  There are no shelves, just looming stacks, their memories thin as shale.  Here, an errant touch is enough to know an empire from coup to ruin.  The old man tells me this as he is leaning, falling into the stacks.  The first that hits me is the story of a man whose parrot outlived him.  It only knew one word: sorry.  The second is a woman who is compelled to eat her own hair, that taste of snakeskin.  Next, I hear the sickening crackle of a conquistador’s pyre.  Next, every unwanted look.  Glaciers calving and reforming.  The invention of steel and money, but not before deception. Bodies, water, information.  They’re all white, everything is white, so bright it is a desert, a place of nothing.
Objects
Somewhere in the depths of the city is The Object.  It’s difficult to say from which epoch The Object originates because it appears in writing from the city’s past, present, and future.  Before their languages were subject to the decree of Romanizar, the Xibipiio tribe told a story of qinchibri, a mythical bird whose feathers, when plucked, could draw mountains and forests into being, even animate the spirits of the dead.  The conquistadors knew The Object as piña, which they found growing on a bayside beach.  It was even sweeter than the cane they would soon cultivate, and it revealed to them, in terrible visions of pestilence and splendor, God’s intention for mankind.  The stockbrokers of our day make pilgrimages to The Object, hoping to read Taurus and not Ursa in its shimmering constellations.  Years from now the same men will be stripped of their fortunes and take to the underground.  They will trail the musk of sweat and sandalwood through the steam tunnels, rehearsing the speeches they’ll deliver when they do finally find The Object.  You took everything from me, they pray as they walk this labyrinth of no entrances or exits.
Is The Object God, some have asked. In a sense, yes, it is whatever we want to see, whatever we need, whether we know it or not.  On the nights I follow my yarn into the city’s belly, I do indeed find what I’ve been looking for all along.  Contained within The Object is a city, so perfect it can only exist in miniature, its glassy surface the same firmament that contains it.  Get close enough to this other world and your breath might become its fog, which is to say something whose beauty mustn’t be explained.  Remember when you were a child, and you’d spin a globe on its brass axis, let it rotate until you stopped it by placing a finger on the location you were born or where you would die, which, when you really think about it, are the same happening, obverse and finely etched as the sides of a coin.  That’s when you’ll think to look over your shoulder and there he is, that sad, abstract face in the stars.  He’s spinning out of control and there’s nothing to hold onto, no totem, no crystal ball, just the grooves of your own tiny shell.
Lovers
People in the city take lovers, how could they not?  The evening fog comes on suddenly and old houses can’t keep the heat though they do have working fireplaces.  I once taught a student at the university how to open her house’s flue.  She watched this most ancient process with distrustful awe.  We fed the fire on last semester’s books, their contents mostly forgotten.  She sensed my long history, those pages we learn and can never unlearn, no matter how we try.  She feared, not that she might be added to the library, but that I wouldn’t think to take her off the shelf again, brush the dust from her jacket, admire the distance between dog ears.  But this process is also why she invited me in, to see where this obtuse volume might fit.  When our fire was almost dead, she asked me to imagine all those shelves and all those aisles, how they run parallel to each other and therefore never actually touch.  They make a city, this city, where paper is now millions of little squares beneath a glass sheet.  This is why a lover must be taken.  No body gives its self any more.
Okay.  I've got two more. 
Almost every weekend I find myself at a party.  The hostess greets me at the door with a kiss on the cheek and lets me know I should be excited for the special guest.  They have oysters on a bed of ice and boats of cocktail sauce.  Necklaces hang from chandeliers.  Two women wearing Venetian masks try to get the naked, gold‑painted man to break his pose.  Unattended children in boxy blazers keep refilling their champagne flutes from the fountain.  It is the peak of summer, so snowdrifts have been built in the dining room and spiked cocoa is being served with chestnut and nutmeg shaved over the foam.  Ham and prime rib glisten under a heat lamp, waiting to be slathered in jellies and chutneys.  Revelers in hideous wool sweaters sing microtonal carols accompanied by a player piano.  A famous actor has been hired to dress as a mage and hand out gold.  A girl with a halo made of mistletoe asks me if she can get coal in her stocking this year.  I move through the towers of wrapped gifts and find myself in the library where women have pulled up their gowns so they can stamp grapes. Others boil cane down to mash for the instant distillery, which puffs steam up towards the shelves that can only be accessed with a rolling ladder.  The house is full of vapors, conspicuous smoke in the greenhouse, canisters emptied in the kitchen, visible breath in the walk‑in freezer.  It is the dead of winter, so sand dunes have been built in the ballroom and mai tais are being served in pineapples.  Mango spears for the coconut syrup fondue.  Men and women in formalwear loincloths dance to a quantized steel drum.  A notable artist has been commissioned to face paint partygoers who wish to sing in the blood sacrifice.  A girl with a bone through her septum asks me if she can be the virgin.  I move through the labyrinth of bodies and find myself under a spotlight at the base of a black ziggurat.  I am shivering and sweating at the same time, and the host’s voice comes through the speakers, snorting like a bull.  Ladies and gentleman, your guest of honor. 
 Days
There are days when I stop and accept the pink sadness of it all.  Often it’s one of those unassuming Tuesdays when mercury is in retrograde and everyone knows to ditch work and lay in the grass.  But more likely, it’s something closer, a hummingbird hovering for a moment, or the fog makes me think of giftwrap instead of gauze.  Today, it was an open window, a woman singing to herself as she went about her morning.  She was older, I could tell by the long grooves in her voice, and so was the song.  I recognized it, could even sing along, and yet, I couldn’t tell you it’s name.  Nor did I care to, and this relinquishing was what let me know.
I walk south, then north, then south again.  I leave change in coffee cups and smile at strangers as if they are not. Window shopping is quite appealing, this casual freedom of seeing myself both inside and out.  I am a regular at this establishment, but also the surprise guest, a chance encounter.  A group of attractive young somethings passes by with a basket full of charcuterie, wildflower honey and levain, something brushed in truffle oil.  Is that a backgammon set?  They’re off to the beach.  They invite me to join, and I do.
We drink white wine out of paper cups, though we never get drunk.  It takes a half‑hour to roll the joint, but no one minds; this is part of the texture.  Did you know, someone asks. Have you read, another says.  The fog crinkles away and there is our gift, the sun, bright and dumb as a fresh tennis ball.  We forget to play backgammon. We forget each others’ names.  The fog returns as if it had never left, but not before the sun melts into the water, warming us each with its almond light.  We must do this again, everyone agrees, though even if we do, this will never come again, not like this.
Was this day one I lived, or was it a future memory, an object to be placed in a cigar box until it is perfectly bittersweet?  Did I manage to break through the panes that circumscribe each one of us?  Surely not, but I was no longer an algorithm, or perhaps, I lost track of what I was. Maybe I am packed away in a hexagon, but at least there is honey in a hive.  Tomorrow we will wake different, or the same. This glass you hold will still be the glass that holds you.  I will try to make peace with the great ellipsis, and I will fail, I will.
Thank you.
[Applause] 
>> NICK GREER:  So how do we want to do Q&A?  Microphone?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  It was buzzing a little bit.
>> NICK GREER:  Yeah, I think it was ‑‑ let just turn it off.  It's time. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Where did the ideas for the map come from and what made you want to write a story about maps as an instigator?
>> NICK GREER:  Are you talking about Manifolds? 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Yeah.
>> NICK GREER:  Yeah, I like maps, that's kind of a base level thing.  You know, it's interesting to me that cities, like every single city I go to has a street called Euclid, right, for like Euclidian geometry or whatever, kind of a sendup, and so I was intrigued by how it always seems like there's some repetition to cities that I go to, but there's also these little distinct elements and so I like the idea of focusing on the ways in which cities are distinct versus non‑distinct at the same time.  And I feel like maps are a cool way of accessing that.  I don't know, it seemed relevant. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I was wondering how you went about conceptualizing the cities ‑‑ city or cities in these piece, there are some moments of familiarity that remind me of San Francisco.  I think you're in San Francisco right now so the mission and sort of the fog coming over the buildings, but then certainly some elements that are utterly unfamiliar.  So were you thinking of San Francisco in particular or was it a conflation of different cities or how did you go about creating this particular place?
>> NICK GREER:  Yeah, or how particular is the place in the first place. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Sure.
>> NICK GREER:  In the first place, yes.  So maybe it's good to give some background information about why this book exists, too.  I took a class during my MFA on just short‑form writing, which, you know, could mean flash fiction or prose poems or anything that's short, like one page.  And the goal of the class was to produce a book, a chapbook.  And we were doing writing exercises in the beginning and I was writing really a bunch of different locations, they all turn out to be this kind of like funner walking around the city thing, this I who can kind of go into third person detached, kind of floating perspective, but then also have specific moments where they observe things.  
And I had just come back from being in Vietnam doing some research.  So I actually had one that I didn't read that was based off of some time in Vietnam that I translated back to a more kind of open‑ended city, right?  
So San Francisco has a place like Chinatown, which is completely different than any other neighborhood in the city.  It's really insular and has a completely different feel, and yet that's there, so I kind of took a bunch of different cities.  You know, I was thinking of Ho Chi Minh City in that particular instance, but a lot of cities that I visited or lived in, I kind of folded them, hopefully softly, into the base of San Francisco, and San Francisco is definitely the heart of this.  And so I think that's why you might feel a little bit ‑‑ some other places coming in.
As far as the intent of why using multiple cities in one and having this specificity versus non, it goes back to the other question about maps.  There seems to be a similarity to every city versus also a distinction or a difference.  And I liked kind of hovering between those two states, which also has a lot to do with when you say there's things that are totally unfamiliar or alien, I think that's important to both the fabulous tradition and the Flâneur tradition.  The idea that you're not going to slot into any one reality, there's some surreality, there's some hyper reality, and in the Flâneur, too, we'll walk around the city and it's meant to, there's a real choice quote that I should have written down, that was like the Flâneur embodies the contradictions of the modern city or something like that.  
And I like the idea that the Flâneur is being an observer, getting to walk around the city and see things, but you're also a participant, because you're physically on the street.  And so I just really enjoyed that kind of hovering perspective between different states.  So I think when you talk about the city being specific or nonspecific or placed or unplaced it has to do with every dimension of the story functioning that way or more dimensions, let's not say every, let's not give me credit for that.
Other questions?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Can you tell us more about your upcoming project, I think you mentioned the name of it about maps? 
>> NICK GREER:  Oh, Territory? 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Yeah, Territory.
>> NICK GREER:  So Territory is ‑‑ we're calling it a literary project, because journal might seem a little weird.  There are issues that themed, it is, it's kind of an acrostic project, we would issue people maps on a certain theme, the first issue is Utopia, the second is underworlds, the third is Arizona, the fourth is an open theme, but also people could take that an open as opposed to unthemed.  
And the idea is we'd give people a map and they'd explore the territory, whatever that entails.  And we expect that what people produce won't just be okay, we gave you a map and you give us a story that takes place physically on the map, maybe you look at the map as an object, maybe you make your own map.  You know, we don't give you the map.  There's a lot of ways to think about it.  And the goal there is to yes, inspect like place, but I think there's also a lot of place‑based journals or journals that care about that.  I think we're more interested in like slightly more heady considerations of representation, like what happens when you put a territory into a map, what kind of compressions and reductions and distortions do you need to do to be able to do that.  
Like a map is a really powerful tool, the idea that you can, you know, compress the entire world into this tiny space, but obviously there's, you know, not much granularity to a compressed map.  I mean, if you're looking at a map of the world, you not necessarily going to se Louisville on it.  So asking people to inspect that but through a more literary mode rather than a scientific mode or maybe a hybridized mode of the two is the purpose of that project.  Yeah.  Are you looking to submit? 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Yeah, I was.
>> NICK GREER:  Just curious.  Oh cool, yeah.  Yeah, right now it's just a splash page with a mailing list, so it doesn't give people much information.  Our first issue will come out I think on May 1st.  Other questions?
>> KIKI PETROSINO:  I do.  The Flâneur has traditionally been theorized as kind of a male observer and certainly a male from whatever the dominant culture might be.  But the observer might be writing in or into, and so it seems to me that one's experience of a city is actually kind of a function of who you are when you're in the city and how you're approached or not approached.  And I just wonder in your piece, who is the narrator?  How did you think about that?
>> NICK GREER:  Yeah, I mean, like me and not me, okay?  Like I thought about this a lot, like how do you build persona in this.  Like, I don't think I could possibly represent, you know, anybody beyond me in writing like ever, but to create that kind of hovering ambiguous point of view or sense of space, I think that's maybe an attempt to get outside the self.  There's a lot of like language and imagery about being trapped in certain spaces here or about like really complex enclosures, like the idea that the manifold's one or these kinds of non‑orientable infinite manifolds where you can ‑‑ just like a Möbius strip, you can just keep going on it forever.  
And in the last one, days, there's the idea of being kind of constrained in an algorithm or trapped in a hexagon.  I think the idea that like our choices are becoming increasingly algorithmically motivated is frightening to some people.  And so I guess when I was thinking about constructing persona, I felt very much like I couldn't get outside of that but maybe the whole point of writing a thing like this, observing a city is to try to get outside of one's self, to try to make connections.  And you know my time living in San Francisco, I had interactions that were totally ‑‑ in fact, I think I had ‑‑ my street interactions, I had better interactions with homeless people than I did with like non‑homeless people, and I think maybe that's why homelessness recurs so much in this thing.  
Like people at bars will say, you know, fuck you, who are you?  Why are you talking to me?  I'm in my bubble, I'm living my like wonderfully self‑contained yuppie existence that I've planned on, which is very different than people who are just kind of open to experience.  And I just had a lot more open interactions in surprising situations I think when I lived in San Francisco, a place that I, you know, grew up in and around, so a place that ought to be familiar, but ultimately became kind of de‑familiarized when I was living there in my early 20s, which I guess is where this is coming from. 
Yeah, I think another thing that's present here, too, is like ‑‑ is a line of questioning around history and whiteness, so you're talking about like the male perspective of the Flâneur, but I think maybe looking at it from like generally from like who's in power and I think whiteness is maybe a little more present here, where a city like San Francisco is a place that has a lot of stacked histories, and people only seem to remember the most recent one or there's a desire for futurity, like always getting to the next history that we're building through engineering or technology or something like that.  
And I think there's something sad and ghostly to lost histories there and I was trying to ‑‑ I was trying to ‑‑ I was dancing around that a little bit.  I don't have anything super specific to say, but that was definitely a line of inquiry of this work. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Do you feel that it's part of any tradition or is it just about originality and novelty?
>> NICK GREER:  Oh, this is kind of inviting deep philosophical inquiry into what novelty is, if it's possible. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  So stick with the first part, do you see yourself as part of any Robert Browning or ‑‑  
>> NICK GREER:  Well, I mean, I cited Flâneur and I cited fabulism and I feel like Calvino's, his Invisible Cities is certainly present here.  So I'd say I'm participating ‑‑ I feel a little weird about fabulism, because at least some people I've talked to about fabulism, people talk about fabulism like a genre or like a club you can join, and I feel like it's more a line of inquiry.  And so when you say traditions, I think maybe I feel like I'm operating within a lot of different lines of inquiry, maybe somebody that would create that kind of like hovery ambiguous thing that I've been alluding to a couple of times.  So I'll say I like novelty, I'm trying to do something different, I'm trying to do something new, but I definitely ‑‑ or no, can I mask a lack of novelty, like an axiomatic impossibility of novelty by having more different traditions that I tap into than other people?  Maybe that's what I'm trying to do. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Okay, thanks.
>> NICK GREER:  Yeah? 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Yeah, you mentioned in your upcoming work you will have a version of Arizona.  I was curious if there were any influences in this ‑‑ in the Glass City from your time in Tucson, not just in San Francisco.
>> NICK GREER:  Yeah, necessarily, but also I think specifically in that Memories piece, you know, going to a grid of garbage and petroglyphs, I think is Tucson‑motivated and Tucson‑inspired.  I don't know, I think my look‑back window on what I was tapping into was more my time in San Francisco, but I was definitely influenced by the physicality of Tucson.  But I've written about that separately, so maybe not so much, maybe in quiet ways it's come through, yeah.  And I think Arizona, too, is another place of similarly‑stacked histories that get ignored, except the futurism people seem interested in there are like really good irrigation techniques for golf courses and like military technology, so slightly different interests, but same kind of vibe, similar vibe. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Was there anyone in the MFA faculty that were influential?
>> NICK GREER:  Yeah, actually I totally should have said this earlier, but the person who did this short‑form class is the writer Aurelie Sheehan and she had done ‑‑ I don't know, I feel like offering this class was part of her personal narrative as a writer in a lot of ways, like I think people come in, and you have a concentration in MFA.  You have poetry, you have fiction, you have nonfiction, some places have screen writing, some places explicitly do hybrid or interdisciplinary stuff. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I'm actually at U of A, so I was just wondering.
>> NICK GREER:  Oh, you're at U of A, cool.  Yeah, so Aurelie had I think written some more like let's say quote/unquote traditional stuff or like stuff that slotted into fiction and I think she was just really attracted to some stuff that she'd read growing up, like Richard Brautigan was somebody she cited.  And she's like wait, why don't I do that?  And she was asking ‑‑ she had this kind of like wonderful shrug about wait, why don't I do these things?  Why don't I give myself liberty, like why am I so like locked into these various institutions that I participate in.  
And so she ended up writing a book called Jewelry Box, and her subtitle for that is Histories, all right, and I think she means histories ‑‑ I don't know if she mean it in the like Herodotus sense, but I think she likes the idea that they could be hovering between true and untrue or, you know, it's fiction because she's going to take liberties but it's going to be nonfiction in that she's the eye behind it.  
And so I think she designed this class to give us like the opportunity to ask that question.  Like why don't I do this thing?  And so I think this was me asking that of myself, being somebody whose more like, you know, I guess I walked in my MFA like I'm going to write a novel, because that's the unit that you write for something like that.  I don't know.  So I enjoyed this project for that reason. 
>> KIKI PETROSINO:  We should probably end here so everyone can enjoy the rest of the conference.  Thank you so much, Nick.
[Applause] 
>> NICK GREER:  Thank you.