Boethius and Bojack

As, then, righteousness itself is the reward of the righteous, so wickedness itself is the punishment of the unrighteous.
Accordingly, by this way of reckoning, whatever falls away from goodness ceases to be; whence it comes to pass that the bad cease to be what they were, while only the outward aspect is still left to show they have been men. Wherefore, by their perversion to badness, they have lost their true human nature. Further, since righteousness alone can raise men above the level of humanity, it must needs be that unrighteousness degrades below man’s level those whom it has cast out of man’s estate. It results, then, that thou canst not consider him human whom thou seest transformed by vice.

~~ Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy , Book IV Chapter iii

Last year, when I read Dante’s Divine Comedy, I noticed a lot of references to Boethius in the Hollander notes. I’d come across the name before, but had it filed under “medieval Catholic theology” and thus had ignored it. Dante was a way of finding some points of interest in that category, so I made a mental note to look into Boethius a little more. And, like most mental notes, it got lost.

Enter Bojack Horseman, the most unlikely route to medieval Catholic theology ever. I had no idea how unlikely, however, since I knew less about Bojack Horseman than I did about Boethius. A recent Millions article by Joel Cuthbertson teased with: “We’re born broken, and yet our wicked choices punish us. Somehow, BoJack the alcoholic, humanoid horse has bumped into Boethius, the 6th-century Christian philosopher.” That got my attention.

I started with Bojack, since I figured he’d be easier to comprehend than Boethius. Problem is, I’ve never taken to animations a la The Simpsons or South Park, and my tolerance for frat boy pranks and sex humor is limited, so after a couple of episodes I got the idea – he constantly misbehaves and feels quite bad about being a jerk, but not bad enough to change his behavior – and figured I’d be better off with Boethius and his Consolation of Philosophy.

It seems the most popular point from Boethius is the paradox of God’s omnipotence coexisting with free will. For whatever reason (hmmm…?) that topic, fascinating as it is, just doesn’t interest me at this time; I’m more interested in his idea that bad people feel bad, even if they seem to be feeling pretty good, because that’s part and parcel of being bad. Some years ago, as a self-comforting measure, I decided we don’t know what people go through in their heads, we only know what we can see, and I have to imagine bullies, tyrants, and megalomaniacs can’t be truly happy people, no matter how they taunt the rest of us with their power. Maybe this is fantasy, but it’s how I cope with seeing the bad guys win again and again.

For Good Fortune, when she wears the guise of happiness, and most seems to caress, is always lying; Ill Fortune is always truthful, since, in changing, she shows her inconstancy. The one deceives, the other teaches; the one enchains the minds of those who enjoy her favour by the semblance of delusive good, the other delivers them by the knowledge of the frail nature of happiness.
…
Finally, Good Fortune, by her allurements, draws men far from the true good; Ill Fortune ofttimes draws men back to true good with grappling-irons.

~~ Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy , Book II Chapter viii

It seems to me Plato made some gestures in the direction of goodness as a benefit in itself, rather than as an instrumental benefit, at least as concerns his theory of justice in The Republic. But that’s not quite the same as what I’m getting from Boethius (who is, incidentally, classified as a neo-Platonist): that doing evil, no matter how profitable or pleasant, degrades our humanity, and getting away with it degrades our humanity even more. Hence the animal metaphors, from Circe turning Odysseus’ men to swine, to the animal lexicon in reference to evildoers (dog, pig-headed, beast, the word “animal” itself), all the way to Bojack’s world where about half the players are half-animal.

Consolation… is divided into five Books, each Book divided into alternating chapters and songs. As a special treat, I discovered the folks at Cambridge University reconstructed the music of those Songs, a project not as easy as it sounds, since written music was still in its infancy in the sixth century. In fact, Boethius himself is credited with the system of using letters for names of notes (though he used a lot more than just A thru G and staves didn’t exist yet), which Guido built on a few hundred years later. The chapters are dialogues between Boethius as a prisoner awaiting execution, and Lady Philosophy, who offers him consolation, hence the title of the work. They read to me very much like Plato’s Socratic dialogues, though I’m sure a more sophisticated philosophical historian would notice significant differences.

Why are Nature’s changes bound To a fixed and ordered round? … Love it is that holds the chains, Love o’er sea and earth that reigns; Love—whom else but sovereign Love?— Love, high lord in heaven above! … Love, all-sovereign Love!—oh, then, Ye are blest, ye sons of men, If the love that rules the sky In your hearts is throned on high!   Boethius, COP, Book II, Song vii

Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy: But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars”   Dante: Paradiso, XXXIII, 142-145

I can see why Dante would have been interested in Boethius, given the similarities between them: both were punished as enemies of the state, both created their greatest works while in desperate straits, both used muses as figures in their writing, both constructed belief systems to deal with injustices dealt to them, including a view of a higher, deeper, more meaningful goodness and justice, and a more jaundiced view of the prosperity of the wicked. Dante even borrowed Lady Philosophy for his work In Convivio. But I also see a difference: Dante then turned to his Divine Comedy where he completed his journey through the hierarchy of joy: poetry at the bottom, then philosophy, and above them both, the divine. In this way he did Boethius one better, though it seems to me Boethius, or at least Lady Philosophy, considers philosophy and religion to be one and the same.

Cuthbertson stops short of attaching any of this to the authorial intent behind Bojack: “these specific theological and philosophical ideas are no doubt alien to the explicit vision of Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of BoJack Horseman. For all the moralizing, pseudo-psychology, and downright pontification of its characters, the show is written by comedians struggling with felt truths.” The scripts have a tendency to drop a line or two of profound insight into the strangest places once or twice per episode (of the two I’ve seen, that is), and while I’m not willing to sit through the rest of it to get a better feel for the series overall, I can’t believe the character’s name and his combination of human and animal characteristics was chosen randomly.

In any case, I’m glad this came across my path. I’ve just done the most preliminary reading of Boethius, of course, and am just sketching out some points that interest me at the moment. I’m just starting a Philosophy course that begins with proofs of God’s existence, and as a vaguely Christian agnostic still recovering from the religious trauma of my youth, I hoped this would get me closer to the right frame of mind. I hope to run into a more rigorous, structured outline of all this at some point, to put it into a more accurate frame. But I’m glad my mental note from last year was moved to the top of the pile. Funny, where a half-equine reprobate can lead, if you give him half a chance.

Finishing Pushcart XL

At the Mediterranean Café I scribbled a note in my journal “why not a best of the small presses.” I let it drop for a year, coming back to that notion in the summer of 1975 in a seaside cabin on Long Island.… What happened next with my best of the small presses idea was astonishing and continues to amaze me. The Founding Editors said okay, good idea, and off Pushcart sailed on a venture that brings us to this introduction decades later.… Many did not expect it would last more than a year, maybe two.… But the Prize refused to die…

~~ Introduction, Bill Henderson, Editor

Every year, I take a little longer to blog through Pushcart. That’s ok, I’m not in any hurry. I like taking my time with each piece. In fact, I’ve been delaying this final post because I’m not quite ready to admit I’m done – and BASS doesn’t drop until October. But it’s time.

I can see a certain symmetry in the open-and-close stories. We started in New York, with an intercultural intersection gone awry, and ended in Detroit with harmonics from the personal to the national to the global all ringing together. At this moment I believe we are all both fundamentally alone, and inextricably linked; these stories highlighted different angles of this paradox, through the lenses of the cities and lives chosen as their subjects.

I saw some other pairs: two poems used broken cups as metaphors, and two stories involved unsatisfactory meetings of young women with older mentors after a long absence. Two pieces featured bells.

To pick favorites is a bit silly, since I change my mind every so often about what I love in a read, but I’m going to try anyway.

For fiction, Colum McCann’s “Sh’khol” still stood out, as it did when I first read it in BASS 2015. Not only did it affect me emotionally, but it kept me turning pages even on second and third reads.

I was mesmerized by Joanna Scott’s “The Knowledge Gallery”, though I’ll admit I was disappointed to find the symbols carried no authorial intent. I’m still debating if that means they have no meaning.

Asako Serizawa’s “Train to Harbin” impressed me both technically and from a broader human perspective; it’s historically-based fiction with significant sociopolitical implications for the present, as well as a deep and touching character portrait.

For non-fiction, I thoroughly enjoyed James Hannaham’s “Artist’s Statement”. This is the second time that art-gallery prose has been at the top of my list, in spite of my complete ignorance about art. Maybe I should start going to art galleries.

“A Ring of Bells”, Catherine Jagoe’s memoir of bell-ringing in England, struck a chord (sorry) with me. Part of it was content-related, but I enjoyed her interweaving of the personal with the informational.

I think I have to give the prize for Essay that Most Made Me Think to Daniel Lusk’s very short “Bomb” which ended with its own bomb of sorts and again made me wonder about the line between fiction and nonfiction.

How can I separate out three poems from the many that were scattered through the volume, poems that varied from a few lines to a few pages, some that required more training than I have to fully appreciate. While acknowledging those, I’ll stick to the ones that were more at my pay grade, starting with Kurt Brown’s “Snapshot” for its use of form to evoke a sense of what is missing.

Form also played a primary role for me with “The Soldier of Mictlán” by Rigoberto González. The rhythm is addictive, yet, like the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s 7th symphony, it takes full advantage of the power of repetition to direct the reader’s experience.

I must give the award for bad timing to Dan Albergotti’s “Holy Night”. It’s not his fault I read his poem at a time of particular turmoil, but I’m pretty sure I’ll remember it because of that.

And so, as hard as it is, it’s time to put the book on the shelf, and turn to other things. It’s all still with me, and as always, I’ll recall something from this anthology in the future and look back to find perhaps a completely different reading. Art is a living thing, after all; we take it in, and it grows within us.

Pushcart XL: Perry Janes, “Night Movers” from Glimmer Train #90

The month my stepbrother Tony died in a ball of gas-lit flame, the Sarychev Peak Volcano erupted in Russia and changed the Michigan sunset. It was all over the news: particles blown into the atmosphere and diffusing across the continents. The way they interfered with the refraction of light over the Mississippi, the Chattanooga, the Detroit River. It turned the sky true lavender, no pinks or reds or blues.
… The way I saw it, I opened each night with the show of what the day had offered. Red meant the day had been a mild one. Orange, the city had run itself hot, and overflowed. Those stripey motherfuckers that looked like a stack of multicolored pancakes, filled with pinks and all the rest, meant the day had been a tired one.
But that lavender had me stumped.

Pluck a guitar string; play a note on a piano; tap a spoon on a crystal goblet: the sound will continue long after the initial strike. In contrast, the sound of a smack on a pillow ends immediately. Musical instruments are designed for resonance. Some materials, like crystal, have a natural resonance that others, such as cloth, lack.

One definition of resonance: “the reinforcement or prolongation of sound by reflection from a surface or by the synchronous vibration of a neighboring object.” Note the two components: reverberations of the original sound off nearby objects, and additional sound generated as those nearby objects are themselves put into motion by the original sound. For some astonishing effects of sound resonance, take a look at science Youtuber Brusspup’s demonstrations with salt and water. Powerful stuff, resonance.

It’s a word I tend to use a lot (at least six times in reference to different stories throughout this blog) as a kind of shorthand for something that touched me in a lot of ways. Multiple overtones and harmonics, rather than a one-note story. I’m not sure this story resonates with me, but it sure resonates with itself, creating layers upon layers of interwoven imagery from a variety of surfaces and neighboring objects, things as diverse as the raped and abandoned city of Detroit, a death not yet fully mourned, and ashes from a Russian volcano. All of that resonance comes together in, obviously enough, a massive schoolyard bell mysteriously out of context.

Zeke hasn’t been working for Tye as a night mover for very long, only a month or so since his brother’s death. I’m not familiar with night movers. Apparently it’s a thing the foreclosed and evicted do at the last minute, though I’m not sure what moving out in the middle of the night buys them; how much more evicted can they get? The point is that these evictions are so routine, businesses have set up to accommodate them. I’m reminded of the Michael Moore film Roger and Me showing a similar string of evictions from Flint homes.

The insidious poverty and despair is another harmonic running through the piece. ” Tye was part of a new migration of suburbanites to Detroit, enamored with the idea of rebuilding what was left behind.” The more cynical among us might wonder if all that leaving behind was engineered, or at least not seriously resisted, for the express purpose of rebuilding at bargain rates. The catastrophe we glibly refer to as stalled socioeconomic mobility resonates through Zeke’s brother’s death, as well as through the job Zeke uses to tame his insomnia.

Emptiness is a vacuum; absence is a memory.

I’m enchanted by that difference – if it even is a difference. Perhaps it’s meant to be a recapitulation, but I see emptiness and absence as very distinct things. Emptiness is a base condition. Absence is the result of something that was there, but is no more. Like a brother. Or a city.

The plot of the story covers one night, one moving job. I’m quite taken with Zeke’s observation about evictees always leaving a photograph behind. Ashes spread around the globe, perhaps. A presence to resist the absence. And in this home, a strange discovery: a huge schoolyard bell, tipped on its side, far to heavy for two men to move.

Then I realized that the bell was humming. Note so low it almost went unnoticed. The ringing peaked and quieted like my echo talking back.

Resonance. The ashes from Russia, the bell from a schoolyard, the diaspora of the poor, a haunting death. And now, the literal resonance of this bell, emitting sub-aural tones. That’s pretty impressive story construction, all those elements, none of which feels emphasized, but all of which create an ominous roar.

In checking out the author, as I tend to do when I encounter someone for the first time, I discovered that Janes (who, forgive the stereotypes, looks far more like the president of his high school computer club than a weaver of darkly perceptive resonance) has made a short film titled “Zug”. That surprised me, since the quote just above reminded of Jamaal May’s poem, “The Hum of Zug Island”, which I encountered in last year’s Pushcart. Zug Island outside Detroit has achieved some notoriety for its subliminal hum. I also note the story was recommended for Pushcart by Timothy Hedges, whose tense piece about a Detroit bus appeared in the 2013 Pushcart. All the writer’s horses and all the writer’s men can’t seem to put Detroit back together again. And again I must wonder if that’s because someone wants it that way. Privatized schools, privatized prisons: are privatized cities the next step? Or do I need to get a tin foil hat?

I see this is the final piece in this year’s Pushcart. An interesting choice: a final note that continues to sound after the book is closed. Powerful stuff, resonance.

Pushcart XL: Barbara Hurd, “The True Seer Hears” (non-fiction) from The Fourth River, #11

Insects outnumber humans by two hundred million to one. Most of them hear, most of them make noise – clicking grasshoppers, stridulating dung beetles, head-banging termites…. and except for the usual crickets and cicadas, most of them do it out of audible reach of the likes of me, who rose early this morning to sit with my granddaughter Samantha on a downed hemlock at the overlap of forest and field and test the truth of the poem I loved many years ago. You will never be alone, William Stafford wrote, you hear so deep / a sound when autumn comes. Autumn – with its sounds of coherence? – has clearly come to Appalachia – the hills are yellow and bronze.

I confess: I’m not much of a nature lover. I further confess that a big part of my unenthusiam stems from a near-phobic aversion to insects. As a result, reading this essay was less than comfortable for me. I appreciate the sentiment, however, and understand the importance of the tiniest (and creepiest) critters in the overall biosphere. All I ask is that they keep away from me.

I’m particularly fond of the multisensory aspect conveyed by use of the term “seer” (which is indeed a formed from “see”) and the emphasis on hearing in both Hurd’s enumeration of buggy sounds and in the title of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which is the focus of much of the essay. Carson’s book was perhaps the first academic-quality ecology book to make its way into the general public consciousness. Published in 1962, the first Earth Day would follow in 1970, leading to the current division between those who want to leave an intact planet behind for their grandchildren and those who bemoan the passing of such things as incandescent light bulbs and spray cans. Who could’ve guessed.

But Hurd’s point is more general than one book, or even one movement:

Can we simultaneously hear what’s not yet come, what’s here, and what’s gone? Polyphonic silences, like polyphonic music, demand deep listening. Such listeners historically have been called seers, or fools – the difference is sometimes very slight. Is a fool someone whose listening has not yet led to truths? Or someone who hears sounds that do not and never have existed, nor ever will? And can one hear too much? Perhaps to truly hear the world requires both heightened sensitivity and a fair amount of filtering and skepticism. Balance, in other words.

There’s Carson, and there’s whatever celebrity is pushing the latest antivax or contrail conspiracy theory. Alfred Wegener never saw his plate tectonics theory accepted; today it’s taken for granted. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren waited years before the bacterial cause of peptic ulcers was made part of the medical canon. Physicists keep changing their minds about whether the universe will expand, contract, or just peter out in time. Science takes its time – wisely so – before putting the stamp of approval on an idea. And many of us will never forgive the medical establishment for all those years of margarine.

But it goes beyond scientific theory as well. Every time we take a stand on any issue, particularly a controversial one, we are preparing our epitaph. For those in the public eye, every decision becomes part of history. It might be worth thinking about how you want to go down in history when choosing a hill to die on.

Also remember: history is always written from a point of view. Insects have been around 2000 times longer than people, and, as Hurd points out, greatly outnumber us. Who will be around to write the history?

Pushcart XL: April L. Ford, “Project Fumarase” from New Madrid, Summer 2014

After the last St. James Lacop congregant passed away, the State repurposed the church as a meeting place for members of AA and other damned populations, but no one is damned enough to travel one hour northwest of Palmyra to a dirt cul-de-sac of six boarded-up farmhouses whose front porches are sunken and splintered open in places where people once worked on chairs and smoked corncob pipes; the church’s disrepair is a statement about how little twenty-first century God participates in the lives of the dysfunctional and insolvent.

Sometimes, right off the bat, I pick up on the wrong cues, or misinterpret the right cues, then hang on to those faulty premises so hard I’d rather ignore how completely confused I am rather than reconsider my initial assumptions. We’re talking about reading, right? Yeah, that, too.

The first thing that threw me was the capitalization of the word “State”. Typically, when we talk about a state like Maine or Oklahoma or North Dakota, the word isn’t capitalized; that one action of the shift key implies not a geographical division but a larger government presence. This got me started on the wrong path, thinking some oppressive government was repurposing buildings and damning populations for flaws like alcoholism. Don’t tell me the past few months haven’t had an effect on my psyche. Add in Palmyra, and I wasn’t sure what country we were in (though I live in a state with towns like Mexico and Berlin and Calais). Even the corncob pipes couldn’t bring me back. Add in that I can’t count – or I can’t keep track of what century I’m in – and I ended paragraph 1 with the impression this was a future post-apocalyptic 1984-style novel. Hunger Games, for the young who aren’t sure what happened in 1984.

For the record, a far more accurate reading, one I eventually came to, is of a present-day, present-issue police procedural: the raiding of a polygamous, inbreeding cult to prevent the ongoing incestuous rape of thirteen-year-old wives and the conception of children doomed by an actual genetic condition science currently refers to as fumerase deficiency.

Once I got myself straightened out (and it’s amazing how long it took; no wonder it’s nearly impossible to convince anyone of anything once they’ve spent some time believing something else), I found the story for me resided in the comparison of two women, an unlikely pair: an investigator sent to conduct the raid, and one of the child-mothers she’s trying to rescue.

Peggy must win the group’s trust by the end of the day; otherwise, Laird will transfer her back to the windowless office filled with reports of missing persons. He was frank about why he invited her on board: “We need someone with a soft touch.” She is the only woman on the team.

While the recognized victim has been subjected to brainwashing and misogyny and under the control of men for all her 13-year-old life, officer Peggy is in pretty much the same predicament. We watch her as she wavers between two objectives: saving the girl, and saving her career, between believing her own instincts and following the rules.

Because I got off to such a bad start, I’m afraid I never gave the story a fair chance. I suspect it’s a lot more intricate than I recognize, but for me, that’s become the point, a sort of meta-lesson for the times. And sometimes, my search for accompanying art can connect me to a story. Here, I just got distracted by images of fumerase. Thanks to MOOCs, primarily Eric Lander’s Intro to Bio course from MIT, I actually have some idea of what that picture shows: alpha helices, a couple of small beta sheets, some random coils and loops, and the presence of the positively-charged lysine at the 324th position on the protein, with histadine on the 188th spot. That’s a weird thing to get from a story, but I’m trying to be more open to possibilities. Maybe I should focus more on reading the story correctly.

Pushcart XL: Frederic Tuten, “Winter, 1965” from Bomb #129

In the few months before his story was to appear, he was treated differently at work and at his usual hangouts. The bartender at the White Horse Tavern, himself a yet unpublished novelist, called out his name when he entered the bar and had twice bought him a double shot of rye with a beer backer. He had changed in everyone’s eyes: He was soon to be a published writer.
And soon a serious editor at a distinguished literary publishing house who had read the story would write him, asking if he had a novel in the works. Which he had. And another one, as well, in a cardboard box on his closet shelf that had made the tour of slush piles as far as Boston. Only twenty-three, and soon, with the publication of his story in Partisan Review, he would enter the inner circle of New York intellectual life and be invited to cocktail parties where he, the youngster, and Bellows and Mary McCarthy, Lowell and Delmore would huddle together, getting brilliantly drunk and arguing the future of American Literature.

~~ Complete story available online at BOMB.

I very much enjoy reading Tuten’s stories, but I have never felt qualified to comment on them. He writes icebergs: stories that are two or three layers deeper than the surface story, and the surface story – French Impressionists, eccentric philosophers – are resonant enough in themselves, usually in octaves I haven’t yet learned to hear. His stories intrigue me, make me want to understand the entire world so I can follow along.

But here, he writes about an unsuccessful writer, giving me half a chance. For, while I’ve never been a successful writer, I sure as hell have been an unsuccessful one, and the trauma of the inciting incident hits me like the ground at the bottom of a thousand-foot cliff:

On the day the magazine was supposed to be on the stands, he rushed, heart pounding, to the newspaper shop on 6th Avenue and 12th that carried most of the major American literary magazines, pulled the issue of PR from the rack, opened it to the table of contents and found his name was not there. Then turning the pages one by one, he found that not only was his story not there, but neither was there any breath of him.
Maybe he was mistaken; maybe he had come on the wrong day. Maybe the delivery truck had got stuck in New Jersey. Maybe he had picked up an old issue. He scrutinized the magazine again: Winter, 1965—the date was right….

Ouch.

Lest you think I’m spoiling the story, all of the above occurs within the first few paragraphs. The story is in the setting (the not-yet-successful writer’s view of the 1964 New York literary atmosphere) and the reveal of the character so briefly sketched in the opening, a character who, although he drops literary names everywhere he goes, does not have a name of his own. You don’t get a name until you’re published.

As I’m prone to do when I’m over my head, I go looking for those who are more likely to be able to see what is beyond me – successful writers, of course. Peter Trachtenberg compares the story to a Chaplin film. Then there was the commentary that, although very brief, tapped me on the shoulder: fellow Mainer (!) Joseph Tomaras notes the writer’s chronic overreaching and “his fantasies of other people, women especially, more satisfying than his actual interactions with them”. Though I didn’t consciously recognize that quality, it may be a large part of what drew me to the story. I’ve always said I preferred second-hand life: to read about a country rather than to travel, to analyze culinary ingredients and techniques rather than learn high-end cheffery, to read stories rather than write them.

The story ends with a dedication to Tom McCarthy, with whom I’m unfamiliar. I feel like I could create an entire curriculum just by Tuten’s stories. In any case, I’m curious why the dedication is at the end, rather than the beginning. I also wonder if the story is autobiographical: Tuten is about the right age to have been a writer struggling to break into New York lit in 1965. The story has been selected for the 2016 O Henry prize anthology; I’ll have to see what the contributor note looks like when that’s published, if any clues there sate my curiosity. But in the end there’s always the story, which is plenty.

Pushcart XL: Lilliam Rivera, “Death Defiant Bomba or What to Wear When Your Boo Gets Cancer” from Bellevue Literary Review, Spring 2014

Samuel Lind: “Magestad Negra”

If the doctor’s appointment is early, at 9 a.m., pull out the red sheath dress, the one that you bought on sale at Nordstrom with the famous but unpronounceable designer label. The red will wake the receptionist up like a motherfucker and cause her to send you hate for daring to outshine her that morning. The receptionist will think you’re tacky, loud, too much. In the bloodshot color, the doctor will notice that you wore the equivalent of a flag and think you’re stately and in charge. You’ll wear red, definitely red.
If the doctor’s appointment is later, say at 3 p.m., then the only color you should wear is … red.

~~ Complete story available online at Bellevue Review

Bomba, a quick google tells me, is a dance of Afro-Caribbean origins, first created by slaves on the sugar plantations of Puerto Rico and still celebrated today worldwide. It’s a conversation – no, more of a challenge – between dancer and drums, a kind of dare: “Oh yeah, well, see what you can do with this!”

Rivera has organized the story – in second person, no less – in the form of the dance: Basic Steps (Paseo Basico) give us a look at the woman preparing for her husband’s medical appointment, the Greeting (Saludo) takes place at the office (we often spend more time with receptionists and clipboards than we do with doctors), The Exchange (Piquetes) where the doctor delivers the words he’s practiced, the ones risk management has approved, as the woman desperately tries to inject some humanity into the process, tries to get a reprieve, a sign of mercy, maybe just an extra minute into the workflow-management time slot approved for this IDC-10 diagnosis code; and the Goodbye (Despedida) that closes the dance/appointment.

What an interesting image to use for a medical visit. Over the past several years, Lancaster University in Great Britain did a landmark linguistic study on the use of metaphor, typically military, in serious illness. The dance metaphor in this story is tailored to one person, and, interestingly, is not aimed at the medical condition, not at aberrant cells or microbes run amok or a confused immune system, but at the doctor.

Rivera discusses the origins of this story in a BLR interview: her husband has multiple health problems, and she knows how to advocate for patients. How odd that patients so often need advocacy when dealing with a system that should be an ally.

That same interview gives the origin of the second-person approach. She envisioned the story as an instruction manual of sorts, and that made second-person a natural choice. At the time she was unaware of the generally negative attitude towards the technique. I think the inclusion of the dance elements was a bit of genius, since that personalizes and adapts what could have been a routine instruction manual style into something quite powerful and very different, a story where you can hear the drums and see the skirt flashing. Her unawareness was a stroke of luck: had she stuck to the quality-control and risk-management assessed plan, the story would never have emerged in as powerful a form. And since it was originally published in the literary magazine run by Bellevue Hospital, we can only hope doctors are listening.

Pushcart XL: Ann Beattie, “The Cloud” from Salmagundi #184

Back in the town where she’d graduated from the university five years before, Candace waited at the inn to be picked up by Uncle Sterling. This was a business trip, paid for by her company in D.C., and they were amenable to putting her somewhere other than the DoubleTree out on the highway. Sterling was able to drive his car again, after finishing the last round of chemo three weeks earlier. The prognosis was good, but Candace’s mother Claire still wept about it on the phone, and Candace was worried, herself. Sterling was her favorite relative, even if he did maintain contact with her father. For sure he understood that Hank was an untrustworthy liar, but the two former brothers-in-law still occasionally golfed together, belonged to the same gym – not that Sterling had been seeing much of that place lately.

The last Ann Beattie story I read was “The Indian Uprising” in BASS 2014. I had to make a chart of characters so I could keep track of who was who and the general significance of the interactions.

This story seems more than anything like a rewrite of that one. No, not a rewrite; a transplant. Most of the major elements are very similar: the young woman visiting a terminally ill older man who’s been something of a role model, lots of ancillary characters, a trip for a meal that gets a little weird, and… footwear. In this case, $500 boots. Though a quick look at Neiman Marcus tells me $500 is actually pretty low-end for designer boots, I’m so far removed from things like this I can’t even get my mind around it. I agonized for weeks before deciding to invest $90 in my LLBeans a few years ago, figuring it would be the last pair of boots I’d ever have to buy. But $500? And they’re not even the kind of boots that help you navigate snowbanks or slush puddles.

In fact, Candace spends so much energy she could be spending on her favorite uncle worrying about whether something on her boot is a scratch or mere dirt, I wonder why we let ourselves get enslaved to things like boots that require such concern. I suspect it’s better than contemplating the impending death of a favorite uncle. While it’s not up to me to judge fictional characters for how to spend their fictional money, it is up to me to notice, and wonder what it means.

Another similarity to the older story is the use of a title that comes from the story. I was much more on board with the technique this time around, possibly because the tableau was so familiar in so many ways: a writer losing work due to computer failure, and the always-amusing conversation between the tech-savvy and the not.

“Uncle Sterling, she didn’t have it backed up in any way she could retrieve it? Do you mean the hard drive crashed, or – ”
“The one thing ‘I know, I convinced her to keep the machine, to print the story every time she had a new part. She didn’t have a printer before. Anyway, this guy was teaching the course told us that for very little money, she could have everything backed up and it could go to heaven.”
“What?”
“A service you pay for, where everything you write – ”
“Automatic backup?” It goes to the cloud?”
“That’s it! I told you, up in the sky, like a moonbeam bouncing back! Goes to the clouds.”
“Cloud,” she corrected. “It’s an absraction, but – ”
“Buckets of moonbeams, buckets of tears!”
She looked at him, confused. It was like having a conversation with a crazy person.

I happen to span the period between Bob Dylan and the cloud. For some reason, that makes me feel smug, even though just a few years ago I had to ask someone exactly what “the cloud” was. I was quite disappointed to find out it was just an exotic name for modernized off-site storage. I’d expected something far more mystical – as does Uncle Sterling, when he responds to Candace’s request to go somewhere quiet for a beer: “A perfect place, complete salvation…. A cloud.” Now you’re talkin’. Even his whimsy is death-focused, while hers is boot-focused. Head in the clouds vs feet on the ground.

I didn’t put anywhere near as much effort into this as I did last time, maybe because I’m cranky with the heat, maybe because I just didn’t find it that interesting a story. Maybe because I’d read it before.

Pushcart XL: Meghan O’Gieblyn, “Hell” (non-fiction) from The Point #9

A couple of years ago, a Chicago-based corporate-identity consultant named Chris Herron gave himself the ultimate challenge: rebrand hell. It was half gag, half self-promotion, but Herron took the project seriously, considering what it would take in the travel market for a place like hell to become a premier destination. … The joke was posted as a “case study” on Herron’s personal website and quickly went viral in the marketing blogosphere—a testament to the power of effective branding.

~~ Complete essay available online at The Point

I’ll admit it: I was initially disappointed the entire piece wasn’t about Herron’s prank. At first it seemed to me like a cute, barely relevant anecdote a public speaker might use to introduce a talk, something to get the audience on his side before stating her case. About two-thirds of the way through the essay, however, it becomes evident that the anecdote is not trivial, nor is it irrelevant; in fact, it’s pretty much the point.

O’Gieblyn takes us on a personal tour of hell as she understood it during different phases of her life, from age 5 to college. Many of her recollections of childhood were familiar to me. I spent fewer years in fundamentalism, but we went through much the same childhood processes of uncertainty and fear, unanswered questions we end up feeling ashamed for asking.

We follow her to a strict Bible college, and this would probably be a routine religious biography except for a visit to a megachurch which brings Herron’s advertising plan for hell back into focus.

Hybels keeps a poster in his office that reads: “What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?” Rick Warren’s Saddleback motto is “Let the target audience determine the approach.”

Late last year, I had quite a reaction (the online equivalent of a hissy fit) when Coursera started referring to its courses as “products” and making changes aimed at “increasing revenue.” That’s nothing compared to my visceral reaction to reading O’Gieblyn’s description of churches using words like “business”, “customer”, and “value”. Add that to images like the Catholic Church protecting pedophiles, the Westboro Baptist Church preaching their message of hate, and it seems to me that church has become the problem. It’s no wonder I felt accused when a bag lady at the bus stop noticed my long blue skirt (my version of jeans, so much more comfortable at my age and size) and asked if I were “one of those Christians”

Like so many formerly oppositional institutions, the church is now becoming a symptom of the culture rather than an antidote to it, giving us one less place to turn for a sober counter-narrative to the simplistic story of moral progress that stretches from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue. Hell may be an elastic concept, as varied as the thousands of malevolencies it has described throughout history, but it remains our most resilient metaphor for the evil both around and within us. determine the approach.”

O’Gieblyn drifted away from fundamentalist religion, but still feels a kind of nostalgia for old-style hell and wonders if we need more discussion of the nature of evil in our lives right now. I’m not sure about that approach, either. First, I don’t see a need to equate hell, or the devil, with evil. People can get themselves mighty twisted without any supernatural intervention.

But even granted the need for a Lucifer to explain how evil came into the world: Most Christian religion holds that God created Adam and Eve with free will, and put the forbidden fruit in the Garden, so they would choose to obey him, rather than obey because there was no option to disobey. Doesn’t selling salvation by fear mean people are running away from something? Some of the most appealing people I know are religious, but I didn’t know that for quite some time. They aren’t running around screaming, “I’m a Christian so I … [don’t drink, vote pro-life, tithe, whatever]”. They simply lead lives that have at their core a generosity, a gentle solidity, that’s irresistible. Isn’t it more in line with the original Plan if the church creates something people run towards?

Pushcart XL: Kevin Prufer, “Immigration” (poem) from Southern Review, Summer 2014

When the wheels came down over Miami,
the stowaway in the landing gear,
half-frozen and unconscious,
slipped from the wheel wells into blue air.

Modern life is amazing. Wikipedia has an entire page listing the 103 wheel-well stowaways since 1947: names (if known), to-from locations, and, in the case of the 75% who die, a guess at the cause of death. Typically, that’s freezing, hypoxia, or falling from altitude, but sometimes, it’s hard to tell which occurred first. Most (though not all) are travelling from poorer or more repressive places to large cities like London, Paris, New York, though there was a 16-year-old who ran away from home the hard way, stowing from North Carolina to Baltimore. His body, damaged beyond recognition, was found in a nearby woods the next day.

You’d have to assume someone’s pretty desperate, for one reason or another, to do such a thing. I’m not sure most of us, sitting at our computers and reading poetry, can begin to understand that level of desperation, but I think the world right now would be a little better off if we at least tried.

Whether this poem is based on an actual specific incidence of stowaway immigration or is merely representative, I don’t know. I can’t find a report of a stowaway falling on a car roof, but I didn’t look that hard, since I don’t think it matters to the poem. Or to the stowaway.

In two stanzas, eight lines each, starting with syntactically end-stopped lines that get progressively more enjambed as we proceed through the poem, Prufer manages to capture three (or four, depending on how you count) points of view.

We start off with the stowaway himself, or, more precisely, the speaker’s vision of the unconscious stowaway. Speculation about his frame of mind on the way down follows, before we shift, in the second stanza, to the occupants of the car on which his body fell. We then focus on the young son who was with his family in the car, and his reaction, before broadening out to the speaker’s embodiment of the stowaway again in the final line. I’m fond of such circular structures, and it seems morally right, somehow, to begin and end with the stowaway, as seen through the eyes of the poet.

Pushcart XL: E. A. Durden, “The Orange Parka” from Glimmer Train #91

“Future 86” by Jane Fine

Ten minutes before closing time, Rakesh sees his daughter enter the store. He is not in his own section, Kitchen Appliances, but in the neighboring section, Surveillance, where he has been fiddling with a pair of binoculars. He happens to be looking through the instrument’s wrong end and gets a miniature view: glossy black hair falls to the waist of a well-rounded figure; a piece of clothing throbs the color of tangerine. As he removed the lenses from his eyes, he finds it hard to breathe.
The jacket of tangerine is the same, but the girl is not.
… It has been fifteen hours since he knew where his daughter was.

I spent the first two-thirds of this story with a distracting voice in my head screaming, “Why don’t you call the police?” I even wondered if that was the point of the story, to show the culture clash between white America and immigrant New York. This wasn’t something I pulled out of thin air; the text gives evidence of his natural reticence: “He is not used to the sort of confessions his adopted countrymen are comfortable with, and apparently comforted by”. Add to that, knowing what can happen to people of color when the police are brought in, I wondered if Rakesh may have had more sociological reasons for not reporting Prithi missing. I still come back to that screaming voice in my head: do NYC police not even bother to look for missing teenagers these days? Does even asking the question mean I have crossed some threshold of super-cynicism?

But it seems none of this is what Durden had in mind when she wrote the story. She writes about it at length in a Glimmer Train essay (which contains what I would consider spoilers; I think the reader’s agony and confusion is part of the aesthetic experience here) and focuses on the problem of “good” characters. I’m not sure I need more than a widower father’s pain to make a story interesting, but apparently a moment of rudeness – a moment I barely even registered – is central to the story. I’m a very bad reader, running off in my own direction, asking questions about police.

Those questions are indeed muted two-thirds of the way through the story by events that turn this into what happens next and finally substitutes blue in for orange in a last scene so cinematic I can practically hear the closing music –plaintive strings, I think – as I watch the snow fall between the lines on the page.

I may not fully understand Rakesh, but I can feel the pain and confusion radiating from him. The conflict between a job he hates yet can’t afford to lose, and the search for his daughter. I understand him best when he describes, with apparent recognition and approval, a moment from his wife’s life, the life they had before moving to America:

After her father died from a heart attack in the midst of chores on the family farm, Rakesh had found his wife crying into a washcloth at the kitchen sink. Yet she had the presence to know when her own emotions were beside the point. She did not insist on cherishing a point of view.
He had no such distance. He could not point to a tree and say, simply, “That is a tree.” Whatever he was feeling engulfed whatever he came upon. The name of the thing was merely a kind of buoy, colorful but forlorn, a marker indulged by an immensity.

He reaches out for help in his own way. At a long-scheduled teacher’s conference at Prithi’s charter school, he’s surprised to discover they know her less than he does. When the conference ended after a few sentences, I found myself annoyed until Rakesh wondered why it only lasted three minutes (“Were he a parent of the leggy, fleece-wearing set, would he have pushed for more of the teacher’s time? Would he have gotten it?”); I’d thought the pacing of the scene was off, but it was painfully, shamefully accurate, and to great effect.

Like Rakesh, the story hesitated to reveal itself, but as I looked at it over and over, pulling quotes, re-reading passages, I discovered hints and signposts I’d missed at first. I want to call Rakesh and comfort him, but I fear that would only make him uncomfortable.

Pushcart XL: Jane Hirshfield, “A Cottony Fate” (poem) from The Paris Review, #209

Art by Julia Bereciartu

 

Long ago, someone
told me: avoid or.
 
It troubles the mind
as a held-out piece of meat disturbs a dog.

~~ Complete poem available online at Harpers

In her Rumpus interview with Rebecca Olson, Hirshfield reveals that the advice to “avoid or“, offered by Ted Weiss, referred to poetic construction. This poem, as she notes, transplants the poetic advice to life as lived.

I’ve always had the sense that the word avoid was less emphatic than don’t. We might avoid things we find unpleasant (for me, raw onions or Westerns) but make occasional exceptions if the reward is high enough (I’m very hungry and that chicken salad with Vidalias looks amazing) or simply to see if our tastes have changed (nope, not even Star Trek could make a Western I could sit through for 47 minutes). But if I’m highly allergic to shellfish, you can bet I’m not going anywhere near them, and boxing is a big don’t for me.

My sense of the word appears to be idiosyncratic, however; most people think of it as a prohibition. In that case, I have very mixed feelings about the dictum in both spheres. I’m not sure if Weiss was referring to the use of a word in the final draft, or to an attitude during composition, but I’ve been thinking about that for days now: while I can’t come up with an example, a line something like “it’s a metaphor-1 or a metaphor-2” seems very familiar, either with contrasting metaphors to show multiple senses of an event, or with a progression to deepen a single sense. I don’t see why either should be prohibited.

In the broader sense, we are our choices. To have an open field, with the option of going left or right or up or down, is the foundation of freedom; without choice, we’re hamsters on a treadmill. And yet, choices can paralyze us. Psychologists are convinced that when we face too many good outcomes, we freeze and end up with nothing. I’ve mentioned the Bell Jar scene of Esther Greenwood’s fig tree dream before; it’s a good example. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t, have choices.

But Hirshfield is right: as of now, “there was no other life.” I did what I did. Some of it, I’m not proud of. Some of those decisions were life-saving; others were highly destructive. I don’t have those decisions to make any more, and it’s time to live with the consequences. And by the way, tomorrow I will have to live with the consequences for today’s decisions.

I’m uncertain about the title. Is the cottony fate the present uncertainty of how we will look back on our decisions, years hence? Or is it the comfort of swaddling that abandonment of the path of “what might have been” for acceptance brings?

My decision-making technique, as I’ve grown older, has evolved from benefits and risks to what I call the Morley Safer test (no one under 60 will understand that reference, but so what). A year, five, ten years from now, when Morley Safer interviews me on 60 Minutes, how will I feel about the decision? Can I honestly say I did what seemed to be the right thing? That’s what I get in the last line of the poem.

Pushcart XL: Josh Weil, “Long Bright Line” from VQR #90.3

VQR Art by Stephanie Shieldhouse

The Society for Aeronautical Enthusiasm. Sometimes, when she was sad, or scared, or simply felt the inexplicable weight of herself, she would intone the strange words like an incantation: Aeronautical enthusiasm, aeronautical enthusiasm, aeronautical … She said it now … enthusiasm … starting up the station steps … aeronautical … shoe-clacking through the empty lobby … enthusiasm … to the shut door … aeronautical enthusiasm. She knocked.
Inside it was all smoke and suit backs, elbows at her head level, her father bending down, face flush as drunk, but eyes clear, grin pure, whoop a straight shot of glee. He scooped her up.
“Fifty-nine seconds!”
How long had it been since her father had held her like that?
“Eight hundred and fifty feet!”
Lifted her so high? With each hoist and drop she felt her years shake off, seven, six, five, her brother’s age, Larry in the corner watching, this is what it’s like to be him.
Before her face: a piece of paper, some smiling stranger lifting and lowering it for her to read. At the top, the stationmaster’s name. At the bottom, that of the man her father called their father: Bishop M. Wright.
“The Flyer!” Her father raised her high again. Near the ceiling the air made her eyes water. “The Flyer!” He lifted her into the pipe-smoke clouds.
But she wasn’t, wouldn’t be. The balloon ride he’d won—best guess at time and distance of the first flight—was a prize he unwrapped on the cold walk home: how they would scale the sunset, skim beneath the stars, a Christmas present more miracle than gift. Just not for her. Why? The basket size, the limits on weight. Besides, he said, ascending so high would surely swell that head of yours. He tugged her braid. No doubt big as the balloon itself. Laughed. While around them little Larry ran in circles, whooping.

~~ Complete story available online at VQR.

We live in a time when we believe you can have anything you want, if you work hard enough. It’s a lie, of course, but we repeat it over and over until we believe it, bolstered by those rare tales of those who have persevered through the impossible, the Rudy Ruettigers who played football at Notre Dame, the Jamaican bobsled team, the Forrest Gumps who changed the course of history … oh, wait, that one was fiction. Sometimes it’s hard to keep them apart.

It’s true, Clara probably could have become a flyer. But after her mother died, her family needed her, and though her love for flight never subsided, she made her peace with her place on the ground:

When summer came she stole away to Asbury Park. Walked to the train station, bought a seat east, saw the ocean for the first time, the boardwalk, the beach, slept on sand, discovered the affect her shoulders had on men, her smile, snapped up a ride, attained a ticket, was there on the field when Brookins crashed into the crowd, when Prince plummeted 6,000 feet, held her breath with everyone else, praying for his parachute to open (open! open!), felt the spectators’ communal shudder, would sometimes feel it again, back home, alone in the kitchen cracking the back of a bird, or serving a spatchcocked half to her brother, or sewing a split in her father’s yellowed longjohns, or stepping off the train onto the platform of her small Ohio town the day that she returned. But for one August night, at the edge of the Atlantic, looking up, she had been struck by a sudden sureness that it would be all right. The moon. The Milky Way. The Stardust Twins swooping through. That was what the papers called them after that first night flight, Johnstone and Hoxsey circling each other in the lunar glow, their pale-winged biplanes soaring smooth as owls. And her, beneath them, swept by the peace of certainty. Neck stretched back, face flat to the sky, she knew it: She was not meant to be up there; she was meant to be down here, here like a cairn seen from above, a landmark, her.

Then she worked the hell out of her cairndom, accidentally becoming a world-famous artist by using her own point of view and creating designs only fully visible from 1000, 5000, 10000 feet.

The art Clara creates sounds wonderful in concept (it’s very hard for me to visualize most of it): shadows of planes, as they would appear had an actual plane been flying overhead, reaching across the ground; mirrors creating the long bright line of the title by reflection of the sun, only visible from an altitude until the FAA forces its dismantling; a Japanese haiku in the snow, obliterated by the Army for fear it might be some kind of signal to the enemy. She marries a man “for his location”; the reason that location is desirable to her is one of the many tiny and delightful surprises sprinkled through the story; there’s often a delicious, desire-multiplying delay between the raising of a question in the reader’s mind, and the understanding of the answer. Her journey as an artist changes over time, as does aviation, and the story follows her through the decades.

I’ll be honest: I missed a lot of the details, and thus a lot of the impact, simply because, like my difficulty visualizing the art, I found the prose style very hard to read. Fortunately, it’s available online (link above) so while I regret what I’ve missed, it’s lost only to me. And perhaps only temporarily; I can always try again.

Five years ago, I read a story by Josh Weil in One Story, a tale that completely charmed me. It was in some ways similar to this one: set a century back in a rural place, the plot revolving around a piece of technology (an electric light) that captured a woman’s imagination. Because I enjoyed that story so much, I tried to read his The New Valley, a trio of novellas, but they didn’t work for me. Sometimes it’s like that: I’m captivated by a story, but it’s idiosyncratic. It’s why I have yet to find a “favorite author”. But so what, I’ll approach the fictional world one work at a time. Accepting where you’re meant to be doesn’t have to be a defeat. It can also be freedom.

Pushcart XL: Dan Albergotti, “Holy Night” (poem) from Crab Orchard Review, 19.1

My father said he wished the child were dead.
He didn’t say it in so many words,
but he said it. And it was Christmas Eve.
I breathed in silent tension next to him.
 
The news anchor said that of the seven
born to a black couple three nights before
the weakest child had gathered strength and would,
the doctors said, most likely now survive.
 
I’m sorry to hear that, my father hissed.
 

~~Complete poem available online at Crab Orchard Review

Timing’s a bitch sometimes.

I originally wrote an incoherent, rage-filled post on this poem last week, even scheduled it, but decided to unschedule it and let it sit a while.

Reading poetry, really reading it, requires a kind of willingness to enter into the text and become part of it for a while. Given the events of last week – the video images of Alton Sterling being pinned down and executed (there’s no other word for it) because there are police who believe shouting “Stop resisting” after the body cams have, oops, “fallen off” is some kind of olly-olly-oxen-free; then watching Philando Castile die in the front seat of his car and wondered what it was like for the four-year-old child in the back to watch, first her father shot, then her mother forced to her knees at gunpoint by people in uniforms; then watching Twitter explode with the murders of police officers at a peaceful protest in Dallas and, by the way, the wrong man identified online as a suspect for fuck’s sake – I wasn’t in the mood to listen to someone whining about how sad he is that his asshole racist father ruined another family Christmas so he drove away to look at the moon.

And that’s too bad, because I think the poet’s probably a very good guy. It’s a gentle, lyric poem with a biting edge, and yeah, he feels rotten and it’s Christmas and he doesn’t understand how these people who are, through no fault of his own, his family can claim to be Christians and go to the Candlelight service and sing hymns of divine love and then spit out hate. At another time, maybe even a couple of weeks ago, maybe a couple of months from now, I would’ve come up with a couple of observations about the poetic structure, told a few stories of my own racist family. But that seemed inadequate last week. Still does. Probably always has, and I guess I should wonder why I don’t always notice it. Maybe I already know why.

Over the weekend, while I thought I was letting this post sit, the hashtag #WhitePrivilege started trending. That’s what this poem is about. I don’t think that’s what Albergotti intended it to be about – I think he intended it as showing his own sadness and helplessness in the face of the insanity of racism – but the ability to escape racism – to not have to talk about it with your kids, to turn off the news feeds, to relax secure that you don’t automatically arouse suspicion just by being – has to be one of the top signs of white privilege. I should know, I do it often enough.

So I hope the poet will understand if his work is less the conduit for aesthetic or emotional connection, and more the receptacle for my anger, an anger directed at myself as much as at anyone else. Timing’s a bitch sometimes, and he deserves better. But, so did Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and Oscar Grant and John Crawford and Freddy Gray and Tamar Rice and Eric Gardner and and and.

Pushcart XL: Sarah Vallance, “Constance Bailey in the year of Monica Lewinsky” (non-fiction) from Gettysburg Review, Winter 2014

Constance Bailey is the poorest person on their list, the woman from Little Brothers tells me when I turn up at their office in Roxbury and offer to volunteer. At eighty-eight, she has no friends or family.
“She hasn’t thought much of the volunteers we’ve sent her in the past,” the woman says, scrunching up her forehead. “She’s picky. I’m not going to lie. The last few visitors didn’t work out. She didn’t take to them at all.” The woman puts on a pair of reading glasses and looks down at a notebook in front of her. “There’s a scribble here that says she doesn’t want any more visitors. Never mind, let’s try and see what happens.”

Vallance is white, comfortably middle-class, Australian, young, educated, visiting Harvard for a year to research her dissertation on access to health care for the elderly poor of the African American community. Ms. Bailey, old, poor, black, alone, and very, very crochety, provides her with supplemental insight into the human side of that project. Vallance’s essay about her year visiting Ms. Bailey goes about how you’d expect: two women from opposite sides of the earth, from opposite strata of the most obvious criteria, who develop a very close and caring relationship.

The essay is not without its humorous points. Monica Lewinsky isn’t one of them; in fact, she’s barely mentioned. There is, however, an attack cat. And there’s this:

I look up at a poster behind her of the Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly logo with its single long-stemmed rose. A red rose seems like an odd symbol for a charity that matches volunteers with old people, but that thought leaves my mind almost as soon as it enters.… I spent more time than I should pondering the name Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly. Are they little in stature or little in age? It is a slightly creepy name for a charity.

For some reason, this strikes me as hilarious, but I don’t think the name seems creepy at all. There’s an organization of Catholic nuns called Little Sisters of the Poor, so why not little brothers of the elderly? Little Brothers is not an overtly religious organization like the nuns, however. It was founded right after WWII in France, came to the US in the 50s, and now has a sprinkling of chapters in major cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Boston. It’s motto is “Flowers Before Bread.” While I don’t dispute the importance of either, I’m not sure a hungry person would agree with the priorities. But in the richest country on earth, as we keep hearing, we should have both in abundance.

Connie and I share an odd worldview. Neither of us likes people very much, but we care deeply for their welfare. We talk about the contradiction and decide we are parked misanthrope, part humanitarian. I tell her that my father, a geologist, preferred rocks to people. “A rock will never disappoint you,” he you say. “And they don’t speak.” Connie laughs and tells me she wishes she had met him. “He would have loved you,” I say, and she smiles.
Connie has always preferred animals to people. We were both like this since we were little. “Animals are a lot easier to love,” Connie says, and she is right. She would rather be alone with her cat and an old persons in need of visitors. I am pretty certain I will be the same. We talk about the paradox of loneliness: that we are more likely to be lonely with others than without.

As a confirmed hermit, I agree with that last line.

Vallance’s story has its parallels with Ms. Bailey’s. A riding accident left her with serious traumatic brain injury, so she had to re-learn language, writing, and walking before doing PhD research was on the docket. Something of a miracle, really, though I suppose the determination to get up and walk was a major factor. But isn’t the possession of such determination a miracle in itself? Having that tool in our personality doesn’t mean one is a better person; it’s an unearned gift some are granted. Taking credit for the grace bestowed upon you is poor form.

So why put Lewinsky in the title? A time marker? The print form of click bait? I don’t think so. I see a thematic relationship about assumptions drawn from surface features, assumptions that we sometimes cling to in order to retain our paradigm of the world, assumptions we sometimes have to struggle against in order to see reality. Assumptions can be tested and, when necessary, released, but only if we’re willing to tolerate some cognitive dissonance and be more flexible about who’s part of us, and who isn’t.

Ordinary, nice old people must exist in the world, but no one writes essays about them. The cranky curmudgeons are a lot more interesting, especially when they have attack cats. Though, from what I’ve learned about current practices in non-fiction, I’m wondering if the cat is added in for reader interest. See, people who make things up in their essays: you taint the pool.

Pushcart XL: Keetje Kuipers, “Migration Instinct” (poem) from Codex Journal, Spring 2014

Today the wife of the last man who made me lonely
is having a baby. Oh, October: we all want
to get up and leave, crawl out of our flesh sacks and fly
like mad.

~~Complete poem available online at Codex Journal

For quite a while, this one was a real head-scratcher. What does migration have to do with a long-ago love, with what used to be, other than the obvious: we move on. And thankfully so, or we’d all be acting out like jilted teenagers all over the place. But the poem, what is the poem doing, and how is it doing it? I see a turn: is it a sonnet? I don’t have the confidence to declare a 17-line poem to be a sonnet; can I do that?

I’m not sure why it suddenly dawned on me, but it did: Stop tying it to a chair with rope, as Billy Collins puts it – this is hilarious! Stop getting psychological (no one makes you lonely, we do that to ourselves by where we focus) and for pete’s sake, stop counting syllables (yes, there is an accumulation effect in the phrases of the first sentence, a kind of expand-and-contract in the first two lines, that makes it read so nicely, but so what) and look at what’s going on: all this drama over an old boyfriend becoming a father? A day of green eyeshadow – really, green? – and running stop signs? And then back to washing diapers and everything’s ok?

Sonnet, maybe; the turn in the last four lines is unmistakeable. But parody, definitely. And possibly, just possibly, elegy: a couple of lines of mourning, complete with interjection, then some praise for what she was back in the green eyeshadow days, before the forward looking conclusion of baby care. Which, frankly, is my idea of hell, but I understand some people like it.

Then I see there’s a dedication: To Becky. Is Becky the daughter? Will she someday read this poem, and think, wow, Mom was a hellraiser? Or is Becky someone else, a friend who hasn’t yet migrated? Come to think of it, I still don’t quite see the connection with migration, other than the obvious already stated. I’m not invested enough in the poem to care. Bad sign. But sometimes, they go by me. Maybe I’m just too removed from days of passion’s rage, and too uninterested in motherhood, to find a way in.

Am I being disrespectful? Insightful? Stupid? All at once? Probably. But I giggled through Madame Bovary, and this strikes me as tapping into the same hyperdramatics.

Pushcart XL: Dan Chaon, “What Happened to Us?” from Ploughshares, Spring 2014

Rusty Bickers went walking through the fields at dusk, Rusty Bickers with a sadness and nobility that only Joseph could see. Joseph dreamed of Rusty Bickers at the kitchen table, eating Cap’n Crunch cereal before bedtime, his head low, lost in thought; Rusty Bickers, silent but awake beneath the blankets on his cot, his hands moving in slow circles over his own body, whispering “Shh…shhhh… hush now”; Rusty Bickers standing in the morning doorway of the kitchen, watching Joseph’s family as they ate their breakfast, his shaggy hair hanging lank about his face, his long arms dangling from slumped shoulders, his eyes like someone who had been marched along way to a place where they were going to shoot him.
Joseph heard his mother’s bright voice rang out: “It’s about time you got up, Rusty!”

For the second time this week, I find myself wondering more about my reaction to a story, than to the story itself.

Dan Chaon wrote a favorite story of mine (“To Psychic Underworld”, originally published in Tin House #46, now available online via that “From the Vault” feature of the TH blog). I was drawn to the oddball Critter and his searching for connection. This current story also features an oddball in the character of Rusty, and he too is desperately searching for a connection following the death of his parents in a house fire (which he is under suspicion of starting); but I was too creeped out by the ominous threat looming over Joseph to care much about Rusty. That’s one. I was also disappointed by the resolution; it didn’t live up to the impending doom. That’s two.

One? Two? One, two what? One, two weird reactions I wish I hadn’t had. But I did, so I need to examine them and see what’s going on.

Siding with Joseph was natural; he was presented as vulnerable. Rusty, I need to realize, was just as vulnerable, though he turned his vulnerability into unappealing and frightening behaviors. Still, his need was there. Joseph sees it: that line in the opening paragraph, the haunted eyes of someone surviving a death march and just waiting for the end. But my compassion for that pain got lost when I got scared. That’s the malignant effect of fear.

As for my second reaction, I suppose I could chalk it up to ever-escalating violence of real life. After all, a single-victim shooting doesn’t even make the news any more. Or, the plethora of violence in pop culture. Those explanations would be accurate, but incomplete. I think it’s that I don’t recognize the final tragedy as… all that tragic, beyond the ho-hum what-a-shame. In fact, it was more of a relief, and that is indeed tragic. At a minimum, we’re left with “gentle, helpless unknowing” of the last sentence, and the lonely, alienated future that implies. But the loss is much greater than that.

The title asks, What happened to us? I ask, What happened to me?

I’ve been taking a couple of moocs dealing with ancient Chinese philosophies recently. We’ve been discussing the Confucian concept of ren 仁, which Confucius never explicitly defined but considered crucial. It’s often translated as “benevolence” or “humanity”, that which makes us human, which makes us see others as parts of the whole of humanity. I toyed with the idea of “empathy” for a while, but it seems more expansive than any single word. This story has shown me how far I have to go to discover ren.

Pushcart XL: Edward Hirsch, “Variations on a Psalm” (poem) from Five Points #16.2

When I was in distress, I sought the Lord; at night I stretched out untiring hands and I would not be comforted. (Psalm 77:2)

And I would not be comforted
        When I was in distress
            I sought the Lord
I did not know why I did not believe
 
While I stretched out untiring hands
          And I would not be
            Comforted in my distress
I sought the Lord

~~ Poet’s reading (audio only) of complete poem available online

The 77th Psalm is about repentence. It’s one of the later psalms (the “Asaph” psalms, which may be by Asaph or just transcribed or collated by him) so it’s probably not about David’s major sin of murder and covetousness. But all of these get applied to a more general audience anyway, a nation of Israel that has forsaken the ways of their God.

A verse from the psalm is repeated in slightly different order, and every once in a while, a new phrase is introduced, generally about not believing or not praying. It’s kind of interesting to think of praying and not believing in the same phrase, to pray to find out why there is no belief, but I don’t think the belief is one of believing in the Lord, but of believing in the eventual deliverance from suffering: impatience with forgiveness. Who hasn’t felt that. “Hey, I’ve said I’m sorry, now where’s my forgiveness?” The variations become very personal, however. Tormented. Confused. Pushing away, pulling towards.

The sound of the poem when read aloud is hypnotic, like a chant. At one point the grammar is inverted “Comforted I would not be”) leading me to wonder if this can all be read in many different ways. There’s no punctuation; which phrase goes with which? Are the stanza breaks, the line breaks, guidelines or rules or just for visual regularity? Hirsch’s reading (link to audio provided above) becomes less regulated by visual cues as he goes on; it’s an intriguing effect, changing the sense at some points. If the poem were much longer, it would turn into word salad – but not quite.

Here’s where my lack of technical poetics training really hampers me: I have no idea what’s happening here. Hirsch is a literary giant; I regret I can’t follow where he leads. Perhaps I should read his “Poet’s Choice” column, or his 2000 book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. But instead, here I am with untiring hands, impatient for the deliverance in which I have no belief.

Pushcart XL: Daniel Lusk, “Bomb” (essay) from New Letters #80.3/4

Keiji Nakazawa’s autobiographical manga on Hiroshima

The night the atom bomb nicknamed “Fat Man” fell from a plane over Nagasaki in faraway Japan, Kay DeWitt got her first period. I know because I was outside her house, kneeling on a concrete block beneath the downstairs bathroom window, when she burst in.

~~ Complete essay available online at the author’s Facebook page

A couple of years ago, I took a dogmatic hard-ass stand over a non-fiction piece titled “Corn Maze”, a Pushcart-winning article that was more or less the author’s admission that non-fiction isn’t necessarily truth, but an arrangement of reader-hooking elements around a core of truth, and who cares that the people quoted in the article on adventure vacations didn’t exist and the quotes were made up, the people who did exist gave boring quotes and it’s all about what makes a better narrative. I got pretty self-righteous about it, tried to figure out what I was missing.

Just about a week ago, one of the non-fiction pieces I wrote about opened with a little girl getting very sick and sitting on dirty towels usually used to clean up the dog’s muddy paws. The article was full of details about deaths and illnesses caused by work conditions around the world, then the piece ended with the sentence, “The only part of this essay I have invented is the dog Lynx.”

I was again perplexed: why include that detail, then? What was the truth: were the towels clean? Do Were they muddy for another reason? Do towels muddied by a dog’s paws make the story so much better than, say, just taking used towels with that hamper smell, or ruining perfectly clean towels? Were there towels at all? I wondered if I should address any of this in my post, but I decided no, the essay was available online, the dog was a small detail (so why inclulde it?) and the ending sentence made a pretty cool ending, answering the question of why it was included, and it truly had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the piece (which was important and serious) and I really wanted to discuss the subject, not rant about non-fiction should be non-fiction again, and anyway, if you admit something is invented, is it still cheating? And it was a pretty cool ending, a kind of pulling-the-rug-out thing.

And now I run into it again, except this time, it isn’t one detail in this short (less than a page) piece that’s changed and the rest are true, it’s one true thing and the rest is invented, with the mea culpa again tacked on at the end:

You can believe that this is true. So even if I admit that I’ve lied about everything but the bomb and not having sisters, the bomb is so big it would make you believe any small, human story I told you. Even if there was a Kay DeWitt having her first period, saying I was outside her window on that August evening in 1945 is still a lie. But hearing that the bomb killed more than 75,000 people, as it reportedly did, that would be unforgettable for anyone, even if they weren’t alive yet when it happened. That part, the bomb part, is the truth.

I’m so confused. At least the bomb is the truth. Wait, what am I saying??!?

I have to admit, I’m not even 100% sure this is categorized by Pushcart as non-fiction. It’s not fiction (they label fiction, but not poetry or non-fiction, as part of the byline for each piece). It’s listed as an essay in the back material. But Daniel Lusk is primarily a poet, and I’ve been fooled before by prose poems. But it doesn’t read as a prose poem. It reads as an essay, and maybe it’s ok to make things up in an essay (which isn’t journalism, after all, it’s point of view, and isn’t this the same as including dreams and wishes, which aren’t true but are appropriate when labeled such?), especially a self-referential essay about it being itself a lie.

I have to say, this is the only piece, fiction or non-fiction, I’ve ever read about the US dropping the bomb on Hiroshima that had me thinking about something other than the US dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. I’m not even trying to figure out whether it’s grotesque or ironic or some other artsy thing to compare Lusk’a view – or, non-view – of a girl bleeding from her vagina to the view experienced by six-year-old Keiji Nakazawa as his world burned and melted before his eyes, later shared with the world in the mangas I Saw It and Barefoot Gen.

What is the purpose of an essay, any essay? To persuade, evoke, inform, amuse, invite, confound? What was the purpose of this essay? I have no idea. Is it “good”, whatever that means?
I’m undecided: It’s brilliant. Or a deception. Or a brilliant play on deception. The only thing I’m sure of: I think I want to read more by Daniel Lusk. And, just as the ultimate goal of a biological organism is to reproduce, that may be the ultimate goal of all writing. Or at least of all writers.

True, or false?

Pushcart XL: Christian Kiefer, “Hollywood and Toadvine” from Santa Monica Review, Spring 2014

Salvador Dali: Phantom Cart (1933)

The notion that there is something wrong with the new ruler of the Evil Empire does not take very long to sink in.… Then this new man with the disturbing birthmark that was like a cloud, seeming to take on the shape of whatever might be on the viewer’s mind. A map of Japan. A rubber duck. Your wife’s intimate parts. Try having a discussion where the future of the world teeters on the knife-edge of nuclear destruction with a man who has your wife’s vagina emblazoned on his forehead. It is a difficult discussion to have.

Oh, this is good. But be forewarned: fans of Ronald Reagan might not think so.

I would imagine that constructing a fictional story around a well-known real-life personage must be tricky, and the more well-known the personage, the trickier. It’s true that you get most of the character for free, and in this case, setting comes along with it, at least for those of us whose memories go back to the 80s (and we can all be depressed for a moment when we realize not everyone’s does). But those are also constraints on the writer; the story has to fit public perception, while offering something unexpected. Kiefer pulls it off, via books:

It is this birthmarked man, Mikhail Gorbachev, apparently a big reader, who suggests you might enjoy reading something other than Louis l’Amour and that there are several American authors he himself reads with regularity, one of whom has penned a new Western.
“I will send you this book,” Gorbachev tells you over the phone.
“That sounds fine and I’ll look forward to reading it,” you answer in return.
“I must tell you, Ron, that this book is unlike your Louis l’Amour.”
“Well, as long as it’s not Danielle Steele, that’s fine.”
He laughs. “Okay, no Danielle Steele then.”
“That’s women’s reading,” you say. “My wife reads that kind of thing. Not for men.”
He pauses long enough that you begin to wonder if the line has been disconnected when he says, “Maybe I sent her new book too. For Nancy.”
Weird, you think, but you think him anyway. Why he has access to stores of Danielle Steele novels at the Kremlin is not a question you feel comfortable asking, so you turned other topics. Nuclear war. SDI. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Foreign policy. That kind of thing.

Leave it to a writer to chart a path through a reader’s tastes. And leave it to a slightly wacky writer to force a choice between Blood Meridian and Danielle Steele.

Much of the story is a romp (and great fun at that), but it gradually takes on somber overtones (then again, I can find somber overtones in anything; it’s kind of my specialty). As I read, Reagan turned into a sympathetic character, a man with a problem just like every other character, a man struggling with self-image vs id. Steve Almond wrote a flash about Nixon (“Nixon Swims” from his teeny tiny collection This Won’t Take But A Minute, Honey) that chokes me up; after that, getting me to feel gently towards Reagan is a piece of cake, especially when I struggle with self-image every time I see my Sidney Sheldon novels and police procedural series buried in the most obscure regions of my bookshelves.

That’s still all in good fun, but then the direction went from inward to outward, and raised questions. That question in the film “The American President” cropped up: how much of being President is about character? Forget campaign promises: what story will run through the President’s head when making crucial decisions in an unanticipated situation?

Kiefer did a wonderful interview with Beth Ruyak on Capital Public Radio out of Sacramento, partly about this story and his Pushcart win (he didn’t know he’d won, or was even nominated, until another writer congratulated him) and partly about his novel The Animals. This story grew out of his dissertation topic, the use of literary narrative forms, particularly Westerns (“the American mythological form”), in the writing of history.

Narrative in everyday life is interesting enough – the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves about others, the stories we tell others about ourselves – but when it comes to politics, the effect can be much broader. For a different angle on how narrative affects our politics, check out this panel Chris Hayes led with four fiction writers (including George Saunders) in January 2013 focusing on the narrative used by President Obama during the 2012 election cycle (grateful shoutout to Chris Hayes, who responded to my tweet “Would videos from the 1/13 show with writers about political narrative be available online anywhere” with a link within 5 minutes. Pretty classy, considering I’m a total stranger and an absolute nobody).

In a court of law, it isn’t about truth, it’s about who has the better lawyer; in history, it isn’t about what happened, but about how people remember what happened. And in politics, it’s about who has the best story. God bless America. Kiefer’s story asks: just how does that story guide the decisions of the winner?