Herman Melville: “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853)

But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of. While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report which will appear in the sequel.

~~ Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”

Ah, Bartleby: a longish short story, printed in two consecutive issues of Putnam’s in November and December 1853 and later included in Melville’s collection The Piazza Tales, to good response (“It touches the nicer strings of our complicated nature, & finely blends the pathetic & ludicrous” [Richard Henry Dana, Sr.]; “One of the best bits of writing which ever came from the author’s pen” [Berkshire County Eagle]). It’s been made into several movies, plays, and operas, and serves as the go-to story for every junior high school English teacher in the US, not to mention what must be hundreds of thousands of term papers, dissertations, and theses.

Yes, this is another item on the syllabus for the upcoming “Fiction of Relationship” class taught by Arnold Weinstein of Brown University via Coursera.

Since it’s also one of the most analyzed stories in the Western canon, I’ll bypass a great deal of very interesting symbolism (a terrific University of Kansas website offers a wide array of resources, as does Bartleby the Inscrutable, a collection of essays edited by M. Thomas Inge that served as a primary source for me) and just focus on the relationship aspects.

Or, I should say, on the possible relationship aspects. One of the fun things about this story is that anyone can read anything into it – or nothing at all. As it happens, a great many scholars have read a great many things into the relationship between the unnamed Lawyer and Bartleby, and seen in them reflections of a variety of relationships.

Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting one perfectly harmless in his passivity; then, in the better moods of the former, he will endeavor charitably to construe to his imagination what proves impossible to be solved by his judgment. Even so, for the most part, I regarded Bartleby and his ways. Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I can get along with him.

~~ Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”

One of the (to me) more obscure and thus more interesting interpretations, put forth by Egbert S. Oliver in “A Second Look at ‘Bartleby’,” is that Bartleby represents Thoreau, with Melville as the Lawyer. He starts off discounting his own thesis – Melville never wrote anything about Thoreau, never discussed him, never met him, and may never have read “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (he did borrow Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers from a friend in 1850, three years before Bartleby was written but that’s it). But he knew a guy who knew a guy – in this case, he knew Hawthorne, who had a collection of essays including “Civil Disobedience.” That’s pretty thin. Oliver’s essay has been debunked by several other scholars.

However, I’m always intrigued by someone who swims upstream.

Thoreau says with a defiance which Melville must have admired: “I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.” Bartleby’s associates, his neighbors, his jailers even, did not know what to make of him, and Thoreau had found the same reaction of bewilderment. “They plainly did not know how to treat me… for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall”… This is the kind of challenge which intrigued Melville and set his mind to working out the implications. Here is a man who lives in society, certainly to a real extent dependent on it, yet withdrawing, aloof. Bartleby, when asked to join in cooperative tasks, replies, “I would prefer not to.” He gives no reasons. He simply wishes to refuse. Thoreau’s advice is explicit. He is encouraging a withdrawal from life, even an attaching of one’s self to others, as he had built his cabin on Emerson’s land.… Melville quietly writes the satire to show that one cannot afford such a boast: to squat somewhere and live within yourself is to refrain from living.

Oliver equates Thoreau’s “I declined to pay” and the resulting wish “to withdraw and stand aloof” with “I would prefer not to.” The diarist becomes the scrivener, the green trees of Concord with the green screen the Lawyer uses to keep Bartleby out of sight but within easy reach; “Bartleby, too, simply wished to refuse. He stood aloof. He never gave reasons. He never argued. He embodied passive noncooperation.” Of course, Thoreau did give reasons for his refusal to pay the tax, and during his time of aloof withdrawal in the woods, he showed up at Emerson’s house for dinner regularly and sent his laundry out to his mother. Not that it matters, since Walden is a different book.

I don’t have the knowledge of either man, or either writing, to support or defend Oliver’s theory. The notion of passive resistance and civil disobedience is obviously central to both texts, which may imply a causal link but certainly does not require one. It may be more likely that Melville had read Thoreau’s essay and incorporated those ideas into the story without specifically intending there to be a symbolic relationship between the two people. Or he may have chosen the idea for a different reason.

Leaving the Thoreau connection behind, as academia has done, as more of an interesting diversion than a serious theory, we come to the more popular interpretation of Bartleby as the artist vs. society. Here I rely on Richard Chase’s “A Parable of the Artist” from Herman Melville: A Critical Study (1949).

The short stories of this period of Melville’s life are personal and introspective. Melville was thinking of himself as an artist and trying to understand the artist’s relation to his society. Bearing this in mind and on the internal evidence of the story, there seems no doubt that Melville was consciously writing a parable of the artist… Bartleby is a scrivener – that is, a writer. He insists on writing only when moved to do so. Based by the injunction of capitalist society that he write on demand, he refuses to compromise… The other scriveners, Turkey and Nippers, represent what we might now call “middle-brow” culture. They have sold out to the commercial interests and suffer from the occupational diseases of the compromised artist in a commercial society – neurosis, alcoholism, and ulcers.… They maintain a grudging and suspicious attitude toward Bartleby, their acknowledged superior as a scrivener – the attitude of the uneasy middle-brow toward the genuine artist.

Just a few weeks ago I went off on a rant about the relationship between Art and Commerce, so this piqued my interest. Things get even more interesting when family gets mixed in, since not only were two of Melville’s brothers lawyers, so was his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, and all contributed to the support of the Melville family during the lean years. I think it’s as if Melville is reassuring himself he has made the right choice, for to do otherwise would be to abandon the Artist in favor of Commerce, and look what would happen to both of them.

Chase heads in the direction of family connections as well.

I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. Hence, though I belong to a profession proverbially energetic and nervous, even to turbulence, at times, yet nothing of that sort have I ever suffered to invade my peace. I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public applause; but in the cool tranquility of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds. All who know me, consider me an eminently safe man.

~~ Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”

In fact, there’s a wealth of analysis out there describing the story as a depiction of Melville as Bartleby and either his brothers or his father-in-law as the Lawyer; in “ Melville, Lemuel Shaw, and ‘Bartleby’,” John Stark goes so far as to cite a specific legal opinion, Brown v. Kendall (establishing “ordinary care” as the standard in tort law), which Shaw as judge adjudicated. Writers frequently – always? – use writing to work out their own complicated feelings; I think Steve Almond says something in This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey to the effect that it’s why writers become writers. Looking at the family through the lens of Bartleby provides an interesting view. I wonder: did they recognize themselves? Did they care? Did they, for that matter, even read the story? Consider this: today, how many people know the name Allan Melville, or Lemuel Shaw?

In vain I persisted that Bartleby was nothing to me—no more than to any one else.

~~ Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”

But relationships with others aren’t the only relationships we have; what about our relationship with self? We might say, “I’m so proud of myself” or, for that matter, ashamed, when we do something we thought was beyond us. We surprise ourselves all the time, wonder where some feat (or craven act of cowardice) came from. I think it’s pretty common to look back on our younger selves and wonder what we’d think of the person we’ve become, and at least now, it’s almost a parlor game to write a letter to the “you” who will be some number of years from now; even in business, there’s the variation, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” We’re very capable of evaluating ourselves as somewhat, if never entirely, separate from ourselves, even if we can’t quite admit it – or if we often don’t want to.

It’s a common interpretation that Bartleby is the double for the Lawyer, a part of himself he’s not sure he likes, a part that just isn’t cooperating. To pick one, Mordecai Marcus, in “Melville’s Bartleby As a Psychological Double“:

Evidence that Bartleby is a psychological double for the lawyer-narrator is diffused throughout the story, in details about Bartleby and in the lawyer’s obsessive concern with and for Bartleby. The fact that Bartleby has no history, as we learned at the beginning of the story and in a later dialogue, suggests that he has emerged from the lawyer’s mind.
…
The professional friends represent the rationality of the “normal” social world, an external force which recalls the lawyer from his tentative acceptance of the voice of apparent unreason represented by Bartleby….The last action which suggests identification of the two occurs when in the prison yard Bartleby behaves as if the lawyer is responsible for his imprisonment and perhaps for his hopeless human situation as well.

I can see this easily: the Youth confronting the Adult he has become, particularly in the prison scene when the Lawyer visits and is rebuffed: “”I know you,” he said, without looking round,—”and I want nothing to say to you.” This is perhaps the clearest point, for me, of the double interpretation, the artistic Youth wanting nothing to do with the practical, commercial Adult who first demands, then abandons, then imprisons him and lets him die. Of course, the Adult did none of these things directly to Bartleby, but it must seem that way to the Youth inside, betrayed following peer pressure, whose promise, needs, desires went unfulfilled in favor of what turned out to be a rather trivial life. It’s an accusatory look back on what could have been.

I’m interested in Marcus’ observation that “The lawyer is not visibly changed after a struggle with his double.” This echoes Chase’s comment about the father/son nature of the pair here and in “Benito Cereno” in that the son-figure dies but the father-figure remains unenlightened. I do see a similarity in the two stories: the main character is baffled by the odd behavior of a second character, yet is unable to resolve the problem which eventually comes to a messy end. And there’s the ambiguous utterance in both stories: Benito Cereno’s last words, “The negro,” is as intriguing as “I would prefer not to.”

Without any symbolic interpretation, the relationship is just as interesting. The Lawyer is baffled, alternates between private rage and tolerance, and seems to feel some strong connection to Bartleby. It’s highly unusual; under no circumstances would an employer permit such an employee to remain past the first refusal to perform an expected part of his duties. It’s the sort of reaction I recall from some hidden-camera scenarios, where people will tolerate incredible strangeness, possibly out of fear that they are misunderstanding or overreacting. But this tolerance lasts past the credible stage for Bartleby; yet it remains a credible story. Puzzling, perhaps, but not farcical or outlandish.

The “I would prefer not to” line gets all the attention, but there are others: “I know where I am” speaks volumes to me.

If Melville had published this story today, say, in The New Yorker (it has the proper elements of the classic TNY story: urban setting, ambiguity), he’d have done a Page-Turner interview and answered questions about exactly what he meant by every puzzling phrase. When the story ended up anthologized in a prize volume (wouldn’t it?) he’d do more interviews, end notes, and explanations, and by the time I got to it, I’d be able to determine exactly what he was thinking. Perhaps there’d be some commentary, a few people who would go past what was offered, link what was said to a theory about short stories or psychology or lawyers that they hold near and dear, and we wouldn’t have hundreds of books and tens of thousands of essays putting forth interpretations. We’d each read the text and create a story unique to us, a story that includes episodes from our pasts and hopes for our futures, instead of looking at the story as something that will appear on a midterm in multiple-choice form.

I think we would’ve lost something very special. Ah, humanity.

Pushcart 2013: Julián Ríos – ” Mortes’s Story” from Procession of the Shadows: The Novel of Tamoga excerpted in The Hudson Review, Spring 2011

It was toward the end of September, when the drowsiness of autumn was beginning to make itself felt; the hours went by more slowly and time itself seemed to stagnate like the forlorn waters of the salt marshes around Tamoga.
“A traveling salesman,” said or thought absentmindedly all the bored men gathered in the station with nothing better to do as dusk fell and they saw first the enormous suitcase and then the short man, comically veering from side to side in his efforts to drag it along the platform. “A dung beetle,” someone in the group joked, trying to breathe new life into their flagging conversation. They stared at the stranger for a few moments longer, but nobody could be bothered to add another comment. They watched the train disappear into the endless rain, feeling a twinge of disappointment, a nostalgia for times past.

Prepare for a close read: this is a sentence-level story.

I suppose to be consistent I should rail against the inclusion of a novel excerpt as a short story; but notice, right in the title, the excerptness of the piece is clearly declared. Is it a novel, or a collection of linked stories? In the foreword (available online via Googlebooks, as is this first story if you’re careful) Ríos gives this characterization: “Although the nine chapters can stand on their own as short stories, I always thought of them as forming part of a choral novel about an imaginary town and space, with characters revealing the events of their lives and the lives of others in a way that was to a greater or lesser extent interrelated.” I’m completely smitten with the term “choral novel” which might work today for US marketing purposes, where short story collections have always been considered anathema. It is, it seems, what I would consider a “novel in stories.”

There’s a vaguely old-fashioned, mysterious air to the story, not surreal but not quite real, either. The atmosphere creates most of that, a description of a town already that hasn’t bothered to stop breathing yet.

From the window of his second-class compartment, Mortes would have gazed out at the rain-swept platform, the faded sig with the letters T and M almost completely worn away, so that it read A OGA. He would have been greeted by a jumble of clouds and roofs. Seeing this, he must have thought the town was gloomy enough for what he had in mind. It’s also likely that what persuaded him to get off the train at the last moment was weariness, boredom… not to mention that from the start he thought he could rely on our stupidity and collective curiosity, our lack of foresight…

Mortes – note the name – is the “stranger who comes to town,” one of the fundamental plots of all fiction. We see a little bit into him, and a little bit into the town through him as he spends his day and evening there. Early on, we see “he was only among us for a few hours,” and given the atmosphere, we have a good idea of how the story will end.

The narration captured my attention from the start. I was under the impression it was the “we” voice, first-person plural, since it switches pretty handily throughout from “he” to “we.” Yet, although the narrator seems to be quite familiar with the histories of everyone in the story, and quotes them liberally on the matter of Mortes’ visit, the narrator does not have access to inner thoughts; these are surmised or guessed. So this is not an omniscient “we.” And then… aha! There is a single “I” in the narrator’s voice, on the second page, putting the story in “storyteller voice”: the storyteller never overtly interacts with anyone else in the story and never introduces him/herself. This disappoints me somehow; I was so hoping for another first-person plural. As to the identity of the narrator, whether it is an actual person, or more of an ethereal presence, perhaps emerges more clearly elsewhere in the collection (which I have a great urge to read).

The story ostensibly follows Mortes, who has become something a legend in the town on the edge of extinction, where nothing out-of-the-ordinary ever happens. But it becomes more of a study of the townspeople Mortes encounters:

Despite the fact that he was only among us for a few hours, he is still remembered with great relish, especially because of how his story ended; many people swear not only to have seen him, but to have talked with him. He had the gift of metamorphosis, apparently, because each one of us remembers him differently – although it’s possible that all of our impressions were equally correct: happy, timid, forlorn, a joker, sneering, respectful, cynical, dull, likable: he is all those things in our accounts of him. In the end we are left with fascination, and the impossibility of telling his story, because in this case the words are more concrete than the facts, and a story is really only worth telling when words can’t exhaust its meaning. We are also free to imagine and attribute multiple, contradictory, and obscure objectives to that rather short, rather skinny, rather ungainly stranger who chose Tamoga as the stage for his performance. Now Mortes is nothing more than words and a vague image already beginning to fade in our memory…

As Mortes avails himself of the various services of the town – the bus, the hotel, the café, the club, the telephone office, the brothel – we learn about the residents. One-Armed Gomez, the bus conductor; Doña Milagro, abandoned wife, uncle’s heir, and innkeeper; Alcides, her godson; Prado, restauranteur; Barbosa, the barkeep; Señorita Serena, the telephone operator; Doña Maria, the lonely old woman who revels in her nightly anisette; and, finally, Cardona, the inspector, who investigates exactly what we’ve known he’d be inspecting from the first page.

The circumstances of Mortes’ visit to the town are as murky as the fog that envelops them all. He seems to have leapt from the train at the last second. His telephone conversation says one thing; the other party, when she arrives after it’s all over, says another. In some ways, this story is like a game of telephone, as history and tradition change each time the passes through another teller. I suspect the root purpose of the story, the first in the book, is not to tell us about Mortes, but to introduce the town. That it’s done with an intriguing mystery and character study is a bonus.

Being woefully ignorant of world literature (well, all literature, really, but especially that from outside the US), I’d never heard of Julian Ríos. From the Dzanc review I discovered that Ríos wrote Shadows in the 60s when Franco was in power, and put it aside as unpublishable due to the censorship of the time. He went on to make his name as a post-modernist with other novels, only returning to Tamoga recently. I’m glad he did.

Herman Melville: “Benito Cereno,” 1855

Robert Shore: “The San Dominick”

…Captain Delano’s surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine.

I’d never read “Benito Cereno” before; I’m not sure I’d ever heard of it, in fact. That’s a shame, because Melville does some very interesting things here, and does them very, very well. It’s another tale I read in preparation for the upcoming “Fiction of Relationship” class taught by Arnold Weinstein of Brown University, offered free online through Coursera.

It’s a difficult novella to read, and not just because of the usual 19th century verbiage. The story is designed to expose slavery, and the racism that is the basis of slavery, as malignant, dangerous, and downright stupid, and to do that, of course, it must be loaded with racism. But though the skin crawls at some of the comments (the animal imagery in particular), thematically it’s worth a read, because it packs a punch, landing squarely on racism’s nose.

However: it belittles racism by belittling the mid-19th-century version of the “white liberal.” As a 21st century white liberal, I have to take into account that what to me seems like a worthy psychosociological message might read very differently to someone of African heritage, particularly to those African-Americans who are descended from slaves. I don’t want to mimic Captain Amasa Delano’s tunnel vision.

In fact, like most men of a good, blithe heart, Captain Delano took to negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs.

The text is available online in several formats of both audio and print. It’s based on an historical incident, written up by Captain Amasa Delano himself in Chapter 18 of his volume A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. An edition of this chapter of his work is available online, following the fictional story.

The interplay between fiction and reality is always interesting; sometimes real life plays out in narrative fashion, and sometimes it needs a little help. In many respects Melville remains very true to fact: in his essay “Israel Potter: Common Man as Hero,” pre-eminent Melville scholar Hennig Cohen states: “When he wrote “Benito Cereno” he evidently saw undisguised adherence to the facts of his source as an asset, and not simply to document. He had long since discovered the usefulness of authentic fact to embody symbolic significance…”

Yet there are differences, and they’ve been enumerated by many researchers, helpfully enumerated by Henry Hughes in “Seeing Unseeing: The Historical Amasa Delano and his Voyages” available online at the Duxbury Rural and Historical Society (Captain Delano having been from Duxbury).

To give a few specific examples, Margaret Y. Jackson’s research of the differences are well-enumerated and expanded upon in “Subversive Dialogues: Melville’s Intertextual Strategies and Nineteenth-Century American Ideologies” by Moonsu Shin. While he kept the names of the two ship captains intact, he changed the names of the ships, from the Spanish ship Tryal to the St. Dominick, and the year of the event, possibly to evoke the Black Friars of the Dominicans and/or associate the character Babo with the slave revolt in Haiti led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. For that matter, Babo was merely a name in Delano’s source account, the ringleader who was killed during the retaking of the ship; it was his son, Mure, who stood at Benito Cereno’s side through the day. Melville seems to have merged these two characters into his fictional Babo.

No wonder that, as in this state he tottered about, his private servant apprehensively followed him. Sometimes the negro gave his master his arm, or took his handkerchief out of his pocket for him; performing these and similar offices with that affectionate zeal which transmutes into something filial or fraternal acts in themselves but menial; and which has gained for the negro the repute of making the most pleasing body-servant in the world; one, too, whom a master need be on no stiffly superior terms with, but may treat with familiar trust; less a servant than a devoted companion.

I find the most fascinating aspect of the story to be the way Melville presents events with multiple interpretations, without tipping his hand as to what is actually going on. The reader sees events through Captain Delano’s eyes, and so is fooled along with him. Yet at the same time, the reader – this reader, at least – wants to distance herself as far as possible from Delano throughout. While Delano thinks, at first, that Cereno is merely depleted by the horrible circumstances of his voyage – disease, lack of provisions, calms – he repeatedly entertains other ideas: Cereno is an imposter, not a captain at all; Cereno is a murderous maniac and is figuring out how to murder him and take over his ship. He keeps changing his mind. I find a similarity to the protagonist in Bartleby, who wavers over and over between compassion and frustration. The constant here is how Delano sees Babo: the faithful servant, helpful, always at his master’s side, when in fact it is Babo who holds the knife.

Yet, it’s obvious on second reading what’s going on, that Delano blanches when he doesn’t know how Babo wishes him to react to a situation; that Babo is directing him, keeping him from being alone with Delano at any time, insisting he “needs rest” whenever Babo wants to convey how to handle a situation. Babo is, in every important way, the author of the tale, Cereno is the narrator (who is always under the control of the author, whether the author admits it or not), and Delano, along with us, is the reader.

Several scholars have taken on the task of analyzing exactly how Melville managed to pull this off. Johannes D. Bergman, in “Melville’s Tales” refers to this as “a complex non-dramatic third-person narration,” apparently used by Melville in only one other story, “The Bell Tower,” which also deals with enslavement. He reveals the technique was not an unqualified success:

The tale’s unreliable, even deceptive, narration led some readers to think it an ‘artistic miscarriage,’ as Newton Arvin called it. For Arvin the atmosphere of the tale is built up tediously with a silly portentousness; Melville is too tired to rewrite. George William Curtis, commenting on the story for Putnam’s in 1855, said “[Melville] does everything too hurriedly now.” Curtis was particularly concerned that the “dreary documents” at the end had not been worked into the proper narrative.

– Johannes D. Bergman, “Melville’s Tales” in A Companion to Melville Studies, ed. John Bryant, p. 265

It’s interesting that the documents of the trial appearing at the end of the story may not have been originally what Melville intended; according to “Melville Biography: A Life and the Lives”
by James Barbour, Melville “sent Putnam’s the completed portion along with legal documents pertinent to the narrative. The reader for the magazine failed to see that Melville may have intended the documents as an outline of the conclusion, and, though complaining about the lack of continuous narrative, recommended that the story, ‘Benito Cereno,’ be printed.

Willliam B. Dillingham looks at the narration in detail, finding four separate narrative voices: the Official, Individual, Authorial, and Reportorial. Merton M. Sealts, in his Critical Review of Dillingham’s Melville’s Short Fiction from 1977, gives an overview: “Three of these represent aspects of the vision of the common and ordinary world with which Melville was almost constantly at odds. The most important view is, as always, the submerged one, underlying and undercutting the others.”

For more information on Dillingham’s four voices (I can’t find the original), I rely on Darren Hughes, who looked at the work in his paper, “That First Comprehensive Glance“

The “official” voice is that of the deposition section, which serves as the “legal stamp” that officially settles the affair. However, like Cardwell, Dillingham identifies Melville’s rhetorical use of irony here, claiming that he “transforms the deposition [into] . . . a commentary on the vanity and foolishness of ordinary mankind who cannot see or will not see the sameness of all.”

The “individual” voice is Delano’s, distinguished from the others by its literalness and by its simplistic figures of speech. According to Dillingham, because Delano is blunt-thinking and incapable of irony, his perception is likewise limited, provoking juvenile similes like his description of the negresses as “unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as doves.”

Dillingham’s is a subtle, but important, distinction, as it necessarily attributes all of “Benito Cereno”‘s complex metaphoric language to the “authorial” voice. “Its style,” Dillingham writes, “is a metaphor for its message. . . . Melville depicts what Delano sees, but the terms of that depiction, that is, the figures of speech that make the correspondences necessary for the idea of similitude, are usually not Delano’s” (244-45). Instead, the story’s trademark irony — which deliberately targets Delano and, therefore, could not represent his own point of view — is clearly “authorial.”

Finally, Dillingham identifies a fourth narrative voice, the “reportorial,” which is distinguished from the “authorial” by its neutral tone and informational function. Dillingham cites the story’s opening paragraph as an example of the “reportorial” voice: “It embodies no worldview or any character’s viewpoint. It furnishes facts and is nonevaluative.”

– Darren Hughes, “That First Comprehensive Glance”

In “More Apparent Than Real,” Dane Barca creates his own vocabulary for this effect: the Ocular Fallacy: “The assumption that the gaze accurately reads what it actively misreads is a condition I call the ocular fallacy.” He credits this to not only racism, but to imperialism, and uses the “Gordian Knot” scene to support his view (on the digressive side, I’m quite fond of his paper, not only because it’s a great term, but because Barca sounds like a fascinating person: English PhD, law student, elite bartender).

Melville set himself a tough task: with whom do we, as the reader, identify? Sympathize? Do we stick with Delano in spite of his horrific view of slavery and race? Do we feel sympathy or disgust for Cereno? What about Babo, who never tells us his side of the story, who is robbed not only of his freedom but of his voice? Yes, in the story he commits atrocities against Cereno’s sailors as he leads the slave revolt. Yes, two wrongs don’t make a right. But when you’ve been kidnapped, enslaved, and degraded, is there anything that makes a right? And is it not possible Babo is acting in the best traditions of the South American slave owners, from whom he learned his vicious cruelty? Do we not reap what we sow?

The ending reminds me a bit of Bartleby, which, now that I think of it, also has a title character who is not the protagonist, and also deals in ambiguity. Edward H. Rosenberry, in “Melville’s Comedy and Tragedy,” notes: “In Benito Cereno (‘The Negro’) and Bartleby (‘I know where I am’) occur moments of tragic illumination.” To me, Cereno’s final exclamation, “The negro” is right up there with “The horror.” To what is Delano referring? I don’t really know; see, ambiguity is not a recent invention of TNY. Perhaps that his worldview has crumbled with the realization that a mere slave could take power over him. Perhaps that he’s seen what slavery is like.

But this class is, after all about relationships. I have no idea which relationship will be considered for this work: Cereno and Babo? Cereno and Delano? Delano and Babo? The reader and the text? The real people vs fictional characters? I’ll have to see; in the meantime, I’ve just been enjoying the story as a story, as an opportunity for the kind of literary archeology I haven’t done in a long time.

[References not linked to an online source were found in A Companion to Melville Studies, edited by John Bryant, Greenwood Press 1986]

Jonathan Lethem: “The Gray Goose” from TNY, 5/6/13

TNY Story Art – Weegee photo

Precisely to the same degree that she’d been mothered in disappointment, in embittered moderation, in the stifling of unreasonable expectations, in second-generation cynicism toward collapsed gleaming visions of the future, the morose detachment of the suburbs, Miriam was in fact a Bolshevik of the five senses. Her whole body demanded revolution, her whole character screamed to see high towers raised up and destroyed. Every yearning Rose might ever have wished to dampen had been doubly instilled in her daughter. For all her quashing of utopias, Rose had merely been proving Miriam’s innate suspicion that life was elsewhere.

In a nutshell: If Tessa Hadley had grown up Jewish in Brooklyn, her Stella would’ve been Lethem’s Miriam.

Like the Hadley excerpts (and yes, this is an excerpt, backstory for the novel that isn’t here), I thought the parts were greater than their sum. I loved some individual scenes, and there’s prose and imagery to die for (like Rose’s early miscarriage: “… the pregnancy lapsed, in the privacy of night, leaking out of Rose in gobs and streams…”), but in the end, it’s another teenage rebellion story, with generational echoes of Rose’s backstory. As I understand it from Lethem’s Page-Turner interview, the novel follows Miriam to sites of revolution beyond Brooklyn. I can see how this section would be great background for that.

We start off with backstory (to the backstory) about the mom, Rose, who bonded with another Communist at a cell meeting, and, despite their differences (he the urbane German Jew vs. she the Polish Brooklyn variety) married him after she missed her third period. One miscarriage and four years later Miriam was born; shortly thereafter, Dad, more Communist that Jew and not Brooklyn at all, fled the family to return to Germany:

In 1948, the year Miriam’s father left, she was given an album. Last Sunday mornin’, Lord, Lord, Lord! Oh my daddy went ahuntin’, Lord, Lord, Lord. …The way her mother handled the album reminded Miriam of the Jewish ritual actions Rose despised… really any time Miriam had ever witnessed a Jew handling papers of importance or turning the pages of a book as if unworthy, grateful, ennobled, discreetly defiant, all at once. Rose opened her political books in this way.

The folksong “The Gray Goose,” sung by Burl Ives, plays a strong thematic role throughout this excerpt (I wonder if it persists through the entire novel). It’s interesting how we co-opt symbols. It seems “The Gray Goose” was originally a black southern folk song, recorded by Leadbelly, and had strong anti-slavery connotations: a footnote crediting John Greenway’s journal article “The Flight of the Gray Goose: Literary Symbolism in the Traditional Ballad” points out “the indestructible figure of the Gray Goose who though shot, picked, pickled, and boiled, etc., couldn’t be stopped. At the end of the folksong, the Gray Goose flies away from its tormenters and escapes to freedom.” And in case you don’t have your copy of Southern Folklore Quarterly #18 from 1954 lying around, my library is obtaining the article for me from UMaine in Orono, which shows you just what a public library can do just for the asking. It’ll take a few weeks, though (they’re in summer session and nobody’s home), so I’ll have to return to it at that time.

Given Rose’s early enthusiasm for communism, it’s interesting she treats Burl Ives with such reverence, as he was one of those who “named names” to save his career. Then again, given the far greater betrayal of her husband’s abandonment of the family, it’s probably just a footnote to Rose’s conversion from ideologue to bitter cynic.

In any case, explaining the Bolshevik interpretation of “The Gray Goose” is Miriam’s way, ten years later in 1956, of establishing her communist roots to her date and her more desirable target, a Columbia student to whom she hopes to lose her virginity. The twists the tale takes along the way to this goal are pretty hilarious, but given the multisensory nature of Miriam’s rebellion, I was most interested by the subway scene in which she initiates the Columbia boy, already suffering from “boroughphobia – fear of Brooklyn” – to the best curve on the I. R. T.:

“It’s the only place in the system where you can watch the front cars of the train you’re on pull into a station from the rear cars,” Miriam said. Hammering the point home, she felt like Rose. Like she’d picked up Rose’s hammer of personality to impress the Columbia boy, to bonk against his broad, pretentiously daft forehead. (How could you go to so much trouble to arrive in New York City, as the throngs at Columbia and Barnard had, and not ride the system?) As if Miriam’s life-exuberance pointed back toward Rose’s punitive ferocity, just the way the I.R.T. screamed in the direction of home.

No matter where you go, there you are. It’s a nice way to keep the relationship between Rose and Miriam in the forefront, echoing Rose’s relationship with her husband as detailed in the first part of the excerpt. While Miriam’s attempt to be grown-up at 16 by going to a cozy Greenwich Village student hangout and losing her virginity, she’s got that same mix of boldness and fear that comes with all teenagers in varying degrees. She thinks of her Columbia man in terms of passing muster with Rose, then shakes off that thought as irrelevant: too late, we all saw the remaining apron string that, as hard as she tries to deny it, still remains her guideline, even if just to show her the path she wants to rebel against.

Maybe it isn’t Tessa Hadley at all; maybe it’s just the universality of teenager separation anxiety, the love/hate push-pull. Whatever it is, it’s probably, as I said, a great foundation for the novel. But no one ever told the realtor, “This is my dream house,” after just seeing the foundation.

Pushcart 2013: Seth Fried, “Animacula: A Young Scientist’s Guide to New Creatures” from Kenyon Review, Spring 2011

Lorna McIntosh: “Invisible Animacula”

But if emotion is not a direct response to our state of being, then what function does it serve? This question that the prehalifite view perceived as being so crucial is, of course, ridiculous. It neglects the fact that the universe is a hairy, tangled mess filled with purposeless digressions, of which our entire emotional framework is most likely just one among the uncountable. At any rate, be wary of those who would attempt to judge things solely by their function. The world is not an implement.

I made some comments on this piece when I first encountered it in Fried’s story collection The Great Temptation last year. I was going to allow that to stand for its appearance in this Pushcart volume (the second story from that collection to be selected for the Pushcart), but on re-reading the story, I changed my mind: as one story in a collection, it got short shrift, with only brief mention a few of the individual organisms.

Organisms?

Yes, organisms. The story is comprised of a set of gently academic (i.e., no training required for readers) essays, some laying out foundations of science, and some detailing a set of microorganisms you’ve likely never heard of. Don’t feel bad; no one has. They don’t exist in our current scientific literature, or, for that matter, in our universe. But they exist in Seth Fried’s.

If this were just a clever fictional scientific report about fictional organisms, it’d be a thoroughly enjoyable novelty piece. What raises the level is this: Through the examination of these organisms, Fried mines down into our humanity. It’s not just what the critters are; it’s what we reveal about ourselves as we examine them, and how we react to that very revelation. We can learn a great deal from these organisms, about our sense of identity, our need to see a purpose to our existence; about our flawed perception and status-seeking tendencies; and about fear, hope, and self-destruction.

Sprinkled among these bio-graphs are a set of short essays on the nature of science as a whole. My favorite is “The Role of Creativity in Science” which begins with an engaging thought experiment (“If a stranger were to approach you with a box of crayons and ask you to draw a clown, how would you respond?”) and its application to the scientist, who, in spite of the image we all have of the bespectacled humorless drudge squinting at a bubbling beaker, is a highly creative individual. It takes great creativity to imagine that something, anything, from unexpected fogging on photographic film to the gunk that grew in a lab dish left in the sink during an August holiday, might be might be important.

And of course it takes a lot of creativity to come up with organisms that exemplify our most human characteristics. We can learn a lot from studying these organisms.

What surprised me on reading the story in the Pushcart anthology was the omission of certain sections that were in The Great Frustration. Some of these were my favorites – the beautiful dawson, the unobservable bartlett, the sonitum that thrives on sound, and the delicious bastrom which only becomes more delicious when it is eaten alive in a frightened state (and you know where it goes from there). Presumably, these were added for Fried’s collection and did not appear in the original Kenyon Review publication of this story. This leads to one conclusion: you simply must obtain a copy of The Great Frustration, if not for the bastrom, for last year‘s Pushcart-winning “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre” which was the reason I bought the collection myself.

Some of my favorite creatures in this edition of the story:

The Eldrit

Once characteristics of a creature are fixed, it is given a role to fill as a result of those characteristics.

Identity: The eldrit changes. In fact, it’s impossible to describe, since between the scientist observing it in the microscope and writing down those observations, it’s already changed into something else. An intense investigation was undertaken to observe an eldrit continuously, assuming it would run out of permutations and reveal its true nature. That observation revealed no such true nature; or, more accurately, that its true nature is to change. All of which is fascinating, but leads to a larger question:

Why does it change? The example of a microorganism adapted to life in the lower intestine raises the question: if you find yourself in a shitty situation, why not change?

But the ability to change is not without sacrifice:

…the eldrit misses out on one of the most pleasing aspects of being a creature, which is, simply put, being a creature.
…Consider the gazelle. There is an unmistakable bravery in its implicit admission that, through being a gazelle, it is a gazelle…. it manages to take responsibility for what it is, while the eldrit can only change unconditionally, a slave to its wild, untouchable freedom.

The Kessel

Purpose: The kessel’s claim to fame is its brief life – one four-hundred-millionth of a second. That gives rise to all sorts of interesting observations about humanity:

In consideration of the kessel, human nature seems to be open to two conflicting criticisms. The first is that we see our average lifespan as being insufficient… despite the fact that we still find time enough to be bored and to wish for time to move faster. While the second criticism is that we see our average lifespan as sufficient and that the actions contained therein are significant. We flatter ourselves with the assumption that anything of importance can be accomplished in our seventy to eighty years when the earth has been around for billions of years and has been known to change dominant species as if they were hats.

But typically, one level of introspection is not enough for Fried, nor for his characters. The document also discusses the effect of the study of such creatures on the scientists conducting the study: “this air of arrogance and scorn…They are typically unkempt and wild-looking…these people are ready to conclude that everything we hold dear is futile and amounts to nothing.” Yet he doesn’t leave us there, either; the kessel has other qualities that are far more uplifting.

What I find striking about this section is the overt idea that birth, procreation, and death can exist simultaneously for the kessel – while the essayist allows for despair and hope in the same fashion, allowing form, content, and theme to merge into a single experience.

The Paglum

In other words, an impression reveals to us how much of reality can be discarded with reality still being successfully expressed. In the end, an impression is not a depiction of reality, but a seeing-through, a shutting-out of everything that is not essential.

Perception: Bobby McFerrin does a video in which he said of his bodily percussion, a precursor to contemporary beatboxing, that he gives the audience enough to continue in their own imagination; he sings the bass line a little, then switches to melody and the audience “hears” the bass line continuing (you can see this in practice in his spectacular audience-participation version of “I Can See Clearly Now“). Maybe he learned that from the paglum, an exceptional impressionist that never loses its own identity while evoking another. The consequences of this trick of perception may seem small, until you consider how we manage to see what we want to see so much of the time and base our behavior on that skewed perception.

The Perigite

Progress: This creature lives in space, in rings outside the Earth’s atmosphere. And again, Fried uses them to examine a very human reaction:

Just as we tend to look back with pity and condescension on all the creatures that are still bound to the ocean, we as a people began to understand that the next stage of life would look back in the same way on us, still bound to this floating palace of dirt….we feel usurped and irrelevant. Excluded, and jealous. Yet, we also cannot help but maintain that first touch of pride we experienced upon learning of life’s great journey out into the universe. Despite ourselves, we regard those far-off rings affectionately. We wish them well.

That last section makes a lovely close to the piece, sending us off into space and into the future with an optimistic vote of confidence in our ability to be, when it all comes down to it, human in the best possible sense of the word, in spite of the complexity that being human entails.

Antoine François Prévost: Manon Lescaut (1731)

“Abbé Prevost reading Manon Lescaut” 1856, Joseph Caraud

She struck me as being so extremely beautiful, that I, who had never before thought of the difference between the sexes, or looked on woman with the slightest attention — I, whose conduct had been hitherto the theme of universal admiration, felt myself, on the instant, deprived of my reason and self-control. I had been always excessively timid, and easily disconcerted; but now, instead of meeting with any impediment from this weakness, I advanced without the slightest reserve towards her, who had thus become, in a moment, the mistress of my heart.

And the rest, as they say, is history, or at least a short novel that to modern sensibilities seems almost comical in its implausibility. No, I take that back: no almost about it. Are the scholars sure this wasn’t a spoof?

There’s a reason I read mostly contemporary, or at least 20th century, fiction. I have trouble taking the older stuff seriously.

Nevertheless, I read the Abbé Prevost’s “Manon Lescaut” – the last of seven volumes of Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité and the only thing by Prevost anyone ever bothered to read – in preparation for a Coursera class beginning in June, The Fiction of Relationship. That’s a great title for a course, to begin with, since it can be read a couple of different ways: is it a psychology course, indicating the notion of “relationship” a fiction? Or a fiction course about relationships in fiction? It is, in fact, a fiction course. Or at least that’s how it’s billed.

“Manon Lescaut” (which, in addition to being painfully long and overcomplicated, has a painfully long and overcomplicated title to match, “L’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut”) was published in 1731; it’s been used for two major operas. And it’s quite a slog, through paragraphs like:

My only regret on quitting Amiens arose from parting with a friend, some years older than myself, to whom I had always been tenderly attached. We had been brought up together; but from the straitened circumstances of his family, he was intended to take orders, and was to remain after me at Amiens to complete the requisite studies for his sacred calling. He had a thousand good qualities. You will recognise in him the very best during the course of my history, and above all, a zeal and fervour of friendship which surpass the most illustrious examples of antiquity. If I had at that time followed his advice, I should have always continued a discreet and happy man. If I had even taken counsel from his reproaches, when on the brink of that gulf into which my passions afterwards plunged me, I should have been spared the melancholy wreck of both fortune and reputation. But he was doomed to see his friendly admonitions disregarded; nay, even at times repaid by contempt from an ungrateful wretch, who often dared to treat his fraternal conduct as offensive and officious.

(After a while, I just start screaming at the page: “Get on with it!” but that isn’t helpful.)

In other words: our narrator and protagonist, the Chevalier des Grieux (apparently the rich get titles instead of names) has a best friend Tiberge who’s going to give him sage counsel throughout the story; if he’d listened to him, instead of running off with Manon, maybe his life wouldn’t have turned into a train wreck. But sage counsel doesn’t stand much chance against love.

So instead, on his way to the seminary with Tiberge, the 17-year-old Chevalier falls in love at first sight with Manon, a lower-class girl on her way to the convent, sent there by her family to keep her from screwing everyone in her home town:

‘You may probably answer, that the proposed end, the promised reward, of virtue, is infinitely superior to that of love? No one disputes it, but that is not the question—we are only discussing the relative aid they both afford in the endurance of affliction. Judge of that by the practical effect: are there not multitudes who abandon a life of strict virtue? how few give up the pursuits of love!

He’s got a point there.

The Chevalier and Manon run off together, and he discovers she has a small weakness: she loves stuff. She’s never had any, you see, so when she’s around stuff, she wants it. And she’s pretty much willing to do what she needs to in order to obtain it. First she “visits her favors” upon an older gentleman, surprising the hell out of the Chevalier when he catches them. She later visits those same favors upon the older man’s son for the same purpose. Each time, the Chevalier is shocked, and each time, he finds ways to talk himself into forgiving her. I know all about not being able to let go, but he seems downright delusional:

Never had mortal a greater contempt for money, and yet she was haunted by perpetual dread of wanting it. Her only desire was for pleasure and amusement. She would never have wished to possess a sou, if pleasure could be procured without money.

It is true Manon doesn’t want money, per se. She wants a lovely house and a fully-appointed carriage to take her to the theatre and a toilette bursting with beautiful garments and ribbons for her hair and the finest wine with her dinner, that’s all. If those things were free, she wouldn’t care about money at all.

In commentary, she’s often called a courtesan. But they’re being polite. I happen to have some oddball nascent opinions on the legal view of prostitution, namely that it was aeons ago stigmatized mainly to restrict the financial freedom of women; they’d otherwise have an asset that would give them power over men, and that wouldn’t do at all. So when I start calling Manon a slut, I contradict myself, which bothers me. But not much, since in this context it’s too farcical to take seriously.

The Chevalier descends to cheating, lying, stealing, and eventually, murder, in order to provide his Manon with the pleasure she loves so much and keep her at his side, when she’s not off supplementing their income. It’s quite pathetic. The Chevalier’s father kidnaps him for detox, but that doesn’t work; they’re both arrested, but he breaks out and rescues her and they get by, killing a guy along the way, until they’re arrested again. They’re exported to New Orleans, which, in the early 18th century, was “nothing more than a collection of miserable huts…. inhabited by five or six hundred persons…. surrounded by some earthen ramparts, and a deep ditch.” There, he actually marries her, something they’ve just not bothered with so far, and in a twist of irony, that leads to her doom.

Maybe I’m being too harsh on her. Maybe she truly is a sweet, simple poor country girl who falls in love with the Chevalier independent of his wealth, and when his father cuts him off, she simply doesn’t understand that he won’t appreciate her helping out with finances in the ways she does. But I don’t think so.

The book is prefaced by a quick segment to introduce an outside observer, a man who sees the couple on the eve of their transport to the wilds of America. I’m not sure if this is a stylistic requirement of the time, an early attempt to start in media res (the novel was still being born in 1731), but the main effect is to require that the rest of the story, all 88 pages of it, be in quotation marks. The envelope doesn’t even close at the end. I don’t know much about the literature of the era, but it’s annoying as all get-out.

I got a strong religious message from this story. Prevost was, in fact, a priest at one point, and biographies hint at a few somewhat scandalous adventures (Dave on the Madame Pickwick Art Blog put it this way: “First Abbé Prevost, a sometime cleric, wrote his famous story, then set out to live it.”) To me, the message is clear that ever since the Garden of Eden, Woman has been leading Man astray. And, if you weren’t paying attention in church, the love of pleasure dooms everyone within a hundred yards. At least if you’re a poor woman.

But the class I’m taking is about relationships, so I tried to focus my attention there. The three primary characters of the Chevalier, Manon, and Tiberge, form a classic addictive triangle. The Chevalier loves Manon, and she claims over and over to love him and just be screwing around to earn the money to live in the manner to which she wishes to become accustomed, if only he weren’t so frugal, and later, thanks to the devastation he wreaks upon himself as he follows this downward spiral of declining morality, so penniless. His friend Tiberge seems to love him; it was pretty clear to me there was some serious bromance going on, though the Chevalier ended up using Tiberge just as Manon used the Chevalier in a cute little chain effect of charming evil.

To put it another way: the Chevalier is the addict, Manon is the drug, and Tiberge is the enabler. The Chevalier’s father and Manon’s brother are accessory characters who echo the roles of their primary attachees: the father wishes to save his son, even kidnaps him at one point to rescue him from Manon and the depravity he’s engaging in on her behalf, and the brother helps the couple in their schemes.

A relationship that interests me far more is the one between the father and son Manon services. She takes up with the father during her first period with the Chevalier; the son appears during the second, and the father assists the Chevalier in ending the son’s dalliance. I’d love to be a fly on the wall at their family dinner.

In the category of irrelevant but irrepressible: long ago, a voice teacher assigned me “Adieu, notre petite table” from the Massenet opera. I always had the impression the table was a metaphor as she left her lover, but now that I’ve read the story and am convinced she is as emotionally attached to her lovely furniture than to any person, I think she is in fact singing a tearful goodbye, at repossession, to an object she can no longer afford, a lifestyle that is again out of her reach.

‘Love! love!’ cried this grave magistrate as I went out, ‘thou art never to be reconciled with discretion!’

You said it. But damn, that was a long 99 pages to read through to come up with that. The good news: Bartleby, which isn’t half bad for the 19th century, is next. The bad news: Jane Eyre, which I’ve been able to avoid in 58 years of reading, looms ahead. I’ll try not to giggle.

Pushcart 2013: Anthony Wallace, “The Old Priest” from The Republic of Letters

The Republic of Letters story art

The old priest is a Jesuit, brainy and fey. He smokes Pall Malls fixed bayonet-style in an onyx and silver cigarette holder, and he crosses his legs at the knee. He tells stories as if he is being interviewed for a Public Television special on old priests. A small, guttural chuckle serves to launch one of his very interesting anecdotes: it’s a kind of punctuation that serves as transition, like a colon or dash. You bring your latest girl to see the old priest, you always bring your latest girl to see the old priest.

The good news: the story’s terrific, and it’s available online. The bad news: it’s surprisingly long for an online story – 12,000 words. And, oh, it’s in second person, both primary characters unnamed. To cap it off, the protagonist is, among other things, a writer. Given all those no-no’s, I’m surprised anyone anywhere ever published it, let alone that it ended up with a Pushcart prize, but that should tell you something: namely, it’s a damn fine story. And isn’t that always the point?

It’s a story about exactly what you think it’s about but it’s couched in the lifelong relationship between a wannabe-writer with no stories to tell, and a priest overflowing with stories – he once flamenco’d the night away in Spain, saw Ava Gardner at a bullfight. But it’s really at its heart about what we carry with us and how we finally lay it down: love in all its destructive glory.

It’s a story that’s difficult to discuss without spoiling it; the effect is in the reading. The structure is a spiral built around the protagonist’s friendship with the priest, his teacher in high school. The emotional ride, brought to a devastatingly perfect touch-down by the last paragraph, is spectacular, as the writer “circles the airport” throughout the story, getting closer with each pass but not landing until the final sentences.

Throughout the first half of the story, the priest tells his wild tales (come on, seeing Ava Gardner at a bullfight in Barcelona? That sounds like something borrowed from Hemingway) while the wannabe-writer bemoans his lack of life experience, the paucity of stories he has to tell. He eventually realizes he does, in fact, have stories to tell: the priest’s stories:

You call the book The Old Priest and you get an agent interested, and he gets a publisher interested. Priests old and otherwise are hot news that year because of the sex abuse scandal that is in all the headlines… It is written in the second person; it is “mannered, overstylized, derivative,” to quote one reviewer. As a writer you have some talent, most people seem to agree, but you also have an odd quirk that has proven a fairly severe limitation: you are only truly comfortable writing in the second person.
In fact, you wanted to change the title of your book to The Second Person, but the publisher didn’t want to do it and the book went out into the world as The Old Priest. “Old priests are what sells,” the editor told you, “not witty references to grammar books and Graham Greene. Let your character be the sap and you be the smart one.” He was smart, that editor, but he missed the reference to Jesus, the second person of the Holy Trinity. Also perhaps the second person as the conscience or moral self, now that you think of it. All the same, you liked that: “Grammar Books and Graham Greene” should really be the title of something, though nothing you will ever write.

Being a bit of a second-person fan, of course I loved this. But the theological reference, not to mention Graham Greene, are just for show: second person is necessary to distance the wannabe-writer from himself. It’s explicitly stated in that explanation about second person as moral self. I’m also reminded of Marko Fong’s term for this use of second person: “alienated first person.” I’m especially fond of this term applied to this story because the wannabe has all the experience he needs. But he can’t face his own experience, he’s still trying to process it throughout his life, so he keeps circling the airport.

I wasn’t optimistic when I started this story, seeing as I haven’t had a lot of luck with stories featuring priests; but within a page, I was hooked, and stayed there. Part of that is the ramping of tension throughout: did he, or didn’t he? I also found some great scene work: priest and writer getting stoned on magic mushrooms with the priest hallucinatorially turning into a goat-man in a section that reminds me of the Bolaño story I just read; it’s great imagery with amazing symbolism built in, and just the right touch of bizarre ambiguity.

In another great scene, the protagonist recollects the role of priests in his family:

At a certain time of the year the parish priest came to bless the house. You remember your grandmother kneeling down in the cramped living room, her head bowed, the priest intoning the words and sending sprinklets of holy water flying from a small, occult-looking bottle drawn from his inside pocket. You like to remember his black suit, his black hat with its short brim, his small black cigar balanced nimbly on the railing just beyond the open doorway. The priest reeking of cigar smoke and spewing holy water on the dated furniture. Your grandmother kneeling on the spinach-colored carpet, kerchiefed head bowed low. Years later this memory or set of memories was triggered by the climactic scene in The Exorcist: the two priests standing in the room with the possessed girl, throwing holy water and chanting, “The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!”

Again, the subtext of that in the context of the story is spectacular.

I’m very fond of the telescoping of levels of story – the writer in the second-person story writing the second-person book that is the story, or part of it at least, and even extending into reality: the writer of the story shares a few autobiographical traits with the protagonist: he was a casino dealer and is now a university professor, and based the old priest on “an influential Jesuit he met in his schooling.” And come on, though I rather dismissed it just a couple of paragraphs ago, the Graham Greene reference and theological nature of “The Second Person” is very clever, yet it fits in completely naturally, without that tacked-on feeling of a writer out to prove how clever he is. Incidental cleverness, organic to the story. And finally, at the very end, all the cleverness breaks down into honesty. No wonder a 12,000-word online story in second person about a writer won a Pushcart.

I guess my bad-luck streak with priest stories is officially broken.

Poetry: Pushcart XXXVII (2013)

Wordart by Marta Pelrine-Bacon

Last year when I posted about the Pushcart poetry, I admitted I was scared of poetry. I still am. But maybe a little less scared.

This September I’ll be taking a (free!) poetry class from the University of Pennsylvania via Coursera on Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, a course that promises to teach me ” how to read poems that are supposedly ‘difficult.’” I considered waiting until after the course to do this post, but that would push things to next year, and that’s just not a good idea. And it isn’t like I’ve never taken a poetry class before. But learning the basics of meter and how to recognize a sonnet aren’t skills that I find particularly useful when I’m confronted by a poem.

So I just read, and react. I’m always surprised at how accessible the Pushcart poems are; a couple of them went over my head, and I’m sure I could’ve gleaned a great deal more, particularly in terms of techniques used. But each of these poems was an aesthetic and emotional experience for me. I hope someday poetry can also be more of an intellectual experience, and I’ll be able to better articulate exactly how the poet creates that experience.

I’ve divided the poetry into three categories: first, those that include commentary, in-line or by link, from people who know what they’re talking about. Second, poems that are available online; I did my best to provide some semblance of comment for these. And third, the ones that aren’t online; I’ve included a few lines and some general notes.

Poems I had help with:

Adam Zagajewski: “I Look at a Photograph” from Tin House, Spring 2011 translated by Clare Cavanagh (available online; scroll halfway down the page)

I gaze at the photograph, I can’t tear my eyes away,
and suddenly I imagine that they’re all still alive
as if nothing had happened, they still scurry to lectures,
wait for trains, take sky-blue trams,
check calendars with alarm, step on scales,
listen to Verdi’s arias and their favorite operetta,
read newspapers that are still white,
live in haste, in fear, are always late,
are a bit immortal, but don’t know it,

I’m very lucky to find myself in e-contact with writer Naomi Williams through our blogs, so when I noticed she, as a former Pushcart winner, had nominated this piece, I thought I’d ask her to speak to it, to share what it was that struck her about the poem. She generously agreed; here are her comments:

First–and I’m assuming this is carried over from the original Polish, but I don’t really know–the entire poem is one long sentence. The way he’s able to pile on clause after clause, moving from the photo to his memories to his imagination and back, in the end, to himself, sustaining that tension all the while — it’s just mesmerizing. Mesmerizing to the reader the way, it seems, looking at the photo is to the speaker.

I also love the use of tense in this poem. The photo captures a moment in the past, and the speaker acknowledges that “freezing” in time by using present tense throughout. Or maybe he is himself caught in that moment — suggested by his admission that he “can’t tear” his eyes away from the picture. Even before he tells us outright that, “suddenly I imagine that they’re all still alive,” he’s already given himself away in the previous line when he describes, in that sort-of “eternal” present tense, the “Orthodox churches,/where on Sundays the basses sing so mightily…” The Orthodox churches that, for all we know, are no longer standing at all.

It’s one thing, of course, to imagine that people one once knew are still, in some alternate, photographic universe still living the lives they were living when the photo was taken. But Zagajewski maintains present tense even when he refers, late in the poem, to actual, datable events like the invasion of the NKVD — events that are obviously not depicted in the photograph & most likely occurred later.

I’m also just taken by the way his images and references aggregate & mix up the universal and the personal, the general and the specific, the historical with the timeless. You’ve got the more-or-less general “they” who are all “still alive,” scurrying to lectures, waiting for trains, etc., who give way to specific individuals–his grandmother with her cake, his cousin about to catch pneumonia–who in turn give way to, or are perhaps swept away by–the generic depradations of “pogroms, uprisings, deportations” and then the specific ones (Wehrmacht, NKVD), before returning to a more general “they,” which then becomes “me”–”me,” the speaker, but by then, of course, “me” the reader as well.

The poem is, as you say, a sad memoir, but it also places us all, in this way that I find simultaneously chilling & reassuring, in the position of those (“they”) who go on with their lives as if nothing will ever change but who are always on the cusp of disaster, always too late to save ourselves from history, & always too busy with our “so much to do” to remain other than in ignorance of that inevitability.

Thanks, again, Naomi, that’s so much more specific than my typical poetry comments. I was struck by the religious imagery in the beginning – the basses in the Catholic and Orthodox church choirs singing so loudly the community could hear – which gave way, both in the poem and historically, to the Wehrmacht and then the NKVD.

Patricia Smith: “Laugh Your Trouble Away” from Sugar House Review, Fall/Winter 2011

                       You pout, he pulls,
and, not for the first tune, you wonder what he hides.

For me, the power of this poem was in the slow dawning of exactly what’s happening. It highlighted in a concrete way how race matters; always, every day, race matters. Sometimes, no matter how enlightened or liberal we are, we forget that. As I started reading, I had pleasant memories of all the carnivals and midways of my past, only to be brought up hard against what kinds of memories others might have. This is one of my favorites, because it taught me more than poetry, and that’s exactly what poetry, what all art, should do. For technical analysis, I’ll rely on a post by Ken Nichols at Great Writers Steal for his analysis of the shift in POV, the “action” of the poem.

Mary Szybist: “On a Spring Day in Baltimore the Art Teacher Asks the Class to Draw Flowers” from The Kenyon Review, Fall 2011

What should be remembered, what
imagined?

The Associate Editor of The Kenyon Review explains “Why We Chose It” as part of a trio of Szybist poems about annunciation. By itself, I don’t see annunciation, but it’s devastating, nonetheless. The juxtaposition of art and abuse; the use of memory, to remember what can’t be forgotten but also can’t be borne. No matter how much I read, I’m still astounded so much can be wrung out of words.

Diane Seuss: “Everything is Sexual or Nothing Is, Take this Flock of Poppies” from Blackbird, Fall 2011 available online)

                       …Either the whole world is New
Orleans at 3 a.m. and a saxophone like a drill bit or it’s all clinical
          sunlight and sad elementary school architecture, circa 1962…

I’m going to just enjoy the delightful read and leave the commentary on this to Ken of Great Writers Steal, where you’ll find, as I did, that the poem teaches structure before spiraling off from the concrete to the abstract. Not to mention potential and kinetic energy.

Elizabeth Powell: “Match.Com/Matthew Likes Buttered Toast, Vulnerability…” from New Ohio Review Spring 2011

We are invented, in part,
By the wanting and not having
Of others….

By now, you should be realizing that Great Writers Steal is a far better place for poetical analysis than this is. But what I contribute is the view of someone who doesn’t quite get poetry, and this poem worked for me because I got it immediately: the crazy idea of meeting someone we will love online, the dream that the people we meet online will be people like us, and not people like Matthew. And the loneliness that’s behind it all.

Jill McDonough: “Preface” from Harvard Review Online #6 (available online)

Hand and foot, from head to toe, the body we know
like the back of our hands, we say, patting our palms
since we don’t know back from front

Reproduction, and how we make sense (or nonsense) of it. And guess who has a terrific take on the use of italics for dialogue.

Rasheda White: “A Shadow Beehive” from Ecotone, Fall 2011 (available online)

                       I hear my mother
in the kitchen drying out the darkness.

In the Fall 2011 issue of Ecotone, John Rybicki included a set of poems by children, including this one by fourth-grader Rasheda White, saying: “Children see the magic and possibility that reside in all things.…Lift these pages to your eyes and read, and if the urge strikes you, drop to your knees.” The imagery is delicious.

Poems available online:

Sommer Browning: “It Isn’t Dead, Just Different” from Spork, (text and video available online)

At night the Turnpike is lit like a wet snake.
No matter which way you travel, you’re heading
for the fangs.

A brush with death, and chicken sandwiches on the New Jersey turnpike. The anthology has omitted a few things – dialogue tags, italics – from the original. I’m not sure it’s an improvement. Then again, I’m not sure I could tell this was a prize-winning poem in a game of “emo or poetry?”

Alicia Ostriker: “April” from Poetry, February 2012 (available online)

What a concerto
of good stinks said the dog
trotting along Riverside Drive
in the early spring afternoon

More juxtaposition: this is the third stanza. Whether it’s a rising arc, a downward spiral, or a level playing field, the reader gets to decide.

Elton Glaser: “Do the Do” from Southern Poetry Review 48:2 (available online)

It’s all jism and jungle, late love and cheroots,
Sweat equity on the dance floor.
Somebody lies about his rusty heart. Somebody don’t.

I can hear the music as I read this, I can smell the room. I like how the focus moves around the room before zeroing in on the band, each member in turn.

Matt Mason: “Notes for my Daughter Against Chasing Storms” from Nebraska Poets Calendar ( video available online)

Tornadoes swing through like a kid
playing hopscotch…

Oh, you must see him read this poem; it takes a turn I sure wasn’t expecting, but it turned out to be one of those “oh, of course!” surprised-yet- inevitable turns. There’s a school of thought that literature must be kept context-free, but I disagree, particularly on this poem: my reading from the printed page had a melancholy, tragic feel; had the poet been a woman, I think this would’ve been correct, but his more ebullient, mocking read makes perfect sense as well. How interesting, the difference between my read off the page and his from the lecturn. I learned something from this one: try reading in multiple ways to get a view of the poem from different angles.

Jane Hirshfield: “In A Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed” from Ploughshares, Fall 2011 (available online)

As a person who’s once loved completely,
a country once conquered,
does not release that stunned knowledge.

I love the story of this poem: a friend asked Hirshfield for “poems for a mushroom/fungi anthology” but as she had no mushroom poems, she wrote the introduction instead (“Poems, like mushrooms, demand our close attention before they can be found or seen at all”). The idea of a mushroom poem lingered, and she ended up writing two, including this one. I’m not sure I quite grasp the poem as a whole beyond the lingering-scent imagery, which is lovely, but I’m fascinated by the above lines.

Alan Michael Parker: “A Fable For Our Anniversary” from Subtropics, Spring/Summer 2011 (available online)

It was one of those dawns that didn’t
and then was. The crows were calling
in their office across the street,

all that old business of the soul and such,
but don’t you worry, I wasn’t scared.
And now I have a goat:

Think Mockingbird – though you can’t tell from the stanzas here. I loved reading this, yet once again, I have no idea why in objective terms it’s a great poem, other than recognizing the combination of a hint of threat (the last bag of rice, the crows) and fanciful magic.

Ted Kooser, “Lantern” from The Kenyon Review, Fall 2011 (available online)

In the predawn cold and darkness,
it was only a pinch of light,
not more than a cup of warmth,
as a farmer carried it over the snow
to the barn where his dozen cows
stood stomping, heavy with milk
in the milky cloud of their lowing.

Everything leaves something behind, and sometimes that something can generate more than you ever dreamed possible. At least when in the hands of the 13th U.S. Poet Laureate.

Marianne Boruch: “The Art of Poetry” from Pilot Light, September 2011 (available online)

isn’t sleep. Isn’t the clock’s steady
one and one and one though seconds eventually make
an hour. And morning passes
into a thing it might not recognize by afternoon.

This is the kind of poetry I feared Pushcart would be full of before I started reading it: beautiful images, but damned if I know what she’s talking about.

Fred Moramarco: “Elegy for Kenneth Koch” from Poetry International #17 (available online)

It seems too crazy, like one of your mad, funny poems,
that you’re not with us anymore, not here to point out
the thisness of things, like mountains, circuses, and fresh air.
You were always the court jester of poets,
topping pretension from its granite and marble heights.

Even a poetic Philistine such as I can appreciate a student’s life-long respect for a teacher. Moramarco passed away himself in February, and the poem was republished as a memoriam.

Laura Rodley: “Resurrection” from The New Verse News (available online)

Carry this, they ask,
carry this load of bamboo
tied with rope upon my back
take this load to my mother,
tell her I got lost upon the way
and now in deep waters of the ocean
I have not forgotten.

A lovely elegy for the spirits of those lost to the tsunami. It starts off with some measure of futility – irony of the closing-the-barn-door variety – then turns exquisitely, heartbreakingly personal.

Reginald Dwayne Betts, “What We Know of Horses” from River Styx May 2011 (audio and print available online)

… Call this place a horsecollar, a way to redefine a world,
& watch how it cuts into skin, how the leather embraces
all of our necks. Even as a visitor behind plate glass I brace
myself for cuffs.

This is overwhelmingly powerful, but controlled; a look at prison through the man whose brother is incarcerated. The horse metaphor comes from Psalm 20: “Some trust in chariots and some in horses.” The poem uses dual word meanings – “horse” meaning heroin, “cuff” as shackles and a slap – to take self-aware self-destruction as a partner and dance.

Michael Waters: “Beloved” from Gospel Night (available online if you’re very careful)

She scours shelves for American novels –
Overhead bulbs fizzled out years ago –
Then finds the harrowing tale of a slave
That makes her bulb seem to surge with power
Hour after hour in the old cubicle.

It’s a gorgeous poem, a love song to books and that was before I found the author’s commentary. His wife lived in Romania under Ceauşescu, and at 16, she carried own light bulb to the library to read: Ethan Frome, Toni Morrison, whom she met ten years later. Another remarkable poem.

Toon Tellegen: “A Man Found An Angel” from The Manhattan Review Fall/Winter 2011/2012 (available online)

A man found an angel, in some out of the way place,
let’s fight, said the man,
good, said the angel

I adore this little parable. Maybe we’ve all been thrown into the abyss, victims of our own hubris, and we don’t even have the awareness to realize it. The poem was translated from the Dutch by Judith Wilkinson; I’m always surprised when poetry translated can work like this. The translator must become a bilingual poet.

Adrian Blevins: “Tally” from The Georgia Review, Fall 2011 (available online)

The babies smelled like mixed-up milk and cotton dragged
through a little wax, but not like sugar or any amount

of caramel. …

Now, see, just when I think I’ve got the hang of it, something comes along that stumps me. I’m pretty sure this is painfully grim. I just don’t know the specifics. Then again, are the specifics necessary?

Deborah Brown: “Walking the Dog’s Shadow” (available online)

It’s best to let grief enter you like this,
alone with your own black dog,
a drag on anyone’s leash”

Wonderful metaphors, and a touch of word play – “shows you how well it heels” – make this special. To think of grief as a pet makes it more manageable, gives you a new avenue of approach.

G. C. Wadrep: “Internal Monument” from Michigan Quarterly Review (available online)

A man was sad—for himself, maybe for someone else, maybe he had lost something, or someone—so he hired some workmen to erect a monument.

A charming little fable. I think it’s about ego props, and the false directions we take all the time. I would think the monuments inside ourselves would be the ones that matter, but apparently they don’t help much. Which leaves the stars, if we could only raise our eyes and look up.

And the rest:

Matt Hart: “Beyond and Beyonder” from Smartish Pace #19

                                                  …When they listen
to our music, when they open our books, remember
our wars and treaties and image, will they find there
a lightness or an absence where we fluttered?…

We all need to remember that we will be judged, just as we judge those who went before us. It’s a lovely poem, but I’m afraid it’s in that category of “teenager or master?” for me – I like it, I just don’t know enough about poetry to understand why it’s a great poem.

Christine Gelineau: “Socanasett” from Paterson Literary Review, 2010

When the clothes went missing
from a neighbor’s line we understood the boys
were not cold, or suddenly shy but
crafty, looking to blend back in
with those of us who didn’t yet now what they knew:
the true worth of one’s own skin
and what it can cost to own it.

I was gliding along, thinking of the time I lived near a youth detention center – then the last two lines stopped me dead. This is how you sneak up on a reader with an interpretation that changes everything.

Cristian Flores Garcia: “Lucky One” from American Poetry Review, Sept/Oct 2011

We wait. We sit. We hold hand, sister and I. He asks
which one is the lucky one?

Lucky is a relative term when you and your sister are crossing the border in the trunk of an ’86 Ford Grenada to get to your parents. The poem itself mimics the girls’ experience: the tight constriction, the flash of light, the relief at the end – but you, and they, know it isn’t over.

Davis McCombs: “First Hard Freeze” from Indiana Review, Summer 2011

… and whatever it is
that will unmask the girl who masks the old
woman who is turning the tap comes crawling
up from timber on a night like this…

I think this is about fear of death, but I’m guessing.

Diane Wakoski: “Oysters with Lemon in Montmartre” from Fifth Wednesday, spring 2011

In any mirror, you always face the loss
of memory; mirrors retain
nothing of what they have seen.

I like the balance of accessibility and fancy here. A woman finds a random scrap of paper with those title words written on them, and they take her back to another time. Part memoir, part rumination on memory itself, all revolving around oysters and a summer in Brittany long ago.

James Richardson: “Vectors 3.1: Aphorism and Ten Second Essays” from Hotel Amerika, Spring 2011

The self does not exist. But just try to change it.

I think this is cheating. Yes, they’re very clever aphorisms, all worth reading. But… is there a unifying principle here? Maybe it’s just over my head, in which case, it’s brilliant. At least more brilliant than I.

Bruce Bennett: “The Thing’s Impossible” from Ploughshares, Fall 2011

Don’t write a villanelle to tell a tale:
they’re not the form for narrative or plot.
It’s pretty obvious why you will fail.

Guaranteed to make you smile. Beside the limerick (if a limerick can be considered poetry), the villanelle is the only form of poetry I instantly recognize, and, thanks to Plath, Thomas, and Auden, love. It takes a twisted mind to invent such a form, but it has the sing-song effect that’s counterbalanced by the often melancholy content. Bennett starts off with a quote from The Making of a Poem in which “the absence of narrative possibility” is asserted, then goes on to tell a story via villanelle. Just the act itself is poetry.

I’d hoped to have this post ready for National Poetry Month, but life intervened. That’s ok, I’m the sort of person who reads two short story collections in Poetry Month and does poetry in Short Story Month. The line blurs sometimes, anyway.

Poetry was more fun, and less scary, than last year. I’m even looking forward to next year already.

Joshua Ferris: “The Fragments” from TNY, 4/29/13

New Yorker art by Eric Hanson

“You think no more surprises, and then,” one of the men coming toward her said.
“Then you get free luggage,” the second man said.

The elements of this story are familiar: eavesdropping (unavoidable in the era of the cell phone); material possessions (unavoidable in the era of consumerism); infidelity (unavoidable in the era of humankind, not to mention in fiction). But Ferris finds a way to put them together in a way that’s a little different.

At the opening, a husband is idly eavesdropping on a conversation in a bar when his wife, Katy, a high-powered lawyer who’s been working unusually long hours on an important case, calls. He finds himself eavesdropping on her, as it becomes evident she’s butt-dialed him and is unaware he’s listening in:

Static shifting, churning, then lifting suddenly. He hollered to be heard. “Yoo hoo, Katy!”
“… no, he thinks I’m…”
More static.
“… just wish… could spend the night…”
Then a man’s voice. “… too bad you live… have an extra hour…”
More static. He plugged his other ear and listened intently. The words were torn before they reached him, irrecoverable. He was no longer saying her name, just listening.
“… dinner, but if you’re not…”
“… hungry all right, but not for…”
He listened for ten minutes. Only fragments came through. Amplified, then muted. He strained to identify the man’s voice. It was low and familiar. Long periods of static gave way to discrete words, occasional phrases.
He stood in the cold trying to interpret them. By then, he knew his life was over.

I like the understated way this is handled: the guy standing in the cold (of course), realizing what this conversation, in combination with his wife’s extended absences from home supposedly due to work, means.

The husband spends a few days eavesdropping around the city, perhaps checking on how reliable an overheard fragment could be. It’s pretty easy to tell what the conversations are about in general terms: the price of a scarf; beauty spa workers wearing scrubs; a stock market order; a custody fight. None of them could be mistaken for an illicit affair. Then again, they’re a lot more complete than the static-ridden fragments he heard from his wife on the phone, but he might not be inclined to look for exculpatory evidence in his frame of mind.

Ferris connects this to material possessions:

There were things that were “his” and things that were “hers,” a distinction from long ago that now reasserted itself with a cruel and vivid haste. Every “her” thing was a reminder. She was “her” now, just that, no longer Katy, no longer his wife. He would call her “her” for the rest of his life.

Our point-of-view protagonist has remained unnamed throughout, a choice I always find interesting. Often a first-person narrator never gets a name, but this is third-person, so why that choice? At first I thought, maybe it turns him into Everyman; we can more easily empathize with him. Or maybe it’s to emphasize his invisibility as an eavesdropper. But maybe it ties in to this paragraph: it distances him from us. I’m not sure why Ferris would do that, but it’s too perfect a match to be coincidence. Maybe it’s part of the fragmentation; we only see parts of him, and his name is not a part we see. Or maybe I’m overreading again.

Now that the focus in on their possessions, those things become the focus of the plot, as the husband gives her stuff away to strangers passing on the street. This culminates in the final scene quoted at the start: a switch in POV, with Katy coming home, overhearing a conversation between two guys pulling a roller bag she recognizes as hers.

In his Page-Turner interview, Ferris says his wife thought Katy might be innocent; a (male) friend disagreed. Although I think the wife is clearly cheating, the possibility of her innocence makes it a more interesting story.

I think it’s more interesting also because the husband doesn’t confront Katy, though he has several opportunities to do so; on one night, he’s asleep, and on another, he feigns sleep. Seen as a writer’s choice, it makes the story entirely about the husband, since we never hear Katy’s side. But it works on the character level as well: the husband doesn’t want to hear her make excuses, which will probably be very good ones, seeing as she’s a lawyer. If a marriage fractures this easily, was it was much of a marriage to begin with? I’m reminded of an anecdote about a complainer who, when his difficulties were remedied, refused to accept, saying, “I would rather have my grievance.”

Ferris’ interview is also notable for his comments on story process.

I never intended to make a story. I was interested in putting speech patterns down on the page (or to be more exact, the screen) and seeing how they looked. Oddly, when I decided to shape them into a story, most of the fragments had to be invented.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but a writer usually crafts a better narrative.

Roberto Bolaño: “Mexican Manifesto” from TNY, 4/22/13

Gaylord Morris: “Montezuma”

…[S]he introduced me to the world of public baths, which from then on, and for a very long time, I would associate with pleasure and play. The first one was, without a doubt, the best. It was called Montezuma’s Gym, and in the foyer some unknown artist had done a mural where you could see the Aztec emperor neck-deep in a pool. Around the edges, close to the monarch but much smaller, smiling men and women bathe. Everyone seems carefree except the king, who looks fixedly out of the mural, as if searching for the improbable spectator, with dark, wide-open eyes in which I often thought I glimpsed terror. The water in the pool is green. The stones are gray. In the background, you can see mountains and storm clouds.

Ah, a Roberto Bolaño story about Mexican bathhouse culture. Just what I was waiting for.

The last time I tried to read Bolaño, I was quickly defeated. I did somewhat better this time around, but I still required a good deal of assistance. Fortunately, lots of assistance is just a few clicks away. The story itself is also available online.

Grant Catton addressed my first point of confusion quite directly in his blog review: “The story is about a young man and woman who use each other as ‘buddies,’ holding hands as they explore together a strange and subterranean culture they likely wouldn’t have had the guts to explore alone.”

I’d wondered about the couple, Laura and the unnamed first-person narrator; the relationship seems less than committed, shall we say. The narrator describes a woman who thinks little of changing her opinion capriciously. Either that, or the narrator changes his view of her capriciously:

One day I’ll wander around in here, Laura said. Her experience raiding public baths was greater than mine, which wasn’t saying much, considering I’d never before crossed the threshold of such an establishment. Nevertheless, she said she knew nothing of baths. Not enough. She’d gone a couple of times with X and, before X, with a guy who was twice her age and whom she always referred to with mysterious phrases. In total, she hadn’t been more than ten times, always to the same place, Montezuma’s Gym.

In the space of these few sentences, Laura 1) knows nothing of the baths; 2) knows more than the little the narrator knows; 3) went a couple of times; 4) went about ten times. I may be overly fastidious about details, but which is it? This all adds to the subversive sense of unreality, confusion, and/or threat.

The narrator claims, from what seems to be a future look-back point (which gives me the impression this might have been conceived of as a section in a novel, but I don’t know enough about Bolaño to say), to associate this period of his life, the bathhouse phase, with “pleasure and play.” Throughout the piece, however, there’s a sense of threat and danger, along with grim imagery – tombstones, Nazi showers. Sex – impalement, loss of control, nakedness – is, psychically speaking, pretty scary stuff. Just in case you’re doubtful about that, Bolaño throws in ” an old divan reminiscent of psychoanalysis and bordellos.”

I’m quite fond of a rather extraordinary scene, part of the visit that is most detailed:

I felt Laura’s fingers caress my shoulder. In a little while, I realized that Laura was playing, very gently, but it was a game: her pinkie was sunbathing on my shoulder, then her ring finger would pass and they’d greet each other with a kiss, then the thumb would appear and both pinkie and ring finger would flee down the arm. The thumb was then king of the shoulder and would lie down to sleep; it seemed to me that he even ate some vegetable that was growing there, for the fingernail dug into my flesh, until the pinkie and the ring finger returned, accompanied by the middle and index fingers, and all together they would frighten the thumb, who hid behind an ear and spied on the other fingers from there, without understanding why they’d thrown him out, while the others danced on the shoulder and drank and made love and, out of sheer drunkenness, lost their balance and fell off the cliff and down the back, an accident Laura would take advantage of in order to hug me and lightly touch her lips to mine; in the meantime, the four fingers, terribly bruised, would climb up again, clinging to my vertebrae, and the thumb would observe them without ever thinking to leave his ear.

I went into the story assuming there was a level above the literal one, because, well, Bolaño is that kind of writer. The title, of course, sounds overtly political. And yes, the notion of “revenge” crossed my mind, but I’m pretty sure that’s a connotation unique to ignorant ethnocentric Americans like me, and it’s probably also pretty offensive, so I discarded it. Still, Montezuma towers over all, in a mural appearing in the foyer of Montezuma’s Gym, a favorite bathhouse. The story returns to the mural at the end:

Montezuma’s eyes, bottomless. Montezuma’s neck suspended above the surface of the pool. The courtiers (or maybe they weren’t courtiers) who laugh and converse, trying with all their might to ignore whatever it is the emperor sees. The flocks of birds and clouds that mix together in the background. The color of the pool’s rocks, doubtless the saddest color I saw in the course of our expeditions, comparable only to the color of some faces, workers in the hallways, whom I no longer remember, but who were certainly there.

I’m not well-versed enough in Mexican history or culture to extrapolate much from this, but a worried king neck-deep in a pool opening and closing the story must have significance. To the rescue: Manel at The Mookse and the Gripes, who proves a wonderful guide to that aspect: “…the title, and Bolaño’s country of origin [Chile], lead me to believe that this is definitely a story about sex, which is really a story about politics.” The discussion is extraordinary.

With stories like this, perhaps I should just sit them out and let the people who understand what they’re reading do the talking. But then I wouldn’t learn anything, and that is my purpose here. I’m already learning to be a little less afraid of Bolaño.

Douglas Watson: “The Messenger Who Did Not Become A Hero” from One Story #177, 4/8/13

Art by George Fuentes

There was a messenger who was stuck working for a no-good King. That the king was no good had been proved by numerous studies. His intentions may have been good, but results-wise, he was not good. The delivery of kingly services to subject/consumers had grown markedly less efficient since the death of the old king. Also, the new king was not really handsome enough to be a king. He was duke material at best, according to the studies.
For a distinguished messenger nearing the end of his career, it was embarrassing to be working for so mediocre a king.

If you started out writing a fairy tale that turned into a humorous version of Les Miz, morphed into the Odyssey, and finished off with The Death of Ivan Illyich and tied it all together with social satire, you might end up with something like this story. Of course, you would never do such a thing. But Douglas Watson would.

Watson first came across my radar when I read his flash, “Life On The Moon,” on the Tin House blog, and couldn’t add it to my Online Fiction Sampler page fast enough.

But this is not a love story.
It is a philosophical story with a surprise ending.

Our non-hero messenger (with a passion for good coffee) does, however, fall in love. He also joins a revolution, un-revolves eight days later, heads for Sumatra and doesn’t quite make it. He does discover the benefits of self-employment, and eventually… well, you’ll have to read the story.

I suspect there are many philosophical references here that just go past me; my knowledge of philosophy begins and ends with Sophie’s World. But I’m sure there’s something very deep and analytical here about messaging; your own, vs. someone else’s. I’ve been rather obsessed with messaging over the past week or so, but come on, it’s right there in the title. This was a great story to run into right now.

In his One Story Q&A, Watson describes his approach to narrative distance:

I think it’s a way of trying to fold my own self-consciousness about the act of writing into the product itself—you know, like: Now add three tablespoons of self-consciousness. Beat until almost smooth. Melt the protagonist over medium heat. Add a dash of conflict and just enough sugar to make the reader care about the character. Mix well and bake for a million years in the Oven of Remember, This Whole Thing Is Kind of a Joke! Let cool before serving.

That’s the attitude.

Pushcart 2013: Jeanne Shoemaker, “Sonny Criss” from The Iowa Review, Fall 2011

Photo by Carol Walker, WildHoofbeats

Sonny Criss was named after his father, William Henry Criss, called Sonny for the obvious reasons, and lived with his mother, Delpha Mae Criss, and his father on a fifty-thousand-acre spread halfway between Chugwater and Wheatland, Wyoming. His best friends were his horse, Spider, a 15.3-hand chestnut quarter horse, and his blue heeler dog, Red.

Once upon a time there was a college student. She was in a class on “Forms & Techniques of the Short Story” and had to write a 3,000 word essay, but she didn’t really want to write an essay, and she’d heard a former student had wrangled his way out of the essay by writing a short story, so she wrote a 10,000-word short story instead of the 3,000 word essay. She’d never written a short story before, but hey, she was taking a Short Story class and she’d read a lot of short stories, and what better way to show she’d learned something than to actually produce the form the class was supposed to be teaching. But the professor said, “No.” The woman was very persistent and said, “What about if you give me 70% of the grade for this story – which is, by the way, 10,000 words, longer than the assignment requires, and shows an example of a western, which is one of the essay topics – and 30% for the essay which I’ll write anyway?” The professor said, “No.” But she didn’t give up, and she finally wore him down: he agreed to give her 50% credit for the story and 50% for the essay which turned out to be terrible, but the short story was good enough not only to get through the class but to get her a Fellowship in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop a few years later.

But even though that’s a happy ending, there’s more to this little fairy tale. This was a very persistent woman, and here she’d written this story based on her grandmother and grandfather on the Wyoming ranch where she’d grown up – “a world that doesn’t exist any more” – so it meant a lot to her, and since the story was good enough to get her into the best creative writing program in the country, she sent it out to some literary magazines. They all said “No.” She sent it to a few more, and they said “No,” too. She sent it to more, and more, and more, until finally, after forty “no”s, The Iowa Review said “Yes.”

Now that’s another happy ending, but in fairy tales, things happen in threes, so there’s still more. The Iowa Review nominated the story for a Pushcart Prize and – you guessed it, it won and ended up in the 2013 Pushcart Prize anthology. And that’s how the woman who just wanted to get out of writing a boring essay (and who refused to listen to the word “no”) turned her first short story into a Pushcart Prize, because “We can all be tricked by cleverness and other conceits. Writing with an open heart is hard to do. I wrote this story with an open heart.”

That woman’s name was, of course, Jeanne Shoehorn, and this is a true fairy tale.

Pushcart (and BASS and PEN/O.Henry) makes a good effort to include a variety of voices, including those rural and western. It would be easy to focus on urban/suburban fiction, using the occasional exotic drama of overseas settings to stir things up. It’s harder to include a story most will see as old-fashioned: a lot of exposition. A portrait of a specific family in a setting that, yes, doesn’t exist any more, that may never have existed for most readers.

But that doesn’t mean these voices, these stories, aren’t important. Stories like “Mr. Tall” or “Two Midnights in a Jug” from XXXV, like “That Story” from XXXVI and even “Nothing Living Lives Alone” (which I hated when I read it in BASS) from this volume. They form our history, our culture. They may not be the dominant thread in literature, and I may not even enjoy some of these stories, I may even make some snotty comments about not understanding why they’re prize-winning material and I may even consider them my least-favorite stories in the volume, but they still matter as much as the voice of the post-modernist or the story about the hipster or the exotic overseas locale or the urban academic or the alienated suburbanites embroiled in a hostile marriage.

This particular story is not an easy story to quote; Shoemaker wrote a saga, not sound bites. You have to follow Sonny through his diabetic coma to get the full impact from a passage like this:

Sonny couldn’t shake the feeling that everything he was accustomed to and took for granted was now tentative and flimsy. Though he had always been a good son, he was kinder to his mother and more patient with his father. He patted his horse and dog more.

You have to see that lead into the care he takes with Red after a rattler bite, the scene in the vet’s office, to know these people.

You have to see how they treat their cows, know about Mom getting older and having trouble doing all the milking, the need to sell those cows, before you can appreciate Will’s comment “Pruitt doesn’t know a thing about dairy cows, didn’t even ask their names,” you have to read the whole scene about the selling of those cows, and the whole story for that matter, before you really get something like:

Bosie and Queenie, the cows that weren’t leaving, wouldn’t get out of the way, wouldn’t let Pruitt separate them. Bosie was Queenie’s daughter, her firstborn, and the two ran the herd. They made cow decisions: where to graze, when to lie down, when to get up.

You can write papers about the symbolism there, but only if you read the whole story, this story about a guy who lives on a ranch with his mother and father, who sees the ranch under assault not from marauding bands of hooligans or space aliens but from the 21st century. A family of people who work hard every day until they drop in their tracks, about neighbors who care about each other, about people who are in a daily working partnership with animals and nature, about losing a way of life a little at a time, but hanging on to it with both hands until there are no more hands to hold on with.

If they were a primitive Amazonian tribe facing extinction, anthropologists would be writing them up. But they’re not, they’re us, the us that we don’t think about very much, so it’s up to Jeanne Shoehorn (and Tony Earley and Wendell Berry and Jack Driscoll and Marc Watkins) to write it down so we’ll remember who we are. Thanks, folks.

Bonnie ZoBell: The Whack-Job Girls (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2013)

Cover design by Cynthia Reeser; photo by Al Faraone

You know who they are – the women who can’t get out of their own way, or can’t get started; the ones lost in whatever dreams they’ve had since childhood that are preferable to reality, women who’ve missed the mark somewhere, gone over the edge, around the bend. Women who never cared about the mark, the edge, the bend in the first place. Whack-job girls. They aren’t stupid. And they aren’t crazy, certainly not in a technical sense, not at first, though in time, they could be. They’re just like the rest of us, and they’re just doing the best they can with what they’ve got.

These are the women Bonnie ZoBell has gathered together in her chapbook, The Whack-Job Girls.

I knew Bonnie back in my Zoetrope days, from the Newbie office and the Flash Factory where we read and reviewed each others’ work (and I understand Zin lurks in her latest Office there even now). One of the benefits of Zoetrope was the opportunity to hang around with writers like Bonnie (who, I should mention, has an MFA from Columbia, an NEA Grant, and serves as associate editor of the Northville Review and contributing editor of the Flash Fiction Chronicles, among other things like her day job teaching writing to college students). I was lucky enough to see the beginnings of some of these stories; I recognize the prompts from a few of them (“500 words combining public transportation and the death of a pet…” “…using the name of a Factory member and at least one of these elements…”). I knew I had to read the collection, and I was very happy to find it in downloadable format as well as in paperback.

I asked Bonnie a few question, and, bless her heart, she answered.

How did the collection come about? Did you decide to put together a collection of your favorites, and noticed they were all about, well, whack-job girls, or was it a conscious decision to select pieces that fit that description?

Funny you should put it that way, Karen. That’s pretty close to how the collection came about. I had a lot of flash I’d written, so I made a list of the ones that I thought were my best. As I’m sure you know, flash writer that you are, it’s pretty hard to be objective about that since they’re all your babies. Yes, I looked through them trying to see any connecting themes. I did know that I thought “The Whack-Job Girls” was my best title for a story, which was confirmed by some writer friends I asked. And then, yes, I noticed that there were a lot of, well, whacky girls in these stories—alienated, acting in unusual ways, not quite right socially. So then I took out all the stories with male protagonists and started trying to arrange the rest of the stories around the theme of whackiness.

Though I read a lot of collections, I don’t know much about how they’re organized. How did you decide on the order of the stories?

I considered several things when I put the stories in order and changed my mind a few times as well. I wanted the first few stories to be some of my strongest as well as my last story. But also I was trying to vary the stories so that, for instance, if there were only two second-person stories, I didn’t put them next to each other. I tried to have a nice mix of first-, second-, and third-person stories throughout, though other considerations meant I couldn’t always do that. The other type of stories I tried to keep apart were stories on the same topic. For instance, I think there ended up being two stories with domestic abuse in them, and since it’s definitely not a book about domestic abuse, I made sure those weren’t right next to each other because I didn’t want people to get that idea.

I love the trailer – can you talk about the process of creating it?

The trailer was a lot of fun. I’m writing an article about that and other trailers for Flash Fiction Chronicles. I wanted a trailer because I think they’re cool and help give a flavor for a book you might be considering buying. However, I’m not rich and I have very little time since I teach. I knew there were big-shot places that you could spend a lot of money on them, but I also had friends who had friends who had made them, so I started looking around for someone more reasonable who might make one for me. A friend, Talia Carner, referred me to John Ray Gutierrez at Big Burrito Media. He’s very reasonable, a lot of fun to work with, and best of all, a lot of his work his crazy, which went right along with the book.

I recognize some of the stories and prompts from the Flash Factory. What do you think are the benefits of working from prompts? The drawbacks?

Every single one of the flashes in the book came from The Flash Factory on Zoetrope. I’ve gotten a lot of story ideas from the prompts given in that office, too. The biggest benefit of working from prompts, at least for me, is that they encourage me to write about topics and characters that wouldn’t normally come to mind. There are no drawbacks that I know of. If you don’t want to write from a prompt because you already have a story in mind, then don’t!

You have another book coming out next year – What Happened Here. I read at least one story (I think) that will be included in that collection. Did you set out to write a series of linked stories, or did it just evolve that way?

Yes, the publisher of my dreams, Press 53, has taken my connected collection, What Happened Here. I couldn’t be happier about that because I think Kevin Morgan Watson is so smart and a wonderful editor. I’m still having some trouble getting the title story the way I’d like it to be, and he’s given me some great advice—not prescriptive so much as talking to me and helping me to understand what it is I’m trying to say in that story. No, they weren’t originally connected, but I came up with a central incident to connect them all to, which was a plane crash that occurred in my neighborhood of North Park in San Diego some thirty years ago. I do think that even when we writers are writing about wildly different topics—or so we tell ourselves—the stories are still all from the core of who we are, so they weren’t very hard to connect.

With all this going on, are you having the time of your life right now?

Ha! Silly girl. You’d think, huh? I’m very happy that more people will be reading my work, most of all. But I’m also on a big learning curve finding out how to promote a book, which takes a lot of time—both the learning and the promoting. I’m looking forward to a time in the future when I can sort of unplug from everything and go back to doing more writing.

A quick take on a few of my favorite flashes:

“Nonnie Wore No Clothes” from Foundling Review, December 2011.

Nonnie felt that if she bared as much of herself as she could, if she were as open as she could possibly be, she might glean something from the Virgin, some deeper understanding and therefore willingness might be accorded to her. Maybe she’d catch a break. Maybe Mary would perceive that while Nonnie wasn’t perfect, she really did need some help right now.

What it’s like to be desperate enough to see the Virgin Mary in a smudge on the wall – and how sometimes that can let you love, just enough. Since I recognized the prompt, I was particularly interested in Bonnie’s contributor note about the origin of the story. It’s also available as an audio recording, complete with music and sound effects.

“Black Thumb” from Used Furniture Review

“She’s only heard me once. I take great pains. And it wasn’t that bad, simply me telling a man he had beautiful nose, no matter what other women told him.”

You can’t be everywhere at once – or all things to all people – but that doesn’t stop some women. The problem is when worlds collide, and your daughter hears you on the phone with a client.

“You Are Not Langston Hughes” from FRiGG, Winter 2008.

You wanted something different. In Spokane, you were tired of working as a lunch waitress at the Bon Marche department store. You wanted more urbane city centers than the NorthTown Mall, to surround yourself with more important bodies of water than Lake Coeur d’Alene, to know people whose dreams extended beyond nine to five.

I’ve never been bitten by the New York bug, but if I ever were, this is the way I’d want to do it. I love the voice – and yes, second person might be why.

“The Whack-Job Girls” from Bartleby Snopes, January 2010.

That’s what the men have started calling the regulars at Nellie’s since all the trouble started, the Whack-Job Girls. And the Girls call them the Short-Fuse Dudes. The Girls don’t have to sit around and take it. Not according to Oprah.

To be honest, I’m not sure what’s going on here (except for the dedication) but it’s a story with snakes and Chinese food and a Loretta Lynn song, “Love is Like Bad Noodles.” Would you think I was incredibly stupid if I admitted I googled that to see if there really was such a song? There is, actually – it’s on the trailer created by Big Burrito Media – but Loretta Lynn had nothing to do with it. The fun part is, I know who these women are. I recognize them. I see them every day.

“Black Friday” from Night Train,

Howard lit a cigarette, not seeming to notice anything amiss. A clear sign that it was never going to work with him.

The leftover turkey was just the first hint.

“Serial” from Necessary Fiction, October 2010

Rich is still seated, but soon after dinner we’ll recline into prone positions on our separate couches, our “boats,” as we like to call them. On our boats we are safe, neither sharks nor serial killers can get us. We idle unthreatened in our living room.

When I heard this passage on the trailer, I knew I had to have this book.

“Graveyard from Wigleaf, October 28, 2011

Could the man or the woman in the hotel room have been defecating on the wall and using the hair dryer at the same time? I should want to know, since my major is anthropology, what makes human beings do the things they do.

Hotel maids have all the fun.

The stories are very short – they’re flash, after all – and display a variety of voices and styles. Some are wildly abstract. Some are somber and earnest; they led me into my own heart, and I nodded along as I read. Many are funny, in that way that seems so about-someone-else and becomes so surprising when we see ourselves in a mirror. All are fundamentally heartbreaking.

And they all feature whack-job girls: women in various stages of oddness, of differentness; women who are just a thought away from being… us.

Manuel Gonzales: The Miniature Wife and Other Stories (Riverhead Books, 2013)

…I can’t help but wonder that maybe we need this kinds of moments. Not moments of quiet, but moments when our lives are upended by violent tragedy, monsters, zombies, because without them, how would we meet the men and women of our dreams, how would we make up for the sins of our pasts, how would we show our true natures – brave, caring, strong, intelligent?
I wonder, How would we?

—”Escape from the Mall”

Manuel Gonzales bakes pies. And he writes fiction. I have no idea if his pies are any good, but his short stories are terrific.

I’ll admit it: I prefer my fiction weird. Oh, it’s not that I don’t truly appreciate a gentle coming-of-age tale, or a piece that powerfully employs characterization and conflict in a conventional setting; I can be truly captivated by great realism. But – my heart belongs to weird.

In The Miniature Wife, Gonzales approaches weird from every possible angle. And a few impossible ones.

There’s the discourse-weird: the fictional obituaries, the fake journalistic interviews. And the situation-weird: the plane circling the airport for twenty years, a woman who’s injured by sound. And the supernatural-weird: zombies, a werewolf, a unicorn. But when was the last time a werewolf story turned out to be about family structure and Oedipal conflict? Or a zombie story left you wondering about the premise, or a war story shifted, like the figure-ground vase optical illusion, into something else?

This is weird in the service of the living, breathing soul of people who experience weird every day of their lives, whether it’s a guy in “The Artist’s Voice” who talks through his ears – or just one of us real-life people trying to get through to our spouse. This is weird that makes you forget it’s a zombie story because it becomes a story of growth and change; weird that makes the werewolf the least important character in the story; weird that forces you up against all the trials of the real world, weird that makes you cry.

How do people deal with extraordinary circumstances – retreat, attack, adapt? What needs – for love, for communication, for creation – are so great, they overcome impossible obstacles? What’s amazing to me is how effectively these things can be evoked by, say, an obituary. Or a zombie story.

It’s a weird that is always, always, about something else. Read these stories twice: once for the surface story, and once for the meta story. It’s immense fun.

I decided to read this book because Aimee Bender loved it, though I was primed by the time I read that review: he’d published in One Story, my favorite literary magazine (before I’d subscribed, unfortunately), and I’d been hearing a lot of good things about this collection.

I’ve only recently begun paying attention to how story collection are put together. In this case, I might not have been able to miss it. The opening story – the One Story offering from 2005 – provides a splendid introduction, setting us up for an unexpected ride. The final story, quoted above, puts the entire book in perspective. Maybe we need to look outside the ordinary, the safe, the comfortable, to find out what we’re capable of. Who knows, we might find a zombie that makes us cry, or a hit man who makes us laugh.

Rather than enumerate the stories in the order they appear, I’m going to clump them into categories.

Fictional Journalism

As nervous as it makes me to put those two words together, given how recent events have been handled by the news media, that’s the only thing I can call this: the interview as fiction. As a narrative technique it creates a third-person story via first-person: a story, told in third-person, and there’s the meta story, told in first person. I’m not sure if there’s a technical description of this (please tell me if there is), but it’s wonderful. It evokes much of the medical non-fiction I have (Sacks, Roueche, Klawans). It may not be by accident that the content of these stories leans scientific.

“Farewell, Africa” (available online at Guernica)

It was not the speech we knew. Mitchell had managed somehow to boil it down to its essence, or maybe he made it into something entirely new. I can’t remember it now, not its specifics, not past those first few words, and Mitchell hadn’t written it down, had abandoned, at the last moment, his own notes, and cannot remember it himself. It spoke of tragedy, I think. I think, too, that it spoke to the enormous loss of life, to the sense that this world had been pushed to the brink, but in truth, the speech might not have been about any of that. It was not the speech we knew, yet by the end of the speech, I felt as if I weren’t listening to Mitchell as he spoke in front of us, as if the words weren’t coming from him, but had been born inside my own head, had always been part of my own thoughts, that Mitchell was simply reminding me of something I already knew and had somehow forgotten.

I’m astounded at how wonderful this was to read on so many levels. The overt story, a near-future history about the snafus at an elaborate art gala and a former presidential speech-writer who’s never managed to live up to the one great speech he once wrote. But then, with the last paragraph, it becomes a different story entirely, a story about how this story is told, about the story some are telling right now. About where the characters – where we – are directing our attention. And, by the way, there’s some great writer-stuff in there as well:

Whenever he would come across the speech in a bookstore or when he was at someone’s house and saw that they owned a copy of the speech, which was, for a long time, being reprinted in textbooks and on its own, he would pull it off the shelf and turn to the beginning of his speech and then start to cross out words and sentences and, sometimes, entire sections.
“Once,” he told me, “I got carried away and accidentally edited a friend’s copy of the speech down to a five-minute affair. Ten minutes if you read it really slowly.” He laughed and said, “I saw what I’d done and quietly put the book back on the shelf and then, later in the evening, made a show of finding it on the shelf again and pulling it down and then pretended to be shocked at what someone else had done to it. My friend was so embarrassed and upset that for a moment I almost told him the truth, but I never did.”

Read it for the speech. Read it for the flirtation. Read it for Australia, Japan, and Africa, before it’s too late.

“The Artist’s Voice”

The question I want to ask him, but don’t have the heart to, or don’t need to because I feel like I already know the answer to it, is this: is it worth it? This piece of music you are composing in your head, will it really be so good that it is worth all of this?

What would you sacrifice for art? What if the very thought process involved in creation left you tied up in knots, unable to move? Would you still create? But that isn’t the only question raised by this story. It’s also, again, about the human need to communicate, no matter what. Karl Abbasonov speaks through his ears. There’s a fairly technical explanation of how this is possible (which seems fairly reasonable until the final stages), but don’t let that scare you away; the heart of the story requires no scientific knowledge at all. If you ever read Berton Roueche in TNY (I have several volumes of his collected “Annals of Medicine” columns) or Oliver Sacks (the neurologist with the heart of a poet), you’ll feel right at home. And if you haven’t, but you’ve ever had a need that couldn’t be squelched by the limitations of reality, you’ll feel right at home anyway. The presence of the first-person narrator allows for voices, points of view, other than Karl’s, to be heard. It’s a terrific technique, and if I ever take another crack at fiction, it’s one I may explore.

“The Disappearance of the Sebali Tribe“

If you were to ask her, as I did, how it felt knowing that she had helped uncover the Sebali tribe hoax, she might shake her head and smile, somewhat ruefully, and say, “I hardly did a thing about it, really.” She might then ask you where you’re from, if you’d had a nice trip, if you needed another cup of coffee, if you’d ever been to Boston before, if you’d made a visit to the Common yet, “which is really much nicer in the spring and early summer,” she might go on to say, “but we just had a good snow, and you should really go see the park before too many other people go tramping through it.” And then she might mention Frederick Law Olmsted, who, she will explain, is best known for his design of Central Park in Manhattan, but who also designed a series of parks joining the Boston Common to its outlying neighbors, which is called the Emerald Necklace, and then she might suggest that you visit Jamaica Pond, a component of the Emerald Necklace, located in Jamaica Plain, “which hardly anyone ever goes to anymore,” she will continue, “because the neighborhood’s been run down a bit, but it’s a nice park really and if you go at the right time, it’s quiet and empty, and you can sit on the bench and look out over the pond that is there and sometimes see a goose or a swan or a cormorant, even. But if you go there, then you’ve got to visit El Oriental for lunch, and since the thought of anyone else going to El Oriental only makes me want to go there, too, then I just might have to join you,” which is how I eventually found myself sitting with her, one recent afternoon, in a small Cuban restaurant (El Oriental de Cuba) in Jamaica Plain… I tried my best to figure out how this small, unassuming young woman from Abilene, Texas, uncovered the truth behind one of the largest anthropological scams of the past 50 years.

Gonzales doesn’t just have a grasp on narrative technique and theme; his prose is beautiful, too. But it’s not just beautiful: this paragraph, wandering and meandering, also reveals character, character that I think becomes crucial later in the story. And by the end, I had a whole different theory of the Sebali Tribe hoax.

A Meritorious Life: The Fictional Obituaries

These short interstitial pieces, a subdivision of “Fictional Journalism,” yet with a flavor all their own, capture some of the little absurdities of life.

“Juan Refugio Rocha: A Meritorious Life“

When the fire started, Rocha was with the gorillas, standing outside their habitat talking to them, as he often did, from a safe distance.

Remember the old E. M. Forster tenet: “The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.” This piece gives us the story, and plenty of nuance to construct our own plot. I love a writer who trusts the reader – but still prepares for the worst, just in case.

“William Corbin: A Meritorious Life”

Corbin owed his fascination with Klouns to his father, a village constable, who often took his three sons (of which William was the youngest) to variety acts and lowbrow, death-defying street shows, carnivals performed by traveling circuses hailing from Eastern European regions near or bordering the Black Sea. Inevitably, performing as part of one troupe or another, would be a Kloun, who, big-footed, of pale complexion, and with an over-expressive face, would often steal the show through popular movements skits and drama tumbles and the performance of ineffable sleights of hand.… One day, a young William broke from his family, found his way to a small congregation of Klouns, separate from the amassing crowd, and offer himself to them as an apprentice.

Oh come on, where did you think clowns came from? The “obit voice” of this adds to the mounting humor; I couldn’t stop smiling.

“Henry Richard Niles: A Meritorious Life”

Niles’s first words were oeghene lachen. And from there, he let loose with a string of vowel sounds, grunts, and guttural whines released at an imperceptible and near constant speed: “The sound of it hurt our ears,” his father said. It would be another three years before his parents would learn that his first words, when translated into English, were eyes laughing. Some believe this to have been Niles’s first poem.

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with Ostrogothic; no one is. You’ll get the jist of it anyway. Language – poetry – is a very strange thing, and sometimes the need for expression is so powerful, it leaps over what is possible.

“Juan Manuel Gonzales: A Meritorious Life“

A cute little O. Henry story. I keep wondering if there’s any significance to the character’s name.

“Harold Withy Keith: A Meritorious Life“

According to hospital records, Harold and Martin Keith were born simultaneously, and, never quite the younger or the elder twin, H. W. Keith was referred to by family members as the Left Twin.

Seems a man tries to turn himself into a plant, but maybe not. I didn’t quite get this one, which tells me I’ve still got my judgment in spite of my growing enthusiasm for this collection.

Supernatural Creature Stories: The Werewolf, the Unicorn, the Zombies

I’m a little concerned these stories might lose the literary-fiction audience – though they might also lure in a whole other audience. Wouldn’t that be… zombie-like.

While I’ve always loved high-end spec fic, I’ve also been pretty dismissive of zombie and werewolf stories (and vampire stories as well, though none are included in this volume). It’s the anti-Twilight reaction. I don’t know much about the folklore of these things, something about silver bullets and Jack Nicholson in a terrible movie quite some time ago. But here, these creatures become participants in something else, something wonderful. Recalculating…

“All of Me“

The zombie in me would like to make a few things clear. The zombie in me would like to make it clear that there is no zombie in me, per se. Would like to make it known that there is only me, in fact, and that all of me is zombie.

What I find especially fascinating about this story is, again, how it’s told. I can’t say more without venturing into spoiler territory, but some nuances pointed me in a particular direction. Of course, sometimes I go in wrong directions, but I still wonder. No matter how you see it, this is, again, beautiful writing – beautiful for a purpose (motion, train of thought: look at the rhythm in this paragraph) – beautiful enough to make a zombie seem sympathetic, courageous, heroically flawed:

There was that one time. There was that one time with the memories, a slew of them. Relentless memories, a series of them, flashing through my head for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, one right after the other, nonstop, these memories, in no particular order, of no special significance, but personal, deeply personal, brief sensations, images, smells, sounds, forced out of hiding, maybe, by that darker part of me, forced out into the open to be devoured or simply to dissipate, those last remaining pieces of the me that was made before. A park bench, the quality of light in a dormitory cafeteria, the smell of lavender, the smell of cooking oil cooked too hot, a swimming pool, a bloodied knee, soft, soft lips, a blue couch, a darkroom, a bright blue sky, a man’s voice saying “sometimes I just don’t know about you, son,” a flat tire, a long, hot stretch of road, mist rising off a small pond, a kite shaped like a swan overhead, the first cool day in October, and on and on, these memories rose up from within me, traveled through me and then out. I staggered under the rush of them, and then they were gone, so quickly gone, I stumbled, grabbed for a chair, sat down hard on the floor, and that was it. I remember them still, but I remember them now as things I have seen in a movie or on the television, as disconnected sensations that don’t touch me at all.
So let’s not demean ourselves with talk of who I was and if this person still lives inside me. If my eyes are this person’s eyes and if in them you can see remnants of who this person once was.
Let’s not resort to this kind of nostalgic preening.
Let’s not reduce my story to that kind of tragedy.
Instead, let’s remark on how unsurprising this outcome really is, and then let’s move on, inexorably, deliberately on.

In his Book Club Conversation with The Rumpus, Gonzales said he wrote this a long time ago, “just on the cusp or right before the cusp of all the zombie stuff happening,” but he never placed it. Someone dropped the ball when they rejected this one; it’s great. And I say that as someone who hates zombie stories. I do wish I could get Lily Tomlin out of my head, though.

“Escape from the Mall“

This story has nothing to do with me. I know this, even as I am in the middle of it. This story has everything to do with Roger and Mary and Tyrone and the security guard. I don’t know the security guard’s name, but he’s got a look about him, a look that makes me think that this story is his story, too, more his story, anyway, than my own. He’s got that reformed-addict-turned-security-guard-waiting-to-make-the-ultimate-sacrifice-for-the-misery-he-caused-in-his-youth kind of look. That, or maybe it’s just that he looks bigger than the rest of us.

This final story of the collection is in itself suspenseful and psychologically astute. It also sums up the collection as a whole: how do we react when confronted with the unexpected? With danger? When we don’t have a lot of information and need to trust our instincts? I read this just after the Boston Marathon bombing, but it’ll apply to the next mass casualty situation as well, whether it’s a tornado or a gas leak or violence. Some people grow into leadership. Even when the zombies are out to get you. Dang, I love what this guy does with zombies.

“Wolf!”

What if I were to confess that I loved my mother dearly but that I am happy the rest of them are gone, eaten, disposed of? Noah, Josephine, William, Richard, Sarah, Rebecca, and Ruth? Even Father?
What then? Am I a bad son? A bad brother? A bad person, if I tell you that I liked that it was just Mother and me and no one else? Does that make me a monster, too?

Any story can be told in many ways. One of the most obvious choices a writer makes is to decide who’s telling the story; who is the Point of View character? Here, Gonzales makes an interesting choice. When a man is bitten by a wolf and turns into a werewolf, we don’t hear about what it’s like for him. We don’t even hear about what it’s like for his wife. We hear, instead, what it’s like for his son. Turns out, even a werewolf story can have a great deal of psychological complexity.

I did not build a cage for my father. Nor did I knock him unconscious, secure him, with a rope and tape, to the kitchen table in order to slice him open, figure him out.
I did not drag him by chains from town to town, calling out, “Come, see the eighth natural wonder! Come, look upon the horror that is my father, the Wolfman!”
I did not charge for admission, did not benefit by his capture in any way whatsoever.
What I mean to say is: I was not cruel. Not at first.

Dang, I love what he does with werewolves, too.

“One-Horned & Wild-Eyed“

After he first told me it was a unicorn, and after I got over the initial shock of the thing, and when I was still just playing along, I asked him, “Does it have a name?” ignoring for the moment the unreality of the thing he was showing me, or, rather, the unreality of his belief in it.

We all have to ignore the unreality of something. Might as well be a unicorn.

Weirdness Not Otherwise Specified

In a recent interview with Book People Blog, Gonzales discussed his use of the bizarre in his stories:

“When it comes to the fantastic or science-fiction elements, what compels me about them is the idea that you can introduce something fantastic or horrific—like a unicorn or a zombie—to a story and then play around with expectations and actions and reactions. These set-pieces are there to act as a catalyst, to stir things up in these characters’ lives, but not generally in an expected way. The unicorn in the unicorn story isn’t typical, doesn’t bring a goodness or purity to the world it inhabits, but causes rifts and strife. I always feel that the fantastic, when introduced into real life, will complicate life, not make life better, and I think it’s fun to play with those complications, and speculate on how characters will react to them.”

But he doesn’t need zombies or unicorns. He can create weird with anything.

“Pilot, Copilot, Writer” (excerpt available at Poets & Writers)

We had become a fixture of the Dallas skyline, no different or more exciting than the neon Mobile Pegasus.

People will get used to anything if they see it long enough.

As the lead story in the collection, this snared me in right away with the bizarre premise of a plane hijacked not to go somewhere, but to circle the airport for twenty years. The story kept me, however, with its depth of exploration of how such an event might affect people. I don’t think the reactions are specific to the extraordinary situation here, but rather might occur, at some level, in any context in which a group of strangers discovers they will be spending more time together than planned. Maybe it’s universal, considering we’re all pretty much stuck here together on this planet. And what of the boy born to one of the passengers on the plane, a child of the sky? Was it by chance the Pilot chose him to be his successor? How does the social structure mutate over time? What do they see as the eventual outcome? As resistant as Gonzales was, in his 2005 One Story Q&A when the story was first published, to characterize this as a fable or allegory, I find that impulse to be irresistible. I will agree, however, that the practical matters added a (forgive me) grounding touch.

“The Miniature Wife“

The truth of the matter is: I have managed to make my wife very, very small.
This was done unintentionally. This was an accident.

Many of the stories here feature a restrained, calm voice, but it’s in this story I think Gonzales best uses that restraint as a painter uses brush strokes to indicate movement or stasis. The calm initially felt rather dismissive towards the wife (“she doesn’t have a job to speak of” nor her own friends; miniaturized indeed. Hey, whaddya know, this is feminist fiction). But as the situation escalates, it sounds more forced, until it seems to mask hysteria, resignation, triumph. But that could just be my reaction. And again, the choice of the point-of-view character is amazing. We don’t hear anything from the, ahem, little woman, only from him. That can’t be an accident, now can it?

My wife is stronger than I am. I am ready to admit that now.
You are stronger than me.
I haven’t slept in three days.
Can you see the white flag, dear? Am I waving it high enough for you?

And we all know what happens when a woman proves herself to be stronger than a man.

“The Sounds of Early Morning“

My, I’m jumpy, she said.
She said this thinking she should at least be able to hear her own voice inside her head.
Anxious, she said.
Anxious, she said again.
Anxious, she said. And again. Louder. And louder. Straining her throat. Yelling, screaming.
She closed her eyes and cupped her hands over her ears as if she were in a concert hall and yelled as loud as she possibly could. Try to imagine what her voice, so loud, might sound like.
Nothing.
She opened her eyes then, and, seeing what was left now of her husband’s face, she let out a small gasp and then covered her mouth, afraid even the softest sound might ruin him beyond repair.

I’m always relieved, when I have an overwhelmingly positive reaction to a book, to find a few negatives. It shows I’m not deluded. This one went by me. Sound is a destructive force, I get that, but there’s something going on with the husband – home surgery? – and there are looters and kids… The whole idea of sound hurting makes me a little nervous in itself, since it’s along the lines of Ben Marcus’ Flame Alphabet (or maybe I’m just free-associating; Gonzales studied under Ben Marcus when he was working on his MFA at Columbia) in which children’s language becomes toxic to adults. But mostly, I just can’t follow the story.

“Cash to a Killing” (available online at Esquire)

I wish I could say that killing the guy was an accident, and maybe if you were to take the long view of the situation, take into account the events of his life, those of my life, of Roger’s, the arbitrary successes and failures that befell the three of us, or, even further back, befell our parents, grandparents, great grands, back to our oldest ancestors, and determined that it was some accident of fate that he ended up who he was and I ended up who I am, and Roger ended up as Roger, you might say it was an accident, but taking the short view of things, we killed him deliberately and with specific purpose. And despite Roger’s argument, just because we killed the wrong guy doesn’t change, for me, the fact of the matter: he was the guy we intended to kill, we killed him, end of story.

If you feared Gonzales could only write in a restrained, formal voice, this story will ease your mind. But I don’t think it’s one of the strongest stories; it’s almost an extended Abbot & Costello routine.

“The Animal House” (available online at Five Chapters)

You could say, too, that over time I became attached to these animals. Not to all of them, but to enough of them that on occasion I had to stop myself from giving a certain squirrel or a certain pigeon a name, and that on other occasions, unable to stop myself from naming a raccoon, say, I had to stop from speaking that name aloud, from trying to scratch it behind its ears, had to stop myself from thinking of them as pets or friends.

Like “Escape from the Mall,” this story deals with the ways in which we change under certain circumstances, like when your town is clearing out and you’re at loose ends so you end up squatting in an abandoned house with this girl who’s really into animals. Again, not one of my favorites, but the last scene is powerful.

“Life on Capra II“

I think about hoisting him up out of the muck and throwing him over my shoulder and pushing him back to the convoy, if only to have some good story to tell Becky once we get back to the barracks, maybe make like he wasn’t killed with the first shot, that he was barely breathing but that I wouldn’t leave my good friend Ricky behind, and that he expended his last breath to tell me to keep going, to never give up, that I would someday find true love in the sympathetic heart of a beautiful woman. But then I figure I don’t actually have to go through all the trouble of carrying Ricky’s deadweight body to be able to tell the same story, so I leave him where he is and start beating a hasty retreat.
That’s one of the first lessons any new cadet learns here on Capra II: Simplify your life.

The best part of the story is the gradual (or, if you’re sharper than me, not so gradual) realization of what’s going on (or what I think is going on), so I won’t spoil it. Becky, who never appears, but is nonetheless a cool character. I got the sense I got a whiff of Heinlein’s Venus fiction (maybe “Logic of Empire” without the slavery angle) and Stephen O’Connor’s “Ziggurat.”

Manuel Gonzales is himself an interesting character. He owned a pie company before heading off to Columbia to get his MFA. In his One Story Q&A that accompanied publication of “Pilot, Copilot, Author,” he tells a story about going through the airport on the way to a pie-baking contest and worrying they’d take away his favorite whisk. You gotta love a guy with a favorite whisk. While he’s a little puzzled at the curiosity it generates, he credits his pie baking with getting him in to Columbia’s MFA program.

And, in case I didn’t mention it, he writes great stories.

But I’m not done yet. I can pull myself up. I can pull myself to my feet and run and run harder and faster than I’ve ever run before. I can make it to those stores and burst through them and into the parking lot and find my car. I can outrun those bastards and start this all over. I will watch less television. I will spend more time outside. I will foster stray animals and donate to charity walk-a-thons and look both ways at intersections. I will call my sister and apologize for what I said to her on her wedding day. I will let love into my heart. I can survive this. I can run and my life will be different and I will not look back.

— from “Escape From the Mall”

Tessa Hadley: “Valentine” from TNY, 4/8/13

TNY Art by Beata Boucht

It’s June, and summer is thick everywhere, a sleepy, viscous, sensuous emanation; optic blasts of air, opaque with pollen from the overblown suburban gardens, are ripe with smells from bins and dog mess. We are mad with summer, chafing and irritable with sex. We are fifteen…
Something has to happen.
Into our heat that morning comes Valentine.

What is it with Tessa Hadley and TNY? Does she have pictures of Deborah Treisman with goats or something?

I know, that isn’t really fair. After all, this is only the sixth Hadley piece they’ve published in slightly less than two years. They’ve published Alice Munro six times as well in roughly the same period, and George Saunders five times. I wasn’t aware Hadley was in that league, but I’m not big on leagues anyway, so I’m always happy to see someone crash a league.

The offerings of those other two authors, however, were actual short stories, instead of novel excerpts as three of Hadley’s pieces have turned out to be. In her Page-Turner interview Hadley says she didn’t know when she wrote “Honor” whether it would be a story or part of a novel; it wasn’t until later that Stella’s life story would become a novel-in-stories. That may have been the case when she wrote it, but at the time it was published, it was called the first chapter of her planned novel. The novel is due out in the UK next month. Maybe this is the most highly-anticipated blockbuster of the decade, and I’m just too ignorant to realize it. But I’m really, really tired of Stella.

My main issue: I find Stella as a short-story character to be perhaps not as interesting as Stella the novel-in-stories character could grow to be. The movie might be great; the clips aren’t working for me.

In the first installment, “Honor,” I saw a not-that-unusual situation developed with skill and great attention to detail. I called it “very good background” to a story that hadn’t started yet, which, as the first story in a novel-of-stories, is exactly what it turns out to be. “The Clever Girl,” which is the title of the novel-in-stories, introduced a stepfather Nor; in this present story, set shortly thereafter, the stepfather is George, leaving me to wonder: is this a different stepfather, two stepfathers in such a short period of time? Or was it just Hadley’s decision to change the name? It matters.

If I were feeling more generous – and I should be; the writing here is lush and evocative – I’d admit it’s an interesting idea, to follow a writer’s development of a character through a novel-in-stories. The structure of the novel interests me as well: stories set at different ages, demonstrating different phases in Stella’s life. The understanding of her family situation at age eight. Her developing intelligence as a young teen. And now, at fifteen, her blossoming sexuality, her desire for independence.

But my attention is all thrusting forward, onward, out of there. I’ve burned my boats I can’t go back – or, rather, I do go back, dutifully, every evening after school, and do my homework at the same table in the same stale olive-green dining room, and still get the best marks in the class for everything, nearly everything. But it’s provisional, while I wait for my real life to begin. I feel like an overgrown giant in that house…

That’s effective; we’ve all been there. So why am I not more taken with Stella?

I should be (yes, I know, I keep saying that…the crew at The Mookse and the Gripes loved this story, and I always get nervous when I’m on the opposite side of the fence from them). I like the “memoir voice,” that term Marko Fong used that conveys perfectly what first person past does. It’s a tricky thing, too: we need to see the future projected, but not too much of it. Hadley uses it very effectively early in this particular story to let us know that the teenage romance with Valentine will come to an end, but he will show up later in Stella’s life. It’s more than just foreshadowing; it’s a conspiratorial whisper to the reader: “Pay attention to this; you’ll want to recall it later on.” I like writer-reader conspiracies. The problem with an excerpt is, we don’t get to see the payoff.

The prose itself here is wonderful, perfectly conveying the first sexual flush of a fifteen-year-old girl. It’s a distinct change in tone from the earlier stories, and it cooks. I wanted to be fifteen again, but this kind of fifteen, not the fifteen I actually was.

I wanted Val because he was different – as I was different. What I felt at my first sight of him that summer morning was more than ordinary love: something like recognition.

One of my problems with the story is that she tips her hand. I knew the nature of the problem from the moment Valentine appeared, saw it there amidst all the red herrings. Again, if I were feeling more generous, I’d see it as confirmation of a hunch, instead of a failed grand reveal. I don’t insist on surprise; I admitted that everything I expected to happen in The Fault of our Stars actually happened, so what’s the difference? Perhaps it was the humor; or maybe Hazel just fit my personal tastes better. For whatever reason, by the end of this story, I felt a bit cheated. I felt – to assume a 15-year-old persona – “Well, duh!”

As for my mother, cleverness could never beat her. In my mind, I was convinced that her life – housework and childcare – was limited and conventional. But, in my body, I was susceptible to her inpatient brisk delivery, her capable hands fixing and straightening – sometimes straightening me, brusquely, even when I had half grown away from her…

That said, it’s still my favorite of the Stella stories. The teenage urge to break away from the safety of home and parents clashing with the desire for that very safety, sure. And my heart broke for Stella as she subsumed her own tastes and appreciations to conform to Valentine’s opinions, which, as a teenager in love, she saw as vastly superior to her own. I so wanted to slap her out of it, to tell her, “You’re the winner in this relationship; it’s he who should be imitating you.” But this learning process, how to be ourselves in the company of another, is by necessity a solo act, and Stella has to go through it on her own. In fact, I was so engaged in this aspect of the story, the consequences of this first romance seemed almost an afterthought.

But I’m sure we’ll see another story about that soon. Thanks to the goats.

Pushcart 2013: Sue Allison, “Made to Measure” (non-ficton) from The Antioch Review

Measuring Tape Art from lofiles.org

What do we measure? Everything. We measure IQ, we measure earthquakes, we measure wind chill, wrenches, wire gauge, tornadoes, comas, grit, type; we measure the brightness of lunar eclipses; the hardness of pencils, of gypsum, of talc. We measure the brain activity of meditating monks (very high). We measure brain size.… We measure shoelaces: a shoe with four pairs of holes takes a sixty-centimeter-long lace. We measure consumer satisfaction, carbon emissions, the rate at which the permafrost is melting. We measure justice. Themis carries a scale to make this point: justice is not some abstract value; it is something we measure. We measure what matters to us; once measured, it matters more.

This is my favorite kind of material: a combination of gentle science and story.

Allison sandwiches a great deal of entertaining and thought-provoking information in between the bookends of a related personal experience: during a period when her wristwatch was broken, she somehow always knew what time it was. “It was as if I had acquired a sixth sense.… The physics of being in time felt less like science and more like dancing.”

From there, she discusses many varieties and methods of measuring, and, most specifically, the language of measurement. I’m not sure I always agree with her; I’m not even sure she always agrees with herself. But it’s a delight to read.

The beauty of words is that they are unstable – they change, they stretch, they have various and multiple meanings – but the beauty of numbers is that they are not. The move to metric measurement has meant a move from words – jigger, apostle, nip – and their maddening refusal to remain fixed as if to remain constant is death itself, which, it turns out, it is – to numbers.

Having just completed a math course where the astonishing relationship between numbers was a core part, I’m not signing on to this notion that words are wonderful and numbers are boring and stagnant. Yes, the metric system is very, well, systematic. Isn’t that a form of beauty? Isn’t it quite remarkable that there is a form of measurement that makes it possible to go from the incredibly small to the unimaginably large by just moving a decimal point? That speed and mass and force can all be related simply by choosing the right measuring system?

Allison is a little easier on physicists:

Physicists, it seems, like to name their discoveries with their human, not their scientific, natures. Reflecting the need to ground themselves in the real words, rather than abstract numbers, they talk in barns (1.0 x 10 to the minus twenty-eight meters squared) and sheds (1.0 x 10 to the minus 24 barns) and outhouses (do you really want to know?), and shakes, the time it takes a lamb to shake its tail, which nuclear engineers have given as the name for ten nanoseconds. And it is how we got Clark for the most fundamental particles of the universe and the “flavors” they come in: up, down, charm, strange, up, and bottom. Someone’s going to have to straighten this out all over again someday.

It’s in the discussion of the nature of measurement itself that the essay becomes the most intriguing. Why do we have this compulsion to measure? We measure shoes and houses and amounts of grain for practical reasons, but why, in the fifth century BCE did the “first historian” Herodotus include the thickness and height of the walls of Babylon? Or, two hundred years later, did Aristarchus of Samos wonder how far away the moon might be, and set out to determine the measurement (and remarkably accurately)? “It starts with wonder.” And that might be the most human trait of all.

Her more modern associations interested me as well. I was already familiar with the infinite coastline, but she made an additional connection that now fascinates me:

The more precise our measuring becomes, the more the theories sound otherwise: the theories of Relativity, of Incompleteness, of Indeterminacy, of Uncertainty, and now, of Chaos are the great breakthroughs of the 20th century.

This is perhaps the natural offshoot of the infinite coastling: as we know and measure more and more, what we don’t know becomes more crucial, to the point where we need to measure what we can’t measure. Of course the vocabulary shifts.

I’m more interested than ever in the relationship between words and numbers, thanks to my recent mathematical experiences (the timing of this essay is pure coincidence; funny how I say that over and over again). Didn’t numbers exist before organisms capable of language existed? Sure they did. But is it possible to harness those numbers without language? Can a bacterium add? Of course not; but it can divide. And don’t forget: even a pine cone knows the Fibonacci series.

Whether one is crossing the tundra in caribou skins or pounding the pavement in four-inch heels, to measure is to make a personal connection to the perceived world.… To measure is to make a connection. To do it without a net is thrilling.

I haven’t worn a watch in years. I just never called it dancing before.

Pushcart 2013: Shannon Cain, “Juniper Beach” from Colorado Review, Spring 2011

Charlie works as an auto travel counselor in the Cranston, Rhode Island, branch of the American Automobile Association. Mostly her job involves the assembly of TripTiks. Charlie’s parents are newly dead, their car having run off the road three weeks ago outside Tucson, Arizona. Upon her return to work after their funeral, she began creating TripTiks that send Triple A members to destinations different from those they’d asked for.

Remember TripTiks? I didn’t know Triple A still made them. TripTiks are an assemblage of maps held together by a spiral binding at the top, each of a small stretch of space that when collated by someone like Charlie, provide a single route of travel from Point A to Point B, complete with known construction delays, speed traps, and rush-hour re-routes. Pre-GPS GPS. And, as Charlie knows, “[a] good map tells you where you are, where you’re going, and where you’ve been.”

Over the course of this story, Charlie uses a TripTik to find out those exact things about herself.

In the wake of her family tragedy, she’s been having trouble in a number of areas. At work, for instance. When the Leaf Family requests a TripTik to Disney World, she sends them instead to Jupiter Beach:

If Ruth and Geoffrey Leaf carry out their plans, the Leaf children will not, during this vacation, run squealing into the waves of the great and friendly Atlantic. They will not bite into tuna sandwiches gritty with sand. They will not squint into the clear sky and engage in thrilling speculation about Gulf Coast hurricanes.

The details of how completely and ingeniously she plans this re-routing are completely captivating. Charlie’s one smart cookie. Though I suppose I should give full credit to Cain, who, in her interview with Colorado Review, admits she used to work for Triple A preparing TripTiks. I wonder if any of her customers ended up somewhere they didn’t expect.

Work isn’t the only area of Charlie’s life that’s in bad shape. Her six-year relationship with girlfriend Heather seems “headed for dissolution” though Heather’s unaware of it, or unwilling to face it. Since the tragedy, Heather’s been immensely supportive, in fact. And it’s driving Charlie crazy.

“You’re in shock,” Heather says. “Don’t make any big decisions right now.” She pushes Charlie’s bangs offer for head. Which is an annoyance, given that her four head is the area over which Charlie has configured her bangs to fall.
…
Whatever interesting edginess that existed in Heather’s personality has disappeared. She has become gentle and kind and philosophical. She offers resources.

That detail about the bangs made me smile; I felt a real bond with Charlie. So many people in my life have felt it was their duty to rearrange my hair, my clothing, my furniture, my life, to suit their tastes, unaware that things might not be the way they are by accident, that they might, in fact, be precisely as I wish them to be.

Charlie buys an RV and heads off to look for America. But it’s not about Heather; she’s just collateral damage. It’s about Dad.

Charlie’s got two images of her father. One is from childhood, and may have influenced her career choice:

Her father took them to every state in the Union connected by asphalt. He exceeded the speed limit, care not a whit about seatbelts, drove under the influence of fatigue and bickering children and sips of whiskey from a silver flask nestled between his legs. He showed the miracle after miracle.

Sounds pretty idyllic, except for the whiskey. Which is a big exception. Charlie has memories of the whiskey, too, from later in her childhood. And now, most recently, she has the image from the accident that took her parents’ lives when her father, drunk, on another road trip with Mom, ran off the road “into a two-hundred-year-old giant saguaro cactus, top-heavy with six tons of monsoon-season moisture. It collapsed onto their car, crushing it. It would be nice if the circumstances of her parents’ death didn’t remind her of a scene from a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.”

Armed with her newly-purchased RV and a file of bizarre accident clippings – the Montana twins whose mother drove the ambulance that responded to their rollover; the family in Yellowstone wiped out by a bus of tourists; the bizarre coincidence of falling ice and a logging truck in Alaska – Charlie travels the country, trying to reconcile the divided images, the anger playing against the grief. Trying to forgive. To heal.

It’s powerful stuff, yet it’s told in such a restrained way, with such detail, there’s not an ounce of sappiness. The ending works perfectly, bringing her full circle, though perhaps not in the most obvious way.

Pushcart 2013: Kathleen Balma, “From Your Hostess at the T&A Museum” from The Café Review,

Edouard Manet, “Olympia” 1865

If you will not tip me for my dance, tip me for daring to ask.

In 1865, the Salon of Paris had to hire armed guards to restore order around Eduoard Manet’s painting Olympia. Why? It wasn’t because the subject was nude; female nudes had been represented by artists for hundreds of years. It was because she was 1) a real woman, and a courtesan at that, not an idealized goddess from ancient mythology, and 2) she was shamelessly staring back at the viewer staring at her. Beth Harris and Steve Zucker put it like this, in their SmartHistory lecture:

…There’s a long tradition of the female nude represented in the most erotic, sensual way, clothed by mythology or clothed by sheer beauty… [but Olympia] is sentient, she is thinking, and she is confronting us even as we look at her… one was confronted by her sexuality… the name Olympia was common for courtesans in Paris… confronting 19th century Paris with its own corruption… unmasking illusion of images… confronted by her gaze and her thinking…

Yep, there’s nothing more shocking than a thinking woman. And now here’s another thinking woman, taking up the mantle. Except she’s not made of paint and created by a man; she’s poet Kathleen Balma, whose very short piece here – a pole-dancer’s monologue – smacks the reader in the face with reality.

Tip me for staring back so hard it puts even Olympia to shame and makes her chat noire slink ever closer to her overlooked and underrendered black maid.

This juxtaposition of art and sleaze is so perfect, it left me slack-jawed after reading. It first appeared in that smallest of small presses, The Café Review from my own Portland, Maine, a journal that prints only 250 copies, retains no archives, and has a web presence that confused me with Google references to Diazepam and Fioricet (I have no idea what that’s about… perhaps the URL expired or was pirated or hacked, but it’s a totally legitimate, if tiny, poetry magazine and has nothing whatsoever to do with low-cost drugs). Fortunately, it’s also available on the poet’s website.

Tip me for what you don’t see: the abstract; the invisible the squiggly outline of a model’s brain matter in silhouette; the negative space plastered between fleshy objects like some happy vacuum, giving form to the nothingness between us.

When I finished reading, I let that phrase linger: the nothingness between us. The nothingness of nudity. The nothingness of lewdness, which strips humanity from the woman as surely as it strips clothes, leaving only flesh. The nothingness between us. But you got what you came for, so tip her, ok?

Pushcart 2013: Jaquira Díaz, “Section 8″ from The Southern Review, Winter 2011

Ed Smith: “Raft”

The same summer the Magic City Strangler started cruising South Beach men’s rooms, before the Section 8 projects were dismantled and we were all forced out, I did my last stint in juvie. I was sixteen, and I went in pretending I owned the place, bragging to all the younger girls that it wasn’t my first time.

So much is going on in the background of this story, yet the focus is always on a sixteen-year-old trying to negotiate a path through adolescence. There’s a very subtle hand at work, and a lot of mastery of tone and nuance.

Section 8 housing, the Strangler, and a killer who hasn’t left enough burned female corpses behind to earn a nickname yet – this is the background of Nena’s life. This is where Nena just spent an extra month in Juvie because her mother couldn’t be bothered to pick her up.

But it’s more than just background or setting. It adds a bass line thrum of threat throughout, sure, but, as the last sentence of the story makes clear, it’s also an intrinsic part of the story: Nena’s relationship with her homegirl Boogie.

Maybe it was the way we were raised, the way we were programmed to think of two men, or two women, as simply wrong. Maybe we were excited by the wrongness of it. Or by the danger. Either way, it didn’t matter. I thought of the possibility of losing her, Boogie up in Jersey without me, lying like this in someone else’s bed. And so I kissed her.

With marriage equality surging (finally!) all around us, it’s sobering to remember there are still places where being tagged “gay” can get you sprayed with bleach. Or worse.

This relationship goes through several twists and turns as Nena feels a tug-of-war between her long friendship with Boogie, and the fear of the difference between what one moment might have meant to her, and to Boogie. Diaz executes each change in Nena’s relationship with Boogie with a delicacy that can only be appreciated by reading the story.

Complicating all that is the arrival of a new kid on the block, Junito, who brings out a powerful protectiveness in Nena when he shows a reluctance to discuss his mother’s incarceration: “I wanted to tell him that I understood, but I kept my mouth shut. I hated when people thought they knew what I was going through.” Look at the layers there – she doesn’t want to tell him she knows how he feels because she knows how he feels about that.

Maybe because Diaz isn’t that far removed from teenagerdom herself, the kids are perfectly observed throughout, oscillating between bravado and panic, stupidity and wisdom, cruelty and gentleness without missing a beat. The events swell and recede, and the most important moments happen in near-silence, like prayers:

“Am I sleeping over?” she asked, changing the subject. Before I got locked up, she slept over all the time when her mom worked the graveyard shift.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Are you?”
“If you want me to,” she said.
It had been nothing, but we were still dancing around it. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I took her hand, and we sat there for a while, our fingers interlaced.
“I want you to, ” I said finally.

I love the writerly choices Diaz makes, the way she focuses our attention at various moments. The final climactic event is itself a crash of cymbals, yet the heart of it all lies, again, in that which is not explicitly narrated, but powerfully conveyed nonetheless. And yet, I found it a difficult story to write about: it’s like trying to capture a cloud and hang it on the wall.

John Green: The Fault In Our Stars (Dutton Books, 2012)

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost anything is, really.)

Terminal illness books are sort of a specialty of mine. I typically stick to non-fiction since I’m more interested in the gory details than in writing quality or an emotional story, but a few weeks ago I saw a passionate review of this book by Janet Potter on The Millions. Many of the comments made about it during the recent Tournament of Books resonated with me as well: dark humor, devastating wit. I haven’t been reading a lot of YA fiction (at least not since I was a YA), but I loved Speak and I’m not opposed to broadening my horizons so I impulsively (back when I was reading impulsively) placed it on my library request list.

Hazel is your basic outrageously precocious teenager. At 16, she’s already got her GED so she’s taking classes at the local community college, she thinks about the infinite numbers between 0 and 1, she’s memorized Prufrock. She’s the sort of character that made me feel terrible when I was 16, because I didn’t rise to that level of sophistication. She’s the sort of character I wished I was. I wouldn’t mind being her now, in fact. Except for one thing: her tenuous life revolves around her oxygen tank and the occasional-miracle drug called Phalanxifor.

Her mother forces her into a support group:

This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying….
The Support Group, of course, was depressing as hell. It met every Wednesday in the basement of a stone-walled Episcopal church shaped like a cross. We all sat in a circle right in the middle of the cross, where the two boards would have met, where the heart of Jesus would have been.
I noticed this because Patrick, the Support Group Leader and only person over eighteen in the room, out of out to the heart of Jesus every freaking meeting, all about how we, as young cancer survivors, were sitting right in Christ’s very Sacred Heart and whatever.

Green gets a lot of mileage out of the “heart of God” metaphor, as Hazel shares one of my pet peeves: the faulty use of the word “literal” as an intensifier. But the Support Group serves as a home base for the story: it’s where Hazel meets Augustus who becomes the star-crossed love (I’m a little concerned about the blended star metaphors, but not unduly) of her short life-so-far.

The backbone of the plot, besides dying teenagers, is a fictitious book titled An Imperial Affliction by a fictitious author named Peter Van Houten (“the only person I’d ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it’s like to be dying, and (b) not have died,” says Hazel). Apparently, Green gets a lot of questions about AIA and its author, Peter Van Houten (“a pretty well-known journalist once asked me how Peter Van Houten felt about my depiction of him”), but it doesn’t exist, though the concept of it is based on Infinite Jest (as is most imagined-but-not-written fiction, I suppose) and, more directly, perhaps, The Blood of the Lamb (which I may have to add to my terminal-illness-books reading list).

I love this technique of hiding an imaginary book inside a real book. I especially love Hazel’s feelings about the book:

My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn’t like to tell people about it. Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

I’ve felt that way about books (and music). They almost become a test of intimacy: Is this person someone I can imagine telling about this book? Will s/he “get” it, and if not, what becomes of this relationship? It’s the perfect book for an outrageously precocious teenager, particularly an outrageously precocious teenager with cancer, to love:

But it’s not a cancer book, because cancer books suck. Like, in cancer books, the cancer person starts the charity that raises money to fight cancer, right? And this commitment to charity reminds the cancer person of the essential goodness of humanity and makes him/her feel loved and encouraged because s/he will leave a cancer-curing legacy. But in AIA, Anna decides that being a person with cancer who starts a cancer charity is a bit narcissistic, so she starts a charity called The Anna Foundation for People with Cancer Who Want to Cure Cholera.

An Imperial Affliction‘s ambiguous ending (it sounds like a great book; too bad it doesn’t exist) allows for much of the action of the plot, as Hazel and Augustus begin a quest to find out “what happens” after the book ends. Oh, how many discussions of TNY stories head down this path. It gives the book solid momentum, and delivers us to the turning point of the actual novel. No, I won’t reveal it. But it shouldn’t come as a big surprise. Pretty much everything you expect to happen in this book, happens. That’s not a complaint; it’s comforting, in fact. It’s nice to read something a little predictable once in a while. And it’s very nicely done, with, indeed, dark humor and devastating wit, if a book about teenagers with cancer can be imagined that way.

A central theme in the book is the idea that relationships have the potential to hurt. That’s what relationships do, of course: it’s almost inevitable that someone in a relationship will be hurt at some point. Some day those little things that seemed so sweet in courtship will become major annoyances, or one will change and the other will not be able to keep up, or after a long and perfect harmony, someone will die, barring the improbable coincidence of simultaneous passing. It’s human nature to crave relationships anyway. We’re fools that way. But we’re the ones who are still here, after all, so the evolutionary advantages of emotionally attaching yourself to another person are indisputable.

For Hazel, of course, there’s a whole other level to the potential hurt of relationships.

“I’m like. Like. I’m like a grenade, Mom. I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”…
“I’m a grenade,” I said again. “I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there’s nothing I can do about hurting you; you’re too invested, so just please let me do that, okay? I’m not depressed. I don’t need to get out more. And I can’t be a regular teenager, because I’m a grenade.”

For me, the take-home of this book lies here, on the other side of that fear: “You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world… but you do have some say in who hurts you.”

Yes, there’s a movie in the works. It’s the Love Story of this decade. For those with grey hair only: raise your hand if you still have your tattered copy of Love Story. Thought so. It was a terrible book. This one is much, much better.

As a side note, the acknowledgements include Vi Hart, the creative genius whose math videos like the recently posted Reel frequently obsess me. I’m not sure why that came as a surprise: everyone seems to know Vi Hart (I think I was the last person in the western hemisphere to discover her) and John Green and his brother Hank have a rollicking YouTube channel themselves at VlogBrothers.

It’s a good book, with a lot of great elements. It’s funny (unless you are, have, or know a teenager with cancer), it’s tragic (yes, I cried through the whole last third, which may be why I strongly preferred the first half), it’s smooth reading with a great rhythm and enjoyable style. It didn’t rise quite to the heights of what I was expecting, given the buzz, but I’m glad I read it. Then again, terminal illness books are my specialty.